The Art of Dying

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NDErs, is that like your experience? No, it is not. There are some similar features, but there are other features that are very different. Morse, M., and Perry, P. (1990). Closer to the light: Learning from the near-death experiences of children. New York, NY: Villard. But increasingly, science presents us with a picture of a much more mechanical universe in which there is no absolute morality and man has no purpose and no personal responsibility except to his culture and his biology. We no longer live in an age when faith is sufficient; we demand data, and we are driven by data. And it is data - data that apparently throws some light on our current concepts of Heaven and Hell - that the near-death experience seems to offer. Among those 450 participants, 76 percent were women. Does this finding mean that women are really spiritual and that men have a long way to go? No, I do not think so. I think it is simply that women are much better letter writers than men. The age distribution of those who experienced NDEs was interesting: there were equal numbers in each decade. In other words, the number of people who reported having had their NDE sometime in their first decade of life, age 0–10, was very similar to those who reported having it in their second decade, and so forth. So our findings indicate that there is no privileged age range for having an NDE. So although the ketamine model is the best scientific candidate so far to account for the NDE in cardiac arrest, it cannot explain every feature of NDEs. And I am not sure that even if we say that the NDE is a ketamine-like experience, we can, in fact, completely understand the whole of the NDE during cardiac arrest. Because we are left with the problem of exactly when does the NDE occur? And the only way you can get an answer to this is through out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

We asked 500 of those who wrote to answer a detailed questionnaire about their experiences. Our aim was to gather in a standardised format as much detail as we could about the NDE, the people who have experienced it and the effect that the experience has had on their lives. In addition she has worked as an agony aunt advising on sexual problems on radio and in Company magazine. She is involved in sex education programmes in various schools in London, and also works as a telephone counsellor for Childline, a helpline for children of all ages. Moreover, we have many DBVs reports in which people are seen “on the other side” who the dying patient had no idea was deceased. We also have many reports of shared DBVs, in which not only the dying person, but other people in the room (e.g., relatives, medical personnel) also experience the phenomena. These cases are impossible to explain away as hallucination or some offshoot of a dying brain. DBVs happen to atheists and people who do not believe in an afterlife. They happen across cultures. They happen to people who do not expect to die. Greyson, B. (1983). The near-death experience scale: Construction, reliability, and validity. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 171, 369–375. The data available suggest that NDE phenomena are described differently in different cultures. Tunnels, for example, seem to be a particularly Western feature. Take, for example, the journey from this dimension to an otherworldly dimension. Japanese NDErs do not report tunnels. Instead, they have caves. People will walk towards a cave, which will be the entrance to the new reality. Quite often, they report having come up to a dark river where there was a boatman. This feature is absolutely inherent in their culture. Among hunter-gathers, the transitional journey most often involved a river. They reported going on journeys, most commonly by getting into a boat and paddling for three days before arriving at an otherworldly area.

I was particularly interested in the pastoral landscapes, because they are also reported by terminally ill patients in approaching-death experiences. The landscapes have always been described as very beautiful, and usually include wonderful flowers. We had one or two botanists among our respondents, and they said that the colors were most exciting, but, interestingly, that they saw no new species, only species they already knew. Of course, the main focus of the respondents was the incredible beauty of all those vibrant colors. Britton, W. B., and Bootzin, R. R. (2004). Near-death experiences and the temporal lobe. Psychological Science, 15, 254–258. In any case, Dr. Kerr, a careful researcher, found that dying people did see animals and pets in DBVs. You can learn more about his research here:

Giovetti, P. (1999). Visions of the dead, death-bed visions and near-death experiences in Italy. Human Nature, 1(1), 38–41. Responses to Selected Questions From the Audience Question: Is there a difference between hallucinations and NDEs?What did we find? We found prototypical NDEs: feelings of peace and joy, sense of harmony, bright lights, heightened senses, encounters with mystical beings, encountering barriers of no return, and so on. Out of a base group of about 220 people who were admitted to the unit after a cardiac arrest, only 63 people survived. Of those 63 survivors, 56 (89 percent) had no memories during their arrest; and 7 (11 percent) had memories. Of these latter 7, four (6.3 percent) met the Greyson criteria for an NDE, and the other two, although not meeting the Greyson criteria, did have NDE features which made us put them in the NDE group. So our rate is about 10 percent, so one can generalize to cardiac arrest as a whole and say that about 10 percent of survivors of cardiac arrest will report NDEs.

Darin Martin’s husband, Steve, was dying of cancer. As he got closer to death, Steve told her that he was seeing their dog, Czar, walking down the hallway. Czar, a Great Dane, had died four years before. At one point, Steve made sure he and his wife stepped out of his way, so Czar could pass.

Greyson’s (2003a) American study was of 1,595 patients admitted to a cardiac care unit with heart trouble. He found an incidence of 10 percent NDEs among cardiac arrest survivors and found that the more severe the illness, the more likely the survivor was to report an NDE. And what he said is this: ‘‘The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a period of impaired cerebral perfusion [absence of blood flow to the brain] raises particularly perplexing questions for our current understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function’’ (p. 275). So that is now in the literature. And based on that, Sam Parnia and I have a paper being reviewed for Neuroscience Letters in which we propose the experiment which I am going to show you. Whether or not they will publish it, I do not yet know. I was interested to know whether there were any spiders, gnats, snakes – anythingthat bites. We found nothing; none was reported. And what about other animals? Our respondents did reportanimals, but only very seldom, and only dogs. One man saw all the dogs of his life come bounding over the hill towards him. So all in all, it was a very pleasurable experience to be in this land, and if the many NDErs who assert that we allwill have this experience at death are correct, our data indicate that it is not going to be awful. You will be able to stroll around the garden, and you will nothave to worry about what’s going to bite you. So all three dogs seem to be reacting. Of course, they can’t tell us what they are reacting to, but the women present said they all felt the presence of their original dog, who had died of cancer many years ago. They believed that he was coming to help Kelly transition (which she did the following day).