lands, often seen as a garden
• a barrier or border
• a decision whether to go on or go back, sometimes made by the NDE-er, sometimes made for them
• return into the body
• life-changes such as increased openness and spirituality
If NDEs are genuine journeys to another dimension, you’d expect them to be similar in all times and places, but are they? Gregory Shushan, a cultural historian at the University of Oxford, has compared contemporary NDE accounts from around the world with historical accounts of NDEs from the religious literature of India, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and found marked similarities – leaving the body, rising into a light, meeting spirits, a life-review, the return. We see similar accounts in classical literature (Plato’s myth of Er is a famous account, as is Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) and in Christian accounts, although medieval Christians tended to report seeing Hell populated by corrupt priests. Shushan speculates that various cultures’ conception of the afterlife may have sprung from a core NDE experience, with cultural dogma then added to survivors’ accounts.11
There are some cultural differences in people’s accounts, however. Some Western accounts report meeting Jesus, particularly in evangelical Christian books, while Indian NDE-ers are more likely to meet Yama, god of death. Indians are also more likely to say they were sent back to their body not because they had a mission to complete, but because of a bureaucratic error. In general the similarities are more marked than the differences. This is one reason that evangelical Christianity, having become briefly enraptured by ‘heaven-tourism’ accounts, like Heaven Is Real and the recently debunked The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, now distances itself from NDE research. In 2015, a leading evangelical bookstore stopped selling heaven-tourism books,12 because most NDE accounts do not fit with traditional Christian accounts of the afterlife: the physical body is not resurrected, the soul goes to Heaven immediately rather than at the Last Judgment, the soul doesn’t necessarily meet Jesus, and it doesn’t apparently matter if you’re Christian or not. And most NDE survivors come back less religious, less likely to identify with a particular religion and less likely to go to church.
Are NDEs epiphenomena caused by physiological processes, or glimpses of another dimension? The evidence is not decisive either way. Some researchers have tried to prove consciousness leaves the body by hiding a sign in the top corner of an operating theatre to see if any NDE survivors happen to catch a glimpse of it on their way to Heaven. None has. Sceptics have put forward materialist explanations for NDEs: they are the last fireworks show of a brain shutting down from oxygen-starvation; the tunnel is the visual processing system atrophying; the loving white light and gathered spirits of loved ones are the ego trying to console itself in the face of its annihilation. If that is the case, if the brain is capable of putting on such a vivid, coherent and consoling virtual-reality show while going offline, all I can say is ‘Well played, brain.’ The alternative to the brain-restricted theory of consciousness is that the mind is not confined to the brain, the brain instead acts as a sort of filter or radio-receiver, and consciousness survives and expands after the brain dies. Ecstasy, then, is a glimpse of a vaster consciousness that our sense of self emerges from and returns to. That is what Myers, James and Huxley believed. It was what I felt during my NDE. But you’d need some pretty solid evidence to overturn the brain-restricted theory of consciousness, such as strong proof of telepathy, or remembrance of past lives, or messages from beyond the grave. Myers, James and colleagues began to collect such evidence in their work for the Society for Psychical Research, which attracted some of the best minds of the day, including Marie Curie and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Unfortunately, para-psychology does not have the prestige it had in James and Myers’s day. Today, it is often written off as a respectable object of enquiry by the guardians of science and it struggles to attract funding, which is a pity, considering there’s plenty we don’t yet understand about the nature of consciousness.13
The fruits and risks of spontaneous spiritual experiences
What are the fruits of spontaneous spiritual experiences? In all three cases – the moments of connection, the moments of surrender, and near-death experiences – people typically report positive benefits to their mental health. They find such moments healing, connecting and inspiring. People responding to my survey said they felt their spiritual experiences had made them feel more ‘at home in the universe’; they felt more connection and empathy to other beings, and also more love for themselves. Spontaneous spiritual experiences also make people more open: they ‘made me open to other ways of looking at things’, they ‘made me less sceptical, less quick to judge, more compassionate’. They made some people feel that we are not ‘just’ our brains, bodies or egos, and perhaps something in us survives after death. One of the most common emotional changes from NDEs is that people come back less afraid of death because they think death is not the end.
For some people, including me, spontaneous spiritual experiences led to a feeling of deep psychic regeneration after a time of crisis. One respondent writes: ‘It allowed me to relinquish my desperate control over my negative feelings, either physical pain or mental depression or spiritual guilt. It’s like my well has run dry, but the very last bit of digging uncovers the spring that refills the well of my soul.’ Although such experiences are very different from the rationalism of CBT, there are parallels. We are stuck in a prison of negative ego-beliefs; liberation comes when we let go of them. In CBT, this liberation comes from the slow, rational dismantling of beliefs, a chipping away at the walls of the shed. In ecstatic experiences, people are suddenly liberated – the walls fall down and they are free. But you probably still need regular ethical practices to turn your epiphany into durable habits.
However, it is a mistake to think that spontaneous spiritual experiences are always joyful and life-enhancing. There can be aspects of spontaneous experience that are difficult to accept or integrate. First, people may encounter a spiritual presence they perceive as threatening, evil or demonic. Up to 10 per cent of NDEs involve a Hell experience – some accounts are worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. And, of course, many people’s experience of hearing voices or seeing spirits is deeply intrusive and distressing, for example a voice repeatedly telling you to kill yourself. How should we view such negative experiences? I’d suggest the best way is to see them as ‘shadow’ aspects of our own psyche, not fundamentally real, just a projection from our subconscious that we can transform if we maintain courage, wisdom and compassion. The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us: ‘Be not daunted or terrified or awed. Recognise whatever appears as the reflection of your own consciousness.’ Eleanor Longden, who delivered a much-watched TED talk about hearing voices, says she managed to come to terms with an intrusive, aggressive and ‘grotesque’ demonic presence, who plagued her for years, by recognising him as ‘the unaccepted aspects of my self-image, my shadow’. By taking a more practical and compassionate approach to him, and not letting herself be bullied, Eleanor and her shadow managed to work out a more balanced and amicable relationship.14
Even positive spontaneous experiences can be difficult to integrate into one’s life. One can find mundane reality disappointing after having had an ecstatic glimpse of God or Heaven. Some NDE survivors say they wish they hadn’t come back. Personally, I have longed to have another such experience but am still searching for the door. It can also be very difficult to communicate an ecstatic experience. Other people may not understand or care. The RERC database is full of tragi-comic moments like this:
Starting around 1967, there were several different times in the middle of the night that silvery figures appeared on my side toward the bottom of the bed . . . At one time in particular I was so startled that I made a noise which awakened my husband as they vanished. When I told him that there were three humanoids standing there, he sarcastically shouted, ‘Well, do me a favour:
