In this bonus episode of the Grief 2 Growth podcast, host Brian D. Smith outlines a concise, four‑category framework for evidence supporting the existence of an afterlife. He begins by inviting listeners to explore his pay‑what‑you‑want resources for grief support, then moves into the core content: (1) Direct evidence such as near‑death experiences (NDEs), after‑death communications (ADCs), and shared death experiences, citing interview subjects like Lisa Jones and William Peters; (2) Scientific evidence, referencing extensive research by Bruce Greyson, PMH Atwater, Penny Sartori, Gary Schwartz, Julie Beischel, and studies on mediumship, reincarnation memories (Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker), and emerging technologies like the “Soul Phone”; (3) Reports from millions of people worldwide, emphasizing the sheer volume (5‑10 % of the population) and veridical nature of many NDE accounts; and (4) Philosophical arguments, highlighting works by Jens Amberts and Bernardo Kastrup that argue for consciousness‑first idealism. Throughout, Smith stresses that the convergence of these four lines of evidence, taken together, constitutes proof beyond reasonable doubt. The episode concludes with calls to action: a free “GEMS” guide, a free NDE‑lessons ebook, and a link to his store for guided meditations, workbooks, and courses on grief and afterlife study.
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You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Hey there, welcome to the first bonus episode of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. Buzzsprout has a new feature where I can give you bonus content in exchange for financial support. Full disclosure, this content I'm about to present to you is available for free. It's on YouTube. It's part of a series I'm doing called Ask Me Anything. But I do intend to use this feature more to give you bonus content. But really, this is about whether or not you want to support the show financially. And if you do, I'd appreciate your continued support. If you want to listen for free, that's of course always okay. So without further ado, here's the first bonus episode. Hey there, I'm doing a series I call Ask Me Anything, and you can ask me anything and I'll see if I can give you an answer. Now, interestingly enough, someone yesterday asked me to do a 5-minute video on all the reasons why I believe that there is an afterlife, or there's proof of an afterlife. I tried to take on this challenge. I've recorded this a couple of times. I can't do it in 5 minutes, but I can do it in less than 10. I've been studying the afterlife for about 40 years now. And there's so much that I've learned. But what I want to do is give you an outline and point you to some other resources to get you started. So let's first of all, let's talk about what are the ways we can know anything. One would be through direct evidence or experience. That's having a personal experience ourself. A second way would be through scientific evidence through research. And I'm looking at my notes as I'm doing this to make sure I don't miss anything. Second way would be through scientific research or experiments by other people. A third way would be experience of other people. And then a fourth way would be philosophical or logical arguments. And I would argue that all four of these ways, there is a ton of evidence that shows the existence of an afterlife. And I think when you take them all together, I would go far— so far as to say proves. Now, when I say proves, I don't mean to a logical conclusion, as in there could be no other way to look at it. But I mean proves as in beyond any reasonable doubt, beyond any other explanation that's actually reasonable. So let's go through these in order. And I'll give you the evidence I find in each of these categories. The first is direct evidence or experience. Now, for most of us, direct evidence or experience of the afterlife would involve us going to the afterlife, which we can't easily do. We can't die and then come back very often. Now, some people do, we call those near-death experiences. But there are other ways to experience the afterlife, without having to go there yourself. And that would be through after-death communications. People who have crossed over can come back in certain ways and gives us, gives us signs, gives us synchronicities. We can have afterlife visits with them, or in dreams. There's something called a shared death experience, where the person who is here that's going to stay here actually crosses part of the way over with the person who is dying. It's very similar to an NDE, but the healthy person actually experiences it. I've interviewed a couple of people that have had these. The first one that comes to mind is Lisa Jones. So you can look her up in my YouTube videos or my podcast, my interview with Lisa. Also a guy named William Peters, who is actually probably the world's leading expert on shared death experiences, and has had several shared death experiences himself, and teaches people how to actually have one. So these are some ways that we can have direct evidence of the afterlife. Without having to cross over ourselves. Now, a second body of evidence is scientific evidence. Now, because our culture and our scientists are so materially biased, they don't believe that the afterlife is even possible, they don't typically study it. The other thing is it's beyond the ability of our instruments to measure. Now, we do know that most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, up to 95%. We can't measure that either, but there is more than our instruments can measure out there. But when it comes to scientific evidence, that doesn't mean we have to give up that there isn't any. Near-death experiences, which I mentioned before, have been studied by scientists extensively. I refer you to books by people like Bruce Greyson in terms of scientific studies. PMH Atwater studied near-death experiences extensively. There are near-death experiences that are veridical, that we can show by evidence of people have abilities to know things they shouldn't know if they were in their bodies. And if they were dead at the time of having the experience, people seeing things that they shouldn't be able to see, hearing things that happened like away from them, out of the room, down the hall, across the country. So those are some ways you can, you can look at evidence is through near-death experiences have been studied scientifically. Also, Dr. Penny Sartori wrote an entire book on near-death experiences, refuting a lot of the explanations like they're induced by drugs, or the last gasp of a dying brain, or a lack of oxygen. Their after-death communications have been, have been studied some by scientists. So some of the things we talked about before, like dream visits, signs and synchronicities, mediumship would be another one that has been studied by people. Dr. Gary Schwartz has done extensive research on mediums in laboratory settings, Dr. Julie Beischel, has as well. So mediumship has been studied. Another way of looking at evidence scientifically, and this is really fascinating, is childhood reincarnation memories. There are children who remember being grown, remember being a base— famous baseball player, for example, there's a kid that says he was Lou Gehrig, remember being a fighter pilot, kids have a kid named James Leninger, who remembers being a fighter pilot, and can identify the names of the people that he flew with, that he could talk, he can describe the ship he was on. He talked about the airplane that he flew, extensive knowledge, a kid that remembers being a Hollywood agent, not exactly most kids fantasize, something most kids fantasize about, talked about how many times the guy had been married, how old he was when he died, etc. There's some extremely detailed childhood reincarnation memories. I refer you to the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia. Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia. One of the books is called The Boy Who Knew Too Much is a great book to read if you want to know more about childhood reincarnation experiences. And Jim Tucker has written a couple other books about, you know, his studies of child reincarnation experiences. Again, I mentioned laboratory mediumship studies, people have studied mediumship in the lab under controlled conditions. Dr. Gary Schwartz, Dr. Julie Beischel, couple examples, Afterlife Experiments, a book I wrote like 20 years ago, when Dr. Schwartz wrote it. And there's also some communications experiences going on with scientists. So Dr. Gary Schwartz is working on something called the Soul Phone. And there's been some scientific research on that, some things that have actually been published on that. Sonia Rinaldi has been working with technology to communicate across the veil. So that's another body of evidence we have in terms of science. There's other people's reports. Now, it's interesting when it comes to other people's reports, when it comes to the afterlife, a lot of times we don't take them so seriously. If someone says that they had a sign or synchronicity, or they had a dream, or they saw a loved one, we might dismiss it as wishful thinking or hallucinations, or just, you know, a grief brain. But the thing is, other people's reports we take seriously at other times. For example, if a scientist performs an experiment, he reports on his findings, we're taking his subjective experience, we're taking his word for what he saw. Now, there is peer-reviewed, and things are repeated in scientific experiments. Unfortunately, afterlife communications don't often lend themselves to being repeatable. But when we have a body of evidence, for example, near-death experiences, where literally hundreds of millions, and I would say billions of people have had them across the course of time, then why wouldn't we take that seriously? These are people from all walks of life, religious, not religious, believers in the afterlife, not believers in the afterlife, all sorts of religions and ethnicities, etc., across the globe have been reporting these experiences for thousands of years since people could communicate. And again, a lot of these experiences are veridical, but whether they're veridical or not, when billions of people report something— and just to give you an idea, 5 to 10% of the population has had a near-death experience, which means in the United States alone, that's somewhere between 50 and 30 million people, hundreds of people a day are having these experiences and coming back. Now, when people have a near-death experience, and they go deep in a near-death experience, I can talk about that in another video. But when they go deep, they come back, they are 100% convinced there's an afterlife, they're 100% convinced that it's real. And it's more real than this life. Their lives are typically changed, you typically don't come back the same person they were before. Dreams and hallucinations do not do that to people. I refer you to a book by a guy named Jens Amberts, J-E-N-S, the last name is A-M-B-E-R-T-S. The book is called Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists. It's a great philosophical argument, taking the near-death experience and breaking it down the way I did a little bit here and making, I think, a pretty much airtight case for why near-death experiences are real. And if near-death experiences are real, then the afterlife is real. Also, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, K-A-S-T-R-U-P. He's also been interviewed. I've interviewed him on my podcast, has written a book called Why Materialism is Baloney. Start with that one. There's a philosophy called idealism, which says that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness precedes the physical, the material that we live in, that we are not just our bodies, we are not just our brains. In fact, we are consciousness coming through the material. Having this experience. And if that's the case, then we pre-existed everything that's material, we come in and we have a temporary experience. And then we move out back to the spirit world again. So instead of calling that the afterlife, I would call this the between life. Like we, we live in spirit form, we come here, we have this temporary experience, and then we go back to spirit. So what I've just given you, again, to review are 4 different ways that we can know this through direct evidence, something that you might experience yourself, through scientific evidence, which has been well documented, I gave you a few examples, through other people's reports, I encourage you to look up other people's reports. Look at my YouTube channel, I've interviewed a lot of people that have had incredible experience, near-death experiences, shared death experiences, and also afterlife communications. And then philosophical arguments, look up people like Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, and the book I mentioned by Jens Amberts. So that's my real quick summary. I hope that made some sense to you. I hope it helps. If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask. I'm excited to announce I have a great new resource. It's called GEMS: 4 Steps to Move from Grief to Joy. And what it is, it's 4 things that I've found that I do on a daily basis to help me to navigate my grief. And I'm offering it to you free of charge. It's a free download. Just go to my website, www.grieftogrowth.com. /gems, G-E-M-S, and grab it there for free. I hope you enjoy it. Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 lessons that you can learn from the near-death experience without going through all the trouble of dying to learn them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons. And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe the NDEs are Absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grief-the-number-2-growth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.
