Light at the End of the Tunnel

“I opened my eyes and found myself in a corner of the room”, said Emran, a friend recalling his grueling experience in the Operation Theatre he had survived after a hit-and-run accident. “Instantly, I saw doctors huddled over a body. I knew that it was me lying on the table. But I was outside of my body, floating in the corner of the room. It made no sense to me. Suddenly, I was floating through a tunnel. Then, there was bright white light and everything seemed so timeless… and peaceful!”

On conferring with his doctors, I discovered that they had lost Emran… for about 40 seconds he was as good as dead. Then, his heart had revitalized.

Emran had undergone an NDE (Near-Death Experience), a term coined 30 years ago by Raymond Moody, an American researcher, to explain the incidents of a large number of people who, whilst apparently dead, had reported meeting deceased relatives or heavenly beings, coming to a cliff where a decision about life or death must take place, seeing one’s life pass before their eyes called a ’life review’, acute awareness, timelessness and intense emotions before being resuscitated. Today’s medical science saving more lives coupled with increasing research on NDEs yields soaring numbers of such experiences.

What are NDEs? Why are they so universal? Are they the prelude to our life after death or the very last experience we have before oblivion? Is their an irrefutable scientific explanation?

For years now, questions such as these have mystified researchers and theorists. The answers, till this day, stay unconvincing and unendorsed.

Are NDEs a final odyssey into the Afterlife? Not quite. For one, not everybody who has “come back from the dead” has reported an NDE. Secondly, you do not have to be nearly dead to have an NDE. Many similar experiences are recorded of people who have taken certain drugs or had seizures or anaphylactic shock.

A very interesting, yet numinous happening during the NDEs is when the “experiencer” looks down on his body and surroundings from a height, also called an out-of-body experience (OBE). OBEs are among the most frequently reported occurrences during an NDE. However, OBEs (and tunnels) are also often reported outside the sphere of NDEs. In OBE, a person can see his own body in various situations and under different surroundings. These may include: an operating room, a previous life episode such as in a classroom or with friends where the “experiencer” watches himself relive those moments. An OBE is often accompanied by intense feelings of satisfaction, peace, ecstasy, anxiety or pain depending on the situation of the OBE.

Another interesting happening is recalling, after one has recovered full consciousness, the entire, detailed conversation that went on among the medical staff in the room, despite being unconscious during the operation. One interesting question is whether NDEs are culture specific. What little research there is suggests that in other cultures NDEs have basically the same structure, although people’s backgrounds and dogmas govern how they are interpreted.

While most of the NDEs are reportedly “pleasant”, the flipside holds the “hellish” experiences where meetings with demons and sensations of being in a lake of fire are reported. NDEs often alter the beliefs and lives of those who endure them. Upon awakening, people may return with unusual abilities such as: seeing, awareness of science and other technologies regarding time and space and, most commonly, change in personality and spiritual transformations.

To date, there have been plentiful scientific, physiological, psychological and spiritual elucidations related to NDEs. As I put forth some of them here, it is again worth mentioning that an “absolute” cause has yet not been acknowledged.

Astral Projection

Could we have another body that is the vehicle of consciousness and leaves the physical body at death to go on to another world? Spiritually, NDEs are an account of a soul’s transition from the mortal world to the eternal.. In the earliest experiments, mediums claimed they were able to project their astral bodies to distant rooms, see what was happening and even react with their (physical) bodies when it was actually their (invisible) astral body that was feeling something. In other experiments, dying people were weighed to try to detect the astral body as it left. Early this century a weight of about one ounce was claimed but more recent experiments have used the most sophisticated detectors but to show it was not a real effect.

Lysergic Acid

While under the influence of Lysergic Acid, frequently feel they have had both a religious and an out-of-body experience. This was linked to an NDE. However, the visual hallucinations from a Lysergic Acid experience are not consistent from one person to another, quite unlike NDEs.

Low Oxygen Levels

Some researchers attribute NDEs to hypoxia (an absence of oxygen reaching living tissues) by arguing that the brain in such circumstances experiences pleasurable feelings and a natural high in which NDE episodes are imagined. However, countless cases of those who had an NDE did not have any deficiency of oxygen.

Endorphin Model

Under extreme pain or stress, the brain sometimes releases natural chemicals called endorphins to relieve the condition. They affect people in the same way morphine or heroin does. The hallucinations thus produced are linked to NDEs. However, there is no medical proof that the brain creates a greater quantity of endorphins because of the stress of dying.

Delayed Anesthetization

Hearing is the last sense to be anesthetized prior to surgery and the first sense to return in the recovery room. During a NDE, even though the person is not conscious or able to see, the level of the brain responsible for hearing is still functional and able to hear as well as form memories of what is heard. This, however, does not explain the other constituents of an NDE.

Autoscopic Hallucinations

The psychological event of seeing one’s double is known as autoscopy. The OBE element of NDE is said to be an autoscopic hallucination. However, there is a difference of “direction” between the two which can be illustrated in this way: a man lying on his bed sees his double hovering above himself — he is having an autoscopic hallucination; a woman sees herself lying on her bed from above — she is having an NDE.

Conclusion

The sheer unexplained nature of NDEs and their startling frequency within the populace from around the world poses astonishing questions to our understanding of mind, matter, consciousness and reality. Is what we perceive subjective? Or does there exist an objective explanation to everything?