Near-death experience as a spiritual awakening

“For a few people,” UK neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick notes, the NDE confirms the religious faith they have. “But for many, perhaps most, it is a spiritual awakening that may have very little to do with religion in the narrowest sense, and nothing to do with dogma. It certainly tends to confirm belief in some form of afterlife. But when the presence of some higher ‘being’ is felt, this is only seldom defined as, for example, a Catholic or a Jewish God. And Christian icons such as Jesus and Mary are notably absent except in very rare cases. The experiences have a universal quality.” If an NDE were simply a psychological experience, “one would expect it to be much more culturally influenced than it seems to be.”

Mrs Joan Hensley wrote: Certainly my life changed. I am less frightened of dying personally, and I do believe there is life after death. But it hasn’t particularly made me more ‘religious;’ what I do feel is that there are so many religions in the world, why should our God be the only one or indeed the correct one? I feel my experience proved there is a God—before that I don’t think I really believed in anything, just accepted what my parents believed in.

“Almost everyone who has studied near-death experiences has found that at least some of the people have become more sensitive or intuitive. After his NDE, Dennis Stone of Coventry began to foresee future events. In August 1938 my first premonition of impending disaster occurred. I saw a vision of the Second World War. I found myself standing about a hundred yards or so from my home, watching Coventry burning and hearing the bombs whistling down and bullets spanging off brickwork. I looked down the London road and watched a bomb set fire to a fuel dump close to the local cemetery.

All this I told my family and I became agitated because they did not believe me. That is until it actually happened in precise detail—with one exception: I was not quite in the precise spot on that fateful night. I was ducking the machine-gun bullets from German planes, which, I might add, killed nine of my neighbors close to me.

“One of the most fascinating and detailed letters we received was from a man who suffered two cardiac arrests after a coronary thrombosis, and had several experiences during this time. Most were positive, but he also had an experience of ‘Hell.’ It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occasionally I was basted by people (devils) sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the ‘devils’ used to make sure that I was being truly roasted. I wanted to call out but no sound would come; it felt as if my brain or consciousness was buried deep within me and was too deeply embedded for either them to hear or for me even to make it work. I was overcome with the feeling of utter doom and helplessness.

He explains away this experience, however, as being due to the treatment he received in hospital. I was wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, an electric heat cage was put over me and during that time I was turned several times and innumerable injections were given.

Fenwick comments: “In those organized religions in which Hell figures, suicide is a sin and might well be considered an entrance qualification. And yet none of the people who wrote to us about a near-death experience during a suicide attempt reported a hellish or even an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, what they experienced seemed to provide a reason for continuing to live.

Anne Thomson wrote: I could cope no longer with three small children and one dreadful husband (whom I later divorced). I took a massive overdose of sleeping tablets and was not found for four hours. I was rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance from the RAF base in Wales, where we lived at the time. I very nearly died and was unconscious for four days. On the fourth day I was slipping away. I had a cardiac arrest and the doctors and sister were working on me.

I left my body. I went up very slowly, not looking back at myself in the bed. The peace was beyond what I can explain; it was so beautiful, I felt so light in weight and I saw I was going towards a white light—not the white like this notepaper I wrote on, but a spiritual white. I almost reached this light, when suddenly I was pulled downwards and did not stop till I was back in my body. I was heavy, everything seemed so dark and then I came to and slowly came to realize I could not be taken, as three children needed their mother.

I always did believe in God but only because it was bred into me. But since that experience I have a lot of faith towards God and towards life beyond our lives on Earth. I firmly believe God made me well and helped me through all my time of rearing three children alone in the years that followed.”

 

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

 

Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung's near-death experence

In a hospital for surgery in Switzerland in 1944, the psychiatrist Carl G. Jung had a cardiac arrest and recalls this “near-death experience” [which occurred before Raymond Moody used this phrase to identify this experience while dying].

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or spotted dark green like oxidized silver.

Far away to the left lay a broad expanse—the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the sliver of the earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back—as if in the upper left of a map—I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view—approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had every seen. Then Jung recalls: A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space. I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic dark block.

As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. I am this bundle of what has been and what has been accomplished.

The experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence.

Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a ‘fait accompli,’ without any reference back to what had been. There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.

After he had recovered from his cardiac arrest, Jung wrote: I would never have imagined that any such experience was possible. It was not a product of imagination. The visions and experiences were utterly real.

We shy away from the word ‘eternal,’ but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought into a concrete whole. Nothing was distributed over time; nothing could be measured by temporal concepts. The experience might best be defined as a state of feeling, but one that cannot be produced by imagination.

How can I imagine that I exist simultaneously the day before yesterday, today, and the day after tomorrow? There would be things that would not yet have begun, other things that would be indubitably present, and others again which would already be finished and yet all this would be one. One is interwoven into an indescribably whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.

“Carl G. Jung’s Near-Death Experience,” http://www.near-death.com/experiences/notable/carl-jung.html. See also Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 289-90.

After cardiac arrest doctors hear patient's laugh

Dr. Paul Sanders was a family physician before retiring. He told Dr. Janis Amatuzio of his own personal experience that was extraordinary.

I had just arrived home from work one evening when the phone rang, and the nurse told me that Dad had suffered a cardiac arrest. Those were the days before the patient directives and do not resuscitate orders were in place.

Dr. Sanders rushed back to the hospital and to his Dad’s room. He recalls: As I got to the doorway something quite extraordinary happened. I glanced to my left and saw my father’s motionless body lying in bed, ringed by nurses with their backs to me. Dr. Seacamp was on the other side of the bed, intently doing CPR. He glanced up quickly as I stopped in the doorway. 

And just at that moment, I was startled when to my right I heard more than sensed the absolutely unmistakable sound of my father’s booming laugh. It was bold, gleeful, and joyful, that wonderful sound I hadn’t heard in so many months as he suffered with his disease. My heart jumped with joy.

I knew in an instant that he was fine, and I turned to Dr. Seacamp, saying, “Let him go.”

Oh, so you heard him, too! Dr. Seacamp, replied.

I knew something extraordinary had happened and that we had witnessed a miracle. I miss my father greatly, but I will never forget the sound of his laughter and the experience of awesome joy as I walked into that room. 

Janis Amatuzio, Beyond Knowing: Mysteries and Messages of Death and Life from a Forensic Pathologist (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006), 160-161.

View into eternity at bedside death

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity documents “shared death experiences” involving physicians, nurses, and hospice workers. A hospice psychologist in North Carolina writes of her experiences: 

The deathbed scene is not fully in this world. And although I am not religious, hospice work has awakened me to a spiritual dimension of life.

In my opinion, everyone who works with the dying long enough must have some awareness of these experiences. I believe the spiritual experiences of dying people somehow leak out and pervade the area around them. If you step into that area with the right temperament, you will receive, I feel, a sense of the sacred in the presence of the dying.

I have experienced the room taking on a different configuration a number of times. The only way that I can describe it is that moving energy pulses through the room. I often feel something that I can’t name.

The bedside of the dying offers a view into eternity. Like looking through a window into elsewhere, from time to time I see lights and twice have had clear views of what appear to be structures. On both occasions I saw patients leave their bodies in a cloud form. I saw them rise out of their bodies and head toward these structures.

I would describe these clouds as a sort of mist that forms around the head or chest. There seems to be some kind of electricity to it, like an electrical disturbance. I don’t know if I see it with my physical eyes, but it’s there all the same. There is no doubt in my mind that you can sometimes see people depart for the other side.

Shared death experiences may confirm communication between the living, dying, and dead. A sergeant at Fort Dix in New Jersey sharing his experience, which was verified by his physicians:

I was terribly ill and near death with heart problems at the same time that my sister was near death with a diabetic coma in another part of the same hospital. I left my body and went into the corner of the room, where I watched them work on me down below. Suddenly, I found myself in conversation with my sister, who was up there with me. I was very attached to her, and we were having a great conversation about what was going on down there when she began to move away from me.

I tried to go with her but she kept telling me to stay where I was. “It’s not your time,” she said. Then she just began to recede off into the distance through a tunnel while I was left there alone.  When I awoke, I told the doctor that my sister had died. He denied it, but at my insistence, he had a nurse check on it. She had in fact died, just as I knew she did. (90-91)

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: An Investigation into Shared Death Experiences  (London: Rider, 2010), 102-03. 90-91.

Resurrection is spiritual not physical

The New Testament gospels are anonymous. The shortest gospel is attributed to Mark, a colleague of Paul. The earliest version of this gospel reports that Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome (another follower of Jesus), come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, and are told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus "has been raised" and gone to Galilee, where he will meet them. The gospel ends by saying the women "fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (Mk. 16:1-8)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple Matthew, an earthquake opens the tomb and an angel delivers to the two Marys, who come to the tomb, the same message as in the gospel of Mark. When the two women run to tell the disciples, Jesus appears and speaks to them, and the gospel says: "they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him." After the women tell the disciples what they have witnessed, the eleven disciples go to Galilee, see Jesus, and worship him. But, the gospel adds, "some doubted." (Mt. 28:17)

The gospel attributed to Paul’s colleague Luke says two men in dazzling clothes tell the two Marys and Joanna (another follower of Jesus), that he has been raised from the dead. Jesus doesn't appear to the women, but does appear to two other followers and to Peter, before appearing to some of his disciples in Jerusalem. He says: "Look at my hands and my feet, see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Lk. 24:39) This gospel says Jesus eats a piece of fish, tells his disciples to stay in Jerusalem, blesses them, and then is lifted up into heaven. (Lk. 24)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple John, Mary Magdalene comes alone to the tomb and finds the stone rolled away. Jesus appears to her and says, "Do not hold me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father." He gives her this message for his disciples: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." The gospel of John also says the disciple Thomas doubts the resurrection, until Jesus appears to him by the Sea of Galilee and eats fish with him and several other disciples. (Jn. 20-21)

Paul’s resurrection account differs with all of the gospel stories. Paul tells the Christians at Corinth: "I handed on to you . . . what I in turn had received [from the disciples] that Christ appeared to Peter, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time. . . . Then he appeared to James [the brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem], then to all the apostles. Last of all . . . he appeared also to me." (1 Cor. 15:3-8)

As Paul is writing in the 50s and the gospel authors wrote after the Jewish revolt that begins in 66, Paul’s resurrection account is earlier. Moreover, Paul seems unaware of stories about Jesus appearing to women at an empty tomb or eating with his disciples.

Paul is, however, aware that some Christians doubt in the resurrection, for he writes to the Corinthians: "how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul explains that resurrection is the fulfillment of God’s will for all creation, not merely the raising of Jesus from the dead. Christ is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead that will come for all those, he says, "who belong to Christ." (1 Cor. 15:20-23) And he argues that the resurrection of the Christians in Corinth will be the same as the resurrection of Christ.

It appears that some among the Christians in Corinth, have asked: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Paul answers: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." And he explains: "There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." (1 Cor. 15: 40, 42, 44)

The authors of the New Testament gospels ignore the earlier resurrection account Paul received from the disciples and also his explanation that resurrection is not physical. We, too, may doubt the resurrection, but there is no doubt that Paul's spiritual experience of the risen Christ transformed his life and the course of history over the following two millennia. 

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer

Patient's NDE felt like "going home"

Neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton reports that he is able to predict when his patients are going to die. He first experienced this premonition while assisting a veterinarian with animals. “I began to notice that there seemed to be some energy or light that spread out from the animals themselves, and then completely enveloped them right before the moment of death.“

Later, as a medical student, I became aware that I could perceive a pale yellowish hue around human patients, almost like the light thrown by a candle. This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient’s skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon. As their impending death drew nearer, the yellow-colored light grew more tightly focused around their bodies and faces.”

While caring for Harry who had survived a heart attack, Hamilton noticed “that yellow, waxy light in his eyes, from his skin.” There were “no symptoms like chest pain or arrhythmia. I had nothing solid to go on except my premonition. I told a white lie to the charge nurse to get Harry back into the ICU. I explained, “I thought I had seen a run of ventricular tachycardia on his monitor. I had just not been quick enough to capture it on the paper strip.” With this warning, the supervising nurse immediately granted his request.

Prior to this reversal in his recovery, Harry had shared with Hamilton his near-death experience during his heart attack.

I got to tell you that there really was nothin’ scary ‘bout it. I just felt at peace, loved. I just seemed to rise up in the air, like a puffy cloud. I could see myself lying in the grass. But it wasn’t like I was scared. I just felt like I was going home, like being on furlough to see my family during the war or something. You know, something that you’re jus’ dying to do. I suppose that’s a pun or somethin’. But you get what I mean, don’t you? It was like I was lookin’ forward to it. Like I’d been lookin’ forward to it for the longest time, and now I was goin’ to finally get there, get to do it.

Now, Harry continued, it isn’t like I wanted to die or somethin’ like that. ‘Cause I sure as hell din’t want to leave Phyllis [his wife]. But at the same time, I knew there wasn’t anything to fear ‘bout what lay beyond this life.

After his cardiac arrest, shocks to his heart, CPR, and an injection with Adrenalin failed to bring Harry back to his physical life.

Allan J. Hamilton, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (Penguin, 2009).

Cardiologist affirms consciousness beyond death

Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel in his book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near-Death Experience presents medical research verifying that: “consciousness, with memories and occasional perception, can be experienced during a period of unconsciousness ― that is, during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity and all brain functions, such as body reflexes, brain stem reflexes, and respiration, have ceased. It appears that at such a moment a lucid consciousness can be experienced independently of the brain and body."

“Many argue,” he adds, “that the loss of blood flow and a flat EEG do not exclude some activity somewhere in the brain because an EEG primarily registers the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. In my view this argument misses the point. The issue is not whether there is some immeasurable activity somewhere but whether there is any sign of those specific forms of brain activity that, according to current neuroscience, are considered essential to experiencing consciousness. And there is no sign whatsoever of those specific forms of brain activity in the EEGs of cardiac arrest patients.”

Van Lommel reports that this “endless consciousness” during a NDE includes “nonlocal aspects of interconnectedness, such as memories from earliest childhood up until the crisis that caused the NDE and sometimes even visions of the future. It offers the chance of communication with the thoughts and feelings of people who were involved in past events or with the consciousness of deceased friends and relatives. This experience of consciousness can be coupled with a sense of unconditional love and acceptance while people can also have contact with a form of ultimate and universal knowledge and wisdom.”

To explain NDEs, he turns to quantum physics and endorses “the not yet commonly accepted interpretation that consciousness determines if and how we experience reality.” In this view “consciousness is nonlocal and the origin or foundation of everything: all matter, or physical reality, is shaped by nonlocal consciousness.” If this is the case, van Lommel concludes, “Our endless consciousness predates our birth and our body and will survive death independently of our body in a nonlocal space where time and distance play no role.”

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperCollins, 2010), 161, 165, 247, 223, 228, and 307.