Vast numbers of books now exist on dying—books for the terminally ill and their family and friends, for researchers and death educators, for psychotherapists and gerontologists, for physicians, nurses and hospice workers. One would think death were a new topic.

There are also instruction manuals on what to expect and/or what to do at or after death, such as the Tibetan, Egyptian, American, and other Books of the Dead. There are even various New Age devices to help induce "near-death experiences" or "out-of-body experiences" as a "preparation" for death. And there are self-help manuals on how to kill yourself.

At numerous universities the social sciences (psychology, for example) frequently incorporate the field of thanatology—the study of death. Some writers have even divided the subject into two major branches—"applied" and "theoretical" thanatology.²

Today, a new interest in death has emerged that promises to expand well into the twenty-first century. Perhaps more than any other subject, the "near-death experience" (NDE) has helped resurrect this interest in death. But what is an NDE? It is an alleged experience of the afterlife that takes place while a person is clinically dead.

It appears that, along with everything else, death has come out of the closet. In the March 1992 Life magazine it was noted that "the increasingly open discussion of these [NDE] visions has begun to change the climate of dying in America."³

The typical near-death experience (NDE) has been described by leading death researcher Dr. Raymond Moody. His several books, including the eight-million bestseller Life After Life, opened a new era of "scientific" study of the near-death experience. With the near-death or clinical death phenomenon some people who are brought back from "death" have reported being alive the entire time they were "dead." This phenomenon occurs among people with a wide diversity of religious belief and no religious belief at all—from atheists to Zen Buddhists.⁴

When co-author John Weldon wrote his first book on the subject in 1976, there was almost no literature available. Today there are scores of books and research papers. Unfortunately, almost all of them reveal that the NDE is frequently an occult experience.

The composite or classic NDE⁵ involves the perception of being "out of the body"—and looking down at one’s body while resuscitation attempts are being administered. Soon afterward the person finds he or she is in another location where the spirit world is encountered. There the person engages in non-verbal or verbal communication with various spirits, usually of dead friends and relatives or a "being of light." This entity is often very warm and loving and involves the "dead" person in an evaluation of his or her life by showing an instantaneous playback of the major events. At some point, the person finds himself approaching a barrier or border which he is not allowed to cross. He is told he must go back to earth, for his time to die has not yet arrived. However, the participant’s experience in this other state of existence is frequently so peaceful, joyful, and loving that he desperately does not want to return. Nevertheless, he finds himself back in his body anyway. And when he awakens in this world he finds that he had been pronounced dead, but was fortunately (?) revived.⁶

Skeptics and materialists are doubtful about all this and have put forth a variety of theories that they think explain the phenomenon. Some of the major explanations are that NDEs are

The problem with these theories is that none of them adequately explain the facts of the NDE. For example, they cannot explain how people who were brain dead at the time are later able to describe in vivid detail the attempts of medical personnel to resuscitate them. It would seem that the most logical explanation is that these people were somehow outside their bodies actually observing the procedure.

Let us give an example. In one study, 25 medically informed patients were asked to make educated guesses about what happens when a doctor attempts to resuscitate a clinically dead patient. Almost all persons in the control group (23 of 25) made "major mistakes" in providing descriptions of the resuscitation procedure. On the other hand, "none of the near-death patients made mistakes in describing what went on in their own resuscitations."⁷ Studies like this present evidence that these people were actually outside their bodies looking down upon their "death" just as they claimed.

It should be emphasized that not every dying person has an experience of this type. Most have none at all, and of those who do, not all are glorious. Although most Americans seem unaware of the fact, many people—perhaps up to half—report hellish experiences. Further, Christian and non-Christian NDEs appear to be of a qualitatively different nature; for instance, the occult elements are typically lacking in the Christian NDE.⁸

However, polls indicate that some ten million Americans have had a near-death experience, and the influence of these experiences upon the public’s perception of death has been dramatic. The NDE has played a major role in promoting the view that death may not be so bad after all. Further, millions of NDEs have helped to under gird an occult view of death (and even life) as something that is highly positive. For example, contacting the alleged dead or other spirits is so frequent in the NDE that the disciplines most likely to benefit from such episodes are mediumism, channeling and other forms of spiritism. Thus, if we examine near-death research as a whole, it essentially confirms the mediumistic view of the afterlife.

In fact, as more scientists have become interested in the NDE, the possibility has emerged for a "scientific" necromancy to develop under the guise of death research. Because NDEs often involve contact with the dead, these experiences can be used to promote a "legitimate scientific" basis to study mediumism and other forms of spiritism. After all, some may reason, if dying people experience contact with the dead, how can scientific objectivity be retained if we refuse to study living contact with the dead—for example, through mediumism and other forms of the occult?

Nevertheless, Gallup and other polls consistently reveal that over 70 percent of Americans believe in life after death, and have since 1944 when surveys began: 70 to 80 percent continue to believe in heaven and 50 to 60 percent in hell.⁹

But with the occult revival in our culture, necromancy has also been increasingly accepted. Almost half of a Los Angeles sample (44 percent) "claimed encounters with others known to be dead."¹⁰ A nationwide poll conducted in 1986 by sociologist Andrew Greeley of the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center, based on a sample of almost 1,500 people, found nearly identical results—42 percent believed they had been in contact with the dead.¹¹ Perhaps this explains why channeling alone is now a $100 million a year business.¹²

One reason these NDEs are so powerful in our culture is that they seem to deny the biblical teaching of an eternal hell, which many people fear. Rather, these experiences teach people that they will live forever in a heavenly environment and that there are no consequences to death at all. This is what most people want to believe.

Thus, the way the NDE is currently being popularized in American life the biblical concept of hell could be erased from our culture. Millions of people who once weren’t so sure are now convinced that death is a wonderful experience and that there is no hell.¹³ Even many ministers have been so influenced by the near-death experience as to reject the biblical view and adopt an occult one. All of this is a reflection of our cultural swing toward the New Age view of death, which is fundamentally spiritistic in nature.

What many people do not understand is that with an NDE we are not dealing with true death. And, we are certainly not dealing in the realm of scientific confirmation of life after death, despite some proponents’ claims. Rather, we are encountering personal, mystical/occult experiences that occur in some near-death states. But these same experiences also occur in many occult religions and practices and in various altered states of consciousness wholly unrelated to death per se.

For example, in large measure the NDE is merely one form of the occult out-of-body experience (OBE). Both have fundamentally the same impact on the person—removal of the fear of death and dramatic psychological aftereffects.¹⁴

But both the NDE and OBE have many other similarities including cross-cultural occurrence, spiritistic contacts, worldview changes and development of psychic powers.¹⁵

One of the leading modern NDE researchers is University of Connecticut psychologist Dr. Kenneth Ring. In Heading Toward Omega, he reveals two crucial implications of the NDE: (1) its removal of the fear of death; and (2) its radical transformation of the living.

For almost everyone Ring and other researchers have encountered, the NDE has been one of utterly indescribable joy, love, beauty, peace, and harmony. According to Ring,

He cites the description given by the famed psychotherapist Carl Jung who described the feelings he had after his own NDE: "What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it…."¹⁷ Thus Ring concludes:

In essence, the NDE itself is analogous to the planting of a spiritual "seed" within a person which then appears to grow into its genetically predetermined tree—replete with fruit. As Ring comments, "The key to the meaning of NDEs lies in the study of their aftereffects.…"¹⁹

This is why, Ring says, almost all early researchers necessarily missed the true meaning of the NDE—enough time had not elapsed to examine its real fruit. We agree. By examining the "fruit" of the NDE, we may ascertain its true meaning. In the next several questions we will do this.