Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

[ xiv ] This term is used to describe a pattern of experience which tends to be reported by approximately 35% of people resuscitated from apparent death. Research shows that the experience has been reported in almost all cultures and traditions and across the centuries. However, the increasing ability of modern medicine to resuscitate has led to a recent upsurge in the number of cases. The experiences include reports of ‘leaving the body’, ‘looking down on the resuscitation attempts’, ‘feeling a sense of life-review’, ‘meeting deceased relatives and friends’ and enjoying a series of religious experiences of a mystical type including ‘encounters’ with a bright light sometimes perceived in personal terms and identified with a figure from the percipient's own religious traditions. The pattern of experiencing appears to be common across religious traditions, cultures and world-views, though naturally the terminology used in the religious descriptions is culture-specific. The mode of the experience is clearly hallucinatory in form, though its status is harder to evaluate. Many researchers insist that the experience is entirely natural and the product of features such as cerebral anoxia, psychological stress or other natural causes associated with the universal human experience of dying. Others see the experiences as evidential of consciousness preparing for the survival of death and ... log in or subscribe to read full text