Either way, it works for a lot of people, as the success of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programmes shows. Several AA attendees I’ve spoken to say the ‘surrender to a Higher Power’ aspect of the programme was very helpful for them, even if they weren’t sure what they were surrendering to. However, AA doesn’t work for everyone: AA says 33 per cent of participants are still abstinent after a decade, while other reports suggest only 5 to 10 per cent stay sober.
Near-death experiences
Finally, the third most common type of spontaneous spiritual experience is the near-death experience. I had one of these myself, back in 2001, when I’d been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for five years, following a terrifying trip on LSD when I was 18. For 5 awful years, I had been beset by panic attacks, mood swings, depression and social phobia, which made me deeply ashamed and crippled my ability to connect to others. I felt dissociated, a stranger to myself, and had no idea if I would ever get better.
My family and I were on our annual skiing holiday in Norway, where my great-great-grandfather had built a hut in the woods. On the first morning, we decided to go down the black slope on the mountain opposite our hut. At the steepest part of the slope, I crashed through the fence on the side of the mountain, fell 30 feet or so, broke my femur and back, and knocked myself unconscious. I woke up and was bathed in a warm white light. It felt like the white light was conscious, that it was a separate being that loved me, but also that it was the deepest part of my nature, and of all our natures. It was incredibly peaceful to rest in the unconditional love of this white light, like coming home after long wandering. I felt released from all the anxiety and fear I had been carrying around for the last five years – the fear that my brain was broken and I was destined to be miserable, the need to prove myself to others. It seemed to me that there is something within us far bigger than the ego, and this ‘something’ – this luminous loving-wisdom – can never be entirely lost, not even in death. I still don’t know what it was exactly that I encountered – whether it was my soul, or God, or just a bang on the head. But I do know that this brief experience was fundamental to my recovery from PTSD. It gave me the insight that what was causing my suffering was not burned-out neural transmitters but my own beliefs, which I could change. I felt rejuvenated, reconnected to my deepest self, able to open up and trust other people. I never told anyone what had happened, because it was so beyond my normal frame of reference. But I’ve always felt grateful to whatever it was that I encountered, and it permanently changed my attitude to death.
The scientific study of near-death experience (NDE) began in the late-nineteenth century, and took off in the 1970s with the publication of scientist Raymond Moody’s bestseller, Life After Life. NDE research is now a well-established academic field, with several research teams around the world.10 Thanks to better cardiac resuscitation methods, more and more people survive cardiac arrests, and roughly five per cent of survivors report some sort of NDE. In a few cases, survivors have out-of-body experiences during surgery and are able to report many details of the operating procedure. People often report quite similar NDEs, and researchers have built up a model of typical features: an NDE is rated ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’ according to how many of these features it has (my own NDE rates a shallow four, rather gallingly). The typical characteristics include:
• an out-of-body experience, seeing the body left behind
• moving through darkness, often described as a tunnel
• going into a light
• meeting deceased relatives
• an encounter with a ‘being of light’ often identified as God, accompanied by feelings of peace, joy, bliss
• a life-review
• visions of celestial lands, often seen as a garden
• a barrier or border
• a decision whether to go on or go back, sometimes made by the NDE-er, sometimes made for them
• return into the body
• life-changes such as increased openness and spirituality
If NDEs are genuine journeys to another dimension, you’d expect them to be similar in all times and places, but are they? Gregory Shushan, a cultural historian at the University of Oxford, has compared contemporary NDE accounts from around the world with historical accounts of NDEs from the religious literature of India, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and found marked similarities – leaving the body, rising into a light, meeting spirits, a life-review, the return. We see similar accounts in classical literature (Plato’s myth of Er is a famous account, as is Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) and in Christian accounts, although medieval Christians tended to report seeing Hell populated by corrupt priests. Shushan speculates that various cultures’ conception of the afterlife may have sprung from a core NDE experience, with cultural dogma then added to survivors’ accounts.11
There are some cultural differences in people’s accounts, however. Some Western accounts report meeting Jesus, particularly in evangelical Christian books, while Indian NDE-ers are more likely to meet Yama, god of death. Indians are also more likely to say they were sent back to their body not because they had a mission to complete, but because of a bureaucratic error. In general the similarities are more marked than the differences. This is one reason that evangelical Christianity, having become briefly enraptured by ‘heaven-tourism’ accounts, like Heaven Is Real and the recently debunked The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, now distances itself from NDE research. In 2015, a leading evangelical bookstore stopped selling heaven-tourism books,12 because most NDE accounts do not fit with traditional Christian accounts of the afterlife: the physical body is not resurrected, the soul goes to Heaven immediately rather than at the Last Judgment, the soul doesn’t necessarily meet Jesus, and it doesn’t apparently matter if you’re Christian or not. And most NDE survivors come back less religious, less likely to identify with a particular religion and less likely to go to church.
Are NDEs epiphenomena caused by physiological processes, or glimpses of another dimension? The evidence is not decisive either way. Some researchers have tried to prove consciousness leaves the body by hiding a sign in the top corner of an operating theatre to see if any NDE survivors happen to catch a glimpse of it on their way to Heaven. None has. Sceptics have put forward materialist explanations for NDEs: they are the last fireworks show of a brain shutting down from oxygen-starvation; the tunnel is the visual processing system atrophying; the loving white light and gathered spirits of loved ones are the ego trying to console itself in the face of its annihilation. If that is the case, if the brain is capable of putting on such a vivid, coherent and consoling virtual-reality show while going offline, all I can say is ‘Well played, brain.’ The alternative to the brain-restricted theory of consciousness is that the mind is not confined to the brain, the brain instead acts as a sort of filter or radio-receiver, and consciousness survives and expands after the brain dies. Ecstasy, then, is a glimpse of a vaster consciousness that our sense of self emerges from and returns to. That is what Myers, James and Huxley believed. It was what I felt during my NDE. But you’d need some pretty solid evidence to overturn the brain-restricted theory of consciousness, such as strong proof of telepathy, or remembrance of past lives,