Celestial Travelers - Near Death Experience

by Dr. Melvin Morse
Introduction

Near death experiences (NDEs) have been reported throughout human history in a wide variety of cultures. In the past 20 years an explosion of accounts of such experiences occurring to those surviving coma, cardiac arrest, and noninjurious near fatal brushes with death has been reported. Such events occur to a broad cross section of society, including children, and are variously estimated to occur in between 10% and 90% of near-death situations. A number of similar elements are common to NDEs, including out-of-body experiences (OBEs), hearing buzzing or rushing sounds, entering into a void or a tunnel, seeing or entering into a bright spiritual light, encountering a border or limit, and the subjective perception of making a conscious choice or being forced to return to the body. Anecdotal cases exist in which the reality of the out-of-body perceptions can be independently verified by external conditions, situations, people, and objects. Childhood experiences are often compelling because children have a different perception of death than adults. Their experiences are simple and reveal a core NDE that is universal to the human dying experience.

The various elements of the experience can be replicated by electrical stimulation studies of the temporal lobe or by hallucinogenic drugs. It is possible that hallucinogenic neurotransmitters play a role in the NDE. Wish fulfillment, death denial, dissociative psychologic trauma, and other psychologic defense mechanisms have been advanced to explain the experiences. Regardless of cause, the experiences are apparently transformative, resulting in decreased death anxiety, heightened spiritual perceptions and awareness, increased subjectively perceived psychic abilities, and decreased symptoms of depression and anxiety. Adults who had NDEs as children describe themselves as living mentally and physically healthy lives, even donating more money to charity than control populations.

Many commentators agree that NDEs provide invaluable insight into the processes of dying. Their importance lies in documenting that dying patients are often aware of their surroundings and undergoing spiritual and emotionally dynamic experiences, even if patients appear to be unconscious. These experiences theoretically can be invaluable in empowering dying patients and their families to understand death and heal grief. If society can institutionalize the concept that the processes of dying are often joyous and spiritual, irrational use of medical technology in dying patients may be reduced, leading to substantial savings in health care costs. The current debate over whether they document an objectively real heaven or soul obscures the fact that NDEs are as real as any other human emotion and ability. Although enough evidence currently exists to make the survival hypothesis scientifically respectable, near death studies are in their infancy and are not currently of sufficient caliber to support such a conclusion. These experiences are the only objective evidence of what it is like to die. Near death experiences are best understood as one element of a spectrum of related clinical experiences known as death-related visions.

For the past 100 years, there has been intense interest in the scientific community and by the general public in scientific verification and validation of spiritual experiences.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, scientists in England and America investigated encounters with ghosts, mediums, spirit communication with the dead, and death-bed and near death visions. Although interest in the scientific community waned from 1910 to 1960, once again interest in deathbed and NDEs has exploded. This is not an isolated phenomenon but has appeared in the context of tremendous public interest in a wide variety of spiritual and paranormal issues, including spirit channeling, paranormal abilities, spiritual healing, encounters with UFOs, and even kidnappings by UFOs. It has been pointed out that the first wave of UFO sightings occurred in the late nineteenth century at the same time of the first modern accounts of deathbed visions. Carl Sagan is the most articulate proponent of the idea that perhaps these visions and encounters originate in our own cultural psychology and are not so much an understanding of another world but a reflection of our own inner psychic longings.

Interest in these experiences has become most pronounced during a time in which our society is losing its cultural myths and shared spiritual rituals and longings. Joseph Campbell stated that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. Mythology makes one "part of a society of living and dead that came long before you were here and will be here long after you are gone. It nourishes you and protects you." Mankind's myths giving meaning to individual lives and help to interpret events such as death.

It is precisely this current lack of meaning for our own death and the death of others that, in my opinion, has led to such intense interest in NDEs, especially the experiences of children, who are often regarded as too naïve to invent stories based on repressed fear of death. Historian Philip Aries describes modern society as having abandoned the traditional relationship between death and society, which had previously existed for tens of thousands of years. Starting with modern funeral practices in which the body was embalmed and preserved, death has become taboo, medicalized, and a defeat for patient and physician alike. Bluebond-Langer, an anthropologist who studies children on a cancer ward for 1 year, described a sense of mutual pretense and shared denial in children who were dying of cancer between the children, parents, staff, and physicians. Once a fatal diagnosis was made, conversations with the child became briefer and often terminated abruptly if the child asked too many questions about death. A child's death is seen as a defeat by everyone involved.

Pediatricians have been described as not being trained to handle children's deaths. Residency training often provides a model that death occurs because either we have failed or our medical systems have failed. Colleagues often do not support each other when a patient dies, and it is difficult to create a climate in which death can be openly discussed and grief expressed.

If it is difficult for us to confront death, it is understandable that is equally difficult to discuss spiritual visions associated with near death. Spiritual visions are often stigmatized as being irrational and absurd within the scientific community. Our world view is so closed to anything nonmaterial that scholarship and a belief in the spiritual are perhaps mutually exclusive. In describing a case of spontaneous cure of a patient who was moribund with meningococcal meningitis and Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome, Gardner reports that the patient ascribed her recovery to spiritual intervention. The physicians involved described her as "the one that got away," meaning that she simply defied the odds of dying for unknown reasons. Although her case was well documented, soon the accuracy of the diagnosis was called in doubt. He concludes that so fixed is our world view that even in such well-documented cases where patients and physicians are available for questioning, spiritual cures are probably impossible to prove. This case dramatically illustrates the wide gap between the world view of physicians adhering to our current scientific medical model and the more spiritual world view often seen in our patients.

Technology has so dominated modern medicine that a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine advocated rehabilitating auscultation of the heart with a stethoscope because it might lead to the physician actually touching and talking to the patient. "This therapeutic aspect of the diagnostic procedures is thwarted if, instead of meeting the doctor, the patient is given a sheaf of requisitions for expensive laboratory tests that may or may not be germane to his or her condition."

Clearly, much of the success of modern medicine is because of those very technological advances that allow so many to have NDEs. Yet every experienced physician acknowledges that there is a faith or a spirit or a vague undefined something that motivates the human body sometimes to heal and other times to die. Extensive reviews of the interactions of the mind and body to heal have been published. Prayer, guided imagery, cancer support groups, and simply having patients talk with an anesthesiologist about what the pain of surgery will be like all have documented effects on biologic healing. One recurrent theme in the mechanisms of the mind's effect on the body is that there is a belief system that has meaning for the patient. One of the main effects of NDEs is that they create new meanings of life and death for those who have them, as well as those who hear about them, new meanings that may well be therapeutic.

There is nothing inherently unscientific or irrational about studying the process of dying by talking to children and adults who have survived near death. Every scientific investigation begins with a surprising fact, something that challenges our preconceived notion of what the world should be. Nevertheless, studying the subject accounts of survivors of profound emotional and physical trauma is obviously fraught with research pitfalls. Issues of recall bias, patient selection bias, investigator bias, cultural expectations, and the fact that most of the research in this field is not peer reviewed and often the subject of television talk shows rather than skeptical scientific debate makes study design and interpretation of data difficult. However, in the past decade, the field of qualitative research has matured and become a science. As clinicians, we routinely make decisions based on clinical research. Certainly interpreting near death research is no more difficult than interpreting research on other equally mysterious topics such as colic and infant feeding practices.

Spiritual visions and paranormal events can be best studied if perceived as psychic events described by human beings, with an agnostic viewpoint to the veridical reality of them. Eleven percent to 14% of the average American population who are mentally and physically healthy and do not take drugs have had an OBE; such experiences must be normal and worthy of study as a unique clinical entity.

This article will review NDEs from the perspective of a practicing pediatrician. I will discuss their implications in bereavement counseling of parents who have had children die, as well as in working with dying children. These experiences raise a wide variety of difficult emotional issues in the children who have them and in their parents. Medical professionals and society can benefit from learning about such experiences, but the lack of a common cultural understanding of such experiences, as well as the wide gap between the materialistic viewpoint of the scientific establishment and the spiritual longings of the general public, must be resolved before we can begin to use these experiences to best advantage.

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