In the 1960s, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) technique was adopted across the country, and around the same time, physicians and emergency personnel were hearing a great increase in stories from those who were brought back from the brink of death.
Sometimes they had witnessed their own resuscitation, despite having little or no brain or heart activity, and sometimes they spoke of light and love and a great beyond.
Jeffrey Long, a medical doctor specializing in radiation oncology, first came across the phenomenon in the 1990s. He had been flipping through the Journal of the American Medical Association and looking for a cancer-related article when, “completely by accident, I found an article that said ‘near-death experience’ in it,” Long said in an interview with The Epoch Times. He had never heard of it, but stopped to read the article “because how can you not be fascinated by wondering what happens after we die?”
Shortly after that, he began to research the subject himself and created a survey for near-death experiencers to fill out.
“I said, ‘was your experience dream-like in any way?’ emphasizing was there any correlation between dreams and near-death experiences, and we expect a yes and explanation. It was the most embarrassing question I’ve ever asked as a researcher. Uniformly, people responding to that question were going ‘no! no way, my near-death experience was nothing like a dream, absolutely not,’” Long said.
While dreams skip around and are generally disorienting to some degree, near-death experiencers feel fully conscious, hyper-alert, or hyper-aware, and the experiences proceed in an orderly fashion, Long said.
What they were experiencing was reality, but a different reality as we know it.
After the term “near-death experience” was coined in Dr. Raymond Moody’s book “Life After Life” in 1975, much research has been done on the nature of these experiences. The possibility of biological changes in the experiencer’s body creating these has been ruled out, and the ability of these experiencers to recall real, concurrent events accurately though they could not have perceived physically remains unexplained.
Long founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) in 1998, and has since collected 4,000-plus cases of near-death experiences. NDERF defines a near-death experience as “a lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death.”
Meeting God?
Long says there have been four iterations of the NDERF survey (nderf.org/hub), and it has been translated into more than 30 languages. Over time, he has updated it to ask more questions about the content of the experience, adding more “spiritual” questions asking about experiencers’ encounters with God and concepts of unity, love, oneness—things experiencers were frequently reporting from different cultural or religious backgrounds.“Over and over, I would see people describe God very consistently,” Long said, adding that in a survey, 45 percent of respondents described such an encounter. “A lot of times they say that God is an earthly word and what they encountered was so powerful, so wonderful, that no English word, or earthly word in any language, could possibly describe the overwhelming love, connection, majesty, knowledge of this being they encountered in this near-death experience.”
“God, over and over again, is described as being overwhelmingly loving, caring, loving them for who they are, everything they are, a very strong sense of non-judgment, a very strong sense of overwhelming knowledge,” as well as knowledge of God having a “creator” role, Long said. “For most commonly, God is described as being the light of light, unlike anything in their prior earthly life, more beautiful and, if you will, a mystical type of light.”
Long adds that there are a small percentage of distressing, or what some describe as “hellish” experiences. Some of these experiences had a hellish beginning, and then a heavenly portion to the experience, but not all. Interestingly, he adds, these respondents will add that those experiences were what they needed.
“They often say ‘I had issues in my life where I needed a kick in the pants.’ They have issues of guilt, anger, resentments, a dark part of their soul, if you will, and they will be very upfront and say ‘I needed this experience,’” Long said. They go on to make significant positive changes in their life. “They just simply are aware that that is what a loving God Creator would have created as an experience to help them to optimally learn from it grow and live their life as well as possible for the rest of their earthly life.”
Substantial Change
Long says it’s typical for near-death experiencers to make substantial changes in their life moving forward.A large body of research has found a typical pattern of change, called “after effects,” which include significant value shifts in the person. On average, it can take seven years for experiencers to integrate these changes into their lives and feel resolved.
“They bring back, if you will, a piece of heaven they saw back to their earthly life.”
“They become more loving, they become less materialistic, they become more interested in spiritual values. They become much more believers in the reality of God and believers in the reality of an afterlife, no surprise,” he said. This can be through actions like leaving unloving relationships or changing jobs to pursue a service and healing profession. “Interesting, throughout the rest of their life, which is often decades, the changes in values actually increase over time.”
Studying these experiences has changed Long as well.
“It had a huge impact on my life. I started out, if you will, like a skeptic. I’m a show-it-to-me kind of person. I’m a physician and I make my decisions and understandings of life based on solid evidence,” Long said.
His father was the chair of pharmacology at the University of Iowa, and their family was “very science-oriented,” he said. They would discuss research during family dinner, asking “what’s the evidence on that?”
“We also had a religious side, we attended church, but ultimately in our family it was the strong belief in science as being a very important tool to understand the reality of this world we live in,” Long said.
Ultimately, this would give him the tools and language to use science to document near-death experiences, and shed light on the reality of an afterlife and the reality of God.
Today his belief in God is based in both his Christian faith and “a mountain of evidence,” Long said. In fact, that evidence is stronger than what is used in many common medical decisions, he added.
“That’s actually increased my Christian faith. I’m now reading the Bible, and can sort of understand how profoundly loving [Jesus] was, maybe beyond anything that they could have put into words 2,000 years ago, and yet here are near-death experiencers describing over and over again Jesus’s profound love for people.”
“As a physician that treats cancer, that’s helped me to treat my patients that have life-threatening illness more courageous, more openly,” he said. “It’s helped me be a better doctor for my patients.”
“I’ve given a lot of talks to medical groups, and over the years, I’ve been very impressed that how open physicians are to the reality of near-death experiences. When we go over the lines of evidence ... doctors understand that, they understand that if you’re unconscious or clinically dead, as they unfortunately have often encountered their own patients, they know when they come back, there can’t possibly be any lucid, organized time experience during that time of unconsciousness or coma, unless they had a near-death experience.”
More and more people are aware of what near-death experiences are today, and talking about them with their health care teams, Long said; and with increased awareness, he projects the research will only get more interesting.
“What we don’t know about near-death experience outweighs what we do know,” he said. “Consciousness, God, afterlife—these are some of the great questions that humanity has faced throughout all of its existence.”
