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.[47] 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[48] 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, you can mark me down as a believer.
Last Words
47
That is, in the near-death journals. You can find them in certain fundamentalist Christian publications. I read that in the February 1990 issue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network newsletter
48
And now I must reveal to you that Wes is not a defibrillator insertion patient in Charlottesville, but in San Francisco, near where I live. The human subjects committee for Greyson’s study would not allow me in the operating room. So I called UCSF Medical Center, who kindly let me observe an insertion. My apologies to the reader, and my thanks to UCSF Medical Center (number six on