by Colin Wilson
In 1942, an American researcher, Dr Gertrude Schmeidler, of Radcliffe College, produced a result that was almost as important. She was testing a group of students for extra-sensory perception (ESP), and before the experiment, she asked them which of them believed in the possibility of ESP and which didn’t. She labelled the ‘believers’ sheep and the ‘nonbelievers’ goats. When she examined the results of the card-guessing tests, she discovered that the sheep had scored significantly above chance. But what was even more interesting was that the goats had scored significantly below chance. They were unconsciously ‘cheating’ to support their view that ESP does not exist. In doing so, they were revealing as much extra-sensory perception as the sheep, but using it negatively. For years, mediums and psychics had been explaining that their powers often failed to work in the presence of sceptics, and the sceptics had jeered at this as a feeble excuse. Gertrude Schmeidler had demonstrated that scepticism is not necessarily as scientific and detached as it pretends to be.
These results were taken to heart by Dr Helmut Schmidt, a research scientist at the Boeing Laboratory in Seattle. If people are more likely to show extra-sensory perception in a friendly, trusting atmosphere, then it would be a great advantage if the scientist could devise an experiment in which cheating is quite impossible. Then he can relax and try to coax the subject into the right mood for ESP. Schmidt met this challenge by devising a machine that used decaying radioactive material to make various lamps go on and off. Nobody has the least idea when the next radioactive atom will ‘decay’ and shoot out a high-speed particle. Schmidt’s subjects had to guess which lamp would be the next to light up, and press a button. Then the machine automatically registered a hit or miss.
Schmidt soon discovered a number of subjects who scored well above chance. Many of these were already psychic — one physicist admitted that he often dreamed of the future. Schmidt also produced a perfect demonstration of Gertrude Schmeidler’s ‘sheep and goats’ argument — one extrovert American girl who produced scores well above chance, and one introverted South American whose scores were equally far below chance, demonstrating as much psychic ability as the extrovert, but used in a negative direction. These two subjects were also able to demonstrate psychokinesis — mind over matter — by willing lights to flash on and off in a particular direction. Helmut Schmidt was the first scientist to demonstrate the reality of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis in the laboratory.
These advances were impressive. But anyone who took an interest in psychical research in the 1960s and early 1970s had to admit that it had all become rather boring. Card-guessing games and random-number generators may produce marvellously convincing proofs of the reality of extra-sensory perception or precognition, but it is hard for most people to work themselves into a state of excitement about it. This is not quite what Myers and Sidgwick had in mind on that famous starlit walk.
There was at least one researcher who was still working in the older tradition. Dr Karlis Osis, born in Riga, Latvia in 1917, had worked with Rhine at Duke University on extra-sensory perception and precognition before he became research director at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York. Osis was fascinated by the kind of death-bed visions reported by Sir William Barrett — like the case of ‘Mrs B’,* who saw her father and sister in the room as she was dying, although she had no idea that her sister was dead. He called them ‘Peak in Darien cases’, from the last line of Keats’s sonnet — a suggestion of reverence and awe. He had the sensible idea of circulating a questionnaire to doctors and nurses, asking them what they had observed about dying patients. Six hundred and forty questionnaires were returned, covering more than thirty-five thousand cases. In 1961, Osis published his observations in Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses.
One of the first things Osis discovered was that fear is not the dominant emotion in most dying patients. Discomfort and pain were commoner; but what was surprising was the large number of patients who were elated at the time of death, even to the point of exaltation and seeing visions. These amounted to about one in twenty. The visions were often of ‘heaven’ — of beautiful cities or a ‘promised land’. A six-year-old boy dying of polio saw beautiful flowers and heard birds singing. Most of these patients were fully awake and in clear consciousness, with a normal temperature. Many patients who were brought back from the dead by medical attention were often unwilling to be revived and expressed sentiments like ‘I want to go back.’ One doctor, recalling two personal experiences of near death hallucinations, suggested that this might be due to oxygen starvation of the brain. He had been close to death by drowning, and also by oxygen starvation when his breathing equipment froze up in an aeroplane; on both occasions he experienced beautiful imagery and a feeling of deep happiness; he resented being revived from drowning. But other medical experts have disagreed, and Osis points out that such visions often occurred in fully conscious patients long before the final slide into the death coma.
In his summary of conclusions, Osis remains cautious. He notes that Barrett was mistaken to believe that all death-bed visions of relatives involve those who are dead. He found that 52 per cent were of dead relatives, 28 per cent of living relatives, and the remaining 20 per cent of religious figures. But the Census of Hallucination taken by the Society for Psychical Research showed that people in normal health saw twice as many living relatives as dead ones. So ‘predominance of hallucinations of the dead seems to be a real characteristic of terminal cases’. And in reply to the obvious criticism that dying patients may be sedated or in states of fever, he points out that most of the visions of dead relatives happened to patients who had not been sedated, who had no ‘hallucinogenic pathology’, and who were fully awake and able to respond intelligently to questions. So in its general conclusions, Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses backs up the conclusions reached by Barrett in Death Bed Visions: that dying people usually feel no fear of dying, and that they often believe they are being met by dead relatives.
Osis concludes his study by remarking that his observations need verifying, particularly by studies in other cultures. This hint was taken up by his colleague Erlendur Haraldsson, who conducted similar studies in India. It might have been reasonable to expect that, in a totally different culture — particularly one that places less emphasis on life after death — death-bed visions would be of a different kind. Haraldsson discovered this was not so; the death-bed visions of Indians were much the same as those of Americans.
Osis and Haraldsson approached the problem of death in the detached spirit of a Society for Psychical Research investigation. The other major investigation of the 1960s was undertaken with altogether more emotional commitment. Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross had visited the extermination camp Maidanek at the end of the Second World War, and established a camp for refugees on the Vista river in Poland. In America in the early 1960s, now married to a professor of neurology and pathology in Chicago, she was struck by the American tendency to ignore death and pretend that it does not exist. She often found that doctors would refuse to admit the terminally ill to their wards. She gained nationwide notoriety when she invited a twenty-year-old girl who was dying of leukaemia to her classes at the University of Chicago, and Life ran an article about the experiment. The death of this girl in 1970 confirmed Dr Kübler-Ross’s feeling that our ‘death-denying society’ needs to have its attitudes changed.
To begin with, her attitude towards life after death was one of scepticism; she was only concerned with the psychological problems involved in accepting death. Gradually, her study of the dying led her to the conviction that both ‘survival’ and reincarnation are established facts. Her own observation of death-bed visions of the dying confirmed that they often see dead relatives. She noted, for example, that while dying children hope to be with mummy and daddy, they actually tend to see deceased grandparents on the point of death.
Her conclusions, set out in books like Of Death and Dying and Questions and Answers on Death and Dying,
are not presented as systematically as those of Osis and Haraldsson, but their general outline is clear enough. She believes that everyone knows the time of his own death, and that everyone who dies is met by dead relatives or other loved ones. She has also come to accept that dying should be regarded as a climax of living, and perhaps as its most beautiful experience. She is convinced that all human beings have ‘guides’ who continually watch over them, and who can be seen in moments of psychic stress. As to the ‘world beyond death’, she has accepted two major conclusions that are stated repeatedly in the literature of spiritualism: that time in ‘the next world’ is quite unlike time as we know it, and that there is no ‘judgement’ of the dead; they judge — and punish — themselves.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s obvious emotional identification with her subject has led to accusations that she has allowed her beliefs to dictate her findings. This may well be so. But it is also clear that these findings are based upon the study of hundreds of cases, and that they are basically consistent with those of Barrett, Osis and Haraldsson.
By the late 1960s, the subject of near-death experiences had begun to attract an increasing number of serious investigators. Two of these, Russell Noyes and Ray Kletti, came upon some long-forgotten work on this subject by a professor of geology from Zurich, Albert Heim, whose own near-death experience had occurred when he was leading a climbing party in the Alps in 1871. A gust of wind blew his hat off, and as he tried to grab it, he fell seventy feet to a snow-covered ledge. The fall only occupied a few seconds, yet he felt that time had expanded into far more than that:
Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundred fold velocity … I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me … Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light, without anxiety and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul. I became ever more surrounded by a splendid blue heaven with delicate and rosy and violet cloudlets. I swept into it painlessly and softly and I saw that now I was falling freely through the air and that under me a snow field lay waiting.
Heim was knocked unconscious by his fall but survived. And the exquisitely peaceful quality of the experience led him to begin collecting other people’s observations on climbing accidents. He claimed that, over twenty years of research, he had discovered that 95 per cent of the victims had experienced similar feelings to his own. Heim’s conclusion was that people who had died from falls had experienced the same feeling of peace and reconciliation at the end.
Noyes and Kletti published a translation of Heim’s observations, and added much research of their own. Unlike Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, they were unable to accept the view that such experiences provide some kind of proof of survival. Their own conclusion was that when man faces death, he experiences a ‘depersonalisation’ which is basically a psychological defence against death. The result is a kind of ‘death trance’ whose purpose is to make death easy. The sensation of seeing the whole of one’s past life also seems common to these experiences. Lyall Watson quotes the case of a nineteen-year-old skydiver who fell from a height of three thousand feet.* ‘All my past life flashed before my eyes … I saw my mother’s face, all the houses I’ve lived in, the military academy I attended, the faces of friends, everything.’ In fact, he had a soft landing and broke only his nose. These experiences of heightened memory have obviously a great deal in common with the ‘flashback’ experience discovered by Wilder Penfield when he touched the cerebral cortex with an electric probe during an operation on an epileptic and induced memories of childhood.
In the mid-1960s, when Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was beginning her research into the death experience, a young philosophy student at the University of Virginia, Raymond Moody, was also starting to collect accounts of near-death experiences. One of the men who aroused his interest in the subject was a psychiatrist, Dr George Ritchie of Virginia, who, as a young soldier, had apparently ‘died’ and then revived. In December 1943, Ritchie had been in hospital in Texas with a respiratory infection. He began to spit blood and lost consciousness; when he woke up he saw his own body lying on the bed. Outside in the corridor a ward boy walked through him; a man he tapped on the shoulder ignored him. He tried to get back into his body but found it impossible. Then Ritchie experienced some kind of religious revelation. The room became ‘brighter than a thousand arc lights’ and a figure he identified as Jesus appeared. After a tour of a great city in which he was shown the consequences of sin, Ritchie woke up in his body, quite convinced he had died. Like so many who have been through the near-death experience, Ritchie insisted that it was quite unlike a dream; it all seemed quite real.
For the next eleven years, Moody went on collecting near-death experiences, quite unaware that anyone else was doing so — at this stage he had never heard of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. Three years’ teaching philosophy convinced him he would rather be a doctor, and he took a medical degree. Over the years, he collected about a hundred and fifty near-death experiences, was struck by their basic similarities, and wrote a short book about them called Life After Life. When his publisher sent a proof to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, she commented that she might have written the same book herself. Life After Life appeared in 1977, and became a national bestseller.
The similarities are certainly striking. There was, first of all, the sense of peace and happiness described by Heim, the Rev. Bertrand and so many others. There was another experience that appeared again and again: the impression of moving through a dark tunnel, usually with a light at the end. ‘I was moving through this — you’re going to think this is weird — through this long dark place. It seemed like a sewer or something.’ ‘It was like being in a cylinder …’ ‘I entered head first into a narrow and very very dark passageway.’ ‘Suddenly I was in a very dark, very deep valley.’
In case after case, the person emerges from the tunnel to find himself looking at his own body. (There were, however, many cases in which the experience began with the out-of-the-body experience.) A youth who almost drowned saw his body ‘in the water about three or four feet away, bobbing up and down. I viewed my body from the back, and slightly to the right side.’ A woman who ‘died’ with heart trouble felt herself:
sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed — actually it seemed as if I went through the rail — on down to the floor. Then I started rising upward, slowly. On my way up, I saw more nurses come running into the room … then I stopped, floating right below the ceiling, looking down.
Compare this with a case described by Kübler-Ross, in which a woman in intensive care went into a critical condition, and the nurse rushed out of the room to get help:
Meanwhile, this woman felt herself float out of her body. In fact, she said she could look down and see how pale her face looked. Yet at the same time she felt absolutely wonderful. She had a great sense of peace and relief.
The same thing was described again and again by Moody’s subjects: the out-of-the-body experience, accompanied by a blissful sense of timelessness. Another recurrent feature was the perception of the ‘new body’ — shaped like the physical body that had been left behind. Patients often became aware of this ‘new body’ when they realised they were no longer in the old one — often by trying to communicate with other people. ‘I tried talking to them but nobody could hear me, nobody would listen to me.’ ‘… they would just walk through me’. The physical senses often seem to be heightened, so that seeing and hearing are far more keen than in the physical body. But the ‘hearing’, when it concerns voices, seems to be a form of telepathy or thought-transfer. (This again is a feature that can be found in records of near-death and after-‘death’ experiences since the beginning of psychical research: communication becomes telepathic.) There is often
a feeling of awful loneliness, but this is usually dispelled when the ‘dead’ person becomes aware of others like himself: sometimes other people who have died — relatives or friends — and sometimes an entity or spirit he believes to be a guardian angel. One man was told by such a spirit that ‘I have helped you through this stage of your existence, but now I am going to turn you over to others.’ One of the commonest experiences was of a bright light — like the ‘thousand arc lights’ described by George Ritchie — which seems to radiate a sense of love and warmth; Christians, understandably, are inclined to identify this with Jesus. There is a sense of direct telepathic communication, without language. ‘It was like talking to a person, but a person wasn’t there.’ The ‘light’ may ask probing questions about what the person has done with his life. And this, Moody found, was often followed by ‘flashbacks’, a flood of memories in which the past life is seen in review.
Very often there was a sense of some kind of border or limit — like the big stones described by Wiltse. It may be a body of water, a distant shore, a grey mist, or many other things. The ‘dead’ person experiences a conviction that if he passes this limit, then he is permanently ‘dead’. Until it is passed, there is a choice of returning to the body. Since all Moody’s interviewees had returned from the near-death experience, he heard many different versions of how the return to the body was accomplished. ‘I just fell right back down to my body. The next thing I knew I was in my body again.’ ‘… it was just like a swoooosh and I felt like I was drawn through a limited area, a kind of funnel, I guess’. But the majority of people simply woke up and found themselves ‘alive’ again.