blind people see

The Kenneth Ring, et al Study of Near-Death Experiences of the Blind

Ring, Cooper, and Tart studied the highly unusual phenomenon of blind people seeing during near-death experiences.^[24] As noted above, persons having a near-death experience are able to see (without their physical visual apparatus) – they even have sensorial knowledge of data beyond ordinary physical capabilities (see above, II.A, on corroborative veridical features of out-of-body experiences). The Ring et al study adds further corroboration to the veridical (verifiable) sensory knowledge of near-death patients studied by van Lommel, Morse, and Moody. Though it is truly significant that sighted patients are able to report sensorial data that occurred while they were unconscious with great accuracy, it is even more significant that blind patients are able to do the very same thing with the same degree of accuracy.

The high corroborative value of this data moved Ring et al to study 31 blind patients (21 of whom had a near-death experience and 10 of whom had out-of-body experiences only). Of these 31, 14 were blind from birth and evidently had no experience of seeing, and 17 had some experience of seeing in the past (though they were blind at the time of their near-death experience or out-of-body experience). Ring summarizes his findings as follows:

Among those narrating NDEs, not only did their experiences conform to the classic NDE pattern, but they did not even vary according to the specific sight status of our respondents; that is, whether an NDEr was born blind or had lost his or her sight in later life, or even (as in a few of our cases) had some minimal light perception only, the NDEs described were much the same. ¶ Furthermore, 80 percent of our thirty-one blind respondents claimed to be able to see during their NDEs or OBEs, and, like Vicki and Brad, often told us that they could see objects and persons in the physical world, as well as features of otherworldly settings.^[25]

Ring et al also found that the quality of perception was quite high among the majority of blind patients who reported seeing during their near-death experience:

How well do our respondents find they can see during these episodes? We have, of course, already noted that the visual perceptions of Vicki and Brad were extremely clear and detailed, especially when they found themselves in the otherworldly portion of their near-death journey. While not all of our blind NDErs had clear, articulated visual impressions, nevertheless enough of them did, so that we can conclude that cases like Vicki’s and Brad’s are quite representative in this regard.^[26]

What about the 20 percent who reported that they could not remember themselves seeing? There are two explanations: (1) they did not, in fact see anything during their near-death experience, or (2) even though they seem to have had some kind of perception, they did not recognize it as “seeing.” Ring comments about the latter phenomenon with respect to one of his patients as follows:

As one man, whom we classified as a nonvisualizer, confessed, because “I don’t know what you mean by seeing,” he was at a loss to explain how he had the perceptions he was aware of during his NDE.^[27]

Even with this ambiguous group within the study, the results are quite significant, for the 80% who were able to report sensorial knowledge were accurately reporting what they could not have seen with their physical bodies. This gives a high degree of credibility to a non-physical existence during a near-death experience. It also indicates that this non-physical existence is in some way “embodied,” because it not only preserves self-consciousness, memory, intelligence, and self-identity (which belong properly to the “mind”), but also sensorial perception which requires an interaction with the physical world effected by embodiment. This evidence of non-physical survival (with its dimension of non-physical embodiment) is quite probative because it cannot be explained in any other physical (physically embodied) way.