Of course alternative “explanations” of near-death phenomena are available. In fact, from the purely philosophical point of view, an infinity of hypotheses could be constructed to explain any experience, observation, or fact. That is, one could go on forever manufacturing more and more theoretically possible explanations for anything one wanted to explain. It is the same in the case of near-death experiences; all sorts of possible explanations present themselves.
Out of the many kinds of explanations which might theoretically be proposed, there are a few which have been suggested quite frequently in the audiences which I have addressed. Accordingly, I shall now deal with these more common explanations, and with another which, though it has never been proposed to me, might well have been. I have somewhat arbitrarily divided them into three types: Supernatural, Natural (Scientific), and Psychological.
Rarely, someone in one of my audiences has proposed demonic explanations of near-death experiences, suggesting that the experiences were doubtless directed by inimical forces. As a response to such explanations, I can only say this. It seems to me that the best way of distinguishing between God-directed and Satan-directed experiences would be to see what the person involved does and says after his experience. God, I suppose, would try to get those to whom he appears to be loving and forgiving. Satan would presumably tell his servants to follow a course of hate and destruction. Manifestly, my subjects have come back with a renewed commitment to follow the former course and to disavow the latter. In the light of all the machinations which a hypothetical demon would have to have carried out in order to delude his hapless victim (and to what purpose?), he certainly has failed miserably—as far as I can tell—to make persuasive emissaries for his program!
1. THE PHARMACOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
Some suggest that near-death experiences are caused by the therapeutic drugs administered to the person at the time of his crisis. The surface plausibility of this view derives from several facts. For example, it is generally agreed by most medical scientists and laymen that certain drugs cause delusional and hallucinatory mental states and experiences. Furthermore, we are now passing through an era in which there is intense interest in the problem of drug abuse, and much public attention has focused on the illicit use of drugs such as LSD, marijuana, and so forth, which do appear to cause such hallucinatory episodes. Finally, there is the fact that even many medically-accepted drugs are associated with various effects on the mind which may resemble the events of the experience of dying. For example, the drug ketamine (or cyclohexanone) is an intravenously injected anesthetic with side effects which are similar in some respects to out-of-body experiences. It is classified as a “dissociative” anesthetic because during induction the patient may become unresponsive not only to pain but also to the environment as a whole. He feels “dissociated” from his environment, including the parts of his own body—his legs, arms, and so forth. For a time after recovery, he may be left with psychological disturbances, including hallucinations and very vivid dreams. (Note that a few persons have used this very word—“dissociation”—to characterize their feelings while in the out-of-body state.)
What is more, I have collected a few accounts from people who, while under anesthetics, had what they plainly identified as hallucinatory-type visions of death. Let me give one example.
It was some time in my early teen-age years, I was in the dentist’s office for a filling and was given nitrous oxide. I was kind of nervous about taking it, because I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up again. As the anesthesia began to take effect, I felt myself going around in a spiral. It wasn’t like I was turning around, but like the dentist’s chair was moving in a spiral upward, and it was going up and up and up.
Everything was very bright and white and as I got to the top of the spiral, angels came down to meet me and to take me to heaven. I use the plural, “angels,” because it’s very vague but I’m sure that there were more than one. Yet I can’t say how many.
At one point the dentist and nurse were talking to each other about another person, and I heard them, but by the time they finished a sentence I couldn’t even remember what the first of the sentence had been. But I knew they were talking, and as they did their words would echo around and around. It was an echo that seemed to get further and further away, like in the mountains. I do remember that I seemed to hear them from above, because I felt as though I was up high, going to heaven.
That’s all I remember except that I hadn’t been afraid or panicked at the thought of dying. At that time in my life, I was afraid of going to hell, but when this happened there was no question in my mind but that I was going to heaven. I was very surprised later that the thought of death hadn’t bothered me, but finally it dawned on me that in my anesthetized state nothing bothered me. The whole thing was just happy because I’m sure the gas made me completely carefree. I blamed it on that. It was such a vague thing. I didn’t dwell on it afterwards.
Notice that there are a few points of similarity between this experience and some others which have been taken to be real by those to whom they happened. This woman describes a brilliant white light, meeting others who are there to take her to the other side, and lack of concern over being dead. There are also two aspects which suggest an out-of-body experience: Her impression that she heard the voices of the dentist and nurse from a position above them, and her feeling of “floating.”
On the other hand, other details of this story are very atypical of near-death experiences which are reported as having actually happened. The brilliant light is not personified and no ineffable feelings of peace and happiness occurred. The description of the after-death world is very literalistic and, she says, in accordance with her religious training. The beings who met her are identified as “angels,” and she talks of going to a “heaven” which is located in the “up” direction, where she is headed. She denies seeing her body or being in any other kind of body, and she plainly feels that the dentist’s chair, and not her own motion, was the source of the rotatory movement. She repeatedly stresses the vagueness of her experience, and it apparently had no effect on her belief in an afterlife. (In fact, she now has doubts about survival of bodily death.)
In comparing reports in which the experience is plainly attributed to a drug with near-death experiences which are reported as real, several points need to be mentioned. First of all, the few people who have described such “drug” experiences to me are no more and no less romantic, imaginative, intelligent, or stable than are the persons reporting “real” near-death experiences. Secondly, these drug-induced experiences are extremely vague. Thirdly, the stories vary among themselves, and also markedly from the “real” near-death visions. I should say that in choosing the specific case of the “anesthetic” type of experience to be used, I have purposefully chosen the one which most closely resembles the group of “real” experiences. So, I would suggest that there are, in general, very great differences between these two types of experiences.
Furthermore, there are many additional factors which rule against the pharmacological explanation of near-death phenomena. The most significant one is simply that in many cases no drug had been administered prior to the experience nor, in some cases, were drugs given even after the near-death event. In fact, many persons have made it a point to insist to me that the experience clearly took place before any kind of medication was given, in some cases long before they obtained any sort of medical attention. Even in those instances in which therapeutic drugs were administered around the time of the near-death event, the variety of drugs employed for different patients is enormous. They range from substances such as aspirin through antibiotics and the hormone adrenalin to local and gaseous anesthetics. Most of these drugs are not associated with central nervous system or psychic effects. It also should be noted that there are no differences as groups between the experiences related by those who were given no drugs at all and the experiences related by those who were under medications of various types. Finally, I shall note without comment that one woman who “died” twice on separate occasions some years apart attributed her lack of an experience the first time to her anesthetized condition. The second time, when she was under no drugs at all, she had a very complex experience.
One of the assumptions of modern medical pharmacology is the notion, which also seems to have gained acceptance among the great mass of laymen in our society, that psychoactive drugs cause the psychic episodes with which their use is associated. These psychic events are therefore considered to be “unreal,” “hallucinatory,” “delusional,” or “only in the mind.” One must remember, however, that this view is by no means universally accepted; there is another view of the relationship between drugs and experiences attending their use. I refer to the initiatory and exploratory use of what we call “hallucinogenic” drugs. Through the ages men have turned to such psychoactive compounds in their quest to achieve other states of consciousness and to reach other planes of reality. (For a lively and fascinating contemporary exposition of this side of drug use, see the recent book, The Natural Mind, by Andrew Weil, M.D.) Thus, drug use has historically been associated, not only with medicine and the treatment of disease, but also with religion and the attainment of enlightenment. For example, in the well-publicized rituals of the peyote cult found among American Indians in the western United States, the peyote cactus plant (which contains the substance mescaline) is ingested in order to attain religious visions and enlightenment. There are similar cults all over the world, and their members share the belief that the drug they employ provides a means of passage into other dimensions of reality. Assuming this viewpoint to be valid, it could be hypothesized that drug use would be only one pathway among many leading to the achievement of enlightenment and to the discovery of other realms of existence. The experience of dying could, then, be another such pathway, and all this would help to account for the resemblance of drug-induced experiences like the one given above to near-death experiences.
2. PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS
Physiology is that branch of biology which deals with the functions of the cells, organs and whole bodies of living beings, and with the inter-relationships among these functions. A physiological explanation of near-death phenomena which I have often heard proposed is that, since the oxygen supply to the brain is cut off during clinical death and some other kinds of severe bodily stress, the phenomena perceived must represent some sort of last compensatory gasp of the dying brain.
The main thing wrong with this hypothesis is simply this: As can easily be seen from a survey of the dying experiences reported earlier, many of the near-death experiences happened before any physiological stress of the required type took place. Indeed, in a few cases there was no bodily injury at all during the encounter. Yet, every single element which appears in cases of severe injury can also be seen in other instances in which injury was not involved.
3. NEUROLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS
Neurology is the medical specialty dealing with the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases of the nervous system (that is the brain, spinal cord, and nerves). Phenomena similar to those reported by persons who nearly die show up also in certain neurological conditions. So, some might propose neurological explanations of near-death experiences in terms of supposed malfunctions in the nervous system of the dying person. Let us consider neurological parallels for two of the more striking events of the dying experience: The instantaneous “review” of the events of the dying person’s life and the out-of-body phenomenon.
I encountered a patient on the neurology ward at a hospital who described a peculiar form of seizure disorder in which he saw flashbacks of events in his earlier life.
The first time it happened, I was looking at a friend of mine across the room. The right side of his face just kind of became distorted. All of a sudden, there was an intrusion into my consciousness of scenes of things that had happened in the past. They were just like they were when they actually happened—vivid, completely in color, and three-dimensional. I felt nauseated, and I was so startled that I tried to avoid the images. Since then, I’ve had many of these attacks, and I’ve learned just to let it run its course. The closest parallel I can draw to it is the films they have on television at New Year’s. Scenes of things that happened that year are flashed on the screen and when you see one, it’s gone before you can really think about it. That’s how it is with these attacks. I’ll see something and think, “Oh, I remember that.” And I’ll try to keep it in my mind, but another is flashed up before I can.
The images are things that really happened. Nothing is modified. When it is over, though, it is very difficult to recall what images I saw. Sometimes, it’s the same images, other times not. As they appear I remember, “Oh, these are the same ones I’ve seen before,” but when it’s over it’s almost impossible to recall what they were. They don’t seem to be particularly significant events in my life. In fact, none of them are. They all seem very trivial. They don’t happen in any sort of order, not even in the order they happened in my life. They just come at random.
When the images come, I can still see what’s going on around me, but my awareness is diminished. I’m not as sharp. It’s almost as if half of my mind is taken up with the images, and the other half is on what I’m doing. People who have seen me during an attack say that it just lasts about a minute, but to me it seems like ages.
There are certain obvious similarities between these seizures, which doubtless were occasioned by a focus of irritation in the brain, and the panoramic memory reported by some of my near-death subjects. For example, this man’s seizure took the form of visual images which were incredibly vivid and were actually three-dimensional. Further, the images just seemed to come to him, quite apart from any intention on his part. He also reports that the images came with great rapidity and he emphasizes the distortion of his senses of time which went along with the seizure.
On the other hand, there are striking differences as well. Unlike those seen in near-death experiences, the memory images did not come in the order of his life, nor were they seen all at once, in a unifying vision. They were not highlights or significant events in his life; he stresses their triviality. Thus, they did not seem to be presented to him for judgmental or educational purposes. While many near-death subjects point out that after their “review” they could remember the events of their life with much greater clarity and in more detail than before, this man states that he could not remember what the particular images were following the seizure.
Out-of-body experiences have a neurological analogue in so-called “autoscopic (self-seeing) hallucinations,” which are the subject of an excellent article by Dr. N. Lukianowicz in the medical journal, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. In these odd visions, the subject sees a projection of himself into his own visual field. This strange “double” mimicks the facial expressions and other bodily movements of its original, who is completely baffled and confused when he suddenly sees an image of himself at a distance from himself, usually straight ahead.
Though this experience is clearly somewhat analogous to the out-of-body visions described earlier, the differences heavily outweigh the similarities. The autoscopic phantom is always perceived as alive—sometimes it is thought of by the subject as even more alive and conscious than he is—while in out-of-body experiences the body is seen as something lifeless, just a shell. The autoscopic subject may “hear” his double talk to him, give him instructions, taunt him, and so on. While in out-of-body experiences the whole body is seen (unless it is partly covered up or otherwise concealed), the autoscopic double is far more frequently seen only from the chest or neck up.
In fact, autoscopic copies have many more features in common with what I have called the spiritual body than with the physical body which is seen by a dying person. Autoscopic doubles, though sometimes seen in color, are more often described as wispy, transparent, and colorless. The subject may in fact see his image walk through doors or other physical obstacles without any apparent trouble.
I present here an account of an apparent autoscopic hallucination which was described to me. It is unique in that it involved two persons simultaneously.
About eleven o’clock one summer night about two years before my wife and I were married, I was driving her home in my sports convertible. I parked the car on the dimly-lit street in front of her house, and we were both surprised as we both looked up at the same time and saw huge images of ourselves, from the waist up and sitting side by side, in the big trees which hung over the street about one hundred feet directly ahead of us. The images were dark, almost like silhouettes, and we couldn’t see through them at all, but they were quite exact replicas, anyway. Neither of us had any trouble recognizing both of them at once. They moved around, but not in imitation of our movements, since we were just sitting still watching them. They did things such as: My image picked up a book and showed something in it to the image of my wife, and she leaned over and looked more closely at the book.
As we sat there, I would narrate the scene for a while—tell my wife what I saw the images doing—and what I said was exactly what she had been seeing them doing. Then we would switch. She would tell me what she was seeing them doing, and it would be exactly what I had seen.
We sat there for a long time—at least thirty minutes—watching this and talking about it as we watched it. I guess we could have gone on like that for the rest of the night. My wife had to go in, though, so we finally just walked together up the steps going up the hill to her house. When I came back down, I saw the images again, and they were still there as I drove away.
There is no chance that this was any sort of reflection of us in the windshield because the top of the car was down and we were looking way up over the windshield to see them the whole time. Neither of us ever drank, either—and we still don’t—and this was three years before we had even heard anything about LSD or drugs like that. We weren’t tired, either, even though it was fairly late, so we weren’t asleep and dreaming it. We were very awake, alert, amazed, and excited as we watched the images and talked about them with each other.
Granted, autoscopic hallucinations are in some ways like the out-of-body phenomenon associated with a near-death experience. However, even if we were to focus on all the points of similarity and to neglect the differences entirely, the existence of autoscopic hallucinations would not give us an explanation for the occurrence of out-of-body experiences. The simple reason is that there is no explanation for autoscopic hallucinations, either. Many conflicting explanations have been proposed by different neurologists and psychiatrists, but they are still debated, and no one theory has gained general acceptance. So, to try to explain all out-of-body experiences as autoscopic hallucinations would only be to substitute a bafflement for an enigma.
Finally, there is another point which is relevant to the discussion of neurological explanations for near-death experiences. In one case I found a subject who had a residual neurological problem deriving from a near-death encounter. The problem was a very mild deficit consisting of the partial paralysis of a small group of muscles on one side of the body. Though I have often asked whether there were any residual deficits, this is the only example I have found of neurological damage following a near-death encounter.
Psychology has not yet attained anything approaching the degree of rigor and precision which some other sciences have reached in the modern age. Psychologists are still divided into contesting schools of thought with conflicting viewpoints, investigative approaches, and fundamental understandings about the existence and nature of the mind. Psychological explanations of near-death experiences, therefore, will vary widely according to the school of thought to which the explainer belongs. Instead of considering each type of psychological explanation which might possibly be proposed, I shall stick to a few which I have heard most often from members of my audience, and to one which has struck me as in a way the most tempting.
I touched earlier on two commonly proposed psychological type explanations—those which hypothesize that either conscious lying or unconscious embellishment might have occurred. In the present chapter I want to consider two others.
1. ISOLATION RESEARCH
In all of the public lectures I have presented on my studies, no one has ever advanced an explanation of near-death experiences in terms of the results of isolation research. Yet it is in precisely this relatively recent and rapidly growing area of behavioral science that phenomena most closely resembling the stages of the experience of dying have been studied and produced under laboratory conditions.
Isolation research is the study of what happens to the mind and body of a person who is isolated in one way or another; for example, by being removed from all social contact with other humans, or by being subjected to a monotonous, repetitive task for long periods.
Data on situations of this type has been gathered in several ways. Written accounts of the experiences of lone polar explorers or of solitary survivors of shipwrecks contain much information. During the last few decades, researchers have attempted to investigate similar phenomena under laboratory conditions. One well-publicized technique has been to suspend a volunteer in a tank of water which is the same temperature as his body. This minimizes sensations of weight and temperature. He is blindfolded and his ears are fitted with plugs to intensify the effect of the dark, sound-proofed tank. His arms are constrained in tubes so that he cannot move them, and he is thus deprived of many of the normal sensations of joint movement and position.
Under these and other solitary conditions, some people have experienced unusual psychological phenomena, many of which strongly resemble those I outlined in Chapter 2. One woman who spent long periods alone in the desolate conditions of the North Pole reports a panoramic vision of the events of her life. Shipwrecked sailors stranded alone in small boats for many weeks have described hallucinations of being rescued, sometimes by paranormal beings almost like ghosts or spirits. This bears vague analogies to the being of light or departed spirits whom many of my subjects have encountered. Other near-death type phenomena which recur in accounts of isolation experiences include: Distortions of sense of time, feelings of being partly dissociated from the body, resistance to going back to civilization or leaving isolation, and feelings of being “at one” with the universe. In addition, many who have been isolated by shipwreck or other such events say that after a few weeks of being in this condition, they came back to civilization with a profound change of values. They may report that afterwards they feel inwardly more secure. Clearly, this reintegration of personality is similar to that claimed by many who have come back from death.
Likewise, there are certain aspects of dying situations that are much like the features found in isolation experiences and studies. Patients who come near death are often isolated and immobile in the recovery rooms of hospitals, often in conditions of subdued sound and light and with no visitors. One might even wonder whether the physiological changes associated with the death of the body could produce a radical kind of isolation resulting in an almost total cut-off of sensory input to the brain. Further, as was discussed at length earlier, many near-death patients have told me of the distressing feelings of isolation, of loneliness, and of being cut off from human contact which came over them when they were out of their bodies.
Indeed, one could no doubt find borderline cases which could not be classified clearly either as near-death experiences or as isolation experiences. For example, one man gave me the following story of his stay in the hospital during a severe illness.
I was extremely ill in the hospital, and as I lay there I kept seeing pictures coming at me, just as though they were on a television screen. The pictures were of people, and I could see a person, as though out in space at a distance, and it would start coming toward me, then it would go past and another one would appear. I was perfectly aware that I was in the hospital room and was sick, but I started to wonder what was going on. Now, some of these people I knew personally—they were friends and relatives of mine—but the others I didn’t know. Suddenly, I realized that all the ones I knew were people who had died.
One might well ask how to classify this experience, since it has points of similarity to both near-death and isolation experiences. It seems somewhat analogous to the near-death experiences in which meetings with the spirits of departed individuals took place, and yet different from them in that no other near-death phenomena took place. Interestingly, in one isolation study a subject, who was alone in a cubicle for some time, described hallucinations in which he saw pictures of famous men drifting past him. So, is the experience just quoted to be classified as a near-death experience occasioned by the patient’s extreme illness, or as an isolation experience brought on by the conditions of confinement necessitated by the state of his health? It might even be the case that no absolute criteria can be drawn up which would enable one to classify every such experience into one of the two separate categories. Perhaps there will always be borderline cases.
Despite these overlaps, however, the results of isolation research do not provide a satisfactory explanation for near-death experiences. In the first place, the diverse mental phenomena occurring in conditions of isolation cannot themselves be explained by any current theory. To appeal to isolation studies to explain near-death experiences would be, as in the case of “explaining” out-of-body experiences by referring to autoscopic hallucinations, merely to substitute one mystery for another. For, there are two conflicting strains of thought about the nature of the visions which take place in conditions of isolation. Some no doubt take them as “unreal” and “hallucinatory,” and yet all throughout history mystics and shamans have sought solitude in the wilderness in order to find enlightenment and revelation. The notion that spiritual rebirth can be brought about by isolation is an integral part of the belief systems of many cultures and is reflected in many great religious writings, including The Bible.
Although this idea is somewhat alien to our contemporary Western belief structure, there are still numerous proponents of it, even in our own society. One of the earliest and most influential isolation researchers, John Lilly, M.D., has recently written a book, a spiritual autobiography, entitled The Center of the Cyclone. In this book he makes it clear that he regards the experiences he had under conditions of isolation to be real experiences of enlightenment and insight, and not “unreal” or “delusional” at all. It is also interesting to note that he recounts a near-death experience of his own which is very much like the ones with which I have dealt, and that he puts his near-death experiences in the same category with his isolation experiences. Isolation, therefore, may very well be, along with hallucinatory drugs and a close call with death, one of several ways of entering new realms of consciousness.
2. DREAMS, HALLUCINATIONS, AND DELUSIONS
Perhaps, some say, near-death experiences are only wish-fulfilling dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations which are brought into play by different factors—drugs in one case, cerebral anoxia in another, isolation in yet another, and so on. So, they would explain near-death experiences as delusions.
I think several factors weigh against this. First, consider the great similarity in content and progression we find among the descriptions, despite the fact that what is most generally reported is manifestly not what is commonly imagined, in our cultural milieu, to happen to the dead. In addition, we find that the picture of the events of dying which emerges from these accounts corresponds in a striking way with that painted in very ancient and esoteric writings totally unfamiliar to my subjects.
Secondly, there remains the fact that the persons with whom I have talked are not victims of psychoses. They have struck me as emotionally stable, normal people who are functional in society. They hold jobs and positions of importance and carry them out responsibly. They have stable marriages and are involved with their families and friends. Almost no one with whom I have talked has had more than one uncanny experience in the course of his life. And, most significantly, these informants are people who can distinguish between dreams and waking experience.
Yet, they are people who report what they underwent as they came near death, not as dreams, but as events which happened to them. They almost invariably assure me in the course of their narratives that their experiences were not dreams, but rather were definitely, emphatically real.
Finally, there is the fact that independent corroboration of a kind exists for certain of the reports of out-of-body episodes. Though commitments to others prevent me from giving names and identifying details, I have seen and heard enough to say that I continue to be baffled and amazed. It is my opinion that anyone looking into near-death experiences in an organized way is likely also to uncover such strange apparent corroboration. At least, I believe he will find enough facts to make him wonder whether near-death experiences, far from being dreams, might not belong in a very different category indeed.
As a final note here, let me point out that “explanations” are not just abstract intellectual systems. They are also in some respects projects of the egos of the persons who hold them. People become emotionally wedded, as it were, to the canons of scientific explanation which they devise or adopt.
In my numerous lectures on my collection of narratives of near-death events, I have encountered proponents of many types of explanations. Persons who are physiologically-, pharmacologically-, or neurologically-minded will regard their own orientations as sources of explanations which are intuitively obvious, even when cases are brought up which seem to weigh against that particular explanation. Those who espouse the theories of Freud delight in seeing the being of light as a projection of the subject’s father, while Jungians see archetypes of the collective unconscious, and so on ad infinitum.
Although I want to emphasize again that I am not proposing any new explanations of my own through all this, I have tried to give a few reasons why explanations that are often proposed seem to me at least questionable. In fact, all I really want to suggest is this: Let us at least leave open the possibility that near-death experiences represent a novel phenomenon for which we may have to devise new modes of explanation and interpretation.