Though I suspected that a conversation with Tanous would leave me chewing on my cage bars, I decided to try to call him. I did not succeed, because in 1990, Alex 2 had, like Osis, made the big one-way trip out of his body. So we are left to conclude that either Tanous was some sort of bizarre on-call living ghost, or Osis was a deluded or sloppy researcher.
SO LET’S SAY, just for a moment, that people who have near-death experiences are actually leaving their bodies. That they are making some sort of transcendent journey into a different dimension. And that one of the off-ramps in this dimension leads to the afterlife. This means that near-death experiences could—just possibly—provide us with a sneak preview of our own impending eternity. If only someone had kept a list of near-death experiencers’ descriptions of this place.
Someone did. Michael Sabom’s book includes an appendix of all twenty-eight “transcendental environments” glimpsed or “visited” during subjects’ near-death experiences. There seem to be two basic versions: the weather report and the farm report. Fully half the environments consisted of nothing but sky. Heaven appears to have a similar weather system as earth; there were approximately the same number of reports of blue sky and sunshine as there were of clouds and mist. One or two meteorologically inclined individuals included both in their report (e.g., “blue sky with an occasional cloud”).
The other half of the twenty-eight descriptions consisted of gardens or pastures, often with a gate thrown in. The heavenly farmland was more or less deserted, the exceptions being one pasture with cattle grazing and one landscape of people “of all different nationalities, all working on their arts and crafts.”
It seems pretty clear what’s going on here. People are experiencing something dazzling and euphoric and totally foreign, and interpreting it according to their image of heaven. Greyson agrees. “I think the experience is so ineffable that we just put whatever framework, whatever models and analogies we have, onto it.” Greyson says these cultural overlays also apply to the experience of rushing down a tunnel. “I had one truck driver I interviewed call it a tailpipe.” Likewise the experience of being sent back to return to one’s body. In one journal article I read, a man who lived in India experienced this as being told there’d “been a clerical error.”
The alternate explanation, of course, is that the people who had these NDEs actually saw heaven, and that heaven looks just like it looks in the holy books. This is, of course, tricky to prove. Someone who’s been there would have to bring back photographs. Preferably someone scientific, someone trustworthy and pedigreed.
On December 26, 1993, the Hubble Telescope made visual contact with Heaven and took hundreds of pictures and sent these pictures of Heaven to Goddard Space Center in Maryland…. In the pictures of Heaven, you can see bright light and what looks like the Holy City…. Heaven is located at the end of the Universe.
This dispatch comes to us courtesy of the Internet Religious News service. One fine day I called Goddard Space Flight Center to see what they had to say about this. “Well,” said a good-natured NASA spokesperson named Ed Campion, “it is true that Hubble focuses on faint lights at the most distant parts of the universe.” That’s why NASA sent a telescope way out into space—to get it closer to the oldest, most distant parts of the universe, the stuff that dates to the Big Bang. But Campion hadn’t heard about the heaven photos. Or the secret NASA space probe that recorded millions of voices singing “Glory, Glory, Glory to the Lord on high” over and over—as reported, here again, by our imaginative friends at the Internet Religious News service. Or the NASA photos of the “two Giant Human-Looking Eyes in deep space that are billions of light years around and billions of light years apart looking at Earth.”
“That last one,” said Campion, “kind of gives me the willies.”
Realistically speaking, if the place experienced by people who almost die exists as something other than a neurological phenomenon, it’s no more likely to be located by astronomers than the soul was likely to be located by the early anatomists. It exists (if it exists) in a dimension other than that of time and space, a dimension we typically can’t access (if indeed we do access it) until we die. Greyson’s thinking is that cessation of the brain’s everyday activities, as happens during clinical death, might enable the consciousness to tune in to a channel normally blocked or obscured by the chatter. “It’s almost as if the brain in its normal functioning stops you from going there,” he told me. “And when you knock those parts of the brain out, then you’re able to.”
Other than a brush with death, are there other ways to deflect that bothersome everyday sensory input and experience the transcendent reality that may or may not be out there all the time? You bet. The following is a passage from a chapter on the drug ketamine in the book Anesthesiology: “I would suddenly find myself going down tunnels at high speed…. One time I came out into a golden light. I rose into the light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the light, which I believed to be God.” London psychiatrist and ketamine authority Karl Jansen quotes the passage in his own book Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Ketamine is today rarely used as an anesthetic and fairly commonly used as a recreational drug. Jansen used to be of the opinion that since ketamine—or LSD or pot, for that matter—can produce ersatz near-death experiences, this meant that surgical or cardiac arrest patients’ near-death experiences were similarly hallucinogenic.
He has of late changed his tune: “The fact that near-death experiences can be artificially induced does not imply that the spontaneously occurring NDE is ‘unreal’ in some way,” writes Jansen in Ketamine. “It has been suggested that both may involve a ‘retuning’ of the brain to allow the experience of a different reality from the everyday world.” If this is true, it suggests it may be possible to preview death by taking ketamine—which is precisely what self-described psychonauts Timothy Leary and John Lilly did, in what they called “experiments in voluntary death.”
If you want to have a K-induced near-death experience, I read in Jansen’s book, you should take a fairly ambitious dose, and you should take it by injection. You should also be prepared for all manner of physical side effects ranging from the dangerous to the embarrassing. Your eyes may wander off in different directions. Your body may jerk uncontrollably. In his book, Jansen passes along the advice of The Essential Psychedelic Guide author D. M. Turner, which is to have a friend or “sitter” present when you take ketamine. (Turner, Jansen wryly points out, died alone in the bath with a bottle of K beside the tub.)
Before I traveled to England for my mediumship course, I scheduled an interview with Jansen in London. I wanted him to be my sitter, but I didn’t, at this point, tell him. I was hoping he’d offer. I imagined we’d sit in his office and chat for a while, and then he’d open a drawer. I happen to have some ketamine right here. I’ll gladly provide you with a safe, clinical environment in which to have a near-death experience with absolutely no unsightly side effects.
Jansen made no such offer. He was in the process of relocating to New Zealand and was staying at a hotel while in London. He had no office, so we met in his hotel bar. He was tall and suave and accompanied by a similarly tall and suave Russian woman. We talked for half an hour, shouting over the din while the Russian woman looked on intently. I imagined her looking on intently while my eyes rolled around in my head and my extremities spazzed. I no longer wanted to take drugs with Dr. Jansen.
The clean-and-sober voluntary-death alternative takes the form of a Buddhist meditation. Pure Land Buddhists, who date back to A.D. 400, believe that by practicing certain rather extreme forms of meditation, it’s possible to experience the same heavenlike locale that people report having experienced during brushes with death. These guys were the original near-death experience researchers. One of the junior monks’ duties was to sit at the bedside of moribund elders and jot down their deathbed visions of the Pure Land. By the eleventh century, more than a hundred accounts of the Pure Land had been transcribed, including many
from people who had been thought dead and then revived. The monk Shantao was one of the most ardent devotees; his sermons contained long, vivid descriptions of the Pure Land. Possibly too vivid: Osaka University professor Carl Becker writes in an article in Anabiosis: The Journal for Near-Death Studies that at least one listener was compelled to take the express route to the Pure Land, committing suicide in the days following the sermon.
Should you, too, wish to preview the afterlife, here are instructions for the “constantly walking meditation practice”: “For a single period of 90 days, only circumambulate exclusively…. Until three months have elapsed, do not lie down even for the snap of a finger. Until the three months have elapsed, constantly walk without stopping (except for natural functions).”
Before you begin, I should warn you that both Pure Land Buddhists and ketamine users occasionally experience something closer to hell than heaven. As do near-death experiencers. Researcher P. M. H. Atwater, who interviewed more than 700 people about their near-death experiences, reported that 105 of these individuals described their experience as unpleasant. But only one researcher ever claimed to be hearing tales of literally hellish goings-on. Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings recounted dozens of stories of people hearing screams and moans and witnessing violent scenes of gruesome torture at the hands of grotesque animal-human forms. Rawlings raised eyebrows in the NDE community with his second book, which advocated a commitment to Christianity as a way of ensuring one doesn’t end up in the sorts of hellish scenarios he claimed his non-Christian near-death experiencers were describing.
If you take Rawlings out of the picture, reports of hell-like sights and sounds are rare.* You will be pleased to know that Atwater never once heard a description of a fiery or even unseasonably hot locale. Both Atwater and Greyson concluded that the difference between an unpleasant near-death experience and a pleasant one is largely one of attitude. A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world “all working on their arts and crafts” can seem like heaven or, if you’re me, hell. The same vast expanse of empty sky that looks beautiful to one person may seem lonely and barren to another. I once interviewed a geologist who searches for meteorites on empty, wind-battered ice fields in Antarctica, where the snow is whipped into knee-high white swirls. He sometimes gives talks and slide shows of his travels to the public. Most people tell him they can’t imagine spending months at a time in such a cold, barren locale. One night a quiet older woman came up to him as he was putting away his slides and said, “You’ve been to heaven.”
Bruce Greyson has also written papers on what he calls the distressing near-death experience. I asked him whether researchers had ever looked for a correlation between having a hellish near-death experience and being a mean, rotten person. Just, you know, wondering. His answer was reassuring: “We have very blissful accounts from horrible people.” He told me the story of a Mafia bagman who was shot in the chest and left to die. While lying there bleeding, he had “a beautiful experience, in which he felt the presence of God and unconditional love.” One of the focuses of Greyson’s near-death work has been the effects—often profoundly positive—that near-death experiences have on people’s lives. The bagman, for example, quit the Mafia and now counsels delinquent boys. “He walked away from his lifestyle,” says Greyson. “I talked to his former girlfriend, who used to complain to me: ‘Rocky just doesn’t care about money, about things of substance anymore.’ ”
I DON’T KNOW if Wes can hear anything, but he surely can’t see. His face, like the rest of his body, is draped in blue surgical cloths. If he could see, he’d surely be entertained. Everyone in the room is dressed in bulky lead kilts and matching lead dickeys to protect their thyroids and reproductive organs from the real-time X-rays that are helping the surgeons thread a sensor wire through Wes’s* heart. The wire will be connected to the body of the defibrillator, soon to be sewn into a pocket in the pectoral muscle just below the spot where a more conventional shirt pocket would be.
And now it’s time to almost kill Wes. A technician from the defibrillator company fiddles with a small computer that remotely manipulates the implanted device. In the corner of the screen is the company’s disquieting logo, a heart with a jagged lightning bolt through it. “We’re preparing to shock,” announces the technician. Depending on the voltage and on what the heart is doing when you shock it, the charge can either induce or stop fibrillation. “So it can kill him, or save him,” she says brightly.
This time, they’re aiming—temporarily, of course—for the former. “Here we go,” says the technician. “I’m enabling and … I’m inducing.” The jolt makes Wes’s chest muscles contract violently, jerking his torso up off the table as though he’d been kicked from below. “We have VF,” says the technician, sounding all urgent and mission-control. “VF” stands for ventricular fibrillation. On the EKG monitor, Wes’s heartbeat dithers wanly. What’s going on in his mind right now? Is he beholding the bright light? Speeding through the tunnel? Attending an appliqué class? Wherever he is, it’s a brief visit; three seconds later the defibrillator is preparing to shock his heart back to lub-dub.
Twenty minutes later, Wes is being wheeled to the recovery room. Technically speaking, anyone who makes it to a recovery room can’t have been dead. By definition, death is a destination with no return ticket. Clinically dead is not dead dead. So how do we know the near-death experience isn’t a hallmark of dying, not death? What if several minutes down the line, the bright light dims and the euphoria fades and you’re just, well, dead? We don’t know, says Greyson. “It’s possible it’s like going to the Paris airport and thinking you’ve seen France.”
Greyson is an inestimably patient person in a field rife with inconclusive data and metaphysical ambiguities. I ask him what he thinks, in his heart of hearts. Does the personality survive death? Surely, after all these years, he has an opinion. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we come up with evidence that we do survive. I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we come up with evidence that we don’t.”
Sabom is less equivocal. I asked him, in an e-mail, whether he believed that the consciousness leaves the body during an NDE and is able to perceive things in an extrasensory manner. “Yes,” came the reply.
I asked van Lommel the same question, and got the same reply. “I am quite sure that it is not a hallucination or a confabulation,” he wrote. “I am convinced that consciousness can be experienced independently from the body, during the period of a nonfunctioning brain, with the possibility of nonsensory perception.”
Van Lommel mailed me a draft of a new article in which he presents a theory as to how this might be possible. He uses the analogy of radio or TV transmissions. All these channels, these different electromagnetic fields packed with information, are out there all the time. We can’t watch HBO if we’re already watching Bravo, but that doesn’t mean HBO’s broadcast ceases to exist. “Could our brain be compared to the TV set, which receives electromagnetic waves and transforms them into image and sound? When the function of the brain is lost, as in clinical death or brain death, memories and consciousness still exist, but the receptivity is lost, the connection is interrupted.” Then he went all Gerry Nahum on me. His paper stepped into quantum mechanics, to phase-space versus real-space, to nonlocality and fields of probability. Neuronal microtubules made an appearance. I had to set it down.
I can’t evaluate this sort of theorizing, because I have no background in quantum physics. A few months ago, I was corresponding with a Drexel University physicist named Len Finegold. I mentioned quantum-mechanics-based theories of consciousness. You can’t hear someone sigh through e-mail, but I heard it anyhow. “Please beware,” came his reply. “There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don’t have an explanation for something, it’s quantum mechanics.”
So I’m holding out for the guys on the ceiling. As soon as someone sees an image on Bruce Greyson’s computer, y
ou can mark me down as a believer.
*Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear.
*My favorite being “The Anesthetized Patient Can Hear and Can Remember,” from a 1962 Journal of Proctology article. “Their physiologic adaptations to the stress of surgery may be profoundly disturbed by what they hear,” wrote the author, leading me to mistake him for a caring physician. Then he went on: “Medico-legal implications are obvious even if we do not care about the patient.” I sat there blinking in disbelief. I did this again twelve pages later, upon seeing the emblem of the International Academy of Proctology: a double-snake caduceus with a free-floating length of rectum standing in for the pole.
*In checking the spelling of “Kimberly-Clark” on the web, I note that the personal hygiene empire has expanded well beyond sanitary napkins. It’s a global powerhouse spewing forth multiple brands of diapers, adult diapers, disposable training pants, bed-wetting underpants, “flushable moist wipe products,” award-winning disposable swim pants, and “cloth-like towels strong enough for big messes,” though probably not the big mess of umpteen billion used disposable hygiene products.