Priest DIED, Had PROFOUND Near Death Experience & Met God

And now, from beyond our dimension, this is the Jeff Mura Vagas. Here's Jeff. My guest is Dr. Gota Hard-Brunetrupe, Professor of Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language at the Munich School of Philosophy. He has also had a near-death experience which we're going to learn about and more. Dr. Brunetrupe, thank you for joining me and welcome. Thanks for having me and greetings from Munich. I also teach in St. Louis, so I'm accustomed to the American audience and I'm glad that you invited me and I will report and reflect on my experience. And I hope it will be fruitful for everyone. Dr. Brunetrupe, we are excited to have you. And if you don't mind, let's start on the day that you had your experience and go from there. So my experience happened a long time ago, more than 30 years ago and I was still pretty young at the peak of my physical abilities and I suffered a very severe infection after surgery and almost died. And in this process I had a cardiac arrest and was resuscitated in a shock room, emergency room. And it was in this context I had my near-death experience. And if I may, I will quickly go through it and tell you what I experienced and you may interrupt me at any time with questions or afterwards, whatever you prefer. Sure. So my first experience was I think I'm about to die because I felt that my circulation was no longer working and my hand and feet were getting cold and stiff. And this was accompanied by an almost unspeakable horror and terrible of a deep, almost biological physical kind. This is the end. And I felt that the energy in my body retracted from the outside towards the inside so that the most important organs would still be supported but the rest was already dying. And then I, so the feeling was panic and then I lost the visual contact with the outside world but I was still conscious but I couldn't see what's going on in the room. And what happened then after I had realized that I'm dying is that from one second to another like in a fraction of a second I would say, the total panic changed into the deepest calm like a polished diamond, a clearness of mind where there was no movement of thoughts or feelings, nothing of the panic but also no happiness or bliss, nothing, just pure consciousness. I had never experienced anything like this even though I was before and I'm still a sent meditation practitioner but I think looking back this is something like you try to achieve in meditation that state of mind where as they say in yoga, all movements of the mind have come to a standstill and that was exactly what it was and it is a very profound experience. It cannot be described in words and it's also from someone who is a philosopher of mind a bit shocking because something which would be caused by like neurotransmitters like the enormous fear I had would slowly temper off and what gets less and less and then would be overtaking maybe by another emotion but this was like a one zero thing from 100% fear to enough to no feelings at all but clear consciousness that was the first stage and then I wondered what is am I dead now what is going on and very early on I had a short out of body experience but in my near death experience the out of body experience was not very pronounced I didn't find much interesting in it obviously so I left my body and I saw from the typical angle somewhat above me I saw people working on me and I was wondering about this one guy who had an orange jacket where all the other ones had this white medical jackets but this person had an orange one and I said who is he what is he doing here and later I learned after the near death experience that this guy had come from an ambulance and he was wearing the kind of jacket he would wear so that the cars at night would reflect in an orange color and so they would see you and also during the daytime so this was a traffic alarm color or whatever but I of course this I hadn't known this so it just occurred to me why is this orange color in the room it's a strange thought but that's what I thought and I clearly remember this but this was the end of my out of body experience and so the at least in the term of observing the room because the next thing I observed which was much more profound was my live review and as a young man in the early 30s I was looking back at my entire life to this point in a level of details which is just beyond words it seems that we don't forget anything there were like the tiniest my new details from my childhood which were reappearing in a strange almost simultaneous 360 degree view holistic view of everything I can language doesn't we have no language to capture about how that feels like it's an information overflow so to speak but the information is absolutely clear crisp realistic not dreamlike or drug like distorted so I grew up in the 70s so I'm not totally alien to these distortions but it wasn't it wasn't like this at all it was super realistic and there was an evaluative aspect to it I would feel the pain I have caused in others and I would relive those moments where I had caused pain in others and where I had experienced love and had given love and it was a very highly empathetic psychologist might say transpersonal point of view so that I was more than I could do in my everyday consciousness experience the vantage point or the subjectivity of the other of course I cannot become the other but you understand what I mean you can be more or less empathetic and this was hyper empathetic and it was interesting that I'm I'm a kind of a achiever who became a university professor very young and so on and resolved oriented hardworking kind of guy and all of this didn't play a role at all in my life review my professional achievement I was a pretty good athlete also and mountain climbing and rock climbing and all of that didn't show up at all so all only relationships of love and where did I hurt somebody and how did that feel to the other person after that I entered what I would call a transition experience [BLANK_AUDIO] And it has somewhat the feeling of going through something narrow and you don't know where you're going. So maybe tunnel is the right word, but I would, for me, it was the experience of transitioning, leaving this place into something different. And it was also accompanied by an experience of very little light, two more and more light. So I transitioned into this other world or dimension or whatever it is and was surprised because it was full of light and very energetic, but it was not like the physical reality we know, but it was more a reality of energy and light. It's also kind of escapes my verbal capabilities to express it. And I felt also that I was not alone and I felt friendliness and openness by those others, even though I did not speak to a particular person like many other neotathic experiences did. And this was after maybe a moment of where I am, I had this orientation, a very pleasant place to be, which I still long for today, after over 30 years later. So I was in this different place, but the next step was probably the most profound one, because then I was catapulted or maybe absorbed into the experience of an all-encompassing, all infinite love. Even when I speak about it now, I kind of shiver a little bit, sort of foul in experience of love. I am blessed that I had experiences of deep love before that, but it's nothing in comparison to what I experienced at that moment. And there was no verbal interchange, there was interpersonal interchange in the sense that I was feeling completely loved to the extent that my ego kind of dissolved, melted, but I was still there. It's paradoxical, I know. But I would not have to keep up my ego barriers to protect me from the negativity of the outside, because I was so encompassed by love that all my ego barriers, barriers could be dissolved or torn down, and I was just swimming in this ocean of love. And this, today, still up to this day, is probably the most profound experience I have ahead. And I interpreted as some kind of mystical experience of God. I think that's when people speak about God, that's probably what they mean when they say that God is love or expressions like this. And then also very suddenly, in an instant, I was not giving an advice, you have to still take care of this or that. In an instant, I was back in my body, shivering on cold, and remember that I was told, you have been just resuscitated from a cardiovascular shock and you were briefly gone, but we got you back. So that's basically the experience. Thank you for sharing your experience with us. When you first transitioned from panic into calm, while you were in that state of mind, did you see anything like reewing what some people call the black void? Well, I did not see any particular objects. So the black void is not a bad expression because it's really hard to explain. Blind people sometimes, when talking to blind people, they tell me, I don't see anything, I don't even see black. And that's maybe, that's very close to it because there was no, there was no visual, no experience of any kind, not even black. The mind of sense experiences had vanished. And since we never have this state, normally, it's very hard to describe. It was pure consciousness, but it had no no typical sensory content. Like wide or yellow or shape or even pitch black. And was just the calm mind. Maybe there was something like I, me, I existing almost Cartesian, but there was no, not even reflecting about this. This is all already too much reflecting. I was there, obviously, that's what I want to say, but there's not, not an experience of a landscape. And also, which was the most dramatic, there was no experience of emotion. Where I was later, I had a very profound emotional experience of love. But at this early stage, there was no emotion at all, neither negative nor positive. You mentioned later that you left your body. So at that point, do you feel like your consciousness was still in your body or perhaps in a different realm? More than that or so, I was consciously observing the world from a vantage point outside of my body. And I had no experience of my body. The body was in a painful state or in a stress state or physical stress. So my consciousness was not connected to my body. My consciousness had left my body. And I have some philosophical troubles with dualism for reasons we can go into. But this experience sometimes makes me think whether maybe there's some truth to dualism that our mind can really disconnect from the body or at least from a level of the body in which it normally cooperates or interacts. So it wasn't certainly not my normal sense organs. And I did not see the world from the perspective where my eyes were situated, for example. But I did see the world. So the seeing had disconnected from the eyes. And it was, as I said, which I found out earlier, small examples. You know, there are hundreds of better ones in the literature that I could observe very critically what was happening in the room because I inquired about the guy with the orange jacket later on and was told that he was in fact there. I like how you use the word disconnect. And it makes me think about when someone has anesthesia during surgery, it also appears to be like a disconnect, but they are not consciously awake. Do you think it's similar? That you were consciously awake before you could visually see your body from the roof? Well, of course, I did not lose consciousness during the entire experience. And it also seemed to me that I did not use wakefulness. So I would not consider it as a dream. When during a dream we are conscious, but we are not wakeful. We are not awake. So wakefulness and consciousness are two different things. And from my subjective experience and heads of color all I have, I was not only conscious but fully awake during the entire experience. And I was. in a different realm, but that's how it's. That's only what I can say how it fell to me. You probably already know this, but many of the near-death experiencers somehow disconnect from the body just before trauma. Like, if they got run over by a car, they don't really experience the pain of being hit by the car. It's almost like the consciousness has a safety release or something to prevent the consciousness from that amount of suffering. And I feel like maybe that's where you were, and then we transition somehow. Are you not seeing anything to now? You're seeing the surgical theater happening. Yes, it could be that it wasn't like the physical trauma, but maybe the overwhelming experience of dying, that no blood was transported into the white logons in the brain, which is also interesting that the brain is capable. If this experience was caused by the brain to such a profound experience as the live review, if it's so to speak, undernourished and has the lack of oxygen and glycogen or whatever, that might be an explanation that I disconnected from reality of dying. But that's of course not what it feels like from the first person point of view. From the person's point of view, I feel no desire to disconnect, no intention to disconnect. From the first person's point of view, it's more or less the experience of being thrown, or as I said earlier, catapulted into a different realm. When you're out of your body and you're watching the man in the orange jacket and the other physicians, do you think that are so? You know, obviously you're not using your eyes, but your soul is somehow or your spirit is somehow interpreting what's going on. Do you think there's some kind of data transfer mechanism that goes from the soul to the brain so then the brain is interpreting it as vision in some way? Well obviously there has to be some transfer because by all our knowledge, I'm using my brain now to recall this experience. So somehow in my brain, this experience or parts of it is being stored. And I use my brain now to communicate as imperfectly as it is the experience to you and your listeners and viewers. So there is a connection. I think there's two possibilities. Since we know from the Averse Study I, there was a person who had a profound near-death experience and could observe the environment in the operating theater, three minutes after the cardiac arrest. And by all known standards, three minutes after the cardiac arrest, the brain is severely disabled and he should not be able to have a really good sensory information being processed by the brain about what is happening in the room and what is being talked and what is being done. But this person had them, we had a very good proof of this in an experimental, in a controlled setting during the Averse Study. So there's two possibilities in my eyes. Either the mind can really leave the body and then the dualists arrive that as PIM fun-lommal, the cardiologist who worked, studied near-death experience, he once speculated maybe the brain is just a receiver and the mind is a sender, a sending unit, but they're not the same. And that's dualism of course. That's the one possibility. The mind is really something different than the brain and can just leave the brain. The other possibility which is more pan-psychist than I have certain sympathies for this as well, that maybe our connectedness to the mind is much deeper in the brain than these higher level structures at the cortical level that we need for our normal waking consciousness. Maybe mind and much more deeply connected, maybe at the lowest level, the plank level, the quantum level of the universe and the universe has this mental aspect right from the get-go in it. And then maybe in the experience of near-death we look, we let go of this very particular connection to the material aspect of our brains, the higher level cortical structures and so on, but we are still connected to the lower levels which are much more deeper and holistic to the material world. And so the mind does not connect from the material world, but it enters into a more fundamental level and at that fundamental level everything is connected with everything at an information level so we can have access to information which we cannot have during our normal state waking consciousness. So that's a less dualistic interpretation and I think those are the two possibilities. Some of my guests talk about the body being a manifestation of the mind. And I think that would be the less dualistic possibility you're speaking of. Would you agree with that? Well, there is an interpretation of pan-psychism where there is something like a world soul. So the universe, it's not like that every little particle has its tiny little aspect of mentality and then if you put those together like Lego pieces, a higher level mind appears, no, there is already a unifying mental unity at the lowest level of the universe. So the universe is minded in that respect. This is a great tradition both in the East and the West. Buddhism has always called this and we now call it holistic or cosmopan-psychism or pan-cosmo-psychism sometimes. Spinoza had a similar view and even Plato spoke about the world soul and if that is correct then really everything in nature is a manifestation of the world soul. Not just human experience but animals, plants and everything are manifestations of this underlying mental unity and this would be very much be in line with my experience of this infinite love as ultimate reality. So that's of course highly speculative and that's not a scientific statement. It's a it's it's high level metaphysics and speculation but in those ultimate questions we can but speculate but it might be that way that the underlying reality is deep down mental, unified, holistic, a world soul which manifests the plurality of things we experience. While you were in the realm of infinite love, was that also a place of infinite knowledge where you knew everything? I wouldn't say that I knew everything. At least I didn't try so to speak. I didn't have any because I was so immersed in love, I was not trying to solve the deepest mathematical puzzles but I was in a way I became all knowing about the purpose of my life for example so because looking for the purpose of our lives. And it became very clear to me in this experience that the purpose of life is to seek wisdom and deep knowledge, not superficial knowledge. There's lots of superficial knowledge which you find like on TikTok or whatever. But wisdom and deep knowledge and loving, deep loving and caring relationships. Those are the two things we should seek in life. This became obvious to me. So I became all-knowing or very powerfully knowing about who I am, what my purpose is in life. I wouldn't go as far that I knew everything, at least I didn't. I had the experience that my mind was way sharper and clearer than in my normal waking consciousness. But I wouldn't go so far that I had the feeling of becoming all-knowing, no, that I didn't have. After you discovered your life's purpose, how did you change once you came back? I was already a philosopher and a member of the Jesuit Order, so I was already a person seeking for meaning and meditating. So I was not one of those people who lived a life of like material, seeking material goods, becoming the richest person in the city or in the country as a life goal, so that I would have to change that I was already on that path of being a seeker of wisdom. But I changed in other respects and there's very common and probably not very new to your listeners or viewers because they are so common for most of us near-death experiences. One profound change was that I lost completely my fear of death. I remember that I felt shortly before I fall asleep in the evening, they say in philosophy that death is the little brother of that sleep, sorry, that sleep is the little brother of death. So whenever we sleep we kind of have to let go and fall into the nothingness of sleep. And this transition when you fall asleep reminds us of the moment when we die. And to this day happens when I fall asleep and it reminds me of the moment I will die sometime in the future, hopefully not very soon. And then I have a smile on my face and I say, wow, someday I will die. How nice is that? So that's not a very natural attitude towards death. And I didn't have that before the experience. This came from the experience. The other thing, another change was that I was prone to periods of depression before I had the experience. Like many people who are very philosophical and sensitive and not very materialistic, my inside, I sometimes would despair about the situation of the world, my own situation. And two or three times this grew into severe depression. And this depression was kind of a company, a company, me so that even sometimes when I felt the world was nice and was like a beautiful picture that was always the stain in the picture of darkness and depression. And I could notice that this feeling of this power of depression over me got a little bit less profound when I grew older. So it was probably the most profound in late puberty or earlier adulthood, 17, 18, 19 years old. But it did help had power over me. But it vanished completely after the near death experience. It never came back. Which is interesting that something which belongs to one's personality, so to speak, I would say, before that I would have said, this is part of my personality. That's who I really am. And but this one experience, there was few seconds eradicated this. Another aspect is that I once read that Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi was asked, who was obviously a very religious person, whether he could doubt the existence of God. And then what I read, I'm not perfectly sure whether it's true. But it makes perfect sense to me. What he, according to this report, answered was that it was more easy for him, or it was easier for him to doubt that he is now sitting in this room, than to doubt the existence of God. Because he could imagine that he's currently asleep and just fantasizing dreaming being in this room. But he cannot make sense of the thought that he makes up the idea of God, fantasizing it. That's exactly what happened to me. I'm a trained professional philosopher. So to doubt things and to find holes in arguments, that's what I do for a living. And I can doubt any argument for the existence of God at an intellectual level and find the flaw in it within minutes. Because that's my profession. But existentially as a person after that experience of total love, I cannot really doubt the experience of something which people might call God. Some people then have very strange ideas of God. And that's not what I mean. I mean an ultimate spiritual reality that is benevolent towards us and that is intrinsically love and good, loving and good. I cannot add an existential level, doubt that this exists. So that's something that has changed. And I might add one more. I was like many young males. I had difficulties reading the minds of others to be empathetic. I was not very good at this. And sometimes made from my good perspective laughable mistakes in trying to read the intentions and feelings of others. And also this changed dramatically after the near death experience. All of a sudden after the near death experience, I could feel what people were going through without having to ask them. They would just enter the room and I would immediately feel something is wrong and maybe what kind of roughly it was because I wouldn't have all the information. But I had a connection to other people from one day to another. I didn't have it the day before the near death experience and I had it the day after which was a profound change in my life. Many of the near death experiences report that during their life review, the most important things we can do here are random acts of kindness. And you mentioned that this is a place about relationships. Why do you think the purpose of coming here is about human interaction and human relationships more than anything else? That's a very deep question. I think that actually 2b is to be related. So we are what we are by the relationships we enter. And it's the mind is much more able to enter into relationships than the physical world because the mind can be anywhere at any time. I can now say a truthful sentence about Jupiter, for example, so saying it is the largest planet in the solar system. And Jupiter makes that sentence true right now without the some information has to flow from Jupiter to my thought and making it true which will take a few minutes to travel by the speed of light or whatever. So the mind is our organ of connectivity. The mind as Eric Stolz said is somehow everywhere. And the more we open up and lower our borders so to speak, the more we become connected to everything and the more we become real in that sense. And what I felt in this ultimate experience of being immersed in love is that by tearing down my borders, my outside borders becoming more connected, becoming more open, I did not become less real but I became more real so to speak. And that's I think the point of randomness here, we have doing random acts of kindness so that it's not again, my kindness connected to I'm kind because the person I'm kind to is sexually attractive to me. Or I expect from that person something in return, the person is influential and can give something in return. Or it's a direct neighbor and so it will elevate the experiences in my neighborhood. Randomness is gratuitous. It is not self-serving. And this is really radical relatedness, which is openness towards the other, letting the other be what it is independent of my conditions or self-serving interests. It's unconditional love. And random act of kindness are what makes them so beautiful is that they are unconditional. There's nothing attached to them because I won't see that person again probably. Just meet the person at the airport and then never meet the person again. But that is truly selfless love because I have nothing to expect in return. And that's radical openness and that allows for a deeper sense of connection. And it's almost somewhat divine because in the religious tradition we believe that divine love is absolutely unconditional. I don't have to meet certain conditions to be loved by God. So that's in that way I would answer that question. It seems like a lot of our interactions with each other is transactional. I think you're basically saying the same thing. But how do we make it where good acts naturally occur with us without having to force it to happen? Yeah, that's also a difficult question to answer. I think to a certain extent the beauty of human existence is that we can make ourselves. We have a given nature, a physical nature as homo sapiens in certain genetic makeup. And we maybe have a metaphysical nature as somehow a being which is torn between animal and angels, who speak and a little bit of both. And so we have a nature but we are not at different levels, physical metaphysical wherever you want to place it. But we are not confined to our nature. We can somehow which was very stressed by the existentialists like Sartre or Kirkligor. We can make ourselves by our decisions. And so we are not bound completely by the past. And we are not completely determined by the past. I think the live review also tells me this I have learned from this and I can change. I'm not bound by the past. How does this relate to your question? I can by making certain decisions like random acts of kindness, spending more quality times with others, opening up to others so that they can see my vulnerabilities and my weakest spots, so to speak. By making those conscious decisions, I over time form myself in so that I don't have to do it anymore by conscious decision because now it's become my nature. But that's not a nature that was just given to me by nature or by God or by fate, whatever you believe in. But partly we can make our nature. And I think that's also the message of the near-death experience or those mystical experience that we trust that we can change, that we are not completely determined by our upbringing and our genes. I'm not disputing that they have enormous influence on us, but we do have the power to form our own personality to an extent. And we and not by thoughts primarily, but by actions. Actions of kindness, of openness, of love, of caring. And over time it will change who we are. Earlier you said that you are a Jesuit. Does that mean you're a member of the clergy or a priest? Yes. What are your thoughts on reincarnation? Philosophically, reincarnation presupposes the truth of dualism. Because if I could be the same person, but in a body of a frog, for example, I would re-incarnate as a tiger. Then who I am as a person really has nothing to do with my body. You can take my soul like as a crystal and place it in the tiger body, in the human body, in the frog body. And I have philosophical, philosophical trouble believing this because I think for many, many reasons that mind and matter are much more closely connected. So I think that I'm by my very nature, a human and I could not become, still be me, still be go to heart printup and not be a human. I have trouble understanding this. But then you might say, well, you might reincarnate in another human, that I find much less of a troublesome idea because I think I'm a process philosopher. So I was very much influenced by by white head, the British American plate philosopher, metaphysician of the 20th century Alfred North Whitehead, who says the reality is in constant change, nothing is permanent. In a way, since my body doesn't stay the same for minute to minute, it always changes. My mind re-incarnates even now during this interview from second to second into a somewhat different body. So in that respect, I'm very open to this notion. And then of course there's the religious aspect. Re-incarnation, you get re-incarnated as long as you need it to become saved in the end. Here I have some theological issues. If this becomes a machine, a salvation machine, so to speak, the mechanism. So we put the piece of clothing in the washing machine the first time. the stain is still there before the second time. As long as finally the stain is gone and the outcome is fixed, some pieces of clothing will be cleaned in one cycle, others need four or five cycles. But in the end everything will be cleaned. That's too deterministic for me. But I know that's not necessarily the view of our Hindu friends. So I don't want to impose that view on them. I'll just say if reincarnation means that there is like a machinery of redemption, I don't like it because my view, which is also somewhat inspired by the need of experience of the cosmos is not that of a mechanism of a machine, but that of a living spontaneous and free organism. So that's what I can say about that. What is your definition of God? I would say God is being a such, not simply a being among other beings. It is God is being a such infinite everywhere, but it's not an abstract principle, but being a such with a, what we would call a dimension of personality. So he cares, he loves his interpersonally connected. So he's not simply a thing among others, like a person like us, but a rather big one. I think that's the most dangerous misunderstanding of God. Because if God was a thing outside of myself, I would feel like I have to fight with him. God is being a such everywhere, encompassing everything inside of everything and everything is inside him. It's not a being among others, but his very nature is love and being connected to everything and caring for everything. So are you saying that God is not a being that is separate from us, but we all are collectively God as well as all the physical aspects of our environment as well? Well, we are in God, yes, and God is in us. That's how I see it now. We are not outside God. We are in God and God is in us. So God is not an outside reality. Like the famous spaghetti monsters of the new atheist, a ridiculous entity, which we could imagine outside the universe. No, God is much more intimately connected with us and the universe. Actually, the entire universe is for my point of view within God. When you are going through the tunnel, do you feel like it's possible that what you're experiencing is a recalibration of your energy, like increasing your energetic frequency? That's not the way I talk. I know there's a tradition of people who interpret the world with calibration of energies. I'm not very knowledgeable of this tradition. I'm now trying to make sense of it for my experience. It makes sense that to a certain extent I was an instrument which was out of tune before the Neadev experience. It was a nice instrument, but it was somewhat out of tune. It could have been tune better. And after the Neadev experience, the instrument, which is my mind and my body, my whole existence, if we would for a moment as a metaphor see, as a musical instrument, is now tune better. So it's more beautiful and more capable and better sounding and more in tune with the rest of the universe. If that's recalibration, then that makes perfect sense to me. Some of my guests believe that their your death experience was something that happened on purpose to get them back on track with their life purpose. It wasn't an accident. That's what I'm saying. Is that possible for you? Yes. It happened at as crossroads in my life where I was doubting many things and many previous certainties had become uncertain. And I was struggling finding a clear vision of my future and purpose in life. And it happened exactly at that moment where I needed it most, so to speak. And that's surprising. That the famous German poet, I cannot say that in English, hold on any certain, if the danger is the greatest, the rescue usually appears. In the moment of greatest danger, the rescue miraculously appears. And that's from a somewhat religious point of view, seems like a divine interaction or something that happened on purpose. If you say it happened on purpose, you assume that there is a mind doing something on purpose because purpose requires a mind. So there's a greater mind, greater than mine, that did this on purpose. We have to be careful, though, to say that me having this illness or having this accident was done by imposed on me, like on Job in the Old Testament, to test me or to make me reach the next level. I wouldn't go that far. I would rather say that there is in whatever trouble we experience. There is the offering, the invitation, the lure to growth, to meaning, because the universe in itself is ultimately meaningful. And the more I discover that I'm part of this greater all-emcompassing meaning, I can find meaning in myself. And those experiences that widen my horizon of meaning also give me the possibility to discover more meaning in my life. Do you feel that the other side that you are on is more real than this one? Yes. Why is that that most people claim that to be? That's again a very good question. I have no good answer to it. When we experience something with great clarity, not foggy, and so we think it's real. So if I see in the distance a tree, but it's foggy and snowing, I'm not absolutely sure whether it's a tree. So I'm not sure whether it's real, but it might be a tree. It looks pretty much like a tree. But if I'm standing in front of the tree in bright daylight on a sunny afternoon, this is obviously, I cannot doubt the reality of this tree. And since my mental capacity seemed to be so much more powerful, and the reality I was experiencing was like the bright sunny daylight compared to the foggy snowing. They were, I couldn't make out the tree clearly. The reality that I experienced so clearly, of course, seemed to be absolutely real. And there was no doubt of misrepresenting it or making something, something up, because the mind is as the highest of its capabilities, higher than the ones I have ever experienced during my normal wakefulness. And the mind is somehow connected to reality. It seems to me what I experienced was real. I'm not making the philosophical claims that I have an proof that this was real. But I can tell you that from my first person point of view, it was the most real thing I ever experienced. The one that I could least doubt. I think science would say that humans think about 60 to 80,000 thoughts per day. Do you think this clarity that you experience is somehow due to a separation from the mind and a release from this monkey mind and chatter that we have? It could be. Once again, I don't know exactly what happens there. In the brain, I don't know exactly how it's related to the brain. I don't know whether somehow the mind disconnects from the brain at all or maybe some areas of the brain. We don't even know how our normal waking consciousness is caused by the brain. There is no universally accepted scientific theory of consciousness. So if we don't even know about our normal consciousness scientifically, now we could we know scientifically about the nature of those extreme experiences. So it could be that our mind is capable of much more than we usually use because usually we are connected to this physical body which is a has a risen in evolution and we have to survive. We have to find food and mating partners and we have to find shelter and our brain is very good at this and we can survive in this world much better than computers or even the best AI can. So we have we are very powerfully adapted to this world to survive here. But maybe if the mind is not being tied to surviving in this material world or in this part of the world or this dimension of the world, maybe if it's free from this, it has other capacities that we don't use right now or if they use if we use them too much, we would distract it from that's that's perfectly possible. I definitely get the impression from my dear new ethics experience that our minds are much more capable of much more capable than what we normally use them for. I think that feeling and having feelings is really created by the body. For example, when you left your body initially, the feeling of panic and fear disappeared. But the only thing that doesn't resolve for me is that when you did go to this place of infinite love, how are you feeling infinite love without the body? I would not say that I was bodyless because when I entered this realm, which I called the realm of energy and light, I could place myself in a space like structure here I am and there are others around me. So that's kind of a bodily existence. Like let's say a number has no bodily existence. The number three is not five inches long or the number four is a little bit longer than the number three. They are not in space. They are outside of space and time. And that's not what I was. I was not outside of space and time. It was just a different space and a different time. And so I was in touch with this infinite love and I was communicating with it and thereby also partaking in its infinity. But I still was at a place. So going back to this earlier said about rain and connection. I think humans are always embodied. We are not mere spirits. We are always at a place from which we communicate to others who are always in a place, other humans. And to me, this experience of being in a place has not vanished. It was not just this three-dimensional physical space in which I'm now in this room. It was a completely different dimension of space, so to speak. It doesn't make sense, I know. But I try to do the best I can to capture in words which are made for this world, an experience which was out of this world. What's the difference between being a philosopher of the mind and someone who studies psychology? The both connected because the boundaries between empirical science and psychology and philosophy are not 100 percent clearly defined. But a psychologist looks for questions that can be answered by the scientific method. You set up an experiment and then the experiment will give you an answer to your question. Where are the philosophical questions cannot be answered by setting up an experiment? So if you, for example, ask, is the mind identical with the body or is the mind something else than the body? Could there be a world which is just like ours? I was here talking to you, but I was just some kind of chat GPT with no consciousness and you were some kind of chat GPT with no consciousness. But otherwise the world would be like ours. So our physical consciousness, physical cosmos, but without consciousness could that be, could like an all powerful being creates such a cosmos? That's a philosophical question because we cannot set up an experiment to test it. So there are questions like is the mind identical to the body? Are we free, for example, is there a soul for which there are no ultimate tests in a scientific way? So psychologists cannot within their method answer them. And those are the philosophical questions that cannot be answered by the scientific method, i.e. by experiments. But they are still burning and important questions to us. Well, since you brought up chat GPT, some of my near-death experiences feel that this realm is some type of simulated reality, maybe not by computers, but something else. What are your thoughts? It could well be. That our reality is assimilation. So in philosophical idealism, Bishop Parkley thought the world consists only of minds and experiences, experience serous and experiences. And we don't need anything else. There's no matter outside. So what do we have from matter? The matter of the screen in front of me, if I touch it, I feel a certain resistance. There is something there. But what are you talking about? You experience of resistance. So whenever we talk about the outside world, we talk about our experiences. So maybe everything there is is minds and experiences and everything else is simulated in those minds. This could be our situation so that the physical world we live in is kind of a user interface like in in in the movie matrix, the first movie matrix, a simulation in our minds. And the ultimate reality behind it is something other and most likely than something more mental and more spiritual so that the material world is a simulation. Here again there is no knock down empirical argument in physics for example that this is not the case because by every argument the physicist can come up with or with every argument the physicist can come up with against this idea of a simulation we can simply say that's part of the simulation. So whether we live in a simulation or not cannot be decided by the sciences it's a philosophical it's a deeply philosophical question and in the near death experience we it becomes clear to us that our normal waking consciousness, wakeful consciousness is just one aspect of reality. Maybe it's just one user interface to reality and we think it's the entire reality but it's just one one way of looking at it and it's not not even the most interesting one. Since this is part of the experience it it lends certain credence to the idea that all we have of the world is a user interface i.e. a simulation. You wrote an article about near death experiences being a boundary situation. If people would like to read that where did they go? Well this is my most recent article on near death experiences and it just came out a few days ago. Fortunately it is available as a free download from the publisher so I will give you the link. It is I interpret near death experiences here at a boundary situation and it's inspired by the German philosopher Carl Jasper's who was a psychiatrist and a very influential existentialist in Germany and he said that human existence reaches its depth in certain boundary situations. This was for example the boundary situation of failure if you have a great project in life maybe you're a marriage and it fails or you need experience of despair and then he said also the experience of death is such a boundary situation in which human life reaches its ultimate death. So the boundary situation is a situation in which human existence can reach its full potential because we reach our ultimate depth. And in this article I described near death experience I talk about the different interpretations and I use this concept by the German philosopher Carl Jasper's to interpret them as a boundary situation in which we can realize our ultimate potential and live human existence to the fullest. Dr. Bruntrup before we finish up can you leave us with a last positive message? We are beings that are connected to other beings endowed with a mind and mentality and we become more real and more fulfilled the more we connect to others and the deepest connection we have to others is love to care for others to support others and let others care for us and support us. And this is much more important than achievements in your job or sports or whatever. It is this web of love, the universal connectedness of loving beings that gives our life ultimate meaning. That's my message from the near death experience and live accordingly. Make this your most important priority in life and you will live a fulfilled life. Dr. Bruntrup thank you for your message and thank you for being my guest. Thanks for having me and all the best to you and all your listeners and viewers.