Losing fear, getting peace

In the present issue of SPR, Professor Rubino Pedersen ponders on his personal experience of happiness and peace after a stroke attack, preceded by a long-lasting coma. After lengthy autobiographical investigations, he writes of his discovery of the discussions of NDE, Near Death Experience, a cluster of symptoms that fit well to his own experience. In addition to this, Professor Rubino Pedersen also makes an important point about the failing communication between the research fields. Indeed, a lot has been published about NDE, a profound, existential experience that, according to Karl Jaspers, can be defined as a kind of limit experience. It includes often shattering feelings of transcendence of space, time and perceptual boundaries. Separation of mind from body, altered perception of time, space and memory revival are among its common components. Most frequently reported are strong positive affects, such as happiness and peace, empathy and unconditioned love. Seeing others from this and the otherworld in bright light or cosmic unity are repeating dimensions of NDE. Several people have reported reception of some extraordinary knowledge of existence and of safe trespassing across the boundary between life and death. The NDE experiences are for the most positive, though also some distressing events are narrated about. Constitutive for the pattern is that the symptoms arouse after ‘nearness of death’, in the situations after trauma, shock, anaesthesia, or generally after having encountered death in one way or another. According to several researchers, the common aftereffect, reported by almost all who have an NDE, is a total loss or a diminished fear of death and feelings of peace (Holden, Greyson and James 2009). The first psychological reports of NDE were published by William James and the research team around him in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Before that similar type of experiences have been presented in the stories and narratives of rituals and religious experiences. According to many authors, experiences with parallel contacts are known in most cultures. From the early 70s, NDE has gained an enormous interest among several audiences, from psychology and psychiatry to neuroscience, western popular media, arts and new age. Edwin Shneidman, a psychiatrist who established a research initiative later named ‘thanatology’, described in 1971 narratives of a group of people who attempted suicide by jumping from Golden Gate. Subsequently, after having recovered after a fatal act, they told about the experience of peace and a feeling of a kind of new knowledge that made them feel safe and powerful. What was also important for Shneidman, a practising psychiatrist, was that several persons got rid of the coercive manner of attempting suicide. Concurrently, with Shneidman’s psychiatric work, Raymond Moody, a psychologist, published extensive research on NDE in a book ‘Life after Life’ (1975). The research idea was based on Moody’s own NDE experience, and in the book, his attempt was to describe the phenomenon, to achieve a scientific typologization of the NDE experiences and to make it comprehensible for the larger audience. Moody also popularized actively his results. Consequently, he gained a snow-ball-like data on NDE experiences from people all over the US and Europe. Currently, several scientific journals, societies and assemblies discuss and publish work on NDE. What makes NDE so interesting? What can we learn from such experiences? Leo Näreaho, Finnish theologian, studies this very question in his book