Near Death Experiences 101: What They Are, What the Science Says, and What They Teach Us About Life
What if death isn't the end but a doorway?
Near death experiences, or NDEs, have been documented across every culture, throughout all of recorded history, and in people of every age, background, and belief system. They've been studied by medical doctors, neuroscientists, psychologists, and parapsychologists alike, and the evidence for them is far more compelling than most people realize.
In this post, we’ll scratch the surface on NDEs, exploring what they are, what the science says, and perhaps most importantly, what these extraordinary experiences with death teach us about life.
“There is one common element in all near-death experiences: they transform the people who have them. In my twenty years of intense exposure to NDEs, I have yet to find one [person] who hasn’t had a very deep and positive transformation as a result of his experience.”
here’s what you’ll learn in this article:
What near death experiences actually are, who has them, what they typically involve, and why they can't be easily dismissed as hallucinations, oxygen deprivation, or drug-induced states.
What the scientific and spiritual evidence for NDEs reveals, including veridical perceptions, accurate descriptions of resuscitations, and the remarkable consistency of experiencers' accounts across cultures and belief systems.
What NDEs teach us about the nature of life, consciousness, and what might lie beyond the physical, and why the life lessons of experiencers might be the most practically valuable takeaway of all.
🎙 If you prefer to listen instead, click here to access the podcast episode.
Table of Contents
What Is a Near Death Experience?
Common Features During the NDE
Common Features After the NDE
Psychological Changes
Physiological Changes
Aren't NDEs Just Hallucinations?
Aren't NDEs Caused by Oxygen Deprivation?
Can't Drugs Produce NDEs?
Scientific Evidence
Veridical NDEs
Accurately Describing Resuscitations
Out-of-Body Evidence
Realer Than Real Memories
Spiritual Evidence
Kimberly Clark-Sharp
Dr. Eben Alexander
A Brief History of NDEs
Documented accounts of near death experiences date back thousands of years to ancient Greece and Rome. All the major religious traditions include stories of NDEs, as do narratives collected from indigenous populations around the world. The medical literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries includes NDE cases as well.
The earliest known description of an NDE was recounted by Plato in his "Myth of Er," written in 420 B.C. And it was Dr. Raymond Moody who coined the term "Near Death Experience" in 1975 in his best-selling book Life After Life, bringing the phenomenon into mainstream awareness for the first time.
NDEs aren't as uncommon as you might think. They're described by around 10 percent of people whose hearts stop, and surveys taken in the US, Australia, and Germany suggest that 4 to 15 percent of the general population have had one.
Who Has NDEs? The Demographics
One of the most striking things about NDEs is how democratically they occur. They don't seem to target any one type of person over another.
According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), no significant correlation has been found between religious beliefs and the likelihood or depth of an NDE. No significant correlation has been found between age, race, sexual orientation, or economic status and the likelihood, content, or depth of an NDE either. There's also no correlation between a person's life history, beliefs, behavior, or attitudes and the likelihood of having one.
Perhaps most notably, there's no evidence that the means of coming close to death, including suicide attempts, affects the likelihood of having a harrowing NDE. Any and all brushes with death appear to be equally capable of producing one.
What Is a Near Death Experience?
Dr. Raymond Moody defined an NDE as:
"a profound psychological event that may occur to a person close to death, or if not near death, in a situation of physical or emotional crisis. Because it includes transcendental and mystical elements, an NDE is considered to be a powerful event of consciousness, resulting in profound, lasting aftereffects."
NDEs vary greatly from one person to another and no two are exactly alike, but they do tend to share common features.
Common Features During the NDE
Freedom from pain and physical limitation. Many experiencers describe the feeling of leaving the physical body as akin to taking off a heavy suit of armor, as if they've been freed from a physical chamber that's far too limiting and heavy for the vastness of their spirit. It's not uncommon to hear experiencers recall seeing a silver cord connecting their soul to their physical body.
The mind functioning more clearly and rapidly than usual. Experiencers consistently describe a state of hyper-lucidity, with their personality and individuality still fully intact.
A brilliant light or brilliant darkness perceived as alive, intelligent, and powerful. According to spiritual teacher Tricia McCannon, this bright white light is the person's higher Self, or the soul's Angelic Twin, that's come to greet them. However, few people recognize this luminous spirit as their own higher self, so many come back and report it as an Angel or a spiritual teacher like Jesus.
An overwhelming sense of peace, well-being, and unconditional love. This is perhaps the most universally reported feature of the NDE, cutting across all cultures, belief systems, and demographics.
Access to unlimited knowledge.
A holographic life review. Experiencers vividly revisit important events from their past, often from an outsider's perspective. This review can also include a look at pivotal choices and what might have unfolded had different decisions been made.
Celestial sounds and music. Many experiencers describe hearing extraordinary music or sound. Interestingly, there's a connection here to the physics concept of String Theory, which suggests that vibrating strings within atoms oscillate at different frequencies to create what some describe as a kind of background symphony of the universe. NASA has even begun documenting the sounds of the universe through a process called sonification, which translates astronomical data into sound. It's genuinely extraordinary to hear.
Other common experiences during NDEs include previews of future life events, encounters with deceased loved ones or spiritual beings, and visits to or glimpses of spiritual realms including what many describe as the Akashic Records, the Halls of Amenti, and realms of crystalline light.
Common Features After the NDE
Around 80 percent of people who have an NDE report that their lives were forever changed by the experience.
As IANDS notes,
"Experiencers were not returning with just a renewed zest for life and a more spiritual outlook. They were evidencing specific psychological and physiological differences on a scale never before faced by them."
Psychological Changes
A significant decrease in or complete loss of fear of death
Becoming more spiritual regardless of preexisting beliefs, including atheists and agnostics opening to spirituality and religious individuals becoming less dogmatic and more universally spiritual
More loving attitudes toward self and others, including the development of unconditional love without the conditions society typically imposes
Radical acceptance and compassion for others
An increased sense of meaning and purpose
Heightened intuition or psychic abilities
Decreased interest in material possessions, personal recognition, and competition
Increased interest in altruistic endeavors
Viewing life on earth as just one of many learning opportunities for the soul rather than the end-all, be-all of existence
A sense of timelessness and an ability to flow with the present moment that others might describe as being "spacey"
Increased curiosity and desire to learn
As NDEr Katherine Glenn beautifully puts it:
"There are many paths up the mountain to reach God and it really doesn't matter which one you take, because when you get there to that mountaintop it is all the same love, light, peace, harmony, gratitude, wisdom, truth, and victory for everybody."
Physiological Changes
Altered thought processing, shifting from sequential and selective to holistic and broad
Heightened sensitivity to light and sound, with many finding they can't tolerate loud or discordant sounds
Kundalini awakening, or the feeling of energy surges running up and down the spine
Electrical sensitivity, in which the experiencer's energy field appears to affect nearby electrical equipment, causing microphones to squeal, light bulbs to pop, and computers to suddenly lose data
FAQs from NDE Skeptics
Aren't NDEs Just Hallucinations?
This is one of the most common dismissals, and it doesn't hold up well under scrutiny.
Hallucinations tend to be illogical, fleeting, bizarre, and distorted. The vast majority of NDEs are logical, orderly, exceptionally clear, and comprehensible. People who have experienced both hallucinations and NDEs consistently describe them as being vastly different, with hallucinations having a foggy, "unreal" quality and NDEs being crystal clear and vivid.
Evidence also suggests that the prevalence of mental illness among NDE experiencers is identical to those who haven't had one. In other words, NDEs don't appear to be a symptom of psychological instability.
NDEs are commonly described as feeling "realer than real," meaning they feel far more vivid and substantial than anything experienced in ordinary waking life.
A particularly compelling example comes from Dr. Bruce Greyson's research…
A young man named Justin accidentally overdosed on LSD at 18. He recalls intense hallucinations before his NDE and desperately wishing to return to a normal state of consciousness.
When he collapsed and his heart stopped, he describes his consciousness separating from his body. During the out-of-body NDE, everything was crystal clear and completely untouched by the drug-induced hallucinations occurring both before and after.
As Justin described it:
"The NDE was crystal clear, as in waking up and rising to a new day. But, when I later woke up during the night at the hospital, I was once again hallucinating and very groggy from LSD."
Aren't NDEs Caused by Oxygen Deprivation?
This hypothesis doesn't hold up either.
Physicians have compared oxygen levels of cardiac arrest survivors who did and didn't have NDEs, and their findings discredit the anoxia theory.
In one study, NDErs actually had higher oxygen levels than non-NDErs. And as of 2021, no study has ever shown decreased levels of oxygen during NDEs.
Can't Drugs Produce NDEs?
Ketamine and psilocybin are the two substances most often cited as capable of producing mystical experiences that share elements with NDEs.
But Karl Jansen, psychiatrist and the world's leading expert on NDE-like ketamine experiences, has said the following after 12 years of study:
"I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience. It exists when we begin, and may persist when we end. Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist."
The Evidence
As Dr. Bruce Greyson writes in his book After,
"Far from leading us away from science and into superstition, NDE research actually shows that by applying the methods of science to the nonphysical aspects of our world, we can describe reality much more accurately than if we limit our science to nothing but physical matter and energy."
Veridical NDEs
A veridical NDE is one in which the experiencer acquires information during the NDE that should have been impossible to know, which is later confirmed to be accurate upon regaining consciousness.
In other words, the experiencer obtains verifiable information through means that can't be explained by any conventional understanding of perception or cognition.
One striking example: Dr. Kenneth Ring documents 21 cases of accurate visual perception in blind individuals during their NDEs in his book Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind.
Accurately Describing Resuscitations
Two separate studies, conducted by cardiologist Michael Sabom and intensive care nurse Penny Sartori, compared NDE experiencers' descriptions of their own resuscitations to those of cardiac arrest survivors who hadn't had an NDE.
The findings were striking…
Patients who reported leaving their bodies described their resuscitations with high accuracy, while every cardiac arrest survivor who hadn't had an NDE made major mistakes in describing the equipment and procedures used during their resuscitation.
Out-of-Body Evidence
A review of 93 reports of out-of-body perception during NDEs, conducted by Jan Holden, found that 92 percent were completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent were completely erroneous. In other words, 92 percent of experiencers accurately described what was happening in the physical world around them while they were clinically dead.
As Dr. Greyson notes,
"The fact that any out-of-body perceptions are accurate should be enough to make us scratch our heads."
Realer Than Real Memories
Dr. Bruce Greyson and psychiatric trainee Lauren Moore used the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire, a widely used scale designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of fantasies or dreams, to evaluate NDErs' recollections of their experiences.
The results were remarkable.
NDEs were remembered as more real than both imagined events and actual real-life events. Experiencers' memories of their NDEs had more detail, clarity, context, and more intense emotional qualities than memories of anything they'd experienced in ordinary life.
Spiritual Evidence
The spiritual evidence, while less tangible, is perhaps even more compelling to an open mind.
Because so many experiencers, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof, describe various spiritual realms in strikingly similar ways.
This is particularly notable when it comes to lesser-known spiritual places that experiencers often had no prior awareness of before their NDE.
For instance, many people who visit what they describe as the Akashic Records during their NDE had no prior knowledge that such a place existed. And yet they experience it and describe it in remarkably consistent ways: vast rectangular buildings with glowing white transparent walls, long marble tables stretching into the distance, thick books lining every shelf.
What's more, experiencers almost universally describe these places as feeling deeply familiar, as if they've been there many, many times before.
Many experiencers also describe a life review in which they revisit all the moments of their current life in vivid detail, often holographically and from an outsider's perspective. Notably, experiencers describe feeling firsthand the emotions of every person they interacted with throughout their lifetime, including the direct impact of their own actions on others.
Dr. Greyson has also found, across four decades of research, that it's not uncommon for experiencers to describe things that completely contradict their cultural and religious beliefs. In other words, NDEs don't seem to be shaped by what people expect to experience.
Two Extraordinary NDEs
There are literally thousands of documented NDE cases, each extraordinary in its own way.
The two shared here were selected because they offer profound insights for spiritual believers and raise profound questions for skeptics.
Kimberly Clark-Sharp
Kimberly Clark-Sharp's NDE is one of the most well-documented and widely cited in the literature.
Her account, described in her book After the Light, is extraordinary in its detail and in the veridical elements it contains.
Rather than summarize it and risk losing the nuance of her experience, we'd encourage you to read her account directly here (also linked in the resources section below).
Dr. Eben Alexander
Dr. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon with over 25 years of experience at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in the US. Before his own NDE, he was quick to dismiss his patients' accounts as hallucinations.
That changed in 2008, when Dr. Alexander contracted acute bacterial meningoencephalitis and fell into a weeklong coma. He was given less than a 10 percent chance of survival, and if he did survive, he was expected to spend the rest of his life in a nursing home due to the severity of the brain damage he'd sustained.
Not only did Dr. Alexander survive, he made a full and miraculous neurological recovery. And when he woke up, he had vivid memories of an elaborate near death experience that had occurred while all neocortical functioning of his brain was completely shut down.
The experience was so profound that he spent the next six weeks documenting it in detail, producing a written account of more than 20,000 words.
Before we get into his description, it's worth briefly addressing the controversy surrounding his story. An Esquire article published in 2013 called his NDE into question and gained significant traction. However, the claims in that article have since been thoroughly debunked by experts and witnesses alike. Dr. Laura Potter, the one witness interviewed for the piece, quickly released a public statement saying her account was taken out of context and that "I felt my side of the story was misrepresented by the reporter. I believe Dr. Alexander has made every attempt to be factual in his accounting of events."
Several years after the article made headlines, leading NDE researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson was given access to Dr. Alexander's complete medical records. Greyson reviewed all 600-plus pages himself and had two other physicians independently review them as well. All three concluded independently that Alexander had been extremely close to death with a brain "as disabled as it could have been," and that he had witnessed things while comatose that he should not have been able to perceive.
In Dr. Alexander's own words:
"Those memories began in a primitive, coarse, unresponsive realm (the 'Earthworm's Eye View') from which I was rescued by a slowly spinning clear white light associated with a musical melody, that served as a portal up into rich and ultrareal realms. The Gateway Valley was filled with many earth-like and spiritual features: vibrant and dynamic plant life, with flowers and buds blossoming richly and no signs of death or decay, waterfalls into sparkling crystal pools, thousands of beings dancing below with great joy and festivity, all fueled by swooping golden orbs in the sky above, angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems that thundered through my awareness, and a lovely girl on a butterfly wing who proved months later to be central to my understanding of the reality of the experience."
He continues:
"While writing it all up weeks later, God seemed too puny a little human word with much baggage, clearly failing to describe the power, majesty and awe I had witnessed... All of my understanding of space, time, mass, energy, information, soul journeys, causality, the afterlife, reincarnation, meaning and purpose took on extraordinary relationships that I am even now just beginning to unravel."
And he concludes:
"My coma taught me many things. First and foremost, near-death experiences, and related mystical states of awareness, reveal crucial truths about the nature of existence. Simply dismissing them as hallucinations is convenient for many in the conventional scientific community, but only continues to lead them away from the deeper truth these experiences are revealing to us."
The Experiencer vs. The Skeptic
It's worth pausing here to reflect on why NDEs remain so controversial despite the weight of the evidence.
It's difficult to change in general. And it's notoriously difficult to change our beliefs, because our egos have built their identities upon them. An NDE often requires the experiencer to make a radical and humbling admission: that there is indeed something far greater beyond this day-to-day experience we call life. The atheist opens her arms to spirituality. The agnostic softens into wonder. Within this shift is a quiet but freeing acknowledgment of having had it "wrong" all along.
The skeptic, on the other hand, isn't required to change much of anything. He can cling to his existing beliefs because his identity is entangled with them. And his desire to be right about something that defines his ego can become more important than genuinely opening to the possibility of things he can't yet explain.
There's nothing wrong with healthy skepticism. In fact, it's essential. But there's a meaningful difference between genuine open-minded inquiry and the kind of reflexive, identity-protecting dismissal that's dressed up as scientific rigor.
As Dr. Greyson puts it: "Pretending something didn't happen just because we can't explain it is the exact opposite of science."
Ultimately, the invitation here isn't to believe blindly. It's to discern for yourself. Look at the evidence from multiple angles, listen to your own inner knowing, and resist the urge to outsource your conclusions to any external authority, including this one.
What NDEs Teach Us About Life
As NDE researcher Kenneth Ring writes,
"The true promise of the NDE is not so much what it suggests about an afterlife, as inspiring and comforting as those glimpses are, but what it says about how to live NOW."
Here are some of the most consistent and profound life lessons that emerge from NDE accounts across cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems:
Being human is a role the soul has taken on to expand its perception. Life on earth isn't the totality of existence. It's one extraordinarily precious learning opportunity within a vastly larger reality.
What we perceive through our physical senses is a tiny fragment of what reality actually is. NDEs are thought to take place in the astral realm, which is itself considered to be an intermediate dimension that merely connects the physical world to higher light realms. In other words, the extraordinary beauty experiencers encounter in their NDEs is just the beginning of what's out there.
Don't take things so seriously. The divine, as many experiencers report, has an excellent sense of humor. And what feels so urgent, so catastrophic, so all-consuming in the day-to-day turns out to be one tiny drop in an ocean of infinite existence.
Death isn't something to fear. In the words of NDEr LeaAnn Carroll, "My death experience is more real to me than life." And NDEr Yolaine Stout: "This was more real than anything on earth. By comparison, my life in my body had been a dream." The death of the body, it seems, is the return to the fullness of life and the limitless nature of our consciousness.
The purpose of life has nothing to do with money, materials, power, or recognition. It's about connection, evolution, expansion, and at the end of the day, love. It always comes back to love.
Final Thoughts
In the words of neuroscientist Charles Whitehead,
"Anomalies tend to get swept under the carpet until there are so many of them that the furniture starts to fall over."
The evidence for NDEs is substantial, rigorously documented, and growing. And yet we don't have to wait for science to catch up before we allow ourselves to be moved by what these experiences suggest.
When our hearts nudge us in the direction of believing in the seemingly unbelievable, that nudge is worth paying attention to. The mind might never fully verify what we know to be true from some deeper place within. But if believing in it brings hopefulness, peace, or a greater sense of meaning, isn't that worth something in itself?
We don't have to wait for external permission to trust our own inner knowing.
References and Further Reading
Books
Greyson, B. (2021). After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. St. Martin's Essentials.
Holden, J. M. (2009). Veridical perception in near-death experiences. In J. M. Holden, B. Greyson, and D. James (Eds.), The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation. Praeger/ABC-CLIO.
McCannon, T. (2010). The Angelic Origins of the Soul. Bear and Company.
Moody, R. (1975). Life After Life. Mockingbird Books.
Ring, K. and Cooper, S. (1999). Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. William James Center for Consciousness Studies.
Rivas, T. and Smit, R. (2013). A near-death experience with veridical perception described by a famous heart surgeon and confirmed by his assistant surgeon. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 31(3).
Websites and Research Organizations
International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS): iands.org
Near Death Experience Research Foundation: nderf.org
Near Death (website): near-death.com
UVA's Division of Perceptual Studies: med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies
Dr. Raymond Moody's website: lifeafterlife.com
Dr. Bruce Greyson's website
Dr. Eben Alexander's website
Videos
ABCs of NDEs with Dr. Raymond Moody
Exceptional NDEs with Dr. Jeffrey Long
Evidence of the Afterlife with Dr. Jeffrey Long
Articles
Common Elements Found in NDEs
The Akashic Records 101
Early Studies in Parapsychology at Duke University
Full Neurological Recovery from Escherichia coli Meningitis Associated with Near-Death Experience
Eben Alexander Answers Skeptics' Criticisms
NASA's A Universe of Sound
Documents
Veridical NDE Research List (free full-text articles)
CIA's Declassified Project Stargate Documents
