Near-Death Experience
What is Near-Death Experience
Descriptions of Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences are not new. Parallels to such phenomena, recorded in ancient manuscripts, are the essence of many mystical experiences that form the basis of the world’s great religions.
Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences are most commonly reported as happening when someone is either approaching or is in a situation presenting a very real and imminent threat of death. Examples include the delayed opening of a parachute or an extended fall in a mountaineering accident. People stranded in remote places after a shipwreck or plane crash, and perceiving no hope of rescue, have also reported NDEs. Advanced dehydration and heat stroke can also invoke an OBE. (Care is needed here though because dehydration is also associated with hallucination.)
However, further research has revealed that the above are by no means the only circumstances under which people have NDEs and OBEs. It's also been recorded that people sitting quietly and calmy by the livingroom fire have had spontaneous NDEs. They also occured during sleep and through meditation.
Hallucination was for years the mainstay of sceptics. Their argument was that the patient had been given hallucinatory pain killers. Other claims were that is was due to a lack of oxygen in the brain (hypoxia), an excess of carbon dioxide (hypercarbia), or a last-gasp effort by the dying brain to maintain consciousness. The arguments against hallucination were not immediately obvious. Over the last decade though, medical and scientific research has eliminated all of the arguments claiming hallucination, hypoxia and hypercarbia.
An NDE usually, but not always, happens in several stages.
The Out-of-Body stage
This is usually the first stage. The person finds themselves above their body looking down. They can see and hear everything that is said and done in their immediate vicinity. Many are able to move around the area and even leave the building.
• A man who had an OBE during an operation (performed by Dr Lloyd Rudy) was able to move away from the operating table, down to the far end of the operating theatre, around the corner and accurately read the notes on the pin board.
• During an OBE in hospital, a woman was able to move herself to her Venezuelan doctor’s flat (Dr Ricardo Ojeda-Vera) where he was writing a letter to his mother in Spanish. She was able to read and understand the letter even though she spoke no Spanish.
• One of the most famous case of an OBE is that of Pam Reynolds, which many say is definitive proof that the mind separates from the body when close to death. She had an OBE during surgery when surgeons had reduced her body temperature to just 10 degrees centigrade (it should be about 37) and they drained all the blood from her head. (To read more about this remarkable case, see the page entitled: Pam Reynolds.)
Out-of-Body Experiences, though striking in similarity, often reveal remarkable abilities in those subjected to the experience. These abilities are explained and categorised very well in The Self Does Not Die by Dutch researcher, Titus Rivas et al. It is published by the IANDS (the International Association of Near Death Studies) and is available on Amazon.
The Near-Death stage
It is in this, the second phase, that the experiencer sees a bright light and feels a force pulling them towards it. For many, their journey to the light is along a very bright tunnel and they often enter another realm. By far the most prominent feeling is that of overwhelming love and joy. They are told this is the realm they will enter after death and is often identical to the realm seen during a Deathbed Vision. (See the page on Afterlife Science). As they approach the light, they hear a voice ‘talking’ to them. All communication is by direct thought transfer (telepathy). They often meet dead relatives and/or people to whom they were very close. There are many examples of people for whom this was a great shock because they hadn’t yet heard of the person’s death, (the technical term for such an experience is a Peak in Darien).
Many NDEers have a life review. They are made not only to review how they treated other people, but also to experience themselves how they made others feel. This can have a profound effect on how the NDEer conducts themself after the experience. Some caution is needed here. People sometimes report that during a crisis, such as getting into difficulties when swimming and starting to drown, their life rushed past them. There's the possiblity that, in some cases, it's merely the brain rushing through all past experiences in the hope of finding a solution to the current crisis. But it should quite definitely not be excluded that they did indeed have an NDE.
Very often, an NDE brings about deep changes in how the experiencer views life. During an NDE, everything is far more real in that realm than the one in which we're now. The biggest reality is that of the afterlife. For those who have a very deep NDE, they can see not only the present, but also the past and the future. They're shown the passage of human existence from the very beginning to where it's leading us.
All experiencers become far less materialistic. Many find they are now highly intuitive, and have psychical abilities, especially precognition.
The circumstances leading up to these experiences, often serve to reinforce just how real these phenomena are and to confound sceptics. Two such examples are the case of Pamela Reynolds and the research of Dr Kenneth Ring, et al, who showed that people who had been blind all there life could see during an Out-of-Body Experience.
The Extraordinary Case of Pamela Reynolds
This is the extraordinary case of Pamela Reynolds’ Near Death Experience during extreme surgery. It was so unique, so spectacular, that many said no further research in Near Death Experience was necessary. It took place in 1991 and has been debated among scientists ever since. Many say this was the definitive proof of Near-Death Experience.
In 1991, doctors diagnosed Mrs Reynolds as having an aneurysm (a swelling in an artery) in her brain. It could burst any time, meaning instant death. To make matters worse, the defective site was right at the centre of her brain in an area very difficult for surgeons to reach. The doctors were very open with her. Without surgery, death was certain. However, given the location of the aneurysm, she had only a 50:50 chance of surviving the only surgical process that could save her life.
Normal human body temperature is about 37 degrees centigrade (98.4 degrees Fahrenheit). When it drops below 35 ºC, the person suffers hypothermia; below 32 ºC, shivering stops and they require emergency treatment. But even then, there’s a very real probability that they’ll lose the fight. Once anaesthetised, they dropped Pam’s body temperature to just 10 ºC (50 ºF). To help put this into its true perspective, this is only 5 ºC above the temperature of the refrigeration units in hospital mortuaries.
To add to the enormity of Pam’s situation, they now drained all the blood from her head. Under any other circumstances, she would have been declared dead long ago. As the surgeon started cutting through the bone of her skull, Pam realised she was outside her body. From a viewpoint just over the surgeon’s shoulder, she could see everything he and his colleagues were doing.
Obviously, Pam survived surgery. Later she was able to recount exactly what the surgeon did. She described with great accuracy, the tools the surgeon used, the special box they came in and everything people said. One thing puzzled her. Why, if operating on her head, was there so much activity down by her legs? The answer was simple. It was from the arteries in legs that they drained the blood from her body. Sceptics find this case very frustrating. Not only did the surgeons confirm that everything Pam saw was accurate and actually happened, but she also had no blood in her brain at the time and her body temperature was down at mortuary level.
Unfortunately, in 2009, Mrs Reynolds died from causes totally unrelated to her aneurysm.
Blind Sight
It’s well known that during a Near Death Experience, people can see and hear all that’s around them. Quite obviously, their eyes remain inside their heads. If the NDE phenomenon really is true, then it should stand up to an obvious question: Can blind people also see during an NDE? Quite remarkably, they can. This must surely be one of the most definitive proofs that the mind and the body are two very separate entities. It does of course open up a huge raft of highly complex questions. How, for example, do we receive and construct visual images when having an Out-of-Body Experience?
Dr Kenneth Ring and his associate Sharon Cooper not only carried out research into whether blind people could see during an NDE, but they took it a step further. They asked the ultimate question: Could people blind from birth, see during an NDE. Tragically, finding a sufficient number of such people wasn’t as difficult as you might think. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the incubators used for the treatment of premature babies used too much oxygen, the consequence of which was the total destruction of the optic nerves of these tiny children.
It didn’t take long to find people in this group who’d had an NDE. The results were astounding. Even people blind from birth, with no optic nerves at all, can see during a Near Death Experience. They did have a few problems regarding the exact interpretation of what they saw, which is only to be expected, nevertheless, the results were free of all ambiguity.
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