Interest in what came to be known as near death experiences (NDEs) pretty much began with the publication in 1975 of” “Life After Life ” by psychiatrist Raymond Moody. Moody, described some 150 accounts of what he called the “near-death experience.” While no one experience coincided exactly with another, a broad theme with common elements ran through them. Moody described a kind of prototype NDE as follows:
“A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.
After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before–a being of light–appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives. Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that other scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life.”
Moody’s book attracted enormous popular attention among general readers as well as stimulating considerable interest among researchers.
The first actual scientific study of near-death experiences was carried out by psychologist Kenneth Ring and reported in his 1980 book Life at Death. He was impressed with how similar the accounts were to those reported by Moody. As a result of their close brushes with death, NDE experiencers and non-experiencers alike reported a number of personal and value changes. These Ring summarized in the following, which he was careful to note lacked “a sense of nuance and particularity,” and obviously did “not correspond to any one individual case.”
The typical near-death survivor emerges from his experience with a heightened sense of appreciation for life, determined to live life to the fullest. He has a sense of being reborn and a renewed sense of individual purpose in living, even though he cannot articulate just what this purpose is. He is more reflective and seeks to learn more about the implications of his core experience, if he has had one. He feels himself to be a stronger, more self-confident person and adjusts more easily to the vicissitudes of life. The things that he values are love and service to others; material comforts are no longer so important. He becomes more compassionate toward others, more able to accept them unconditionally. He has achieved a sense of what is important in life and strives to live in accordance with his understanding of what matters.
Those reporting NDEs described subsequent changes in their views on such perennial issues as religion and death, not noted by those coming close to death without an NDE. These changes, Ring characterized as a heightened spiritual awareness that involved the sense of being closer to God, feeling more prayerful, taking less interest in formal religious services, but expressing greater tolerance for various forms of religious expression and endorsing an attitude of religious universalism. The experience significantly reduced or eliminated their fear of death and increased their belief in an afterlife, with a greater openness toward a reincarnation.
In 1982 the pollster George Gallup, Jr. published a popularized account of a large national investigation into the near-death experience in a book titled Adventures in Immortality. The Gallup organization conducted this study following the same rigorous polling strategy used in their other studies. Fifteen hundred adults in more than 300 scientifically selected localities across the nation were personally interviewed about their beliefs and attitudes regarding heaven, hell, and other aspects of life after death. Special attention was given to “near-death” or “verge-of-death” experiences. Some 15 percent of the sample, which for the entire American population would mean about 23 million people, said they had had a close brush with death. Of those about 35 percent found themselves catapulted into another dimension of reality or consciousness. These 5 percent (.15 x .35) applied to the total US population yielded an estimated 7.7 million people that could be said to have experienced an NDE. Updating this 5 percent to the 2017 population yields 16 million NDE experiencers. About one percent of those reporting unusual experiences during their close brush with death in the Gallup poll described negative elements. These included:”featureless, sometimes forbidding faces beings who are often merely present, but aren’t at all comforting a sense of discomfort—especially emotional or mental unrest feelings of confusion about the experience a sense of being tricked or duped into ultimate destruction fear about what the finality of death may involve.”
Gallup’s research indicates that, as Moody suspected, near-death experiences are much more common than might be suspected. However, to publicly reveal one had such an experience might bring into question his or her mental health.
With grant funding from the National Cancer Institute pediatrician Melvin Morse initiated the first scientific study of near-death experiences in children, described in his 1990 book ” Closer to the Light” . Morse developed two comparison groups, a control group consisted of 121 children who were critically ill, were hospitalized in an intensive care unit, but never had life-threatening episodes, and a small group of twelve who “had looked death in the face” as a result of cardiac arrests stemming from accidents, diseases and heart stoppages during surgery.
Children in the two groups were carefully matched to make sure they were the same age. What Morse discovered was that not one of the 121 children in the control group had anything resembling a near-death experience, whereas eight of the twelve survivors of heart attacks had visions of leaving their bodies and traveling to other realms. Their experiences included at least one of the standard NDE traits—being out of their physical bodies, traveling up some sort of tunnel, seeing a light, visiting with people who describe themselves as being dead, seeing a Being of Light, having a life review, and maybe even deciding consciously to return to their bodies. (Morse, 1990)
In their 1999 book “Mindsight” Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper describe their investigation of near death and out-of body experiences among a different and most unique population, people who are blind. The authors located 31 people, 14 who had been blind from birth, 11 who lost their sight sometime after five years of age (adventitiously blind), and the remaining six who were severely visually impaired. Twenty –one had NDEs, and 10 had one or more OOBEs. Through their interviews, Ring and Cooper found unequivocally that NDEs did occur among people in all three categories of blindness, and that they took the same general form and were comprised of the very same elements as those of sighted individuals. Overall, 80% of the respondents reported visual impressions during their NDEs or OBEs.
These accounts they described in language of unhesitating declaration, even when they have been surprised, or even stunned, by the unexpected discovery that they could in fact see. Like sighted experiencers, our blind respondents described to us both perceptions of this world as well as otherworldly scenes, often in fulsome, fine-grained detail, and sometimes with a sense of extremely sharp, even subjectively perfect, acuity.
Moody, R. (1975)). Life After Life.
Ring, K. (1992). The Omega Project.