CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080041-9

Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080041-9
IDEAS
Life After Death?
The experience is a familiar one to
many emergency-room medics. A pa-
tient who has been pronounced dead and
unexpectedly recovers later describes
what happened to him during those mo-
ments-sometimes hours-when his
body exhibited no signs of life. Accord-
ing to one repeated account, the patient
feels himself rushing through a long,
dark tunnel while noise rings in his ears.
Suddenly, he finds himself outside his
own body, looking down with curi-
ous detachment at a medical team's
efforts to resuscitate him. He hears
what is said, notes what is happen-
ing but cannot communicate with
anyone. Soon, his attention is
drawn to other presences in the
room-spirits of dead relatives or
friends-who communicate with
him nonverbally. Gradually, he is
drawn to a vague "being of light."
This being invites him to evaluate
his life and shows him highlights of
his past in panoramic vision. The
patient longs to stay with the being
of light but is reluctantly drawn
back into his physical body and
recovers.
Clues: Once dismissed as noth-
ing more than hallucinations,
these "near death" experiences
are now being seriously examined
by several psychiatrists and psy-
chologists for possible clues to
what happens at the moment of
death. One such researcher, Dr.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, an interna-
tionally respected expert on the
psychiatrie dimensions of dying,
now claims that she has proof that
"there is life after death" on the
basis of hundreds of such stories.
Although other psychologists be-
lieve that Dr. Kubler-Ross lends
too much credence to tales told by
the dying, her outspoken views
have recently heightened scholar-
ly interest in near-death phenomena.
What most impresses Kubler-Ross
about the cases she has assembled over
the last eight years is the evidence of out-
of-body consciousness-that is, the ap-
parent ability of people who exhibit no
respiration, heartbeat or brain-wave ac-
tivity to describe events taking place
around them. She is currently checking
out each case against medical records for
a book she plans to publish next year. "If
you have a woman who has been de-
clared dead in a hospital and she can tell
you exactly how many people walked
into the room and worked on her, this
cannot be hallucination," she argues.
Although details of near-death accounts
vary somewhat, Kubler-Ross says that all
her subjects report certain common ex-
periences: a pervasive sense of calm
well-being, a feeling of personal whole-
have lost limbs-and the experience of
being greeted by previously deceased
loved ones. As a result of such experi-
ences, she says, "many of them resented
our desperate attempts to bring them
back to life. Death is the feeling of peace
and hope. Not one of them has ever been
afraid to die again."
In a series of in-depth interviews
conducted independently of Kubler-
Ross's research, another physician has
discovered extraordinary similarities
among 50 near-death experiences result-
Bettmann Archive
Fifteenth-century woodcut of soul leaving body
ing from accidents, illness and sudden
cardiac arrest. According to Dr. Ray-
mond A. Moody Jr., who holds a doctor-
ate in philosophy as well as a medical
degree, many subjects experienced en-
hanced intellectual capabilities and,
upon recovery, amazed doctors by their
unusually technical knowledge of resus-
citation procedures.
Unlike Kubler-Ross, Moody does not
claim scientific proof of an afterlife. But
he does believe that most near-death
experiences cannot be readily explained
away as delusions induced by pain-
killing drugs: the narratives, he says, are
too clear and too similar to one another.
In his popular paperback "Life After
Life,"* Moody also dismisses cultural
conditioning as an explanation because
the reported experiences do not conform
to co, temporary American images of
death. On the contrary, he asserts that
"the picture of the events of dying which
emerges from these accounts corre-
sponds in a striking way with that paint-
ed in very ancient and esoteric writings
totally unfamiliar to my subjects." In
particular, Moody finds that the experi-
ences of floating out of the body, meeting
spiritual companions and encountering a
being of light are remarkably analagous
to images found in the Tibetan Book of
the Dead.
As part of yet another effort to track
down : lues "that would suggest an after-
life," psychologist Karlis Osis of the
American Society for Psychical Re-
search in New York City has tabu-
lated by computer interviews with
877 physicians who have reported
deathbed visions by their patients.
Most of them involve dying pa-
tients who see benign apparitions
roming for their souls. Osis has
letermined, at least to his own
atisfaction, that patients whose
brains were impaired by high fever
ir disease reported fewer visions
than those who were fully alert at
leath. Moreover, he asserts, pow-
erful drugs such as morphine and
Demerol actually decrease the co-
herence of such visions. "The sick-
brain hypotheses we considered
"lo not explain the visions," Osis
oncludes, "and so far it looks as if
patterns are emerging consistent
with survival after death."
Waiting for Data: Critics of afterlife
research have held then fire until
they can see the data that Kubler-
Ross publishes. Still, savs psychia-
wrist Charles Dahlberg of New York
University, "I don't see how you
an set up the control group need-
d to examine this subject scientifi-
rally. The afterlife is a matter of
laith." Father Eugene Kennedy, a
Roman Catholic priest and profes-
sor of psychology at Chicago's Loy-
Ja University, finds Kubler-Ross's
new focus "a falling-off from her
previous work which related death
to the whole of human life." Kennedy,
for one, believes that "intimations of
immortality don't come from vaporous
experiences at life's end but from the
love and creativity we exercise to over-
come the tragedies of life."
Even if Kubler-Ross has not proved
her point, she has laid out phenomena
that modern science has not yet ade-
quately explained. "I don't at all agree
with Elisabeth when she says that the
experiences she and I have both had
working with the dying absolutely guar-
antec life after death," says Dr. Charles
Garfie id of the Cancer Research Insti-
tute of the University of California. "1
also don't take the extreme scientific-
maten dist position that these are the
utterances of deranged persons. I don't
really i now what is happening, and I am
willing to tolerate the ambiguity."
Approved For Release 2001/03/26"" CIA RDP96-00787R000200080041-9
with bureau reports
Newsweek, July 12, 1976
4.1