we all know that we can have no insight whatsoever as to what lies on the other side of death’s door. But in the last few decades, advances in medicine have made instances of resuscitation from the brink of death including instances of resuscitation after the complete cessation of brain activity a far more common occurrence.

The accounts given by individuals who have had such “Near Death Experiences,” or NDEs, (of which there are many thousands) have revealed some startling and fascinating
patterns. These accounts, though they
have not rendered death a completely
discovered “country”, are akin to the
first reports returned from explorers to
a new land.

An entire field of research has sprung
up to analyze this phenomenon.
Researchers from the fields of
medicine and psychology have come
together to form the International
Association of Near- Death Studies
(IANDS, website iands.org ) and the
Near Death Experience Research
Foundation (NDERF, website: nderf.org )

In 2005, IANDS released The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences to summarize the conclusions of 30 years of research in this field.

This should come as a wake-
up call to those inclined to doubt the
existence of the Deity:
“NDErs often believe that they have
survived because God willed it and had
a divine purpose in bringing them
back…They have experienced the love
of God and been changed by it. Many have come face-to-face with a personal God with whom they continue to maintain a loving relationship.”

the sheer volume of NDE accounts, has become a phenomenon that is difficult to ignore.
“the majority of researchers who have investigated the phenomenon, generally professionals with medical, psychological, or other scientific training—many of whom started out as skeptics—have concluded that these experiences are authentic.”

The strategy most often pursued by skeptics is to declare the NDE to be a hallucination…most often a hallucination produced by the eroding
neural environment of the dying brain.

But the astute reader (with or without
expertise in the fields of brain science
or psychology) will immediately
recognize why this explanation is
inadequate to explain frequent
encounters with a “personal God:”

Hallucinations amongst various people
share commonalities in terms of their
perceptual alterations but not in terms
of the content of the experience.
For example, if one were to administer
a hallucinogenic drug such as LSD to a
large number of people, it would not be
surprising if most or all of the subjects
reported similar symptoms.

These might include visual hallucinations, a feeling of euphoria, a feeling of separation from one’s body, etc…
Further, it would not be surprising if
the content of one of the subjects’
hallucinations included meeting a
purple leprechaun named Bobo who
led him on a journey to Never-Never
land.

One would certainly not expect,
however, for multiple subjects to report a similar encounter with a similar purple leprechaun. The experiential content of hallucinations are unique to each individual. And entering into a “loving relationship” with a “personal God” speaks of the content of a vast number of NDE experiences and can therefore not be classified as hallucination.

“In 1991, Reynolds was found to have
a basilar artery aneurysm in the brain
that could not be operated on with
conventional neurosurgical methods
without imminent risk of death.

She was taken to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix where the neurologist Robert Spetzler had pioneered a new type of surgery called hypothermic cardiac arrest, nicknamed
‘Standstill.’

What the patient first had to undergo included clinical death, which would mean that the brain EEG would come to a stop (no cerebral cortex activity), there would be no response from the brain stem (hence no brain function), and blood flow to the brain would cease.

Reynold’s body temperature was brought down to 60 degrees, her heartbeat and breathing stopped, her brainwaves flattened with no electrical activity in the brain, and the blood drained from her head.

Just when she was brought to this state and before the surgery commenced, Reynolds felt herself ‘pop’ out of her body.

She gave remarkably accurate
descriptions of the unusual
instruments used in the surgery, as
well as the activities taking place in the
operating room. This was followed by
her encounter with her deceased
relatives.”


In 1998 Kenneth Ring, PhD, and Sharon
Cooper, MA, published a landmark
article in the Journal of Near-Death
Studies about blind people who have
vividly visual near-death
experiences….An especially interesting
subgroup in this study was made up of
case reports from individuals who
were born totally blind and had NDEs
with the typical elements, including
detailed visual content.”

Watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9AfJbXe3rc