Recalling previous lives: Rawlette excerpt #15

Jim Tucker

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Another frequently recurring feature of these cases is the presence, not just of verbally expressed memories, but of behaviors that match what would be expected of the person in the previous life. Phobias are one example. Ian Stevenson wrote that, out of 252 cases he studied in which the death of the previous person was violent, in 50% of them, the child remembering the death had a corresponding phobia (for instance, a fear of water if they remembered drowning).

Other behaviors reported in children with past-life memories are more idiosyncratic reflections of the past personality they remember. A young girl named Rylann O’Bannion was afraid of thunderstorms and told her mother she’d died in the backyard when there was a loud noise and the rain shocked her. On another occasion, Rylann said she remembered seeing a plane crash when she was standing in the yard. She also remembered the name “Jennifer” and said the year 1971 felt “familiar” to her. These clues helped Rylann’s mother discover a girl named Jennifer Shultz who had died outside her home when a plane crashed into her neighborhood during a thunderstorm. This Jennifer had been born in 1971. In addition to her memories that matched Jennifer’s death, Rylann also exhibited behaviors that were later discovered to match Jennifer’s. They both had the unusual habit of opening and closing the drawers in their bathroom vanities, not to take anything out of them but just to look inside. And both girls created owls from yarn that they then perched on sticks. This commonality can’t be chalked up to a fad in children’s crafts, as Rylann and Jennifer were born almost four decades apart.

More evidence for the validity of children’s past-life memories comes from the fact that psychological testing of the children who have these memories has not revealed any connection with psychopathology. In fact, these children have higher-than-average intelligence and are less suggestible than other children, as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale.

Another interesting statistical fact is that, among cases in which the death remembered is a natural (non-violent) one, the lives remembered are roughly 50% male and 50% female. However, among cases in which the death remembered is “unnatural” (a murder, a suicide, or an accident), 73% percent of the cases are of male lives. This matches the general statistics on unnatural deaths in the United States, where 72% are male. That is, these children’s memories, evaluated as a whole, accurately reflect sex differences in manner of death in the population at large.

The sheer number of past-life memories that have been verified as accurate combined with the overall consistency of the phenomenon points to past-life memories being much more than the product of childhood imagination. Thousands of children have memories of lives that did take place in another body. But does this automatically mean the survival hypothesis is true? It has been suggested by some that these children are not actually identical with or inhabited by the surviving consciousness of the people whose lives they remember but instead are just accessing those people’s memories by some not-yet-understood process that doesn’t involve the continuing consciousness of the deceased. The idea is that either these children are psychically accessing the past or are psychically accessing “dead” memories.

Little is known about the mechanisms by which these memories present themselves to the consciousness of the children who have them, but whether or not these children are wholly identical with the people whose lives they remember, it is clear that at least part of the consciousness of those people lives on in these children. In the strongest cases, these children not only share the memories of the deceased but also multiple aspects of their behavior/personality and even physical characteristics. Many continue to have emotional attachments to people the deceased knew, in some cases still being in love with their former spouses. Since memories, personality, and interpersonal attachments are three of the primary characteristics we’re interested in seeing survive beyond our death, it is hard not to see these children’s memories and behavior as a kind of survival, even if only partial. (It bears remembering, too, that survival, even while we are still in the same living body, is almost always “partial,” in the sense that we are continually forgetting the previous events of our lives and changing our personality and behavior to a greater or lesser degree.)

Furthermore, these children generally identify themselves with the person whose memories they carry. For instance, the mother of one child with previous-life memories was trying to help him put them behind him and live in the present, and so she told him, “Ryan, you do know that you are not that man in the picture anymore. We just want you to be Ryan.” According to Tucker, who investigated the case, her son responded “that he was not the same as the man in the picture on the outside but that on the inside he was still that man.” (There are, however, some cases in which people with memories of previous lives feel some separation from that other personality, in some cases even referring to them in the third person. See, for example, the case of Kilden at the beginning of the next section, who alternates between third- and first-person pronouns.)

Also, it’s important to note that near-death experiencers corroborate children’s memories of previous lives in various ways. For instance, many NDErs report learning about reincarnation during their NDEs. Mary Helen Hensley, for example, was the daughter of a Baptist minister and as a young person never gave the idea of reincarnation a second thought. Nevertheless, when she had an NDE at age 21, she saw a play-by-play review of her current life as well as suddenly remembering many lives she’d lived before. She says, “Of the many things that I can remember [from the NDE], there is one that I feel compelled to convey with certainty—I think it is important to state that reincarnation is a fact.” Another NDEr reports, “After my NDE, I understood that this life here is only one of many we have to go through. We are bound to be born here time after time [until] we are good enough to go to other dimensions permanently."

In addition, there are a few accounts of NDErs who, while apparently out of their bodies but still hanging around the physical world, remember attempting to jumpstart the reincarnation process by entering the bodies of newborns. Here’s an excerpt from an NDE account published in a London newspaper in 1935:

Then suddenly I was again transported—this time it seemed to be against my wish—to a bed-room, where a woman whom I recognized was in bed, and two other women were quietly bustling around, and a doctor was leaning over the bed.

Then the doctor had a baby in his hands.

At once I became aware of an almost irresistible impulse to press my face through the back of the baby’s head so that my face would come into the same place as the child’s.

The doctor said, “It looks as though we have lost them both.” And again I felt the urge to take the baby’s place in order to show him he was wrong, but the thought of my mother crying turned my thoughts in her direction, when straightway I was in a railway carriage with both her and father.

Interestingly, the NDEr went on to report that he recognized the woman in labor as a neighbor of his. Upon reviving in his own body, he told his parents that the neighbor’s baby was dead because he couldn’t get into its body. They discovered afterward that the woman in question had indeed delivered a stillborn baby that day (and had herself died, just as the NDEr observed during his experience).

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Memories of past lives: Rawlette excerpt #14

Ian Stevenson

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of having lived a previous life in a different body don’t get nearly as much press as near-death experiences, even though the literature documenting the accuracy of past-life memories is much vaster and more thorough than the literature on verified paranormal perception in NDEs. Much of the documentation related to memories of previous lives is due to the monumental work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who beginning in the 1960s spent several decades traveling the world conducting extremely thorough investigations into the past-life memories spontaneously reported by young children.

Similar work, with similar results, has been conducted on a smaller scale by several other researchers, including Satwant Pasricha, Antonia Mills, Jürgen Keil, Erlendur Haraldsson, Jim B. Tucker, and James G. Matlock. These researchers have sought to determine whether there are actual deceased people whose lives correspond to the past-life memories children report, how closely the children’s memories correspond to the details of these people’s lives, and whether the children could have learned these details in some non-paranormal way. 

For many of these cases, the correspondences between the memories and the lives of the deceased are so accurate and detailed, and the possibility of the children learning such details in a normal way so remote, that the best explanation appears to be some sort of “reincarnation”: the continuation of a deceased person’s consciousness in a new body. By 2001, the University of Virginia already had in its collection over 2,500 cases that investigation showed to be suggestive of reincarnation.

There has also been a lot of interest in the past 70 years in retrieving past-life memories through hypnosis. However, the number of hypnotic regression cases in which the existence of the specific individual remembered has been verified is much smaller than the number of spontaneous cases where this has been achieved, and there is debate within the parapsychology community over the accuracy of memories evoked by hypnosis. For this reason, I’ll restrict my attention in this essay to spontaneously occurring memories.

One of the most striking cases of past-life memory investigated in the United States in the last couple of decades is that of a boy named James Leininger, who at age two began having terrible nightmares during which he would scream, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following months, James began talking about the content of his nightmare while awake. His parents asked him for more details about what had happened to the plane he was in, and James said it was shot, by the Japanese. Later, James added that his plane was a Corsair. James also told his parents that he had flown his plane off a boat. When asked for the name of the boat, James replied, “Natoma.” His dad said that the name sounded Japanese, and James looked “perturbed” at this comment. He corrected his father, telling him it was American.

James’s father, Bruce, had strong Christian convictions and at the time of James’s first comments had a negative reaction to the idea that they might be indicative of reincarnation. However, Bruce was open-minded enough to try to investigate the things his son was saying. Through a web search, he discovered that there had indeed been a U.S. escort carrier named “Natoma Bay” in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Over the following months and years, James went on to produce further details about his apparent memories of another life. When asked who the little man in the plane was, James would say either “me” or “James,” which didn’t seem very helpful. When they asked if there was anyone else in the dream with him, he gave the name Jack Larsen and said that Jack was a pilot, too. At another time, James saw a picture of Iwo Jima in a book and said, “My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.” And, on still another occasion, James told his dad that his plane had been hit at the front of the engine, right in the propeller.

Bruce eventually learned that pilots from Natoma Bay had participated in the Iwo Jima operation and that only one pilot had been killed during it: a pilot named James Huston. When Bruce was finally able to get his hands on the aircraft action report for the day of Huston’s death, he saw that, flying right next to Huston was a pilot named Jack Larsen. Bruce was also able to talk to four men who had actually seen Huston’s plane go down that day. They all confirmed that Huston’s plane had been hit head-on, in the engine.

James had also reported that “Little Man” had two sisters, Ruth and Annie, and he specified that Ruth was four years older than Annie, who was four years older than he was. It turned out that James Huston did have two older sisters with these names, and their ages were spaced in the way he indicated.

One thing James said that didn’t seem to be quite right was the fact that his plane had been a Corsair, as there had never been any Corsairs flying from Natoma Bay. James Huston had died in an FM-2. And yet it was later discovered that James Huston had flown a Corsair before coming to Natoma Bay. His surviving sister Anne had a couple of pictures of him in front of a Corsair, and it was confirmed that Huston had previously tested the Corsair for the Navy.

This case has been carefully researched by Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, among other researchers. And while it is certainly one of the most strikingly detailed of the American cases of apparent past-life memories, it is far from the only one of its kind. As previously mentioned, similar cases have been collected and studied in countries all around the world, and they show remarkable consistency in their features. 

For instance, children nearly always begin speaking about their memories of another life between the ages of two and five, and they generally stop talking about them between five and eight years old, although there are some adults who retain spontaneous past-life memories as well. Another consistency is that past-life memories tend to be of things that happened close to the end of the previous life, and almost 75% of children with past-life memories make statements about how they died.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Eye-witness testimony: Rawlette excerpt #13

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—We have now seen some of the independently verifiable aspects of near-death experiences, but the evidentiary value of NDEs doesn’t stop there. While aspects verifiable by third parties are important corroborations of the objective quality of the experiences, there is so much more to the near-death experience than what can be verified by an independent observer, and we would miss a lot by not listening carefully to all aspects of the testimonies of those who have had the experience themselves.

To begin with, those who have had a near-death experience are almost universally convinced of the reality of life after death and see their fear of death vanish. That is, those who have actually had the experience—including those who were previously die-hard atheist physicalists—are sure that consciousness goes on after permanent bodily death.

Another aspect of NDErs’ accounts that weighs against the hallucination hypothesis is the fact that 71% of NDErs say that their NDE memories are clearer and more vivid than those of other events. In fact, one common observation made by NDErs is that the experience was “realer than real.” Compared to what they experience in the NDE, normal life seems like a dream.

NDErs also commonly report that, during the NDE, they not only perceive more, with 360-degree vision and the ability to perceive events at a distance in space and time, but they also describe their thinking as being faster and clearer. Dr. Bruce Greyson reports in his 2021 book After that, among more than a thousand NDErs he’s surveyed in his 45 years of studying the phenomenon, “half described their thinking during the NDE as clearer than usual, and almost as many described it as faster than usual.” 

The vast majority of his NDErs who described experiencing life reviews reported them as “more vivid than ordinary memories.” Some even noted that they were able to perceive more detail in their life review than when the events actually happened to them. An NDEr named Tom Sawyer, for instance, reports that, during one scene of his life review, he was able to perceive things so clearly that he could have counted the number of mosquitoes present. An NDEr named Peggy says that, during her NDE, “I did not have the limited consciousness I have on earth. It felt like I had 125 senses to our normal five. You could do, think, comprehend, and so on, you name it, with no effort at all. It’s as if the facts are right before you in plain sight with no risk of misinterpretation because the truth just is! Nothing is hidden.” 

Another woman, a Canadian anthropologist, reports that, during her NDE, “I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree [sic] spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher.”

Some NDErs feel they suddenly understand huge quantities of information about the universe, only some minor portion of which they are able to retain when they return to their body. According to surveys conducted through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website, 30.7% of NDErs felt that, during their NDE, they understood everything “about the universe.” In fact, experience in an NDE is so different from normal experience that NDErs have trouble even describing it. NDEr Steve Luiting reports, “The language spoken [during the NDE] was much, much more complex and could literally encapsulate experiences. Even the memories when coming back into my body flattened, simplified, and became symbols of what really happened. I believe this flattening happens simply because the human brain can’t understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien.”

It’s intriguing to consider the idea of “super-survival,” the idea that our post-death selves may actually be a significantly enhanced version of the selves we currently experience ourselves as having. As one NDEr has said, “Our identity will continue to be—in a greater way.” But whether or not our consciousness is in fact enhanced after the death of our bodies, the most important point to recognize here is the sheer number of near-death experiencers (again, 4-15% of the general population) and their overwhelming conviction that what they’ve experienced is indicative of survival of consciousness after the permanent death of the body.

As philosopher Jens Amberts emphasizes in his forthcoming book Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists, “at least some NDErs were equally as skeptical of the existence of an afterlife or of the idea that NDEs are or can be indicative of an afterlife as we may be now, and at least some of them also shared the intensity of that skepticism, and at least some of them also shared whatever justifications we may think or feel that we have for that skepticism. And yet, the NDE thoroughly and justifiably convinced them that there really is an afterlife....” 

When so many eye-witnesses with reasoning faculties similar to our own all say the same thing, we do well to pay attention— especially when these reports offer us a glimpse into a state of being that, to the rest of us, is the equivalent of a locked room. Rather than insist that it’s impossible for what’s in that room to be different than what we experience outside it, we would do well to take seriously the testimony of those who have the relevant firsthand knowledge.

At the same time, despite all the compelling evidence from NDEs that consciousness doesn’t depend on a functioning brain, it’s still true that NDEs are not actually testimonies from people whose bodies are permanently dead, but only people whose bodies are provisionally, reversibly dead. Despite their conviction otherwise, it is still logically possible that their experiences do not accurately reflect what we will experience when our bodies permanently die and degrade. 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Future and shared death: Rawlette excerpt #12

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—A final important point regarding paranormal perception during NDEs is that about a third of those NDErs who report experiencing a life review recall that that review contained visions of future as well as past life events, and at least some of those future events have then taken place, even when they were still 20 or 30 years in the future at the time of the NDE. In a case reported to Kenneth Ring, a 10-year-old had an NDE in which he received the information “You will be married at age twenty-eight” and “You will have two children.” Eighteen years later, during the year following his twenty-eighth birthday, he met and married his spouse, and they went on to have two children.

A related phenomenon is that NDErs sometimes report meeting their future children during their NDEs and/or meeting the future children of other people. I’m not aware of any cases that provide strong objective verification of this beyond the fact that, when these children are born, the NDErs recognize them as the ones they saw in their NDE, but the mere fact that NDErs report these interactions with future children dovetails with memories some children have of a pre-birth existence, memories we’ll explore in the sections Memories of a Previous Life and Memories of the Intermission Period Between Lives.

Shared Death Experiences

Yet another strike against the “hallucination of a dying brain” explanation for NDEs and a point in favor of their portraying objective aspects of reality is the fact that near-death experiences can often be shared by others. Sometimes these are other people who are near death at the same time,  but generally they’re perfectly healthy people. Often the shared death experience happens when they’re in the same room with the dying, but if there’s a strong emotional bond, they may share the dying experience even at a distance. The experience generally includes one or more typical NDE elements: floating out of the body, seeing the deceased loved ones of the dying person, encountering a light, even sharing in the dying person’s life review.

Dr. Raymond Moody, who is famous for popularizing NDEs with his 1975 bestselling book Life After Life, in 2010 co-wrote a book called Glimpses of Eternity that is dedicated to this related phenomenon of shared death experiences. Moody reports that, in giving lectures around the world, he has found that 5-10% of the members of his audiences have had a shared death experience, which is only slightly less than the percentage of his audience members who’ve had NDEs.

An especially evidential aspect of shared death experiences is the fact that, just like apparitions and dreams of the deceased, they sometimes happen simultaneously to multiple living people present at a death. For instance, Moody relates the experience of four siblings and a sibling-in-law who all perceived some of the same extraordinary phenomena while they were gathered around their dying mother. At first, all they saw was a bright, unearthly light, but just after their mother took her last breath, vivid, cloud-like lights gathered and formed themselves into a bridge-shaped entrance way. The children then saw their mother come out of her body and go through this portal. It was a joyful experience for them, and one of them even heard “beautiful music,” though the rest did not.

In another multiply shared death experience, two sisters who were by their mother’s side as she was dying of lung cancer saw the room start to swirl. When it stopped, they found themselves standing beside a much younger version of their mother and started to see scenes from her life. Many of them were from before the girls were born—like their mom’s first boyfriend and her heart-breaking breakup. They even discovered more recent events they’d known nothing about, like the fact that their mother had a crush on her widowed neighbor. One of the sisters says, “What we saw was so real that we thought we had died too. For months it was beyond belief until we finally accepted it.”

The fact that multiple healthy individuals can perceive NDE phenomena as someone is dying shows that these phenomena are not mere side effects of drugs or physiological changes that occur as the brain shuts down. They appear instead to be real events that nevertheless can’t be perceived by everyone.

 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Apparitions during NDEs: Rawlette excerpt #11

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness - "Further evidence for the reality of expanded perception during NDEs comes from cases in which NDErs had the experience of perceiving events at a location other than that of their body and someone at that location also perceived an apparition of the NDEr. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit catalog four such cases.

In one of these, reported by critical care physician Dr. Laurin Bellg, a young man was so estranged from his dying mother that she refused to allow him into her hospital room. He was hanging out in a nearby bar when he was amazed to see her walk in. He started to go to her, but other people passed between them, and afterward she was gone. Around the same time, the woman (whose body was actually still lying in her hospital bed) woke up and told her daughter, 'I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that I was in a bar and I saw my son sitting at a table crying, and he got up to start coming to me. And I got scared and I woke up.'

"In another case cataloged by Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, this one investigated by Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Olga Gearhardt of San Diego, California, was receiving a heart transplant. Her whole family had gathered at the hospital during her surgery, except for her son-in-law, who had a phobia of hospitals. At 2:15am, the new heart would not beat properly and then stopped completely. The resuscitation process took hours, but finally her new heart was persuaded to function properly. Meanwhile, the son-in-law, at home, woke up at 2:15am to see Olga standing at the foot of his bed. She was so lifelike that he thought it was actually her, that her plans must have changed and, instead of getting surgery, she had come to his house. He asked her how she was doing, and she told him, 'I am fine, I’m going to be all right. There is nothing for any of you to worry about.' When she disappeared, he got up and wrote down the time and what she had said. The next morning, when Olga came out of surgery, she mentioned 'the strange dream' she’d had, which appears to have been a near-death experience. She not only had the experience of being out of her body watching the doctors operate, but she went to her family in the waiting room and tried to communicate with them. Unable to get through, she then decided to go to her son-in-law at his home, where 'she was sure she had stood at the foot of her son-in-law’s bed and told him that everything was going to be all right.'

"These cases of reciprocal apparitions don’t just provide evidence for the reality of the near-death experience but also give us further evidence with regard to apparitions of the dead. The fact that apparitions of those near death are experienced in much the same way as apparitions of the deceased and that NDErs have been able to report back on their subjective experience of being at the location in question makes it even more plausible that apparitions of the deceased (some of which occur long after death) also reflect their conscious presence."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

NDES increased perception: Rawette excerpt #10

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness - "Another strike against the hallucination explanation for NDEs is the sheer number of cases in which NDErs experience increased perceptual abilities. While it frequently can’t be verified that this increased perception happened precisely at a time when their bodies were in cardiac arrest or had no brain function, the mere fact that, while their bodies were compromised in some way, they were able to experience more than they would be able to when their body is functioning normally is a crucial indication that perception and bodily function do not always go hand in hand, and can even be inversely correlated.

"For instance, in a case reported by Dr. John Lerma, an 82-year-old man had an NDE in which he experienced floating out of his body in the hospital trauma room. From a position near the ceiling, he saw a coin sitting on the right corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor. He could see that it was a quarter dating from 1985. After he was resuscitated, he asked his doctor, Lerma, to check whether the quarter was really there, so he could know whether his experience had been real. Using a ladder, Lerma verified that the 1985 quarter was just where the patient had seen it.

"In another case, this one reported by Drs. Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence in their article 'Further Evidence for Veridical Perception during Near-Death Experiences,' a patient at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut reported having an NDE in which she was pulled upward through the floors of the hospital until she was up above the roof looking at the city skyline and her attention was drawn to a red shoe. A skeptical physician later went onto the roof and discovered a red shoe there.

"Other NDErs have had verified perceptions of things as unexpected as their wife and daughter discussing taking cuttings from a tree in a hospital courtyard, a person they thought was a health nut buying a Snickers bar from a vending machine, both of their grandmothers suddenly taking up smoking, and details about the amputation of a leg in a nearby operating theater.

"Janice Miner Holden reviewed 93 reports of physical events observed during NDEs and found that 86 were fully accurate, 6 contained some error, and only 1 was entirely wrong. Some researchers have attempted to do controlled studies of perception during cardiac arrest by placing hidden targets high up on hospital shelves, out of the normal visual field of patients. So far, these studies have only had 12 patients who reported leaving their bodies during an NDE, and none of them reported noticing the target."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

NDE verified perceptions: Rawlette excerpt #9

Almost everyone is familiar with near-death experiences (NDEs), in which people momentarily die (or come close to dying) and then, upon regaining consciousness, describe having had experiences such as floating out of their bodies, seeing the whole scene from up above, going into a tunnel where they met deceased loved ones, seeing a review of the events of their life, and even entering a beautiful, light-filled realm where they met God. Surveys indicate that somewhere between 4 and 15% of the general population has had a near-death experience, and among those who have survived cardiac arrest, more than one study has found the proportion of those experiencing an NDE to be as high as 23%. While attempts to explain NDEs without appeal to survival of bodily death abound, none of these purported explanations is able to account for all of the characteristics of these experiences.

Verified Perception During Cessation of Brain Function

One of the most common skeptical explanations for near-death experiences is that they are the mere hallucinations of a dying brain. That is, (1) the body of the person having the near-death experience is not actually dead during the experience, just dying, and (2) their experience is just a hallucination created by the brain in this extreme state. One of the most important pieces of evidence that refutes this explanation is the existence of cases where NDErs report seeing or hearing events that can be verified to have taken place while they were in cardiac arrest and without brain function.

Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf H. Smit have collected a number of cases of verified paranormal perception during NDEs in their 2016 book The Self Does Not Die, and they devote an entire chapter to cases of awareness and perception during cardiac arrest. One example involves a man who was found “unconscious, stone cold, and apparently clinically dead out in a meadow.” Medics tried to resuscitate him on the way to the hospital but were unsuccessful. On arrival at the hospital, his body was “ashen gray, with livor mortis (in which blue-black discoloration occurs where blood pools in the lowest areas of the corpse) and blue lips and nails.” He had no blood circulation and no heart rhythm. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit emphasize that activity in the cortex of the brain ceases about 15 seconds after cardiac arrest, eliminating the possibility of any complex conscious experience. By the time this man was brought into the hospital, he had been in cardiac arrest for a great deal longer than 15 seconds. At the hospital, a nurse removed the man’s dentures before continuing resuscitation efforts. It then took an additional hour for those resuscitation efforts to be effective enough for the patient to be transmitted to the ICU. About a week later, the patient spoke to the nurse who had removed his dentures and said that he had watched the nurse remove them. Not only that, but he said he’d seen the nurse put them on the pull-out shelf of a cart that had lots of bottles on it. The nurse confirmed this was what he had done: he’d put the man’s dentures on the pull-out shelf of the crash cart.

In another case, exceptionally well-documented, a woman named Pamela Reynolds was undergoing surgery for a brain aneurysm when she had an NDE. Throughout the procedure, Reynolds was under anesthetic, had her eyes taped shut, and had loud clicks and white noise playing in her ears through earbuds, but she nevertheless found herself able to perceive events going on in the room around her. Reynolds experienced herself as floating above her body and over the surgeon’s shoulder, and she was later able to accurately describe the specific type of saw used by the surgeon as well as the case that contained its interchangeable blades. She also reported hearing someone remark that the arteries in her right groin were too small and then someone else suggest the left groin. She was surprised by this conversation as she hadn’t known that her brain operation would involve draining the blood from her body through her groin.

Nevertheless, the exchange she described had taken place, even though multiple persons who had been present in the operating room at the time confirmed that there should have been no way for her to perceive these things. Interestingly, Reynolds never reported hearing the loud clicks that were playing directly into her ears at the volume of a lawn mower or a subway train going through a station. That is, her perceptions of sound did not seem bound to what was being received by her ears.

Now, the verified perceptions just described occurred in an early stage of Reynolds’ surgery. What is even more impressive than this is what she experienced near the end of the procedure, because by that time, not only was she completely anesthetized, but her body had been cooled to a severely hypothermic temperature, her heart and breathing had been stopped, and blood was drained from her head. It was during this part of the procedure that Reynolds reported perceiving two more things she shouldn’t have been able to. The first was that the operating room staff was listening to the song “Hotel California,” and the other was that they “shocked” her twice while restarting her heart. One of the neurosurgeons in attendance confirmed that the staff had indeed listened to “Hotel California” and that her heart had to be restarted twice. This is not a number that could have been easily predicted, as the number of necessary attempts varies.

Some might argue that perceptions like those of the dentures and of Reynolds’ resuscitation efforts could be obtained by the NDEr after resuscitation, by using psi to look into the past and see what happened while they were unconscious. However, it’s hard to see any independent motivation for this hypothesis, beyond the desire to cling to the notion of brain-dependent consciousness at all costs. Furthermore, if time is no barrier to our capacity for psi, this implies that our consciousness can transcend time, and in that case, it’s not clear that the concept of death—of our being alive at one time and dead at another—is even coherent. If we can access the past psychically, then there is an important sense in which survival necessarily exists, as the “past” consciousness of our loved ones is still accessible to us in the present.

  

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.