an evil force, and one enters what can only be described as a hell-like environment. In the negative cases, there are after-effects, too. “Like those respondents who had positive experiences, the people in this category returned from their encounters with an increased conviction that life continues after death. They also felt a strong urge radically to modify their former way of life.”12
In all, about one-eighth of Grey’s interviewees reported experiences that were hell-like. None of this, of course, means that such imagery has to be taken in a literal fashion or that there is such a place or state as a literal hell. But, it is clearly an area of research that still needs much more careful examination. As Osis remarks, “If this pattern is replicated and sound, it would require nothing less than considering the positive and negative NDEs as one integrated whole—a sweeping reorganization of our views.”
Problems with the Near-Death Experience
According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies, “An NDE may occur when a person is considered clinically dead, or even to one not close to death but who is under some biological and/or psychological stress. Somehow, the experience appears to be a biologically-based trigger for a spiritual event.” For me, one of the most exhaustive and fascinating attempts to understand just what is going on in this event is a book by Carol Zaleski, Other-world Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. Zaleski, who wrote this work initially as her doctoral thesis in religious studies at Harvard, gives us a sparkling overview of the NDE and sets it in a more universal perspective by analyzing examples from sources as diverse as the epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, St. Paul and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her main focus, however, as the title says, is a comparison of medieval otherworld journeys with those described in the NDE literature of today. In addition, she reviews the modern scientific debate between the advocates of the NDE as a real glimpse of eternity and the hard-nosed skeptics who pour cascades of cold water over such “imaginative flights of fancy.”
Zaleski finds amazing parallels between the experiences of medieval saints, mystics and ordinary folk, and those relayed on talk shows or in the books of the NDE researchers of today. But she also finds some remarkable differences: “Gone are the bad deaths, harsh judgment scenes, purgatorial torments, and infernal terrors of medieval visions; by comparison, the modern other world is a congenial place, a democracy, a school for continuing education, and a garden of unearthly delights.”13 In other words, there is something very western about the terms in which the modern otherworld traveller conceptualizes his or her vision.
This brings us to one of the first observations I want to make about the NDE. The experience, though obviously universal in the sense that we can find examples of it at every time period and in every culture, is nevertheless culture specific. That is, it is expressed in forms of thought and language peculiar to its historical context. While those who have had the experience may all, or nearly all, see beings of light, these will be described variously as Jesus, Buddha or Krishna depending on who is doing the seeing and where. Zaleski points out, for example, that Dante’s heaven is much more hierarchical than any heaven in modern NDE experience. But the social order of Dante’s time was itself a hierarchical one: “For medieval audiences, the ranking of the blessed in a series of concentric but ascending heavens . . . derived its plausibility—or rather its imaginative power—from the fact that it reflected and affirmed the social order and provided an emblem for the structure of human intelligence.” What this cultural component indicates is that, whatever is happening in the NDE, there is certainly a subjective element provided by the individual concerned. If someone is indeed viewing a reality of some kind, it is a reality shaped by a particular background, conditioning and life situation. This, of course, does not automatically mean that the NDE itself can be dismissed as totally subjective. Being human, it is impossible for us to apprehend any reality in this world or the next without bringing to it whatever we ourselves are, and shaping it accordingly. It is possible intellectually to conceive of a totally objective reality in the abstract, but in practice there is no such thing as the “unobserved observer.” Even in science, allowance has to be made for the contribution we make in describing the “real” world.
A second problem faced by Zaleski and admitted in varying degrees by even the most enthusiastic of the NDE proponents is that of defining death itself. No matter how moving some of the descriptions of journeying into this other realm may be, we have to keep reminding ourselves that the operative word in “near-death experience” is “near.” All of these visionaries were near death; they were not actually dead, because, by definition, to be dead is to be at that point from which any kind of physical return is ruled out. Zaleski quotes from an article in the British medical journal The Lancet: “Death is just beyond the point from which anyone can return to tell us anything.” As she goes on to say, the “popular appeal of return-from-death stories rests partly on the assumption that temporary absence of vital signs is equivalent to death.”14
The difficulty here is that it is now very hard, even for ethicists and medical experts, to agree on what constitutes death. What’s more, as medical technology and skills advance and ever more amazing rescues of the dying are possible, even tentative definitions have to be constantly reexamined and updated. It should be remembered too, in this connection, that even NDE researchers themselves do not want to restrict the NDE too closely to death because they have documented so many cases where the same experience was encountered not near death but during meditation, in the face of extreme danger, while on a drug or during childbirth. Even allowing for all of this, however, I agree with Moody that while those who experience NDEs are not really dead in the full sense of the word, they have come very much closer to this ultimate experience than the rest of us. Or, as Zaleski puts it, “Whether NDEs occur in the grip of death or only in the face of death, they may still constitute a revelatory encounter with death.” These experiences are certainly not proof of a life after death, or of the other realities and entities reported. But, it is argued, they could well supply at the minimum some evidence upon which a belief in life after death could reasonably take its stand.
The critics, as one would expect, have come up with a wide variety of natural explanations to account for what the proponents of the NDE claim is a vision of another world or plane of reality. Certainly, as both Zaleski and Moody admit—along with a host of other responsible researchers in this field—it is essential to look hard at the question of whether any sufficient, natural causes exist to explain the phenomenon before leaping to any transcendental conclusions. In The Light Beyond, Moody devotes his final chapter, “Explanations,” to a detailed refutation of a range of natural possibilities. Zaleski, too, in an even more thorough manner, considers the critical literature and explanations ranging from the effects of stress on the body to drugs or sensory deprivation. Her chapter is called “Explanations and Counterexplanations.” There is no need to repeat here everything that has been said pro and con. Instead, I propose to look at the most obvious alternative, the hallucination theory.
Since a large majority of those who have experienced near-death were on various medications at the time of their brush with death and since altered states of consciousness can be produced by such physiological factors as an acute lack of oxygen (hypoxia or anoxia) or a sudden rush of endorphins, enkephalins or other as yet unknown chemicals secreted by the brain when stress, pain or fear occur, many skeptical scientists have argued that what we are dealing with here is some form of hallucination. As Zaleski says, as far as the debunkers are concerned, these “endogenous opiates are a neurochemical equivalent for and an answer to grace.”15
I believe this theory deserves further consideration. There can be no doubt that the human mind is capable of quite extraordinary thoughts and visions under the right stimuli. Visionary experiences can be produced by extended fasting, by extremes of physical exhaustion or by hallucinogenic substances. As I have already made clear, I am not personally subject to mystical visions or visitations of any kind. However, I do know what it is like to hallucinate on a chemical substance.
Let me explain. In the summer of 1962 I took
