Robert Crookall's research: Taylor excerpt #17

Greg Taylor writes: There is one more aspect of research into mediumship that helps to establish that it is indeed interconnected with those other areas: accounts of the dying experience, as related by the dead themselves.

More than a decade before the publication of Life After Life – the 1975 book that started the public fascination with near-death experiences – another researcher, Dr. Robert Crookall, investigated the phenomenon and wrote about it in a pair of relatively obscure books: The Supreme Adventure (1961) and Intimations of Immortality (1965). Crookall cited numerous examples of what he called “pseudo-death,” noting the archetypal elements that Raymond Moody would later bring to the public’s attention as the NDE. What’s more, however, he also compared these ‘pseudo-death’ stories with accounts of the dying process as related by those who claimed to have already gone through it: deceased communicators speaking through mediums. Intriguingly, Crookall found a number of the same recurring elements, despite the fact that they were recorded well before the details of NDEs became well-known.

For example, Crookall noted that, according to the deceased communicators, the newly-dead are usually met by other deceased loved ones, just as has been related by those who have undergone NDEs and ELEs. This of course may not be considered a surprising thing for a medium to say – it’s probably what most people would hope for after dying. But the common elements continue and include some of the more idiosyncratic features of the NDE. For instance, Crookall noted that communicators often declare that “in the early stages of transition, they experienced a panoramic review of their past lives” – it’s worth emphasizing that the words used, “panoramic review,” are the exact same as used by a number of NDErs (and see also Moody’s archetypal NDE description mentioned earlier). In one case the communicator recounted that shortly after death “the scenes of the past life” are revealed; another said that upon ‘waking’ his “entire life unreeled itself.” Another said that after dying his thoughts “raced over the record of a whole long lifetime,” while another communicator said he saw “the events of my past life pass, in a long procession, before me.” One account sounds almost exactly like a typical NDE, with the dead communicator first having an out-of- body experience where he looked down upon his body and those gathered around him, before:

...the scenes of my whole life seemed to move before me like a panorama; every act seemed as though it were drawn in life size and was really present: it was all there, down to the closing scenes.

Crookall’s research also found that, just as in the case above, communicators regularly made note of the OBE component. For example, one communicator noted that he “seemed to rise up out of my body.” According to another, “I was not lying in the bed, but floating in the air, a little above it. I saw the body, stretched out straight.”

And communicators also described one other familiar element of the NDE: traveling through a tunnel and emerging into another realm full of light. “I saw in front of me a dark tunnel,” said one, before traveling through it and then stepping “out of the tunnel into a new world.” Another communicator noted that they remembered “a curious opening, as if one had passed through subterranean passages and found oneself near the mouth of a cave... The light was much stronger outside.”

The common elements are compelling. For anyone familiar with the literature, these reports through mediums are startlingly similar to the accounts of NDErs – and yet Crookall collected them years before the archetype of the NDE became common knowledge. In having one anomalistic phenomenon seemingly confirm another, we might see a parallel to the ‘impossible’ anomaly of stones falling from the sky being confirmed by combining reports from two different sources – for example, eye-witness testimony of a fireball, and the subsequent discovery by others of strange rocks in the same locality. 

 

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.