It is now 10 years since Dr Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, the first survey of the Near Death Experience, became a best-seller. Research now shows that there is a continuation of conscious experience in some 40 per cent of cases where a person’s physical body is comatose after an accident, surgery or other life-threatening trauma. The subjective existence of the NDE is no longer in doubt. Nor are the sometimes dramatic after-effects.
Professor Kenneth Ring of the University of Connecticut has described a widely accepted sequence of stages in the experience. The first stage (they occur with diminishing frequency) is characterised by an overwhelming sense of peace, calm, and well-being, as well as freedom from bodily pain, which may have been acute. In the second stage, the experiencer feels detached from the physical body, which is often seen below and in a slightly different light.
The detachment is emotional as well as physical: the self no longer identifies with what it sees as a physical instrument to be discarded when worn out. There is a sensation of weightlessness; mental processes are very clear and the senses of sight and hearing extremely acute. Hearing seems to be telepathic: “I heard him say, or rather, saw him think.” Experiencers are often able to describe in some detail events which actually took place while they were “unconscious.”
Sometimes these two stages are bypassed and the experiencer finds herself or himself moving rapidly down a dark tunnel towards a light. Some researchers interpret this as the transition into another mode of consciousness.
In stage four, the lights gradually enlarges until the experiencer emerges into it. There’s a feeling of love, joy, beauty, and peace; the light exudes compassion and understanding, and may be felt as a presence or being with whom the experiencer feels at one, which some call an encounter with the “Higher Self.”
Many are at first distressed and disappointed to find themselves back in the physical body with its pain and limitations. Not only life experiences, but also the effects of thoughts, feelings and actions on others are now felt as if they were at the receiving end. The moral implications of this are momentous: it implies that we are so linked to each other that we undergo the reverberations of all we think, say, feel or do. For the experiencer, awareness and control of thoughts, feelings and actions become a central concern.
At this point, the experiencer may have the impression of seeing his or her earthly life in review, discovering that nothing has been erased. There may be meetings with dead relatives and loved ones, who usually make it clear that the experiencer’s time is not yet up and that they must return to earth. Sometimes the return is symbolically presaged by a door, boundary or river which they are not allowed to cross. People return for two main reasons: either their purpose has not been fulfilled or they must meet the needs of family and dependants.
The final and deepest stage is ‘entering the light’, into a transcendental environment of surpassing beauty. “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it,” wrote C.G. Jung, after his own NDE in 1944. “But once inside, you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”
He found his illness gave him a glimpse behind the veil into what he called the truly real life; he was horrified at the prospect of returning to “this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of three dimensions and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time.”
For Jung, death, far from being the irreversible extinction of consciousness, heralded an expansion and intensification of experience. It was our physical reality which now seemed unreal, limited and robot-like: a complete revolution of perspective and assumptions.
A small number of negative NDEs has also been recorded. In Return From Death (Routledge and Kegan Paul), the first comparative survey to be published in this country, Margot Grey has found it possible to discern five stages which correspond to the positive ones: fear and a feeling of panic; out-of-the-body experience with an urge to return to the physical body; entering a black void; sensing an evil force which tries to drag you down; and entering a hell-like environment.
Perhaps the most pervasive after-effect of the NDE lies in the changed attitude to death and the possibility of an afterlife. Experiencers – as distinct from people who have been close to death but have not experienced continuation of consciousness – lost their fear of death and are convinced of the existence of an afterlife, whatever the researchers conflicting interpretations.
They tend to find they have an enhanced appreciation of beauty, silence, the present and the small things of life. Their concern for others is greater; they have more insight and understanding, more tolerance and acceptance; they become more sympathetic listeners. They are less concerned with impressing others, and have an increased sense of self – worth.
Material values and status matter less; there is more emphasis on being rather than having. Some record the development of paranormal and healing abilities. There is a quest for meaning and intellectual or spiritual understanding.
The change in religious or spiritual orientation can also be significant. Typically, there is an emphasis on the spiritual life and unconditional love, with less stress on formal aspect of religion. People feel closer to God, especially if they have had a mystical encounter. There is an openness to eastern religions and the idea of reincarnation, a belief in the essential unity of all faiths, and an intense desire for a universal religion which would dissolve the barriers that human beings have erected against each other.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Margot Grey’s book has to do with the “planetary visions” – ostensibly precognitive glimpses of coming world events. Whatever one’s interpretation of the evidence, there is a surprising consensus on what is to come: widespread earthquakes and volcanic activity, a pole shift, erratic weather patterns, drought and food shortages, economic collapse, social disintegration, diseases of unknown origin, and possibly nuclear or natural holocaust or catastrophe.
Such calamities are seen as the inevitable result and reflection of a universally flagrant and ignorant violation of natural and spiritual laws, a necessary shake-up and purification which will bring a new sense of unity and cooperation. The severity of the disasters is said to depend on the extent to which human beings work to acquire the qualities that the NDE itself brings: unconditional love and spiritual values.
So the NDE is not a peripheral phenomenon of merely private interest. It points to a living universe and a spiritual view of humankind, towards personal survival of death, and towards the breakdown and renewal of our civilization. The crisis is an opportunity.
“Guardian”
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