Is Out-of-Body Perception Accurate in NDEs?

A brief overview of research in non-physical perception during near-death experiences—and the implications

Jun 27, 2025

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Heightened Lucidity and Powers in the NDE

Of near-death experiences (NDEs) it is often reported that during the event, thought is sharpened, enhanced, and sometimes much faster, as opposed to stymied or obliterated altogether, which would be expected if NDEs were merely the result of neurological malfunction, hypoxia or some form of brain damage.

The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website (nderf.org) hosts the largest collection of publicly available NDEs on earth (over 3,700). In a survey of 1,122 NDErs they asked, “How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal, everyday consciousness and alertness?”

835 people (74.4%) answered that they had “More consciousness and alertness than normal”; 229 (20.4%) experienced “Normal consciousness and alertness.^⁠1”

This sharpened state of cognition and perception seems to stand in contrast with many “astral” experiences from intentional OBEs—the reasons for this we have covered already in this chapter. Moody’s NDE subjects, for example, found that generally their senses of sight and hearing were significantly, even drastically, improved. However, people reported that they typically didn’t “hear” in the auditory sense, but in more of a telepathic sense.

People sense thoughts and energies holistically in the NDE and OBE state, hinting again at the microcosm mirroring the holographic macrocosm. Rather than hearing sound waves via the physical apparatus, people sense data input through the whole (holographic) energy field, or “soul/spirit.”

Victorian-era seer Charles Leadbeater commented on this holographic property in The Inner Life: all particles of the (egregorial) astral body are in constant motion and pass through every chakra centre, resulting in each centre imparting a receptivity to a specific set of vibrations, meaning ultimately, “all the astral senses are active equally in all parts of the body.^⁠2” (Emphasis added)

NDErs often find they know what people around them are thinking, as opposed to hearing their thoughts audibly, and this way can anticipate what an incarnate human is about to say.^⁠3 Thus the “subtle bodies” do indeed facilitate “paranormal” abilities, such as non-verbal communication/telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition of various forms.

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In the early 1900s, English medium Earnest H. Peckham communicated with a being identifying himself as A. H. Stockwell, a reverend from the late 1800s. Among other things, he commented on his new “fourth-dimensional” vision, saying he could see objects from all sides at once, as well as seeing into, around, and through them.^⁠4 Moreover, objects did not diminish in size with distance, as we perceive in third density (the astral and mental planes are considered non-spatial—though a fourth dimensional sensory input would render any apparent distances null).

As mentioned, various OBErs, NDErs, and occultists have made identical observations. Leadbeater has stated how someone operating in the astral body can see objects behind, above, and beneath equally well and simultaneously^⁠5. Researchers in the NDE field call this 360 degree astral vision “mindsight.” It has also been experienced by people hypnotically regressed into the life-between-life/interlife realm, or bardo.^⁠6

This “spherical vision” (or hyper-vision) is common of both adult and child NDErs and sometimes lingers for a time afterwards (expanded residual bandwidth of consciousness). It also happens to those born blind or who develop blindness later.^⁠7

One woman who had an NDE resulting from pneumonia during her second pregnancy reported: “I could see everything…I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously. Three hundred-sixty-degree spherical vision.^⁠8”

Earlier we discussed Sabom’s work in analysing OBE perceptions during NDEs and the findings of high accuracy as compared to the low accuracy of control groups. A number of further studies have been done to test OBE perception during NDEs—all strongly supporting Sabom’s original findings and the conclusion that OBE perceptions during NDEs tend to be highly accurate (and unexplainable from a medical or physiological point of view).

Sartori for her part, had by 2006, interviewed fifteen NDErs, of whom eight reported leaving their bodies. She compared the accounts featuring OBEs to ones without OBEs and found it was the people who had the OBEs that provided highly accurate accounts of their resuscitations, while those not having the OBEs showed no such accuracy.^⁠9

The following year Dr Janice Holden published a laborious study comparing all NDEs she could find featuring OBE perception published since 1975 in scholarly articles and all relevant books through to Moody’s 1975 classic.

Her analysis of the 107 cases of apparently non-physical veridical perception supported Sartori’s conclusions and destroyed the superficial and inverted logic of NDE “sceptics” who try to disqualify all NDE perception as “hallucinatory” simply because a portion of it sometimes may seem to be (and even then, interpretation is often the key factor—and additionally, most critics have little grasp of the esoterics involved).

Holden reported:

Using the most stringent criterion, that a case would be designated as inaccurate if even one detail of the account were found not to correspond to consensus reality, I found that only 8 percent of all cases involved inaccuracy, including 8 percent of the cases involving material phenomena and 11 percent involving transmaterial [non-physical] phenomena.^⁠10

Conservatively speaking, that’s a finding of 92% accuracy. Non-physical perception, as all readers of Book 1 already know, is a real phenomenon. Sartori’s five year study (2008) of OBE perceptions of hospital patients found that NDErs tended to be highly accurate in describing what happened during their own resuscitations, while the non-NDE control group performed woefully in their descriptions^⁠11, as happened with Sabom.

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Dr Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry conducted a large retrospective investigation of NDEs featuring OBE observations and published their findings in 2010. They reviewed 617 NDEs from the NDERF website. 287 of those NDEs with OBEs had enough information to assess the accuracy of their descriptions of their out-of-body observations. “280 (97.6%) of the OBE descriptions were entirely realistic and lacked any content that seemed unreal.^⁠12”

At this point, the “sceptics” should really just sit down and try to learn something—starting with the actual meaning of the term “scepticism”.

As Long correctly points out, many NDEs feature observations that the NDEr could not reasonably have been expected to make. For instance, when 56-year-old Al Sullivan had his NDE thanks to a coronary blockage in 1988, he saw the surgeon in charge of the operating theatre “flapping” his arms like wings, as if trying to fly.

After beginning his journey in an upward direction, Sullivan found himself “in a very thick, black, billowy smoke like atmosphere”—initial perception through the etheric-astral composite body. He then rose to an amphitheatre-like place (the operating theatre) featuring a bright light, while also noticing the presence of three human-like figures nearby. He looked into this light-filled space and noticed with amazement his lifeless body to the lower left-hand side.

The surgeon seemed somewhat perplexed, as well as performing a perplexing movement: “I thought he was flapping his arms as if trying to fly^⁠13…”

After Sullivan’s NDE (which featured contact with his deceased mother) and return to consciousness it was established through another doctor present, a Dr LaSala, that the cardiac surgeon working on Sullivan, a Dr Takata, “would flatten his palms against his chest and give instructions to his assistants by pointing with his elbows,” creating the impression that he was “flapping” his arms like wings, as Sullivan observed while out-of-body.

This was a habit Takata had “because, after he has scrubbed in, he does not wish his hands to touch anything until he is actually ready to do the surgery.”

LaSala added that he had never seen another doctor do this.^⁠14

Long also cites the experience of Kate who, while clinically dead on the operating table, met both her deceased grandma and a woman she had never seen before, but whom her own mother later confirmed was actually her great grandma who had died long before Kate was born. During the NDE Kate was informed by her grandma it was not her time to join them yet, but she would eventually return there^⁠15.

Additionally, Kate, in her OBE state, also witnessed the doctor unexpectedly throw a surgical instrument on the floor, which did happen as she described—all while she was under general anaesthesia.

As Long and others keep pointing out, there are no objections put forth by anti-psi materialists that have withstood the onslaught of empirical and verifiable information. Contrary to what materialist dogma presupposes, “maximal consciousness and alertness” during NDEs “is typically when the body is unconscious.”^⁠16

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Site in the Blind

In 1997 Ken Ring and Sharon Cooper published a powerful study of thirty-one blind people where they specifically addressed the question of visual perception in the blind during OBEs and NDEs. Their data showed that blind people,

including those blind from birth, do report classic NDEs…that the great preponderance of blind persons claim to see during NDEs and OBEs; and that occasionally claims of visually-based knowledge that could not have been obtained by normal means can be independently corroborated.^⁠17

Ring and Cooper were careful to point out that, while it’s tempting to conceive of these people’s “visual” experiences in terms of normal eye-brain sight, it isn’t really the same thing—they called it a

transcendental awareness that functions independently of the brain but that must necessarily be filtered through it and through the medium of language as well. Thus, by the time these episodes come to our attention, they tend to speak in the language of vision, but the actual experiences themselves seem to be something rather different altogether^⁠18…

They clarified that what’s happening is a process that begins with the mind—fully independently of the brain—“becoming self-referential, that is, becoming identified with consciousness itself, and then converting this noumenal consciousness into a dualistic modality that generates the familiar phenomenal world.”^⁠19

As you’ve not doubt grokked by now, dear reader, we are not always dealing with representations of the familiar world at all, but entirely other orders of consciousness/reality.

Abstract non-physical/noumenal data has to be converted (interpreted) into terms that make sense to an earth-conditioned mind.

One subject who was totally blind from birth (Vicki Umipeg) had an OBE glimpse of the crumpled car she had been travelling in at the time her NDE was triggered, as well as viewing her body in hospital from the ceiling and being able to correctly identify it as hers due to a distinctive wedding ring she wore, and other features. She then was pulled into a tunnel towards a light, heard music which developed into hymns and then “rolled out” and found herself lying on grass, surrounded by trees and flowers in a place made of light; the light conveyed love.

“Everybody there was made of light. And I was made of light. There was love everywhere. It was like love came from the grass, love came from the birds, love came from the trees.”

She met five people she had known in life, including her grandmother, who had all crossed over, and who appeared in prime-of-life condition. No actual words were exchanged, but only feelings of love and welcome.^⁠20 Vicki was then flooded with massive amounts of information, including understandings of things like calculus and science which she had no knowledge of. She felt as if she knew everything and it all made sense: “this place was where I would find the answers to all the questions about life…It’s like the place was the knowing.^⁠21

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Following this profound development, a being of greater luminosity appeared (who she interpreted as “Jesus” though the being did not self-identify as such—and never does) and informed her she had to go back to teach more about “loving and forgiving,” plus to have her three future children (which she eventually did).

“But first,” it stated, “watch this.”

He/it then initiated—you guessed it—the famous panoramic life review starting from her birth, while commenting helpfully to assist her understanding of choices she had made and their repercussions. Once completed, the luminous being told her she had to leave and suddenly she landed back in her body with “a sickening thud.^⁠22”

These words come from someone who never had ocular vision and did not even have a concept of “light” or “seeing.” There were at least two such people involved in this study who expressed such a sentiment.

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Nine of the fourteen participants who were blind from birth reported some form of “sight” during their NDE. Evidence of vision was even stronger among the OBErs: Nine of ten claimed sight, and including the five people who had both an NDE and one or more OBEs on other occasions, the figures amount to thirteen out of fifteen.

Overall, participants reported the same kinds of visual impressions as sighted people in describing NDEs and OBEs. Ten of the twenty-one NDErs said they had some kind of vision of their physical body, and seven of the ten OBErs also did.

Umipeg’s case was presented as illustrative of the types of rich experiences that blind people in the study had during NDEs and OBEs. Umipeg’s NDE could be considered absolutely classic and quintessential (for a Westerner)—it is identical in essence to many NDEs of sighted people. That should tell us something.

Brad Barrows, blind from birth like Umipeg, also was pulled through a tunnel and emerged into an immense field suffused with an all-encompassing effulgence. He walked on a path surrounded by tall grass, and saw tall trees with immense leaves. There were no shadows in this (“astral”) realm.

Here he heard beautiful music, unlike anything from earth. Walking toward the sound, he approached and then climbed a hill, eventually finding a brightly glittering stone structure which he entered. Inside, Brad encountered an unknown man who emanated an overwhelming love (one can infer this is Brad’s Daimon/Ego, a projection or representative of his “soul cluster”—more on that later). Without a word, he gently nudged Brad backward, initiating a reversal of the experience, which ended with him in bed gasping for air, attended by two nurses. Brad, like Vicki, has been blind from birth.^⁠23

Barrow’s and Umipeg’s cases exemplify the Moody-type NDE structure, as Ring points out. They demonstrate how a living human can experience a “preview” or glimpse of the hyper-dimensional imaginal interlife state inhabited by their Daimon, the trans-temporal part of them residing in the “quantum field” that knows their life template and so sends the human Eidolon back to earth to live out the remainder of its apparently planned incarnation.

The NDERF survey of 1,122 NDEers indicated that OBE vision was not merely available, but enhanced beyond regular ocular sight. NDERF respondents also reported “More consciousness and alertness than normal,” with 83% (19) who had NDEs under general anaesthetic giving this answer, compared to the 74% response from those without it (a much larger sample of 437 people)^⁠24.

Increased clarity, vision, and mental processing are commonly reported.

One odd, yet powerful, case helps us draw the line between hallucination and veridical OBE vision. A thirty-three-year-old man in a drug-induced delirium started hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. As his condition deteriorated he left his body and looked back at it, able to see his brain was still hallucinating, though from his lucid and clear OBE perspective he could not see the hallucinatory small humanoid thought-forms.^⁠25(Cont’d in Book 2)

Some things to consider as I wrap this up.

Notice I am emphasising the accuracy of “out-of-body” perception of situations that tend to focus around familiar earthly scenes, such as someone’s body, the medical setting, etc.—situations where the percipient can obtain reliable feedback on their perception, and where verification is therefore possible (which is not always the case with non-physical perception). The accuracy of many reports is indisputable, and (despite the rather anaemic attempts of “sceptics”) there is simply no pat physical explanation that can account for this accuracy. Funda-Materialism fails abjectly, can we move on, please? Funda-Religion is no solution either.
When attention/consciousness shifts away from such aforementioned earth-like scenery and identifications (such as, “I am the human known as Brendan Murphy”) there is a tendency towards increasingly abstract modes of aesthetic representation of what I regard as the triadic field of consciousness-information-meaning (the so-called “quantum field,” but more aptly known as the aetheric medium). Ring’s and Coopers observation about consciousness becoming numinous and self-referential in NDEs bears revisiting here for the profound implications. (I will deal with all of this in more depth in Book 2—and likely 3 as well.) Metaphysicists over centuries have told us how “higher planes” of reality become increasingly abstract, as attention and identification with earth life is reduced, and this makes sense through a more modern lens too, though in my work I have tried to develop a less naive framework and model of “what’s going on” than what has traditionally been accepted, and also what is now commonplace in the “astral aliens” crowd.
Ring’s and Cooper’s eyeless vision (sight in the blind) NDEs offer some of the most profound support for the notion that we are all immersed—or networked in—a collective human field of consciousness (a.k.a. the imaginal realm), and, moreover, that it appears to have an embedded (pre-quantum) archetypal architecture and structure. How else could NDE perception of blind-from-birth people so precisely match the NDE perception/experience of people with functional vision? The most parsimonious explanation is outlined here in points 2 and 3, but I will contextualise all this for you massively in Book 2 of THE GRAND ILLUSION, an unprecedented study on the afterlife, immortality, and the nature, structure, and dynamics of the collective (unified) field of human consciousness.

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¹Jeffrey Long, MD, Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality, Missouri Medicine, 2014 Sep-Oct; 111(5): 372–380.

²Leadbeater, The Inner Life, 202.

³For an example, see Moody, Life After Life, chapter 2.

⁴Parisetti, 21 Days Into the Afterlife, 148-150.

⁵See Leadbeater, Chakras, chapter 4.

⁶See J. Whitton, 112 for one example.

⁷See Atwater, The Forever Angels, chapter 6.

⁸Ring and Cooper, Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision, Journal of Near-Death Studies, 16(12) Waiter 199?

⁹Sartori, Near-Death Experiences, cited in Shushan, Near-Death Experience in…. See also Moody and Perry, Proof of Life…, chapter 2.

¹⁰Holden, More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Response to "Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features”, Journal of Near-Death Studies, 26(1), Fall 2007 2007 LANDS. See also, Janice Holden, Veridical perception in near-death experiences. In Holden JM, Greyson B, James D, editors. The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO; 2009. pp. 185–211.

¹¹Jeffrey Long, Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality, Mo Med. 2014 Sep-Oct; 111(5): 372–380, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

¹²Ibid.

¹³Cook, Greyson, Stevenson, Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 377-406, 1998

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵Long, Evidence for Survival of Consciousness in Near-Death Experiences: Decades of Science and New Insights, https://www.nderf.org/NDERF/Research/EvidenceBigelow.pdf

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁷Ring and Cooper, Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision, Journal of Near-Death Studies, 16(12) Waiter 199?

¹⁸Ibid.

¹⁹Ibid.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹Ibid.

²²Ibid.

²³Ibid.

²⁴Long, Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality.

²⁵Greyson, Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: