Near-Death Experiences do not have a physical or medical root. Patients
reporting an NDE all experienced some of the following ten characteristics.
(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
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 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.
Children generally
are not motivated by personal, cultural, or religious agendas (and therefore
they are unlikely to report data to help these agendas...
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).
Adults who have had
near-death experiences as children have a much lower fear of death than people
who have not had them. 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.
Near-Death
Experiences of the Blind
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.
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? NDE
pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness
and the mind-brain relation. 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) 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” 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.
