Are NDE's Proof We Are Not Our Bodies?

 Estimated read time | 4 min

In recent times the topic of the Afterlife has been gaining attention and it’s even beginning to be discussed by mainstream media, from guests in popular morning shows talking about their experiences or academics who have researched the topic to documentaries which today can be found even on Netflix.

While the literature on the topic has always existed and in fact is the one of the main if not the main concern of our Religions, Philosophies and perhaps Science alike, this newly gained interest in the topic comes from recent and rapid advances in the medical fields, which through knowledge and technology are potentially bringing people back from the ‘other side’.

Coming Back to Life... With a Story to Tell

Around the 60’s or 70’s advancements in medicine allowed medical interventions to be more successful when dealing with traumatic accidents, illnesses and cardiac arrest in life or death situations, many times at the last minute or when people were already ‘clinically' or even biologically dead.

Certainly an amazing achievement for the medical professionals not only for the prowess attained by knowledge and technology but also a human side as we could picture these professionals surrounding the patients who would literally ‘come back to life’ and if this wasn’t amazing enough, a considerable amount came back with a story to tell.

It is believed that 10 to 20 % of people who are close to dying or clinically dead and brought back come back with this story, enough of a population to get many professionals in the field interested, such was the case of Raymond Moody or Bruce Greyson whom began to document such stories.

It’s the SAME Story

Theorists on the subject claim that an NDE (Near-Death Experience) will never be the same, it’s always different depending on the person, cultural background and perhaps even mood or situation in which the close encounter occurred and while this could make a great argument to think that all of this is  a simple ‘hallucination of the dying brain’ there are certain elements to NDE’s which appear in most stories, peculiar themes or events like ‘The Life Review’ or ‘the Light’.

Indeed, no two NDE stories are the same yet the main thing that changes seems to be the perception and interpretation through religious themes, settings etc. the messages, the events, the methodology is so precise that some theorists have mapped the process and have begun comparing the phenomenon to other ASC (Altered States of Consciousness) experiences.

Could this be Evidence of Meaning in Life?

Generally, anecdotal data is not evidence but when the reports keep stacking, begin to be analyzed by scholars, academics and people in the medical fields and then are often used in data collection comparing similar phenomena which likewise is beginning to be studied by science and in turn is gaining the interest from institutions and the media, perhaps it’s time to take the phenomenon seriously and start to speculate about it’s meaning given that it taps into the biggest questions humanity has ever asked, who are we? where we come from? and of course, where we're going?

Skeptics often allude to the phenomenon as a hallucination of a dying brain (even though in many cases it’s a dead brain as mentioned above), yet how is it possible that the same occurrences, like meeting entities, beings of light, ‘shedding’ of the body and moving oneself through thought, communicating through telepathy, sudden understandings or ‘downloads’ of information where the subjects claim that they understand everything about life and in most cases they feel an assurance that there is a positive force which pervades the universe and each and every one of us is part of it, we are IT. All these descriptions could fit 3-4 different types of ASC experiences, not only NDE’s.

NDE’s however have one peculiar theme, ‘The Life Review’ where the subjects claim they see all of their lives, sometimes in a flash, sometimes in a movie theatre, sometimes in flying bubbles on a cosmic setting and this is not the most interesting part, the subjects claim that they can re-live the situations, be there, not only as themselves but as the others involved, they can literally feel other people’s feelings if they were hurt, they can follow them and see the consequences of their actions in THEIR lives, and the great majority of experiencers come to the same conclusions about what matters in life, its all about the little things, and -others-, its all about what the experiencers call ‘Love’.

While this is an amazing conclusion, if we look into the details and the implications, we get more questions than answers, how could WE see, feel, think what OTHER’s felt, one conclusion could be that there are no others and we are not our bodies, nor our brains.

More on the Life review…