Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (22 page)
Authors: J. Steve Miller
Example:
We don’t find reports that 90% of the people taking Valium have dreams that
begin with lying on rafts in a swimming pool, chatting with their best friends
who are also on rafts, followed by a walk to an ice cream shop where they sip a
milkshake and talk to the proprietor about relaxing life events. Then they walk
toward the restroom and find themselves transported to a mountain chalet, where
they choose a book from a seemingly endless bookshelf and sit on a porch
overlooking a trout stream. Instead, the variety of dreams produced in a
relaxed state could be seemingly endless.
21)
Life
After Life
, 21. Dr. Sartori’s patients were from the UK, almost entirely
Welsh. She reported, “The NDE reports from this sample were consistent with
other Western accounts of NDEs documented in the literature. There were no
features culture specific to a Welsh population.” Penny Sartori,
The
Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients
(Lewiston,
Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 225.
22) Maurice Rawlings,
Beyond Death’s Door
(New York: Thomas Nelson,
1978), xiii.
23)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 143. Among Dr. Sartori’s patients who had
deep NDEs, “…none of the patients claimed to be familiar with NDEs prior to
their hospital admissions” (Sartori, 266).
24)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, xii.
25)
Life After Life
, 175.
26) See, for example,
Recollections of Death,
116,162. One person would suddenly
lose consciousness mid-sentence. Another was hit from behind by a car.
27)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 147. Sabom’s study concluded, “A person’s
age, sex, race, area of residence, size of home community, years of education,
occupation, religious background, or frequency of church attendance did not
seem to affect whether he or she would or would not encounter an NDE during a
near-death crisis event. Moreover, knowledge of the NDE prior to the near-death
crisis event did not appear to predispose the person subsequently to report an
NDE following a crisis event.” (
Recollections of Death
, 57,61)
28)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 147.
29)
Sartori discounts wishful thinking as a cause by citing seven patients who
explicitly spoke of being surprised by the content of their NDEs.
The
Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients
, 215,216,
274,275.
30)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 19.
31)
Life After Life
, 105. One NDEr in Sartori’s study reported seeing
someone who might have been Jesus, but he didn’t expect Jesus to look that way
at all. “I don’t know who he was; he might have been Jesus for all I know but
that’s not what I’d expect Jesus to look like, his hair was scruffy and needed
a good combing! His eyes were piercing and bright, it’s as if I was drawn to
look at his eyes.”
The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care
Patients
, 192. See also
Science and the Near-Death Experience
,
111,115,117,105,107,124,264,219.
32)
Life After Life
, 77-84.
33) Jeffrey
Long,
Evidence of the Afterlife
(New York: HarperOne, 2010), 17.
34)
Recollections
of Death
, 50. For details of conversations on the other side and how they
each had closure, see 210,211; also
Light & Death,
23,67,68,111,112,114.
36) Ibid.
37) See,
for example,
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 71-79.
38)
Melvin Morse,
Closer to the Light
(New York: Villard Books, 1990), 3-21.
39)
M. Morse,
(1983). A near-death experience in a 7-year-old child.
American
Journal of Diseases of Children (1960)
,
137
(10), 959-961.
40)
Closer to the Light
, 18-21.
41) Melvin
Morse, writing in
The Light Beyond
, Raymond Moody (New York: A Bantam
Book, 1988), 108.
42)
M.
Morse, D. Conner, D., D. Tyler, D. (1985). Near-death experiences
in a pediatric population. A preliminary report.
American Journal of
Diseases of Children (1960)
,
139
(6), 595-600; M. Morse, P. Castillo,
D. Venecia, et al. “Childhood Near-Death Experiences.”
American Journal of
Diseases of Children
140 (1986): 1110-1113;
Closer to the Light
,
Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, 1990, Villard Books, NY, 1990.
43)
Serdahely “concluded that adult retrospective accounts were
indistinguishable from contemporary pediatric NDEs” (W.J. Serdahely, 1991). A
comparison of retrospective accounts of childhood death experiences with
contemporary pediatric near-death experience accounts.
Journal of Near-Death
Studies
9:223. “In terms of NDE content, even though every experience is
unique, the NDEs of children and teens follow a consistent pattern that appears
to be little different from the pattern experienced by adults…. Neither do
children’s experiences appear to be affected by cause of near-death crisis,
age, gender, religiosity, or any other demographic variable. One distinction
appears to be that children are almost always accompanied into the light” (
The
Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
, 92,105).
44) According
to Richard Bonenfant, “Children’s accounts are often informative simply because
they report exactly what they see without great concern over the rational
interpretation of their observations.” R.J. Bonenfant, A Child’s Encounter with
the Devil,
Journal of Near-Death Studies
20:95(2001). From
The
Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
, 91.
45)
Consciousness
Beyond Life
, 75,76.
46) Ibid., 72.
47)
Science and the Near-Death Experience
, 254-268.
48) Ibid., 254, 255. Another line of evidence could be exploring NDEs in
which a person is surprised to encounter a person on the other side that he
didn’t know had died. Bruce Greyson cites 29 cases in his article, “Seeing Dead
People Not Known to Have Died: ‘Peak in Darien’ Experiences,”
Anthropology
and Humanism
, Vol. 35, Issue 2, pp. 159–171, (2010). Greyson also notes, “In
our collection of 665 NDEs, 138 (21 percent) included a purported encounter
with a deceased person, whereas only 25 (four percent) included a purported
encounter with a living person.” To use these as evidence for the afterlife, it
seems we’d need to discover what percentage of NDEs include an encounter with a
person not known to have died. If the amount is smaller than four percent, then
couldn’t the people not known to have died be merely a subset of those living
persons who were seen?
49)
Science and the Near-Death Experience
, 257.
50) Ibid., 256.
51) Ibid., 258.
52)
Deathbed visions may also serve as a sort of evidential bridge from near-death
experiences to final-death experiences. Some researchers note that since NDEs
are by definition experienced by people who don’t remain finally dead after
their experience, that we must make the unwarranted assumption that at a
person’s final death they’ll experience some of the same features as the NDE. Of
course, the only way to know this with 100% certainty would be to experience
final death ourselves, but the deathbed vision would give us an indication from
those who are at the point of entering their final death state.
53) See especially Raymond A. Moody,
Glimpses of Eternity
(New York:
Guideposts, 2010).
54)
Ibid., 13,14.
55)
Glimpses
of Eternity
, 77,80,81.
56)
From personal interview with Bucky.
57)
Life
After Life
, 5,6.
58)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, vi.
59)
Beyond
Death’s Door
, xii, xiii.
60)
Consciousness
Beyond Life
, 310. Why would they lie? Put yourself in their place. Having
just gone through such a trauma, they’re obviously afraid that sharing such a
wild experience will cause people to think they’ve gone a bit whacko. No wonder
they’re very hesitant to share. One of the men I interviewed shared his NDE
with his wife, but even though his surgeon was a Christian, he didn’t tell him.
Although he works with a men’s ministry in a church, he’s reluctant to tell
people there. He’s not sure why he’s so reluctant – he simply is. But all this
hesitation to share argues strongly against someone making it up to get
attention.
This is very different from a TV evangelist telling about his
miraculous answered prayer. Now maybe it indeed happened to the evangelist, but
since he’s got everything to gain from such a dramatic testimony, I question
it. But for the patient with no religious TV show, whose body is in bad shape
and risks having his sanity questioned, there’s no apparent motive for making
up such an event.
61)
Life After Life
, 89.
62) Ibid., 85.
63)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 39.
64) Ibid., 23.
65) See especially K. Ring, and S. Cooper, 1999.
Mindsight: Near-death and
out-of-body experiences in the blind
. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of
Transpersonal Psychology.” Van Lommel reports on the blind NDE in
Consciousness
Beyond Life
, 19,23-26,39. Sartori states, “The reports [of the blind
seeing] were considered to be genuine due to the similarities between NDEs in
the blind and the sighted, the sincerity of the experience and in some cases,
the corroboration of witnesses.”
The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized
Intensive Care Patients
, 100, commenting on Ring and Cooper, 68.
66)
http://www.newdualism.org/nde-papers/Ring/Ring-Journal%20of%20Near-Death%20Studies_1997-16-101-147.pdf
Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the
Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision,
Journal of Near-Death Studies
.
“There is no question that NDEs in the blind do occur and, furthermore, that
they take the same general form and are comprised of the very same elements
that define the NDEs of sighted individuals. Moreover, this generalization
appears to hold across all three categories of blindness that were represented
in this study: those blind from birth, those adventitiously blind, and those
severely visually impaired.”
“The second issue, and the one that was the driving force of this study,
was whether the blind claim to have visual impressions during their NDEs or
OBEs. On this point, too, our data were conclusive.
Overall, 80 percent of our respondents reported these claims, most of
them in the language of unhesitating declaration, even when they had been
surprised, or even stunned, by the unexpected discovery that they could in fact
see. Like sighted experiencers, our blind respondents described to us both
perceptions of this world and otherworldly scenes, often in fulsome,
fine-grained detail, and sometimes with a sense of extremely sharp, even
subjectively perfect, acuity.”
What do the blind “see” in their normal dreams (as opposed to their
NDEs)? “(1) There are no visual images in the dreams of the congenitally blind;
(2) individuals blinded before the age of 5 also tend not to have visual
imagery; (3) those who become sightless between the age of 5 to 7 may or may not
retain visual imagery; and (4) most persons who lose their sight after age 7 do
retain visual imagery, although its clarity tends to fade with time.”
67) Ibid.,
125.
68)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 24-26.
69) Ibid., 26.
70) Ibid., 152.
71) Ibid., 55. The study comes from C. Sutherland,
Transformed by the
Light: Life after Near-Death Experiences
(Sydney, Australia: Bantam Books,
1992).
72)
Life
After Life
, 84.
73) Ibid., 84,85.
74)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 40.
75)
Life After Life
, 105.
76) Ibid., 65.
77) Ibid., 84.
78)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 152; Sabom had the same results when comparing
his NDErs with his control group –
Light & Death
, 95-97.
79) (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
)
80) To prove you’re not just dreaming that you’re reading, or to prove that
we’re not in a fabricated delusion like “The Matrix,” all we can say is that we
have a vivid apprehension of people and leaves and grasshoppers through our
senses. And if you think about it, you can’t really go beyond that “vivid
apprehension.” You may say, “Yes, but I talk to other people who have the same
vivid experience of this physical world and we can do physical experiments
which prove that it’s real.” Sure, but if this were all a dream world, those
people and experiments would all be a part of your dream. It’s merely because
it seems qualitatively different from a dream – it
seems
real – that you’re
very confident that you’re reading a book rather than merely dreaming that
you’re reading a book.
81) But let’s take this a step further, starting with an analogy. Let’s say
you’re trying to make a decision between two cars to buy, and in your opinion,
the typical reports don’t give you enough information. So the salesman pulls
out a study showing a non-biased consumer report of the last 500 people who
bought these cars. Ninety percent reported that they’re really glad they
purchased car #1 after one year.
So
what’s your verdict? Even without driving the car yourself for a year, wouldn’t
you be wise to accept the experience of the 90 percent? Is accepting the
experience of multitudes of NDErs really so different, even though we’ve never experienced
one?
82) For the sake of brevity, I’ve ignored the contributions of Swiss-born psychiatrist
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. When she moved from Switzerland to New York City in 1958
to complete her education, she winced at the deplorable state of the dying.
Rather than dying surrounded by friends and family, they typically died in
lonely hospital rooms, surrounded by blinking lights and beeping machinery.
Doctors often failed to engage them, viewing death as their failure to heal.
Optimistic Americans didn’t want to think about death.
Kübler-Ross forced us to examine the death experience and
emotionally engage the dying. Her work helped bring about both hospice and professional
counseling for the dying. She also listened to patients when, close to the
point of death, they suddenly became very alert and told of a beautiful place
of reunion with deceased loved ones. As a respected scientist, Kübler-Ross was honored
with 18 honorary doctorates. She taught physicians and academics about death
and dying and wrote over 20 books. As she taught, she exposed them to the
near-death experience.
