Welcome...

"Dr. Morse, I have a wonderful secret to tell you. I was climbing a staircase to heaven". Chris, age 8, told me this after being resuscitated when his heart stopped beating as a result of kidney failure. As a Pediatrician and neuroscientist, I have been studying that secret since 1980.

Picture of a near death experience by the child who experienced it.
Picture of a child's near death experience

This picture was drawn by a seven year old girl who nearly drowned in a swimming pool.  Above the blue line, we see the girl in a world with flowers. As I expressed complete disbelief at her story, she patted me condescendingly on the hand and told me, "You'll see Dr. Morse, Heaven is fun."

She wanted to stay in heaven, however, a person she thought was Jesus told her that she had to go back to help her mother with medical problems associated with her (then) unborn brother. She didn't know what these problems were as the baby was not born yet. Yet she draws her unborn brother at the bottom of the picture with a big heart in his chest. After this drawing was made, he was born with severe heart disease.

For more pictures, see Children's NDE Drawings

Mission

My original research, and subsequent studies by others, have documented that the near death experience is real. This understanding, that death is in fact a dynamic spiritual event in which the dying are frequently fully conscious, has profound implications for the living.

Nothing less than a new scientific paradigm is at hand, one that will transform human culture as surely as the birth of written language. I want to be an active part in the birth of this new paradigm.

Areas I am interested in include:

  1. Using spiritual experiences in facilitating healthy grieving and healing.
  2. Understanding the importance of the near death experience in transforming our approach to death and dying.
  3. Continuing to document and develop an understanding of the neurobiology of the spiritual and near death experience. Consider, for example, the development of written language. The human brain evolved tens of thousands of years before humans developed writing; yet we have specific brain structures associated with written language! The more we document the science of spiritual brain function, the better we will understand its purpose in our ordinary lives.
  4. Work with other professionals and especially students and graduate students to continue to develop a body of research that will eventually reach critical mass and catalyze the new paradigm that is coming.
  5. Understand how intuition, the art of split second decision making, is related to the near death experience and spiritual experiences in general. My current research with police officers, FBI agents, and executives of major corporations indicates that intuition may well be a type of mediumnistic experience.
  6. Learning how to differentiate true spiritual insight from anxiety-provoked reactions to stress and fear and how to rely on our intuition in our ordinary lives.

This is an ambitious agenda. Ultimately I need your help, from inviting me to speak at conferences (to achieve the cross pollination of ideas that that typically involves), to your being part of my research or interacting with my website.

The stakes are high. Human culture has been at a "tipping point" with regards to the reuniting of science and spirit, for well over a hundred years. At the turn of the last century, the top scientists and Nobel Prize winners of that time devoted themselves to creating a new spiritual paradigm. That effort ended in failure, with a resultant spiritual dark age of science marked by the intrusive overuse of medical technology in dying patients, to the development of atomic bombs which serve no rational social purpose.

We have a new opportunity, as exciting new developments in the scientific community once again cause us to reexamine our spiritual beliefs. Please join me in the development of a new paradigm of understanding the nature of human consciousness and the reuniting of science and spirit.

Contact Me

Dr. Morse's latest book: "Where God Lives" was a best seller in the United States and France. It won the European Book Sellers 2002 Award for best non-fiction book of the year. He has presented the scientific information in the book in several scientific papers accepted in mainstream scientific journals. Order Books