Chapter 6

What Is a Near-Death Experience?

An Introduction to the Phenomenon That Changed How We Think About Death

A First Look

A man walks into a hospital with chest pain. He is fifty-four, a mechanic, a father of two. The nurses take his blood pressure, hook up a monitor, and start an IV. Then the alarm sounds. His heart has stopped.

The team runs to his bedside. They begin chest compressions. A doctor gives the order to shock. The paddles charge. His body jolts.

From his point of view, though, something very different is happening.

The pain vanishes. In its place comes a deep, sudden calm. He feels himself rise. He can see the room below him, the team working over a body on the gurney, the nurse pumping the bag. It takes a moment to realize that the body on the gurney is his own.

He is not afraid. He notices this, and it surprises him. A warmth surrounds him. A light appears, soft at first, then bright beyond anything he has words for. He senses a presence in the light, a presence of overwhelming love. Someone he loved, someone who died years ago, stands beside him. He hears, or perhaps only knows, that it is not his time. He must go back.

The next thing he knows, he is gasping on the gurney, a nurse's face above him, the fluorescent lights too bright. His ribs ache from the compressions. But something is different. He is different. He tries to tell the nurse what happened, but the words fall short. She pats his hand and tells him to rest.

Later, he will try to explain it to his wife, to his pastor, to friends. Most will not know what to make of it. Some will look uncomfortable. A few will say it was just the drugs, or just the brain shutting down. But he knows what he experienced, and he cannot un-know it. He is no longer afraid of death.

What just happened to this man?

That is the question this chapter sets out to answer. Not yet the question of whether it was real (we will get there), or whether it came from God (we will get there too). Just the simpler, more basic question: what is this experience that so many people report? What does it look like? What are its common features? And why should a careful, Bible-believing Christian pay attention to it?

Across the first five chapters of this book, we built the case that you are more than a body. You are a body joined to a soul. The soul is real, and it survives death. Now we turn to the evidence. And the evidence begins here, with the near-death experience.

Where the Word Came From

Accounts of experiences at the edge of death are not new. The Greek philosopher Plato recorded the story of Er, a soldier left for dead on a battlefield who revived on his own funeral pyre and described a journey beyond the body.¹ In the late nineteenth century, a Swiss geology professor named Albert Heim collected accounts from mountain climbers who had survived near-fatal falls. He found a common pattern of calm, heightened awareness, and a rapid review of their lives.² Scattered reports continued to appear across the centuries, in medieval literature, in missionary journals, in the letters of physicians. But nobody put them together in a systematic way until the 1970s.

The man who changed that was Raymond Moody.

Moody had studied philosophy before entering medical school. He held a doctorate in philosophy and had taught the subject at a university.³ In medical school, he began hearing patients describe striking experiences during close brushes with death. Not just one or two. Dozens. And the accounts were strangely alike.

He tracked down 150 survivors of life-threatening events, including cardiac arrest, and studied fifty of them in detail.⁴ Though these people did not know each other, their stories shared a set of features that kept coming back. Moody identified eleven of them. Patients described a sense that words could not capture what had happened. They recalled hearing themselves pronounced dead. They felt a deep peace. They heard unusual noises. They moved through a tunnel toward a light. They met others who had died. They encountered a luminous, compassionate being who helped them review their lives. They sensed a border or limit they could not pass. They felt themselves separate from their bodies and watch events from above. And then, often against their will, they returned.⁵

Moody also noticed a striking pattern in what happened afterward. These people changed. They became less focused on status and wealth. They sought greater meaning and purpose. They lost their fear of death and came to see it not as an ending but as a passage into something new. Many tried to tell others what had happened, but most people did not believe them. So they stopped talking about it. In some cases, other people had been able to confirm details the person described seeing while unconscious.⁶

This pattern of transformation has been confirmed again and again in the decades since. The careful Dutch prospective study led by Pim van Lommel followed cardiac-arrest survivors for eight years. Those who had reported an NDE showed a lasting increase in their belief in an afterlife, a greater interest in the meaning of life, more acceptance and love for others, and a marked decrease in their fear of death. Those who had survived cardiac arrest without an NDE did not show these same changes. Most striking, the transformation deepened over time. The differences between the two groups were larger at eight years than at two. An experience that lasted only minutes during cardiac arrest produced changes that grew stronger for nearly a decade.

In 1975, Moody published those accounts in a short, groundbreaking book called Life After Life. It became an instant bestseller, eventually selling over thirteen million copies, and attracted global media attention.⁷ In that book, he gave this cluster of experiences a name: near-death experiences, or NDEs for short.

It was not the only name on offer. Earlier writers had tried other labels. The nineteenth-century French psychologist Victor Egger had spoken of "imminent death experiences." Other researchers later offered alternatives, some of them quite awkward. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist who became one of the most careful researchers in the field, recalls what happened when Moody gathered the early researchers at the University of Virginia in the late 1970s: everyone had a different favorite term.⁸ One proposed "circumstantial logic experiences." Another suggested "perithan experiences." Still another tried "circumthanatologic experiences." But Moody's phrase had already caught hold in the public mind. "Near-death experience" is the term that stuck.

"Because Moody's book had already become so popular in the media, the term near-death experience is what stuck in the minds for better or worse."

— Bruce Greyson, quoted in Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying

I say "for better or worse" because the name is not perfect. It suggests that the person only came near death. But many of these people were clinically dead. Their hearts had stopped. Their brains showed no measurable activity. Some were in that state for minutes. Calling it a "near-death" experience can make it sound less serious than it is. The early researchers adopted the term partly to avoid controversy. They felt people could accept being "near to" death but would resist the idea that anyone had actually died and come back.⁹

Despite its limits, the name stayed. And the research took off. Over the five decades since Moody's book, thousands of these experiences have been collected, studied, scored, and debated by cardiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, and scholars of religion.¹⁰ What began with one man's curiosity in a Georgia medical school has become a recognized field of scientific inquiry.

The Core Features

What does a near-death experience actually look like? Moody was the first to try to answer this. He noticed that while no two accounts were exactly alike, a striking set of features kept appearing.¹¹ He identified about fifteen of them, and he built what he called a "theoretically ideal" account that wove them together in the order in which they typically occur.

In Moody's composite picture, a dying person hears himself pronounced dead. He begins to hear an unusual noise, a buzzing or ringing. He feels himself moving rapidly through a long, dark tunnel. Then he finds himself outside his own body, watching the resuscitation from above. Others come to meet him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died. A warm, loving being of light appears and helps him review his life. He approaches a barrier or border. Then he is told, or knows, that he must go back. He returns to his body, often against his will.¹²

Moody was careful to point out that this was an abstraction. No single person reported all fifteen elements. Many reported most of them, and a few reported up to twelve. But no one element appeared in every account, and no element appeared in only one account. The experience came in degrees.¹³

In the years that followed, other researchers confirmed and refined the picture. Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, studied the accounts and described what he called the "core experience," organized into five stages: peace, body separation, entering a dark region, seeing the light, and entering the light.¹⁴ Ring also noticed something important: people who were "dead" longer tended to report deeper, more complete experiences. Those who had only a brief brush with death often reported only the first stages. It was as though the experience had a depth to it, and how far a person went depended on how close they came to the point of no return.¹⁵

Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist who built the largest online database of NDE accounts in the world, identified twelve common elements based on thousands of cases.¹⁶ Long's Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) has collected over four thousand NDE accounts, making it the most extensive public collection available. His research team translated portions of the NDERF survey into more than twenty languages, allowing them to gather accounts from all over the world.¹⁷

Long's twelve elements included an out-of-body experience, heightened senses, intense positive emotions, passing through a tunnel, encountering a brilliant light, meeting deceased loved ones or mysterious beings, a sense of altered time, a life review, encountering heavenly places, learning special knowledge, reaching a boundary, and returning to the body. An NDE does not need to include all twelve. But most include several, and each one alone can be a powerful experience.¹⁸

But the single most important tool for defining and measuring the NDE came from Bruce Greyson.

Why does a scoring tool matter? Because without one, researchers could not be sure they were all studying the same thing. Early NDE research was scattered. Some investigators focused on visions of God. Others tracked out-of-body reports. Still others studied time distortion or emotional changes. Greyson saw the problem clearly: "It was difficult to know whether we were all collecting examples of the same kind of experience, or whether we were studying a variety of different experiences that might happen when people think they're dying."²¹

The NDE Scale solved that problem. And it held up. Twenty years after its publication, two skeptical scholars, a statistician and a psychologist, put the scale through a rigorous independent test. They had no interest in defending NDEs. Greyson handed over his raw data and waited. The result confirmed that the scale measured one consistent experience across men and women, across ages, and across cultures. Scores remained stable no matter how many years had passed since the experience.²²

One detail is worth noting. Going through a tunnel, which many people associate with NDEs, did not make it into the final sixteen features. Greyson found that people report tunnel experiences about as often with NDE features as without them. So a tunnel alone is not a reliable sign that an NDE has occurred.²³

Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and one of the most rigorous researchers working today, has proposed a framework of seven main stages: separation from the body, a review of life, travel to a destination, arriving at a beautiful place, encountering a bright and loving light, seeing a luminous being or deceased relatives, and a decision to return.²⁵ These seven stages overlap closely with what Moody, Ring, Long, and Greyson have all found. The details vary from person to person. The arc of the experience does not.

In my doctoral research, I used a nine-point framework developed by Shaun Tabatt to score all 5,278 cases for the presence of these core features. Tabatt's framework awards a point for each of the following: the death or near-death of the person, an out-of-body experience, heightened senses, encountering other beings, visiting otherworldly realms, a life review, gaining special knowledge, returning to the body, and lasting life changes afterward.⁴⁶ The results were striking. Out-of-body experiences appeared in about 85 percent of cases. Heightened senses appeared in about 92 percent. Encountering other beings appeared in about 69 percent. Life reviews were less common, at about 24 percent, but when they occurred, they were among the most powerful parts of the experience. Lasting life changes afterward appeared in about 87 percent. The average score across the entire dataset was about 7 out of 9. Children under age thirteen scored an average of 6.9, adults aged thirty-one to fifty scored 7.0. The pattern held regardless of age, background, or decade.⁴⁷

What an NDE Is Not

Because the NDE touches on death, dreams, visions, and the afterlife, it can easily be confused with other things. It helps to say plainly what it is not.

It is not an ordinary dream.

People who have had NDEs are nearly unanimous on this point. Dreams fade. NDEs do not. Dreams are hazy and often nonsensical. NDEs are reported as strikingly clear, logical, and vivid. Jeffrey Long's NDERF survey asked over a thousand experiencers how their level of consciousness during the experience compared to normal waking life. Nearly three-quarters said their awareness was greater than normal. Only about five percent said it was less.²⁶ And unlike dreams, NDE memories remain sharp and stable for decades. Greyson found that NDE Scale scores did not change no matter how many years had passed since the experience, which means the memories are not drifting or being embellished over time.²⁷

Greyson also checked whether NDEs might be a sign of mental illness. He used standard psychiatric screening questionnaires and compared people who had had NDEs with people who had come close to death without one. The rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and every other measured condition were the same in both groups, and the same as in the general population. Having an NDE does not make a person more or less likely to have a mental illness.²⁸

It does not require full clinical death.

The name "near-death experience" can be misleading here. Some NDErs were in full cardiac arrest with no heartbeat and no brain activity. Others were in life-threatening emergencies but were never technically dead. A few have reported the same features during events that only seemed life-threatening, such as a fall that ended without injury. Moody himself defined "near-death" broadly, as any situation in which a person would likely have died without medical help.²⁹ The strongest and most striking cases, as we will see in later chapters, tend to occur during documented cardiac arrest. But the experience is not limited to those cases.

It is not the same as a deathbed vision.

This distinction matters, and it often gets lost. A deathbed vision (sometimes called a deathbed experience, or DBE) happens in the dying process, hours or days or even weeks before death. The dying person may see deceased relatives, angels, or a beautiful place. They often become very peaceful. But they do not come back. They die.

An NDE, by contrast, happens to someone who comes to the edge of death and returns. The person survives. They can tell us what happened. The two experiences share some common features, and they point in the same direction. But they are different kinds of events, and this book treats them separately. Deathbed visions have their own rich history and their own body of research, and Chapter 26 gives them the attention they deserve.³⁰

It is not, by itself, proof of heaven.

This is an important point, and I want to be honest about it from the start. An NDE is a reported experience. It is data. It is often powerful, moving, and very hard to explain in purely physical terms. But an experience, even a true one, is not the same thing as a theological conclusion. A person may genuinely leave their body and see real events in the room below. That tells us something remarkable about the soul. But it does not, all by itself, tell us that everything the person saw in the light was a message from God. Some of what NDErs report lines up beautifully with Scripture. Some of it does not. The work of telling the difference is the work of discernment, and this book will return to that work again and again.

How Common Are Near-Death Experiences?

More common than most people think.

Random polls in the United States and Germany suggest that about four percent of the entire population has had a near-death experience. If that figure holds, it means roughly nine million Americans, about two million people in the United Kingdom, and around twenty million Europeans have had one.³² These are not small numbers.

Among people who actually survive cardiac arrest, the rates are higher. In a careful prospective study of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors in the Netherlands, about 18 percent reported an NDE.³³ Bruce Greyson found a rate of about 15.5 percent in his prospective study of 116 American cardiac-arrest survivors.³⁴ Kenneth Ring and Michael Sabom, working earlier, had estimated that around 27 to 30 percent of people who come close to death report the experience.³⁵

Why do the numbers differ? Probably because of memory. Cardiac arrest is devastating to the brain. Many survivors are in a coma for days or weeks afterward. Some never regain full mental function. If the experience itself is real but the ability to remember it is damaged by the medical crisis, then the true rate of experience may be much higher than the rate of recall. We simply do not know how many people have NDEs that they cannot afterward retrieve.³⁶

There is another factor that keeps the numbers low: silence. Many NDErs do not talk about what happened to them. They are afraid of being mocked, or diagnosed, or dismissed. Greyson has found that experiencers were often reluctant to speak, and that many had kept their experiences secret for years or even decades. When Parnia's team interviewed cardiac-arrest survivors, one woman made them promise that nobody else would find out. She was afraid of her husband's reaction. If millions of people have had this experience but many of them are not talking, the true scope of the phenomenon is even larger than the numbers suggest.

I do not want to get ahead of the evidence. The hospital studies and the prevalence data belong to Chapter 12, where we will look at them closely. For now, the point is simple: this is not a rare curiosity. Millions of people report it. Every pastor, every nurse, every chaplain, every family that has sat at a dying loved one's bedside may encounter it. Physicians, as John Hagan has stressed, do not yet appreciate how often their patients experience NDEs or how to care for those who have one.³⁷ It deserves to be understood.

The Range of the Experience

When most people picture an NDE, they picture the warm version. The peace. The light. The love. And in fact, the great majority of near-death experiences are positive. In my doctoral research, I found that about 80 percent of remembered NDEs are positive experiences, filled with peace, love, and a sense of welcome.³⁸

But not all of them.

About 20 percent are what researchers call distressing NDEs. These may involve darkness, confusion, fear, or a sense of being trapped. Some include terrifying figures or a feeling of judgment. A few describe torment. These accounts are harder to hear, and they raise hard questions. Are they glimpses of hell? Are they the work of the enemy? Are they something else entirely?

The careful researchers, people like Nancy Evans Bush and Barbara Rommer, have found that distressing NDEs come in several different types. Some involve a sense of being in a dark, empty void. Others involve hostile or frightening beings. Still others begin as positive experiences that take a dark turn. Flattening them all into one explanation would be a mistake.³⁹

I believe, as I will argue in Chapter 22, that distressing NDEs correspond to what the Bible calls Hades (Greek hadēs, the intermediate waiting place of the dead who are apart from God), not to the final hell (which Scripture calls Gehenna or the lake of fire). But that is an argument for later. For now, I simply want to be honest: the NDE world is not all sunshine. Some of these experiences are frightening, and they deserve the same careful attention as the joyful ones.

The Bible itself gives us precedent for the idea that a vision from God is not always comfortable. When the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord, he did not feel warm and peaceful. He cried out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). When Daniel received visions, he was left weak and trembling (Daniel 10:8–9). An encounter with the living God is real. It is good. But it is not always easy.⁴⁰

The positive and the distressing experiences together form the full picture. Ignoring the dark side would be dishonest. So would treating every dark experience as proof that all NDEs come from the devil. The truth, as usual, requires more care than either extreme.

Why This Matters for Our Question

So why does a near-death experience matter to us?

Let me be direct. The NDE matters to us because it appears to show something that should not be possible on a purely physical view of the person: a mind working clearly, vividly, and accurately while the brain is shutting down or has stopped entirely.

Think about what the standard NDE involves. A person's heart stops. Blood flow to the brain ceases. Within seconds, the brain's electrical activity begins to go flat. By every physical measure, the conditions for consciousness are gone. And yet, during this exact window, some people report the clearest, most vivid, most structured awareness of their entire lives. They describe specific events in the room. They report conversations they should not have been able to hear. They identify details they should not have been able to see. And in many cases, those details are later confirmed.⁴¹

This is the puzzle that makes the NDE so important for the question this book is asking. If you are nothing more than your brain, then consciousness should die when the brain dies. You should not be able to think, to see, to remember, to reason while your brain is flat. And yet people do. Or at least, they report doing so, and the confirmed details in many cases support them.

Long's survey found that the great majority of experiencers consider their NDEs to be "definitely real." These are not fringe voices. His sample included physicians, scientists, attorneys, and nurses. In a survey of over a thousand NDErs, almost all considered the experience the most profound of their entire life.⁴²

For the first five chapters of this book, we built the case from Scripture and from careful theology: a human being is a body joined to a soul, and the soul survives the death of the body. Now, in Parts III and IV, we turn to the evidence. And the near-death experience is where that evidence begins. If even one person truly perceived real events while their brain showed no activity, then something was doing the perceiving. Something besides the brain. Something that the Bible has a name for.

The soul.

But there is a further reason the NDE should matter to Christians, not just to philosophers of mind. Some believers worry that NDEs lead people away from the faith and toward New Age beliefs or Eastern religion. The careful research tells a different story. J. Steve Miller studied one hundred consecutive NDE accounts from the largest online database in the world and found that only seven mentioned anything even loosely opposed to Christian beliefs. Of those seven, only three contradicted Christian doctrine in any specific way. The experiences themselves, Miller found, rarely teach reincarnation, universal salvation, or anything that directly attacks historic Christian teaching.⁴⁸

Cardiologist Michael Sabom tested this question with his own patients. His Atlanta Study tracked cardiac-arrest survivors who had reported NDEs, looking at whether the experience pulled them away from traditional faith. It did not. Belief in reincarnation showed no net change. Church attendance went up, not down. The strongest increases came from those who already held traditional Christian beliefs. Sabom concluded plainly that belief in reincarnation and Eastern religion is not a direct result of the NDE itself.⁴⁹

The apostle Paul seems to have known what this is like. He wrote of a man "caught up to the third heaven," and he was not sure whether it happened "in the body or out of the body" (2 Corinthians 12:2–4). Paul's uncertainty is striking. It is exactly the kind of confusion modern NDErs describe. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, "gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55).⁴³ These are not near-death experiences in the clinical sense. But they show us something the Bible takes for granted: that a person can perceive spiritual realities that go beyond what the body's senses can reach. The idea is not foreign to the Christian faith. It is woven into the story.

"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows."

— 2 Corinthians 12:2 (ESV)

None of this means we take every NDE claim at face value. The work of weighing the evidence is just beginning. In the next chapter, Chapter 7, we will learn how to tell strong evidence from weak evidence. In Chapter 8, we will look at out-of-body experiences and what they mean. In Chapter 9, we will examine the most powerful veridical cases and the data from my doctoral research. And in every one of those chapters, the question of discernment will travel with us.

But first we had to know what we are looking at. Now we do. A near-death experience is a structured, vivid, and often life-changing experience reported by people who have been at the very edge of death. Its core features are consistent across decades and across cultures. It is not a dream. It is not a deathbed vision. It is not, by itself, proof of heaven. But it may be the closest thing we have to a report from the border between this world and the next.

From a Christian standpoint, we should expect this. If the Bible is right that we are body and soul, and if the soul survives death and stays awake, then it would not be strange at all for people pulled back from the edge to bring reports of what they glimpsed. What would be strange is if they had nothing to report. The Bible does not promise that dying will be blank and silent. It promises that the dead are alive. "He is not God of the dead, but of the living," Jesus said (Luke 20:38). If that is true, then the NDE is not a threat to the faith. It is a window into something the faith has always taught.

But a window can let in light, and it can also let in wind. Not every report that comes through deserves the same trust. That is why the next chapter turns to the question of evidence, and why the work of discernment will follow us all the way to the end of this book.

And the question now is how to weigh it. That is the work of the chapters to come.