Professor Studied NDE’s For 30 Years; What She Reveals Is Unbelievable (NDE)

My name is Janice Minor Holden and I'm a Professor Emerita of Counseling from the University of North Texas. I spent 31 years on the counseling faculty preparing licensed professional counselors and school counselors. About a third of professors' job is to do research and so my research area was near-death and related experiences. So for about three decades I was looking into various aspects of near-death experiences and the ways that they relate to counseling but even beyond that. So I studied everything that is typical about near-death experiences and some particular focus on their connection to counseling. The field of near-death studies actually began, it's credited to have begun in 1975 with Raymond Moody's book Life After Life and that's the book where he created the term near-death experience and he had interviewed about 100 people who'd had near-death experiences and noticed that there were these similarities in their experiences and there were after effects. So he compiled all that in that book and as a result people who wanted to do more really controlled scientific research jumped on to the topic and originally the field focused on the nature of the experience itself and then the after effects and so those were some of the things that I focused on as well. And then I branched out into other areas such as there's a phenomenon where somebody who's had a near-death experience and discloses it to somebody else what kind of experience they have in the way the person reacts to them and we know that when someone has had a near-death experience and they disclose it that first disclosure has a big impact on how they're going to proceed to integrate the experience. If the first confidant responds in a helpful way through things like identifying with the experience that this was a near-death experience, avoiding pathologizing the person or the experience like not thinking that or saying that it's crazy or that the person's crazy for having had it, not demonizing the experience saying that it's in some way evil and acknowledging at least the potential reality if not the reality of the experience because it feels absolutely real to people who've had it. Then that's a positive disclosure experience and the person's likely to go on and integrate the experience well and if the confidant does the opposite of those things then the person goes on to have problematic process. They kind of get psycho-spiritually stuck until they encounter an atmosphere in which they can be their experience and they are accepted and help to inquire into the meaning and significance of the experience for them. So I got into that whole disclosure area and then I also became very interested in the aspect of near-death experiences where the experiencer meets deceased loved ones and the whole phenomenon of after-death communication that also happens to a lot of people outside the context of a near-death experience. So I see my two areas of specialization as near-death experiences themselves, the experience, after-effects, disclosure issues, implications for our understanding of consciousness and so forth and then also after-death communication and the role of that in grief and grief counseling. I've come to conceptualize near-death experiences as having kind of like three levels. At the deepest level are some features that are found in near-death experiences across cultures. So for example, meeting deceased loved ones is one of them that happens very frequently in near-death experiences across cultures and perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body. That's very nearly universal. Moving rapidly through space, whether it's material space or some transmaterial space, that's a common theme. Light is a common theme in across cultures in near-death experiences. Now that doesn't mean that each of these things happens in every experience, but it's more like if you look at a hundred near-death experiences or a thousand of them, you see that these themes recur very commonly among people. So that's that deep kind of almost universal level. And then the next level, the second of the three levels, is what I call the cultural level. And that's where, because in near-death experiences people are in a different reality than this reality that, you know, this material reality we're in, what they perceive often doesn't directly translate into terms that we use in earthly language. And so people tend to perceive what they're experiencing through their cultural lens because it's the only way they know how to understand or interpret what they're seeing. And sometimes I think culture can even influence what form that universal theme takes. At the third level is what I call the individual level, and that's where no two near-death experiences are exactly alike. And there are always unique personal aspects to each one. So let's just take the theme of moving rapidly through space. In the West, it's real common for people to report that in their near-death experience, they moved rapidly through a tunnel-like structure, or some other structure, or some other open space. But there's this rapid movement through a non-material space, but that has some form, usually some form. Sometimes it can just be movement through blackness, but it often takes some form like a tunnel-like thing. And in New Zealand, a near-death experiencer might experience themself moving rapidly over the island of New Zealand toward what they call the jumping-off place of souls. So you can see that you've got the same theme of rapid movement, but it's taking a different form depending on whether someone is a Westerner or a native New Zealander, a Maori. But then even then, if you just look at Westerners who have moved rapidly through a tunnel-like enclosure, no two tunnels are even described alike. Some people say that it's a dark tunnel with a light at the end. Others say that it's a light tunnel that is even brighter at the end. And other people say that it's this undulating with all these colors and things. Some people perceive other spirits in the tunnel. Others don't. So you've still got rapid movement through a tunnel-like structure, but it's already taking the rapid movement that the universal theme is taking its cultural form of a tunnel, which tends to be reported more in the West. And then the personal level is that even the specific form and appearance of the tunnel varies from one person to the other. I see a difference between the idea of religion or any aspect of one's cultural upbringing influencing the experience and dictating it. I think that there's definitely influence. I think there's reason to think that it doesn't dictate because people sometimes have experiences related to religious beliefs that absolutely contradict their religious upbringing. You know, they may expect any of a number of things, but what's going to happen when they have a near-death experience is something that might be very different from what they believed. And one of the most common after-effects is people leaving organized religion, not because they're rejecting it, but just because they find that it's too small to explain what they experienced in their NDE, that their religion doesn't account for what they actually experienced and now know to be the nature of death and consciousness and the universe and that sort of thing. One little research study I did was I found all the near-death experience accounts that I could on the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website, where there are thousands of people who've submitted their NDEs from around the world, really, and the ones that made a reference to Jesus and to describing his physical characteristics. And I found, I think, something like 17 cases, and then I compared, like, what color was his hair, what color were his eyes, what was he wearing, what did his voice sound like? And just the voice, take that for example. One person said that his voice was like lilting music. Another said that his voice was like a powerful freight train. And his eyes, one person said they were blue, one said they were brown, one said that his eyes weren't a color, but they emanated light. And I found no two descriptions of Jesus that were identical. There was a little bit of a clue in two of the cases. These were two people who presumably didn't know each other and didn't know about each other's near-death experiences. They just registered on the website what they had experienced. And in both of these cases, they had been greeted by a spiritual entity who said, you're about to meet Jesus. And the experiencer was like, okay. And the spiritual entity said, how would you like him to appear? Because he's very happy to appear in whatever way is easiest for you to perceive. And so it is very much the possibility that we influence how things appear in near-death experiences based on what we are prepared to perceive. Some people will say, for example, that the being of light was God. It's like they had the experience of this being of light, this all-knowing, all-loving force. So they see this being of light and they encounter and sometimes have a sense of merging with this being of light that's all-knowing, all-loving. And some people immediately interpret that this is God. And then other near-death experiencers will say, you know, I don't know what that was. Maybe that was God, but it's certainly not God the way that I learned about God. So I'm hesitant to put that label on it, but I'll just call it the light or the being of light because that's the form that it took. So people can be interpreting sometimes based on their personal or cultural background. And sometimes when things don't exactly match what they expected, they'll be a little circumspect and not make a commitment as to what that force was. Can we predict who will have a near-death experience? Because to drop way back to the beginning, one of the things we know is that of all the people who survive a close brush with death through serious injury or illness, 80 to 90% of them will come out the other side and say that they don't remember anything unusual at all. They may or may not have lost consciousness. Even if they did, when they were unconscious, they have no memory of anything. Only about 10 to 20% of people report a near-death experience, which is an experience of their consciousness functioning apart from their physical body and observing the material world or observing and participating in a transmaterial domain that is a world that is not of the material world, but still has environments and entities in it. And so the question arises, why do 80 to 90% of people not remember anything and 10 to 20% of people remember something? Is there something different between those two groups of people? And to encapsulate a whole lot of research into this question, the answer is no. There is no reliable difference between people who do and don't remember NDEs. And furthermore, some people for one reason or another have more than one close brush with death, and sometimes they'll have an NDE in one but not in another. So we truly have no idea. I like to say that heaven only knows why some people have NDEs. And when I say have, I should actually say why some people recall and report a near-death experience, whereas most people don't. We know there are some cases where people actually recall it, but they don't report it until years later. They'll then admit that they had had an NDE but never spoke about it. But that's a very small number of people. And we also know of cases where people, they say they truly did not remember having an NDE until years later. Something might happen that triggers their memory. So it might be that the people who don't report one had one but aren't reporting it or had one but don't remember it. But it probably is the case for most people that they just truly didn't have one. And that bears out because in studies of after-effects, people who report having had a near-death experience report significantly greater after-effects than people who survived a close brush with death without an NDE. And so there's no reason to think these people had an NDE who say they probably didn't. But those who did have very characteristic after-effects, and you've probably heard those after-effects, people that almost to a person, they report that they absolutely lost their fear of death as a result of the experience because they now know from experience what the first moments of death are like. And they feel confident that what they experienced characterizes what death will continue to be like if they had stayed dead. That's the biggest one is the loss of fear of I like to break these down into psychological, spiritual, physical, and social after-effects. And some of the other psychological ones besides loss of fear of death include things like becoming more compassionate, more emotionally sensitive to other people, more like committed to be helpful and kind to other people. It's a lot because of the life review. And then some of the spiritual after-effects are becoming more interested in spiritual matters and sometimes tending to become more spiritual rather than religious, although some people do become more religious, but it's a minority. Most people leave organized religion and but become much more spiritual. And then also what are sometimes called spiritual gifts, where people have the ability to see the future, to know what another person is thinking and clairvoyance, see what's happening at distant locations and things like that, what we call paranormal abilities. And then in the physical domain are people a lot of times after an NDE, their metabolism changes. They may need to eat less food. They may have an aversion to certain foods. They may just generally more sensitive, more sensitive to medication, to pollutants and allergens and things like that. And then also in the physical domain are what are called electromagnetic effects, where electromagnetic things in the person's environment go kaflui in their presence. And then in the social realm, you can imagine how all these other changes, if the person has psychological, spiritual and physical changes, they're essentially not the same person they were before their near-death experience, and that can have repercussions in their social world. The reason I'm interested in veridical perception is not just because near-death experiencers almost always say that the experience itself was absolutely real, and often they'll say it's realer than here. I remember in my dissertation study, I was reading the questionnaire response of one of my participants, and when I asked, would you be open if after your NDE, if someone had approached you to talk with you about the extent to which the experience felt real, would you have been willing to talk with them? And rather than answer that question, what he wrote was that experience was realer than sitting here writing this response to you. And that always just really stuck with me. Subjectively, it's absolutely real. Near-death experiencers come back with some lessons, and what they tend to say is that our purpose in physical existence is to advance in our capacity to love, to become more loving to each other and to ourselves. In order for humanity to hear the message, they have to really believe that near-death experiencers are bringing a genuine message from the spiritual domain of a reality that is incontrovertible, that this is the nature of reality, this is the nature of human existence, and we need to get on board with it. Some people who haven't had experiences like this are on board too, but a lot are not, and understandably, because these experiences are of a qualitatively different nature than our normal material lives. But if humanity is to hear this message, then that the reality of NDEs needs to be established, and that's kind of my most important intention in doing near-death-related research.