1: Eden, Part 1

[Note: Endnotes have been stripped out.]

Dancing in the Dark:the other near-death experience

CHAPTER 1: The Beginning

Eden

It is nearly the end of a movie, and the hero is dying. The scene has been set: a gauze curtain blows gently at the window; outside, a gray rain spatters the moss walk of a cemetery populated by grim monuments—veiled women, mourning cherubs, weeping angels. The camera turns slowly back into the dim room, in the corner of which a shadowy figure suggests the Grim Reaper. Moviegoers see the hero’s hand rise weakly to touch the face of his beloved, and then…a slump, and the hand falls. Camera fade to Reaper. Everyone in the theater knows the hero has died.

That deathbed scene, or one much like it, was common in theater and film until toward the last decade of the 20th century. Then, abruptly, the imagery shifted and characters began to die altogether differently. Now when a hero dies, a curtain may still drift gently at the window, but the gloomy cemetery is gone, along with the moss and the Reaper. Today the camera looks not at the failing hero but with his eyes. A soft radiance bathes the room as, slowly, we rise with the camera and the vision of the leading man to the ceiling or higher, and we see his still body below. Coming mysteriously into the room, perhaps as if through mist, is the figure of a much-loved person—the lost love, or a child or cherished army buddy. Behind that presence may be another: a great, brilliant Being, or a splendid and welcoming light; if the director has religious aspirations, the figure may be wearing a long robe and sandals. Scenes from earlier in the film flash across the screen, clips recognizable as earlier in the hero’s life, and seeing them resolves unanswered questions. The hero, or what might be his spirit, rises to meet the deceased lover, the child or buddy, and together they move away, into the glorious light. Everyone in the theater understands: the hero has died.

In the space of little more than ten years, the Grim Reaper virtually disappeared as the representative of Death, replaced by a Being of Light. What happened to make such a dramatic shift? What happened was that through the work of two physicians the public came to know something startling and unprecedented about dying—that it didn’t sound frightening or gloomy at all.

In the early 1970s Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was already well known for her work with dying patients and their families, and for her description of the emotional stages many go through as they struggle to accept the reality of their approaching death. She had become, unintentionally, a controversial figure in the medical community for her audacity in insisting that death is a natural part of the life cycle, not just a physician’s failure.  Thousands of people crowded her public lectures and workshops and heard stories of unexpected events reported around the time of death: dying patients had told Kubler-Ross they could see presences waiting for them; family members spoke of rooms filling with light. Science had no explanation for the accounts, other than to call them hallucinations.

In those same years, a young man with a PhD in philosophy, Raymond A. Moody, Jr., entered medical school. En route, he discovered and began quietly collecting curious accounts of people who had been close to death, who later told amazing stories of having had powerful, transcendent experiences—during the time they had been declared by their physicians to be clinically dead. Finding no existing term for the events they described, Moody called them near-death experiences.

In 1975, Moody published a small book based on fifty of the accounts he had gathered. The book, Life After Life, ran to fewer than 200 pages and was published by tiny Mockingbird Books of Georgia. No one, certainly not Moody himself or John Egle, his surprised publisher, was prepared for the response. The book took the world by a storm which has sometimes abated but never entirely calmed in the decades since. Life After Life became a best-seller, one of the most influential books of the late twentieth century.

In an era notorious for its near-pathological avoidance of death, Moody began his book by asking openly, “What is it like to die?” He answered the question in a way that offered a view quite different from a dismal vision of the Grim Reaper.The accounts in his collection echoed what Kubler-Ross was telling her audiences, but still, it sounded fantastic. The stories came from different parts of the country, from people who had no contact with each other, but the commonalities were striking. Person after person described hovering outside of their physical body; rocketing through vast distances; finding strangely beautiful landscapes where they joyously encountered the presences of friends or loved ones who had previously died, and sometimes meeting a loving presence which appeared somehow to be surrounded by a radiant light, perhaps even made of light. Some people said it was God; Christians tended to describe the figure as Jesus or a favorite saint; deeply religious Jews said it was perhaps one of the Judges; the uncertain called it simply “a being of light.” Many told of seeing a review of their life in which they felt the effects of their actions; of encountering some kind of barrier or boundary between life and ‘beyond’; of being told that it was not time for them to be there, that they must return to the ordinary world.

For example, a ruptured appendix produced this experience:

“I became very weak and I fell down. I began to feel a sort of drifting, a movement of my real being in and out of my body, and to hear beautiful music. I floated on down the hall and out the door onto the screened-in porch. There, it almost seemed that clouds, a pink mist really, began to gather around me, and then I floated right straight on through the screen, just as though it weren’t there, and up into this pure crystal clear light, an illuminating white light. It was beautiful and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love. The thought came to my mind, ‘Lovest thou me?’ This was not exactly in the form of a question, but I guess the connotation of what the light said was, ‘If you do love me, go back and complete what you began in your life.’ And all during this time, I felt as though I were surrounded by an overwhelming love and compassion.”

From a woman who had lost a lot of blood during childbirth:  “The doctor gave me up and told my relatives that I was dying. However, I was quite alert through the whole thing, and even as I heard him saying this I felt myself coming to. As I did, I realized that all these people were there, almost in multitudes it seems, hovering around the ceiling of the room. They . . . had passed on before. I recognized my grandmother and a girl I had known when I was in school . . . It was a very happy occasion, and I felt that they had come to protect or to guide me. It was almost as if I were coming home, and they were there to greet or to welcome me.”

The pattern in the experiences emerging from Moody’s and Kubler-Ross’s work sounded very much— could it be?—like heaven. Life After Life also noted some experience aftereffects: People reported a loss of their fear of death, said they felt differently about themselves, expressed new belief in a continuation of life beyond death; a few noticed a deepening of their intuition.:

“Now, I am not afraid to die. It’s not that I have a death wish, or want to die right now. I don’t want to be living over there on the other side now, because I’m supposed to be living here. The reason why I’m not afraid to die, though, is that I know where I’m going when I leave here, because I’ve been there before.”

“. . . After you’ve once had the experience that I had, you know in your heart that there’s no such thing as death. You just graduate from one thing to another—like from grammar school to high school to college.”

“It was a blessing in a way, because before that heart attack I was too busy planning for my children’s future, and worrying about yesterday, that I was losing the joys of the present. I have a much different attitude now.”

“One thing that I think has been given to me . . . is that I can sense the needs in other individuals’ lives. Often, for instance . . . it seems I can almost read their faces and tell that they need help, and what kind.”

Moody’s book was published in 1975, at a time when death and care of the dying had moved out of the household and the cycles of family life into the hospital, where it had been professionalized, sanitized, distanced, and made foreign to the vast majority of people. Dying had become a mysterious and frightening process, and death, always the great and fearsome Unknown, was even more an “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” But suddenly travelers were not only returning; they were in books and on talk shows everywhere, the subject of Hollywood movies and featured in favorite television shows. It was almost impossible to avoid them, and the impact was stunning.

Is the Universe Friendly?

Albert Einstein is said to have remarked that the most important question facing humankind is this: “Is the universe a friendly place or not?” The question captures tens of thousands of years of human wonder and exploration—religion, philosophy, science, the substance of civilization. What’s out there? Is it trying to get us? How can we placate it? Can we control it? Can we be safe here?

We may go camping to “get in touch with nature,” but until very recently most people lived there full-time. During all those hundreds of thousands of years of living close to the planet itself, like a child carried close to its mother’s heartbeat, there was always a relationship between the human community and the environment, both the visible surroundings and the great unseen, the invisible forces and powers that governed the physical earth. And because those people, too, felt the wondering that would one day be Einstein’s (“Is this place friendly?”), and because they, too, heard stories of transcendent events that we call near-death experiences, they developed ceremonies and offerings to the powers they felt stirring, rituals and sacrifices designed to ensure continued survival and well-being. When the world seemed ominously dangerous, there were things that could be done to set things right.

The life of religion has been a basic element of human history, helping to describe The Way Things Are. Like us, they described what they saw and developed cosmologies (models) according to their understandings to explain the movement of the sun, the moon, clouds and stars. And so—compacting eons into a single sentence—by the time of the 14th century, Western religion and culture happily understood that God had deliberately created Earth to be the center of everything important, and human beings were pivotal to the entire universe.

By the Creator’s very design, low was low, and high was high, and each individual had a secure niche of status and function, a stable place in creation. This was God’s design, described as the Great Chain of Being. It explained that at the very top God reigned over all the universe, and closest to him were the orders of heavenly host, the spirit-beings, angels and archangels, ranked in order of power and importance; and just below them humans, both spirit and flesh, their orders also arranged by importance—first kings, princes, courtiers and warriors, the commoners and then peasants; next, animals, animated but without a soul, all of them ranked (dogs above sheep, butterflies above grubs); plants (edible plants ranked above poison ivy); until at the bottom was the inanimate material world of minerals and rocks and dirt. The system was orderly and understandable and stable; above all, it was permanent. Moreover, it was psychologically and spiritually reassuring: I am where God wants me to be.

Then, in the early decades of the 1500s—just yesterday!—the astronomer Copernicus came upon a horrifying truth: it was not the sun but Earth that moved. Earth was not the very center of creation! His discovery was so unthinkable that for many years most people did not realize its implications; yet it was the first step. Humanity was about to be eased toward the door and then evicted from that secure old home place represented by the Great Chain of Being. Galileo and his telescope followed Copernicus, proving that it was possible to see what Copernicus had described, and the mathematician Kepler with his description of the laws of planetary motion, and as their description of the physical universe became clearer, the extent of the implications of a heliocentric universe began to be understood. It was the sun, not Earth, that was central to the solar system, with Earth reduced to being one among countless other circling orbs in an unimaginably vast space in which there was no sign of Heaven.

It was the onset of the scientific revolution, a world view which gave birth to the powerful philosophy of materialism that claimed, and still claims, that only the physical world has anything of value to say, that metaphysics and God-talk and the world of the spirit are illusory. The scientific revolution led directly to the Industrial Revolution, and the accomplishments of this mathematical, material-based eruption were so swift and so compelling that science began to replace religion as the prime authority—in many cases the only authority—for truth.

And then came Darwin, with evidence that God’s creatures great and small had originated not in a single divine week, as Genesis said, but had developed step by infinitesimal step from earlier life forms. Humanity was not the proud result of a single, deliberate act of God but was said to be the outcome of the landward development of a Devonian fish that, as Loren Eiseley put it, had cunningly managed “to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat.” Now, a Buddhist society, accustomed to considering the illusory nature of world and self, could adapt to this new information; and Jewish communities, with their more flexible understanding of scripture, withstood the news without shattering; but but the Christian West had no such sense of mutability. For Christians who had so confidently believed themselves superior to everything eldse on Earth, and who read the Bible’s creation story as literal fact, the shock was devastating. For them, humanity—and its ego—were summarily knocked from its place as the very purpose of the great Chain of Being, and the materialist view was seen to be undermining God and creation. Although the truth of evolution is demonstrable, a passionate opposition to it is still fierce and widespread in some quarters more than a century later.

The Great Chain of Being had come undone. With it went permanence and stability. By mid-19th century the materialist view of science was undermining the sense of intrinsic meaning in human life, replacing it with a mechanistic cosmology, a seemingly meaningless history, and wishful thinking as a substitute for deep-rooted faith in a sacred reality. And the home place itself, said science, was not a meaning-laden and cherished creation of the Lord of the Universe but a soulless flying ember, ashes of a great explosion that happened so long ago as to be unimaginable.

Can such a universe be considered friendly? It is an irony that Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th century, is credited with asking the question, for it is one that science is not designed to answer. The subject will be discussed in more depth later on; for now it is important to note that it is the business of science to deal with quantity, not quality. By its own choice, science does not ‘do’ values other than those that are numerical. A clear explanation comes from Huston Smith in his book Forgotten Truth: “A number is a number, and number is the language of science. Objects can be larger or smaller, forces can be stronger or weaker, durations can be longer or shorter, these all being numerically reckonable. But to speak of anything in science as having a different ontological status—as being better, say, or more real—is to speak nonsense.”

In short, science cannot provide a friendly universe; it can provide only a description of what it observes physically: the planet Earth as a spinning bit of rubble toward the edge of a nondescript galaxy within a seemingly impersonal immensity. When Einstein asked, “Is the universe friendly?” the answer, according to science, was a resounding, No!

However, the residents of that bit of rubble are curiously designed to hunger after meaning and purpose, qualities beyond the realm of science. And into their longing came Life After Life. No wonder the message of radiant near-death experiences was greeted like food after famine! For the first time in centuries, here was abundant evidence of “something more,” something meaningful beyond the sterile emptiness of the 20th century materialist model. At last, here were people whose direct experience with that “something” led them to say, yes, the universe is friendly—not only friendly but loving and welcoming, and it is safe to die.

The impact was stunning. Audiences turned out by the hundreds of thousands to hear the stories, listening in absolute silence—their attention so focused they forgot to cough, to shift position, almost to breathe—then going out to tell their families and friends about what they had heard. From the miniscule audiences of small Rotary luncheons to the millions hearing Oprah, it seemed that everyone was hearing about near-death experiences. In less than the space of a single generation, it became hard to remember the earlier foreboding sense of death and dying, or the way the entire topic had been taboo in social conversation.