Picasso
When we lived in Venezuela, most of the people in the American community who were Catholic attended one particular church. It was a Venezuelan Catholic church, but the bulk of its congregation consisted of Americans who worked for the oil companies. The kids were remanded to catechism classes, which pretty much amounted to brainwashing sessions about the nature of god, the universe, and all that. God is everywhere, God is good, God’s word is gospel.And when you die, you’re going to be judged as hopeless, maybe salvageable, or yes, you made the grade.
I remember siting there in this class and thinking that it was all wrong, that what happened when we died was what we believed would happen. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and confess sins that I made up and do penances for things I hadn’t done, and I mean, please, Eve tempted Adam with a silly apple? Are you kidding me?
In all fairness to the Catholic church, I agreed with the previous pope about the immorality of the Iraq war. But that’s about the only area where I agree with the church. Most religions seems to have a vested interest in encouraging us to believe we’ve got one life to get it right, that some archangel or god will be sitting in judgment of what we have have done – or not done; what we have achieved – or not achieved; that some angry god may decide to sideline us somewhere till we tow the line.
Sounds like politicians, right? But if you look at the literature about near death experiences, you find something quite different from what most Christian religions preach.Tonight, rewriting the ultimate journey section in our book, here’s what I found – and mined:
Science discounts anecdotal evidence. If it’s not replicable in a laboratory, under controlled conditions, then sorry, folks, it doesn’t count. Physician and author Dean Radin mentions this in The Conscious Universe, where he lumps apparitions, hauntings, OBEs, and NDEs under the same iffy category. “Because almost all the evidence for these phenomena comes from uncontrolled, spontaneous cases – and thus was necessarily collected as after-the-fact anecdotes rather than as controlled laboratory results – scientific confidence that what they appear to be is very poor.”
Really? And exactly how would a near-death journey be replicated under laboratory conditions? In the 1990 movie
Flatliners, a group of medical students explore the world of NDEs by stopping their hearts – and then being revived. Many things go wrong, of course, it’s Hollywood. But each of them relive experience nightmarish episodes from childhood, relive the injustices and cruelties they’ve inflicted on others, but ultimately discover that
something survives.
The irony of dismissing anecdotes as valid, as proof, is that anecdotes are the only things we have at this point in scientific explorations of NDEs. Ask Raymond Moody, whose 1975 book Life After Life is a compilation of more than 100 stories from people who were declared clinically dead and were subsequently resuscitated. Moody’s book stamped the word near-death experience on the collective consciousness.
Two of the personal experiences that follow were left as comments on our blog. The last story was told to us by a friend. Each experiences is different, but there are certainly common factors.
In 1966, Connie gave birth to her first baby, a son. She carried him for ten months before her “quack OB” decided to induce labor. The baby was fine, but large. Three days after he was born, she began to hemorrhage, to bleed out. “As the code team frantically tried to give me more blood and shoot epinephrine directly into my heart, blood came out of me faster than they could get it in. My body was dead. My heart ceased to beat. I flatlined. I don’t recall how I moved out of my body, but I vividly recall hovering near the ceiling and watching the doctors and nurses in their panic.”
Yet, she felt no awareness of her physical distress. “It was pure bliss. I stopped looking at what was happening below me and felt myself gliding away from that room, farther and farther. I didn’t pass through a tunnel, exactly. It was more as if I stepped through a door or a gate onto a kind of brightly-lit path or beam that seemed to be tugging me towards the most brilliant spectrum of colors, indescribable. I was so eager to reach those colors. But a voice, coming from someone I didn’t see, very clearly said to me, Connie, you can’t stay here. You have a new little boy to raise, and two more little boys coming. You have to go back.”
But Connie had no desire to go back.She was infused with such comfort and peace and joy that she felt angry that something seemed to be relentlessly pulling her back. She looked down and was in the room again, then very suddenly, with a severe jolt that seemed like an electrical shock, she was back in that ravaged body.
“The code team was ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I spent thirty-one days in what was then an ICU unit. It was written in my chart that for six minutes I had flatlined, with no cerebral activity and no pulse. I was dead, not “nearly dead”, as the so-called experts call it. There are no words in any language that can adequately describe the experience of being dead.“
What’s especially interesting about her NDE is that the voice was right. She went on to have two more boys. Her sons are now grown, Connie spent years working as a hospice nurse and a medium. You can’t convince her that what she experienced was a blip in her synapases or some hallucinogenic tale her brain spun as it was deprived of oxygen.Even Jung, who had an NDE, described it as: “Everything that happened in time had been brought together into a concrete whole. Nothing was disturbed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts.”
Vicki D drowned at the age of sixteen. “I drifted up and saw myself lying on the beach as they administered CPR. Someone was behind me and kept asking me different questions. I remember feeling so peaceful and warm until the voice behind me told me to look closer at the girl on the beach and I slowly realized she looked like me, and then BAM!
“I was on the beach looking up at the sky, water was coming out of everywhere including my eyes and ears and they were clamping an oxygen mask on me and I was in so much pain and gasping for breath. One reason why I personally feel it was real and not a hallucination is that I still remember it like it just happened and this was 36 years ago.”
During the birth of her first child, Renie Wiley died. She remembers drifting up toward the ceiling and watching the doctors as they tried to resuscitate her. Certain information was available to her in that state and she realized that her primary doctor was going to be shipped off to Vietnam and that he wouldn’t return.
When he brought her back into the world of the living, she described what she had experienced. She told him what she’d seen for him and begged him not to volunteer. He was shocked. No one knew that he had applied as a medic in Vietnam. And she was also right. He was killed in Vietnam.
