You Will Never Die!
This Course Will Give You the Proof
The Afterlife Research and Education Institute has created apps with:
- The most compelling evidence that you will live on after your body dies.
- How you can communicate with your loved ones in the afterlife.
- What your personality style is and why you have conflict with people in your life.
Near-Death Experiences Show We Live On After the Brain Stops Functioning
Introduction to Lesson 10
Near-death experiences are, in a sense, the closest thing to a firsthand report from the other side of the transition — accounts from people who were clinically dead, by every medical measure, and who returned describing a continuity of consciousness that conventional neuroscience struggles to explain.
Accounts from physicians and nurses abound about people brought back from near death who have experiences of entering a warm, loving environment where they speak with their deceased loved ones. The phenomenon was named a near-death experience (NDE) by Raymond Moody. During NDEs, many people see and hear what was going on as physicians and nurses worked frantically to revive them while they were unconscious. They recount statements made by those in the room, describe people and instruments, and even accurately restate conversations that went on in other rooms.
An organization of people who have had the experience, called the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS), now has tens of thousands of members. Dozens of books describe cases of people who have had near-death experiences. A Gallup and Proctor poll in 1982 estimated that 5 percent of the adult population of the United States have had near-death experiences. Other surveys put the number at 7.5 percent.
Near-death experiences, in other words, are commonplace. One of the most remarkable things about NDEs is that while brain dead, without a trace of brain function, these people see and hear what is going on in the scene where their body lies unconscious, and at times in other rooms of the same building. They then remember all of the details and recount them to the astonishment of physicians, nurses, and family members.
More Acute Senses When They Should Be Failing
Perhaps the most puzzling feature reported across near-death experiences is this: at precisely the moment the brain should be shutting down from lack of oxygen, experiencers consistently describe perception becoming sharper, not dimmer — clearer thought, more vivid color, more acute awareness than in ordinary waking life. This runs directly counter to what should happen if consciousness is simply a product of neural activity failing under oxygen deprivation.
This is one of the many hundreds of accounts of patients completely unconscious, almost dead, who had clear senses and described what happened while he was completely unconscious.
A nurse had removed the dentures of an unconscious heart attack victim and put them into the drawer on the table in the operating room, called a crash cart.
A week after the incident, as the nurse was distributing medications, she came to the heart attack victim’s room and he exclaimed excitedly, “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are. Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart. It had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” At the point when the nurse removed his dentures, the patient was in a deep coma with his eyes closed, but he was perfectly accurate about what had happened.
The nurse said this about what the man then reported.
“When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated, as well as the appearance of those present, like myself.
At the time that he observed the situation, he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted.
The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death.” Four weeks later, he left hospital as a healthy man.
Verified Observations During Clinical Death
In some of the most carefully documented cases, patients who were clinically flatlined — with no measurable brain activity — later accurately described specific events occurring in the operating room, conversations held by medical staff, or objects deliberately placed out of normal view as part of formal research protocols designed to test exactly this possibility.
Cardiologists and other medical professionals have reported that 10% to 20% of their cardiac arrest patients describe near-death experiences in great detail. Researchers who have studied these cases have found no conventional physiological explanation for how such accurate perception could occur.
A famous NDE demonstrating that people are having sensory experiences when the body’s senses were not functioning was the subject of a documentary, “The Day I Died,” and reported in Light and Death, a book by cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom.
Sabom explains that Pam Reynolds Lowery (1956–2010) experienced a near-death experience (NDE) in 1991 during a high-risk brain surgery to remove a giant aneurysm at the Barrow Neurological Institute. The procedure, known as hypothermic cardiac arrest or “standstill” surgery, involved lowering her body temperature to 10°C, stopping her heartbeat and breathing, draining all blood from her head causing her brain activity to flatline, and generating loud, continuous clicking in both ears that would drown out all sound from the operating room.
During this period of clinical death, Reynolds reported an out-of-body experience in which she floated above the operating table and observed the surgery with heightened clarity. This is a summary of Sabom’s account.
To remove a large deadly aneurysm from beneath her brain, Pam Reynolds was put into a state of hypothermic cardiac arrest. Her body temperature was lowered to sixty degrees.
Her heartbeat and breathing were stopped and the blood was drained from her head. Her brainwaves flattened, showing no brain activity.
After her successful operation, she was warmed and her own blood was returned to her body. When she could communicate, she reported a startling near-death experience.
She gave remarkably accurate, detailed descriptions of the surgical procedure.
She reported that someone in the operating room said something about her arteries being small, and she described the Midas Rex bone saw as looking like an electric toothbrush, having interchangeable blades and a high-pitched whirring sound.
These things she saw and heard occurred during the time when she was deeply unconscious, but before the blood was actually drained from her.
During the time she described hearing and seeing details, her eyes were taped shut and her ears were plugged with devices that monitored her brain stem activity.
These devices produced loud clicks measuring ninety-five decibels at a rate of eleven point three clicks per second, drowning out all outside noise.
During the near-death experience, she reported floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel to a light, at the end of which her deceased relatives and friends were waiting.
Her long-dead grandmother was there. Eventually, her deceased uncle took her back and she reentered her body.
She said that during the experience she saw with vision that was brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision.
When she heard her deceased grandmother calling, the sound was clearer hearing than she had with her ears, but her auditory functions were shut down by the noisy clicks and she was unconscious.
Five eminent cardiac and medical specialists, Dr. Sam Parnia, Dr. Van Lommel, Dr. Robert Spetzler, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and Dr. Michael Sabom all supported the accuracy of Pam’s stated experience during her clinical death, reporting that what she saw corresponded to what actually happened.
She saw and heard details while either sensory deprived and unconscious, with her eyes taped shut and hearing blocked by loud clicks, or while she was brain dead. Her mind was released from the constraints of the unconscious body so she had clear sensory experiences without the body.
An Unconscious Migrant Worker Sees an Object on a Hospital Ledge
Kimberly Clark Sharp, MSW, LiCSW, is a near-death experiencer and author of After the Light. Named one of the “40 Most Influential People Under the Age of 40” in the Pacific Northwest in 1987 for her work in the field of death and dying, Kimberly pioneered the field of critical care social work, founded the department of social work at the world’s first bone marrow transplant center and founded Seattle International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), the world’s oldest support group for NDErs. She also taught death and dying at the University of Washington School of Medicine and is a retired clinical assistant professor.
In this account, Sharp describes a patient named Maria who was near death and unconscious when she experienced rising up out of the hospital and seeing something on a window ledge.
Maria a Hispanic migrant worker suffered a massive heart attack and was rushed to Harborview’s coronary care unit. She went into cardiac arrest. The team successfully resuscitated her.
The next day, Maria insisted that during her cardiac arrest, she had left her body. First, she saw herself from above, watching the doctors work on her body. She saw the paper from the cardiac monitor flowing out of the machine and kicked under the bed. Then she found herself outside the building. And there, she noticed a man’s tennis shoe lying on an outside window ledge on the third floor. It was dark blue, well-worn, with a distinctive scuff mark where the little toe would be. She said the shoelace was tucked under the heel.
Maria begged Kimberly Clark Sharp, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington who was working with patients in the hospital, to find the shoe to prove to others that she had really been there, on a ledge far from her while her body lay in the resuscitation room. Clark went to the third floor and began checking rooms on the north side of the building. She found the shoe. It was dark blue, scuffed on the left, lace under the heel, exactly as Maria had described.
Why Is This Evidence Beyond a Reasonable Doubt of the Afterlife?
Near-death experiences present a direct contradiction that conventional neuroscience has never adequately resolved: in every case in this lesson, perception became sharper, not dimmer, at precisely the moment the brain was least capable of producing it. The denture patient was in a deep coma with his eyes closed, yet accurately described events, people, and a room he could not have perceived through ordinary senses. Pam Reynolds’s brain was flattened — showing no electrical activity whatsoever — while her ears were physically blocked by clicking devices and her eyes were taped shut, and she nonetheless accurately reported specific conversation and equipment in the operating room, later confirmed by the surgical team itself.
Maria’s case removes the last remaining objection some might raise about these accounts — that patients may unconsciously absorb fragments of conversation even while unconscious. Maria did not report anything happening inside the room where her body lay. She described a physical object in a location she had never been, outside the building entirely, on a ledge three floors up that no patient, however alert, could have seen or reached. Kimberly Clark Sharp did not take Maria’s word for it — she went and checked, room by room, and found the shoe exactly as described, in a location Maria could not have known about through any of her five senses.
What makes this evidence difficult to dismiss is not any single account but the consistency of the pattern across unrelated patients, unrelated hospitals, and unrelated witnesses with every professional incentive toward skepticism. When a brain with no measurable activity produces perception more accurate than the brain functioning normally beside it, and when that perception extends to physical objects and locations entirely outside the range of any of the body’s senses, the evidence points toward a conclusion the data itself keeps forcing on cautious, skeptical medical professionals again and again: that consciousness does not depend on the brain to see, to hear, or to know.
You have now seen ten distinct lines of evidence, developed independently, by researchers who rarely knew of one another’s work, converging on the same conclusion: your loved one’s consciousness did not end. In Area 2, we turn to what the evidence suggests actually happens in the moment of transition itself.
Questions and Topics for Group Discussion
- Near-death experiences involve heightened, not diminished, perception at the exact moment the brain should be failing. What do you make of that reversal of what we’d expect?
- Dr. Sabom’s account involves specific, later-verified details perceived while the patient’s own senses should have been completely unable to register them. How does verified, specific detail change how you weigh an account like this compared to a more general description of light and peace?
- Surveys suggest as many as 1 in 13 to 1 in 20 adults have had a near-death experience. Does learning how common these experiences are change how you think about them?
- Physicians and nurses are often the ones most astonished by what patients report after resuscitation. What do you think it’s like to be a medical professional encountering this evidence repeatedly in your own work?
- This is the final lesson of Area 1. Looking back across all ten lessons — voices, materializations, ITC, spontaneous appearances, guided connections, trance and mental mediums, dreams, and now near-death experiences — which single piece of evidence, from any lesson, has stayed with you the most, and why?
You Can Be Part of Helping Humanity Change.
Your support helps bring this work to everyone suffering from fear of death or grief over the passing of a loved one.
If the Afterlife Research and Education Institute’s work means something to you, please support it with $6 a month or $65 per year or another donation amount you specify.
- The most compelling evidence that you will live on after your body dies.
- How you can communicate with your loved ones in the afterlife.
- What your personality style is and why you have conflict with people in your life.