Childhood NDEs (Near Death Experience) - Unique Evidence
• Seven-year-old Katie was found in a swimming pool; she drowned. Pediatrician and researcher Melvin Morse resuscitated her in the emergency room, but Katie remained in a deep coma - she had cerebral edema, had no gag reflex - and breathed with a ventilator. Doctors estimated Katie's chances of survival at 10%.
Surprisingly, she completely recovered in three days.
When the girl arrived at the hospital to undergo a second examination, she immediately recognized Morse and told her mother: “This is him, the bearded man. At first there was a tall doctor without a beard, and then he came. Immediately I was in a large room, and after I was transferred to a smaller room, where I was X-rayed."
Katie gave other details, for example, how a tube was inserted into her nose - everything told exactly coincided with what was happening, but she "saw" what was happening when her eyes were closed and her brain was in a deep coma.
Morse asked what she remembered from nearly drowning. In the end, if she choked with a seizure, everything could happen again.
Katie clarified: "Are you asking about how I visited the Heavenly Father?" This answer struck Morse as very curious, and the doctor replied: “That would be a good place to start. Tell us how you met the Heavenly Father."
“I saw Jesus and the Heavenly Father,” Katie replied. Maybe she noticed the shocked expression on the doctor's face, or maybe it was all about her natural shyness. Anyway, Katie didn't go on that time.
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A week later, the girl showed more talkativeness. She did not remember anything from how she was drowning, but she remembered that at first it was dark, then a tunnel appeared, through which Elizabeth came. She described her as "tall and pretty" with bright golden hair.
Elizabeth escorted the girl through the tunnel where she met several people, including her late grandfather, two little boys named Mark and Andy, and others. In addition, Katie said that she visited her earthly home, where she saw her brothers rolling a toy soldier in a jeep, and her mother was cooking chicken and rice. She even remembered what everyone was wearing. Katie's parents were amazed at how accurately she described everything.
In the end, Elizabeth took the girl to meet with the Heavenly Father and Jesus. The father asked if she wanted to return home. Katie wanted to. Jesus asked if she wanted to see her mother. Katie said yes and woke up.
Katie talked for almost an hour, but that hour changed Dr. Morse's life. He began questioning the nurses in the intensive care unit. They recalled that when the girl woke up, she first asked: "Where are Mark and Andy?" She asked several times about them. Morse thought for a long time about Katie and how she shared her experiences. Although the girl was very shy, she spoke "confidently and convincingly" about what happened to her.
The doctor spent several hours asking Katie's parents about the girl's childhood; anything that could explain such feelings. Katie's parents are Mormons and did not tell her about the tunnels, nor about the guardian angels, or anything like that. When Katie's grandfather passed away, her mother explained that death is like seeing off someone who floats away in a boat, while friends and relatives remain on the shore.
Dr. Morse described this case in the American Journal of Childhood Illness and began to think about further research. He received a cancer research grant, but Janet Lunsford, who was responsible for granting the grants, supported his desire to start studying NDEs in children at the Seattle Children's Hospital instead of cancer. Morse assembled a group of eight scientists, each with relevant experience. For example, Dr. Don Tyler, an anesthesiologist, studied the effects of anesthesia on the brain. Dr. Jerrold Milstein, head of the Department of Pediatric Neurology at the University of Washington, has studied the brain stem and the hippocampus …
After 3 years of research, Dr. Morse came to the following conclusions: “In medical schools, we are trained to look for the simplest explanations for medical problems. After going through all the other explanations, I think that the easiest way to explain NDEs is that they are really short-term visits to the other world. Why not? I have read all the complex psychological and physiological interpretations of NDE, and none of them seemed quite satisfactory to me."
He published the results of his research in a medical journal, and later published a book in which there was a more detailed presentation of the material.
When children experience NDEs, they mention the same elements as adults. But it is highly doubtful that they could have heard of NDEs before or had the same psychological expectations as adults. Children's spontaneity in describing events entirely outside their previous learning and experience provides a unique and compelling body of evidence. Part of Paradise Is Real owes its success to little Colton's NDE charm. His story seems childishly spontaneous; in his own way, he spoke freshly and naively about things that only adults can fully understand.
If childhood experiences were based on what children wanted to see in a serious illness, they would probably see their parents in a dream. But their reports indicate that during NDEs, they often see deceased grandparents or pets. After the NDE, their lives, like those of adults, change dramatically. They become more empathetic than their peers; they guess the emotions behind the spoken words.
• Here are some more near-death experiences for children. A 5-year-old boy fell ill with meningitis, fell into a coma and, waking up, said that he had met a little girl on the other side, who said that she was his sister. She told him: “I am your sister. I died a month after I was born. I was named after your grandmother. Our parents called me Ritya for short."
Coming out of a coma, the boy told his parents everything. They were shocked and briefly left the room, and then returned and told the boy that he actually had an older sister named Ritya, who died of poisoning a year before his birth. They decided, while he was still young, not to tell him about it.
The supernatural explanation seems to be more in line with childhood NDEs than the natural one, based on attitudes or wishful thinking. In particular, the first explanation is supported by numerous corroborating evidence.
Life After Death - Described by NDE Survivors
• “I passed out in the store, went there to buy groceries. I woke up during the operation, but realized that I was hovering over my own body. There were crowded doctors, they were doing something, talking among themselves.
I looked to my right and saw a hospital corridor. My cousin was standing there talking on the phone. I heard him tell someone that I had bought a lot of groceries and the bags were so heavy that my aching heart could not stand it. When I woke up and my brother came up to me, I told him what I had heard. He immediately turned pale and confirmed that he had spoken about it when I was unconscious."
• “I had the feeling that I was flying at high speed in a vertical tunnel. Looking back, I saw a huge number of faces, only they were distorted into disgusting grimaces. I felt scared, but soon I flew past them, they were left behind. I flew towards the light, but still could not reach it. It was as if he was getting further and further away from me.
Suddenly, at one point, it seemed to me that all the pain was gone. It became good and calm, a feeling of peace enveloped me. True, this did not last long. At one point, I sharply felt my own body and returned to reality. They took me to the hospital, but I did not stop thinking about the feelings that I experienced. The awful faces that I saw were probably hell, and the light and feeling of bliss was heaven."
• Ruby had a successful caesarean section at a Florida hospital when she suddenly passed out from a rare complication known as amniotic fluid embolism.
After some time, Ruby said that when she lost consciousness, she was in a different place. It was beautiful, everything shone. There she met her late father, who said that it was not her time and she should return to Earth.
• “I remember almost nothing, only music. Very loud, like a march from an old movie. I was even surprised that they say that a serious operation is underway, and then the tape recorder was turned on completely. Then I realized that the music was getting kind of strange. Nice, but weird. She was kind of extraterrestrial. I have never heard such a thing … I cannot explain it plainly. The sounds are absolutely not human."
• “I saw myself from above and from the side. As if I was lifted up and crushed against the ceiling. At the same time, I watched for a very long time how doctors are trying to revive me. It was funny to me: "I think how cleverly I hid from everyone here!" And then it was as if I was sucked into a whirlpool and "sucked" back into the body.
• “… I found myself in hell. There was complete darkness and silence all around. The most painful thing was the lack of time. But the suffering was very real. Only me, suffering and eternity. And now a chill passes through the body at the memory of this horror. That's when I called to Christ for help for the first time in my life. How could I know about Him? Nobody preached to me. Maybe this knowledge is innate. But Christ helped. I returned to reality and at the same moment fell on my knees and began to thank God."
• “I ate mushrooms bought at the bazaar, and the next day I woke up in intensive care. My kidneys and liver have failed. While I was unconscious, I saw hell: it was hot, there was a cauldron around which devils were running. And then fog and forgetfulness. I realized that death is not the key to all doors, it rips these doors off their hinges. After clinical death, hallucinations appeared. All the time voices were heard that ordered to commit suicide. I quit my job and went to a monastery. There, after confession and communion, everything passed. Now I attend church weekly. Everything hurts, my hands go numb. I went to the doctors - no one knows anything, but I am no longer afraid of death."
• “Three years ago I crashed on a scooter. The head knocked through the back door of a parked car. Disconnected immediately. Suddenly she saw a man. He said: "It's too early for you to die - you have to save." After the shots, like in a movie: a girl and a boy, and next to me and my future husband. Recovered in intensive care. The doctors said that they did not live with such fractures, and a month later I went to university. What I saw came true: I work as a midwife, got married and gave birth to a child. Every year on that day I come to the scene of the accident and thank you for staying alive."
• “It happened during recess, I was in the third grade then. I was sitting at my desk, suddenly my stomach started to hurt badly, it became very bad, my eyes darkened. Fell to the floor …. and woke up in the sky. I saw my body, but no legs. As if in a cloud I was looking at my class from above. All around there are clouds. I thought: "I have to go back, otherwise my mother will swear!" I began to pull very downward. I woke up, my head ached terribly. "Still, so crash from the desk!" - said friends. It turned out that I have vegetative dystonia. But with fainting, as a rule, I see or hear dreams, but here everything is different. I often think about it. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, life is very short”.
Deathbed Visions
The first known attempt to put together deathbed reports was by Professor Sir William Barrett. His wife, a doctor, pushed him to study.
• One day, when she came home from work, she told Sir William about a remarkable vision that had been told by Doris, a patient who was dying after a difficult birth. Doris spoke with great joy that she had seen her late father. Then, with a rather puzzled expression, she said, "Vida was with him." Doris turned to her and repeated, "Vida is with him." Doris's sister, Vida, had died three weeks before, but due to Doris's health condition, her relatives did not tell her about it.
In the second half of the twentieth century, three full-scale studies of near-death visions were carried out. The first work collects and analyzes reports from nurses and doctors, which cover more than 35,000 cases. The second collected approximately 50,000 patient reports. Both of these studies were conducted in the United States. Later, a third work appeared, which collected 255 reports of near-death visions in India. Ironically, "the results of the Indian study were consistent with the results of earlier studies on almost every point."
Here are some interesting pieces of evidence from these studies:
1. Those who reported that the deceased relatives or angelic beings had come for them to take them died sooner than those who simply talked about seeing angels and angelic beings in another world.
2. Sometimes people who were not going to die told about visions, which excludes the possibility of waiting for an event.
• One young (about 30 years old) Indian, educated in college, quickly recovered from his illness. They were going to discharge him that day; both the doctor and the patient hoped for a complete recovery. Suddenly the patient exclaimed: “There is someone in white robes! I will not go with you! After 10 minutes. he passed away.
If such visions are born of cultural expectations, it is possible to assume that expectations will differ greatly from person to person and from culture to culture. But a large percentage of coincidences better agree with the supernatural explanation (there is life after death!) Than with the purely materialistic (there is no life after death).
Common NDEs are confirmed by numerous eyewitnesses
Those who are often close to the dying person (his relatives and friends) share with him near-death experiences. Reports of shared, or shared, NDEs are valuable from an evidence point of view: multiple people see and feel the same thing. In addition, such incidents do not lend themselves to natural scientific explanations, for example, the hypothesis of the dying of the brain, because many of the "accomplices" did not have the brain in the process of dying! They have neither hypoxia, nor hypercapnia (a condition caused by an excess amount of carbon dioxide in the blood), nor a fear of death; there are no other symptoms that could affect the brain at the time of death.
Here is an example of near-death visions shared by several family members who were nearby.
• 5 Anderson siblings in Atlanta were on duty at the bedside of their dying mother. Because she was seriously ill for a long time, the children psychologically resigned themselves to the inevitable. According to one daughter, "suddenly a bright light appeared in the room." He was not like “any earthly light. I pushed my sister in the side to check if she was seeing the same thing as I, and, turning to her, I saw that her eyes had become huge, like saucers … My brother was sitting with his mouth open. We all saw the same thing, and we got scared for a while."
Then they saw lights that took the form of a portal, a passage. Their mother left the body and left through this passage in a state of ecstatic joy. All agreed that the passage resembled the famous Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley National Park.
Other shared experiences sometimes include a review of some events in the life of the deceased; “Accomplices” may see friends and relatives of the deceased, whom they did not previously know. One of the survivors subsequently looked into the album and recognized the people he first saw during such a divided NDE.
Because such experiences are always something unexpected, it is difficult to chalk them up to wishful thinking. And even if someone really wants to see someone's soul leaving, it is unlikely that they will be able to jointly observe such unexpected things as the distortion of space in the room, which have been described in many unrelated cases.
In reading Dr. Moody's book on Separated Near-Death Experiences, I have come to the conclusion that these kinds of experiences are quite rare. Only Moody, I thought, could write about a large number of shared experiences, since in his life he interviewed more than one thousand people who had been in a state of clinical death.
Imagine what my surprise was when, while talking with my close friends, I learned that one of my relatives, a retired history professor, told me about his own shared near-death experience.
• Bucky woke up at three in the morning, felt a terrible weight in his chest. All the symptoms he described reminded me of a heart attack. He saw the light in the distance, then he left his body and looked at his body as if from the ceiling. Then the heavenly creatures approached him (in relation to the place of his observation, the light was now behind him). He experienced extreme peace, as many who have experienced near-death experiences talk about. Bucky came to himself in his bed, sweating profusely, and immediately the phone began to ring. His father, who lived 90 miles from him and had no serious illness before, died suddenly of a heart attack.
Reports of shared or shared NDEs seem to take the evidence to the next level. Often more than one person claims to have faced the same obscure phenomenon. I repeat, since friends and relatives did not experience the psychological and physiological symptoms of dying, it is hardly possible to attribute their feelings to oxygen starvation or other signs of brain dying. Dr. Moody gives many similar reports; many of them mutually confirm each other in the book, published in 2010, "Looking into Eternity: Watching how loved ones move from this life to the next."
Face-to-face conversations
Dr. Moody writes that before research began, he would have dismissed this kind of story straight away. Talking to people who have experienced NDE changed his mind. Dr. van Lommel was a staunch materialist, but he never forgot that one highly emotional patient who recovered from cardiac arrest spoke of "a tunnel, bright colors, light, beautiful scenery and music."
Dr. Rawlings initially considered most of the life-after-death stories he heard about near-death experiences “fiction, conjecture, or imagination,” until one of his patients, who died several times and was reanimated, was each time enthusiastic reported that he was experiencing "on the other side." The genuineness of the patient's stories prompted Rawlings to take the patient's stories seriously.
One of the people I spoke to personally was a person who had achieved success in life; an intelligent, respected, self-confident person in his 60s. I started the conversation with friendly small talk and then asked about his NDE. Excitement caught his breath. No, I do not mean that as he spoke, there were tears in his eyes. At first, until he could cope with his emotions, he could not speak at all. He apologized and asked me to wait a few seconds until he regained consciousness.
As an interviewer, I had no doubts that my interlocutor was absolutely sincere - he was completely sure that he left his body, moved to another dimension and talked with three beings about whether to return to earth or not. He said that his experience "was very different from a dream." What he faced was real, powerful, unforgettable and life-changing.
While this may seem rather subjective at first, remember that in court, clearly sincere testimony is considered legal evidence. If, for example, a wife is genuinely afraid of her husband who has beaten her, the court may prohibit the husband from approaching his wife. Of course, the wife can turn out to be a liar and a good actress. When it comes to near-death experiences, each case must be checked to see if its authors are looking for cheap popularity.
On the one hand, it seems that little Colton ("Heaven really is") in his messages is childishly innocent. On the other hand, the skeptic inside me tells me that children love to be the center of attention. And Colton's story of paradise certainly got him a lot of attention! The latter consideration does not necessarily negate his veracity, but it would be unwise to lose sight of such a possible motivation. I saw interviews on YouTube of priests who painted their visions of life after death in colors. Here it is possible to suspect the intention to revive interest in the books written by them.
But when it comes to the plethora of NDE reports, there is little hidden reason for the authors to lie. Ordinary people are extremely reluctant to share their experiences, as shown in many studies. They do not seek cheap popularity at all; they do not want to make money from their stories of the other world. On the contrary, quite often they have pretty good reasons not to talk about their experiences or even pretend that their NDE was "just a very detailed and vivid dream."
The deaf "hear"
This is how a boy who does not hear from birth described his near-death visions: “I was born absolutely deaf. All my relatives hear, and they always communicated with me using sign language. So I talked directly with about 20 ancestors using some kind of telepathy. An exciting sensation …"
Indeed, "exciting". The boy did not hear from birth and did not learn verbal communication. And yet it turned out that he communicates effortlessly, while not using sign language, but directly, from consciousness to consciousness. He didn't have to learn a new way of communicating. His words are in no way compatible with what we know about the work of the brain.
The blind see
People who are blind from birth do not "dream". Blind people perceive dreams through other senses. Even those who have lost their sight in the first 5 years of life are devoid of visual imagery.
Nevertheless, as a result of a study of 31 NDEs of the blind (almost half of them do not see from birth), it turned out that:
1. “… the blind, including those born blind, report the classic NDEs common for the sighted; the vast majority of blind people tell what they saw during the NDE and OBE (out-of-body experience); in confirmation they provide information based on the ability to see, which they could not acquire in the usual way, which was confirmed by corroborating evidence from an independent source”;
2. “… the study did not reveal an obvious difference between the subgroups of the sighted and the blind in relation to the frequency of certain elements of near-death experiences. Thus, regardless of whether a person is born blind, lost his vision at a later age, or suffers from severe visual impairment but is able to see, NDEs are very similar and structurally do not differ from those described by the sighted”;
3. “Like the sighted, the blind respondents described both their perception of this world and scenes from life after death, often in great detail. Sometimes they had a feeling of extraordinary visual acuity - in some cases the vision was perfect."
• Here is the case of Vicky, who was blind from birth. At the age of 22, she fell into a coma after a car accident. According to Vicky, “I have never seen anything, I did not distinguish between light and shadow, nothing … I did not“see”dreams. In my sleep, my sense of taste, touch, hearing and smell helped me. There was no visual sensation."
After the accident, she suddenly realized that she could see perfectly clearly what was happening in the intensive care unit, where a medical team was energetically resuscitating someone. Vicky recognized her wedding ring (which she often felt) and gradually realized that it was her body and she probably died. She flew up to the ceiling and for the first time saw trees, birds and people. "… it was incredible, amazingly beautiful, and I was absorbed in this feeling, because before that I could not really imagine what light is." Before returning, she met with relatives who had died before her.
Regarding Vicky's sensations, Dr. van Lommel wrote: “By the standards of modern medicine, this is simply unbelievable … that all her observations could be easily verified."
In terms of the evidence for life after death, the NDEs of the blind are very important from several points of view. If the evidence is genuine (and the authors of the studies give strong reasons that they fully trust their sources), then all natural hypotheses - physiological, psychological, and others - turn out to be woefully untenable.
From a psychological point of view, it is impossible to "train" the blind in advance on visual sensations of this kind, because they cannot even understand what light and darkness are, much less distinguish colors, halftones, shades, are not able to determine the distance by eye, etc. From a physiological point of view, they have no visual memories from which to start. Electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain is capable of awakening memories of tastes and sounds in them, but not visual memories.
If blind people see during NDE, they are not seeing with their closed eyes, useless in a hospital bed or near an overturned car. Obviously, they see with a different, sharpened vision of an immaterial body, devoid of the imperfections that are left behind.
Supporters of natural science explanations should treat the description of life after the death of the blind as a serious challenge to their worldview.
Everything that happens with NDE is extremely convincing
According to the results of five independent NDE studies, only 27% of respondents believed in life after death before NDE. But even more than 20 years after the NDE, although they had a lot of time to comprehensively think about, analyze what happened to them, and try to somehow explain everything, 90%, by their admission, still believe in life after death.
Moreover, the more time they had for reflection, the more they believed in life after death. In one study, where only 38% of respondents believed in life after death before NDE, 100% believed in it after NDE. Needless to say, there has been a huge shift in underlying beliefs that comes after a single incident.
J. Steve Miller