When Nolan’s vital signs flatlined, what happened was that, as best as I can describe it, Mary Fran, his mother, who had died five days before, came down and scooped Nolan up out of his body
Dr. Scott Taylor is a well-known researcher and speaker in the field of NDE studies. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Near-Death Experiences: Discovering and living in unity.
Dr. Taylor is a skilled trainer and Monroe Institute’s former president and executive director. He is an expert at using binaural beat technology (Hemi-Sync) to enter into and hold expanded states of awareness. Scott is author and voice of six best-selling albums from Hemi-Sync, the “Into the Light” series. He also is the creator and facilitator of the 5 ½ day “NDE Intensive” which uses the pathways laid down by NDErs to explore states of consciousness.
He has twice served on the board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies and co-moderated their annual conference at least a dozen times.
Dr. Taylor earned his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and his doctorate in Education from University of St. Thomas. He also holds a degree in spiritual counseling from the New Seminary.
In this interview at the 2014 conference of the International Society for Near-Death Studies, Scott describes his shared death experience after his girlfriend and her son transitioned from this life to the next a terrible car accident.
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Transcript of Dr. Taylor's Interview
Hi, I’m Scott Taylor. I’m here at the 2014 IANDS Convention in Newport Beach, and I’d like to tell you what happened to me during my shared near-death experience. It occurred in 1981 in the middle of July. I was in love with a woman whose name was Mary Fran. And Mary Fran and her son Nolan were driving home from the lake, and they were in a horrific car accident. Mary Fran was killed outright, and Nolan, who was seven at the time, was mortally wounded. He had a head injury, and it took him about five days to make his transition. What happened was that Mary Fran’s family is a large one, and she was third in the family order, but Nolan was the first grandchild. And so because of the time of five days, all of the sisters and significant others, the uncles and aunts, and just the whole family wound up converging on St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, part of the Mayo system.
And so when it came time for the, let’s just say when the nurse came in and said it was time, and that Nolan’s vital signs were going down very slowly, but it was clear the transition was going to be happening soon. We all went into his hospital room. And because I was just the boyfriend, we’d been dating about six months, all of the aunts and uncles, nieces, and nephews were gathered bedside, and I was about six deep in the room. And so I and Mary Fran’s youngest brother, Willie, wound up just sitting on the windowsill while we were waiting for Nolan. And I’d never seen anyone who had made their transition before. And it’s slow, and it’s gentle, and it took a while.
And so we just kind of waited in silence and in kind of a prayerful state, I guess. And when Nolan’s vital signs flatlined, what happened was that, as best as I can describe it, Mary Fran, his mother, who had died five days before, came down and scooped Nolan up out of his body and it was it was an exquisite reunion and that reunion was filled with with joy and as you can only imagine a mother receiving her son back again. But then a really quite extraordinary thing happened. They turned to me and included me in their embrace, and then the three of us went to the light together. This was something I could never have even possibly imagined because when we hit the light, when we entered this light, it was a joy, this amazing love, it was this bursting of reunion with the most loving entities and with Mary, Fran, and Nolan.
And then what happened was that I slowly came back. They went on and I came back into the physical room. But what makes this a little special or weird is that I bilocated during that period because I was fully present in the room with all of the relatives and I was with them in the light. So I know I was fully present in the room because Nolan had just made his transition And the room was filled with grieving relatives. They’d just lost their brother, their sister, their nephew, their grandson. They… And I was keenly aware of this really emotional time. And yet, I was so happy. I was so filled with joy and love that I thought my face would break. So I had the ability to recognize that I was completely inappropriate. And so I wound up just covering my face with my hands so I could be in the room with all of the grieving relatives. And then I slowly integrated back into my body and there was the so I became fully present again.
I didn’t know what to do with this experience. Let’s just say I grew up in the Presbyterian Church and this whole going to the light by location is just not part of the lexicon of that tradition so I didn’t know what to do with it for the for the longest time, so I kept quiet I didn’t tell anyone for a really long time, 15 years, and it was quite exquisite. So, fast forward 15 years, I’m now at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I’m doing my doctoral work, and I wind up doing my dissertation on people who’ve had near-death experiences. And it wasn’t until I started reading the literature about near-death experiences that I found out that I’d had one because I would never have considered myself as having had a near-death experience because, well, I wasn’t dead. I was perfectly healthy. I was just sitting on a windowsill next to Willie and this extraordinary thing happened to me. I never would have put myself in there, but there was a paragraph in one of P.M.H. Atwater’s books that detailed how this happens to some people and it fit me to the T. And all of a sudden now I had a name for what happened to me. It was a shared or a near-death-like experience that became my, I could put words to it, I could put it in context and it kind of made, it made sense to me.
So in the process of doing my research, I had asked all kinds of people if they wanted to participate, and as it turns out, one of Mary Fran’s relatives had had a near-death experience subsequent to Mary Fran’s. And when I interviewed her, we sat down to do the interview, and she said to me, “I know why you’re asking me this. It’s because of the experience we had in the room, right?” I said, “Excuse me, no, we’re here to talk about your near-death experience, you know, four years later.” And she said, “Really? I thought maybe we talked about what happened when Nolan died.” I said, “Okay, yes, you tell me first what happened to you, and then I’ll tell you what happened to me.” And she related to me an almost identical experience, that she had witnessed Mary Fran come and pick Nolan out of her body, that she had witnessed the same exquisite reunion between Mary Fran and Nolan, and that Mary Fran and Nolan had turned to her and taken her to the light.
So, it wasn’t really just me, it was, there were four of us that had gone to the light, Mary Fran and myself and the other relative of Mary Fran’s and myself. We all went there together and it was, it was verified, not only has it been verified in the literature that this is a real thing. But that particular experience had a, was witnessed, was experienced by somebody else using almost identical language. So I, this is real. This is, and it was amazing.
Interviewer: Scott, can you give us any idea what it was like to perceive Mary Fran scooping up Nolan? How did you perceive that?
Thanks for asking the most difficult question. I use visual language, and it wasn’t entirely that. There’s this great word, it’s called “ineffable,” that says we don’t have language, we don’t have words in the English language to describe that, but there is something undeniable about a certain person’s energy pattern. I knew it was Mary Fran. I could sense when Nolan left his body. I could absolutely feel the reunion between the two of them. Could I say that I see it like I see with my physical eyes? No, yes, It’s it was a Heart connection. It was clearly emotional. There is no doubt in my mind what happened in terms of the energetic between us. That’s as good as I can get now.
Interviewer: Okay, so what was it like for you emotionally, psychologically, mentally to be silent about an experience that you found so profound?
So this experience didn’t fit anything that I knew. The idea that you could leave your physical body and be at two places at the same time that you could enter the light and be merged with a loving oneness. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to put words around this experience so part of me says that it was it was just fine because I had to process that. Another part of me was, as soon as I put words around something, you know, because words put boundaries on concepts, and what I didn’t want to do was to put boundaries on the experience, because it was so amazing. So it wasn’t like a loss, or I was afraid of things, or I didn’t want to tell my family. It’s just that I didn’t know how to. I didn’t have the words for it. I really wasn’t prepared to talk about that. I was grieving and and when I thought about it, I just broke into tears. But when I finally had the intellectual framework to hang my experience on, it just all snapped into place and it made so much sense that’s why you know these conferences are so wonderful because you get to hear and see and connect with people who’ve had similar experiences.
Interviewer: So it certainly helped you integrate the experience in your life when you met this other relative who was in the room who had an experience that was almost identical to yours how did that change you? How did it change your life?
Like we’re good now. I am so, I’m so down with this no I’m just it was it was that last chink in the puzzle that says I can take this out and I can talk to people because this isn’t strange anymore. It isn’t outside of the norm, and it wound up within that couple-year period I interviewed a lot of people who had near -death experience and it’s just confirmed and confirmed and confirmed again for me over and over again that this is a normal normal thing for the human race that it’s that many people have this that it’s so profoundly changing but not weird. It’s just it’s it’s just part one part of who we are that I think as a race we’re beginning to discover and not only discover but to embrace and then say “Wow. Think of what we could do if we know more about this. Think of how we could evolve as a human race if we understand the implications of near -death experiences.”
Interviewer: So you feel that you’ve pretty much integrated the experience in your life but I imagine you have to be very careful about who you tell this experience to.
I used to be. You know as as I get older the the less I care. I am much braver than I used to be. I have little reticence now in explaining what happened to me. I will sometimes change my languaging because when you know you’re talking to certain groups they have certain frames of reference and it’s helpful to take this story and put it into a reference they can relate to. It doesn’t change the essence of the story at all. It just means that I’ve gotten more sophisticated as a communicator to say, okay, I know where you’re at and this is what happened to me using language that is comfortable for you. Sure.
Interviewer: Okay, Scott, last question. We’re here at the IANDS conference, International Association for Near-Death Studies, and people are talking about their near-death experiences, and yet from a scientific point of view, science can, you know, they can refute these things in their own way, to their own satisfaction, but there’s something about a shared near-death experience that bypasses those objections. Can you talk about what the shared near-death experience has to offer and why it bypasses some of the objections that science has?
Wow, there’s a great question. A couple of reasons. One, I was not ill. I was not impaired in any way, I was just sitting on a window sill and experiencing the room filled with grieving relatives. So there wasn’t anything that you could point to that would say, well, you know, he was dying, he was, you know, lack of oxygen or whatever. I’m perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, I’m just grieving. So, from that standpoint, there’s lots of folks who can’t point then. I mean, that’s one thing that you can take away. Another might be that these shared near-death experiences are, especially mine when I have it verified, and where somebody says you know I experienced exactly what you experienced; it’s just that we didn’t recognize each other, and I completely get that. So there’s another piece that says valid that it’s it’s there and it’s real.
Interviewer: Okay, Scott, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Thank you, Mal.