Dr. Bizarro’s Eclectic Collection of Strange and Obscure Facts by Stephen Spignesi

Author:Stephen Spignesi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Permuted Press
Published: 2018-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

Sources: The Death Penalty Information Center, Murderpedia.org, Dr. Michael L. Radelet, University of Colorado

Chapter 29

10 Common Elements of a Near-Death Experience

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

—T. S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi”

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES (NDEs) are also known by the term, “The Lazarus Syndrome.” The phrase “Near-Death Experience” was first coined by Raymond Moody in 1975 but there are reports of this type of experience in the Bible, and in the writings of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.

A Near-Death Experience is an apparent preternatural event that a person goes through at the point of death. The reason we’re even aware of NDEs is because the people who have had them near death were saved, and thus, able to tell about it. This feature will look at the common elements of the majority of NDEs, but first here is a rundown of some possible explanations for the experience.

• Some scientists and doctors look to hypoxia as a cause for an NDE. Hypoxia is a decrease of oxygen to the brain, and, the theory goes, when the brain is oxygen-deprived, hallucinatory sensory experiences occur.

• More spiritually-oriented people such as psychics and clergy choose to believe that a Near-Death Experience is an actual look, and actual experiencing, of the next world and the afterlife. They believe that we all experience exactly what all NDE’ers do, except that the majority of us don’t come back to life and, thus, the experience remains within the soul of the deceased.

• Carl Sagan, in his book, Broca’s Brain, may have the best explanation of all. His theory is that a Near-Death Experience is a re-experiencing of our own birth. This would explain why NDEs are especially common (and similarly remembered and recounted) in three- to nine-year-olds who “die” and are brought back to life. Their latent birth memories are far more “recent” than those of, say, a seventy-five-year-old. Sagan put it this way: “[E]very human being, without exception, has already shared an experience like that of those travelers who return from the land of death; the sensation of flight; the emergence from darkness into light; an experience in which, at least perceived, bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.”

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