One of the replies I received came from the Reverend Ken Martin, pastor of Siloam United Church in London, Ontario. Martin wrote to me on August 22, 1989, to say he had recently had a remarkable out-of-body experience during a “silent heart attack.” It was the first of two attacks, and Martin, who is forty-eight, had been feeling tired and overworked. He told me he had made notes in his diary the same night he had his NDE and offered to share them. I spoke with him on the phone, discovered that the NDE had had a profound effect upon him, and invited him to send me his account. Here it is, verbatim: “I was sleeping earlier tonight with my wife, Beverley, when suddenly I awoke. There was an incredible pain in my chest and I was suddenly aware of being lifted up from the bed into the air. I took a fleeting, backward glance at the bed and saw Beverley sleeping, and then I was transported right out of the room into the sky. The sky was very dark in the background and yet there were swirls of very bright lights. I found myself caught up in one of these swirls. It was like being at the small end of a long funnel that was opening wider and wider. I was rushing through the funnel in a fast-moving swirl of light. It was incredibly bright. It was also warm and I felt very much at peace and extremely contented. It was as if there was a great strength lifting me and pulling me forward. I experienced the feeling that I was going home. There was no pain, no depression, and no worries about finishing my thesis, earning a living, or whether or not I would be able to return to work. It was as if these things were gone forever. I had a very definite feeling that I was coming home from someplace I had left a long time ago. Then I saw an extremely bright light ahead of me. All was so peaceful, warm, and well. I was rushing faster and faster into this ever-widening swirl of blazing light. It was as if someone was summoning me to come home but I heard no voice. The overwhelming feeling was one of incredible peace. Then, abruptly, I was yanked back and found myself in my bed again. I felt deeply disappointed and cried out: ‘Oh no, not this again!’ I guess that was a terrible thing to think and voice. Although there had been a few seconds as I first had felt myself being lifted into the dark sky when I felt disappointment at leaving my family, that feeling had quickly left me, overwhelmed by the sense of peace. Now I was back in bed with all the pain and depression and worry. I wept because I had come back. I now have a deep feeling that ‘home’ is somewhere else and would like to go back. When will I resume my journey? It was incredible!” Martin has now lost forty pounds—he had been up to 195—is swimming regularly on his doctor’s orders, and is back at work in a busy parish. In his accompanying letter to me, he says he now knows first-hand that “there is nothing to be afraid of after death.” He is also convinced that there is so much more to life than what we have known on earth. “Yet, I am also convinced that we Christians are in for a big surprise and that we have certainly made our God far too small.” He added that, apart from his wife, he has told nobody else about his experience. He has not, at the time of my writing this, shared this experience with his congregation. “Why not?” he queries. “Likely because I’m afraid of being called eccentric, crazy, or worse.”
It is impossible to do more than skim the surface of my flood of mail on this and related subjects, never mind describing in any adequate way all of what is now available on near-death experience. Letters have come from the educated and the uneducated, from the religious and the non-religious, from those who believe in life after death and those who previously were total skeptics. Many of those who wrote to me were not at death’s door when their “glimpse of eternity” or their sense of being able to “look down on my body” from some other vantage point occurred. Nearly all of them spoke of the “light,” of feelings of a peace beyond understanding, and of seeing loved ones or supernatural beings—God, Christ, Krishna, angels, or others—aware that they were using symbolic language to express what had happened to them. Most say their attitudes to both life and death were changed in the process. One man wrote to say that he now feels as though he is living “with one foot in each of two different worlds.” While there is generally some regret at not having passed on to the other side, there is, paradoxically, a greater commitment to this life, a desire to learn more, to love more. While those who have the experience do not necessarily become suddenly more religious, they invariably become more spiritual, more concerned with the depth dimension of living. All fear of death and dying, they say, is gone.7
“Hellish” Near-Death Experiences
One of my correspondents wrote me: “In 1992 I had a brain aneurysm bleed, and was given very little chance to live. Unfortunately I didn’t have the wonderful experience of going to the light. I went to the darkness and it was an experience that was both terrifying and life altering. If this is a glimpse of hell it is not at all the fire and demons—it is total isolation. I often wondered if there are others who have had this experience and if they see it as a warning or as a prophetic experience. I have never discussed this with anyone as it seems to be outside the bounds of what we all desire. Thank God I don’t think it lasted long. But it is as clear today as if it happened this morning.”
It is tempting, given the overwhelmingly positive nature of the NDE portrayed in the bulk of both popular and scientific literature, to assume that, whatever is signified by this phenomenon, its main thrust is extremely good news about dying and death. However, there is another side to the story, one that has not yet been fully studied and assimilated by NDE researchers. That some people who come close to the gates of death experience a reality that is anything but reassuring was first fully discussed by Dr. Maurice Rawlings in his 1978 book, Beyond Death’s Door.8 Rawlings, an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, argued from his medical experience that some people who have an NDE feel themselves to be in hell. Beyond Death’s Door is not a particularly good book in my opinion, as Rawlings only manages to adduce a very tiny number of such stories, and one has the feeling throughout that he had already decided on his conclusions before he began his research. But at least Rawlings has raised the issue that possibly all is not light and bliss during the near-death experience.
When George Gallup Jr. published his 1982 book, Adventures in Immortality: A Look Beyond the Threshold of Death, he too referred to respondents who said they had had a “hellish” experience while close to death. For the most recent and the most insightful look at this aspect of the NDE, though, one must look at Margot Grey’s Return From Death: An Exploration of the Near-Death Experience.9 Grey, a humanistic psychologist, based her research on interviews with thirty-eight people claiming near-death experiences and many more patients she later worked with in her practice. Grey herself had an NDE when she had a close brush with death while travelling in India. She reports she too had an encounter with light accompanied by a “feeling of being very close to the source of light and love, which seemed to be one.” Grey, who has no religious ties, states quite categorically that her studies have brought her to the conclusion that “conscious awareness survives physical death.”10
Her chapter on negative experiences breaks some new ground. She bases her remarks here on five of her own cases and nine negative cases from the general literature, together with information gleaned from interviews with cardiologists who have been on the lookout for NDE reports from their patients. Like Rawlings, these doctors stressed that negative NDEs are only made known very shortly after the episodes happen. In other words, such experiences tend to be quickly repressed. Grey found that those who experience this type of NDE feel a sense of guilt or shame at hellish experiences and would rather not admit to them. She also concludes that they may indeed have had some terrible deed in their background that they felt accounted for their sense of being in or going to hell. In his review of her book, Karlis Osis says that in this finding Grey “has put her finger on the right spot. We might need to rethink our methods. Maybe we have relied too much on the self-reports of the patients and have failed to ascertain observations made through the cooler eyes of doctors and nurses who were around when the patients started to talk about the NDEs that were still fresh in their memories.”11
Grey was able to come up with some quite significant similarities between the pattern of positive NDEs and that of the negative ones. In the negative NDE, instead of peace and a sense of well-being, there is a feeling of fear and panic. The sense of being out of the body is similar in both types. Instead of entering a tunnel, however, in
