All About Near Death Experiences

I generally have very little to say about various eschatological theories. The fact is, I don’t know, and don’t really feel like I can know. Until we discover a way for people to die, bring them back, and have them retain their consciousness (without the brain, which seems quite unlikely), I don’t think we’ll have a real clear picture on it.

jmb, I realize that everybody has their own cup of tea their own way, but statements like this make me wonder if people are really up on the latest data. I read the other day a philosophical article from about 1925 that I can’t put my finger on at the moment, and if I understood correctly, the general gist was about what you said above. Essentially, “we don’t know anything, there’s no data. Very few people claim to have seen the Master of the Universe. It’s not testable. It’s not study-able.”

I am a humanist. I agree with the spiritual idea that eschatological pretzels are yucky. I agree that now is the day and the time of our salvation. But I am also a scientist. And when there is data, I believe it shouldn’t be ignored.

This is the 21st century. Things are changing. Old paradigms don’t always hold true any more. There may be more evidence than you think. At the same time, you can’t put old wine into new bottles. Looking at new evidence with old paradigms doesn’t work. The paradigms have to change. What is God? What am I? Who are you? The old theological and philosophical constants such as “omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent” may no longer work. Seek and we shall find. Ask and we shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened unto us.

Well, I am certainly open to the evidence. Please point me in the right direction!! I know there is data, but it seems to be in support of the idea that there is no spirit, or life after death at all. I just barely took an online psychology course from Yale in which this was discussed. The instructor was fairly clear that the consensus (at least among psychologists) seems to be that the grey lump of meat in our head is responsible for our consciousness, and that when we die it is the end. I am open to the possibility that they’re incorrect, but the evidence I have seen doesn’t lend any creedence to any of the various eschatological theories. I have read some NDEs, but these seem to be explained by other psychological phenomena. I understand they have spiritual value nonetheless, but in terms of what I consider to be reality on this subject, the answer is I don’t know.

But if you are aware of some more up to date scientific data on the subject, please enlighten me!

Having said this, I do like the ideas of reincarnation, and in some ways the whole notion of becoming a god, and spawning offspring like us, etc. is very cyclical in a reincarnation-ish way.

Jmb, your post sums up my feelings perfectly (although you speak with the advantage/wisdom of a Yale psych course).

Here are my core conclusions:

1. It’s clear that for the vast majority of near death experiencers (estimated by Gallup to include 5% of the US population), the subjective reality of the afterlife world puts the physical world to a mere illusion. Consider that as data. Knead it and fry it.

2. As in the rest of life, what matters is not “proof”, but ascertaining the “most likely” explanation. What explanation accounts best for wide unanimity regarding highly detailed, technical, and culturally anomalous elements of this subjective afterlife? What explanation accounts for its effect on subsequent quality of life? Detailed technical discussion available on request.

However, you seem pretty comfortable with your current atheistic model. I say go with it as long as it seems best to you.

Tom

There are two ways one can view out of body/near death experiences:

1) We have spirits/souls and during temporary death, they leave the body and some people have the good fortune of remembering this in great detail.

2) That the sensations people think are proof of a spirit/life after death, are really just the effects of some sort of trauma/stimulus on the brain.

We can’t know/prove anything about the first theory, but we can believe it is “proof” of something we already believe in. With the second theory, we have a scientific explanation, which can be repeated, and gives us very detailed knowledge of what is happening to the brain when someone has a NDE. Scientists have been studying this issue for quite sometime; Michael Shermer says the following:

What is going on here? New evidence indicates that they are, in fact, a product of the brain. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger, in his laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, for example, can induce all of these experiences in subjects by subjecting their temporal lobes to patterns of magnetic fields. I tried it and had a mild out-of-body experience.

Similarly, the September 19, 2002 issue of Nature, reported that the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues discovered that they could bring about out-of-body experiences (OBEs) through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe

Other scientists have found that ingesting large amounts of ketamine can also induce an out of body experience. Unless someone has lived a very, very isolated life, they will have heard about some sort of life after death, souls/spirits, etc. These thoughts are already in the brain, and people use this “knowledge” to help them interpret/understand what happened to them when they had an NDE.

People that share their NDE’s are retelling something that happened presumably while they were dying; that makes the likelihood of accuracy low, and exaggeration/misremeberance high. Conscious eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable; they remember seeing things that never happened, they exaggerate, they forget, so the idea that people remember an event with a high level of accuracy while dying seems slim. That doesn’t mean they can’t remember some of the experience, but their belief systems seem to fill in/add to the experience.

The best scientific data we have indicates that NDE’s are sensations caused by the brain under duress/lacking oxygen/stimulation of certain areas of the brain, not people’s spirits leaving their bodies. Ultimately, that doesn’t mean anything about the actuality of an afterlife or God, but–to me–it means NDE’s shouldn’t be used as evidence of God/heaven.

A question you and I might both ask ourselves is this: “Does my perspective make it more likely or less likely I would respect the work of those with the ‘opposite’ perspective?”

To Tom: “How closely and openly are you willing to examine the stories of Dr. Susan Blackmore et al?”

To Wordsleuth: “How closely and openly are you willing to examine the stories of __________?

Thank you for making me think and evaluate my positions. I try and keep this in mind as I examine stories in the future, especially those that I might feel predisposed to disagree with.

I thought it might be interesting to have a thread here all about the Near Death Experience phenomenon.

INTRODUCTION

The Near Death Experience is a broad category (generally connected with actual bodily trauma) of human experience within a range of transcendent experiences. Transcendent experiences like the near death experience may also be connected with out-of-body-experiences, alien abductions, dreams, entheogens (ketamine, LSD, peyote, salvia divinorum, etc.), lucid dreaming, etc. From a clinical perspective, the Near Death Experience in particular is attractive for study because it very often occurs unexpectedly, spontaneously, and under medical observation. It is also very common; Gallup is purported to have estimated that 1/20 of Americans claim to have had a near-death experience.

Prior to the work of Raymond Moody, the Near Death Experience (NDE) was what we might call the “Near, Dear Experience”, because most newly “returned” experiencers were unable to find a way or an audience for communicating their experience. Now, however, groups like the International Association for Near Death Studies and Near Death Experience Research Foundation collect stories from thousands of experiencers. Every story is different, and common threads connect them all.

Experts on the NDE include Susan Blackmore (strong physiological interpretation) and Kenneth Ring, Raymond Moody, and Melvin Morse (spectrum of physiological and afterlife interpretation).

TOM’S BACKGROUND

I’ve mentioned here and there on the board (in the forum) that I’ve read dozens of peoples’ near death stories. By dozens I probably mean around one hundred since 2003. I am able to speak firsthand about the threads, similarities, differences, and themes of the NDE. I’ve also (during my brief experiment with atheism) perused Susan Blackmore’s physiological framework for the NDE. As I understand, she is the premier researcher developing a physiological model.

THE TOM HAWS NDE PHENOMENOLOGY MAP

I constructed the following list of elements hastily (on August 9, 2006 during my experiment with atheism) from dominant and obvious themes in NDE accounts. The order of the elements is also based on dominant and obvious themes I have noted. But for any given person’s NDE account it is likely that some elements will be missing, and it is possible that the order of some elements may be mixed.

(Researcher Kenneth Ring constructed an index of “Core NDE” themes that I would expect would be similar to my “map”. It might be interesting in the thread to compare his index to my map.)

1. Trigger

The overwhelmingly dominant NDE trigger is trauma, though there are numerous other less-common triggers.

2. Separation from body

“I popped out”, perhaps with a sound

3. Immediate Contemporary and Local Physical World Observations

Perception of dwelling as a non-physical or even non-corporeal being in the physical world perceiving physical people and events concurrent with the time and place of the experience.

4. Wandering through the physical world

Similar to element 3, but ranging beyond the place of the experience.

5. Darkness or Void

6. Light

7. Familiar people and themes in another world

8. Tour of another world and/or this world

9. Life review

10. Oneness

11. Time to return

12. Re-entrance into body

13. Jubilant declaration

14. Loneliness

15. Changed life

TOM FROM THE HEART

Well, I don’t know that I’ve said much from my own heart, . My reality is that the NDE is an afterlife experience that gives useful information and affects global reality positively today. Maybe that is enough for a thread opener.

HiJolly,

Yes. No questions. No comments. Just yes.

What’s your take on it?

Well, paradoxically, I am at a loss for words at the moment. And yet I have been practically an effusive broken record about the NDE on threads all over this community. Maybe I am just cautious. Maybe I am staring bug-eyed into your headlights. Maybe you just flipped my mysticism switch. I don’t know what to say, Bruce. Ask me a technical question!

How about this? I am very comfortable with the fact that elements of the “NDE” may result from “alien abductions”, LSD, ketamine, or heart attacks. And I believe in the assessment of thousands of simple and quiet people who frame their subsequent mortal years around that experience.

Although it’s been 20 years since my heavenly voyage, I have never forgotten it. Nor have I, in the face of ridicule and disbelief, ever doubted its reality. Nothing that intense and life-changing could possibly have been a dream or hallucination. To the contrary, I consider the rest of my life to be a passing fantasy, a brief dream, that will end when I again awaken in the permanent presence of that giver of life and bliss.

Beverly Brodsky

So Tom,

You seem to have studied this enough to have a qualified opinion. How do you feel about NDE being physiological?

I recall reading somewhere the idea that these experiences were just the brain “shutting down”. What’s your take on it?

Bruce, I am interested in what Tom H. has to say on this, but I also have an opinion and would like to offer it up.

Clearly, the evidence from experimentation in teh physical brain is that there is a definite connection between physical stimuli in the brain, and the effects of many mystical or religious experiences. Not only physical, but also chemical.

To me, this is not a problem. I think God (however we define God) uses natural processes and such to do what He does. That we have found ways to ‘duplicate’ religious experience is truly wonderful and very interesting, even if the substance of the experience does not exactly fit the reality of public experience. As usual, it is not the reality of the discovery that is troubling, but the assumptions and biases (a priori thinking) on the part of everyone involved (including the subjects of study) that is troubling to me. I’m not blaming anyone for doing that, we all do.

No one in the sciences can do a $500,000 six-month study without justifying it. To do that, they much come to conclusions that ‘make sense’. And that’s the rub. What makes sense? No scientist can base a conclusion on “God did it”. It just can’t be done, if the scientist wants to remain credible.

IMO, when you deal with the human mind, there’s a lot going on and we understand about as much of it as a dog understands algebra. We’re improving, certainly. But just as historians must exclude the improbable, so too scientists cannot arrive at conclusions without reliable evidence. Limiting these experiences to a physiological cause ‘makes sense’.

But I don’t think we’ve gotten to the real, bottom-line answers yet.

HiJolly