by Pim van Lommel

Moody’s NDE Classification

In 1975 psychiatrist Raymond Moody wrote his first book on near-death experience. In it he described twelve different NDE steps but emphasized that most people experience only a few. It is rare for all steps or to be reported. Each NDE is unique and is experienced as a coherent episode rather than a series of clearly distinct steps. The order of the reported steps can also vary a little. At this point I should mention a comparative study that looked at whether there is any difference between NDE accounts recorded before and after 1975. The question was whether the publicity that followed the publication of Moody’s book had any influence on the contents of an NDE. However, the study showed that all the NDE elements he mentioned were reported just as frequently before as after 1975; the sole exception was the tunnel experience, which was reported a little less often in the past. The NDE and its effect on patients appear to be essentially the same worldwide except for some culture-specific differences in content and interpretation. One intercultural study shows that certain NDE elements, such as the panoramic life review and tunnel experience, are reported less frequently by the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and the islands in the South Pacific.

Moody described twelve possible NDE steps or elements and the order in which they are usually reported.

1. The ineffability of the experience

2. A feeling of peace and quiet; pain is gone

3. The awareness of being dead, sometimes followed by a noise

4. An out-of-body experience (OBE); from a position outside and above their bodies, people witness their own resuscitation or operation

5. A dark space, experienced by only 15 percent of people as frightening; people are pulled toward a small pinpoint of light in this dark space, which they describe as: A tunnel experience; they are drawn rapidly toward the light

A frightening NDE; approximately 1 to 2 percent of people linger in this dark space and experience their NDE as frightening (also known as a hell experience)

6. The perception of an unearthly environment, a dazzling landscape with beautiful colors, gorgeous flowers, and sometimes also music

7. Meeting and communicating with deceased persons, mostly relatives

8. Seeing a brilliant light or a being of light; experiencing complete acceptance and unconditional love and gaining access to a deep knowledge and wisdom

9. The panoramic life review, or review of life from birth: people see their entire life flash before them; there appears to be no time or distance, everything happens at once, and people can talk for days about a life review that lasted only a few minutes

10. The preview or flash forward: people have the impression that they are witness to part of the life that is yet to come; again, there is no time or distance

11. The perception of a border: people are aware that if they cross this border or limit they will never be able to return to their body

12. The conscious return to the body, accompanied by great disappointment at having something so beautiful taken away

Moody’s classification is a useful starting point for discussing the various aspects of an NDE. I understand full well that this is an artificial division and that while these steps or elements may be distinct, they cannot be isolated because the NDE constitutes a continuous experience. It is a practical division, however, because each of the twelve steps or elements raises different questions about a possible scientific explanation for an NDE. How is it possible for people to observe their own resuscitation from a position above their lifeless body? How can they have clear thoughts and retain their memories without a physical body? How is it possible for them to meet and recognize deceased relatives? How is it possible to experience a life review or a preview in mere minutes, as if time and distance do not exist in this other, unearthly realm?

The various elements will be discussed individually in the order in which they are usually experienced. All elements will be illustrated with typical examples. In some cases I include several quotations to better illuminate the various aspects of the element in question. Most of the quotations are taken from experiences that were shared with me in person or in writing by people I met in the course of my research. I reproduce the experiences anonymously and have made them as unidentifiable as possible. Translations follow as close as possible people’s original words, even where this results in somewhat unwieldy language.

1. Ineffability

What happens in a life-threatening situation is often totally unfamiliar and indescribable and lies outside our normal sphere of experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that people run into difficulties when they try to put their experience into words.

“I was there. I was on the other side.  For a long time that was all I could say. I still get tears in my eyes thinking about the experience. Too much! It’s simply too much for human words. The other dimension, I call it now, where there’s no distinction between good and evil, and time and place don’t exist. And an immense, intense pure love compared to which love in our human dimension pales into insignificance, a mere shadow of what it could be. It exposes the lie we live in in our dimension. Our words, which are so limited, can’t describe it. Everything I saw was suffused with an indescribable love. The knowledge and the messages going through me were so clear and pure. And I knew where I was: where there’s no distinction between life and death. The frustration at not being able to put it into human words is immense.

“I regret that words can’t do my experience justice. I must admit that human language is woefully inadequate for conveying the full extent, the depth, and the other dimension I’ve seen. In fact, no pen can describe what I went through.”

2. A Feeling of Peace and Quiet; the Pain Has Gone

For many people, the overwhelming feelings of peace, joy, and bliss constitute the first and best-remembered element of their experience. The intense pain that usually follows a traffic accident or a heart attack is suddenly completely gone.

“And the pain, especially the pressure on my lungs, was gone. The atmosphere made me feel totally relaxed. I’d never felt this happy before.”

3. The Awareness of Being Dead

It is often confusing to hear bystanders or doctors declare you dead at a moment when you feel extremely alive and whole. If a sound is heard at this point it is usually a buzzing or whistling sound, sometimes a loud click or a soft murmur.

“The weird thing is that I wasn’t at all surprised or anything. I simply thought: Hey, I’m dead now. So this is what we call death.”

4. An Out-of-Body Experience

During an out-of-body experience people have verifiable perceptions from a position outside and above their lifeless body. Patients feel as if they have taken off their body like an old coat, and they are astounded that despite discarding it they have retained their identity, with the faculty of sight, with emotions, and with an extremely lucid consciousness.

The out-of-body experience begins with a patient’s sensation that his or her consciousness is leaving the physical body but continues to function unchanged. Sometimes this is accompanied by fear, followed by a (futile) attempt to return to the body, but patients often feel liberated and are amazed at the sight of the lifeless or seriously damaged body. The most common vantage point is from the ceiling, and because of this unusual position some people initially fail to recognize their body. People experience their new weightless body as a spiritual or nonphysical body that can penetrate solid structures such as walls and doors. It is impossible to communicate with or touch others who are present. To their utter amazement, people go unnoticed even though they can hear and see everything. The range of vision can extend to three hundred sixty degrees, with simultaneous detailed and bird’s-eye views. Blind people too have the faculty of sight while deaf people know exactly what has been said. While this is happening, people discover that all it takes to be near someone is to think of that person.

This out-of-body experience is of scientific importance because doctors, nursing staff, and relatives can check and corroborate the reported perceptions and the moment when they were supposed to have taken place. In a recent review of 93 reports of potentially verifiable out-of-body perceptions (or ‘apparently nonphysical veridical perceptions’) during NDE it has been found that 43 percent had been corroborated to the investigator by an independent informant, an additional 43 percent had been reported by the experiencer to have been corroborated by an independent informant who was no longer available to be interviewed by the investigator, and only 14 percent relied solely on the experiencer’s report. Of these out-of-body perceptions, 92 percent were completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent was completely erroneous. And even among those cases corroborated to the investigator by an independent informant, 88 percent were completely accurate, 10 percent contained some error, and only 3 percent were completely erroneous.

This proves that an out-of-body experience cannot be a hallucination, which is a sensory perception that is perceived as real by the hallucinating person but that does not correspond with reality. Just like a psychotic episode or the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, a hallucination is not rooted in objective reality. It is neither a delusion, an incorrect interpretation of an actual perception, nor an illusion, an apparent reality or a false sense of reality. This raises the question whether the out-of-body experience may be a type of extrasensory perception.

The scientific importance of out-of-body experiences prompts me to include quite a few, very diverse examples. First up is the account of an out-of-body experience as told to me by a nurse at a coronary care unit. The account, taken from an article in The Lancet, was verified by us, and we asked the nurse to write it down as objectively as possible.

During the night shift the ambulance crew brings in a forty-four-year-old cyanotic [purplish-blue skin discoloration], comatose man. About an hour earlier he had been found in a public park by passers-by, who had initiated heart massage. After admission to the coronary care unit, he receives artificial respiration with a balloon and a mask as well as heart massage and defibrillation. When I want to change the respiration method, when I want to intubate the patient, the patient turns out to have dentures in his mouth. Before intubating him, I remove the upper set of dentures and put it on the crash cart. Meanwhile we continue extensive resuscitation. After approximately ninety minutes, the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he’s still ventilated and intubated, and he remains comatose. In this state he is transferred to the intensive care unit for further respiration. After more than a week in coma the patient returns to the coronary care unit, and I see him when I distribute the medication. As soon as he sees me he says, “Oh, yes, but you, you know where my dentures are.” I’m flabbergasted. Then he tells me, “Yes, you were there when they brought me into the hospital, and you took the dentures out of my mouth and put them on that cart; it had all these bottles on it, and there was a sliding drawer underneath, and you put my teeth there.” I was all the more amazed because I remembered this happening when the man was in a deep coma and undergoing resuscitation. After further questioning, it turned out that the patient had seen himself lying in bed and that he had watched from above how nursing staff and doctors had been busy resuscitating him. He was also able to give an accurate and detailed description of the small room where he had been resuscitated and of the appearance of those present. While watching this scene, he had been terrified that we were going to stop resuscitating and that he would die. And it’s true that we had been extremely negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he had been making desperate but unsuccessful attempts at letting us know that he was still alive and that we should continue resuscitating. He’s deeply impressed by his experience and says he’s no longer afraid of death.

Here is the account of a patient who had an NDE with out-of-body experience caused by complications during surgery:

“No, I’d never heard of near-death experiences, and I’d never had any interest in paranormal phenomena or anything of that nature. What happened was that I suddenly became aware of hovering over the foot of the operating table and watching the activity down below around the body of a human being. Soon it dawned on me that this was my own body. So I was hovering over it, above the lamp, which I could see through. I also heard everything that was said: ‘Hurry up, you bloody bastard’ was one of the things I remember them shouting. And even weirder: I didn’t just hear them talk, but I could also read the minds of everybody in the room, or so it seemed to me. It was all quite close, I later learned, because it took four and a half minutes to get my heart, which had stopped, going again. As a rule, oxygen deprivation causes brain damage after three or three and a half minutes. I also heard the doctor say that he thought I was dead. Later he confirmed saying this, and he was astonished to learn that I’d heard it. I also told them that they should mind their language during surgery.”

Next up is the account of psychologist Carl G. Jung of his out-of-body experience during his heart attack in 1944. His description of the earth from a great height is remarkable because it is quite consistent with what images from outer space taught us only some forty years ago—decades after Jung’s experience.

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or spotted dark green like oxydized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad expanse—the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back—as if in the upper left of a map—I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view—approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

This is the story of a woman in a deep coma who was about to be taken off the ventilator because she had been declared brain-dead by her treating neurologist. She had no measurable brain activity.

“While she was thought to be in a deep coma without any apparent brain activity, her specialist and husband were having a conversation by her bedside. The specialist predicted that his patient would be a ‘vegetable’ for the rest of her life and asked the husband to consider taking her off the equipment that was keeping her alive. The husband was still hopeful of a recovery, so she was kept on the ventilator. Several months later the woman woke up, despite the somber prognosis. It emerged that she had been able to hear throughout most of her coma and had overheard the conversation between her doctor and husband about passive euthanasia! She said how awful this had been and that while she had been trying to shout that she was still there, that she wanted to live, be with her husband and children, they were discussing her possible demise.

The account of somebody who is color-blind: “I saw the most dazzling colors, which was all the more surprising because I’m color-blind. I can distinguish the primary colors, but pastels all look the same to me. But suddenly I could see them, all kinds of different shades. Don’t ask me to name them because I lack the necessary experience for that.”

Next up is the account of Vicki, a woman who was born blind. She was born extremely premature in 1951, after a pregnancy of only twenty-two weeks, and immediately placed in a very primitive incubator and administered 100 percent oxygen. Such a high concentration of oxygen damages the development of the eyeball and optic nerve, which doctors were not aware of in the early days of the incubator. Thousands of premature babies who survived such early incubators went completely blind as a result. Vicki suffered complete atrophy (withering) of the eyeball and optic nerve. The visual cortex, the part of the occipital lobe of the brain that processes light stimuli into images, also fails to develop properly when it receives no light stimuli from the nonfunctioning eyes and optic nerves.

Vicki’s near-death experience is described in Kenneth Ring and S. Cooper’s book, and she was also interviewed at length in the BBC documentary The Day I Died. In 1973, when Vicki was twenty-two, she was hurled out of her car in a traffic accident. A basal skull fracture and severe concussion left her in a coma, and she had a fractured neck and back vertebrae and a broken leg. She caught a brief glimpse of the car wreck from above (as a blind woman she could see and recognize the smashed Volkswagen van), and later in the emergency room, where she had been taken by ambulance, she was able to see from a position above her body. In the room where she saw a body on a metal gurney, she also spotted two people and could hear them talking and expressing their concern. It was only when she recognized her wedding ring, which of course she knew only by touch, that she realized that it was her own body. And after she had gone up “through the ceiling,” she saw the roof of the hospital and trees.

“I’ve never seen anything, no light, no shadows, no nothing. A lot of people ask me if I see black. No, I don’t see black. I don’t see anything at all. And in my dreams I don’t see any visual impressions. It’s just taste, touch, sound, and smell. But no visual impressions of anything.

“The next thing I recall I was in Harborview Medical Center and looking down at everything that was happening. And it was frightening because I’m not accustomed to see things visually, because I never had before! And initially it was pretty scary! And then I finally recognized my wedding ring and my hair. And I thought: is this my body down there? And am I dead or what? They kept saying, ‘We can’t bring her back, we can’t bring her back!’ And they were trying to frantically work on this thing that I discovered was my body and I felt very detached from it and sort of ‘so what?’ And I was thinking, what are these people getting so upset about? Then I thought, I’m out of here, I can’t get these people to listen to me. As soon as I thought that I went up through the ceiling as if it were nothing. And it was wonderful to be out there and be free, not worry about bumping into anything, and I knew where I was going. And I heard this sound of wind chimes that was the most incredible sound that I can describe—it was from the very lowest to the very highest tones. As I was approaching this area, there were trees and there were birds and quite a few people, but they were all, like, made out of light, and I could see them, and it was incredible, really beautiful, and I was overwhelmed by that experience because I couldn’t really imagine what light was like. It’s still…a very emotional thing when I talk about this…because there was a point at which…at which I could bring forth any knowledge I wanted to have.”

Vicki goes on to explain that in this other world she was welcomed by some acquaintances. As Ring and Cooper point out:

There are five of them. Debby and Diane were Vicki’s blind school-mates, who had died years before, at ages eleven and six, respectively. In life, they had both been profoundly retarded as well as blind, but here they appeared bright and beautiful, healthy and vitally alive. They were no longer children, but, as Vicki phrased it, “in their prime.” In addition, Vicki reports seeing two of her childhood caretakers, a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Zilk, both of whom had also previously died. Finally, there was Vicki’s grandmother—who had essentially raised Vicki and who had died just two years before this incident. Her grandmother, however, who was further back than the others, was reaching out to hug Vicki.

Vicki’s experience concludes with a forced reentry into her body:

“And then I was sent back and then I went back into my body and it was excruciatingly painful and very heavy and I remember feeling very sick.”

The fact that somebody who has been blind from birth as a result of an atrophied eyeball and optic nerve and who has an undeveloped visual cerebral cortex can nonetheless see people and surroundings raises significant questions. How is it possible that this woman can see, from a position outside and above the body, at a moment when she is in a coma caused by brain damage sustained in a serious traffic accident? She has never been able to see. Besides, she perceives things from a position outside her body. How does she do this? What is responsible for this? How can she be aware of her perceptions during her coma? This is impossible according to current medical knowledge. The stories of Vicki and of other blind people with an NDE are forcing scientists to consider new ideas about the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Vicki’s reported observations could not have been the product of sensory perception or of a functioning (visual) cerebral cortex, nor could they have been a figment of the imagination given their verifiable aspects.

5. A Dark Space

People feel like they are pulled rather abruptly into a dark space, which they describe as an enclosed space, a void, or a well. Approximately 15 percent of people experience their stay in this dark space as frightening.

“And then everything went dark, but to my mind I didn’t lose consciousness, because my memories are as vivid as ever… As I peered into the dark, the color changed from black to deep blue, not dark, but an intense cobalt blue that leaves you speechless… Soon I found myself in a dark space, a kind of tunnel, which didn’t seem to end. I couldn’t go back, but plowing through it seemed an equally dreadful prospect. Would I ever get out? Or would I suffocate somewhere halfway? You see, there was very little space in this tunnel; it was really tight. After I had spent a long time—more than terrifying—squeezing through this tunnel, a glimmer of light appeared at the end, and after a real struggle I stood, or found myself, in this absolute light, which seemed to envelop me.”

The Tunnel Experience

A little pinpoint of light appears in this dark space, and people are often pulled toward it at an incredible speed. They describe it as a tunnel experience.

People move through this dark, occasionally multicolored or spiral-shaped narrow space, sometimes accompanied by visible or invisible beings or by music. They approach the light, which slowly intensifies to become an exceptionally bright but nonblinding light. Eventually people are wholly enveloped by this light and feel completely absorbed by it. This process is coupled with an indescribable feeling of bliss, a sense of unconditional love and acceptance. The journey through the tunnel appears to be a passing from our physical world to another dimension where time and distance no longer play a role. This sensation of moving through a tunnel toward the light has become almost synonymous with near-death experience.

“I felt that I was sliding deep down into another state of consciousness. That’s to say, my consciousness traveled while my body remained motionless on the bed. I could see my body, but I couldn’t feel it. I was being sucked away, as it were. I entered an extremely dark, long, and spiral-shaped tunnel, which struck me as frightening though not unfamiliar at first. I soared through this spiral-shaped funnel, and the further or the higher I got, the lighter it became. The intensity of the light changed to a deep purple/violet. ‘Above’ me I saw an extremely bright, radiant white light. I whirled, floated, toward it.”

“I felt that I was letting go of my body and rising up. Through the roof. Over the hospital. Everything became smaller, and I began to accelerate. Everything around me was dark, with the exception of several stars that hurled toward me and I noticed their different colors. I had no time to look at anything because I was moving so fast. Things slowed down when I saw that I’d ended up in a kind of hourglass and that I was being ‘sucked’ toward the opening. Then I realized that I wasn’t alone because a flow of translucent beings was heading the same way as me and another flow was moving in the opposite direction. When I thought about reincarnation, it later dawned on me that it could well be this flow. Once I got through the opening everything began to change. First off, I got this feeling. It was so emotional that I can’t possibly describe it. I was overcome with a feeling of peace that I’d never known on earth… An overwhelming feeling of love came over me, not the earthly feeling I was quite familiar with, but something I can’t describe. Above me I saw a bright light, and on my way there I heard beautiful music and I saw colors I’d never seen before. As well as the feelings I just described, I had the impression that this was a different dimension altogether. And if anything was missing it was our earthly conception of time! I had what you might call an enhanced vision of this other dimension. On my way up, toward the all encompassing light, I saw numerous other ‘beings’ who were also heading there. When I had nearly arrived at this light, a kind of membrane in front of it stopped me from going any further…”

“All of a sudden I knew that I was dead. This realization struck me as odd. I hovered about twenty feet above my body, which was still on the operating table. I was surrounded by doctors who were talking to one another, but I didn’t hear their voices. I also saw my husband waiting on a bench in a darkish room somewhere in the hospital. He was nervous. He was rolling a cigarette. From one moment to the next I found myself flying through a tunnel. It was extremely long, and I flew through it head-first. The tunnel was virtually horizontal, but at a slight upward angle. It was about 10 feet in diameter. I heard a whizzing sound, like wind blowing past my ear, and in the distance I saw a bright light, which I was being sucked toward, but which still seemed a long way off. And all this time I felt scared, powerless, and lonely, because nobody knew that I was aware that I was dead. I wanted to either return or not be aware of my death. But I clearly had no choice in the matter… The light that I was now approaching was of a kind that I’d never seen before and that differs from any other kind such as sunlight. It was white and extremely bright, and yet you could easily look at it.”

Excerpt from Consciousness Beyond Life

See Part II here.