Near death experiences: Fenwick excerpt #8

Advocate for the Afterlife: "In this session we present some of the most compelling evidence for the afterlife and ask Dr Fenwick to resume the stand:"

   Raymond Moody       

Dr Fenwick: In 1973, Dr. Raymond Moody, in his seminal book 'Life after Life' (Moody, 1975) made one of the most interesting, controversial and importantobservations of the 20th century when, he observed that ‘consciousness’ somehow seemed to exist while the patient was unconscious during a heart attack. It was this concept that stimulated the field of near-death research, and raised questions about the generally accepted, reductionist view of science that consciousness is created by and limited to a brain.

Most subsequent studies have been retrospective, questioning people and examining their medical records sometime after their experience. Michael Sabom (1982) examined patients who had been in a variety of near-death circumstances, such as severe traumatic injury or comas as well as cardiac arrests. Some claimed to have seen their own resuscitation procedures while unconscious and, correlating their accounts with the medical records, Sabom found that the evidence did indeed point towards the experience having occurred during unconsciousness.

The term ‘Near Death Experience (NDE) has come to refer to a wide range of experiences: those occurring during a true cardiac arrest, when the patient may actually be medically, though temporarily, dead; those in which they have been literally near death, in an accident or illness; those which result from extreme fear – the so-called fear-death experiences; and those which are part of a transcendent continuum in which death is not involved.

To clarify the terminology, Dr. Sam Parnia, a palliative care physician, has suggested that the term ADE – Actual Death Experience should be used for those experiences occurring during cardiac arrest when the person would have died had they not been resuscitated (Parnia et al., 2001). In this chapter the term NDE is used only for conditions which do not fit this classification.

Near Death Experiences

Studies in the USA and Germany indicate that 4.2% of the population have had an NDE and that more than 25 million people worldwide have had one in the last 50 years.(van Lommel, 2011). Since 1997, an entire journal has been devoted to their study, the ‘‘Journal of Near Death Studies’, (JNDS, 1987).

The features of these experiences vary, but the most common are: 

·  ineffability,

·  timelessness,

·  awareness of being dead,

·  out of body experience,

· being drawn through a tunnel towards a light,

· meeting other human spirits, often deceased relatives,

· often in a beautiful garden,

· a life review,

· a feeling of peace and a sense of harmony or unity with the universe,

· awareness of a boundary beyond which they cannot go,

· a feeling of being pulled back to the body because it is not their time to go.

· Sadness at having to leave something so beautiful.

Time in an NDE does not move in a linear fashion. Your life can be reviewed in a fraction of a second. Both past and future can be known. Using NDEs as a model, it seems that, in life after death, time is variable and flexible.

Advocate for the Afterlife: We would now like to call as a witness Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, who experienced an NDE after a car accident:

Moretti:

I remember a vision from above my car ..... many people were there.... as luminous presences which made me feel a sort of peace and sense of acceptance, even though I was aware that I was close to death. I remember lying on the ambulance bed...... I told my friend that I had a strange dream. When he told me... we had a car accident, I immediately heard the noise of the ambulance and felt a terrible pain.

I was reluctant to report what I remembered. I was reading physics at university and trying to frame my experience within scientific theories. When my friend described the sequence of the events, I realized that my story was filtered by a logical interpretation that I introduced later. My perception was looking at events simultaneously, like pictures on a screen.

After that, I started to read accounts from people in coma of the 'out of body' aspects, the presence of light and the absence of a temporal sequence, framing them in the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. I did not answer all the scientific questions, but I felt that death is a passage to another dimension with no separation between masses and times. I am no longer worried about dying, because I am just experiencing my identity as a human body localized in space and time, here and now. I am convinced that when I die I will experience another form of identity, free from fear and pain. My grandmother said that that dimension should be good, since no one came back to complain.

 

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.