Antti Savinainen – Finland
Philosopher and psychiatrist Raymond Moody published the first book on near-death experiences (NDEs), Life after Life, in 1975. Moody interviewed 150 people who had experienced an NDE and presented his findings in this book, which created broad interest and became a best seller. Although it was based on qualitative data (individual recollections), Moody’s later research utilized more rigorous methods typically employed in medical science.
People who have been pronounced as clinically dead and then resuscitated often tell quite similar stories about their experiences, although they should have had no experience at all when their brains were not functioning. Moreover, their accounts resemble Theosophical authors’ descriptions of the death process given almost a hundred years before Moody’s book. I will explore the research findings of NDEs, discuss their criticism, and present a Theosophical interpretation of them.
Key Features of the Experience
Not everyone experiences all features of the deep NDE, but I will present here the most frequently reported experiences (Long & Perry, 2010). The first experience is usually one of detachment from the body. People report hearing and seeing what is happening in the recovery room from above their bodies. This is often accompanied by clearer and brighter awareness than usual, even if the person’s brain function is nonexistent. For many people, ut-of-the-body consciousness is accompanied by an experience of great and unconditional love, compassion, joy, and peace.
A small proportion of NDEs will see a life review showing the significant events from birth onwards. Among Western NDEs, 13 percent have reported a life review, while indigenous people usually have no life story associated with their NDE experiences. The life narrative happens very quickly, but the experiencer can still follow it intensively. Time is experienced much more quickly, so it is a kind of fast-forwarding of a film of life. The following extracts illustrate the moral nature of life review and the judgment of right and wrong (Long & Perry, 2010, 14, 114):
I saw how selfish I was and how I would give anything to get back and change.
Every second from birth until death you will see and feel, and [you will] experience your emotions and others that you hurt, and feel their emotions. . . . I will not see what others have done to you. I will see what you have done to others.
I learned that many of the things I thought were ‘wrong’ were not necessarily wrong. I also learned of opportunities to love others that I passed up.
Around a third of people have experiences of rapidly passing through a multicolored tunnel. The next phase is a clear, bright, although not dazzling, light, which is very attractive. (Encountering this light is more common than the tunnel experience.) In the light, one encounters other conscious beings, such as deceased relatives or unknown beings of light who nevertheless feel very familiar. One experiencer said meeting these beings was like meeting the most important people in their life again after a long separation. This reunion is generally accompanied by overflowing love and joy.
During the NDE experience, one appears to understand everything: life, other people, and the universe. Life and existence feel deeply meaningful, and one experiences the oneness of everything. Towards the end of the experience, one reaches a limit (reported by about a third of the participants in one study) beyond which there seems to be no return to the physical life. The experiencer may understand this intuitively, or the light being may let them know.
The NDE experience feels so heavenly that it can be very difficult to return to a sick body. The decision is made easier when the experiencer remembers or is reminded of children or other loved ones who still need them.
A very small proportion of NDEs are frightening (1 percent in some studies). They tend to occur in cases of suicide or drug overdoses, although they may occur even in normal people who have a strong fear of death. After the out-of-body experience, these people enter a dark or grey void of loneliness and despair. They may feel the presence of an evil entity and hear frightening voices. Some describe a place very similar to hell. Even these unpleasant experiences can have a positive effect: some have taken their experiences as a warning and opportunity to improve their lives.
Let us now look at a pioneering study in NDE research.
The Lancet Study
Pim van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who, early in his career, encountered a near-death experience after resuscitating a patient who was very disappointed to have to give up his happy existence in another world. Van Lommel thought that the phenomenon could be explained by medical science. He became interested in the subject and, together with colleagues, began a major study in 1988 in the Netherlands. Ten hospitals were involved, where resuscitated patients were interviewed as soon as possible. The patient’s medical and other background information was thus reliably available, unlike in previous studies, where efforts had been made to find information years after the experience. A suitable control group included patients who had not experienced a near-death experience. All patients who were still alive and had consented were interviewed two years after the experience and a third time after eight years, making it a longitudinal study. The study was published in 2001 in the highly respected medical journal The Lancet (van Lommel et al., 2001).
Of those resuscitated, 18 percent (62 out of 344 patients resuscitated) reported having experienced NDEs, and 7 percent had had a deep or very deep NDE, including several of the experiences described above. The survey allowed for investigating factors that may have influenced the NDE experience. Medical factors (such as medication and lack of oxygen), fear of death, past knowledge of NDEs, religion, or educational background were not found to be associated with NDEs. The experience was more prevalent in individuals younger than sixty, as well as in those had previous NDE experience (among other factors). Memory problems, on the other hand, reduced the likelihood of experiencing NDEs.
The longitudinal study revealed significant differences between the NDE and control groups. Both groups experienced changes in attitudes and values, but the NDE group experienced a more profound change in life values. They were more loving, empathetic, and accepting. Their interest in spirituality increased, while it decreased in the control group. Several studies have found that the NDE experience reduced commitment to traditional Christianity. This was also reflected in the van Lommel study by reduced church attendance, which, on the other hand, slightly increased in the control group.
The NDE group members’ appreciation of money, property, and social status had declined. Fear of death had decreased in both groups but more significantly in the NDE group. Belief in life after death was stronger in the NDE group. Some in the NDE group reported that they had become more sensitive to other people’s emotional states and had experiences of clairvoyance and foreknowledge. However, the van Lommel group did not examine the validity of these abilities.
The van Lommel study and many other studies highlight the life-changing nature of the NDE experience. Those who undergo it are likely to feel that what matters in life is love for themselves, other people, and nature. In the following story, this ethical change becomes particularly clear (van Lommel, 2010, 47–48):
I’m no longer afraid of death because I’ll never forget what happened to me there. Now I’m certain that life goes on. Over the years I’ve undergone a number of changes. I feel a strong connection with nature. . . . I’ve acquired a great sense of justice. I’ve become more patient and peaceful. . . . I feel a strong urge to never lie again. I’d rather keep silent than tell a little white lie. I enjoy life immensely. I believe that people have stopped living from the heart.
Van Lommel says that people generally become more forgiving, tolerant, and compassionate as a result of their experience; in other words, they tend to embody unconditional love in their lives. Van Lommel also points out that NDEs reflect the cosmic law that whatever we do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves; everything is interconnected.
A positive NDE does not always have purely positive effects. Some convince themselves that they are God’s specially chosen people, who have a mission to spread their NDE experience as if it were a new religion. Others find it difficult to integrate their experiences into a new understanding of life if those who are close to them ignore them or make fun of them. In still other cases, relatives and friends may have too high expectations, thinking that the person with the NDE has become an all-forgiving saint with healing powers and prophetic abilities.
As a result of his research, van Lommel became convinced that NDEs are a real phenomenon, strongly suggesting that human existence continues beyond death. Studying NDEs revealed new perspectives on life to him personally: for example, in one interview, van Lommel said he was amazed at how every thought is significant. He quit his job as a doctor, wrote a book about his own and others’ research, and started lecturing about NDEs.
Impressive NDE Cases
As noted above, people report being able to observe their environments during the NDE. Some cases are reasonably well documented and relevant to the scientific evaluation of NDEs. As of 2007, there were forty cases in the scientific literature with confirmed evidence of accurate out-of-body perception. I present three cases here.
In the first case (reported in The Lancet by van Lommel’s team), a Dutch patient was brought to hospital in a deep coma. His nurse had removed the dentures for intubation to ensure breathing and stored them in a box. Later, the nurse met the man in the cardiac ward. The man immediately recognized the nurse and told her that she had taken his dentures. The man said he had seen the CPR from outside himself. The nurse also gave a written statement about the incident.
In another case, thirty-five-year-old American Pam Reynolds was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was very difficult to operate on. Reynolds was given a daring operation in which her body temperature was lowered, her heart and breathing were stopped, and blood was drained from her brain. In other words, Reynolds had to die clinically for the operation. Her vital signs were carefully monitored throughout. The operation began with the opening of the skull; Reynolds was then under anesthesia but not yet clinically dead. She then heard an unpleasant sound in the cranial cavity. Hearing should not have been possible under these circumstances, especially as she had plugs in her ears which sent a regular signal to them. Next, she left her body through the top of her head and saw her body and surroundings from above. The perceptions seemed clearer and more lucid than normal sensations. She heard a doctor say that the vein was too small when the doctor installed a device to oxygenate the blood. Reynolds wondered what they were doing to her lower extremities, as this was supposed to be brain surgery. She saw that only part of her hair had been shaved for the surgery. She described the skull saw, which looked like an electric toothbrush to her. Reynolds knew beforehand that her skull would be sawed open, but the surgeon thought it highly unlikely that she would have seen the saw before the operation, because it is only taken out when the patient has been anesthetized. Reynolds’ description of the saw was not entirely accurate, although she did see it as drill-like. In other respects, her description of the operation was correct.
In the third case, a shoe played a key role. Maria, a migrant who worked on the outskirts of Seattle, was taken to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. Three days later, she had another heart attack, which she survived thanks to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Afterward, Maria told a nurse that she had had an out-of-body experience during CPR, in which she noted a device monitoring her vital signs and their readings. Next, she moved outside the hospital. She could correctly describe the areas outside, including those that were not visible from her room.
Maria was drawn to the third-floor windowsill, to which she moved with her willpower. On the windowsill was one tennis shoe (for the left foot), a male model. The shoe was dark blue and worn at the toe. Maria asked the nurse to check whether the shoe was real or imaginary. The nurse found the shoe in the place described; its features matched Maria’s description.
Criticism of Near-Death Experiences
From the above, one might think that science has now proven what religions and Theosophy have known: there is life after death. Despite the evidence, not everyone is convinced. Some skeptics believe that the NDE experience is perfectly compatible with current neuroscience (Blackmore, 1993). NDEs are explained as hallucinations, due, for example, to a lack of oxygen or abnormal brain activity in a crisis. However, no empirical evidence exists for the hallucination hypothesis in NDE studies, as the van Lommel group study reveals.
Skeptics also contend that a combination of memories, imagination, expectations, and lucky guesses can explain the impressive cases of people reporting their observations. For example, a correct description of CPR could fit well into this explanatory model, since many people have seen CPR on TV shows. But this hypothesis has been tested and disproved empirically: one researcher interviewed resuscitated patients with and without NDE experiences. It turned out that people who had had NDEs were able to describe their own CPRs with great accuracy, while the control group made at least one serious error in describing theirs.
Let us then look at the seemingly convincing, well-documented cases presented above. In the tennis shoe case, while in the hospital room, Maria may have heard passers-by talking about a strange shoe and then forgotten what she had heard. The mind could have spontaneously constructed a story after the resuscitation, using what she may have heard. It is also possible that when she arrived at the hospital, she had seen things in the hospital environment, which she then explained as external observations. Similarly, Reynolds may have heard sounds around her despite the anesthetic (this has sometimes been reported); her mind may have exploited her partial sense of hearing and touch and then constructed the experiences described without conscious deception. Moreover, confirmation of the dentures in the van Lommel study had been sought from the nurse but not from the comatose man, so this case is also suspect to a dedicated skeptic.
Perhaps the most important scientific disagreement concerns the time at which the experience of death occurs. If it does indeed occur during clinical death (when, for example, the electroencephalogram, or EEG, shows a flatline), this would strongly suggest that consciousness can operate independently of the brain. Some evidence supports this claim, but as the skeptical explanations above indicate, the evidence is not incontrovertible.
To this, I might add that even if there were indisputable evidence, it would still be unlikely to force the skeptic to abandon the current model of brain science. It has been suggested that even if there is no measurable brain electrical activity in the cortex, there may be electrical activity in deeper parts of the brain, allowing some form of consciousness to be maintained. The problem with this argument is that there is no evidence for the persistence of consciousness in the deeper parts of the brain during clinical death.
The reader may conclude from these examples that hardly any evidence could be so solid that it would change the opinions of strict materialists about the nature of consciousness. There is always a possible explanation that can be found to avoid changing a worldview that is perceived as repugnant. It is good to be critical: it is part of the scientific search for truth, but a dogmatic commitment to materialism is not scientific.
Let us now look at how Theosophy explains the perceptions of near-death experiences.
Theosophical Perspective
Theosophy claims its knowledge is based on supersensible empirical observations on the postmortem state. In this view, the expanded faculties of human consciousness act as instruments of knowledge. Thus the scientific study of the NDEs offers an exciting opportunity to compare Theosophical explanations with scientific findings.
As we have seen, both Theosophy and Anthroposophy offer precise descriptions of the stages of life after death. Many aspects of these descriptions match well with those documented in NDE research: the life review with moral evaluation of the past life and the realization that love is of utmost importance in life; the out-of-body experience and the ability to see and hear mourning relatives; the joyous meeting with friends and relatives on the other side.
Of course, Theosophical descriptions go much further than the NDE research. For instance, those who had had NDEs are typically silent about the purification process, the purgatory stage, in the afterlife. On the other hand, the negative NDEs could be correlated with the purgatorial stage.
Nonetheless, some aspects of the NDE are challenging to understand from the point of view of Theosophy. For instance, it is surprising that only a relatively small proportion of NDEs incorporate a life review. How can this be explained? Perhaps the NDE includes certain glimpses of life after death, and not everyone experiences the death process in its entirety. Furthermore, although the NDE subjects in the studies were clinically dead, they could still be resuscitated (after all, without resuscitation, they would have died for good). In a Theosophical interpretation, the link between the physical and the etheric body—the “silver cord”— had not yet been broken.
Why do only less than a fifth of those resuscitated remember such an experience? Is it the case that most people do not experience anything during clinical death? Theosophical knowledge offers one perspective on this question. In Theosophy, sleep is sometimes called the “little brother of death” because, in sleep, the astral body leaves the body and experiences all kinds of things in the invisible world. But this memory is not transferred to the physical-etheric brain unless the individual’s thought and emotional life have been purified. This point of view would suggest that all clinically dead people do have such experiences while unconscious, but not all of them can remember them. This is not to say that people who have experienced NDEs are more ethically evolved than other people. There are probably further internal reasons for remembering NDEs, and I would not be surprised if there were a scientific explanation in the future.
The moral character of life review is central: the person knows clearly the purpose of life and how she should have lived it. This has a profoundly life-changing effect, as discussed above. The light being met by the NDEr could be interpreted as the higher self or perhaps as a guardian angel. Notably, both NDEs and Theosophy point to a great love consciousness, the Oneness of all.
Discussion
Science is based on methodological naturalism, according to which conclusions are only admissible by appealing to natural—that is, material—causes. This assumption has proved to be a fruitful starting point for scientific research. Nevertheless, NDE research results seem to challenge this assumption. Perhaps even from a scientific point of view, the best way to explain the empirical findings of the NDE is that consciousness can exist and function independently of the brain. This might not have much impact on everyday brain research, but it would be a significant paradigm shift for the study of consciousness and the scientific worldview.
Of course, it is clear that the evidence from NDE research does not satisfy everyone: skeptics and people committed to conservative Christianity will not change their views, because it is always possible to make further assumptions that insulate one’s own core beliefs.
Yet I believe that for most people, the results of the NDE research can have a significant impact. After all, the NDEs reveal what people know to be true about life, at least in their hearts: that life is absolutely just and that there is a marvelous goodness and love behind it all.
Sources
Blackmore, Susan (1993). Dying to Live: Science and the Near-Death Experience. London: Grafton.
Long, Jeffrey, and Paul Perry (2010). Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences. New York: HarperOne.
van Lommel, Pim (2010). Consciousness beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne.
van Lommel, Pim, R. van Wees, V. Meyers, and I. Elfferich (2001). “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” Lancet 358 (9298), 2039‒45.