Near-death experiences are indeed the only more or less straightforward glimpse of life after death. Unfortunately, we will now be discussing just that phenomenon. “Unfortunately” because you will have to examine its nature from a completely different point of view. Simply put, it is clear that both out-of-body experience and lucid dreaming are of the same nature as near-death experiences at clinical death. However, the first two somehow fail to prove the existence of an afterlife. They even refute some commonly advanced claims. Before examining the issue, I would like to start by saying upfront that I am not trying to prove that there is no afterlife. I would only like to demonstrate that one of the phenomena associated with the life-after-death issue may possibly be of a wholly other essence and significance.
Perhaps we could start by saying that from a purely logical point of view, it would be incorrect to consider “near-death” experiences to happen near the moment of actual death, as accounts of them are always related by living people… Maybe this all has more to do with life than death. I would also like to note that Raymond Moody, whose book we will be citing, did not go so far as to state that the accounts he gathered were unambiguously conclusive evidence of the survival of the soul and life after death. He merely made a hypothesis and backed it up using the excellent testimonies he collected.
You’ll have to admit that if you hadn’t known beforehand that the following accounts belonged to people who were at the edge of death, it would have been easy to assume that they were written by alive-and-well practitioners of out-of-body experience (OBE) or lucid dreams:
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
…I could feel myself moving out of my body and sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed-actually it seemed as if I went through the rail-on down to the floor. Then, I started rising upward, slowly…
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
… At that point, I kind of lost my sense of time, and I lost my physical reality as far as my body is concerned-I lost touch with my body. My being or my self or my spirit, or whatever you would like to label it-I could sort of feel it rise out of me, out through my head. And it wasn’t anything that hurt, it was just sort of like a lifting and it being above me…
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
… I was above the table, and I could see everything they were doing. I knew that I was dying, that this would be it. Yet, I was concerned about my children, about who would take care of them. So, I was not ready to go…
Conversely, when reading the experiences of lucid dreams, one might simply assume that they are descriptions of situations experienced at the moment of death, especially considering the fact that the feeling of imminent death is one of the most common sensations experienced while out-of-body.
During an uncontrolled exit from the body, that which you fear or expect the most is exactly what will happen to you. And that’s where reports of gods, flights of the soul, and UFOs come from. To put it simply, exit from the body occurs when the conscious mind is “on”, but the body is “off”. Apparently, the same thing can happen while under anesthesia or dying, and often does. That is, people fall into the same state that practitioners of out-of-body travel do. If you happened to find yourself in such a situation while on the operating table or during a serious illness, in the overwhelming majority of cases your thoughts would turn to God, angels, and a tunnel with a bright light at the end – which is exactly what you would get.
There is no trait characteristic of near-death experiences that is not also characteristic of out-of-body travel. For example, seeing one’s own body on the bed:
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
…He were “able to see everything around me -including my whole body as it lay on the bed without occupying any space”…
(Mister SIGMA)
…I felt like my body was going through the ceiling, and even so I was pulled up higher and higher. I was afraid that this was already death, and was afraid not so much of death as of the unknown. Everything was happening so rapidly, and I wasn’t ready for such changes… I flew about my room and saw myself lying in my bed…
Flying orbs radiating light:
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
…When I woke up in severe pain. turned over and tried to get in a more comfortable position, but just at that moment a light appeared in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling. It was just a ball of light, almost like a globe, and it was not very large, I would say no more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter… I had the feeling of being drawn up and of leaving my body, and I looked back and saw it lying there on the bed while I was going up towards the ceiling of the room…
(Ruklinok)
…I was levitating about one foot over the bed… I couldn’t figure out why everything was lit underneath my back. I looked over my left shoulder and saw a small, bright, white orb about six inches from my shoulder blade – that’s what was illuminating the room…
Periodic lack of bodily perception:
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
…Dying persons whose souls, minds,consciousnesses (or whatever” you want to label them) were released from their bodies say that they didn’t feel that, after release they were in any kind of “body” at all….
(Tolik)
…It was incomprehensible, there was no feeling, I couldn’t see my own hands. I was like an orb, transparent and hanging on the wall over the bed…
Meanwhile, even the vaunted tunnel of light is not the exclusive domain of near-death experiences:
(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody)
…I was moving through this-you’re going to think this is weird-through this long dark place. It seemed like a sewer or something. I just can’t describe it to you. I was moving, beating all the time with this noise, this ringing noise…
(Igor.L)
…When flying through the tunnel, I noticed that it had a lot of spurs and paths. There was a bright light at the end. I became interested in what was going on, and fell into another reality…
The similarity between the two experiences is inescapable. It is obvious even to someone who has experienced neither firsthand. As the number of out-of-body practitioners continues to increase, I have been meeting more and more people who have had both types of experience. And do you know what they say? That the experiences are one and the same! There is no fundamental difference between them, except that there is no risk of death when one practices on one’s own.
There is another strong argument in favor of near-death experiences and out-of-body travel being the same thing: false near-death experiences. There is no difference whatsoever between them and their bona-fide near-death counterparts. For example, once a person came up to me and started telling me about how he had experienced clinical death, an exit from the body, travel through a tunnel, etc. But after asking him some questions, it became clear that no clinical death had occurred, and that the rest of the experience had happened during a standard, spontaneous exit from the body. This is because clinical death is when doctors establish the fact of cardiac arrest, which is different than dozing off after a sumptuous breakfast of jam doughnuts.
What’s more, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you’re dying when having an out-of-body experience. Such thoughts occur in about a fifth of all exits from the body. Even after having had thousands of OBEs or lucid dreams, I still fall into such terror myself from time to time. That’s to say nothing of novices, who often cower back into the body after having just left it:
(Budushee)
…I actually fell onto the floor, but felt no physical sensation from it, just a panicky fear and omen of looming death…
(Yuri)
…Upon becoming fully aware of my nature, I clearly understood that I didn’t have a body, it was simply gone! My first thought was, “so this is what death’s like!”
(Lilia)
…That’s when it hit me that I was dying. I ran to the living room and saw myself lying on the bed. And I jumped back into myself…
So, Is There Life after Death or Afterlife?
However, you might argue that with all of the above I have just proved that there is life after death. Actually, the correct deduction is that we can have near-death experiences without the threat of dying. Meanwhile, there is one more kicker here. During my first years of practicing out-of-body travel, I was sure that my soul was actually leaving my body and that I was therefore immortal. But after undertaking endless experiments, it turned out that my “soul” was not travelling through the physical world at all, but throughout something else entirely. It’s possible that this is all just a mental projection, albeit a more realistic one than the physical world. Many believe that it’s a parallel world. But that’s not important here. What’s important is that this is a very complicated question and that many answers are possible.
Conclusion: it’s possible that near-death experiences are important not as proof of life after death, but as evidence that we all have a great many more abilities in the physical world than we are aware of, even if we only realize this in critical situations. This is reinforced by the fact that any person can experience such a “near death” by following special technique-based procedures, and without any threat to life or limb.
