By Wayne Allensworth
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
— John 8:12
Written in the fourth century BC, Plato’s Republic includes the oldest recorded account of what Dr. Sam Parnia, author of Lucid Dying, calls “recalled experiences of death” (RED). In that account, a Greek soldier, Er, falls on the battlefield, but is revived in a funeral parlor. What he described after revival echoes down through millennia of human experience: a journey from darkness to light. Spiritual guides accompanied him on his journey. He faced a moment of judgment. The Greek soldier who had passed into what Parnia calls “the gray zone,” a passage from life to death, said he felt peaceful, even joyous, and experienced visions of great beauty. What he described was what the Greeks called his psyche, his spirit, his soul, his consciousness, passing beyond our world and into the next.
Er’s story was not unique. Through the ages, others who died and were revived told the same story. Artists have frequently attempted to depict and interpret what happens when we die, painting their own visions of Heaven and Hell, of Paradise and Judgement. But only one, as related by Parnia, the famed 15th-16th Century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, depicted the journey through the gray zone from life to death. In his Ascent of the Blessed (see above), Bosch depicted a large tunnel shaped like a funnel, which narrowed and erupted in a blinding white light near the top of the dark panel. In the middle of the rays of light, a solitary figure awaits as a white-robed, luminous, winged entity guides another person toward the light.
Beneath the funnel appears to be a staging area where others wait to begin their ascent. They are guided away from earth, becoming lighter, less attached to their bodies. Luminous entities are helping them along their way. Those ascending seem drawn toward the light, a light that illuminates the darkness. The Roman Catholic Bosch depicted these entities as angels. Had Bosch himself experienced the journey? Or had he heard of it from others, for as Parnia relates in his book, the scene that the Dutch artist depicted so many centuries ago did not surprise him when he first viewed the painting: Bosch was faithfully depicting many of RED’s core elements.
Lucid Dying is the culmination of almost 25 years of Parnia’s research and work as a critical care and resuscitation specialist. He is Director of Critical Care & Resuscitation Research at the New York University School of Medicine and co-chair of the cardiac arrest resuscitation committee at the NYU Langone Health System. He has published two previous books on RED, but Lucid Dying synthesizes his decades long research.
From NDEs to RED
Stories similar to Plato’s account circulated for centuries. But not until the 1950s-1960s did doctors begin hearing more of them from revived patients. Parnia explains that ventilators and life support systems had become more common, sophisticated and effective. What’s more, doctors, nurses, ambulance attendants, and members of the general public learned cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. They revived more patients in critical condition. Modern critical-care medicine created a new field of study — death and dying. Most of those revived did not remember what had happened. In most studies only a small percentage did, though in others as many as 10 to 20 percent recalled their experiences. By the 1970s, the phenomenon initially dubbed a Near Death Experience was becoming known globally. One of the first to research NDEs was Raymond Moody, a medical student who compiled 150 stories about passing into the gray zone and being revived. None of Moody’s subjects knew one another, but they all told him much the same story. Moody published his findings as Life After Life in 1975. His findings corresponded with previous stories about a series of experiences, dating from antiquity, shared by those who recalled the gray zone.
Parnia began resuscitation work in the 1990s. At the time, he was not familiar with Moody’s work, nor with the compilations of NDEs published by others in the nearly 20 years since Moody wrote his book. He revived patients in cardiac arrest, those who had “flat lined,” and would previously have been declared dead. And he began hearing stories from other critical care doctors, as well as from nurses, about gray-zone experiences of their patients. Getting to the bottom of those stories has become Parnia’s life work. He sought other doctors and medical staff who heard similar stories, then spoke to the revived. He has worked with doctors in the United Kingdom and with researchers at the University of Virginia, compiling, collating, and researching a growing number of what Parnia began calling RED. The stories came from people across the world and from different cultures who were medically dead but then revived. Parnia noted that they could not have been dreams, as some critics asserted. After all, could millions of people have the same dream? Was it some kind of common series of hallucinations? Parnia and his associates developed a rigorous methodology to judge his findings. He and his team’s methodology included using sophisticated computer and AI technology to collect, collate, and compare a great number of these stories, and the team has also compared to them the experiences of dreams and hallucinations, which are quite different from RED.
His most recent project has been using the latest technologies to assess brain function (or the lack of it) in patients undergoing resuscitation. Again, most do not survive and of those who do, only a small percentage recollect the experience. But their experiences are very much the same. Parnia concluded that those who pass into the gray zone experience a real event. It was neither a delusion nor a dream, nor a hallucination induced by a dying brain. And the time window for reviving those who had died was much wider than commonly assumed.
For starters, his research and that of others has revealed that brain tissue and organ functions can be revitalized in those who have died not just minutes but, in a few cases, even for hours after death. Irreversible brain damage after minutes of oxygen deprivation is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. He also concluded that traditional physicalist assumptions about consciousness — that consciousness is but the sum total of brain functions, an emergent property of physical mechanisms — are wrong. Parnia believes that consciousness is separate from brain function but works through it in a complementary manner to shape our experiences. Human will and choices are not an algorithm determined by genetics and physical processes. The processes signify the interface between the realm of consciousness and physical reality. Parnia compares consciousness to an electromagnetic impulse that can carry information — a field or pool of consciousness that exists beyond our present means of detection but manifests itself through our embodied selves. A bit of the field of consciousness develops as a personality via embodied experience.
It is just a matter of time, as Parnia sees it, before resuscitation technologies will revive many more of those who have died. He especially hopes that otherwise healthy people who suffer cardiac arrest can be safely revived and go on to lead productive lives. Death as defined by physicalists is an either/or phenomenon. A clear line separates life from death. And death is the end of consciousness, itself the result of physical mechanisms. Parnia has redefined death as a process, even as a medical condition that can be treated, so to speak, within a certain time window, the extent of which we still cannot determine. And it is not the end. “Life” as we commonly think of it is consciousness, psyche, spirit, or soul. And as Parnia puts it in Lucid Dying, the physical aspect of our humanity receives consciousness “at the beginning (in the womb)” and is detached from it as we enter the grey zone [my emphasis: whether he knows it or not, Parnia’s work has implications regarding abortion]. What’s more, consciousness exists all along the chain of being, even in creatures that lack brains, such as single-celled animals that seem to have consciousness, as they can learn, find food, and make decisions.
Indeed, Parnia’s conclusions about life, death, and the nature of consciousness overlap considerably with those of Iain McGilchrist, who also writes about a realm of consciousness, of a passage to death that returns a differentiated (through embodiment) bit of consciousness to the field of consciousness. McGilchrist also notes that a brain is not required for living things to display attributes of consciousness and intelligence. The lowly slime mold, for instance, can traverse a maze. He concludes that the ultimate source of consciousness and being is the ground of being, God. And, again like Parnia, McGilchrist writes that something is special about human consciousness, for only humans can write a symphony, create great works of art, build spacecraft that can travel to the stars, and ask the hard existential questions about our very being. We are not merely “meat computers,” clumps of cells passing through a meaningless universe. In fact, meaning and purpose are at the center of Parnia’s conclusions about what RED can tell us.
Into the Light
In Lucid Dying, Parnia shares the experiences of those who have had RED and describes them in detail. His in-depth dissection of these experiences is far too intricate to reproduce here, but with some slight variations, the experiences include the following attributes:
People heard themselves pronounced dead. They viewed what was happening from above the proceedings — the “out of body experience”—and when revived described in detail what was done, what was said, and described the thoughts of doctors, nurses, and relatives. Parnia’s team checked these recollections against those of medical personnel and relatives and found them remarkably accurate.
They felt detached from one’s body, though often there is a sense of an unseen cord or line that maintains contact with their physical selves. They passed through a long tunnel, moving toward a light. At the same time, those having this experience were not alarmed, but, rather, felt a sense of peace, that all was well.
Those passing into the gray zone reported encountering loved ones and friends who had died. But they also encountered a luminous, powerful, and knowledgeable being, one who was compassionate and benevolent, who acted as a guide on their journey. Some experienced seeing other beings along the way, beings who they knew to be of varying degrees of knowledge, as if they, too, were on a journey not yet completed. There was a hierarchy of spiritual development in the gray zone.
The luminous, benevolent guide took them through a detailed life review. They learned that the smallest incidents might be of far greater importance than they had anticipated. They judged themselves for things done and undone and had the singular sensation of being able to experience their lives not only from their own perspectives, but from the perspectives of people around them — including the especially unsettling experience of feeling all the anguish, physical and mental pain they had inflicted on others either intentionally or unintentionally.
Suicides have a particularly disturbing experience. The guide on their journey in the gray zone told them their problems were inescapable. They must go back and find a way to get through them. They must face the truth of what they had done and of how it had hurt others. That suicide did not resolve anything. Suicides also reported seeing a group of lost souls — perhaps suicides like themselves — who were wandering aimlessly, awaiting their time to return, contained in a sort of holding pen.
Gray zone travelers reported a heightened awareness. They felt fully alive in a way they had never experienced. Parnia calls this “hyper-consciousness,” as they see the whole of reality in 360 degrees. Many of the revived spoke of having been made aware of the totality of truth, of knowledge. The gray zone experience was so dazzling, so profound that they found its particulars ineffable. Based on certain scientific calculations, Parnia posits, our universe might have more dimensions than we realize and that the gray zone is an entry to another dimension of reality. In my father’s house are many mansions.
At the end of their journey was a final portal. If they passed through it, they could not return. But their guide told them that it was not their time, that they had more to do, and had to go back. Their initial reaction was a wish not to return. The sense of serenity, of being at peace, was that strong. But many of them acknowledged that they had spouses or children or other responsibilities, and so must return. Some returned to have a second chance, to do better, as their life reviews had made them aware that they were not the people they thought they were. They could do better and wanted to do better. Some were shaken by their life reviews. Upon their revival, they uniformly stated that they had a new outlook on life. They did not care so much for material things, money, or position. They wished to live for others and felt a sense of serenity and peace in their lives. RED became a life-changing event that had lasting effects. They no longer feared death, but instead saw it as a transition to a new stage of being.
The great light at the end of the tunnel was an entity greater than any other being they encountered. It was wiser, more knowledgeable; indeed, it was the source of all knowledge, of everything. Those who had been to the gray zone often described this ultimate being simply as “love” — unbounded, all- encompassing love. God is love. Parnia reviews the cases of all sorts of people from diverse cultures. Some were religious — Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus — and some described themselves as being atheists or agnostics. All perceived this ultimate being and acknowledged that being’s presence. God was no longer an abstraction or a fairy tale. Religious people sometimes identified their guide in the gray zone as an angel in keeping with their religious traditions. Others spoke simply of a compassionate, luminescent guide.
During the life review, Parnia stresses, what an individual said they believed in life didn’t count. It was not their record of attendance of religious services that mattered. It was their actions and their intentions that counted. The point of the review and of the return (some spoke of having sensed they had returned before, of having lived more than once) was to guide them on a journey aimed at becoming fully realized human beings. Of passing through what I might describe as a process some theologians call “theosis,” or sanctification, of becoming as perfect as we may by God living in us. As I read these accounts, I became acutely aware that the best model, indeed, the only model that fully corresponded with the aims of the process, was Christ. Christ told us to pick up our cross and follow him.
“What would Jesus do?” is a way of expressing our desire to imitate Christ in our daily lives. What matters is not stating a set of propositions but living in the light of Christ — faith made manifest in action. Intentionality, what is in one’s heart, is crucial in judging our actions. I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one can come to the father but through me, he said (John 14:6). I take that passage to emphasize focusing on Christ’s example and following his path to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Questions and Conclusions
One can ask many questions after reading Parnia’s book. As he himself points out, we only know what happened to those who came back. And those who didn’t? The people whose experiences Parnia describes are not the worst of us. They are not criminals or psychopaths, who seem to have no conscience, living only for themselves. Would they even admit to needing to improve? And I wonder what the life review of, say, an abortionist might be like. Something like hell, I’d guess.
Also, in conjunction with studies I’ve brought up in previous articles, we must consider other credibly reported phenomena that challenge the physicalist world view. Mystical experiences and visions. The efficacy of prayer in healing. Young children recounting the memories of deceased people they never met or even heard of. The existence of semi-autonomous personalities in the human psyche that appear capable of “possessing” individuals. Savants and geniuses who have expanded the realm of their consciousness beyond its normal capabilities, suggesting a vast field of consciousness with untapped resources. As Parnia relates, our physical embodiment necessarily focuses and limits consciousness to interact with the physical reality in front of us, and is apparently released from those limits, expanding to hyper-consciousness, after death. There are also stories of Indian yogis stopping and restarting their hearts and more. In view of Parnia’s research, it seems to me that a man who had one foot — or one fundamental aspect of his being — in the next world, who was in part the incarnation of the ultimate light at the end of our tunnel, could have mastery over the physical processes involved in life and death. If Sam Parnia can revive the dead, maybe he could, too.
We won’t know all the answers until we ourselves pass over and remain on the other side. But I find Parnia’s work encouraging and reassuring.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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