NDE View on Connection

Near death experiences might on the face of it seem an odd topic for Transformation, but I find that when we get to understand them in a factual way, and the mystery is eliminated, it can help us create deeper connections. The biggest source of separation is fear. By eliminating the fear with truth, we permit ourselves the opportunity to deepen connection.

The classic analogy used by mediums to explain their connectedness is a radio receiver. We might instinctively know there is a particular station out there, but we have to scan or dial to find it. When we tune in, only then does our RAS connect to the new information and open us up to the new channel so we can ‘hear.’

I have not had a NDE, nor do I desire one. In my immediate family, however, I knew two people who had NDE’s. They were careful whom they shared the experience with, and their stories only really came out after several glasses of wine and much prompting on my part. The details of the stories never changed.

In both cases the words ‘connected to everyone and everything,’  described their feelings during the experiences. There was no separation between the self and the universe.

In the first account the person automatically returned to her body having spent some time watching from somewhere up on the ceiling of the operating room. She was joined by a long deceased relative who said that even though the medical staff had announced her death it was not her time to depart.

In the second account the person was offered a choice to return to her body and earthly life or to ‘go on.’ The person offering the choice was her father who had died many years before.

Both stories or memories were told in explicit detail. Because I knew both the person with the NDE and the ‘guides’ who showed up I can validate the accuracy of the descriptions. Clearly, there is a connective force, through time and space.

You might not have had a NDE, nor know someone who has. It might be hard to accept. What does the science say?

Since 1998, Jeffrey Long, M.D., a radiation oncologist in Louisiana, has been collecting and documenting near-death experiences—across cultures, languages, and countries.

Here is part of an interview with him:

Q: There are accounts of many mystical experiences and encounters “beyond the veil”—why did you decide to focus on near-death experiences? And why do you believe that only about 10 percent of people who become clinically dead experience one?

A: For decades, researchers, myself included, would scratch our heads and wonder why some people have near-death experiences and why some people don’t. And why, despite the fact that there are very strong, consistent patterns, no two experiences are alike. What’s going on with all that? I think the Rosetta Stone of understanding came for me many years ago when someone shared a near-death experience that was an incredibly blissful and positive experience. She firmly believed that she had encountered God in an unearthly realm during her near-death experience. And for the first time out of thousands of instances that I’ve ever seen, she asked God directly: “Why me? Why was I so blessed to have this experience happen to me?” God’s response was very revealing: “Love falls on everyone equally; this is what you needed to live your life.” I think that helps explain why some people have these experiences and some don’t. I think it’s coming from a wisdom outside of ourselves. And I think it helps explain why people have very similar experiences, yet no two are identical.

Q: You have found that near-death experiences dramatically change peoples lives—why do you think that is?

A: Oh yes, enormously. It’s interesting, we’ve asked very direct survey questions about that, so we have some quantified data. The great majority of people who experience a near-death experience change. And unlike virtually every other transformative human experience or life-changing event of earthly origin, the changes in their life actually seem to become progressive and more notable the longer they live. These changes can go on for decades and you just wouldn’t do that in response to an experience that you understood to be unreal or hallucinatory. In fact, we ask that as a very direct survey question: What do you currently believe about the reality of your experience? And of about 590 NDE responders, 95 percent say the experience was definitely real with the other options being probably real, probably not real, and definitely not real. So among those that have these experiences, virtually everybody knows that it was a real thing. It’s just much harder to believe for those of us who have never had one. Seeing is believing. If you don’t personally have a near-death experience, which is again a blessing—obviously these people nearly died—it’s hard to understand these unearthly experiences.

Q: For some people, do these have the quality of a vivid dream?

A: That’s a great question. In the very first version of the survey in 1998 when I first put the website up, I asked that question: Was your experience dream-like in any way? I deliberately worded that in a somewhat non-scientific way because it was leading them to answer yes if any part of their NDE was dreamlike. I thought, geez that’s about as aggressively as I can conceive of wording a question to bring out any dream-like aspects, at any time, in any way during the experience. Well, the responses to that question were so overwhelmingly, “NO, absolutely not, no way, are you kidding?” I felt bad I was asking them that because the responses were not only so uniformly no, but so emphatically no. I ended up taking that question out because I got a tongue thrashing up behind the ears. That was one of the very first things I learned at the dawn of my research and understanding: No, near-death experiences are not dream-like in any way.

Q: What were the other similarities in response to survey questions that reinforced your belief that these are so real?

A: In my first book I had nine lines of evidence for the reality of near-death experiences. What’s most persuasive to me as a physician-researcher is a little bit different than the lines of evidence that are most persuasive to the public. The public is very persuaded by a near-death experiencer who was totally blind from birth and yet had a highly visual NDE—it was the first time she ever saw. And they are also persuaded by out-of-body experiences. In a little over 40 percent of my surveys, NDE’s observed things that were geographically far from their physical body, that were way outside of any possible physical central awareness. Typically, someone who has an NDE with an out-of-body experience comes back and reports what they saw and heard while floating around, it’s about 98 percent accurate in every way. For example, in one account someone who coded in the operating room had an out-of-body experience where their consciousness traveled to the hospital cafeteria where they saw and heard their family and others talking, completely unaware that they had coded. They were absolutely correct in what they saw. These types of out-of-body experiences are very persuasive to a lot of people. A lot of people with a medical or scientific background, like me, are very persuaded by people who have had near-death experiences while under general anesthesia. Under adequate general anesthesia, they’re very carefully monitoring heart respiration—in fact, it’s artificially controlled in many operations because you literally shut the brain down to the point where the brain can’t simultaneously breathe. And so the person needs to be artificially ventilated. When their heart stops, i.e., when they code, and they’re under general anesthesia, it’s extremely well-documented that they have no brain activity—yet, when these people have an out-of-body experience, what they report of what goes on during codes is what really happens, and not what Hollywood shows. Its frantic, crash carts aren’t immediately available, there can be some swearing typically by the doctors. It is very difficult for everybody there. It’s not like what they show on TV—you would have to be there to accurately report on what is happening. After this out-of-body experience, when they then go on to have a typical near-death experience, it again seems doubly impossible. For one, they’re under general anesthesia and there shouldn’t be any possibility of any conscious experience; secondly, their heart has stopped, and 10-20 seconds after your heart stops, the electroencephalogram, or EEG, that measures brain critical electrical activity goes absolutely flat. So, during general anesthesia to have your heart stop and have a near-death experience absolutely, in my mind, almost single-handedly refutes the possibility of a near-death experience being the result of a physical brain function as we know it. It is not a dream state, it is not a hallucination. It is absolutely beyond any medical explanation.

Q: Do you believe that someone has to be physically dead to trigger a near-death experience?

A: My definition of near-death experience is fairly stringent among researchers. In other words, they have to be unconscious at the time of the experience or clinically dead with absent heartbeat and respiration. They have to be so physically compromised, that if they didn’t get better they would suffer permanent irreversible death. I think that’s what the public, in general, accepts near-death experience to be. In the media public vernacular, the deader the better. Now, having said all that, we have a huge number of experiences that can occur without a life-threatening event. Just an hour ago, I reviewed an experience from this week, and one of them was a dream. If you pulled out the very beginning of it and the very end of it, it would be indistinguishable in most people’s minds from a near death experience: In the dream, he felt he had died, suffered pain, the pain immediately went away, he had an out-of-body experience, he felt intensely positive feelings, he approached a light and was told it’s not your time, he felt resentment that he had to come back. All that is a classic near-death experience. And yet, this is what made me wonder: He woke up, and called it a dream, but said he had blood on his tongue and a bad taste in his mouth. I am suspicious that he had a seizure. That would explain the tongue biting, though there was no indication of any seizure disorder before or after. And he had what sounds more like sleep paralysis. So I scored that one as just being NDE-like.There are a number of people within a number of different circumstances who have experienced non-dreams as an out-of-body experience. Prayer and meditation are the most common settings in which people have experiences that resemble near-death experiences.

Q: Based on your research, what do you think happens to consciousness after death?

A: Part of what I’ve been doing some research on lately may offer a direct answer to that important question. Certainly, you can’t ask that question of people who die irreversibly, but I now have a growing number of what I call shared near-death experiences. This is where two or more people have a simultaneous life-threatening event where they lose consciousness. And they both have a near-death experience but they’re aware of each other. One of the classic ones that I present to groups is fiancées, and it’s a tear jerker.

A guy and a gal are driving to Canada and have a bad car wreck—the two of them are actually holding hands as they share their near-death experience rising above the car. They’re met by spiritual beings, and they feel intense love, which is all very classic. The beings separate the two from holding hands. Two of the four beings take the lady and move away with her, toward a light. The other two beings gently take the guy and lead him back down to the car, which is burning below him. He recovers consciousness in the car and his fiancé is leaning on his shoulder, though he knows already that she is dead. He knows he has been with her sharing a near-death experience on her initial part of permanent irreversible death.

We have about 15 or 16 of these accounts. Shared near-death experiences are certainly suggestive that what is reported in near-death experiences is a pathway that can occur for those who permanently, irreversibly die. Of all the shared near-death experiences that I’ve studied in my research series, one of the people permanently, irreversibly died and yet they were communicating during their near-death experience, often in great detail. So, the remarkably good news is that near-death experiences may well be what actually happens based on shared near-death experiences.

Q: When people are given a choice, whether to continue with death or return to life, or when a situation like this happens when fiancées are separated, what is the idea? Was it inevitable that she was going to die, and it was not yet his time?

A: Interestingly, during some near-death experiences some people are given a choice, and some are simply returned to their body involuntarily. Among those who are aware they have a choice to return to their earthly body, it is remarkable that the great majority do not want to return. That’s very puzzling, isn’t it, when you consider that all their friends, family, and loved ones are on earth, and everything that they remembered for their entire life up to that moment was their earthly life. How could they not want to go back? According to 75 to 80 percent, the answer is they feel very intensely present, positive emotions in their near-death experience, more so typically than they ever knew on earth. They very strongly like this afterlife realm, this unearthly realm, which some call Heaven, and there’s a sense of familiarity like they’ve been there before. They very much want to stay. It’s amazing how powerful these experiences are.

To more directly answer your question on why some shared NDEs have a choice and some don’t, reading between the lines, you can tell that the other person in the shared NDE had more severe trauma—either injury or illness—and their body simply wasn’t able to support life. These are people who really did die irreversibly because that life-threatening event was so severe that this was not a near-death experience to them, it was a witnessed death experience. And there was no choice.

Q: Why do you think some people are so resistant to the idea that NDEs could be real, and so desirous to find a physical explanation for what’s behind them?

A: Coming from a scientific background, this is just so different from the typical scientific thinking about consciousness and literally who we are. It’s much easier for scientists to try to grasp onto what we call material explanations for evidence—and obviously, there’s no material or physical brain explanation that could account for all of this. I think part of it is they want to draw the unfamiliar to what is familiar to them, and they have a lot of confidence in science, which is a great thing. It’s interesting that the scientists who are skeptics tend to find explanations for NDEs that correlate with their area of scientific expertise. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist, will see rapid eye movement or random trusions, which is interesting. An anesthesiologist, who worries about the effects on the cell membrane, will believe NDEs are related to mitochondria, the energy producers in all cells. And the psychologist will believe that there’s a psychological explanation.

“In addition, when something comes from the center of our being, it’s no longer an action—it becomes who we are. We don’t need to think about it or work at it. We become an instrument for service to manifest on this planet. This is the difference between being of service and performing a service.

This connected level comes with the realization that there’s no separation between the self and the Universe. It’s the knowledge that what I do for the Whole, I’m also doing for the self, and vice-versa and that’s truly a joyful and fun state to be in!”

– Anita Moorjani, from Dying To Be Me

There is no homework here but you might like to take some time out to contemplate this.

‍