Thoughts on a particular NDE

 

Thoughts on a particular NDE

NDEs (‘Near Death Experiences’) are anomalous experience that happen to people in situations in which they are very close to death, for instance while being unconscious during a cardiac arrest. There are a lot of NDEs reported and a good survey is, in my opinion, Bruce Greyson’s book ‘After, A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond’. In this text, I’ll comment upon one significant NDE reported by the atheist and skeptic philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910-1989) that occurred on 1 June 1988, which he shared on a Telegraph article published on August 28, 1988. It should be noted that Ayer’s experience didn’t fully convince Ayer and, indeed, later in another article he said

“… that experience has weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief.” (source: https://www.philosopher.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Ayer-PSDeadsml.jpg )

So, we can’t say that for Ayer his experience was one of ‘conversion’. Nevertheless, his account is worthy to quoted in full:

“I was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint. A further consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should. I felt that it was up to me to put things right. I also had the motive of finding a way to extinguish the painful light. I assumed that it was signaling that space was awry and that it would switch itself off when order was restored. Unfortunately, I had no idea where the guardians of space had gone and feared that even if I found them I should not be able to communicate with them. It then occurred to me that whereas, until the present century, physicists accepted the Newtonian severance of space and time, it had become customary, since the vindication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, to treat space-time as a single whole. Accordingly, I thought that I could cure space by operating upon time. I was vaguely aware that the ministers who had been given charge of time were in my neighborhood and I proceeded to hail them. I was again frustrated. Either they did not hear me, or they chose to ignore me, or they did not understand me. I then hit upon the expedient of walking up and down, waving my watch, in the hope of drawing their attention not to my watch itself but to the time which it measured. This elicited no response. I became more and more desperate, until the experience suddenly came to an end.” (source: https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/a-j-ayer-what-i-saw-when-i-was-dead/ )

It is notable that apparently Ayer had this experience while his heart stopped beating for four minutes. So, while not being perhaps ‘dead’, he was quite close to it. If we assume, just for the sake of the argument that this experience was veridical, it is quite easy to interpret it as a religious revelatory experience: Ayer was confronted by a ‘red light’ which he was aware that was the ‘controller of the government’ of the universe and we might suggest that this ‘light’ might be God. Furthermore, he also reports the presence of other creatures which he tellingly call ‘ministers’, perhaps angels.

If one reads other accounts of NDEs, it is quite interesting that there are indeed common themes which taken at face value would indicate: an encounter with spiritual beings, a ‘life review’, contact with deceased people, visions of otherworldly realms (mostly blissful but in some cases quite ‘hellish’), out of body experiences (OBEs), special insights and so on. Furthermore, people seem also to report a change of attitude, a lessened fear of death (unless in the case of traumatic NDEs), and curiously enough vivid memories of the events. At the same time, though, having read various accounts of NDEs, one can’t help but notice differences in details. If, for instance, one compares Ayer’s NDE with other NDEs, one can notice that others might report the encounter with Christ, Krishna etc and, therefore, it seems that there is some kind of cultural influence. At the same time, though, the ‘hereafter’ that is described by NDE-experiencers often is different from how religions depict the afterlife. When one looks in the details, it is apparent that if we take literally these experiences, no religion ‘fits perfectly’. As far as I know, for instance, no religious worldview ‘matches’ Ayer’s description of his experience. And this might indeed suggest that NDEs are often a very specific kind of hallucinations.

This doesn’t mean that I think that they aren’t relevant and important. It is quite notable that these people report an experience when they shouldn’t be conscious at all and, at least to me, it is highly interesting that the memories are very vivid. Dreams, for instance, who are also conscious experiences in situations in which people seem unconscious, are notoriously hard to recall and often if one doesn’t write down one’s memories soon after awakening, dreams are often forgotten. It might be the case that NDEs are different precisely because the person is often aware of being either ‘dead’ or close to be dead. Anyway, given the highly subjective character of these experiences (similarities in the themes notwithstanding), I am sceptical that they should be taken at face value in their content. Furthermore, one should also be cautious to assume a ‘paranormal’ explanation of these experiences simply because that they aren’t fully explained. At the same time though, I think that NDEs clearly show that we still have yet to fully understand the boundaries of life and death and when the moment of death truly occurs.