by Mark Pitstick MA, DC

If you’ve not already, please read . . .

  1. ‘The Great News‘ (article #19 at SoulProof.com/Articles)
  2. ‘Eight Developments for Widespread Conscious Living Now’ (#125)
  3. Greater Reality LIVING Program: Integrating ‘The 8 Developments’ Into Your Daily Life (#72)
  4. Greater Reality HEALING Program: Journeying FROM Deeply Grieving TO Brightly Shining (#82)

The evidence-based information and holistic resources outlined in these articles will help you to:

  • realize your true nature as an eternal being of consciousness / life-force / energy 
  • receive guidance and assistance from highly evolved energies and Source / The Light
  • heal old wounds, release lower energies, and update erroneous teachings
  • create the greatest life YOU have envisioned (YOU = your higher self / soul)
  • help others by sharing your greatest gifts
  • make our world a better place

As enough people do this, widespread personal and planetary change will naturally unfold. 

 

Near Death Experiences

When I was nine years old, my Uncle Cliff’s car collided with a semi. He nearly died from severe multiple injuries and was in the hospital for a long time.  When he finally came home, he was pale, thin, missing teeth, and couldn’t walk.  From his hospital bed in the family living room, he spoke through a wired jaw about what he experienced when he almost died: walking in a meadow of lush green grass, hearing beautiful music, and seeing Jesus; feeling an accelerated awareness with everything being more brilliant and colorful than usual; no longer fearing bodily death; being so peaceful that, except for missing his family, he didn’t care if he came back.

Since then, many documented near-death experiences have provided impressive evidence for the continuation of life beyond the grave.  For example, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, M.D., wrote Proof of Heaven and described his near-death experience during a week-long coma.

That many of these cases have been validated by respected physicians, university professors, and scientists further points to the authenticity of life after bodily death.  The abbreviation for near-death experience is NDE and those who experience these states are termed NDErs.

Tens of thousands of NDE cases have demonstrated the persistence of awareness after physical death. Typical stages during a NDE include: feeling being outside of the body, hearing a buzzing

or ringing sound, going through a tunnel, seeing radiant Light, meeting loved ones who changed worlds, encountering angels and guides, sensing beautiful scenes and colors, hearing angelic music, feeling peaceful and at home, learning lessons, being told it’s not one’s time to stay there, and a rapid journey back into the successfully resuscitated body.

Although NDEs were first described thousands of years ago, more people are now successfully brought back from the brink of irreversible death because of advances in medical resuscitative capabilities. These NDErs were clinically dead, that is, had cessation of their heart, lung, or brain functions. During that time, a significant percentage of them have fascinating and life-changing experiences.

Clinical reports of near-death experiences first came to my attention in the 1970s when I was working as a respiratory therapist and attending theology school. While the topic of NDEs was sometimes met with skepticism by health care professionals, my earlier experience with Uncle Cliff helped me keep an open mind. I interviewed a number of patients who were successfully resuscitated and asked them: “Do you remember anything during your time while unconscious?” Several excitedly told me about beatific experiences with classic NDE traits.

Validated research on almost ten thousand NDErs constitutes the most impressive evidence for life after bodily death. I will categorize NDE information into the following sections: historical continuity, verifiable cases, pediatric validation cases, life previews, empathetic NDEs, blind persons and NDEs, and transformative aspects. In addition, I will briefly mention out-of-body experiences.

Historical Continuity
NDEs have been reported quite similarly and independently across time in various cultures. They were first reported thousands of years ago, as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and The Aztec Song of the Dead.  These descriptions were lost or little known for centuries, yet score remarkably high on modern NDE measures such as the Near-Death Experience Validity Scale by Ken Ring, Ph.D. Ancient

reports of what souls encounter after death also mirror those during transcendent experiences with consciousness altering substances.

In The Light Beyond, Dr. Raymond Moody stated that there  have been cases of NDEs far back in history, dating to references by Greek philosopher Plato in 347 B.C. Pope Gregory the Great’s sixth- century Dialogues are a set of deathbed visions, ghost stories and near-death accounts providing evidence of the soul’s immortality.  Dr. Carol Zaleski, author of Otherworld Journeys, said the literature of the Middle Ages is filled with such accounts.

A massive amount of NDE literature exists, thanks to Moody, Ring, Greyson, Morse, Grof, Sabom, Grosso, Ritchie, Lundahl, Osis, Haraldsson, Wade, Tart, Atwater, Cooper, Becker and others. Current studies of diverse age groups in other cultures show the same patterns or universality of reports.

Verifiable Cases
NDE cases with verifiable aspects strongly point to the existence of awareness surviving physical death. In Lessons from the Light, Ken Ring, Ph.D., said that many people “… tell of leaving their bodies for a moment and having a panoramic and detailed perception of the environment around their body. Suppose, then, these descriptions could be checked independently and verified. If one could show that these patients could not possibly have seen what they did naturally or acquired this information by other means, we would have some fairly impressive evidence to support the objectivity of NDEs.”

After much research, Dr. Ring concluded, “We now have good evidence, and from multiple sources, that the NDE is indeed an experience that has its own objective character and is, in a phrase, ‘on the level.’ (After considering evidentiary cases) I hope you will be reassured that the doubts about the validity of the NDE can be safely dispatched on purely scientific grounds.”

In Messages from the Masters, Brian Weiss, M.D., described a number of NDEs with verifiable aspects. One woman suffered massive head trauma from a severe auto accident and was very near death. As the doctor spoke with the family about the inevitably  fatal outcome, the patient floated out of her body. She found her family even though they were far from where the medical team was working on her. Upon overhearing the conversation, she tried to communicate to them that she wasn’t really dead. After her recovery, she accurately repeated the conversation between the surgeon and her family.

Another patient awoke in a very agitated state after major surgery.  During the procedure, she floated above her body when her blood pressure and heart rhythm became abnormal. From this vantage point, she could see the surgeons and read the anesthesiologist’s notes in her chart. Upon awakening in the recovery room, she was still panicked because of these complications. She correctly told Dr. Weiss what had been written on her chart even though she had been unconscious. Because of the positioning of her body to the doctor, she couldn’t have seen the notes even if she had been awake.

Dr. Weiss concluded, “I have heard these and other stories of clinical accounts of patients with near-death and out-of-body experiences from so many physicians that I cannot explain them away on medical or physiological grounds.”

There are so many validated NDE cases that they are collectively known as tennis shoe stories. In Closer To The Light, Melvin Morse, M.D., and Paul Perry described the story of psychologist Kim Clark who was counseling a patient named Maria after she had a cardiac arrest. They stated, “The woman wasn’t interested in what Clark  had to say. Instead, she wanted to talk about how she had floated around the hospital while doctors struggled to start her heart.

To prove that she had left her body, the woman insisted that there was a shoe on the ledge outside Clark’s window. Morse and Perry continued, “Clark opened the window, but could see no shoe. ‘It’s out there,’ the woman insisted. Clark leaned out, but still could not see the shoe. ‘It’s around the corner,’ said the woman. Courageously, Clark crawled onto the ledge of her fifth-floor window and around the corner. There sat a shoe, just as Maria had described.”

NDE research is also full of accounts of survivors who, while clinically dead, encountered relatives who had passed on but were unknown to the subject during life. Later, positive identification was confirmed by photographic or anecdotal evidence. In addition, many patients develop extrasensory abilities during and after the NDE.

Another verifying aspect of NDEs involves so-called surprise meetings with people the survivor didn’t know had died. For example, one woman was very ill at the same time that her sister was near death on a different floor of the same hospital. During her NDE, the woman watched from above the resuscitative efforts on her body. To her surprise, she met her sister and they enjoyed a great conversation until the sister began moving away from her.  The woman stated, “I tried to go with her, but she kept telling  me to stay where I was. ‘It’s not your time,’ she said… Then she just began to recede off into the distance through a tunnel while I was left there alone. When I awoke, I told the doctor that my sister had died. He denied it, but at my insistence, he had a nurse check on it. She had in fact died , just as I knew she did.”

In Transformed by The Light, Morse and Perry relate a similar case of a woman who was bleeding profusely after delivering a baby. As medical personnel worked on her, she could see them from a vantage point above and her intense pain suddenly disappeared. She went through a tunnel toward bright light but before she reached  the end, “A gentle voice told me I had to go back. Then I met a dear friend, a neighbor from a town that we had left. He also told me to go back. I hit the hospital bed with an electrifying jerk and the pain was back. I was being rushed into an operating theater for surgery to stop the bleeding. It was three weeks later that my husband decided I was well enough to be told that my dear friend in that other town had died in an accident on the day my daughter was born.” (6)

Pediatric Validation Cases
Young children, who describe the sequence of events during NDEs just as adults do, provide an impressive category of evidence. The literature is rich with verifiable accounts of pediatric NDEs that include many complex details about resuscitative procedures that are incomprehensible to young children. Children have not been exposed to religious or cultural views about what happens after death. They aptly describe death as a vacation and something they will return from.

I will share just two examples of pediatric NDE cases as described in Closer to the Light by Melvin Morse, M.D., and Paul Perry. The first involved an eight-year-old boy who fell from a bridge and hit his head on a rock in the water. After floating face down for at least five minutes, he was pulled from the water by a policeman. The boy had stopped breathing and didn’t have a pulse; after performing CPR for thirty minutes, the policeman declared him dead.  Even so, a helicopter emergency team started resuscitation and rushed him to the hospital. The boy didn’t regain consciousness until two days later when he accurately described his rescue and resuscitation in great detail. He knew all of this, he said, because he had been watching the whole time from outside his body.

The second case involved an NDE at age nine months. Mark, the patient, told his parents about this experience at age three.  His parents had never told him about his cardiac arrest and most children don’t remember events at that age. However, “…following   a Christmas pageant, he said that God didn’t look like the man in     the play they had just seen. When his father asked him what  he meant, Mark told him what had happened during that frantic night  two years earlier: ‘I saw nurses and doctors standing over me trying  to wake me up. I flew out of the room and (went to the waiting    room, where I) saw Grandpa and Grandma crying and holding each other. I think they thought I was going to die. He then reported seeing a long, dark tunnel and crawling up it.”

The bright light at the end of the tunnel kept him going and he found a bright place where he ran through the fields with God. “He was very animated when he described this run with God. He said that one ‘can double jump in heaven’… God then asked if he wanted to go ‘back home.’ Mark said ‘no,’ but God told him he would come back again some other day.” Mark vividly remembered his experience until age five and, at the time Morse wrote the book, was a well-adjusted teenager.

Blind Persons and NDEs
NDEs reported by those who are blind constitute particularly impressive evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond physical death. In Books of the Dead, Stan Grof, M.D., discusses, “… reported cases where individuals, who were blind because of medically confirmed organic damage to their optical system, could at the time of clinical death see the environment.”

He continued, “Occurrences of this kind, unlike most of the  other aspects of near-death phenomena, can be subjected to objective verification. They thus represent the most convincing proof that what happens in near-death experiences is more than the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of physiologically impaired brains.”

As amazing as verifiable NDEs are, they are even more astonishing when the subjects are blind. In the foreword of Mindsight by Ken Ring, Ph.D., and Sharon Cooper, Ph.D., researcher Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., stated, “The authors of this book have practiced essential science, real science. They have looked at the facts about NDEs, particularly NDEs among the blind, and provided us with extremely stimulating and thought-provoking material that we must take into account in coming to terms with reality… these facts argue strongly that there is some very real sense in which we are ‘spiritual’ beings, not just material beings.”

Ring and Cooper provide an example of a validation NDE in a blind person. Irreversibly blinded earlier in the day after a surgical accident, Nancy later went into respiratory arrest and was unconscious. As the hospital staff wheeled her down the hall, her gurney hit the elevator. At that moment, Nancy described stepping out of herself and watching the events around her. She looked down the hall about twenty feet and saw two men standing there, her  son’s father and her boyfriend. Then she looked down at her body still laying on the gurney.

She saw the IV, black ambu bag covering her face, the surgical head cover on her, white sheets, and three staff people on her left and right. At that point, Nancy said, “And then the classic white light, bright, the most beautiful light, soothing, comforting just washing over (me).”

Afterward, interviews with her boyfriend and ex-husband corroborated the details outside the elevator. The positions of the ambu bag and staff members would have blocked her from seeing the two men and other details.

Of this, Ring and Cooper state, “Thus, we conclude that in all probability there was no possibility for Nancy to see what she did with her physical eyes… Yet, she did see, and, as the corroborative testimony we have provided shows, she apparently saw truly…There is no question that NDEs in the blind do occur and, furthermore, that they take the same general form and are comprised of the very same elements that define the NDEs of sighted individuals.”

In my radio interview with Dr. Ring, he added that a panel of vision specialists was not able to come up with medical explanations that could explain these findings. This research, he stated, makes a very strong supportive argument for the beliefs of many people about the continuation of consciousness beyond physical death.

Transformative Aspects
A common and enduring aspect of NDEs is the accompanying transformative effect. NDErs have such a strong belief in immortality that any fear of death is nearly or completely extinguished. Survivors of NDEs typically reorder their life priorities and often change to more meaningful jobs involving service to others. They also view their bodies as vehicles for their real selves and take better care of themselves.

My friend Ed Sarno, Ph.D., had an NDE after open heart surgery.  At bedtime on his first day home from the hospital, his dimly lit room filled with bright light and he felt more energetic, joyful, and peaceful than he ever had in his life. He was given the choice to cross over or remain on earth. He decided to stay. As soon as he made this choice, the light subsided and he was back in a painful post-operative state. But, he said, his life is now radically different. He knows—without a doubt—that he can’t lose: if he lives to one hundred years of age, that’s great; if he dies today, he gets to resume the wonderful journey he glimpsed.

A deep faith and internalized belief about a Higher Power and never-ending life are common after NDEs. These dramatic lessons impart a lasting hope and assurance of things not seen but nevertheless vitally real. Said Nancy Bush, past-president of the International Association for Near-death Studies, “Most near-death survivors say they don’t think there is a God. They know.”

A U.S. News & World Report article stated, “No matter what the nature of the (near-death) experience, it alters some lives.  Alcoholics find themselves unable to imbibe. Hardened criminals opt for a life of helping others. Atheists embrace the existence of a deity, while dogmatic members of a particular religion report feeling welcome in any church or temple or mosque.” Further, those who had undergone NDEs became more altruistic, less materialistic, and more loving. Having stared eternity in the face, people returning from NDEs often lose their taste for ego-boosting achievement.

Such positive transformations also occur in children. Studies that track pediatric NDErs show that they are happier, have less drug use, enjoy better relationships, and in general are more hopeful than those around them. Their glimpse of the Light and life beyond apparently affects them for the better throughout their lives.

Interestingly, even when there is orthodox religious training to the contrary, NDErs do not describe death as an entrance into either a fiery hell or golden streets. Instead, they commonly describe dying as a transition, an entry into a higher state of consciousness. Other comparisons are to a reunion, homecoming, awakening, graduating, or escaping from jail. They don’t view Creator as a punishing, judgmental despot but, rather, a totally fair and loving Presence that works with everyone no matter how sinful or awful their deeds while on earth. As many NDErs have stated, you are one with the One and part of Source.

Radical changes for the better happen to nonbelievers in a Higher Power and the hereafter just as frequently as to believers. After an NDE, most everyone becomes more spiritually oriented. They have learned that an emphasis on loving compassion —not doctrines and denominations     — is most important and that the Light is all-encompassing.  NDEs usually engender more enlightened theological views. Having glimpsed the Light firsthand, these near-death survivors know that Creator completely and always forgives and understands.  They have experienced an almost unbearable degree of love and acceptance and know that the Infinite is not vengeful and unreasonable. Most NDErs no longer fear eternal punishment in a fiery eternal hell, nor believe any such place exists.

Moody stated, “One NDEer I spoke to had been a minister of the fire and brimstone variety. It wasn’t infrequent, he said, for him to tell his congregation that if they didn’t believe the Bible in a certain way, they would be condemned to burn eternally. When he went through his NDE, he said the being of light told him not to speak to his congregation like this anymore. But it was done in a nondemanding way. The being just implied that what he was doing was making the lives of his congregation miserable. When this preacher returned to the pulpit, he did so with a message of love, not fear.”

NDErs are usually affirmative on the question of universal salvation, that is, a never-ending opportunity for a heavenly existence for all. Some people question whether Source Energy embraces everyone, especially those committing morally reprehensible acts like rape, murder, and molestation. Dr. Ring stated that the answer by NDErs is unqualified: everyone gets to enter the Light. This runs counter to some teachings and some question, “Even Hitler?”

Of this, Ring stated, “I remember an answer that was given to this query by an NDEr friend of mine who, as a child, had suffered severe sexual and physical abuse from her father. When she found herself in the Light, she asked it telepathically, ‘Does everyone come here?’ She was told ‘Yes.’ Then, she herself asked the very question that represents the limit for most people: ‘Even Hitler?’ ‘Yes.’ And, then, pushing the Light even further, she found herself asking, ‘Even my father?’ Again, ‘Yes.’”

The existing NDE research successfully refutes skeptics who claim that NDEs can be explained solely by physiological changes such as lack of oxygen. Likewise, various aspects of NDEs, such as verified vision by blind persons, cannot be satisfactorily explained by psychological dynamics. The evidence in this section is very difficult to explain unless there is indeed consciousness operates apart from normal brain function.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

Thank you for telling others about this article!  Your life, and that of others around you, will be more enriched when you:  

  1. read the article again so you really know it.
     
  2. discuss with close family and friends to more deeply internalize it.
     
  3. take action steps that seem right for you.
     
  4. share it with others via social media, discussion groups, and other ways.

Hugs, love, blessings, and let it shine!
Mark

Mark Pitstick, MA, DC
author, lecturer, counselor, and holistic chiropractic physician; spokesperson, research assistant, and strategic planner for the SoulPhone Project; founder of Greater Reality Living, Healing, Helping, and Sharing Programs

SoulProof.com    SoulPhone.org   GreaterRealityPrograms.com

Mark Pitstick, MA, DC is a master’s clinical psychologist, holistic chiropractic physician, and clinical nutritionist.  He has also helped others in pastoral counseling and suicide prevention / education settings.  His goal is to help you know and show that this earthly experience is a totally safe, meaningful, and magnificent adventure amidst eternity. 

To learn more about the Greater Reality LIVING, HEALING, HELPING, and SHARING Programs, visit ‘Greater Reality Programs’ top tab at SoulProof.com and SoulPhone.org.  Also see  articles #19, 72, 82, 119, 122, and 125 at SoulProof.com/Articles.

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Note: This article is intended as a reference source, not to replace professional treatment for physical, emotional, or mental problems.  The author disclaims any liability arising directly or indirectly from the voluntary use of action steps discussed in article. 

I created this article while ‘wearing the hat’ of a clinician, counselor, and educator.  My statements are based upon some scientific research; much clinical and experiential evidence; my personal experiences; and my best current understandings.  This program does not reflect my roles with the SoulPhone Project since those require solid scientific data for all statements.