The Near Death Experience: Spooky Tales or Proof of Life After Death?

Everyone has heard of the “near death experience,” or NDE for short. The NDE happens so often it is almost commonplace. The experience happens to people who suffer some accident or physical trauma that puts them at the point of death. It involves a feeling of leaving the body, of looking down at their own sleeping form from above. Some also see a bright light and experience moving through a long tunnel towards that light. It is common for NDE patients to have a “life review,” wherein they are made to remember the major events of their lives, the successes and the failures. They often meet a figure in white garments who greets them into the light, and tells them that their time is not yet, to return to the land of the living.

For most of us who hope there is life after death, such stories are comforting. However, they are “anecdotal,” that is, personal stories that cannot be evaluated scientifically or objectively.

I once worked with a woman in an accounting firm, whom I will call “Sandra,” who one day told me about her NDE. She had a miscarriage and something had gone wrong during her period of recuperation at home. During the night she hemorrhaged badly. Her husband was awakened by the warm pool of blood, and found his wife unconscious. Their mattress was soaked with blood. He quickly threw on some clothes and carried his unconscious wife to the car, then rushed her to the hospital.

He exited the car, trying to carry Sandra into the emergency room, when suddenly an ambulance driver saw him struggling and rushed over to help. The ambulance driver, a big, tall man, threw my friend over his shoulder and began running towards the emergency room door, slapping her legs as he did so to stimulate circulation. Sandra remembers the details well, even though she was unconscious. She watched it all happen just over the ambulance driver’s shoulder.

Sandra was wheeled quickly into a surgery room, where she watched the frantic doctors struggling to save her life. That is to say, she watched from the ceiling of the operating room, looking down on her own body and the doctors around her. Her husband tried to come in and the doctors pushed him out. As doctors shouted orders to nurses and transfusion equipment was hurriedly prepared, Sandra felt relaxed, comfortable and unworried. She was surprised by all the fuss, which she felt to be unnecessary.

Sandra did not travel through the tunnel towards a light like many others. She just awakened in her hospital bed and thought, “wow, that was weird!” Later, Sandra verified the details she remembered with her husband and the operating room doctors; the facts all checked out, i.e., they were not merely hallucinations.

A few years ago I read a book called “Closer to the Light: Learning From Near Death Experiences of Children,” by Dr. Melvin Morse, M.D. Dr. Morse treated some children who had nearly died, one by almost drowning in the family swimming pool. When he was examining the children following their recovery, they told him startling stories of a world beyond this one. He later got a research grant and studied the phenomenon in children.

Morse said he thought children would provide interesting data, as they are too young and innocent to be embarrassed by such experiences, and are less likely than adults to color these experiences with previous religious or cultural programming. The result was his fascinating book. I read the book right after my father died, and found it to be a great source of comfort and hope.

Amazon now lists many books on the Near Death Experience. One of the first, if not THE first book on the subject, was Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life.” Moody, if I remember correctly, was teaching at a university where the subject of NDE’s came up. He described the experience to his class and asked them how many of them knew someone who had experienced a NDE. A number of hands shot up. This intrigued Moody, a doctor, who began studying it in depth and eventually writing his ground-breaking book on the subject.

Moody concluded that there are nine experiences common to most people who have had a near death experience. These are:

hearing sounds such as buzzing
a feeling of peace and painlessness
having an out-of-body experience
a feeling of traveling through a tunnel
a feeling of rising into the heavens
seeing people, often dead relatives
meeting a spiritual being such as God
seeing a review of one’s life
feeling a reluctance to return to life

This is a topic I find fascinating.

Pre-Death Visions

Several months ago I reread Dr. Melvin Morse’s book, “Closer to the Light,” about the near death experience in children.  Dr. Morse researched the phenomenon in Seattle around 1990 and came up with a number of interesting cases.  Two different children told him that in the next world they could “double jump.” 

One of the chapters deals with “pre-death visions,” the visions the dying have before they enter the near-death state.  Dr. Morse gives several accounts of dying people seeing dead relatives who come to comfort them or escort them to the next world.  One dying boy told him that he had visited a crystal castle where he met several of his fellow patients who had died before him.  The dying have reported seeing angels, God, and other people who enter their bedrooms to talk to them.

I know of only one person who has had pre-death visions, and that was my own father.  In the weeks before he died, my father told my brother and sister-in-law (with whom he lived) that he kept seeing “people, out of the corners of my eyes.”  Once, when they were watching television together, my father asked my sister-in-law:  “Do you see them?  Do you see those people standing by the fireplace?”  Another time he told her, “I’m seeing those people out of the corners of my eyes again.”

My brother and sister-in-law took my father to the doctor for an EEG (a brain scan).  Nothing unusual was found.

My father died within weeks after these visions.  I have always wondered if they were delusions or actual visitors from the next world, waiting to escort him over the threshhold.  I’m probably a credulous fool, but I tend to believe it was the latter.

The Mystical Experience: Direct Knowledge of God

Can you know God through the workings of your own mind?  Or do you need an agent, a religious leader, or a book of ancient scriptures to get you there? 

The answers are:  yes, you can know God directly through something called “mysticism.”  No, you don’t need to have an agent or intermediary or ancient book to get you there.  The direct knowledge of God occurs to some people as a flash of insight that is very powerful and thrilling.  This flash of insight is called “the mystical experience.”  

I never thought about it much, but I suppose I am a mystic.  I have had the mystical experience three times in my life.  Each experience happened to me in my youth, while I was earnestly seeking to know God and while I was discussing God with other young men.  However, the most powerful of the three happened to me in June of 1964.  At the time it happened to me, I had never heard of mysticism or the mystical experience.  I only knew that I had experienced something extraordinary, something profound. Some background:  when I was 19 years of age, I was acutely aware of my mortality and horrified at the thought of death.  I had begun a search to find the truth about God, whether or not He existed, and if He did, what He wanted from human beings.  Was there an after life?  What did you have to do to get there? 

In June of 1964, two church buddies accompanied me and my younger brother on a camping trip.  The four of us went to Seacliff, California, where we camped in a tent overlooking the Pacific ocean.  One night we went down to the beach after the sun had set and noticed that the white caps of the incoming tide were no longer white – they were glowing in a beautiful, luminescent blue.  Since I was a biology major at the time, I knew the glowing light was caused by unicellular organisms in the surf, either dynoflagellates or diatoms.  These one-celled marine animals glowed in royal blue, causing the tide to glow blue from their teeming millions.  When we walked on the wet beach, a circle of blue sparkles would erupt around each footstep. It was like walking through sapphires. We were in awe of nature’s beauty.

We sat on a dune overlooking the incoming tide of blue light, looking up at the sky and the moon and the stars.  We began to talk about God and whether He had a plan for man.  That’s when it happened to me.  Suddenly the mortal veil slipped from my eyes and I instantly perceived the divine nature of the universe.  In that moment, all doubt about the existence of a supreme being vanished completely.  God was no longer an abstract idea, but an indisputable fact.  

This cosmic insight lasted only a few moments, but in those moments I perceived and understood eternity, the interrelationship of all things and the fact that there is no death.  I perceived a large multitude of people standing in a far away plain, the people who have died, and was relieved to know that men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin live on.  In those brief moments I lost all fear of death.  I realized that I was as important in the grand scheme as the largest stars or suns, that I existed for a reason.  It was a thrilling revelation and all human fear, doubt and cynicism were burned away by the divine light that flooded my mind. 

I did not feel that I had some kind of magical experience, or that I had learned something new.  I felt as if I had learned something I already knew, but had forgotten.  I felt that this divine truth was always in front of me, but that somehow I couldn’t see it.  For whatever reason, the door to my soul had opened briefly to allow in the light.

I was 19 years old.  I didn’t have a clue what had happened to me, or that the same experience happens to other people too.  I went to bed in my tent that night, listening to the surf crash against the sandy shore, and slept very soundly until morning.

It wasn’t until a few months later that I found out my flash of insight is called “the mystical experience.”  I learned it in a class in philosophy that I took at San Jose State.  My teacher, a Buddhist, told me that there are religious sects in the Far East that spend all their time trying to experience what I had experienced.  These schools of thought constitute something called “Myticism.” They call my kind of experience ”attaining enlightenment,” or “achieving nirvana.”  It was amazing to me: I had the experience and I didn’t even have to go on a diet of bean curd and goat’s milk!  I didn’t have to burn incense or wear saffron robes or shave my head or sit in the full lotus position.  What many eastern monks spend a lifetime trying to experience, I had experienced, with no real effort.  I felt blessed. 

The Mystical Experience, Described by Others

Note:  To understand this post I suggest that you first read the prior article above this one.  It explains what the mystical experience is and why it is significant.

This past week I spent a lot of time reading “Cosmic Consciousness,” by Richard Maurice Bucke.  Bucke was an M.D. who had the mystical experience when he was 36 years old.  The experience never repeated itself, but Bucke was so moved by the experience that he decided to research the mystical experience and write a book about others who have had it.  His book was published in 1901.

Bucke wrote of both famous and ordinary people who have had a mystical experience, or as he put it, attained “cosmic consciousness.”  He includes in his study people like Walt Whitman, Plotinus, Socrates, Balzac and others.  Some of these people wrote better descriptions of the experience than others.  I plan to post some of them here.  The best place to start, no doubt, is with Dr. Bucke’s own personal mystical experience.  He writes (describing his experience in the third person):

It was in the early spring at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year.  He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind deeply under the influences of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment.  All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city, the next he knew that the light was within himself.  Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven.

Among other things…he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.  He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted that in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew, neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind.

Robert Ringer, in his book “Action,” also talks about the mystical experience and cites one described by Harold W. Percival, who in his book “Thinking and Destiny” wrote:

From November of 1892 I passed through astonishing and crucial experiences, following which, in the spring of 1893, there occured the most extraordinary event of my life.  I had crossed 14th Avenue, in New York City.  Cars and people were hurrying by.  

While stepping up to the northeast corner curbstone, Light, greater than that of myriads of suns opened in the center of my head.  In that instant or point, eternities were apprehended.  There was no time.  Distance and dimensions were not in evidence….I was conscious of Consciousness as the Ultimate and Absolute Reality….It would be futile to attempt description of the sublime grandeur and power and order and relation in poise of what I was then consicous.  

Twice during the next fourteen years, for a long time on each occasion, I was conscious of Consciousness.  But during that time I was conscious of no more than I had been conscious of it in that first moment.

See my description of my own mystical experience in the previous post below.