What happens after we die? Near-death experiences suggest the soul and afterlife exist, says doctor
“I was not sure how this was possible but it was not distressing. I was glad that the horse went home. I remember watching myself be found and thinking that I must have died, yet I felt no pain.”
She saw the people at her house get a phone call, the ambulance rushing to save her – and her life flash before her eyes. Betty saw things that are, for a lack of a better word, inexplicable.
Betty didn’t die, but she did have a near-death experience (NDE) – according to Dr Jeffrey Long, a leading expert in these unusual events. The radiation oncologist, who oversees the care of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy, lives and works in Kentucky, in the United States.
Long has dedicated decades of his professional life to researching death – or those who have flirted with death and lived to tell the story. Betty’s is one of the more than 5,300 cryptic cases recorded on his Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website.
Long says NDEs “occur at a time when the person is so physically compromised that they are typically unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead”.
About 17 per cent of those who come close to death report NDEs. People of all ages, backgrounds and beliefs, from countries across the globe, have reported them, including on Long’s websites.
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Each experience is unique to the individual, but the reports share common characteristics. Frequently, the person describes an overwhelming sense of ease, liberation from pain, and a general sense of euphoria. NDEs are almost never negative in nature.
Long first learned of the term “near-death experience” when he was in residency training decades ago, from an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“How can one not be fascinated about wondering what happens after we die?” he asks, recalling his reaction to the piece. It triggered his passion for researching NDEs and learning as much as he could from those who have had them.
He set up the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation in 1998. Since then, through a form on its websites nderf.org, for Near Death Experience, adcrf.org, for After Death Communication, and oberf.org, for Out of Body Experience, Long has garnered more than 10,000 reports of “exceptional human experiences of all types”.
“NDEs stand head and shoulders above all other categories of experiences in terms of their evidentiary reality and extensive content with evidence of a soul and an afterlife,” he says.
He has studied more than 5,000 NDEs and says about 45 per cent of people who have an NDE report an out-of-body experience, in which their consciousness is separated from their physical body. As “it” hovers above, the individual is able to see and hear what is happening around them.
Shortly after the out-of-body experience, people regularly find themselves transported into another realm. After travelling through a tunnel and experiencing a bright penetrating light, many, he says, report being greeted by deceased loved ones and sometimes pets.
Even if the loved one (or pet) died at an advanced age, they almost always appear to be in the prime of their lives.
He adds that the majority of individuals expressed having a profound feeling of affection and tranquillity, and a reluctance to leave this alternate dimension.
Some people have reported having had more than one of these extremely vivid, seemingly transformative experiences, Long says.
People reporting NDEs have no incentive to lie, Long says. To complete the questionnaire to file an NDE on the foundation’s website requires about 45 minutes. Those who do this are not paid, nor are their names ever made public.
Long goes to great lengths to add witness statements to support the NDE narratives offered.
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“My goal is to uncover the truth about NDEs, wherever that path leads. I study NDEs as a scientist, not as a religious person,” he says, adding he was not particularly religious when he started his research – and that his goal is not to prove the existence of God.
Long rejects the idea that NDEs can be explained only by physical brain function, and says that more than 30 “sceptical” explanations of NDE have been presented over many decades.
“No one or several of these sceptical explanations make sense, even to the sceptics as a group,” he says.
He stressed that “sceptics can’t explain anything that we observe in NDEs let alone the totality of what occurs during NDEs”.
A work in progress on his main website responds to specific sceptical arguments, including those that suggest the NDE is a reaction to hypoxia – reduced levels of oxygen in the brain and other bodily tissues – or to drugs, or that it is merely hallucination-induced.
He has also addressed the sceptics in published research and books. His papers include “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality”, published in the journal Missouri Medicine, in 2014.
He provides nine lines of evidence, based on his research and that of others, and concludes: “Multiple lines of evidence point to the conclusion that near-death experiences are medically inexplicable and cannot be explained by known physical brain function.”
Another paper, “The Phenomenology of Iranian Near-Death Experiences”, was published in The Journal of Near-Death Studies, in 2020. It provides an analysis of 17 near-death experience accounts provided by Iranian Shia Muslims to determine how theirs compare with NDE accounts by people from Western cultures.
His books include Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2011) and God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (2015).
He joins many other researchers, including fellow medical doctors, in his keen interest in NDEs. He also contributed to a 2009 book, The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, by psychiatrist Dr Bruce Greyson – another leading expert in NDEs, and former professor and counsellor Janice Miner Holden, who is president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
Although Long never set out to prove the existence of an afterlife or any sort of transcendent realm beyond our earthly experiences, he is adamant that something ethereal really does exist. Why?
“The level of consciousness and alertness during near-death experiences (NDEs) is usually greater than that experienced in everyday life, even though NDEs generally occur when a person is unconscious or clinically dead,” he says.
From a purely medical perspective, this high level of consciousness while physically unconscious is inexplicable.
Second, he says, the vast majority of out-of-body experiences (OBEs), one of the most common elements of NDEs, are incredibly realistic.
“What NDErs see and hear of earthly events in the out-of-body state is almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was observed or heard during the NDE, the out-of-body experience observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate,” Long says.
Third, NDEs share common traits no matter where they happen.
“Near-death experiences appear remarkably consistent around the world, and across many different religions and cultures. NDEs from non-Western countries are remarkably similar to NDEs that occur in people in Western countries.”
Long concludes: “These are all lines of evidence that near-death experiences, and their consistent message of an afterlife, are real.”
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