Death, as we are frequently reminded these days, is a taboo subject...there is an unspoken resistance to any talk of leaving this life and of what might happen next.
"Once the fear of death is transcended, life becomes a transformed experience because that particular fear underlies all others. Few people know what it is to live without fear--but beyond fear lies joy, as the meaning and purpose of your existence surfaces." Power and Force, The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.
Near-death experiencers (NDErs) are thrust suddenly into spiritual consciousness without any preparation and then returned to a community in which such experiences are not valued. We in the West are largely gripped by a pathological fear of death. This is far less the case in many non-Western cultures, where the ethos of death is often more mystical, more clearly understood and more integrated into physical life.
Once regarded as meaningless hallucinations, near-death experiences (NDEs) have become the subject of serious study by medical and various other researchers in recent years. NDEs continue to be reported by individuals who were pronounced clinically dead but then were resuscitated, by people who in the course of accidents or illnesses feared that they were near death, and by some who actually died but were able to describe their experiences in their final moments ("deathbed visions").
Raymond Moody, the psychiatrist who coined the term "near-death experience" in the mid-1970s, identified 15 elements that seem to recur in near-death experiences: ineffability, hearing oneself pronounced dead, a feeling of peace, hearing unusual noises, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of the body, meeting spiritual beings, encountering a bright light or being of light, a panoramic life review, a realm where all knowledge exists, cities of light, a realm of bewildered spirits, a supernatural rescue, a border or a boundary, and coming back into the body. After further study, he added four recurrent aftereffects: frustration upon relating the experience to others, broadened or deepened appreciation of life, elimination of the fear of death, and corroboration of out-of-body visions.
NDEs generally have a profound and apparently lasting impact on many who experience them, often precipitating a significant change in values and attitude toward death and a new sense of purpose or meaning of life. Long before Moody coined the term, I personally experienced a NDE during an automobile accident while a student at the University of Florida. I found myself in a dark tunnel and encountered a bright light in the distance, experienced a fast yet comprehensive life review, had a feeling of peace (discovering that the process of dying was comforting) and being out of the body. After that life changing experience, I no longer fear death and have been open to taking risks in living a life of passion and meaning.
NDErs do not subsequently attend church more often or participate in other modes of formal religious worship. Even though NDErs expressed indifference toward organized religion, they also described "an overall tolerance for all ways of religious worship." The moral assessment that takes place in the life review provides NDErs with an experiential moral order that is based on "empathic resonance" with other people, meaning the direct perception of an intrinsic interconnectedness and interdependence among all living beings. Near-death experiencers know firsthand how their thoughts, feelings, and actions affect others.
At the very least, near-death experiences should foster spiritual growth by leading us to question some of our basic assumptions about mind and brain, about our relationship to the divine and about the universe and our role in it.
Source: Shift: At The Frontiers of Consciousness, December 2007