The Skeptic Tank

To my way of thinking, I have not had an official near-death experience or a bona fide out-of-body experience. Just hasn’t happened yet.

I have a few personal friends or people that I met at IANDS who have had these experiences, but I can’t say with any certainty that I have. I had two surgeries with anesthesia before I was 20, but I don’t remember anything unusual about them. Some people have suggested that ether (when it was used) caused some funny business.

For me, NDE stories and their global implications for humanity are awesome. That for me is the real hook in my continuing quest to learn more about NDEs and woo-woo.

I am quite aware of the voices of skepticism that tell us to chill our enthusiasm. I must say that in many ways, I am skeptical of the skeptics. It’s not their pursuit of truth that’s objectionable. It’s their attitude. They talk as if anyone who has written a book on NDEs is either trying to cash in on the gullibility of the masses or is an inept investigator who is a victim of frauds and charlatans.

I suppose the best way to characterize my own feeling is that I love the idea that there is more to life than what we perceive with our physical senses. I love accounts of otherworldly places so much that I am afraid that they are too good to be true. So, I look for proof that satisfies me on a personal level that life goes on. I am not out to prove to the world that what I want to believe is true, but I am out to play a lot of ”what if it were true?”

I have come to the opinion that it is just as necessary for the skeptics to prove that there is no afterlife as it is for the mystics and the experiences to prove eternal living. Rather than taking the attitude that it is “obvious” that we die, because physical death is observable, I would like more in the way of proof that death is the final killing off of consciousness.

For me, the amalgam of what NDE accounts offer is juice for the evolution of humankind. The big picture view that I get is that we’re here on the planet for a reason; that the universe has meaning. Rather than the religious rhetoric that God has a plan and that’s why everything happens as it does, NDErs often bring back the vision of souls participating in the evolution of the Universe. They often say that God’s plan is for us incarnated souls to choose our own karmic evolution. I like that a lot better.

Skeptics don’t offer much nourishment for the figurative soul. About the only level I see in their rants is “don’t waste your money supporting frauds and quacks.” That puts it on the plane of consumer activism, but otherwise offers no spiritual solutions.

I do agree that many so-called spiritual leaders aren’t playing with a full Integrity deck. Celebrity psychics who charge a king’s ransom for their services, seminars, and vacation packages particularly underimpress me. I’m not too crazy about the kind of psychic reader who focuses on fortune telling. And wow, who wouldn’t want a pre-recorded digital woo-hoo woo-woo message from world famous Sylvia Browne?

On the other hand, meeting people who have had near-death experiences has provided me with a whole different view. While several of them have written books, most have not. They are not selling their experience. Many are trying to recover from their experiences.

They go to IANDS groups for support and conversation with others who have “been there.” Many of them are still annoyed at having to come back from the ethereal to the physical world, especially when it means returning to a body that was mangled in an accident or in great pain from disease.

Many of them have been mentally brutalized by friends, relatives, and sometimes medical professionals for talking about what they experienced “as if it were real.” Many become quite shy talking about it, not wanting to face snarling inquisitions.
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Of course, one of the major issues to come up for NDErs is people saying, “If you came back to life, you weren’t really dead, were you?” This implies that a near-death experience is not good enough as a preview medium for an afterlife “because near-dead ain’t real dead.”

Skeptics usually point to artificial means to have pseudo-NDEs or out-of-body experiences (OBEs), like drugs, to prove that this could be a medical, not a metaphysical phenomenon. They also lean on the theory that when the brain knows it’s facing imminent death, it stages a grand finale in the form of a wowza hallucination. My position is if that were true, we should study it and find out more about this cool brain trick, because there could be many beneficial applications for it.

I do know from personal observation that NDErs often get quite emotional when talking about their paranormal adventures. They’d have to be pretty good actors to pull this off. And it’s not just the outbursts of tears or the choppy speech. Sometimes it’s the look that crosses their faces, the “if you only knew” look.

People who come back from these journeys feel a much greater urgency to heal and improve the planet than those who write long dissertations complaining about the flimsy scientific evidence for soul survival. That could be the most telling sign of all..