There Is Life After Death. Tom Harpur
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to those who lost their sight because of accidents or disease later in life. Ring and his associates are unequivocal in their conviction, based on the evidence presented by this group of NDErs, that the blind do have visual perception, that is, they can see in a clear and detailed fashion during their experience—even those who are blind from birth.
In his first book on near-death experiences, Life After Life, Moody analysed the “otherworld journeys” of those who have been to the brink of death and have reported “miraculous” glimpses of a world beyond. They found a plane of existence glowing with love and understanding, a place of bliss and light that can apparently be reached only “by an exciting trip through a tunnel or passageway.” In his later book, The Light Beyond, he summarizes the characteristics of these “near-death visions” in this way: “NDErs experience some or all of the following events—a sense of being dead, peace and painlessness even during ‘painful’ experience, bodily separation, entering a dark region or tunnel, rising rapidly into the heavens, meeting deceased friends and relatives who are bathed in light, encountering a Supreme Being, reviewing one’s life, and feeling reluctance to return to the world of the living.”4
By chance, a few days after I had read Life After Life, I noticed a brief story in the Toronto Star about a man who had been critically wounded in the abdomen by a shotgun blast at close range. He was a night watchman at a Canadian Tire store outlet in the west end of Mississauga, Ontario, and had surprised two thieves in the act. What caught my eye was the statement in the story that this security guard had “died” twice during the many hours of surgery required to save him. I kept the clipping for three months and then tracked him down by phone. He was by then well on the road to a near-miraculous recovery and was willing to give me an interview. I told him nothing in advance of my area of interest. I spent several hours with him and discovered that, although he was reluctant to talk about it at first, he had had an experience that he described as “a kind of religious conversion.” It turned out that during the moments or minutes when his vital signs had totally flattened out on the monitor and the doctors were certain they had lost him, he had in fact had an NDE.
It was my first direct encounter with anything of the sort, and it gave me a strange feeling to hear him describe roughly the same phenomenon outlined in Life After Life. Incidentally, at that time he had not read the book and had been afraid to speak to anyone else about his experience for fear of being thought strange. Not every detail matched the complete profile of an NDE given above, but there were enough of the major traits—the tunnel, the sense of shining light and the reluctance to “go back”—to make me realize he was talking about essentially the same thing. I wrote the story and it gained a considerable response from readers and other media.
I was not the first Toronto Star journalist, however, to have reported such a case. In my first months at the paper, well before Moody set off the NDE floodtide with Life After Life, a colleague of mine at the newspaper, Sidney Katz, wrote the strange story of Leslie Sharpe. Sharpe, who at that time headed a successful Toronto-based printing firm, had never concerned himself with the ultimate mystery of life after death. But, as Katz told it, “. . . late one spring afternoon a year ago, Sharpe, sixty-eight, had an experience that changed all that. He died.” Katz, basing his account on an article by Sharpe that had just been published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, told how the man had gone to Toronto General Hospital complaining of sharp pains in his chest and left arm.5 Once in bed, his symptoms vanished and blood pressure, heart sounds, everything, seemed completely normal. Later that same day, however, at two minutes to four in the afternoon, he looked at his watch. A few seconds afterwards, he gave a very deep sigh and his head flopped over to the right.
He reported: “I remember wondering why my head flopped over, because I hadn’t moved it. I figured I must be going to sleep. That was my last conscious thought.” Immediately, Sharpe was looking down at his own body from the waist up. “Almost at once, I saw myself leave my body, coming out through my head and shoulders. The body was somewhat transparent, although not exactly in vapour form. Watching, I thought, ‘So this is what happens when you die.’” Next, the businessman found himself sitting on a small object, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and travelling through a blue-grey sky at great speed. He had the feeling he didn’t know where he was or where he was going but that this was “one journey I must take alone.” He felt safe and that everything was “being taken care of.” Then he began to feel a “delightful” floating sensation as he was bathed in a bright yellow light.
He wrote: “I have a scar on my right leg, the result of an old injury. Although at the time I was not conscious of having any lower limbs, I felt the scar being torn away and I thought, ‘They have always said your body is made whole out here. I wonder if my scars are gone?’” Continuing to float, he tried unsuccessfully to locate his legs. The sensation of tranquility and joy engulfed him so fully that he could only describe it afterwards as “something beyond words to tell.” Just then, a series of hard blows to his left side brought him back to consciousness. His heart had been restarted by means of shocks from an electric paddle. Looking up, he could see the doctors and nurses. He heard someone say that he’d taken “a bad turn.” In the article he wrote in the medical journal and in his interview with Katz, Sharpe said he then told the medical team not to resuscitate him if he suffered another relapse. He wanted the experience to “go on and on. If that was eternity, I wanted to stay there. I was annoyed at being brought back to earth.”
Some facts given in Katz’s article are important. Sharpe was not a member of any religious group and had not been to church for many years. In his own mind, he had “long ago reached the conclusion that death was the final end and that beyond that there was nothing.” He had, according to the hospital staff, received only Demerol and was not on any hallucinogenic chemical. (Demerol, a strong narcotic, normally produces extreme drowsiness and some confusion of mind as it numbs pain. In rare cases it can contribute to hallucinatory experiences of a confused nature, quite unlike the highly structured account that Sharpe describes.) Having “returned from death,” he had lost any fear of it he previously had. “I’ve had the rare privilege of seeing behind a closed door that’s never opened. I’m no longer afraid to go.” Finally, Sharpe wrote his story for the Canadian Medical Association Journal at the urging of his physicians, Drs. Robert L. MacMillan and Kenneth W.G. Brown of Toronto General’s coronary care unit. It bore the very conservative title “Cardiac Arrest Remembered.”
Those familiar with the writings of Dr. Carl Jung will be aware that the great psychoanalyst, at first a colleague and then a critic of Sigmund Freud, had a very similar experience to that of Sharpe, one which he later said ranked among the most meaningful of his eventful life. During a brief clinical “death” after a heart attack, he said, “It seemed to me I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of earth bathed in a glorious blue light. Ahead of me I saw a shining temple and was drawn towards it. As I approached, a strange thing happened. I had the certainty I was about to enter an illuminated room and meet there all those people to whom I was beloved in reality. There I would understand at last the meaning of my life.” Jung then realized he was being pulled back into his physical body. It happened at the same moment his doctor injected him with a strong heart stimulant.6
Of the hundreds of readers who responded to the requests in my column to describe briefly any experience they had had which for them constituted evidence of an afterlife, about forty responded with a story of an NDE. What was significant, in my view, is the fact that no two of them were exactly the same and none was a replica of the full, classical NDE that is regularly discussed in the media. That, plus the way in which most respondents stressed that this was the first time they had ever told anyone outside their immediate family circle about the experience, gives considerable credibility, I believe, to the conviction that what they describe did actually happen.
• R.H.D., of Burlington, Ontario, wrote: “Prior to quadruple bypass surgery in 1979, I experienced cardiac arrest while in the intensive care unit at Joseph Brant Hospital. The arrest occurred during sleep but I was brought ‘back to life,’ as it were, by a very alert and able nursing staff. I have retained a very vivid recollection of the few minutes that I was ‘dead.’ Whether it was a dream or a temporary entrance into eternity I will obviously never