How do you know if you have had an NDE?
No NDE is exactly the same. There are no text book answers as to why some experience some things, and others do not. We are unable to answer quantitative questions around experiences or to understand relative comparisons such as time vs depth of experience, or beliefs vs type of experiences.
In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody’s research, as written in Life After Life, looked at 150 case reports over a 10 year period. Throughout these reports, Moody identified common elements in which a ‘core’ experience constituted:*
A Strange Sound: A buzzing, or ringing noise, while having a sense of being dead.
Peace and Painlessness: While people are dying, they may be in intense pain, but as soon as they leave the body the pain vanishes and they experience peace.
Out-of-Body Experience: The dying often have the sensation of rising up and floating above their own body while it is surrounded by a medical team, and watching it down below, while feeling comfortable. They experience the feeling of being in a spiritual body that appears to be a sort of living energy field.
The Tunnel Experience: The next experience is that of being drawn into darkness through a tunnel, at an extremely high speed, until reaching a realm of radiant golden-white light. Also, although they sometimes report feeling scared, they do not sense that they were on the way to hell or that they fell into it.
Rising Rapidly into the Heavens: Instead of a tunnel, some people report rising suddenly into the heavens and seeing the Earth and the celestial sphere as they would be seen by astronauts in space.
People of Light: Once on the other side of the tunnel, or after they have risen into the heavens, the dying meet people who glow with an inner light. Often they find that friends and relatives who have already died are there to greet them.
The Being of Light: After meeting the people of light, the dying often meet a powerful spiritual being whom some have identified as God, Jesus, or some religious figure.
The Life Review: The Being of Light presents the dying with a panoramic review of everything they have ever done. That is, they relive every act they have ever done to other people and come away feeling that love is the most important thing in life.
Reluctance to Return: The Being of Light sometimes tells the dying that they must return to life. Other times, they are given a choice of staying or returning. In either case, they are reluctant to return. The people who choose to return do so only because of loved ones they do not wish to leave behind.
In 1983, Dr. Bruce Greyson, Psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, developed a scale to help measure the depth and variations within NDE’s. Much like Moody’s list, this scale is slightly extended, and helps us to better understand NDE’s. An experiencer will most likely experience some if not many of the following items:
Time speeds up or slows down.
Thought-processes speed up.
A return of scenes from the past.
A sudden insight, or understanding.
A feeling of peace or pleasantness.
A feeling of happiness, or joy.
A sense of harmony or unity with the universe.
Confrontation with a brilliant light.
The senses feel more vivid.
An awareness of things going on elsewhere, as if by extrasensory perception (ESP).
Experiencing scenes from the future.
A feeling of being separated from the body.
Experiencing a different, unearthly world.
Encountering a mystical being or presence, or hearing an unidentifiable voice.
Seeing deceased or religious spirits.
Coming to a border, or point of no return.
The above categories are broken into 3 main categories; Cognitive, Paranormal, and Transcendental.
The idea is that this scale would be scored in order to identify whether an NDE has occurred. Scoring takes place as follows:
Outside of this scale, many experiencers report a loss of the fear of death, and a feeling that they have returned ‘home’. Perhaps it is the renewed belief that we are not from this world, and that we have somewhere to return to that eliminates that fear.
The fear of death, also known as thanatophobia or Death Anxiety. It seems that a large majority of people suffer from death anxiety in one way or another. Whether it is the death of themselves, the death of a loved one, o r death on a larger scale (like a terror attack or accident involving many fatalities), and yet, it is a topic we don’t talk much about.
Based on my own research and interviews, I have been lucky enough to hear first hand accounts of all of the elements mentioned in the Greyson scale. Whilst some people experience beings, others experience beings in the form of light, and whilst some receive life reviews (looking back over the life lived until that point), others receive life previews - future events in their lives, and how things may look in multiple scenarios, for example, whether they chose to, or not to return back. The biggest point to make, is how incredibly similar Near Death Experiences can be, and yet how completely different or unique an experience can be.
REFERENCES:
Greyson, B. (1983). The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, reliability, and validity. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 171, 369-375.
Source: https://www.near-death.com/science/experts/raymond-moody.html
