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).”