There Is Life After Death. Tom Harpur
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Yet, while I would never care to repeat it, nor would I ever recommend it to anyone else, the experience was spiritual in that it further convinced me of dimensions of beauty or wider “doors of perception” only hinted at in ordinary life. Significantly, I felt no urge to stay there and no deep sense of peace.
It is tempting to infer from this personal account that perhaps the skeptics are right after all. In the NDE some kind of hallucination— possibly nature’s way of softening the moment of death—is taking place. Moody himself counters this argument with substantial evidence that a large number of recorded NDEs have taken place when there was a completely flat EEG.16 “The sheer number of these cases tells me that in some people NDEs have happened when they were technically dead. Had these been hallucinations, they would have shown up on the EEG.” The difficulty with this solution, however, is that at the current level of technology an EEG does not always give a precise reading in every instance. As Moody himself concedes, “Brain activity can be going on at such a deep level that surface electrodes don’t pick it up.” What impresses me much more is the remarkable fact that while NDEs vary widely in their tone and content, as we have seen, there is nevertheless a common core of experience running through them all regardless of time or place. It strains credulity in my view to suppose that hundreds of thousands of experiences, all of them hallucinatory, would still manage unanimously to convey such a profound sense of other-worldliness and of having somehow transcended death. I find this all the more cogent when the results of such experiences are almost uniformly positive—loss of the fear of death, commitment to greater love and understanding and commitment to a greater spiritual, although not necessarily religious, awareness and lifestyle. One other significant point should be made. As Zaleski makes clear, “for every pathological condition presumed [by the critics] to cause near-death visions, one can find subjects who were demonstrably free of its influence; therefore no single psychological or physiological syndrome can account for near-death experience.”17
In How to Know God, Deepak Chopra, the prominent doctor-writer, correctly notes that researchers today have found that many of the experiences summed up under the letters NDE can be reproduced if the right temporal lobe of the brain has been deprived of oxygen for a few moments. There can be a sense of going into the light or having visions of departed souls or angels welcoming one into the light. But, he wisely comments that “inducing the experience isn’t the same as having it; there is no spiritual meaning . . . to oxygen loss.” He observes, as we have already said, that people who have experienced near-death episodes report profound spiritual changes.18
In the years since Zaleski’s ground-breaking book, a lot of research has been done around the world. Particularly important is the work of Britain’s leading clinical authority on the NDE, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and his scientist wife, Elizabeth. Fenwick himself is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and an internationally known neuropsychiatrist—a specialist in the mind/brain interface and consciousness studies. Together the Fenwicks have written The Truth in the Light—An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (1996). Indeed, Elizabeth began her research convinced that NDEs could all be explained away scientifically. But, after confronting the full evidence, she concluded: “While you may be able to find scientific reasons for bits of the Near-Death experience, I can’t find any explanation which covers the whole thing. You have to account for it as a package and sceptics . . . simply don’t do that. None of the purely physical explanations will do; (sceptics) vastly underestimate the extent to which near-death experiences are not just a set of random things happening, but a highly organized and detailed affair.” Dr. Peter Fenwick is scathing in his critique of the professional skeptics’ arguments and systematically destroys the entire range of objections made—from the one about the NDE being the natural product of a “dying brain” to the ever-present theory of wish fulfillment. He has a list of questions that he challenges the skeptics to answer. They are incisive, tough-minded and, in my view, utterly convincing. He accuses skeptical psychologists in particular of writing “absolute rubbish” about the NDE because they’re venturing into territory—the study of brain function—where they have no training at all. The Fenwick book is one all doubters should be required to read.
There is one final objection I want to look at before summarizing our findings. It deserves attention both because of the prestige and popularity of its chief proponent and because, at first sight, it has about it an aura of great plausibility. I’m referring to the views of astronomer and keen debunker of all paranormal phenomena the late Carl Sagan. In the concluding chapter of his book Broca’s Brain, titled “The Amniotic Universe,” Sagan uses the symbolism that has gathered around the universal experience of birth to explain away the cluster of experiences reported by those who have had an NDE.
In his view, not only the NDE but almost every major religious concept, from death and rebirth to the primal Eden and the Fall, derives from our unconscious memories of the womb, the birth passage, the emergence into light and being swaddled and nursed. Religion, from his extremely polemical point of view, is nothing but the vague recollection of profound experiences at a time when we are utterly helpless and inarticulate.
As noted, there is an immediate surface appearance of verisimilitude about this. Yet, to coin a phrase, the more you scratch the surface of it the more there is to scratch. Without attempting to deal with Sagan’s theory as it affects the whole of religion, let me simply set out the problems I have with it vis-à-vis the topic in hand, the NDE.
First, birth, unlike the classical NDE, is an experience of moving from a place of safety, warmth and total intimacy out into the exposed and separated world of individual existence. However dependent and close to the mother, the baby begins to experience the pain of existence right from the start. With the first breath often comes a cry. Any accounts of birth experiences I have encountered in the relevant literature all stress the element of trauma and pain that attends the moments of our leaving what Sagan calls “the amniotic universe.” This is not what the NDE is about.
Second, so far from being “blurred perceptions” or “vague premonitions,” as Sagan describes our perinatal memories, reports of the NDE describe a great sense of clarity surrounding both perceptions and the recall of them later. In fact, as we have seen, many liken normal, waking perception to “dreaming” compared with the reality and vividness of what they have gone through.
Third, Sagan deliberately ignores or plays down the extraordinary transformational power of the NDE. Nothing he says, in my view, comes close to explaining why it is that the majority of people who’ve had a near-death experience find themselves so profoundly moved and changed by the events of their NDE. Something numinous or totally “other” seems to have happened to them.
Sagan, a media-wise, militant skeptic, may have been a scientist, but he can hardly be viewed as completely objective in his claims at this point. He was a leading member of the American Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. It was founded in 1976 by Sagan, Isaac Asimov and others to combat media promotion of anything purporting to be mysterious or unexplained— from the Bermuda Triangle to Von Daniken’s alien astronauts. There is nothing wrong with any of that except that, in their enthusiasm to expose “pseudo-science,” Sagan and company sometimes have been carried away and have swept with too wide a broom. They end up at times espousing not science but scientism, the view that only the empirical, scientific method can yield true knowledge. There are few things less scientific than that!
Obviously, if death is indeed a kind of new “birth” into an entirely different dimension of reality and being, it would not be surprising if attempts to describe it were to parallel those attendant on our emergence into the light of this world as infants. But the differences, at least to this investigator, seem to be much greater than the similarities.
The one overwhelmingly important aspect of the NDE none of these critics have ever really been able to deal with is the life-changing impact on the vast majority of subjects experiencing it.
After his NDE, Carl Jung wrote: “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”19 This view is almost universally held by both those who experience NDEs and the positive NDE researchers.