Floating over your own body, looking down while surgeons cut you open? Check.
Seeing a luminous tunnel that looks inviting to enter? Check.
A benevolent celestial figure that appears to soothe you? Check.
A joyous reunion with loved ones, including pets; though you’re aware they’re dead, they appear to be in the prime of their lives? Check.
Feeling an overwhelming sense of love and peace and that this new otherworldly realm is their real home? Check.
Death, be not proud, anymore. Man’s darkest fear is being challenged by scientists who have been able to roll back the expiry date of many individuals. Research results suggest that the final process of death is not grieving, but a transition into another state of consciousness. Breathing stops. The heart shuts down. The brain stops transmitting signals. You gently segue into nothingness, where Death waits to shroud you into the folds of its cloak of night. Modern medicine is pushing back.
The heart of the matter is the heart. “In the end, everyone dies of cardiac arrest,” observes Sam Parnia, Director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research at the Langone Medical Center, New York. In a global study, AWARE II, which lasted for three years starting from 2017, Parnia and his team monitored 567 patients in 25 hospitals around the world as they underwent cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after suffering cardiac arrest. Parnia, who is also Director, Human Consciousness Project at Britain’s University of Southampton, observed that of the 53 survivors, 11 reported a sense of awareness during CPR and six reported a near-death experience (NDE). He prefers to describe what happens to a human being during a fatal cardiac arrest as ‘actual death experiences’ (ADEs), to replace the commonly used NDEs.
DARKNESS AWAITS
Parnia is one of the world’s foremost medical scientists working on discovering the link between post-mortem life and the NDEs of patients who were resuscitated after lapsing into coma or even clinical death. The team faced a unique challenge: recording EEG readings and capturing brain activity during the few seconds between chest compressions. The brains of many victims of cardiac arrests kept sending out brain signatures of lucid consciousness as electric pulse beats for up to 10 minutes after the first stroke. In an interview in VICE magazine, Parnia said, “Most doctors are taught, and believe, that the brain dies after about five or 10 minutes of oxygen deprivation. One of the key points that come out of this study is that that is actually not true. Although the brain flatlines after the heart stops, and that happens within seconds, it doesn’t mean that it’s permanently damaged and (has) died. It’s just hibernating.
What we were able to show is that actually, the brain can respond and restore function again, even after an hour later, which opens up a whole window of opportunity for doctors to start new treatments.” The AWARE study’s findings upend modern human definitions of death and consciousness by establishing that the mind could exist long after death has begun. While studying the NDEs of people who died of cardiac arrest for a specific period and were brought back to life, researchers found that their recitations across continents, from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa and Australia, were the same. Dr Nishit Chandra, Director of Interventional Cardiology, Fortis Escorts Hospital, Delhi, says, “This commonality in the experiences can’t be ignored.”
THE ENIGMA OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Hindu scriptures, the Christian concept of purgatory, and the Buddhist belief that life and death is a continuum and consciousness doesn’t shut shop after death have a similar message: the soul lasts for aeons, until it merges with a higher power, or energy. Legendary psychiatrist Carl Jung coined the phrase ‘collective unconscious’, which “contains in itself the psychic life of our ancestors, right back to the earliest beginnings”. Hence, it keeps trying to “lead all conscious processes back into the old paths”.
Heart doctors and neurology researchers are coming closer to understanding the nature of the Jungian unconscious, which perhaps includes communication between those who have crossed over, using neural pathways of a yet-to-be-discovered network. Are NDEs real or hallucinations? Frankly, most doctors and psychologists don’t know. “I’ve never come across any patient of mine, here or in Europe, having such experiences,” says Mariella Zanoletti, a psychotherapist with a degree from King’s College, who practises in Delhi. Sadhvi Bhagwati Saraswati, International Director, Parmarth Niketan, Rishikesh, on the other hand, believes that NDEs are not hallucinations. She says, “The scientific world has tried to claim jurisdiction over a lot more than what it can logically explain. For example, love cannot be quantified, but it exists. The inability to prove through science doesn’t mean that it is not real. Likewise, NDE is a spiritual connect with the creator—the route between the aatma and parmatma.”
TAKING THE SPIRITUAL ROUTE
Jung’s guru, Sigmund Freud, insisted that the human unconscious behaves as if it is immortal and humans cannot imagine their own death; when we try to, we are mere spectators—just like people who have NDEs. Hindu philosophy and mythology centre on the nature of consciousness and reality. Take, for example, the story of King Janaka, Sita’s father, which appears in the Mandukya Upanishad. He was never defeated in war. But he had a bad dream in which he loses a war and goes into exile.
Hungry and weary of wandering, he gets a bowl of rice from a stranger. But the rice is knocked to the ground by a hawk. In those days, dreams and omens had special significance: King Janaka woke up in alarm. He went into a panic, questioning, “Is this reality, or is that reality?” A sanyasi asked Janaka, “Did you experience what happened in the dream? Can you experience your present waking state?” Janaka nodded. The sanyasi declared, “Neither that is the reality, nor this is the reality. Only you are the reality.” What Janaka experienced was oneirophrenia, which modern psychologists describe as a ‘hallucinatory dream-like state’ that can be mistaken for reality. Freud believed that dreams are the result of two mental processes: unconscious forces that construct a wish expressed by the dream, and the process of editing it, which forcibly distorts the expression of the wish. In Freud’s view, all dreams are forms of ‘wish fulfillment’. Says Siddha practitioner Bala Yogi, who is also one of the tantris at the Padmanabha Temple in Thiruvananthapuram:
“A philosophical interpretation of Janaka’s nightmare could be that he wished to familiarise himself with an unfamiliar state: loss and humiliation, which taught him evolution and detachment.” The modern medical trend of incorporating spirituality and New Age practices in treatments is gaining traction. Christina Puchalski, Director of the George Washington Institute of Spirituality and Health and an Associate Professor of Medicine, George Washington University Medical Center, is an advocate of the synergy between spirituality and healthcare. In a paper on how clinicians understand patients better by knowing their spiritual history, she defines spirituality as something that allows a person to experience life’s transcendent meaning. Spiritual questions that arise in patients who are gravely ill or dying are: What gives my life meaning? Why is this thing happening to me? How will I survive this loss and what will happen to me when life ends? In spite of slim evidence, NDEs can help both the clinician and the patient relate to and support each other. In an article titled When Mortality Calls, Don’t Hang Up, US-based Dr Sally Leighton wrote: “The physician will do better to be close by to tune in carefully on what may be transpiring spiritually, both in order to comfort the dying, and to broaden his or her own understanding of life at its ending.”
Medical researchers concede that NDEs are the only spiritual events that can be scientifically investigated, using electromagnetic monitoring and by analysing case studies. In an Indian study, ‘Three cases of near death experience: Is it physiology, physics or philosophy?’, psychiatrist-researchers Moushumi Purkayastha and Kanchan Kumar Mukherjee describe the case of a 22-year-old Indian male who suffered a cardiac arrest, lasting for around 10 minutes. He was resuscitated after 36 hours of staying unconscious. During the period, he described rushing through a tunnel of white light. He felt a sense of absolute peace and calm while he was having a cardiac arrest. He also had an NDE of witnessing doctors trying to revive him.
After a few months, the memories faded and all he could remember was the light. Says the Sadhvi: “On death, the brain ceases to exist, but the mind lives on. While we are alive, the mind requires the brain in order to navigate through experiences. There, however, is an aspect of the mind that is not relegated to the brain—what we call the sukshma sharir. This travels with the soul. It’s like what one feels when, for example, a person is lying on a hospital bed and experiences floating above and looking down on his own body.” Dr Jeffrey Long, an American radiation oncologist who founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation in 1998, discovered a similar phenomenon in most of his subjects. In an article in Insider magazine, Long writes about scientifically evaluating stories of NDEs. He found that no two experiences are the same, and that all anecdotes had an unvarying, predictable pattern. About 45 percent of the individuals had an out-of-body experience (OBE) when their consciousness left their physical body. He writes, “One woman even reported a doctor throwing a tool on the floor when he picked up the wrong one something the doctor later confirmed. After OBEs, people say they’re transported into another realm.”
REALM HUNTERS
Parnia’s ultimate search is to unlock the secrets of this ‘realm’. He thinks it is possible to revive people who had fatal cardiac arrests by decoding NDEs. The terms ‘heart attack’ and ‘cardiac arrest’ are not interchangeable. The former happens when blood circulation to the heart is blocked. Cardiac arrest happens when the heart collapses and instantly stops beating. In the bestseller, The Lazarus Effect, Bill Ransom and Frank Herbert explain that “death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as ‘cardiac arrest’; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called ‘death’”. Dr Long, too, is certain that there is life after death, “without a doubt”. He describes an NDE subject as “someone who is either comatose or clinically dead, without a heartbeat, having a lucid experience where they see, hear, feel emotions, and interact with other beings”. Investigations by medical pioneers like Parnia and Long suggest a confluence of spirituality, mythology and science, where death is just another dimension and life exists as pure consciousness sans the physical body.
A prospective study published in The Lancet on NDEs of cardiac arrest survivors by Dutch scientists reported that patients heard conversations and saw the actions of people around them while they were comatose. “Miracles exist. Everything around us is a miracle. Nothing in this world exists without it. Science may try to explain how a living organism works, but ultimately procreation will not happen if there was no miracle,” explains Sadhvi Bhagwati Saraswati.
THE AFTERLIFE QUESTION
The question then is how long can a person’s brain survive after death before ‘hanging up?’ “Up to 10 minutes”, is Dr Chandra’s response. “Every minute that passes after CPR isn’t given, reduces survival chances by 10 percent,” he says. Parnia, however, knows about a Japanese girl who “had been dead for more than three hours. And she was resuscitated for six hours. Afterwards, she returned to life perfectly fine and has, I have been told, recently had a baby”. But it isn’t guaranteed that all people who had NDEs survive; of two footballers in different parts of the world who had an accident on the field, one survived and another died. Prevailing CPR methods remain unchanged since its discovery in 1960.
“Most doctors will do CPR for 20 minutes and then stop,” Parnia told an interviewer. “The decision to stop is arbitrary, but it is based on an instinct that after that time, brain damage is very likely and you don’t want to bring people back into a persistent vegetative state. But if you understand all the things that are going on in the brain in those minutes—as we now can—then you can minimise that possibility.” Dr Chandra insists that everybody over 10 years of age must be mandatorily taught BLS (basic life support) in schools. In the US, students cannot pass their final exam until they have learned CPR. For an experienced cardiologist, Dr Chandra keeps an open mind on alternative explanations. “The aatma, or the soul, doesn’t die. The rebirth concept could be true since there are too many examples of individuals recounting people and places they have never seen as part of their past lives,” he says.
POWER OF PRAYER
In all cases when a patient is wheeled into an OT, their loved ones pray to god to save them. Even doctors have their own quirks: many emergency department (ED) doctors are called ‘black clouds’ by some superstitious colleagues behind their backs; they feel that ED doctors attract critically ill patients during their night shifts. Some doctors avoid saying the words “never” and “quiet” lest the gods be tempted to intervene. Easing the suffering of a patient gives a doctor’s life meaning. Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp wrote: “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.”
Even amid the grimness and trauma of Dachau, where the Nazis murdered more than 28,000 people between 1940 and 1945, he finally understood death as a spiritual door to figuring out the meaning of life. The Hindu explanation for ‘senseless’ suffering is karma, the cycle of life and death, which takes you to ultimate freedom from pain. The universal mythos that godly assistance can save lives is illustrated in both Indian and Greek mythology: Savitri and Satyavan, Euridice and Orpheus. Yama, the god of death, returns Satyavan to life, impressed by Savitri’s purity and dedication to dharma. Ahilya, who was cursed to turn into stone by her husband Sage Gautama, was given life by Lord Rama. Lord Krishna brought back his guru Sandipani’s long-dead son to life.
Says Dr Jaya Sukul, Clinical Psychologist, Marengo Asia Hospital, Faridabad: “I believe in miracles, both as an individual and as a medical professional. So many things happen medically that are unexplained by science. For example, a patient, who is not expected to make it, ultimately lives, while another doing well, suddenly is lost.” Purkayastha and Mukherjee use the example of a 30-year-old Hindu married woman to investigate a possible link between god and death. After a severe head injury, the patient was operated on and put on a ventilator for eight days. She remained unconscious for around two months. It took her about a year to gradually recover. Her account of the experience during this period reaffirmed what the researchers had found in other cases. “She described that she was in a brilliant light in which she floated. She then went to ‘heaven’ where there was a pantheon of gods with ‘hierarchy’. There was the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, but even they were in hierarchy ‘junior’ to ‘Om’, an apparition of light. She could recall what had been earlier discussed between doctors about technical matters regarding ventilator, endotracheal tube and tracheostomy. Though she was reluctant, she was then ‘sent back’ by ‘Om’.”
The relationship between spirituality and medical treatment is controversial. Well-known rationalist and academic C Ravichandran says an NDE is like any other life experience. “Near-death means within life. It is not returning from death, but simply the continuation of life at different levels of consciousness. It is impossible to counter-check the so-called NDE stories and narratives. Even if they are true and credible, there is nothing to be curious about because your brain is well capable of making you feel, hear and see a plethora of things in a spectrum of conditions ranging from full alertness to semi-comas.”
Dr Sukul classifies NDEs as a result of trauma, and maintains they are not hallucinations. “These are emotionally intense and traumatic instances. Physiologically and psychologically, the responses are aligned to trauma. There would be adrenaline and excessive dopamine. Many express it as entering a tunnel, seeing a white light or falling. This is the imagery that one is conditioned to socially, and this manifests itself in our subconscious. It is codified in our brain. This is what we refer to when we think of death and afterlife,” she says.
Dr Nimesh G Desai, Psychiatrist, Former Director at the Institute of Human Behaviour & Allied Sciences, Delhi disagrees. He says NDEs “are nothing but hallucinations induced by high stress, mental disorder, alcohol or drug abuse, or even sleep deprivation. The imagery, however—like a bright light—cannot be explained scientifically. Yes, the brain remains active for a little while after death. This also explains the near-death experience. The important material stored in the brain flashes before it”.
THE MIND-BRAIN CODE
Where is this important material stored, then? Perhaps yoga holds the clue. The equation between consciousness and the mind has vexed traditional medical practitioners. Yoga speaks of three minds—the sense mind, the ego mind and intellect. In a peer-reviewed article on the relationship between theories of cognition and consciousness in ancient Indian belief systems and Western theorising and research, German psychologist Peter Sedlmeier and psychology professor at Pondicherry University, Kunchapudi Srinivas, worked on the psychological theory of cognition and consciousness using the Samkhya-Yoga principles. They wrote, “Theories of cognition contained in the ancient Indian systems have the potential to modify and complement existing Western mainstream accounts of cognition. In particular, they might serve as a basis for arriving at more comprehensive theories for several research areas that, so far, lack strong theoretical grounding, such as meditation research or research on aspects of consciousness.” In Samkhya-Yoga, the mind is not situated in the brain, which fundamentally differs from the Western view that the mind works by itself.
Death is an inevitable process, which the majority of people fear and enlightened individuals perceive as a transition. Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that “while we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we no longer exist”, which is why fearing death is fruitless. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna teaches Arjuna that only the body can be killed, while the soul remains immortal. Such explanations aside, medical science, which combines ancient and modern practices, and spiritual and material precepts, is giving man more power over life and death. It is also crossing frontiers where, as in Star Trek, ‘no man has gone before’. The Consciousness Code is the last enigma that awaits the starships of curiosity.
Realm of Nothingness
There are many accounts of people sharing their near-death experiences online. Reproduced here are a few.
I overdosed on sleeping meds during my freshman year. I was legally dead for three minutes (or so I was told)... I do remember a little bit of the ambulance ride, but not from my own body... It could have been a dream, but I saw my own unconscious body, flatlined. I remember the EMT in the ambulance (whom I did not see before I passed out) had mint green hair and I couldn’t remember his name, but I asked for him when I regained consciousness about three days later.”
I was taken in for an emergency hysterectomy and they had to give me 11 units of blood. The night after the surgery, I continually would stop breathing and they told my SO they were expecting
me to go into cardiac arrest at any time. I remember seeing my dead aunt sitting on the bedside while I felt my spirit lifting up out of bed. She looked at me and said: “Dammit, it’s not your time yet. Now knock it off!”
They put me in a medically induced coma, and during it I apparently flatlined. I felt a feeling of rushing upwards, with a bright, cream-coloured light ahead of me. There were a lot of indescribable colours in the beams of this bright light. All while I could see this, it felt like I had relieved every second of my life in an instant, and I could even hear some of my friends talking to me. Then it got quiet. Then I could hear singing. It sounded like bells… I was standing somewhere. There was a fog all around me, and I saw my best friend (who at the time I’d been fighting with and he’d stopped talking to me) come out of the mist. He told me that I couldn’t go yet, that I have to keep trying, and if I promised not to give up, he’d see me back on Earth. I wordlessly agreed, and I was instantly pushed (into) my body...”
What Happens When You Die?
Cleveland Clinic, which started as a small outpatient clinic, became a multi-specialty group practice in 1921. Now the world’s first integrated international health system staffed in 200 locations across the world with six million patients annually, it has an elaborate definition of death. The body strives to survive till its last breath and death happens at the moment when it puts down its tools. The last breath. The immobile heart. The still brain. Other vital organs such as kidneys and liver shut down. Like Parnia, the medical scientists at Cleveland, too, believe that death is a process and dying is the last function the body performs for you.
How long does it take to die? Depends. Health, quality of treatment, and timely interventions are factors. Scientists at Cleveland have studied symptoms of approaching death. Less physical activity and more sleep are signs that the body is quitting because it no longer has the strength. A Redditor who ‘died’ twice before being resuscitated writes, “It was not just a gap. Much like a dreamless nap, you don’t just wake up and feel like time just jumped ahead. You know that you’ve been asleep for a while. At the same time, you can’t really remember experiencing anything at all, unless you had a dream. So yes and no. I experienced something, and that something was nothing.” Nothingness approaches as the heart delivers less oxygen-rich blood throughout your body. Since a morbid system doesn’t require nourishment, appetite declines months or weeks before the lights go out. Skin gets thinner because the body no longer produces fresh cells. As death nears, body temperature drops. Breathing declines steadily and goes into long periods of not breathing.
Some patients exhibit sudden surges of energy. Some feel restless after long periods of sleep. Patients try to get up from bed, remove IVs and sensors etc. The brain of a dying person processes sensory information differently from before, especially at night. Perception becomes so sharp in some that they even sense what others in the room may not be aware of. Research shows that the brains of many dying people release a wave of chemicals as death nears, and take the mind into hyper-reality. This is when they ‘hallucinate’—seeing deceased relatives or a bright light. They may get the sensation of travelling to meet a loved one who died previously.
People slip from sleep into unconsciousness—what psychologists describe as a ‘dream state’ of extended rest. According to research, dying people can feel and hear loved ones comforting them as they slip into unconsciousness. Medical experiments have recorded that touch and hearing are the last senses that shut down. Studies also show that the brain remains active for several minutes after a person is declared dead, but isn’t conscious or aware that they are dead. Fear of death is the oldest instinct, but scientists believe that understanding the process makes it easier to face your own death or that of a loved one. A survivor wrote in a post, “I definitely fear it less. I know now that death is nothing worse than sleeping. When you die, you just stop existing, nothing to worry about.”