A SCIENCE PROFESSOR SEES THE LIGHT

        When he went out for a run one day in 1983, Dr. Don Morse, a Temple University science professor, was like many of his scientific colleagues, not believing in anything beyond the material world.   His views regarding a spiritual world and life after death began to change a few minutes into his workout. 

        As Morse exercised, things started spinning around in ever widening circles and everything began slowing down.  His heart was racing and was so loud that he thought it would burst through his chest.  Then it began to slow down and seemed to stop completely.  He then fell to the ground.  “I knew I was dying, but I wasn’t afraid,” recalls Morse, a 71-year-old resident of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, now retired. “The light was incredibly beautiful, and I felt wonderfully calm and secure with a benevolent presence beside me.”

        Morse describes the light as being extremely bright and white.  “It enveloped me so that I could see nothing but this light.  I was not afraid.   I felt secure, warm, and serene.”   He then recalls seeing his whole life flash before him, including temper tantrums as a child, his victory in a dart-throwing contest, a hospital bout with colitis, asthma attacks, family visits, throwing a player out at home plate, shooting a winning basket, crying when the New York Giants lost a game, seeing his father die from lung cancer, getting married, seeing his three children born, doing a surgical procedure on the day President Kennedy was killed, receiving a Temple University research award, as well as many other events in his life.

      When the life review ended, he remembers leaving his body, flying over the clouds, and arriving at Mt. Eden Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, where he observed his funeral…or what might have been his funeral had he decided not to return to his body. He recalls reading his obituary in the paper the next day.    Shortly thereafter, he felt the sharp pain of an injection and realized he was still in the hospital.  Morse had taken his run on the grounds of a large Philadelphia hospital, where he had been hospitalized after suffering a severe reaction to quinacrine, a drug used to treat a gastrointestinal disease.  However, he felt strong enough that day to get in a little light exercise.  Apparently, he wasn’t strong enough.

         While Morse now understands that he was having a near-death experience, he didn’t recognize it as such then. “I was a research scientist who was well schooled in evolutionary biology, genetics, microbiology, immunology, and with some knowledge of archaeology, anthropology, cosmology, and quantum physics,” he muses. “At that time I had never heard of a NDE.  I was an agnostic and considered it a hallucination.  I pushed it to the back of my mind, although I’d often think about it.”

      In 1995, following the death of his sister and some friends and relatives, Morse began suffering from a “general anxiety disorder” relating to his own mortality.  He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t exercise, couldn’t enjoy his food, and began experiencing abdominal cramps and neuralgic-like headaches.  It was then that he began to try and make sense out of his NDE.    “Even though I didn’t see the spiritual connection at first, the NDE did trigger a tremendous change in me,” Morse offers.

      “Those 12 years between the NDE and the death anxiety were the most productive of my life.  I could go to a lecture and be writing something on a tablet totally unrelated to what was being discussed, but I’d still know what was being talked about in the lecture.  I could deal with all kinds of distractions that previously bothered me.  From what I’ve read, that happens to a lot of people who have had NDEs.  There’s something going on in the subconscious, both physically and psychologically.”

       Morse began reading everything he could about near-death-experiences, out-of-body travel, apparitions, visions, dreams, spirit communication, the occult, past-life regressions, psychic phenomena, the paranormal, life after death, spiritual evolution, God and the universe, and found a preponderance of evidence that allowed him to formulate a rational depiction of the afterlife.  His findings and views are now set forth in a book, Searching for Eternity (Eagle Wing Books, Inc., 2000)

       Although some of his scientific colleagues may feel that Morse has “abandoned ship,” Morse says that he still believes in the scientific laws and principles he had learned and followed over his 45-year scientific career.   “It’s just with the one law that science cannot and might never understand,” he continues.  “That is the law that explains where we came from.  In a nutshell, I cannot comprehend a universe that is intelligent enough to create itself with all of the million-to-one incredibly chance phenomena that eventually resulted in an intelligent human species.  In addition, I cannot believe that 16 million people who have had near-death experiences, which mimic many of the great religions’ concepts of the afterlife, could have created it in their brains.”

      Morse agrees with the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, that death is man’s greatest fear, especially in the second half of life.  “Some people can suppress it, repress it, or deny it better than others,” he explains.  “But we all have it.  Some people go through life at a fantastic pace just to block out their thoughts on death.”  To overcome this death anxiety, Morse advocates a holistic, integrative approach to stress management.  That involves cultivating an awareness of death, grasping the fact that the consciousness does survive, and that death is merely a transition to another realm of existence.

     “The more you learn about it,” he says, “the more you understand it and face it without too much stress or anxiety.”    – Michael E. Tymn