Old Light on the Near-Death Experience

In my most recent book, Consciousness Beyond Death, I focused on the near-death experience, including eight NDEs that occurred before Dr. Raymond Moody gave a name to the phenomenon in his 1975 best-seller Life After Life.  While bits and pieces of the pre-Moody NDEs have been mentioned here and there by other authors, I tried to provide much more detail than the accounts I’ve seen summarized.  One of those is the NDE reported by Cora L. V. Richmond (aka Cora Scott, lower right photo) in her 1923 book, My Experiences While Out of My Body.  It is one of the two or three most profound NDEs I’ve read about.  Richmond reported a state of “Super-Consciousness,” explaining that it was a state of  KNOWING.  Deceased loved ones welcomed her, those with the “tenderest ties” among the first. Her guide took her on a tour of the spirit world and she witnessed scenes in which spirits were attempting to minister to humans under their guidance but failed because of earthly barriers, primary selfishness and not being open to spirit influence. There’s so much more. 

In her 1917 book, How I Know that the Dead are Alive, Fanny Ruthen Paget (upper right photo) offers one of the most vivid and detailed NDEs that I’ve come across. While out of body, she visited her fiancé in another town. She was able to see his “shadow body” better than his physical body.  The fiancé was sleeping, but he awakened, sat up and cried out, ‘Fanny, Fanny.” She tried to communicate with him, but he did not react to her words. She perceived that her vibratory environment did not harmonize with his. She moved on and was welcomed by loved ones and others, including her spirit guide, who identified himself as Meon. Like Cora Richmond, Paget was also given a tour of the spirit world, including a place of “red darkness’ which Meon explained to her was inhabited by souls still within earth’s magnetism, or spiritual gravitation. “Earth interests hold them,” Meon told her, adding that some preferred it and others were not strong enough spiritually to progress beyond that point.  Here again, Paget had much more to say. 

Even before the NDEs reported by Richmond and Paget, there was a fairly detailed one reported in an 1863 book, From Matter to Spirit, authored by Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, the wife of the renowned British mathematician, Augustus De Morgan, who wrote a lengthy preface to the book. This NDE was reported by Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (upper left photo), who is remembered today for devising the Beaufort Wind Scales. The experience took place when, as a young seaman, he fell into the water near his ship.  Unable to swim, he felt that he was drowning. “From the moment that all exertion had ceased – which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation – a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquility succeeded the most tumultuous sensation,” he explained. “It might be called apathy, certainly not resignation; for drowning no longer appeared an evil; I no longer thought of being rescued, nor was I in any bodily pain.  On the contrary, my sensations were now of rather a pleasurable cast…..”  He saw his life played back before him in what he called a called a “kind of panoramic view,” in which each of his acts “seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or consequence.”

Another intriguing NDE took place in 1889.  It was experienced and reported by Dr. A. S. Wiltse, a physician of Skiddy, Kansas.  Although he was told he was without pulse for about four hours and declared dead, Wiltse experienced a state of consciousness in which he wandered about the room and then outside somewhat bewildered but still marveling at what he was seeing and experiencing.  He saw his supposedly lifeless body lying there with his hands clasped over his chest. “I discovered then a small cord, like a spider’s web, running from my shoulders back to my body and attaching to it at the base of my neck in front.”  When he found himself back in earthly consciousness, he was disappointed.   

Another physician, Sir Auckland Geddes, a British surgeon turned statesman, told his audience at the Royal Medical Society’s 1937 bicentenary celebration of a “strange experience” of a man who had seemingly “died” and returned with a detailed memory of all that happened to him while “dead.”  Geddes said the experiencer preferred to remain anonymous, but indications were that either he or another physician was the experiencer. “Although I  had no body, I had what appeared to be perfect two-eyed vision, and what I saw can only be described in this way, that I was conscious of a psychic stream flowing with life through time,” Geddes quoted the experiencer. He saw himself as sort of a cloud that was not a cloud, free in a time dimension of space. He was upset when brought back to “life.’ 

A more recent NDE involved a long-time friend, the late Dr. Donald Morse, a Temple University science professor, who believed in nothing but the material world. While out for a run, more of a jog, in 1983, Morse lost consciousness and fell to the ground. He recalled thinking he was dying, but he wasn’t afraid. “The light was incredibly beautiful, and I felt wonderfully calm and secure with a benevolent presence beside me,” he related to me. He was enveloped by the light and then saw his whole life flash before him. “I was a research scientist who was well schooled in evolutionary biology, genetics, microbiology, immunology and with some knowledge of archaeology anthropology, cosmology and quantum physics,” he continued, but he added that he had never heard of an NDE until he experienced it himself and began studying it.  It resulted in a complete change in his worldview, followed by the most productive years of his life. 

Skeptics argue that such a phenomenon as the NDE is not limited to a near-death state, as it has been reported by people on drugs and even by pilots undergoing anti-gravity training. Some people are able to induce an “out-of-body experience (OBE) in which they detach themselves from their physical bodies.  The NDE is just one type of OBE.  Whatever the trigger for the OBE, the experience appears to validate the words of St. Paul that we have two bodies – physical and spiritual – the latter separating from the physical at the time of death.  

I’ve never had a near-death experience, at least one I can remember.  I consider myself a “vicarious experiencer,” having heard enough of them to accept the reality of it all.  There are too many reported NDEs by credible people to jump to the conclusion, as skeptics do, that they are all drug-induced hallucinations. Many of them did not involve drugs at all.  The closest I’ve come to an “out-of-body” experience was in a four-mile race at Ala Moana Beach Park here in Hawaii around 1978.  It was not the so-called “runner’s high” that runners often talk about; I had a number of those over 50 years of running. This one was much different.  I was sharing the lead near the half-way mark with another runner when I suddenly realized that it felt effortless. I knew from more than 20 years of experience as a competitive runner that I was supposed to be feeling some stress and strain at the pace we were maintaining. However, the sensation was one of effortless floating. I considered surging ahead of my younger competitor and leaving him in my wake, but I didn’t seem to have feet to accomplish that.  It was almost as if I were floating, and then I seemed to be 20-feet above my body while watching myself and my competitor match strides and bump elbows.  That snapshot memory is still imprinted on my brain. After a few seconds, I was “back in my body” and it was no longer effortless.  My body was now feeling the struggle. My competitor sprinted to the finish ahead of me. That experience alone would not have convinced me that the mind is the soul and that consciousness does not originate in the brain, but, as Sir Oliver Lodge, a renowned British physicist, once said, it is the cumulative evidence that convinced him of the difference between mind and brain.  

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die,Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife,Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death:  New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.

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