"We can find this same phenomenon in near-death experiences," I said. "There has been tons of research done on NDEs, and the scientific community completely ignores this data. They stick their fingers in their ears and close their eyes, refusing to look at evidence that contradicts their materialist worldview. To quote Tim Minchin, 'Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.' Scientists have been operating on faith for a long time now.
Anyway, here's a section from The Holographic Universe that talks about the cultural variations in NDEs…"
One of the most interesting aspects of the ND phenomenon is the consistency one finds from experience to experience. A summary of a typical NDE is as follows:
A man is dying and suddenly finds himself floating above his body and watching what is going on. Within moments he travels at great speed through a darkness or a tunnel. He enters a realm of dazzling light and is warmly met by recently deceased friends and relatives. Frequently he hears indescribably beautiful music and sees sights - rolling meadows, flower-filled valleys, and sparkling streams - more lovely than anything he has seen on earth. In this light-filled world he feels no pain or fear and is pervaded with an overwhelming feeling of joy, love and peace. He meets a “being (and or beings) of light” who emanate a feeling of enormous compassion, and is prompted by the being(s) to experience a “life review,” a panoramic display of his life. He becomes so enraptured by his experience of this greater reality that he desires nothing more than to stay. However, the being tells him that it is not his time yet and persuades him to return to his earthly life and re-enter his physical body.
It should be noted that this is only a general description and not all NDEs contain all the elements described. Some may lack some of the above-mentioned features, and others may contain additional ingredients. The symbolic trappings of the experiences can also vary. For example, although NDEers in Western cultures tend to enter the realm of the afterlife by passing through a tunnel, experiencers from other cultures might walk down a road or pass over a body of water to arrive in the world beyond.
Nevertheless, there is an astonishing degree of agreement among the NDEs reported by various cultures throughout history. For instance, the life review, a feature that crops up again and again in the modern-day NDEs, is also described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in Plato’s account of what Er experienced during his sojourn in the hereafter, and in the 2,000-year-old yogic writings of the Indian sage Patanjali. The cross-cultural similarities between NDEs has also been confirmed in formal study. In 1977, Osis and Haraldsson compared nearly nine hundred deathbed visions reported by patients to doctors and other medical personnel in both India and the United States and found that although there were cultural differences - for example, Americans tended to view the being of light as a Christian religious personage and Indians perceived it to be a Hindu one - the “core” of the experience was substantially the same and resembled the NDEs described by Moody and Kubler-Ross.
Michael Talbot
"So," I said, "it's as if these near-death experiences are the same general phenomenon, but the superficial aspects of them deviate according to the person's beliefs. If you believe in the Christian God, you experience a Christian-flavored death. If you're a Hindu, you experience a Hindu-flavored death. This is all perfectly logical if the algorithm minimizes surprise and, therefore, maximizes evidence for your own self-concept."
"I can see why scientists brush that data off, though," Zac said. "NDEs do look an awful lot like hallucinations."
"No, they don't. If you stop and look at the data, NDEs obviously aren't hallucinations. The scientists have no excuse. The least they could do is investigate the matter seriously and use the observational evidence to question their assumptions. If they spent a little less time telling spiritual people how stupid they are for believing things on faith, and a little more time actually doing real science instead of ignoring evidence that falsifies their materialist religion, maybe this riddle would have been solved decades ago. I'm so sick of their blatant hypocrisy and intellectual arrogance. I'll continue reading this section just to get the point across."
Although the orthodox view of NDEs is that they are just hallucinations, there is substantial evidence that this is not the case. As with [out-of-body experiences], when NDEers are out-of-body, they are able to report details they have no normal sensory means of knowing. For example, Moody reports a case in which a woman left her body during surgery, floated into the waiting room, and saw that her daughter was wearing mismatched plaids. As it turned out, the maid had dressed the little girl so hastily she had not noticed the error and was astounded when the mother, who did not physically see the little girl that day, commented on the fact. In another case, after leaving her body, a female NDEer went to the hospital lobby and overheard her brother-in-law tell a friend that it looked like he was going to have to cancel a business trip and instead be one of his sister-in-law’s pallbearers. After the woman recovered, she reprimanded her astonished brother-in-law for writing her off so quickly.
And these are not even the most extraordinary examples of sensory awareness in the ND out-of-body state. NDE researchers have found that even patients who are blind, and have had no light perception for years, can see and accurately describe what is going on around them when they have left their bodies during an NDE. Kubler-Ross has encountered several such individuals and has interviewed them at length to determine their accuracy. “To our amazement, they were able to describe the color and design of clothing and jewelry the people present wore,” she states.
Most staggering of all are those NDEs and deathbed visions involving two or more individuals. In one case, as a female NDEer found herself moving through the tunnel and approaching the realm of light, she saw a friend of hers coming back! As they passed, the friend telepathically communicated to her that he had died, but was being “sent back.” The woman, too, was eventually “sent back” and after she recovered she discovered that her friend had suffered a cardiac arrest at approximately the same time of her own experience.
There are numerous other cases on record of which dying individuals knew who was waiting for them in the world beyond before news of the person’s death arrived through normal channels.
And if there is still any doubt, yet another argument against the idea that NDEs are hallucinations is their occurrence in patients who have flat EEGs. Under normal circumstances whenever a person talks, thinks, imagines, dreams, or does just about anything else, their EEG registers an enormous amount of activity. Even hallucinations measure on the EEG. But there are many cases in which people with flat EEGs have had NDEs. Had their NDE been simple hallucinations, they would have registered on their EEGs.
In brief, when all these facts are considered together — the widespread nature of the NDE, the absence of demographic characteristics, the universality of the core experience, the ability of NDEers to see and know things they have no normal sensory means of seeing and knowing, and the occurrence of NDEs in patients who have flat EEGs — the conclusion seems inescapable: People who have NDEs are not suffering from hallucinations or delusional fantasies, but are actually making visits to an entirely different level of reality.
Michael Talbot
