Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (12 page)

Five-year-old Paul was returning home from getting his school uniform tailored when he dashed into the road and was struck by a passing van:

I jumped from the Jeep and ran to cross the road to reach home first. What I remember is something coming beside me (later I knew it was a van). What I really remember is just [taking] one or two steps into the road before something happened…. I felt like a hydrogen balloon floating in the air. I was going upward. I slowly opened my eyes, and I saw my body lying on the roadside. I got really frightened. I felt…paralyzed and I was going upward, but I felt… someone was carrying me very lovingly (an unconditional love). I tried to move my body and turned my eyes upward to see who was carrying me. What I saw was Mother Mary. She wore a blue and pink dress with a crown.… I felt very comfortable in her hands.

When she was eleven years old Jennifer was in a severe car accident. She saw her “limp and lifeless body” below. The voice of a spiritual being told her she was needed back at the accident site to help the unconscious driver. Here is her experience as she wrote it:

Then the voice said, “His nose is cut off his face; you will need to go back and help him; he is bleeding to death.” I said, “No, let somebody else do it. He will be fine without my help. I do not want to go back down there. No!” The voice said, “I will tell you what to do. You take off his shirt after you pick his nose up off the floorboard of the car. It will be next to your feet and his right foot. Place his nose on his face, pressing down to stop the bleeding. It’s just blood, so do not be afraid. I am with you as always.” (I knew I was never alone from as far back as I could remember.) “So then, Jennifer, you will begin to walk him up the right side of the road, and a car will come. Tell the man to take you to the nearest hospital. Keep the man calm, and lead him to the hospital where you were born. You know the way and everything will be all right. You must do this. Understand?”

Jennifer goes on to say that when she returned to her body everything happened as she was told by the spiritual being. A car stopped and carried them to the hospital where she was born. She was able to calm both the anxious driver and the accident victim who lost his nose. And there was a happy ending: a skin graft was used to reattach the nose with “barely a scratch left to notice.” The astonished emergency room doctor said, “I cannot explain what kind of miracle I just witnessed in this emergency room today.”

I want to be the first to point out that many of the children’s NDEs you just read were reported many years or even decades after they took place. Skeptics may say that children are not likely to remember NDEs that happened so long ago and therefore are not able to accurately report what truly happened.

William Serdahely, PhD, addressed these skeptical concerns. Serdahely, a health sciences professor from Montana State University, compared five NDEs reported by children with five NDEs that occurred in childhood and were reported years later when the NDErs were adults. He analyzed the reports by comparing forty-seven characteristics of NDEs between the two groups. Serdahely concluded, “This study … supports the claims of previous researchers that adults’ retrospective reports of childhood NDEs are not embellished or distorted.”
⁶

Another study, this by Bruce Greyson, MD, in 2007 found that NDEs do not seem embellished or diminished even after nearly twenty years.
⁷
This was a study of seventy-two NDErs who shared their NDEs and answered the sixteen questions comprising the NDE Scale in the 1980s and then answered the questions again almost twenty years later. Comparison of the two administrations of the scale showed no significant differences in overall scale scores or in responses to any of the sixteen questions. This study provides some of the strongest evidence that NDEs are reliably remembered even when shared decades after their occurrence.

An additional important study was done by Pim van Lommel, MD, and associates in 2001.
⁸
This was the largest prospective study of NDEs ever performed. As part of this study, NDErs who suffered cardiac arrest were interviewed about the NDE shortly after the incident, then two and eight years later. This study found that NDErs accurately recalled their NDEs eight years after their occurrence.

It doesn’t matter if the NDEr is four years old or forty- four, the elements of the near-death experience remain the same. The best evidence finds that NDEs are neither embellished nor forgotten over time. NDEs are not “created” in the subject’s mind by what they see on television or read in books, and they are not significantly modified by cultural influences. Near-death experiences are
real
events that happen to people of all ages.

What do the children who approach death think of their experience on the other side, and what do they do with it over the course of their lives? The Transformations Study conducted by Dr. Morse provides evidence that NDEs create changes in an individual that can’t be faked.
⁹
He studied more than four hundred people, some of whom had near-death experiences and some who did not. He administered tests with questions about happiness, spirituality, death anxiety, mysticism, materialism, eating habits, and psychic abilities. All of this was aimed at exploring the aftereffects of NDEs on people who’d experienced them as children.

Morse found that those who’d had near-death experiences as children had less death anxiety than the non-NDE population; they also had increased psychic abilities, a higher zest for life, and increased intelligence. Among his conclusions was that NDEs are real because their long-term effects are real. In short, as we at NDERF say,
you can’t fake the effects of a near-death experience.

All of which reminds me of Katie, who as a three-year-old child inhaled a cashew nut that lodged in her windpipe. She was standing in the kitchen when the shocking event took place. She turned blue and passed out. Her grandfather, a firefighter, was unable to revive her and pronounced her dead.

The ambulance arrived nearly thirty minutes after the 911 call. Katie was watching much of the action from a place outside of her body. As she wrote:

When I died, I rose above my body and saw my grandfather working on my body. My body was of no interest to me; instead, I moved out of the room toward a presence I felt in the living room area. I went toward this presence, which was within a brilliant, sun[lit], bright, space—not a tunnel, but an area. The presence was unbelievable peace, love, acceptance, calm, and joy. The presence enveloped me, and my joy was indescribable—as I write this I am brought back to this emotion, and it delights me still. The feeling is spectacular. I did not experience this presence as God (I was too young to understand the concept), but I did experience this presence as that which made me. I knew without a doubt that I was a made creature, a being that owed its existence to this presence.

I do not remember reentering my body.

When I woke up the next day, I knew two things for sure: (1) that there is life after death and (2) I was a created being. I did not know this as rational knowledge, but rather I expressed this by pestering my mother with question after question: Who made me? What was eternity? And what was God? She was unable to answer my questions but was wise enough to let me talk to others who could.

In her NDERF entry, Katie declares several times that the experience was “definitely real.”

Even now, when I recall the experience, it is more real than anything I have ever experienced in my life. I recall not only the memory but also the emotion. This still motivates me to ask questions.

A skeptic could still discount these as just being empty words. But NDErs often
actively
respond to their remarkable experience. Katie’s NDE motivated her to continue her search into her adult life:

This experience moved me so deeply that I have dedicated my life to looking for answers to my questions through the study [of] both philosophy and religion. I am currently working on [a] doctorate in theology.

Near-death experiences are real and transformative. They are not the product of our television culture, and they are not invented by the people who experience them, even if those people are children.

Personally, I listen to children more carefully now than ever before. From the mouths of children we can learn important lessons pointing to the reality of the afterlife.

Ours is the largest cross-cultural study of NDEs ever performed, a fact that makes me feel confident in presenting these remarkable conclusions:

The striking ability of near-death experiencers to consistently recall in great detail their experiences, even decades later, is a testament to the power of the near-death experience. It is a unique and remarkable state of consciousness. It is often the most dramatic and transformative experience in the life of NDErs, wherever in the world they live.

The evidence suggesting that there is no significant difference in near-death experiences worldwide makes possible a major step forward in human relations. It means that at the point of death,
all
people may have a similar experience. We may be separated by languages and cultures, but the possibility of having similar spiritual experiences as dramatic and transformative as NDEs unites us around the world.

Recognizing that people from all cultures experience similar events at the point of death may be a useful tool for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. That makes NDEs an important spiritual concept that can help humanity strive toward world peace. The evidence that near-death experiences are basically the same
worldwide
may be a reason to stop bickering over differences and instead focus on our similarities.

Some years ago Jody Long began the enormous project of translating the NDERF survey into non-English languages. Jody began developing a network of volunteer language translators, one that has grown to more than two hundred fifty translators worldwide. These volunteers translate non-English NDEs, all of which are posted on the website in both their original language and the English translation. The volunteers also translate English NDEs posted on NDERF into non-English languages. This allows bilingual readers to correct any possible inaccurate translations. Currently there are more than two thousand near-death-experience accounts in non-English languages posted on NDERF, with more added regularly.

Sections of the NDERF website and the NDEr questionnaire have been translated into over twenty languages. With the NDERF questionnaire translated into so many different languages, nearly all NDErs throughout the world can find the NDERF questionnaire in a language they are familiar with. This allows NDERF to receive NDEs from around the world, including non-English NDEs. No prior study has been able to directly compare so many NDEs shared in English with NDEs shared in languages other than English by having all the NDErs personally answer the same questions. That was done by using the questionnaires on the NDERF website.

For the NDERF cross-cultural study, NDEs from countries where English is not the predominant language were divided into two study groups. The first study group included 79 NDEs shared in languages other than English, and the second study group included 26 NDEs shared in English from countries where English was not the predominant language. The NDERF study also looked at NDEs from non-Western countries, which will be discussed later.

The first study group was 79 NDErs from countries where English is not the predominant language who shared their NDEs in a language other than English. The comparison group included 583 NDEs shared in English from countries where English is the predominant language.

To compare the two groups of NDEs, I used nearly the same methodology that was discussed previously in chapters 6 and 9, where we discussed the NDEs under general anesthesia and in children. For the cross-cultural part of the NDERF study, I included all NDEs regardless of their score on the NDE Scale. I felt this was reasonable, as the NDE Scale has not been validated for non-English NDEs and non-Western NDEs. This part of the study included only NDEs that were posted on the NDERF website.

The results:
In comparing the first study group composed of non-English-language NDEs with the comparison group, all thirty-three NDE elements were present in both groups. Of the thirty-three NDE elements compared, eleven elements appeared with a statistically differing frequency of occurrence between the two groups, and two more elements were borderline statistically different. These results indicate many significant differences in the responses of these two groups of NDErs to the thirty-three questions about NDE content.

The results were surprising and puzzling. Could these results be due to NDEs being different around the world? Or could language translation issues result in them seeming to have different content when their content is actually similar?

In scientific studies, when puzzling results are found, it often helps to look deeper for an explanation. That is exactly what we did with the NDERF cross-cultural study. To look deeper at non-English NDEs, an experienced NDE research volunteer, Lynn, came to the rescue. A questionnaire was developed for reviewing the content of NDEs posted on NDERF. The questionnaire included fifteen questions about NDE content. All 79 non-English NDEs in the first study group had been translated into English and posted on the NDERF website. Lynn completed this questionnaire for all 79 non-English NDEs and all 583 English NDEs in the comparison group. Her hard work allowed us to more directly compare the content of non-English NDEs with the comparison group of English-language NDEs.

From the comparison of fifteen NDE elements between the two groups, there were only two questions where the percentage of occurrence of the NDE element was statistically different. There were no NDE elements where the percentage of occurrence of the NDE element was borderline statistically different.

Lynn’s review of both groups of near-death-experience accounts found many fewer differences in NDE content than was suggested from the previous results from the first study group. This suggested to me that non-English-speaking NDErs might have a somewhat different interpretation and understanding of the translated NDERF survey questions than did English-speaking NDErs. This language barrier might account for most, and perhaps all, of the apparent differences in responses to the NDERF survey questions between the two groups.

It is very likely that some words and concepts in the NDERF survey questions may be misunderstood if the survey is taken in a language other than English. For example, the NDERF survey includes words and phrases like
senses, unearthly,
and
harmony or unity with the universe.
These words and phrases were not haphazardly chosen. They are straight from the NDE Scale questions, the most validated questionnaire for
English-language
NDE surveys. However, if you don’t know the nuances of English, it is easy to see how these words and phrases could be misunderstood or interpreted differently from their English meanings.

To help understand how language barriers might affect responses to the NDERF survey, the NDERF cross-cultural study looked at a second study group. The second study group was made up of 26 NDEs that had been shared with NDERF in English but that came from countries around the world where English is not the prevailing language. This is an interesting study group, as these NDErs live in a culture unique to their country yet understand English well enough to share their NDEs and complete a complex questionnaire in English. The comparison group included the same 583 NDEs used in the first study group, that is, NDEs shared in English from countries where English is the predominant language. As with the first study group, I compared the responses of the second study group with the comparison group to the thirty-three questions on the NDERF questionnaire that covered NDE elements.

I almost fell out of my chair when I first saw the results of this part of the study. All thirty-three NDE elements were present in both groups. The percentage of NDEs with each NDE element was the same in both groups; no NDE element occurred statistically significantly more or less often in either group. There was a trend toward a significant difference in the responses to only one question.

The conclusion:
The most reasonable conclusion from the NDERF cross-cultural NDE study is that the content of near-death experiences appears to be the same around the world. Such experiences, in both English- and non-English- speaking countries, include the same NDE elements. The elements appear to follow the same order of occurrence. In reading the accounts of NDEs from around the world, including those shared in English and those translated into English, I am impressed at how strikingly similar they are. You have probably noted that in prior chapters there are many examples of NDEs from around the world, and these experiences were like all other NDEs. There appears to be little difference, and most likely no difference, in the frequency of occurrence of NDE elements in NDEs around the world. This is further strong evidence that NDEs are not products of cultural beliefs or prior life experiences. Near-death experiences are, in a word,
real.