By now, many doubts and objections will have occurred to the reader. In the years that I have been giving talks, in private and in public, on this subject, I have been asked many questions. In general, I tend to be asked about the same things on most occasions, so I have been able to compile a list of those questions which are asked most frequently. In this chapter and the next I shall address myself to them.
Are you just making all this up?
No, I’m not. I very much want to pursue a career in the teaching of psychiatry and the philosophy of medicine, and attempting to perpetrate a hoax would hardly be conducive to that aim.
Also, it has been my experience that anyone who makes diligent and sympathetic inquiries among his own acquaintances, friends, and relatives about the occurrence of such experiences will soon have his doubts dispelled.
But aren’t you being unrealistic? After all, how common are such experiences?
I am the first to admit that, due to the necessarily limited nature of my sample of cases, I am unable to give a statistically significant numerical estimate of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon. However, I am quite willing to say this: The occurrence of such experiences is far more common than anyone who hasn’t studied them would guess. I have given many public lectures on this subject, to many kinds and sizes of groups, and there has never been an instance in which someone there didn’t come up afterward with a story of his own, or even, in some cases, tell it publicly. Of course, one could always say (and truly!) that someone with such an experience would be more likely to come to a lecture on such a topic. Nonetheless, in many of the cases I have encountered, the person involved did not come to the lecture because of the topic. For example, I recently addressed a group of thirty persons. Two of them had had near-death experiences, and both were there just because they were members of the group. Neither knew the topic of my talk beforehand.
If near-death experiences are as common as you say, why isn’t this fact more generally known?
There seem to be several reasons why this is so. First and foremost, I think, is the fact that the temper of our times is, in general, decidedly against discussion of the possibility of survival of bodily death. We live in an age in which science and technology have made enormous strides in understanding and conquering nature. To talk about life after death seems somehow atavistic to many who perhaps feel that the idea belongs more to our “superstitious” past than to our “scientific” present. Accordingly, persons who have experiences which lie outside the realm of science as we now understand it are ridiculed. Being aware of these attitudes, persons who have transcendent experiences are usually understandably reluctant to relate them very openly. I am convinced, in fact, that an enormous mass of material lies hidden in the minds of persons who have had such experiences but who, for fear of being labeled “crazy” or “over-imaginative,” have never related them to more than one or two close friends or relatives.
In addition, the general public obscurity of the topic of near-death encounters seems to stem in part from a common psychological phenomenon involving attention. A lot of what we hear and see every day goes unregistered in our conscious minds. If our attention is drawn to something in a dramatic way, however, we tend to notice it thereafter. Many a person has had the experience of learning the meaning of a new word and then seeing the word in everything he picks up to read for the next few days. The explanation is usually not that the word has just taken hold in the language and is appearing everywhere. Rather, it is that the word has been there in the things he has been reading all along but that, not being aware of its meaning, he generally skipped over it without being consciously aware of it.
Similarly, after a lecture I recently gave I opened the floor for discussion and a doctor asking the first question said, “I have been in medicine for a long time. If these experiences are as common as you say they are, why haven’t I heard of them?” Knowing that there would probably be someone there who had encountered a case or two, I immediately turned the question back to the audience. I asked, “Has anyone else here heard of anything like this?” At this point, the doctor’s wife raised her hand and related the story of a very close friend of theirs.
To give another example, a physician I know first became aware of experiences of this kind by reading an old newspaper article about a speech I gave. The next day, a patient gave him, unsolicited, an account of a very similar experience. The physician established that the patient could not have heard of or read about my studies. Indeed, the patient confided his story only because he was baffled and somewhat alarmed by what had happened to him and was seeking a medical opinion. It may very well have been that in both instances, the doctors involved had heard of some cases of this before, but had thought of them as individual quirks rather than as a wide-spread phenomenon and had not fully paid attention to them.
Finally, there is an additional factor in the case of physicians which may help to account for why so many of them seem unaware of near-death phenomena, even though one would suspect that doctors, of all people, should have encountered them. In the course of their training, it is constantly pounded into M.D.’s-to-be that they must beware of what the patient says about the way he feels. A doctor is taught to pay close attention to the objective “signs” of disease processes, but to take the subjective reports (“symptoms”) of the patient with a grain of salt. It is very reasonable to do it this way, because one can deal more readily with what is objective. However, this attitude also has the effect of hiding near-death experiences, since very few physicians make it a practice to ask about the feelings and perceptions of patients whom they resuscitate from clinical death. Because of this attitude, I would guess that doctors—who in theory should be the group most likely to uncover near-death experiences—are in fact not much more likely to hear of near-death experiences than are other persons.
Have you detected any differences between males and females with respect to this phenomenon?
There seems to be no difference at all in the contents or types of experiences reported by males and females. I have found both males and females who have described each of the common aspects of near-death encounters which have been discussed, and there is no one element which seems to weight either more or less heavily in male vs. female reports.
Still, there are differences between male and female subjects. On the whole, males who have had death experiences are far more reticent to talk about them than are females. Far more males than females have told me briefly of experiences, only to fail to respond to my letters or return my calls when I tried to follow up with a more detailed interview. Many more males than females have made remarks such as “I tried to forget it, suppress it,” often alluding to fears of ridicule, or intimating that the emotions involved in the experience were too overwhelming for them to recount.
Although I cannot offer any explanation of why this should be so, apparently I am not alone in noticing it. Dr. Russell Moores, a noted psychical researcher, has told me that he and others have observed the same thing. About one-third as many men as women come to him reporting a psychical experience.
Another interesting fact is that a somewhat larger number of these experiences than would be expected took place during pregnancy. Again, I can’t explain why this should be. Perhaps it is only that pregnancy is in itself a rather risky physiological state in many ways, attendant with many potential medical complications. Coupled with the fact that only women get pregnant, and that women are less reticent than men to talk, this might help explain the frequency of experiences taking place during pregnancy.
How do you know that all these people aren’t just lying to you?
It is quite easy for persons who have not listened and watched as others have related near-death experiences intellectually to entertain the hypothesis that these stories are lies. However, I find myself in a rather unique position. I have witnessed mature, emotionally stable adults—both men and women—break down and weep while telling me of events that happened up to three decades before. I have detected in their voices sincerity, warmth, and feeling which cannot really be conveyed in a written recounting. So to me, in a way that is unfortunately impossible for many others to share, the notion that these accounts might be fabrications is utterly untenable.
In addition to the weight of my own opinion, there are some strong considerations which should rule heavily against the fabrication hypothesis. The most obvious is the difficulty of explaining the similarity of so many of the accounts. How is it that many people just happen to have come up with the same lie to tell me over a period of eight years? Collusion remains a theoretical possibility here. It is certainly conceivable that a nice elderly lady from eastern North Carolina, a medical student from New Jersey, a Georgia veterinarian, and many others several years ago banded together and conspired to carry out an elaborate hoax against me. However, I don’t regard this to be a very likely possibility!
If they are not overtly lying, perhaps they are misrepresenting in a more subtle way. Isn’t it possible that over the years, they have elaborated their stories?
This question points to the well-known psychological phenomenon in which a person may start with a fairly simple account of an experience or event and over a period of time develop it into a very elaborate narrative. With each telling, a subtle detail is added, the speaker coming eventually to believe it himself, until at last the story is so embellished as to bear little resemblance to the original.
I do not believe that this mechanism has been operative to any significant degree in the cases I have studied, however. In the first place, the accounts of persons whom I have interviewed very soon after their experience—in some cases, while they were still in the hospital recovering—are of the same type as those of people who have recounted experiences which took place decades ago. Further, in a few cases, persons whom I have interviewed wrote down descriptions of their experiences shortly after they happened and read to me from their notes during the interview. Again, these descriptions are of the same sort as experiences which are recounted from memory after lapses of some years. Also, there is the fact that quite often I have been only the first or second person to whom an experience has been related, and then only with great reluctance, even in cases where the experience happened some years before. Though there has been little or no opportunity for embellishment in such cases, these accounts, again, are no different as a group from those accounts that have been retold more often over a period of years. Finally, it is quite possible that in many cases, the reverse of embellishment has taken place. What psychiatrists call “suppression” is a mental mechanism whereby a conscious effort is made to control undesired memories, feelings, or thoughts or to conceal them from awareness. On numerous occasions in the course of interviews, persons have made remarks which are strongly indicative that suppression has occurred. For example, one woman who reported to me a very elaborate experience which took place during her “death” said, “I feel that there is more to it, but I can’t remember it all. I tried to suppress it because I knew people weren’t going to believe me anyway.” A man who suffered a cardiac arrest during surgery for major wounds received in Viet Nam related his difficulty in dealing with his out-of-body experiences emotionally. “I get choked up by trying to tell about it even now…. I feel that there is a lot I don’t remember about it. I have tried to forget it.” In short, it seems that a strong case can be made that embellishment has not been a very significant factor in the development of these stories.
Did all these people profess a religion before their experiences? If so, aren’t the experiences shaped by their religious beliefs and backgrounds?
They seem to be to some extent. As mentioned earlier, though the description of the being of light is invariable, the identity ascribed to it varies, apparently as a function of the religious background of the individual. Through all of my research, however, I have not heard a single reference to a heaven or a hell anything like the customary picture to which we are exposed in this society. Indeed, many persons have stressed how unlike their experiences were to what they had been led to expect in the course of their religious training. One woman who “died” reported: “I had always heard that when you die, you see both heaven and hell, but I didn’t see either one.” Another lady who had an out-of-body experience after severe injuries said, “The strange thing was that I had always been taught in my religious upbringing that the minute you died you would be right at these beautiful gates, pearly gates. But there I was hovering around my own physical body, and that was it! I was just baffled.” Furthermore, in quite a few instances reports have come from persons who had no religious beliefs or training at all prior to their experiences, and their descriptions do not seem to differ in content from people who had quite strong religious beliefs. In a few cases, someone who had been exposed to religious doctrines but had rejected them earlier in life acquired religious feelings with new depth after the experience. Others say that although they had read religious writings, such as The Bible, they had never really understood certain things they had read there until their near-death experiences.
What bearing, if any, do the experiences which you have studied have on the possibility of reincarnation?
Not one of the cases I have looked into is in any way indicative to me that reincarnation occurs. However, it is important to bear in mind that not one of them rules out reincarnation, either. If reincarnation does occur, it seems likely that an interlude in some other realm would occur between the time of separation from the old body and the entry into the new one. Accordingly, the technique of interviewing people who come back from close calls with death would not be the proper mode for studying reincarnation, anyway.
Other methods can and have been tried in investigating reincarnation. For example, some have tried the technique of “far age regression.” A subject is hypnotized and the suggestion is made to him that he go back mentally to successively earlier and earlier times in his life. When he reaches the time of the earliest experiences he can recall in his present life, he is then told to try to go back even beyond that! At this point, many persons begin telling elaborate stories about previous lives in earlier times and distant places. In some cases, such stories check out with remarkable accuracy. This has happened even when it can be established that the subject could not have known in any normal way about the events, persons, and places he describes so accurately. The case of Bridey Murphy is the most famous, but there are many others, some even more impressive and well-documented, which are not as widely known. Readers who wish to pursue this question further are referred to the excellent study, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson, M.D. It is also worth noting that The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which so accurately recounts the stages of near-death encounters, says that reincarnation does occur at some later point, after the events which have been related by my subjects.
Have you ever interviewed anyone who has had a near-death experience in association with a suicide attempt? If so, was the experience any different?
I do know of a few cases in which a suicide attempt was the cause of the apparent “death.” These experiences were uniformly characterized as being unpleasant.
As one woman said, “If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.” In short, they report that the conflicts they had attempted suicide to escape were still present when they died, but with added complications. In their disembodied state they were unable to do anything about their problems, and they also had to view the unfortunate consequences which resulted from their acts.
A man who was despondent about the death of his wife shot himself, “died” as a result, and was resuscitated. He states:
I didn’t go where [my wife] was. I went to an awful place…. I immediately saw the mistake I had made…. I thought, “I wish I hadn’t done it.”
Others who experienced this unpleasant “limbo” state have remarked that they had the feeling they would be there for a long time. This was their penalty for “breaking the rules” by trying to release themselves prematurely from what was, in effect, an “assignment”—to fulfill a certain purpose in life.
Such remarks coincide with what has been reported to me by several people who “died” of other causes but who said that, while they were in this state, it had been intimated to them that suicide was a very unfortunate act which attended with a severe penalty. One man who had a near-death experience after an accident said:
[While I was over there] I got the feeling that two things it was completely forbidden for me to do would be to kill myself or to kill another person…. If I were to commit suicide, I would be throwing God’s gift back in his face…. Killing somebody else would be interfering with God’s purpose for that individual.
Sentiments like these, which by now have been expressed to me in many separate accounts, are identical to those embodied in the most ancient theological and moral argument against suicide—one which occurs in various forms in the writings of thinkers as diverse as St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke, and Kant. A suicide, in Kant’s view, is acting in opposition to the purposes of God and arrives on the other side viewed as a rebel against his creator. Aquinas argues that life is a gift from God and that it is God’s prerogative, not man’s, to take it back.
In discussing this, however, I do not pass a moral judgment against suicide. I only report what others who have been through this experience have told me. I am now in the process of preparing a second book on near-death experiences, in which this topic, along with others, will be dealt with at greater length.
Do you have any cross-cultural cases?
No, I don’t. In fact, one of the many reasons I say that my study is not “scientific” is that the group of individuals to whom I have listened is not a random sample of human beings. I would be very interested in hearing about the near-death experiences of Eskimos, Kwakiutl Indians, Navahos, Watusi tribesmen, and so on. However, due to geographic and other limitations, I have not been able to locate any.
Are there any historical examples of near-death phenomena?
As far as I know, there are not. However, since I have been fully occupied with contemporary instances, I have simply not had the time adequately to research this question. So I would not at all be surprised to find that such reports have been recounted in the past. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that near-death experiences have been vastly more common in the past few decades than in earlier periods. The reason for this is simply that it has only been in fairly recent times that advanced resuscitation technology has been available. Many of the people who have been brought back in our era would not have survived in earlier years. Injections of adrenalin into the heart, a machine which delivers a shock to the heart, and artificial heart and lung machines are examples of such medical advances.
Have you investigated the medical records of your subjects?
In so far as possible, I have. In the cases I have been invited to investigate, the records have borne out the assertions of the persons involved. In some cases, due to the passage of time and/or the death of the persons who carried out the resuscitation, records are not available. The reports for which substantiating records are not available are no different from those in which records are available. In many instances when medical records have not been accessible, I have secured the testimony of others—friends, doctors, or relatives of the informant—to the effect that the near-death event did occur.
I have heard that, after five minutes, resuscitation is impossible, yet you say that some of your cases have been “dead” for up to twenty minutes. How is this possible?
Most numbers and quantities one hears quoted in medical practice are means, averages, and are not to be taken as absolutes. The figure of five minutes which one often hears quoted is an average. It is a clinical rule of thumb not to attempt resuscitation after five minutes because, in most instances, brain damage from lack of oxygen would have occurred beyond that time. However, since it is only an average, one would expect individual cases to fall on either side of it. I have in fact found cases in which resuscitation took place after twenty minutes with no evidence of brain damage.
Were any of these people really dead?
One of the main reasons why this question is so confusing and difficult to answer is that it is partly a semantic question involving the meaning of the word “dead.” As the recent heated controversy surrounding the transplantation of organs reveals, the definition of “death” is by no means settled, even among professionals in the field of medicine. Criteria of death vary not only between laymen and physicians, but also among physicians and from hospital to hospital. So, the answer to this question will depend on what is meant by “dead.” It will be profitable here to look at three definitions in turn and to comment upon them.
1. “DEATH” AS THE ABSENCE OF CLINICALLY DETECTABLE VITAL SIGNS.
Some will be willing to say that a person is “dead” if his heart stops beating and he quits breathing for an extended period of time, his blood pressure drops as low as to be unreadable, his pupils dilate, his body temperature begins to go down, etc. This is the clinical definition, and it has been employed for centuries by physicians and laymen alike. In fact, most people who have ever been pronounced dead were adjudged so on the basis of this criterion.
There is no question but that this clinical standard was met in many of the cases I have studied. Both the testimony of physicians and the evidence of medical records adequately support the contention that “deaths” in this sense did take place.
2. “DEATH” AS THE ABSENCE OF BRAIN WAVE ACTIVITY.
The advancement of technology has brought the development of more sensitive techniques for detecting biological processes, even those which might not be observable overtly. The electroencephalograph (EEG) is a machine which amplifies and records the minute electrical potentials of the brain. Recently, the trend has been to base assessment of “real” death on the absence of electrical activity in the brain, as determined by the presence of “flat” EEG tracings.
Obviously, in all of the cases of resuscitation which I have dealt with, there was an extreme clinical emergency. There was no time to set up an EEG; the clinicians were rightly concerned about doing what they could to get their patient back. So, some might argue that none of these persons can be adjudged to have been “dead.”
Suppose for a moment, however, that “flat” EEG readings had been obtained on a large percentage of the persons who were thought dead and were then resuscitated. Would that fact necessarily add very much here? I think not, for three reasons. First, resuscitation attempts are always emergencies, which last at the very most for thirty minutes or so. Setting up an EEG machine is a very complicated and technical task, and it is fairly common for even an experienced technician to have to work with it for some time to get correct readings, even under optimum conditions. In an emergency, with its accompanying confusion, there would probably be an increased likelihood of mistakes. So, even if one could present a flat EEG tracing for a person who told of a near-death experience, it would still be possible for a critic to say—with justice—that the tracing might not be accurate.
Second, even the marvelous electric brain machine, properly set up, does not enable us infallibly to determine whether resuscitation is possible in any given case. Flat EEG tracings have been obtained in persons who were later resuscitated. Overdoses of drugs which are depressants of the central nervous system, as well as hypothermia (low body temperature) have both resulted in this phenomenon.
Third, even if I could produce a case in which it could be established that the machine was correctly set up, there would still be a problem. Someone could say that there is no proof that the reported near-death experience took place during the time the EEG was flat, but rather before or afterwards. I conclude, then, that the EEG is not very valuable at this present stage of investigation.
3. “DEATH” AS AN IRREVERSIBLE LOSS OF VITAL FUNCTIONS.
Others will adopt an even more restricted definition, holding that one cannot say that a person was ever “dead,” no matter how long his vital signs were clinically undetectable, and no matter how long his EEG was flat, if he was subsequently resuscitated. In other words, “death” is defined as that state of the body from which it is impossible to be revived. Obviously, by this definition, none of my cases would qualify, since they all involved resuscitation.
We have seen, then, that the answer to the question depends upon what is meant by “dead.” One must remember that even though this is in part a semantic dispute, it is nonetheless an important issue, because all three definitions embody important insights. In fact, I would agree with the third, most stringent definition to some extent. Even in those cases in which the heart was not beating for extended periods, the tissues of the body, particularly the brain, must somehow have been perfused (supplied with oxygen and nourishment) most of the time. It is not necessary that one assume in any of these cases that any law of biology or physiology was violated. In order for resuscitation to have occurred, some degree of residual biological activity must have been going on in the cells of the body, even though the overt signs of these processes were not clinically detectable by the methods employed. However, it seems that it is impossible at present to determine exactly what the point of no return is. It may well vary with the individual, and it is likely not a fixed point but rather a shifting range on a continuum. In fact, a few decades ago most of the people with whom I have talked could not have been brought back. In the future, techniques might become available which would enable us to revive people who can’t be saved today.
Let us, therefore, hypothesize that death is a separation of the mind from the body, and that the mind does pass into other realms of existence at this point. It would follow that there exists some mechanism whereby the soul or mind is released upon death. One has no basis upon which to assume, though, that this mechanism works exactly in accordance with what we have in our own era somewhat arbitrarily taken to be the point of no return. Nor do we have to assume that it works perfectly in every instance, any more than we have to assume that any bodily system always works perfectly. Perhaps this mechanism might sometime come into play even before any physiological crisis, affording a few persons a brief glimpse of other realities. This would help to account for the reports of those persons who have had flashbacks of their lives, out-of-body experiences, etc., when they felt certain that they were about to be killed, even before any physical injury occurred.
All I ultimately want to claim is this: Whatever that point of irretrievable death is said to be—whether in the past, present, or future—those with whom I have talked have been much closer to it than have the vast majority of their fellow human beings. For this reason alone, I am quite willing to listen to what they have to say.
In the final analysis, though, it is quite pointless to cavil over the precise definition of “death”—irreversible or otherwise—in the context of this discussion. What the person who raises such objections to near-death experiences seems to have in mind is something more basic. He reasons that as long as it remains a possibility that there was some residual biological activity in the body, then that activity might have caused, and thus account for, the experience.
Now, I granted earlier that there must have been some residual biological function in the body in all cases. So, the issue of whether a “real” death occurred really reduces to the more basic problem of whether the residual biological function could account for the occurrence of the experiences. In other words:
Aren’t other explanations (i.e., other than survival of bodily death) possible?
This in turn brings us to the topic of the next chapter.