Near-death experiences: Mays excerpt #1

Robert G. and Suzanne B. Mays write: What is the human experience of dying? Among those who can tell us are those human beings who have been close to death and experienced the first stages of the dying process—those who have crossed the threshold of death and returned. Their experiences are called near-death experiences (NDEs).

In the early period of our research in 2005, we concluded that NDEs are an archetypal phenomenon that holds the key to understanding the existential questions of life and death—indeed to understanding the essential nature of the human being. Our conclusion is that NDEs provide the best evidence that the essential aspect of the human being—the Self—is independent of the physical body and survives the death of the body.

Most often, NDEs occur when one is near to death or in a state of extreme psychological or physical distress. What defines an NDE are the characteristic “elements” of the experience that are reported afterwards, for example:

There is a profound sense of peace and freedom from pain. 

 

There is a feeling of separation from the body, generally floating above one’s physical body. This portion of the NDE is sometimes called the “out-of-body experience” (OBE) phase of the NDE. 

 

One may see events in the physical realm beyond normal physical sight that are later verified as accurate, called “veridical perceptions.”  

 

One may enter a beautiful heavenly realm or a dark velvety void, feeling it is one’s True Home. This portion is sometimes called the “transcendental” phase of the NDE.  

 

One may encounter deceased relatives or spiritual beings, including a “Being of Light.” 

 

One may have a review of the events of one’s life, a “life review,” or a preview of future events.  

 

One either chooses to return to earthly life or is told to return to the body.

 Throughout an NDE, there is a continuous sense of one’s self, and afterwards, the near-death experiencer (NDEr) has a number of aftereffects, most prominently the loss of fear of death. The NDE is often felt to be the most significant event of their life—their life is changed forever.

Many of the aftereffects also indicate that there has been a change in the “energetic configuration” of the physical body. For example, many NDErs experience interference with watches and electronics; have increased sensitivities to bright lights, loud sounds, crowds, some medications, and some foods; and avoid watching television and movies, especially those containing violence. Over 90% of NDErs report they experienced a marked reduction or complete elimination of their fear of death and a dramatic increase in belief in an afterlife.

Being close to death by itself does not constitute an NDE. Many people who come close to death—or actually die for a period of time, for example with cardiac arrest—do not remember experiencing anything. Only about 10–20% of cardiac arrest survivors recall experiencing an NDE.

Furthermore, many people who are not close to death also experience an NDE, for example during sleep, meditation, or fainting. These non-life-threatening NDEs are the same phenomenal experience with the same features, regardless of their precipitating cause—whether occurring in cardiac arrest or during meditation. This fact suggests there is a common mechanism for all NDEs.

 

Robert G. Mays, BSc and Suzanne B. Mays, AA,  “There is no death: Near-death experience evidence for survival after permanent bodily death.” An essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies addressing the question: “What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?” Footnotes are omitted from these excerpts but are available in the full text available on the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Death as the great healer: Remen excerpt #15

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: Sometimes the particulars of the way in which someone dies, the time, place, even the circumstances, may cause those left behind to wonder whether the event marks the healing of hidden patterns and personal issues, and answers for that person certain lifelong questions. Death has been referred to as the great teacher. It may be the great healer as well. Educare, the root word of ‘education,’ means to lead forth the innate wholeness in a person. So, in the deepest sense, that which truly educates us also heals us.

The theory of karma suggests that life itself is in its essential nature both educational and healing, that the innate wholeness underlying the personality of each of us is being evoked, clarified, and strengthened through the challenges and experiences of our lifetime. All life paths may be a movement toward the soul, In which case our death may be the final and most integrating of our life’s experiences.

Anything that is real has no beginning and no end. The stories in your life and in mine do not stop here. 

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 325, 331.

Death may bring wholeness: Remen excerpt #14

Dr. Remen writes of a specialist in palliative care, who described to a group of medical colleagues an experience he had while caring for a hospitalized young man who was dying of AIDS. Both the patient and his family were bitter, rejecting, and hostile despite his efforts to reach out to them. Finally giving up on it, he had simply delivered the best technical care he knew.

At three o-clock one morning he was called by the nurses, who informed him that his patient had died and asked him to come it to pronounce him dead and sign the death certificate. Remembering that he needed to be at rounds very early the next morning, he hastily threw clothes over his pajamas, and began driving to the hospital. 

 

As he drove down the darkened streets, he spontaneously looked up  and saw the night sky as if for the first time. The darkness seemed a silent and holy emptiness without beginning or end. In this vastness, stars hung as countless pure points of radiance. He had never seen the night in this way and was filled with awe and a profound feeling of peace and gratitude. 

His intellect attempted to dismiss this as fanciful, pointing out the need to hurry and take care of business so as to be able to get up early the next day. But he stopped his car by the side of the road anyway, got out, and allowed the experience of awe to wash over him. In about fifteen minutes it receded and he drove on to the hospital under a sky that looked much the same as always. The experience had been brief, but powerful and surprisingly important to him although he couldn’t say why.

Together the group of physicians considered what this experience may possible have meant. Various interpretations were offered, but the one that stopped further conversation was that perhaps the patient, in passing onward, may have found a way to share his present perspective directly with his doctor as an apology and a parting gift. As one of the doctors put it, ‘Perhaps at the moment of death there is a reclaiming of wholeness . . . and the wholeness may pass very close to us.’

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 320.

 

Extraordinary knowing: Remen excerpt #13

Dr. Remen writes: In response to an invitation to remember a moment in the practice of medicine that might be considered a sacred experience, a seasoned neonatologist, the director of the neonatal unit at a large southern hospital, offered a group of colleagues this account. After weeks of struggle, her patient, a tine premature baby, was dying despite everything that a state-of-the art intensive care nursery could offer. It would not be long and it was time for the parents to say good-bye. With a heavy hear she called the baby’s father and invited him to meet her at the hospital. The child’s mother, distraught after weeks of uncertainty, now required medication. She had stopped visiting a few weeks ago. He would come alone, he said.

As she put down the phone, she became aware of the beeping of the monitors and other machines and the bustle of the  intensive care nursery and felt the need for some quiet to organize her thoughts while she waited for him to arrive. She went down the hall to the chapel, the only quiet place nearby, to be along for a few minutes and find words to tell the young father that his little son was not going to make it.

Fifteen minutes later, as she was walking toward the visitors’ waiting room, she found herself thinking that perhaps she should give the baby a trial with a certain drug. The thought surprised her, as this drug was not customarily used for the baby’s problem, and she shook her head in annoyance. But the strange thought would. Not easily go away. She reviewed the baby’s course with the father, assuring him that everything possible had been done and suggesting they go to the intensive care nursery together to say good-bye. As she looked at the sadness in his face, she found herself thinking ;After all, what does it matter?’ and suggested that perhaps there was one more thing she could try, a drug not usually given for this condition, but which she was thinking of using now. She would like to have his permission to use it. He gave this readily and they went to the nursery together.

The baby appeared moribund. Embarrassed to make so unusual a request of the nurses, she prepared the injection and administered it herself. Together she and the father waited, standing on either side of the Isolette, watching the blue and gasping baby. There was no change. Wanting to give him a chance to be alone with his child for the last time, she left to do some paperwork. A few hours later, she looked into the unit and was surprised to see him still there. She approached the Isolette and found that the infant’s tiny chest had slowed and his breathing was normal. Scarcely able to believe her yes, she raised her head and found the father looking at her. Their eyes held for a long, wordless moment. This was the moment she had chosen to tell us about as a ‘sacred’ moment. Recently these parents brought their child back to visit her. He is twelve years old.

The circle of physicians sat thinking about this for a while. Then the neonatologist began to describe the way in which she had dealt with this strange happening at the time. She has a very orderly and pragmatic mind, she told us, and it had disturbed her. She had tried to find an explanation for it so she could dismiss it. Gradually she became convinced that somewhere she had read or hear a preliminary report of research which mentioned the use of this drug for the baby’s condition and this was why she had thought of it. She could not remember the journal or the meeting where she had gotten this information, but she became more and more certain that it was so. This allowed her to forget the whole thing.

About two years later, she read of a study of premature infants with severe respiratory distress who had been given this very drug and had recovered. The mystery was solved! Delighted, she called the researchers to ask where they had published their preliminary reports or presented their work in progress. She was stunned to discover that this article was the first time the study  had been written up or presented anywhere. It had just been too odd to talk about until the results were final. She told them then that she had an additional case.

 

In musing aloud about her personal reactions, she told us that she had clung to an explanation that would have allowed her to keep her familiar and comfortable sense of the way in which the world works. She had rejected the gift of awe once, so it had been given to her again.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 318. 

A vision before death: Remen excerpt #12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Witnessing the unexplainable: Remen excerpt #11

For the last ten years of his life, Tim’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the devoted care of Tim’s mother, he had slowly deteriorated until he had become a sort of walking vegetable. He was unable to speak and was fed, clothed, and cared for as if he were a very young child. As Tim and his brother grew older, they would stay with their father for brief periods of time while their mother took care of the needs of the household. 

One Sunday, while she was out doing the shopping, the boys, then fifteen and seventeen, watched football as their father sat nearby in a chair. Suddenly, he slumped forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath uneven and rasping. Frightened, Tim’s older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond, a voice he had not heard in ten year, a voice he could barely remember, interrupted, ‘Don’t call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right.’ And Tim’s father died.

Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. ‘Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,’ he told us quietly. ‘My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 300-301.

Life is filled with mystery: Remen excerpt #10

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: I am not much of a meditator. No matter. I have come to suspect that life itself may be a spiritual practice. The process of daily living seems able to refine the quality of our humanity over time. There are many people whose awakening to larger realities comes through the experiences of ordinary life, through parenting, through work, through friendship, through illness, or just in some elevator somewhere.

The recognition that the world is sacred is one of the most empowering of the many realizations that may occur to people with life-threatening illness and those close to them, their friends, family or even their health professionals. It is one of the ways that such people heal the community around them. And should they die, it is often the legacy they leave behind.

After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. ‘I don’t know’ had long been a statement of shame, or personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once.

But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illness tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn’t know and couldn’t explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening.

For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways, it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times which were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unproveable but simply to remain open and wait.

I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don’t seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places; life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. And unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 288, 292-293.