“Science may keep saying: 'Such things are simply impossible'; yet so long as the stories multiply in different lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is bad method to ignore them.”
–American psychologist William James
Near-death Experiences (NDEs) are experiences of extraordinary visions and perceptions during periods of unconsciousness among people who were medically dead or nearly dead due to various causes like accidents, diseases, surgeries or attempted suicides. These people returned from the dead or the near-dead to tell us their amazing experiences.
NDEs have been reported since time immemorial in cultures all over the world. In a cross-cultural study published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, March 1978, researcher Dean Sheils reported that NDE beliefs appear in about 95 per cent of the world's cultures and that they are striking in their uniformity even though the cultures are diverse in structure and location. In modern times, popular interest in near-death experiences was initially sparked by Raymond Moody's 1975 book Life After Life, which reported numerous NDEs among a wide cross section of people. According to the Gallup and Proctor survey in 1980-1981, 15% of all Americans have had an NDE. In a more clinical setting, Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist from Netherlands, found that, among patients who had been successfully revived from cardiac arrests, 18% had an NDE.
During the NDEs, patients report undergoing many extraordinary experiences like travelling into a realm filled with beautiful colors, meeting effulgent beings and having life reviews – all of which often have profoundly life-changing effects on the patients. From the scientific viewpoint, the most relevant among the NDEs are the autoscopic out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in which the patients report having seen their body from a perspective outside the body – generally from above the operating bed – and also give verifiable descriptions of, say, the surgical procedures adopted by the medical staff. According to current mainstream science, patients who are unconscious cannot be aware of such details and so their descriptions can be nothing more than hallucinations or educated guess at best.
Skepticism vs Evidence
This indeed was the attitude of Dr Michael Sabom, an American cardiologist who started his NDE research in the late 1970s as a skeptic. In his book, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation Sabom outlined his initial plan to disprove the claimed perceptions of autoscopic OBE patients: “I would pit my experience as a trained cardiologist against the professed visual recollections of lay individuals. In so doing, I was convinced that obvious inconsistencies would appear which would reduce these purported visual observations to no more than an ‘educated guess’ on the part of the patient.”
Sabom’s initial skepticism soon faded away as evidence kept piling up during his over three decades of NDE research. Here are some of the cases from Sabom’s books, cases that changed his understanding of life and death and also the understanding of thousands of his readers.
A retired Air Force pilot who had suffered a massive heart attack recounted the resuscitation procedure in rich detail. He even described the motions of the two needles of the defibrillator, which is an electronic device used to administer electric shock to attempt to restore the normal functioning of the heart: “It [the defibrillator meter] was square and had two needles on there, one fixed and one which moved… the first needle moved each time they punched the thing and somebody was messing with it. And I think they moved the fixed needle and it stayed still…It [the moving needle] seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter or something registering…The first time it went between one-third and one-half scale. And then they did it again, and this time it went up over one-half-scale, and the third time it was about three-quarters.”
Sabom explains the significance of this specific observation: “I was particularly fascinated by his description of a ‘fixed’ needle and a ‘moving’ needle on the face of the defibrillator as it was being charged with electricity. The movement of these two needles is not something he could have observed unless he had actually seen this instrument in use. These two needles are individually used (1) to preselect the amount of electricity to be delivered to the patient [patient’s description: “they moved the fixed needle and it stayed still”] and (2) to indicate the defibrillator is being charged to the preselected amount [patient’s description: “the moving needle seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter or something registering”]. This charging procedure is only performed immediately prior to defibrillation, since once charged, this machine poses a serious electrical hazard unless it is correctly discharged in a very specific manner. Moreover, the meters of the type described by this man are not found on more recent defibrillator models, but were in common use in 1973, at the time of his cardiac arrest.”
How could a person who was (1) in the middle of a cardiac arrest (2) about to be jolted by an electric shock (3) while being almost certainly unconscious (4) not in a physical position to observe the defibrillator meter (5) methodically observe the motion of the needles on its dial?
In another Sabom case, a woman provided a medically accurate and detailed description of her lumbar disk surgery which was performed with the patient in supine position. She reported that her surgery had been performed, to her surprise, not by her surgeon but by the chief resident in neurosurgery, a detail that was correct but had not been divulged to her.
In addition to Sabom, many other researchers have also come across NDEs involving veridical or factual perceptions.
How could the subjects have acquired such accurate information of what had happened while they were medically unconscious? Could they have got the information about the medical procedures from prior general knowledge? Such precise knowledge seemed unlikely among patients not directly connected with the medical profession, still Sabom, being a rigorously scientific researcher, decided to evaluate this possibility. So he questioned a control group of twenty-five cardiac patients, whose backgrounds were similar to the backgrounds of those reporting NDEs. When the control subjects were asked to imagine what they would see happening in the operating room when doctors resuscitate a cardiac arrest patient, two of them could not give any description at all and twenty among the remaining twenty-three made major errors. In marked contrast, of the 32 subjects who reported having NDEs, 26 gave general descriptions that did not include any major errors and six gave very detailed reports that exactly matched their medical records, which had not been seen by them. Based on this study, Sabom concluded, “These NDE accounts most likely are not subtle fabrications based on prior general knowledge."
Could the subjects have been partially conscious and thus acquired this information possibly through sounds and touches?
Information beyond one's vicinity
But this hypothesis fails to explain the NDE cases in which the subjects provide accurate information from outside their immediate vicinity, information that they could not have obtained from sounds and touches or by any normal means even if they were conscious.
Sabom reports a case in which a patient recovering from sickness suffered an unexpected cardiac arrest. After he was revived, he reported that he had an OBE in which he had travelled down the hall and had seen his wife, eldest son and daughter arriving there, which was what had actually happened. This information is highly significant because (1) as he was soon to be discharged, he was not expecting his family members to visit (2) even if he had known that they would be visiting him, he couldn’t have known who would be visiting because he had six grown children, who took turns accompanying their mother when she came to see him (3) his family members were stopped in the hall that was ten doors away from the room where he was being worked on by the doctors and nurses (4) his face was turned away from them and (5) he was in the middle of being resuscitated from cardiac arrest.
These kinds of NDEs have been reported for over half a century and are nowadays being reported with even greater frequency. In 1954, Hornell Hart published a summary study of out-of-body experiences during which the subject reported information that required some kind of paranormal knowledge. Hart (1954) found 288 cases mentioned in various publications and determined that in 99 of these cases the information reported by the subject was later confirmed. This indicated that the reports were genuine. Furthermore, in 55 cases, witnesses reported seeing an apparition of the subject at a location different from the subject's body.
Hallucinations?
Could these experiences simply be hallucinations of people wanting to avoid fear of death? But NDEs are markedly different from hallucinations in their contents and effects, as is evident from the table below:
| Halluciations |
NDEs |
| Hallucinations generally comprise disorderly events with hazy visions |
NDEs generally comprise orderly events with clear perceptions |
| Hallucinations usually leave their subjects feeling disturbed and agitated |
NDEs usually leave their subjects feeling peaceful and serene |
| Hallucinations have little noteworthy long-term effect on the subjects |
NDEs are often profoundly life-transforming, inspiring the subjects toward a more purposeful and spiritual reorientation of beliefs and lifestyle. |
NDEs differ from hallucinations not only in their experiential aspects, but also in their scientific causative mechanism. In near-death situations the most likely cause for hallucinations is anoxia, or lack of oxygen in the brain. But anoxia leads to a confused state of mind, whereas NDE subjects experience great mental clarity – often greater then what is experienced in normal consciousness. Another known hallucinogen is hypercarbia or excess of carbon dioxide. But this is highly unlikely to be the cause of NDEs because almost no hospital would allow excess carbon dioxide in their intensive care units or operating theaters, where the NDEs generally occur.
Hallucinations can also be caused by unusual drugs treatment. But many NDEs are known to have occurred when the medical treatment of the subjects was monitored and did not involve any hallucinogenic drugs.
Moreover, in an article in the medical magazine, The Lancet, Pim van Lommel and her Dutch co-researchers expose a fatal flaw in all such physiological explanations of NDEs: “With a purely physiological explanation [for NDE] such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.” Lommel points out that among all the people under similar hallucinogenic or physiological conditions, only some undergo NDEs. This selectiveness of NDEs shows that they are not hallucinations and also that they are not caused by any physiological conditions.
Add the compelling fact that many NDE subjects give factually accurate information that could never have been obtained through hallucinations and the hallucination hypothesis about NDEs can be safely buried deep under the ground.
Could the NDE researchers themselves be somehow at fault in giving these reports? To those who argue like this, it can be pointed out that many of the NDE researchers were skeptics who undertook their research not with an agenda to “prove” their religious beliefs, but with the intention to disprove what they initially thought was pseudo-science. Thus it is not their beliefs led them to “find” evidence, but rather that their evidence compelled them to revise their beliefs. Moreover, NDE research is not the monopoly of a few non-mainstream scientists; hundreds of scientists all over the globe are engaged in NDE research. In fact, these scientists have formed several global forums such as The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) which critically researches and discusses the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual nature and ramifications of near-death experiences. That IAND is a serious research body is evident from its publications: the quarterly newsletter Vital Signs and the peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies.
How?
If consciousness were emerging from the brain, as mainstream science would have us believe, then an unconscious person cannot have
- Clear thought process,
- Knowledge of one’s surroundings and
- Knowledge beyond one’s surroundings.
But these NDEs – and many more – show that what is theoretically considered impossible has actually happened, as has been documented by rigorous researchers, under well monitored conditions. In science, the purpose of theory is to explain the facts, and not to quarrel with the facts. Given the facts, NDEs strongly disprove the theory of the cerebral origin of consciousness. Indeed, just one of the hundreds of NDE cases is enough to disprove that theory; if even one person’s consciousness continues when his brain is non-functional, then that one case proves that consciousness does not originate from the brain.
Then, where does consciousness originate from? For the answer to this question, we need to go beyond material research to spiritual revelation. The scriptures of the great religions of the world reassure us that life doesn’t end with death. Ancient texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetian Book of the Dead describe otherworldly journeys. But by far the most comprehensive and coherent exposition of the afterlife is found in the Vedic texts of ancient India. The Vedic texts contain many descriptions of NDEs with the most well-known being the remarkable NDE of Ajamila narrated in the Srimad Bhagavatam (Canto 6, chpts. 1-3), which closely parallels many modern NDEs. But more importantly the Vedic texts like the Bhagavad-gita systematically analyze the mechanism of interaction between the body and the soul, an analysis that helps understand the mechanism of NDEs too.
Unlike the Western tendency to use the words “soul”, “mind” and “consciousness” interchangeably, the Vedic texts precisely define these terms and clearly differentiate between them. The Bhagavad-gita, the world renowned classic that is the essence of all Vedic wisdom, proclaims that the soul which pervades the body with consciousness is indestructible (Bhagavad-gita 2.17). Thus the consciousness is like the energy of the soul just like the sunlight is the energy of the sun (Bhagavad-gita 13.34). The mind is a subtle material element that acts as a connecting link between the body and the soul.
In its current material existence, the soul channelizes its consciousness through two kinds of bodies: gross and subtle. The gross or visible body is what we normally call our physical body and the subtle body is comprised mainly of what we normally call the mind. Usually the consciousness of the soul is channelized through the mind to the brain and the body to the external world.
But because the soul and the body are essentially different, the soul can separate from the body under special circumstances like when the body is damaged. Upon such separation, the soul continues to be conscious through the subtle body even when the brain is dysfunctional. This is how NDEs take place. This mechanism is diagrammatically depicted below:
(Diagrams adapted from the doctoral thesis of Mukunda Madhava Dasa)
The characteristic of a good scientific theory is that it not only explains coherently the phenomenon that it is intended to explain, but it also explains other related phenomenon. The Vedic paradigm helps us to explain NDEs and OBEs, but also a related phenomenon known as mindsight. In his book NDES of the blind: Mindsight, Kenneth Ring describes many blind people who were able to see only during their NDEs and never again. The Vedic texts explain that the mind has subtle sensory faculties which when coupled with the gross sensory organs enable the soul to see. Among the blind, due to biological factors, their sensory organ is impaired and so they are unable to see. But they as souls still have the power to see and so when their subtle body is decoupled from the gross body in OBEs, the subtle eye which is no longer obstructed by the dysfunctionality of the gross eye is able to see. Similarly, the Vedic paradigm can also explain many other paranormal phenomenon like telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience etc. But that will the subject of other future discussions.
To conclude, NDEs offer a dramatic and authentic demonstration that consciousness is not dependent on the brain and life is not dependent on the material body. By giving some of us experiences of life beyond the perishable body, the NDEs beckon all of us to strive for the complete experience of eternity. Indeed, the import of the NDEs resonates with the universal message of the Vedic scriptures to reclaim the eternal life that is our eternal birthright:
Mrtyur ma amrtam gama
"Go from death to eternity."
