As a hospital chaplain, Lee Witting would make a point of asking those who had died and been resuscitated if they remembered experiencing anything on “the other side.”
“And about one out of 10, or one out of 12, would have a story,” said Witting, who has been the host of the podcast “NDE Radio” for 10 years now. Witting, who had a near-death experience (NDE) himself at age 7, has interviewed some 500 other experiencers for his show and many more before that as a chaplain.
“Near-death experiences, they’re universal. They happen to anyone,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how you were raised, if you were a believing Christian or an atheist, or from a different religious tradition ... the voice from the light has actually told a number of people from near-death experiences that it’s not your religion, it’s your capacity for love that’s determinative of how you spend eternity.”
Witting said he feels those who do have NDEs are “called” to. Some 80 or 90 percent of people resuscitated don’t have these experiences. Their souls didn’t leave the body.
Bottom of the Lake
The 7-year-old Witting was swimming in a lake when he stepped too far out and screamed before sinking down.“As my body was down at the bottom of the lake, my soul was suddenly up in a birch tree next to the cottage,” Witting said.
His mother heard the scream and ran out of the cottage, diving in and pulling him out of the water. She threw him facedown on over a log, thumped him on the back trying to get the water out, and effectively gave him chest compressions this way and revived him. Then Witting went back into his body.
Besides the out-of-body experience, Witting had been in a space of infinite darkness, and saw a small pinprick of light. For years, he assumed this was the view he had of the sky from the bottom of the lake before he died, and dreamed of it often. He became very interested in astronomy and “the big picture,” asking his parents for a telescope and turning the attic into a planetarium.
Years later, he read Dr. Raymond Moody’s book “Life After Life,” the seminal work on NDEs that alerted people across America that the strange experience they had was, in fact, more common than they might have believed. By then, Witting had gone back to that lake and realized the view of the sky was nothing like those dreams. That “bright,” “velvety” darkness and “pinprick” of light was something many other near-death experiencers also described.
To the Next Room
Witting, retired now, was the chaplain of a major hospital in Maine for 15 years, talking to an average of 30 people a day.“I‘ll give you one simple example from a hospital visit I made. I went in and asked the woman if she’d seen anything when she was on the other side, and she said, ‘Yes! I saw my dad.’”
The woman, in her 60s, said her father had died three years prior, but when she saw him, he looked much younger, better, maybe in his 30s. She saw a beautiful light behind him and wanted to run toward it like a little girl, but he picked her up and held her, telling her she had to go back because it wasn’t her time.
“She was so happy to have had that experience,” Witting said. “And as a chaplain, you can take a story like that and take it to the next room.”
“There might be a cancer patient, someone a doctor has told, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing more we can do for you,’ [someone] in depression and terrible pain, and if chaplains would only realize they can use these stories to pick up people’s spirits—I would say to a person like that, ‘Well listen, I just heard a really interesting story from another patient about how she died and what she saw. Would you like to hear it?’”
Witting did so often and saw just how their spirits could be lifted.
How Can I Call You?
Mentions of God come up rather frequently in NDEs.“And many—and this is interesting—many of them say they meet Jesus, and it’s not necessarily Christians,” Witting said. Often he’s described as a golden light that, as you get closer, becomes a figure of a man.
“I interviewed an Orthodox Jewish man one time. He said, ‘I was there and Jesus hugged me’. I say, ‘How did you know it was Jesus?’ He said, ‘Oh I just knew,’” Witting said. “So this is a manifestation of God’s love in a being that is available to all on the other side; it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or non-Christian. It’s a manifestation of God’s love that materialized on earth for a time.”
In his NDE studies, Witting has also picked up an interest in quantum mechanics, which touches on a oneness that many near-death experiencers try to describe.
“Moses, when he asked God, ‘How can I call you?’ ‘What name do you have?’ when he first encountered God, God said ‘I am that I am.’ And in Hebrew ‘am’ is an imperfect, it’s an is-ness that comprises both the past and the future,” Witting said. “This is what quantum is beginning to realize too ... two particles light years apart, when one does one thing, the other particle reacts exactly, simultaneously, in the same way because of this entangled connection that it has, that we all have.”
The Dark Experiences
Researchers note that there are unpleasant, “hellish” NDEs as well, but they are a very small number. Witting found the same; one man described to him something from a Dante-esque hell, another described being in a clam shell that was closing slowly.“I think these are warnings, I don’t know if they are self-generated or not,” Witting said. Some Buddhist traditions say once you go past the light you go to a place of self-generating monsters, he added, and he feels there is some truth in that. “When you feel like you’re being closed in a clamshell or somehow being separated from the source, it’s because you’re not ready for the source.”
10 Other People
The biggest difference Witting has seen these stories make is reducing the fear of death.When Witting had his own experience at age 7, he had no idea what it was and didn’t tell his mother for fear it would upset her. What good could it do to tell her that her son, whom she took her eyes off momentarily, had not just drowned but actually died?
But today, since Moody’s book defined the NDE and research steadily grew in the 1970s and 1980s, many people are quite familiar with the idea. Various estimates state that well over 100 new NDEs may be taking place each day in the United States, though this cannot be tracked. Surveys have found that around 1 in 20 American adults have had an NDE.
“If everyone who has had a near-death experience would tell not only their family and friends, but 10 other people, we could change the attitude of the whole world about this, the importance of love, the capacity for compassion would be incredibly increased,” Witting said.
His own experience and speaking about NDEs during his chaplaincy taught him the vital importance of practicing love, compassion, and empathy. For the patients who had had these experiences themselves, it was often the most important spiritual experience of their life, and the last thing he would want anyone to do was belittle it.
“I like to say that everyone is entitled to, in their lifetime, at least one mystical experience that they cannot explain rationally,” Witting said. Likely you’ve had one, he explained. If we could only acknowledge it, we might realize that “God is still speaking” to us.
“The people that wrote the Bible down, how did they get that message? Some of them got it through dreams, some got it through automatic writing, some got these amazing books in the Bible through near-death experiences, and to deny the reality that God is still speaking to us is to shortchange God, I think.”
Once, at an NDE conference, he met a man who asked him to tell him more about the idea because he had a contract from a publisher to write a book on it, but he didn’t believe they were real.
He said, “Well what’s happened in your life? Have you ever had something you couldn’t explain?”
The man thought about it, and eventually, he shared a story about his pet dog, a wonderful dog he traveled with everywhere, including on those long trips driving across states. He was heartbroken when the dog died.
One year, as he was driving down to Florida for the winter, he was falling asleep at the wheel on a high-speed road, coming close to the guardrail and cliffside.
Suddenly, he heard his dog barking in his ear and jerked awake, shook his head, and pulled away in time.
He said, “Well how could that be, how could my old dog be there for me like that? And Witting said, ”Well there’s your experience.”
