"larry king live" starts right now. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com tonight, can we come back from the dead? people who have been there say yes. >> it's very peaceful. it's very serene. it's extremely, extremely bright. i mean, it is bright. >> modern day medicine and 21st century technology have made it possible. what about other near-death experiences, the ones science can't explain? can those who have passed away return to human form in someone else's body? it's a life and death hour next. on "larry king live."

good evening, i'm jeff prox from survivor sitting in for larry. tonight we're talking about survivors in a different context. medicine and technology are bringing people back from death. there are those who have died but have lived to share their experience. you'll hear from some of those and about some of those stories later in the hour. according to the near death experience research foundation, yes, there is one, nearly 800 near-death experiences happened every single day in the u.s. alone. joining us to talk about it is dr. sanjay gupta, cnn chief medical correspondent and author of "cheating death, the doctors and medical miracles saving lives against all odds." also dr. deepak chopra. author of "life after death." and dasusa author of "life after death the evidence." sanjay, in your book you talk about the idea what we used to think of as the lines between life and death, this black and white thing is changing. >> yeah. i mean, we had this sort of

conventional wisdom that it's a binary thing. one moment you're here, the next moment you're not. i think scientifically we know that's not true. death is very much a process. things happen in the body. things happen at all different levels of the body. the good news is really at so many points during that process things can be reversed. you can start to look at that death as a process and turn it in the other direction which i found incredibly fascinating. >> deepak, in a recent pew poll they discovered 30% of catholics believe in reincarnation and for the first time ever, more people, 49% say they have had a mystical or religious experience. more than say they haven't. what's happening? >> lots of things are happening. first of all, there's a lot of interesting science now that is suggesting. by no means is this clear, there's a lot of controversy about this. there's a lot of interesting signs that are consciousness, which is the place where we

perceive, think, emote, imagine, have insight, intuition, choice making. this part of us is not a product of our brain. you know, scientists have until recently believed that, you know, just like your gallbladder secrets bile and your pancreas secrets pancreatic juice, your brain secretes -- >> you're separating the brain and the mind? >> yes. the mind, that consciousness, the one i'm talking to right now is not a product of the brain but is localizing through the brain. just like people who are seeing us right now on their screens, you know, we're not in their television boxes. we are coming through these airwaves and they're perceiving us, but if they open the box they won't find deepak or jeff or everyone there. if i look inside you i won't find your soul because it's not there. in fact, your body is experienced in your consciousness. your mind is experienced in your consciousness. and the evidence is pointing out

that this consciousness is nonlocal. which means it exists outside of space time and, therefore, mathematically it's impossible to destroy this consciousness. >> what do you make of these numbers? you've studied this. it's a big shift in philosophy of how people are looking at life after death. >> i think the issue is absolutely huge, and a friend of mine who got cancer recently made the observation to me that when something like this happens you discover that the normalcy of your everyday life is a bit of a sham, because we live life as if we're never going to die and suddenly we have to confront that. the question of whether something comes after death, i don't, you know, whether you're a believer or whether you're a skeptic, you're going to have to wonder about that. it's going to make a lot of difference in how you live now. i think what makes our time exciting and unique is now there's evidence about all this. not only near-death experiences but evidence from physics, biology, evidence from the science of the brain. all of which seem to suggest

that the old idea, simply our mind and our brain are the same and when we die our brains obviously die. if that's the case there's no life after death. there are new possibilities created by modern knowledge. that's really what i think is exciting today. >> sanjay, in medicine, you're experimenting with something even here in new york i think with hypothermia, trying to cool the body down to expand the process of death? >> well, you know, for doctors and any health care professionals it's really about trying to buy time. if you buy into the idea that death is a process, it doesn't happen just like that -- >> the thing we're used to hearing in the medical room, the doctor says time of death 3:18. >> that's exactly right, jeff. it was a profound experience i had as a medical student where i watched a person come in, a patient, around the same age as me after a car accident and everyone was working on him. trauma surgens, neurosurgeons, everybody. at one point someone said time

of death 2:34. i remember thinking, that's it? it seemed so arbitrary back then. that's what i've been searching for. with regard to hypothermia it's this idea if, look, your heart has failed you have one of two things you can do. either restart the heart to get oxygen to the body or decrease the demand of the body for that oxygen. hypothermia decreases demand and lowers a set point a bit. buying doctors and health care team more time. >> deepak, if that's right, then it ties into what you believe, i think, which is that life and death is just -- there is no beginning o inning or end. >> they are space time events in the continuum of life. the opposite of life is not death. the opposite of death is birth. and the opposite of birth is death. life is the continue wum of birth and death, which goes on and on.

and life is as he said, it's a process. it's one process. it's perception, cognition, emotions, moods, imagination, insight, intuition, creativity, choice making. these are not the activities of your networks. you orchestrate these through your networks. if i ask you to imagine the color red or look at the color red, there's no red in your brain. there are erect rick l filings. what's the relationship with your consciousness and what happens in the brain? this is called the hard question in science today. >> i'm a little lost right now which is a good thing. we're going to come back and figure this out. i'm fascinated by this toptopic. we may not be able to prove life after death but the other question is can we disprove it? a skeptic joins us with the other side. that's next. we'll make sense of all this.

welcome back to "larry king live." i'm jeff from survivor sitting in for larry tonight. we're talk about coming from the dead. joining us, michael shurmur, ph.d., founder, publisher of "skeptic magazine" and associate director of the skeptic society and columnist for "scientific american." welcome, michael.

you're a skeptic. we're going to refer to you as the skeptic. what's your take so far on this discussion? >> well, a couple of things. first of all when it comes to the after life, i'm for it, of course. who wouldn't be? what i'm for and what's true are not always the same, and so i think there's actually three different lines of evidence that lead us to conclude that the idea of the afterlife is probably a product of our brains starting off with our brains. that is, we're natural-born do lists. we tend to think mind is separate from brain because our brains can't perceive themselves. so we naturally think there's something else floating around up there. we know for a fact if you remove part of the brain through stroke, surgery, injury, from impact or whatever, whatever the function was that was destroyed in that part of the neural tissue, that function is gone. that part of the mind is gone forever. unless it's rewired. you're going to have to wait on this, deepak. on the second point, is that our

primary function of our brains is to run our bodies. we have a neural network in our left hemisphere that coordinates the inputs from the body into a self. we have a sense of self we can decenter, imagine being somewhere else. close your eyes and picture yourself on a beautiful california beach. everybody will see themselves, their bodies down on the sand. not looking out through their eyes but seeing their bodies. that's kind of like what happens in an out of body near-death experience. three, we know from extreme sports, from mountain climbers, from arctic explorers that they have a third man factor. they have a sense of presence. like somebody else nearby, although there clearly isn't. this could be oxygen depravation, could be cold, could be starvation, could be loneliness. our brains concoct this alternative person, another sense presence we can't sense being inside of ourselves so we think of it as an extension of

ourself. >> first, deepak, you took issue -- >> i have to tell michael that he's very supertishs. he's addicted to the superstition of materialism. the first thing he said about the brain, you destroy a certain part of the brain and that function will not come back, he hasn't kept up with the literature. there's neuropalace thisty. if the nuri activity can change the activity of neurons, what comes first? >> there's also a -- >> go ahead. >> there's a deeper point, that is that a correlation doesn't establish causation. there's no question the mind and the brain go together. then the software and the hardware in my computer go together. if you think of your mind as a kind of software and brain as the hardware, sure if you damage the hardware the software won't function. that doesn't mean the hardware caused the software. take the software out and run it on a different computer or

download it into your iphone. the fact the two go together doesn't mean one causes another. the brain may be a receiver or transmitter for the mind in the same way the cd player is a receiver and transmitter for the music waves. the radio isn't causes the waves. it's the mechanism for the waves to be manifested. >> i'd like to ask michael, are we talking to you, michael, or to your networks right now? >> you're talking to both. you're talking to my individual neurons and my whole self. >> when you said you like to believe in the afterdeath, was that your network speaking or was it you? >> that was my hope module. >> okay. so when you say i'm skeptical about this, who's the eye that's skeptical? your networks or is it you? are you confused? >> you're probably familiar with michael gazanaga's idea of the left hemisphere interpreter. a little narrator storystorytel.

i think what we all do is we all sort of put those things together with ourselves as the central character in our story. >> which doesn't exist according to you. >> no, no, it does exist. it's a higher order form of neuroactivity. there's patterns of the neurons firing and columns of neurons firing. we can ratchet up in a wholistic way without it being new agish spiritual kind of thing. >> the thing i like best about the show so far is i'm not necessary. was a world war ii pilot reencar nated in the body of a little boy? that's what the boy says. cko: q. boss: come a long way, that's for sure. and so have you since you started working here way back when.

gecko: ah, i still have nightmares. anncr: geico. 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. was a world war ii fire pilot reincarnated? authors of "soul survivor." how their son, james had

memories of a world war ii pilot killed in battle more than 60 years ago. james is 11 years old. andrea, when did you first realize something was not right? that james was having ideas or stories he wanted to share about this? >> well, initially it started off, james always had a fascination with airplanes and that seemed like something a little boy would be fascinated with, like big trucks or something like that. the real problem started about two weeks after james' second birthday. he had a night terror which he never had before and this first nightmare began a series of nightmares that started occurring every other night. every night. four or five times a week he'd have these screaming nightmares where he'd be laying on his back, kicking his feet up at the ceiling like he was in a box trying to kick his way out. and after several months of this, he was having a nightmare and i came down the hallway and i was able to finally determine what he was saying. he was saying, airplane crash on fire. little man can't get out.

>> bruce, even at 3 he was -- james was drawing pictures of an airplane crash. i think we have one. do you -- did you talk to him at that point? he was very young then. did he have an idea what was going on? >> well, by the time he started drawing those pictures, he'd been talking about this for several months. that didn't start until seven or eight months after he really began talking about what was happening. prior to that, in the dreams or after the dreams or before he'd go to bed or in a dreamy state mostly, he started to tell us things about what would happen and essentially gave us three items of information over about a three-month period. one, he gave us the name of the ship which i verified through research on the internet. >> this is the ship that the airplane took off from? >> that's correct. >> yes. >> he gave us the name, matomo. i asked him where his airplane

came from because he told us it was shot down by the japanese. he said it came from a boat. so in another question he then -- i asked him the name of the boat. he said natomo. i did a google search on that. a month later he gave us the name of a guy he said he flew with when we asked him if there was anyone else in his dreams. >> i want to be clear on this, bruce. he gave you the name of somebody he had flown with? >> that's right. jack larson. >> i kept asking him if he remembered what his name had been in his last life or in his dreams and hi said his name was james but that is his name. i finally gave up on that line of questioning and finally asked him, do you remember anybody else you threw with or friends? he said jack. jack larson. >> james, you're 11 now. you're a little older. been dealing with this for a while. what do you make of it now? do you still have these dreams?

can you connect this to anything? are they starting to lesson for you? >> it has diminished -- >> so you're not remembering it as clearly as you were when you were younger? >> no. >> it wasn't like he had cognitive memory. it wasn't like you could sit and i could say, tell me about when you were on the last season of "survivor." these memories weren't active in his mind. it was usually a trigger or something that would happen or he'd see or smell or hear something then he would come out with this little piece of information and that was it. then it was pretty much gone forever. there was probably only three to five instances where we were able to sit down and question him and ask him questions. the rest of the time when we tried to do that if he didn't initiate that conversation he didn't seem to know what we were talking about. it was a very interesting phenomenon. >> is there a medical

explanation for what james experienced? we will find out. thing as taking a chance?

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we are back talking about reincarnation. they say a world war ii pilot was reincarnated in their son, james. sanjay, is there anything that comes to mind for you medically that could explain how this could happen? >> as a neuroscientist we cant to explain everything scientifically first. was there a experience he had, did someone tell him a story at some point, did he watch something in anything that could have somehow put this memory into his head, into his mind and his brain. i'll tell you, the answer may come back absolutely no. and at which point you really have to ask yourself is it okay

not to fully be able to explain things physiologically? when i was writing my book that's to the point where i got. i wanted to explain things like the story that we're hearing about james. there were some things that couldn't be explained. could his memory exist somewhere else besides in his brain specifically? and was being harnessed at a very young age from a previous experience that may have been in a different life? that sort of stuff, that perfect intersection between science and spiritually which is very interesting. >> michael, the skeptic, have you done any research or investigated anything that might explain why james would have such vivid ideas of another life lived? >> sure. yeah, there's two things there. of course, as sanjay said, it's okay to say i don't know. on this case, obviously i wasn't there inside james' head, but when i was his age i was totally into world war ii planes and ships. i built models, i did drawings, i read everything i could. that's what young boys do. we're into that kind of stuff.

it's not a big stretch to imagine -- >> michael, you're just talking -- sorry to interrupt you. you're chalking this up to he's a young kid? >> it's not a big stretch to imagine how he could take that into his dreams a lot of these images and you get a couple of selective hits and spin it into a story. my general problem with reincarnation is the numbers problems. there's been about 100 billion people that have ever lived and there's 6 billion alive today. where are those other souls? >> deepak, where are they? >> first of all, the numbers problem i think is a bogus problem. particularly because in the views of reincarnation, particularly the hindu view, there can be a traffic, if you will, between humans and nonhumans. for example, if somebody is terrible in this life we'll be seeing you as a cockroach in the next life. it's not a matter of being reincarnated into other human beings. i think there's a bigger point here. belief in life after death is absolutely universal.

existed from the dawn of man kind. many people in the record believe in it. the denial of life after death is only in western culture and recently. >> where is that boy's soul? >> there are eastern and western views of immortality. by in large in the eastern view, your soul lives on and it can live on multiple times. life after life after life. >> fair question, michael asked, deepak, where is his soul? >> i address that question. it's actually a very good question that he's asked. imagine that you're looking at an ocean and you see lots of waves today and tomorrow you see a fewer number of waves. it's not so turbulent. what you call a person actually is a pattern of behavior of a universal consciousness. there is no such thing as jeff because what we call jeff is a constantly transforming consciousness that appears as a certain personality, a certain

mind, a certain ego, a certain body. you know, we had a different jeff when you were a teenager. we had a different jeff when you were a baby. which one of you is real jeff? if you go to heaven and meet your relatives, will you meet the person with alzheimer's who died at the age of 100 or meet the young teenager? there is no such thing in the deeper reality as a constant entity called a person. when he says 6,000 traffic jam, this that and the other, it's all nonsense. it's a primitive way of looking at it. >> michael, i have a question. why not believe? why are you focusing so much -- because if you're wrong -- >> because his neural networks will not allow him to. >> the question i'm getting at is -- >> bad for the heart as well. bad for you, michael, to be so skeptical. >> i'm not really worried about it. here's why. i think that we would like to believe things that are actually true and although i can't disprove the afterlife, neither

can the other side prove it. i think the preponderance of evidence, our brains create these things. consider the god helmet michael persinger's lab i went up and did and had an out of body experience. generated nothing by mall netic fields. you can create these artificially in the lab. >> i think that's a fallacy. experience is not discredited by the fact you can recreate it. i say the sun is blinding me. that's an illusion. i can produce a flashlight and blind you at home. >> the fact you can recreate it doesn't mean if -- >> of course not. >> everybody agrees -- >> a normal brain is an editing device to begin with. if you take kittens and bring them up in a room that only has horizontal stripes they'll see a horizontal world. bring kittens up in a room that has vertical stripes they'll see only a vertical one. is it vertical or horizontal?

>> their neurons atrophy. >> that's right. they atrophy as a result of an interpretation of a experience. you've conditioned yourself to believe in a certain way and now your neurons will reenforce your belief system. >> we're going to break. so a quick question. now that james is a little older and these memories are starting to diminish do you have any doubts of what happened? >> no. i have no doubt whatsoever. it's funny to listen to michael because the ultimate skeptic going into this whole thing was my own husband. bruce was completely a nonbeliever in the concept of reincarnation and went about all the research that's in our book to try to disprove and prove that whatever was happening to james was the result of a logical, something that could be logically explained. >> it was something definitely happening that i didn't understand and we tend to reject what we don't understand out of hand. >> so you guys are still convinced -- >> we're still convinced.

>> that it didn't happen. we have three people on the panel who are ready to -- >> i'd like to have a one-week debate with the skeptic in front of a live audience with a good moderator. >> okay. you're on. >> is there proof of life after death? maybe. they're going to keep going. we're going to take a break. [audio: gavel hits the desk] this bill will let americans keep the coverage they have now. ...and guarantee no one is denied coverage for getting sick... ...or for a pre-existing condition. this bill keeps all medical decisions between doctors...

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you're watching "larry king live." we're joined by dr. jim tucker, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virgin virginia. he has studied over 2, 500 cases of reincarnation memories in kids and the author of "life

before life" and here to explain reincarnation memories and what he's learned from years of research. you heard the story of james. young boy. thinks he was in world war ii. is this a similar story to what you researched with the kids? >> it is. at the university of virginia we've been studying them for nearly 50 years. and what we have found is that kids from all over the world report very similar things at around the age of 2 or 3 they start coming out with these stories about how they lived before. some of them give a lot of details like james has. some give much fewer, but it's a very similar phenomenon. takes place in places, where there's belief in reincarnation but also in places and families who have never given it a second thought before in. >> some of these cases the kids have similar scars to the people that they reincarnated from sp. >> that's right. several hundred of them have had birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds.

usually the fatal wound on the body of the previous person. and what we've done with some of them, ian stevenson who started the work, he was able to get autopsy reports from a lot of the people whose lives the kids seem to remember and match up how well the birthmark or birth defect matches with the wounds the previous person had. >> were you able to chart the time between, you know, death and reincarnation? >> well, it varies. the average time is only about 15 or 16 months in our cases. so for the kids who seem to come back with memories, the time span tends to be short. james is an exception of that. we're talking about 50 years. we have others like that. in general it tends to be quite quick. >> a study is one thing. believing in that study that there's a result is another. has this convinced you these are real? >> well, i think if you look at the strongest cases that they

provide pretty substantial evidence that something has gone on here. there can be this carryover of memories and emotions that seem to survive after a body has died and then carry-on in another child. >> all right. do you talk about life after death? why some people don't take it seriously and why they should when "larry king live" returns. for practically just your signature. and volkswagen even covers scheduled maintenance at no cost. it can't be that easy. [ engine revs ] [ tires screech ] [ seat humming ] [ engine revs ] [ seat humming ] [ seat humming ] [ pen scratches ] that was pretty easy. [ male announcer ] sign then drive is back. hurry in and get legendary volkswagen value for practically just your signature. ♪

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near death experiences, hundreds of people claim to have them every day in the u.s. alone. we're talking about how and why this occurs. and there are people, of course, who don't believe in them at all. you talk about in your book that life after death, it's sort of the elephant in the room. we're all fascinated by it but nobody really wants to delve into it. >> the atheists and skeptics are saying give us experience empirical evidence. we don't have -- we can't talk to dead people. we can't go to the other side of the curtain. the near-death experiences are probably the closest thing. there are thousands of them that occur all around the world. they have a bunch of ingredients that are very similar. the sense of being drawn through a tunnel, of seeing a bright light, some cases meeting dead relatives or friends, feeling the presence of a celestial being. for a while what the atheists would say, well, this is a kind of mind game, a little bit like if you took ha loose no jennic

drugs. it's the uniformity and universality of the near-death experience that makes you have to take it seriously. it's not so easy to write it off. >> sanjay, when you look at the study, 2, 500 cases is a pretty decent sample. where do you merge the medical world and the spiritual world? >> well, it's interesting, you know, listening to both jim and dinesh. with regard to near-death experiences. if that's the beginning of your spectrum. scientists try to explain a lot of things away scientifically. the tunnel can be explained away by a lack of blood flow to the back of the eye. lose peripheral vision, tunnel. seeing the deceased relatives is a cultural thing, for example, in western cultures. eastern africa, people having near-death experiences tend to see things they wish they have done in life. that tends to be their cultural

thing they have. having said that, what's interesting, i wanted to tell you and dinesh, when i was researching fis thr a long time, i was thinking i could explain it away physiologically. things i heard and validated and believed convinced me there were things i could not explain. things that were happening at that moment, that near-death experience moment that could not be explained with existing scientific knowledge. that's where you have to put the spirituality and answer and reasoning on the table when it comes to these sorts of things. >> one very important phrase there. existing scientific knowledge. i don't think science and spirituality are things that are enemies. you know? science always looked at the world objectively. when we're looking at consciousness, it is our consciousness that's looking at consciousness. >> a researcher reported years ago, some patients who are blind have had near-death experiences and there are studies of blind people who have had near-death experiences and able to describe

the number and gender of people in the operating room, the kind of instruments that were used often. the color of the drapes. things that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to know. now, again, we should look at this skeptically. we should see if there are natural explanations for all this. my point is the weight of the evidence, when you balance it out, is that there is something going on. see, if the atheists are right, these kinds of near-death experiences shouldn't be rare. they should not exist at all. what the near-death experience are telling us is when the body breaks down you are cliply dead. your heart has stop or there's no measure of brain activity. consciousness and experience seems to go on. kind of like saying i've turned the car off, taken the key out, the car is till running. a man died on a football field seven years ago and came back to life.

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high school football game seven years ago. when he went into cardiac arrest, died and was revived. dr. sanjay gupta spoke to him. take a look. >> oh my goodness. a referee has collapsed on the field. >> reporter: for 65-year-old bob sh reefer, that video is sometimes still difficult to watch. >> you're suddenly down. >> i'm down. i'm dead. >> what did you experience? did you have pain? >> no. nothing. nothing. >> reporter: he was in cardiac arrest. on this very field during a high school football game. a team trainer armed with the school's brand new aed or automated external defibrillator, shocked him back to life. >> it was scary. >> reporter: shrever wchoking u as he showed me the video that day. what were you experiencing when everyone was seeing this? >> it's very peaceful. it's very serene.

and it's extremely, extremely bright. i mean, it is bright. and i was -- i saw a place that i was supposed to go. i saw that halo, and something was saying, go toward the halo. >> reporter: he says he was dead for two minutes and 40 seconds. >> powerful stuff. bob shrever will tell us more about his near-death experience when we return right after this. ♪

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ahead on 360, brazilian court rules in favor of a new jersey father fighting to win custody of his son. could this be the end of his five-year battle?

tonight and only on 360 the boy's grandfather speaks to us. senate setting a date and time for a vote on the health care bill. so will this bill be a win for you or for the special interests? we're keeping them honest. the most memorable moments of 2009. some of our favorite anderson cooper moments and he's not here to defend himself. we'll show you all of them just ahead. that and much more coming up at the top of the hour. bob schriever says he died and was revived. we're talking about what happened to him when he went into cardiac arrest and came back from the dead. bob is the co-founder of the sudden cardiac arrest association. what do you remember of that? >> not much. when it happened to me, it's -- i was just following the quarterback on a rollout and i took two or three steps and took a half a step and started to lean and that's all i remember. >> no pain? >> no pain. i had a heart attack before

where i had minor jaw pain. i was unaware of it. it was during another game. i was unaware until after the fact until i had the symptoms. being the macho guy i was i refused to do anything about it. but when i went down i, no pain, no nothing. i just blanked out. that's all i remember. >> sca. sudden cardiac arrest. you know bob from doing the story and also explore the idea of near-death experiences in your book. similar story? >> yeah. yeah. the stories are very similar in terms of what we hear. people who have sudden cardiac arrest and other things as well. again, in this country, similar stories. the point i was trying to make earlier is the idea, as part of what they experience, they couldn't have possibly had that experience explained away completely by the brain or explained away completely physiologically. some of what happened to bob and what he told me, i couldn't explain it.

that's what was so interesting. >> there's a psychologist who advanced a theory that's widely discussed now called the dying brain. when your brain goes into shutdown mode it generates these experiences. bob is a kind of walking refutation of this theory for the reason is if all the people who have had near-death experiences are living among us. they drive to work. they function normally. if bob's brain died how did it reconstitute itself? how did it repair itself? the dying brain theory doesn't hold up to scrutiny. >> let's get michael back into this. michael, if bob had been hooked up to your machines what would they have shown? >> he wasn't dead. you started this hour off with sanjay gupta explaining we can't say somebody's dead at one given moment at a particular time on the clock. that's not how it works. takes two, three, five ten minutes to go through a dying process. the ref wasn't dead. he was in a near-death state. we know from dr. james winnerry from the u.s. air force who has

documented over 700 near death and out of body experiences in pilots going through g-force loss of consciousness. it's simply hip pox ya or oxygen depravation to the cortex. >> michael -- there's a little bit of semantics going on there. we made the point of saying that the old way of saying you're now dead is being revisited, but there's still the idea that death is a process and i think what we're saying here, deepak, if you go with that, that bob was in the process of dying. >> i think also there's a larger physical framework here. you know, 100 years ago if you said life after death, used particularly religious vocabulary, heaven, hell, idea of having a resurrection, in modern physics none of this made sense. space and time were presumed to extend definitely in all directions. people said, matter, we know what that's like. bodies die. what is there to live on?

today a scientist will talk about hidden dimensions, multiple rounds. we know if other universes exist they have laws totally different than our universe. >> it's important to remember that -- it's important to remember that before we say something is out of this world that we first haven't gotten a worldly explanation. you said earlier, deepak, i can't explain everything naturally. okay. so what. that doesn't mean there's a super natural force. the fact you called consciousness the hard problem. right. the fact we don't have a cogent theory of consciousness doesn't mean that altered states of consciousness are something spiritual or supernatural. >> i don't believe in anything supernatural. when did we use the word supernatural? >> either there's life after death or isn't. it's like asking a caterpillar, is there life having being a caterpillar?

the caterpillar might say, no way, i can't conceive of what it's like to be a butterfly but that's part of the natural order. >> there are traditions that say the in-body experience is a socially induced collective hallucination. we do not exist in the body. the body exists in us. we do not exist in the world. the world exists in us. >> that doesn't work for me. >> i know it doesn't work for you. who's the you talk ing to me right now? >> let's get the you that you're in the room with us, bob. weigh in on this. >> i'm not a medical person. what they're talking about is over my head. in our organization we have many, many survivors who belong and tell the same story or basically the same story. i did witness something. i didn't go as far as some members did because they were dead. clinically dead if you want to put that term. much longer period of time. thanks to the medical we have today where they can keep them alive than i was. you hear the stories they tell and before this all happened to me i was not a believer in this.

i have to tell you right now, i am now a believer in this. more spirited debate about a very spiritual matter or maybe not right after this. bu is a be. i heard that from consumers digest. it offers better highway mileage than a comparable camry or accord. estimated 33 highway. i saw that on the epa site. so how come the malibu costs so little. it's a chevy. you have cop hair. the award-winning chevy malibu. compare it to anyone and may the best car win.

>> this is jeff norman. he doesn't get health insura

welcome back to "larry king live." why can some people die and still go on living? we've been exploring the life

and death topic with some experts. deepak, if there is life after death, then does it matter how you live this life? >> i think just because there's life after death doesn't really change anything in the deeper sense. but it does -- because, you know, when you die, you're not going to be a better person than you are now. you're going to carry-on the consciousness you have now. >> there's no hope for me? >> if you do have -- live beyond hope. hope is a sign of despair. you have to live in a state where you want the truth, okay? >> we'll do therapy later. >> if there is life after death, the quality of your life tomorrow depends on the quality of your life today. so the best way to ensure a great future for you is to be present now and live it the best way you can with loving kindness, compassion, joy of the success of others, and peace. >> deepak, that's the smartest

thing you said today. i have to say i completely agree with you. whether there's an afterlife or not, that's how we should live our lives. >> you are saying that's the way our networks should -- who's you? >> i do think there's a -- there is implications because -- >> i am my brain. >> let me ask you this. if a -- would a near-death experience of a serial killer be different from that of somebody who's lived -- >> it would be. in fact, initially the near-death experience seemed entirely positive. there have been extensive compilation of nightmarish and hellish near-death experiences which have shocked people into transforming their life. here's the point. if there's no life after death and we reflect on that, in a sense we are passengers on the titanic. we can rearrange the deck chairs, turn up the music but the ship going down. if there is life after death we have a reason to believe in cosmic justice. we will believe goodwill be

rewarded, evil will be held accountable. we can face death more bravely because it's not the end, it's a gateway to another life. we can teach morality to our children. derive a sense of meaning and significance in our life. life after death, if there's residual uncertainty, the preponderance of the evidence supports it. it's good for me to believe. it makes sense. >> is there any unethical aspect to the death -- the process of death has begun and you're going to stop it and bring it back? >> absolutely not. i mean, that's what doctors in the medical community are trained to do. it does raise questions of what do we really know about death? what's really happening? what is death per se? i don't think we're good at determining that yet. i mean, even within hospitals the idea of brain death which deepak sort of talked about, for the most part it's a clinical exam. in one hospital they may give you slightly different answer versus another hospital which may not seem like a big deal

except the fact we're talking about death and it becomes a very big deal. it's not at all a -- >> we've spent b on hour going back and fourth. deepak is going to look for you somewhere in between wherever you are and we are right now. have you taken anything from this? >> i do think that the p preponderance of evidence argument is the way to go because it can't be proved or disproved in the court of law. in my case i tend to be skeptical. >> deepak would say to you, michael, michael, deepak would say to you, you prove it then. >> well, it's not -- the burden of proof is not on me. i'm not making a positive claim there is an afterlife, therefore i have to prove. let's keep an open mind, but we don't know. why not just say -- >> 30 seconds -- >> that's the first sensible thing he said. let's keep an open mind. >> no, no, second sensible thing. remember, i agreed with you