I had a NDE in the hopital once when I temporally died. It was the single most out of this universe experience I’ve ever had. No gods, no devils, no white lights. I “saw” the impersonal aspect of life, the universe and everything. Words are completely inadequate to describe it. It’s like trying to describe what taking acid is like to someone who hasn’t. You can say, “the walls breathed, paisley patterns everywhere, see the universe in a plant leaf etc.” this was transcendent in nature. I became aware of the totality of everything.
I should also point out that I’ve taken all of the major hallucinogenics many, many times and I know them inside and out. What I experienced that night was not even in the same universe or dimension as drugs, meditation etc.
So I’m wondering if anyone else has had one and what you take on it was.
there are a wealth of threads here on NDE. Generally in Great Debates, but some also in GQ.
Many of them are quite lengthy, as one particular poster is an advocate for the position that NDEs have revealed to him the ultimate truths about life, the universe, and everything. Others here disagree, and extended discourse ensues (to say the least).
I’ll let you search for those threads though, as wading thru that morass gives me a headache.
Since the OP is asking for opinions and personal experiences, at the moment this is better suited for IMHO than GQ. I’ll leave it to the IMHO mods to determine at which point it may need to be tossed into GD.
I have not, although I am fascinated with them. I read Closer To the Light and although the stories were heartwarming, the science was specious. I am told that during at least one of my surgeries my life was on the line more than once, but I never had an NDE.
No subject has ever been dead. That’s a term of art in these situations, not a literal reality. If any of these people had really died, they would still be dead.
It’s a hallucination, by the way. The identical experience can be produced with certain drugs (not LSD).
The above link actually lists a set of events and how prevalent they are:
*Ring (1980) classified NDE’s on a 5 stage continuum:
feelings of peace and contentment;
a sense of detachment from the body;
entering a transitional world of darkness (rapid movements through tunnels: ‘the tunnel experience’);
emerging into bright light; and
‘entering the light’.
60% experienced stage 1, but only 10% attained stage 5 (Ring, 1980). As might be predicted in a mental state with a neurobiological origin, mundane accounts with less symbolic meaning also occur, e.g. children who may ‘see’ their schoolfellows rather than God and angels (Morse, 1985). *
Unfortunately, it doesn’t say whether ketamine induced NDEs have the same breakdown of prevalence.
Just to add some more GQ style data, but I’ll point out that where Christians who experience a near death experience will see angels and God and such, people from other religions and cultures see imagery matching their view of the afterlife. So if NDEs are proof of the afterlife, then it would appear that the afterlife is what you choose to believe it is rather than something infallibly correct.
Sage Rat, I thought the drug that most closely paralleled this was actually DMT, which you can search on Erowid if you’d life.
Other than that, can you say more on your experience jakesteele? I understand that words fail, but surely you can tell us a little more about your experience?
The Wikipedia says that experiments with it haven’t had as consistent or as strong of results as hoped. Of course that might be more in match with real life occurrences, where most people don’t achieve the deepest stages.
Have you considered the possibility that taking “all of the major hallucinogenics many, many times” has adversely effected your mental state, and that you might not be the best judge of the reality of NDEs?
My mother had one when she was a small child. I think she was about four or five. Her mother went into a bank and left the car running with my Mom, her older brother and two of her cousins inside it. Buttons were touched and sticks were shifted and suddenly the car was rolling out into the street. Everyone bailed, but somehow my mother ended up slipping under the wheel of the car, which crushed her entire chest and rib cage.
She stopped breathing pretty much immediately. She accurately remembers the entire ambulance ride from a 3rd person perspective, as if she was above it… and she remembers the white lights and the gates of heaven and talking to her dead great-grandma. According to my grandmother, my Mom talked incessantly about wanting to go back to heaven and stay with Jesus during the first few weeks of her recovery. She was not raised in a religious household, so that struck Grandma as kind of odd.
My mother is now in her forties and her fundamental beliefs about Life, the Universe and Everything all go back to this NDE she had as a kid. My Mom is a Christian but puts no stock in the Bible… she just believes that God is real because of that and a few other bizarre experiences she’s had throughout the years. She once met a lady in the hospital who had an NDE that was of the horrible variety–the burning in hell variety–so she believes in evil too.
I don’t really believe in any of that stuff, except the 3rd person ‘‘top-down’’ view she got in the ambulance is a somewhat common form of dissociation that usually is the result of trauma. I would say that having a car on top of you counts sufficiently as trauma, and as I said, her memories of the ambulance ride were corroborated by her mother. The rest of the stuff though… whatever. Nevertheless I can’t deny this experience has had a profound impact on the way that she views the world. If I had an experience like that I don’t know what I would make of it.
It’s called a Near Death Experience, not a Dead, Dead Experience or a Deader-Than-A-Doorknob Experience. You’re just bantering semantics.
How do you know it’s a hallucination? And how do you know the identical experience can be produced with certain drugs? You would have to have had a NDE and then had them induced with those certain drugs.