Near Death Experiences

In my journey for the divine, I'm trying to get as close to the source as possible. When seeking religion, the closest you can get to evidence is usually ancient texts, artifacts, and traditions whose definite origins can be rather questionable. I keep thinking, isn't there anyone or anything around TODAY that could be used as direct evidence of a divine nature to the universe? It's frustrating that no human alive today will ever have these answers until after they're dead. But then you can't come back and tell people what you've found out. Unless of course you died and were brought back to life.

Near Death Experiences (or NDEs) have become more common than ever in the past several decades as resuscitation technologies have improved. More people than ever are crossing the line of death for a short period of time, are brought back to life, and are telling about their experiences. A personal story about an NDE came to my mind recently (which I'll tell later), and since then I've been doing some research on the subject, and it's completely fascinating. I feel like it's the most profound information we can possibly get about any kind of spiritual nature of life, because there are people who seem to be directly experiencing it.

It seems there are many physicians out there trying to make this into an objective science, however due to the nature of this subject, this science tends to cross over into spiritual themes, accompanied by many of the typical feel-good loving tones of discussion. Dr. Raymond Moody and Dr. Jeffrey Long are two of the prominent names I've heard so far. They've collected thousands of NDE stories and documented the circumstances surrounding each event, such as the person's physical situation at the time of death, their demographic position, religious background, etc. Dr. Long has compiled his NDE stories on his website, www.nderf.org. The design of this site is pretty shoddy, but the point is to provide an input for people to share their NDE stories.

What I find very interesting is that it seems no matter what country, religion, age, or cause of death, the NDEs seem to be very similar. A 3-year-old Hindu child in India could have an experience very similar to a Catholic Priest in the US. Here are several similar traits that seem to be shared throughout NDE accounts as a whole:

• A sense of being dead, but not being necessarily bothered by it. A feeling of peace and painlessness.
• An out-of-body experience, often times seeing their own body during resuscitation efforts. In many cases, accurate recounts of details of these resuscitation efforts are described and later verified as correct, having been observed when the person was unconscious or clinically dead.
• A tunnel experience (the sense of moving up or through a narrow passageway), often times with a brilliant light at the end, brighter than any light on earth, yet painless to look at. Accompanied by feelings of intense love and joy.
• Encountering other beings or deceased loved ones with great welcoming and joy
• A sense of finally being "home"
• Encountering a "Being of Light", a "force", God, or a similar figure
• Being given a "life review" of every moment of their life, even from birth. Many times this review includes experiencing the emotions of the people they affected with their actions.
• No sense of time
• An awareness of infinite knowledge at their disposal. None or very of little of this knowledge is allowed to be retained upon returning to their body.
• A choice to return to their body, or message that it's time to return, most often met with reluctance to return. A sense that they still have work to be done or things to be learned on Earth.
• An understanding of the idea that humans' main purpose on Earth is to love each other.
• The experience may also involve after effects, such as: personality transformation, loss of the fear of death, greater spiritualism, and greater ecological sensitivity. These people are generally less materialistic and more interested in relationships with people.

Not everyone has all of these experiences, and they vary quite a bit, but they account for the general thread of NDEs as a whole.

Regarding the religious aspect of a person's NDE, these same experiences seem to be interpreted through the religious beliefs of that which they're most familiar with. IE, a Christian (or someone who grew up in a Christian society) will be in "heaven" and see "Jesus", a Hindu will see "Brahman", and so forth. And an unaffiliated person or an atheist has generic descriptive names for all their events, however they will still sense one main God at center of the experience. Which is interesting - no matter what background you are, there seems to be one God at the center of everything. And incidentally it seems to be very rare for an atheist to have a dramatic NDE and remain an atheist.

I think this entire phenomenon is incredibly profound and transcends our current ideas of religion – or at least updates them. Perhaps ancient peoples had these experiences and described them as best they could, and over tens of thousands of years these primitive peoples evolved into the religious history we currently know. But regardless of what any ancient book says, people today seem to be directly experiencing a spiritual side of our universe that we only fully become a part of after our body dies. And these experiences do somewhat match up with current religious beliefs, but not entirely. Honestly I'd rather take the word of thousands of first-hand witnesses of the divine than the word of texts that are thousands of years old and corrupted by the mind of man. It makes me consider the definite possibility that there is one God at the center of all life, and that our true purpose during this life is to love each other. That's the gist of most modern religions anyway, just without all the extra hullabaloo.