This is the second part of a two-part series. The first part can be found here.
In Part 1, I gave a brief overview of near-death experiences (NDEs) and some arguments for why they might be the real deal, and I also gave some good reasons to be skeptical. I tacked back and forth like a good sailor would, but now I’m turning the bow into the wind. Any time the average person is presented with something of a spiritual nature for which he isn’t acclimated (ie., outside his own tradition), the tendency is to just shrug his shoulders and go on his merry way. But in Mormon tradition, we’re taught to evaluate spiritual things by their fruits, right? Well, when it comes to NDEs, I’d argue that there’s some pretty compelling fruit. In fact, I’d put them right up there next to your average conversion story.
According to Dr. Jeffrey Long (author of Evidence of the Afterlife), a majority of people experiencing NDEs (NDEers) claim positive life-changing aftereffects, including much less anxiety about death, a greater appreciation of life, a generally more optimistic outlook, and deeper, more meaningful spirituality. NDEers claim a greater sense of empathy and prioritize relationships more, even ending relationships they realized were unhealthy. They are much more likely to believe in God, but they’re also less sectarian, some no longer attending church/temple/mosque because they don’t feel what’s being taught makes sense in the light of what they personally experienced. Many NDEers reported making significant life changes, including changing careers into fields serving others, like nursing, teaching, social work, and life coaching. Those whose NDEs came about from a suicide attempt rarely try suicide again.
Some NDEers claim an element of the supernatural even followed them back. Some of them healed and revived in a miraculous, medically inexplicable fashion. Some of them returned with spiritual/psychic gifts, such as extraordinary empathy — sometimes they could just tell what another person was feeling. Some felt they’d brought back knowledge from a pre-mortal existence. Others claimed they’d have premonitions (knowing when someone was sick or in danger) or even foresee events (eg., one claims to have predicted the Boston Marathon bombing to a sibling). A few even claimed some limited telepathy and telekinesis. [1]
Interestingly, Dr. Long noted that NDEs are often very hard for people to process, and that on average it takes about 7 years [2] for them to come to terms with it. A lot of them don’t share their story right away, and when they do, they get a lot of negative feedback. Some have even had pastors tell them their experiences were of the devil. Because it’s such an intense and intensely personal experience, most NDEers choose to only share their stories with a select group, rather than risk being thought crazy. Dr. Long noted that those who did receive early negative feedback reported fewer long-term benefits than those who received more positive feedback. [3]
As I’ve read dozens of NDE accounts, I can see people struggling to understand and communicate what they experienced. Dr. Eben Alexander (Proof of Heaven), in trying to describe this difficulty, says to imagine that you’re a chimpanzee. 
You’re living your chimpanzee life, when all of the sudden, you somehow become a person for a day. You get introduced to calculus, geography, music theory, computers, cell phones, and all these wonderful and miraculous things, and then just as suddenly, you’re a chimp again, left to make sense of everything with your chimp brain. After years of chimp post-processing (most NDEs are reported years after the fact), you’re left trying to explain all these amazing things to all your chimp buddies in chimp language.
None of the more involved (“deeper”) NDE accounts are the same. Some are just crazy, but still have the traditional elements in them, which makes me wonder if they were experiencing brain malfunction and some real spiritual event simultaneously. Consequently, when it comes to trying to get spiritual insight from NDEs as a group, it’s impossible not to filter out material that seems incongruous. I don’t feel bad about doing this — we do the same thing with the Old Testament. It’s just that everybody does it a little differently based on our own personal biases and preconceived ideas, including me. So with that disclaimer, here are some overarching themes from the deeper NDEs that I observed:
God is Love — As much as I hate writing that (it seems SO cliche — a statement trying so hard to be profound that it’s meaningless), I read NDEers making that claim over and over again. Heather said
“The level of love was so incredible, immense and overwhelming. I have never felt that anywhere on earth.”
“I saw the brightest light I had ever seen. It was like warm molasses and it filled every single speck of my being. The light was love, pure love. It was so spectacular, that I cry just writing this out. I was wanted. I was loved. I was needed. I felt like a place had been waiting for me, and it would be waiting for me when it really was my time.”
It didn’t seem to matter whether they were interacting with a voice, with the bright light, an ascendant master, Jesus, or some other divine being, they’d all [4] describe an overwhelming love and acceptance. It seemed they just couldn’t emphasize the point enough. One even went so far as to say the universe was created from that love and that everything in that higher dimension acted according to that love. [5] They didn’t want to leave that love to return to their bodies.
Lack of Feeling Judged — Life reviews seemed to happen with at least one other being present, and almost without exception, NDEers reported they were remarkably non-judgmental. For example, in Katherine’s account, she said
“After the life review, I was taken before more beings which seemed to be wiser than the two who brought me to my life review. I communicated with them about my decisions during my life review and areas where I could improve. While it was a collaborative process, I had deep respect and reverence for these beings. I felt that they loved me completely and without any judgment. In psychology there’s a term to describe this called ‘unconditional positive regard.’ I felt completely sure that they had this feeling for me. This surety felt like a warm glow of light around me.”
Even among those who committed some pretty wicked and selfish acts during their lives, they didn’t feel judged [6] [7], they just saw where they’d gone wrong and what they needed to change. [8]
Family — So, so many accounts included appearances by deceased family. There’s a strong sense that family is connected well into the afterlife, as NDEers would report seeing deceased family they were close to as well as some they may never have met. One woman said she was led through her experience by a girl she’d aborted in pregnancy. For Dr. Eben Alexander, after his initial elation over his experience ebbed and he was once again immersed in the drab and frustrating cares of normal life, this was the thing that really cemented his experience. He had been adopted and by the time he’d reconnected with his biological family, one of his biological sisters had died before he got a chance to meet her. But when he saw a picture of her, he recognized her as the “girl on the butterfly wing” who had guided him through the planes of existence toward God.
Connectedness — I’m not sure what term to use here, but many deep NDEers described being able to see how everything and everyone was connected, that nothing was truly separate. Some of them described a collective consciousness with God, and some that the collective consciousness was God, and some that they were part of God. Some described God as creating the perfect order that everything was a part of. However described, the overall impression was that they were part of a whole, while at the same time remaining distinctly themselves. It gave them a sense of belonging and of abundance and of well-being. It makes our our earthly experience seem so dark and lonely by comparison.
So what Mormon doctrines have I found supported by NDE accounts? [9]
- Loving God who knows us personally
- Existence of our “spiritual selves”, or the soul
- Premortal existence
- Purpose of life is growth, and we chose to come
- Free will
- Family relationships continue after death
- Fallen world (outside this existence, there’s much less evil)
- Time — it doesn’t exist in death as we know it in life (all things before God’s eyes continually)
- Mission on earth / work for us to do
So what Mormon beliefs do we have that NDE accounts don’t support, or what beliefs have NDEers come back with that don’t align with Mormon beliefs?
- The emphasis on physicality — not one account I read mentioned God having physical form. Nor is there much indication of spirits regarding their lack of bodies as a disadvantage [10]
- Reincarnation — many NDEers believe that we return again and again to earth life as part of progression, and this seems particularly true of those who evangelize their experiences
- Absolute lack of judgment on God’s part
- No evidence of need for ordinances or authority — family connections appear strong in NDEs independent of temple ordinances, and NDEer’s don’t come back looking to get baptized
The LDS doctrine of the Spirit World isn’t well fleshed out, so it’s hard to say whether it’s supported or contradicted, especially since the descriptions of NDEs are so different. Also, the Mormon idea that spirit bodies look like physical bodies holds in some NDEs and is contradicted in others. The doctrine for which support is most remarkably ambiguous is with respect to Jesus Christ — some accounts hold Him central, and others make Him seem irrelevant or even have some other central supernal entity.
It’s helpful to remember that NDE accounts often include descriptions of a barrier keeping them from moving on and seeing more, or of having knowledge that they wouldn’t be able to return with, so it’s not like they’re conclusive or comprehensive. And, we have to remember these descriptions are as being from one chimp to another. I suspect it’s like the proverbial blind men describing different parts of the elephant.
Personally, I love some of the messages NDEer’s have brought back with them. My soul longs for God, and my inner skeptic is held at bay by the feelings of hope and anticipation that came from reading through all these accounts. Perhaps there’s a single statement that resonated with me the most. It’s from Dr. Eben Alexander, it was almost parenthetical, and it struck me as profound:
“Physical life is characterized by defensiveness; spiritual life is just the opposite”
If you think about physical organisms struggling to survive, or teenagers’ social angst, or professionals trying to advance, this statement about mortal life being characterized by defensiveness is just so true. But when I think about the way I feel when I have the Spirit of God about me, it truly is just the opposite: I’m open, I’m humble, I’m utterly secure, and I love.
Overall, I’d say that while there’s a lot reported in near death experiences that leaves me scratching my head, the lasting impression I have is one of great optimism. I’m convinced there’s just so much more out there, and so much to look forward to. I’ll close with Heather V.‘s summary of what she learned from her experience:
“Our jobs on earth are to find out how to break through all these illusory walls everywhere that we erect to hide who we are. We need to really love each other and love ourselves. I felt as though there was a sense of humor too. It was like a deep appreciation for our lives and even for our failures. We are suppose to learn from our failures and not beat ourself up over them. We find a way to forgive and love ourselves because in reality, in the real place of creation, there is only Love. It seemed the message was that if we couldn’t find a path to love, then we are destroying something very very precious.“
So, what do you think?
[1] I had links to NDERF website accounts so you could read some specific examples of these claims, but I appear to have deleted them somehow.
[2] I really don’t know how he arrived at this number or what exactly he means by it. Maybe he means it takes an average of about 7 years before they’re willing to openly talk about it.
[3] Brings to mind our Mormon culture of keeping sacred experiences to ourselves rather than “casting [our] pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend [us]” (Matthew 7:6)
[4] Not all — I’m being hyperbolic
[5] Interestingly, Dr. Eben Alexander said something similar but used the word “Consciousness”. “Ahm” (he felt “God” was too limiting a term) was Consciousness. Everything was created from and as part of that Consciousness. But Dr. Alexander also emphasized the tremendous love he felt emanating from Ahm.
[6] During one woman’s life review (one of my deleted links), she said she felt “physical heat” when she saw her adultery, her lying, and especially her abortion, but she said she never felt judged or condemned by the being conducting the life review. She just knew she needed to change.
[7] On the other hand, some NDEers claimed to have seen and even experienced hell, and others have stated that the amount of good and bad they’d done in their lives was weighed, but these seem much less common.
[8] Incidentally, a few said that when they were reviewing their life’s choices, they weren’t reviewing their own feelings so much as the feelings of others whom they were affecting.
[9] Based on my parsing, since you can find an NDE account to contradict any position you want to take (kind of like with Brigham Young quotes!)
[10] Some accounts included stories of lost spirits wandering on earth or those seeking pleasures/addictions from life, eg., George R. Ritchie’s account in Return from Tomorrow.
Took me a minute to work out why so many would meet someone who had a lack of judgement, and how they would know the person lacked judgement. Did they cross against a light or saw through a board they were sitting on?
Sorry, Frank. I edited a little to make my writing less obtuse.
Great. Now how to I make my reading less obtuse?
I really like this Marin. I had a fascination with NDEs 10 years or so ago after becoming good friends with a woman who’d had one when she was young. She had a terminal illness in her later years and the way she looked at death was so different compared to anything I’d ever experienced before.
Then I found Emma Lou Thane”s Book, The Place of Knowing, and there it was again: that very distinctive way of viewing death and also life. One of the things I found so fascinating about Emma Lou’s tale was that for a long time she knew something had happened, but it took over a year (if I remember right) and someone else telling her she’d had a NDE for her to even begin exploring it. Her brain literally couldn’t make sense of it for that year.
More than anything, my exploration led me to a place of faith based on a lack of ‘knowing.’ If that makes any sense at all. I like the chimp analogy. We are chimps trying to understand the internet but all we are capable of is recognizing that there are flashing screens, noise, and buttons. God, His plan, His son, His afterlife are so much bigger than our tiny human understanding that if we are lucky we may recognize a couple of symbols here and there and a few flashing lights, but true knowledge and understanding are beyond our capabilities. I find that deeply comforting at the same time I recognize within myself that trying to understand stretches me for the good.
Sorry… Martin, not Marin.
Regarding 1,3,4 under: NDEers come back with that don’t align with Mormon beliefs?
Alma 40 makes it clear that after you die, you go hang out while you wait for the day of resurrection, and then comes the judgement. So yes, you’re there with other spirits.
#2 is the only one that cannot be explained by that logic.
I spent the last week of his life with my father as he died from a bowel obstruction in the hospital at age 90. He never had a NDE as we seem to define it in this discussion. He did fight in WWII operating small landing craft on the beaches of the South Pacific. More than once the craft was blown out from under him and he had to swim over a mile through the reef in the middle of a battle to get back to the larger ships . He would probably claim these were real NDEs.
I think he never got onto a boat of any sort after he was out of the Navy. We only went to an ocean beach once with him (Bear Lake doesn’t count) and it was when I was an adult and I dragged him to it . He hated being there. I guess they were killing fields to him. On rare occasions he would mention a gruesome experience when he killed an enemy, after we were adults. He claimed to have residual malaria that gave him frequent night sweats for decades after the war but I believe now it was a manifestation of PTSD, although he had no other symptoms of it.
When he was probably past 80 years old, he showed me a picture of about 30 guys with whom he trained and he could remember each of their names and unique things about them, not necessarily uplifting (like many were ex-convicts furloughed from prison to fight the war). I volunteered to try and track some of them down so he could reconnect with them. He replied; oh, they’re probably all dead by now. I countered, you don’t know that, lets find some of them. He was silent for a moment and then said: I was the only person in that picture to survive the war and I witnessed most of them being killed.
My grandmother was a nurse and end -of-life care was done in her home for most of her 9 siblings and also not a few of her grandfather’s siblings along with him. She did not do this alone, she had a little army; 5 daughters and 3 daughter-in-laws in the first wave and quite a few of my cousins and other relatives and friends in the second wave to help. Men only helped with a few tasks requiring heavy lifting. As a youth living nearby I helped by doing chores and staying out of trouble. After grandma got old and left the house empty, it did seem to me that the ghosts of these relatives haunted it. But they were not angry or malevolent.
After my uncle died (who also fought in the Pacific in WWII and never recovered from debilitating “shell shock” to the point of living independently) I spoke at his funeral as the most recent RM in the family and one of the few who thought he was amusing. I also played a mischievous trick on my most pious Aunt, his sister who claimed to have seen him in a dream. The last time I saw my uncle the day before he died, he was grumbling about his pious sister getting him a copy of the scriptures in large print and preaching to him to read his scriptures every day. He was threatening to whack her over the head with the scriptures and tell her to go to hell. A few days after the funeral my pious Aunt was down in the dungeon, a secret tunnel he had dug in his paranoia under the basement where they stored food and car parts. I sneaked into the otherwise empty house, down the stairs and closed the dungeon door and latched it, locking her in there. Then imitating my uncle’s halted gait after his stroke when he was partially paralysed, I slowly climbed the wooden stairs dragging one foot behind the other and chuckling quietly, like he used to do. She though it was his ghost who had returned and locked her in there. She screamed his name in terror and pounded the door so hard it eventually broke the flimsy latch and she ran pell mell up the stairs and out of the house. She left the front door flapping in the wind and laid rubber all the way down the street . Soon the entire family heard of this additional miraculous and troubling, spiritual visitation.
My father had this same lack of fear or anxiety the last week of his life about dying as is described above. He was interested whether he would survive or not but he didn’t seem to be the least bit fearful. As the condition worsened and grew more painful in spite of morphine, he remarked, there is no easy way for me to die, is there. All of his children were at his bedside the day I knew it was hopeless and the time had come to dial back the treatments and turn up the morphine drip and let him go. It was about the most difficult decision a person ever makes. As we sat and watched him pass away over a few hours, we felt enormous sadness and grief. But when he finally became motionless after many minutes of agonal breathing, and grew pale and very relaxed; and we knew he was gone; a sense of peace came mixed with what seemed like unbearable sorrow. At that moment I had the clearest genuine appreciation, both on a rational and an emotional level, of what a great man he had been, in spite of his faults. I want to believe that was the point when Christ actually washed his sins away with His blood. I also felt such gratitude that I was privileged to be his son.
I doubt I will ever have a NDE, they are so rare. But we will nearly all experience the death of a person we care about deeply and it really hurts. Perhaps this intense love and light from God upon death can sometimes be reflected in a small measure onto those who love the person dying. God is hopefully not like a prankster who locks his pious Aunt in the family dungeon.
Andy, I agree that our understanding of the spirit world is such that the occupants wouldn’t necessarily have evidence regarding 1, 3, and 4. I think it’s pretty mainstream Mormon teaching that spirits in the spirit world haven’t yet left their “2nd estate”, and that departing spirits don’t pass back through the veil of forgetfulness that we pass through at birth. This is a presumption when it comes to missionary work in the spirit world, as per D&C section 138. Even though it’s not explicit, it would only make sense that they’d need to be taught about Jesus and the plan of salvation if they couldn’t remember, because we believe that the plan of salvation was understood and agreed to by all those who came to earth.
However, that belief itself could be item #5 in that list, because NDEers often claimed to learn all sorts of knowledge, including learning of the premortal existence and the choice we made to come to earth. Some of them claim to remember “understanding everything” — until they were sent back to their bodies.
As for #2, reincarnation, I actually felt like it could easily fit into the overall plan of salvation and thought that maybe we haven’t been told about it because then we wouldn’t take this life seriously enough. But, it would certainly help explain why, if the reason we have life is to experience and learn, different people’s lives could be SO different in terms of what they learn and experience. With reincarnation, the variety of experience could be balanced out somewhat. That wouldn’t obviate the need for a Savior, though — we’d still need as much grace as we would for a single life. I haven’t really tried to think it through, though, and I’m certainly not advocating it.
I am a 57-year-old life-long member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I believe, follow, and live the doctrine the best that I can. I am in the same ward with Julie Rowe, if any of you know about her, and I consider her a friend. After learning some of her details and learning some things that I had never really considered, I went on a study binge to try and make sense of many of these issues that are being discussed and fit them into the Gospel message.
In the past several months I have ripped through several dozen YouTube videos dealing with NDE’s, and was exposed to all of the ideas presented in the main blog post. Everyone seemed ostensibly sincere. I had a general sense of “this makes sense” and “this feels good”, except that, despite a few references to Jesus and/or The Source and libraries with the Books of Life and one lady trying to push her face through the blur that was covering the face of God, there was a very distinct lack of any references to the Savior, or Atonement, or ordinances, coordinated missionary efforts similar to what President Smith saw, among other Gospel principles.
Then a week ago I stumbled across Dr. Michael Newton’s “Journey of Souls” (Parts 1 and 2). Not realizing that there was a part 1, I listened to part 2 first. Looking back, I’m glad I did. He accidentally stumbled across regression to past life memories, and then later stumbled across “life between lives” memories. With over 7000 case studies, it is nearly impossible to dismiss his work. Completely fascinating, but again, there was a distinct lack of the doctrines mentioned above. However, nearly all, if not all, cases described some distant “other” place where the sages, ascended masters, and so on up to The Over Soul or The Source, resided; some type of boundary or barrier that they knew very little about and which their memories couldn’t cross. So this pool of “lesser developed souls” were doing their incarnating and re-incarnating, under the care of Guides, until their “Karmic” burdens were evened out and they no longer had the need or desire to re-incarnate and experience not only more Earth time but also time on other worlds (mostly uninhabited by other “people”).
It was a fascinating book to listen to and I would recommend it on a “Hmmm, I wonder…” kind of a basis.
Two things in particular are troubling me: 1. Ordinances for the dead. If a person is living multiple lives, and if this person were the mother the first time and then subsequently comes back as the child of her daughter the next time, who exactly would we be doing the baptism for? This would make family history a real nightmare. 2. Resurrection. Every person assigned to this earth will be resurrected. Once resurrected, the body and spirit are permanently joined. My current understanding is that this would nix re-incarnation. So are all of these “lesser developed” souls in a time crunch to get all of their incarnating done before the final resurrection?
So, here I am trying to make this puzzle piece fit and waiting for the further light of understanding from the True Source, Jesus Christ, through the Holy Ghost. I have a sneaking suspicion that the covenant-making people of the House of Israel play a major role in the portion that is still hiding behind the curtain.
This is Christ’s world. He created it using substances that are faithful to the Father. These substances are now completely faithful to Him as well. All souls that come to this earth are His; He purchased all of us with His Atonement.
I sincerely hope that there are multiple dimensions, multiple time line potentialities, gazillions of worlds with trillions of varying life forms, universes beyond number, worm holes, and so on. How amazing will that be?