“It’s possible to be physically dead while your mind lives on.”

Pim van Lommel is a well-respected Dutch cardiologist who has become one of the leading authorities in the world on the near-death experience or NDE.  Here I continue with a few notes taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

First, I share a comment in which someone who had experienced an NDE draws a striking conclusion from it:

It’s possible to be physically dead while your mind lives on.  Only one thing matters: your attitude toward other people.  (45)

Dr. Van Lommel summarizes the “life changes” that many scholars have studied in near-death experiencers:

[T]he life changes derive in no small measure from the new insight that love and consideration for oneself, others, and nature are paramount and that death is not the end of everything.  (47)

And now, here are some of Dr. Van Lommel’s rather more abstract reflections on the idea that “It’s possible to be physically dead while your mind lives on”:

The numerous retrospective and few prospective studies provide conclusive evidence that NDEs can occur under diverse circumstances and not just in life-threatening situations.  But no clear medical or psychological indicators have been found that explain why some people do but most people do not experience an NDE.  Medication or demographic factors such as gender or standard of education play no role.  The NDE occurs in all kinds of circumstances, in all ranks of society, in all sections of the population, in all religions, in all cultures, and in all times.  Only a younger age seems to elicit more frequent NDE reports.  The younger a person is, the greater the chance of an NDE.

The universal experience of a clear and enhanced consciousness during a period of deep unconsciousness, with lucid thoughts, emotions, and memories from earliest childhood and sometimes with perception from a position outside and above the lifeless body, raises fundamental questions.  It resembles neither a dream nor the incoherent stories that are sometimes told upon waking from a coma with brain damage nor a hallucination.  It bears no resemblance to the familiar side effects of medication or to memories of birth.  But then what is it?  (112-113)

Some NDE elements, specifically the lucid consciousness and verifiable perception during the loss or serious impairment of brain function, challenge the prevailing view of the relationship between consciousness and the brain, which sees consciousness as a product of brain function.  (113)