Are NDEs real? Mays excerpt #3

How can we check that the experiences in an NDE are real? For one thing, we can check the parts of an NDE that relate to events in the physical realm. Do the NDEr’s perceptions of physical events during the NDE match what actually happened, according to other witnesses? Yes, in many NDE cases, the NDEr’s perceptions of physical events were verified as completely accurate. Typically, the NDEr’s brain function at the time was severely compromised by deep anesthesia, coma, or cardiac arrest. In many of these cases, the NDEr’s perceptions were impossible to perceive by ordinary means because the NDEr’s vision was blocked or the events occurred at a distant location.

Dozens of such cases, verified by independent sources, are documented in The Self Does Not Die. Al Sullivan had emergency cardiac bypass surgery, during which his eyes were taped shut and he was anesthetized. A surgical drape over his head blocked any possible physical perception of the surgeon, Dr. Takata. During the surgery, Sullivan experienced floating above his body, looking down on the surgery. He noticed that Takata seemed to be “flapping” his arms as if to fly. Immediately after he had recovered, Sullivan told his cardiologist, Dr. LaSala, of this unusual behavior. Takata had the habit of placing his hands on his chest to avoid contaminating them and pointing with his elbows when he needed to direct his surgical assistants. Both LaSala and Takata could not explain how Sullivan could have known of this behavior, with Sullivan being under deep anesthesia, with his physical eyesight blocked, and Takata’s behavior involving no sound or touch—perceivable only through a visual process.

Sullivan accurately described seeing Dr. Takata’s idiosyncratic movements while he was under total anesthesia, with his eyes taped shut and his head behind a surgical drape. Sullivan immediately told cardiologist LaSala about Takata’s unusual movements whose response was, “Who told you that?” Sullivan responded that he had seen it himself from above his body in the operating room during his NDE. But Sullivan should not have been able to perceive the surgeon’s movements. The doctors have no explanation for this. Takata said in an interview, “Frankly, I don’t know how this case can be accounted for. But since this really happened, I have to accept it as a fact. I think we should always be humble to accept the fact.”

A skeptic can object to the case of Al Sullivan because Sullivan was merely under anesthesia and there are cases of “anesthesia awareness” in which the patient is aware during surgery but cannot move or speak. In Sullivan’s case, Takata’s movements were unusual, purely visual events that could not be seen because Sullivan’s eyes were taped shut and were behind a surgical drape blocking sight of the operating area. There was no way for Sullivan to perceive Takata’s flapping arms, even if Sullivan were completely awake with his eyes open, because his vision would have been blocked by the surgical drape.

Skeptics can also object because Sullivan wasn’t close to death during the operation—his brain was still functioning, even though he was unconscious under anesthesia. They may say there might be some currently unknown brain function that would support such perceptual abilities. However, there are dozens of cases of verified veridical perceptions during an NDE occurring during cardiac arrest when all brain function has ceased.

For instance, cardiac surgeon Lloyd Rudy operated on a patient to replace a heart valve. After the surgery, Rudy could not get the patient off the heart-lung machine and restart his heart. After numerous failed attempts to wean him off the machine, the patient was declared dead. The life-sustaining machines were turned off, except for the heart echo-probe and other monitoring instruments. The patient had no heartbeat, no blood pressure, and no respiration for at least 20–25 minutes. During this time, Rudy and assistant surgeon Roberto Cattaneo stood in the OR doorway in their short-sleeve shirts discussing how they might have done the procedure differently. Then the patient’s heart spontaneously started beating again and developing blood pressure. Rudy called the surgical team back and they eventually resuscitated the patient who remained in a coma for two days in the ICU. The patient recovered with no neurological deficit and later reported having an NDE and floating above the scene in the OR. He recounted several accurate veridical perceptions during this time. In particular, he reported seeing the two surgeons standing and talking in the OR doorway in their shirt sleeves, with their arms folded, and seeing Post-It notes stuck together in a chain on a computer screen. The notes were telephone messages for the doctors that had been added after the surgery started.

Rudy commented, “He described the scene—things that there’s no way he could know. ... So what does that tell you? Was that his soul up there? ... It always makes me very emotional.” Cattaneo also commented, “The patient’s description of his experience is as Dr. Rudy described it word by word. People should interpret this according to their own beliefs, these are the facts.” In a later interview, Cattaneo remarked, “My role was that of assistant surgeon. I was in the case from beginning to end. I did witness the entire case and everything that my partner Dr. Rudy explained. I do not have a rational scientific explanation to explain this phenomenon. I do know that this happened. This patient had close to 20 minutes or more of no life, no physiological life, no heartbeat, no blood pressure, no respiratory function whatsoever and then he came back to life. Moreover, he recovered fully. ... This was not a hoax, no way, this was as real as it gets. ... One can believe what one wants to believe but this in my mind is a miracle unexplainable by current scientific knowledge.”

The evidence is clear that Rudy’s patient had died. There was no heartbeat, no blood pressure, and no respiratory function for 20–25 minutes, as indicated by the monitors which had been left on. The doctors pronounced the patient dead and told his wife that he had died. The patient’s chest was closed up briefly and prepped for postmortem exam.

When the heart stops, there is no blood flow to the brain. The brain electrical activity and brain function that are dependent on this blood flow cease after 10–20 seconds. Yet Lloyd Rudy’s patient experienced a vivid NDE while his heart had completely stopped. Although his eyes were taped shut, he later reported perceiving veridical details of the doctors and the OR that were later verified by the two surgeons. The unusual purely visual events the patient perceived included the two doctors standing in the OR doorway in their shirt sleeves and the Post-It notes stuck to the computer screen. These perceptions occurred from a vantage point near the ceiling during the time there was no brain electrical activity.

How could a patient with no brain function have accurate perceptions from a location outside the physical body? This case and many others similar to it suggest that the perceptual, cognitive and memory aspects of the mind can operate outside the body, independent of brain function.

 

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 in the full text available from the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

NDE core experience: Mays excerpt #2

NDEs have consistent, well-defined characteristic elements and qualities. The NDE Scale assesses the number and intensity of the elements in an NDE to give a measure of the “depth” of the experience. The NDE Scale contains 16 items, each assigned a value of 0, 1, or 2 depending on the intensity of the element addressed in the item. A total score thus ranges from 0 to 32. An NDE is defined as a score of 7 or greater. The average score for an NDE is about 16.

An independent statistical analysis of the NDE Scale was performed in 2004 that showed that NDEs are a structured experience. The Scale has been translated into more than 20 languages and used in hundreds of studies around the world. It measures one consistent ‘core’ experience that is the same for people of all ages and across many cultures.

NDEs are not merely isolated stories or anecdotes. There is a remarkable uniformity of the NDE elements across many countries and cultures (5; 60). Based on a Gallup poll and two research studies, between 4% and 8% of people have had an NDE (15; 27; 49). Given the uniformity of NDEs across many societies, a conservative estimate would be 5% of the world population have had an NDE. If that’s the case, the elements and details of NDEs have occurred to nearly 400 million people worldwide—more than the entire population of the United States. So, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have had an NDE and have lost their fear of death.

The elements in NDEs are remarkably consistent. For example, about 35% of NDErs are told they must return to the body (33). Usually they hear the same words, to the effect “It’s not your time; you must go back; you have more to do on Earth.” Just as when many millions of tourists visit Paris and report seeing the same unusual structure which we then regard as an objective reality—the Eiffel Tower—so when many tens of millions of NDErs journey to another realm and hear the same unusual admonishment, with essentially the same wording “It’s not your time; you must return ... ,” their experience can be regarded as objectively real, not imagined.

Thus, the elements of an NDE may appear to be merely subjective experiences when taken individually. However, when an element is considered collectively across many millions of NDEs, the element can be regarded as the experience of a common, objective reality witnessed and shared by many NDErs. With this strong evidence from NDEr accounts, researchers are justified in accepting NDEs as providing valid data for scientific study, using the same rigorous empirical observations as in any other field of science.

In this paper, we consider successive aspects of NDEs and other death-related experiences. We examine the implications of these phenomena and their counterarguments. We draw conclusions, based on the evidence, to develop a coherent overall explanation supporting the proposition that human consciousness survives permanent bodily death.

The quality of the evidence we use is based on the following factors:

NDErs are credible eyewitnesses to their experiences. For example, an NDEr reports observing an unusual event in another location while out-of-body which he later corroborates with a doctor. NDErs report their experience as hyperreal. The memory of their NDE does not change over time and is dependable .

Millions of NDErs report the same experience with the same characteristics. For example, about 35% of NDErs report observing objects or events which could be corroborated and about half of them report that the facts were later corroborated. NDErs who observe and later corroborate an unusual event join perhaps 60 million other eyewitnesses worldwide who reported the same objective phenomenon—verified veridical perceptions from a position outside the physical body.

Similar first-person testimony from multiple NDErs provides strong objective evidence. The weight of this evidence depends on the number of NDErs reporting the particular phenomenon.

Independent corroboration from other credible witnesses of the phenomenon provides further objective evidence to the NDEr’s testimony.

Multiple lines of evidence from NDEs and other death-related experiences build a consistent, coherent picture of the overall phenomenon.

Thus, the collective weight of multiple lines of evidence, each supported by numerous cases—which in many instances have independent corroboration—can rise to the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

 

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 in the full text available from the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

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.