Near-Death Experiences
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.
No patients reported
distressing or frightening NDEs.
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.
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
(2) Positive emotions
(3) Out of body
experience
(4) Moving through a
tunnel
(5) Communication with
light
(6) Observation of
colors
(7) Observation of a
celestial landscape
(8) Meeting with
deceased persons
(9) Life review
(10) Presence of
border
These findings have
been corroborated by many other studies.
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. 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.
Melvin Morse, MD –
Study of Near-Death Experiences of Children
Melvin Morse, MD adds
to The Lancet study by focusing specifically on children, and compares an NDE
study group with a large non-NDE control group. Studying children’s experiences
has four major advantages:
(1) the vast majority
of children have never heard or even had the occasion to hear about near-death
experiences (therefore, their accounts cannot be biased by others’ reports),
(2) children generally
are not motivated by personal, cultural, or religious agendas (and therefore
they are unlikely to report data to help these agendas),
(3) children are
reticent to report near-death experiences (even to their parents) because the
experiences are so extraordinary and the children feel the need to “belong” and
avoid ridicule, and
(4) the NDE has
transformative effects on the children long after their occurrence.
Morse compared his
study group of 12 children spanning ten years (who were resuscitated from
cardiac arrest or who had returned from deep comas) with a control group of 121
children who were severely ill but not resuscitated or in deep coma, and an
additional control group of 37 children who had received large doses of
mind-altering drugs but were also not resuscitated or in deep coma.
None of the 121
children in the control group experienced anything like a near-death
experience. In the study group, 8 out of 12 did experience some of the above
ten characteristics of NDEs (70%). This variance is so vast that it cannot be
explained by coincidence or statistical aberration. Furthermore, the control
group who had received mind-altering drugs did not report anything like an NDE.
Morse drew two conclusions from this which he presented in two peer-reviewed
journal articles (by the American Medical Association):
(1) It is not unusual
for children who have been resuscitated during cardiac arrest or have recovered
from a deep coma to have some of the characteristics of near-death experiences,
and
(2) These experiences
were not produced by narcotics, mind-altering drugs, oxygen-deprivation states,
or stressed psychological states (and thus, they are not attributable to
hallucinations).
Morse also completed
another study of the transformation of children and adults by near-death
experiences, which is corroborated by van Lommel et al and Raymond Moody. He
placed particular emphasis on a characteristic which could be measured with a
fairly high degree of objectivity – the fear of death. In order to accomplish
this, he assembled a group of several psychiatrists, psychologists, and
neuro-psychiatrists (as well as student interns and volunteers) to study the
transformative effects of near-death experiences in almost 500 patients. He
used two methods to measure death-anxiety in both the study group and the
general population, and concluded as follows:
We discovered that
adults who have had near-death experiences as children have a much lower fear
of death than people who have not had them. This was true whether they had
vivid and wonderful memories of a flower-filled heaven or a brief and fleeting
experience of light. Furthermore, the deeper their experience, the less they
were afraid of death. This finding is in sharp contrast to people who have come
close to death and survived, but were not fortunate enough to have had a
near-death experience. They actually had a slightly higher death anxiety than
normal. And…people who identify themselves as being intensely spiritual, have
the same death anxiety as the general population.
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. 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. 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.
Van Lommel concludes
as follows:
How could a clear
consciousness outside one’s body be experienced at the moment that the brain no
longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG? . . .
Furthermore, blind people have described veridical perception during
out-of-body experiences at the time of this experience. NDE pushes at the
limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the
mind-brain relation. In our prospective study of patients that were clinically
dead (flat EEG, showing no electrical activity in the cortex and loss of brain
stem function evidenced by fixed dilated pupils and absence of the gag reflex)
the patients report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning,
emotion, sense of identity, or memory from early childhood occurred, as well as
perceptions from a position out and above their ‘dead’ body.
In every instance of
an encounter with the “being of light” in the studies of van Lommel, et al,
Morse et al, Ring et al, and Moody, patients reported the experience to be one
of intense love. The following case resembles hundreds of others reported by
the above researchers:
I became very weak,
and I fell down. I began to feel a sort of drifting, a movement of my real
being in and out of my body, and to hear beautiful music. I floated on down the
hall and out the door onto the screened-in porch. There, it almost seemed that
clouds, a pink mist really, began to gather around me, and then I floated right
straight on through the screen, just as though it weren’t there, and up into
this pure crystal clear light, an illuminating white light. It was beautiful
and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of
light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light,
and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect
understanding and perfect love…. And all during this time, I felt as though I
were surrounded by an overwhelming love and compassion.
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