MD calls the NDE an "Actual Death Experience"

Dr. Sam Parnia presents several striking NDE accounts, but also discusses possible medical explanations due to lack of oxygen, chemicals present in the body, and psychological hypotheses. Noting that contemporary medical care in hospitals has extended the time a patient can be without heart or brain function, and yet be resuscitated, Parnia suggests the phrase Actual Death Experience (ADE) is often more accurate than Near-Death Experience (NDE).

One of Parnia’s patients shared with him this life review during his NDE: I wasn’t just watching the events. I was reliving the experience from their point of view and at the same time (and I don’t know how this works) I was also experiencing it from a higher reality; the truth of the matter. I saw my own lies and my own self-deception, which I had used to convince myself that doing certain things was okay because people had deserved it.

Then I was experiencing the emotional impact it had on other people. I felt their pain. I felt the shock on them. But then at the same time I also saw that they have their own lies and self-deceptions and so the net result was that I felt like I was a failure as a person and I wasn’t the person I had thought I was. I felt really dreadful and it was completely humbling.

The NDE survivor clearly affirmed: the judgment came all from myself. It was not from an outside source, but then this being that was with me was also sending me comforting messages—thank goodness!—and one of them was it was alright as I was only human.

Parnia writes of a case involving a three-and-a-half-year-old boy named Andrew who had open-heart surgery. Two weeks after the surgery, Andrew asked his parents when he could go back to the sunny place with all the flowers and animals. His mother said, yes, they’d go to the park again.

No, I don’t mean the park, he said. I mean the sunny place I went to with the lady. When she asked what lady, he replied, The lady that floats.

“His mother told him she didn’t understand what he meant.

You didn’t take me there. The lady came and got me. She held my hand and we floated up. You were outside when I was having my heart mended. It was okay, the lady looked after me, the lady loves me. It wasn’t scary. Everything was bright and colorful [but] I wanted to come back to see you.

Later, in an unrelated situation, Andrew’s mother showed him a photo of her own mother, who had passed away. Andrew said, That’s her. That’s the lady. The lady he was referring to was his deceased grandmother.”

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 133-138.