NDE life reviews: Ruickbie excerpt #7

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

Albert Heim

In 1871, the Swiss geologist Albert Heim (1849–1937) was mountain climbing in the Appenzell Alps in northeastern Switzerland. Leading a party down a steep snowfield on 2,502 m (8,209 ft) high Mt Säntis, he lost his footing and went over a cliff. As he tumbled more than 60 ft in free fall, a curious thing happened, time slowed down: “What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time.” He had time to plan what to do before he hit the ground – keep hold of his Alpenstock or let go, take off his glasses, or keep them on? – worry about missing his inaugural university lecture in five days time, and wonder how his loved ones would take the news of his death.

His train of thought was suddenly interrupted: “I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance.” When he hit the snowfield below, he lay unmoving. His companions must have thought him dead, but he recovered consciousness and was fit enough to give his lecture. Despite pursuing a glowing career in geology, Heim never forgot his experience on Säntis and collected thirty similar accounts told to him in person by fellow mountaineers (including the British physicist John Tyndall), soldiers, construction workers and others who had had what today we would call near-death experiences. His was the first systematic study of such experiences and he discovered that many others had felt that “time became greatly expanded,” often with “a sudden review of the individual’s entire past.”

Since then reports of what has become known as “life review” have increased dramatically. In 1998, Dr. Jeffrey Long established the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) to collect firsthand accounts of people’s near-death experiences using an online questionnaire. In the first ten years of running this project he received over 1,300 reports of NDEs. As of 14 June 2021, NDERF has now received 4,929 reports from people all over the world.

The first case he documented was that of Dr. George Rodonaia, with an MD and PhDs in neuropathology and the psychology of religion, Rodonaia was just about the best qualified person to have a near-death experience and had one of the most astonishing near-death experiences on record. Before emigrating to the USA in 1989, Rodonaia was a research psychiatrist at the University of Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union. In 1976, he was hit by a car and pronounced dead at the scene. Near-death researcher Phyllis Atwater, who got to know Rodonaia well, said he had been assassinated by the KGB. Being dead he was taken to a morgue and remained there for three days, only showing signs of life when a doctor started to perform an autopsy. As a scalpel cut into his abdomen, he felt his consciousness being forced back into his body. Among other things, he described this experience:

I underwent what has been called the ‘life-review process,’ for I saw my life from beginning to end all at once. I participated in the real life dramas of my life, almost like a holographic image of my life going on before me – no sense of past, present or future, just now and the reality of my life. It wasn’t as though it started with birth and ran along to my life at the University of Moscow. It all appeared at once. There I was. This was my life.

Atwater could understand what he was talking about, she had experienced three NDEs following a miscarriage. During the second episode she experienced a profound life review:

I remembered hearing stories of past life reviews, a particular feature of dying common to all, where your life passes before you at great speed for final review. Remembering this, I expected some kind of theatrical showing of my life as Phyllis or perhaps something like a television replay, but such was not the case. 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 passers-by 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. No detail was left out.

What is evidentially important here is that her experience did not match her expectations; she could not be said to have had a life review because she expected to have one. And then there’s the quality of her life review itself. What is also remarkable is that life review often involves, as in Atwater’s case, a total and immersive re-enactment at a transcendent level. It is not a simple replay of the past, which would situate the person’s consciousness within their past self, but an experience with depth, an actual reality, often extended beyond what would have been the person’s perspective in life, whilst maintaining an ordinarily impossible exterior conscious awareness.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.