Moody must be given credit for having given a name to the phenomenon and for having brought it dramatically to the forefront of public consciousness, but he certainly did not invent the NDE. Plato wrote about it. In his classic dialogue, The Republic, which focuses on the theme of the true nature of justice and the ideal state, Plato tells the mythos or story of a man called Er. There was a great battle in which Er was grievously wounded and ended up being tossed on a funeral pyre because he was presumed dead. However, as the fire was about to consume him and his dead comrades, it was discovered he was still alive. Plucked from the burning pyre just before it was too late, he was given proper care and was soon able to talk. He then told his rescuers of an extraordinary “journey” he had just taken. It is obvious to the modern reader that Er is describing a more or less typical NDE. The date of The Republic is nearly five centuries BCE.
Current research shows that the NDE has appeared in various forms since the dawn of literature.3 But does the NDE really constitute evidence that there is some kind of afterlife, a state of blissful existence beyond “the valley of the shadow of death”? It is to this question that we now must turn.
Since all of the basic data about the NDE phenomenon is of necessity highly personal and anecdotal—flowing as it does from first-hand accounts of the experiences of ordinary people—it is essential to make this chapter as personal as possible. Let me begin, then, by saying that, while the statistical evidence for the prevalence of the NDE is quite arresting and should not be underplayed (some NDE researchers have used a figure as high as 60 percent of all those who experience clinical “death”), it is by no means true that everyone who comes close to death, has a narrow escape, endures cardiac arrest or is declared clinically or even brain-dead and then survives has some kind of mystical revelation of a life beyond. I haven’t. But, I have, however, had several uncomfortably close brushes with death.
In the summer of 1949 while still in my teens, I was teaching school on a Cree reserve in the remotest corner of northwestern Ontario, about a thousand miles from Toronto. I was struck down with a violent fever and acute dysentery and had to be flown out in a single-engine float plane to Sioux Lookout, a tiny frontier town. For about two weeks I hovered in and out of consciousness while the two doctors at the rudimentary hospital debated whether or not to perform surgery on my seriously ulcerated intestines. In all, I was in hospital for six weeks and finally emerged a pale, skinny vestige of my former self. I was told I had had a severe case of amoebic dysentery and that neither nurses nor doctors had expected I would leave the place alive. All I remember of the crisis part of the illness was that, while I might have been able to utter a few, brief mental prayers at moments of lucidity, my chief awareness was of not having the strength to care whether I lived or not. I just wanted to be left alone. There were no mystical overtones whatever, although, naturally, once it was all over I felt extremely grateful to be alive and on the road to recovery.
A second close encounter happened in 1979 on a hazardous trek over very rugged terrain in the interior of Nepal. My photographer and I were on assignment for the Toronto Star. The project was for a newspaper series called “Christmas in Asia.” We had spent a week in Calcutta visiting and interviewing Mother Teresa, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her outstanding work among “the poorest of the poor.” After visiting her orphanage and the House of the Dying, we also spent some time with a remarkable Canadian minister, Rev. Mark Buntain, who had built a modern hospital and ran schools both in Calcutta and in the surrounding countryside, including one near the city dump where abandoned children tried to make a living from scouring the rubbish for saleable scraps of metal and glass. He was called “St. Mark of Calcutta.” From Calcutta we flew north to Kathmandu, hired a car to take us over a single-track, treacherous road (built by the Chinese) into the foothills of the Himalayas. We were dropped off in the middle of nowhere and had to hike the final 40 kilometres into a jungle hospital near a mountain village called Amp Pipal. We were on our way to visit a Canadian missionary doctor, Helen Huston, who was known in some circles as “the doctor on the roof of the world.” It was growing dark as we wound our way up a steep path that our Sherpa guide—a bronzed, wiry man who, though almost half my size, had the strength of a lion—said was the final ascent to the Huston clinic. Suddenly, at a sharp turn in the path, I felt myself stepping into nothingness. I fell hard against the lip of the cliff face and started to slip towards the yawning abyss below. Fortunately, the frame of my large backpack caught on a root and I lay there on my back afraid to move. I heard Bob, the photographer, call my name and then there was a crash as he too took a misstep and landed in a bush just above me. It seemed an eternity, but it was actually a short time before the Sherpa reached down and pulled us both to safety. The following day we walked back down to where our near miss occurred and were horrified by the awesome, sheer drop into the canyon that lay only a couple of feet from where we had hung so precariously. I will remember the feelings and thoughts I had during the moments lying on my back on the edge of that precipice, where the least movement could have ended in tragedy, for the rest of my life. But, there was no hint of any life review; no memory of anything other than fear and the kind of praying only extreme danger can provoke.
During my research, I have found many people who have had cardiac arrest while in intensive care or during surgery, or who have had close encounters with death such as I have described, but who have had nothing dramatic to report. My own father-in-law is a case in point. Some years ago he suffered a severe heart attack while undergoing kidney surgery. A few months later, he had open-heart surgery to remove the scarring caused by the attack and was in a coronary intensive care unit for several days. While he had some mild hallucinations as a result of the medication he was on, there was nothing he could identify as truly mystical, nothing approaching an NDE.
Leading figures in NDE research admit they don’t know why some have the experience and others do not. In an interview, Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Connecticut’s Medical Center and one of the best-known researchers in this field, told me he considers it quite possible that all those who “die” and come back have an NDE, but that for unknown reasons some of them repress it. Greyson said, “It could be either that they didn’t actually come close enough to really dying or that some other factor, say, the medication, interfered in some way. In situations like this, people are under extreme stress, so it’s hard to calculate all the variables.”
Intrigued, I followed this up by interviewing three anaesthetists, including Dr. Richard Cooper, assistant professor in the Department of Anaesthesia at the University of Toronto Medical School. They told me that there are usually three components in any general anaesthetic: analgesics to prevent pain, muscle relaxants to prevent bodily movement during the surgery or other procedure and amnesics to ensure the experience is forgotten. As Cooper explained, the amnesics are to erase or prevent the formation of memories of the operation. “People don’t want to be aware of what has gone on,” he said. Those rare few who do manage some recall generally are plagued by a sense that “something has gone wrong.” They can even have recurring nightmares in which they sense danger or risk of death but are unable to move to avoid it. The amount of amnesic given (usually one of the benzodiazepines) varies with each patient, and the effects vary as well, depending on other drugs being administered at the same time. Some surgery, the doctors said, is done without the use of amnesics if it is thought they might interfere with, for example, the heartbeat of cardiac patients. However, given the wide use of memory suppressants in most serious operations, I find it noteworthy, not that many who experience clinical death during surgery don’t have an NDE, but that so many appear to remember so clearly that they did.
Kenneth Ring, whose first book, Heading Toward Omega (1984), examines the transformative effects of NDEs on those who experience them—including the temporary heightening of perceptual abilities—is today one of the leading authorities on this entire phenomenon. Particularly striking and persuasive are his ongoing studies of blind people who have had either NDEs, out-of-body experiences or, in many cases, both. The first results of this research came in a 1997 article in the International Association for Near-Death Studies’ official Journal of Near-Death Studies. Those wishing to follow this aspect further should read also Ring’s