Van Lommel’s "consciousness": Cook excerpt #11

Nick Cook writes: Alerted by patients who, after massive heart-attacks, came ‘back from the dead’ – almost universally they had attested they had been to, and returned from, a state in which they had left the body, entered a realm of infinite connection and non-existent time, been drawn to a light and imbued with a feeling of connection and pure love – Dr Pim van Lommel has pulled together a lot of data on near-death experiences.

“The point is,” he told me in the early stages of my Phase 2 research, “information and energy are never lost – and that’s what we see in the veridical evidence of what people say they see when they are clinically dead, things it should not be possible to see. And here I’m not just talking about NDEs, but out-of-body experiences, too. What it all amounts to, is clear evidence of what I call a continuity of consciousness.”³⁰

The point he makes that we need to discuss here is ‘veridical’. Of the many definitions found online, the Oxford Dictionary’s - ‘a coinciding with reality’ - comes closest as a scene-setter for the short diversion that follows.

Van Lommel, now retired, forged a career as a renowned cardiologist. In 1969, as an attendant doctor in a coronary care unit in the Netherlands, he had his first experience of a cardiac patient who ‘came back from the dead’ to report all the classic signatures of an NDE. His curiosity awoken, in 1986, he began to ask all the patients at his outpatient clinic who had undergone resuscitation whether they had ‘any recollection of the period of their cardiac arrest’. “I was more than a little surprised to hear, within the space of two years, twelve reports of a near-death experience among just over fifty cardiac arrest survivors,” he wrote later³¹.

He gained international recognition following the publication of an article in the Lancet, a highly respected UK-based, peer-reviewed medical journal, in which he and his colleagues discussed 344 cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest³². One group that reported having had an NDE was analysed against a control group that did not, with the two being compared two and eight years later.

Of those 344 patients, 62 (18 per cent) reported an NDE, of whom 41 per cent described a ‘core experience’ (its meaning unaffected by ‘external variables’ like gender, age the time of the NDE, and latency and intensity of the NDE). Van Lommel went on to write half a dozen or so other papers on the subject of NDEs, as well as a book, ‘Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience’, a best-seller in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The purpose of this diversion is not to seek to verify the survival of consciousness through the myriad NDE studies that have been performed by van Lommel and others – whether you’re a proponent of NDEs or not, they attest to something valid at the centre of the phenomenon – but instead to look at the kind of evidence a ‘court’ would accept as veridical; proof that what happened was ‘coincident with reality’.

Broadly, two criteria get called into question: the first is whether the patient was dead in any clinically acknowledged sense; the second is whether, while ‘dead’, they were afforded an ability to see or know things they couldn’t possibly have known via the senses we employ when we’re fully conscious (or, for our purposes here, ‘alive’).

A case that illustrates the point is related by Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social care worker in the critical care unit of a Seattle hospital, regarding what has come to be known as the ‘case of Maria and shoe’33. In 1977, Maria, a middle-aged Mexican migrant worker visiting Seattle to see friends, suffered a massive heart-attack, followed by a second while in hospital. As Clark Sharp watched efforts to revive her, Maria ‘flatlined’ – she wasn’t breathing, and the monitor indicated no heartbeat. She was, fortunately, resuscitated quickly and stabilised, but soon afterward began to tell Kimberly, in a highly excited manner, what she had experienced while ‘clinically dead’. She had left her body, she said, and had watched the efforts to revive her from a corner of the ceiling in the room. She accurately described everything that had taken place, all of it highly persuasive; although, it has to be said, not impossible to derive by surreptitious means – prior knowledge of hospital procedure being one.

But the part that really got Kimberly’s attention was Maria’s description of what she had perceived during the emergency from other viewpoints around the hospital - in particular, while outside, three or four stories above the ground, staring very closely at a strange object that had grabbed her focus on a window ledge. It turned out to be a tennis shoe, which she described as being dark blue, with a scuffed outer side, near the little toe, and a white shoelace tucked under the heel. Maria was so keen to prove that she had been ‘alive while dead’ she persuaded Kimberly to go and look for the shoe, which she eventually found on a hard-to-see, let-alone-access ledge outside of the building’s third floor. The shoe was exactly as Maria had described it.

Here, then, is what veridical evidence is: if it could be proven Maria was clinically dead and that she had seen things she could not possibly have perceived from her gurney, or any other vantage point using her five senses, then QED something remarkable must have happened; enough, perhaps, to invoke Wheeler’s aphorism.

But instead, it seems, Wheeler’s ‘strangest thing’ conflicts so markedly with some people’s belief systems that their first instinct is to want to kill the anomaly, rather than ‘get curious’ about it.

NDE research is no exception; and, in a sense, this isn’t unreasonable: extraordinary claims rightly demand extraordinary evidence. But, as with other areas of anomalous science, what we see in the ‘case of Maria’s shoe’ is the dismissal of whole bodies of research because of a sceptical tendency to pick apart one or two cases, rather than evaluate the body of data as a whole. Are we really to dismiss the work of van Lommel, Janice Holden, President of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Dr Sam Parnia, associate professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center³⁴, because Clark Sharp failed to prove (to the satisfaction of some) that she received the salient details of the shoe from Maria before she went and located it on the ledge? There is a wealth of research across thousands of cardiac arrest and other near-death survival cases that point toward some form of ‘nonphysical veridical perception’ among a hard core of cases³⁵.

Does this mean that we have to accept all their evidence and analysis? No, it does not.

This capacity of the NDE’er to acquire by psychic means the kinds of veridical knowledge that is often presented as ‘clear evidence’ of post-death survival is rightly called into question here.

We should not tag veridical data emerging out of an OBE as evidence of an NDE – they are clearly not the same.

Per Janice Holden, there are two sides to an NDE: the ‘material aspect’, involving earth-bound evidence of the shoe kind, which shares some characteristics with an OBE; and the ‘trans-material aspect’, in which the experiencer ‘perceives phenomena in transcendent dimensions beyond the physical world’³⁸ – much as my wife had when her mother died.

For NDE’ers to acquire veridical knowledge by psychic means doesn’t make their experience any the less remarkable – an OBE is remarkable.

But it isn’t conclusive proof that our consciousness survives permanent bodily death. For this, we must continue to look elsewhere.

30 Skype interview with the author, 15.6.20
31 Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, p. vii, Pim van Lommel, M.D., Harper Collins, 2010.
32 Van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in Survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039-2045.
33 See Chapter 6, The Shoe on the Ledge, by Kimberly Clark Sharp, MSW, from Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence For An Afterlife by Leslie Kean, Three Rivers Press, 2017.
34 He is also director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton in the UK.
35 For example, whilst at the University of North Texas, Dr Holden – in her paper More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Response to “Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features” – identified 107 cases of apparently nonphysical veridical perception, in which a case would be designated ‘inaccurate’ if even one case were found not to correspond to consensus reality. Thirty-seven per cent of the cases ‘involving apparently completely accurate perception’ were determined to be accurate by independent, objective sources.
36 My emphasis. 
37 Op.cit., p.93.
38 Leslie Kean, quoting Holden, on p.97 of Surviving Death.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.