Chapter 19

The Tunnel and the Light

Patterns Across Cultures and Centuries

Tom Sawyer was forty when the pickup truck fell on him. A heavy-equipment operator from upstate New York, he was working under a vehicle in his driveway in May 1978 when the jack slipped. The truck dropped onto his chest. He could not breathe. He could not move. He felt his life slipping away. And then everything changed.

He found himself moving — fast — through what he later described as a kind of tunnel or passageway. Dark on either side. A pull toward something ahead. Far in front of him, a light. As he moved closer, the light grew brighter. It did not blind him. It welcomed him. By the time he reached it, he understood — somehow, without being told — that he was in the presence of something alive. Aware. Loving him.¹

When the paramedics restarted his heart, Tom Sawyer came back. He had been clinically dead for several minutes. He spent the rest of his life trying to put what he had seen into words.

Tom Sawyer's report is one of thousands — tens of thousands, if we count the worldwide databases — that share the same basic shape. A passage. A direction. A light at the end. A presence in the light that knows you and loves you. The names change. The cultural details shift. A Hindu villager describes stairs going up; a Solomon Islander describes a path through the bush; a Korean grandmother describes a bridge over a river. But the shape — transition, then light, then presence — keeps showing up.

This chapter is about that shape. What is the second phase of a typical near-death experience? Why is it so consistent, across cultures that share almost nothing else? And what, if anything, does it tell us about what the Christian tradition has always claimed — that there is something more on the other side of dying, and that the something is not impersonal?

What This Chapter Is Asking

In the previous chapter we looked at the out-of-body phase — the moment when the dying person finds themselves outside the body, often above it, watching the resuscitation team work. That phase carries most of the strict evidential weight of the NDE literature. It is where the verifiable details come from. It is where physicalism has the hardest time explaining what happens.

But the OBE phase is not the whole experience. For most NDErs, it is only the beginning.

What follows is a transition. The experiencer, no longer tied to the body, moves — and feels themselves moving — toward something. Some report a tunnel; some, a passage of darkness; some, a doorway or a flight of stairs; some, a river to cross. The imagery varies. The motion does not. There is a forward-ness to it, a sense of traveling, often very fast. And there is a destination.

What the experiencer is moving toward is, in nearly every case, light. A light that is not like sunlight or any light they had seen before. A light that does not hurt the eyes. A light that, as it draws closer, turns out to be alive.

I want to be careful with what I am claiming here. I am not arguing yet that this light is Christ — that case is built carefully in Chapter 21. I am not arguing yet that what follows the light is the eschatological judgment — that case is built in Chapter 20, on the life review. The argument of this chapter is narrower. It is about a specific feature of the NDE landscape: the transition phase. What it looks like. How consistent it is. And what, on the most careful reading, it suggests.

The Shape of the Transition

When Raymond Moody published Life After Life in 1975, he listed fifteen common features of what he called the near-death experience. Among them: the feeling of being separated from the body; meeting deceased relatives; the encounter with a being of light; the life review. But the feature that captured the public imagination was the tunnel. So strongly did the tunnel image enter popular culture that “going into the tunnel” became shorthand for dying.²

Moody's original sample was small — about fifty cases — and Western. Later researchers wanted to know whether the tunnel was a real cross-cultural feature or a quirk of his sample. Kenneth Ring, working with a larger and more systematic sample, found that the tunnel or some variation of it appeared in roughly a third to a half of NDE reports.³ Bruce Greyson's standardized NDE Scale, developed in 1983, includes the transition feature as one of its sixteen scored items.⁴ By the time Pim van Lommel's Dutch cardiac-arrest study was published in The Lancet in 2001, the transition phase had been documented in dozens of peer-reviewed studies.⁵

What does the transition actually look like, in the words of those who report it?

Most often it is described as motion through a dark space. The space has shape. Some experiencers call it a tunnel; others, a corridor or long room. Some describe a flight of stairs going up. A small number describe what feels like a fast-moving elevator. The Indian case literature, much of it documented by Satwant Pasricha and Ian Stevenson in the 1980s, reports something different: messengers who appear, often called Yamadutas in the Hindu tradition, who escort the dying person along a path or to an official-looking presence who reads from a book.⁶ Solomon Islanders describe a journey along a path through the bush, sometimes across water. Native Hawaiians describe entering a doorway. Children, across cultures, often describe simpler imagery — a doorway, going up, a hallway.⁷

Underneath this surface imagery, the structure repeats. There is movement. The experiencer is not stationary. There is direction. The motion is toward something specific, not random. There is darkness around the path. The space the experiencer is moving through is often described as dark or shadowed. There is something ahead. And what is ahead is, in nearly every report, light.

The light is the second feature, and the more important one. NDErs consistently describe it in three ways at once: as bright, as warm, and as alive.

The brightness is unusual. Many experiencers report that the light should have hurt their eyes — it is described as brighter than the sun — but does not. They look directly at it without flinching. Some say it is so bright that everything else is washed out, as if the light is somehow the medium of perception, not just an object within their visual field. The brightness is also clarifying. In its presence, the experiencer feels they can see things — and themselves — more clearly than ever before.

The warmth is harder to put into words. NDErs reach for the language of being held, surrounded, embraced by the light. They describe it not as a thing they are looking at but as a thing they are inside.

The aliveness is the part that breaks the categories. Almost every careful NDE researcher has noted that the “light” of the NDE is not really an “it.” It is a who. The light is aware of the experiencer. The light loves them. The light knows them. NDErs use the verb “loved” more often than any other word when they describe this phase. Bruce Greyson, in his 2021 book After, observes that the encounter with this presence is one of the most consistent and most transformative single elements of the NDE — across decades, across cultures, across belief systems.⁸

This is where I have to slow down. We are at the threshold of theology, and the chapters immediately ahead — Chapter 20 on the life review and Chapter 21 on the encounter with the Being of Light — will do most of the deep work. But the basic fact is so striking that it has to be named here. In the second phase of most NDEs, the experiencer arrives at a presence that is personal, that knows them comprehensively, and whose response to them is love.

Christian NDErs, almost without exception, identify this presence as Christ. Sometimes the recognition is immediate. Howard Storm, the atheist art professor whose 1985 NDE became My Descent into Death, recognized Jesus by name when the figure came to lift him out of darkness.¹⁰ Sometimes the recognition develops gradually, over the course of the encounter. Sometimes it happens only after the return — the experiencer reflects, and realizes who they had met.

Non-Christian NDErs identify the presence according to their own framework. A Hindu may describe a benevolent deity. A Muslim, the loving God of Islam. A secular person, “a being of light” with no theological label. The phenomenology — personal, loving, knowing — stays remarkably constant. Only the naming varies. The full implications of this — whether the presence is the same in every case, and whether the Christian identification is the right one — are taken up in Chapter 21 and again in Chapter 29. For now, what matters is the fact: the cross-cultural consistency of an encounter, not just an experience.

The biblical Christian will hear, in this description, echoes of texts they know well. “I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). In the Greek of the New Testament, phōs — light — is a constant Christological theme, especially in John’s writings. The patristic tradition picked up the theme and ran with it. Clement of Alexandria, in the Stromateis, wrote of Christ as the One who descended into the realm of the dead and preached to them.¹¹ Origen, against Celsus, defended the same patristic conviction: at death, the dead meet the One who is the light.¹² The full theological development of these patristic descent traditions belongs to Chapter 25. What I want to note here is only that the NDE transition pattern fits very naturally with what the patristic tradition was already saying about death long before any of this evidence existed.

A skeptic might say: of course Christians describe the light Christologically — they are seeing what they expect to see. But the skeptic owes us an explanation for why the same light, with the same personal-loving-knowing structure, shows up in the reports of people who expected nothing of the kind. Atheists report it. Children too young to have absorbed cultural-religious imagery report it. People who had never heard of NDE research report it before NDE research existed. Pre-1975 reports — collected from old hospital records and historical archives, often in cultures with no concept of the NDE — show the same shape.¹³

The transition, in short, is not a single fixed image. It is a structure. Movement, then light, then presence. The cultural specifics drape over the structure but do not change it. Anglican grandmothers and Korean shamans and Bolivian miners report the same three-step pattern, with their own cultural decoration on each step. That is what we have to explain.

The Two Physicalist Explanations

Two physicalist accounts of the transition phase have been seriously proposed. Both deserve a fair hearing.

The first is the dying-retina theory, developed most fully by the British psychologist Susan Blackmore in Dying to Live (1993).¹⁴ Blackmore argued that the tunnel is an artifact of the visual cortex. As blood flow decreases, the periphery of the visual field dims first, leaving only a bright center. To the dying patient, this looks like a tunnel of darkness with a light at the end. The tunnel, on Blackmore’s account, is not a real passage. It is the way an oxygen-starved brain experiences its own visual shutdown.

It is a clever theory. And it explains a small piece of the data — the rough geometry of darkness around, light in the center. But it explains very little else, and it fails on points the larger phenomenology will not let us ignore. First, the tunnel is reported by congenitally blind NDErs whose visual cortex has never processed normal sight (Chapter 11 develops these cases at length). Second, the experiencer often reports moving through the tunnel, with vestibular and proprioceptive components — speed, direction, the sense of forward travel — that visual-cortex shutdown alone cannot produce. Third, the tunnel is not always present at all. Many NDErs skip it entirely and find themselves in the light without a passage. The dying-retina explanation cannot accommodate this variability without becoming so flexible that it stops being a real explanation. Fourth, and most decisively, the tunnel-imagery account gives no account at all of what the experiencer arrives at. Blackmore can tell us why the patient sees a tunnel. She cannot tell us why the light at the end of every patient’s tunnel is, by their report, alive and loving.

The second is the cultural-conditioning hypothesis, developed by the medical sociologist Allan Kellehear in his 1996 book Experiences Near Death.¹⁵ Kellehear is more careful than Blackmore. He grants that NDEs occur. He grants that they have phenomenological consistency. His argument is narrower: that the interpretation — the tunnel, the white robes, the angelic figures — is supplied by culture, and that the deep structure is more variable than the Western literature lets on. He documents, fairly, that Indian and indigenous reports often differ in surface imagery from Western ones.

But Kellehear’s own data, when read with care, supports a different conclusion. The surface imagery does vary — tunnels in the West, paths and rivers elsewhere — but the structural elements (transition, light, presence, encounter, life-review-like moral reckoning, return) are robust across cultures. The post-Kellehear cross-cultural literature has, if anything, tightened the case. Belanti, Sartori, and Pasricha, working in different national contexts since the late 1990s, have found that the structural pattern survives even when local culture supplies very different imagery.¹⁶ And the children’s-NDE data — children too young to have absorbed cultural imagery, reporting the same structural pattern as adults — cuts against the conditioning hypothesis at its weakest point.

Cultural conditioning is real. It shapes the vocabulary the experiencer uses to describe what happened. It does not seem to shape the experience itself.

What We Can Say, and What We Cannot

What can we say with confidence after looking at the data?

We can say that something happens after the OBE phase that NDErs describe with remarkable consistency. The experiencer moves. They move through some kind of dark passage. They move toward light. The light, as they reach it, turns out to be personal — aware of them, loving them, knowing them.

We can say that this pattern is robust. It shows up in adults and children, in believers and skeptics, in patients who expected an NDE and patients who had never heard of one, in Western and non-Western cultures, and in pre-1975 reports collected before NDE research existed. The cultural-imagery details vary. The structural shape — passage, light, presence — does not.

We can say that the leading physicalist accounts struggle. The dying-retina theory explains a piece of the visual geometry but not the rest of the phenomenology. The cultural-conditioning theory explains the variation in vocabulary but not the consistency of structure. Neither explains why the light is reported, by NDErs of all backgrounds, as a personal presence that loves and knows them.

We have to be careful about what we are not saying. I am not saying that every NDEr’s report is theologically reliable in every detail. Christian discernment of NDE content matters, and Chapter 30 develops that work in detail. I am not saying that the light of every NDE is the same as the light of every other NDE — phenomenologically yes, but the question of what that light is requires the careful Christological work of Chapter 21. I am not saying that the transition phase, by itself, proves substance dualism. The cumulative case for dualism is built in Chapter 23, and it draws on many strands of evidence beyond this one. And I am setting aside, for this chapter, the difficult sub-category of distressing transitions — the small number of NDErs who report dark passages without a welcoming light, or who experience the transition itself as frightening rather than peaceful. Those cases are real, they are theologically important, and Chapter 28 is dedicated to them.

What I am saying is more modest. The transition phenomenology is one of the cleanest cross-cultural patterns in the entire NDE literature. It is consistent. It is structured. It is hard to explain without conceding that something real is happening to the dying person — something that is not a private artifact of one culture’s expectations or one brain’s hypoxic shutdown.

For the Christian, this should be unsurprising. The historic Christian tradition has always said that the dying person does not vanish into nothing. The historic tradition has always said that what waits beyond the threshold of death is not impersonal — it is the personal God who made us and who, in Christ, has gone before us into the realm of the dead.¹⁷ The transition phenomenology of NDEs is the empirical correlate of that doctrinal claim. It does not by itself decide between Christian theological options. But it sits very comfortably with the Christian story, and it sits very uncomfortably with the strict-physicalist alternative.

Why This Matters

I want to close with a pastoral observation. Most of the NDErs whose reports build the transition pattern were not theologians. They were truck drivers and homemakers and accountants who came as close to dying as anyone gets and lived to talk about it. And one of the things they say, almost universally, is that the transition is not frightening. The dark passage feels safe. The motion feels purposeful. And the light, when they reach it, is the most peaceful thing they have ever known.¹⁸

This matters for the way we talk to the dying. A great many Christians die anxious. They fear pain. They fear separation from those they love. They fear judgment. Some of these fears are wise; the New Testament does not pretend that death is nothing. But some of the anxiety we carry into our dying comes from a picture we have absorbed — from horror movies and from a thin theology — of death as an empty fall into darkness. The NDE evidence tells a different story. The dying do not seem to fall. They seem to be carried. The dark, when they enter it, is not the absence of light but the corridor toward it. The light, when they reach it, is not a stranger but a presence that knows them and loves them.

This will not be every Christian’s death. Not every dying believer will have an NDE; most will not. But the shape of the testimony — that what the dying meet at the threshold is not nothing but Someone, not coldness but love — is a gift the church can lean on as we sit with the dying.

In the next chapter we follow the experiencer past the threshold and into the light, where, very often, something else begins to happen. The experiencer finds themselves looking at their own life — the whole of it, in a single panoramic glance.