Читать книгу There Is Life After Death - Tom Harpur - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTHERE ARE MILLIONS of people today—well over eight million in the United States alone—who claim to know what death is like. They have “died” in the sense that they have suffered cardiac arrest or have been otherwise declared clinically dead and then have regained consciousness. Others, under the influence of various anaesthetics, in the throes of giving birth, at moments of extreme crisis and danger, or simply in a “natural” out-of-body event, report curiously similar perceptions of a transitional state of being between this world and another. All have come back from this experience remarkably changed and with an amazing story to tell.
For many people, ever since Dr. Raymond Moody described this phenomenon in his trendsetting, pivotal book Life After Life, published in 1975, the near-death experience (NDE) is the final proof they have been waiting for that life goes on beyond the grave.1 The skeptics and serious critics disagree. So much more has been written on this subject in the period since that first book by Moody, and so much invaluable research has been done by doctors and scientists, among others, that we must now attempt to come to terms with the possibilities and problems raised. What light does the NDE throw upon the belief in life after death? The fact that the experience does occur on an extraordinarily vast scale in all cultures and climes is not in doubt. Researchers who are officers of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), of which I was for some years a member, report that as many as 35 to 40 percent of all those who have almost died can recall a near-death experience.2
Moody must be given credit for having given a name to the phenomenon and for having brought it dramatically to the forefront of public consciousness, but he certainly did not invent the NDE. Plato wrote about it. In his classic dialogue, The Republic, which focuses on the theme of the true nature of justice and the ideal state, Plato tells the mythos or story of a man called Er. There was a great battle in which Er was grievously wounded and ended up being tossed on a funeral pyre because he was presumed dead. However, as the fire was about to consume him and his dead comrades, it was discovered he was still alive. Plucked from the burning pyre just before it was too late, he was given proper care and was soon able to talk. He then told his rescuers of an extraordinary “journey” he had just taken. It is obvious to the modern reader that Er is describing a more or less typical NDE. The date of The Republic is nearly five centuries BCE.
Current research shows that the NDE has appeared in various forms since the dawn of literature.3 But does the NDE really constitute evidence that there is some kind of afterlife, a state of blissful existence beyond “the valley of the shadow of death”? It is to this question that we now must turn.
Since all of the basic data about the NDE phenomenon is of necessity highly personal and anecdotal—flowing as it does from first-hand accounts of the experiences of ordinary people—it is essential to make this chapter as personal as possible. Let me begin, then, by saying that, while the statistical evidence for the prevalence of the NDE is quite arresting and should not be underplayed (some NDE researchers have used a figure as high as 60 percent of all those who experience clinical “death”), it is by no means true that everyone who comes close to death, has a narrow escape, endures cardiac arrest or is declared clinically or even brain-dead and then survives has some kind of mystical revelation of a life beyond. I haven’t. But, I have, however, had several uncomfortably close brushes with death.
In the summer of 1949 while still in my teens, I was teaching school on a Cree reserve in the remotest corner of northwestern Ontario, about a thousand miles from Toronto. I was struck down with a violent fever and acute dysentery and had to be flown out in a single-engine float plane to Sioux Lookout, a tiny frontier town. For about two weeks I hovered in and out of consciousness while the two doctors at the rudimentary hospital debated whether or not to perform surgery on my seriously ulcerated intestines. In all, I was in hospital for six weeks and finally emerged a pale, skinny vestige of my former self. I was told I had had a severe case of amoebic dysentery and that neither nurses nor doctors had expected I would leave the place alive. All I remember of the crisis part of the illness was that, while I might have been able to utter a few, brief mental prayers at moments of lucidity, my chief awareness was of not having the strength to care whether I lived or not. I just wanted to be left alone. There were no mystical overtones whatever, although, naturally, once it was all over I felt extremely grateful to be alive and on the road to recovery.
A second close encounter happened in 1979 on a hazardous trek over very rugged terrain in the interior of Nepal. My photographer and I were on assignment for the Toronto Star. The project was for a newspaper series called “Christmas in Asia.” We had spent a week in Calcutta visiting and interviewing Mother Teresa, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her outstanding work among “the poorest of the poor.” After visiting her orphanage and the House of the Dying, we also spent some time with a remarkable Canadian minister, Rev. Mark Buntain, who had built a modern hospital and ran schools both in Calcutta and in the surrounding countryside, including one near the city dump where abandoned children tried to make a living from scouring the rubbish for saleable scraps of metal and glass. He was called “St. Mark of Calcutta.” From Calcutta we flew north to Kathmandu, hired a car to take us over a single-track, treacherous road (built by the Chinese) into the foothills of the Himalayas. We were dropped off in the middle of nowhere and had to hike the final 40 kilometres into a jungle hospital near a mountain village called Amp Pipal. We were on our way to visit a Canadian missionary doctor, Helen Huston, who was known in some circles as “the doctor on the roof of the world.” It was growing dark as we wound our way up a steep path that our Sherpa guide—a bronzed, wiry man who, though almost half my size, had the strength of a lion—said was the final ascent to the Huston clinic. Suddenly, at a sharp turn in the path, I felt myself stepping into nothingness. I fell hard against the lip of the cliff face and started to slip towards the yawning abyss below. Fortunately, the frame of my large backpack caught on a root and I lay there on my back afraid to move. I heard Bob, the photographer, call my name and then there was a crash as he too took a misstep and landed in a bush just above me. It seemed an eternity, but it was actually a short time before the Sherpa reached down and pulled us both to safety. The following day we walked back down to where our near miss occurred and were horrified by the awesome, sheer drop into the canyon that lay only a couple of feet from where we had hung so precariously. I will remember the feelings and thoughts I had during the moments lying on my back on the edge of that precipice, where the least movement could have ended in tragedy, for the rest of my life. But, there was no hint of any life review; no memory of anything other than fear and the kind of praying only extreme danger can provoke.
During my research, I have found many people who have had cardiac arrest while in intensive care or during surgery, or who have had close encounters with death such as I have described, but who have had nothing dramatic to report. My own father-in-law is a case in point. Some years ago he suffered a severe heart attack while undergoing kidney surgery. A few months later, he had open-heart surgery to remove the scarring caused by the attack and was in a coronary intensive care unit for several days. While he had some mild hallucinations as a result of the medication he was on, there was nothing he could identify as truly mystical, nothing approaching an NDE.
Leading figures in NDE research admit they don’t know why some have the experience and others do not. In an interview, Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Connecticut’s Medical Center and one of the best-known researchers in this field, told me he considers it quite possible that all those who “die” and come back have an NDE, but that for unknown reasons some of them repress it. Greyson said, “It could be either that they didn’t actually come close enough to really dying or that some other factor, say, the medication, interfered in some way. In situations like this, people are under extreme stress, so it’s hard to calculate all the variables.”
Intrigued, I followed this up by interviewing three anaesthetists, including Dr. Richard Cooper, assistant professor in the Department of Anaesthesia at the University of Toronto Medical School. They told me that there are usually three components in any general anaesthetic: analgesics to prevent pain, muscle relaxants to prevent bodily movement during the surgery or other procedure and amnesics to ensure the experience is forgotten. As Cooper explained, the amnesics are to erase or prevent the formation of memories of the operation. “People don’t want to be aware of what has gone on,” he said. Those rare few who do manage some recall generally are plagued by a sense that “something has gone wrong.” They can even have recurring nightmares in which they sense danger or risk of death but are unable to move to avoid it. The amount of amnesic given (usually one of the benzodiazepines) varies with each patient, and the effects vary as well, depending on other drugs being administered at the same time. Some surgery, the doctors said, is done without the use of amnesics if it is thought they might interfere with, for example, the heartbeat of cardiac patients. However, given the wide use of memory suppressants in most serious operations, I find it noteworthy, not that many who experience clinical death during surgery don’t have an NDE, but that so many appear to remember so clearly that they did.
Kenneth Ring, whose first book, Heading Toward Omega (1984), examines the transformative effects of NDEs on those who experience them—including the temporary heightening of perceptual abilities—is today one of the leading authorities on this entire phenomenon. Particularly striking and persuasive are his ongoing studies of blind people who have had either NDEs, out-of-body experiences or, in many cases, both. The first results of this research came in a 1997 article in the International Association for Near-Death Studies’ official Journal of Near-Death Studies. Those wishing to follow this aspect further should read also Ring’s 1999 book, Mindsight, written with co-researcher E. Valarino. The blind subjects interviewed ranged from those congenitally blind from birth to those who lost their sight because of accidents or disease later in life. Ring and his associates are unequivocal in their conviction, based on the evidence presented by this group of NDErs, that the blind do have visual perception, that is, they can see in a clear and detailed fashion during their experience—even those who are blind from birth.
In his first book on near-death experiences, Life After Life, Moody analysed the “otherworld journeys” of those who have been to the brink of death and have reported “miraculous” glimpses of a world beyond. They found a plane of existence glowing with love and understanding, a place of bliss and light that can apparently be reached only “by an exciting trip through a tunnel or passageway.” In his later book, The Light Beyond, he summarizes the characteristics of these “near-death visions” in this way: “NDErs experience some or all of the following events—a sense of being dead, peace and painlessness even during ‘painful’ experience, bodily separation, entering a dark region or tunnel, rising rapidly into the heavens, meeting deceased friends and relatives who are bathed in light, encountering a Supreme Being, reviewing one’s life, and feeling reluctance to return to the world of the living.”4
By chance, a few days after I had read Life After Life, I noticed a brief story in the Toronto Star about a man who had been critically wounded in the abdomen by a shotgun blast at close range. He was a night watchman at a Canadian Tire store outlet in the west end of Mississauga, Ontario, and had surprised two thieves in the act. What caught my eye was the statement in the story that this security guard had “died” twice during the many hours of surgery required to save him. I kept the clipping for three months and then tracked him down by phone. He was by then well on the road to a near-miraculous recovery and was willing to give me an interview. I told him nothing in advance of my area of interest. I spent several hours with him and discovered that, although he was reluctant to talk about it at first, he had had an experience that he described as “a kind of religious conversion.” It turned out that during the moments or minutes when his vital signs had totally flattened out on the monitor and the doctors were certain they had lost him, he had in fact had an NDE.
It was my first direct encounter with anything of the sort, and it gave me a strange feeling to hear him describe roughly the same phenomenon outlined in Life After Life. Incidentally, at that time he had not read the book and had been afraid to speak to anyone else about his experience for fear of being thought strange. Not every detail matched the complete profile of an NDE given above, but there were enough of the major traits—the tunnel, the sense of shining light and the reluctance to “go back”—to make me realize he was talking about essentially the same thing. I wrote the story and it gained a considerable response from readers and other media.
I was not the first Toronto Star journalist, however, to have reported such a case. In my first months at the paper, well before Moody set off the NDE floodtide with Life After Life, a colleague of mine at the newspaper, Sidney Katz, wrote the strange story of Leslie Sharpe. Sharpe, who at that time headed a successful Toronto-based printing firm, had never concerned himself with the ultimate mystery of life after death. But, as Katz told it, “. . . late one spring afternoon a year ago, Sharpe, sixty-eight, had an experience that changed all that. He died.” Katz, basing his account on an article by Sharpe that had just been published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, told how the man had gone to Toronto General Hospital complaining of sharp pains in his chest and left arm.5 Once in bed, his symptoms vanished and blood pressure, heart sounds, everything, seemed completely normal. Later that same day, however, at two minutes to four in the afternoon, he looked at his watch. A few seconds afterwards, he gave a very deep sigh and his head flopped over to the right.
He reported: “I remember wondering why my head flopped over, because I hadn’t moved it. I figured I must be going to sleep. That was my last conscious thought.” Immediately, Sharpe was looking down at his own body from the waist up. “Almost at once, I saw myself leave my body, coming out through my head and shoulders. The body was somewhat transparent, although not exactly in vapour form. Watching, I thought, ‘So this is what happens when you die.’” Next, the businessman found himself sitting on a small object, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and travelling through a blue-grey sky at great speed. He had the feeling he didn’t know where he was or where he was going but that this was “one journey I must take alone.” He felt safe and that everything was “being taken care of.” Then he began to feel a “delightful” floating sensation as he was bathed in a bright yellow light.
He wrote: “I have a scar on my right leg, the result of an old injury. Although at the time I was not conscious of having any lower limbs, I felt the scar being torn away and I thought, ‘They have always said your body is made whole out here. I wonder if my scars are gone?’” Continuing to float, he tried unsuccessfully to locate his legs. The sensation of tranquility and joy engulfed him so fully that he could only describe it afterwards as “something beyond words to tell.” Just then, a series of hard blows to his left side brought him back to consciousness. His heart had been restarted by means of shocks from an electric paddle. Looking up, he could see the doctors and nurses. He heard someone say that he’d taken “a bad turn.” In the article he wrote in the medical journal and in his interview with Katz, Sharpe said he then told the medical team not to resuscitate him if he suffered another relapse. He wanted the experience to “go on and on. If that was eternity, I wanted to stay there. I was annoyed at being brought back to earth.”
Some facts given in Katz’s article are important. Sharpe was not a member of any religious group and had not been to church for many years. In his own mind, he had “long ago reached the conclusion that death was the final end and that beyond that there was nothing.” He had, according to the hospital staff, received only Demerol and was not on any hallucinogenic chemical. (Demerol, a strong narcotic, normally produces extreme drowsiness and some confusion of mind as it numbs pain. In rare cases it can contribute to hallucinatory experiences of a confused nature, quite unlike the highly structured account that Sharpe describes.) Having “returned from death,” he had lost any fear of it he previously had. “I’ve had the rare privilege of seeing behind a closed door that’s never opened. I’m no longer afraid to go.” Finally, Sharpe wrote his story for the Canadian Medical Association Journal at the urging of his physicians, Drs. Robert L. MacMillan and Kenneth W.G. Brown of Toronto General’s coronary care unit. It bore the very conservative title “Cardiac Arrest Remembered.”
Those familiar with the writings of Dr. Carl Jung will be aware that the great psychoanalyst, at first a colleague and then a critic of Sigmund Freud, had a very similar experience to that of Sharpe, one which he later said ranked among the most meaningful of his eventful life. During a brief clinical “death” after a heart attack, he said, “It seemed to me I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of earth bathed in a glorious blue light. Ahead of me I saw a shining temple and was drawn towards it. As I approached, a strange thing happened. I had the certainty I was about to enter an illuminated room and meet there all those people to whom I was beloved in reality. There I would understand at last the meaning of my life.” Jung then realized he was being pulled back into his physical body. It happened at the same moment his doctor injected him with a strong heart stimulant.6
Of the hundreds of readers who responded to the requests in my column to describe briefly any experience they had had which for them constituted evidence of an afterlife, about forty responded with a story of an NDE. What was significant, in my view, is the fact that no two of them were exactly the same and none was a replica of the full, classical NDE that is regularly discussed in the media. That, plus the way in which most respondents stressed that this was the first time they had ever told anyone outside their immediate family circle about the experience, gives considerable credibility, I believe, to the conviction that what they describe did actually happen.
• R.H.D., of Burlington, Ontario, wrote: “Prior to quadruple bypass surgery in 1979, I experienced cardiac arrest while in the intensive care unit at Joseph Brant Hospital. The arrest occurred during sleep but I was brought ‘back to life,’ as it were, by a very alert and able nursing staff. I have retained a very vivid recollection of the few minutes that I was ‘dead.’ Whether it was a dream or a temporary entrance into eternity I will obviously never know. However, just prior to administration of electric shock by the staff, I travelled through a long and misty-white tunnel, the end of which I never reached and the surroundings of which were immensely peaceful. I can remember no other details but it was an experience which I can never forget. It was not just a matter of imagination.”
• P.W.L. is a physicist with one of the largest public utilities in Canada. He had an NDE in 1965, a decade before Life After Life appeared. P.W.L. only realized that other people had had a similar experience when he happened upon the condensation of Moody’s book in Reader’s Digest in 1976. He never spoke of it to others until 1989, when he took an introductory course on the New Testament at the Toronto School of Theology. Early on a Saturday in January 1965, he was involved in a serious car accident on the Gardiner Expressway, the major arterial roadway running along the Toronto waterfront. The police closed the Gardiner immediately afterwards and the story was carried in the final edition of the Toronto Star the same day. His memory of the actual crash was “wiped out,” he says. He was not wearing a seat belt and only learned later that he had been battered between the two doors and the steering wheel and then thrown clear. He does remember lying waiting for the ambulance and giving his girlfriend’s phone number to some bystanders. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital where, in emergency surgery, his ruptured liver was sutured and repairs done to a series of tears in his lower intestine. While unconscious on the operating table, P.W.L. had “an amazing experience.” He became aware of a bright, round, yellow light overhead. “Then, I was up there beside the yellow light, watching the operation from the vicinity of the ceiling. I could see myself in the yellow illumination, in sharp focus on the operating table below. There was medical equipment above my body but it didn’t impede my view in any way. I had the feeling that I was in the arms of God. An overwhelming sense of unconditional love and concern and support completely saturated me, in direct mind-to-mind contact, and it persisted for an indefinite duration. There was no dialogue involved. And then I woke up in the recovery room. My immediate reaction was, ‘So that is what God is like!’” Having graduated from university in physics not all that long before, he says he was a “nominal Christian” with considerable skepticism prior to his NDE. He is aware that what happened to him is not firm proof of anything, but it changed his religious outlook completely. “Before, I could only hope, but now I know what God is like and that God loves each of us, whether we deserve it or not.” One immediate result of the NDE, he says, is that he proposed to Jean, his girlfriend, while he was still in hospital, and they were married nine months later. I met with this man not long ago at the close of a lecture I had just given. We discussed his NDE briefly and I must say that I have seldom met anyone whom I would judge to be less given to hallucinations or flights of fancy than this particular scientist.
• Several women wrote about NDEs or out-of-body experiences they had had during the process of giving birth. Two of these were instances where the baby was either born dead or died during the delivery. P.R., for example, relates that on August 1, 1947, she had the following “unforgettable experience.” She was in the delivery room of the local hospital. “Something had gone wrong with the way the baby was being born. Suddenly, I remember, I found myself walking up a path in a beautiful garden. The scent of the flowers was over-powering. I was walking towards a figure dressed in white, surrounded by a bright light. This person was holding a baby in his left arm and holding his right hand out to me. I heard someone calling me from what seemed a long distance away and suddenly I was out of the garden and back in the delivery room. One of the nurses, who happened to be a friend of mine, told me that the baby had died. I have not been able to talk about this very much but have told members of my prayer group.”
• J.C.S. writes: “On my father’s deathbed, but while he could still speak, he told my husband and me that he had nothing to fear now that the end of this life was drawing to a close. Then he told us about his bout with pneumonia in 1939 or 1940, pre-antibiotics, at home. He said he had never felt so ill before or since. Then he ‘died.’ He was at the ceiling of his bedroom looking down at the doctor seated by his bed shaking his head at his body, with his parents standing arm-in-arm behind the doctor. His father was grim-faced clutching his wife who was sobbing gently. Dad was met by a being of pure, warm inviting light. No words were spoken, but there was clear communication. This being was to be his guide. The ceiling ‘disappeared’ and he found himself, with his guide, on the edge of a shining path. He was gently told that he had died to the life of that body below. Seeing his parents’ obvious distress, my father asked if he could make them happy. His guide told him that he had a choice to make. The path that led to the next life beckoned, but he could return to his body. He was warned that much physical pain might ensue. Even as Dad watched the doctor begin to pull up the sheet to cover his face, Dad chose this life. He felt a wave of approval and then he was back in his body looking up at the shocked face of the doctor. After Dad had finished speaking, his countenance was beaming and he appeared to be other-worldly. Visiting hours were over. Dad kissed both of us and said that this was likely his final ‘good bye’ to us. He slipped into a coma that night and died a couple of days later without speaking again.”
• One of the replies I received came from the Reverend Ken Martin, pastor of Siloam United Church in London, Ontario. Martin wrote to me on August 22, 1989, to say he had recently had a remarkable out-of-body experience during a “silent heart attack.” It was the first of two attacks, and Martin, who is forty-eight, had been feeling tired and overworked. He told me he had made notes in his diary the same night he had his NDE and offered to share them. I spoke with him on the phone, discovered that the NDE had had a profound effect upon him, and invited him to send me his account. Here it is, verbatim: “I was sleeping earlier tonight with my wife, Beverley, when suddenly I awoke. There was an incredible pain in my chest and I was suddenly aware of being lifted up from the bed into the air. I took a fleeting, backward glance at the bed and saw Beverley sleeping, and then I was transported right out of the room into the sky. The sky was very dark in the background and yet there were swirls of very bright lights. I found myself caught up in one of these swirls. It was like being at the small end of a long funnel that was opening wider and wider. I was rushing through the funnel in a fast-moving swirl of light. It was incredibly bright. It was also warm and I felt very much at peace and extremely contented. It was as if there was a great strength lifting me and pulling me forward. I experienced the feeling that I was going home. There was no pain, no depression, and no worries about finishing my thesis, earning a living, or whether or not I would be able to return to work. It was as if these things were gone forever. I had a very definite feeling that I was coming home from someplace I had left a long time ago. Then I saw an extremely bright light ahead of me. All was so peaceful, warm, and well. I was rushing faster and faster into this ever-widening swirl of blazing light. It was as if someone was summoning me to come home but I heard no voice. The overwhelming feeling was one of incredible peace. Then, abruptly, I was yanked back and found myself in my bed again. I felt deeply disappointed and cried out: ‘Oh no, not this again!’ I guess that was a terrible thing to think and voice. Although there had been a few seconds as I first had felt myself being lifted into the dark sky when I felt disappointment at leaving my family, that feeling had quickly left me, overwhelmed by the sense of peace. Now I was back in bed with all the pain and depression and worry. I wept because I had come back. I now have a deep feeling that ‘home’ is somewhere else and would like to go back. When will I resume my journey? It was incredible!” Martin has now lost forty pounds—he had been up to 195—is swimming regularly on his doctor’s orders, and is back at work in a busy parish. In his accompanying letter to me, he says he now knows first-hand that “there is nothing to be afraid of after death.” He is also convinced that there is so much more to life than what we have known on earth. “Yet, I am also convinced that we Christians are in for a big surprise and that we have certainly made our God far too small.” He added that, apart from his wife, he has told nobody else about his experience. He has not, at the time of my writing this, shared this experience with his congregation. “Why not?” he queries. “Likely because I’m afraid of being called eccentric, crazy, or worse.”
It is impossible to do more than skim the surface of my flood of mail on this and related subjects, never mind describing in any adequate way all of what is now available on near-death experience. Letters have come from the educated and the uneducated, from the religious and the non-religious, from those who believe in life after death and those who previously were total skeptics. Many of those who wrote to me were not at death’s door when their “glimpse of eternity” or their sense of being able to “look down on my body” from some other vantage point occurred. Nearly all of them spoke of the “light,” of feelings of a peace beyond understanding, and of seeing loved ones or supernatural beings—God, Christ, Krishna, angels, or others—aware that they were using symbolic language to express what had happened to them. Most say their attitudes to both life and death were changed in the process. One man wrote to say that he now feels as though he is living “with one foot in each of two different worlds.” While there is generally some regret at not having passed on to the other side, there is, paradoxically, a greater commitment to this life, a desire to learn more, to love more. While those who have the experience do not necessarily become suddenly more religious, they invariably become more spiritual, more concerned with the depth dimension of living. All fear of death and dying, they say, is gone.7
“Hellish” Near-Death Experiences
One of my correspondents wrote me: “In 1992 I had a brain aneurysm bleed, and was given very little chance to live. Unfortunately I didn’t have the wonderful experience of going to the light. I went to the darkness and it was an experience that was both terrifying and life altering. If this is a glimpse of hell it is not at all the fire and demons—it is total isolation. I often wondered if there are others who have had this experience and if they see it as a warning or as a prophetic experience. I have never discussed this with anyone as it seems to be outside the bounds of what we all desire. Thank God I don’t think it lasted long. But it is as clear today as if it happened this morning.”
It is tempting, given the overwhelmingly positive nature of the NDE portrayed in the bulk of both popular and scientific literature, to assume that, whatever is signified by this phenomenon, its main thrust is extremely good news about dying and death. However, there is another side to the story, one that has not yet been fully studied and assimilated by NDE researchers. That some people who come close to the gates of death experience a reality that is anything but reassuring was first fully discussed by Dr. Maurice Rawlings in his 1978 book, Beyond Death’s Door.8 Rawlings, an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, argued from his medical experience that some people who have an NDE feel themselves to be in hell. Beyond Death’s Door is not a particularly good book in my opinion, as Rawlings only manages to adduce a very tiny number of such stories, and one has the feeling throughout that he had already decided on his conclusions before he began his research. But at least Rawlings has raised the issue that possibly all is not light and bliss during the near-death experience.
When George Gallup Jr. published his 1982 book, Adventures in Immortality: A Look Beyond the Threshold of Death, he too referred to respondents who said they had had a “hellish” experience while close to death. For the most recent and the most insightful look at this aspect of the NDE, though, one must look at Margot Grey’s Return From Death: An Exploration of the Near-Death Experience.9 Grey, a humanistic psychologist, based her research on interviews with thirty-eight people claiming near-death experiences and many more patients she later worked with in her practice. Grey herself had an NDE when she had a close brush with death while travelling in India. She reports she too had an encounter with light accompanied by a “feeling of being very close to the source of light and love, which seemed to be one.” Grey, who has no religious ties, states quite categorically that her studies have brought her to the conclusion that “conscious awareness survives physical death.”10
Her chapter on negative experiences breaks some new ground. She bases her remarks here on five of her own cases and nine negative cases from the general literature, together with information gleaned from interviews with cardiologists who have been on the lookout for NDE reports from their patients. Like Rawlings, these doctors stressed that negative NDEs are only made known very shortly after the episodes happen. In other words, such experiences tend to be quickly repressed. Grey found that those who experience this type of NDE feel a sense of guilt or shame at hellish experiences and would rather not admit to them. She also concludes that they may indeed have had some terrible deed in their background that they felt accounted for their sense of being in or going to hell. In his review of her book, Karlis Osis says that in this finding Grey “has put her finger on the right spot. We might need to rethink our methods. Maybe we have relied too much on the self-reports of the patients and have failed to ascertain observations made through the cooler eyes of doctors and nurses who were around when the patients started to talk about the NDEs that were still fresh in their memories.”11
Grey was able to come up with some quite significant similarities between the pattern of positive NDEs and that of the negative ones. In the negative NDE, instead of peace and a sense of well-being, there is a feeling of fear and panic. The sense of being out of the body is similar in both types. Instead of entering a tunnel, however, in the negative NDE one enters a black void. There is no light, but rather the sense of an evil force, and one enters what can only be described as a hell-like environment. In the negative cases, there are after-effects, too. “Like those respondents who had positive experiences, the people in this category returned from their encounters with an increased conviction that life continues after death. They also felt a strong urge radically to modify their former way of life.”12
In all, about one-eighth of Grey’s interviewees reported experiences that were hell-like. None of this, of course, means that such imagery has to be taken in a literal fashion or that there is such a place or state as a literal hell. But, it is clearly an area of research that still needs much more careful examination. As Osis remarks, “If this pattern is replicated and sound, it would require nothing less than considering the positive and negative NDEs as one integrated whole—a sweeping reorganization of our views.”
Problems with the Near-Death Experience
According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies, “An NDE may occur when a person is considered clinically dead, or even to one not close to death but who is under some biological and/or psychological stress. Somehow, the experience appears to be a biologically-based trigger for a spiritual event.” For me, one of the most exhaustive and fascinating attempts to understand just what is going on in this event is a book by Carol Zaleski, Other-world Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. Zaleski, who wrote this work initially as her doctoral thesis in religious studies at Harvard, gives us a sparkling overview of the NDE and sets it in a more universal perspective by analyzing examples from sources as diverse as the epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, St. Paul and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her main focus, however, as the title says, is a comparison of medieval otherworld journeys with those described in the NDE literature of today. In addition, she reviews the modern scientific debate between the advocates of the NDE as a real glimpse of eternity and the hard-nosed skeptics who pour cascades of cold water over such “imaginative flights of fancy.”
Zaleski finds amazing parallels between the experiences of medieval saints, mystics and ordinary folk, and those relayed on talk shows or in the books of the NDE researchers of today. But she also finds some remarkable differences: “Gone are the bad deaths, harsh judgment scenes, purgatorial torments, and infernal terrors of medieval visions; by comparison, the modern other world is a congenial place, a democracy, a school for continuing education, and a garden of unearthly delights.”13 In other words, there is something very western about the terms in which the modern otherworld traveller conceptualizes his or her vision.
This brings us to one of the first observations I want to make about the NDE. The experience, though obviously universal in the sense that we can find examples of it at every time period and in every culture, is nevertheless culture specific. That is, it is expressed in forms of thought and language peculiar to its historical context. While those who have had the experience may all, or nearly all, see beings of light, these will be described variously as Jesus, Buddha or Krishna depending on who is doing the seeing and where. Zaleski points out, for example, that Dante’s heaven is much more hierarchical than any heaven in modern NDE experience. But the social order of Dante’s time was itself a hierarchical one: “For medieval audiences, the ranking of the blessed in a series of concentric but ascending heavens . . . derived its plausibility—or rather its imaginative power—from the fact that it reflected and affirmed the social order and provided an emblem for the structure of human intelligence.” What this cultural component indicates is that, whatever is happening in the NDE, there is certainly a subjective element provided by the individual concerned. If someone is indeed viewing a reality of some kind, it is a reality shaped by a particular background, conditioning and life situation. This, of course, does not automatically mean that the NDE itself can be dismissed as totally subjective. Being human, it is impossible for us to apprehend any reality in this world or the next without bringing to it whatever we ourselves are, and shaping it accordingly. It is possible intellectually to conceive of a totally objective reality in the abstract, but in practice there is no such thing as the “unobserved observer.” Even in science, allowance has to be made for the contribution we make in describing the “real” world.
A second problem faced by Zaleski and admitted in varying degrees by even the most enthusiastic of the NDE proponents is that of defining death itself. No matter how moving some of the descriptions of journeying into this other realm may be, we have to keep reminding ourselves that the operative word in “near-death experience” is “near.” All of these visionaries were near death; they were not actually dead, because, by definition, to be dead is to be at that point from which any kind of physical return is ruled out. Zaleski quotes from an article in the British medical journal The Lancet: “Death is just beyond the point from which anyone can return to tell us anything.” As she goes on to say, the “popular appeal of return-from-death stories rests partly on the assumption that temporary absence of vital signs is equivalent to death.”14
The difficulty here is that it is now very hard, even for ethicists and medical experts, to agree on what constitutes death. What’s more, as medical technology and skills advance and ever more amazing rescues of the dying are possible, even tentative definitions have to be constantly reexamined and updated. It should be remembered too, in this connection, that even NDE researchers themselves do not want to restrict the NDE too closely to death because they have documented so many cases where the same experience was encountered not near death but during meditation, in the face of extreme danger, while on a drug or during childbirth. Even allowing for all of this, however, I agree with Moody that while those who experience NDEs are not really dead in the full sense of the word, they have come very much closer to this ultimate experience than the rest of us. Or, as Zaleski puts it, “Whether NDEs occur in the grip of death or only in the face of death, they may still constitute a revelatory encounter with death.” These experiences are certainly not proof of a life after death, or of the other realities and entities reported. But, it is argued, they could well supply at the minimum some evidence upon which a belief in life after death could reasonably take its stand.
The critics, as one would expect, have come up with a wide variety of natural explanations to account for what the proponents of the NDE claim is a vision of another world or plane of reality. Certainly, as both Zaleski and Moody admit—along with a host of other responsible researchers in this field—it is essential to look hard at the question of whether any sufficient, natural causes exist to explain the phenomenon before leaping to any transcendental conclusions. In The Light Beyond, Moody devotes his final chapter, “Explanations,” to a detailed refutation of a range of natural possibilities. Zaleski, too, in an even more thorough manner, considers the critical literature and explanations ranging from the effects of stress on the body to drugs or sensory deprivation. Her chapter is called “Explanations and Counterexplanations.” There is no need to repeat here everything that has been said pro and con. Instead, I propose to look at the most obvious alternative, the hallucination theory.
Since a large majority of those who have experienced near-death were on various medications at the time of their brush with death and since altered states of consciousness can be produced by such physiological factors as an acute lack of oxygen (hypoxia or anoxia) or a sudden rush of endorphins, enkephalins or other as yet unknown chemicals secreted by the brain when stress, pain or fear occur, many skeptical scientists have argued that what we are dealing with here is some form of hallucination. As Zaleski says, as far as the debunkers are concerned, these “endogenous opiates are a neurochemical equivalent for and an answer to grace.”15
I believe this theory deserves further consideration. There can be no doubt that the human mind is capable of quite extraordinary thoughts and visions under the right stimuli. Visionary experiences can be produced by extended fasting, by extremes of physical exhaustion or by hallucinogenic substances. As I have already made clear, I am not personally subject to mystical visions or visitations of any kind. However, I do know what it is like to hallucinate on a chemical substance.
Let me explain. In the summer of 1962 I took a year’s leave of absence from my parish in Scarborough, Ontario, to return to Oxford, England, for some postgraduate studies in patristics, the writings of the early fathers of the Church. In February 1963, Dr. Frank Lake, a British psychiatrist from Nottingham, came to the university for a series of lectures. Lake was one of the earliest pioneers in the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of the mentally ill. He had been a missionary doctor in India for a number of years, and had spent almost all of his time as a psychiatrist dealing with people heavily involved in organized religion. At his invitation, following one of his lectures, I joined a small group of other clergy who volunteered to assist in a research project. Lake had become discouraged by the difficulty and length of time required for traditional analysis and counselling and was experimenting with LSD as a psychiatric shortcut. (I would remind the reader that this was well before LSD appeared in North America and became part of the drug scene in any way. At this point, none of us had even heard of it before.) I hitchhiked up to Nottingham one weekend that spring and joined Lake and the others at his centre, a place called Lingwood. An Anglican priest came and, along with four other priests, one of whom had been a distinguished Spit-fire pilot in the Battle of Britain, I received Holy Communion and then was administered some LSD. Each of us had been assigned to a room of his own and the doctor dropped by frequently to monitor what was going on.
Although it happened many years ago, the experience remains perfectly vivid in all its details. I had known nothing like it before and have never since. At first, it was like seeing Technicolor movies run at a very high speed inside my head. The speeded-up images were mainly of various family members, often doing extremely funny things. A tremendous sense of exaltation flooded me and it seemed nothing would ever be impossible—writing a world bestselling novel, rivalling the greatest artists who had ever painted, or composing music as great as Mozart’s or Beethoven’s. There were sensations of glorious light, and then visions of great beauty, both of the human form and of natural landscapes.
Suddenly, the mood changed, and with a growing sense of dread I approached a tunnel, which was as arid and dry as dust. The sensation of drawing a fingernail over a slate blackboard is the closest I can get to describe the feeling on my skin as I was forced through. From that point on, the trip became much worse. Spider-like monsters threatened my very being. Even with my eyes open it seemed as though the room was filled with horrific presences with sinister intent. Quite frankly, it was terrifying until I felt myself growing increasingly angry and wanting to fight back. I imagined myself wielding a short, sharp sword and plunging it into the belly of the enemy creatures, much like Frodo did with Shelob in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This was followed by a renewed sense of exaltation and awareness of a beauty I had never dreamed existed.
All of this went on for at least two hours, and even much later, when I was able to leave the centre and go for a walk in a nearby park, the flashbacks continued. One moment I was in the park watching the children playing and some adults busy with a cricket game, the next I was back in my own inner world with its exaggerated fears and glories. I remember looking across the park at some slum-like houses in the distance. Caught in the rays of the westering sun, they seemed to stand out with a glory that utterly transformed them.
I’m not sure what help any of us were to Dr. Lake in his research. The memory of the experience stands out much more sharply for me today than his conclusions with all of us afterwards. Although I gained no personal insights that could not have been acquired by other means, there was certainly a revelation of a kind. What was instructive was the glimpse into the incredible capacity of the brain to invent or recall suppressed material and to put it together in totally unexpected and original ways. There was, however—and this is in marked and important contrast with the NDE—no specifically religious content that I can remember, no visions of God or of Christ, no feeling of being in another realm of existence. Yet, while I would never care to repeat it, nor would I ever recommend it to anyone else, the experience was spiritual in that it further convinced me of dimensions of beauty or wider “doors of perception” only hinted at in ordinary life. Significantly, I felt no urge to stay there and no deep sense of peace.
It is tempting to infer from this personal account that perhaps the skeptics are right after all. In the NDE some kind of hallucination— possibly nature’s way of softening the moment of death—is taking place. Moody himself counters this argument with substantial evidence that a large number of recorded NDEs have taken place when there was a completely flat EEG.16 “The sheer number of these cases tells me that in some people NDEs have happened when they were technically dead. Had these been hallucinations, they would have shown up on the EEG.” The difficulty with this solution, however, is that at the current level of technology an EEG does not always give a precise reading in every instance. As Moody himself concedes, “Brain activity can be going on at such a deep level that surface electrodes don’t pick it up.” What impresses me much more is the remarkable fact that while NDEs vary widely in their tone and content, as we have seen, there is nevertheless a common core of experience running through them all regardless of time or place. It strains credulity in my view to suppose that hundreds of thousands of experiences, all of them hallucinatory, would still manage unanimously to convey such a profound sense of other-worldliness and of having somehow transcended death. I find this all the more cogent when the results of such experiences are almost uniformly positive—loss of the fear of death, commitment to greater love and understanding and commitment to a greater spiritual, although not necessarily religious, awareness and lifestyle. One other significant point should be made. As Zaleski makes clear, “for every pathological condition presumed [by the critics] to cause near-death visions, one can find subjects who were demonstrably free of its influence; therefore no single psychological or physiological syndrome can account for near-death experience.”17
In How to Know God, Deepak Chopra, the prominent doctor-writer, correctly notes that researchers today have found that many of the experiences summed up under the letters NDE can be reproduced if the right temporal lobe of the brain has been deprived of oxygen for a few moments. There can be a sense of going into the light or having visions of departed souls or angels welcoming one into the light. But, he wisely comments that “inducing the experience isn’t the same as having it; there is no spiritual meaning . . . to oxygen loss.” He observes, as we have already said, that people who have experienced near-death episodes report profound spiritual changes.18
In the years since Zaleski’s ground-breaking book, a lot of research has been done around the world. Particularly important is the work of Britain’s leading clinical authority on the NDE, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and his scientist wife, Elizabeth. Fenwick himself is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and an internationally known neuropsychiatrist—a specialist in the mind/brain interface and consciousness studies. Together the Fenwicks have written The Truth in the Light—An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (1996). Indeed, Elizabeth began her research convinced that NDEs could all be explained away scientifically. But, after confronting the full evidence, she concluded: “While you may be able to find scientific reasons for bits of the Near-Death experience, I can’t find any explanation which covers the whole thing. You have to account for it as a package and sceptics . . . simply don’t do that. None of the purely physical explanations will do; (sceptics) vastly underestimate the extent to which near-death experiences are not just a set of random things happening, but a highly organized and detailed affair.” Dr. Peter Fenwick is scathing in his critique of the professional skeptics’ arguments and systematically destroys the entire range of objections made—from the one about the NDE being the natural product of a “dying brain” to the ever-present theory of wish fulfillment. He has a list of questions that he challenges the skeptics to answer. They are incisive, tough-minded and, in my view, utterly convincing. He accuses skeptical psychologists in particular of writing “absolute rubbish” about the NDE because they’re venturing into territory—the study of brain function—where they have no training at all. The Fenwick book is one all doubters should be required to read.
There is one final objection I want to look at before summarizing our findings. It deserves attention both because of the prestige and popularity of its chief proponent and because, at first sight, it has about it an aura of great plausibility. I’m referring to the views of astronomer and keen debunker of all paranormal phenomena the late Carl Sagan. In the concluding chapter of his book Broca’s Brain, titled “The Amniotic Universe,” Sagan uses the symbolism that has gathered around the universal experience of birth to explain away the cluster of experiences reported by those who have had an NDE.
In his view, not only the NDE but almost every major religious concept, from death and rebirth to the primal Eden and the Fall, derives from our unconscious memories of the womb, the birth passage, the emergence into light and being swaddled and nursed. Religion, from his extremely polemical point of view, is nothing but the vague recollection of profound experiences at a time when we are utterly helpless and inarticulate.
As noted, there is an immediate surface appearance of verisimilitude about this. Yet, to coin a phrase, the more you scratch the surface of it the more there is to scratch. Without attempting to deal with Sagan’s theory as it affects the whole of religion, let me simply set out the problems I have with it vis-à-vis the topic in hand, the NDE.
First, birth, unlike the classical NDE, is an experience of moving from a place of safety, warmth and total intimacy out into the exposed and separated world of individual existence. However dependent and close to the mother, the baby begins to experience the pain of existence right from the start. With the first breath often comes a cry. Any accounts of birth experiences I have encountered in the relevant literature all stress the element of trauma and pain that attends the moments of our leaving what Sagan calls “the amniotic universe.” This is not what the NDE is about.
Second, so far from being “blurred perceptions” or “vague premonitions,” as Sagan describes our perinatal memories, reports of the NDE describe a great sense of clarity surrounding both perceptions and the recall of them later. In fact, as we have seen, many liken normal, waking perception to “dreaming” compared with the reality and vividness of what they have gone through.
Third, Sagan deliberately ignores or plays down the extraordinary transformational power of the NDE. Nothing he says, in my view, comes close to explaining why it is that the majority of people who’ve had a near-death experience find themselves so profoundly moved and changed by the events of their NDE. Something numinous or totally “other” seems to have happened to them.
Sagan, a media-wise, militant skeptic, may have been a scientist, but he can hardly be viewed as completely objective in his claims at this point. He was a leading member of the American Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. It was founded in 1976 by Sagan, Isaac Asimov and others to combat media promotion of anything purporting to be mysterious or unexplained— from the Bermuda Triangle to Von Daniken’s alien astronauts. There is nothing wrong with any of that except that, in their enthusiasm to expose “pseudo-science,” Sagan and company sometimes have been carried away and have swept with too wide a broom. They end up at times espousing not science but scientism, the view that only the empirical, scientific method can yield true knowledge. There are few things less scientific than that!
Obviously, if death is indeed a kind of new “birth” into an entirely different dimension of reality and being, it would not be surprising if attempts to describe it were to parallel those attendant on our emergence into the light of this world as infants. But the differences, at least to this investigator, seem to be much greater than the similarities.
The one overwhelmingly important aspect of the NDE none of these critics have ever really been able to deal with is the life-changing impact on the vast majority of subjects experiencing it.
After his NDE, Carl Jung wrote: “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”19 This view is almost universally held by both those who experience NDEs and the positive NDE researchers. But, of course, we are here still in the arena of faith and not of absolute scientific proof. In her review of Moody’s The Light Beyond in the IANDS Journal of Near-Death Studies, Judith Miller, Ph.D., chided Moody for not stating his faith in more positive terms and for not challenging traditional scientific paradigms.20 Moody, the acknowledged “leader on the cutting edge of this field,” began the book by saying: “We are no closer to answering the basic question of the afterlife now than we were thousands of years ago when it was first pondered by ancient man.” In other words, since the evidence provided by NDEs can’t be replicated on demand in a scientific laboratory, none of the amazing stories is firm proof of life after death. What the matter comes down to in the end is the authority or weight we give to mystical glimpses or visions of realities other than the empirical world we live in.
Zaleski argues that, like the arguments for the existence of God, the realities attested to by people who have had an NDE belong to a totally different sphere where the question is not so much can they be proven to be true as, do NDEs give insights which can be verified in one’s own experience? She concludes: “We may find no difficulty in respecting the testimony of those whose lives have been transformed by a near-death vision, but we can verify their discoveries only if, in some sense, we experience them for ourselves.”
I find the whole expanding exploration and research in this field and of consciousness studies to be one of the most exciting developments of our time. In my own thinking and research I find myself increasingly (though cautiously) positive about the validity of the NDE as a strong witness to invisible realities beyond. What carries most weight with me, as I have already suggested, is the consistency and clarity of the stories themselves, together with the undeniable evidence of dramatically changed lives. I know from my own pastoral experience the truth of what researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson has said. Psychiatry or therapeutic counselling often takes years to bring about only slight changes in people’s outlook and behaviour, but “the NDE regularly brings about a total transformation almost overnight.”
One final point. Mark Fox in his 2003 book, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience, raises the question clearly and persuasively: Why have the churches and religious leaders in general paid so little attention to what, after all, lies very near to the heart of what they are all about? The NDE raises sharply the issues of the nature of the soul, the afterlife, our personal destiny and, ultimately, the very meaning of life itself. Like Fox, my personal belief is that this entire phenomenon offers a bridge between religion and the modern world that church leaders should be rushing to cross. It affords a common language today in a crucial area where meaningful communication has virtually broken down.
