“When the brain is not functioning well,” he reflected, “the mind becomes free to function.”
And, perhaps, free to explore another, spiritual, realm.
Now let’s travel all the way down the rabbit hole. Say, for the sake of argument, that these people who could see and hear when their brains were not functioning were not lying. Say their consciousness was not trapped in the brain. Does this unleash the outrageous idea that consciousness—your life and mine—survives death? Scientists summarily dismiss this idea as so much rubbish. I would not even raise it—except that now neuroscience is getting into the act.
CHAPTER 10
Are We Dead Yet?
THE FRAGILE YELLOW PAPER IS UNDATED, but my mother and I figured it referred to the winter of 1939. Mom was enrolled in a finishing school just outside of New York City. She was eighteen. My grandmother was forty-one. One bitterly cold evening, Mom received an urgent phone call. Granny had fallen deathly ill.
When Mom arrived at Granny’s bedside, she found her mother slipping in and out of consciousness. Granny was attended by two Christian Science practitioners and a medically trained Christian Science nurse. They kept a fierce prayer vigil for nearly three days, but on Saturday morning, Granny “slipped out of this world and moved through a brief space of darkness,” as she would later write, in a written testimony that my mother found after Granny’s death. According to the people by her bedside, “the eyes did not close but a film closed over them and all activities ceased.”
But not for Granny. Granny was on the move. “I had passed the portal called death,” she wrote. “There was no fear and no anxiety. I seemed to be walking or going some place. I was conscious of the fact that I had left the world and those dear to me just as much as if you walked out of a room and closed the door behind you. After walking for a time, the light seemed to be breaking through and everything seemed to be getting much lighter when suddenly a light that I have never seen anything like before broke before me, and I was completely surrounded by a brilliancy that blinded me, so that I could hardly see. . . . A voice spoke to me and said, ‘Go back, you are needed there.’ As a soldier obeys a command spoken to him without a question, so I obeyed this command.”
An hour passed, and the friends next to Granny’s bed continued to hold vigil, unaware of Granny’s subterranean travels. Suddenly, “to the astonishment of them both, I opened my eyes wide” and began to speak.
“I heard my own voice talking, and this is what was said as they took it down. . . .‘It is wonderful.’ ‘It is beautiful.’ ‘The darkness is all gone, there just isn’t any more darkness at all.’ ‘There is no death.You don’t have to die.’ Turning to the [friends], I said,‘You never have to be afraid again.’ ”
At that moment, Granny threw off the covers. “I’m hot!” she declared, and rose from the bed, brushed her teeth, and asked for some breakfast.
When my grandmother returned from this ethereal voyage, she gave no external sign of the internal rewiring—at least, not in her personality. She remained an efficient, independent woman, one who would soon defy the convention of mid-century America and file for divorce. She continued her “healing” as a Christian Science practitioner. But the near-death experience instantly shifted her view of life, as if she switched from a magnifying glass to a telescope. Her prayer life, it seemed, increased in intensity by orders of magnitude, and she became somewhat famous for her healings.
“After that, she brought about the most remarkable physical healings that I know of personally,” my mother recalled.
“Do you know why?” I asked.
“Yes. She said to me,
‘Never be afraid
.
’
She said the whole experience taught her that there is nothing to fear, and that everything is love. That love was the light. There was no death, and so you need never be afraid.”
Back then, no one discussed such far-fetched phenomena. Even Mom was unaware of the details until she inherited her mother’s papers, four decades later.
Beginning in the 1970s, particularly with the advent of books like Dr. Raymond Moody’s
Life After Life
,
1
thousands of people rushed forward to recount their journeys to the brink of death and back. These accounts contained many of the same elements: the white light, the beauty, the peace, the sense of viewing one’s body from the outside. Skeptics believe that these similar phenomena reveal not a universal mystery pointing to eternal life but a common neurological response to the brain shutting down. But tell that to my grandmother, tell that to anyone else who has touched death—and tell that to increasing numbers of scientists.
If out-of-body experiences represent a pivotal battle in the war over consciousness—that is, whether your mind, will, and identity are only the expression of brain chemistry—then near-death experiences represent the battle to come. The questions posed by these experiences are too spooky for most mainstream scientists. Does your soul survive death? Is this life a shallow introduction to eternity, and death a sort of summer recess between kindergarten and first grade? Are we like stick figures on a chalkboard who live in two dimensions—until one day we pop off the board and find a three-dimensional world with not just length and width, but depth as well? And does that next dimension leave physical fingerprints on those who have traveled there and back?
The Perfect Death
A brief brush with death is the Hail Mary of altered consciousness: it’s risky, but if it works out, you score big.Visions, peace, and serenity, light and love, unity with all things, dramatic personal transformation: everything that psychedelics or temporal lobe epilepsy, meditation or spontaneous mystical experiences offer, you can find in one near-death experience.Which is not to say you should stick a fork into an electrical socket; most people do not return from the edge of death. But it does explain why I found the three hundred people gathered in Houston such an embarrassment of riches.
The 2006 conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies marked a watershed moment for the movement. Host ing the conference was M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the premier cancer hospitals in the world. After years toiling on the outskirts of science, this endorsement by a world-class medical center tickled the near-death folks to no end. The participants at the conference—the subjects and scientists alike—were like a tour group watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and suddenly being invited inside to dine with the queen.Yes, I thought as I settled into my comfortable seat in the hospital’s ultramodern auditorium, near-death experience has
arrived.
Near-death experiences have always been with us, but not until recently have they been mentioned in polite company. It took the book
Life After Life,
which was first published in 1975, to crack the dam of embarrassed silence and allow all those repressed stories to gush out. And gush they did—with such force that scientists began to divert them into different categories: the stages and elements of near-death experiences,
2
who gets them,
3
why they get them, how people are transformed, and various psychological, physiological, and neurochem ical explanations, or, rather, the failure of all those explanations to explain away the caress of death.
In the past three decades, scientists have conducted more than forty studies of nearly 3,400 near-death experiencers. Articles have appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as
The Lancet
,
Nature
,
Brain
, and
American Journal of Psychiatry
, as well as the subject’s flagship publication,
Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Most of these studies are fairly rudimentary. The problem comes down to money: Who is going to fund this research? As a result, a small band of researchers has toiled with barely enough bread and water to sustain them, compiling stories and statistics, until they have now amassed a fairly large body of research.
If one were looking for the
Mona Lisa
of near-death experiences—perfect and mysterious, each stroke masterfully executed—I would point to the story of Edward Salisbury. I met Edward on the first day of the conference in Houston, a tall, lanky man partial to checked shirts and black leather vests. His salt-and-pepper beard was neatly trimmed, his black hair sat flattened docilely against his head.When he spoke to me, he gazed kindly but unswervingly into my eyes. Those eyes held me hostage, as did his story.
On December 29, 1969, Edward was driving to see his fiancée in a new Firebird convertible. He was twenty-six, a young executive at Coca-Cola, driving too fast for the wet, winding roads of Atlanta’s suburbs. His car hit a curb and suddenly—
BANG
—he felt as though he’d been hit by a swinging door from behind. His car plowed into a tree and in the next instant, Edward was “merging” with the tree, going up its arteries and popping out on top, twenty-five feet above the road.
“As I looked around—it was like I was looking off a balcony—I said,‘That car looks like
mine
,’ ” he recalled.“I looked a little closer and there was this body slumped over the steering wheel. And I realized, Hey, that’s my body! If that is my body, then who am I? How did I get here? And in the next instant I was sucked away into a cascading, swirling wormhole of transformation.”
Edward found himself in a beautiful bright presence, “like walking out of a movie theater in the daytime,” and sank into the warmth as into a steamy bathtub. He soaked in the peace and joy for some time. Then he began to investigate the scenery.
“It’s as if I had walked into the Library of Congress. There are these giant tomes, and I looked around, and every question, every concern, every thought I had, was answered as quickly as I formed the thought. Questions like, ‘Why was I here?’ ‘How come my father was so upset with such-and-such event in his life?’ And all my questions were answered.”
Eventually Edward exhausted his questions. He spotted a majestic figure sitting on a throne—someone, he said, who bore a striking resemblance to Charlton Heston in his movie role as Moses. This was God the Father, apparently, and God patted His left thigh and said, “Come on,” like Santa Claus in the department store.
“And in the next instant, I am in His lap, with His arm supporting my back, and He is pouring down this smiling love, it was in His eyes—the love I see in mothers when their baby is given to them at birth,” Edward recalled. “And God said, ‘This is where you always are, if you would only know it.’ ”
Edward recalls basking in God’s gaze, until God pointed down to His feet. There Edward saw images, like so many pictures from an album that had spilled on the floor—memories spanning from his childhood to just a few days before the accident. He relived the memories from a 360-degree perspective, not only what
he
, Edward, had done and thought and felt, but how his actions affected others. He saw the girl in elementary school who had a lisp, and recalled teasing her because he wanted to be accepted by the other children.
“So I mimicked her. And I not only recalled the experience, I felt how
she
felt. I experienced the consequences of my behaviors.”
Edward paused, looking truly stricken. “As I recall it now, I want to cry with how cruel I was and how painful and hurtful that was. And I turned again into God’s eyes, and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And the response was an unconditional, loving acceptance that said, ‘It is neither good nor bad in the greater sense. Are you through?’ ”
In this way, Edward marched through his entire life, recalling his bad acts and his good. The time in high school when he rescued a girl from drowning at the beach, the moments a few days before his accident when he had fudged on an expense account. Finally Edward had picked up the final snapshot: his life review was complete. Sensing that they were done, and that he might be asked to leave the peace and return to his wrecked body, Edward announced that he did not want to return.
“I said, ‘Let me just put this pile of pictures back in order, and just send a message to Mom to let her know I’m okay, not to worry,’ ” he said.“I had a momentary thought—an earthly attachment—and Boom! I woke up in the hospital bed with my mother rubbing my feet. It was two weeks later.”
Edward’s story is a masterpiece. Not only does it include every element of a near-death experience, but his description precisely echoes the stories of other people at the Houston conference: the out-of-body experience, viewing his crumpled body with puzzlement and painlessness. The perfect, infinite knowledge he received in the “Library of Congress,” as if tapping into a conscious intelligence, all-knowing and all-seeing. The total acceptance and lack of judgment by God or the light, depending on one’s religious doctrine. The life review, in which the experiencer lives through the experience from at least two sides: his actions and their impact on others. The personal transformation that the traumatic experience sparks. Edward, for example, gave up his business career to become “a minister, a yoga teacher, and my wife’s chauffeur.” Finally, the return to his body, which was triggered by a connection to his life, to unfinished business and relationships.
Because I had been exploring the brain in the throes of “mystical” experience, I saw patterns that I might otherwise have missed. These events were not unique to dying. People suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy recalled having visions, hearing words or music, feeling the presence of the sacred. Those who ingested psychedelics—especially those who were in the final stages of cancer—recounted full-blown dramas that included death and resurrection, oneness with all things, an overwhelming love, the certainty that the death of the body did not mark the end. In both cases, when people returned from their drug trip or death trip, their fear of death had evaporated. Spiritual virtuosos in prayer and meditation reported not only visions (for some) but also an overwhelming peace and unity with all things and the certainty that there is more than this material world. Spontaneous mystics could have written the scripts for some of the near-death experiencers; but mainly they felt an overwhelming love that had nothing to do with theology or religious denomination. It seemed that, with the possible exception of temporal lobe epilepsy, encountering the “other,” or the “other side,” radically transformed the experiencer, as if rewiring his priorities and even his personalitiy. Every person I met in Houston testified to that fact.