NDEs have renewed my Christian Faith

Not long after my mother died, my father during surgery suffered a cardiac arrest. As the physicians worked on his unconscious body, he “awoke” floating above the operating table―seeing the physicians working frantically to revive him and hearing their voices. Then he found himself moving through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, where he saw my mother, smiling and waiting. As he came near to her and into the light, he felt an overwhelming sense of being loved and forgiven. But my mother communicated to him that it wasn’t his time yet, and then he floated back through the darkness and into his aching body.

For several years my father didn’t tell anyone of this extraordinary experience, but finally he shared it with me. Trained as a scientist, he had no way to explain his near-death consciousness during his cardiac arrest under general anesthesia. His life was altered, however, by what he experienced and remembered. My father was not a religious man, but his near-death experience (NDE) left him without any fear of death. Also, I believe, he became more loving and accepting. At age 90, when a second stroke left him unable to swallow, he told me his time had come. He asked that his IV be disconnected and that a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order be entered into his medical record. After a day without water or food, he slipped into a coma and three days later died peacefully.

My father’s NDE not only changed his life, but mine as well. Since his death I have read many accounts of near-death experiences and studied the research reported by physicians and other scientists. My father’s experience and my research have also affected my recent writing about faith, consciousness, and science. My essays are available online primarily on two of my four web sites, but especially on the web site at www.doingfaith.com. I cannot adequately summarize all these readings and how they have changed my thinking, but here are few paragraphs that try . . .

First, I am now convinced we are souls having a human experience, rather than human beings who some believe have souls. By “soul” I mean living-perceiving-meaning moments of consciousness that come from (and in this life continue to be part of) the sustaining timeless source of all living-perceiving-meaning. NDEs such as my father’s verify an enhanced consciousness that is not the result of brain activity—and in fact seems to require the loss of ordinary consciousness. NDE survivors affirm we all are part of an enhanced and endlessly creating consciousness.

Physicists describe this unfolding or evolving consciousness as the nonlocal background for all that is. In the words of Christian teaching, we “live and move and have our being” in “the kingdom of God.” This kingdom, of course, is immaterial, but hints of it enter our material experience. NDEs especially reveal the power and purposes of this spiritual realm, or what several of the authors in this collection call “the Other Side.” I believe the Light my father and millions of others have experienced during an NDE confirms the Christian witness that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”—whether we are Christians or participate in other religious traditions or are agnostics or atheists.  

Second, I know that our purpose in this life is to grow in the Light of this unconditional Love. In every moment, in the trials of living and dying, and in all our relationships, this is our challenge and opportunity. We always have a choice to love creatively, with courage and hope. We can strive to be forgiving, as we have been forgiven. We can embrace our living and dying with gratitude and joy. Each of us has our own fate—a calling to our individual quest to wrest faith and hope from suffering. Yet, we all are One in this extraordinary adventure.

Along the way each of us will have guides from the Other Side—from loving angels or caring ancestors or other beings. Or from what psychologists identify as our unconscious. This guidance will usually be ambiguous, as we each must find our own way. Our evolving-loving-consciousness is part of the timeless evolving-loving-consciousness that gives meaning and purpose to all reality. I encourage you to look for your guidance in prayer, meditation, humor, art, music, and children, as well as in your disappointments.

Third, I am filled with hope that we come from and will return home to the everlasting Light offering unconditional Love. We enter life on earth with a purpose, I now believe, and whether or not this purpose is fulfilled we will end our embodied experience on earth with a forgiving life review and new insights into the meaning of our cosmic adventure. 

 

The photo shows my father and oldest child, Kim Traer. I'm grateful for the lessons I've learned from each of them.

NDEs have real effects

Kenneth Ring’s main focus in Lessons from the Light is on the after effects experienced by NDE survivors. He writes: “These studies show that whatever the nature of the NDE, it is real in its effects.” NDE survivors often “say that following their experience, they did not become more religious, but more spiritual. By this, they seem to mean that the formal aspects of religion—in the sense of organized religion—become less important to them and a more universal and inclusive spirituality that embraces everyone comes to exert a deeper hold on their allegiance.

“Many NDErs afterward tell us that they find they have become unusually sensitive to light, sound, humidity, and a variety of other environmental stimuli or conditions. Taste sensitivity increases, and one’s tolerance for alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs diminishes. Not surprisingly, NDErs report more allergies. Also, a large proportion of these persons discover, for instance, that digital wristwatches will no longer work properly for them, or they ‘short out’ electrical systems in their cars, or computers and appliances malfunction for no apparent reason." (126-30)

What is known as “the life review” has a significant effect on many NDE survivors. Ring writes: “While it is true that there is an aspect to the life review in which one watches the scenes of one’s life like a spectator, many persons report that at the same time they are in these scenes and are living through them as if they are actually experiencing them again.

One NDE survivor recalls: What occurred was every emotion I have felt in my life, I felt. And my eyes were showing me the basis of how that emotion had affected my life. What my life had done so far to affect other people’s lives, using the feelings of pure love that was surrounding me as the point of comparison. And I had done a terrible job. God, I mean it! Looking at yourself from the point of how much love you have spread to other people is devastating’. (Ring, Heading toward Omega, 71.)

“For the experiencer, the life review is not only a personal revelation or an insight into principles of cosmic relevance, but also a healing. Not just what you see about yourself, but how you come to see and understand it is what heals you of what may be long-standing feelings of inadequacy and patterns of self-defeating behavior. The result is a kind of forgiveness of oneself and others that returns you to your authentic self." (147-98)

Finally, Ring writes, NDE survivors have no fear of death. “Those facing death do not fear it; they know the Light awaits them. Those who wish to take their own life learn that it is impossible to do so; there is only life. Those who grieve are comforted and sometimes even transformed. And those blessed with a vision of a loved one who has left them know with certitude that their beloved still lives and that the connection has not been broken.

I looked further down the tunnel and saw the light. I realized immediately where I was. The light was home. I knew that I could only return here. There was no question of losing this place. It was home, and I, and everyone else, came here and there was no possible way to avoid it or miss it. It was the only thing that was guaranteed, returning here.

Ring concludes, by affirming: “the true promise of the NDE is not so much what it suggests about an afterlife—as inspiring and comforting as those glimpses are—but what it says about how to live now." (248-82)

Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Insight Books, 1998; Moment Point Press, 2006).

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NDEs are not hallucinations

Psychologist Kenneth Ring notes that in every NDE he have considered, “the individual encounters some kind of a presence within the Light, someone or something that gives the impression of having an omniscient knowledge of the person and an infinite solicitude for his or her welfare and future well-being.

“When we nearly die, then, we find that we are not alone and presumably have never been alone. We have someone or something that appears to guide us benevolently, albeit invisibly, in our life on this earth, but that can intervene at critical moments and, as in the near-death state, manifest clearly into our awareness. This in itself is profoundly reassuring.

Ring counters the critics who claim these experiences are hallucinations by citing examples of detailed perceptions by NDE survivors that were verified. An audiologist, whose myopic vision meant he couldn’t see much without his glasses, had during military service the following OBE experience—without his glasses on.

I had had a spinal injury and was undergoing what was supposed to have been an uncomplicated cleansing and scraping procedure [when complications developed]. I sensed something turning sour in my system and literally yelled in my mind, ‘Hey, guys, you’re losing me!’ [Then] I just floated upward to the top of the canvas tent and looked down at the scene. I saw the dust on the supposedly clean and sterile OR lights, someone just outside smoking a cigarette, the near-panic of the medical staff, and the expression of the big, black Air Force corpsman who was called to come in to forklift me in his arms while others beat me on my back. He had a clearly discernible scar on the top of his closely cropped head, in the form of a small cross. He was the only one not wearing a facemask, having been summoned on the spur of the moment.

A South African man with double pneumonia was in hospital and became friendly with a nurse. Later, he told Ring:

While I was in a coma (and I believe clinically dead), my friend, the nurse, was killed in an automobile accident. I met her on the Other Side. She asked me to return, promised I would meet a loving wife, and asked that I tell her parents she still loved them and was sorry she wrecked her twenty-first birthday present (a red MGB). Needless to say, when I told the nursing staff upon my return that I knew Nurse van Wyk had been killed and the car she had been killed in was a red MGB (something only her parents knew) while I was “dead,” people started to sit up and take notice.

Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Insight Books, 1998; Moment Point Press, 2006), 64-68.

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Steve's near-death experience transformed his life

Steve also shared his experience with Kenneth Ring’s class on NDEs. Ring explains: “In 1975, when Steve was twenty-four, he underwent oral surgery in which some impacted wisdom teeth were to be removed. Before the procedure, Steve was injected with a sedative in his left arm and was later given sodium pentothal. That did not seem to take, and the surgeon, with some exasperation, then injected a total of four cartridges. After the surgery was completed—some two hours later!—Steve was taken to a windowless, postoperative recovery room and, while there, had his experience.

I awakened from the surgery, blinded by a river of white light. I thought it was an aftereffect of the general anesthesia. I thought it was odd that it pushed beyond my optic nerve and went through my entire body. I immediately rose to my feet and looked at the nurse who had helped me up.

She wasn’t a nurse. She was clothed in light, extraordinarily beautiful and loving. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I almost cry when I think about it. The light that shone from the center of her was gloriously beautiful. I looked back and down at my body, still lying on the recovery couch under a blanket. Here I was, standing beside a being of light, looking at my body.

Before I reasoned it through, she intercepted my thoughts. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not dead. You’re quite alive. Your heart is still beating. Look!’ I looked. I could see the chambers emptying and filling with blood. I could see the vascular system and the life-sustaining materials working their way through the entire body.

She had a veil of energy at her back, which separated her world from mine. She said, ‘It’s a one-way path. If you go through there, you can’t come back here. Your life will be over, and you won’t have done the things you need to do.’ Brilliant shards of light in all colors danced around the opening. They appeared and disappeared, as if the light energy was being fragmented and shattered at the contact point between two worlds at different energy levels.

She showed me some details about my children [who were not yet born] and revealed a view of another woman even more lovely and desirable—the wife I was married to. She then said it was time to return, that my breathing had stabilized, and that my nervous system was able to work on its own. I saw her light begin to withdraw from me as she retreated from my view. This light persisted for two or three seconds as I awakened, while my wife was holding my face in her hands.

The NDE changed Steve’s life. I felt tremendously ignorant. I started buying books. I filled up notebooks on histories of different nations, on archeology, and on philosophies. I found I could memorize and play a Bach prelude and fugue with only a few hours of preparation, whereas before I had to struggle for weeks to learn a piece of music.

My family found my changed viewpoint unbearable. My ability to see the future, and my tendency to react and answer the private thoughts and intentions of my father’s business associates, rather than their outward, polished manners, was very disturbing to everyone.

I can’t watch TV cop shows. I think it’s obscene to show a killing without remorse. My teenagers and I have a running battle about their TV selections.

I love God more than anything. But I almost can’t go to church. I can’t relate to the shame and guilt in the lessons. The discussions on guilt and sin don’t hold any relevance for me, and don’t make me happy. They don’t fit into any of the experiences I’ve had. I tried opening these subjects gently and cautiously with local church leaders, but they didn’t respond well.”

 

Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Insight Books, 1998; Moment Point Press, 2006), 36-40.

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Her NDE "life review" filled her with compassion

Psychologist Kenneth Ring writes: “For the past ten years I have been teaching a course on the near-death experience (NDE) at my university. Every semester, thirty-five to forty young undergraduates arrive at my classroom on the first day of the new term, usually somewhat nervous about taking such an offbeat course but generally enthusiastic and curious about the topic that has already excited their interest.

Ring invited Laurelynn Glass Martin to share her NDE with his class. “Laurelynn, who is now in her thirties, began by explaining how her life changed when she was a senior in college. She had gone into the hospital to have what was supposed to be a routine twenty-minute laparoscopic surgical procedure. However, her physician, as she learned later, exerted undue force making the initial incision, puncturing her abdominal aorta, her right iliac artery, the inferior vena cava, and her bowel in two places, ultimately hitting her vertebral spine. As a result, Laurelynn lost almost 60 percent of her blood—and her pulse and, obviously, nearly her life.

Without any warning, Laurelynn recalls, she suddenly found herself floating above her physical body, off to the right side, observing with detachment, the efforts of the medical team to revive her lifeless form.

The surgical team was frantic. Red was everywhere, splattered on their gowns, splattered on the floor, and a bright pool of flowing red blood, in the now-wide-open abdominal cavity. I couldn’t understand what was going on down there. I didn’t even make the connection, at that moment, that the body being worked on was my own. It didn’t matter anyway. I was in a state of freedom, having a great time.

I then traveled to another realm of total and absolute peace. There was no pain, but instead a sense of well being, in a warm, dark, soft space. I was enveloped by total bliss in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance. The darkness was beautiful, stretching on and on. The freedom of total peace was intensified beyond any ecstatic feeling ever felt here on earth. In the distance, I saw a horizon of whitish-yellowish light. I find it very difficult to describe where I was, because the words we know here in this plane just aren’t adequate enough.

I was admiring the beauty of the light but never got any closer because next I felt a presence approaching from my right, upper side. I was feeling even more peaceful and happy, especially when I discovered it was my thirty-year-old brother-in-law who had died seven months earlier. Although I couldn’t see with my eyes or hear with my ears, I instinctively knew it was him.

He didn’t have a physical form, but a presence. I could feel, hear, and see his smile, laughter, and sense of humor. It was as if I had come home, and my brother-in-law was there to greet me. I instantly thought how glad I was to be with him because now I could make up for the last time I had seen him before his death. I felt bad about not taking the time out of my busy schedule to have a heart-to-heart talk with him when he had asked me to. I felt no remorse now, but total acceptance and love from him about my actions.

“Reflecting on her behavior toward her brother-in-law seems to lead Laurelynn back further into her life and, before she knows it, events from her childhood begin to appear to her, all at once, yet in chronological order. In one, she says: I had teased a little girl my own age (five years old) to the point of tears. I was now in a unique position to feel what that little girl had felt. Her frustration, her tears, and her feeling of separateness were now my feelings. I felt a tremendous amount of compassion for this child. I hadn’t realized that by hurting another, I was really just hurting myself.

Other thoughts were conveyed to me, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow; now I get it. Everything about our existence makes sense.’ I finally got around to questioning my brother-in-law (not with words but more [like] transference) about what was happening and asked him if I could stay. He told me it wasn’t my time yet, that there had been a mistake, and that I had to go back. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll go back, but I know how I can get back up here.’

At the same instant, his thoughts were mine, saying: ‘You can’t take your own life (suicide). That isn’t the answer, that won’t do it. You have to live your life’s purpose.’ I understood, but I still remember thinking, I don’t want to go back, and his thought came to me, saying, ‘It’s okay; we’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here for you again.’ The last thought of his was ‘Tell your sister I’m fine.’

I felt myself going back, dropping downward through darkness. I didn’t feel that I had a choice and was slammed into my body. I couldn’t believe I was returning to such a hellish environment, but then the beauty of the experience flooded back to me, giving me the most serene peace and calm I could hope for under the circumstances.

After the NDE, value changes came. I felt that the materialism and external stuff that was a big focus before just didn’t matter anymore. My priorities in life took a complete turnaround. I felt there was a purpose for my life, even down to the smallest detail of being kind to others spontaneously and freely, loving more deeply, [and] being nonjudgmental and accepting of one’s self and others. I also got a strong message about the importance of always seeking knowledge. I no longer fear death and, in fact, will welcome it when it is the right time—and that’s only for the universal, supreme power to decide. Until then, though, I try to enjoy each day like it’s my last and live more consciously in the moment.”

Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Insight Books, 1998; Moment Point Press, 2006), 27-32.

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The NDE experience of grace

Kenneth Ring is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), and founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. His other books about near-death experiences include Life at Death (2013), Heading toward Omega (2012), The Omega Project (2012) and Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (2008), and Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience.

Ring is an early NDE researcher who also taught a course about NDEs for many years at the University of Connecticut. In his course and in this book he argues that sharing NDEs with others may provide some of the emotional and spiritual benefits, and even personality changes, that have been verified as likely for NDE survivors. In other words, a person doesn’t have to have an NDE but may be influenced by hearing about NDEs to lose their fear of death, or to be convinced that death is not a time of divine judgment. I know pondering my father’s experience and reading about NDEs have affected me in these ways, and this is in large part why I am trying to share these experiences with my children and grandchildren.

Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, writes in a Forward to the 1998 edition of Lessons from the Light: “If any one person can claim to be an authority on near-death experiences (NDEs) without having had one, that person must surely be Kenneth Ring. Ken dares to writes frankly in these pages about the meaning of NDEs, inferring teleological conclusions from his empirical studies. In violating the scientistic taboo against mentioning such concepts as meaning and purpose, Ken honestly confronts a topic most scientists pretend plays no role in their thinking. As the biologist Ernest William von Brück put it more than a hundred years ago, ‘Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.’

Some theologians “have decried NDEs for holding out the false promise of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace,’ the unconditional forgiveness of sins without any required contrition. ‘Cheap grace,’ wrote Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, ‘is the deadly enemy of the Church.’ But is that in fact what NDEs promise, or is that a misreading of its message?
 

In reality the grace that is bestowed upon NDErs comes hand in hand with a very costly discipleship. The unconditional love NDErs report in their experience does not by any means gloss over their sins or excuse their future behavior. Quite to the contrary, NDErs experience firsthand in their NDEs the painful consequences of their sinful behavior, and return to earthly life as confirmed disciples, who understand from their own experience that their behavior does indeed matter, far more than they could have imagined."

Bruce Greyson, 1998 Forward in Lessons from the Light, xv-xix. The photo above is Greyson.

 

Greyson is a co-author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), a book that Eben Alexander highly recommends in Proof of Heaven, his NDE account.

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NDEs may be shared "transpersonal experiences"

Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick writes: “William of Occam’s proposition that the simplest explanation is usually the best is as valid today as it was in the fourteenth century. It is logical to assume that one brain mechanism underpins both NDEs and mystical experiences, rather than to argue that one of them—the NDE—has quite a different explanation. If we accept that the NDE is a form of mystical experience, it explains at least some of the things that have puzzled us. It explains why not everybody who is near death has one, and why there is no common cause.

“But the major question still remains unanswered. How is it that this coherent, highly structured experience sometimes occurs during unconsciousness, when it is impossible to postulate an organized sequence of events in a disordered brain? One is forced to the conclusion that either science is missing a fundamental link which would explain this, or organized experiences can arise in a disorganized brain, or that some forms of experience are transpersonal—that is, they depend on a mind which is not inextricably bound up with a brain.

“This is a story that was told to me by the niece of an old lady who was an old family friend. Some years ago the old lady lay peacefully dying, at home, in her own bed. Her niece, who was looking after her, was sleeping in a room just along the corridor. She left the doors of both rooms open so that she could easily hear her aunt if she called. During the night the niece woke and saw light outside her door. Thinking that a light had been left switched on, she got out of bed and saw that the light was streaming from the door of her aunt’s room. As she entered the room she saw that the light was surrounding her aunt. As she watched, the light slowly faded and her aunt died.

"When I was told this story it reminded me of a letter I had received from a mother who was at the hospital bed of her dying child. She too had described seeing a light full of pure love shining from and surrounding her child as he finally died. Now, one has to think very differently about a light, which can be seen only by the dying person and one, which seems to emanate from them, which others can see.

“These accounts seem to show that the NDE may not be just a private experience, but part of a common world that we can all experience,” Fenwick suggests. Also, “These experiences could suggest a different reality and a different model of the universe; one in which there is an interconnectedness between people both before and after death. But unless mind and brain are separate it is difficult to see how this can be.

“If we accept the subjective experience of the people who gave these accounts, then we have to accept that what happens to the dying person can in some way affect those around them; that the NDE can sometimes be a shared experience rather than just a personal one. One mind seems to be affecting another mind directly—and this is not something that is built into or can be accounted for by any of the scientific theories we’ve looked at so far. We have to look for some quite different theory of mind.

“We’ve been assuming that everything is created within the brain. An alternative view is that everything is transmitted through the brain. William James was one of the strongest exponents of the transmission theory. He described in his book Human Immortality (1898) the idea that beyond the ‘veil of reality’ in this world, and particularly beyond the brain, there is a transcendent reality in which the soul may live. He argued that it is the brain, which transmits and modifies the beam of consciousness.

“We have seen that the NDE is both timeless and independent of death; that it seems to be part of the spectrum of normal human experience. For many people the NDE is a profound spiritual experience. It makes them value life without clinging to it, appreciate each day as though it was their last."

  

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

 

The Art of Dying (2008) by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick “looks at how other cultures have dealt with death and the dying process (The Tibetan ‘death system,’ Swedenborg, etc.). They compare these practices with phenomena reported through recent scientific research. The book also describes the experiences of health care workers involved with end of life issues who feel that they need a better understanding of the dying process, and more training in how to help their patients die well by overcoming the common barriers to a good death—such as unfinished business and unresolved emotions of guilt or hate.”

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Dying-Peter-Fenwick/dp/0826499236/. 

The first 41 minutes of this excellent and very informative video  has an update on Fenwick’s research and reflections as of August 24, 2014. Fenwick describes the dying process and its similarities with NDEs. He draws on and affirms end of life experiences (ELEs) and describes the transition during dying, from our ordinary consciousness of experiencing the duality of subject and objects to a non-duality experience of consciousness that characterizes NDEs as well as dying.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1XK68tMm7Y

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