NDEs weight of evidence: Taylor excerpt #5

Greg Taylor writes: One experience related by Greyson illustrates this and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view. 

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that? 

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny.

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events,it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” 

 

A subsequent study by researchers from the One experience related by Greyson illustrates this, and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that?

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny. 

 

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events, it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” A subsequent study by researchers from the University of Padova using electroencephalography (EEG) to compare characteristics of NDE memories with memories of both real and imagined events found similarly. 

 
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.  

Research on NDEs: Taylor excerpt #4

Greg Taylor writes: Throughout history, we find the same elements repeating again and again in the testimony of people who have had a brush with death. What could explain these commonalities? For skeptics, the heavenly visions of the NDE can be explained simply as a delusion: hallucinations brought on by the various physical and/or psychological burdens put on the brain by its imminent demise. But just as we saw with early scientific opinions regarding meteors, this seems to be more a way of trying to explain it away, rather than valid science. Veteran NDE researchers Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. Emily Williams Kelly and Dr. Edward Kelly analyzed the explanations put forward by skeptics and found that not only are none of them supported by any research evidence, but also that most are in fact contradicted by the evidence.

Bruce Greyson

In their 2009 paper “Explanatory Models for Near-Death Experiences,” the researchers systematically worked through the list of possible ‘solutions’ offered thus far, “paying special attention to how well they can account for the various features of NDEs.” These skeptical explanations can be separated into two groups – psychological-based theories, and those focusing on physiological factors. In the former category we find offerings such as the ‘expectation model’ (in which NDEs are products of the imagination, created to protect ourselves when facing threat of death, and which conform to personal or cultural expectations); depersonalization (feelings of detachment and removal from reality when facing threat of death); ‘the birth model’ (the suggestion that the tunnel, bright light and otherworldly realms of the NDE are memories of our birth experience, reproduced at death); and personality factors (susceptibility to hypnosis and dissociation, fantasy proneness, absorption, dream recall, etc.). Physiological-based explanations for NDEs include altered blood gas levels (lowered levels of oxygen, known as hypoxia or anoxia, or increased levels of carbon dioxide, known as hypercarbia); neurochemical theories (the release of endogenous endorphins, opioids or psychedelic-like chemicals such as ketamine or DMT during times of stress); neuroanatomical models (abnormal activity in parts of the brain, such as the limbic system and temporal lobes, brought on by stress and/or altered gas and chemical levels); and rapid eye movement intrusion (mentation typical of REM sleep intruding into waking consciousness).

But the researchers found that while many of these might seem like worthwhile candidates, the evidence did not support them. For instance, the birth model is contradicted by the fact that NDE accounts featuring ‘travel through a tunnel to another realm’ were just as common among those born by Caesarean section as with those born by normal vaginal delivery. Meanwhile, the expectation model is confounded by NDEs reported by children too young to have formed afterlife expectations, and also by NDEs in adults that often run sharply counter to the experiencer’s beliefs about death and the afterlife. Brain stimulation studies have not provided the support for neuroanatomical models that supporters claim, with experiences reported in such situations bearing little resemblance to NDEs. And the altered blood gas levels theory falls flat as well as NDEs sometimes occur in situations where there are no changes in blood gas levels. Furthermore, as other researchers have pointed out, “any acute alteration in cerebral physiology such as occurring in hypoxia, hypercarbia, metabolic, and drug induced disturbances and seizures leads to disorganized and compromised cerebral function [and] impaired attention,” but the NDEs reported by those who have suffered cardiac arrest “are clearly not confusional and in fact indicate heightened awareness, attention and consciousness at a time when consciousness and memory formation would not be expected to occur.”

“Almost all NDErs (near-death experiencers) report that their thinking processes were ‘faster and clearer than they ever have been before’,” Dr. Bruce Greyson notes, “despite their brain being impaired – for example, in cardiac arrest.” Indeed, one analysis of 653 NDE reports of cardiac and/or respiratory arrest patients for unprompted, spontaneous references to quality of conscious mentation during an NDE found that both figurative and abstract mentation were reported to be either preserved or markedly improved. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Near-death experiences (NDEs): Taylor excerpt #3

Greg Taylor writes: Near-death experiences (NDEs) first gained widespread public attention in 1975, with the release of Raymond Moody’s bestselling book Life After Life. In that book, he described many of the elements reported during an NDE with the following idealized example (most NDEs will not include every single aspect): 

 

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval. 

 

...Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before – a being of light – appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events in his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time of his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives. 

 

...the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life. 

 

Researchers estimate that 10-20% of people who come close to death report NDEs, and they have been recorded throughout history and across cultures worldwide. And while interpretations of the experience vary, the core elements remain the same. For instance, some 2000 years ago the Roman historian Plutarch mentioned the experience of one Aridaeus of Soli, who “fell from a certain height upon the nape of his neck and died...he was carried away to be buried when he came back to himself and rapidly recovered.” Aridaeus told how, having ‘died’, he felt his spirit body exiting his physical body through his head, after which he had an out-of-body experience (OBE). His sense of vision when in this new ‘spirit body’ was augmented – sharper, and strangely capable of viewing “around in all directions at once” – and he could now “move in all directions easily and quickly.” A deceased relative who had died at a young age then appeared before him, showing Aridaeus the inner workings of the afterlife realms. Upon reviving from death, Aridaeus transformed himself, becoming purer of heart and helpful in his community. 

Despite occurring two millennia in the past, the story of Aridaeus could be lifted straight from Moody’s Life After Life. In fact, it even contains aspects that were not mentioned by Moody, but have since been found in multiple modern NDE reports. For example, Aridaeus spoke of being able to see “in all directions at once”; a recent account describes it in those exact words: “I could see in three dimensions...I could see all directions at once.”  Another modern NDE explicitly notes “I could see 360 degrees around me at the same time.”

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

A scientific paradigm shift: Taylor excerpt #2

Greg Taylor writes: The people of every time have tended to regard their science as the apotheosis of all knowledge, but time and again history has proven that not to be the case. In ancient times, we had the very sensible, to the eye of the observer, Ptolemaic system of astronomy which described the strange motions of the planets that revolved around the obvious center of the cosmos – Earth – only for it to be replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus. In the late 19th century, many scientists believed that the field of physics was almost complete: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,” experimental physicist Albert A. Michelson announced in a speech in 1894, “and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” A little more than a decade later, both quantum physics and relativity had completely upturned our models of how the cosmos works.

In his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, physicist Thomas Kuhn described these always incomplete and erroneous to some degree scientific frameworks that we live and work within at a certain time as paradigms, and the change from an outdated paradigm to a new one he named a paradigm shift. Within a paradigm, a certain model of ‘what reality is’ exists and dominates – and is somewhat self-supporting, as those embedded within the paradigm often believe that model to be the only possible ‘reality’, and thus reject alternative models and anomalies that don’t agree with that model. Over time, however, those anomalies accumulate, until a scientific revolution occurs that upends the previous model and supplants it with a new one.

In this essay, we will present a large set of anomalies that challenge the current scientific paradigm – in which physical matter is ‘reality’, consciousness is just a by-product of the brain, and we do not survive death – and suggest a new one.

The reason most people are not familiar with this mass of extremely convincing evidence is, as Kuhn noted, because ‘normal science’ is “predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like,” and it thus “often suppresses fundamental novelties” because they are subversive. So, in reviewing this evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death, one of the highest hurdles that must be cleared is the bias of modern science’s negative opinion on the possibility. And one of the tactics used in suppressing the evidence, by skeptics invested in defending the current paradigm, is to only accept evidence from multiple replications of lab studies by scientists using ‘blind protocols’ (and, truthfully, even then they probably still wouldn’t accept it). However, this is not generally how science actually works when it comes to spontaneous, anomalous phenomena. In these areas, often it is eyewitness testimony that provides the most convincing and useful evidence. 

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay may be downloaded with all its references at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Evidence for life after death: Taylor excerpt #1

Greg Taylor writes: On Christmas Day, 2011, Ben Breedlove passed away at his home in Austin, Texas, from complications of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), at the age of just 18. Diagnosed with HCM at 12 months of age – a condition in which the heart muscle is abnormally thick, making it more difficult for it to pump blood – Ben had already cheated death on a number of occasions throughout his life. Less than three weeks earlier, paramedics had rushed to his school and used a defibrillator to revive him after he had collapsed while walking between classes. But on Christmas Day, there would be no return from death.

Remarkably, though he lived his life in the shadow of the constant threat of sudden death, a week before his passing Ben made clear to his family that he was no longer afraid of it. At a family gathering the day after yet another cardiac event, Ben – a committed Christian – said a prayer for those closest to him: “I pray that my family wouldn’t be sad or scared for me anymore, because I’m not sad or scared. I pray they would have the same peace that I have.”

Ben’s lack of fear was the result of a strange experience he had while the paramedics were working on him after he had collapsed at school. After he passed out, Ben realized he could still see and hear what was going on, and just as the paramedics were preparing to use the defibrillator on him, he suddenly ‘awoke’ in a white room with no walls, “a brighter white than he could ever describe that seemed to engulf his surroundings in every direction.” In this never-ending whiteness, Ben “listened to the most quiet he had ever heard in his life.” He found himself in front of a full-length mirror, and as he stared into it, realized he wasn’t just looking at his reflection, but was...

...looking at his entire life. In a sense of time that Ben could never explain, he stood in front of that mirror and watched his entire life, every moment he had ever experienced, play out in front of him in real time. Yet somehow it went by in an instant. In that incomprehensible moment, Ben felt proud of himself, of his entire life, of everything he had done.

Ben was asked, “Are you ready?”, to which Ben – assuming he was going to heaven – replied “Yeah.” After hearing the words “Go now!”, Ben woke to find himself back at his school, being resuscitated by the paramedics.

Ben had undergone what is known as a ‘near-death experience’ (NDE). This strange phenomenon, recorded countless times throughout history and in different cultures around the world, occurs when a person has a brush with death and undergoes an experience that appears to give them a glimpse of an afterlife realm.

Ben’s sister Ally recounts that after this NDE, “it was clear that Ben had a new resolve... in some ways, he had crossed over already; he had seen the other side and formed his opinions about it; he accepted it...he was content with that possibility, almost happy about it.”

When Ben’s father asked him to talk about the peace he felt during his NDE, Ben described it in terms of Philippians 4:8: “It’s just like the verse says (‘And the peace that surpasses all understanding shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’). You can’t describe it. You just have to be there.”

Ally recalls that, following the NDE, in a quiet moment together Ben told her, “I think that God let me have that vision so I wouldn’t be afraid of dying.” He passed away a week later.

What if we could all experience that surety, the peace of knowing that something lies beyond the door of death? How would society be different, if we knew that death wasn’t the end for our loved ones when tragedy took them from us? Our entire approach to death would be forever changed: how we treat the dying (medically and socially), our grief at losing loved ones, and our anxiety over our own mortality.

As it turns out, there is enough evidence for us all to accept this as reality: indeed, as we will see, the survival of consciousness beyond physical death seems the most likely conclusion when we carefully examine the masses of evidence and testimony collected over time from four areas of research:

• Experiences had during brushes with death: near-death experiences

• Experiences had at the time of death: end-of-life experiences

• Experiences involving those beyond death: communication through mediums

• Experiences of returning from death: memories of past lives reported by children.

In fact, the evidence from these areas is so strong that the only thing truly stopping us from accepting it is modern science’s blind insistence that it is an impossibility. However, once we grasp that human understanding of the cosmos and our existence has constantly been updated through the ages as our knowledge and experience has expanded with new evidence, it is less difficult to take the next step to accepting survival of consciousness as the most logical explanation for the data that we will present. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay may be downloaded with all its references at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

ELDVs of the dying: Kerr excerpt #22

ELDVs testify to our greatest needs--to love and be loved, to be nurtured and feel connected, to be remembered and forgiven. They are centered on self-understanding, concrete relationships, personal histories and singular events. They are made of images and vignettes that emanate from each person’s life experiences rather than from abstract preoccupations with the great beyond: a walk in the woods relived alongside a loving parent, car rides or fishing trips taken with close family members. Long-lost loved ones come back to reassure; past wounds are healed; loose ends are tied; lifelong conflicts are revisited; forgiveness is achieved. And based on the content of these dreams, it’s obvious that the forgiveness and love that count the most come from family. For thirteen-year-old Jessica, who was nearing death, her greatest fear was being alone in an afterlife without her mother, that is until Jessica’s ELDV conjured up her mother’s best friend Mary who predeceased her. In her own words, Jessica knew with certainty that she was “not going to be alone” after death, and that she would be “loved.” Jessica’s profound and enduring feelings of being loved and secured didn’t emerge from a distant dream. Jessica was clear: she observed Mary in wakefulness. Jessica also had dreams of her deceased dog Shadow who reaffirmed that she was “ok,” secured in love.

Although ELDVs, like Near Death Experiences (NDEs), entail the same paradox of a vibrant mind in a declining body, there are critical qualitative differences between NDEs and ELDVs. Characteristics of NDEs include impressions of being outside one’s physical body, awareness of being dead, a “tunnel” experience, movement toward and/or being immersed in “light”, life review and entering another realm of existence. These characteristics are not typically described in patients experiencing ELDVs. ELDVs are reported with much less abstraction or complexity. NDEs are commonly associated with a dramatic and lasting change in personality and outlook on life, whereas ELDVs leave the dying restored rather than changed.

ELDVs are felt and aligned with the life led – personal and core to self and one’s relationship to others. Unlike the person experiencing NDEs who is often motivated to analyze and share their experiences, the patient experiencing ELDV is not. A critical distinction between NDEs and ELDVs are that NDEs are often explained or dismissed in terms of changes in physiological function as part and parcel of the biological changes occurring as a result of “clinical” or nearing dying. The same criticism cannot be used to dismiss or refute ELDVs. Patients in our studies were not just interviewed in the last minutes and hours before death but longitudinally, in the days and weeks before death. All our study patients were screened for confusion, and many were high functioning and living independently when their ELDVs began. In other words, the experience of NDE occurs within clinical death whereas the ELDV experience occurs irrespective of how strong or tenuous the link between body and mind is or has become.

The results of our studies clearly reveal ELDVs as a state of consciousness that is different from other states of mind we may experience in health. For example, we have shown that ELDVs are distinct from dreams in several ways. Regular dreams are often defined as projections of latent psychodynamic processes and are rich in symbolism. By contrast, pre-death dreams and visions rarely contain the abstraction, behind-the-scene or metaphorical meanings we have come to expect from typical dreams. We have yet to have a patient emerge from an ELDV and ask for interpretation, analysis, or input. The time for introspection and therapy has passed. In fact, this is what patients tell us loud and clear: these dreams are different and unlike other dreams, because they are lived, virtual, experienced, and “more real than real.” They are a form of communication and connectivity that exit on a different plane which might be called transcendental and in which there is no distance between the dreamer and their dream experience. They often offer blueprints for a peaceful, visionary, and certainly revisionary end of life, and the meaning transcends the relation to the self to emanate from and in our relationship with loved ones. The following video is of a dying patient named Horace. In the video you will notice how Horace struggles to find language to describe what he is experiencing when his eyes are closed. He is overwhelmed just trying to describe his feelings of “happiness”, comfort, reunion, and love. He describes his deceased wife as even more beautiful than he remembered and felt “everywhere was “happiness” (Link to Horace Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssfw-sRiNuo).

ELDVs are also most commonly defined by unique communication between the dying patient and those individuals featured within the ELDV. They entail reframing the communication they stage as something that transcends language: participants typically report very little verbal exchange with those who pre-deceased them. The smile of the long-deceased child or the wave of a departed wife doesn’t require language or explanation. The exchange resides in a dimension of consciousness that is simply felt, understood and shared.

As the data revealed, End-of-Life Dreams and Visions also challenge the parameters of typical recollection or memory. Recollecting implies retrieving a prior time from the vantage point of the present, and ELDVs go beyond what we consider re-accessed or rekindled memories. The dying do not remember a person as in a picture, but rather, they are themselves immersed in a larger experience that is lived, rich and sense filled rather than simply conjured from memory. There is a qualitative change in perception or state of awareness, of something within oneself. Simply put, patients are not looking back; they are ensconced within the experience, sometimes communicating with someone whose recent death they had not been informed of, or resurrecting smells, sounds, and details that go well beyond our usual cognitive interpretations. 

The following video is of Jennifer who is describing the inner experiences of her dying partner Patrick. In it, Patrick relives eating his family’s “secret” spaghetti sauce with his deceased grandmother. His consciousness is immersed and responding to unseen surroundings that exist in a shared mental space, and Patrick now relays an awareness of feelings, perceptions and senses that may not be shared with the living but is shared with the dead, including the sensation of being full after having shared a meal. Patrick’s ELDVs even include new “memories”: just before death, Patrick now remembers the long-forgotten and missing ingredient in the secret sauce (Link to Jennifer Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InncrCm_O18).

ELDVs are inherent to our human existence and are evident in dying patients regardless of age or cognitive ability. As noted in our case study, ELDVs challenge our limited understanding of cognition and mental ability: patients who experience ELDVs aren’t confused but rather display heightened acuity, insight and consciousness, and such experiences occur in patients who are cognitively different such as those with dementia or Downs Syndrome. Past events that may not have previously been recalled with such vividness and detail prior to their terminal decline now return to resurrect a life rich in emotional tones, meaning and history. More than recalled, these experiences are relived and felt with a renewed sense of existence. Such patients often re- experience the best parts of having lived beyond even their conscious control. Based on their compromised cognitive status, such patients were not included in our formal studies, but we did document, and even videotape, family reports of their loved ones’ end-of-life experiences. An elderly woman named Irene, who suffered with advanced dementia, kept re-experiencing the presence and love of her long-departed husband Gary. 

The following video is of Irene’s daughter, Sue, describing her mother’s experiences at life’s end. Irene was joyful and complete in her final days. Days before death, Irene attempted to leave the nursing home: she was reexperiencing the best day of her life, her wedding day, and needed to get to the service (Link to: Sue Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNGcExMqa8).

It has been noted--by our research team and others--that patients rarely report religious content in their end-of-life experiences (15, 41). Still, while this may be surprising, it is also not the point. While there are relatively few references to the symbols of faith, the tenets of faith, love and forgiveness, are common themes within pre-death dreams and visions. 

This is an insight that is beautifully expressed in the writings of Kerry Egan, a hospice chaplain in Massachusetts.* In her short but powerful piece “My Faith: What people talk about before they die,” Ms. Egan explains that she is routinely called to the bedside of dying patients who want to talk, not about God but about their families and “the love they felt, and the love they gave .... people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God”. To Ms. Egan, not mentioning God directly does not create conflict with her own religious faith or role as chaplain because it is in the love felt by family members for each other that she recognizes God and the teachings of her religion: “If God is love, and we believe that to be true, then we learn about God when we learn about love. The first, and usually the last classroom of love is the family... We don’t have to use words of theology to talk about God; people who are close to death almost never do. We should learn from those who are dying that the best way to teach our children about God is by loving each other wholly and forgiving each other fully - just as each of us longs to be loved and forgiven by our mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.” At the hour of our death, spiritual transformation is no longer external to the self. It happens in the innermost recesses of our being. As we progress toward acceptance, illness and death place us on a spiritual path that that reunites us with consciousnesses that were never gone and ultimately re-affirm who we are through their returned love.

We have lost our way with dying and with death. It has become easier to live longer, but harder to die well. I had been trained to view dying as medical failure when I began working at Hospice in 1999. Sadly, the acceleration of the science of medicine has obscured its art, and medicine, less comfortable with the subjective, has been more concerned with disproving the unseen than revering its meaning. Amid the current madness of medical excess, there is a need for spiritual and cultural renewal that medicine alone cannot address. It is when medicine can no longer defy death that nature assumes its rightful role, and the process of dying becomes what it has always been: a human experience with physical and spiritual dimensions, seen and unseen. From this vantage point, the dying process, which includes transformative subjective or inner experiences such as end-of-life dreams and visions, becomes less about finality than about life’s resilience.

As Hospice work demonstrates again and again, when the patient is kept comfortable and otherwise left to follow the natural course of things, death becomes more enlightening than a simple pulling down of the shades. This enlightenment is one that encompasses altered forms of consciousnesses, a double consciousness as it were, those of the departed as well as the patients. Whereas traditionally, consciousness is defined as an awareness of self and of the world around, ELDVs include alternative forms and beings that include not just dreams and visions of them but the lucid consciousness of others as constitutive of the self. The departed loved one’s consciousness exists as an extension of one’s own and their surroundings become indistinguishable from the patient’s as inner and outer worlds collide and become one. What observers may view as a sudden change in perception is lived, in other words, as an expanded consciousness rather than as a change by the patient. It is not that an alternate reality supplants theirs, but rather that their reality grows to include what is an “other world” only to outsiders. To the patient, the distinction does not exist, and their loved one’s world is merely an expansion of their immediate surroundings. As such, the tragedy of human existence is not the fact of death or suffering or the inability to defeat these but our inability to think dying as anything other than the “diming of the light.” By exploring the nonphysical and subjective experiences of dying in an objective fashion, through both research and film, we have worked to reframe and humanize dying from an irredeemably grim reality to an experience that contains richness and continuity of meaning and relationships for patients and loved ones alike.

At life’s end, dying patients summon up comforting processes at life’s end are beset by symptoms of a failing body over which they have limited control. They are at their most frail and vulnerable, existing within suffering states of aching bones and air hunger. Catheters, IV’s and pills may now be part of their everyday, sometimes literally functioning as extensions of their bodies under the daily medical management that is their new and irreversible lot. They may experience various degrees of cognitive, psychological and spiritual dissonance. Yet even as the inexorable march of time is taking its toll on their bodies and minds, many also display remarkable awareness and mental sharpness in the context of their inner experience, an awareness that resides in their consciousness, a consciousness that transcends death and its limitations.

*Kery Egan, "What People Talk About Before They Die," https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/20/health/what-people-talk-about-before-dying-kerry-egan/index.html.

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. The full text with notes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

The bereaved experience: Kerr excerpt #21

Dr. Christopher Kerr writes of dying patients having dreams or visions of renewing friendships with deceased friends and relatives:

The human grief experience is multidimensional, flexible, and personal. Bereaved family members and caregivers learn to adjust to a world without the deceased in myriad ways. What remains a constant, however, is 1/ the higher level of acceptance achieved by the dying and the bereaved alike when they get to witness the life-affirming, material, and transformative effects of end-of-life experiences 2/ the triggering of their own richer emotional and spiritual inner experiences. In our studies, the bereaved describe deriving peace and reassurance from the knowledge that their family member felt at ease and loved in their last moments. For example, the elderly sister of one of our patients shared that “when he told me that he saw his favorite sister (deceased) hold out her hands to him, it made me feel comforted because I knew it comforted him.” Caregivers repeatedly and explicitly use words that denote contentment rather than mourning: “He did find comfort talking to and seeing people who passed before him. He was not afraid or scared – he had told me.”

Many bereaved family members make sense of their dying relative’s end-of-life dreams and visions by drawing on their belief in the afterlife, God, angels, or heaven. That is what the rather agnostic Michele did after her daughter Ginny’s last conversation with God. But how each family caregiver chooses to make sense of their loved one’s end-of-life dreams and visions matters little. What is remarkable is how the meaning making sometimes develops independently of one’s interpretive framework, since Michele was originally agnostic and was swayed by her daughter’s ELDVs. These experiences help the dying and their loved ones alike work through the pain of loss by creating continuity and presence across time and death.

The therapeutic quality of end-of-life experiences extends to the bereaved in ways that can never be fully accounted for if we merely approach them as representations or memories. It embodies, for caregivers as much as for the dying, the possibility of being reunited, and it allows them to adjust to life without their loved one while maintaining a continuing bond. The desire and need for connectivity remain a constant across dying and grieving, death and bereavement.

Michele and Kristin both responded to their child’s death with the same paradoxical disregard for the separation death supposedly entails. They both still talk about and to their respective daughters on a daily basis. They dream about them. They both continue decorating their homes for the holidays for their little girls’ sake. They do it because “Ginny expects it” and “Jess would be upset with me if I ever skipped a year”.

Like Michele, it is in her daughter’s last end-of-life experience that Kristin finds the comfort she needs. In particular, Jess’s vision of her mother’s deceased friend Mary, whom she identified as “an angel”, is what provides Kristin with the reassurance that her little girl’s transition transcended the emotional and physical toll of death.

Michele worked through the pain of grief in ways that echo Kristin’s emotional trajectory. She too was awed and comforted by her daughter’s rich inner world and by the extraordinarily soothing quality of her end-of-life experiences. “She is always teaching me something”, Michele said two days before Ginny’s passing when her daughter was no longer responsive. This too was an extension of the remarkable effects of Ginny’s end-of-life experiences. Michele was left to question her own belief system. “Who knows?” she concluded, throwing up her hands in surrender, “Maybe there is a castle. I no longer know what not to believe.”

Like Kristin, Michele is now moved by mementos, pictures, and toy animals that recall her daughter’s presence. A rainbow appears and makes her smile. Heart shapes in clouds, rocks, and water drops are evidence of Ginny’s presence. She often takes refuge in Ginny’s room which she has left untouched. Bereavement has become a steady and gentle companion, a process and extension of the continuity that Ginny’s end-of-life experiences represented.

In the midst of immense tragedy, Michele has found solace and meaning in the same love and evidence of consciousness that permeated her daughter’s end-of-life experiences and whose cascading influence will sustain her until the day, she says, she too finds her way to Ginny’s “castle.”

As our study on the dreams of the bereaved suggests, patients’ end-of-life experiences seem to find a reflective counterpart in their loved ones’ dreams. Our quantitative study conducted at Hospice shows that many recently bereaved individuals experience vivid and deeply meaningful dreams themselves that feature the presence of the deceased. Prevalent dream themes included  pleasant past experiences, the deceased free of illness or at the time of death, in the afterlife appearing comfortable and at peace, and the deceased communicating a message. These themes overlap significantly with previous models of bereavement dream content. As with ELDVs, the specific effects of these dreams on bereavement processes include increased acceptance of the loved one’s death, comfort, spirituality, sadness, and quality of life, among others. These results support the theory that dreams of the deceased are highly prevalent among and often deeply meaningful for the bereaved who have them. Again, as with ELDVs, a positive growth or transformation in the person have them hinges on the continued presence of predeceased loved ones.

While this study does not assess whether or how the dreams of the bereaved are related to or different from ELDVs, the coincidence in content and effect is remarkable and noteworthy. For example, one participant wrote ‘‘[the dream] put my mind at peace about my brother’s death. I miss him very much, but I know he is in God’s hands and happy.’’ Others described how their dreams helped them to retain a connection with the deceased: ‘‘I feel closer to mom than at the time of her death. At the time I felt cut off. Now feel as if I was reconnected in at least a small way.’’ Some explained how their dreams intensified their feelings of grief (‘‘My sister and I cared for our mother around the clock. The dreams just make me sadder and I miss her when I wake up’’) or support (“My mother speaks to me while I dream. She tells me things about situations in my life and how to handle them. I get to hold my mother in my dreams and get to feel her warmth and love’’). Another participant had a dream of her [deceased] mother walking on the beach and holding the hand of a small boy named Eric. Her parents had previously lost a baby and named him Eric “who had died before Jane was born. Eric was to be our last of three children, but when he died, we had Jane.’’

Like ELDVs, the dreams of the bereaved bring back the departed in moments of transcendence where the consciousness of the recently departed is summoned to bring peace, sometimes resolution, and always love. 

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. The full text with notes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.