Oxford, England, for some postgraduate studies in patristics, the writings of the early fathers of the Church. In February 1963, Dr. Frank Lake, a British psychiatrist from Nottingham, came to the university for a series of lectures. Lake was one of the earliest pioneers in the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of the mentally ill. He had been a missionary doctor in India for a number of years, and had spent almost all of his time as a psychiatrist dealing with people heavily involved in organized religion. At his invitation, following one of his lectures, I joined a small group of other clergy who volunteered to assist in a research project. Lake had become discouraged by the difficulty and length of time required for traditional analysis and counselling and was experimenting with LSD as a psychiatric shortcut. (I would remind the reader that this was well before LSD appeared in North America and became part of the drug scene in any way. At this point, none of us had even heard of it before.) I hitchhiked up to Nottingham one weekend that spring and joined Lake and the others at his centre, a place called Lingwood. An Anglican priest came and, along with four other priests, one of whom had been a distinguished Spit-fire pilot in the Battle of Britain, I received Holy Communion and then was administered some LSD. Each of us had been assigned to a room of his own and the doctor dropped by frequently to monitor what was going on.
Although it happened many years ago, the experience remains perfectly vivid in all its details. I had known nothing like it before and have never since. At first, it was like seeing Technicolor movies run at a very high speed inside my head. The speeded-up images were mainly of various family members, often doing extremely funny things. A tremendous sense of exaltation flooded me and it seemed nothing would ever be impossible—writing a world bestselling novel, rivalling the greatest artists who had ever painted, or composing music as great as Mozart’s or Beethoven’s. There were sensations of glorious light, and then visions of great beauty, both of the human form and of natural landscapes.
Suddenly, the mood changed, and with a growing sense of dread I approached a tunnel, which was as arid and dry as dust. The sensation of drawing a fingernail over a slate blackboard is the closest I can get to describe the feeling on my skin as I was forced through. From that point on, the trip became much worse. Spider-like monsters threatened my very being. Even with my eyes open it seemed as though the room was filled with horrific presences with sinister intent. Quite frankly, it was terrifying until I felt myself growing increasingly angry and wanting to fight back. I imagined myself wielding a short, sharp sword and plunging it into the belly of the enemy creatures, much like Frodo did with Shelob in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This was followed by a renewed sense of exaltation and awareness of a beauty I had never dreamed existed.
All of this went on for at least two hours, and even much later, when I was able to leave the centre and go for a walk in a nearby park, the flashbacks continued. One moment I was in the park watching the children playing and some adults busy with a cricket game, the next I was back in my own inner world with its exaggerated fears and glories. I remember looking across the park at some slum-like houses in the distance. Caught in the rays of the westering sun, they seemed to stand out with a glory that utterly transformed them.
I’m not sure what help any of us were to Dr. Lake in his research. The memory of the experience stands out much more sharply for me today than his conclusions with all of us afterwards. Although I gained no personal insights that could not have been acquired by other means, there was certainly a revelation of a kind. What was instructive was the glimpse into the incredible capacity of the brain to invent or recall suppressed material and to put it together in totally unexpected and original ways. There was, however—and this is in marked and important contrast with the NDE—no specifically religious content that I can remember, no visions of God or of Christ, no feeling of being in another realm of existence. Yet, while I would never care to repeat it, nor would I ever recommend it to anyone else, the experience was spiritual in that it further convinced me of dimensions of beauty or wider “doors of perception” only hinted at in ordinary life. Significantly, I felt no urge to stay there and no deep sense of peace.
It is tempting to infer from this personal account that perhaps the skeptics are right after all. In the NDE some kind of hallucination— possibly nature’s way of softening the moment of death—is taking place. Moody himself counters this argument with substantial evidence that a large number of recorded NDEs have taken place when there was a completely flat EEG.16 “The sheer number of these cases tells me that in some people NDEs have happened when they were technically dead. Had these been hallucinations, they would have shown up on the EEG.” The difficulty with this solution, however, is that at the current level of technology an EEG does not always give a precise reading in every instance. As Moody himself concedes, “Brain activity can be going on at such a deep level that surface electrodes don’t pick it up.” What impresses me much more is the remarkable fact that while NDEs vary widely in their tone and content, as we have seen, there is nevertheless a common core of experience running through them all regardless of time or place. It strains credulity in my view to suppose that hundreds of thousands of experiences, all of them hallucinatory, would still manage unanimously to convey such a profound sense of other-worldliness and of having somehow transcended death. I find this all the more cogent when the results of such experiences are almost uniformly positive—loss of the fear of death, commitment to greater love and understanding and commitment to a greater spiritual, although not necessarily religious, awareness and lifestyle. One other significant point should be made. As Zaleski makes clear, “for every pathological condition presumed [by the critics] to cause near-death visions, one can find subjects who were demonstrably free of its influence; therefore no single psychological or physiological syndrome can account for near-death experience.”17
In How to Know God, Deepak Chopra, the prominent doctor-writer, correctly notes that researchers today have found that many of the experiences summed up under the letters NDE can be reproduced if the right temporal lobe of the brain has been deprived of oxygen for a few moments. There can be a sense of going into the light or having visions of departed souls or angels welcoming one into the light. But, he wisely comments that “inducing the experience isn’t the same as having it; there is no spiritual meaning . . . to oxygen loss.” He observes, as we have already said, that people who have experienced near-death episodes report profound spiritual changes.18
In the years since Zaleski’s ground-breaking book, a lot of research has been done around the world. Particularly important is the work of Britain’s leading clinical authority on the NDE, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and his scientist wife, Elizabeth. Fenwick himself is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and an internationally known neuropsychiatrist—a specialist in the mind/brain interface and consciousness studies. Together the Fenwicks have written The Truth in the Light—An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (1996). Indeed, Elizabeth began her research convinced that NDEs could all be explained away scientifically. But, after confronting the full evidence, she concluded: “While you may be able to find scientific reasons for bits of the Near-Death experience, I can’t find any explanation which covers the whole thing. You have to account for it as a package and sceptics . . . simply don’t do that. None of the purely physical explanations will do; (sceptics) 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.” Dr. Peter Fenwick is scathing in his critique of the professional skeptics’ arguments and systematically destroys the entire range of objections made—from the one about the NDE being the natural product of a “dying brain” to the ever-present theory of wish fulfillment. He has a list of questions that he challenges the skeptics to answer. They are incisive, tough-minded and, in my view, utterly convincing. He accuses skeptical psychologists in particular of writing “absolute rubbish” about the NDE because they’re venturing into territory—the study of brain function—where they have no training at all. The Fenwick book is one all doubters should be required to read.
There is one final objection I want to look at before summarizing our findings. It deserves attention both because of the prestige and popularity of its chief proponent and because, at first sight, it has about it
