What happens when you die?

What doctors found when they asked

For most of history, near-death experiences reached us as stories. In 2001 a team of Dutch cardiologists did something different. In ten hospitals they followed 344 patients who had been resuscitated after cardiac arrest, and asked them what they remembered.

Sixty-two of them, 18 percent, described a near-death experience, and 41 described a deep, “core” experience. The researchers looked at medication, at how long the heart had stopped, and at fear of death beforehand. None of it explained who had one. Their conclusion:

“With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.”

Pim van Lommel and others, The Lancet (2001)

Larger studies since have found the same kind of thing. The AWARE study followed 2,060 cardiac arrests. Of the survivors interviewed, 9 percent described a near-death experience, and 2 percent described seeing and hearing what actually happened during their resuscitation.

Sources:Pim van Lommel and others, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001)Sam Parnia and others, “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—a prospective study,” Resuscitation 85 (2014)

Seeing from outside the body

The reports that are hardest to explain away are the ones that can be checked: a person says they watched their own resuscitation from above, and tells what was done and said.

AWARE checked one such case. The team timed it by sounds in the room, and the University of Southampton, which led the study, reported:

“…consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat.”

University of Southampton (2014)

It added that “the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.” The patient's heart had stopped, yet afterward they described their own resuscitation, and the details checked out. Sam Parnia, who led the study, said why that is so strange: the brain “typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping.” The follow-up study, AWARE II, played a sound and showed a hidden image during resuscitation. Of 28 survivors interviewed, one named the sound; no one named the image. It also found that in some patients, with the brain badly short of oxygen, normal brain activity came back during CPR, as late as 35 to 60 minutes in, and Parnia's team took it as a possible sign of clear, real experience. Cases that can be checked are rare, but the one that did matched what really happened.

Sources:University of Southampton, “Results of world's largest Near Death Experiences study published” (October 7, 2014)Sam Parnia and others, “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—a prospective study,” Resuscitation 85 (2014)Sam Parnia and others, “AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest,” Resuscitation 191 (2023)

Blind from birth, and seeing

Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, and his research assistant Sharon Cooper asked what happens when people who can't see come near death. They interviewed 31 blind and severely visually impaired people who had near-death or out-of-body experiences. Fourteen of them had been blind from birth.

Twenty-five of the 31, 80 percent, said they could see. So did nine of the fourteen who had been blind from birth. One of them was Vicki Umipeg. She was born very premature, given too much oxygen in her incubator, and blinded. Asked whether she had ever seen anything, she said:

“Nothing, never. No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever.”

Vicki Umipeg, in Ring and Cooper (1997)

In 1973, when she was 22, she was thrown from a van in a crash in Seattle. She says she saw her body from the ceiling of the hospital and knew it was hers by her wedding ring. Then she rose into a place of light, where she recognized Jesus. He told her, “It's not your time to be here yet and you have to go back.”

Seeing was so new to her that at first it frightened her. She had never had a single picture to compare it with. A dream is made from what a person already knows. Vicki had never seen anything to make one from.

Her crash was too long ago to find the people who were there, so her account can't be checked; Ring and Cooper called checking the weakest part of their study. But one case they could check. A woman they call Nancy was blinded by a mistake in surgery in 1991. Rushed down a hall on a gurney, she was slammed into an elevator door and found herself above her body. She said she could see down the hall, where two men she knew stood frozen, staring. Ring and Cooper found one of them, Leon, and he independently confirmed it. And even with her sight, the respirator on her face would have kept her from seeing down that hall.

Sources:Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, “Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997)Jeffrey Long, “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality,” Missouri Medicine 111 (2014)

Jeffrey Long's thousands of accounts

In 1975 Raymond Moody, then a medical student, gathered accounts like these in a book, Life After Life, and gave them the name we still use: near-death experiences. Jeffrey Long has gathered far more.

Long is a radiation oncologist in Louisiana. He founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, which collects accounts people write down themselves; its websites now hold more than 16,000 experiences. In a 2014 paper for Missouri Medicine he set out nine lines of evidence that these experiences are real:

1. Lucid, organized experiences while unconscious or clinically dead
2. Seeing what was going on from outside the body
3. Vision in people who are blind
4. Experiences under general anesthesia
5. Life reviews
6. Meeting loved ones who have died
7. Experiences of young children
8. The same experience across cultures
9. Lasting changes afterward

Take one of his numbers. Of 617 accounts shared one after another on his site, 287 described an out-of-body experience in enough detail to judge. He found 97.6 percent of those “entirely realistic,” meaning nothing in them seemed unreal, and 65 people say they checked what they saw for themselves and found nothing wrong.

Long's case rests on how many accounts there are and how much they agree: children and adults, the blind, and people in many countries describe the same kind of thing.

Sources:Raymond Moody, Life After Life (1975)Jeffrey Long, “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality,” Missouri Medicine 111 (2014)Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF)

John Burke: the accounts beside Scripture

John Burke comes to the same stories as a Christian teacher. He and his wife Kathy founded a church in Austin, Texas, which he led for 26 years, and he says he has studied more than a thousand near-death experiences.

In Imagine Heaven he sets more than a hundred of them beside what the Bible says, a chapter at a time: loved ones, the light, the life review, the city of God. Lay what people describe next to what Scripture already said, and they line up:

The light is the heart of it. Who is the man of light? “Those who know Jesus know he's Jesus,” Burke says.

None of this adds to the Bible, and Burke doesn't treat it as if it did. He reads the accounts the right way round, with Scripture as the measure, and where they agree, it is the Bible's picture they agree with.

Sources:John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Baker Books, 2015), and his siteBilly Hallowell, “He Studied 1,000 Cases of People Who Claim They Visited Heaven After Nearly Dying,” TheBlaze (November 26, 2015)Jeffrey Long, “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality,” Missouri Medicine 111 (2014)Howard Pittman's testimony (1992, restored by Precious Testimonies)2 Corinthians 5:8Revelation 1:161 John 4:162 Samuel 12:231 Corinthians 4:5Revelation 21:23

Not every experience is peaceful

Not everyone meets light. Karl Falken says two creatures came to take his soul, and he isn't alone. Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson reviewed thirty years of research and found that as many as one in five near-death experiences may be mainly distressing. Some are a terrifying emptiness; the openly hellish kind seems to be the rarest.

And not everything that shines comes from God. Howard Pittman heard the most beautiful voice of his life telling him to stop breathing, and he believes it was Satan. The Bible warns, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). So John writes:

“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

1 John 4:1

A being of light who says sin doesn't matter, or that every road leads to God, fails that test, however bright it is.

Sources:Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics,” Missouri Medicine 111 (2014)2 Corinthians 11:141 John 4:1

Isn't it just the dying brain?

That is the main objection, so here it is at full strength. Scientists have proposed a lack of oxygen, a buildup of carbon dioxide, the brain's own chemicals, and unusual activity in the temporal lobes. A 2019 study compared 625 near-death accounts with about 15,000 reports of drug experiences, and the most similar came from ketamine, an anesthetic. A neuroscientist and a psychologist titled their review “There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences.”

But none of these explains what the hospitals found. In the Dutch study the experiences didn't follow medication or how long the heart had stopped, and most patients who were clinically dead had none, which is not what a lack of oxygen alone would produce. A drug can bring on something that feels similar. It doesn't let a patient describe their own resuscitation and get the details right, and it doesn't explain why people blind from birth say they saw.

One more test. If culture and expectation wrote these experiences, they would differ from place to place, but Long found that “all near-death experience elements appearing in Western NDEs are present in non-Western NDEs.” Put each explanation to the test, and see what is left:

Brain chemistry can explain a vivid experience. It can't explain a blind woman seeing two men down a hall, or a man describing his own resuscitation and getting it right. Those point where the Bible points: you are more than your body, and death is not the end of you.

Sources:Chris French, “Near-death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors,” Progress in Brain Research 150 (2005)Charlotte Martial and others, “Neurochemical models of near-death experiences,” Consciousness and Cognition 69 (2019)Dean Mobbs and Caroline Watt, “There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (2011)Pim van Lommel and others, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001)University of Southampton, “Results of world's largest Near Death Experiences study published” (October 7, 2014)Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, “Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997)Jeffrey Long, “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality,” Missouri Medicine 111 (2014)

Paul and the man caught up to paradise

The Bible has its own account of a man taken up out of this world. Paul tells it about “a man in Christ,” and he means himself:

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows… was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.”

2 Corinthians 12:2–4

Some readers tie it to the day Paul was stoned at Lystra and dragged out of the city for dead (Acts 14:19). Paul doesn't name the day; he calls it “visions and revelations from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 12:1). Either way, he was taken up to paradise, heard what he could not repeat, and came back.

Then look at what Paul did with it. He kept quiet about it for fourteen years. He told it as if about someone else. He refused to let anyone “think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say,” and God gave him a thorn in the flesh “to keep me from becoming conceited” (2 Corinthians 12:6–7).

And when Paul set out the gospel, he pointed to Jesus, risen and seen by Peter, the Twelve, more than five hundred at once, James, and last of all Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).

Sources:2 Corinthians 12:1–10Acts 14:19–201 Corinthians 15:3–8