that has gathered around the universal experience of birth to explain away the cluster of experiences reported by those who have had an NDE.
In his view, not only the NDE but almost every major religious concept, from death and rebirth to the primal Eden and the Fall, derives from our unconscious memories of the womb, the birth passage, the emergence into light and being swaddled and nursed. Religion, from his extremely polemical point of view, is nothing but the vague recollection of profound experiences at a time when we are utterly helpless and inarticulate.
As noted, there is an immediate surface appearance of verisimilitude about this. Yet, to coin a phrase, the more you scratch the surface of it the more there is to scratch. Without attempting to deal with Sagan’s theory as it affects the whole of religion, let me simply set out the problems I have with it vis-à-vis the topic in hand, the NDE.
First, birth, unlike the classical NDE, is an experience of moving from a place of safety, warmth and total intimacy out into the exposed and separated world of individual existence. However dependent and close to the mother, the baby begins to experience the pain of existence right from the start. With the first breath often comes a cry. Any accounts of birth experiences I have encountered in the relevant literature all stress the element of trauma and pain that attends the moments of our leaving what Sagan calls “the amniotic universe.” This is not what the NDE is about.
Second, so far from being “blurred perceptions” or “vague premonitions,” as Sagan describes our perinatal memories, reports of the NDE describe a great sense of clarity surrounding both perceptions and the recall of them later. In fact, as we have seen, many liken normal, waking perception to “dreaming” compared with the reality and vividness of what they have gone through.
Third, Sagan deliberately ignores or plays down the extraordinary transformational power of the NDE. Nothing he says, in my view, comes close to explaining why it is that the majority of people who’ve had a near-death experience find themselves so profoundly moved and changed by the events of their NDE. Something numinous or totally “other” seems to have happened to them.
Sagan, a media-wise, militant skeptic, may have been a scientist, but he can hardly be viewed as completely objective in his claims at this point. He was a leading member of the American Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. It was founded in 1976 by Sagan, Isaac Asimov and others to combat media promotion of anything purporting to be mysterious or unexplained— from the Bermuda Triangle to Von Daniken’s alien astronauts. There is nothing wrong with any of that except that, in their enthusiasm to expose “pseudo-science,” Sagan and company sometimes have been carried away and have swept with too wide a broom. They end up at times espousing not science but scientism, the view that only the empirical, scientific method can yield true knowledge. There are few things less scientific than that!
Obviously, if death is indeed a kind of new “birth” into an entirely different dimension of reality and being, it would not be surprising if attempts to describe it were to parallel those attendant on our emergence into the light of this world as infants. But the differences, at least to this investigator, seem to be much greater than the similarities.
The one overwhelmingly important aspect of the NDE none of these critics have ever really been able to deal with is the life-changing impact on the vast majority of subjects experiencing it.
After his NDE, Carl Jung wrote: “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”19 This view is almost universally held by both those who experience NDEs and the positive NDE researchers. But, of course, we are here still in the arena of faith and not of absolute scientific proof. In her review of Moody’s The Light Beyond in the IANDS Journal of Near-Death Studies, Judith Miller, Ph.D., chided Moody for not stating his faith in more positive terms and for not challenging traditional scientific paradigms.20 Moody, the acknowledged “leader on the cutting edge of this field,” began the book by saying: “We are no closer to answering the basic question of the afterlife now than we were thousands of years ago when it was first pondered by ancient man.” In other words, since the evidence provided by NDEs can’t be replicated on demand in a scientific laboratory, none of the amazing stories is firm proof of life after death. What the matter comes down to in the end is the authority or weight we give to mystical glimpses or visions of realities other than the empirical world we live in.
Zaleski argues that, like the arguments for the existence of God, the realities attested to by people who have had an NDE belong to a totally different sphere where the question is not so much can they be proven to be true as, do NDEs give insights which can be verified in one’s own experience? She concludes: “We may find no difficulty in respecting the testimony of those whose lives have been transformed by a near-death vision, but we can verify their discoveries only if, in some sense, we experience them for ourselves.”
I find the whole expanding exploration and research in this field and of consciousness studies to be one of the most exciting developments of our time. In my own thinking and research I find myself increasingly (though cautiously) positive about the validity of the NDE as a strong witness to invisible realities beyond. What carries most weight with me, as I have already suggested, is the consistency and clarity of the stories themselves, together with the undeniable evidence of dramatically changed lives. I know from my own pastoral experience the truth of what researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson has said. Psychiatry or therapeutic counselling often takes years to bring about only slight changes in people’s outlook and behaviour, but “the NDE regularly brings about a total transformation almost overnight.”
One final point. Mark Fox in his 2003 book, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience, raises the question clearly and persuasively: Why have the churches and religious leaders in general paid so little attention to what, after all, lies very near to the heart of what they are all about? The NDE raises sharply the issues of the nature of the soul, the afterlife, our personal destiny and, ultimately, the very meaning of life itself. Like Fox, my personal belief is that this entire phenomenon offers a bridge between religion and the modern world that church leaders should be rushing to cross. It affords a common language today in a crucial area where meaningful communication has virtually broken down.
“Mediums claim the stimuli are there for all to perceive but they’re low level and subtle, and most of us are too distracted by the outside world as well as our own thoughts and feelings to sense them.”
– GARY SCHWARTZ, Ph.D.
The Afterlife Experiments
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