The Near-Death Experiment

CONTENTS   [The Plan of This Book]

Introduction

Chapter 1.  NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: First-Person Knowing With Certainty              

Chapter 2.  SCIENCE: Third-Person Consensus With Uncertainty

Chapter 3.  RELIGION: Received Assertions Perceived as Knowing

Chapter 4.  THE GODLY ALGORITHM: Logical Correlation of Consistent Evidence 

Chapter 5.  OUR EXISTENTIAL SITUATION: Today Creates Tomorrow

Appendices:   NDE Teachings and Mandates

                           The Phoenix Values

Quotes and Notes      [by chapter]

Suggested Reading    [by chapter]

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 Dear Reader, for the next few moments please join me for a most interesting experience in perspective. It’s called a “thought experiment.”

You won’t find thought experiments much taught in the usual teaching places—grade schools, high schools, not even in colleges. But they should be, because thought experiments are a wonderful way to attain new knowledge, deepen your understanding, and even—for most people—to experience a little-used part of yourself. You simply go inside, to a quiet, creative place we all have within us, where your own reasoning is the only thing that exists.

For a warmup, let’s glance over the thought experiment Albert Einstein famously invented enroute to developing his general theory of relativity. He knew his subject involved the big things, like the universe and the way gravity caused the universe to develop as it has. But he also wanted to “feel” the problem so as to better understand it. Never one to simply depend on mathematics for truly understanding a thing, (as scientists so often do, unknowingly thereby often becoming quite misled), Einstein thought up a clever way to experience gravity using nothing but his own thoughts. Here’s a simple explanation of how he did it.

He imagined he was standing inside an elevator somewhere in outer space where, of course, there is no (or vanishingly little) gravity. The elevator’s closed door precluded seeing anything outside, so there was no visual reference point by which he might orient himself. In such sensory-deprived circumstances, his sense of touch was the only available sense of any practical use to him—specifically where his feet touched the floor. He imagined feeling his feet suddenly press harder against the floor. This feeling, he reasoned, must mean that the elevator had started ascending, and therefore the weight of his body was pressing downward on his feet and his feet were pressing downward against the floor. If the inertia of his body was pressing down, that had to mean the elevator was going up.

But wait. It was impossible, he realized, to know whether the elevator had begun moving upward—or if it had already been moving downward and then came to a stop. The feet-pressing-on-floor sensation would feel identical in both cases. You couldn’t be sure which was true unless you knew the initial condition:  Was the elevator 1) at rest, and started moving upward, or 2) had it already been moving downward and then came to a stop? That pressing-downward feeling was relative. It depended. In fact it was even more uncertain than that. Suppose the elevator had already been moving upward, but then it accelerated and increased the speed at which it was ascending. That feet-pressing-downward feeling could be the same as a result of acceleration as it would by starting upward from a position at rest. And, of course, vice versa. Therefore, he realized, it was impossible to distinguish between acceleration and initial motion, as well as “up” or “down.” It was all relative unless you knew the elevator’s status (up or down? at rest or moving?) before anything had changed. Gravity is pretty much like that

Now re-read those last two paragraphs and, with details in mind, find a quiet place, close your eyes and re-create for yourself the sensory feelings just described. The only real way to appreciate a thought experiment is to personally experience one (a so-called “first-person” experience). When you get back we’ll try our own thought experiment as promised.

*          *          *

The theory of general relativity, (concerning the very large) and its mate “special relativity” (concerning the very small) are among the most thoroughly proven and re-proven scientific theories in the history of science. Broadly speaking, the two relativities have constituted the utmost foundations of what we believe to be the truth about reality in this universe ever since Einstein figured them out and brought them to public attention at the beginning of the twentieth century. They are called “theories” only because that’s how science works—you can never be sure you won’t discover some new fact that forces you to change what you previously thought you knew, regardless how certainly you thought you knew it. So there are very few things science calls unchangeable “laws,” and there is no such thing as a theory that is immune to getting revised or even replaced—regardless how rock solid it may be or how long it has stood—if some newfound factual evidence forces us to change how we perceive and understand things. When an irrefutable new fact or group of facts forces recognition that a thing previously thought true was wrong after all, no matter how long it was thought to be true, recognizing and accepting the new truth is called intellectual honesty. Some people have it and some don’t yet.

The subject of our new thought experiment is like that. Like Einstein, we know our subject involves some really big things—like science and religion and spirituality and the universe and life and death and even the definition of life and life’s purpose—big ideas about which many people agree and disagree but mostly hold half-considered opinions that are just all over the place. We’d like to attain here some knowing we can all agree is certain—some things we all know in common, about which we share in common a feeling of certainty as to what is actually true—as well as some inner confidence that we actually understand what we think we know.

Modern science has been around only a bit more than two centuries, but in that short while the way we use it has utterly transformed the way we think, the way we live, and the face of our planet. Science tells us We are quite sure we don’t know everything that’s true, but we’re pretty sure we know several fairly fundamental truths, plus a whole raft of facts that logically (we infer) must be true because they rest on those fundamentals. Religion, by contrast, has been around for something over three thousand years that we know of, and it too deeply influences how many of us think. Religion tells us We know exactly what is true because our traditions and holy writings tell us what has stood true for thousands of years—and furthermore (some religions add) you’ll be in deep trouble unless you agree that what we say is true and adopt it as your own. Both science and religion tell us You can’t possibly know truth unless you pursue it my way and my way only. Logically speaking, at least one of them has to be wrong about that. Maybe both. Science and religion have been pretty much at war with each other for an entire century now, mutually shouting past each other with insulting ultimatums like My way is the only right way and your way is [arrogant or stupid (pick one)] as well as wrong.

In my humble opinion there’s plenty of wrongness to go around and the intransigent irritation science and religion constantly hurl at each other is holding us all back. The unresolvable ego contest between these enormously powerful human institutions is creating, and ever reinforcing, closed mindsets at a time in history when the very thing we all most need for knowledgeable, ethical, spiritual growth—not to mention survival—is fully open minds. This opinion will be further addressed in our thought experiment and through the remainder of this book.

In your mind’s eye, imagine yourself holding up a very large umbrella. It’s an extraordinary, very special kind of umbrella, in that no matter how many people you place under it, the umbrella expands to cover them all. In what follows, keep your eye on the umbrella.

Start with the Baptists. They’re quite a crowd. You must gather them all in, and “all” includes all the many different kinds of them: Southern Baptists, American Baptists, Foot-washing Baptists, Free Will, Congregational, Apostolic, Conservative, Cooperative, tongue-speaking, snake-handling…and many—many—more subdivisions of the overall denomination known as “Baptist.” Now that you’ve got them all under the umbrella (which has of course extended itself to cover them), pause and ask: Why are there so many different kinds of Baptists? What can possibly be the details on which they so disagree that they feel they must semi-separate and take up different forenames like “Southern” or “foot-washing”? For that matter, what is it that they all agree on enough that they can all call themselves “Baptists”? What is it they have in common?

Next gather in the Methodists, all the different kinds of them too, which are many. Watch the umbrella’s edges expand outward so that all the Methodists and Baptists, all of them alike, side by side, are now under it. What is it they disagree on? What do they have in common? Now bring in all the rest of the Protestants (which means Those Who Protest). Bring in the Lutherans, the Quakers, Episcopalians, Presbyterians; Church of God; Church of Christ; Congregationalists; Mormons; Seventh day Adventists; Pentecostalists—keep going, you’re barely started—Plymouth Brethren, Anabaptists, Moravians, Anglicans, Calvinists, Amish, Mennonite…  If your memory fails, consult your favorite search engine for a “List of protestant denominations.” Today, mine finds the Pew Research Center saying there are 180 of them;  on the same page another source says there are “hundreds or thousands” of protestant denominations and it’s not possible to define or categorize them. Assuming either statement approximates truth, ask yourself:  Why are there so many different kinds of protestants? Regardless of any possible answer, the umbrella has extended outward again and they’re all under it. So even though they all disagree enough to have separate existences, what is it they all have in common? What joins these protest-ants rather than separates them?

They surround you now—people shoulder to shoulder to the horizon in all directions. It is necessary for you and your great umbrella to rise upward…upward…to maybe a half mile high, so you can see clear out to the edge of all these people, these Protestants. Now from your higher perspective you can see the more distant horizon, out beyond the crowd of people—a great circular horizon, and you’re at the center of it. As is your great umbrella—overreaching all the people, its edge is yet farther away.

Now bring in the Catholics, all the many different kinds of them. One source lists Roman, Armenian, Byzantine, Coptic, Ethiopian, West Syriac, East Syriac (Chaldean), and Maronite. Another lists 242 different kinds of Catholics. Other lists sort them in yet other ways of counting. It’s a gang in any case. These different kinds of Catholics disagree enough to have separate existences and different names, yet they all call themselves Catholic. The crowd surrounding you seems to have doubled in size. Notice how the big umbrella has widened yet again, covering all the above plus a few who say they’re none-of-the-above but they’re still “Christians.” So now all the Christians in the world, with their thousands of sectarian names, shelter under the one big umbrella. With such differences, what is the thing they all have in common? Their differences seem to be very important to them, sometimes expressed even in the costumes they wear, so what is the essence of their Christian togetherness?

Moving right along, bring under the great umbrella the several different kinds of Jews. Then all the many kinds of Muslims, of whom there are dozens if not hundreds of different sects, all disagreeing with each other slightly or greatly. It’s quite a diverse crowd under the umbrella now:  all three of the so-called Abrahamic religions. All three are on record as a contentious lot, which rather explains their excessive diversity. All three are variously descended in context of the legendary covenant whereby God promised his special protection to Abraham and his descendants—not to mention a gratis gift of the ancestral homeland of the people known as Canaanites, a pleasant, heavily populated land of milk and honey which the Canaanites and their revered ancestors had inhabited for untold generations—God’s only stipulations being 1) exclusive devotion (by Abraham, and all his descendants) to Himself As The One And Only True God, and 2) performance of the odd ritual of circumcision, which many moderns still observe and many don’t.

Thus went the birth in that part of the world of the idea called “monotheism” (an idea already invented in other parts of the world). Now bring in other monotheists—the Unitarian-Universalists and Swedenborgianists who are “sort of but not exactly” associated with the others, then go find plenty of still others in this not-quite-certain subcategory. Considering all the obvious differences and serious disagreements that set these Abrahamic-descended religionists apart from—and often violently against—each other, what in God’s name can it be, really, that they all share in common?

It is again necessary to raise your perspective…so up you rise now, higher…maybe a mile up, so you can see, in every direction, all the vast peoples who seem to fulfill God’s promise to long-ago ancient Abraham. From this higher-yet perspective you can see way out to a farther, still bigger, horizon—and the great umbrella centered above you reaches out to it, over-arching, embracing them all.

And all that is just the Western religious traditions. Now, under the great umbrella’s inclusive reach, bring in the additional billions of people who represent the Oriental religious traditions, including the world’s most ancient. They represent several times as many people as do the Western religions, depending on how you count, and some of them have hundreds if not thousands of sectarian subdivisions—all the great many different kinds of Hindus; all the various Buddhists; the Confucians, Taoists, Shinto, Sikh, Sufism, Tantra…  Any pretense of counting how many different religions exist on this planet has to be immediately obsolete. In one perspective, you could say the human propensity for no two humans to agree on more than six details at a time means there are probably as many different religions as there are people alive at any one moment.

Nevertheless there they are, claiming to be of this or that religion, and mostly self-convinced that they actually are. We shall call these billions the “organized” religions, though it’s not easy to discern much actual organization in some of them. They’re all organized in the sense that they each have their own doctrines—i.e., the written details about what they say they believe, respectively. Every religion’s doctrines differ in some ways from every other religion’s doctrines—which of course raises unwelcome questions about who’s right and who’s wrong about whatever, but never mind that for now. As it happens, and with few exceptions, organized religions tend to require that anyone wishing to join their membership must profess to believe their particular doctrines, or at least pretend to. “To join us you must believe as we believe,” is the general rule. Unfortunately, throughout human history, a less general rule has recurrently arisen: “Believe as we do or die.” One can never be sure it won’t arise to take lives again, perhaps even locally, as in fact prevails locally in several parts of the world right now, especially India and the Middle East, not counting random U.S. and European terrorists.

Notwithstanding all that, the big wide umbrella has grown wider still—overreaching, encompassing, the billions of adherents of organized religions who now stand beneath it. And without the least regard for who beneath it may agree or disagree with anything whatsoever, the umbrella envelops them. And of course you’ve had to raise your perspective again, still higher than before. So now consider once again—a bit more carefully this time: What is it that all these disparate people in all their differently-named religions agree on? What do they have in common, whether they know it or not? Despite their manifold differences, what is it that unites rather than separates them?

Our thought experiment must now expand beyond “religion” into the broader, more encompassing term “spirituality”—a very large word indeed. Higher perspective, an expanded umbrella-like overview, is needed, for understanding tends to arrive slowly in this arena. Around the world unprecedented growth is occurring in the numbers of people who self identify as “spiritual but not religious.” They are in two categories—I’ll call them the longtimers and the newcomers.

Newcomers first. In the United States the numbers of people identifying themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious has risen from nine percent two decades ago (2000-2003) to a full one-fifth (22%) of the adult population today, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. This trend toward increasingly generic spirituality is an almost exact counterpoint to the falling numbers of Americans who claim any religious affiliation. Traditional organized religions are in fact being abandoned all over the world, especially by young adults. This unprecedented trend is notably prominent in the Western Hemisphere, where the deeply judgmental Abrahamic trilogy of religions predominate, and more especially in the U.S. where Christianity—with its stark up-or-down Heaven-or-Hell-forever judgement—is the predominant organized religion.

These newcomers are very much latecomers compared to the broad, non-sectarian, encompassing spirituality of the longtimers—i.e., indigenous peoples around the world, whose beliefs have endured for tens of thousands of years. For example, Native American tribes alone number in the hundreds (e.g. Apache, Hopi, Inuit, Cherokee), each with their minor tribal nuances on a near-universal generic story of creation by a single deity who also taught their ancient ancestors how humans should live and behave toward one another. Comparable creation stories prevail for New Zealand’s Maoris, Australia’s so-called Aborigines, Japan’s Ainu, Arctic Europe’s Sami, and the hundreds of (relatively) isolated tribes living out their lives in the remotest parts of Borneo-Sarawak, the Amazon, Oceania, the Arctic and elsewhere. Many have managed, remarkably, to maintain lifestyles close to the natural world despite modern culture’s enormous centripetal tug. Most such indigenous peoples have survived five hundred years of exploitation and calculated genocide by adapting to their colonizers while retaining the core of their ancient cultural values and spiritual beliefs. Collectively, they probably represent history’s most dramatic example of perseverant survival against all odds.

Many of these indigenous peoples quietly endure around the world today, their daily lives expressing ancient spiritual roots more fully than do most moderns in their relatively younger religions. In general, the indigenous perspective says this world IS spiritual, at all times and in every possible way. Expressed in the naturalistic terms of their various languages, many native peoples’ ideas are equivalent to each other as well as similar to spiritual-but-not-religious moderns. And, like those moderns, their native beliefs ordinarily have no labels. Being adaptive and flexible over time and from person to person, such spiritualities of course cannot be defined as doctrines, much less as religions. They are spiritual beliefs held in common, with individual nuances, by the members of tribal groups. In many ways, surviving ancient indigenous generic spiritualities are indistinguishable from the lately-arrived spiritual-but-not-religious postures of many ordinary moderns.

So now bring in both of these spiritual groups—the expanding Spiritual-But-Not-Religious moderns and the surviving tribal peoples—gather them all in under your big spreading umbrella and watch it spread wider yet again, embracing them all. Let the respective tribes’ spiritual beliefs be represented by the names of as many tribes worldwide as you can find. Tribal names will have to serve as stand-ins for all their similar-but-divergent religio-spiritual beliefs which have no names, they just are. You must rise higher again, so you can see all the many different-believing peoples, way out to the far horizons. Briefly pause and take stock:  Considering all the masses of humanity now standing beneath your vast umbrella: What have they all—spiritually speaking—in common?

Relatively few now remain outside the umbrella’s vast spread, but these few are just as important as the others.  We’ll call them Neither-Religious-Nor-Spiritual. There are two categories of them: Engaged and Indifferent.

Those we call “engaged” are firmly—extravagantly—convinced that religion is hogwash, rank superstition, ignorance of the worst sort. They think about this a lot, and their frequent re-thinking always reinforces their deep certainty that religion—all world Religions of every nature, and all their stupid doctrines and all their contradictory dogmas, and all their silly teachings, and everything about them—are the bane of humanity. Religions are holding us all back, they say, keeping us in ignorance. These engaged non-believers tend to be emphatic, sometimes outspokenly loud, always intense in their eye-blazing conviction that RELIGION IS WRONG. The difference in intensity of a religious believer and the intensity of a religion hater is often not readily apparent. Moreover, these engaged anti-religionists rarely make any slightest distinction between “religion” and “spirituality.” They typically treat both words as if they were one and the same thing—quite the same as those dolts who use the terms “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. Thus do they all lay bare their grievous ignorance for all to see, full unaware of how embarrassed they really ought to be for not knowing the enormous differences in the definitions of these four terms.

Our final remaining group are The Indifferent. They don’t know and they don’t care that they don’t know. Their lives are simply not engaged with any concerns about religion or spirituality or any other immaterial aspects of the material world with which their daily lives do engage. If they can’t see it and touch it, put a value on it, it means nothing to them. Some of these are highly educated, but they value nothing immaterial. Many are barely educated at all, and so very poor they don’t have time to waste on spiritual thoughts when their every thought must focus on simply staying live. These all share in common that they do not care about, or spend time thinking about, religion or spirituality. If one counts the professed religious believers who don’t really believe and don’t really spend any time thinking about it and are truly indifferent, this last group is quite larger than it seems to be.

 

The moment has arrived. All the people in the entire world stand shoulder to shoulder in one great circular crowd, all gathered beneath the great umbrella. There are so very many of them—more than eight billion—you’ve had to rise quite high into the sky just to see them all, clear out to the edges. The great umbrella of course rose with you, and it has again spread out—out—outward—far enough that it overreaches and encompasses all eight billion-plus beneath its sheltering canopy. Glancing upward, the great umbrella—we notice for the first time—has not only expanded, it has no color, as umbrellas ordinarily do. It glows like the most brilliant white light of all time. It is made of light.

Now to the point of our thought experiment. Repeatedly we have asked:  What do all these people collected beneath the umbrella have in common? They are all human, of course, but their religious and spiritual beliefs—or lack of them, as the case may be—are as varied as the DNA that distinguishes each of their fairly different bodies. And as concerns the immaterial reality that is the focus of all their variegated religious and spiritual leanings, what they believe and don’t believe is, as they say, just all over the map. Residing in the privacy of their eight billion-plus individual minds are major differences, nuances of difference, and ever-changing beliefs. Even those who most seem to hold identical beliefs, don’t really. No wonder there’s so many different doctrines all over the world. Absence of complete unanimity seem to be their only truly defining religious characteristic. But to characterize them as more different than alike would be a misleading disservice to all humankind.

So what is it that they actually do share in common?

Almost all of them (except, always, a few egoistic and demented holdouts) would readily agree that the golden rule is a tacitly agreed-upon worldwide standard for human conduct: Treat others as you want them to treat you. This simple “Do-unto-others” statement comes as close to universal human acceptance as any human utterance we normally encounter. Some version of it appears in every language on Earth, so we can reasonably say this belief is shared by virtually every human old enough to have learned it. How interesting, that one of our oldest, most perseverant gems of human wisdom is concerned with how we should treat each other—a goal no religion has ever achieved.

And yet… even this gem of a golden rule is imperfect: It is grounded in self interest. I want you to treat me nice, so I’ll treat you nice up front as a sort of incentive-based self-serving tradeoff. The golden rule does not contain the least hint that I should treat you nice for no other reason than that you are a child of God, just like me, utterly equal in our God-derived existence. Or because we both came from God, we both have God within us, and we need no other reason than that for treating each other as the God-containing spirits we intrinsically are. This reason bears no slightest trace of self interest. We should treat each other with mutual love and respect because of who we are. First and last word, period. And THAT is what we all—every last human soul on Earth—share in common.

Well, that’s all very nice. But I never heard it before, ever. What’s your source for that?

Over the course of many years of studying near-death experiences, I became convinced that God exists and this universe we live in is subordinate to a far greater reality that is properly defined as “spiritual.” I don’t “believe” in God—in fact I don’t “believe” in anything whatsoever, certainly not in the way religions use that word believe. I don’t believe in God, I am convinced of God—there’s a big difference. And what convinced me was good credible evidence. Like any scientifically-minded researcher with a genuinely open mind, I looked for evidence—and in near-death experience reports I found it in abundance. Chapter 1 tells all about how it convinced me.

In our thought experiment the great umbrella is a metaphor for the collected human testimonials of thousands of individuals who have had a near-death experience. They die or come close to dying, but then—often thanks to modern medical life-saving technology—they are restored to full-functioning life. Quite a few of them, feeling their experience incredible and absolutely life changing, take the time to write down the details of what they remember experiencing during the time they were dead or nearly so. Those details are in many cases extraordinarily sophisticated. The things they collectively tell the rest of us outrank all the world’s formal religions and informal spiritualities put together.

The matters about which these writings inform us come in the form of teachings and mandates that are exquisite in their simplicity and timeless in their profundity. In some respects the teachings and mandates seem to be religious, but they’re not—they are spiritual. But they likewise differ from tribal and personal spiritualities—though, interestingly, with generally less difference than their differences from organized religions. Oftentimes they also embrace matters that are scientific, though in a way more encompassing than science as we know it, and they contradict nothing of science except science’s misbegotten opinion that immaterial spirituality cannot possibly be real. The collective teachings and mandates delivered up to us via the written reports of tens of thousands of near-death experiencers are both spiritual and scientific, and they are more than both. Such near-death experiences have been happening through all human history, but it’s only here in the age of mass-media communication that we’re enabled to become aware—thanks to those who put their stories in writing—of what happened to them and the enormous significance of what they learned while they were dead or nearly so.

Bringing our thought experiment to a conclusion, suppose you are having a near-death experience. During the experience you meet a brilliantly shining white light, and you somehow know—you just know—that this incomparably bright light is the great umbrella spirit called God and a thousand other names. God is with you as you experience a life review—an everything-all-at-once remembering of every minute and second of your life to date. It seems incredible, but there it is and you see it all, all at once. When it’s completed you are left with these simple understandings of the purposes for which you came to Earth to live this lifetime:  Help others as they need help; Love them unconditionally, even the unlovable; Attain knowledge, understanding and wisdom, so you can better love and help others; Grow in spirit, living your Earth life to the fullest…then bring your experiences home to Me.

 

In this book I will focus attention on the enormous, existential, significance of what near-death experiencers are telling us at this particular moment in human history. I will also expend some words showing that science and religion have a mutual problem. Neither of these great human institutions seems to be aware of the true nature of their mutual problem, nor if they were would either of them likely agree that it is mutual. But that’s where they’re both wrong.

Their problem has multiple parts and it goes like this. Science believes that our brain creates our mind. Religion disagrees, and believes that the soul—a synonym for mind—sorta “moves in” and occupies the new brain when an infant is born. Science has no idea how the brain creates the mind, though it is very, very certain that it does, because—obviously, says science—there is no other way it could possibly happen…is there…?  For its part, religion is a little vague on whether 1) soul already exists “somewhere out there” before the brain’s birth or 2) soul just sorta “comes into existence” and arrives by direct shipment—maybe…probably—from Heaven-Nirvana-Wherever at the instant of brain’s birth…possibly even at conception…maybe…?

The real question they both utterly fail to address concerns consciousness—a synonym for mind and soul, and other titles it has gained over the years. Most commonly it’s referred to as “the hard problem,” a term coined by Australian philosopher/scientist David Chalmers,  though also often called “the explanatory gap” and “the mind-body problem.” I personally think of it not as a “problem” at all, but rather as a “mind-brain perplexity” about which both science and religion are equally perplexed and about equally immersed in a swamp of mutual misunderstanding.

Concerning this problem by any name, both science and religion believe [whatever they have respectively chosen to believe] very strongly, even emphatically.  I italicize “believe” because the word is used here in its religious sense—meaning a strongly felt though unjustified certainty that some firmly held opinion represents true fact, based solely on faith unsupported by any evidence at all. Religion is perfectly happy with faith. But for science faith is unscientific and unseemly—which to a real scientist is about as insulting as it gets.

Science takes great pride in its (undeserved) reputation for “scientific (meaning non-religious) objectivity.” Science seeks to maintain its (undeserved) reputation by insisting that truth must be established by, and only by, disciplined observation and/or experiment coupled with rational reasoning—all of which must be replicable by unlimited numbers of third-person others so that anybody and everybody has a fair shot at concluding, or disproving, whether a supposition is true. Science calls this approach “scientific method,” and is fairly vain in believing that it is committed consistently to that method. Don’t waste your time trying to look up a definition of “scientific method”—there’s about ten thousand of them and they’re all similar but different.

Religion cares not a fig for scientific method, and, century after century, defaults to believing [whatever it is that each religion believes] on faith alone. In contrast to science’s third-person (him, her, them) perspective, religion has a first-person (I, me, we) hand-me-down perspective of “if it was good enough for our ancestral fathers it’s good enough for us,” determinedly insisting that such devotion equates to truth, thereby simultaneously evidencing no slightest concern for unequivocal truth. But pay heed here:  religion is utterly correct in its certainty that first-person perspective is all important, but it doesn’t know what to do with this shining perspective, and constantly abuses it. For example, religion fixates on ancestral fathers but rarely mentions the views of most ancestral mothers—who are of mild interest to science as it racks up a flood of genetic discoveries by following mitochondrial RNA which appears only in the maternal lines.

In consequence of this basic conceptual disagreement between science and religion, many scientists (but not all) think all religions are superstitious and backward if not indeed stultifying and harmful, while many (but not all) religious representatives think science is a tsk-tsk atheistic bad influence on society and probably on their children’s moral development. Both positions are as wrong as they are off-course and extreme, but they fairly shout that science and religion’s mutual problem isn’t just their problem—it’s also our problem. This is, or should be, of deep concern to the rest of us. I assume you understand why, else you wouldn’t be reading this book.

 

Seek and ye shall find, as they say, and I’ve been at it since I was three years old, when a strange but exceedingly memorable paranormal experience came upon me. That was eighty-five years ago. I’ll fully describe that experience later in this book because it is relevant to the book’s raison d’être. For introductory purposes, here’s a short version of my true story.

“You are part of a great experiment,” the spirits told me. I somehow knew they wanted to observe my thoughts. I didn’t know why, but their observations—this I also somehow knew—were important to me as well as to them. To accomplish their observations they entered my mind, as they were now doing, one at a time.  Their entry did not displace me. We coexisted mentally, each spirit and I, for a fleeting brief instant.  That was all the time required, I somehow knew, for a spirit to enter, assimilate the whole of my mind—memories, thoughts, reasoning, everything—and move out, back to its own realm. It was like suddenly knowing something you’ve never consciously known before but, undeniably, there it is, and you just somehow know that it’s true.

It was instantaneous transfer of a total mind copy—my mind—to each of thousands of spirits, each transfer leaving the original unchanged—and all happening very fast. As each spirit moved out another moved in, used its infinitely thin slice of time to “read” a complete copy of my mind, and instantly passed on through to be replaced in turn by yet another. Though each spirit’s stay was incalculably brief, they seemed infinite in number, and the pass-through I was experiencing would never cease. They somehow conveyed to me the understanding that this had been going on since before I was born, and would continue through life until my body grew old and died. Even then only a fraction of this host would have “experienced me,” they were so great in number. And they every one of them would have automatically passed their findings on to God, because they, all of them, were aspects of God.

All this, inexplicably, I just “knew.” I have no idea how I knew it, but to this day I remember clearly that feeling of marveling at what I was experiencing while I was experiencing it. I was, repeat, only three years old. Now, as a grouchy 88-year-old, I expect to be believed when I state, most unequivocally, that this is an absolutely true story that I did indeed personally experience—very alive, and very real. For several decades I told no one about it, but I finally got past that.

I remember that as I wondered what was going on, what it meant…I received answers…then quickly realized that each time my mind posed a question, “feeling” the answer came instantly. Telepathic is the only word I know that seems to apply—whole understandings simply appeared in my mind, all at once, with no words or sentences involved. When I eventually committed this memory to writing in my early twenties, I had to invent “spoken” words in an attempt to convey the communications that in fact were exchanged directly. I paraphrased, in words, those wordless thoughts indelibly remembered. In reality there were no words, just whole thoughts that came instantaneously into my mind, and my understanding of them was total, complete.

My first thought-question was not to the spirits, it was about them:  What’s going on? Does this happen to everybody? Immediately came the thought-answer into my mind: No, just a few who were expressly placed here for this great experiment. You’ll probably never meet any of the others—they’re few and far between on the Earth.

From that point on, my thought-questions were addressed directly to them:  Q: Does this mean that we—me and those few others—are we more important than other people?  A: No, you’re just serving this particular…purpose…which sets you a little apart from the rest. Other than that you’re no different from all other people. Everybody experiences the same things you do, through their own senses and thoughts. But we’re not observing everybody as constantly as we are you. Most of those in the experiment aren’t even aware they’re in it or being observed. You are one of the very few who has perceived us…

 

As I write this Introduction, the eighty-eighth anniversary of my birth in 1937 fast approaches. Yet most assuredly do I still clearly remember the mental exchanges of that self-defining spiritual experience at the tender age of three years. Every feeling, every thought I had while it was happening—I remember it all as crisp and clearly as if it had all happened this morning.

I am writing this book after a lifetime of gradually intensifying seeking. I didn’t soon set out to understand the mystery that had so unexpectedly imposed itself on me. It just laid there. Yet for fully half my life I wondered why I kept on so frequently recalling it…and, each and every time, wondering about it all over again. The only certainty was that this paranormal experience of my early childhood popped unbidden into my mind at least once a week, often more—always to be pondered and wondered at—during all those years since 1940, so long ago, when I was three.

Then in midlife came a change. The remembering and wondering—which gradually turned into full-blown seeking—intensified compellingly over the past three decades. I don’t know why. It manifested as the avid reading of hundreds of books, uncountable articles and incessant thinking until, insight by insight, a broader, previously unperceived overview emerged in understanding.

In consequence of doing all that and slowly drawing conclusions from it, I modestly conclude that I’ve seen something relatively few others have seen. One of the reasons I think this is that for approximately thirty years now I’ve been looking for a certain book to read and, despite reasonable diligence, have never found it. I finally concluded that no one has yet written it, or is likely to, and, since I think it essential that such book must exist, I must write it myself. Such book must properly speak to a fair handful of subjects that to my thinking naturally belong together and should be presented together in one book that spells out how they belong together—and, especially, why. I suppose some people might not see them that way, but that’s okay. I do.

They belong together, these several subjects, because they share in common that they are all components of one ubersubject, like a lovely crystal with multiple facets that fit together perfectly. The ubersubject includes at least the following: near-death experiences first and foremost; then cosmology and quantum physics; metaphysics and spirituality; evolution on the grandest conceivable scale; astronomy; chemistry and its offspring biology; history of religions and history of science; human culture; population growth, consumption and pollution; derangement of Earth systems and global climate; economics and ethics; statistical probability; and purpose. Especially Purpose. Condensed and organized, these topics become the five chapters of this book.

That’s by no means all the topical arenas that actually and integrally do interrelate with each other, but we frail mortal minds must imagine some kinds of boundaries simply in order for our understanding to handle the complexity. In the real universe—or, more broadly, in what we call “reality”—nature has no boundaries. None. Things on Earth and throughout the wide universe touch all other things—with no such distinctions as the kind we call “edges.” In reality, I have learned, there are no such things as boundaries. Everything is one thing, called Unity, or God.

Those lines drawn on maps—so-called boundaries between counties and provinces and states and nations—are purely human constructs, manmade separations usually conceived for narrow, limited, human purposes, too often selfish and aggrandizing. Mother Earth doesn’t recognize our puny made-up boundaries. Like the lines artificially drawn between physics and chemistry and biology—and the false lines between religion and spirituality and science—those lines are dashed. They are fuzzy and indistinct. They have no place in a consolidated, integrally interrelated Theory of Everything. In all modesty, I feel fortunate to have finally caught up with this small piece of understood truth that humanity’s spiritual adepts and philosophers have been trying to teach us through all human history. So I humorously called my ubersubject the Modest Theory of Everything (MTOE)—until I realized that still was not “everything-enough.”

So I re-named it the Spiritual Understanding of Everything (SUE).

 

Given this book’s premise that everything relates to everything else, I could simply begin with any given topic, lay out the relevant narrative, then branch to the other topics in turn. But a perspective that features interface between science and spirituality will also be a central theme throughout the book because, after eighty-seven birthdays, I am well convinced that those two subjects are one subject—a science-spirit unity not yet much recognized by humanity at large.

World religions as such are not overtly part of this unity, they are subordinate. The spiritual aspect of the science-religion-spirit unity is a vast umbrella, so very broad that it over-reaches, encompasses and subsumes all the “great” world religions. It rolls them all up together, along with all the additional hundreds of indigenous spiritualities of native peoples everywhere which it also subsumes—it sums them all, averages them, and wads them together into a great ball made of a very few great truths that constitute, in a single word, “Spirituality.” This resulting unitary Spirituality has no doctrines and no dogmas. It simply consists of the teachings and mandates received from God and other divine spirits during near-death experiences.

Consistent with these things, the first chapter following this Introduction will address near-death experiences, a subject nearer the center than any other subject. By beginning with details of the phenomena described in the reports of so many thousands of people who have undergone such an experience, my intent is to establish a contextual foundation of evidence on which the rest of the book must stand with legitimacy that is both self evident and logically sound. I long ago concluded that near-death experiences provide that context. Building the context begins with factual description of what a near-death experience is—i.e., “What happens?”—and proceeds to its significance: “What does it mean? What difference does it make? Why is it important?”

In particular, NDEs are here examined as evidence, so that readers may consider their credibility in comparison to more conventional science-specified examples of credible evidence. In my opinion this deeply significant comparison is inadequately addressed in the scholarly NDE literature, in terms of its full equivalence to non-material phenomena science routinely accepts as valid. For example, the statistical significance science routinely uses as a basis for conclusions (beliefs) about immaterial quantum reality applies with full equivalence to immaterial near-death experiences based on sheer quantity of them alone, not to mention the overwhelming consistency in the patterns they reveal. Both, on equal grounds, constitute evidence. Science’s claim of unbiased attention to all phenomena in our natural universe is demonstrably specious on the record, where solid NDE evidence is neglected and studiously. even emotionally, ignored.

To ensure legitimate comparability, I will especially focus attention on the realm of non-material realities, where one hundred percent of near-death experiences and at least one-half of hard-core physics are equally well represented. Understanding NDEs as bona fide evidence must be established beyond question if unbiased minds are ever to agree that NDE phenomena, and their ultimately important implications, are compellingly believable and worthy of our consideration. And let there be no doubt: it is essential that many minds in this troubled, globally overheating world come to such agreement, and soon, as the final chapter will spell out in some detail.

Chapter 1 is designed for readers at every level of familiarity with near-death experiences and spiritually transformative experiences. It will be especially useful for readers superficially or semi-informed on the subject. Since the subject first made headlines in 1975 with publication of Raymond Moody’s best-selling book Life After Life, most Americans have “heard of” NDEs, but relatively few have studied them in detail and many never read about them at all. On the other hand, readers already well-informed of the NDE literature will benefit from the book’s broad perspective, which I believe to be fresh if not indeed original in its scope. For all readers:  the later chapters introduce multidisciplinary context I have not seen treated as an integrated subject in any existing scientific, cultural, spiritual or NDE-specific literature, but consider essential.

Chapter 2 explores science in terms of the great mysteries it still confronts, quite unanswered here in the third decade of the twenty-first century, and considers the interface at which those scientific mysteries become indistinguishable from the spirituality of near-death experiences. Chapter 3 addresses religion as such, and—given the teachings we learn from NDEs—its questionable relevance to the foremost concerns of humanity here in the twenty-first century. Chapter 4 uniquely seeks to present a holistic spiritual construct logically based on the teachings and mandates revealed by NDEs. Chapter 5 then considers the consequences of humanity’s inattention to those teachings and mandates, their relevance to modern society’s fundamental economic values, and how population-driven consumption and pollution are grossly deranging the planetwide natural systems on which all life, including our own existence, depend.

Near-death experiences offer us a fresh, uniquely broad perspective on life and living, a whole new way of seeing timeless old taken-for-granted things we mistakenly thought we knew well. Our task is to approach this wealth of new insights with minds that are open enough to see those old things with new and fuller understanding. This book is my attempt to help that happen.

 

 

Chapter 1.  NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: First-Person Knowing With Certainty               

 

 WHAT IF AND SUPPOSE

What if near-death experiences are exactly what they seem to be…

…in full consistency with Ockham’s famous razor, so adored

by scientists, because—they opine—the simplest, most straightforward

option must surely be the truth…just about always…mostly…

 

And suppose, as NDE Teachings neutrally state,

that this universe resides within a veiled-off, adjacent,

vast realm some call Paradise, Heaven, Happy Hunting Ground,

which Is the domain of, and vibrates with the infinite energy of,

the Everything Creator some call Dios, Gitchi Manitou, God

 

And suppose, as NDE Teachings tell us,

that you really are an Eternal Spirit—as religions

insist—dwelling by choice, for a mortal lifetime, in this body

that is Evolved Up from the elements of universe, from sun and

Earth elements—as science insists—and that religion and science are

both right in principle—but are grievously, doctrinally, in detail,

both Wrong about what Energy Is and what your Purpose Is

 

And further suppose, as NDE Mandates tell us,

that all those thousands of experiencers told you that

God wants us all to attain knowledge and seek understanding,

to learn to love each other, every one, and to help each other, ensuring

that every one of us has adequacy of food-clothing-shelter-lifeneeds,

and to love and protect our Earth and all its little creatures and

the verdant habitats on which their precious lives depend,

to grow in spirit, and find our way back home at last

 

Ah, what then?

 

In respectful tribute to

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: What If You Slept…

 

*          *          *

 

On the well documented facts summarized in this book, I will build a case that near-death experiences are exactly what they seem to be, and that the massive archives of NDE reports accumulated over the past half century constitute credible documentary and scientifically-valid evidence of consciousness beyond bodily death. To put this plainly:  You don’t die when your body dies—the conscious you lives on most vibrantly alive, and quite well thank you, though definitely in a non-material spiritual state that exists independently outside the physical body.

DEFINITION of a Near-Death Experience (NDE)

A near-death experience (NDE) is one among several types of spiritually transformative experiences (STEs) in which the experiencer usually acquires unequivocal first-person certainty that consciousness exists eternally apart from the physical body with which it temporarily is fully integrated during a mortal lifetime, and which may be characterized by up to a dozen or so categorical features, all experienced outside the body, such as being drawn through a tunnel, meeting deceased relatives and divine spirits, reviewing one’s lifetime to date, and attaining greatly enhanced perception and understanding of reality. NDEs typically leave experiencers with deeply changed values, new understandings of life purpose and convinced certainty of the unreality of death, as well as thoroughly, permanently, spiritually transformed.

SEMI-SEQUENCE of Near-Death Experiences

In a nutshell, almost all NDEs occur in some version of this scenario: 1) a person’s life is in peril from dire illness, trauma, or imminent threat of death (as when one foresees an impending car crash or avalanche just seconds away); 2) the person then realizes his/her “Self” has somehow moved outside its body, that the Self is now in fact non-material, vibrantly alive, pain free, and can move about by mental will alone; 3) this disembodied (spiritual) Self then undergoes one or more (up to a dozen or so) types of NDE “features,” including meeting other spirits and traveling to non-Earthly (spiritual) realms of existence; except for the NDE’s beginning (leaving the body) and its ending (re-entering the body), the particular sequence in which the dozen or so features may occur differs randomly across all NDEs; Self finally then 4) returns into its body, to resume its Earthly lifetime and tell others what happened (though some never tell); also 5) in many cases, apparently most, the experiencer’s values and lifestyle subsequently change, often quite dramatically, as a direct consequence of these unexpected, utterly personal experiences.

CATEGORIES of Near-Death Experiences

Three categories of NDEs should be distinguished. In the first, the NDE experiencer comes “very near” to dying—may even be in extended coma—but does not quite complete the dying process, and sooner or later gets resuscitated, sometimes as if by a miracle (many do regard their recovery as miraculous). Quite a few of these people write down the interesting things they consciously experienced while their body was near death—i.e., a classic “near-death” experience.

In the second category the body actually proceeds to clinical death—long defined by medical science as no breath and no heartbeat for five minutes or more—and no electrical-nerve activity in the brain or brain stem as confirmed by a flat-lined electroencephalogram (EEG). (Some clinicians, trying to expand this definition to be consistent with cases where revival occurs far beyond five minutes, remain blocked by the inertia of medical opinion as of this writing.) But then, despite these “certainties” of the body’s physical death, techno-medical efforts manage to restore heartbeat and breathing, and fully-functioning life returns to the dead body—sometimes, remarkably, up to an hour or more later. This technically is not a “near”-death experience as, by all known measures and prevailing definition, the body was in fact dead and would have stayed that way if not for the life-saving medical procedures now routinely applied in emergency rooms. But here too, with or without techno-medical support, some people simply revive, seemingly miraculously, for no known or apparent reason—sometimes without any intervention at all…and occasionally even after being deposited in a hospital morgue. And here too, we learn about these only because those involved bother to write down what they experienced while they were dead.

A third type called a “shared-death experience” occurs when a perfectly healthy person who is attending a dying person inexplicably shares that person’s experience of leaving the body. In such cases the living person typically accompanies the departing spirit for some limited “distance” into the departure—until their two spirits part and the healthy one is instantly deposited back in his/her own very much alive body. Some of these too get written down, and so we learn of such unusual shared-death experiences happening around us every week and day.

An Introductory Overview of NDE Features, Context, Learning and Knowing

A person experiencing any of these three categories of death or near-death may encounter up to a dozen or so fairly distinct phases or events I have chosen to call “features”—i.e., “what happens” during an NDE. I number them as “a dozen or so” because the actual number varies from case to case. Every NDE includes at least two features: its beginning and its ending. It begins when the experiencer becomes aware that s/he is both conscious and outside the body. Most NDEs then involve at least two or three of the features before the Self returns to the body and the experience ends. Many people experience half a dozen or more, and a lesser percentage experience the full dozen (or so) features described in some detail further below in this chapter.

For example, a feature often noted by NDE experiencers is joyfully meeting and communicating with their deceased relatives, who appear to be vibrantly alive and well (typically also looking younger than when they died). Another of the most memorable and consistently described features is a feeling of being embraced in infinitely rapturous “unconditional love” by an all-powerful spirit who experiencers variously identify as God, or whatever equivalent name is the ultimate deity in the experiencer’s native culture—e.g., Buddha, Krishna, Manitou, etc.

An especially significant feature reported by some experiencers is “total knowledge” (also called “All-Knowing”) they were shown by [usually by the ultimate deity, but sometimes other spirits]. Such knowledge sometimes is so very total that the experiencer reports having merged with God—I became God—and knowing everything God knows about this universe… and the greater spiritual realm… and the reason for everything being as it is. However, it is important to note that the person who has only a minimal NDE—such as leaving the body, realizing s/he is outside the body, and then immediately returning to the body—also emerges with important new knowledge of enormous consequence in the milieu of human concerns:  unequivocal certainty that it is possible for consciousness to exist outside the human body.

Depending on the depth of the near-death experience, the knowledge that can be gained is of three types:

• Teachings: such as Time is an Earthly illusion—in reality there is no such thing as time.
• Mandates: what God [or cultural equivalent] wants us to do—our Purpose for living this Earthly lifetime, such as spiritual advice to Change the world by helping others.
• All-Knowing: Some experiencers (but not all), at some point during their NDE, come to know and understand everything there is to know—in both this universe as well as in the heavenly realm. They describe having the “total knowledge of God”—i.e., everything that can be known—including all of science, and vastly more that science doesn’t yet know, and even the reasons why God created this universe. This all-encompassing knowledge and understanding is both overwhelming and temporary. It typically ends when the experiencer’s spirit reenters his/her body, marking an end to the NDE experience. Thereafter the experiencer remembers only that s/he briefly had such total knowledge, but the details are irretrievably lost because—it also is remembered—such total knowledge “is not permitted” while the spirit is engaged in a mortal lifetime.

I am much intrigued by All-Knowing—what seems to me one of the most interesting features that can occur during NDE experiences—i.e., an opening of one’s mind to Total Understanding of everything in existence. This subset of NDE experiencers say that when [Spirit/God] opened their minds to complete and total understanding of Everything, “it all” made sense, the whole of creation made sense, like an aha moment. They understood Everything, including many things they wouldn’t normally even think about in ordinary life—topics like quantum physics, and why energy in all its forms does what it does, why the stars and planets form, what atoms and galaxies are for, and all the mysteries of the universe…it all becomes crystal clear.

Some experiencers report that they loved this unique experience and think of it as the high point of their lives. Others report feeling distressed by it, as:  it was more than I could bear, I couldn’t stand such vast total knowledge. Every person reporting this unique all-knowing experience, without exception, states that no memory of the Total Understanding existed afterward, other than remembering that it did in fact happen. Many display obvious difficulty in selecting words adequate to what they are struggling to convey. In these innocent reports, many of their authors obviously stressed as they wrote, I find convincing certainty that people were granted a temporary glimpse of their own Godhood, their Selves as temporarily and semi-detached “sparks” of the Creator-All-That-Is:

I absolutely knew, in an indelible way that I find difficult to describe, that I had left my body and returned to my true self and that it had been glorious. I knew myself as Light. I felt my powerful strength, vast understanding, and connectivity to All That Is. Not power as in “power over” anything, but the innate ability to go anywhere in time and space, to gain knowledge of all things, to create and flow and BE. I was huge. I was clear. I was neither male nor female, but both, and more, at once. I was JOY. I was LOVE. I was part of the whole, one with my soul group.

My NDE was not the classic story with going through a tunnel toward bright light or meeting pre-deceased relatives or God. I recall pitch darkness and a sense of a warm comforting still presence surrounding me. I was immersed in peace and tranquility. I was given total and absolute knowledge about ALL things instantaneously! I marveled in ecstasy that I knew everything about everything there was to know in the universe right then and there. It was incredibly energizing to comprehend all that power, from knowledge about physics, astronomy, psychology, medicine, agriculture, meteorology, chemistry etc etc—EVERYTHING about how the physical and spiritual worlds operate. I felt electrifying elation, being “on top of the world,” and so joyful to possess ultimate Truth.  In Earth time, that experience likely lasted seconds to minutes but it was the most gratifying experience I have ever known. Rescue personnel wanted me to exit the [wrecked] car but, stubbornly, I wanted to remain in that moment of absolute enlightenment. All the wisdom was rapidly fading, almost as suddenly as it was imparted to me, and I tried in vain to hang onto any and all fragments of insight. I felt quite annoyed and distressed that, while I was expected to communicate with the state police trooper, all my knowledge evaporated. It has been nearly 30 years since my NDE. Recently, I was sweeping leaves off our porch and, out of the blue, I recalled this NDE with a new insight. I think the darkness I had was my momentary death, and at the hour of my greatest need, it was God within me who allowed me to know everything that God knows. I was quite overwhelmed by the enormity of that belief.

I asked for a moment more and I was granted it. I soaked all the love I could into my entire being. It felt glorious. I felt pure and light and whole and loved and loved and loved. In this ‘moment,’ I understood everything. Creation, purpose, love. Physics, numbers, existence. I was completely at One with all of existence.

Though All-Knowing becomes unrecallable when the NDE ends, the Teachings and Mandates remain well and fully in memory for the experiencer to ponder and be influenced by—and to mention in a written report. These highly significant Teachings and Mandates are available for the rest of us to ponder in the writings variously published by NDE experiencers and researchers. I can attest that they—especially the Mandates—are powerful indeed. In my judgment Teachings and Mandates are the ultimate value for anyone who desires to understand this entire subject.

NDEs, like Spiritually Transformative Experiences generally, have two key aspects: 1) what happened (the dozen or so features), and 2) why is it important—what difference did it make? No discussion of NDEs is complete unless it gives thorough treatment to both aspects. So much of NDE literature is devoted the features alone that I’ve come to call them the gee-whiz factor. Granted, they are fascinating and I’m as fascinated as anyone else, but the truly important aspect lies in what comes afterward, when survivors’ life values change, they feel a complete change in their life purpose, and choose to channel their life energies into completely new activities with intent to increase love and reduce world conflict. Whenever NDEs are taken seriously as credible, believable evidence of the greater reality they describe in such detail, these Teachings and Mandates have extraordinary potential, as guidance for ethical living, to bring understandings, peace and beneficial changes into our troubled world.

One other major aspect of NDEs must be mentioned before we enter the subject in full detail. Regardless of how many features may occur, they all typically occur within a “context” that is common to all NDEs overall, and that context has several “aspects” all of which apply to the NDE as a whole. These will be discussed below, but as a brief introductory example, every feature experienced during an NDE may be experienced in a context of “exceptional lucidity” that is “ineffably” beyond the power of words to express. Describing the dozen-or-so features, and the context within which those features occur, is the foundation of this book’s purpose, because so many thousands of people have in fact experienced them—and so many millions have no idea all this is going on around them every day.

 

TWO CLASSIC NDEs

To introduce near-death experiences, I think it helpful to immediately immerse the reader in two of the best, most comprehensive NDE reports I’ve encountered. I know of no better way to begin to perceive just how important is this subject and its potential influence in our modern world.

Psychologist Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., one of the founders of IANDS (International Association of Near Death Studies), published his book Lessons From the Light in 1989 (updated in 2006). By serendipitous bad luck, I did not happen upon this particular book until the year 2021. I found it enchanting. And I was ready for it. The understandings from eight decades of my life—with all the reading, wondering, yearning, seeking—were refined and clarified by that one beautiful book, especially its dramatic last chapter. The book arose out of Ring’s own lifelong quest for knowledge and understanding, which led him through decades of NDE research—interviewing hundreds of experiencers, sharing his gleanings in scholarly papers and several excellent books.

I’m not altogether sorry I didn’t read the book years earlier. The understanding I’ve sought would lack the significance it has for me if I hadn’t worked so long to attain it the hard way. And of course his book doesn’t cover all that other stuff contained in all those other dogeared books on my shelves dedicated to physics, cosmology, biology, economics, ethics and more. Without them as context, I would not have been prepared to recognize such confirmation when I finally saw it. But Ring’s book does splendidly reaffirm that core, that centrality of science-spirit interface for which I had searched so very long, working it all out grain by grain. It was gratifying to read, one after another, affirmation of ideas I had worked out on my own, conclusions I had slowly reached—had replicated, if I may use science’s favorite word in this context—in Ring’s selected quotations by NDE/STE experiencers who have met and deeply communed with God.

For anyone with mind open enough to receive it, the book absolutely confirms the unification of science and spirit—that everything is one thing. Ring is a good writer who holds the reader’s interest with his knack for putting word-thoughts together in very clear, communicative context. But its highest highlights are the quoted words of the people who had these extraordinary experiences. They not only experienced the full dozen NDE features, they went deeper than I have seen anywhere else. The reports they have provided are elevating to say the least.

In sharing the two that follow I happily aid and abet Ring’s stated motive for writing his book—to demonstrate that ordinary people can be as transformed as are NDE/STE experiencers by simply reading about those experiences. Of this, I’m a living example. Ring wanted such elevated understanding to reach as many people as possible. Consummately, so do I. Perhaps one day human understanding about how we all ought to be behaving will reach a critical mass, and that day will mark the end of wars and the self-serving hubris known as “individualism.” We seem to be individuals, and individualism has achieved the status of divinity in U.S. culture, but that is only the egoistic temptation of our Earth-evolved brains. In fact we are all parts of God.

I think the following are among Ring’s most dramatic cases, though even these excerpts convey only incompletely the experiencers’ remarkable stories. I heartily recommend reading the whole book for yourself, for seldom is found equal depth and breadth of such importance—who we are and why we’re here. No doubt there are other NDE reports equally rich in detail and explanation as the two that follow, but I haven’t yet encountered them. In any case, these classic reports are ideal preface to my detailed descriptions of NDE features that immediately follow them.

NDE #1. Mentally Naked Before God 

(Six paragraphs from Ring¹, pages 298-299. Quoted with permission. Subheads added.)

“I then remember traveling a long distance upward toward the light. I believe that I was moving very fast, but this entire realm seemed to be out of time. Finally I reached my destination. … There, before me, was the living presence of the Light. Within it I sensed an all-pervading intelligence, wisdom, compassion, love and truth. There was neither form nor sex to this perfect being. It…contained everything, as white light contains all the colors of the rainbow when penetrating a prism. And deep within me came an instant and wondrous recognition: I, even I, was facing God.

“I immediately lashed out at Him with all the questions I had ever wondered about; all the injustices I had seen in the physical world. I don’t know if I did this deliberately, but I discovered God knows all your thoughts immediately and responds telepathically. My mind was naked; in fact, I became pure mind. The ethereal body which I had traveled in through the tunnel seemed to be no more; it was just my personal intelligence confronting the Universal Mind, which clothed itself in a glorious, living light that was more felt than seen, since no eye could absorb its splendor. I don’t recall the exact content of our discussion; in the process of return, the insights that came so clearly and fully in Heaven were not brought back with me to Earth. I’m sure I asked the question that had been plaguing me since childhood about the sufferings of my [Jewish] people. I do remember this: There was a reason for everything that happened, no matter how awful it appeared in the physical realm. And within myself, as I was given the answer, my own awakening mind now responded in the same manner: ‘Of course,’ I would think, ‘I already knew that. How could I ever have forgotten!’ Indeed, it appears that all that happens is for a purpose, and that purpose is already known to our eternal self.

All-knowing. “In time the questions ceased, because I suddenly was filled with all the Being’s wisdom. I was given more than just the answers to my questions; all knowledge unfolded to me, like the instant blossoming of an infinite number of flowers all at once. I was filled with God’s knowledge, and in that precious aspect of his Beingness, I was one with him. But my journey of discovery was just beginning. Now I was treated to an extraordinary voyage through the universe. Instantly we traveled to the center of stars being born, supernovas exploding, and many other glorious celestial events for which I have no name. The impression I have now of this trip is that it felt like the universe is all one grand object woven from the same fabric. Space and time are illusions that hold us to our plane; out there all is present simultaneously. I was a passenger on a Divine spaceship in which the Creator showed me the fullness and beauty of all of his Creation.

“The last thing that I saw before all external vision ended was a glorious fire—the core and center of a marvelous star. Perhaps this was a symbol for the blessing that was now to come to me. Everything faded except for a richly full void in which That and I encompassed All that is. Here, I experienced, in ineffable magnificence, communion with the Light Being. Now I was filled with not just all knowledge, but also with all love. It was as if the Light were poured in and through me. I was God’s object of adoration; and from His/our love I drew life and joy beyond imagining. My being was transformed; my delusions, sins and guilt were forgiven and purged without asking; and now I was love, primal Being, and bliss. And, in some sense, I remain there, for Eternity. Such a union cannot be broken. It always was, is and shall be.

Return to body. “Suddenly, not knowing how or why, I returned to my broken body. But miraculously, I brought back the love and the joy. I was filled with an ecstasy beyond my wildest dreams. Here, in my body, the pain had all been removed. I was still enthralled by a boundless delight. For the next two months I remained in this state, oblivious to any pain… I felt now as if I had been made anew. I saw wondrous meanings everywhere; everything was alive and full of energy and intelligence.

Lasting certainty. “Although it’s been twenty years since my heavenly voyage, I have never forgotten it. Nor have I, in the face of ridicule and disbelief, ever doubted its reality. Nothing that intense and life-changing could possibly have been a dream or hallucination. To the contrary, I consider the rest of my life to be a passing fantasy, a brief dream, that will end when I again awaken in the permanent presence of that giver of life and bliss. For those who grieve or fear, I assure you of this. There is no death, nor does love ever end. And remember also that we are aspects of the one perfect whole, and as such are part of God, and of each other. Someday you who are reading this and I will be together in light, love, and unending bliss.”

NDE #2. Interactive Life Review

(Seven paragraphs from Ring¹, pages 287-289. Quoted with permission. Subheads added.)

“And the next I know is that I am standing in this dark room and there is my body on the bed and a sort of darkness, and I look down and see myself, and I said ‘Oh.’  It is sort of surprising because you still feel real. It’s like I am here but I am also there. And about that time one whole side of the wall in the room became like a scene in a dark forest with the sun rising behind it, and there was this path going out through the woods. And I looked at that path and I thought ‘Boy, I really want to go up there. I really want to go up that path.’ And I started moving and then I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, I know what’s happening, I’ve died. I know if I go up that path and go to the edge of the woods and into that light, I’ll be dead.’ But it was so, so peaceful and felt so good. I had never felt that way on the planet. So I started moving up the path and the light got bigger and bigger. It got very big and I started seeing what you call now sort of past memories, a life review kind of thing. And I could see stuff that made me unhappy, and how unhappy I had been, and things like that, and so at that point I said ‘Stop!’ and just everything stopped!  And I was surprised; it stopped. And suddenly I realized this must be an interactive experience, because I am able to talk to it.

Yearning to know and understand. “And so, the next thing I know is I am heading up into this Light. It is sort of like a tunnel. And I go to this Light and again I say, ‘Stop!’ and it stopped. And I said—I don’t remember the exact words but it was to the effect of—‘I think I understand what you are but I really want to know what you really are. Like, reveal yourself, what is this Light? I have heard it’s Jesus, I have heard it’s this, I have heard it’s that.’

Understanding. “And at that time the Light revealed itself to me on a level that I had never seen before. I can’t say its words, it was a telepathic understanding more than anything else. I could feel it, I could feel this Light. And the Light just reacted and revealed itself on another level, and the message was ‘Yes, [for] most people, depending on where you are coming from, it could be Jesus, it could be Buddha, it could be Krishna, whatever.’ But I said, ‘But what is it really?’ And the Light then changed into—the only thing I can tell you [is that] it turned into a matrix, a mandala of human souls, and what I saw is that what we call our higher self in each of us is a matrix. It’s also a conduit to the source; each one of us comes directly as a direct experience [from] the source. And it became very clear to me that all the higher selves are connected as one being, all humans are connected as one being, we are actually the same being, different aspects of the same being. And I saw this mandala of human souls. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, just [voice trembles], I just went into it and [voice falters], it was just overwhelming [he chokes], it was like all the love you’ve ever wanted, and it was the kind of love that cures, heals, regenerates.

Intense yearning and time travel. “And the more I went into it the more I just said, ‘I want to know, I really want to know what’s going on.’ I just kept saying that, ‘I want to know, I want to know.’ And I was taken into the Light and, to my surprise, through it, poom! Like some kind of sound barrier, so that I went through it. And if you can imagine [one’s own] higher self being—it looks more like a conduit than a being, a navel cord, or something like that. At the time it seemed like I was being propelled somewhere. I don’t know if I was moving anywhere in space, but suddenly I could see the world fly away. I could see the solar system fly away. I could then see galaxies and—it went on.

Back to the big bang. “Eventually I got the feeling that I was going through everything that had ever been. I was seeing it all—galaxies became little stars, and super-clusters of galaxies, and worlds upon worlds, and energy realms—it was just an amazing sight to behold. And it felt like I was zooming somewhere but I really think it was my consciousness just expanding at such a rapid rate. And it happened so quickly but it was in such detail that there came another light right at me and when I hit this light, it was like [pause] I dissolved or something. And I understood at that moment I passed the big bang. That was the first light ever and I went through the big bang. That’s what happened. I went through that membrane into this—what I guess the ancients would have called the Void. Suddenly I was in this void and I was aware of everything that had ever been created. It was like I was looking out of God’s eyes. I had become God.

Where God is.  “Suddenly I wasn’t me anymore. The only thing I can say, I was looking out of God’s eyes. And suddenly I knew why every atom was, and I could see everything. And I stayed in that space, I don’t know how long. And I know something very deep happened there. … And then the experience reversed. I went back through the big bang and I understood at that point that everything since the big bang, since what they call the first word, is actually the first vibration. There was a place before any vibration at all. … The interesting point is that I went into the void, I came back with this understanding that God is not there. God is here. [laughs] That’s what it is all about. So this constant search of the human race to go out and find God… God gave everything to us, everything is here—this is where it’s at. And what we are into now is God’s exploration of God through us. People are so busy trying to become God that they ought to realize that we are already God and God is becoming us. That’s what it is really about.

Return to the first Light.  “When I came back to the first Light again—and there was a whole thing that happened between the second light and the first light—it was like a reversal, but this time I could see everything in its energy form, its pure essence, as if I could see you as an atomic form. And it was quite a sight to see the entire universe as we know it as an energy form, and all of it interacting, and all of it having its place and reactions and resonances. It was just an unbelievable dance that was going on. So then there was the second light, the matrix I came through again and at that point…  [it was] more than human souls. Human souls were a part of it. What I saw as I came back through was that whole Gaia thing, and this is before I even knew what Gaia was. I saw that the solar system we live in is our larger, local body. This is our local body and we are much bigger than we imagine. I saw that the solar system is our body. I am a part of this, and this earth is this great created being that we are, and we are the part of it that knows what it is. But we are only that part of it. We are not everything, but we are that part of it that knows that it is.”

 

The (dozen or so) FEATURES of Near-Death Experiences

Any exact count of the “dozen or so” features may occur during an NDE would be questionable on two grounds: 1) precisely where one feature ends and the next begins is not always clearcut, as will be seen in the examples that follow; and 2) different researchers quite validly perceive differently nuanced ways of counting and defining them. This imprecision is unimportant, merely reflecting the non-ordinary circumstances in which all NDEs occur, and may be seen as analogous to the uncertainty meteorologists face in trying to specify precisely when a tornadic funnel begins and ends. It’s a natural thing, without clear boundaries, as most natural things are.

Notwithstanding that, it is accurate to assert that any given NDE may involve up to about a dozen or so such features. These features occur repeatedly across the several existing large NDE databases; they may be seen and verified by anyone, and thus may be categorically described on that aggregate basis. While a particular near-death experience might include only one or two features, most involve several features and a relative few involve all of them. Excepting the fact of flat-line clinical death and medical resuscitation which clinical witnesses can verify, every one of these features is unconditionally knowable only in the mind of the individual who personally experiences it first-hand, known as “first-person” experience. This fact constitutes an a priori tension with mainstream science which “believes” that only third-person experiences can be treated as authentic. I hope this book will effectively counter that arbitrary and false belief.

Source note: I have cited sources for quotes used in this book where they are known. In this first chapter, however, sources for most of the experiencer quotations (italicized) that accompany the descriptions of NDE features remain un-footnoted because I long ago collected them piecemeal over many years and their precise sources were documented (lost) in a long-dead computer. That said, they remain ideal to re-use here, serving the purpose for which I originally collected them—their illustrative and explanatory excellence for the features being described. Most of these quotes were obtained from sources held by the International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS), especially the “NDE of the Month” series IANDS emails to all members, and most can still be tracked down on the IANDS website (iands.org). Many more very much like them are available in the archives of NDERF and ACISTE as cited. An uncommonly high consistency characterizes all NDE experiencer quotations everywhere and in all circumstances.

1. Out of body experience (OBE). This feature, common to essentially all NDEs, marks the beginning of the experience. The dying person’s “Self” (aka spirit, mind, soul, life energy, consciousness, or whatever-you-personally-choose-to-call-it) becomes aware that it has emerged out of its body. Being unfamiliar with this unexpectedly “separated” status, the experiencer often describes feeling momentarily confused. Vision and hearing are always retained, and other senses may apply but are rarely reported. The OBE experiencer usually sees his/her own body, typically lying as if dead, but often does not immediately recognize it. Remarks by doctors and nurses trying to revive the body are often heard and remembered in detail. Any pain the body had been feeling is absent as soon as the OBE begins. Most experiencers report an unusual feeling of “detachment” from normal concerns, such as a parent’s concern for children’s upbringing, or empathy for relatives grieving over the grave condition of the experiencer’s damaged body:

I felt a sense of excitement and wonder. I didn’t even think about my body or about anything or anyone I loved on earth. There was complete detachment and no remembrance of my earthly life during my experience which, after I came back, I thought was odd but not distressing. I don’t think it meant my life or the people I love here aren’t important to me, it was more about being in the present moment in order to limit distraction. It was a completely natural feeling to be so present without any sense of concern or burden.

If the NDE takes place in a hospital, as so many do, not only does the experiencer see and hear nurses and doctors attempting to resuscitate the body, specific actions such as CPR and electric shock to restart a heart are often seen and remembered in great specificity. These are often described afterward in verifiable detail to disbelieving medics who typically insist “You could not have seen that, you were dead!” In one celebrated case a man remembered watching a nurse remove his false teeth and place them on a crash cart shelf while his body was in deep cardiac arrest. He caused quite a ruckus several days later when he asked for their return and described exactly where the nurse had left them.

In many cases the out-of-body Self rises and [for no known reason] hovers at ceiling level, dispassionately observing the scene below. Most do not report being aware of this rising-up as it is happening, but do often report a feeling of lightness or weightless floating. Some experiencers report noticing that their “hands”—now immaterial—pass through material objects, such as walls and even other people who may be present. Some report noticing that their out-of-body Self has not retained its human shape, becoming instead an ethereal sort of semi-body form, or even completely shapeless. Many experiencers report noticing that they feel no particular relationship to the body lying there—quite a few variously describe it as an “old container” now discarded.

Immediately after I laid down, I felt my body levitate from the bed. I did not think anything of it because my body still felt “heavy,” as if I still weighed 210 lbs.  As I reached the ceiling of the bedroom, my body flipped around to a birds-eye view. That’s when I saw my real motionless body on the bed, still clutching its chest. Therefore, I applied my critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills to help draw a conclusion on whether or not this was real. What I did know at that point was that I didn’t have any more pain. After analyzing the TV, I looked up at the ceiling and was blown away!  The ceiling in the bedroom was completely gone. The ceiling was replaced with outer space with small bright stars.  It was as if the entire universe was condensed to what looked like a star map on my ceiling!

In some cases the out-of-body experience ends quickly, with or without observations such as those described above. The Self simply feels a sudden “whoosh” and inexplicably finds itself instantly back inside the prone body—often with an unpleasant sensation of being “crammed or squeezed” back in. Many comment on loss of the freedom the Self had felt while out of the “constraining” body—usually described as a “tight fit.” The return to in-body consciousness is often accompanied by instant return of any pain that was afflicting the body prior to the OBE.

But a majority of NDEs do not end so quickly. Most experiencers undergo a few, several, or (rarely) all of the “dozen or so” features that get mentioned in NDE reports. It must be reemphasized that no two NDEs are ever exactly the same. Notwithstanding the exceeding consistency that characterizes NDE reports overall, the many thousands reported over recent decades leave no doubt that every person’s experience is uniquely personal and in some way(s) different from all other NDEs. Like the infinitely differing designs of snowflakes—or the personal DNA and faces of individual humans—no two are, or can ever be, exactly alike notwithstanding their sameness. For explanatory purposes, the whole “dozen” are described here.

2. Exploring and ranging. After becoming aware of being outside the body, some report going exploring. Most such ramblings tend to remain near the body, but some explore nearby environs (often in a hospital) and a few venture far away. Remarkably, experiencers typically report feeling no particular concern that this is an unusual situation, though most do report genuine curiosity about “what’s going on?” They often report amazement at being able to see through ceilings and walls, even to other floors in distant areas of a hospital. Out-of-body vision seems unaffected by distance or intervening structures.

In one highly publicized case, the out-of-body experiencer rose “through” a hospital’s uppermost ceiling into the outside air where she saw (and later reported) a tennis shoe lying on a ledge outside the hospital wall, several floors up and around a corner not visible from any ordinary window view. A subsequent search found the shoe exactly where it had been described. Here are the fundaments of this well known NDE:

[Maria] said she had been distracted by something in a different part of the hospital, and she next remembered staring closely at an object on a window ledge about three stories above the ground.  It was a man’s dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed on the left side where the little toe would go.  The shoelace was caught under the heel.  Maria was upset, she explained, because she desperately wanted someone to go get the shoe.  Not to prove to herself that it was there; Maria knew she was an honest woman and she was telling the truth.  No, she needed to prove it to others—that she really had been out of her body, floating free, outside the hospital walls.  That she wasn’t crazy.¹

¹https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/07/the-shoe-on-the-ledge.html

Some experiencers report thinking a desire to “see” long distance away—such as a relative in a distant city—and instantly find themselves traveling to that distant location at a great and accelerating speed, sometimes reported as “the speed of light.” Subsequent return to the body’s location is also speedy—to think a location is to be there, a so-called psychic ability normally referred to as teleportation. Quite a few NDE cases report the experiencer ascending far up and away from the body’s location, proceeding high into the sky—sometimes miles high, sometimes even into space beyond earth’s atmosphere—and, in a few remarkable cases, to faraway reaches of the universe. Though always accompanied by awe and wonder, these travelings are typically reported in calm, matter-of-fact words that simply describe what was experienced, with no understanding of how it happened, much less why:

After hovering over my house, I remember flying through the air.  If I had to guess the altitude, I would say I was at an altitude of about 50,000 feet!  I remember flying over the Pacific Ocean at night and how the waves had small reflections of light, similar to how the moon shines on the ocean.  Boy, was I flying! I felt afraid because I wasn’t in control of where I was going. It felt like my spirit was thrown across the ocean. I went from Guam to Los Angeles, 6000 miles, in probably 10 seconds. I also felt homesick, because I knew that I was far away from my body. I thought, “I need to get back into my body and start living right!”

I found myself inside a phone booth that was built into the hallway wall. My husband was on the phone with my best friend. He was telling her what was happening. When she would respond, I would be in her office in North Carolina. When he would speak, I would be back in the phone booth. This went on for a while, and I was able to notice changes that my friend had made in her office decor. Next, I was in a large theatre, with a stage and velvet curtains on both sides. No one else was there. I was sitting in the middle of the row. I didn’t know how I got there or why. I waited, and then one of my earliest childhood friends came out onto the stage.  She looked at me, and she let me know that she loved the games that we played and all the laughs that we had. Then it was my turn to tell her how I always had so much fun, but that I was sad when they moved away. We stayed there until we had exchanged love and admiration for each other… I never knew who was coming out next. But each time it ended in giving, and getting, love.

Seeing family members in hospital corridors in consultation with medical staff is commonly reported. Experiencers who try to console weeping loved ones quickly discover that the loved ones do not hear them. Nor does trying to touch them work because the experiencer’s immaterial “hand” passes right through material things like bodies and walls:

….and just like that I was floating above a building but didn’t know where. When I thought about touching it, an opaque form of my hand appeared and when I touched the wall, my hand felt its density but went right through. It was so strange. So, with greater speed I flew through the wall and didn’t feel a thing.  I realized I was in a nursing home. I moved along the ceiling, through walls until I came to a room…

It is of special interest that this experiencer “felt the density” of a wall. It indicates that natural forces—such as the density of matter, and by extension the electromagnetic force which holds atoms together—apparently are relevant in both this material realm and in that immaterial realm of which NDE experiencers so commonly speak in their reports. Since everything in the mortal existence we experience is in reality a manifestation, at some vibratory level, of non-material energy in its many forms, this experiencer’s awareness of a wall’s density while in out-of-body immaterial status suggests that the material (Earthly) and immaterial (spiritual) realms may not be as “far apart” as is commonly perceived. The chapter on science will revisit density of matter. Similarly, note how the following quote mentions (in a healing context) vibration, light, race, religion and national boundaries—scientific and cultural topics that later chapters will address:

I know that I was there [in a spiritual realm] for a while, but I can only remember that they spoke about race, religion, and countries as a way of keeping people separate. They showed me a large room filled with people lying on tables, with large cylinders hanging above them. “There won’t be any surgery; light and vibration will heal their organs.”

When you’ve read enough dozens and hundreds of NDE reports saying the same self-evidently intelligent, logical things in their miscellaneous differing words, you arrive at a conclusion that all those neurophysiologists—oh-so-certain in their absolute materialist certainty—are dead wrong:  the material brain does not create the mind; the immaterial mind is an independent consciousness that is fully able to exist apart from the brain. “How” our immaterial minds interact with our material brains will also be further discussed.

3. Meeting other spirits. Many NDE experiencers—while out of body and in a conscious “spirit form”—meet and communicate with other spirits. I call these spirits “other” because, it must be understood, the person having the experience is him/herself a spirit experiencing conscious existence outside the body and fully sep1arated from the body’s brain. Exactly when such other-spirit meetings may occur during an NDE is variable. A spirit (or often two or more spirits) occasionally appears as soon as the Self leaves the body, though they more typically appear later in the NDE. And sometimes none appear at all. Every NDE is different, but—viewed all together, in the aggregate—they tell a story that can change the world.

The perceived identity of such other-spirits varies considerably. Some are perceived as spirit guides; some as guardian spirits, or as greeters and wise spiritual helpers. Sometimes they are recognized as deceased friends and relatives (and occasionally, to great surprise, people not known to have died just in the past few hours). Meeting an unknown deceased grandmother who typically radiates great love for the experiencer is not uncommon. The identities of such spirits are often recognized, and reunions are typically accompanied by mutual joy. The archives also contain cases involving siblings who had died before the experiencer was born and are now being “recognized” for the first time—always with accompanying joy, love and wonder.

In other cases unknown spirits are perceived simply as caring entities who know more about the spiritual realm than does the experiencer. Such a spirit may greet and give advice, conduct a tour, or—as not infrequently occurs—identify itself as the experiencer’s “guardian spirit” for this lifetime. It is not uncommon for a spirit to be recognized as a dimly remembered playmate (real, or sometimes imaginary) from early childhood. I can to this day recall four such playmates I perceived as important, much-loved companions somewhere about the year between my first and second birthdays. Their names were Tin and Winton, Coon and Hanton, and—as I perceived it—they had entered my small orbit in that order. I remember how very real they seemed to me at that age, and can still recall my parents’ great amusement when I would insist on setting an extra chair or two at the supper table to accommodate these friends.

Fairly often—at what I consider above average frequency—one of the spirits encountered during an NDE will be a well known religious figure. Many NDE scholars agree, as do I, that these seem personally tailored to the experiencer’s cultural experience and expectations. For example, a spirit may be recognized as one’s unnamed “guardian angel,” or it may be perceived as God the creator of the universe. Or—in quite many cases—as Jesus of Christianity, as the Hindu Lord Krishna, or the Buddha, or (less often) the prophet Mohammed—or even indigenous deities such as the Maoris’ Hine-nui-te-po the Goddess of Night. All of these and other culturally-religious figures have been reported by experiencers. Which religion’s representative gets perceived seems always to reflect which religion the experiencer happens to be an adherent of. In virtually every other respect, the thousands of reported NDEs exhibit the common features I am describing.

After gazing at the ceiling and analyzing my television, I turned completely around.  That’s when I saw him! Standing at the corner of the room, was an angel who was around 7-1/2 feet tall.  He didn’t shine or have a glow like I would have imagined, nor did he have wings. However, I knew he was an angel because of his height and that he wore a Greek-like, white robe.   He was a tall and slender elderly man with a neatly trimmed beard that was perfectly edged. I would say that he looked like the actor Christopher Lee when he played Count Dooku, minus the light saber…. We had a long discussion but our mouths did not move. We conversed telepathically. Even though I was in spiritual form, I had all of my five senses. I cannot remember our conversation, but it had to do with me being on the wrong trajectory to Heaven.  Around this time, I realized that this angel was more of a “guide.”

It obviously is significant that NDE experiencers of different cultures describe the spirits they encounter as familiar entities from their own respective cultures. The obverse is also true, e.g., Maoris guided along the “trail of death” by Hine-nui-te-po do not typically meet a spirit they would know as Jesus. Nor would Muslims or Hindus. NDE reports from different cultures around the world confirm that the spirits met by experiencers typically appear in symbolic guise appropriate to the experiencer’s particular culture. As this was stated by a spirit guide in one NDE report, “the message was: ‘Yes, [for] most people, depending on where you are coming from, it could be Jesus, it could be Buddha, it could be Krishna, whatever.’”

Experiencers specify that the communication with spirits occur telepathically. There are no words as used in spoken language, the communications instead come into the mind as whole understandings, all at once. Remarkably, the experiencer’s communications to other spirits are sent in the same way. This was specifically true in my own spiritual experience at age three.

At the moment she made contact, we also talked to each other, telepathically. There was no sound, no thought, it was a direct knowing. It comes from a place where thoughts come into existence. I had a completely wrong idea about telepathy. There are no thoughts involved. It is a direct knowing. When I think about it, it reminds me of my time during college that my professor told me about [Noam] Chomsky, a scientist, who believed that every language has the same basis. That’s why you can translate a text between different languages, if we leave out the cultural aspect.

4. Going through a tunnel. “The NDE tunnel” seems to have taken root in the public imagination as a little-understood popular icon—it symbolizes the near-death experience of which so many speak while knowing next to nothing factual about it. It is my hope that this book will help address both deficiencies. If an NDE continues after the initial awareness of being out of body, becoming aware of a tunnel is often the next thing that happens—typically (but not always) after the Self has experienced some floating/rising above the vacated body. Exactly when the experiencer notices the presence of a tunnel may or may not be preceded by “roaming about” or meeting other spirits. With proviso that no two tunnel experiences are ever reported in quite the same way, the tunnel experience can be generically summarized as follows.

The disembodied Self becomes aware of the entrance to what is almost always described as a large and very long tunnel. “Large” is a relative descriptor. Experiencers variously describe tunnel height as “larger” than themselves, and occasionally so much larger they cannot see the distant walls even though they still “know” they are in a tunnel. The tunnel entrance is usually perceived as “nearby,” and the tunnel interior is virtually always (but not always) perceived as ascending in an upward slope. In almost every case, the experiencer quickly realizes that the Self is being “drawn or pulled irresistibly”—involuntarily—toward the tunnel’s entrance. Though some try to resist, it is consistently reported that being drawn toward and into the tunnel cannot be resisted—many mention that it’s as if some living force had taken control of the experiencer’s location and motion. Quickly then, most experiencers proceed to describing their dramatic transit through the tunnel:

It felt like I was shooting through a tunnel, but I couldn’t see any sides to it. It was dark, but illuminated. I was not alone. I could sense a presence with me. I was tumbling, forward/upward, at an unfathomable speed. It felt like wind. All throughout me. Inside of me. I likened it at that age to being on a roller-coaster, that rushing feeling. It was wonderful. I felt so light, so free. Simultaneously, I experienced this fully, and watched myself experience this with clear vision from a little distance. I can still see myself tumbling, if I concentrate on the memory.

Of special interest in this particular report, the experiencer had dual vision—from inside the self’s body seeing outward, and simultaneously seeing the self’s body from “outside” it. This perceptual duality also occurs in other contexts. I have myself twice experienced dual vision during significant lucid dreams, and still recall the fascinating “inside-outside” perspective of both experiences. As in this report, the tunnel interior is often described as dark—sometimes as a cave-like blackness with total absence of light. Other experiencers report seeing twinkling sparkles of light through the darkness, on the tunnel walls. I can’t recall reading any report in which a tunnel was brightly lighted during the transit. Such differing perceptions seem to be personal, with no apparent significance. Whereas the adventure typically begins with growing awareness of being slowly drawn into the tunnel entrance, a majority of tunnel experiencers report that they soon notice growing acceleration, such that they are soon streaking through the tunnel at a clip some describe as extreme, even “approaching the speed of light.”

Some experiencers report being “accompanied” in the tunnel by an unseen spiritual presence, as the one above states “I was not alone. I could sense a presence with me.” Others report an overwhelming feeling of aloneness. Still others report awareness of other beings who, though unseen in the darkness, are perceived to be spiritual entities of some sort. These are sometimes friendly, sometimes not, and fright or even terror is occasionally reported. Indeed, passing through the tunnel presents so many different kinds of details they cannot be well summarized. Suffice it to generalize that a majority of reports simply speak of solitary passage through a large and very long tunnel…and of being drawn toward “a light” at its distant far end.

5. Enfoldment into loving light. “The light at the end of the tunnel” is a consistent feature in virtually all passing-through-tunnel reports. As experiencers speed through the tunnel they realize they are drawing nearer the light at the far end of the tunnel—and that light is visually growing much brighter and larger as they approach. The light is almost always described as many times brighter than our sun, though—to the experiencers’ surprise—it can be looked at directly without visual distress. Significantly and without exception, every person who reports experiencing the light uniformly describes it as alive, and infinitely loving:

All of a sudden, I was in a tunnel, moving fast towards a bright light, and I say to myself, “Oh, I’m going home today.” I get to the light and there is a definitive terminus, and it’s clear that this is where I am stopping. There were no faces, no figures, only tiny light beams moving slightly, making up this bigger light. They let me know that my ancestors were here to welcome me today, but that my grandmother had intervened. I immediately think, “Oh, my grandma…,” and instantly they say, “No, not that one. You never met this one.”  At that moment, I get that they know everything. “You are only here for a little while; you can’t stay. You contracted in to help others and the children, and get your PhD.” “Whoa, you must have me mixed up with someone else. School was a struggle for me,” I replied. Then I hear back, “That was then.”

Especially note this experiencer’s mention of being reminded of having “contracted” to pursue certain purposes. In context, it seems to me the only possible interpretation here is that the experiencer had previously committed, before being born into this mortal lifetime, to attain knowledge (“get your PhD”) and to “help others” including children. Extrapolation from this context is both logical and reasonable:  i.e., this NDE report explicitly suggests that an Earthly birth—and presumably every Earthly birth—involves a spirit’s decision to enter upon an Earthly lifetime in order to pursue one or more predefined purposes, and that the implementation of such decision is made within a context of commitment to terms prevailing in the spiritual realm from which the spirit will be temporarily separated during the Earthly lifetime.

Considering this interpretation’s extraordinary implied significance, it seems to me that methodically sifting through NDE archives, to discover what percentage of NDE reports contain equivalent mentions of purposeful commitment as a precondition of mortal birth, would be a highly fruitful potential for NDE research that remains yet to be undertaken. Chapter 4 will consider, among other things, these strong implications of 1) reincarnation with 2) pre-birth choice to live a mortal lifetime, as well as 3) the purposes to which that life was pre-committed. Accompanying these will be my modest suggestions for a precedent-setting Comprehensive NDE Research Project intended, and designed, to bring NDEs and their implications more centrally to broad public consideration in the years immediately ahead.

Some experiencers report that when they emerged from the tunnel they were met by one or more spirits that they variously identify as deceased relatives, friends, guardian spirits, or even, sometimes, “unknown.” These greeters often evidence great joy at the reunion, and may provide advice such as “It’s not your time yet, you must go back” (thereby revealing, notice, that they already know it’s to be a near-death, not an irreversible-death, experience). Sometimes these spirit entities then conduct the experiencer on a guided tour of the spiritual realm (such tours are of considerable descriptive interest and a few samples will soon follow).

Many others, however, report that they encountered only a single spiritual entity, and that entity is sensed—instinctively known—to be God (or applicable cultural variants). Their after-the-fact written reports summarily, and very consistently, describe an all-knowing Creator of the universe, a Godly Everything-There-Is. When this is the case, experiencers seem to simply stop thinking (or reporting) about the tunnel, the “speed” of passage or indeed anything else, apparently because their full attention becomes super-focused on the light itself. At this point, as consistently reported, the light eclipses all other concerns and all other thoughts, for the experiencer realizes this all-encompassing light is God or [insert the name of your culture’s uttermost deity].

In all NDEs that reach this point, experiencers consistently report ecstatic feelings that they are the object of infinite love, love beyond all description, coming from the presence of [God]—who typically manifests as a sphere of Intensely Bright Light that is Encompassing Love that is God and is Total Unity all in one Ultimate Presence of Infinite-Love-Light-Divinity. Virtually everyone who experiences this particular NDE feature goes to some lengths to emphasize how far this divine love is beyond the power of words to express. The totality of the experience is clearly ineffable—it is always described as indescribable.

Nevertheless, words are all we have to write books with, so in summarizing what so many experiencers try in vain to describe, I shall try to faithfully convey the intense feelings they invariably try to convey in their own words—words they uniformly call poor and inadequate—as they strive to describe being completely overwhelmed in their welcoming encounter with [God]. The experience they so often report goes, in aggregate, like this:  God is all-accepting and all-loving. God embraces, enfolds, the arriving Self-Spirit with a love that is utterly unconditional and complete, a totality of loving acceptance far exceeding any love the Self has ever known or conceived during its earthly life. A great many people describe this experience as so utterly overwhelming that they lose all sense of Self. A great many experiencers say they became one with God. Momentarily, they are God. Others add deep feeling that they have “come home.”

Many report being received in similar manner as a mother would enfold her beloved infant in her arms, though God is typically described as “without gender.” In addition to blending/merging in which the human Self becomes one with the God-Love-Light, some report their realization that one’s spiritual Self has always been a small piece of God. This divine heritage is often described as (or equivalent to) a Spark-of-God Self that independently chose to go to earth, to enter into an infant body and experience a mortal life on Earth in order to encounter opportunities to grow spiritually, by learning spiritually valued lessons that remain as yet insufficiently learned.

Some descriptions go further. Within the all-encompassing embrace of God, the Self that is now merged with and infinitely loved by God realizes that EVERYTHING is God, that Every Last Thing in This Universe is Light is Energy is Love is God—that God Is All-There-Is. I long ago learned the word that is meant to describe this surpassing concept of God:  panentheism—God is in everything and everything is God. On a personal note I have come to treasure it, this broadest, most encompassing word, this understanding in the trilogy of descriptors of understandings of God by any name:  theism, pantheism, panentheism—with their expanding nuances of meaning.

It seems hard to imagine such Godly grandeur without having personally experienced it. Some experiencers are especially effective in conveying the surpassing inclusiveness they felt:

When I saw it, it was like a ‘remembering.’ I knew where I was headed and I wanted to get there, fast. I can’t recall if I was moving myself towards it or if I was being ‘drawn’ to it somehow, but it was a ‘need/desire’ within me. We moved faster and faster toward this beam of light. It grew in size in my vision and in intensity. I felt like I was flying. We burst into it. And it was indescribable. It was every incredible feeling that I will never be able to describe. It was immediate peace. Absolute, whole peace, all throughout me. There was no pain, there was no fear, there was no shame. I felt completely accepted. Totally whole and loved.

[I felt] Loved beyond comprehension. Loved in my entirety. Loved with a Love I have not felt here. Loved with the purest love there can be. I felt I was ‘home.’ I felt I knew this place/space/being. It was light. It filled every space of my 360-degree vision. It had no form that I can recall, which for a long time left me with other questions, but it was beautiful, and not blinding in the slightest. It was as if I ‘merged’ with the light. It absorbed me, I absorbed it, we became One, completely. In these moments, I learnt much about our existence as humans, about our planet and what we as a species need to do to resolve its problems, the healing that our planet and we as people need.

Please read that last sentence again. It typifies a particular body of NDE reportings that directly speak to the condition, care and future of our planet Earth, to the human future as integrally one with the Earth, and to divine purpose as well as human purpose both now and in the future. Chapter 4 addresses these weighty matters and their breathtaking implications, in contrast with the religion-based view that God gave Man “dominion over” endless exploitation of the Earth (Genesis 1:26-28: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth).

6. Life review. Many people, while having an NDE, experience a detailed total review of their life from birth to the present. This strange event most commonly occurs with those who have just been embraced by the Light. For some others it occurs in no particular context, with or without prelude, usually soon after emerging from the tunnel. In a few exceptional cases it happens immediately after realizing one is out of one’s body and nothing else happens before returning into one’s body. All NDEs are different, though in aggregate they all offer up the same messages. The many NDE experiencers who report a life review are remarkably consistent on the nature of it, which goes approximately as follows.

The experiencer sees his/her entire earthly life laid out in one great totality, as if looking upon a broad panoramic screen that spreads from birth to this moment. The review is often described as akin to watching a movie, except that everything, the entire lifetime, is seen all at once, and all-around with 360-degree vision, and the ability to focus in on any detail while still maintaining a view over the totality of it. Everything is all there, every instant of a whole lifetime, including events unremembered or unnoticed at the time they happened. More than just “seeing” the panoramic lifetime, the Self re-experiences every feeling ever felt during its entire lifetime, all at once, though here too one can focus in on any part of the re-experiencing at will. Reports often mention that time seems to not exist in this experience—one simply re-lives one’s entire life experience in an instant, an omni-present holistic Now. Every instant of that life to date is re-lived all at once, wholly re-felt the same way it felt the first time around. This re-living includes the long-forgotten feelings that accompanied every event in one’s early life so long ago. NDE researcher and author P.M.H. Atwater, who has undergone near-death experiences three times, describes the intensity of her life review this way:

“Mine was not a review; it was a reliving. For me, it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done, plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence whether I knew them or not (including unknown passersby on the street);  plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on weather, plants, animals, soil, trees, water and air.  It was a reliving of the total gestalt of me as Phyllis, complete with all the consequences of ever having lived at all…”

Of yet greater significance, as Atwater mentions, one not only sees all the other people with whom one has interacted through the course of one’s life, one feels their feelings as well. Many reports mention being particularly impressed by seemingly small events in which one’s actions and words were exceedingly important to another person, even though the Self may not have known that at the time it happened. Many experiencers of a life review become aware for the first time that some long forgotten small kindness to another person was inordinately meaningful to that person, and had lasting benefit for that person’s life. I experienced this once when, by chance, I happened upon a colleague of years earlier—a person whose very name I no longer remembered—who told me with great warmth how my long-ago advice that “You should go to college” had changed his entire life for the better. I didn’t even remember giving the advice.

Comparably, many experiencers mention discovering, through the life review, that some careless remark or thoughtless deed made another person feel hurt, angered or humiliated. Many mention how ashamed they feel when witnessing—re-played, as it were—their own selfishness and thoughtlessly hurtful behavior toward other persons, and realize for the first time how much unintended influence they have had, for better or worse, on other people.

I had 360-degree vision and could see all around me. Again, I felt a presence, and also felt complete trust in this company. A ‘movie’ for want of a better word, began to play. It was black and white and huge. As if I were staring at a giant screen that filled the whole of every which way I turned. The ‘movie’ was my life from birth to death, every minute of it, every event I had ever experienced. I watched it and I relived it. While watching/re-experiencing each moment, I found I was now able to experience each event through the emotions of all present at each time.  I watched my own poor mistakes and learnt from every re-living. I had learnt so much. How big an impact my seemingly small actions had on a large scale. How my choices and behavior rippled through the lives of countless others. How the Love I showed spread like wildfire. How the way I mistreated others deeply hurt and affected them and also how that pain, fear and confusion would then impact the lives of others, too. In the ‘time’ I spent in this re-living, I developed a deep gratitude for many things. The experience of life for one. The people and the hearts that had touched my soul in beautiful ways, and the fragility of being human.

I felt all of my emotions and the emotions of the souls I had hurt as well as loved. Much of what I saw was surprising to me because there were more sides to the events than I was aware of when I was living my life. As I watched I thought to myself, I never realized, or I never knew. From all this I learned that it matters deeply what choices I make… I learned just how powerful we humans are and how we can affect each other in positive and negative ways, whether we think we are doing it or not. It was amazing to see how my innocent choices had such a powerful effect on souls that I had no idea I was affecting. The experience was one I will never forget.

In a majority of reports about life reviews, the experiencer is aware that the great spirit of loving light [God] remains nearby, also observing the life review, occasionally commenting, often remaining silent. Many also mention that God is all-forgiving, while simultaneously emphasizing that forgiveness is not even relevant because no human deed needs God’s forgiveness. NDE reports that happen to mention judging emphasize that God is non-judging. Many say God seemed to regard the Self’s earthly life as a gaining of experiences during which there are no mistakes, only a life-long series of opportunities wherein the Self may choose between alternative courses, with every choice being an opportunity to “grow in spirit.” This is of great interest on several counts. The chapter on religion will give further attention to this extraordinary difference from traditional religions’ teachings about judgment and forgiveness).

Comments by [God] during the life review are of two categories, both of which seem of great importance for modern humanity. One is when the experiencer feels regret or shame over some observed statement or deed that resulted in offense or harm to another. The felt guilt and regret are invariably noticed by the [God] Spirit, who may convey assurances of non-judgment, or ask (in various words) “What have you learned from this experience?” The other category is when an experiencer reports that the life review began with the accompanying God/Spirit asking (in various words): “What have you brought me?” The meaning of the question is understood to be asking:  What have you done with your life to help others and raise yourself spiritually?

I was asked—but there were no words; it was a straight mental instantaneous communication—“What had I done to benefit or advance the human race?” At the same time all my life was present instantly in front of me and I was shown or made to understand what counted. I am not going into this any further, but, believe me, what I had counted in life as unimportant was my salvation and what I thought important was nil.

Such Godly communications remembered from NDE life reviews uniquely inform the rest of us of Godly purpose and expectations for we small spirits during our brief sojourns upon the Earth:

• “What have you brought me?”
• “There are no mistakes, there are only experiences.”
• God does not judge us, not ever. The experiencer judging him/herself is the only judging that ever occurs relative to misdeeds re-lived during an NDE life review.

These matters too will be considered at greater depth in upcoming chapters.

7. Experiencing the spirit realm. This feature of the NDE experience, if it occurs at all, most commonly occurs after a life review (though occasionally it may precede the review, or, in some cases, may be the only thing that happens before returning to the body without any life review at all). Every NDE differs from all others in specific details, yet all encompass iterations of exactly the same phenomena. The spiritual realm may be experienced as a solo wandering, or as a guided tour. If a tour, it may be guided by deceased relatives, spirit guides, or the compellingly powerful light-entity most experiencers identify simply as God. Unique and extraordinary experiences in a non-material spiritual realm are variously reported in all the following contexts, and more.

I arrived at what was a vast Library. Greeting the others was like greeting friends and family, although none were from my previous life. These were more ancient than that. Cycling throughout time together. Some had not been incarnate for thousands of years. I was home with them. And we were so happy to see one another. We talked and reminisced. We shared stories of my life. We discussed contacts and purpose. How did I feel about my life?

The most common content of reports that happen to include this “experiencing-the-realm” feature are what I would call “interesting tidbits” about the nature of the spiritual realm—that “place” many people call “Heaven,” or perhaps “Paradise, Valhalla, Nirvana.” All the following examples, among others, are found in a great many reports by NDE experiencers.

Music is often heard—and is consistently described as the most indescribably beautiful music the experiencer has ever heard, wholly unlike and far more enchanting than any music on Earth. [As a lifelong musician, here’s a phrase I coined many years ago: Music is God’s gift to the spirit’s ear. I have always felt—instinctively I know—that musical harmony is a clue to our divine purpose, if we could but perceive and spell it out.]

Colors are usually described as vivid and lovely beyond belief, far more brilliant that any colors on earth. They exhibit many more shades than are discernable or even possible through Earthly eyes. My mother-in-law experienced both divine music and divine unearthly colors during an NDE brought on by a car crash that left her handicapped for the remainder of her life.

Exceptional “aliveness” is often perceived in plants, such as grass and flowers. They exhibit an extraordinary intensity of “being alive” that experiencers report as virtually able to think and communicate. Sometimes the very air itself is mentioned as “sparkling,” “alive,” or “tinkling like tiny bells.” It is of interest here that only in recent years has modern science “discovered” that the trees and plants blanketing the Earth exhibit properties clearly equating to thoughts, decisions, and purposive actions such as releasing chemicals to repel insect invaders.

Vitally alive. People whose NDE involves even a mere two or three of the features described above emphasize how vitally alive they themselves felt during the experience. Independently, many describe the entire NDE as “more real than real”—a phrase that recurs across many hundreds of NDE reports (perhaps even a large majority—no one has ever actually counted).

Ability to propel oneself by thought alone—as is so often reported after the Self first leaves the body at the beginning of an NDE—applies also in the Spirit realm at large. Movng from one location to another requires only that one “will” the move to happen.

The spiritual realm is often described as inconceivably immense—far bigger than this universe we mortals live in. Much the same as out-of-body experiencers report going exploring in our vastly huge physical universe, a relatively few experiencers report a mentally self-propelled tour of this even vaster, immense, spiritual realm:

I moved off in a specific direction. Soaring extremely fast through that space, the enormity and interconnectedness of everything was an all-consuming feeling. I was one with God Consciousness. I was still aware of myself as me, but also as the super-expanded version. The version that knew all and saw all.

8. The boundary and the choice. In contrast to NDE experiencers who find themselves drawn suddenly, inexplicably, back into their bodies at any point during an NDE, many others report encountering a well defined “boundary.” In all such cases the experiencer clearly understands (somehow) that this boundary is a symbolic “line of choice” about which there is no doubt—it is the ultimate life-or-death delimiter of the NDE experience: If you cross that line you will stay here; or, you can return to your body and continue your earthly life only if you freely choose to not cross the line. This point of choice, when it occurs, is one of the more invariant NDE features.

The boundary itself can take many symbolic forms. Across a multitude of NDE reports I have seen it described variously as, for example:  a discoloration across the grass that is lighter on one side and darker on the other;  a wavy shimmering in the air;  a small flowing brook;  a line of flowers where the lawn stops and a field begins;  a sandy strip with me on one side and my beloved deceased grandmother on the other…and so on. Whereas the separator clearly is a symbolic perception, the great many forms in which it appears are all unmistakably understood by the NDE experiencer as the boundary of a choice to become permanently “dead” or return to the body in order to continue living out the in-progress mortal life to its conclusion (I use the words “dead” and “alive” advisedly, because experiencers leave no slightest doubt that “life” in spirit is more alive than the “life” we perceive while on earth).

Accompanying spirits sometimes convey this boundary understanding telepathically, but understanding that the line represents a permanent free-choice decision is usually prominent in the experiencer’s mind without being told. And sometimes the spiritual advisor is God:

I was communicating with the light as well as experiencing being within it and One with it. A conversation began, using telepathy I assume, and I was asked if I would like to return. The absolute truth of my soul is that I felt completely insulted at this suggestion. I was horrified at the thought and felt myself loud within me, respond, “No!” There was a pause and I felt a little confused, wondering why this was being asked of me. Again, the same question repeated within me, “Do you wish to go back?” Again, I said, “No.” There was another pause and then I was shown the baby I had just birthed, lying in the crib beside my body. I was shown much from time to come. Various outcomes that depended solely on whether or not I returned to my body. There would be countless lives that would be touched with this Love if I returned, and many that would not know it if I did not. I remember taking what can only be described as a deep, soul sigh. A knowing sigh. An understanding. Immediately after seeing this, and holding the vision of my newborn daughter in my ‘sight’ and her possible future if I stayed, I said, “Yes.”

Many times the experiencer has no choice about the boundary—it cannot be crossed, even if the experiencer would prefer to stay in this wonderful heavenly place. Upon noticing that a wavy shimmering in the air is also impenetrable, for example, the experiencer may be told: You cannot stay, you must return to your earthly life because you have things to do that remain uncompleted. A great many experiencers report that they wanted to stay, and would have if it were not denied.

But in many other cases the presentation of choice is clear:  You may stay or you may return, it is your choice to make. This often is not an easy choice. Among many examples I’ve encountered, the experiencer faces choices such as returning to a body that is sickly or seriously damaged and in great pain;  or is partnered in an abusive relationship;  or lives with serious trouble and grief that seemed impossible to resolve—and so on. I have noticed a high proportion of reports where the choice to return was made because the experiencer felt compelling responsibility toward others: children yet to be raised;  or wanting to experience a grandchild soon to be born;  or feeling a need to resolve a negative situation with some other person.

When a choice is permitted, there are of course many reasons why people choose to return to this earthly life. As it happens, I find it most interesting that many such examples are expressed in terms that can be straightforwardly understood only in terms of reincarnation:

And then I was handed a book. I flicked through and it looked empty. Every page was blank. And then I opened to a page with words. And when I saw those two words, I knew I was coming back to my life. I was going back. I was supported in this decision, asked again and again if that was what I wanted. I just knew if I didn’t, I would be coming back again to do this. This life thing. Another birth. Another life. Another journey. And I knew that I may not get it again. “Self Worth” had been my nemesis many whole lifetimes. Thousands of them. A vast stream flashing by me. And I knew it. This was the one thing left to master.

Pause to let all that sink in. This quote is a prime example of the Teachings I mentioned earlier, and this particular report’s implications are unusually explicit on matters that religions commonly claim as their exclusive territory. Expressly referring to reincarnation—“I would be coming back again to do this. This life thing. Another birth. Another life…”—the quote is equally explicit about spiritual growth as a purpose for living mortal lifetimes. Though the experiencer doesn’t use those precise words, it is difficult to construe any other meaning from the words used and their context: “I saw those two words…Self Worth…had been my nemesis many whole lifetimes… This was the one thing left to master.”

Near-death experiences belong to no religion. They just are—they are utterly independent and wholly without reference to any religion—and they occur to some people for no known reason. When they tell us things that agree or disagree with any organized religions’ doctrines, that is a fact of no small significance, and so we shall revisit that fact in Chapter 3.

Concerning that stay-or-return boundary:  I have never seen any explanation for why some experiencers are given a choice and others are simply told they must return to their mortal life. One might speculate that the choice is offered when the experiencer has already achieved the main purpose(s) for which its mortal life was being lived, whereas others are told they must return because—as in the quote above—they have unachieved purpose yet to fulfill. But logical though it may be, that would just be speculating…

9. Return to the body. In every case—since these are all experiencers who lived to tell us about it—the experience ended when the out-of-body Self was suddenly returned into the body. Most returns are described as sudden and forceful—often as a “snap” accompanied by pain and some distress. Whether a return to the body is commanded or freely chosen, the return always seems to be immediate. I cannot recall seeing an NDE report where the Self dallied in spirit land after the choice was made or the return was commanded. This is equally true for those experiencers who fervently want to stay but are denied. In the celebrated case of musician Pam Reynolds, whose NDE is probably the most widely studied ever, she very much wanted to stay but was emphatically instructed by her beloved (deceased) uncle that she had no choice, she must go back. When she still mentally resisted, she felt her uncle give her a little push from behind and…presto, she instantly felt compressed back into her body with great suddenness and discomfort. Two other examples follow.

Being forced to re-enter my dark, heavy, small physical body was incredibly painful on an energetic level. The feeling of desolate isolation from my real existence, from whomever I’d just been with, hurt so badly I couldn’t bear it. I was intensely aware, as I had never been before, of the body’s gradual decay. Of its inability to access the freedom of mind and connection that I had just enjoyed once more. I felt so sad and heavy and even angry, and it seemed that my life would not be able to contain the force of my feelings. I wanted to go home! I wanted to be my real self! And more than anything, I did not want to have to stay in this horrid physical meat-body and feel what it felt… It was like the moment when you’re locked into your seat on a big roller-coaster, and the cars begin to bump forward, and you know there’s no way off that ride except to ride it. Only, it was so much more intense than any roller coaster could ever be. I did NOT want this! I felt so out of control of what was happening to me.

I remember tuning into something that sounded like radio static… [As] I focused on this radio static I realized that the static was a “voice”…and if I focused I could interpret this frequency…I received this message…”Go home, your search is at home.” I then did something very human…I got scared. My ego told me that this was crazy and perhaps dangerous…I immediately shrunk back down into my body abruptly. It was all over. From that day on I no longer feared death. I was with God and I was a believer. I dedicated my life to uplift. The details of religion were unimportant to me; it was the love, the brotherly love, that was the nectar.

Those last four sentences mark an important turning point. Up to this point I have discussed phenomena that happen during a near-death experience, i.e., while the Self is still in an undeniably outside-the-body phase of the NDE. However, this story is not complete without consideration of the aftereffects that inevitably follow an NDE—the changes experiencers often feel over weeks, months and (yes) years after returning into the body. I count these aftereffects among the “dozen-or-so” NDE features with some reluctance because, literally, they don’t happen “during,” they happen “after.” Including them is my concession to the research and interpretive traditions that have become established over the fifty years since Moody first published Life After Life. In virtually all publications that address NDEs in any depth, the aftereffects of the NDE are mentioned—and counted—as integral features of the NDE. It is true that these aftereffects rarely occur in contexts other than NDEs or STEs, and it certainly is true that they do occur after a great many (but not all) NDEs.

SIGNIFICANT AFTEREFFECTS of Near-death Experiences

10. Reception by others, pro and con. Given that NDEs and recovery so often occur in a hospital, nurses and doctors are often the first persons the NDE patient has opportunity to tell about the extraordinary things just experienced—followed by family members, friends and ministers. The NDE experiencer has just experienced something wholly new and extraordinary, s/he wants to tell somebody about it, and expects understanding responsive feedback. However, the responses received by experiencers who speak openly about their NDE are decidedly mixed.

Some nurses are prepared to listen with open neutrality to the possibility of NDE stories’ reality, especially after they’ve heard them repeatedly over years from multiple patients—especially terminal patients—and are thus able to respond in an empathetic, supportive manner. Many others—notably doctors immersed in a medical culture of scientific-reductionist materialism—lack relevant experience or breadth of outlook to respond with the needed ear and support.

From the experiencer’s perspective, a disheartening but all too common situation encountered after experiencing an NDE is not being believed that it actually happened. Some personalities are able to dismiss such things and go on. Positive outcomes tend to follow for experiencers who are (or become) familiar with the large and growing body of NDE literature and reports, especially through dedicated organizations such as IANDS, NDERF and ACISTE. But often, unfortunately, experiencers who encounter non-acceptance or ridicule report feeling depression or despair.

Not every experiencer wants to immediately tell anybody. Anticipating disbelief, some fear being thought loony, and so remain silent. Others ponder awhile, keeping things to themselves, trying to sort out the meaning and implications of what has just been, by any definition, the most extraordinary experience of their life. This is notably true for experiencers who have long considered themselves atheists:  despite having long regarded spiritual-religious beliefs as superstitious nonsense, they now find themselves confronted by what seems to be the strongest possible repudiation of their well-reasoned atheist mindset. The neurosurgeon Eben Alexander is a dramatic case in point, and his widely-publicized NDE story is easy to find online. But to all experiencers alike, the NDE is dramatic and emotional in a most intimately personal way, and many return to consciousness life feeling immediate need to talk about it to someone—anyone.

I only told a couple of people about my experience, my then fiancé and my therapist. I have told very few people my story, and only those who I think have an open mind. Although I am a scientist, I have an open mind about the true nature of soul/consciousness. There is no scientific explanation. It’s a profound knowingness that cannot be expressed in words. Of course, the scientist in me knows that my brain must have released a megadose of serotonin during my awakening, but does that mean my soul didn’t leave my body? Or was that release of serotonin a kick from my soul as it left my body? Is the physical just a manifestation of the soul’s desire?

The heavily scientific-materialist indoctrination physicians receive in several years of medical school, and the materialistic culture they dwell in thereafter, predispose most doctors to disbelieve—and immediately dismiss—anything of an immaterially spiritual or religious nature. Anything at all. In consequence, serious psychological letdown in the aftermath of a dramatic NDE is often felt by patients whose reductionist-minded doctors ridicule or offhandedly dismiss their stories as drug reaction, hallucination or delusion. Friends and relatives are an equally mixed bag. Their capacity to believe or disbelieve NDE reportings tend to parallel their religious views, however open or closed those may happen to be. Some of the worst reported emotional damage has been wrought by closed-minded ministers who disdainfully label patients’ beautiful NDE experiences as “the Devil’s work.” NDE reports and literature overflow with distressed reactions to being labeled “crazy,’ mentally deluded, gullible:

I realized I could not give anyone the divine experience that changed my life, and that some people would think I was at best quirky and at worst insane.

11. Spiritual transformation. Many people who go through the NDE experience—dramatic and unusual by definition—are so profoundly affected that their lives become transformed in fundamental ways, often taking whole different courses than if the experience had not occurred. Significant changes of personality and lifestyle are common transformative aftereffects, and are considered by many to constitute the real importance of the whole matter. The four I’ve detailed below are often categorized by other authors as separate and distinguishable NDE “features” in and of themselves. My listing all four under the single feature “spiritual transformation” merely exemplifies why so many researchers find it so difficult to achieve a “count” of NDE features that everyone can agree to. In any case, the following quotation well illustrates how personal values are commonly altered, and many NDE survivors choose to adopt utterly different lifestyles that involve a whole new focus on perceived truth, and giving of oneself to help others:

My after-effects include an increased sense that my life here on earth is limited. That I have a purpose waiting for me on the other side, but I must be patient for the call to go home, so while I’m here, to take advantage of loving myself and others unconditionally, because this is not easy to do in human form but doing so is healing not only for me but others as well. I’ve found myself more sensitive to pain and grief for myself and humanity, which has led to even greater compassion and love, including forgiveness. My spiritual eyes have been opened to see through illusions/lies within myself, others, society, systems, to see the painful truth of how we manipulate and hurt ourselves and others because we are entrenched in fear. And that fear needs to be seen and acknowledged. And the destructive things we’ve done, and their consequences need to be laid bare before us so that we can feel that pain, grieve, and then show ourselves compassion and unconditional love. Then we can show others true compassion and love too. This is how love transcends fear. It’s an acceptance, an integration with pure love as the driver. A return to wholeness.   I believe this knowledge is a result of my experience and one that I’ve put into practice.

Transformation example: Certainty of life beyond bodily death. Thousands of NDE reports attest that the experiencer knows, in the most personal way possible, that the Self can exist outside the body and continues to live on after the body’s physical death. S/he has been there, and now knows the truth of the matter beyond any possibility of doubt. S/he knows with absolute certainty, attained by direct personal experience, that this material world is not all there is—that life continues, fully conscious and vitally aware, in a non-material spiritual realm that exists somewhere that is beyond, and not of, this universe.

I know there is life after death! Nobody can shake my belief. I have no doubt—it’s peaceful and nothing to be feared. I don’t know what’s beyond what I experienced, but it’s plenty for me… Upon entering that light … the atmosphere, the energy, it’s total pure energy, it’s total knowledge, it’s total love—everything about it is definitely the afterlife…

Several world religions have long said the same thing in differing words. With NDE experiencers, however—and not incidentally—this absolute certainty that life continues after bodily death does not produce a rush to go join a church. Many experiencers find it amply obvious that the truths they learned during an NDE are quite at variance from the highly discrepant teachings of world religions—all of them. And although quite a few westerners perceive the loving light/spirit at tunnel’s end to be Jesus (just as other peoples may perceive Krishna or a tribal spirit), the learning conveyed in NDE experiences differs markedly—even drastically—from the differing doctrines taught on Sunday mornings in the conglomeration of sectarian church schools across the USA.

People who’ve experienced an NDE consistently maintain they have discovered a larger truth—Teachings, as I have noted. The slowly spreading influence of NDE teachings in American society may be a factor in our rising demographic trend toward “spiritual but not religious.” On a personal note, I would add that NDEs are not the only way such broader perspectives are attained: simple logic can also turn the trick. For example, by the time I had reached age four or so, I clearly recall observing that the two different churches my parents attended disagreed with each other—and therefore, I deduced at that tender age, they might both be wrong but they could not possibly both be right. Most disagreements are like that.

Great certainty that the soul-spirit-mind-Self, by any name, can exist outside the brain/body and independent of it—in a vibrant, fully conscious state that is self-evidently nonmaterial yet is felt as “more real than real,” as so many attest—is perhaps the most uniformly consistent teaching we receive from experiencers whose NDE began with them leaving the body, as all NDEs do. Personally experiencing is believing. This out-of-body (OBE) experiential certainty in turn lends logical certainty to the corollary teaching that mind/Self/Soul can live on after the body succumbs at the end of this mortal lifetime. Thinking minds may then take the next logical step to realization that—therefore—those neuroscientists who study the brain, with fMRIs blazing in their intense desire to figure out “the hard problem” of how a physical-material brain “generates” immaterial mind and consciousness, are—sad to say and too bad for them—whistlin’ Dixie.

Transformation example: Loss of the fear of death.  Loss of the fear of death gets special attention in many NDE reports. The survivor of an NDE experience knows there is no such thing as death. The fact that death of oneself does not exist, that no person ever “dies,” is known with an absolute certainty that can be felt only by one who has personally experienced the truth. The Self has personally known the momentary unpleasantness of being attached to an impaired body at or near the point of dying—but then the Self exited that body and experienced [some, or several, or all] of the NDE features described above. One of the most common utterances of NDE survivors is I no longer fear dying:

Let’s just say I’m not afraid to go when my time comes. My body might instinctively fight to remain here, but my soul is looking forward to the ONENESS again.

I only told a handful of people about my huge revelation, even though I wanted to shout to everyone, “There is nothing to fear in this world. There is no death!”

As a result of that [experience], I have very little apprehension about dying my natural death … because if death is anything, anything at all like what I experienced, it’s gotta be the most wonderful thing to look forward to, absolutely the most wonderful thing.

For why should we fear that which we come from and return to? Our time on this Earth, no matter how long or short, is a blink of an eye compared to the rest of it. Whether you’re devoutly religious, a once-in-a-blue-moon attendee, non-religious, or atheist, you won’t live forever. Eventually, everyone has to face that moment at the end, whether you’re ready or not, and as someone who has seen what comes after, first-hand, I promise there is nothing about it to fear.

Transformation example: Changed beliefs. As noted, a near-death experience can and often does overturn and replace religious beliefs that had been built up over a lifetime. And the changes have staying power:

It has been 20 years since all of this happened to me. Here are all the things I gained: Rock solid faith in God; No more fear of death; More loving and accepting of my brothers and sisters; An understanding of the importance of forgiveness; A knowing that love is all that is real; A deep gratitude to my Creator and all that is holy; More joy, more peace, more contentment; A grasp of a beautiful concept that giving and receiving are one and the same. And this is but a short list. As I live this earth dream to its conclusion, the insights keep unfolding and enriching me. And I believe my amazing transformation has touched many loved ones in ways they might not even be aware or could express in words. After all, I have learned there are senses beyond our physical bodies that can guide us to truth.

Transformation example: Transformed values.  One of the most remarked-on aftereffects following an NDE is noticeable change in the experiencer‘s most personal, deeply held values. The changes range from moderate to near-total, and are remarkably consistent. In most cases the value placed on loving others and growing spiritually increases while value placed on material wealth and social status decreases. Of course not every experiencer records such dramatic changes, but significant changes of values characterize a clear majority of the many cases I’ve read. The changes are immediate in some cases, others manifest only gradually over many years:

My NDE was without doubt, the most incredible and transformative experience of my life. I have never forgotten a single moment of it and doubt I ever will. It took me time, but I allowed it to transform me in the most beautiful of ways, and I try every day to live and love the way I was loved in those very sacred moments.

Studying and analyzing NDE reports, as have I and many others, clearly reveals that coming in touch with the great truth of one’s immortal nature tends to result in a new perception of life purpose. In several classic examples I’ve encountered, a longtime striver after wealth—often a high-finance or corporate chief of some sort—leaves that occupation within a year after having an NDE, and takes up some more modest new occupation which involves helping people in a direct and personal way (e.g., hospice; home health; non-profit charity). Such cases demonstrate newfound values and desire to help the poorest and most needy among us, often accompanied by a dramatic humbling of occupation, status and personal income. The choice is sometimes described as a compellingly felt need—the experiencer had to do it.

You wouldn’t be here on Earth if you weren’t important. Because everyone is connected. This does not only apply to people but to everything alive on Earth, the animals, and the whole of nature. We all have a mission, and that mission is to be happy and make others happy. We need to create a world we can all live in. A world we can share together. NDE messages have the potential to lift the world to a higher consciousness.^{9  9}(Coppes: Impressions of Near-Death Experiences, pg 111)

I also understood from my mother and God that we are here on this earth for one purpose—to love one another. We have made this life journey on earth so complicated as humans, but in the divine light I understood that everything was truly simple.

Needless to say, deep value changes are not always met enthusiastically by the experiencer’s mate, family and friends, who expect a continuance of the familiar former lifestyle, as it was before the experiencer had the NDE. Critical comments about how the experiencer has “become a different person” are common. So are divorces within a year or two after an NDE. Even where a wealth comedown is not chosen, drastically changed patterns of attitudes, values and behavior are common.

12. Choose a different life path. Changed values and beliefs based on new certainties, acquired through the utterly personal NDE experience, often are accompanied by a new self honesty that can leave no choice but to realign one’s occupation with the newly acquired outlook on life. Physician Eben Alexander’s NDE is a particularly dramatic case in point. After twenty-five years as an academic neurosurgeon at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere, Alexander was suddenly afflicted by bacterial meningo-encephalitis, a serious brain infection that develops rapidly and is often fatal. Falling rapidly into coma, after a week on a ventilator he was not expected to survive. Despite the sheer unlikelihood of recovery, he miraculously regained consciousness and soon related memories of a fairly complex NDE odyssey deep into a spiritual realm. As irrefutable evidence of spiritual realities, Alexander’s exceedingly well documented medical history and NDE, and the comparably documented brain surgery and NDE of singer Pam Reynolds, stand out as probably the two most credible cases in the annals of near-death literature.

Alexander’s case also constitutes a dramatic example of spiritual transformation so thorough that the experiencer’s occupation changes consistent with the changed values wrought by the spiritual experience. With both his medical practice and his former materialistic beliefs left behind, Eben Alexander today travels widely, telling his story across the U.S. consistent with his newfound conviction that the spiritual truths he learned must be shared and spread as widely as possible. I might just add that I share his motivation in my own small way via the writing of this book.

 

The Overall CONTEXT of Near-Death Experiences

All the NDE features described above, constituting “actionable things that can happen” during an NDE, occur within an overall context which itself has several aspects—all contextual in nature. That context and its several aspects need to be recognized if the full meaningfulness of the dozen features is to be completely understood. The following descriptions of contextual aspects should be viewed as “the box” within which all NDE actionable features occur. [See Note at the end of this section.]

1. Exceptional lucidity. NDE experiencers describe their thoughts as exceptionally lucid, and seemingly accelerated compared to normal, familiar brain function. Consciousness feels greatly expanded, and many experiencers have a sense of all-knowing about everything that ever existed. This knowledge is often sensed as “remembered” rather than newly received. Colors and sounds are perceived as “alive” with a vibrancy never before experienced in this lifetime. The phrase “more real than real” appears with noticeable frequency in a great many NDE reports.
2. Transcendental. The dozen or so NDE features described above occur within an overall context that is variously described as “transcendental,” “mystical,” “spiritual” or as “a oneness within an other-worldly environment” many people would describe as “Heaven” (and the many synonyms and equivalents of Heaven in other cultures). Two examples of transcendental context warrant special mention. One concerns All-Knowing, in which the experiencer feels s/he has acquired God-like ability to know and understand Everything, even feeling that s/he has “merged with and become” God. The other is the ability to “see and feel” an entire lifetime’s events all at once; this remarkable ability is universally mentioned by all experiencers who report having a life review. In both examples the experiencer becomes temporarily endowed with God-like abilities, even though the two circumstances are quite different—i.e., reliving one’s own feelings and experiences of an entire lifetime—plus the feelings of countless other people encountered through that lifetime—as distinct from personally feeling God’s all-encompassing knowledge and understanding. Reported over and over again in the two quite different contexts—life review versus All-Knowing—these unusually transcendent phenomena constitute powerful evidence that seemingly separate “individual” soul-spirit-minds are now, have been, and ever will be attached to and a part of God from whence we all sprang and will eventually return to, exactly as the NDE Teachings tell us.
3. Exceptionally strong emotions. Heightened emotions are variously described in terms of contentment, peace, profound love and serenity, without worries or exceptions, an overwhelming sense of love, forgiveness, acceptance—even “joy to your toenails.”
4. Ineffability. The observation that “there are no words to describe the experience adequately” is perhaps the most often-repeated phrase in all the thousands of NDE reports. Wordless telepathy and whole thoughts received without syntax are often referred to as overall context in reports of NDEs that involve spiritual communication.
5. Absence of pain. Many reports mention that any pain being felt from illness or injury is completely absent from the time the Self leaves the body, and returns when the NDE ends and the Self re-enters the body. Also of interest here, this apparent reduction or loss of a fundamental physical feature of mortal human bodies seems to extend comparably into the psychological and emotional aspects. In reading NDE reports I have often noticed that, while out of body, the spiritual Self also appears to have reduced empathy, perhaps even no empathy, for the grieving that is often in evidence by the experiencers’ close family, as well as the sexual desires and interests that characterize all living things brought into being by evolution on planet Earth.
6. Desire to remain in the spiritual realm. Many experiencers, perhaps a majority, report emphatic desire to remain in the peace, pleasant security and loving surround of the spiritual realm. Some experiencers are presented with a choice of whether to stay or return, and, of these, the ones we read about made the sometimes difficult choice to return to this life, usually in felt responsibility for other mortals, especially children, who depend on them. Another common reason for choosing to return is being reminded (by spirit entities) that the purpose for which the experiencer chose to come to Earth in the first place remains unfulfilled.
7. Loss of control. Many experiencers mention a feeling of being “swept along” or “out of control,” especially when being drawn into the tunnel. Others mention a sense of “letting go” or “surrender” to spiritual forces that are perceived to be beyond personal control.
8. Absence of time. Many NDE reports offhandedly mention the experiencer becoming aware that time is irrelevant in the spirit realm—and is illusion on earth. The unusual circumstance of the life review—observing the nearly infinite details of one’s entire lifetime in an all-at-once glance—often appears to exemplify time’s irrelevance for events that occur in this spiritual, non-material context. Recalling the introductory NDE above, in which the experiencer passed both backward and forward through the big bang, notice similar mention in this quote of going temporally backwards, implying time reversibility, or irrelevance:

It was at this point I realized Time did no longer appear to me as it had [when I was] in my body. It was as if I were projected into a moment, or dragged through time, backwards before forwards, to re-feel.

Many experiencers mention their sense of discrepancy between how long an NDE seemed to last versus how brief was the actual elapsed clock time. This of course can apply only in particular cases where it is possible for elapsed time to be observed, but the salient fact is a great many NDE reports emphasize that time is an illusion which only our mortal selves experience here on our planet, in this universe. In the spiritual realm, they assure us, time does not exist:

I’m not sure what happened next. I just remember being in what I can best describe as that timeless, expansive void. It was as though I was hanging out there. It was incredibly peaceful, and though I didn’t see a light, I felt the energy of love, a powerful, amazing sense of peace and love. That image/sensation comes into full view as I type. I didn’t want to leave it, and yet somehow I knew I couldn’t stay either. I had no sense of time.

Scientists who labor in the wholly immaterial field of quantum physics tell us with great certainty that what we perceive as the passage of time is illusion. They readily affirm their considerably incomplete understanding of the quantum realm’s paradoxical mysteries. Though many exaggerate with hopeful comments like We don’t “yet quite fully” understand quantum mechanics (thereby falsely implying that they do understand “almost all” of it), in reality, they earnestly assure us, time does not exist. And, though we live with and in time throughout our lifetimes, we have no reason to doubt that they, like NDE experiencers, cite the truth.

[Note: What in this chapter I have called NDE features and context are discussed at some length by NDE researcher Bruce Greyson in an article: “Researchers’ and Experiencers’ Descriptions of Near-Death Experiences: In Search of a Conceptual Model” (Journal of Near-Death Studies, Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 2023.) By listing sixteen NDE “phenomenological features” that randomly mix features and context, the article blurs the important distinction I highlight in this book between overall context (specifying eight “aspects” of context) and the actionable NDE features which occur within that context.]

 

Five Kinds of SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES (STEs)

Do you know anyone who says s/he has had a spiritual experience? If not just ask around a bit and you’ll soon find some, they’re not at all hard to find. Mostly they just don’t say much about it because they quickly learned some people will call them crazy. Every day of every year, hundreds if not thousands of people have spiritual experiences, with consequences that are dramatic, that significantly change lives—are transformative. And, historical anecdotes tell us, it has ever been so. You don’t hear much about it—not in the newspapers, certainly not in church—but people have quite commonly been having such spiritual experiences down the ages from antiquity through all history, and just down the street only yesterday.

Si Ma Qian is known as ancient China’s most accomplished historian, noted for his conviction that monarchs, ministers and generals are not the only people who make history. Si clearly was ahead of his time. In his Historical Records, dated about 90 BCE, he included chapters on humorists, writers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, even gangsters…and what are in all likelihood the world’s earliest reliably documented STEs. STE narratives in Si’s ancient text came from Bian Que, a medical practitioner who had lived still earlier by more than four centuries, around 500 BCE, and took it upon himself to document two of his patients’ near-death experiences. A healer of note in that early day, Bian Que considered the NDEs sufficiently important to write them down for the record. To our own modern interest, they cite features commonly found in modern NDEs, such as this quote from an ancient experiencer that could have been uttered yesterday:

I have been to the supreme being, and it was very blissful. I traveled with hundreds of spirits through the turning heavens. There was far sounding music in nine renditions with a myriad dances. It wasn’t music of any kind known under the three dynasties. The sound of it invigorated my mind.

As we have seen, anyone who has a near-death experience is likely to be deeply affected by that experience. “Deeply affected” often means so very deep that the experiencer‘s most basic values and reasons for living are changed profoundly and permanently. And, as noted, these changes typically are of a definably “spiritual” nature. Many cases involve longtime atheists emerging fully convinced that God and an afterlife are real. Persons who feared death now welcome it. All alike feel new motivation to love their fellow humanity, and to help those who need help. Many lose interest in seeking wealth and take up new human service occupations.

These dramatic transformations are well known throughout the large community of NDE experiencers—and among the rest of us who have found compelling interest in NDEs and their implications. What is not as well known, at least among the general public, is that NDEs are not the only occurrences that bring on spiritually transformative experiences (STEs). Unlike those NDE experiencers whose bodies become clinically dead but inexplicably, spontaneously revive, STEs “just happen” to people who are perfectly healthy and wide awake. Nobody knows why.

Quotation of an STE experiencer:  It’s only now, some 18 years after this experience, that I’ve realized that many of the changes and disturbances that have come into my life since then are exactly the same as the aftereffects of NDEs. I don’t know if what I experienced fits the accepted definition of an NDE, but I do know that it has fundamentally altered the landscape of my life, changing my spirituality, my relationships with myself and my family, and changing my goals, desires, and way of being. It really helps to learn about the recognized aftereffects of NDEs, to give some context for some of the more puzzling changes I’ve experienced in myself.

Personal note: This testimonial strongly resonates for me. Like my own spiritual experience at age three (described below), this person recognizes the remarkable equivalence between NDEs and spiritually transformative experiences (STEs) that spontaneously, inexplicably, happen—for no apparent reason—to people who are perfectly healthy and wide awake.

NDEs as described earlier in this chapter are ideal to cite for introducing the topic of personal transformation, but several other types of experiences can render people equally transformed. People often refer to these other types as “near-death-like,” because they do indeed have major similarities. But that label is inadequate. Following below are five categorical types of STE I think essential to understanding this broad subject of spiritual transformation: near-death experiences (NDE); perfectly healthy and wide awake (PHWA) experiences; shared-death experiences (SDE); after-death communications (ADC); and lucid dreams.

1. Near-death experiences (NDEs). In modern America the most widely recognized type of STE is the near-death experience, as described at length in this chapter.
2. Perfectly healthy and wide awake (PHWAs). Among the five types of STEs, this PHWA variety is the one most similar to NDEs, and so I list it in second place. Except for going out of body, almost all the features of near-death experiences described above can likewise happen during a PHWA—pretty much identically—to people who are perfectly healthy, wide awake and in vigorous good health. No one knows why. The few existing (and not-very-specific) statistics on the incidence rate of these types of STEs suggest that somewhere between roughly one-third and two-thirds of the population are familiar with PHWAs or have personally experienced one. Even this rough estimate suggests their occurrence is fairly widespread in the population, though they receive the merest small fraction of the attention given to NDEs. I’ve included two examples in this section.

On a perfectly ordinary day, at a moment when you are feeling fine and normal, you suddenly have an experience that is not an ordinary experience. It comes unexpectedly and powerfully. Of a decidedly spiritual nature, it is in some significant ways so non-ordinary that it leaves you stunned and transformed. It claims your fullest attention while it is happening, and the memory of it remains strongly with you forever afterward. It will likely leave you deeply, fundamentally and permanently changed, and you may change still more as time passes. What you have experienced was of such compelling nature that your very values are changed—your spiritual outlook, the way you see life and the way you want to live it—everything.

You have had the “Perfectly Healthy and Wide Awake” (PHWA) variety of Spiritually Transformative Experience (STE). Many things can transform a human personality. STEs are one broad category that includes the five phenomena described in this section, as well as some other spiritual phenomena of less certain credibility. If you learn much about STEs, it likely will be because something piques your interest, you pursue the subject, and then discover the many reports, books and websites devoted to it. Most amazingly, after ingesting hundreds or thousands of those extensive readings, you may even yourself acquire some of the transformative aftereffects that are felt by all those people who so unexpectedly have spiritually transformative experiences… …and you might even directly experience the PHWA type of STE yourself, as per the following two examples.

STE Case 1:  Side trip. You don’t have to be anywhere near dying to experience some of the same features that occur during NDEs. An excellent example was presented at the 2006 conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) held at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In a plenary session a young man spoke at length of his NDE-like experience while in excellent health. Here as my notes recorded it is his story in brief.

He told of being seated on a bench, outdoors in a public place in broad daylight, having an argument with his girlfriend. Suddenly—in mid-sentence—he became aware that his sense of Self had inexplicably moved out of his body and was rising upward toward a tunnel. He went on to experience several of the NDE features described earlier in this chapter, including envelopment within the Loving Light followed by a life review.

In his remarks, the young man made some effort to emphasize that, to that point in life, he had exhibited considerable arrogance and selfishness, including sarcasm and uncaring, hurtful remarks toward others. He described how, during his quite unexpected life review, he experienced the hurt he had so often inflicted on others, empathically feeling their pain. He felt deep remorse as he learned the consequences of his inconsiderate ways, and was flooded with a new determination to change his ways, to be kind and helpful to others.

He reported then a sudden involuntary return to his body…whereupon he discovered that no time at all had elapsed. He found himself returned to that same instant, still in mid-sentence, at precisely the same point where he had been when the experience began. Jolted, he had to search to remember what he had been about to say in that sentence, before his little “side trip” took his mind away on its adventure. Subjectively, he felt as if his OBE, life review and all, had lasted perhaps a half hour or more—though objectively it obviously had all occurred in a brief fraction of a second while he was in process of speaking a single sentence. His reported absence (or irrelevance) of time during his out-of-body experience is a dramatic sample of the many NDE reports attesting that time does not exist in the spiritual realm.

STE Case 2:  Faces—my childhood STE at age three. This wide-awake experience, which occurred sometime during my third year of life, has profoundly affected the second half of my long life. At the time it didn’t much affect me at all, nor did it for years afterward, though it would often pop into conscious awareness to be pondered all over again. During my early twenties I finally wrote down “How I got religion behind my mother’s couch,” because I feared the memory might fade, and it seemed too precious to risk losing or becoming blurred.  Now in my late eighties I doubt such risk ever existed because the memory remains as crisp as if it had happened this morning. I am amused by the title I gave it those long years ago, so revealing that I had not yet grown into any distinction between “religion” and the vastly broader perspective of “spirituality.” My original writing is here edited only for brevity, omitting nothing of substance.

Though I might have been age four, I think I must have been three because I clearly recall how pudgy my legs were, how easily they bent at the waist during that stage when a child likes to sit on the floor, examining things. By age four a boy’s legs grow gangly, not pudgy. Plus I can still recall my own self awareness, at the time it happened, of being very young. When I still crawled, for example, I remember how my parents seemed to tower high above me, giants, but with passing time and my own growth their size quickly descended to normal perspective. I remember quite well a great many things that happened during each of my first three years of life, and know I am not unique because I have met others with equally good memories of early life.

At age three most of my images and thoughts reflected my fairly limited environment of house, yard, surrounding fields, and—three miles distant—our nearby small town which included stores, post office and church. There were also people—”others”—but few were very meaningful until I reached school-going age and became one among a class of thirty. Some of my remembered thoughts were probably carried home from church, the weekly social event in our uneventful prairie life. Possibly these included a concept of “heaven,” a desirable place reputedly somewhere-up-not-here; possibly also “spirit”—something invisible—whatever that meant. But these are just logical possibilities—I really don’t remember thinking about them at all. Nor I do remember my first years of life in our small Indiana prairie home as intellectually stimulating.

So there I sat, on the floor behind one end of my mother’s couch, in the narrow space between couch and wall. The experience began when—for no remembered reason—I glanced up and saw “faces” coming at me. Here they came, all in a row, steeply from the upper right, one behind the other.  Just faces, no complete heads, no bodies. In some way I absolutely cannot explain I knew these were the faces of spirits, and they were observing me for a purpose. Without knowing how I knew, I understood I was of special interest to them. This knowing I felt and remember so well is utterly unexplainable in words—it was a feeling felt at the time, and I still remember it well.

Their purpose seemed to involve my “helping” them experience real-time observation of this mortal world through the perspective of my very-young mortal eyes and other physical senses. They especially wished to observe, and perceive for themselves, my particular mental perceptions of the things my senses experienced. For example: How did my feeling happy differ from my feeling sad?…or What I and my sister both recognize as “blue”—do we both see it the same way, or does it appear to her as what I would call “green” but we both know it as blue?

Many decades would pass before I learned that such questions may involve subjective, conscious experiences defined as “qualia,” notably in relation to an odd sensory condition known as synesthesia—which I happen to have. One doesn’t suffer from it. Synesthesia is a fairly common condition in the population, at least not all that rare, and it manifests in many different ways. Some people, for example, automatically perceive color in numbers—each number has its own “color identity”—and they typically think it strange that everyone doesn’t see colored numbers as they so naturally do. In my case it involves music. When I hear music I also “see” it in my mind; I don’t just hear the music, I see it mentally. This works in the other direction too. I often “see” a song while I’m sleeping, then all that remains is to jot it down on score paper soon after I wake up so it won’t be forgotten and lost. I’ve frittered away some beautiful tunes because I dallied instead of writing them down while they lingered in early morning mind.

These spirits wanted to observe my thoughts. I didn’t know why, but their observations—I knew—were very important to me as well as to them. To accomplish their observations they had to enter my mind, as they were now doing, one at a time.  Their entry did not displace me, we coexisted mentally, each spirit and I, for a fleeting brief instant.  That was all the time required, I somehow knew, for a spirit to enter, assimilate the whole of my mind—memories, perceptions, thoughts and reasoning—and move out, steeply to my upper left, back to its own realm. It was instantaneous transfer of a total mind copy, leaving the original unchanged, to each of thousands of spirit faces—and all happening very fast. As each spirit face moved out another moved in, used its infinitely thin slice of time to “read” a complete copy of my mind, and instantly passed on through to be replaced in turn by yet another. I recall them all as right there, approaching one close behind the other in a very long line that descended on my upper right from the far reaches of “Heaven,” flitting through and looking over my mind, each in turn then departing to my upper left. My perception of these coming-and-going lines may have symbolic, metaphoric, analogy—I really can’t say, that’s simply how I perceived them. Each spirit’s stay was incalculably brief, but they were infinite in number so the pass-through I was experiencing would never cease.

Without thinking, I somehow “understood” that this had been going on since before I was born, and would continue until I grew old and died.  Even then only a fraction of this host would have “experienced me,” they were so great in number. All this, inexplicably, I just “knew.” To this day I clearly remember that feeling of marveling at what I was experiencing as I was experiencing it.

I remember that as I wondered what was going on, what it meant…I received an answer. And then quickly became aware that each time my mind posed a question, I instantly felt their answer coming back to me. Telepathic is the only word I know that conveys how this felt—whole understandings simply appeared in my mind, all at once, with no words or sentences involved. When I eventually committed this memory to writing, I had to invent the following phrases in a poor attempt to convey the essence, the meaning, of communications that in fact were exchanged directly. What appears below thus is my paraphrasing, in words, of wordless “thoughts” distinctly remembered (remembered quite well in fact) from age three. In reality there were no real words, just whole thoughts—understandings is really the better word—that came instantaneously into my mind, and my comprehension of those thoughts was total, complete.

My first thought-question was not to them, it was about them:  What is this? Why are they doing it? Do they do it to everybody or just me? Immediately came into my mind the thought-answer: No, just a few who were expressly placed here on Earth for this great experiment. You’ll probably never meet any of the others—they’re few and far between on the Earth.

From that point my thought-questions were addressed directly to them:  Q: Does this mean that we—me and those others—are we more important than other people?  A: No, you’re just serving this particular…purpose…which sets you a little apart from the rest. Other than that you’re no different from all other people. Everybody experiences the same things you do, through their own eyes, ears, taste, touch and smell, but we’re not observing them as we are you. Most others in the experiment aren’t aware they’re in it or that they’re being observed. You are one of the very few who has perceived it.

Q: How long will this last?  A: All your life.

Q: Will you be controlling me? A: No, you have free will like everyone else. Your choices and actions are your own. We are immensely interested in how you will choose as you encounter each situation that will come before you, how you will respond and opt for your perception of right or wrong, good or bad—and how your judgment will operate in those cases where you’re not sure what’s best. No, you’re in no way controlled. In a way you’re more like an actor on a stage. We are the audience.

Q: An actor just plays a role that was planned by somebody else. Is my whole life planned in advance? A: No. Certain situations you will encounter in life are arranged; how you respond to each one will be up to you.

Q: Are you in here inside me right now, I mean any one of you, since a bunch of you must have zoomed through just while I was asking this? A: Yes, we are here now, as we have been and will be, but you can have no conscious awareness of us as we go through—only we of you. Do not fear, we hold no harm for you, only good will. We love you, little spirit, you are one of us, but you may not again speak with us, or understand why you have this purpose, until your earthly life has been lived out and you rejoin us.

That last communication still to this day has power to moisten my eyes with an irresistible emotion felt almost every time I recall it, and it has been so all my life. I don’t know why.

Then the communications stopped, the experience ended. I returned to a stunned awareness of myself setting there on the floor behind the couch. I cannot say if the episode lasted seconds or minutes, for my sense of time utterly suspended while it was happening. But as I now write in this present moment, my bright remembering of it has lasted undiminished for eighty-four years. And after all this time, I still am just floored by the memory of what I experienced and how I felt while I was experiencing it.

Reflections on the Faces experience. I spent many years debating with myself whether I somehow managed to create this unusual, very spiritual scenario out of an overactive childish imagination, or if it was indeed real. Many times I’ve asked myself—did I honestly have such a profoundly spiritual experience? And just as often has common sense risen up to challenge my doubt: How in the world could a young child, barely out of toddler stage, conjure up such a deeply sophisticated scenario as the memory I still hold so clearly, and is still to this day so very meaningful to me? I think it significant that in my early twenties, when I finally wrote down the experience, I was at that time far distant from the sophisticated metaphysical-philosophical-spiritual understandings I would eventually reach much later in life—most of which didn’t even begin seriously developing until after age fifty.

But that question no longer matters. After decades of studying and personally encountering supra-normal experiences such as NDEs, I concluded the faces experience had to have truly happened, and exactly as I remember how real it felt at the time. I gave it a fair challenge. For forty-five years between ages 25 and 70, I was genuinely agnostic about all things religious or spiritual—including my own three-year-old experience in the spiritual category. Beginning with my early childhood observation that Baptists liked musical accompaniment while Church of Christers thought the very same thing a grievous sin, I have always regarded agnosticism as an honorable expression of honesty. To be agnostic simply means “I don’t know, so I’m not going to pretend or claim that I do.” Would that there were more of it in this pretentious world.

And the honesty worked both ways. I remember wishing that the Faces experience was genuine, not something “merely” conjured up by childish imagination. But this preference conflicted with my strong scientific inclinations. Always drawn to the wonder-filled open mindedness of true scientific exploration, and skeptical of my own childhood memory, it seemed ludicrous that all-knowing spirits could have any need to be conducting an experiment of any kind, much less involving my very ordinary self in it. But years later I would encounter various spiritual writings that do indeed speak specifically of such experimentation “across the Veil.”

By my 70s I was ready. A lifetime of evidence—built up of my own spiritual experiences, lucid dreams, forty years of steadfast reading and research in a dozen major topics from physics to metaphysics, and a particularly compelling dream around age 70—these resolved all doubt. I am convinced, on scientific grounds based on evidence:  It’s all real. Spirit/soul, God, Unconditional love, Otherwhere. Never have I believed anything on blind faith nor ever shall I, but I am now convinced in the way of science based on the evidence. And it feels so interesting, so loving.

The prolonged tension between my equally strong scientific leanings and spiritual curiosity graphs as an ascending curve across seventy of my 88 years so far, abetted by reading cabinetfuls of books and articles dealing with unexplained phenomena. My curiosity about the unknown and unexplainable was insatiable through my teens and early adulthood. And, I can assure the doubtful, there are a lot of unexplained things out there in this world we think we know so well.

3. Shared-death experiences (SDEs). In addition to NDEs and PHWA types of spiritually transformative experiences, a small but significant subset of the collective database involves people who—in this case too, perfectly healthy—have an out-of-body experience simultaneously with another person who is in fact dying. The most common setting is a deathbed watch, typically with the dying person lying in a bed and a relative seated near the bed to comfort and be with the dying loved one.

Such experiencers report that at the moment of death, the attending relative suddenly observes—sees—the dying person’s spirit rise from the body…and the observer simultaneously leaves his/her own body and accompanies the now-deceased loved one for some limited “distance” on its departure. The dying person’s rising spirit is described differently in different reports. It is sometimes seen or perceived as a diaphanous sort of fog—or sometimes a small bright light—that in either case is “known” to be the deceased loved one’s departing spirit. Consistent with my previous observation that no two NDEs are ever quite the same, other reports describe the rising spirit as a fully shaped soul-body in the same image as the now-dead body. Regardless of shape or visual percept, the observer sees and knows the departing spirit leaving the dying body.

The significance here lies in the fact that the attending relative—as his/her own spiritual Self—leaves his/her own perfectly alive-and-well body and accompanies the departing relative’s spirit, sometimes holding spiritual “hands” as they go. How far this shared sendoff continues is variable. The accompanying relative may go as far as the tunnel entrance, sometimes even venturing into the tunnel for some distance until “a felt force” (or some such equivalent) separates the two spirits and turns the mortal one back. After separating, the deceased spirit heads onward, while the other finds itself returned to its living body sitting beside the bed.

I do not recall reading any reports in which the living companion went as far as the light at the tunnel’s far end, but this may simply reflect inadequate research of the archives. The following report by a woman—a de facto “passive atheist”—who shared a portion of her father’s death is exceptional in stating that she followed “to heaven and glimpsed the divine.” Though her quoted words include little detail about the incident per se, she makes the compelling point that she, unlike her dying father, was perfectly well and healthy, yet she unexpectedly found herself accompanying him partway into an undeniably “spiritual” realm. Such STE-based cases strongly repudiate the skeptics discussed at the end of this chapter, because one of the experiencers was neither dead nor dying and retains fully-intact memory. Published by IANDS in March 2019, her report also exemplifies the deep and transformative impact of such shared-death experiences:

My whole life changed when I followed my father to heaven and experienced a glimpse of the divine. Up to this point in my life I had not been a believer in God. Neither was I an unbeliever. I was content living my life without any kind of faith in a life beyond this earthly realm. I was busy with my career as a journalist and my roles as wife and mother. My father’s death turned my world upside down. I had a near-death-like experience, accompanying him part way on his divine journey. Many people doubt the truth of near-death experiences, citing so-called scientific explanations—patients near death having hallucinations due to lack of oxygen, or having other brain chemical changes when death is near that produce false images. But I was not near death myself when my father passed over, neither was I impaired by drugs or alcohol or anything else that might cause false perceptions. What I experienced that night when everything changed was the TRUTH. All else in this world revealed itself as illusory.

Of particular importance in this case is the reporter’s observation that she—perfectly well and healthy, and a professional writer to boot—was subject to none of the contrived reasonings by which skeptics try to debunk NDEs and similar spiritual experiences. She moreover typifies healthy people who have undergone such unusual experiences as “participating observers”—they possess the same certainty about life after death as do those who experience and survive NDEs. Such personally experienced new certainty can and often does bring about spiritual transformations for the observers too.

4. After-death communications (ADCs). A fourth category of STEs, after death communications are spontaneous contacts between living people and a deceased loved one. Like NDEs, such communications are often perceived as positive experiences that are associated with reduction in fear of death, increased spirituality, and belief in life after death—plus newly-gained absolute certainty that the deceased can and do sometimes communicate with the living.^{1 1}https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp- content/uploads/sites/360/2021/10/OMEGA-Journal-of-Death-and-Dying-ADCs-Final-.pdf

How would your own thinking go, for instance, if you felt inexplicably awakened in the middle of the night and saw your grandmother standing in your bedroom door, looking much younger, her body aglow with an inner light, then smiling at you and fading away—and the next morning you receive a call saying your grandmother died last night? This sort of thing happens all the time and is in fact fairly common. You just don’t read much about it because newspapers and magazines don’t print much about it. People who work with hospice patients have quite much to say about communications associated with deaths that they have witnessed, and have even personally experienced—but only if asked. Go find two experienced hospice workers; ask them. Several books on the subject have appeared in recent years. A good place to begin—with over three hundred ADC accounts—is titled Hello From Heaven by Bill and Judy Guggenheim.

5. Lucid dreams. Certain dreams—or certain types of dreams—can also be spiritually transformative experiences. There is available nowadays a very large body of dream literature, both scholarly/medical and of a mystical or “new age” nature, and many people take great stock in it. I don’t propose to add to it, but it is with conscious intent that I cite the subject so it will be considered here in context of spiritually transformative experiences. Several extraordinarily significant dreams have most certainly influenced my own views as well as the course of my life. Over my adult years I have experienced a series of dreams of such lucid and dramatic nature that, all together, they certainly have had significant transformative influence on my metaphysical explorations and conclusions.

I don’t know if my eventual acceptance that immaterial spiritual things are real would have come about, on the basis of my NDE studies alone, if my lucid dreams had not also occurred. But they did occur. They averaged more than one per decade over some sixty years, and eventually I crossed a personal tipping point as their influence accumulated. Now in my late eighties I am certain that the influence of those dreams added profound weight to my profound learnings from all those NDE readings. My major dreams are adequately described in my book Renewal; in this book I will describe only the last and most significant of them—M’sippisea—in Chapter 5.

Other types of paranormal experiences. It must be acknowledged that, beyond the objectively well documented NDEs and STEs I have described, lie several less well documented types of dramatically “felt” inner experiences that are widely said to occur. And perhaps they do; I don’t know. These include extrasensory perception; seances with mediums; hauntings; religious mysticism; and comparable ventures into the unusual, paranormal or unknown which many people devoutly believe to be real and true. Many of these involve perceived contact with spirits and a spiritual realm, and they often produce deep impressions that can lead to permanent changes in outlook, values and beliefs—i.e., “spiritually transformative experiences” in other words. But perhaps they do not. They are unprovable. I think none of these other paranormal areas approaches the narrative sophistication, self-evident consistency and statistical credibility that are intrinsic to NDEs and STEs, but fair thoroughness demands that they be mentioned.

Also commonly remarked in the extrasensory-paranormal arena are matters such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, teleportation, hypnotism, automatic writing, phantasmic appearances, stigmata, speaking in tongues and ancient dialects, and seeing auras. Another example involves numerous instances of psychics assisting police to resolve mystery crimes, though the record is not well documented and the success rate apparently is nowhere near the consistency of NDEs. None of these is “proven” by scientific standards—though the unequivocal documented appearance of one single white crow would open the door to a whole new scientific realm of non-materiality that is now offhandedly dismissed as “unreal.”

Speaking of ephemeral crows, I must note the irony in how various extrasensory phenomena are so often dismissed, even by scientific skeptics, as “only mindreading”—as if telepathy, by any synonym, was not itself an extrasensory marvel. In yet another example, my own son was surprised to learn—only in his sixth decade—that not everyone else sees variously-colored auras surrounding everyone else as has he, routinely and unremarked, all his life. He took it for granted and had simply seen no reason to mention it. I certainly was surprised to learn he does this—he had never thought to mention it because, like breathing, he thought it was natural to everyone.

By contrast, NDE and metaphysical literature is replete with testimonials by people visited unexpectedly by the spirit of a beloved relative…who is soon discovered to have just died. Comparably, the paranormal phenomenon known as hypnotism—poorly understood though it may be—is now almost universally accepted as real, and is even used as “conventional” therapy, by many modern clinicians who, well trained in the materialist culture of allopathic medicine, otherwise reject the very concept of paranormal phenomena.

All that said, I hasten to recognize the decades of meticulous work by Dean Radin, PhD, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Radin’s investigations have explored many aspects of paranormal and parapsychological phenomena, including the possibility of mind’s influence over matter. Keeping aware of his work over many years, unfortunately I have never felt it has produced unambiguously significant conclusions that matter in the way that NDE Teachings and Mandates so obviously matter. Radin’s ideas and work have been extensively criticized and their worth derided by a self-appointed platoon of carping scientific skeptics. Their invariably materialist-reductionist and volubly expressed naysaying about all paranormal and/or religious-spiritual claims of any nature warrant some skeptical attention to the quality of their scientific credibility at the end of this chapter.

Human history’s written record, well augmented by the pre-historical archeological record, presents certainty that people have had definably mystical-spiritual leanings since time immemorial. In each of the major world religions, religious mysticism is prominent as a specialized spiritual subset or offshoot. Mysterious mystical visions and unexplainable spiritual experiences are especially prominent in Christianity’s long recorded history through the two-millennia evolution of Roman Catholicism and its Protestant offshoots. These range from the portentous vision of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus to the spontaneous mystical visions described in much detail by sainted persons such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. Equivalent visions and events are numerous in other religions, such as the moment of enlightenment finally attained by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) and the prophet Mohammed’s descriptions of his conversations in a cave with the angel Gabriel. Ian Stephenson’s investigations of credible past-life memories by children in India—significant though ultimately inconclusive—are a similarly paranormal case in point.

It would be mistaken to suppose “having a vision” is a thing of the past, for such things are frequently reported in modern America and indeed throughout the world today. I simply do not feel a sufficiently credible case—as credible “evidence”—has been made for them, or for the various other paranormal pursuits listed above, as is so naturally accomplished—quantitatively, qualitatively, logically and consistently—by the five types of STEs I have cited.

 

NDE TEACHINGS AND MANDATES

Near-death experiences are the foundation on which everything else in this book must rest. Two cornerstones of that foundation are what I call Teachings and Mandates, and I regard them as far and away the most significant piece of the entire range of NDE phenomena. They come to us as quotations from NDE experiencers’ written reports about what happened during their NDE. Their importance derives from their provenance:  arising in the unique context of an NDE, wherein spiritual beings are often encountered and communicated with, teachings and mandates intrinsically carry meanings and validity that would not, and could not, attend any other context.

Experiencers attain these “extra” understandings partly through the very act of observing various NDE features as they are being experienced, and partly through direct communication with spiritual beings. A great many of these quotes in fact record what spiritual beings said to them. Thus arising directly out of NDE features described above—especially life reviews—they are like “value added” in conveying more meaningful understandings than do the features per se.

Teachings are facts about reality in the dual context all NDEs convey—worldly-vs-spiritual, material-vs-immaterial, here-vs-there. NDE reports are of course loaded with details, but these particular facts tend to be more pointed, more explicit, than much experiencer reporting about “what happened.” Many of the teachings are directly communicated by the spirits encountered during reported NDEs, others reflect experiencers’ observations of things they felt and noticed.

Mandates, by contrast, are guidance on what we should be doing with our lives. Many quote things experiencers were told directly by God—the Almighty Creator Of The Universe saying directly to the experiencer (telepathically, in so many words) THIS is what I want you to be doing with your mortal lifetime. Other spirit beings encountered during an NDE often do essentially the same, communicating guidance concerning the experiencer’s pre-agreed purpose for choosing to be born here in the first place, offering encouragement on shaping life priorities and behaving accordingly. When I first discovered mandates, I soon decided nothing in my life experience could possibly be as important and I must share them as widely as possible.

It seems to me that experiencer quotes have been long delayed in receiving the attention they should merit in the NDE research community. Their intrinsic value may have gone so long largely unnoticed and overshadowed due to research responding to popular fascination with NDE features as such (the gee-whiz factor), or trying to “prove” NDE veridicality to skeptics who will never be convinced by any evidence regardless how credible. NDE-derived teachings and mandates have begun receiving focused attention only within the past five years with publication of books by two researchers, David Sunfellow and Christopher Coppes. I emphatically recommend these books to all serious readers—by Sunfellow: The Purpose of Life (2019) and 500 Quotes From Heaven (2020); by Coppes: Impressions of Near-Death Experiences (2023). Traditional NDE research has been overly concerned with “what” happens and “how” it happens, whereas the quotes in these books are very much concerned with profound “why” questions.

Of significance for this writing, Teachings and Mandates partially overlap with—but also significantly diverge from—many doctrines and teachings of the so-called great world religions. They also highlight some substantial conflicts with popular religious doctrines and teachings. These will be more fully addressed in Chapter 3, but, beginning here, I encourage the reader to compare the quotes presented in this chapter to the doctrinal teachings and beliefs of any religion(s) with which you may be familiar. For these comparisons, please include science as if it were just another religion with persistent biases and faith-based beliefs.

TEACHINGS learned from Near-Death Experiences

NDE Teachings: necessary understandings of reality        Even if the initial “out-of-body” is the only feature experienced, as it sometimes is, that alone is sufficient to leave the experiencer convincingly confronted with—i.e., taught—the fact that one’s Self can exist fully alive outside the mortal body. This highly dramatic teaching opens the mind to certainty that life is not confined to the mortal body. Exactly like inside-the-mind experiences of pain, thoughts and emotions, this knowing certainty is unquestionable because it has been personally felt and known inside one’s Self—whatever the Self is. This knowing typically is quickly followed by crystal clear certainty of the obverse: widespread human belief that one cannot exist without a body, and that one’s Self must die when the body dies, has to be untrue.

There is no greater teacher than personal experience. We of course recognize that personal experiences are sometimes fuzzed with ambiguity, but there is little of that in the thousands of reports about what happens during an NDE. And the more features that are experienced during an NDE, the more Teachings the experiencer learns and knows—as, for example:  God exists, God is real;  my deceased relatives are actually alive and well;  I was a living spirit long before I made the choice and commitment to be born and live a lifetime on Earth—and so on.

By any analysis, there are many of them—my analysis of Sunfellow’s book 500 Quotes produces a count of seventy-five explicit Teachings, and many of those imply others. They cover a lot of ground. The ten examples presented here represent a small random sample of the range of significant Teachings we may learn by studying what spiritual entities “said” telepathically to experiencers during an NDE. The brief titles I’ve assigned are followed by the actual quotes that NDE experiencers reported being told by a spiritual entity (God or some other spirit).

1. Religious doctrine and creed mean nothing Quote: “[I asked my guide] what’s the true religion? I immediately was inside his mind. I could see myself from his place, but also from his higher level of wisdom and experience … And from his place, it was as if a little kid came up and asked ‘’Which kind of cheese is the moon made of?’ He was really sweet about it … he kind of smiled at me, and it was just sweet. He wasn’t making fun of me or saying you’re just a silly little toddler. And I remember his head slightly bowing and this love emanating from him. To experience myself from his view, it blew everything—my whole foundation, everything I had come from—it just pulled it from under me, because now I’m thinking, ‘Oh wow, the moon is not even made of cheese!’ Not that I thought that, but it was like it’s not even about religion.” [NDE experiencer Amy Call]^9S249
2. Religions don’t matter, they come and go Quote: “The Light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images, and signs. I asked The Light, ‘What is going on here?’ The information transferred to me was that your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before The Light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have a chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not. […] I was given a tour of all the heavens that have been created: The Nirvanas, the Happy Hunting Grounds, all of them. I went through them. These are thought form creations that we have created … Some heavens are very interesting, and some are very boring. I found the ancient ones to be more interesting, like the Native American ones, the Happy Hunting Grounds. The Egyptians have fantastic ones. It goes on and on. There are so many of them. […] The Ultimate Godhead of all the stars tells us: ‘It does not matter what religion you are.’ They come and they go, they change. Buddhism has not been around here forever, Catholicism has not been here forever, and they are all about to become more enlightened. More light is coming into all systems now. There is going to be a reformation in spirituality that is going to be just as dramatic as the Protestant Reformation.”  [NDE experiencer Mellen-Thomas Benedict]^9S239
3. Race and sex mean nothing Quote: “When I got to Heaven, one of the first things I asked was about the very issue of bisexuality, as it had caused me a great deal of concern my whole life. My lady guide walked me to a room that had a large screen in it. On the screen, I saw two forms of light conjoining with one another in the act of making love. My guide asked me to tell her which was the male and which was the female? I said ‘I don’t know.’ She smiled at me and said it does not matter. She went on to say that the two lights were what God saw when He looked upon us. She explained that God always sees us in our higher selves and that gender is a very temporary thing that will not be around forever. It was further explained to me that God Himself is both a Mother essence and a Father essence to us, therefore God fully understands our attractions for members of similar genders. It was told to me (or rather I was reminded) that there are no mistakes in the way each of us were made. God knew what each of us would be challenged and blessed with. We each act according to our heart (or developed soul center) and as we mature spiritually, we come up higher each time. [NDE experiencer Christian Andreason]^9S255
4. Time is an illusion Quote: “The concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once. We think in terms of time passing, but in my NDE it felt as though time just is, and we’re moving through it. This means that not only do all points in time exist simultaneously, but also that in the other realm, we can go faster, slower, or even backward and sideways.” [NDE experiencer Anita Moorjani]^9S259
5. Many NDE cases are consistent with reincarnation Quote: “I was completely surrounded by countless movie-like screens—up, down, back, left and right. Displayed on these screens were events from all of my lives, both here on earth and on other worlds. I was experiencing my life review. I saw, felt, tasted, smelled and heard every experience. As I relived them, I relived each event as it was when it occurred … I could see the thoughts and feelings of all those I interacted with throughout my life review.” [NDE experiencer Andy Petro]^8COPPES96
6. Miraculous cures are associated with NDEs Quote: “I knew I was drifting out, between the two worlds, but every time I drifted out into the other side I was shown more and more scenes … I was made to understand this during the tests of my organ functions. The results were not back yet. If I chose life, the results would show that my organs were functioning normally. If I chose death the results would show organ failure as the cause of death due to cancer. I was able to change the outcome of the tests by my choice. I made my choice. As I started to wake up, in a very confused state, I could not at that time tell which side of the veil I was on. The doctors came rushing into the room with big smiles on their faces saying to my family ‘Good news, we got the results, and her organs are functioning. We can’t believe it. Her body really did seem like it had shut down.” [anonymous NDE experiencer, 4-26-2007]^9S
7. Angels guide, protect and teach us Quote: “There was a figure that came up to me from kinda off to the side. She seemed to just come out of nowhere … she gave me a big welcoming embrace of just love. And told me she was going to be my teacher—that she would help me learn what I needed to learn in order to continue my life on Earth and make it one that I would be proud to live. And I kinda fixated on that. I said ‘Wait a minute; you’re going to send me back there? I don’t want to go back there.’ And she said, ‘Well, you’ve already agreed to go back.’ And I told her, ‘I don’t remember that. I didn’t agree to it now. I don’t remember agreeing to going back there.’ She said, ‘Well, you agreed to do that before you were born.’ But my human self, Nancy, the atheist that I had just been, had never heard of [pre-birth agreements] before. So I challenged her on it. I said, ‘Well, I don’t remember agreeing to anything before I was born.’ So kind of in the air in front of me—it’s very weird how this happened—but in the air in front of me, she showed me the time before I was born when I was agreeing to some of the things that I wanted to do and experience while I was living this life as Nancy…” [NDE experiencer Nancy Rynes]^8COPPES168
8. Soul learns best in a body Quote: “True learning happens in the body. This is a big deal to me personally, because so much of my life was about wanting to escape the body and wanting that for other people. I also grew up hearing that when you die you get to take off that glove; you get to be free and so I thought that here [in this world] is the more negative, that there [the other side of the veil] is the more positive. The understanding in this place—as hard as it is to see and understand—is that true learning happens within the body, because when we are in experience, in his form, there is something that evolves within us at the level of the soul that makes the body an important part of the whole. It isn’t that one is good, and one is bad. The two work together in an important way. That was very healing for me personally, to come to a better understanding.” [NDE experiencer Amy Call]^9S103
9. Advantages of an Earthly lifetime Quote: “The other side does not have the physical pressures that having a body has. Here on Earth, you must feed and clothe that body and provide shelter for it from the elements. You are under continual pressure of some sort, to make decisions that have a spiritual base. You are taught on the other side what you are supposed to do, but can you LIVE it under these pressures on Earth? From what I saw and heard there, it is all about relationships and taking care of each other. Perfection is not expected of people, but learning is expected and considered good progress. […] I was told that the Earth is like a big school, a place where you can apply spiritual lessons learned and test yourself, to see if you can actually “live” what you already know you should do.” [NDE experiencer Jean R.]^9S109
10. Choosing an Earthly lifetime Quote: “We (here on Earth) have a role to play. We choose our lives even before we are born—whether we choose a good life or a bad one, it matters not, because there is NO good or bad. It’s just your chosen role. ALL lives lived are essential for our evolution and development … Sorry to say this, but even the most evil—death, destruction, disease—is essential! Think about it: if everything was ALWAYS good and going your way; is all relationships were good and everyone got what they wanted, over the years it would get pretty boring and stagnant. I know it sounds wonderful, but it wouldn’t let us grow much, would it? [IANDS NDE experiencer #3]^9S139

MANDATES learned from Near-Death Experiences

NDE Mandates: necessary understandings of purpose           Mandates are more focused than Teachings. They instruct us about why we’re here (grow in spirit), what we’re here for (learn to love unconditionally), and what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives (love and help others).

On the record of written NDE reports, mandates appear most frequently (though not exclusively) in the life review section of an NDE, and typically consist of advice received directly from God or other spirits encountered. The life review seems to me the most dramatic among all NDE features because, in a great many cases, the Great Spirit many experiencers perceive as God is nearby, looking on, as the experiencer re-lives his/her behavior through this lifetime so far. Mandates don’t mince words, they speak very directly to our individual purposes for being born and living this life—each and every one of us, respectively.

Twelve examples follow. As above, my assigned brief title is followed by the actual quotes that NDE experiencers reported being told by a spiritual entity. Parenthetical “mentions” after each title—meaning how many times each Mandate appeared in my primary source of quotes—may be interpreted as a coincidental indicator of each Mandate’s priority ranking. Keep in mind:  Mandates tell us what we should be doing with our lives—they speak to our purposes for being here living this lifetime. Here too the reader is invited to consider their significance in comparison with the doctrinal beliefs of any religion(s) with which you may be familiar. Unless otherwise specified, these examples are from the life review sections of experiencer reports.

1. We are to love and help others. (11 mentions) Quote: “The most important of my actions was an instant I would never have recalled except for the near-death experience. I had taken a child aside on a very hot day. And this was not a charming or a particularly lovable child. But I wanted this child to feel loved; I wanted this child to feel, really, the love of God that brought him into existence and that brought us all into existence … I took him aside and gave him something to drink and just spent some time with him … And that was the greatest of all [my] actions. That filled me with unspeakable and incomprehensible joy. And it was not an action that anyone noticed. And it was not an action that I even recalled. And it was not an action that I had done with any thought of reward. It was simply an action motivated by love. By selfless love. [NDE experiencer Reinee Paserow]^9S61
2. We are to love each other. (9 mentions) Quote: “This is going to sound silly, but I let it slip that I hated Christianity. And this voice of God … laughed! God has a great sense of humor. Then I realized I didn’t hate Christianity and definitely did not hate Jesus, I just did not like some of his followers. … As I spoke with God, His love for me—this intense love that I can’t explain—was making me feel powerful. For a little while, God let me see through His eyes. I suddenly felt love for everyone.” [NDE experiencer Krystal Winzer]^9S238

Observation:  Not only is Loving established as the highest priority mandate by its total twenty mentions from which the first two examples are selected;  its twenty additional mentions related to similar titles below leave no doubt that the Godly mandate to Love is the paramount purpose of we spirits who are living a mortal lifetime on this earth. Love far outranks all other mandates.

3. Lighten up, don’t be so serious. (8 mentions) Quote: “It seemed impossible that I could be loved and accepted just as I was in that moment. Released from the burden of self punishment, embraced in the wholeness of this forgiving Presence, I was enveloped in joy. I seemed to become transparent, the light of divine love flowing through me. Then I heard … soft, benevolent laughter, which felt like the wise and gentle smile of the Buddha. Again, I was surprised and perplexed; I had not expected to hear laughter from a divine force. It rained over me like soft petals. Then it said: ‘My child, you mustn’t take things so seriously. You are just part of an evolutionary chain, in which all life evolves at different stages of development. You are only human. You need not judge yourself so harshly. Be gentle with yourself.’ I had gotten only the slightest glimpse of the limitless realms beyond the finite boundaries of the world we inhabit. I was eager to learn more.” [NDE experiencer Lee Thornton]^9S92
4. Love plants and animals. (5) Quote: “There is only one truly significant work to do in life, and that is love; to love nature, to love people, to  love animals, to love creation itself, just because it is. To serve God’s creation with a warm and loving hand of generosity and compassion—that is the only meaningful existence.” [Reflecting on teachings of his NDE: experiencer George Rodonaia, MD]^9S116
5. Love those who are unlovable. (5) Quote: “I thought loving other people was going to be easy, but it turns out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done … It’s easy for me to love my mother because she is a really nice woman; a very loving woman. It’s not hard to love someone who is really good and really loving. But what do you do with someone who is difficult, or really nasty? Those are hard people to love. And what does it mean to love someone? Sometimes to love someone means you need to incarcerate them. And that’s not a lot of fun. Sometimes loving someone means you have to put as much distance between them and you as possible and tell them to never call you. And that’s not a lot of fun. Loving people sounds so simple, but it’s very difficult.” [Reflecting on teachings of his NDE: experiencer Howard Storm]^9S77
6. Joyfully engage with life on Earth. (4) Quote: “I was told to think of my time on Earth as an extended visit to the ultimate theme park. Consider it a place with thrilling rides and various adventures that I could choose to experience or not. I was also reminded that the reason we leave the celestial realm at all was for the excitement, variety, adventure and entertainment that different incarnations offer. […] It was explained to me how most of our celestial, eternal knowledge is blanked-out during our chosen life spans on Earth. We must temporarily forget most of what our Higher Self already knows, so we can immerse ourselves in the roles we have chosen to play.” [NDE experiencer Duane S.]^9S110
7. Go ahead, make mistakes and learn from them. (4) Quote: “In the spiritual universe sin is not seen in the same way as it is here. In the spirit world, all things are learning experiences. We are here in this world to make mistakes, to learn and grow from them.” [Reflecting on teachings of her NDE: experiencer Jayne Smith]^9S130
8. We must love ourselves. (4) Quote: “I could see through God’s eye and feel through God’s heart. Together, we witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my 32 years of life was that I had never learned to love myself. […] I realized that God wants us to know that we only experience real pain if we die without living first. And the way to live is to give love to ourselves and to others. It seems that we are here to learn to give and receive love. But only when we heal enough to be real can we understand and give and receive love the way love was meant to be.” [NDE experiencer Barbara Harris Whitfield]^9S122
9. Love people and nature. (3) Quote: “All we have to do is just love God with all our heart and the way we do that is to love each other unconditionally, because God is in every one of us. So when I’m loving you I’m loving God. If I’m not loving you I’m not loving God. So, love God with all our heart. Love each other. Learn how to love unconditionally. And take care of this planet. If we all did that, we’d have Heaven on Earth right now.” [Reflecting on teachings learned: near-death-like experiencer Tony Woody]^9S313
10. Choose love over fear. (3) Quote: “When I was in that other realm, where the layers upon layers of my values and beliefs were stripped away, and I was left facing the truth of who I am at my core, I learned that two primary forces—love and fear—had been driving all my behaviors. One or the other of these two forces was behind every single action I ever took, and I could clearly see that I had, in fact, spent most of my life being driven by fear, not love. I understood with a sudden stunning clarity that to transform my life, whatever I said or did from that point on would need to come from a place of love instead of fear.” [NDE experiencer Anita Moorjani]^9S117
11. Overcome ego and unworthy urges. (1) Quote: My mission, I have come to understand, is to overcome the egoic challenges that all humans face. With humor and humility, we’re here to turn fear, anger, selfish greed, and gloating pride into love and compassion for all life.” [NDE experiencer Louisa Peck]^9S118
12. Always look for the lesson. (1) Quote: “The whole year after my accident was probably one of the hardest years of my life, and I often wondered why I was stupid enough to stay here and not leave when I had the chance. I kept yelling at myself, ‘What the heck were you thinking!?’ Now looking back at what I learned and how blessed I am today, I am so glad I stayed. When I see the rays of sun stream through the clouds sometimes, I get really homesick. To me, God is the Light. That is Him reminding me to remember how much He loves me, and I am never alone. And one day, I’ll get to go back to Him. Until then I plan on having a good time. I look at every obstacle as an adventure now, and I’m always looking for the lesson. It’s a wonderful game. Life is so much easier this way.” [Near-death-like experiencer Mary W.]^9S123

At face value, these Mandates lay out 1) individual purpose for living and 2) guidance for how to fulfill that purpose. But they also they speak to us collectively as communities and social groups. It thus seems self-evident that they equally apply to all humanity at the broadest possible scales in terms of the institutions we create to conduct our human affairs, including our largest political and economic systems that span the globe and exert great influence on billions of individuals, both directly and indirectly. The obvious connections between divinely-mandated moral/ethical behavior and the worldwide consequences of ignoring such mandates constitute the basis for the last chapter’s discussions:  of global warming’s disruptions of Earth’s planetwide natural systems;  of the perverse economic system incentives that are causing the disruptions;  and of democratic systemic alternatives that would foster equality and universal income adequacy.

As to my selections of the quotations above, different researchers using different sources would of course produce different quotes, and probably in different proportions than those appearing here—though, topically, selected quotes would almost certainly be similar. The particular ways in which I’ve arrayed them also likely differ from the ways other analysts would choose to array them. But these are details. I’ve studied this subject long enough to certify that the samples presented here are adequately representative to serve the informational purpose I intended.

In any case, the prospect of expanding this sort of analysis constitutes a wonderful potential for future research—by traditional theologians as well as conventional NDE researchers. Quotations by credible near-death experiences, particularly those quotes that reflect deeply meaningful communications they received directly from God or other spiritual entities, is a fertile field in which the surface has barely been scratched.

 

NDE Demographics and Credibility as Evidence

Everything I’m describing here seems ultimately important to me.  I pause to attest that I am faithfully reproducing, to the best of my ability, an accurate summary of events conveyed in many hundreds of NDE reports—reports I have personally read—by multitudes of people who have had NDEs and lived to tell what they experienced while officially dead or nearly so. I have been reading these reports and considering them in aggregate since 1975. After reading so many hundreds of reports (possibly thousands—one does not set out to keep count of how many one may read in the years ahead), always paying attention to their individualistic tones and nuances as well as their collective similarities, I think it would be difficult for any open-minded reader not to eventually conclude the veracity and truth told by so many people—people from every walk of life who don’t know each other but have all, in common but individually, had this most unusual experience. And what they tell is neither simple nor simplistic—it is very sophisticated.

If several thousand people who don’t know each other and live all over the map have looked you straight in your reading eye and sworn that they saw a white crow, you have fair grounds for concluding there really must be a white crow out there somewhere even though you’ve never seen it yourself. The sheer numbers of these people and the utter consistency of the things they report constitute per se evidence. It’s really no different than agreeing with a few thousand scientists who’ve all concluded that a big bang really happened, though nobody was actually there watching it happen, based on logical inference that, though sometimes tenuous and always hard to establish for the first time, is evidence.

In precisely this context, after some three decades of diligent, cautious scrutiny—not to mention the built-in caution of a long-ago federal military intelligence analyst trained to be doubtful and “consider the source”—all doubt left me. I firmly concluded these people are neither deluded nor confused about their personally experienced reality. I also decided that science’s casual dismissal of their utterly consistent stories, as if they were body-brain malfunctions or delusions, is no more than rationalizations contrived by critics who have not invested the time to simply read the tons of evidence now available to anyone who seeks a truly fair assessment. Later chapters will also address the inconsistency, bias and mindsets such critics display in other contexts.

The NDE features described above happen to a great many people all over the world every day. They add up to an estimated several thousand people every year, every one of whom experiences being dead, nearly dead or at high risk of death, but is revived or somehow survives. The same is true for the other four categories of spiritually transformative experiences, though they produce fewer reports. Nobody knows the true count of NDE and STE experiencers; estimates based on the ones we know about range generally between ten and twenty percent of the population—which, even at the low end, is a great many millions of people every year. It is likewise estimated that only perhaps a fourth to a half of the people who have these experiences ever tell somebody what they experienced—or put it in writing, much less submit such writing to one of the several NDE archives. Many people keep their experience mum for the rest of their lives, telling no one at all, usually for fear of being thought crazy. This regrettable reaction is all too common. The only certainty here is that, as a percentage of human population, there are “a lot” of NDEs happening—“many” every year. Certainly enough that they should be getting our attention.

Some fraction of the reports that actually get written find their way to dedicated repositories such as IANDS, ACISTE and NDERF (respectively: International Association for Near-Death Experiences, American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences, and the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation). There they become publicly available—online—for reading by anyone who wishes to look them up. Many such reports also get published in books written by people who have had these unusual experiences and wish to share them with others, along with the considerable research volumes produced by NDE scholars. Huge databases of such reports are available for public reading—far more than the count of exoplanets science has so far identified orbiting stars in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Who has near-death experiences? Self evident to the question of scientific credibility is the absolutely democratic nature of the affected population. NDEs recognize no social distinctions. They happen to rich people, to the abjectly poor, and all levels in between. They happen to anti-religious scientists and to anti-scientific religious believers, to atheists, religious fundamentalists and fanatics of both persuasions. They come alike to wise and foolish, to democrats and republicans, to sinners, scoundrels and saints, and to citizens of every nation on earth. They come to people who believe in ghosts and to people who don’t, to young toddlers and old elders and all ages in between. To amazed preachers who speak constantly of spiritual things they thought they “knew all about” and to non-believers who wouldn’t set foot in a church for love nor money.

Near-death experiences happen to people in brothels, in convents, in monasteries and in jail. Who you are and what you happen to believe about anything has absolutely no bearing on the matter. People who have near-death experiences are a completely representative cross section of society from which nobody is exempted on account of race, education, gender, politics, sexual orientation, age, tattoos, or any other basis whatsoever. They live all over the map. They don’t know each other, and, with so many thousands involved, collusion is out the question. So when they all report pretty much the very same things, what’s not to accept as true?

Credibility of their reports. Prominent in context of believability is the nature—the uncommon quality—of experiencers’ telling of their stories. The ways in which people describe their experiences, in their own everyday language, is both commonplace and articulate. Most of all, it is convincing. The people in this extraordinary mix, strangers to each other yet all telling the same things in their different words, have no reason to be exaggerating much less lying. Some are experienced writers but most are not. They all equally and obviously struggle to describe what happened and how they experienced it. Their reports represent honest, best efforts to describe, in words, many things that they all—every one of them—mutually insist simply cannot be adequately expressed in words.

Cases involving the very young are of special interest because guile is irrelevant. A case recorded by NDE researcher Kenneth Ring concerns a child who bit into an electrical cord at just under age two and a half. By the time his mother found him minutes later he was not breathing and had turned blue. Emergency room staff subsequently recorded that he had no heartbeat or respiration, his pupils were dilated, and his unresponsive condition persisted a full twenty-five minutes after arriving at the ER—an extreme excess over the 4-5 minutes after which absence of heartbeat is thought to cause irreversible brain damage and certain death. The child’s heartbeat and breath nevertheless returned and, though his development was delayed about six months, he regained normal functioning with no evidence of brain damage. When three months later his mother asked him what he remembered of the incident, he replied “I went in a room with a very nice man and sat with him.” Asked what they talked about he said, “He asked me if I wanted to stay there or come back to you. I wanted to be with you and come home.”

A person who experiences an NDE first-hand knows it happened, knows it was real, and will tell you so with great certainty—all many thousands of them. Many experiencers’ minds—formerly closed to the possibility of a spiritual existence outside the Earthly body they’ve inhabited since birthing into it—are immediately opened and firmly changed. Unlike science’s preferred third-person replicable experience, these first-person experiences can be “known” only by the persons who did the experiencing. For anyone else (like me) to believe the first-person experiencers’ stories, those stories must be convincing. And believe me they are—but only after you’ve read hundreds of them, all telling the same things in different words. Reading a couple of dozen or a mere fifty NDE reports does not yield an informed expert. That status is attained only after immersing one’s mind in hundreds of them, dispersed over time. Many small things must be noticed, and well reinforced, before the discerning mind becomes confidently convinced.

I invite anyone to read through not less than fifty NDE reports in one sitting—and fifty more at the next sitting. Repeat. Read on. The things I write here reflect my own accumulated understandings gained from the large number of reports I’ve read and considered over more than four decades.  The understandings I’ve gained mirror those of others who have examined many reports and written books on the knowledge NDEs convey to us. Like them, I eventually became convinced that NDE reports bring us a new, more meaningful understanding of reality. Such understanding comes to NDE experiencers in seconds; for the rest of us it takes a bit longer.

Some readers may wonder why anyone would bother to read hundreds of reports by people who—echoing each other—claim that 1) they remained vibrantly alive while their body died or nearly died, 2) they were presently restored to “Earth” life back in their body, and 3) they remember dramatic things they experienced during that brief interval between dead-or-almost-so and their return to living consciousness. I can answer that question of my own experience, which has never included an NDE. The veracity of these reports—and their value—can be adequately appreciated only after “so many” have been read, and the commonalities among them have become so self-apparent, that their value and truth simply cannot remain unrecognized. To acquire your own spiritual transformation, you need not undergo a near-death experience, you need only to read about the comparable experiences of many others.

Veridical cases:  NDE events verified by third-person observers

A “veridical” NDE is one in which the experiencer, during the NDE and while out of body, perceives something that another person or persons later independently confirm to be true. Examples include the “false teeth,” “shoe-on-the-ledge” and “shared-death-with-father” cases previously cited in this chapter. Interested readers may peruse 128 cases of veridical NDEs in the book The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena From Near-Death Experiences (by Titus Rivas et al, 2nd edition, published by IANDS, 2023).

In his 1975 book Life After Life that opened modern interest in NDEs, Raymond Moody drew first attention to the question of corroborating them: “The question naturally arises whether any evidence of the reality of near-death experiences might be acquired independently of the descriptions of the experiencers themselves.”  For a firm grounding on this matter I recommend a scholarly writing about veridical NDEs by Jan Miner Holden, which appears as chapter 9 in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Praeger Publishing, 2009). Holden defines a veridical NDE perception as “any perception—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and so on—that a person reports having experienced during one’s NDE and that is later corroborated as having corresponded to material consensus reality.” [Emphasis added] As an example she cites a man who during his NDE encountered a relative he presumed to be still living, but soon afterward received word that the relative had died shortly before his NDE episode occurred.

Holden also describes what I would call ‘the best, most incontestably believable’ veridical NDEs as “apparently nonphysical veridical perception” (AVP)—meaning cases in which it clearly would have been physically impossible for the NDE experiencer to have perceived something that is nevertheless reported as not only having been perceived but is also known by others to be true. A common and frequent example is those experiencers who report looking down from ceiling level at their own body and accurately reporting, quite specifically, what various doctors and nurses were doing and saying. This has happened even in cases where the body’s head was obscured behind a sterile sheet—even, in a few well documented cases, with the eyes taped shut and the ears plugged. Holden points to the extraordinary importance of qualifying AVP reports by noting that if AVP exists, then several conclusions follow. With what seems logical inerrancy, here are her conclusions briefly paraphrased in my own words:

• the subjective things experienced during an NDE are objectively verified; and
• the non-physical consciousness, by demonstrably functioning separate and apart from the physical body, thus directly and convincingly contradicts one of the most fundamental assumptions of institutional science: that the brain “produces” consciousness;
• ergo, consciousness must be presumed capable of continuing apart from and outside the body, and after the body’s physical death, exactly as NDE experiencers report; and
• the messages we received from NDE reports—those Teachings and Mandates I described earlier—are genuine divine guidance we should be recognizing and acting upon.

Holden’s context as always is scholarly. I would phrase the matter a tad differently: The human consciousness called “mind,” by demonstrating its ability to function at full or even superior intellectual capacity while verifiably away from the body, must be presumed to use the brain as a translation medium for mortal communication in like manner as a radio or television set that converts electromagnetic waves into sound and images. Conversations with spirits during an NDE convey conclusively that each human consciousness/mind existed immortally before this body’s birth and will so continue after its death; they also indelibly confirm the existence of God, of an immortal afterlife, and that each person has a purpose for choosing to live a mortal lifetime.

These if-then logical conclusions have great potential to revolutionize humanity’s understandings of ourselves, our origins, our purpose and our responsibilities toward each other. Let me be clear:  I am fully convinced that AVP veridical perception exists and applies to many NDE cases, and that the Teachings and Mandates mean exactly what they say—the skeptical hemings and hawings of science and religion notwithstanding. It is very, very clear to me and to others who have studied the matter that NDEs reveal 1) a whole new unrecognized realm of science and 2) a whole new moral/ethical/loving spirituality that institutional religions—on the record—neither include nor understand. It took me decades of invested conscious effort to reach these conclusions, with rational science ever as my context and guide. I have thus joined a large and growing segment of the population who are similarly convinced, and wonder if our numbers will reach a tipping point before or after science and religion finally, if ever, catch up.

The whole truth. Science, particularly, faces great need to expand beyond its entrenched dictum that researchers must study their subjects “directly”—in contexts replicable by third-persons under a microscope or manipulable in mathematical equations—and acknowledge the utter validity of first-person experience. It may be harder to work with, but it happens to be the truth. Science cannot “directly” study what it thinks it knows about the big bang, so what is so hard about the evidence of thousands who attest that they existed consciously while quite outside the brain? “Classical” science has helped lift us from the Middle Ages to profligate overconsumption and Earth climate derangement. A new “Whole” science, now moving in and replacing the old by encompassing it—subsuming it—is overdue to be recognized for what it is: the whole truth.

Help others, attain knowledge. If our great institution of modern science could make the break of expanding beyond its self-limiting third-person doctrine—which barely existed as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century—then maybe the world’s largest Fellowship-of-the-Open-Mind could help lead the rest of us to a new focus on the very little that’s truly important:  the NDE-derived mandates to love (help others) and learn (attain knowledge). As the ruinous global overheating we continue stoking steadily overtakes and overwhelms us, God knows such spirit-lifting open-minded leadership is needed as never before in all human history.

 

The hard-rock NDE SKEPTICS.

Many non-material aspects of our familiar world are inaccessible to our ordinary senses. Radio and television waves are easy examples, not to mention the satellites and unobtrusively ubiquitous towers that keep your smartphone and GPS magically connected with almost the entire planet. These now-familiar things were undreamed of as recently as the U.S. Civil War (James Clerk Maxwell proposed radio waves’ existence in 1867), so keeping an open mind toward the possibility that some other unfamiliar and undiscerned level of reality may transcend the physical world we perceive is not in the least unscientific or unreasonable. However…

…a persistent clatch of doubters are quite certain that NDEs are not real. NDEs represent nothing more than the flickering spasms of dying brain cells, they say, and almost universally regard them as an artifact of the dying process. Their doubtful certainty is intransigent, and is based—they claim—on scientific grounds and sound reasoning. Never mind that many of the brains who report NDE features are in fact not dying and often not even at risk of dying. Never mind that STEs are experienced by people who are perfectly healthy and wide awake—or have in fact shared a loved one’s spiritual departure. Never mind these well documented facts—much better documented than, say, the sequence and process by which galaxies and stars come into being.

I have long noticed that skeptics’ arguments are neither scientific nor definably logical, they are typically ideological—they have an ax to grind. Their tactical approach to debate concerning NDEs is to assume superior intellect and set about putting NDE spokespersons in their place. They readily tell you they already have their minds made up, and many unhesitatingly declare that nothing—nothing, they insist—could possibly change their minds. No doubt this is true.

The alternate reality reported by NDE experiencers cannot be real—these doubters insist with certainty—because… (their reasoning brains reason) …because science knows God does not exist …because an afterlife is obviously a myth …and everyone knows the brain creates the mind, so …and therefore any interpretations otherwise have just got to be rank superstition. Case closed. Be indignant. Deny these NDEs’ existence. Refuse to investigate…  Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between these true-believer skeptics and a true-believer tent evangelist. In the year 1912, Thomson J. Hudson, PhD, LLD, author of The Law of Psychic Phenomena, in a fully relevant comparable context, said it quite well:

The man who denies the phenomena of spiritism today is not entitled to be called a skeptic, he is simply ignorant; and it would be a hopeless task to attempt to enlighten him. … Modern scientists have an easy way of treating such phenomena, which consists in denying their existence and refusing to investigate. Such men would plug their own ears and deny the phenomenon of thunder if they could not account for it by reference to laws with which they are familiar. And such a proceeding would be no more senseless than, at this day, to deny the phenomenon of [spiritism]…NDEs. [revisionism added]

Laws with which they are familiar… Indeed. Following are a few examples of the skeptical reasonings commonly cited to deny the possibility that NDEs might be real and reveal a broader reality than the laws with which science is—so far—familiar. These examples are covered in detail in the scholarly NDE publication Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly et al., 2007.

Reduced blood flow to a dying brain. Hallucination(s) caused by reduced oxygen and increased carbon dioxide in the dying brain is one of the most persistent circumstances cited by skeptics to theorize away NDEs as the mere predictable consequence of a heart that has stopped pumping blood to the brain. One version of this theory, the unconscious dreamlets experienced by fighter pilots when subjected to extreme acceleration in a centrifuge, gets referenced as an example of “induced NDE-like” features such as tunnel vision, bright lights, brief fragmented visual images and a sense of floating or leaving the body.

The reference is ridiculous. Such artificial circumstances never remotely match the detailed complexity of features that commonly occur over and over again during real NDEs, much less their sophisticated and detail-laden features such as communication with deceased relatives or experiencing a life review. Hallucinations doubtlessly “can” occur in some dying brains in some circumstances, but calling them equivalent to the realistically-perceived NDE features described in this chapter is unsupported supposition that blindly denies reality. Done in the name of science it is especially disgraceful, because claiming them as a cause of NDEs commits the scientific sin of false generalizing. The generalization ignores the multitude of NDEs that comparably occur in situations where neither reduced oxygen nor increased carbon dioxide is in any way involved, such as non-life-threatening illnesses, life-threatening falls, impending accidents, or indeed several of the STEs described earlier in this chapter.

Neurochemical theories.  NDEs are proposed to be generated by the endorphins or other endogenous opioids that may be released by a stressful facing-death situation that brings on an NDE. Endorphins are known to quickly bring on pain cessation and feelings of peace and wellbeing, which of course are common NDE features. However, neurochemicals produce long lasting effects once released—their injection in pain patients, for example, lasts for hours. In contrast, NDEs typically begin with abrupt onset and pain relief lasts only until the NDE ends, which may be no more than seconds later. Here too, sophisticated features such as life review, exploring “Heaven” and All-Knowing are clearly not “caused” by endorphins or opioids.

Migraine auras and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep intrusions are cited as physical phenomena that “might” share causal mechanisms in common with NDEs. One skeptical set says NDE experiences of going through the tunnel reflect dying-brain memories of “coming down the birth canal.” Then there’s the claim (cited in Kelly et al, above) that the list of mental phenomena seen in temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe stimulation “includes all the NDE phenomena.” “All of them,” that last one claims, though by no stretch does it include “all” the variety and intellectual complexity of real NDEs, such as: life reviews; floating around a hospital out-of-body, feeling a vibratory tingle as you pass through walls and ceilings; having meaningful intelligent conversations with God; or meeting a smiling younger-looking Aunt Jane whose body died just last night and you hadn’t even heard about it yet when your NDE happened.

Skeptics’ imaginative examples are endless, and the wider they range the more ridiculous the claims become. They all quite ignore science’s favorite rule of thumb—Ockham’s razor—in which the simplest, most straightforward answer is the favored default option because “it’s the one most likely to be the truth.” Ockham thus in fact automatically advises, “NDEs are exactly what they seem to be:  an extrasensory porthole through which we are shown a broader reality than the one to which our bodily senses are accustomed. The simplest answer is the most likely to be true. But here, and here only, skeptics reject Ockham because to this broader reality we have assigned the label “spiritual.” Let us note the persistent inconsistency of skeptic bias.

Generally speaking, virtually all skeptic arguments against the reality of NDEs represent degrees of mental contortion. Skeptics consistently and grossly misrepresent the sophisticated scenarios and intelligent, articulate reports quoted here and elsewhere as if they were “nothing but” the hallucinations of dying brains and similar trivial misinterpretations. They cherry-pick this and don’t mention that. Anyone who has read NDE reports widely and honestly considered their deeply moral metaphysical implications, and has likewise read many skeptical arguments, can scarcely avoid concluding that these skeptics don’t know what they’re talking about. They quite obviously cannot have read, honestly analyzed or fully considered a respectable fraction of the transformative facts about NDEs. Their off-handed dismissals remind me of politics these days. Scholars who dig deeper consistently reach much different conclusions than do the skeptics.

The NDE skeptics mentioned here are a relatively small subset of the whole population of modern scientists. Most other scientists may not be as phobic as are these, but the institution of science as a whole is today in fact biased against the very concept of spirituality—though by the rules of their own game, they cannot disprove it. NDEs are quintessentially spiritual in nature, therefore they represent an arena against which all scientists, by their training, are biased—which is just another way of saying that science’s default mindset is closed to the possibility that NDEs can describe reality. This is particularly sad, because it has larger negative implications for the society of which science is an integral part.

To be thought insignificant

Scientists seem ever anxious to tell us why we should feel small and insignificant. Seemingly vexed over non-scientists’ failure to feel small and insignificant, they continually harp on this so we won’t miss it. Quite agreeing (with each other) that our ordinary little sun and rocky little undistinguished planet Earth give humankind zero grounds for feeling special about itself—not even at the center of the universe, they usually add—they repeat this scientifically fashionable blather about human insignificance ever and again ad nauseum. Now, a normal measure of humility is doubtless a good thing, but this groveling perception of our human worth and importance seems a tad extremist to me. Such insignificance sentiment pops up gratuitously in a great many books written by scientists, over-reacting still yet today to the bad old Church’s house arrest and persecution of poor Galileo, those four long centuries ago, when Galileo had good science on his side and the Church was dead wrong. But they never mention the rest of the story……about how brash Galileo pushed his luck, wrote indiscreet words, and seriously pissed off his erstwhile friend the Pope.

Had they not been erstwhile friends Galileo could well have burned at the stake like poor big-mouthed Bruno before him. In his stubborn determination to spread Copernicus view of a sun-centered universe, Galileo wrote a mocking “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” The play had three characters: Sagredo, Salviati and Simplicio. The first two names were friends of Galileo who had died, and the arguments he wrote for them openly defend the sun-centered views of Copernicus. By contrast, Simplicio is a fictitious character Galileo invented to defend the geocentric view of Earth as immobile, the center of God’s Creation—i.e., the longtime and intransigent Vatican position. In Italy in those days it was well understood that Simplicio meant “simpleton.” In the dialogue, Simplicio’s arguments are unmistakably similar to Earth-centered arguments that had been quite publicly laid forth by the Pope. The Church being the power it was in those days, Galileo’s trial and house arrest followed soon after. It wasn’t only what he said, it was—you might say—the sarcastic way he said it.

And that’s the amusing true tale scientists never mention when railing over their endless war with what they call wholly-superstitious religion. I think it’s time and overdue to get over it, and move on to something more positive. On wholly scientific grounds, I also think Homo sapiens—like all other living things—are indeed significant and exceedingly special, their very existence a miracle of the first order. In some ways science has become like contemporary politics—a much degraded version of its formerly more honorable self. They both have great need to catch up with the reason we’re all here:  to love, forgive and help each other (even the unlovable), to attain knowledge (and understanding, and wisdom), and to grow in spirit (ever rising, upward).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2.  SCIENCE: Third-Person Consensus With Uncertainty                          

 

10-Scientists ready for new exploring                                                         2: SCIENCE

I must say, I emerged from these enlightening, meaningful analytical experiences with deepened certainty that we—the extended NDE community—have but scratched the surface on the knowledge and significance buried throughout the accumulated thousands of reports by near-death experiencers. I urge the NDE research community to pursue the insights available—for whole societies as well as individuals—through categorical analysis of the quotations embedded in NDE reports. The hundreds of quotes presented in the three cited books are a good place to start, but that’s just three books. Practical search linkages between the large IANDS, NDERF and ACISTE databases would be immeasurably helpful, if such linkages don’t already exist. I join your proposal responders in urging new efforts to invite and collaborate in thoughtfully designed analyses with willing scholars in the scientific community at large. Science news sources indicate that growing numbers of physicists, exasperated over a century’s accumulation of unanswered mysteries at the foundation of all science, are more than ready to extend their search for understanding into paradigm-challenging new corners. This new trend is over and above a Pew Research Center finding that fifty-one percent of professional scientists identify as “spiritual or religious.” Clearly, a meaningfully large audience exists for IANDS pronouncements on overlapping spiritual and scientific mysteries. I want to list some of those mysteries.

11-Science mysteries                                                                                     2: SCIENCE

Science is replete with very large, quite fundamental long-unanswered questions worthy of attention in new exploratory contexts for which the relevance of NDE databases is self evident. What—for example—is Consciousness? But then also: Where did the big bang come from? Where does zero-point energy appear from and vanish back to, fleetingly, constantly, in every cubic inch throughout the universe? Why do the constants of nature remain exquisitely constant while absolutely everything else in nature constantly changes? Is there, really, any difference between particles and waves? Why are black holes oddly implosive opposites of the explosive big bang, and do they have some “balancing role with regard to universal energy? Indeed, WHAT IS ENERGY? What is entanglement? Dark matter? Dark energy? Why does the borderland “between” quantum and classical domains remain unreconciled after a century and more—what is materialist science overlooking? People who have NDEs say they experienced timelessness; can this first-person real experience possibly be correlated with quantum physicists’ identical assertion that time, though we experience it constantly throughout our lives, is in reality illusion? Does that unexplained “veil” that normally blocks mortal perception of the spirit realm somehow correlate with the supposedly unsurpassable Einsteinian limit known as the speed of light?

12-Matter vs energy                                                                                      2: SCIENCE

Scientific tradition divides universal substance into two categories: energy and matter. Energy—whatever that is—came first, in the big bang’s explosion through that infinitely tiny dot of primal singularity. But then—micro-instants after the big bang—energy transmogrified into quarks, which conjoined themselves into protons and neutrons and electrons, which merged themselves into atoms, which in turn hooked themselves together to form molecules which are called the lowest level of “matter.” The multiplying molecules then gathered themselves into vast gaseous nebula from which galaxies and stars and planets self organized and you know the rest of the story. The molecules comprising a solid oak dining table consist of atoms that are almost totally empty space except for miniscule “spaces” (or something) that are “occupied” by the nucleus (protons plus neutrons) and surrounding electrons, every one of which is “nothing but” energy. You cannot slap your hand through that “solid” oak tabletop, but multiple NDE experiencers report feeling a “tingling” sensation when they, out of body, passed through solid hospital walls. Why is that? The apparent solidity of what science calls matter is really illusion, it’s actually energy acted upon in infinite morphological forms by the “forces” (whatever that means) we call gravity, electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force—all of which came through that same big bang—somehow—along with the energy. And science insists that all this—all of it—“just happened, no reason.” Can that make sense to anybody? We’ve all lived our entire lives immersed in cause and effect, so if intuition insists science has to be wrong, trust it. Act on it.

13-Micro-macro divide                                                                                 2: SCIENCE

Scientists call physics the foundation of all knowledge about reality. If so, quantum physics is the concrete footer beneath the foundation. But footers are solid and the quantum world is not—it is indescribably tiny and immaterial. Like light, it cannot be touched. Scientists say reality divides naturally into the micro-quantum world, consisting of everything from the atom on down to the smallest known part which is a quark, and the macro-classical world consisting of everything else from the two-atom molecule on up to the universe as a whole. They study the classical (big) world mostly with telescopes, and the quantum (tiny) world with magnetic super-colliders.

14-Science acknowledges half the immaterial world                                 2: SCIENCE

Scientists are rightly proud of how much they have learned about immaterial reality, mainly by clever experiment plus reasoned deduction, induction, inference and quite a bit of math-based guessing. Importantly here, they fully acknowledge the unquestionable existence of the non-material reality of the quantum world—but then they study only a fraction of it, and deny the reality of that other fraction of non-material reality that we know is revealed by NDEs. In general, mainstream scientists refuse to even look at the non-material NDE evidence, and the few who do seem ever intent only on debunking. This tired old repeating story goes back at least to Galileo, evidencing how religious dogmatism lives on perversely in scientific quarters that think themselves quite anti-religious.

15-Many worlds & Schrodinger’s cat                                                         2: SCIENCE

Illustrating the inconsistency, many scientists believe—in the manner of all true believers—in the ludicrous “many worlds” theory in which every slightest change, by anyone or anything, causes the universe to split into two universes—one in which the change took place and another in which it didn’t. Multiplied by the numbers of all living human, animal and plant change agents all over the Earth, after just a couple of minutes the universe has thusly subdivided into uncountable infinities of multiverses. But that figure, they avow, must again be multiplied by all the agents that ever lived over the past billions of years, plus all the rocks that ever fell or didn’t fall. This multiverse “solution” helps, they say, to “work around” irresolvable conundrums in the arcane math whereby they deduce conclusions about quantum physics. Squadrons of PhDs and not a few Nobels actually profess to believe this stuff, even while declining to take a few looks at the extraordinarily convincing NDE evidence of spiritual reality.

If you think many-worlds kooky, consider this gem. In quantum physics, subatomic entities can exist in multiple states at the same time, a counterintuitive but real condition called quantum superposition. Or example, particles can be waves, and vice versa, simultaneously. This apparent impossibility is said to exist until some interaction—typically a human trying to measure it—causes the superposition to “collapse” to a single state. In the 1930s many scientists subscribed to the notion that collapse could occur only when viewed by a conscious observer. Austrian physicist Irwin Schrodinger thought this patently absurd and devised a thought experiment in which a cat is enclosed inside a box with a vial of cyanide that “might, maybe” be broken by a little hammer. Schrodinger logically applied the absurd conclusion that the poor cat must be “both alive and dead” until a human raised the lid and looked inside to discover the unfortunate cat’s actual fate. For nearly a century now his cat has been widely cited to “illustrate” collapse of quantum superposition—until someone measures it—by ignoring the obvious:  since our evolved human species has existed for only about 300,000 years, how did the universe manage to get along without us for the preceding thirteen billion years? Clearly we in the NDE community have some work to do on collaboration with our would-be learned colleagues in science.

17-Principles of evolution                                                    2: SCIENCE &  4: THE GA

The six principles are: cause and effect; progression through random chance; self organization; emergence; increasing complexity, and net upwardly rising spiritual growth. The first five are all well recognized by science, but not in this grouped context. So grouped they greatly clarify the absolutely central role evolution plays in what I must call a Creator’s divinely ingenious grand plan. By tracing universal evolution backwards, these principles become self evident. In universal context, they operated within the big bang itself and they have operated throughout the unfolding universe ever since. In spiritual context, they imply that the Creator set it all loose in the big bang and then kept hands off, letting it go as it will (though quietly reserving an option, as some NDErs report, for the occasional medical miracle here and there).

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 OUTLINE/CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1.  NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: First-Person Knowing With Certainty

Chapter 2.  SCIENCE: Third-Person Consensus With Uncertainty

Chapter 3.  RELIGION: Received Assertions Perceived as Knowing

Chapter 4.  THE GODLY ALGORITHM: Logical Correlation of Consistent Evidence

Chapter 5.  OUR EXISTENTIAL SITUATION: Today Creates Tomorrow                    

*            *

 

Chapter 1.  NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: First-Person Knowing With Certainty

What If and Suppose

DEFINITION of a Near-Death Experience

SEMI-SEQUENCE of NDEs

CATEGORIES of NDEs                      

INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW of NDE features, Context, Learning and Knowing  

TWO CLASSIC NDES    [Mentally naked before God;   Interactive life Review

The (dozen or so) FEATURES of Near-Death Experiences

1. Out-of-body experience

2. Exploring and ranging

3. Meeting other spirits

4. Going through a tunnel

5. Enfoldment into loving light

6. Life review

7. Experiencing the spirit realm

8. The boundary and the choice

9. Return to the body

SIGNIFICANT AFTEREFFECTS of NDEs

10. Reception by others, pro and con

11. Spiritual transformation            Examples:  Certainty of life beyond bodily death;                         .                      Loss of the fear of death;   Changed beliefs;   Transformed values

12. Choose a different life path

The OVERALL CONTEXT of NDEs

1. Exceptional lucidity

2. Transcendental

3. Exceptionally strong emotions

4. Ineffability

5. Absence of pain

6. Desire to remain in the spirit realm

7. Loss of control

8. Absence of time

Five Kinds of SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES (STEs) 

1. Near-death experiences (NDE)

2. Perfectly healthy and wide awake (PHWA)

STE Case 1: Side Trip;       STE Case 2: Faces;   Reflections on the Faces experience

3. Shared death experiences (SDE)

4. After-death communications (ADC)

5. Lucid dreams

Other types of paranormal experiences

NDE TEACHINGS AND MANDATES

TEACHINGS Learned From NDEs

1. Religious doctrine and creed mean nothing

2. Religions don’t matter, they come and go

3. Race and sex mean nothing

4. Time is an illusion

5. Many NDE cases are consistent with evolution

6. Miraculous cures are associated with NDEs

7. Angels guide, protect and teach us

8. Souls learn best while in body

9. An Earthly lifetime has many advantages for growth

10. We choose our Earthly lifetime

MANDATES Learned From NDEs: Necessary Understandings of Purpose

1. We are to love and help others

2. We are to help each other

3. Lighten up, don’t be so serious

4. Love plants and animals

5. Love those who are unlovable

6. Joyfully engage with life on Earth

7. Go ahead, make mistakes, and learn from them

8. We must love ourselves

9. Love people and nature

10. Choose love over fear

11. Overcome ego and unworthy urges

12. Always look for the lesson

NDE DEMOGRAPHICS AND CREDIBILITY AS EVIDENCE

Veridical cases: NDE events verified by third-person

The Hard-rock NDE SKEPTICS

To be thought insignificant

 

Chapter 2.  SCIENCE: Third-Person Consensus With Uncertainty

New scientific understanding

White crows and unfamiliar laws of nature

What is science?

A scientific mystery: What is consciousness?

…Consciousness pursuing science

Energy-related mysteries of the universe

…A scientific mystery: The irreconcilable macro-micro boundary

…A scientific mystery: Constants of nature

…A scientific mystery: Particles and waves

…A scientific mystery: Entanglement

…A scientific mystery: Dark matter

…A scientific mystery: Dark energy

Yet Bigger energy-related mysteries

…A scientific mystery: Zero-point energy

…A scientific mystery: Black holes

…A black hole-based testable alternative to the standard model

…A scientific mystery: The big bang        Example 1     Ex 2      Ex 3     Ex 4

…A scientific mystery: What is energy?

First pattern: Five principles of Evolution

Cause & effect;    random chance;    Self-organization;  Emergence;  Rising complexity

Second pattern: Four phases of Evolution

…Phase 1:  Evolution of universal structures

Very early universe     Merely early universe     Still pretty early universe     Gravity takes over

…Phase 2: Biological evolution of lifeforms

…Phase 3: Cultural evolution of lifeform intgeractions

…Phase 4: Spiritual evolution  (deferred to Chapter 4)

The century directly ahead as probability (refer to Quotes in Chapter 5)

Science as a state of mind

CONDENSE TO A FEW PARAGRAPHS

…Scientific method(s):    –Ever-provisional vs certitude

–Third-person perspective in extremis (blind spot)

–Gradations of mindset: Open; Biased; Closed

…Unchanging: Gases=pvt;  Energy as unity; atom to molecule

…Ever changing: Time as sequence;   evolve by chance – emerge — rise

…Correlative Ways of knowing:  Instinct/simple vs consciousness/complex;

…Scientific silos:  Physics-Chemistry-Biology-Social science

…Science without boundaries:  Perceiving systems & subsystems;  Analyzing chaos

…Science as simplistic: 1-Ockham; 2-math models; 3-Manyworlds silliness; 4-fMRI/other myths

…Science as arrogance      1-Overstating humankind’s worthlessness;

2-Default skepticism:  Ockham and Galileo

 

Chapter 3.  1^st title: RELIGION: Received Assertions Perceived as Knowing

Childhood through Teens    …Music: Can’t both be right     …Pages floating down     …Unsaved babies in India   …Church around the block   …To save bad teenage boys   …My mother’s worry off my back      …Face to face with BillyGraham fanaticism

Young adulthood through middle age    …European history   …Leonard/Atheism  …Agnostic 45 years   …Age 51: Compulsion: ask questions, seek answers, attain knowledge                         .99     Insights gained between middle and old age       …Scholars avoid definitions of religion

…The world’s great religions:  …Experiential origins   …East (free self) vs west (guilt-save)

…Abrahamic legacy: …Judgment and punishment …Doctrine in stasis

…Christianity: …Jesus vs Paul;    …Hostile takeover;     …New Testament orthodoxy;

…Reincarnation;    …Made-up doctrines (Trinity; Papal Infallibility; Heresy; Exorcism

M’sippisea                                                                                                                                                                Learnings and reasonings of the last 17 years   …Religion v morality: Good people of any ilk

…The many names of God   …Images of God   …Theism, pan-theism, panentheism

…NDE Teachings/Mandates vs organized religions

…Three highlights: 1) Non-Judgement; 2) What have you brought me?  3) All as it should be

 

Chapter 4.  THE GODLY ALGORITHM: Logical Correlation of Consistent Evidence

Laws of Spiritual Evolution:  …Self-organizing;  …Emergence   …Rising   …Veil time as sequence enabling growth;  …Experience, grow, return   …A reason WHY

 

Chapter 5.  OUR EXISTENTIAL SITUATION: Today Creates Tomorrow

Human needs equitably met

…Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

…Economic rights   [to needs for life and functioning in modern society]

…Economic/political confusion

…Systemic third options

…Our final opportunity for ethical choices    [love/caring vs indifference;    generosity vs greed;

cooperation vs competition      commons vs individualism]

Evolving Earth: The three centuries ahead                                                                           .         99 …

…First cause: human overbreeding

…Secondary causes     [over-demand for food, building materials, everything else]

…Ill effects and consequences

-On our Earth        [ocean rise;    food chains collapse;      weather & climate]

-On our fellow lifeforms        [habitat division, overbuilding & destruction]

…Loss of irreplacable diversity

…Population reduction and survival

The fourth phase:  Spiritual evolution

…Values of the survivors

-Purpose: Help others, attain knowledge; Learn to love unconditionally

-Lifelong education: The Phoenix Values

…Fourth density

Appendices:   NDE Teachings and Mandates

                            The Phoenix Values

Notes