Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (14 page)

An Example of an NDE in Childhood

People often wonder, with good reason, how someone can remember an NDE in detail after fifty years. How can she or he be sure that such an account is not a total fabrication? For a number of reasons this seems unlikely. First of all, when someone shares an NDE after many years, the emotions are unmistakable, as if the event happened only yesterday. In tears, this person tries to find the words to describe the experience for the first time. Second, in the Dutch study people used near-identical wording in the taped interviews after two and eight years. Their words were virtually the same as when they first talked about their experience a few days after their successful resuscitation (more about this in chapter 7). Partners and other family members also confirm that many years after the event, the NDE is related almost word for word the same. Finally, it is highly unlikely that somebody could fabricate such convincing evidence of the changes that generally follow an NDE, such as the loss of the fear of death, the newfound insights into what matters in life, and the enhanced intuitive sensitivity.

The following account of a childhood NDE was told to me in person. I asked the NDEr to write down the experience and the subsequent changes.

While clinging to that buoy I felt that my situation was hopeless, and I was about to let go and drown. Suddenly I found myself in another world—a world full of wonderful, green-glowing hills, covered with the most beautiful flowers you could never find here on earth. The most gorgeous light bathed me in unimaginable tranquillity. This was a world I never wanted to leave again.

How long I spent in that world I don’t know, but suddenly I was back on earth. And the surprising thing was that I immediately knew what to do to escape my plight. As if someone helped me, my eyes were drawn to the frayed ends of a cable that tied a ship to the mooring buoy I was clinging to. I regained a bit of strength and reached the other side of the canal. This saved me from a certain death by drowning. The assistance from the other side was palpable to me.

For a long time I was amazed by what had happened to me. I couldn’t talk to a soul about it, not even at home, because five years earlier a younger brother of mine had drowned and I couldn’t open old wounds by mentioning my experience. Strangely enough, I had a lot of paranormal feelings afterward. I could read people’s minds, and I knew what they wanted. Luckily this wore off later, but the intuitive feelings lingered and grew stronger. And yet I had become a loner. I was unable to share many of my emotions, and I had become hypersensitive to other people’s sadness. Events here on earth didn’t leave me cold. I became a conduit for emotions that didn’t really have anything to do with me. My loneliness increased. I kept clashing with colleagues, my partner, and society as a whole. I had become too different from other people.

Some forty years later, in 1992, I was watching television, and to my utter amazement I heard these people talking about the feelings I had and heard that theirs were triggered by a near-death experience. After the broadcast I immediately called the number given in the program and shared my story for the first time. I related my story and was told that I’d had an NDE. I received the recognition I so craved. Since then I’ve undergone a radical transformation. I’ve read hundreds of books on the subject. I soaked it all up, as it were…. And later I had several more out-of-body experiences….

Better chances of survival due to improved resuscitation techniques and treatment options have prompted a rise in NDE reports in the last thirty years. But a near-death experience appears to be a personal rediscovery of an age-old, cross-cultural, but seemingly forgotten knowledge. In the past these experiences were often known under different names, such as visions or mystical, religious, or enlightenment experiences. In antiquity they were referred to as journeys to the underworld. Throughout history there have been many different views on death, but across all times and cultures, people have been convinced that the human essence, usually known as the soul, lives on after the death of the body. This chapter features stories of life after death as found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside quotations from ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire. The insights from these disparate historic texts show striking similarities despite the fact that they were probably rarely shared, either in person or in writing. The sources are diverse, and the nations and peoples that recorded these insights were isolated by great distances over land and sea as well as separated by temporal, cultural, and linguistic differences.

Nothing New

It is an age-old idea that the soul lives on after death, that our lives are judged (the life review during the NDE), and that afterward, depending on how we lived our lives, we may dwell either in blissful spheres or, as a punishment, in fearful environs. The oldest written example of this universal idea about death originates in ancient Egypt, where, according to the
Egyptian Book of the Dead
from the papyrus of Ani (around 1250
B.C.E
.), people believed that after death the soul leaves the earth and sets off on a journey through the underworld, where a final challenge awaits the deceased before he can enter the hereafter: the judgment of Osiris. This involved the enumeration of a long list of sins, which the deceased denied committing. The truth of this denial was then established by weighing the heart against a feather. If the deceased spoke the truth, and the heart was not weighed down by sin, he or she would be ensured of blissful immortality within sight of the sun god. But a dreadful fate awaited those who failed the test of truth, as these sinners were condemned to eternal oblivion.
¹

This view is not confined to ancient Egypt but reappears across times and cultures. According to old books and manuscripts, the idea that the soul can be experienced independently of the body has been known for thousands of years.
²
In ancient India it was said, “Coming and going is all pure delusion; the soul never comes nor goes. Where is the place to which it shall go when all space is in the soul? When shall be the time for the entering and departing when all time is in the soul?” Thousands of years ago this belief in the mortality of the body and the immortality of the soul gave rise to the doctrine of preexistence and rebirth. Plato and other Greek philosophers held the same ideas about a mortal body and an immaterial and immortal soul. The ancient Greek philosophers were probably influenced by ideas from India, the Persian Empire, and Egypt.

But ideas about an immortal soul are not confined to Asia. They are prevalent among many other peoples, including most tribes in Africa, the Aboriginals in Australia, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as the Vikings, Celts, and Romans. The Roman general Julius Caesar wrote in his
Gallic Wars,
“The druids wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded.”
³

And the Roman poet Ovid wrote in
Metamorphoses:

The idea that during life consciousness is not confined to the body and brain is not new either. I recently saw a drawing by Robert Fludd, a doctor and philosopher in seventeenth-century England.
⁵
He believed that our intellect, with all its mental processes, our memories and emotions, and our dreams and visions, is largely located outside of our brain (see figure). The drawing also clearly shows the supposed energy links with our physical body, and with the brain in particular, by way of the crown and the forehead.

Mystical Experiences as a Source of Insight into Death

Near-death experiences have long been a source of new insights into the possibility of life after physical death. Many books on the subject of an afterlife are based on the writer’s own mystical or religious experiences. An example of this is
The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri. Dante’s magnum opus, more than fourteen thousand verses based on his own visions, tells of his seven-day journey through hell and purgatory to heaven. He is initially accompanied by the poet Virgil, but in heaven he consorts with his beloved Beatrice. He encounters the souls of dead people whom he recognizes and with whom he can communicate. In hell he meets people enduring eternal punishment for their intemperance (lust, gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath), for their violence (against others, oneself, God, and nature), and for their deceit (usury, fortune-telling, bribery, theft, false counsel, forgery, and betrayal of family, homeland, and God). In purgatory he meets dead people who are there on account of pride, envy, wrath, lovelessness, avarice, gluttony, and lust. In paradise he encounters Beatrice, scores of saints, and ultimately God’s eternal light. Dante wrote in the third part of
The Divine Comedy,
“Paradise (First Song)”: “I have been in that Heaven that knows his light most, and have seen things, which whoever descends from there has neither power, nor knowledge, to relate.”
⁶

Robert Fludd,
The Cabalistic Analysis of the Mind and the Senses.
1617.

Robert Fludd,
The Cabalistic Analysis of the Mind and the Senses.
1617. Oxford Science Archive, Oxford, Great, Britain. Reprinted with permission of HIP / Art Resource, NY

His descriptions echo what people try to express after an NDE:

In the eighteenth century the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg wrote
Awaken from Death
about the insights he derived from his many mystical experiences after the age of fifty-five.
⁷

Between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, several books were published in Europe on death and life after death based on people’s own mystical experiences. The theosophist Annie Besant wrote
Death—and After
? while the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner wrote
Death as Metamorphosis of Life.
Alice Bailey wrote
Death: The Great Adventure
while
Death Is an Illusion
describes the life’s work of the nineteenth-century Danish mystic Martinus, who had his first mystical experience at the age of thirty.
⁸
All of these books draw on private mystical experiences to examine what happens after death. These texts, dating back more than a century, and the literature from antiquity and other times and cultures show a striking similarity with the content and consequences detailed in more recent NDE reports. In the past too, all fear of death was usually erased by an NDE and replaced by an inner conviction that consciousness survives physical death: “Dead turned out to be not dead.”

Below are a few classic accounts, some dating back to the distant past, of what we now call a near-death experience. These reports underscore that a near-death experience is not just a contemporary phenomenon, made possible by modern resuscitation techniques. In the past these kinds of experiences were known under names that reflected the worldview or religious beliefs of the day. At the time, people spoke of enlightenment experiences, mystical experiences, religious experiences, or visions. In antiquity these kinds of experiences were described as a journey to the underworld or a sojourn with the gods, and in the early Middle Ages as a visit to paradise. These kinds of experiences were primarily ascribed to heroes, saints, and prophets, but sometimes also to normal people, as we will see in Plato’s story about the soldier Er.

World Religions and Mystical Experiences

I quote here some reports with striking similarities between near-death experience and religious or mystical experiences from different world religions. The next sections feature stories of life after death as found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also includes stories about an immortal soul from ancient Greek philosophy.

Hinduism

Ancient India

The Upanishads are based on the Vedas, ancient Hindu stories that were passed down orally for thousands of years and documented around 800
B.C.E
. In ancient Indian culture it was unthinkable that the human soul began with conception or birth. The ultimate aim of this belief was the realization that we are, in essence, immortal. This concept of immortality has no bearing on the physical body but rather involves the “Self.” And the Self does not
become
immortal but is immortal already. As soon as a person becomes fully aware of this, the Self can unite with the Supreme (Brahman). Without this realization, self-regard evokes the illusion that we equal our mortal body. In this state, we remain caught in the cycle of birth and death.

Below are a few quotations from various texts from the Upanishads. The Katha Upanishad features an exchange between Naciketas, who offers himself as a sacrifice so that his poor father can keep his few worldly possessions, and Death, who tells him: