Near-Death Experience

People who have had Near-Death Experiences know what happiness is. Patients reporting a Near-Death Experience all experienced some of the following ten characteristics.

(1) Awareness of being dead

(2) Positive emotions

(3) Out of body experience

(4) Moving through a tunnel

(5) Communication with light

(6) Observation of colors

(7) Observation of a celestial landscape

(8) Meeting with deceased persons

(9) Life review

(10) Less fear of death

Additionally, patients seem to have been transformed by the experience. This is particularly evident in children who lose the fear of death and are transformed for a lifetime. 

These experiences were not produced by narcotics, mind-altering drugs, oxygen-deprivation states, or stressed psychological states (and thus, they are not attributable to hallucinations).

Near-Death Experiences of the Blind

Though it is truly significant that sighted patients are able to report sensorial data that occurred while they were unconscious with great accuracy, it is even more significant that blind patients are also able to describe their surroudings and occurences while they were unconscious.

How could a clear consciousness outside one’s body be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG?  Near-Death Experience pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain relation. Patients that were clinically dead (flat EEG, showing no electrical activity in the cortex and loss of brain stem function evidenced by fixed dilated pupils and absence of the gag reflex) report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, or memory from early childhood occurred, as well as perceptions from a position out and above their ‘dead’ body.

In every instance of an encounter with the “being of light” patients reported the experience to be one of intense love. The following case resembles hundreds of others reported by the above researchers:

"I became very weak, and I fell down. I began to feel a sort of drifting, a movement of my real being in and out of my body, and to hear beautiful music. I floated on down the hall and out the door onto the screened-in porch. There, it almost seemed that clouds, a pink mist really, began to gather around me, and then I floated right straight on through the screen, just as though it weren’t there, and up into this pure crystal clear light, an illuminating white light. It was beautiful and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love…. And all during this time, I felt as though I were surrounded by an overwhelming love and compassion."