Consciousness Beyond Death: New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences

In recent years, near-death experience (NDE) researchers have dared to suggest that this "out-of-body," or dualistic, phenomenon is evidence that consciousness survives death, thereby validating the words of St. Paul that we have two bodies-physical and spiritual-the spirit body separating from the physical body at the time of physical death, or within minutes of it. This "spirit" body has also been referred to as an etheric body, astral body, vehicle of vitality, double, doppelganger, and mental body. Some mystics and psychics claim there are more than two bodies, the so-called "second death" which involves a transition from one spirit body to a higher spirit body.

The spirit body is attached to the physical body by what the Bible calls a "silver cord." While the umbilical cord is severed at birth, the silver cord is severed at death. Those having NDEs have experienced a separation of the bodies, but not a severance of the silver cord.

For many years, dedicated researchers concluded that the NDE was more than a hallucination, a drug-induced reaction, the illusions of oxygen-deprivation, or some evolutionary chemical effect not yet understood by science, but most of them stopped short of suggesting that anything spiritual was involved. Such an hypothesis would have been looked upon as a "religious" explanation, and conflicted with the advancement of science, which was not open to a dualistic explanation, believing it had already impeached religion. Dedicated researchers, however, eventually came to see it as an advancement of science even if it did support religion.

While the NDE was given a name in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody, and was being studied at the same time by Dr. Elisabeth Kűbler-Ross, reports of the phenomenon existed here and there but had not been collected in a single reference until Moody's best-selling Life After Life. Section two of this four-part book offers a number of pre-Moody NDEs, two of them probably the most dynamic or profound NDEs ever reported. The author otherwise draws from his interviews with a number of experiencers and researchers, along with leading references, all supporting the dualistic nature of the NDE.