To begin with, those who have had a near-death experience are almost universally convinced of the reality of life after death and see their fear of death vanish. That is, those who have actually had the experience—including those who were previously die-hard atheist physicalists—are sure that consciousness goes on after permanent bodily death.
Another aspect of NDErs’ accounts that weighs against the hallucination hypothesis is the fact that 71% of NDErs say that their NDE memories are clearer and more vivid than those of other events. In fact, one common observation made by NDErs is that the experience was “realer than real.” Compared to what they experience in the NDE, normal life seems like a dream.
NDErs also commonly report that, during the NDE, they not only perceive more, with 360-degree vision and the ability to perceive events at a distance in space and time, but they also describe their thinking as being faster and clearer. Dr. Bruce Greyson reports in his 2021 book After that, among more than a thousand NDErs he’s surveyed in his 45 years of studying the phenomenon, “half described their thinking during the NDE as clearer than usual, and almost as many described it as faster than usual.”
The vast majority of his NDErs who described experiencing life reviews reported them as “more vivid than ordinary memories.” Some even noted that they were able to perceive more detail in their life review than when the events actually happened to them. An NDEr named Tom Sawyer, for instance, reports that, during one scene of his life review, he was able to perceive things so clearly that he could have counted the number of mosquitoes present. An NDEr named Peggy says that, during her NDE, “I did not have the limited consciousness I have on earth. It felt like I had 125 senses to our normal five. You could do, think, comprehend, and so on, you name it, with no effort at all. It’s as if the facts are right before you in plain sight with no risk of misinterpretation because the truth just is! Nothing is hidden.”
Another woman, a Canadian anthropologist, reports that, during her NDE, “I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree [sic] spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher.”
Some NDErs feel they suddenly understand huge quantities of information about the universe, only some minor portion of which they are able to retain when they return to their body. According to surveys conducted through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website, 30.7% of NDErs felt that, during their NDE, they understood everything “about the universe.” In fact, experience in an NDE is so different from normal experience that NDErs have trouble even describing it. NDEr Steve Luiting reports, “The language spoken [during the NDE] was much, much more complex and could literally encapsulate experiences. Even the memories when coming back into my body flattened, simplified, and became symbols of what really happened. I believe this flattening happens simply because the human brain can’t understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien.”
It’s intriguing to consider the idea of “super-survival,” the idea that our post-death selves may actually be a significantly enhanced version of the selves we currently experience ourselves as having. As one NDEr has said, “Our identity will continue to be—in a greater way.” But whether or not our consciousness is in fact enhanced after the death of our bodies, the most important point to recognize here is the sheer number of near-death experiencers (again, 4-15% of the general population) and their overwhelming conviction that what they’ve experienced is indicative of survival of consciousness after the permanent death of the body.
As philosopher Jens Amberts emphasizes in his forthcoming book Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists, “at least some NDErs were equally as skeptical of the existence of an afterlife or of the idea that NDEs are or can be indicative of an afterlife as we may be now, and at least some of them also shared the intensity of that skepticism, and at least some of them also shared whatever justifications we may think or feel that we have for that skepticism. And yet, the NDE thoroughly and justifiably convinced them that there really is an afterlife....”
When so many eye-witnesses with reasoning faculties similar to our own all say the same thing, we do well to pay attention— especially when these reports offer us a glimpse into a state of being that, to the rest of us, is the equivalent of a locked room. Rather than insist that it’s impossible for what’s in that room to be different than what we experience outside it, we would do well to take seriously the testimony of those who have the relevant firsthand knowledge.
At the same time, despite all the compelling evidence from NDEs that consciousness doesn’t depend on a functioning brain, it’s still true that NDEs are not actually testimonies from people whose bodies are permanently dead, but only people whose bodies are provisionally, reversibly dead. Despite their conviction otherwise, it is still logically possible that their experiences do not accurately reflect what we will experience when our bodies permanently die and degrade.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.
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