If it seems to you that near death experiences (NDEs) are a modern phenomenon then you are largely correct. We can find examples in historical literature that match the accounts that are now commonly reported, but they are scarce. There are also individual retellings such as the ones that temporarily capture the public’s imagination in today’s world. Individual experiences are certainly life- changing for those who go through them—and legitimately qualify as becoming invincible—but they remain anecdotal for the rest of us, interesting, not definitive. However, we are now closing in on five decades of accumulated data from which we may draw some fairly firm hypotheses.
Five decades? Prior to 1967, if you had a heart attack, you almost certainly died. But from 1967 onwards, portable defibrillators began to be used in emergency medicine. Since that time, the cause of death that is the most likely to trigger an NDE is cardiac arrest, because it is the cause of death that can most easily be reversed in a triage situation. It was only from 1975, when Dr.
Raymond Moody published his bestselling Life After Life, that we even have the term “near death experience.”
The most common way materialists dismiss NDE evidence is to claim that a brain starved of oxygen begins to hallucinate lights and colours, similar in experience to when jet fighter pilots black out during extreme manoeuvres. Even from a materialist perspective, such dismissals do not hold the slightest volume of water. Firstly, a single incident in which it can be demonstrated that a patient undergoing an out-of-body experience (OBE) or NDE returns with information they could not possibly have—such as in cases where the patients leave their bodies in operating theatres and travel to their family homes, returning with accounts of what transpired—obliterates the oxygen-starvation hypothesis. And there have been thousands of such incidents. Secondly, OBE/NDEs have occurred when patients have been inside MRI machines that can prove there was zero brain activity, so how could the brain be hallucinating? As for
hallucinations—which certainly do happen during medical procedures—the defining characteristic of an NDE is that it is the most vivid and most real experience of the patient’s life … which does not sound like a sputtering hallucination of a dying, anesthetised brain.
Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel—who studied NDEs in a clinical setting for more than twenty years and published his data in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet—explains the challenge to the “brain hypothesis” in his highly recommended Consciousness Beyond Life:
We still do not know how it is possible for people to experience an enhanced consciousness during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period when the brain displays no measurable activity and all brain function, such as bodily and brain-stem reflexes and breathing, has ceased. Looking at the
interaction between consciousness and the brain, we concluded that consciousness cannot be seen as the product of brain function. In fact, sometimes the opposite seems to apply: the mind influences brain function, both in the short and long term as a result of the empirically proven
principle of neuroplasticity. Our current scientific knowledge cannot account for all aspects of the subjective experiences reported by some cardiac arrest patients with complete loss of all brain function.42
Because of improvements in medical resuscitation, the number of NDEs is actually increasing. Dr. van Lommel estimates that 4 percent of the total population has experienced one, which is about 9 million Americans and 20 million Europeans. From a magical perspective this is hugely fascinating as there has never been such a high number of Otherworld ambassadors in all of human history. Although the metaphysical community has largely ignored the available data, any of our wizardly predecessors would have positively leapt at the insights afforded by them. According to linguist and author Georgi Mishev, Bulgarian folk magic—a more or less continuous evolution of Thracian magical customs—
treats what we call NDEs very seriously.43 Of all the ways one can become a healer in the Bulgarian folk tradition, being close to death through illness or trauma and then returning is the most potent. In Bulgarian, they are called
preneseni, which literally means “transferred.” Those who are “transferred” back are believed to have powers of healing and prophecy, often taught to them by ancestors, saints, the Blessed Virgin, etc. Whilst the research that modern patients who have undergone NDEs have significant life improvements in terms of happiness, reduced anxiety, and so on is very robust, the contemporary Western world is not really in a position to quantify whether these experiences result in improved magical ability. It strikes me as a missed opportunity.
Although such a term would presumably cause mild discomfort to the hundreds of medical practitioners around the world diligently researching NDEs, we really must see the field as a continuation of the Western tradition of spiritualism. Near death experiences sit in that liminal zone between the estimable achievements of modern science and our shared spiritual heritage pertaining to the dead and their influence on our lives. From a chaos magic perspective, the data they offer afford us an unparalleled opportunity to calibrate our necromantic practice with some seemingly quantifiable evidence. On a personal level, the final nail in the coffin of “the brain as generator of consciousness” for me was learning that there are cases of blind people having NDEs who leave their bodies and are able to visually describe objects and faces in the operating theatre. Explain that one to me if these phenomena are simply a case of waking up during surgery!
Here are some of the other insights from Dr. Lommel’s 2001 study published in the Lancet, which encompassed 344 patients in ten Dutch hospitals over a thirteen-year period.44 Eighteen percent reported some recollection of the time during which they were unconscious. Of that 18 percent:
12 percent had significant NDEs and 21 percent had what was described as “superficial” NDEs (in the sense that they were light).
The long-term life effects that arose among those that had NDEs were overwhelmingly positive, including a greater appreciation for love and family, reduced anxiety, and more.
50 percent had an awareness of being dead.
24 percent had OBEs.
31 percent reported moving through a tunnel.
13 percent experienced a life review.
31 percent described meeting with dead relatives.
Beyond the actual awareness of being dead—which is presumably a prerequisite for entering the Otherworld—the greatest percentage experience was meeting dead relatives … meeting ancestors. Imagine that.