Experiencing the Soul

For centuries, our Western civilization has inscribed in countless souls the frightening image of the Grim Reaper, that horrific symbol of death that forcibly comes to take us away-we know not when, we know not where. However, since the advent of research on near-death experiences (NDES), the presence of a loving Being of Light, or the other worldly Light itself, is fast replacing the Grim Reaper as the dominant image of death in our society. Despite this, one of the unfortunate things about the expression, the "near-death experience," is that it implies that this kind of experience only occurs when people survive a near-death crisis of some sort. This is not true. There are many ways in which persons experience other dimensions of reality without the necessity of undergoing a life-threatening medical emergency that culminates in an NDE Nearly dying is only one reliable trigger of this experience. Other ways include meditation, mystical and spontaneous religious experiences, and out-of-body experiences that are not accompanied by any kind of near-death event.

From a strictly scientific perspective, studying NDEs who have been nearly dead provides, at best, evidence relevant to the possibility of life after death-it cannot prove what persons experience after irreversible biological death. Receiving testimony from the irretrievably dead could definitely settle the matter concerning the existence of life after death, but the irretrievably dead are notorious for never sending back their questionnaires!

One thing that has been demonstrated is that NDEs themselves do not need scientific proof in order to believe in life after death. For example, an Australian sociologist, Dr. Cherie Sutherland, conducted a study in which she asked NDEs about their beliefs in life after death before and after their (NDES), She found that before their (NDES), approximately 50 percent of them believed in some form of life after death. The remaining 50 percent either did not believe in life after death, or they had no opinion one way or the other. However, after their NDE every single person without exception believed in life after death in some form. In my own contact with hundreds they found themselves out of body while close to death-what was said and what was done on the operating table-very closely matched both medical records and the eyewitness testimony of nurses, anesthesiologists, and surgeons who were present during these operations.

It should also be mentioned that Dr. Sabom had a control group of non NDE cardiac patients who were asked the same questions about what they would imagine would take place if they'd had such operations themselves. Their accounts were riddled with errors-for example, they described procedures that would only be found in highly dramatic "TV resuscitations," whereas such errors were never made by those who had actually undergone a heart operation and then reported they had witnessed it from an out-of-body vantage point.

One woman who had two near-death experiences in her life told me, "After death, when you see the effects of your actions and even your thoughts on everything and everyone, that is hell. In all of the seemingly insignificant encounters of your life-perhaps your reaction to a stranger who walks into a shop-you see how you are constantly projecting your judgments, your selfish or negative motivations, and you yourself now feel the effects of them."

Still on the subject of otherwise inexplicable visual perceptions that NDErs may sometimes report, I might mention here that one of my own research projects set out to discover whether NDEs ever take place in blind people and, if so, whether the blind report being able to see during these episodes. We found that most of our respondents, including persons who were blind since birth, claimed emphatically that in their NDEs they were able to see, not only things of this world, but things in the other world as well. In some cases, we even have independent evidence that their otherworldly perceptions-which they couldn't have known about by other means-were indeed accurate. Their testimony suggests that whatever limitations or handicaps we may suffer in this life are no longer operative when we are out of our physical bodies and exist in other dimensions. These findings bring a great deal of hope to many people concerning their freedom in the after-death state from handicaps that may have afflicted them grievously in their everyday physical life on Earth.