van Lommel

The van Lommel et al Study

The Lancet (a prestigious international journal of medicine) reported the findings of a longitudinal study of near-death experiences carried out by four researchers in Holland. The study surveyed 344 cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest in ten Dutch hospitals. It compared demographic, medical, pharmacological, and psychological data between patients who reported near-death experiences (hereafter “NDE”) and patients who did not (controls) after resuscitation. In a longitudinal study of life changes after NDE, it compared the groups two and eight years later.^[8]

This study found that 62 patients (18% -- roughly one out of every five) resuscitated from cardiac arrest experienced an NDE with some of the characteristics described above. No patients reported distressing or frightening NDEs. The 18% positive response does not necessarily mean that the other 82% did not have an NDE. Some may have been unable to recall it (which may be linked to a variety of factors from age to prolonged CPR) and some may have been unwilling to recount it (for fear of being thought to be unbalanced). This percentage enabled researchers to conclude that the experiences associated with NDEs were not caused by physiology alone:

With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.^[9]

The researchers concluded from this:

Our most striking finding was that Near-Death Experiences do not have a physical or medical root. After all, 100 percent of the patients suffered a shortage of oxygen, 100 percent were given morphine-like medications, 100 percent were victims of severe stress, so those are plainly not the reasons why 18 per cent had Near-Death Experiences and 82 percent didn’t. If they had been triggered by any one of those things, everyone would have had Near-Death Experiences.^[10]

Of the 62 patients reporting an NDE, all of them experienced some of the following ten characteristics, according to the following distribution:

(1) Awareness of being dead (50%)

(2) Positive emotions (56%)

(3) Out of body experience (24%)

(4) Moving through a tunnel (31%)

(5) Communication with light (23%)

(6) Observation of colors (23%)

(7) Observation of a celestial landscape (29%)

(8) Meeting with deceased persons (32%)

(9) Life review (13%)

(10) Presence of border (8%)^[11]

This study also reported corroborative veridical out-of-body experiences. These experiences enabled patients to have sensorial knowledge which they were not able to have through their physical bodies. In other words, if these patients had not been in an “out-of-body” state, they would never have been able to experience the data they accurately reported. In the Dutch study, one man who had been in a deep coma, later told a nurse that he recognized her and saw where she had placed his dentures during resuscitation efforts, and even described the cart into which she placed them.^[12] Similarly, Melvin Morse and Kim Clark report that a woman had knowledge of a shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital (not near the room where the patient was resuscitated, but next to a fifth-floor office where she was being interviewed). The psychologist who did the interview (Kim Clark) had to crawl along the ledge outside her window to verify the claim. The shoe was indeed there.^[13] Raymond Moody also reports similar veridical out-of-body experiences,^[14] the most frequent of which are people who leave the operating room (after seeing the resuscitation efforts going on) and visit their relatives and friends in hospital waiting rooms (literally moving through walls). One patient reported seeing her young daughter wearing mismatched plaids (which was highly unusual and only knowable if she had actually been in the waiting room). Another woman overheard her brother-in-law talking to a business associate in the hospital waiting room in a very derogatory manner, and was able to report this back to him later. These veridical experiences are evidenced in every major study and help to corroborate the authenticity of the patients’ claims to have been in an out-of-body state (with sensorial capabilities).

These findings have been corroborated by many other studies. One NDE researcher, Janice Holden made a compendium of 107 cases in thirty-nine studies by thirty-seven authors in 2007^[15] in which veridical (verifiable) experiences had been reported. She concluded as follows:

“Using the most stringent criterion – that a case would be classified as inaccurate if even one detail was found to not correspond to reality – Holden found that only 8 percent involved some inaccuracy. In contrast, 37 percent of the cases – almost five times as many – were determined to accurate by independent objective source, such as the investigation of research reporting the cases.”^[16] The other 55 percent did not involve inaccuracies, but could not be completely independently verified by other sources. It is difficult to believe that this degree of verifiably accurate reporting which occurred at a time when there was no electrical activity in the cortex can be attributed to a bodily function. In view of this fact, as well as the fact that many of the reported incidences reached beyond bodily capabilities of the patient, it is reasonable and responsible to believe that these perceptions (as well as the self-consciousness which accompanied it) existed independently of bodily function, and could therefore, persist after bodily death.

Additionally, patients seem to have been transformed by the experience. This is particularly evident in children who lose the fear of death and are transformed for a lifetime (see below). The van Lommel study concludes in this regard:

The process of transformation after NDE took several years, and differed from those of patients who survived cardiac arrest without NDE.^[17]