Tales of the dead come back

I know this happened with my mother-in-law, and she absolutely refused to talk about it:

Why is it important for you to believe that there is life after death?

It was not important for me, at all, to believe. I’m a journalist. I don’t go around thinking, “I really hope there’s life after death.” Indeed, at the beginning I was the opposite—I didn’t want to believe. Yes, death was a source of terror. For me, the worst thing that could happen was nothingness. I would have far preferred to hear that Satan was waiting for me than to learn that there was nothing. But I was absolutely positive that there was nothing after death—that the curtain descends, and that’s it. Act III. It’s over. The stage is black.

And when I first ventured into this strange area of research, I was pretty sure, just as you said, that it was all the result of oxygen deprivation and that these were hallucinations. It was only after I discovered that it can’t be the result of oxygen deprivation, and these were not hallucinations, that I realized I had to change my views. That’s a very difficult thing to do, particularly when you’re past adolescence. But every bit of evidence, every single person I interviewed, forced me to change my views. It was something I did quite unwillingly and with a good deal of skepticism.

What I tried to do, as a journalist, was simply record what these people say happened. All I know is what I’ve reported, which is, when you die, that is not the end. Stuff goes on. That, to me, is weird. But it’s true.

Did engaging with this research make you want to die?

No! Nothing makes me want to die! But it did make me less fearful of dying. It was a long process, though. After the first 20 or 30 interviews, I was still terrified of death. All these people were telling me stuff that I never believed could happen. But gradually I came to accept that what they said was true. So I’m a little less terrified of death now.

You say that having an NDE often invests people with special powers. Tell us about the British air traffic controller.

[Laughs] The British air traffic controller makes me laugh. He told a person I interviewed, a British neuropsychiatrist named Dr. Fenwick, that he had a death experience. Oddly enough, as a result of this death experience, he became terrific at picking and choosing stocks. [Laughs]

The psychiatrist goes, “Uh-huh.” The guy says, “Yeah, you really should invest in British Telecom.”

Dr. Fenwick says, “Uh, yeah. Right.” And of course the stock soars right after that!

Usually these powers involve perceptual abilities, though, [such as] the ability to know what other people are thinking, the ability know what’s going to happen next. So they’re usually less materialistic than this gentleman’s powers. [Laughs] But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

NDEs are, surely, not the same as a complete death experience. These are generally short episodes not lasting more than an hour and often in hospital settings. No one, as far as I know, has returned from the dead after a long period of time and told us about it. Do we know any more than we did before about what will actually happen when we die?

What’s happening now is revolutionary. If you’d told somebody a hundred years ago that they could die for an hour and come back and tell you what happened, that would have been in the realm of theology or philosophy. But now it’s in the realm of the real world.

It’s absolutely true that we don’t know what happens, say, after six days being dead. All we know now—and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s important for scientists to investigate far more—is what happens up to an hour.

How did your friends and peers in the journalistic world react to you writing this book?

It depends who they are. Some of them looked at me like, “Oh, OK. You’re nuts. I never really thought you were before. But now I know you are.”

Others, because National Geographic is publishing the book, said, “Oh, National Geographic! It must be true then.” [Laughs] My religious journalist friends said, “Thank God you’re doing it. You were always such a skeptic and a cynic.”

I have to say that I fall into none of those categories. I’m just a journalist doing what journalists do. I’m interviewing people and trying to find out what is true.

After writing this book, can you say with any more certainty what death is?

Yes, I can. I can say that death is an adventure, which to me is the oddest thing in the world. It takes you from this Earth, this ordinary Earth, into extraordinary places.

One of the experiences I describe is of the renowned psychologist Carl Jung, who died when he had a heart attack in his 60s. He was ultimately revived, and came back describing, in great detail, how he had seen the universe.

One of the people I interviewed had a similar experience. And that shocked the hell out of me because that’s the kind of experience I would love to have. Like an astronaut’s delight. You’re up there. You can move toward planets or away from planets. You can see the Earth. It’s gorgeous. It’s interesting. And it doesn’t cost a thing.