Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (4 page)

Throughout history, in all times and cultures, people have been known to remember an extraordinary experience after a life-threatening crisis.
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This is now known as a near-death experience. In my definition, a near-death experience (NDE) is the (reported) recollection of all the impressions gained during a special state of consciousness, which includes some specific elements such as witnessing a tunnel, a light, a panoramic life review, deceased persons, or one’s own resuscitation. This special state of consciousness can occur during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period of clinical death, but also in the course of a serious illness or without any apparent medical indication. The experience nearly always brings about fundamental and lasting changes in people’s attitude to life and a loss of the fear of death. Because the experience is highly subjective and lacks any frame of reference, other factors, such as individual, cultural, and religious perceptions, determine the way it is described and interpreted. A child will use different words than an adult while a Christian description or interpretation will differ from that of a Buddhist or atheist.

To my mind, the American NDE researcher and professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences Bruce Greyson has formulated another good definition: “Near-death experiences are profound psychological events with transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring to individuals close to death or in situations of intense physical or emotional danger.”
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Professor Janice Holden, recent chair of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS), writes, “Near-death experiences are the reported memories of extreme psychological experiences with frequent “paranormal,” transcendental, and mystical elements, which occur during a special state of consciousness arising during a period of real or imminent physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual death, and these experiences are followed by common aftereffects.”
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Circumstances That May Prompt an NDE Report

In the past these experiences were often known under different names, such as visions or mystical, religious, or enlightenment experiences.
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In antiquity they were referred to as journeys to the underworld. The term
near-death experience
is confusing because the experiences are reported not just by people on the brink of death but also by those who are not in any physical or psychological danger. I will come back to this in more detail later. Although the experiences may occur under a range of different circumstances, they are most frequently reported after a period in which brain function is seriously impaired, such as in cardiac arrest. Other comparable clinical circumstances include brain damage and coma after a serious traffic accident or brain hemorrhage, unconsciousness through shock (low blood pressure) caused by severe blood loss during or after a delivery, or following complications during surgery. Near-drowning is a well-known NDE trigger in children. Other causes include asphyxiation and serious but not immediately life-threatening illnesses with high fever. These experiences are also reported during isolation, depression, or without any clear medical indication during walks in the countryside or during meditation.

Identical experiences, called
fear-death experiences,
are caused by acute fear of death and are reported after a seemingly inevitable death, such as a traffic accident or mountain-climbing accident. Similar experiences occur during the process of dying, when they are known as
deathbed visions
or
nearing-death awareness.

The fact that an NDE can occur under very different circumstances, such as during a coma caused by a cardiac arrest, under general anesthesia, but also without any clear medical indication, is important for the study of its potential causes. The frequently cited argument that an NDE is caused by oxygen deficiency in the brain obviously does not apply to people who experience one during depression or isolation. The experience of a very lucid consciousness at a moment when all brain function has ceased raises important questions about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.

The Incidence of Near-Death Experiences

Better chances of survival due to improved resuscitation techniques and treatment options in recent years have prompted a rise in NDE reports. Many thousands of people are known to have had a near-death experience, but estimates put the number of people who have had one in the past fifty years at more than 25 million worldwide. Fairly recent studies in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. Based on these data, and the assumption that the Dutch population is comparable to its American and German counterparts, it is possible to deduce a similar percentage for the Netherlands and other countries. In other words, according to this research, about 600,000 people in the Netherlands, 2 million people in the United Kingdom, and more than 9 million people in the United States have had an NDE.
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Given this large number, the experience must be quite common during life-threatening clinical circumstances. But underreporting of NDEs is thought to be widespread in hospitals. A possible explanation for this is that the phenomenon confounds current medical knowledge. Seeing NDEs as implausible and inexplicable, most doctors and other health care practitioners are not open to them and rarely come across direct accounts of them. Research has also shown that most patients remain silent about their near-death experience because nobody believes them when they first try to talk about it.
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This was confirmed during an NDE conference at an American university hospital in 1994 attended by some three hundred people. After a few presentations on NDE and somebody’s personal story, a man got up and said, “I’ve worked as a cardiologist for twenty-five years now, and I’ve never come across such absurd stories in my practice. I think this is all complete nonsense; I don’t believe a word of it.” Whereupon another man stood up and said, “I’m one of your patients. A couple of years ago I survived a cardiac arrest and had an NDE, and you would be the last person I’d ever tell.”

Their medical training makes it hard for doctors to accept NDEs, even when they themselves or a colleague experience one. After a cardiac arrest and emergency bypass surgery, a family doctor wrote to me, “I always thought that these things didn’t really exist.” Another family doctor, who suffered a cardiac arrest following complications during coronary angioplasty (the inflation of a small balloon in a coronary artery) and who tried to discuss it with colleagues later, wrote to me, “I encountered nothing but skepticism among cardiologists, although they always remained polite. Several years later I had a checkup with an internist, who also ignored my story. I was unable to share this experience with colleagues and other people.”

Moody’s NDE Classification

In 1975 psychiatrist Raymond Moody wrote his first book on near-death experience. In it he described twelve different NDE elements but emphasized that most people experience only a few. It is rare for all elements to be reported. Each NDE is unique and is experienced as a coherent episode rather than a series of clearly distinct elements. The order of the reported elements can also vary a little. At this point I should mention a comparative study that looked at whether there is any difference between NDE accounts recorded before and after 1975. The question was whether the publicity that followed the publication of Moody’s book had any influence on the contents of an NDE. However, the study showed that all the NDE elements he mentioned were reported just as frequently before as after 1975; the sole exception was the tunnel experience, which was reported a little less often in the past. The NDE and its effect on patients appear to be essentially the same worldwide except for some culture-specific differences in content and interpretation. One intercultural study shows that certain NDE elements, such as the panoramic life review and tunnel experience, are reported less frequently by the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and the islands in the South Pacific.
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Moody described twelve possible NDE elements and the order in which they are usually reported. These elements will be discussed at length later in this chapter.

The ineffability of the experience


A feeling of peace and quiet; pain is gone


The awareness of being dead, sometimes followed by a noise


An out-of-body experience (OBE); from a position outside and above their bodies, people witness their own resuscitation or operation


A dark space, experienced by only 15 percent of people as frightening; people are pulled toward a small pinpoint of light in this dark space, which they describe as:

A tunnel experience; they are drawn rapidly toward the light


A frightening NDE; approximately 1 to 2 percent of people linger in this dark space and experience their NDE as frightening (also known as a hell experience)

6. The perception of an unearthly environment, a dazzling landscape with beautiful colors, gorgeous flowers, and sometimes also music


7. Meeting and communicating with deceased persons, mostly relatives


8. Seeing a brilliant light or a being of light; experiencing complete acceptance and unconditional love and gaining access to a deep knowledge and wisdom


9. The panoramic life review, or review of life from birth: people see their entire life flash before them; there appears to be no time or distance, everything happens at once, and people can talk for days about a life review that lasted only a few minutes


10. The preview or flash forward: people have the impression that they are witness to part of the life that is yet to come; again, there is no time or distance


11. The perception of a border: people are aware that if they cross this border or limit they will never be able to return to their body


12. The conscious return to the body, accompanied by great disappointment at having something so beautiful taken away

Other NDE Classifications

After Moody identified his twelve NDE elements in 1975, Kenneth Ring, a former professor of psychology and NDE researcher, confirmed them in his own study in 1980 but came up with a new classification, distinguishing five NDE phases. Two years later Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, identified three main types while in 1983 Bruce Greyson developed a classification featuring four components.
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I would like to look more closely at these different classifications because each researcher made a substantial contribution to the debate by highlighting different aspects of a near-death experience. For someone with an NDE, however, the experience will always be unique and each classification utterly superfluous.

Ring’s Five NDE Phases

Generally speaking, the early elements in Moody’s classification are reported most often while the later elements occur with steadily decreasing frequency. Ring, however, believed that it was more illuminating to think of the experience as happening in phases, but he stressed that his study’s findings are remarkably similar to Moody’s results.

Ring starts with the affective phase, which includes
feelings of absolute peace, calm, surrender, and bliss,
with the end of pain. This phase is nearly always experienced as positive and occurs in 60 percent of all cases. For Ring the second phase is
leaving the body
and is reported in 37 percent of all cases. Whereas some people’s experience is limited to the sensation of no longer having a body and not feeling any more pain or restrictions, others can actually see their lifeless body and their surroundings from a position outside and above their body. They can clearly see and hear what is being said. They feel detached from their body and experience themselves as complete and transparent. In the third phase (23 percent), people
arrive in a dark, usually peaceful environment.
Some linger in this phase while others hurtle
through a tunnel toward a nonblinding, exceptionally bright light,
which radiates unconditional love and acceptance. This fourth phase is described by 16 percent. The fifth and final phase (10 percent) consists of
entering another, unearthly dimension of unbelievable beauty,
where people hear beautiful music and occasionally meet deceased friends and family. This is also where the life review and flash forward can take place. People have the greatest difficulty leaving this environment to return to the body.

Sabom’s Three NDE Categories

In response to Moody’s book, Michael Sabom was challenged by some friends to explain why he, a cardiologist, had never heard of an NDE. Extremely skeptical, he began to ask people who had been resuscitated whether they had any recollection of their period of unconsciousness. To his surprise, it was only a matter of weeks before he heard the story of an astonishing NDE. It inspired him to embark on a study looking mainly at heart patients. The study, in which he identifies three NDE categories, was published in 1982.

Sabom’s first category is the
autoscopic
or out-of-body NDE, in which patients experience a separation of mind and body. They may be able to perceive their own resuscitation and surroundings, usually from an elevated position near the ceiling. This category was reported in 53 percent of all cases in his study. Communication with living persons proves to be impossible even though they can be seen and heard quite clearly. Patients move through mental force; as soon as they want to see or hear something and they think about it, they are taken there. In their nonphysical “body” people move straight through other people and walls. The moment of reentry into the physical body usually coincides with the moment of successful resuscitation, which patients sometimes observe. Astonished by the level of detail that patients know about their own resuscitation, hospital staff often respond with disbelief. The detailed resuscitation accounts led Sabom to conclude that the out-of-body experiences with verifiable perception could have occurred only during the cardiac arrest. In order to check whether the descriptions of resuscitations were merely reconstructions based on familiar images from medical TV programs, Sabom also interviewed twenty-five heart patients who had not reported an NDE after their resuscitation. Their descriptions contained at least one aspect that did not correspond with reality, unlike those of NDE patients with an out-of-body experience. At times the latter even recalled very specific and atypical details they could not have known.