Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (13 page)

Comparing NDEs from different cultures will always require more than just statistics. As we have seen throughout this book, NDEs often have an emotion, a power, and a depth that transcend the limited questions typically asked to “understand” them. Questions that require a “Yes,” “Uncertain,” or “No” response simply don’t do justice to this experience. I believe that to
really
understand NDEs, one must read them.

To understand my position that NDEs around the world are more similar than dissimilar, it is helpful to read some representative NDEs that were shared in languages other than English and then translated into English. I find them similar to typical NDEs from English-speaking countries.

Elisa from Italy was transformed so much by this NDE, which took place when she fell from a cliff into a ravine, that she considers it her “second birth”:

Suddenly I slid from the wall, and then all was dark around me, deep dark. I didn’t have a body, I was immaterial.… I forgot my body. The time moved fast, and my thoughts were very fast. I saw myself at two years old, then at four in the sea, etc. Suddenly my life was over, and then I saw three sides of my probable future. In that moment I was very sad because I was dead and I knew it clearly and I wanted to return.… Slowly I saw a bright light around me; per instinct I [knew] that was “the line,” the “passage,” and if I passed through it I was dead. I decided not to pass into it because I wanted to live in my world and enjoy all things in it.… I began to pray.… Suddenly it was dark but a different dark, and I began to feel my own body again, and then I opened my eyes and saw the blue sky, and I was ecstatic because I returned in life. I was completely changed.

A woman we will call Hafur, from Colombia, had a near-death experience that allowed her to see her life reviewed several times. It gave her insight into what was important in her life:

The figure on my right, who was guiding me, stopped, and I could not see his face, and as though we were at a small, enclosed beach, there was a hill that served as a place for projecting my life from beginning to end several times, at first rapidly and afterward more slowly. It was amazing how my life was shown with events I had completely forgotten about and others that were so insignificant that it felt like I was seeing each frame of the personal movie of my life on earth. I realized that I understood everything with a great clarity and superlucidity I had never experienced before. I discovered that I had personally chosen to take on a physical body and have the life experiences I was having. I realized I had wasted time in suffering, and what I should have been doing was using my freedom to choose true love, and not pain, in all that came into my life.

As you can see, these experiences have the same elements as NDEs from people in Nebraska or New York. And although there may be some minor differences, in truth, looking at NDEs around the world is like showing a class of young, multinational students a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in France; some will know what it is, others will think it’s scaffolding for a building in progress, and others will think it’s a spaceship. All of the children are seeing the same thing; they are just interpreting and expressing it differently based on what they know of life.

One need only read several of these incredible accounts to realize that there is a raw power in NDEs that transcends language. There are so many examples of this that I could easily fill a book with nothing but transformative near-death experiences from all over the world. But if I had to choose just one that sums up the message of all NDEs worldwide, it might be that of Hafur, the woman from Colombia whose experience is quoted above. Her experience allowed her to see her life several times, as though “I was seeing each frame of the personal movie of my life on earth.”

This experience reshaped Hafur, providing her with revelations that transcend geographic and language barriers. Below is an edited version of the wisdom she received from the light and that she included on her NDERF questionnaire when completing this sentence: A part of what I understood and remember today is …

At the end of Hafur’s list, she expressed a frustration that I have read and heard from many near-death experiencers. “I learned thousands of other things without end,” she wrote. “It is difficult to express in words because words are insufficient.”

Perhaps that’s another real issue. It isn’t just words that get in the way. It’s the indescribable quality of the near-death experience that we are often wrestling with. That alone makes it a universal experience.

So far we have looked at near-death experiences from around the world. Some of these NDE accounts came from non-Western countries with cultures that are usually very different from the cultures of English-speaking countries. We will take a closer look at these fascinating NDEs from non-Western countries.

Next we will look at near-death experiences in non-Western countries. I consider a “non-Western country” to include areas of the world that are predominantly not of Jewish or Christian heritage.
¹
Near-death experiences from people living in non-Western countries are
much
harder to study than are those of their Western counterparts. Researchers encounter both geographical and language barriers in reaching non-Western NDErs. Some people who had near-death experiences have difficulty describing their experience in words, and a language barrier may compound this problem.
²
Finally, people living in non-Western countries may not have been exposed to the concept of near-death experience. They may have had a near-death experience but not know that what they experienced is called an NDE. It is easier for the public in Western countries to hear about near- death experiences because books and the media have been discussing NDEs for decades.

A review of prior scholarly research on non-Western NDEs reveals that there is much work to be done. In the early years of researching near-death experiences, a common problem was the tendency to draw conclusions from studying small numbers of NDEs. A number of studies tried to draw conclusions from fewer than five case studies. Indeed, several of these studies attempted to draw meaningful conclusions from only one NDE case study! Drawing conclusions from a study of very few NDEs would be like testing a new medication on only a handful of people; in all likelihood very little usable information could come from such work. Over the years, as more NDEs became available for research, these earlier conclusions were frequently found to be incorrect.

In other non-Western NDE studies, some in the study group did not have convincing life-threatening events. Rather, many of these studies reported cases of apparent hallucinations, spontaneous out-of-body experiences, or other paranormal events that may happen without approaching death. Some of the people in these studies were likely undergoing febrile hallucinations, for instance, which are caused by high fever and which may be more common in countries that have more infectious illnesses.

In essence, the researchers may have believed that all the people in their study groups had had life-threatening events when they actually had not. Also, there are many non-Western NDE studies in which the definition of
near-death experience
was never made clear.

Other non-Western NDE studies used accounts that were published in the popular literature of that country. These NDEs are probably not representative of all NDEs in the country. Many of these non-Western NDE studies also relied on second-person reporting. This means that the researcher did not talk directly with the NDEr but instead talked with someone else who heard the near-death experience account, which creates the concern that there may be significant inaccuracy. Because of this concern, the NDERF study excluded all second-person near-death experiences from statistical analysis.

It is also important to realize that virtually all nonWestern NDE accounts published in English had to be translated into English. This raises another concern: how accurate is the translation? Some non-English words and concepts don’t translate well, and the language problem may be compounded in cultures where the topic of death is taboo. We have already seen how problematic language barriers are from our study of NDEs around the world.

I could go on and on, but my point is clear: most prior studies of non-Western NDEs have serious flaws that could create the impression that non-Western NDEs are different from Western NDEs. Let’s look at some non-Western near- death experiences.

Gülden, a Muslim man from Turkey, took this voyage to a heavenly realm when an artery burst in the right temporal lobe of his brain. Here’s his story:

I felt that I was rising up above my bed, in the direction of a white, very bright light. Meanwhile, I saw my uncle, who had died one month before. While passing me, he said, “Not yet.” I was surprised how I understood him without spoken words, but I felt very peaceful. Later a woman came to me. If I saw her now, I would recognize her. She took me to a wonderful place with mountains and said that this was the place of my life. The place we went was beautiful, but I said to her that this place is not my life’s place. Then we came to a seashore with a little village, and she said again that this place was my life, but I didn’t know this place and I said to her that this is not the place of my life. After we traveled to some more very beautiful places she said that I was not ready to stay in these places and asked me what I remember about my life.

Mustapha was twelve years old and living in Algeria when he nearly drowned:

I knew that I was drowning, especially as I could not avoid swallowing seawater. Then all of a sudden I could see myself floating within the water, in an incredible calmness and physical and psychological relaxation. I could see this body, very calm, drifting slowly, and also saw bubbles coming out of its mouth. The scene was very real, but with an intense luminosity. I could see everything under the water, as if I had a diving mask on. My vision was near 300 degrees. It was like being a short distance from my body, but I could also see what was happening behind me. I noticed small details: pebbles that were ochre-colored (like fragments of house tiles), also light-colored and striped pebbles, on the seabed, seaweed floating beneath the surface. The rest was sand. There were also small, almost translucent fish just under the surface, which were moving then disappeared with a sudden flick of the tail.

Carol is from Saudi Arabia. She had a complication of childbirth. This experience, she said, helped her realize that “God is everywhere, even the smallest part of material creation.” Here is her story:

I began seeing everything white around me, like this blank page to write on. At the same time I felt a presence, as if someone was with me and was explaining to me about some doubts I had at one time. Not with words, but with images and perhaps telepathy, since I do not remember hearing a voice. But I could understand everything he said, and it was all so clear and obvious that I wondered how I could not have understood this before and that my mother would also be happy to know it. I understood that everything good and bad happened for a purpose.

At NDERF we have received many accounts of near- death experiences that were personally experienced by doctors and scientists. Here is one such case. Dr. Sahar is a physician in Sudan, and here is her account:

The next day in the afternoon, I felt that pain again. I was getting worse and worse, like the delivery pain. I then fainted. My husband, who is a doctor too, hit my face quickly. I awoke at once. He hurriedly carried me to the hospital again. There they told me that my baby is out of the womb and the fallopian tube exploded, which caused me to hemorrhage. They did an urgent operation. After the operation I told my husband that I felt a very great feeling in my first faint at home. I felt that I went to another place where there is very good weather with a lovely breeze. I felt there … a calm and peace which I have never experienced in my life. I told him that I was talking with anonymous people for a long time, as if for months. I don’t remember what we were talking about or who they were, but I remember that I was so happy with them, as if we were sitting there for months! I felt very angry and sorry when my husband made me return to consciousness. Coming back, I felt this life is narrow, dirty, and disgusting. I want to go back there and stay forever.

Simran is from India. He nearly died in a bus crash in which he experienced severe trauma, including head injuries. To Simran, one of the most meaningful parts of his near-death experience was the following:

Then a bright light appeared, having a soft mans voice that told me, “You will leave everything behind—your loved ones, the hard-earned award, money, even your clothes. You’ll come to me empty-handed.” The light also gave me an important message to follow it as much [as] possible.

Portions of the NDERF website have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, and many others. This allows near-death experiencers from non-Western countries to share their NDEs in their own language and to respond to the same survey questions as other NDErs around the world.

The NDERF study of non-Western NDEs is unique. No prior large study has published the narratives of the NDEs, has included only experiences that were medically determined to have included a life-threatening event, and has directly compared the responses from NDErs from non-Western and Western countries to the same detailed questions about the content of their NDEs.

Nineteen non-Western NDErs shared a narrative of their near-death experience and completed the NDERF survey. Nine of these NDEs were shared in English and ten in languages other than English. We compared responses to thirty- three questions regarding NDE elements from these non-Western NDEs to the responses from the same comparison group of English NDEs from predominantly English-speaking countries that we discussed earlier in this chapter.

The results:
All NDE elements that were present in Western NDEs were present in non-Western NDEs. Of the thirty-three NDE elements studied, there was a statistically significant difference between the groups in the responses to five questions, while the responses to two questions were borderline significant. For twenty-six of the thirty-three questions, the NDE elements occurred in both groups with statistically equal frequency.

The conclusion:
All near-death experience elements appearing in Western NDEs are present in non-Western NDEs. There are many non-Western NDEs with narratives that are strikingly similar to the narratives of typical Western NDEs. At a minimum, it may be concluded that nonWestern NDEs are much more similar to Western NDEs than dissimilar. Recall that slightly over half of the nonWestern near-death experiences studied were shared in languages other than English. Earlier in this chapter we found that language translation issues appear to account for significant differences in the content of NDEs from around the world—differences that probably do not actually exist. With these considerations, I believe a reasonable interpretation of the NDERF study findings are that non-Western NDEs appear to be akin to Western NDEs. If there are any differences at all between non-Western and Western NDEs, the differences are more likely to be minor than substantial.
³

At NDERF we have not yet received enough English NDEs from non-Western countries to be able to directly compare them with English NDEs from predominantly English-speaking countries. I expect that someday we will have enough English NDEs from non-Western countries to allow such a comparison. That will certainly be an interesting study.

Until now, all NDERF study findings presented in this book have been consistent with the findings of scores of prior NDE studies. The NDERF study of non-Western NDEs was different, as the findings from this part of the NDERF study are dissimilar from the conclusions of prior studies of non-Western NDEs.

From our prior discussion, it is easy to see how difficult it is to study non-Western near-death experiences. Several researchers have done the best they could with existing data and tried to reach conclusions about non-Western NDEs. These researchers were aware of the difficulties with this type of research, and their conclusions are recognized as tentative.

One of the leading researchers of non-Western NDEs is Dr. Allan Kellehear, a sociology professor. He reviewed previously published reports of non-Western near-death experiences and studied five NDE elements. He concluded that deceased or supernatural beings commonly appeared in nonWestern NDEs. He also found that non-Western NDEs commonly described otherworldly visits. Both of these elements are also common in Western NDEs. However, Dr. Kellehear’s review found some differences between his study group of non-Western and Western NDEs. He states: “Life review and the tunnel experience seem to be culture-specific features.”
⁴

Is this so? From the NDERF study of 19 non-Western NDEs and comparison group of 583 NDEs, I looked at the NDERF survey questions regarding life reviews and tunnels.

There were two questions about life review, with some differences in the wording of the questions. In response to the survey question “Did you experience a review of past events in your life?” the two groups answered as follows:

There was no statistically significant difference in the responses between the two groups. The second survey question relating to life review was an NDE Scale question that asked, “Did scenes from your past come back to you?” Responses allowed to this question were “Past flashed before me, out of my control,” “Remembered many past events,” and “No.” A life review was considered to have occurred if either of the first two responses to this question was selected—that is, any option but “No.” A life review was present in 32 percent of the non-Western NDE group and 25 percent of the Western NDE group. This was not a statistically significant difference. In view of the responses to both of these questions, the life review appears to be present and occur with equal frequency in both non-Western and Western NDEs.

What about tunnel experiences? There was one NDERF survey question that asked, “Did you pass into or through a tunnel or enclosure?” Responses to this question were: