Demystifying Reincarnation 08 – Near Death Experiences – Hallucinations or Guesses?

Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to our series demystifying reincarnation. We discussed elaborately in the past seven sessions about past life memories and now we will be discussing about near-death experiences, about such phenomena in general, which are not easily reconcilable with the mainstream scientific worldview.
One of the pioneers of modern psychology, William James stated, science may keep saying such things are simply impossible. Yet, so long as the stories multiply in different lands and so few are positively explained away, it is a bad method to ignore them. Near-death experiences have been documented in many lands.
In fact, according to many surveys, over 10% of Americans, that means 1 out of every 10 Americans has had a near-death experience. And the word near-death experience has a specific meaning. It is not just somebody who has been near-death.
Rather, it has been a person who has been near-death and has had some extraordinary experience at that time. So, there are people who when they are near-death, they see certain things, they feel certain things and they return back from the brink of death and report to us their extraordinary findings. So, near-death experiences usually have as a category within them out-of-body experiences.
So, in a typical near-death experience, the subject falls unconscious and comes very close to death because of cardiac arrest, because of an accident, because of some other medical complication. And at that time, the subject finds oneself out of the body. That is why it is also called an out-of-body experience.
And they observe themselves from a perspective about their body. They see who all the people around are. If they get a heart attack in a hospital, then they see the nurses rushing around, medical staff trying to resuscitate.
And they see themselves, their own body, and they see their vicinity. And sometimes, they feel themselves floating and moving away from the immediate vicinity to see things beyond their vicinity also. So, this is the normal part of the near-death experience.
Of course, the whole experience is extraordinary. In that sense, you could say it is abnormal. But normal in the sense that they are seeing their normal circumstances, normal situations, normal vicinity.
But after that, they often feel that they are floating out. And they float far into the sky. And they arrive at a distant, distant, distinct realm, where they see some extraordinary visions.
They often meet their deceased relatives, or they meet the religious, the sacred icons of their religious traditions. They experience in front of their eyes, a review of their own life, where their actions are assessed in front of them, where they feel a panorama of emotions going through themselves as they feel themselves being evaluated, as they feel themselves evaluating their actions. Often, before they reach this mysterious realm, they feel that they are passing through some kind of a tunnel out of which they come, and then they reach such a realm.
And at that point, they may have some interaction, some discussion with their religious, sacred icons or with their deceased relatives. And they may be told to, or they may decide to return back to their body. And then they describe themselves waking up.
Waking up, suddenly they are back in their body. And they feel, in some of the cases, they are mysteriously healed of their diseases. Near-death experiences have attracted much depiction in the popular media.
But often, their depiction has focused on these paranormal visions. So, for example, some Christians may say that, you know, in my near-death experience, I went into the heaven and I saw Jesus. And then other Christians may say, this proves that Jesus is real.
This proves that heaven is real. This proves that our faith is true faith. Now, that is one way of looking at near-death experiences.
The problem with focusing on the paranormal visions is that they are unverifiable. There is no other way to know except based on the testimony of that person who is claiming to have had those visions that the visions were actually for real. Such visions can easily be explained away by the skeptics as hallucinations, as imaginations of a religious believer who wants to believe that one will not end with death, that one will continue to live.
Of course, there have been a few cases where skeptics or even atheists have had such visions and their beliefs have transformed because of that. But for us, if we are going to focus on a scientific study of the subject, then the most relevant among these near-death experiences would be the observations by these subjects, by these near-death experiencers of themselves and their vicinity. And whatever they reported seeing, that could be tested against the medical record of what happened and then it could be evaluated whether what they told was right or not and whether they could have known this by any other means or not.
If they could not have known it by any other means, then that would indicate that their accounts were real. They actually came out of their body and saw themselves from outside the body. And this would substantiate the idea that our core existence, we ourselves are different from our bodies, that our body are simply our mortal shells and we, the soul, is the essence who is different from the body.
So, whereas past life memories indicate that the soul leaves one body and goes to another body, past life near-death experiences indicate that the soul can leave the body and come out of body and observe oneself from outside the body. So, let us now look at near-death experiences more closely and evaluate how these experiences can or cannot be explained. One common dismissive explaining or explaining away of near-death experiences is by saying that they are hallucinations, that these are simply hallucinations of people who are near-death.
Now, there are several problems with this hypothesis. Let us compare. First is that hallucinations generally comprise of disorderly events with hazy visions.
When people hallucinate, just things seem to be happening chaotically, this, that, that, this. So, they just, it does not make any sense, whereas NDEs almost always comprise of orderly events with clear perception. In fact, many of the NDRs say that their experience was not just real, they say that it was realer than reality.
It is a deeper, a higher, a richer version of reality that they experienced at that time. And usually, hallucinations, after they get over, the subjects are left feeling disturbed and agitated. But after the NDEs, the subjects feel calm and serene.
Hallucinations just come and go and they have practically no noteworthy long-term effect on those who have hallucinated. Near-death experiences, on the other hand, are often life transforming. Many of the near-death experiencers, the NDRs, they adopt a more spiritual, a more selfless, a more purposeful lifestyle with a more spiritual reorientation of their beliefs.
In terms of causes, hallucinations are often caused by anorexia, a lack of oxygen, which leads to confusion. NDEs often occur in circumstances where there was no lack of oxygen. And correspondingly, there is no lack of mental clarity.
In fact, there is great mental clarity in the case of NDEs. Fifth difference between the two is that sometimes hallucinations are caused by hypercarbia, that is a shortage of carbon dioxide. Now, most NDEs occur in well documented, well cared for, well monitored medical settings such as a hospital or ICU, and there is no possibility of carbon dioxide over there.
Some hallucinations, sixth point of difference is that some hallucinations are caused because the subjects as a part of their medication took some hallucinogens, some chemicals or some medicines that induce hallucinations. In contrast, many of the near-death experiences occur in times when the patients were under medical supervision, and what kind of medicines they were taking was carefully monitored, and there were no hallucinogens as administered to them. So, in the prestigious magazine Lancet, Pim Van Lommel along with his colleagues, he wrote an article about the possibility that near-death experiences may be a result of some chemicals or some other physiological or pharmacological explanations.
And he wrote, with a purely physiological explanation for NDEs such as cerebral anoxia, absence of oxygen, for the experience, most parents who have been clinically dead should report one. This means that if, say, lack of oxygen is the cause of NDEs, then there are so many people in so many different circumstances experience lack of oxygen, and all of them do not go or do not experience NDEs. So, if A is causing B, then every time A is present, B should be present.
But B occurs, so A is lack of oxygen or any other such physiological, pharmacological cause, and B is the effect of near-death experiences. So, even when A is present, B is often not present. And that way, we cannot correlate that this, we cannot say that this is caused by this, that is a problematic cause.
Now, what might these near-death experiences be exactly? How, one further very strong reason that we could give for saying that these are not caused by, these are not hallucinations, is that in a hallucination, hallucination, people simply imagine things which have no coherence with reality. Whereas, in near-death experiences, many of the subjects describe precise events, even conversations, what happened when they were unconscious, and these turn out to be accurate. Among the pioneering scientific researchers in the field of near-death experiences was Dr. Michael Sabom.
He wrote several books, and one of them was Recollection of Death, a Medical Investigation. And he was, he decided, when he heard about near-death experiences, he decided an approach that he would disprove these near-death experiences. How? By purporting, by showing that they were simply guesses.
He reported his method, what he would use. I would pit my experience as a trained cardiologist against the professed visual recollections of lay individuals. In so doing, I was convinced that obvious inconsistencies would appear, which would reduce these purported visual observations to no more than an educated guess on the part of the patients.
This was the explanation that he thought. Okay, even if some people see that something was, I saw this, I saw this, and I said, okay, it could be, it could be as if they guessed it, and they guessed it right. So, as he studied for several decades, doing research, gradually, the investigation itself chipped away at his skepticism.
And he reported many cases. So, let us discuss one such case, which helped to recognize that educated guess was not a satisfactory explanation. There was a retired Air Force officer, Air Force pilot, who suffered a cardiac arrest.
And he was brought in the hospital. And after he came back to consciousness, he said that he saw himself from a perspective above his body. And he said, he noticed that next to him, the medical staff had brought a big machine, which he recognized as a defibrillator.
But he said that there were two needles on it. And then one needle went up immediately. And the other needle, it went up slowly up.
And it was not like it was measuring something, like something that something is measured, as soon as you touch it, the needle shoots up, it is gradually going up. And he described several other circumstances or other circumstantial events also. But Sabaum found this fascinating.
Because he said that this defibrillator was not commonly used. Now, the defibrillator basically is a device, which gives electric shock to the patients. So, in a cardiac arrest, basically, the patient’s heart stops functioning.
And how do we get the heart to function? Basically, shock the heart. Shock the heart by giving a high level electric shocks. And by that shock, sometimes what happens is the subject is thrown up and down.
But in that process, the heart starts pumping and beating once again. So, he said that this kind of defibrillator was, it had two needles, because the first needle was used to set, was set to decide how much voltage shock is to be given. And so that it got set immediately, and the doctor would tell, okay, make it at this level.
And then after that, the second needle would charge gradually, because that was the amount of charge that was being, the defibrillator was being raised to that charge. The defibrillator is never charged and kept in advance, because accidentally someone touches or accidentally it comes in contact with something else. The sheer amount of charge can cause damage, even death.
So, this is the way it is charged. And this kind of defibrillators were common in the past, but they are not very common now. And it is unlikely that a lay person could have known this.
So, first of all, let us look at the possibility. He said that this person is lying on the ground, lying on his back, and the defibrillator is next to him. And these are, these needles, two needles are facing the staff.
So, there is no way that a subject lying on the ground, lying on the bed can see the needles of the defibrillator. And not only that, the subject was in the middle of a heart attack. So, how can somebody in the middle of a heart attack notice something like a defibrillator and its needles and the way those needles are functioning? On top of that, subject was about to be given electric shock means, that the condition was so critical that the subject was most likely unconscious and near death.
And the subject was at an angle from which the defibrillator could not be noticed. And yet, he noticed it and noticed it carefully. Okay, this needle has gone up first, this needle is going on slowly up.
How could he methodically notice like this? So, this seemed to be very unlikely to be the result of educated guess based on past general knowledge. And then he did further studies and he evaluated, he made a test group and a control group and asked subjects to tell what they had experienced or what they think they would have happened in a surgery, during a surgery or during the time when they were unconscious. So, there are near death experiences, there is a near death experiences test group, they were told you describe your what happened during your surgery.
And then he had another group, control group, what was that? They did not have near death experiences, but they had the educational backgrounds, socio-cultural backgrounds similar to that of the near death experiencers. And they were asked to guess what would all happen, what all would happen in a near death experience and it was found that so they had 25 subjects who were asked to guess and out of them two of them could not guess at all. And 20 of the remaining gave major errors in the description.
On the other hand, there are 32 subjects who had NDEs out of that 26 gave precise descriptions, precise methodical descriptions. And therefore, now one thing is again there is objectivity over here, what the NDRs tell can be recorded and usually whatever happens in an operation that is recorded in medical documents. So, the two could be correlated and it could be observed how accurate they were.
And time after time Sabon found remarkable accuracy in the finding of the subjects. And based on that he decided these NDEs accounts most likely are not subtle fabrications based on prior general knowledge. Now, there is one more reason why the near death experiences cannot be a result of prior general knowledge.
Why? What is that reason? That the near death experiences describe not only general features of surgery, they also describe specific events that happened during their surgery alone. So, for example, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, E. W. Cook and his colleagues described the case of Al-Sulaiman. He had a near death out of body experience on 18 January 1988 when he was having emergency coronary quadruple bypass surgery at Hartford Hospital.
In Hartford Connecticut. And when his heart was about to be opened during the surgery, he found that Dr. Hiroyoshi Takata, who was operating him, he started doing something peculiar as if he was trying to fly, just moving his elbows like this, moving his elbows, pointing like this, pointing like this. So, he was feeling very peculiar.
What is the doctor is doing surgery? What is he trying to fly? And then after the surgery, when Al-Sulaiman reported this, Dr. Takata was asked about it. Takata said, yes. After he, when he had cleaned himself, disinfected his hands for doing a surgery, and before he, and after, when he was about to start doing a surgery, he had a habit of avoiding touching anything.
Even the possibility of touching anything that might be infected. So, what he would do is to keep his hands tight, close together. And whenever he had to point to anyone, he would point with his elbow, take that up, pick that up and point like this.
That was his peculiar habit. And there is another doctor at that time, Dr. Lasala, and he said that on that particular surgery, Al-Sulaiman surgery, actually Dr. Takata had done this, pointed in this way. Now, further, there are other researchers who, for example, another case was when a lady, she expected her surgery to take place.
And instead of the, instead of the main surgeon, it was the chief intern who started doing the surgery. She felt scandalized. I am paying for the surgery and expect this reputed surgeon to do the surgery, but why is this person doing the surgery? Now, that is what she saw, and nobody had told her this, but it turned out to be true.
Further, actually, this is not one, two or three, there are hundreds of cases. And there are over 107 such cases with correct perceptions, exerted from 39 publications from 37 different author teams, have been summarized by Janice Minor Holden in her article, Veridical Perceptions of Near-Death Experiences, in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. So, veridical perceptions means accurate perceptions.
So, this is not just one or two, there are scores of perceptions which are there, which are accurate, describing not just general surgical events, but specific events during their unconscious experience, during the time when they were unconscious. And these, therefore, strongly counter the idea that these might be, these might be simply educated guesses. So, now, if these near-death experiences perceptions, experiencers perceptions, are not educated guesses, then what might they be? Could these experiencers have been conscious, and they had observed what was happening? That is the possibility which we will investigate in our next session.
Summarize, in this session, we discussed what near-death experiences are, seeing oneself out of the body, seeing one’s circumstances outside, nearby the body, and then seeing oneself in a for the sake of verifiability, we focused on the perceptions which are seen, which can be tested, and proven to be correct or wrong. And in that case, we discussed, could these near-death experiences be hallucinations? No, because they involve clear consciousness and orderliness, they leave the patients feeling calm, and they do not, they are not caused by any of the known chemical causes of hallucinations, which on the other hand, involve disorderly perceptions and leave the subjects feeling disturbed. And then another reason why they cannot be hallucinations is that they involve factual perceptions, which could not have come about by hallucination.
And we discussed that in that case of actual perception, first expression was hallucinations, second is educated guesses, could they be educated guesses? We discussed Dr. Sabom’s study, and how, where when subjects were asked to guess, most of them guessed it wrong, where as subjects who had near-death experiences, almost all of them gave precise reports, discussed the retired Air Force pilot, who described the defibrillator movement very methodically and clearly, something which no layperson could have known and no layperson could have guessed also. So, along with general surgical, general events of surgery, the subjects also describe specific events and not just one or two, hundreds of subjects have experienced this and therefore, near-death experiences cannot be caused by, cannot be explained away simply as either hallucinations or educated guesses. Thank you.
Hare Krishna.