What Really Happens When We Die?

If you are like most, you may have a fleeting thought about this taboo topic once in a while...However, it's certainly not anything that you spend too much time on. It's too depressing. After all, there is nothing you can really do about it, so why dwell on it, right? But somewhere...far in the back of your mind, it's there. No matter how much you convince yourself that it's not, there is this silent clock ticking...Who knows when it will stop? For each of us the answer is different. Aunt Dorothy may have lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and one, but Uncle Fred keeled over of a random stroke at 40. It is that silent enemy of the unknown that has driven many to seek the answer of what really happens once the heart stops beating. Certainly, who you are is more than just this vehicle on loan to you that we call our bodies. I mean, you are inside somewhere, right? Once the body stops working, what happens to you? Do you just disappear?

Not according to some. Beyond the religious beliefs that many of us may or may not have and beyond the Sylvia Browns and John Edwards of the world, hard scientific research may actually shed some light on the answer. The term "near death experience" was coined in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody. Dr. Moody is a psychiatrist who has written extensively on the subject and has defined the criteria for what is required for an event to be classified as a near death experience (NDE).

It is estimated that roughly ten percent of patients who have been resuscitated after clinical death following heart attacks admit to having had an NDE. One Dutch study of 344 cardiac patients who were resuscitated after clinical death, reported that eighteen percent of those patients reported having NDEs. Despite efforts by skeptics to explain these experiences as mass electrical brain wave activities or hallucinations, many of these experiences simply can not be explained away. And it is not only the devoutly religious that report an afterlife. People from all walks of life, including Atheists and even children, have reported leaving their bodies and crossing over to another plain of existence after their bodies were declared clinically dead. Every day in the U.S., 774 NDEs occur, according to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation

According to Dr. Moody, A near-death experience, or NDE, is a profound event that occurs to a person after or close to death. Across thousands of years and in cultures around the world, NDEs have followed a broad general pattern with common features. No scientific explanation so far accounts for all aspects of NDEs or their effects.

More than 15 common characteristics of an NDE have been reported by near-death experiencers. An NDE may include only one or two of these elements, and, in a few cases, all of them. These include: a sense of being outside one’s physical body, sometimes perceiving it from an outside position; a sense of movement through darkness or a tunnel; intense emotions; heightened perceptions; experiencing a great light or darkness; perceiving a spiritual realm, which may include vividly memorable landscapes; encounters with deceased loved ones, spiritual beings and/or religious figures; knowledge of the nature of the universe; a life review; a sense of oneness and interconnectedness; a border of no return; a sense of having knowledge of the future; messages regarding life’s purpose.

• No two experiences are identical and no single feature is found in every NDE.
• The most commonly reported type of NDE involves intense feelings of peace, joy and love, often an encounter with an unconditionally loving light.
• Harrowing experiences are sometimes reported involving similar common elements but with opposite emotional states—extreme fear, isolation, non-being, confusion, occasional torment or guilt. Two substantial studies have reported the percentage of these NDEs as 17% and 18%, although smaller studies have found as many as 30% .Two online NDE sites report incidences of 8.6% and 15%.

Thousands of documented NDEs challenge Western thinking and belief systems. One subject of debate is whether consciousness (mind) resides exclusively in the physical brain. For example, many people who have had an NDE accurately report events that occurred around their bodies when they were unconscious or even clinically dead. Some NDEs have revealed family secrets, such as the existence of a never-mentioned sibling. Expectations about an afterlife may be challenged, and some people abruptly develop radically new interests and abilities after an NDE. The aftereffects of an NDE or related experience are enduring, often powerful, and may be life-altering.

Current research indicates that about 85% of children who experience cardiac arrest have an NDE. Even very young children, as soon as they are able to speak, have reported NDEs. These were from events that occurred as infants or in the process of being born. Dr. Melvin Morse is a neuroscientist who has studied the near death experiences (NDEs) of children since 1980. According to Dr. Morse, when we die, we become fully conscious, aware of our surroundings, and experience spiritual insights we do not often have at other times in our lives. This is the same with children who have reported experiencing near death experiences. As a young critical-care physician, Dr.Morse started to listen to children’s stories of what it was like to die and return. The more he heard the less he could dismiss as an over active imagination. This was mainly due to the incredible similarities in the reports by children who had never met. This led to his extensive study into NDE's experienced by children who had died and come back. The research proved to be a life changing experience and he has devoted his life to the subject.

According to Dr. Morse, research clearly documents that we are conscious, aware, and have an expanded sense of consciousness beyond the boundaries of our body, at the point of death. This is seen even if the dying person seems comatose and to be without any awareness to observers. Therefore, consciousness is not dependent on normal brain function and persists in spite of profound coma or near brain death. He feels that children are the purest example of the phenomenon due to the fact that so many have described their experiences before they have reached the age that would enable them to be influenced by others. Their stories are pure and true and come from real experiences that they can speak of without realizing the importance of what they are sharing. Some even come back with new found abilities, such as speaking in other languages that they had never known or intense details and knowledge of things far beyond their years.

Despite the fact that for the most part, those who have experienced NDE's have reported overwhelming love and a sense of well being, for some, the experience is anything but comforting. In fact, according to a recent study, the estimated incidence of distressing NDEs (dNDEs) has ranged from 1% to 15% of all reported near death experiences. According to a 1996 study done by Greyson and Bush, some NDErs have reported that their experience was dominated by distressing, emotionally painful feelings such as fear, terror, horror, anger, loneliness, isolation, and/or guilt.

The Greyson and Bush report classified 50 reports of distressing NDEs into four types:

• The most common type included the same features as the pleasurable type such as an out-of-body experience and rapid movement through a tunnel or void toward a light but the NDEr, usually because of feeling out of control of what was happening, experienced the features as frightening.
• The second, less common type included an acute awareness of nonexistence or of being completely alone forever in an absolute void. Sometimes the person received a totally convincing message that the real world including themselves never really existed.
• The third and rarest type included hellish imagery such as an ugly or foreboding landscape; demonic beings; loud, annoying noises; frightening animals; and other beings in extreme distress. Only rarely have such NDErs themselves felt personally tormented. Those who have, say that they know for certain that hell itself is very real as they have been there themselves. Many of those who experienced these events were not religious before their near death experiences.
  

The fourth type, the rarest of all, in which the NDEr feels negatively judged by a Higher Power during their NDE life review in which, typically, the experiencer re-views and re-experiences every moment of their life. This latter type of distressing NDE contrasts sharply with the life review that sometimes occurs in a pleasurable NDE. In the predominantly pleasurable experience, the NDEr feels absolutely loved even as they re-view and re-experience the most unloving actions they committed during their lives. During this process, the NDEr typically is simultaneously themself and each person with whom they interacted. Thus, in the pleasurable NDE, the NDEr experiences what it was to have been on the receiving end of their actions and, typically, experiences profound regret and/or guilt, but within a larger context of being unconditionally loved. In the distressing NDE, by contrast, the NDEr only feels negatively judged.According to experts, the dNDE may occur more than documented. Some causes for lack of reports may include shame, fear of reliving the event or the assumption that they will not be believed. However, many who have experienced these frightening events have went on to change their lives around completely. There are reports of former wife beating drug addicts that come back from these experiences and now are leaders in the religious fields and volunteer their time in sharing their experiences with others.

The bottom line is that, no matter what your religious beliefs, or lack there of, the fact is that NONE of us knows what really happens to us when we die until it happens to us. That being said, there is a substantial amount of documented scientific research to support the theory that there is more to this life than just this one moment. We should all do the best that we can to ensure that we do the best that we can with the time that we are given. You don't get a dress rehearsal with life. You get one shot at it. Make it the best you can and live each day like it is the last one. You never know...it may be. Then what?