While most people who nearly die from some accident or medical emergency recall nothing when they are resuscitated, some do, and their reports tend to contain common features. Typically, the person’s consciousness seemingly leaves the body and floats a few feet overhead. Everything that is going on is seen and heard, even though the physical body is unconscious. The person can then feel as if being rapidly drawn away elsewhere, often with the sensation of flying through a long tunnel.
    He or she usually emerges into a brilliantly lit landscape or garden of otherworldly beauty. Then a being appears – a deceased relative, a religious figure, or a ‘being of light’ – saying it is not yet time to die, and the person returns to the physical body in the throes of being resuscitated.
    On recovery, the person often discovers that the fear of death has disappeared and may even seemingly have acquired novel healing or creative powers.
    This is only a prototypical description, and there are many individual variations to this basic blueprint. Psychiatrist and philosopher Dr. Raymond Moody, coined the term ‘near death experience’ (NDE) in his 1975 bestseller Life After Life, but the actual area of research was instigated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who from the 1950s had been drawing attention to the recurrence of near-death visionary narratives in terminally ill patients.
    Whether there is life after death is one of the primary philosophical conundrums we face as human beings, and believers have seized on the NDE as evidence of survival.
    Most scientists dismiss this - while there is no doubt about the occurrence of NDEs - the explanation they give for them is that as the brain dies electrochemical changes occur within it that trigger hallucinatory states containing imagery one would associate with the situation, such as glimpses of paradise, spiritually powerful beings, and deceased relatives.
    It has even been suggested that our brains contain a final ‘program’ of appropriate signals, which are released into consciousness when death seems imminent. But the whole matter might not be so black-and-white.
    Neutral researchers look for two types of evidence that might indicate that there is an objective aspect to the NDE - verifiable information in the near-death visions or hallucinations that seems to have been obtained by extrasensory means, and whether the experience occurs when the brain has ceased functioning.

At The Hour Of Death

There is some tantalising evidence concerning near-death information. I recall the case of a friend who lay close to death in hospital. At one point she nearly died and felt her consciousness leave her body and float around the hospital ward. It was an L-shaped ward and my friend had been placed at the end of it throughout her crisis. As she ‘floated’ around she noticed a patient with very distinctive red hair in one of the beds that was permanently out of sight of her own bed. It later transpired that the redheaded patient had been brought into the ward after my friend had been admitted, and had never passed in sight of her.
    In their book, At the Hour of Death (1977), Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson cite a number of reports. For example, one man died in Connecticut the day after his sister’s passing in Ohio; prior to expiring, the patient mentioned seeing his sister in the hospital, yet he had not been informed of her death.
    This type of case can work in reverse as well, in that people around the time of death can seemingly ‘call out’ to a distant friend or relative resulting in the distant recipient seeing an apparition or otherwise gaining a sense of the dying person’s presence.
    Another friend of mine had an uncanny experience of this kind. He received a phone call from a colleague who did not give his name but who had a very individual type of humour that my friend immediately recognised. It turned out that this had happened ten minutes after the caller’s death. Had the incident been a hallucination triggered by an extra-sensory impression of the deceased person’s presence?

Beyond the Brain

There are many such reports of inexplicable near-death information, but the trouble is they make up a body of evidence that is only anecdotal, which science finds hard to accept. To make mainstream science take NDEs more seriously a harder type of evidence will be required. This is where a current NDE researcher, neurophysiological consultant Dr. Peter Fenwick, is focusing his efforts. Much of his research is presented in his book The Truth in the Light (1996).
    Dr. Fenwick points out that an NDE has great clarity - it seems fully ‘real’ - and the subject is completely engaged in it, perhaps communicating with otherworldly beings, seeing fabulous landscapes and other effects. Because electrical activity in the brain ceases a number of seconds after the heart stops, this cannot be a neurophysiological effect if it occurs during this period.
    During resuscitation from that state a person is confused and recovers consciousness only slowly. Significantly, NDEs are too lucid and structured to be happening in such a mental state so if the NDE can be proven to occur during either of these conditions a new scientific model will be required to account for it. So far, it seems there has been just one recorded case of an NDE occurring when monitoring equipment showed the patient’s brain had become electrically inert.
    Knowing that there will have to be several rigorously monitored cases of this kind for science to be obliged to reassess its ideas about the NDE, Fenwick is alerting doctors to help test for this. He has also proposed that emergency rooms in a large number of hospitals be fitted with special signs in places like the tops of ceiling lampshades or wall cupboards that would be visible only to a patient experiencing an NDE out-of-body episode. If consciousness does actually become independent of the brain in such experiences then over time the signs will be noticed in a number of cases, but not at all if the out-of-body sensation is just a neuropsychological effect. This nationwide experiment has not yet been set up.

Swan Song

Dr. Raymond Moody, who currently holds the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, is taking more unusual approaches to the study of the NDE. One involves what he calls the ‘swan song’, when a person shortly to die starts to recite or even to sing. Moody has collected hundreds of examples of this phenomenon, and points out that in Japan there is even a tradition of death poetry. The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece also recited as they ‘passed over’, and these included some deliberate nonsense words. The Gnostics, too, had a similar practice.
    Moody likens the swan song to the ‘shaman’s song’ which is used to help carry the shaman into trance on his journey to the spirit world. Such songs contain ‘an integrated intelligible language of nonsense words’ Moody informs us, much like the babbling involved in ‘speaking in tongues’ (glossolalia) which is also associated with trance states.
    He argues that the use of the swan song phenomenon could give the dying and those caring for them a language to cope with the ineffable quality so often reported by those who have had an NDE. He reckons we will only be able to understand what is involved in crossing the threshold of death by creating ‘an alternative form of logic’.

Evoking the Dead

Another of Moody’s highly original approaches to researching the neardeath state involves his invention of the ‘psychomanteum’. This is a darkwalled, dimly-lit small room or cubicle which is empty save for a comfortable chair and a reflective surface, such as a glass or crystal object, a bowl of liquid, or a mirror. The reflective surface has to be so placed that the user of the psychomanteum is able to see it from the chair without looking directly into it.
    Moody got the idea for this arrangement from his visits to ancient Greek sites dedicated to necromancy (necromantions), such as the Oracle of Poseidon associated with the Diros Cave at the southern tip of Peloponnessos near Sparta. It contains a hole now covered with slabs that was said to lead to the kingdom of the dead. Such sites typically feature caves or labyrinthine subterranean passages. Moody had noticed a stone bowl in the site he investigated and figured that it had been used to hold a liquid to provide a reflective surface for gazing into.
    Moody claims that if a person enters a meditative state in the conducive environment created by the psychomanteum and then gazes at the reflective surface, the face of a deceased friend or relative may appear in it. In one experiment, 153 out of 155 subjects experienced ‘a re-union with a departed loved one’. Auditory hallucinations occurred in about thirty percent of the cases. Moody himself claims to have seen a vision of a dead grandparent under these conditions. It is said that space is humanity’s last frontier, but in actuality it is the nature of human consciousness that challenges us.
    We still do not know what lies beyond the threshold of death’s door, but our curiosity and ingenuity continues to make us strain to see. One day, the living may be able to understand what only the dead now know.

Further reading: Otherworld Journeys, C Zaleski, 1987; The Near- Death Experience, L. W. Bailey and J Yates (eds), 1996.

Paul Devereux is not a Freemason but has a strong interest in the spiritual and its links with science. He has written some twenty-six books, the latest Fairy Paths & Spirit Roads is available from Amazon or www.pauldevereux.co.uk.