whose caption no, bruce, i'm the boss and no robert, i am not talking to you. your beat 360 t-shirt on the way. this does it for this edition of "360." thanks for watching. "larry king" starts right now. 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 probst 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. medical doctor, spiritual teacher, author of "life after death." and dinesh d'souza 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? ha do you make of this change? >> 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 our 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 secretes bile and your pancreas secretes 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 surgeons, 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 setpoint 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 or end. it is this long continuum. >> 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 continuum 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 sigh synapse network. if i ask you to imagine the color red or look at the color red, there's no red in your brain. there are electrical 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 topic. 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. trying to sort out what health reform means to seniors?

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welcome back to "larry king live." i'm jeff probst from "survivor" sitting in for larry king 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. in a way amind that continues is

like that. >> first, deepak, you took issue -- >> i have to tell michael that he's very superstitious. 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 neuroplasticity. they're gene regulation. if your mental activity can change the activity of your neurons, then 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 after death, 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 gazzaniga's idea of the left hemisphere interpreter. a little narrator storyteller.

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 rat chet it it up in a holistic way without it being a new age-ish 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 reincarnated in the body of a little boy? that's what the boy says. we will meet james in 60 seconds. in the last year, we've learned a lot. we've learned that meatloaf and jenga can be more fun...

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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, natoma. 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 natoma. i did a google search on that. i found 300 or 400 hits down history of a world war ii ship in the pacific. 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 he 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 flew with or any 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 lessen 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?

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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 spirituality which is just really 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? he was interested in this and maybe his dad was, and that's it? is that right? >> 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 non-humans. 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. the bigger point is belief in life after death is absolutely universal. it's existed from the dawn of mankind. today most people in the world believe in it. the denial of life after death is only in western culture and recently. thousand, there are eastern and western -- >> 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 it becomes an article of faith. 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 magnetic fields bombarding my temporal lobes. 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'm out on the seashore and see

the sunshine, i say the sun is blinding me. michael says, that's an illusion, i can blind you here with a flashlight 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? >> that's because their neurons actually 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 he went about all the research that's in our book to try and disprove and prove that waefr was happening to james was the result of 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. >> the skeptic is convinced 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. i don't know. you know, volkswagen takes care of the scheduled maintenance at no cost. and during the sign then drive event, you can get a cc, jetta, or top safety-rated tiguan for practically just your signature. it's that easy. i can't believe it.

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you're watching "larry king live." i'm jeff probst sitting in for larry tonight. we're joined by dr. jim tucker, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virginia. he's a child psychiatrist, and he's studied over 2500 cases of reincarnation memories in kids.

he's 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. i haven't studied all 2500 cases, but 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. >> some of these cases the kids have similar scars to the people that they reincarnated from? >> 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 intact memories, the time span tends to be very 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. ♪ (announcer) they've been tested, built and driven like no other. and now they're being offered like no other. come to the winter event and get an exceptional offer on the mercedes-benz of your dreams. it's our way of showing a little holiday spirit. hurry before the offer ends january 4th.

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 and some 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 hallucinogenic drugs. you'd have some weird dreams.

and that's true. if you give hundreds of people hallucinogen drugs, they won't have the same dreams. 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, 2500 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. bright lights. sort of the same thing. 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 this for a long time, i thought i was going to be able to explain is it all 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 clinically 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 still running. >> got to take a break. a man died on a football field seven years ago and came back to life. his incredible story in 60 seconds. that lasts all day. take 2 extra strength tylenol every 4 to 6 hours?!? taking 8 pills a day...

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survivor story now. bob schriever was refereeing a high school football game seven years ago when he went sbhu 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 schriever, 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: shcriever choking up as he showed me the video that day. and then he started to talk about what he remembered. 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 schriever will tell us more about his near-death experience when we return right after this. what can i get ya? i'd like one of those desserts and some coffee. sure, decaf or regular? - regular. - cake or pie? - pie. - apple or cherry? cherry. oil or cream? oil or cream? cream... please. when other toppings are made with hydrogenated oil, the real dairy cream in reddi-wip's sure an easy choice. nothing's more real than reddi-wip. fork or... spoon?

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bob 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. he's the co-founder of the sudden cardiac arrest foundation. what do you remember of that? >> not much. when it happened to me, i was just following the quarterback on a rollout, and i took two or three steps and took half a step and started to lean and that's all i remember. >> no pain? >> no pain. i had a heart attack like before where i had some minor pain, jaw pain. i was unaware i had a hard attack until after the fact when i had the symptoms and i recognized it. being the macho guy i was i refused to do anything about it. when i went down with an sea, no pain, no anything. >> sca, sudden cardiac arrest. >> that's correct. >> you also explored the idea of near-death experiences in your book. similar story? >> yeah, yeah. the stories are very similar in terms of what we hear from people that have sudden cardiac arrest and other things as well,

and especially in it country, very similar stories. the point i was making earlier a little bit was this idea as part of what they experienced, though, you couldn't -- 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 he told me, i couldn't explain it. that was so interesting. >> there's a psychologist, susan blackmore who advanced a theory called the dying brain. the idea is when your brain goes into shutdown mode, it generates these experiences. bob is a walking refuse future tags of this theory is that all the people are living among us. they drive to work and function normally. if bob's brain died, how did it repair itself so he's functioning normally? it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. >> 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 is dead at one given moment at a particular time on the clock. that's not how it works. it takes two, three, five, ten minutes to go through a whole dying process. the ref wasn't dead. he was in a near-death state. we know from dr. james winery from the u.s. air force who has documented over 700 near-death -- >> it's time to head back to the -- this is cnn breaking news. we've just been hearing news comes to us from jamaica. an american airlines plane has overshot a runway just a short time ago in jamaica hitting a perimeter fence. we understand that some people were taken to hospital, but none are believed to be in critical condition. the plane was a boeing 737, flight 331 was carrying 145 passengers and 7 crew members. everybody has now left the

plane, which was going from miami to kingston. the flight originated from reagan national airport in washington, d.c. we understand that poor visibility may have been a factor as a result of driving rain in the area. we'll bring you more details when we have them, but for now we'll return you to "larry king live." it mens multiple realms, other universes. what do we know about the other universes? we know that if they 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 got a worldly explanation. you said earlier deepak, that i can't explain everything naturally. that doesn't mean there's a supernatural force. we explain everything. the fact that you called consciousness the hard problem. right. we don't have a theory of

consciousness doesn't mean that altered states of consciousness are something woo-woo or supernatural. >> i don't believe in anything supernatural. when did we use the word "supernatural"? >> it's like asking a caterpillar is there life after being a caterpillar. the caterpillar might say, no way, i can't conceive of what it's looking to a butterfly, but that's part of the natural order. >> there are traditions that say that the in-body experience is a socially induced collective hallucination. we do not exist in the body. the body exists in us. >> that doesn't work for me. >> it doesn't work for you, but who is the you that's talking to me right now? that's the basic question i'm asking you? >> let's get to you in the room with us, bob. weigh in on this as we go to break. >> i'm not medical. all i know in our organization we have many, many survivors who

belong, and they tell the same story or basically the same story. i did witness something. i didn't go as far as some of our 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 we can keep them alive like i was. you hear the stories they tell. before this happened to me, i was not a believer in this. i am now a believer in this. >> more spirited debate about a very spiritual matter or maybe not right after this. i crush you like tiny clown car. because you are... ...clown, yes? female valve: come, you hit me again and i break you. male valve: oh, you messed with wrong pipe now, car. ha, ha trust me...i have to live with her. announcer:accidents are bad. but geico's good with guaranteed repairs through auto repair express.

welcome back. i'm jeff probst. why can some people die and go on living? we've been exploring the life

and death topics 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, you know, because when you die you're not a better person than you are now. you carry on the consciousness you have now. >> there's no hope for me? >> if you life 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. okay. >> 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 be present now and live it the best way you can with loving, kindness, compassion, joy at the success of others and peace. >> deepak, that's the smartest thing you've said today. i have to say i completely agree

with you. whether there's an afterlife or not, that is precisely how we should live our lives. we're in agreement. >> yeah. but you're saying that's the way our synaptic network should live. >> i am my brain. >> let me ask you this. would a near-death experience of a serial killer be different from that of somebody who has lived -- >> it would be. in fact, initially the near-death experiences seem entirely positive, but there have been extensive compilations of nightmarish and hellish near-death experiences which have shocked people into transforming their life. if there's no life after death and we reflect on that, then in a sense we're passengers on the titanic. we can rearrange the deck chairs and turn up the music, but the whole ship is going down. on the other hand, if there's life after death, we have a reason to believe in cosmic justice. we believe that good will be rewarded and evil will be held

accountable. we face death more bravely because it's not the end. we can teach morality to our children. we derive a sense of meaning and significance in our life, which is part of this larger framework. i think life after death if there's residual uncertainty, i think the preponderance of the evidence supports it. it's good to believe and makes sense. >> is there any unethical aspect to the death -- the process of death has begun, and now you're going to stop it and bring it back? >> absolutely not. 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 and what is death per se? we're not good at determining that yet. even within hospitals the idea of brain death which deepak talked about, for the most part it's a clingal exam. in one hospital they may give you a slightly different answer versus another hospital. we're talking about death here,

and it becomes a very big deal. it's not at all unethical to reverse the process. >> we've spent an hour going back and forth. deepak is looking for you somewhere in between wherever you are and wherever we are right now. have you taken anything from this? >> no. >> i do think that the preponderance of the evidence argument is the way to go, because it can't be proved or disproved like in a court of law. i think we have to just liook a the preponderance of the evidence. in my case i'm skeptical and in his case he goes the other way. >> deepak would say to you, michael. deepak would say to you, you prove it, then? >> well, it's not the -- the burden of proof is not on me. i don't have to prove it. i'm saying let's keep an open mind, but we don't know. why not just say i don't know and leave it at that? >> that's the first sensible thing he said. let's keep an open mind. >> second sensible thing. remember i agreed with you. >> there's