Mother of doctor talks to doctor's dead grandmother

Dr. Naomi Remen writes: My given name is Rachel. I was named after my mother’s mother. For the first fifty years of my life, I was called by another name, Naomi, which is my middle name. When I was in my middle forties, my mother, who was at that time almost eighty-five, elected to have coronary bypass surgery. The surgery was extremely difficult and only partly successful. For days my mother lay with two dozen others in the coronary intensive-care unit of one of our major hospitals. For the first week she was unconscious, peering over the edge of life, breathed by a ventilator. I was awed at the brutality of this surgery and the capacity of the body, even in great age, to endure such a major intervention.

When she finally regained consciousness, she was profoundly disoriented and often did not know who I, her only child, was. The nurses were reassuring. We see this sort of thing often, they told me. They called it Intensive Care Psychosis and explained that in this environment of beeping machines and constant artificial light, elderly people with no familiar cues often go adrift. Nonetheless I was concerned. Not only did Mom not know me but she was hallucinating, seeing things crawling on her bed and feeling water run down her back.

Days went by and my mother slowly improved physically although her mental state continued to be uncertain. The nurses began correcting her when she mistook them for people from her past, insisting that the birds she saw flying and singing in the room were not there. They encouraged me to correct her as well, telling me this was the only way she might return to what was real.

I remember one visit shortly before she left the intensive care unit. I greeted her asking if she knew who I was. ‘Yet,’ she said with warmth. ‘You are my beloved child.’ Comforted, I turned to sit on the only chair in her room but she stopped me. ‘Don’t sit there’ Doubtfully I looked at the chair again. ‘But why not?’

‘Rachel is sitting there,’ she said. I turned back to my mother. It was obvious that she saw quite clearly something I could not see.

Despite the frown of the special nurse who was adjusting my mother’s IV, I went into the hall, brought back another chair, and sat down on it. My mother looked at me and the empty chair next to me with great tenderness. Calling me by my given name for the first time, she introduced me to her visitor: ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘This is Rachel.’

My mother began to tell her mother Rachel about my childhood and her pride in the person I had become. Her experience of Rachel’s presence was so convincing that I found myself wondering why I could not see here. It was more than a little unnerving. And very moving. Periodically she would appear to listen and then she would tell me of my grandmother’s reaction to what she had told her. They spoke of people I had never met in the familiar way of gossip: my great-grandfather David and his brothers, my great-granduncles, who were handsome men and great horsemen. ‘Devil,’ said my mother, laughing and nodding her head to the empty chair. She explained to her mother why she had given me her name, her hope for my kindness of heart, and apologized for my father who had insisted on calling me by my middle name, which had come from his side of our family. Exhausted by all this conversation, my mother lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she smiled at me and the empty chair. ‘I’m so glad you are both her now,’ she said. ‘One of you will take me home.’ Then she closed her eyes again and drifted off to sleep. It was my grandmother who took her home.

This experience, disturbing as it was for me at the time, seemed deeply comforting to my mother and became something I revisited again and again after she died. I had survived many years of chronic illness and physical limitation. I had been one of the few women in my class  at medical school in the fifties, one of the few women on the faculty at the Stanford medical school in the sixties. I was expert at dealing with limitations and challenges of various sorts. I had not succeeded through loving kindness. Over a period of time, I came to realize that despite my successes I had perhaps lost something of importance. When I turned fifty, I began asking people to call me Rachel, my real name.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 314.  

 

Jane Goodall's experience of God's purpose

 In her autobiography Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Jane Goodall writes:

“Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.

 

“That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so, I must believe in a guiding power in the universe—in other worlds, I must believe in God.” [pages xiii-xiv]

 

Through the years I have encountered people and been involved in events that have had huge impact, knocked off rough corners, lifted me to the heights of joy, plunged me into the depth of sorrow and anguish, taught me to laugh, especially at myself—in other words, my life experiences and the people with whom I shared them have been my teachers. At time I have felt like a helpless bit of flotsam, at one moment stranded in a placed backwater that knew not, cared not, that I was there, then swept out to be hurled about in an unfeeling sea. At other times I felt I was being sucked under by strong, unknowing currents toward annihilation. Yet somehow, looking back through my life, with its downs and its ups, its despairs and its joys, I believe that I was following some overall plan. To be sure there were many times when I strayed from the course, but I was never truly lost. It seems to me now that the flotsam speck was being gently nudged or fiercely blown along a very specific route by an unseen, intangible Wind. The flotsam speck that was—that is—me.” [2-3]

 

After World War II Jane began to attend courses on the teachings of Theosophy. She writes: “I was especially drawn to the concepts of karma and reincarnation, because I was still trying very hard to make sense of the horrors of the war. If karma was operating, Hitler and the Nazis would pay for their crimes in some future life, while those who were killed in battle or tortured in the death camps may have been paying for former transgressions. They would then either be reborn to a better life or to some kind of heaven or paradise. I had never been able to believe that God would give us poor frail humans only one chance at making it—that we would be assigned to some kind of hell because we failed during one experience of mortal life.” [32]

 

Jane’s ecstatic experience in Notre Dame occurred in 1974, after she had divorced her first husband and the father of her only child. Later in her autobiography she asks: “Was there a guiding force in the universe, a creator of matter and thus of life itself? Was there a purpose to life on planet earth? And if so, what role were we human supposed to play in the overall picture? In particular, what was my role to be.”

 

She responds to these questions in her next paragraph. “There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the ‘evolutionary goof.’ Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ In other words, a plan and a purpose to it all.

 

“As I thought about these ultimate questions during the trying time of my divorce, I realized that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective. I personally was utterly convinced that there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah, or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.” [92-95]

 

Excerpts from Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, (1999, Warner Books), selected by Robert Traer.

A hospice witness: Dr. Christopher Kerr

Dr. Christopher Kerr, author of the 2021 essay “Experiences of the Dying: Evidence of Survival of Human Consciousness” written for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness, writes:

When I became a hospice doctor 23 years ago, neither my medical training nor my doctoral degree in neurobiology could have prepared me for what I would witness at bedside of patients nearing death. I used to believe that my job was caring for life pre-death. Instead, I came to realize that there is more to dying than death.

My observations at bedside have led me to the counterintuitive claim that the survival of human consciousness after death may be nowhere more evident than in what happens to the dying before death. These are moments of transition when the mind’s elevation transcends the body and brain’s deterioration. Put another way, we can’t look into the continuity of consciousness past death by having an exclusive focus on the after. Doing so would assume a before/after division that the dying experience itself renders irrelevant. The dying process is a continuum within which our patients experience a heightening of consciousness and an acute awareness of their past and present existence. This experience includes a consciousness that is most often shared with others who died before them and but who are now fully present to them. The dying process reveals a connectivity between and across lives, both living and dead. This continuity of connectivity persists regardless of time or bodily existence and supports the hypothesis that consciousness survives beyond bodily death.

I used to believe that end of life includes processes that understandably draw us inward towards introspection and reflection, processes that distill life into what truly counts and in so doing, validate having lived and mattered. That the dying process would alter the patient’s perception made sense. What was unexpected if not jarring was that the process entails so much more than just a changed outlook in patients. Shortly before death, the dying have dreams and visions of their predeceased loved ones, scenes of vivid and meaningful reunions that testify to an inexplicably rich and transformative inner life. The phenomenon includes a lived, felt, often lucid experiential reality whereby those loved and “lost” return to the dying in ways that cannot be explained by memory alone. Children and parents sometimes lost decades earlier come back to put patients back together and help them transition peacefully. At the precise moment we associate with darkness, loss, physical decline, and sadness, their presence helps the dying achieve peace, comfort, and forgiveness, which suggests an existence beyond our bodily form. A failing brain does not imply a failing mind, and biological decline does not diminish the soul. In fact, in our final days, our physical form does not follow function: patients are spiritually and perceptually alive and vibrant despite a failing body. This is the paradox of dying.

A remarkable body of work on Near-Death Experiences (NDE) has been cited as evidence that consciousness is more than a byproduct of our brain and survives our mortal form (1-5). Skeptics offer physiologic explanations and argue that the memories or sensations of NDE-like experiences are actually triggered by the brain as it shuts down or reboots; they attribute the phenomena to causes including oxygen shortage, anesthesia, neurochemical responses to trauma and “post-resuscitation syndrome” (6-8). Critics of NDE study protocols also suggest that this research does not “exclude that the reported memories were based on retrospective imaginative (re)constructions built up from memories, prior knowledge, and/or expectations about the world” (9). Others explain NDEs based on spiritual or psychological interpretations, ranging from the theories of Expectancy to Dissociation (6, 9, 10).

Proving consciousness beyond death must not only account for neurobiological changes associated with “clinical death” but also address factors that define and inform consciousness, such as changes in awareness, wakefulness, and connectedness. At Hospice, we routinely care for dying patients who are not only neurologically intact but fully aware and awake. Whereas physical death is a circumscribed event, dying for most is a prolonged process that inherently alters consciousness. The dying processes we witness are anticipated, non-acute and physically irreversible. Yet, instead of exhibiting a waning consciousness, many of our patients display a heightened acuity and a rich inner life which includes changes in perception as well as an awareness of both their internal and external existence. Not surprisingly, such experiences of consciousness are qualitatively distinct from those events described in traumatic or acute death, alterations in brain function from anesthesia or recovery from recusation. The studies conducted at Hospice Buffalo for over a decade further corroborate that the dying are paradoxically often emotionally and spiritually alive, even enlightened, despite their terminal physical decline, not just in the minutes or hours before physical death, but in the days and weeks. In other words, these extraordinary inner experiences that have been attributed to a failing brain with NDEs occur during the dying process on a continuum that goes from intact cognition to the fluctuating states of consciousness and failing organs that define the immediate hours before death.

We hypothesize that only those who are actively dying have the vantage point and the language to define their changing and enlightened existence, the keyhole through which to see what’s beyond. Our work focuses not only on the dying process but specifically, on the experiencing of it, the subjective or conscious dimensions of dying. The tragic physical process of dying often obscures the experiential, inner or subjective dimensions of dying which represent a heightened form of consciousness, an awakening of feelings, wonderous perceptual experiences, insights into one’s present and future existence as well as a feeling of connectivity, wholeness and belonging. Our patients exhibit changes in awareness of thought, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Not only are such experiences near universal, but they are remarkably similar. This is why to find evidence of the survival of human consciousness after death, we need to look at what happens before death, in these moments of transition when the before and after merge to the point of irrelevance and the enlightened mind transcends the body and brain’s deterioration.

The following is a video of our patient Florence, six days before death. She is free of neurologic disease and has not taken any psychoactive medication. Although dying, Florence is physically unburdened and cognitively intact while describing the closing of her life. To her, dying is a conscious experience that is vibrant as well as self-fulfilling. Her consciousness is lucid: she is fully awake, aware and connected. Through this keyhole, Florence doesn’t dream, analyze or simply remember, but instead feels the familiar and comforting presence of those she has loved and lost. Unlike the epiphanies or revelations often associated with NDEs, there are no great insights or messages. In fact, language is near absent and not needed. Florence is instead at her family’s kitchen table in the company of her deceased husband and daughter; she has been put back together and is truly home. Her awareness is acute, complete and secured in the certainty of what has always defined who she is: her relationships. She is now restored in a promise of what lies ahead. Florence doesn’t have any feeling of being out of her body or any perception that she is dead: her existence, as defined by love, is understood and sustained. These experiences are not only validating but remove any fear of physical death. Florence is already on her journey, her consciousness continuing where her body can no longer go (Link to: Florence Interview Video).

These moments of life-affirming enlightenment at the time of death have been acknowledged across cultures and throughout history. Indeed, while modern medicine has been resolutely silent on the topic of dying, often reducing it to mere “medical failure”, the humanities, the realm of culture and religion, have long testified to its significance to humanity. From writers, poets and philosophers as far back as ancient Greece, from Buddhist and Islamic texts to accounts from China, Siberia, Bolivia, Argentina, India and Finland, from the religious and sacred traditions of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples around the world, meaningful pre-death dreams and visions have been widely recognized and celebrated. They are mentioned in the Bible, Plato’s Republic, and in medieval writings such as the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s The Revelations of Divine Love. They show up in Renaissance paintings and in Shakespeare’s King Lear. They appear in 19th-century American and British novels, in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and last but not least, in the Dalai Lama’s meditations on death. If anything, the medicalization of death has obscured a language that has always been available to make sense of our finitude and that has been integral to humanity’s need to maintain connection with the departed. This awareness that we remain intertwined beyond death is central to the story of our shared humanity.

Starting in the twentieth century, reports on pre-death experiences began to be collected systematically through eyewitness accounts (11-16). More recently, a research team at Hospice Buffalo, has conducted studies on over 1,500 patients and families. The process of dying is a reality that only the dying could tell us about, from a vantage point that the living do not share. It was the testimonies of these patients as well as our subsequent systematic studies of their inner experiences that helped us reframe dying and our notion of a before and an after death and of consciousness itself. The data confirmed that the vast majority of dying patients, shortly before death, have these comforting dreams and visions that most commonly summon predeceased loved ones. After witnessing how these bonds of love re-emerge as unbreakable at life’s end, the question we were left pondering was “are the deceased ever really gone?” Indeed, those who returned were not just random appearances; they were most commonly, as with Florence, people who best loved and secured the dying in life and were reuniting at a depth that suggests they were never gone. One ninety-five-year-old gentleman claimed to smell his mother’s perfume as she whispered “I love you” in his ear. His mother had passed ninety years earlier when he was five years old, yet his vision of her was as crisp as if she had just left him. Such experiences return at life’s end in ways that transcend mere recollection and are instead tangible, material, and lived. With full lucidity, these patients claim such experiences are “more real than real” and rich in detail not previously recalled but now vividly summoned.

“Transcendence” is typically the concept used to denote an existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level. The word literally means “going beyond.” It is also a state that is associated with the afterlife and that best represents the work that pre-death experiences do in helping patients transition to death. In fact, the power of the spiritual transformation and “transcendence” they occasion in patients’ lives cannot be overstated. Near death, the boundaries between the experiential and the spiritual, body and mind, present and past, conscious and unconscious impulses dissolve to provide comfort through a process of connectivity across the living, the dying, and the dead. The process brings about a form of spiritual and emotional solace that is rooted in lived experience rather than just dreams or memories. Recognizing people’s experience of dying as the gateway to continued consciousness beyond life and death is crucial if we are to become more literate on what constitutes our mortality.

 

Christopher Kerr, “Experiences of the Dying: Evidence of Survival of Human Consciousness,” an essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in response to the question: “What is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after bodily death?” Dr. Kerr, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer for Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo.

 

Evidence of shared death experiences (SDEs)

Researchers Robert and Suzanne Mays write: "In shared death experiences (SDEs), the SDEr is healthy and awake. They may observe the dying person separate from the physical body at the time of death. Alternatively, they may themselves be drawn out-of-body with the deceased person’s spirit body. The SDEr may observe the life review of the deceased person, similar to the life review in NDEs. The SDEr may observe deceased relatives or friends come to welcome and escort the deceased person to a different realm.

"The SDErs are healthy, credible eyewitnesses of the objective facts they observe. If more than one person is present with the dying person, their individual accounts frequently corroborate each other. For example:

"Scott Taylor’s shared death experience: In 1981, Scott Taylor’s girlfriend Mary Frances and her seven-year-old son Nolan were involved in a horrific car accident. Mary Fran was killed outright and her son survived for an additional six days with a severe head wound. At the time of Nolan’s transition, Scott and a number of Mary Fran’s family were in the hospital room. Scott witnessed Mary Fran come 'across the veil,' approach Nolan, scoop him up out of his physical body, and hold him in a loving embrace. To his surprise, the two of them turned to Scott, embraced him and the three of them 'went to the light.' About 10 years later, Scott spoke with another family member who had the exact same experience at the time of Nolan’s death: When Nolan flatlined, she witnessed Mary Fran come 'across the veil' and scoop Nolan up out of his physical body. They embraced and she got to be part of that embrace. At some point they turned to her and the three of them 'went to the light.' She used the exact same words that Scott used to describe his experience.

"The SDEr observes the dying person’s transition to actual death in three ways: (1) Many of the elements observed by SDErs are identical with NDE elements but are observed from a third-person perspective. (2) We can infer from the SDEr’s descriptions many of the things the dying person experiences. These are the same phenomena as the first-person perspective in an NDE. Finally, (3) the SDEr directly experiences elements that commonly occur in NDEs:

"The SDEr observes that the dying person is out-of-body, meets deceased persons and a mystical being or presence. The SDEr observes that the dying person sees or is enveloped in a brilliant light and enters an unearthly or heavenly realm.

"We can infer from the SDEr’s description of the dying person’s reactions and behavior that the dying person experiences a life review. From the dying person’s expressions of happiness or joy and peace, we can infer they are free from pain, having shed their physical body.

"The SDEr themselves describes that their senses were more vivid and their sense of time changed. The SDEr receives veridical information from their experience which they later verify as accurate. The SDEr is told by the deceased person that they need to return to the body or the SDEr just finds themselves back in the body.

"The SDEr’s observations indicate that the dying person experiences the same things that NDErs experience in their NDE. If we could administer the NDE Scale to the deceased person, the experience would be counted as an NDE. The elements in the two processes are indistinguishable. The only difference is that the dying person does not return to the physical body but continues to exist after physical death.

Thus, the 'spirit body' of the deceased person observed by SDErs is the same as the mind entity that we propose is the essential aspect of the human being. The only difference between the deceased person and the NDEr is that the NDEr returns to physical embodiment whereas the deceased person moves on into a another realm. Thus the deceased person’s conscious Self survives physical death."

 

Robert G. Mays, BSc and Suzanne B. Mays, AA,  “There is no death: Near-death experience evidence for survival after permanent bodily death.” An essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies addressing the question: “What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?” Footnotes are omitted from these excerpts.

Light around those who are dying

Science writer Nick Cook reports: This light phenomenon has been reported by almost all near-death experience (NDE)  researchers, including psychologist and physician Raymond Moody MD, who coined the term ‘near-death experience’ in his 1975 best-selling book, ‘Life After Life’. In his book on shared death experiences, ‘Glimpses of Eternity’, Moody cites a large number of witnesses to light phenomena amongst relatives and carers of the dying. One, Sharon Nelson, told Moody about her encounter with the light at the death of her sister. 

 

‘About one week prior to my sister’s actual passing, a bright white light engulfed the room. It was a light that we all saw and a light that has stayed with us ever since.’

In another case, Moody was approached by two sisters, Maria and Louisa, at a medical conference in Spain who told him about a ‘brilliant light’ that filled the room at the death of their father. ‘The light stayed for maybe ten minutes after he died,’ said Maria, ‘We saw no forms or figures in the light, but it seemed to be alive and have a personal presence.’

And this from a hospice nurse in North Carolina, who, having had a deep fear of witnessing her first death – that of a Mrs Jones – told how she heard Mrs Jones’s voice in her head calling her into the room: ‘I saw her draw her last breath. Right then, a light that looked like vapour formed over her face. I never had felt such peace. The head nurse on duty was very calm and told me that Mrs Jones was leaving her body and wanted me to see the dying experience. I saw a luminous presence floating near the bed, shaped somewhat like a person.’ The experienced nurse witnessed the light in the room, but not Mrs Jones’s ‘presence’. 

 

Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from This Life to the Next, Raymond Moody Jr., MD, PhD, and Paul Perry, SAKKARA Productions Publishing, 2010.

 

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 among prize winners in the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition.

Death involves entering another state of being

Physician Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) suggested to her colleagues: “We shouldn’t nail the dying to the threshold between two states of consciousness. We shouldn’t prolong their lives with medication, injections and life-support machines. We should let them go. They’re not going into nothingness. They’re entering another state of being. We must let our dead go into that world.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 180.

Dr. Jonathan Kopel, a member of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, writes that: “Near-death experiences have positively impacted the medical profession and physician-patient interactions. Counselors trained with NDE literature reduced suicidal thoughts, bereavement, and post-traumatic stress disorder among their patients.

In addition, patients who experienced an NDE showed significant transformation in their spiritual and emotional lives, with many stating a renewed sense of meaning, existential awareness, and mystical experiences. Family and friends of patients who experienced an NDE also reported increased comfort, hope, and inspiration.” 

Kopel and other healthcare professionals affirm that: “NDEs represent a growing paradigm shift beyond the naturalistic interpretations of science and medicine.”

Jonathan Kopel, “Near-Death Experiences in Medicine,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent), 2019 Jan; 32(1): 163-64.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), “made every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective," he affirmed,"death is not an end but a goal.”

C. G. Jung, On Death and Immortality (Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.

 

Near-death experience as a spiritual awakening

“For a few people,” UK neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick notes, the NDE confirms the religious faith they have. “But for many, perhaps most, it is a spiritual awakening that may have very little to do with religion in the narrowest sense, and nothing to do with dogma. It certainly tends to confirm belief in some form of afterlife. But when the presence of some higher ‘being’ is felt, this is only seldom defined as, for example, a Catholic or a Jewish God. And Christian icons such as Jesus and Mary are notably absent except in very rare cases. The experiences have a universal quality.” If an NDE were simply a psychological experience, “one would expect it to be much more culturally influenced than it seems to be.”

Mrs Joan Hensley wrote: Certainly my life changed. I am less frightened of dying personally, and I do believe there is life after death. But it hasn’t particularly made me more ‘religious;’ what I do feel is that there are so many religions in the world, why should our God be the only one or indeed the correct one? I feel my experience proved there is a God—before that I don’t think I really believed in anything, just accepted what my parents believed in.

“Almost everyone who has studied near-death experiences has found that at least some of the people have become more sensitive or intuitive. After his NDE, Dennis Stone of Coventry began to foresee future events. In August 1938 my first premonition of impending disaster occurred. I saw a vision of the Second World War. I found myself standing about a hundred yards or so from my home, watching Coventry burning and hearing the bombs whistling down and bullets spanging off brickwork. I looked down the London road and watched a bomb set fire to a fuel dump close to the local cemetery.

All this I told my family and I became agitated because they did not believe me. That is until it actually happened in precise detail—with one exception: I was not quite in the precise spot on that fateful night. I was ducking the machine-gun bullets from German planes, which, I might add, killed nine of my neighbors close to me.

“One of the most fascinating and detailed letters we received was from a man who suffered two cardiac arrests after a coronary thrombosis, and had several experiences during this time. Most were positive, but he also had an experience of ‘Hell.’ It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occasionally I was basted by people (devils) sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the ‘devils’ used to make sure that I was being truly roasted. I wanted to call out but no sound would come; it felt as if my brain or consciousness was buried deep within me and was too deeply embedded for either them to hear or for me even to make it work. I was overcome with the feeling of utter doom and helplessness.

He explains away this experience, however, as being due to the treatment he received in hospital. I was wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, an electric heat cage was put over me and during that time I was turned several times and innumerable injections were given.

Fenwick comments: “In those organized religions in which Hell figures, suicide is a sin and might well be considered an entrance qualification. And yet none of the people who wrote to us about a near-death experience during a suicide attempt reported a hellish or even an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, what they experienced seemed to provide a reason for continuing to live.

Anne Thomson wrote: I could cope no longer with three small children and one dreadful husband (whom I later divorced). I took a massive overdose of sleeping tablets and was not found for four hours. I was rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance from the RAF base in Wales, where we lived at the time. I very nearly died and was unconscious for four days. On the fourth day I was slipping away. I had a cardiac arrest and the doctors and sister were working on me.

I left my body. I went up very slowly, not looking back at myself in the bed. The peace was beyond what I can explain; it was so beautiful, I felt so light in weight and I saw I was going towards a white light—not the white like this notepaper I wrote on, but a spiritual white. I almost reached this light, when suddenly I was pulled downwards and did not stop till I was back in my body. I was heavy, everything seemed so dark and then I came to and slowly came to realize I could not be taken, as three children needed their mother.

I always did believe in God but only because it was bred into me. But since that experience I have a lot of faith towards God and towards life beyond our lives on Earth. I firmly believe God made me well and helped me through all my time of rearing three children alone in the years that followed.”

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

 

After cardiac arrest doctors hear patient's laugh

Dr. Paul Sanders was a family physician before retiring. He told Dr. Janis Amatuzio of his own personal experience that was extraordinary.

I had just arrived home from work one evening when the phone rang, and the nurse told me that Dad had suffered a cardiac arrest. Those were the days before the patient directives and do not resuscitate orders were in place.

Dr. Sanders rushed back to the hospital and to his Dad’s room. He recalls: As I got to the doorway something quite extraordinary happened. I glanced to my left and saw my father’s motionless body lying in bed, ringed by nurses with their backs to me. Dr. Seacamp was on the other side of the bed, intently doing CPR. He glanced up quickly as I stopped in the doorway. 

And just at that moment, I was startled when to my right I heard more than sensed the absolutely unmistakable sound of my father’s booming laugh. It was bold, gleeful, and joyful, that wonderful sound I hadn’t heard in so many months as he suffered with his disease. My heart jumped with joy.

I knew in an instant that he was fine, and I turned to Dr. Seacamp, saying, “Let him go.”

Oh, so you heard him, too! Dr. Seacamp, replied.

I knew something extraordinary had happened and that we had witnessed a miracle. I miss my father greatly, but I will never forget the sound of his laughter and the experience of awesome joy as I walked into that room. 

Janis Amatuzio, Beyond Knowing: Mysteries and Messages of Death and Life from a Forensic Pathologist (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006), 160-161.

View into eternity at bedside death

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity documents “shared death experiences” involving physicians, nurses, and hospice workers. A hospice psychologist in North Carolina writes of her experiences: 

The deathbed scene is not fully in this world. And although I am not religious, hospice work has awakened me to a spiritual dimension of life.

In my opinion, everyone who works with the dying long enough must have some awareness of these experiences. I believe the spiritual experiences of dying people somehow leak out and pervade the area around them. If you step into that area with the right temperament, you will receive, I feel, a sense of the sacred in the presence of the dying.

I have experienced the room taking on a different configuration a number of times. The only way that I can describe it is that moving energy pulses through the room. I often feel something that I can’t name.

The bedside of the dying offers a view into eternity. Like looking through a window into elsewhere, from time to time I see lights and twice have had clear views of what appear to be structures. On both occasions I saw patients leave their bodies in a cloud form. I saw them rise out of their bodies and head toward these structures.

I would describe these clouds as a sort of mist that forms around the head or chest. There seems to be some kind of electricity to it, like an electrical disturbance. I don’t know if I see it with my physical eyes, but it’s there all the same. There is no doubt in my mind that you can sometimes see people depart for the other side.

Shared death experiences may confirm communication between the living, dying, and dead. A sergeant at Fort Dix in New Jersey sharing his experience, which was verified by his physicians:

I was terribly ill and near death with heart problems at the same time that my sister was near death with a diabetic coma in another part of the same hospital. I left my body and went into the corner of the room, where I watched them work on me down below. Suddenly, I found myself in conversation with my sister, who was up there with me. I was very attached to her, and we were having a great conversation about what was going on down there when she began to move away from me.

I tried to go with her but she kept telling me to stay where I was. “It’s not your time,” she said. Then she just began to recede off into the distance through a tunnel while I was left there alone.  When I awoke, I told the doctor that my sister had died. He denied it, but at my insistence, he had a nurse check on it. She had in fact died, just as I knew she did. (90-91)

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: An Investigation into Shared Death Experiences  (London: Rider, 2010), 102-03. 90-91.

Resurrection is spiritual not physical

The New Testament gospels are anonymous. The shortest gospel is attributed to Mark, a colleague of Paul. The earliest version of this gospel reports that Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome (another follower of Jesus), come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, and are told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus "has been raised" and gone to Galilee, where he will meet them. The gospel ends by saying the women "fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (Mk. 16:1-8)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple Matthew, an earthquake opens the tomb and an angel delivers to the two Marys, who come to the tomb, the same message as in the gospel of Mark. When the two women run to tell the disciples, Jesus appears and speaks to them, and the gospel says: "they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him." After the women tell the disciples what they have witnessed, the eleven disciples go to Galilee, see Jesus, and worship him. But, the gospel adds, "some doubted." (Mt. 28:17)

The gospel attributed to Paul’s colleague Luke says two men in dazzling clothes tell the two Marys and Joanna (another follower of Jesus), that he has been raised from the dead. Jesus doesn't appear to the women, but does appear to two other followers and to Peter, before appearing to some of his disciples in Jerusalem. He says: "Look at my hands and my feet, see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Lk. 24:39) This gospel says Jesus eats a piece of fish, tells his disciples to stay in Jerusalem, blesses them, and then is lifted up into heaven. (Lk. 24)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple John, Mary Magdalene comes alone to the tomb and finds the stone rolled away. Jesus appears to her and says, "Do not hold me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father." He gives her this message for his disciples: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." The gospel of John also says the disciple Thomas doubts the resurrection, until Jesus appears to him by the Sea of Galilee and eats fish with him and several other disciples. (Jn. 20-21)

Paul’s resurrection account differs with all of the gospel stories. Paul tells the Christians at Corinth: "I handed on to you . . . what I in turn had received [from the disciples] that Christ appeared to Peter, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time. . . . Then he appeared to James [the brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem], then to all the apostles. Last of all . . . he appeared also to me." (1 Cor. 15:3-8)

As Paul is writing in the 50s and the gospel authors wrote after the Jewish revolt that begins in 66, Paul’s resurrection account is earlier. Moreover, Paul seems unaware of stories about Jesus appearing to women at an empty tomb or eating with his disciples.

Paul is, however, aware that some Christians doubt in the resurrection, for he writes to the Corinthians: "how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul explains that resurrection is the fulfillment of God’s will for all creation, not merely the raising of Jesus from the dead. Christ is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead that will come for all those, he says, "who belong to Christ." (1 Cor. 15:20-23) And he argues that the resurrection of the Christians in Corinth will be the same as the resurrection of Christ.

It appears that some among the Christians in Corinth, have asked: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Paul answers: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." And he explains: "There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." (1 Cor. 15: 40, 42, 44)

The authors of the New Testament gospels ignore the earlier resurrection account Paul received from the disciples and also his explanation that resurrection is not physical. We, too, may doubt the resurrection, but there is no doubt that Paul's spiritual experience of the risen Christ transformed his life and the course of history over the following two millennia. 

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer

Patient's NDE felt like "going home"

Neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton reports that he is able to predict when his patients are going to die. He first experienced this premonition while assisting a veterinarian with animals. “I began to notice that there seemed to be some energy or light that spread out from the animals themselves, and then completely enveloped them right before the moment of death.“

Later, as a medical student, I became aware that I could perceive a pale yellowish hue around human patients, almost like the light thrown by a candle. This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient’s skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon. As their impending death drew nearer, the yellow-colored light grew more tightly focused around their bodies and faces.”

While caring for Harry who had survived a heart attack, Hamilton noticed “that yellow, waxy light in his eyes, from his skin.” There were “no symptoms like chest pain or arrhythmia. I had nothing solid to go on except my premonition. I told a white lie to the charge nurse to get Harry back into the ICU. I explained, “I thought I had seen a run of ventricular tachycardia on his monitor. I had just not been quick enough to capture it on the paper strip.” With this warning, the supervising nurse immediately granted his request.

Prior to this reversal in his recovery, Harry had shared with Hamilton his near-death experience during his heart attack.

I got to tell you that there really was nothin’ scary ‘bout it. I just felt at peace, loved. I just seemed to rise up in the air, like a puffy cloud. I could see myself lying in the grass. But it wasn’t like I was scared. I just felt like I was going home, like being on furlough to see my family during the war or something. You know, something that you’re jus’ dying to do. I suppose that’s a pun or somethin’. But you get what I mean, don’t you? It was like I was lookin’ forward to it. Like I’d been lookin’ forward to it for the longest time, and now I was goin’ to finally get there, get to do it.

Now, Harry continued, it isn’t like I wanted to die or somethin’ like that. ‘Cause I sure as hell din’t want to leave Phyllis [his wife]. But at the same time, I knew there wasn’t anything to fear ‘bout what lay beyond this life.

After his cardiac arrest, shocks to his heart, CPR, and an injection with Adrenalin failed to bring Harry back to his physical life.

Allan J. Hamilton, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (Penguin, 2009).