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You are here: Home / Archives for Near-death experiences

Near-death experiences

ICU, Memory, NDE

April 26, 2023 By Nan Bush 20 Comments

It has been almost eighteen months since a hemorrhagic stroke in my right temporal lobe knocked me almost completely out of commission. From the very beginning, even the days of confusional mental states in ICU, a single ambition about recovery has been clear to me:  I will put up a blog post. An interesting blog post.

The prospects ranged from dire to unlikely. Tremors snarled my typing and my handwriting is illegible. Sitting up to work required a hoist; I could not stand or reach or lift even a small book. It was a struggle to read a simple mystery novel, much less think enough to write paragraphs. I could not think of a thing to say.

But “inch by inch, row by row,” and as I write this, 517 days of healing have happened and are continuing. I still cannot think of a thing to say on my own; but this past week an email brought a perspective so fascinating that it popped everything open. This morning I made it through a full session of physical therapy walking shakily but without a walker, and this afternoon, here we are, drafting that blog post. Obviously, beyond my own determination, it is the care of a raft of health professionals, therapists, helpers, and people who love me that has brought us all to this point. I am so grateful to them, and to the writer of the email that ignited today’s topic, and to you readers for coming back.

The email from “Ann”:

 My mother (over 80 years old retired teacher) told me that she remembered some things from her recent surgery. I started to look for references about near death experiences and found your article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173534/.

In January this year, my mother underwent an 8-hour-long abdominal surgery under general inhalational anesthesia [anesthetic gas] with endotracheal intubation [insertion of breathing tube] . She was septic, and she had a subileus [partial bowel obstruction] from extensive peritoneal adhesions [abdominal scar tissue] from prior surgeries.

She did not regain consciousness after her surgery and she stayed in the ICU for 45 days. During this time she was extubated, then she experienced hypoxia [low blood oxygen], reintubation, unstable SVT [very fast heart beat with low blood pressure] corrected by synchronized cardioversion, [electrical jolt to restore normal  heart rate] pneumonia, and tracheostomy [opening on of the neck to place a breathing tube].  She did have 2-5 day periods between these crises when she was under light sedation by propofol infusion or no sedation.

My mother is now recovering at a lower acuity unit and she told us that she remembered “things” from her OR and ICU stays:

  1. First she saw amorphous, dark entities approaching her. She was afraid of them.
  2. Then her field of vision brightened up and there was a pleasant light.
  3. In the end she saw a friend, and she knew that she would be all right. The friend is a physician at the hospital where Mother is staying and the friend visits her daily.

My mother thinks it is a memory and it made her more reflective. She is asking questions she would have never asked before (Am I a good person?). Before her illness she never talked about death, the word was banned and her goal was to live to be 100. She was raised Catholic, but for her religion is more of remembering childhood and Latin rituals. She believes in God, though, without defined beliefs about what happens after death.

Do you think this might have been an NDE?  

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

~ ~ ~

Other than that the writer is clearly medically sophisticated, did anything in the content strike your attention? What do you think it was that caught mine?

Here is an expanded version of my response:

Intensive care units are (understandably) notorious for their association with hard-to-explain states of consciousness. Given the seriousness of your [letter-writer] mother’s condition, her intermittent sedations, and the length of her stay in such high-stress surroundings, it is not surprising she has a blur to deal with.

Patients coming out of deep unconsciousness are like travelers returning home from abroad, though the ‘foreign country’ they describe is the unfamiliar territory of the deep unconscious. It is not unusual to hear of indistinct, shadowy figures such as those you mentioned. While many patients, like your mother, experience them as frightening, others find them non-threatening, even comforting presences. There is no “one explanation fits all” to identify them or their function.

Images have always been the language of disordered thinking—but they are also the vocabulary of art and spirituality, subject to much interpretation. The pleasant light your mom mentions is probably as close to having a universal meaning as any symbol, usually interpreted as having something to do with the sacred. The one anomalous element in her description is the presence of the physician friend, as it is not at all common for people who are still living to appear in these experiences.

The experiences are so different from everyday awareness! What are they, and how to interpret them? Given your mother’s situation, three explanations come immediately to mind: hallucination, ICU delirium/delusion, and anomalous experience (near-death experiences, for one).

  • Hallucinations are sensory perceptions, often chaotic, illogical, and emotionally charged, which are not shared in consensual reality. They may be vivid but do not ordinarily carry much in the way of deeper meaning (simply forms). Although a patient’s interpretation of a hallucination may endure and be troublesome, they are not known for creating life-changing aftereffects such as overturned values or sudden psychic abilities.
  • ICU delirium/delusion is a complex quick-onset confusional state, described by DSM-5 as involving attention deficits, disorientation and perceptual disturbances. Delirium, according to PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32644706/) is “the most common clinical manifestation of acute brain dysfunction in ICU,” especially for patients on mechanical ventilation. It may have long-lasting effects such as PTSD.
  • NDEs also present as emotionally charged images, often about movement through space and entering what feels like a profoundly meaningful environment. They tend to be more highly structured than hallucinations and can fall easily into a logical narrative form. They are known for their durability in memory and the pervasiveness of their effects on people’s lives.

So—NDE or not? Many people are powerfully affected by having to think of themselves as dead. If the “near-death” aspect is alarming, there may be comfort in knowing that in any sizable collection of these accounts, the majority are from people who were not medically declared dead (clinically dead), though as many as seventy-five per cent “had a sense of being close to death, were in a life-threatening situation, or believed they were clinically dead” [emphasis added]. (www.iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/key-nde-facts21.html) In other words, although the experiencers felt death, their physicians would not have confirmed it.

That is perhaps the greatest mystery of these experiences: if most do not originate in actual death, what is their source? The fault of the common confusion lies in the “near-death” name, which was accurate for the original study sample, all of whom had been in cardiac arrest; but that uniformity does not hold up in the general population of experiencers. In fact, many accounts featuring elements such as presences and a memorably pleasant light, like your mother’s report, have not explicitly mentioned death at all. The “non-death accounts” are called by many names–mystical experiences, exceptional human experiences, spiritually transformative experiences–there are dozens of terms and acronyms for them—but all may include the familiar NDE reports of out-of-body events, movement through space, encounter with presences, a sense of place and of being at home, emotions, profound life changes. Like death-related NDEs, they rarely speak to the beliefs and dogmas of any specific religion, though there is affirmation for love, compassion, fair play, and a sense of what I will call reverence.

Your mother’s circumstances certainly put her experience within the NDE type of non-pathological event. Coming from the confusing swirl of post-ICU images, as you and your mother are now discovering, the label of the incident is likely less important than the living of the experience’s beneficial psychological and spiritual effects. They are all full of mystery, whatever biological specifics may contribute to understanding them and by whatever name we call them.

The most striking observation to me is this:

“She thinks it is a memory and it made her more reflective. She is asking questions she would have never asked before.”

I have been fascinated by that: “She thinks it is a memory.” I wonder, a memory as opposed to…what? Perhaps a memory, in her terms, is more closely aligned with a physical experience than merely a glimpse of something? I am hearing it as perhaps an instance of our Enlightenment thinking: in Newtonian terms, does a memory originate somewhere tangible, as in a place? (Is this a restatement of the “hallucination vs NDE” question again?

Most NDE accounts are structured like stories, tangibly, with a sequence of incidents, one or more settings, characters—overall, becoming like a location for the memory. Otherwise, the happening might seem like something of no substance, something nonexistent. It’s a fascinating question! Is it perhaps the narrative sense which gives an NDE its feel of stability and being “realer than real”? Is memory simply a perspective?

I am aware that this exploration of things non-physical is likely to be unsatisfying for those grounded in the hard sciences. In terms of consciousness, though, there is no material substance, no physicality. What the writer’s mother remembers is a genuine memory of an experience of consciousness. This seemingly flimsy, invisible reality is actually so powerful that it is launching her, over 80, into asking the kinds of self-reflective questions maturity demands. She has been able to refuse them house-room before this hospitalization, but is now asking developmentally and morally imperative questions about herself and her life.

It is not easy, encountering whatever it is that lives, at least in part, in images across time and cultures and, at least in another part, in our individual heads. Socrates would be pleased that her life is being so carefully examined.

Please share your thoughts!  And “Ann”,  thank you for sharing your question!

Tagged With: consciousness, hallucination, ICU, NDE, near-death exxperience, PTSD, stroke, trauma, vision

More NDE Reckoning Than Expected

May 11, 2021 By Nan Bush 15 Comments

Here’s a conversation about NDEs we haven’t had before—and doesn’t it seem odd there’s anything left we haven’t discussed? The topic comes once again from Nemo (Steve Weber), the source of so many interesting and worthwhile thoughts. Confusingly, there is another Steve Weber who also had an NDE, but that Steve lives in Florida and has a book about his NDE, titled The Place between Here and There. Nemo (Steve) lives in California and has a couple of walk-ins in my book.

It is Nemo (Steve) who writes to me introducing so many intriguing discoveries. Well into the pandemic, and more than a year after I had posted anything here, there were still bits of conversation happening occasionally online around the comments. In one of those lingering exchanges, he wrote:

One thing I’ve come to realize, regarding my current spiritual reality, on my path, is that it is virtually diametrically opposed to my “spiritual reality” of 50 years ago. I’ve wondered more than once what it would be like to time travel back to 1970 and present my current view to that new “Jesus Freak.” I wonder how the old “me” would respond to such apparent heresy. I mention this because I find it prudent to be mindful of this reality when conversing with others lest I become dogmatic and even find myself pontificating (Lord help us!). I’ve often despaired at attempting to convey my “truth”/reality to others, concluding that one’s truth/knowing isn’t transferable– after all, the “me” of much of the last 50 years likely couldn’t identify with it. The realizations that I’ve had regarding my Void NDE therefore have remained largely ineffable– I’ve attempted to convey them, but realize that one really can’t get it unless they’ve been there.

During the holed-up Year of Covid, I had spent my entire time, months on end of twelve-hour and fourteen-hour days, grappling with the story of my NDE and how I got from there to here. But oddly, it seems now, although the year was full of recollections about that earlier self, I had never thought to go back and have a conversation with her. What would we have to say to each other, with such different outlooks and understandings?

Time travel reckoning

In a preface to Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith quotes Gai Eaton in The King of the Castle: “If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step backwards in time and mix with the people of a distant age, he would have good cause to doubt their sanity or his own.” The self of my today is a decade more than a half-century removed from the self of my NDE, which does not sound like “a distant age,” but the differences in thinking clearly mark the pivotal character of the years between. All of us who have memories from the 1960s and beyond have been living a sea change.

We surely knew there was chaos all around, but what most of us did not realize consciously was that so much of it was the crumbling of the Modern epoch. Our understanding of the world, and our certainties and expectations would go with it. Huston Smith continues:

[T]he stages peoples’ outlooks pass through on the temporal continuum have led the West to one that has come to be called “Postmodern” to distinguish it from the Modernity that began in the seventeenth century and ended around the middle of the last century. The Modern Mind took its cues from the new worldview that science introduced, but twenty-first century science has abandoned not just that worldview but worldviews generally. From Aristotle to Dante, the world was pictured as a series of concentric spheres. Newton replaced that with his clockwork universe, but quantum mechanics gives us, not a new picture of the world, but no picture at all. And philosophy has followed suit. Metaphysics died around the time that God died, Langton Gilkey has observed, tying its death to the “death of God” movement that Nietzsche announced, but which took a half-century to come to public notice.

The “no picture at all” of our quantumized Now is the “You are not real” of my NDE,  My earlier self was securely Modern; the current version is recognizably Postmodern, though in contention with the aggressively “woke.” No wonder it has taken such struggle to integrate that hard-edged NDE, which was forcing a leap to a sociological, philosophical, and spiritual developmental stage for which I was not ready. And how interesting that, looking at it from this perspective, it sounds so obvious and not all that hard!

About that conversation with my younger self: it occurs to me that my best option would be simply to give her a copy of Reckoning and get an earlier start on unraveling this reality-shaking NDE.

* * *

Asking a favor:

If you have read Reckoning—and especially if you enjoyed it (or at least found it interesting)—please add your Like to whatever review page you use. The book has been out more than a month and still has only three Likes and a single comment on Amazon. It is reassuring that all three have five stars and the comment is beyond gratifying, but in publishing, having only three people leave a rating is a body blow to the book’s reputation!

Your participation will make a difference. Readers with a distressing NDE need these books! I suspect that some readers may find the changes outlined in this one a bit hard to take in, simply because they are different from the usual NDE pattern and mainstream thinking  That bewilderment is familiar to all of us when first encountering quantum realities!  Your comments can help others make their way through. If you can’t bring yourself to write even a quick review, at least give Reckoning some stars! Five would be lovely, but honesty is important.

Thank you for helping!

Tagged With: NDE, near death experience, reckoning

Advanced Meditation and NDEs

January 4, 2019 By Nan Bush 39 Comments

Happy New Year wishes to you all, and here we are, back again with Dancing Past the Dark. The long hiatus in posting resulted from my sense of having reached my limit with the original 100-some posts; in other words, I didn’t know what more to say.
I had not expected the persistence of some readers who declined to just walk away. They, plus the report of a new study out of the UK, have effected this reappearance; so let’s get to it!
* * * [Read more…] about Advanced Meditation and NDEs

Tagged With: bardos, Buddhist practices near death, Buddhist texts, meditation, meditation and dying, NDE, near death experience, Tibetan Book of the Dead, what happens at death

Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

October 5, 2015 By Nan Bush 11 Comments

This post continues the slightly amplified transcription of my presentation at the 2015 IANDS conference in San Antonio. If you missed the previous post, you might want to read that first and then come pick up here with Part #2.

Comparative valuations

The purpose of traditional initiation rituals was understood not only as being the source of  a “basic change in existential condition,” as Mircea Eliade claimed, but as an entry point to maturity and competence. The rite of passage would be a formal challenge, a test of the newcomer’s fitness for an advanced social role. In spiritual terms, it was expected that the ordeal might give access to altered states of consciousness that could provide a glimpse of other realms, a bit of secret wisdom. In some cultures, obtaining such a vision was (and sometimes is) an essential aspect of the trial. [Read more…] about Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

Tagged With: 2015 conference, afterlife, Cosmos and Psyche, distressing near-death experience, Enlightenment, Fall, hell, initiation, Mircea Eliade, Progress, Richard Tarnas, rite of passage, San Antonio, scary rite of passage

Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage

September 20, 2015 By Nan Bush 12 Comments

No, we are not dead, nor even really gone. The blog and I simply got overscheduled, overdue, and overtired and had to take a time out.

It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, mind you. There’ve been substantial family matters to deal with, and facilitating two groups at church, and a stupefyingly advanced college class reunion back in New York State. And then came the IANDS conference, which went so well it has occurred to me that you might like to know what I said in my presentation, which provides this post. Furthermore, over its three-year history, this blog has accumulated 117 posts, most of them articles not published anywhere else, so  I am working on revising and restructuring the best of them into book form. (Please stay tuned, as I’m going to be asking your help finding a title.)

The conference presentation was an hour long, far too much for a single blog post, so you will find it distributed over the next four weeks (and, if you wait a bit, as a chapter in the new book). As always, your comments will be welcome.

It feels good to be back.

Scary Rites of Passage:

Accepting Distressing NDEs as Spiritual Experiences

Part 1

[Read more…] about Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage

Tagged With: change, cosmology, initiation, Mircea Eliade, rite of passage, shamanism, transformation

Two reviews: Glimpsing Heaven

November 24, 2014 By Nan Bush 1 Comment

Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death

by Judy Bachrach
National Geographic Society

The first word: Review by Nancy Evans Bush

It takes a gifted author to produce a fresh, interesting look at NDEs at this stage in the game. Fortunately for readers, Judy Bachrach brings years of experience as a top-flight journalist to the assignment, and in Glimpses of Heaven: The Stories and Science of  Life After Death she has done just that. Some paths she follows are well-worn, but in her hands they take on new and absorbing perspectives. [Read more…] about Two reviews: Glimpsing Heaven

Tagged With: Glimpsing Heaven, Judy Bachrach, life after death, National Geographic, near death experience, Paranormalia, Robert McLuhan

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