A couple of weeks ago, I received an interesting question from Marianne.  She asked what I thought about near death experiences.  Specifically, she wondered if NDE’s were proof that our consciousness can exist without connection to the physical body, which is highly suggestive of life after death.  It is even suggestive of immortality.  As you can see, this is a profound question, and to answer it I’ve needed to take a couple of weeks to explore the subject more deeply.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the term, a near-death experience occurs, typically in an operating room or a hospital, when the patient “flat lines.”  Because our medical technology has advanced so much in the last 50 years or so, we now have had many reports of these kinds of occurrences.  During a surgery, or sometimes after some sort of extreme physical trauma, all of the patient’s vital signs disappear.  In a word, these individuals physically die.

Dr. Raymond Moody was the first to recognize the importance of these phenomena, and he began the efforts to document cases and to explore them scientifically in the 1970s.  We now have tens of thousands of reports from countries around the world.  As a result, we can no longer dismiss these phenomena.  There is just too much consistency between reports for any kind of dismissal to ring true.

Patients experiencing an NDE frequently report that they leave their body and find their conscious awareness floating above it.  They are able to perceive what occurs to the body during their apparent ‘death:’ what the doctors and nurses are saying and doing, and even what is happening to family members in the building.  Investigators of these experiences are often amazed at the wealth of detail that these so-called ‘dead’ people report.

While these reports are fascinating, the behavior changes that occur as a result of an NDE are even more extraordinary.  Patients report losing any fear of dying – certainly a wonderful effect since many are so deeply afraid of dying!  

More significantly, they also report (and are observed by others to experience) an increase in compassion, a decrease in materialism, a heightened moral sensitivity, a reduced ego reactivity, and a long-term value reorientation.  These effects appear across cultures and persist for decades.  Of note, these changes mirror the results of contemplative maturation.

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Here’s what we actually know about NDE’s.  First, they are not due to a single cause, but rather a result of many factors coming together.  NDE’s reliably occur when the brain is under extreme stress, typically involving:

– Oxygen deprivation, either through hypoxia or ischemia.

– CO2 spikes.

– A disruption in the default mode network.

– A massive endogenous neurotransmitter release (including endorphins,                       serotonin, and possibly DMT.)

– A breakdown of multisensory integration (especially in the temporoparietal junction)

All of this produces the following experiences:

– Ego dissolution.

– Time distortion.

– A life review.

– Hyper meaning attribution.

– Perceived nonlocal awareness.

While these experiences are similar to those experiences developed from mystical contemplation, scientists have also shown that many of these NDE elements can be induced without imminent death.  These include G–LOC in pilots, ketamine, meditation, and seizures.

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So, what does all this mean?  These data indicate that ordinary waking consciousness is a constrained operating mode.  It does not encompass the full bandwidth of human awareness.  You can think of this as a set of phenomena that parallels our experience of light.  With light, we see only part of the full bandwidth; we are unable to see both the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.  (Not to mention x-rays, gamma rays, and the full array of other wildly exotic phenomena.)

Across cultures and across the many events that trigger NDE’s, they consistently show:

– The self is experienced as something other than the body.

– Identity can persist without a narrative continuity.

– Meaning can be perceived as intrinsic, not constructed.

– Fear of death is dramatically reduced over the long term.

– Ethical orientation shifts towards compassion and truthfulness.

These effects are structural rather than transient and emotional.  Something significant happens that radically changes the person’s behavior.  Longitudinal studies show that NDE’s result in long term stable personality change.

One criticism of this research is the claim that NDE’s are somehow an end-of-life hallucination and have no actual objective reality.  If there were no long-term aftereffects from an NDE, this would be a plausible hypothesis.  However, the data strongly suggest otherwise, because the long-term after-effects are disproportionate to the hallucination models.  (Just ask any psychotherapy patient how easy it is to effect a long-term personality change!)

We may not fully understand what is happening with an NDE.  But the data show us that something of utmost significance has happened, and the individuals who experience an NDE have their lives permanently changed for the better.

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Here’s what I would like to believe: that NDE’s prove that human consciousness exists apart from our physical bodies.  Unfortunately, NDE’s do not prove this.  On the other hand, they do point very clearly to the fact that there is a lot more going on with consciousness than we are able to understand using the scientific tools at our disposal.

Perhaps the most interesting question that arises from the scientific study of NDE’s is:  Why does consciousness become more coherent, meaningful, and structured when the brain is failing?  Typically, one would expect the opposite: that when the brain fails, consciousness would become chaotic and unstructured, and there would be no positive long-term consequences should that failure somehow be arrested.

There are three hypotheses that are currently being explored to address this.  In the first, the extreme-brain model, it is believed that the brain creates this state while it collapses.  This model however does not explain the internal coherence of the phenomena that the dying person perceives, nor does it explain the long-term behavioral transformations that occur when the person survives.

The second model, called the filter-receiver model, states that the brain normally limits consciousness, but the crisis of dying loosens this filter so that the individual experiences more of the actual bandwidth of consciousness.  The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s hard to test experimentally.

The third model might be termed the metaphysical model.  Here the understanding is that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality and our brains function simply to localize consciousness to a particular place, namely the body.  As you might imagine, this is my preferred hypothesis.  That said, how do you test it?  One of the criteria for true scientific advance is that your hypothesis must be (potentially) disprovable.  Sadly, the metaphysical model cannot be disproved at this point.

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So where does all of this leave us?  When you sit with these data for a while, what comes up is a rather startling conclusion, at least to my mind.  The conclusion is this: that human identity is not as tightly bound to the ego, or to the internal narratives we create for ourselves, or to our physical/bodily self-representations as we have thought.  In addition, the loosening of these three methods of binding reliably produces both ethical and spiritual maturation.

These conclusions are totally consonant with our spiritual work here.  The great religious traditions agree that our sense of self, our ego, is a very limiting construct.  Indeed, there comes a time when that ego-construct holds us back and keeps us from developing our full potential.

There is a further implication in these data.  While we cannot prove this with the scientific tools we have available, it seems highly likely that consciousness is far more primary than we have thought.  We have thought that matter and energy were the building blocks of our perceived reality.  These data suggest rather strongly, in my view, that consciousness is the fundamental “stuff” of which reality is made.

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Well, I think I will leave you here to ponder.  I have about come to an end of being able to wrap my mind around these data.  In a word, I need a break!  Please continue your daily meditation practice and your own personal explorations of consciousness.  Who knows?  Maybe one day soon you will wake up to Reality and be able to give us the definitive answers the rest of us are searching for.

Remember that you are blessed in every way, today and always!

With deep affection,

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter series helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.