Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2 page)

When I looked into his eyes all the secrets of the universe were revealed to me. I know how everything works because I looked into his eyes for a moment. All the secrets of the universe, all knowledge of all time, everything.

I understood (I use this term because I did not actually hear) the colored drops were the experiences of all who had lived. The experiences existed as separate items yet belonged to the whole. The whole was the collective knowledge of all.

The NDERF survey asked, “Did you have a sense of knowing special knowledge, universal order, and/or purpose?” To this question 56.0 percent of NDErs answered “Yes.” Another question asked, “Did you suddenly seem to understand everything?” To this question, 31.5 percent responded that they seemed to understand everything “About the universe,” and 31.3 percent responded that they seemed to understand everything “About myself or others.”

On my side of the boundary, time seemed to go slow. On the other side, time went by faster.

There was this door in front of me with this music coming out and people celebrating with utter joy that I knew and recognize[d] as home. Once [I] crossed, I couldn’t come back.

I reached the point where I felt I had to make the choice whether to go back to life or onward into death. My best friend was there (who had died of cancer two years before), and she told me that this was asfar as I could go or I would not be able to turn back. “You have come to the edge. This is as far as you can go,” she said. “Now go back and live your life fully and fearlessly.”

I wasn’t allowed to cross that boundary. There was no choice.

The NDERF survey asked, “Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure?” To this question 31.0 percent of NDErs answered “Yes.”

I remember as I looked down at them, I said to the angel, “Why don’t they just let her die?” I did not realize, at that time, the body that I was looking at was mine. Then in a commanding voice, she [the angel] said, “You must go back now.” … “She must live,” she said in a soft calming voice. “She has a son to raise.”

I was really hurt that I couldn’t stay because there wasn’t anything that I wanted more than to stay. Pure love is the best way to describe the being and place that I would be leaving. Under protest, I was sent back.

I found out that my purpose now would be to live “heaven on earth” using this new understanding, and also to share this knowledge with other people. However, I had the choice of whether to come back into life or go toward death. I was made to understand that it was not my time, but I always had the choice, and if I chose death, I would not be experiencing a lot of the gifts that the rest of my life still held in store. One of the things I wanted to know was that if I chose life, would I have to come back to this sick body, because my body was very, very sick and the organs had stopped functioning. I was then made to understand that if I chose life, my body would heal very quickly. I would see a difference in not months or weeks, but days!

The NDERF survey asked, “Were you involved in or aware of a decision regarding your return to the body?” To this question, 58.5 percent answered “Yes.”

As far as I’m concerned, it makes perfect sense that the best evidence for understanding what happens when we die would come from those who actually
did
nearly die or even experienced clinical death. This commonsense perspective is certainly validated in the NDERF study. The substantial majority of people who had a near-death experience believe their NDEs are real and are evidence of an afterlife. For NDErs, having a near-death experience is their personal proof of both the reality of the NDE
and
an afterlife.

In science, confirming the reality of a concept generally comes not from a single observation or study but from many independent studies with different methodologies. This cross-checking among scientific studies has always been the foundation for validating scientific discoveries. Thus it is vitally important to note that the NDERF study findings are corroborated by hundreds of prior NDE studies conducted by scores of NDE researchers. Throughout this book we cite many major NDE studies by other researchers. These other studies almost always make the same observations and come to the same conclusions as the NDERF study. This adds to the converging lines of evidence that lead me to conclude:
There is life after death.

I know this belief takes me out on a limb. Despite a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that shows 74 percent of Americans believe in life after death, I also know that this belief is often attributed to people with deep religious conviction.
⁸
I want to make it clear that I am both a scientist
and
a believer in life after death.

I have reconsidered much of what I was taught in medical school. This reconsideration began many years ago, when NDERF had just started. I was in the medical library searching fruitlessly for information about near-death experiences. It was unusually quiet that day, and as I sat amid tens of thousands of books and journals, I easily became lost in my thoughts. At my fingertips were the greatest medical and scientific studies and concepts in the world. Yet as I searched them, I found that the answer to the mystery of near-death experiences was not here. In the collective knowledge around me from the world’s greatest doctors and medical scientists, I could find precious little to help me fully understand the near-death experience.

I left the medical library with the question I had come in with:
What’s the key to understanding near-death experiences?

Later the answer came to me. It was so simple, yet it required a mind-set different from the one cultivated in my academic training. The answer: listen, and listen
carefully,
to the people who have gone through a near-death experience. They surely are one of the best sources for understanding what awaits us at the brink of death and beyond. Since realizing that fact, I have never looked back. Near-death studies focus on stories and the people who tell them. It is through these people and their stories that answers to many important questions about mortality may be found.

I was in my medical residency at the University of Iowa, looking for a particular article on cancer in the library. The article I was seeking had been published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. The journal comes out weekly and is a fascinating compilation of medical science and research. It is almost impossible for me to pick up an issue and look at only one article, and that is what happened on this day in 1984 when I sat down with issue number 244.

I began thumbing through the journal until I reached a rebuttal to an article titled “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,” by Richard Blacher, MD, of Tufts University in Boston.
¹
The rebuttal was a letter written by Dr. Michael Sabom and was simply titled “The Near- Death Experience.”

What’s this “near-death experience”? I thought. Medically speaking, I knew of no conscious experience that could take place near the point of death. Aren’t people generally unconscious when they are near death? I wondered. Doesn’t the very term
unconscious
imply that there is no possibility of an organized conscious experience?

Leaning forward in my chair, I began to read the letter that would change my life.

Blacher had rattled Sabom with a comment about near- death experiences, saying that they tell us nothing of the final state of death itself. Blacher went on to insist that misinterpretation of this experience could be avoided with a closer examination of this phenomenon, which is what Sabom had recently done. Sabom’s response to Blacher’s article had some electricity running through it.

I have recently conducted a systematic investigation of these experiences in 107 persons known to have survived an episode of unconsciousness and near death (i.e., cardiac arrest and coma). Using standardized interview techniques, the social, religious and demographic backgrounds of each person were evaluated along with the details of each medical crisis event and any possible recollections from the period of unconsciousness….

… I have had patients describe extensive “out of body” experiences during open heart surgery in which they observed the operation in distinct “visual” detail.

To date, I have been unable to find an adequate medical explanation for the NDE. Blacher suggests that these experiences represent a “fantasy of death” and are manifestations of a hypoxic brain attempting to deal with “the anxieties provoked by medical procedures and talk.” Experimentally, persons subjected to severe hypoxia have consistently reported having a confused and muddled memory with severe perceptual impairment preceding the loss of consciousness. This differs from the clear “visual” perception of ongoing physical events following loss of consciousness as found in the NDE. Moreover, many NDEs have occurred in settings far removed from “the anxieties provoked by medical procedures and talk.”

Blacher points out that “the physicians must be especially wary of accepting religious belief as scientific data.” I might add that equal caution should be exercised in accepting scientific belief as scientific data.
²
Copyright © 1980 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.

After reading Sabom’s response I was stunned. Even though Sabom had written only a brief letter to the editor, that letter addressed an aspect of medicine that was entirely new to me. Near-death experiences! Nothing in my medical training had prepared me for a discussion of the topic. It was as though I had missed a vital class and had now found some study material to begin filling that gap in my education.

I asked myself, Why isn’t there more research on this phenomenon? I remember sitting for some time in the library thinking about what I had just read. Then the sound of a book being closed brought me back to the present. I was studying to become a radiation oncologist—a physician who uses radiation to treat cancer—and I couldn’t let myself get sidetracked, even for an afternoon.

I put the subject of near-death experiences out of my head and went on with my medical studies.

Or at least I
tried
to go on as if nothing had happened. After my chance encounter with Sabom’s letter in
JAMA,
it seemed as though near-death experiences sprang up everywhere. I read about them in magazines and newspapers and watched them on television as people told remarkable stories of leaving their bodies at the point of death and going to another world.

I read the classic works on near-death experiences and found a wide variety of definitions for this experience. The term
near-death experience
was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody in his bestselling book,
Life After Life,
a work about the first widely known study of NDEs.
³
Dr. Moody first defined
near-death experience
in 1977 to mean “any conscious perceptual experience which takes place during … an event in which a person could very easily die or be killed (and even may be so close as to be believed or pronounced clinically dead) but nonetheless survives, and continues physical life.”
⁴

Over a decade later Moody redefined
near-death experience
as “profound spiritual events that happen, uninvited, to some individuals at the point of death.”
⁵

Regardless of the exact definition, the question that stuck in my mind was: How is it that people who are clinically dead or nearly so can have these highly lucid experiences? For example, in Moody’s book
The Light Beyond,
a woman’s heart stops on the operating table as anesthetic is being administered, due to an allergic reaction. Rather than having no awareness of her surroundings, as the notion of death would lead me to assume, she told Dr. Moody that she became “relaxed and at peace.” Then a highly lucid series of events began to unfold. Here in her own words is her NDE:

I found myself floating up toward the ceiling. I could see everyone around the bed very plainly, even my own body. I thought how odd it was that they were upset about my body. I was fine and I wanted them to know that, but there seemed to be no way to let them know. It was as though there were a veil or a screen between me and the others in the room.

I became aware of an opening, if I can call it that. It appeared to be elongated and dark, and I began to zoom through it. I was puzzled yet exhilarated. I came out of this tunnel into a realm of soft, brilliant love and light. The love was everywhere. It surrounded me and seemed to soak through into my very being. At some point I was shown, or saw, the events of my life. They were in a kind of vast panorama. All of this is really just indescribable. People I knew who had died were there with me in the light—a friend who had died in college, my grandfather, and a great-aunt, among others. They were happy, beaming.

I didn’t want to go back, but I was told that I had to by a man in light. I was being told that I had not completed what I had to do in life.

I came back into my body with a sudden lurch.
⁶

This was an experience that happened to someone whose heart had stopped! How could that be? After all,
death,
simply defined (according to Merriam-Webster Online), is “a permanent cessation of all vital functions—the end of life.” Yet I was reading dozens of case studies in which people whose hearts had stopped and who were in an unconscious state recounted lucid events containing elements that were remarkably similar to one another.