Greg Taylor writes: Veridical accounts are hardly a rare occurrence: Researcher Janice Miner Holden surveyed the NDE case literature and collected some 107 cases where impossible observations reported by the person having the NDE were later verified. She concluded that “the sheer volume of anecdotes that a number of authors over the course of the last 150 years have described suggests [veridical NDE perception] is real,” and furthermore that “the cumulative weight of these narratives [should be enough to] convince most skeptics that these reports are something more than mere hallucinations on the patient’s part.”
For example, the case of ‘Dentures Man’ consists of evidence of such high quality that it was included in a paper in the respected medical journal The Lancet. In this case from 1979, a 44- year-old man (‘Mr. B’) was brought into the emergency department at Canisius Hospital in the Netherlands by ambulance, after being discovered comatose, hypothermic and without a pulse in a cold, damp meadow in the middle of the night. Hospital staff, including the senior nurse (‘T.G.’), were beginning resuscitation when T.G. noticed that Mr. B was wearing dentures, so removed them and placed them on the ‘crash cart’ so that he could put a ventilation mask on the unconscious man. After Mr. B was successfully resuscitated, he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit; as such, T.G. did not see the man again until a week later while doing rounds distributing medication. T.G. was astonished when, as he walked into the room, the patient he had brought back to life exclaimed “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are!” Seeing the look of surprise on T.G.’s face, Mr. B explained himself: since coming back to consciousness, he had been looking for his dentures. “You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart,” he said. “It had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” T.G. was confused by this, as he remembered that he had done this when the patient was unconscious and undergoing CPR to bring him back to life:
When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death. Four weeks later he left hospital as a healthy man.
To be clear: according to the medical professionals working on Mr. B, everything he witnessed during his NDE took place when he was unconscious, with no blood circulation and thus no brain activity. According to currently accepted medical science, he could not have observed the removal of his dentures in any normal way, even by some reconstruction through imagination and memory based on touch and sounds, as his brain was shut down at the time the dentures were removed. And yet Mr. B. accurately related multiple details of the room, the people in it, and what was occurring, as he saw it from a vantage point near the ceiling.
Another example is that of Al Sullivan. During emergency quadruple bypass surgery in 1989, Sullivan felt his consciousness separate from his physical body, and after traveling through a “black, billowy smoke-like atmosphere,” found himself near the ceiling of the OR looking down upon his own life-saving surgery:
I was laying [sic] on a table covered with light blue sheets and I was cut open so as to expose my chest cavity. It was in this cavity that I was able to see my heart on what appeared to be a small glass table. I was able to see my surgeon, who just moments ago had explained to me what he was going to do during my operation. He appeared to be somewhat perplexed. I thought he was flapping his arms as if trying to fly...
Sullivan also noticed that his own chest cavity was being held open by metal clamps, and was puzzled by the fact that two other surgeons were working on his leg, rather than his heart. He was then distracted by a “most brilliant yellow light” coming from what appeared to be a tunnel to his lower right-hand side (as is common in NDE descriptions of the light, Sullivan noted that although it was “the brightest I had ever looked into, it was of no discomfort to the eyes at all”). He then experienced “warmth, joy and peace and a feeling of being loved” followed by an encounter with his deceased mother, who had died at age 37 when he was just 7 years old.
All at once my mother’s expression changed to that of concern...she left my side and drifted down toward my surgeon. She placed the surgeon’s hand on the left side of my heart and then returned to me. I recall the surgeon making a sweeping motion as if to rid the area of a flying insect. My mother then extended one of her hands to me, but try as I might I could not grasp it. She then smiled and drifted back toward the lit tunnel.
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| Dr. Anthony LaSala |
NDE researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson investigated this report and spoke to both doctors involved in the surgery. Dr. LaSala confirmed that Sullivan had recounted his NDE immediately after regaining consciousness, noting the ‘flapping’ elbows of Dr. Takata – and confirmed that he had never seen any other surgeon do this. Dr. Takata also confirmed that during the operation he stood with hands on chest, pointing with his elbows. Greyson also noted that Sullivan’s OBE observations of the open chest cavity and surgeons working on his leg – which he later learned was the stripping of a vein out of his leg to create the bypass graft for his heart – offer a ‘time anchor’ which confirmed that “Mr. Sullivan’s observation of Dr. Takata flapping his arms occurred when he was under general anesthesia and, at least to observers, unconscious.”
We could go on at length; as mentioned earlier, more than one hundred veridical NDE cases have been identified in the literature thus far. Suffice to say, they are not rare enough to be easily explained by lucky guesses or chance. Research backs that up: cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom surveyed patients who had undergone a resuscitation – including both those who had reported an NDE, and those who hadn’t – asking them to describe what their resuscitation ‘looked’ like. He found that the descriptions of 25 cardiac patients who did not report an NDE were significantly less accurate than the accounts of the 32 near-death experiencers (NDErs) he interviewed. Sabom’s research showed that 80% of those who didn’t have an NDE made at least one major error in their description, but none of the NDErs did so. Furthermore, 6 of the 32 NDErs went even further in describing unexpected events that occurred during their resuscitation, that they wouldn’t have been expected to have any recall of. Sabom’s conclusion? NDErs do indeed seem to be describing actual observations of their resuscitation, rather than recreating them from their imagination and sensory cues.
And we could go farther back in history: more than a century ago, Scottish surgeon Sir Alexander Ogston (ironically, himself no stranger to skepticism from the establishment – his paradigm-breaking discovery of the Staphylococcus bacteria in the 19th century was met with disbelief and in some cases outright hostility by medical authorities) reported a veridical NDE during the South African War. Admitted to hospital suffering from typhoid fever, Ogston reported that as he lay in a stupor, his mind and body became two separate entities. “I was conscious of the body as an inert, tumbled mass near a door, it belonged to me but was not I,” Ogden noted. “In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the walls of the building, though I was aware that they were there and that everything was transparent to my senses.” Ogden recalled that during his OBE he saw “a poor Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon, of whose existence I had not known, and who was in quite another part of the hospital, grow very ill and scream and die; I saw them cover his corpse and carry him softly out on shoeless feet, quietly and surreptitiously, lest we should know that he had died, and the next night I saw him taken away to the cemetery. Afterwards when I told these happenings to the sisters, they informed me that all this had happened just as I had fancied.”
If there were only one or two cases of veridical NDEs, skeptics of the survival of consciousness might just be able to rely on ‘reasonable doubt’ to dismiss the evidence. However, the cumulative weight of cases – and quality of the investigations ruling out alternative explanations, can only be seen as convincing proof that consciousness does in fact separate from the body when close to death.
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the
Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written
for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts
without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a
bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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