Learning From Decades of Empirical Near-Death Research

What It Tells Us... If We're Willing to Look

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An Overview of Real NDEs and Empirical NDE Research

From 1975 to 2005, forty-two studies covering over 2,500 NDE (near-death experience) patients were published in journals and monographs, and yet, despite all the differences in study design and selection criteria, etc., they produced highly similar findings about the content and aftermath of NDEs.^⁠1

Some experiencers have undeniably brought information back from their NDE they could not have possibly known unless they were actually consciously aware while being separate from their lifeless and inert bodies—and tapped into the information field.

The most powerful cases of NDEs, in terms of convincing an open-minded sceptic of their validity, are those in which veridical information is produced through mechanisms that clearly rule out “ordinary” information transmission. 

We will now look at a few such examples without going into any great analysis or pro vs. con arguments for the simple fact that anybody with a few active neural connections can see that such cases are not even remotely convincingly explained through the most popular debunker mechanisms, i.e., the dying brain, brain hypoxia, anoxia, hypercarbia, syncope, chemically induced hallucinations, elaborate putative conspiracies contrived between relevant parties for no apparent reason and with no obvious motive (and no evidence of conspiracy), and so on. 

Numerous NDE researchers—including capable scientists and doctors—have thoroughly “debunked the debunkers,^⁠2” so to speak, and given the framework we laid in TGI Book 1, there is no real need to re-tread the same (boring-ass) ground, though we might take a moment to note a couple of things.

Firstly, recent research has shown that reducing—not increasing—brain activity facilitates a range of transcendent and transpersonal states of conscious experience.

“The most complex, coherent, intense, nonlocal, and transpersonal experiences people report are associated precisely with reductions, or even elimination, of brain metabolism.”

As Dirk F. Meijer notes, this is consistent with the “brain as filter” hypothesis (discussed in Book 1), and, putting it politely, clearly “contradicts the materialist assumption.”^⁠3

NDEs exemplify this better than anything else: the most spectacularly transcendent experiences are being had by people with non-functional brains. 

This “brain as filter” hypothesis explains how traditional techniques for the attainment of transpersonal insight work: by reducing the activity of certain brain regions, they (partially and/or temporarily) take the filtering mechanism offline, allowing consciousness to de-clench and expand beyond the space-time locus of the body. From this perspective, physical death is not the end of consciousness, but its liberation.^⁠4

Let’s hear from NDE researcher Dr. Peter Fenwick re: “sceptics” before we move on. Fenwick is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and an internationally respected neuropsychiatrist—a specialist in the mind-brain interface and the problem of consciousness. He is rightfully scathing with the sceptics of the NDE:

(They) just don’t have the knowledge...So much rubbish is talked about NDEs by people who don’t have to deal with these things on a daily basis. So I’m absolutely sure that such experiences are not caused by oxygen shortages, endorphins or anything of that kind. And certainly none of these things would account for the transcendental quality of many of these experiences, the fact that people feel an infinite sense of loss when they leave them behind.^⁠5

Co-author Elizabeth Fenwick adds that there is no materialistic/reductive explanation that accounts for the NDE as a whole.

“You have to account for it as a package and skeptics...simply don’t do that. None of the purely physical explanations will do. They (Skeptics) vastly underestimate the extent to which Near-Death Experiences are not just a set of random things happening, but a highly organized and detailed affair.^⁠6” 

After personally spending who knows how many thousands of hours studying this kind of subject matter, I can tell you that devoting pages to responding to the asinine claims made by “sceptics” of the NDE (or paranormal in general) is something that has been done so often and so meticulously by previous researchers it would simply be a monumental waste of your time (and mine).

Reductive positivist explanations can theoretically account for bits and pieces of certain NDEs (and likewise for certain aspects of some psi phenomena), but fall far short of the mark in instances where knowledge is demonstrably obtained by “paranormal” means—particularly by someone who is regarded as clinically dead. The “sceptics” cling to an ideology (promissory materialism) that is little more than a rotting corpse.

Vi Horton’s NDE is a case in point. During her NDE she met a deceased brother she did not even know she had. Post-NDE she told her father—the only surviving family member—about the encounter. He was flabbergasted because, in his words, “no one living knew about it but me.^⁠7” 

Cases like this are not hard to find.

One man was near death in hospital due to heart problems at the very same time his sister was near death in a diabetic coma in another part of the same hospital. As he watched the doctors work on his body from the vantage point of the ceiling, he found himself suddenly in conversation with his sister, who had joined him in what we’ve been calling (in Book 2) the “real-time zone” above his bed.

They were having a “great conversation about what was going on down there” when she began to move away from him. He tried to go with her but she rebuffed him, asserting he had to stay. “You can’t go with me because it’s not your time.”

She then receded into the distance through a tunnel, leaving her brother to complete his own NDE. “When I awoke, I told the doctor that my sister had died. He denied it, but at my insistence, he had a nurse check on it. She had in fact died, just as I knew she did.^⁠8”

Such cases are known to researchers as “Peak-in-Darien cases” for reasons I’ll explain. Obviously neurochemistry and repressed memories (or any other reductive theory) cannot explain away such phenomena. 

Many experiencers such as Mellen-Thomas Benedict and Lynnclaire Dennis have brought back scientific discoveries from their NDEs. Mellen-Thomas Benedict participated in a number of medical research projects, and due to the information he gave the researchers, their work was advanced in a significant way. He now does DNA research and works on instruments that can help doctors use certain frequencies of light in healing patients. Lynnclaire Dennis was shown a geometric pattern which top quantum physicists are studying. Another experiencer who lives in Sweden has copyrights on over a hundred inventions making a significant difference in society.^⁠9

A twelve-year-old girl told Swiss-born psychiatrist and NDE researcher Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926 – 2004) once that she had hidden her death experience from her mother. It had been so pleasant she did not want to come back. “I don’t want to tell my mummy that there is a nicer home than ours,” she said. Eventually she told her father all the details, including how she had been lovingly held by her brother.^⁠10 Needless to say, he was shocked, because her brother had died a few months before she was born and her parents had never told her.

Such cases abound in the “paranormal” and transpersonal literature.

In Jan’s case, as a toddler she “dreamed” of both an older and younger brother, the elder being called John. Sometimes both brothers stayed with her while she slept and Jan was baffled when she searched the house in the morning but couldn’t find them (she did this for several years). She later learned her mother had a miscarriage before her older sister was born and the baby was a boy her parents had named John. The younger brother Jan was looking for was eventually conceived and born, at which point Jan no longer was compelled to search for her missing brothers. John informed Jan his job was supposed to have been to protect Jan and her sister but that he would have to do so in spirit form instead of physical.^⁠11

If deceased acquaintances or relatives are encountered in an otherworldly dimension, they are usually recognized by their appearance, while communication is possible through thought transfer. Sometimes totally unknown spirits are encountered during an NDE:

During my cardiac arrest I had [an] extensive experience…and later I saw, apart from my deceased grandmother, a man who had looked at me lovingly, but whom I did not know. More than 10 years later, at my mother’s deathbed, she confessed to me that I had been born out of an extramarital relationship, my father being a Jewish man who had been deported and killed during the second World War, and my mother showed me his picture. The unknown man that I had seen more than 10 years before during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.^⁠12 

Margarita Nomgard, a 27-year-old nurse in Breda, Holland had a serious car accident. She reported that her spirit hovered over her body during a desperate operation to save her life and guided the hand of the surgeon.

“I remember thinking that the surgeon was missing a deep cut that was bleeding badly in a ruptured kidney. I recall floating towards the operating table and coming closer towards him, placing my hand on top of his and guiding it towards the hidden cut. Suddenly he said, ‘Oh here it is…here’s the source of bleeding.’ At that point my spirit re-entered my body and my next memory is waking up in the recovery room.”

Afterwards the surgeon, a Dr D. S. Ashari, confirmed that the woman was hemorrhaging badly until he repaired a deep laceration in her right kidney.^⁠13 

George Rodonaia (Russian name Yuri) brought back veridical information from his three day long(!) NDE (yes, he was clinically dead for three days). He had been run down by KGB agents and was dead on arrival at hospital; his corpse was put in a morgue freezer for three days before being taken out for the autopsy. During this time, Rodonaia was able to visit his family in his discarnate state. He saw his grieving wife and their two sons, both too small to understand that their father had been killed.

Then he visited his next-door neighbours who had given birth to a new child a couple of days before Yuri’s death. They were particularly upset that the baby would not stop crying. No matter what they did she continued to cry; the doctors were stumped. All the usual things such as colic were ruled out and medical staff sent the young family home hoping the baby would eventually settle down. While present in this discarnate state, Yuri used his enhanced vision to scan her body and noted that her hip had been broken shortly after birth (a nurse had dropped her). (He also discovered he could get inside people’s heads and see and hear what they did—again, nothing new to the mystic or occultist or talented remove viewer.) 

Rodonaia telepathically instructed the baby not to cry as no one would understand her—and she did. Having just incarnated from the spirit world, children are often capable of effortlessly perceiving spirits around them. They are still adjusting to seeing through the limited prism of the physical eye-brain system operating in the visible EMF spectrum, rather than exclusively through their energy field/s. Many children cannot conceive that the other people around them are not seeing all the things they are. A similar rule applies to child NDEers who cannot understand why, during the out-of-body part of the experience, the people nearby cannot perceive their astral form; they wonder why people “ignored” them.^⁠14

After this part of the NDE, Rodonaia experienced a life review in which he experienced the death of his parents at the hands of the KGB—totally new information to him at the time. Eventually (after three days in the hospital freezer vault with cadavers) the doctor from Moscow came to perform the autopsy on him and he suddenly revived as his trunk was being cut into, which sent the head doctor screaming from the scene. (Kinda hilarious, IMHO, though probably not so much for the good doctor!) It took three days for the swelling of his tongue to reduce enough for Rodonaia to speak, and when he could, his first words warned the doctors about the child with the broken hip.^⁠15 X-rays and questioning of the nurse responsible proved Rodanaia’s disembodied diagnosis correct. Needless to say, conventional physiological wisdom suggests that Rodonaia should have been irreparably brain-damaged due to hypoxia after three days of death, but such was not the case.

Most staggering of all are those NDEs and deathbed visions involving two or more individuals. In one case, as a female NDEer found herself moving through the tunnel and approaching the realm of light, she saw a friend of hers coming back! As they passed, the friend telepathically communicated to her that he had died, but was being “sent back.” The woman, too, was eventually “sent back” and after she recovered she learned that her friend had suffered a cardiac arrest at approximately the same time of her own experience.^⁠16

Experiences such as this speak to an objectively existing archetypal structure in the collective unconscious—allowing for shared experiences of the tunnel and other afterlife realms. The imaginal realm (term coined by scholar Henri Corbin) does not simply consist of the imaginary. 

A recently shared deathbed vision from a contact in Australia (date: June 28, 2022) featured this salient section regarding her grandfather (“Pop”) who had passed in his sleep:

He was peacefully curled up in bed under the blankets. I laid down next to him in the bed…it just seemed like he was resting. Then my husband who had a really special bond with him came over and put his hand on [Pop’s] back and his energy responded! He had technically “passed” but he was still very much here! 

The funeral people came to take his body and asked if we wanted to say a final goodbye. We gathered in the room and joined in a big hug. I told Pop it was ok to go now and be at peace… Then I saw a spark of light flash, I looked over to see if anyone had noticed, Mum gasped and said, “Did you feel that cold flash?”^⁠17 

Another experience from an Aussie (Lou) who was eighteen at the time:

…a family friend who was in his [sixties] was in hospital—he had bone cancer which started in his left shoulder [and spread]…and the doctors said he had three months left. The next night I woke with an intense pain in my left shoulder—I was in that kind of semi-awake state and I was moving up a tunnel with a light at the end. As I went up I heard this man’s voice saying my name and the pain in my arm went away but then I realised this was not my time but his and I had a moment of panic which fully woke me—I looked at the clock and it was 2 am. The next morning my mum called me to tell me our friend had passed during the night. I asked her to call the hospital and find out time of death and it was 2 am.^⁠18 

There was an interesting post script:

A couple of years after this I was doing the Ouija board with a couple of friends…I didn’t really believe it so I held my hand above the pointer not on it when it started to move and thought one of my friends was pushing it. What it spelled out was: “Lou, tell XXX that Daddy is ok.” The XXX was that man’s daughter. Neither of my friends knew anything about this man.^⁠19

Lou described the initial tunnel experience as peaceful, as she felt all pain leaving her body. 

We should note that attempts to explain the tunnel experience as a Freudian phenomenon have failed, despite being promoted by the likes of Barbara Honegger and Carl Sagan. This idea was demolished by Susan Blackmore’s 1983 study Birth and the OBE: An Unhelpful Analogy, which found, “no significant relationship between OBEs and type of birth, nor between tunnel experiences and birth.^⁠20” 

Tunnel experiences are not imprinted subconsciously by travelling through the birth canal, and people who are born by C-section still have OBEs and NDEs. Period.

How prevalent is the tunnel aspect of the NDE? A 1982 Gallup poll found only 9% of people reported a tunnel. “Today, tunnel reports average around one-fourth to one-third of known cases”—mostly in the USA and a few other countries. Atwater is adamant that outside of that in other parts of the world tunnels are rarely mentioned.^⁠21

Another case of shared experience (also from Atwater) details Steven’s and Debbie’s drowning experience in a river of North Carolina, America. They had been smoking cannabis and, bored, decided (stupidly) to run the knee-high rapids, which quickly led to their being swept off their feet and dragged downriver. Succumbing to the water, Steven found it taking on a golden glow; time stopped and he experienced total peace and serenity, followed by his life review. This finished with an aerial perspective of his own funeral where he saw himself in the casket surrounded by family and friends. Then, as if some benevolent force engulfed him, he was suddenly thrust out of the water, gasping for air. He grabbed Debbie’s hair and swam for the rocks. He recounted, “it became apparent that we both had the same experience underwater—the golden glow, the serenity, seeing our lives flash before us, floating over a funeral, and seeing ourselves in a casket.^⁠22” 

The event that saved Steven’s life has all the hallmarks of a Daimonic intervention (by his own “higher self”), including the cessation of time and the emergence of a golden glow in the water, as well as the accompanying peace and serenity. Another of Atwater’s cases (in The Forever Angels) is from Audy who, at age three, was drowned in the bath intentionally by her psychotic babysitter, and evidently rescued by an unknown force which caused a knock at the door. At this, the babysitter removed Audy from the tub and wrapped her in a towel only to open the door and find nobody there.^⁠23

It probably saved Audy’s life.

In The Fingerprints of God, Arvin S. Gibson tells the story of Jake and his firefighting crew, who became trapped on a steep mountainside when the wind changed suddenly on them. Suffocated from the lack of oxygen, the members of this specialist crew (consisting of two twenty person units) dropped to the ground one by one, only to find themselves “standing” over their bodies in the air. Jake noticed fellow firefighter, Jose, who had been born with a defective foot, and exclaimed, “Look Jose, your foot is straight.”

A bright light now appeared and Jake was greeted by his deceased great-grandfather who explained that none of the crew who chose to return to their bodies would suffer ill effects from the fire. As Jake walked back up the hill protected in a “bubble” from the intense heat, he noticed that some of his metal tools had actually melted, yet he was unscathed. (Recall from Chapter 1 that Daniel Home attributed his paranormal talents—including fire imperviousness—to the presence of his attending spirits.) 

Reaching safety, the crew gathered in awe and reverence, knelt in prayer and “thanked the Lord.” In comparing personal accounts, the men and women were astonished that they had each undergone some type of near-death experience.^⁠24 After rescue, each crew member confirmed the mutual event. Some claimed to have talked to each other while out-of-body. Separately, each of these claims was verified. All involved had met deceased relatives as part of their scenario, and had to choose whether or not they would return to earth.^⁠25 

Italian parapsychologist, Ernesto Bozzano (1862 - 1943) was reportedly the first to notice that dying people mainly see visions of dead folk.^⁠26 He reasoned that if such visions were merely subjective hallucinations produced by dying brains, why not see living as well as dead people?

If these visions were merely concocted by a malfunctioning brain then why the consistency between so many thousands of reports?

Why do we not see NDEers having visions of Santa, Satan, the flying spaghetti monster, honest politicians, well-informed psi sceptics, or other implausible things?

Incidentally, it is true that living people occasionally appear in children’s NDEs, as well as adults, but according to Atwater it’s more common with kids (and we can explain it without resorting to the tired old trope of “hallucinations”—see Book 2). These friendly figures remain present (or visible) only for as long as it takes to reassure the child—then they disappear.^⁠27

Deathbed visions are renowned for producing elevated, even ecstatic states of consciousness in the dying person—if this was really just a dying brain playing up, would we not instead expect disorganised thought, disorientation, fear, or other signs of malfunction or physiological distress? That, however, is not what we find.

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In 1961, Dr Karlis Osis undertook a major scientific study of deathbed visions in which he found some interesting anomalies, including two patients, one schizophrenic and the other senile, who recovered their normal mental functions just before death—^⁠28facts that clearly do not support the “dying brain” hypothesis of the materialist. Michael Grosso supplies similar cases of this nature in Chapter 2 of his well-conceived book, Experiencing the Next World Now. (This phenomenon is known as terminal lucidity—more about that in Book 2.)

The great Carl Jung reports in Synchronicity, the story of a woman who had lapsed into a coma, suffering “a genuine heart collapse followed by syncope due to cerebral anaemia,” only to find herself hovering around the ceiling, observing with great lucidity and bemusement the antics of the panicked doctor, as he paced hurriedly back and forth in the room, apparently not knowing what to do.

The next day, when she felt a little stronger, she made a remark to the nurse about the incompetent and “hysterical” behaviour of the doctor during her coma. The nurse strenuously denied this criticism, believing the patient had been completely unconscious at the time and could not have known anything of what transpired. Only when the patient described in full detail what had happened during the coma was the nurse obliged to admit that the patient had perceived the events exactly as they happened. 

To Jung it was remarkable “that it was not an immediate perception of the situation through indirect or unconscious observation,” but that she “saw the whole situation from above,” as so many NDEers do.^⁠29 Jung himself experienced an NDE in 1944 in which he found himself rising rapidly to a point far above the earth (discussed in Book 2). In the end he was genuinely annoyed at being revived—he preferred his post-mortem condition.

Over time doctors learnt to be mindful of their language while operating on anaesthetised patients. At least one doctor spent several uncomfortable weeks baffled by why his usually very friendly portly patient suddenly cooled towards him post-operation. Eventually he questioned her directly, much to his resulting embarrassment. 

After making an abdominal incision through many excess layers of fat, he had said wryly to his assistant: “Now let’s get a step-ladder and climb down there.” The woman, floating above the bed, had apparently heard every word.^⁠30

F. Gordon Greene has suggested that since more of the room is visible from the corner of the ceiling in a single glance than from any other point, it isn’t surprising that so many people find themselves in this location during the NDE. Atwater adds that three quarters of her database (adults and children) reported going either to the left ceiling corner, or hovering to the left of their body. Furthermore, nurses in critical care units have noted that between 80 and 90 percent of their patients see spirit visitors manifesting to the left. Hospice volunteers and medical staff have made the same observation.^⁠31

There is surely a reason for this pattern—potentially to do with the way brain hemispheres interpret this information incoming from the field.

Interestingly, Neuroscientists Olaf Blanke and Sebastian Dieguez have proposed two types of near-death experiences. Type one, which is assonciated with the brain’s left hemisphere, features an altered sense of time and impressions of flying. Type two, involving the right hemisphere, is characterised by seeing or communicating with spirits, and hearing voices, sounds and music.^⁠32 [Emphasis added]

Though Blanke’s and Dieguez’ hypothesis is specifically regarding the perceptions of NDEers, this right-hemispheric association with seeing spirits could potentially be generalised to the people in waking consciousness who also perceive spirits manifesting on their left. A complicating factor, however, is that each of our physical eyes are split in two in terms of perceiving the world around us. Thus, “objects seen to our left are sensed by the right half of our left eye [and vice versa]. In other words, light coming from anywhere in the left half of the visual environment projects onto the two right half-retinas [of each eye], and the information is sent to the right hemisphere.”^⁠33

Ultimately, information in the visual field is sent to the occipital lobe at the rear of the brain for processing. The “left-handedness” of most spirit manifestations and OB location remains largely a mystery. It may also involve the temporal lobes, which are also used for processing sensory information. Perhaps spirits manifesting as electromagnetic fields in our field of reality stimulate or involve the right temporal lobe more so and therefore are perceived psychologically (we ultimately “see” with our minds) as appearing on the left much more than the right. Obviously this is all speculative on my part.

Studies have indicated the right temporal lobe “contributes to the global processing of visual information,”^⁠34 as opposed to the left temporal lobe (typically the dominant one in most people) which is involved in processing language and verbal information.

In terms of the OB (out-of-body) location of the NDEer specifically, Dan “Phase Conjugation” Winter tells us that the soul/plasma body always goes to the place of optimal charge implosion/compression in the room—and^⁠35 shamanically speaking these would constitute one of the fictional Don Juan Matus’ “power places.” In other words, the soul/ka/plasma body naturally is drawn to the location where it is most electrically supported.

Bonus Case Study 1: A Jewish man named Jacob had been hit by a motorcycle in Holland in 1975, whereupon he experienced himself viewing the scene of the accident and his broken body, from an aerial perspective. He became aware of a golden light that he moved towards, but was told it was not his time to cross over by a monk wearing a brown robe. The monk foretold of several future events that would come to pass in Jacob’s life, all of which did, but that wasn’t even the strange part. In 1980, Jacob was travelling in Israel and stopped to pray at a mosque used by Muslims and Jews alike. As he went to leave, an old Muslim man came up to him and said, “You are different from the others. They rarely sit down to pray with us.”

The old man paused for a moment, looking closely at Jacob before continuing. “You have met the monk. Do not forget what he has told you.^⁠36” 

Bonus Case Study 2: While involved in thanatological work, Stan Grof visited a doctor at a Miami hospital who told him about the NDE of a Cuban immigrant woman who had a cardiac arrest and a classic OBE. She found herself back in Cuba in a house she had previously lived in but not seen for many years. Her distress was due to the fact that the current occupants had made changes to the house, moved things around, swapped out furniture, and also painted the fence a shade of green that she found totally unacceptable.

“Her attending physician had been able to verify that she had accurately described the changes that had occurred in the house during her absence—including the fact that the fence had been painted an unusual shade of green.^⁠37” 

Bonus Case Study 3: The following is part of the report of a nurse from a Coronary Care Unit regarding a 44-year old cyanotic and comatose man brought into the coronary care unit, who needed his dentures removed as staff prepped to revive him: 

Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. The moment he sees me he says: “O, that nurse knows where my dentures are.” I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: “You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath, and there you put my teeth.” I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. It appeared that the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with the CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself.^⁠38 

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Not Quite Dead Brains?

While it is easy to see from the preceding material that veridical psi and OBE perceptions cannot be accounted for by a reductive “dying brain” hypothesis (nor explained by Funda-Christians who think everything that isn’t Jayzus is the devil), there have been some interesting developments in neurology since 2013. Daniel Kroeger and colleagues at the university of Montreal found that a “novel brain phenomenon is observable in both humans and animals during coma that is deeper than the one reflected by the isoelectric EEG.”

Starting within the hippocampus—deep in the brain’s limbic lobe—and rippling out to the cortex, they found quasi-rhythmic sharp waves which they dubbed Nu-complexes.^⁠39 

Evidence indicates the hippocampus is intimately involved in spatial processing, learning and long-term memory formation.^⁠40 “One of the major functions of [the] hippocampus is forming [a] cognitive map, which is a type of mental representation related to acquisition, coding, storing, recalling, and decoding of information on relative locations within a specific environment.”^⁠41 

Perhaps these rhythmic Nu-complex waves identified by Kroger et al. are involved in the early stages of NDEs where people often tend to still perceive themselves as still being in the same physical environment as their physical body (albeit from a different vantage point, usually aerial and near the ceiling). Spatial perception and processing is still relevant and occurring in these early stages of NDEs—does this partially account for the bursts of activity of the hippocampus rippling out to the rest of the brain? Is it encoding in real-time the near-earth OB perceptions of NDEers? (The memories resultantly formed are believed to be distributed throughout the whole brain [holographically], a point I tackled in Book 1.)

We could speculate that as an NDE deepens and the person perceives themselves in other non-earthly and non-spatial realms, this type of hippocampal mapping activity may cease. Unfortunately it appears no one has such data for longer NDEs for obvious reasons.

Also in 2013, Jimo Borjigin and colleagues at the University of Michigan found evidence the brain is not always entirely inactive during cardiac arrest. Experimenting on rats, they found that within the first thirty seconds of arrest, the rats’ brains produced transient synchronous bursts of gamma waves that were global and highly coherent. Thus,

High-frequency neurophysiological activity in the near-death state exceeded levels found during the conscious waking state. These data demonstrate that the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near-death^⁠42. (Emphasis added)

Now, it seems self-evident that a thirty second burst of gamma waves does not explain veridical OBE perception or the “paranormal” acquisition of information during an extended NDE (lasting minutes, hours, or even days!) or other mystical states, however, I speculate these bursts of high activity may be involved in the early stages of an NDE and could perhaps be correlates of non-physical sensory perception as it is reflected/registered and stored “in” the brain.

This short-term brain activity may even partially account for some content of “shallow” (as opposed to deep) NDEs, where there is likely to be a greater degree of the individual’s personal and cultural psychological overlay (before the transpersonal and archetypal elements more fully emerge). Obviously there are many unanswered questions in this realm.^⁠43 

(I have some more exotic speculative ideas about what may be happening here, but I’m not getting into it right now!)

NDEs Are Different to Hallucinations and Imagined Events

It is also worth noting, while we are debunking the would-be debunkers of psi and NDEs, that Greyson (2006) found over a period of twenty years that NDE accounts did not significantly change over time and were not embellished. The accounts were reliable and vividly remembered.^⁠44 Additionally, an important 2014 study by the rather aesthetic Arianna Palmieri and her colleagues at the University of Padova, Italy, demonstrated that,

“NDE memories were similar to real memories in terms of detail richness, self-referential, and emotional information. Moreover, NDE memories were significantly different from memories of imagined events.”  (Emphasis added) 

In sum,

the EEG pattern of correlations for NDE memory recall differed from the pattern for memories of imagined events. In conclusion, our findings suggest that, at a phenomenological level, NDE memories cannot be considered equivalent to imagined memories, and at a neural level, NDE memories are stored as episodic memories of events experienced in a peculiar state of consciousness.^⁠45

Thus, an NDE memory represents a memory of a psychologically real event, not a hallucinated or imagined one. This dovetails nicely with the accounts featuring veridical OBEs and psi.

As Dr Dean Radin saliently points out in Real Magic, it may be that some of the vivid and psi aspects of NDEs emerge so readily because they are not then being suppressed by a normally functioning brain.^⁠46

In Book 1 I emphasised that the brain acts to minimise and focus our consciousness rather then generating it, as funda-materialists believe.

The best NDEs prove my point: various people from around the world have testified that their greatest experiences in this life happened while they were clinically dead with no detectable brain activity.

Thanks for reading. The audio version 🎧 will be posted soon in The Truthiversity.

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*Complete citations will be found in Book 2

¹ Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 107.

² See BOOK 2 of THE GRAND ILLUSION - jump on the wait list to be notified.

³ Meijer, The Anticipation of Afterlife…

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light, 47.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Kevin Williams, Nothing Better than Death, 129.

⁸ Moody, Beyond the Light, 157-8.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Kubler-Ross, The Wheel of Life, 182.

¹¹ See Atwater, The Forever Angels, Introduction.

¹² Van Lommel, Continuity of Consciousness, www.iands.org/research/important_studies/dr._pim_van_lommel_m.d._continuity_of_consciousness_4.html

¹³ Bushby, Glimpses of Life Beyond…, 39.

¹⁴ See Atwater, The Forever Angels, chapter 9.

¹⁵ See Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, 164-6. Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry's book entitled Transformed by the Light is quoted from on www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence10.html. Note: In this report, the child is identified as a boy, and the broken bone is in “his” arm. It appears that something  has been “lost in translation” somewhere. In an account provided by Ian Lawton in New Dawn issue No.116, the broken bone is identified as the hip. Either way, whether hip or arm, Rodonaia observed something in the child while he was dead that the doctors did ultimately verify.

¹⁶ Talbot, The Holographic Universe, 242.

¹⁷ Facebook post from June 28, 2022. Name withheld for privacy.

¹⁸ Private communication, December, 2022.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Blackmore, Birth and the OBE: An Unhelpful Analogy, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 77, 229-238, 1983.

²¹ See Atwater, The Forever Angels, chapter 1.

²² Atwater, The Big Book…, 168-9.

²³ See Atwater, The Forever Angels, chapter 3.

²⁴ Referenced by Atwater in The Big Book…, 169-170.

²⁵ Atwater, Is the Afterlife What We Think It Is? New Dawn, Special Issue No. 7.

²⁶ Grosso, Experiencing the Next World…, 33.

²⁷ See Atwater, The Forever Angels, chapter 1.

²⁸ Gross, Experiencing the Next…, 37.

²⁹ See Jung, Synchronicity, 92–3.

³⁰ Waite, Ch. 3.

³¹ Atwater, The Big Book of…, 361-2.

³² Neil Dagnall and Ken Drinkwater, Are near-death experiences hallucinations? Experts explain the science behind this puzzling phenomenon, https://theconversation.com/are-near-death-experiences-hallucinations-experts-explain-the-science-behind-this-puzzling-phenomenon

³³ RIGHT OR LEFT - DOES ONE SIDE OF YOUR BRAIN CONTROL YOUR VISION?, https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/right-or-left-does-one-side-of-your-brain-control-your-vision

³⁴ J Doyon 1, B Milner, Right temporal-lobe contribution to global visual processing, Neuropsychologia, 1991;29(5):343-60. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(91)90024-3.

³⁵ Winter, Fractal Conjugate Space and Time, 130.

³⁶ Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters, 70-1.

³⁷ Grof, The Holotropic Mind, 138.

³⁸ Van Lommel, Continuity of Consciousness, www.iands.org/research/important_studies/dr._pim_van_lommel_m.d._continuity_of_consciousness_4.html

³⁹ Kroeger et al., Human Brain Activity Patterns beyond the Isoelectric Line of Extreme Deep Coma, PLoS 1, September 23, Volume 8, Issue 9, 2013.

⁴⁰ https://www.britannica.com/science/hippocampus

⁴¹ Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta, Hippocampus Functions, https://www.news-medical.net/health/Hippocampus-Functions.aspx#:~:text=Being%20an%20integral%20part%20of,memory%20consolidation%2C%20and%20spatial%20navigation.

⁴² Borjigin, et al., Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, August 27, 2013, vol. 110, no. 35.

⁴³ FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION OF the neurology, see pages 164-5 of van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life.

⁴⁴ Greyson, Consistency of near-death experience accounts over two decades: Are reports embellished over time?, Resuscitation (2007), doi:10.1016/j.resuscitation.2006.10.013

⁴⁵ Palmieri et al., “Reality”of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, June 2014, Volume 8, Article 429.

⁴⁶ Radin, Real Magic, 158.