A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

August 2016

Recent surveys have shown that between 10-25% of people who recover from a cardiac arrest report they have had an experience during it that is now called a ‘Temporary Death Experience’, a TDE, because they were clinically dead at the time.  These TDEs have a number of common features:

A sense of entering into light

A sense of journeying, typically into an English country garden

A meeting with dead relatives who welcome them and sometimes send them back

But the features which are the most memorable and significant for the person concerned are the peace and calmness and, in the deeper experiences, the intense compassion, love and light that are experienced.  They are life enhancing in that the person feels safe and cared for, and on their return to life have little or no fear of death.

            This is consistent with Near Death Experiences, NDEs, where people do not clinically die, but have an experience which they describe as nearly dying.  A Gallup Survey in the US in 1982 suggested that 4% of the population had had an experience of this sort.  Peter Fenwick, the leading authority on NDEs in the UK says that a blueprint of a characteristic NDE will include:

An overwhelming feeling of peace, joy and bliss.

The person leaves their body and can look down on themselves and is sometimes able to describe in accurate detail what took place in the operating theatre where their body lies.

They may enter darkness, usually a dark tunnel, and at the end they see a pinpoint of light, which as they approach it, grows larger and larger.

The approaching light is described as white or golden, but not painful to the eyes. Very often it seems to act almost as a magnet, drawing the person towards itself.

They may meet a ‘being’ of light, sometimes a religious figure, sometimes simply a presence, that is warm and welcoming.

Sometimes people sense that there is some sort of barrier between them and the light, which in some way marks a point of no return.

People often say they have visited another country, usually an idyllic pastoral scene, or that they have glimpsed such a place beyond the barrier.

Occasionally other people are encountered too, usually dead relatives, more rarely friends who are still alive, or strangers.

At some point the person may see events from their life flash before them. For some events are unfolded to them which are to take place in the future. And some are told there are tasks ahead of them which they must go back and complete.

Often people want to stay, but in every case realise that this is impossible, that it is not yet their time to go. Sometimes they make the decision to go back themselves, usually because they realise that they are still needed by their families.

The return to the body is usually rapid.

            For most, the NDE, like the TDE,  is one of the most profound people have ever had. Often the person returns changed in some way, though not always permanently. Virtually everyone reports that they have no fear of death, though they don’t particularly want to die.          

Peter Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth have written a book entitled ‘The Art of Dying’ that discusses some of the above but also evidence about the actual process of dying, what they refer to as ‘End of Life Experiences’ ELEs.  One of them is what they call ‘Deathbed Visions’ that some dying people describe, usually in a clear or only moderately impaired, consciousness.  The Fenwicks admit that they don’t know how common these experiences are, but they seem to be more common than previously thought. They are not dependent on religious belief.

The visions are nearly always seen as welcoming and the dying person responds with interest and joy.  They are usually of dead relatives, frequently someone the dying person had a close emotional contact with, and their purpose seems to be to help the person through the dying process.  Sometimes this process is taken even further, so that not only does the visitor appear in the room, but the dying person may journey with them to an intermediate reality that they perceive as being more real than the real world, and interpenetrated by light, love and compassion. Sometimes the dying person gets out of bed to try to go with their vision. 

They may drift in and out of this area in the days or hours preceding death.  Both relatives and strangers may be seen, but nearly always they are experienced as a comforting presence, there to help with the dying process and holding out a promise of a continuation of consciousness.  There are many accounts of the ‘visitors’ making their first appearance in the days or weeks before death, and occasionally the ‘visitor’ may be given short shrift if their appearance is thought to be premature.

Like the NDEs there are feelings of absolute peace, bliss or joy, and the experience of light. In both the concept of journey is central, probably because the message of the ‘visitors’ suggests continuity and not finality. Its an optimistic message.  The TDEs are more narrative than deathbed visions and more detailed in terms of the world in which the vision is occurring. The TDE is a journey with a beginning, middle and end, which is the return. In all three the other world into which the person moves has a quality of absolute reality.