Having read much of the written scientific literature, I’ve been watching people recount their near-death experiences (NDEs) on YouTube. Often, I’ve been struck by the authenticity of what I heard, everyday folks struggling to describe a life-changing experience. Some of the NDE stories are professionally produced with another voice smoothly narrating and a visual display meant to evoke heaven and a godly sunrise. These NDE productions impress me much less than the unmediated personal accounts.
One of the highlights of the NDE is an encounter with a great light emanating pure unconditional love. Among the other elements (the out-of-body state, the life-review, the meeting of deceased friends and relatives, etc.), some folks encounter a figure they instantly perceive as Jesus, the light of pure love in a personal form. On Christmas day that I’m writing this, the NDE epiphanies of Jesus especially come to mind.
But there is something puzzling. You would think that a near-death crisis might stir up the religious figures you were raised to believe in. But that isn’t what I have noticed in over a year of watching these online ND stories. What I found is that Jesus plays a critical role in the NDEs of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and avowed atheists—not just Christians. One of the winning traits of the near-death Jesus: he comes as the perfect friend of love, not as a judge or punishing deity. Indeed, he, as well as God when he speaks out, has a sense of humor, even of irony. In one NDEer, Jesus appears in a suit. The woman asks him how come in a suit? He replies, “You wouldn’t have recognized me.” The Jews who report this experience, are keen on a jokey Jesus, and lament that Jesus was mocked and obliterated by their rabbis. They immediately claim him as their guy and seem to forget two thousand years of Christian history. One notable Jew for Jesus is Dr. James Tour, an accomplished American biologist that rejects reductive materialism, rightly, in my view. He does, however, sound a bit extreme when, as I heard him say in his interview, that the entire Bible, both testaments, every single word, are absolutely true. Really?
My puzzlement was magnified by two recent accounts, one from a Buddhist and the other from a Muslim. In both cases where a woman and a man had an NDE, they encountered Jesus and were instantly converted. But in these two cases, the Buddhist and the Muslim were driven to review everything lacking and deficient in their previous Buddhist and Muslim faiths. Instead of feeling love and compassion for people of their born belief systems, they say that unless they become Christians, all the horrors of eternal hell await them. This is morally repulsive. Gone in a flash is that beautiful idea of unconditional love. T
The NDE is an objective and hugely significant experience by virtue of its extraordinary effects and aftereffects. The phenomenon has a flexible structure and is recurrent, thanks to advances in modern medical technology.
There are at least two distinct explanations of this phenomenon. The first is that these are extraordinary illusions that our species has evolved as part of the dying response. The illusions are designed to stimulate the will to live, a trick our suggestible mind needs to carry on the adventure of life, even if it doesn’t change our meaningless fate.
The second theory is more appealing and allows us to imagine that physical dying enables us to enter a new world after we shed our bodies. The NDE seems like the vestibule of a mental universe. Like the physical universe, science had to grow before it understood its unimaginable vastness. The same unimaginable vastness faces us in the mental universe. The NDE seems an authentic venture into a distinct, alternate dimension of space and reality. We are all partially acquainted with this extraphysical dimension of experience when at night we enter dream space.
People who have NDEs usually conclude they are immortal and have no desire to reinhabit their mortal bodies. If we are immortal, then we an assume that Jesus is still alive and conscious, and open to the near-death dimension of existence. And thus it appears to all the people who have reported encounters with Jesus.
It would also be true that all the great souls of the past have survived and may be accessible in ways that might shock us into a new awareness. Mary, the mother of Jesus would have survived, and as we know, visions of Mary are widely reported in modern times.
I’ve written this post as a kind of Christmas card to readers. I am drawn to the picture of Jesus that emerges from the near-death experience. I am not drawn to the accounts of converts that hate and despise the non-Christian teachers they were raised to believe in. In the history of human experience, all sorts of great spiritual teachers have emerged, and there is room for all of them. The fanatics that want to send all non-Christian teachers and believers packing to hell are an abomination. The popularity of the figure of Jesus appearing so frequently in the near-death experience is interesting and puzzling. I’m curious to hear what you all might think about this facet of the near-death experience.
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