The so-called near-death experiences, or NDEs, are experienced by people who are in a state very close to that of physical death and present strong evidence of the existence of a spiritual essence that survives the death of the physical body.

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During such experiences, most people feel themselves coming out of their physical bodies, including often seeing themselves floating above it. Many are projected to another dimension, others still have contact with relatives who have already died. All these experiences, for those who experience them, take place in an absolutely real and quite different way from a simple dream and represent another proof of the continuity of the spirit's life after the death of the physical body.

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Dr. Raymond Moody

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Raymond Moody, MD and PhD in philosophy from  the University of Virginia, PhD in psychology from the University of West Georgia, is widely known for his books about life after death and near-death experiences (NDE).

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While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in 1965, Moody met a psychiatrist, Dr. George Ritchie, who told him about an incident in which he believed he had journeyed into the afterlife while dead for nearly nine minutes at the age of 20 (which Ritchie would later recount in his book “Return From Tomorrow”, published in 1978).

 

Moody then began documenting similar accounts by other people who had experienced clinical death and discovered that many of these experiences shared common features, such as the feeling of being out of one’s body, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel, meeting dead relatives, and encountering a bright light. In 1975, he published many of these experiences in his book “Life After Life: The Investigation Of a Phenomenon — Survival Of Bodily Death”, in which he coined the term "near-death experience". In this book, Dr. Moody investigates more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced “clinical death” and were subsequently revived.

 

Below the Nine Elements of the Near-Death Experiences, outlined by Dr. Moody:

 

1. A Strange Sound:  A buzzing, or ringing noise, while having a sense of being dead.

 

2. Peace and Painlessness:  While people are dying, they may be in intense pain, but as soon as they leave the body the pain vanishes and they experience peace.

 

3. Out-of-Body Experience:  The dying often have the sensation of rising up and floating above their own body while it is surrounded by a medical team, and watching it down below, while feeling comfortable. They experience the feeling of being in a spiritual body that appears to be a sort of living energy field.

 

4. The Tunnel Experience:  The next experience is that of being drawn into darkness through a tunnel, at an extremely high speed, until reaching a realm of radiant golden-white light. Also, although they sometimes report feeling scared, they do not sense that they were on the way to hell or that they fell into it.

 

5. Rising Rapidly into the Heavens:  Instead of a tunnel, some people report rising suddenly into the heavens and seeing the Earth and the celestial sphere as they would be seen by astronauts in space.

 

6. People of Light:  Once on the other side of the tunnel, or after they have risen into the heavens, the dying meet people who glow with an inner light. Often they find that friends and relatives who have already died are there to greet them.

 

7. Being of Light: Those who are dying frequently report an encounter with a powerful spiritual being. The identification of this being varies according to the religious belief of the person involved. Thus, most of those who are Christians identify the light as Jesus, and sometimes draw biblical parallels in support of their interpretation. A Jewish man and woman identified the light as an "angel". A man who had no religious belief before his experience simply identified what he saw as "a being of light".

 

8. The Life Review:  The Being of Light presents the dying with a panoramic review of everything they have ever done. That is, they relive every act they have ever done to other people and come away feeling that love is the most important thing in life.

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9. Reluctance to Return:  The Being of Light sometimes tells the dying that they must return to life. Other times, they are given a choice of staying or returning. In either case, they are reluctant to return. The people who choose to return do so only because of loved ones they do not wish to leave behind.

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Shared Death Experiences (SDE)

 

Moody also describes a phenomenon related to NDEs, which are "shared death experiences" (SDEs), in which a person who is close to another on the verge of death has the experience of something with the same characteristics of NDEs. In such experiences, such visions cannot be attributed to "hallucinations", as one tries to do to NDE occurrences, since people who have such experiences are healthy and fully conscious.

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He first heard about SDEs in 1972, from a medical professor. The professor's mother had a heart attack, and when she was trying to resurrect her mother, she felt herself leaving her body and saw herself trying to resurrect her mother's body. As her mother died, she saw her mother in spirit form, and the spirit encountered other beings, some of whom she could recognize as people her mother had known. Then his mother and the other people were "sucked" through a tunnel.

 

After more than 30 years of research, Moody estimates that SDEs are as common as NDEs. One of the most common features of SDEs is that the person sees the spirit of the dying, which looks like a transparent replica of the person, with an oval shape or like a sphere of light coming out of the head or chest of the physical bodies of the People who die, Moody said in an interview to the Epoch Times.

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Dr. Eben Alexander

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most famous cases of NDEs happened exactly with an American neurosurgeon, a Harvard professor, Dr. Eben Alexander. The fact that he is a specialist in the functioning of the human brain gives Dr. Eben enormous credibility because, more than a person who does not have such knowledge, he has the technical resources to be able to discern reality from fantasy.

 

In 2008, Dr. Eben was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis. He arrived at the hospital with little chance of survival. After a week in a coma, practically disillusioned, he opened his eyes and fully recovered consciousness, completely healed!

 

Before going through this experience, he was extremely skeptical, an advocate of rigid scientific logic. But his life was never the same. During this experience, he was in a place that he compared to the "paradise", where pink clouds contrasted with a dark blue sky. Above him, transparent beings (no angels, no birds, a superior form, according to him) crossed the sky, and he also observed the presence of a blue-eyed woman. Eben makes it clear in his accounts that his stay in "paradise" seemed more real than anything that had happened to him during his lifetime, such as his marriage and the birth of his children.

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He reported that, at certain times in his NDE, he experienced flying on the wings of a butterfly and being accompanied by a being he said to be a guardian angel. As an orphan, Dr. Eben did not know about his biological siblings, and when he contacted them, one of his sisters had already died. Sometime after his NDE, he looked at a photograph that one of his brothers had given him, and discovered that the "guardian angel" he encountered during his NDE was his deceased sister. Dr. Eben describes his experience in details in his book "Proof of Heaven".

 

When asked if his experience had changed his fear of death, Dr. Eben answered: “My experience showed me that death is not to be feared. It is not the end of our relationships with the others. It is not the end of our conscious awareness. At the same time, it also made me even more conscious of how precious life is.  We exist to contribute the most good we can, and to experience all the joys, and learn the lessons we are to learn (and teach others) from the challenges and hardships in life.  I know that the truth of my experience—that our consciousness (soul/spirit) is greater than our physical incarnation, and continues beyond death—holds for every living being.” 

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 Dr. Bruce Greyson

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Bruce Greyson, Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia School of Medicine, said that NDEs are reliable, because the accounts of those who have gone through these experiences remain unchanged over time. He compared a group of reports of people who had NDEs 20 years ago and found that they have remained virtually identical over time.

 

Greyson believes that NDEs are an indication that the mind is independent of the brain, because one would expect impaired brain functions in the clinical situations in which NDEs occur, but their research found no corresponding impairment in mental functions in NDEs.

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In December 2011, Dr. Bruce Greyson travelled to Dharamsala, India, to present at the conference "Cosmology and Consciousness: A Dialog Between Buddhist Scholars and Scientists on Mind and Matter". Dr. Greyson's talk was titled "Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?".

 

“Among several hundred near-death experiencers I have studied, 47% described their thinking during the experience as clearer than it is in their normal waking state. In addition, 38% described their thinking as faster than usual, 29% described their thinking as more logical than usual, and 17% described their control over their thoughts as more control than usual. Furthermore, an analysis of their medical records shows that mental functioning was significantly better in those people who come closest to death.

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“The paranormal features often reported in near-death experiences include a sense of leaving the physical body, sometimes called an “out-of-body experience”. An experience of the person’s physical senses such as vision and hearing becoming more vivid than before, sometimes including seeing colors and hearing sounds that do not exist in this life; a sense of extrasensory perception, knowing things beyond the range of the physical senses, such as things that are happening at a remote location; and visions of the future.

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Finally, many people report that in their near-death experiences they entered some other, unearthly world or realm of existence; many report that they came to a border that they could not cross, or a point of no return that, if they had crossed, they would not be allowed to return to life; many report encountering some kind of mystical or divine being; and some report seeing deceased spirits, often loved ones, who had died previously and who seemed to be welcoming them into the other realm, or in some cases, sending them back to life”

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(Excerpts from "Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?” - Dr. Greyson's talk at the conference, "Cosmology and Consciousness: A Dialog Between Buddhist Scholars and Scientists on Mind and Matter" in Dharamsala, India, December 2011)