Thank you for doing this with us. What is your backstory?

I produced television for more than 27 years. From the Puerto Rican Day Parade and the New York Magazine Awards Show to show-running syndicated shows and network shows like Deal or No Deal in spanish for Telemundo. I worked in development for a company who created Surreal Life and Flavor of Love, directed and produced music videos for a few well-known artists, and pitched and sold my own programming. I was even nominated for a couple of New York Emmys. My intuition led me to great career decisions and to work with some of the best people in the industry.

I moved to Chicago in 2008 when I married my husband Jonathan. As a result, my career stalled. I was ok with it because it forced me to shift gears and focus on what became a priority for me. Creating a family. We already had one daughter, Valentina, who my husband brought with him into our
marriage (not a step-daughter to me at all, more like my own flesh and blood), and we gave birth to our first daughter, Adina, two years after we got married.

Pregnant with our second child, I started having premonitions that I would die giving birth. My intuition was at an all-time high. This wasn’t my first time at the rodeo. This pregnancy was different. Somehow, I knew I was going to need a hysterectomy. I felt that I was going to bleed out, that the baby would
be fine, that my organs were going to attach to each other, and many more detailed visions into the not so distant future. I told everyone. My husband, (a science-minded, PhD Economist from University of Chicago and former Air Force pilot), along with everyone else to whom I voiced my fears, told me the data didn’t support what I was seeing and told me to relax. Everyone, including all the doctors, nurses, friends, strangers, and people on Facebook simply thought I was a hormonal and a histrionic pregnant woman.

That is, until the day I gave birth to our son Jacob and moments later, I died.

I had an amniotic fluid embolism, a rare and often fatal condition (1 in 40,000) where amniotic cells get into the mother’s bloodstream, and if you happen to be allergic to it, your body goes into a type of anaphylaxis and in most cases, you don’t survive. The only reason I did survive, is because I spoke up and ONE DOCTOR listened to her own intuition, flagged my file incorporating extra blood and a crash cart in the OR. And that is 100 percent what saved my life. Or as one MD said to me recently, “I want to correct you, YOU saved your own life.” Technically, we were both right.

Since the experience, my life and my world in television have never been the same.

Who is someone you greatly admire?

Sara Blakely of SPANX. She is brilliant, found a need, and turned it into a multi-billion-dollar company. However, her drive to create so she can give is what inspires me most about her. Pledging half of her wealth to charity and focusing on building up women, (instead of tearing them down) is awe-inspiring.

How do you bring goodness to the world?

People tell me it took courage to survive, but the real courage for me (outside of speaking up when no one was listening), was reliving every painful detail in my book, 37 Seconds.

My way of dealing with pain is to express it, write it, film it, and share it, but my husband’s way is much different. Suppress and repress is his M.O. and he is comfortable with it. Asking Jonathan to relive his most vulnerable side took a lot of courage from him and I will admit, the process of writing took a lot of literal blood, sweat, and tears to get through it.

If it never got published, this would likely be the end of our story, I would continue being a wife and mom, maybe dabble some more in TV, and Jonathan would be annoyed I cracked him open for an exercise in “sharing our emotions.” Not bad at all, just not what was in the cards for me. And even though I saw what would happen to me before I flat-lined, I could never have predicted what would happen in my not so distant future.

When HarperCollins bought the rights, they were certain it would compete with Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven. It did not. I’m not saying people didn’t embrace the book, but they wanted more. The overall reaction was “I wanted to know more about what she saw in heaven,” and I only address everything that was verifiable. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt, some other energy force is working beyond what we can see.

I could have gone into more detail, but I stuck to my intuition and felt there was a stronger message here to validate other’s visions, foresight, and the ability to feel things around us which many consider illogical. And we were pleasantly surprised by who was being affected by our story—the medical community, the agnostics, the skeptics, and complete strangers from all over the world.

Both clinicians and scientists started reaching out telling their own “sixth
sense” and intuitive stories. Every day people would explain how they had nagging feelings about a moment in their lives which they ignored, resulting in horrific outcomes and wishing they had the courage to speak up. They told how my story is now helping others speak up and saving lives.

I respect what happened to me immensely, for without it, I would never have been able to connect to these individuals on such a vulnerable and profound level. It made me realize how important this topic is, how it needs to be shared, and how science and intuitive medicine are both important for patients and doctors alike. And it showed me how it needs to be taken more seriously.

I have become a patient advocate and speaker for many medical institutions, legislative conferences, blood donation services, and universities. Educating doctors and patients alike on using their own intuition when listening or speaking to each other is one of my missions, and finding strength within yourself and your own spirit to overcome even the most catastrophic of situations is another.

I have told many stories in my career, I just never thought the biggest story I
would tell, would be the most personal one.

What are your “5 things you wish you’d known before your experience,” and why?

Listen to your gut. I know we hear this, almost as a cliché, but REALLY—
listen to your gut. My story takes it to extremes, in the fact that it can save your life, but a career, a job, a relationship, anything you decide which goes against your gut, will ultimately make you unhappy and cause you to wish that you hadn’t chose that path. How many times have we told ourselves, “I should have listened to my gut!” Take it seriously. It could result in the best decision of your life, or it can save someone’s life—maybe even your own.

When an obstacle is put in front of you, go around it and don’t take it personally. Just plow through it. However, if many obstacles are preventing you from reaching that specific goal, it might not be your time to reach that goal. The universe has something else in mind for you at this time. You know the saying “go with the flow”? That flow is energy. The obstacles are blockages of that flow. Sometimes you go around it and sometimes there is another path which gets highlighted. Taking the other path leads to a flow where you feel “Hey, I am in a zone.” Ultimately, you will end up at your goal. It just might not be the one with which you started.

It can be done. “It cannot be done,” is something almost everyone in my career has told me. “It isn’t done this way,” “You cannot do that.” Well, if I listened to each and every person who told me that, not only would I have never succeeded in my career, but I would not be alive. Trust yourself. Have faith in yourself. Worst case scenario: you fail, you dust yourself off, and you learn from the experience. Best case: you proved it could be done against their “so-called” odds, but most importantly, it got done because you stuck to your instincts and did it!

If you sense something, say something. This is something which spoke
loud and clear to me during my pregnancy. But I realize now, I had been sensing discomfort in many parts of my career and relationships along the way. Had I just spoken up, dealt with my frustration or misunderstandings, things would not have escalated, because it would have been handled early on. Miscommunications happen all the time. Speaking up would have helped me navigate things better and be more efficient with my time, even if I got fired. Why? Because I would have learned valuable lessons on what not to settle for in the next job and my interview process would have been clearer, leading me to a better start the next go-round.

Embrace change. People, places, goals, businesses, and you, change. Change is a great thing. When I didn’t get a job or lost a job to someone else, I used to ask myself, “What is wrong with me?” I wish I would have learned back then what I know now. Many people stay in a job they dislike, complacent and living each day out like it’s Groundhog’s day. The benefit of hindsight and having a near death experience is that I understand how fleeting life can be. And when you come so close to death, you start evaluating what you want in your life.

My decision to shift gears was thrust upon me, because I had no choice. I tried to go back to producing. I had created a new show I was out pitching, yet everyone wanted to hear our story. I couldn’t get away from it. They kept saying “you should write a book.” I didn’t want to and I continued to pitch and I continued to get rejected. When I finally embraced what everyone else saw for me, the energy stopped working against me and this beautiful path lit up showing me exactly where I needed to be. At many points in one’s life, there are paths to take a chance and make a change. One of those decisions could change the trajectory of your life for the better. Embrace the change.

What are some things you’re working on or excited about?

The book, 37 Seconds is selling in different languages, in 12 countries and growing. I continue to speak, and I went back to TV, but in a different capacity. I signed my life rights to a production company to create a scripted series based on what happened and what continues to happen. Yes, I still have premonitions and yes, I see much more. The journey continues into the next book.

I am also currently writing a movie with a well-known scribe which you will hear about in the upcoming year.

Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a breakfast or lunch with, and why?

Sheryl Sandberg. I love my husband the way she loves (present tense is on purpose) hers. I had such a visceral reaction when I learned of her husband’s passing that I reached out to her immediately. I had zero expectations I would hear from her, I just wanted to give her support energetically. I never got a response, but I felt compelled to talk to her about that soulful connection and how he will again show up for her. I was moved by her open letter on Facebook and her incredible book, Option B. The resilience and strength it takes to try as best you can to compartmentalize the pain, keep going for the sake of others—especially your children—and move forward. She is
someone I would love to break bread with and just give her and her children a hug.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Source: https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-dying-for-37-seconds-changed-her-life-and-will-inspire-you-in-yours-with-stephanie-arnold-be5630af2bde

Dr. Eben Alexander: What I think is going to happen is that science and spirituality, which will be mainly be an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness, will grow closer and closer together.

One thing that we will have to let go of is this kind of addiction to simplistic, primitive reductive materialism because there’s really no way that I can see a reductive materialist model coming remotely in the right ballpark to explain what we really know about consciousness now.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

Today we welcome Dr. Eben Alexander to Skeptiko. Dr. Alexander has been an academic neurosurgeon for more than 25 years, including 15 years at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In November of 2008, he had a near-death experience that changed his life and caused him to rethink everything he thought he knew about the human brain and consciousness.

Dr. Alexander, welcome to Skeptiko.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, your story is really quite amazing. For those who haven’t heard of it and aren’t aware of what you went through, do you want to tell us a little bit about your experience?

Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes. It really struck out of the blue. I’d been quite healthy up until that time. In fact, I was in reasonably good shape because my older son had been putting me through a big workout, anticipating a climb of a 20,000 foot volcano in South America.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Luckily I was in pretty good shape. At 4:30 in the morning, November 10, 2008, I got out of bed. I was getting ready to go up to work. I was working in Charlottesville at the time and I had severe sudden back pain, much worse than I had ever experienced. Literally within 10 or 15 minutes, it got me to a point where I could not even take a step. I was really in tremendous agony.

My wife, Holly, was rubbing my back. Then my younger son, Bond, came in and saw I was in a lot of distress and he started rubbing my temples. I realized when he did that that I had a severe headache. It was like he took a railroad spike and put it through my head. But I was already really going down very quickly. I didn’t know it at the time.

I found out much later that I had acute bacterial meningitis and it was a very unusual bacteria. One that the incidence of spontaneous E. coli meningitis in adults in the U.S. is about 1 in 10 million per year. So it’s really rare. We never found out where it came from. But at any rate, it was in about 2 to 2-1/2 hours it drove me deep down and in fact, my last words really were to my wife, “Don’t call 911. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

Luckily she overruled that and she did that because she saw me having a grand mal seizure on the bed. Of course I don’t remember that and I really don’t remember anything that happened for the next week because I was gone. I was very sick during that time as I heard later. In fact, I was so sick that I was on a ventilator the whole week.

They did several lumbar punctures trying to guide therapy. I was on triple antibiotics very early on, due to a very good medical team. They did a lumbar puncture about the second or third day into this and my cerebral spinal fluid glucose, which is normally around 60 to 80 and in a bad case of meningitis might drop down to about 20, well my glucose went down to 1. So I was really sick.

Alex Tsakiris: So at this point, nothing should be going on in your brain and yet something was happening in your conscious awareness.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Yeah, I’d say that’s correct. To me, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the last three years trying to explain this and that explanation initially, all I was doing was trying to explain it neuroscientifically. Meningitis is very helpful because it’s probably better than anything else at really diffusely wiping out the neocortex. But one can always argue that there’s some idling function at a deep level that might still survive.

In fact, one of the hypotheses that I entertained about all this was because the experience that I’ll describe to you seemed very hyper-real and extremely crisp and vivid, much more real and interactive than sitting here and talking with you right now. I mean, it was extraordinary. That is something that is often described in near-death experiences and of course one of my early hypotheses was well, maybe there’s some differential effect against inhibitory neuronal networks that allowed over-expression of excitatory neural networks and gave this illusion of kind of a hyper-real situation.

I can tell you from having lived through it that it was so powerful and so beyond that kind of explanation that I wasn’t very hopeful that that would work out in the end. But I figured I needed to give it a chance and look at the microanatomy in the cortex and the different connections with the thalamus and basal ganglia and see if I could come up with some way that one might have an illusion of hyper-reality.

I can tell you because of the kind of content of the experience and the powerful, overwhelming nature of it and the fact that it was so complex, I think much of what I remembered from that experience, I don’t think my brain and mind could possibly manage that even now.

I mean, the kind of mental function that occurs when you’re in that hyper-real state, the way that information comes in from spiritual beings and kind of the interaction with them is so intense and extraordinary, it’s really inexplicable in earthly terms. But it would basically outrun any of those kind of theories. That was something I was looking for. In fact, I never found an anatomic distribution that would support that over-activity of excitatory pathways.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. Thanks for doing that. I think we’ve jumped a little bit ahead of the story. For those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about your NDE.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay. Well, you were asking what it is like when one has their cortex shut down like that, and in fact, for one thing I was surprised that I remembered anything because as a neurosurgeon having had many patients who were in comas for various reasons and had a lot of them recover, my understanding was that in general you don’t really remember anything.

Even when the patients seem to be interacting I knew that usually if they’d been sick, for instance with meningitis, that they really wouldn’t remember much of it. Occasionally there were exceptions to that. You’d have patients who would remember very remarkable things from deep inside, but before I had always kind of explained that away with the standard answers. “Oh, that’s what the brain does when it’s very sick.”

What I do remember from deep inside coma, for one thing my first awareness was I had no memory whatsoever of my life. I had no language, no words. All of my experience in life, knowledge of humans, Earth, the universe, all of that was gone. The only thing I had was this very kind of crude existence. And I call it in my book the “earthworm’s eye-view,” because it really was just a crude, kind of underground.

I have a vivid memory of dark roots above me and there was a kind of monotonous pounding, a dull sound in the background pounding away eternally. It was just murky and gross. Every now and then a face, an animal or something would boil up out of the muck and there might be some chant or roar or something. Then they’d disappear again.

It sounds very foreboding to talk about it right now, but in fact, since I knew no other existence I don’t remember being particularly alarmed when I was in that setting. I think that that was the best consciousness that my brain could muster when it was soaking in pus. It turns out that that seemed to last for a very long time. Given that it was my first awareness of anything, it actually seemed to be years or eternity. I don’t know. It seemed like a very, very long time.

Then there was a spinning melody, this bright melody that just started spinning in front of me. Beautiful, beautiful melody compared to that dull pounding sound that I’d heard for eons. It spun and as it spun around, it cleared everything away. This was the part that was so shocking and so hard to explain. It was as if the blinders came off and the reality there was much more crisp, real, and interactive and fresh than any reality I’ve ever known in this earthly existence. That part is very shocking and hard to explain when you go through it, and yet what I’ve found since then is that a lot of people who have had NDEs discuss the same kind of hyper-reality. But it’s very shocking to see it.

For me, I was a speck on a butterfly wing. I had no body awareness at all. In fact, I had no body awareness through this entire kind of deep coma experience. I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them.

Beside me on the butterfly wing was a beautiful girl. I remember her face to this day. Absolutely beautiful girl, blue eyes, and she was dressed in–what I was trying to write all this up in the months after I came back—I described as a kind of peasant garb. I can remember the colors very well. Kind of a peach/orange and a powder blue, just really beautiful.

She never said a word to me and she was looking at me and her thoughts would just come into my awareness. Her thoughts were things like, “You are loved. You are cherished forever. There’s nothing you can do wrong. You have nothing to worry about. You will be taken care of.” It was so soothing and so beautiful, and of course as I said, my language wasn’t really working then. So those particular words were words I had to put on it when I came back out. But a lot of this flowed perfectly when I came back out.

In fact, I didn’t read anything about near-death experiences or about physics or cosmology because of the advice my older son, Eben IV, who was majoring in neuroscience at the University of Delaware advised me. Three days after I left the hospital, when he came home for Thanksgiving back in 2008, he said, “Well, if you want to write this up as a useful report, don’t read anything. Just write everything down you can remember.”

I spent the next two months typing everything I could remember in the computer. It came out to about 100 pages of memories from this deep experience within the coma. I think from that beautiful valley scene on the butterfly wing, waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arks of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arks of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate.

On this butterfly wing, the first time I was there, I remember having this sensation. It was as if there was a warm summer breeze that just blew by. Then everything changed and the scene stayed the same but I became aware. Again in looking back on it, that was my awareness of a Divine presence of incredibly indescribable, kind of a superpower of divinity. Then we went out of this universe.

I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light. There was a distinct sensation from me, a memory, that they were not one and the same. I don’t know what that means.

In my awareness, when I say I was aware, this goes far, far beyond the consciousness of any one—this is not Eben Alexander’s consciousness aware of being in that space. I was far beyond that point, way beyond any kind of human consciousness, and really just one consciousness. When I got there they said that I would be going back, but I didn’t know what that meant.

They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was that this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.

But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.

But suffice it to say that I would find myself back at the earthworm eye-view. What I learned was that if I could recall the notes of that melody, the spinning melody, that would start the melody spinning again and that would take me back into that beautiful, crisp, clear hyper-real valley on the butterfly wing. My guardian angel was always there and she was always very comforting.

Then we would go out into what I came to call “the coral,” which was outside of the entire physical universe. Again, they would show lessons and often those lessons would involve becoming a tremendous part of what they were demonstrating.

So much of it is just indescribable and so much of it there are reasons why we cannot bring a lot of that back. And there are reasons, in fact, it’s why I’ve come to see that we’re conscious in spite of our brain. To me that makes a lot more sense.

I go into detail about all that in my book, but it turns out that I would oscillate from this beautiful, idyllic place in the core, coming back down into earthworm eye-view, and it seems it was three or four times. Like I said, sequencing was so strange because when I was in the earthworm eye-view, everything seemed to be one kind of soup of just mixed foam. It was very hard to put sequence on it but it was very clear to me that several times I would use the memory of those notes and spin that melody and go back in. They would always say, “You are not here to stay.”

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Alexander, a couple of questions. First, what is the title of your book?

Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay. Well, I’m going through several possible agents right now. I don’t have a publisher and I have a feeling that agents and publishers will have their own ideas. What I can tell you is that the tentative working title right now, and this could easily change, is Life Beyond Death: A Neurosurgeon’s Life-Changing Near-Death Odyssey.

Alex Tsakiris: Let me hone in on a couple of things. It’s an amazing experience, an amazing account. Tell us a little bit about coming back into this world. I want to hone in on a couple of things that we need to nail down if we’re going to really try and understand this account from our world.

One thing I want to nail down is the time perspective. How do we know that these memories were formed during the time when you’re in a coma? You’ve already laid out a couple of points about that in that normally we wouldn’t even expect you to have a lot of clear, coherent memories three days after coming out of this coma. But you said that’s when you started writing down this account. You also said you tried not to contaminate your memories with talking to other people. So those are good parts of your story.

What are some other aspects of it that you can tell us that make you confident that these memories were formed while you were in this severely compromised mental state?

Dr. Eben Alexander: I can tell you that when I first started waking up, it was very shocking because as I said, I didn’t have memories of my life before and my family, loved ones, sisters, my wife and sons, they were there. So initially I have a very distinct memory as I was emerging, which was on the seventh day of coma. I was still on the ventilator and still had the endotracheal tube in.

My awareness was of several faces. I remember one was my wife and one was a good friend of ours who is also my infectious disease doctor and a neighbor, Dr. Scott Wade. Then one was also my 10-year-old son. These faces were there. I did not recognize them. They would say words. I didn’t understand the words, but I had a very powerful visual memory. They would kind of boil up out of the muck and then they’d go away.

I’m fairly sure that was Sunday morning because much, much later, after I’d written everything down and I did start asking people about things that had happened, it seemed that that’s when people were doing that. Now in fact, they’d been doing it all week but I think I was unaware of it during the week. That’s mainly based on the people that I do remember seeing who only those who were there that Sunday morning were.

My language started coming back very quickly and so did my visual cortex, because I think—again, it’s so hard to put a time label on this. But in talking with people who were there, I think that probably over an hour or two or three I started getting language back quickly. My auditory cortex started coming online. My ability to understand speech, so what’s called Wernicke’s area in the dominant temporal lobe was starting to come back up to speed and I can understand things. I could then start making speech.

So I was having a very rapid return of cortical function, but I was still kind of in and out of reality. In fact, in my book I go into great detail describing what I call the “nightmare,” which was kind of a paranoid, crazy thing where I was halfway in and out of reality. My younger son, Bond, he can describe it to you. It was kind of a very frightening thing because I would seem to be with it and then I’d be saying things that were just out of my mind.

Of course, initially as I explained to some of my physicians, what I remembered was this incredibly powerful hyper-real spiritual experience. They would say, “Oh, yes, well you were very, very sick. We thought you were going to die. I can’t even believe that you’re back.” They were predicting that I would have two to three months in the hospital and then need chronic care for the rest of my life. So they were obviously quite shocked that I came back like I did. It was just so strange.

Initially I thought, “Gosh, it was almost too real to be real.” That hyper-reality that people describe, I just wish we could bottle that up and give it to people so they could see what it’s like because it is not something that is going to be explained by these little simplistic kind of talking about CO2 and oxygen levels. That just won’t work. I promise you that won’t work.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s an interesting point because as you mentioned briefly, you know it won’t work because you actually went and tried to see if there was a model that you were aware of from your training that could fit your experience, right?

So you became a near-death experiencer who became a near-death experience researcher from a neurophysiological standpoint. I think that’s one of the things that really draws people to your story. Tell us a little bit more about your quest to understand this from the perspective of your background as a neurosurgeon.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay, well I can tell you that I mentioned a few minutes ago that initially I was getting the message from my physicians that I was extremely sick and it doesn’t surprise them that I had very, very unusual memories. There was one other thing that really got my attention that I’ll mention, and that is I told you about the faces I saw kind of floating in the muck, which I think—again, it’s hard to put a time on it. I know that some of them appeared that Sunday morning and maybe the Saturday afternoon. Some could have been earlier.

There was one that I think was earlier, although she seems like all the rest. Her name is Susan Reintjes and she’s a friend of my wife’s. They worked together 25 years earlier teaching in Raleigh. Susan’s had a lot of experience helping coma patients. She wrote a book called, Third Eye Open. It’s about her going into a state or trance and then going to them in whatever fashion. That’s not something I claim to understand. But not through the physical material realm.

In fact, she had done that with a lot of patients and she discussed that in her book. Holly called her up, I think it was Thursday at night that Susan heard all this and said, “Yes, I’ll try and help.” I remember her being there very clearly. I mean, just like all the rest. She was there and she never was physically there. She did this from Chapel Hill where she lives.

Of course, in the first few days as I was coming around and I told my wife about the six faces that I remembered, that does not include my guardian angel who I still didn’t know at that time, but those six faces. And Susan Reintjes was there. Holly said, “She did come to you channeling. She came to you in the psychic realm.” I can tell you when Holly told me that I said, “Of course. Don’t need any explanation for that.”

Of course, as I healed—it probably took three or four weeks for a lot of my neuroscience and neurosurgical training to come back—all along that time I was still writing all this down and not reading anything. I was very tempted but my son had told me, “You want this to be worthwhile, don’t read anything else. Just write it all down.” I just was shocked; I was buffeted because my neuroscience mind said, “No, that couldn’t happen.” The more I heard about how sick I was, my cortex shut down, “No, that’s impossible, your cortex was down.”

Of course, for a while I was going after the hypotheses that involved formation of these very complex, intricate memories either right before my coma or right coming out of it. That really did not explain it at all. Part of the problem, when you get right down to it, is that whole issue of remembering the melody because that was a very clear part of it. I remember the elation when I figured that I could just remember that melody and that spun the melody in front of me.

Then all of a sudden, boom! Everything opened up and I went back out into that valley, so crisp and beautiful, and my angel was with me, as I came to call her, my companion on the butterfly wing. And then out into the core, outside of the universe. Very difficult to explain in that fluctuation.

I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, ”or“ That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not hearing something.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, I think that brings up a very interesting point and one that we’ve covered a lot on this show. To be fair—well, not only to be fair but to really understand the entire phenomena and understand how it fits in our culture, in our society, which I think is important because here you are, someone like yourself with your obvious intellectual capabilities but also medical understanding and you have this experience and you have to come back and try and make it make sense with all your training.

I think all the rest of us are right there with you trying to make sense of these completely counter-intuitive experiences and then trying to jam them back in our head and in our experience. In that sense, I do have a lot of empathy and appreciation for the NDE researchers, both the skeptical ones and the non-skeptical ones. So let me talk a little bit about that NDE research and get your perspective on it. Of course there are a few of these brave researchers out there who have stuck their neck out—really only a very few—and have tried to tackle this.

It seems to me that they’re really barely making a dent in the medical model that we have. The medical model that we have sees us as these biological robots and death as kind of the ultimate Boogeyman. Can we really believe that we’re really going to change such an entrenched system?

Dr. Eben Alexander: I think so. I think that is very much a possibility. There’s this whole issue of mind and brain and duality versus non-dualism and the physical material reductivist models. I go into this in great detail in my book but I think you have to go back about 3,000 years to really get to the beginning of the discussion and to start to see why certain things have transpired.

I think most importantly was the part of this discussion that happened between Rene Descartes and Spinoza back in the 17th Century. They started us into our current era. Our current era is one of mind/consciousness/our soul has been put in the realm of the church more-or-less. There was kind of a truce of sorts that I guess Descartes came up with back then to say there’s mind and then there’s body and just let the natural scientists, those with an interest like Francis Bacon and Galileo and Newton, let’s not burn them all at the stake. Let some of them survive.

So I think it was a good thing to have that truce so that science survived. I mean, I’m a scientist and I love science and the scientific method. I’ve just come to realize that the universe is much grander than we appreciate. So I have to simply broaden my definitions.

I think science is still very important to get us there. Getting back to that mind/brain issue, what happened over time is science kind of grew up and got to be more and more powerful at giving us many things. Science has been a real wonder. But I think that it’s been somewhat at a price and that price came from splitting out mind and body back then and that dualistic approach because as science gained more and more of an upper hand, people were losing track of the kind of mind part of it, the consciousness part.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about that a little bit right now because part of that does seem to be contradictory to your experience and the experiences we’ve heard from other folks who have had these transformative spiritual experiences in that if there is this broader knowing—and much broader—broader doesn’t even begin to describe it but that we hear over and over again.

We hear it from your account; we hear it from many near-death experience accounts. We also hear it from all sorts of transformative spiritual accounts, kundulini accounts, spontaneous spiritual awakenings. There’s this sense of knowing, much, much greater knowing that then must be crammed back into our body and it doesn’t fit, you know? So your account says that and others do, as well.

Can we really then hope to get out of the consciousness loop that we’re in now? Is it just going to be a matter of a philosophical shift like we had back in the 1700’s? Or is there something fundamental to the way that we’re constructed that’s going to keep us limited in how much we can really tap into and understand that knowing that you experienced?

Dr. Eben Alexander: In my view, what I think is going to happen is that science in the much broader sense of the word and spirituality which will be mainly an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness will grow closer and closer together. We will all move forward into a far more enlightened world. One thing that we will have to let go of is this kind of addiction to simplistic, primitive reductive materialism because there’s really no way that I can see a reductive materialist model coming remotely in the right ballpark to explain what we really know about consciousness now.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

Any of the scientists in the crowd who want to get in on this, what I would recommend is there’s one book I consider the bible of this. It’s a wonderful book but it is really for those who have a strong scientific interest in it. It’s called Irreducible Mind, Edward Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Bruce Greyson, Adam Crabtree, Alan Galt, Michael Grassa, the whole group from Esalen and also based in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, have done an incredibly good job. Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is the subtitle and that’s exactly what it is.

I felt their book was quite illustrative and of course it caused a huge splash when it came out in 1987, but again a lot of the reductive materialists like myself were not really going to put in the work to go through all of that. We just thought, “We can’t understand it so it can’t be true.”

Alex Tsakiris: I think you’re being a little bit too generous there because some of the folks do do the work. Do tap into the research and still come out the other end holding onto that materialistic model that we’re stuck with here because there’s a lot invested in it. With that, what I wanted to do was I sent you a couple of audio clips that I thought you might like to respond to because it fits in with what you were just talking about–people who have walked in your shoes and are still there in that model.

The first clip I’d like to play for you is a former guest on this show, Dr. Steven Novella, who is a clinical neurologist at Yale University. He’s a well-known and outspoken skeptic of near-death experiences but a nice guy who’s willing to engage the topic. What I thought I’d do is play this little clip and see any response you might have to it, okay?

Dr. Eben Alexander: All right.

Dr. Steven Novella: The three basic kinds of explanations are one is spiritual; that it represents the fact that the mind can exist separate from the brain. The second one is a psychological experience of some sort. And then the third is that it’s organic; it’s neurophysiological. The evidence and some of the best explanatory models that people are putting forward are blending the second two, the psychological and the organic, the neuroscientific. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a core experience that’s primarily organic. It’s just the kinds of things that can happen to the brain under various kinds of stress.

Alex Tsakiris: Now, I’ve got to add that if you really listen to the whole interview with Steve and the follow-up that we had, what he’s talking about is really a bunch of fluff. [Laughs] There really isn’t any research that shows any neurophysiological cause for near-death experience. I really held his feet to the fire and he was unable to produce anything of any real substance about that research.

But maybe you can talk because it speaks so much to the position that you were in just a few years ago, about that position and that kind of entrenched “It has to be in the brain” kind of thing and how you think that relates to near-death experience.

Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say for one thing I think that a healthy skeptical approach to all this is a good thing because it helps us get to the truth. It helps us know the answer. What we have to be careful of, of course, is not getting in the trap of having our prejudices rule the day. A lot of these experiments and studies, how you interpret them will depend a lot on what your prejudices are going in.

I found early on in my experience, I had to do as Descartes recommended when he was talking about getting to the truth, and that was to really ignore or to reject everything I had ever accepted as real. That was the only way to start getting to where I could figure any of this out. I

know that a lot of the reductive scientific crowd out there—I have a favorite quote from Stephen Hawking. He says, “There’s a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority or imposed dogma and faith, as opposed to science which is based on observation and reason.” What I would say is I think his statement is true as a general statement but that science, and certainly those who believe in science and scientists, are as prone to addiction to imposed dogma and faith as our religious zealot. So one has to be very careful to really step back and want to know the truth. That’s what I think we all would like to know.

Alex Tsakiris: In this case, if we really do step back one of the things that’s troubling to me, and you touched on it a minute ago, is how overwhelming the evidence seems to be. At this point, we can confidently say that near-death experiences didn’t just start happening in the last 20 years since we had advanced resuscitation techniques.

We can confidently say that 4% to 5% of everyone who has a cardiac arrest is having this. There’s obviously hundreds of millions of people over time who have had these accounts and we have thousands and thousands of well-documented, consistent accounts across cultures, across times. These are the measures that we would normally use to say, “This is a real phenomenon.”

And then when the skeptics, and really the mainstream scientists have pounded against it for 20 years with really what amounts to a bunch of very silly explanations but ones that have been carefully looked at and dismissed—was it CO2 , a fear of death, other psychological factors? Is it all the different things like REM intrusion? All these things.

Clearly this would normally be something where we’d be putting a lot of attention into it. Or that it would then become the presumed explanation for it. But none of that’s happening. They have managed to hold back the dyke, you know? So what do you make of that?

Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay, I think in trying to get back to your original question with the previous guest, to me one thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over several years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul of us that is not dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.

But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get. It’s far more profound than I ever realized before.

That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this.

Not only that but as you mentioned a few minutes ago, people don’t even have to go to a near-death situation. There are plenty of mystical experiences that have occurred over millennia that are part of the same mechanism. That’s why all this talk about oxygen, tension, CO2 and all that you can pretty much throw out the window. You really need to be working towards explaining all of those phenomena. Part of the problem is they’re hard to explain but that is a clue.

Willy Lomans was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Well, same kind of thing. They are hard issues and the whole understanding of what consciousness really involves. I came a lot closer to that in my coma experience and coming out of it and in doing all the very intense homework for the three years since then to try and understand it. It’s a difficult question because it’s close to the real truth that we’re going after. If it were easy it would be widely available. It would already have been written up by somebody who wanted to publish or perish. That’s not how it works. It’s not that easy.

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Alexander, in the little bit of time we have left what’s it been like being so public about your experience?

Dr. Eben Alexander: Well, many people have come up to me and said, “Wow, this takes a lot of courage to do this.” You know, it probably would have taken courage to talk like this right after I came out of it. I learned to put the lid on it but then as I did more and more work and talked with more people and started realizing, “Oh my gosh, this is all real.” Then I can tell you, it takes no courage at all. It simply is so powerful to know this.

One thing I’m trying to do in my book is to show why it’s so logical, why this is a very rational way for things to work, especially when you really delve into the profound mystery of conscious existence. Again, I’d recommend Irreducible Mind to any people with a scientific bent who really want to get into it.

Go in there because the whole issue is far, far deeper than we would like to think. It’s absolutely wonderful to realize this. I think it’s going to change this world in wonderful ways. But a big part of it, of course, is to try and broaden the boundaries of science and of what we accept and will use to get towards truth. I’m very hopeful that science and spirituality will come together hand-in-hand and go forward to help with getting these answers and help people to understand the true nature of our existence. A side effect will be that humanity and the grace and harmony that we will see around this world will expand tremendously as we move forward in that fashion.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. It’s certainly an amazing account and you do a great job of bringing forth this information. We wish you the best of luck with that and we’ll certainly look forward to your book, coming out when? Probably next year maybe?

Dr. Eben Alexander: I certainly hope so. I’m hoping to finish it now. I do have a web page which is lifebeyonddeath.net for any people who have an interest. I tell you, I’m so busy on the book. You can send me email or sign up for the newsletter or whatever, but I won’t be responding for a few months. If people are interested, they’re welcome to get in touch and sign up for the newsletter, which won’t come out until I’m done on the book. Then we’ll move from there.

It’s just a wonderful gift and I think people will see that it actually makes more sense than anything else has so far. That’s why I think it’s of inestimable value to get this out to the world.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks so much for joining us today.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Alex.

Source: http://www.skeptiko.com/154-neurosurgeon-dr-eben-alexander-near-death-experience

The deepest realms of super-physical existence

Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.

Then, Dr. Alexander's own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander's eyes popped open. He had come back.

Alexander's recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.

Alexander's story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.

This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life. http://www.lifebeyonddeath.net/

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Everett: Up there there is a feeling of unbelievable mutual love. I have never experienced this feeling since but I still long for it. If you made me choose, even if my life here was really good and I had everything I could wish for I would still without hesitation choose the other side just for that feeling again. Now, in his seventies he has survived five heart attacks, the final one led to his NDE. He’s tired of this life as his wife Ann explains.

Ann: He has such strong longings to go back to the afterlife that he’s tried repeatedly to commit suicide. He then always lies down on the side where his heart is damaged. I have seen him do this several times. If I see that my husband is lying down on the wrong side to die I get onto my knees to beg him to turn around.

October 1999, Everett is in hospital with his fifth heart attack. The doctors have given up.

Everett: I was against the ceiling floating above my own body. I was actually floating over my body through the roof. At that moment I had no idea that it was the roof of the hospital but then I floated above it. I could still see everything that was happening in the hospital. I saw the doctors and the nurses standing by my bed. Suddenly, it all got smaller and smaller it went so fast.

While facing the light Everett claims he heard a voice. She asks him what he’s holding in his left hand. Glittering diamonds, symbols of those he had loved and lost in his life.

Everett: These are the feelings of the people who I had to leave behind. The strange thing that happened at lunch time was that the people I was thinking of all came to see me in hospital!

On the very edge of death, Everett Tabik’s whole long life passes by in front of his eyes and old hidden secret wounds are re-opened. Everett saw everything in his life from birth to near-death. Among familiar scenes he saw a woman and a boy that he didn’t recognize.

Everett: There were people who I didn’t know even existed. Yet, I had this feeling that I had abandoned them. They said to me, “You abandoned us when we needed you the most.” and they were right!

When Everett returned to life he couldn’t get the faces out of his mind. Dredging deep into distant memories he began to recognize the woman, a long-lost lover, but who was the boy. Could it be his son?

Everett: I started to dig deeper into my memories, she had to be somewhere then I remembered her name and her life. It was then that I realized that my relationship with her had had serious consequences. A consequence that I didn’t know anything about.

Everett eventually located his lost lover and she confirmed his suspicions he had fathered a son who had been dead for thirty years. He never knew his son existed, had never even seen him.

Everett: When I stood at his grave for the first time I felt sadness and sorrow. It was the feeling that I had missed him for all those years, although, I’d never met him. You question yourself about what could have been. This is such an enormous loss it will haunt me for the rest of my life. The only help is to know that we will be reunited again one day. That’s what I thought when I stood at my son’s grave for the first time

Who Will Watch the Watchers?

This article is adapted from a five-part series of blog posts that began here. It was updated with an addendum on October 17, 2009.

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Some skeptics have set themselves up as the gatekeepers of science, the sentinels who will keep out false or invalid information and hypotheses while protecting proper, scientific methodology and conclusions. It may not be a coincidence that the largest skeptical organization in the world was known until recently as CSICOP, which is pronounced psi-cop. The skeptics are the cops on the beat, protecting science (and a gullible public) from charlatans, tricksters, and urban legends.

But of course when a group of people set themselves up as the guardians of truth, an age-old problem emerges. Who will check to make sure that the guardians themselves are truthful and trustworthy? Who will watch the watchers?

In this regard, it's instructive to look at a well-known skeptical analysis of a famous near-death experience. The experience itself was reported by Seattle social worker Kimberly Clark. It involved a migrant farm worker named Maria who, during cardiac arrest at Harborview Medical Center, purportedly left her body and observed various details of the hospital, most notably a running shoe that had been left (inexplicably) on a third floor ledge.

The complete story is told at the Survival Top Forty site, though it is not listed as one of the top forty cases. You can read it here (PDF).

The only detailed rebuttal of the case, as far as I know, was offered by three skeptical researchers, who published an article called "Maria's near-death experience: waiting for the other shoe to drop," in the July/August 1996 edition of Skeptical Inquirer, CSICOP's magazine. The researchers are Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan, and Barry L. Beyerstein. (Unfortunately the article no longer seems to be online.)

Not having visited Seattle and investigated for myself, I would not presume to say what actually happened at the Harborview. What I would like to do is submit the above article to the same kind of "skeptical" critique that it would surely receive had it been written to endorse Kimberly Clark's account. The article is long, and this analysis will be lengthy, as well. It will appear in multiple parts.

Remember, I don't claim to know the facts of the case. My point is to apply the standards used by the skeptical authors to their own claims.

Before we get into the debunking article itself, though, let's read a passage from a different article by Barry Beyerstein that appeared (PDF file) in the Rational Enquirer: The  Skeptics' Newsletter for Western Canada (March 2002). Beyerstein writes,

Along with two of my students, Hayden Ebbern and Sean Mulligan, we examined the Maria case to see if it could support all the weight the near death studies movement places upon it. Sean and Hayden travelled several times to Seattle, where the event took place. They visited the hospital and interviewed the social worker who assisted Maria after her NDE. The social worker was Kimberly Clark who has gone on to prominence in the near-death studies movement and written yet another best-selling NDE book based on supposedly verified facts from the Maria case. Hayden and Sean also attended a meeting of local NDE enthusiasts and engaged them in conversation. They came away with the clear impression that these people were scientifically illiterate and far more interested in bolstering their religious beliefs than they were in getting to the truth of the matter.

Note first the disparaging tone adopted by the author. Near-death studies is a "movement." Kimberly Clark has written "yet another" bestseller about NDEs. People interested in NDEs are "enthusiasts." Moreover, these enthusiasts are "scientifically illiterate" and only interested in their "religious beliefs," not in "the truth."

Note also that it was two students, Ebbern and Mulligan, who got "the clear impression" that the NDE group were scientifically illiterate. It would be interesting to know what sort of scientific background, training, and credentials the students themselves had. It would also be interesting to know their qualifications for determining someone else's scientific literacy and psychological motivations. Were they trained psychologists? 

Finally, note that Beyerstein sets up a clear dichotomy. There are the pro-NDE people, who are scientifically illiterate, highly religious, part of a movement with an agenda, and probably motivated by personal profit (writing bestsellers). Then there are the skeptics, who apparently suffer  from none of these liabilities. They are evidently not part of a movement, have no agenda, and do not want to publish commercially successful books. They have no religious (or anti-religious ) views to promote, and of course it goes without saying that they are scientifically sophisticated and knowledgeable.

Yet where is the evidence for any of these implications? An objective observer, I suspect, would regard the organized skeptical community as very much a "movement" with an agenda. Many skeptics have written and published books, and presumably they hoped for bestseller status even if few have achieved it. Many skeptics display a deep-seated hostility toward religion. (The same issue of the Rational Enquirer that carried Beyerstein's article carries this quote from comedian Richard Jeni on religious warfare: "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.") And we have already seen that the Maria case was investigated by "students," whose level of scientific training and knowledge is unknown.

If a parapsychologist said that he'd sent some "students" to visit a CSICOP meeting, and the students came away with "the clear impression" that the CSICOP people were scientifically illiterate and only interested in bolstering their materialist belief system, skeptics would surely cry foul. Then why is it okay when the skeptics themselves use these tactics? 

Now let's turn to the main subject: the Skeptical Inquirer article that attempts to debunk Kimberly Clark's report of Maria's NDE.

The first thing that struck me about this article is that roughly half of its content (excluding footnotes) consists of general comments debunking the whole idea of life after death. The article begins with a Woody Allen quote: "I'm not afraid to die; I just don't want to be there when it happens." This may seem like no more than a humorous aside, but actually it is a key part of the article's general tactic of suggesting that anyone who endorses a nonmaterialistic interpretation of NDEs is motivated by fear of death. Since people will allegedly do anything to rationalize away such a fear, their beliefs about NDEs are inherently untrustworthy.

Right after the Woody Allen quote, the authors say smugly, "Skeptics enter most debates at a disadvantage because they are usually forced to cast doubt on comforting beliefs." Already we see the clear implication that the skeptic is the clearsighted individual "forced" (by whom?) to undermine "comforting beliefs" -- i.e., beliefs that supply reassurance to people enervated by fear of death, but which cannot be supported by any logic or evidence. The authors go on to quote Susan Blackmore, hardly an unbiased source, as saying that "NDEs provide no evidence for life after death, and we can best understand them by looking at neurochemistry, physiology, and psychology." The authors themselves opine, "NDEs are only one example of episodes in which the brain's construction of reality breaks down temporarily."

So it is clear that the authors, whatever claims to objectivity they may like to make, have already dismissed NDEs as evidence for postmortem survival. They entered this controversial area of research with their minds apparently made up in advance. If a promoter of a nonmaterialistic interpretation of NDEs were to start an article by exhibiting such obvious bias, skeptics would undoubtedly object. But I guess it's okay when the skeptics themselves do it.

The authors' review of the case against the afterlife has only just begun. Before they continue, they take time to say, "Virtually every book retelling this now-familiar story [of the NDE] achieves best-seller status and reads substantial rewards for its author." If only this were true, there would be a sure road to riches for all of us struggling scriveners. But of course this statement is mere hyperbole; of the hundreds of titles published about NDEs, only a handful have become bestsellers. Skeptics routinely criticize their opponents for exaggerating. Is it all right for the skeptics to exaggerate?

The authors then cite James Alcock for his views on "why the will to believe so readily overcomes the desire to examine the evidence critically." This, of course, goes back to the overriding motif of the article, which is that fear of death overwhelms any ability to think rationally. Now suppose that an anti-skeptic were to say that the skeptics' fear of the paranormal is so intense that it overrides their ability to think critically or to deal with the evidence in a logical and fair-minded manner. You can just hear the skeptics howl. Again we see the double standard; the skeptics feel free to disparage the motivations and psychology of their opponents, but their opponents are not free to return the favor.

The authors then claim that the founders of the Society for Psychical Research were "disturbed by the implications of modern science for their Christian worldview," a view that hardly accords with the facts. (See Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum, for a thorough overview of the Society's founders.) Most of the principal players in the Society were not believing Christians, and the evidence they found did not necessarily support Christian orthodoxy. But this questionable interpretation of their motives allows the authors to continue their theme that parapsychologists and others sympathetic to the idea of an afterlife are motivated by deep-seated fears and religious biases. Notice that the authors seem entirely blind to the obvious riposte that skeptics, like anyone else, are likely to have hidden motivations and biases of their own. Apparently, in the authors' worldview, skeptics are miraculously free of all prejudice, bias, wishful thinking, fear, and other distortions of the critical faculty; they can see the world is it really is, without delusion or error; while the rest of mankind are hopelessly lost in credulousness and gullibility, which are grounded in irrational fears.

In pointing out that more NDEs are being reported today than ever before, the authors say, "This is likely due to vast improvements in emergency medicine, coupled with a worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalism." What religious fundamentalism has to do with anything is an interesting question. Actually, of course, the content of most NDEs runs counter to the dogma of religious fundamentalism, and many religious fundamentalists accordingly have claimed that NDEs are the work of the devil -- specifically, that the "being of light" encountered by many NDErs is really Satan in disguise. There are some religious fundamentalists who have endorsed the NDE as a legitimate religious/spiritual experience, but there are many others who have not. Why, then, even bring up the matter? Well, because it allows the authors to again hammer home their point that people who take NDEs seriously are driven by religious attitudes (with the unstated inference that anyone with a religious attitude is inherently untrustworthy as an observer or analyst).

For the sake of argument, let's say that this is true. People who have strong religious beliefs cannot be trusted to look at the evidence with any degree of objectivity. If so, then we need to keep in mind that religious belief cuts both ways. The absolute, dogmatic insistence that there is no God, no immortal soul, no afterlife, no higher power, no higher meaning or purpose to the universe is itself a religious attitude, characterized even by some of its own adherents as not just atheism but "anti-theism." Skeptics who adhere to this position, as many (but not all) of them do, are every bit as "religious" as the fundamentalists they disparage. If strong feelings about religion impair one's critical faculty, then the militantly anti-religious skeptics are every bit as impaired as their fundamentalist opponents. Skeptics, blind to their own biases, consistently overlook this obvious point.

"The concept of immortality is, in the final analysis, a metaphysical proposition that can only be accepted or rejected on faith," the authors say. This presumably means that any investigation into the empirical facts that might support life after death is doomed from the outset. Yet the authors undertook such an investigation, and they want us to believe they did so with an open mind. Indeed, at the end of their article, they have the hubris to claim that they were "disappointed" that the case didn't turn out to be as strong as it initially appeared. Anyone who believes the authors were genuinely disappointed by their alleged ability to debunk this case should call me; I have some high-quality swamp land in Florida for sale.

The authors go on to tell us that "a field known as 'near-death studies' has emerged with the thinly veiled agenda of providing a scientific gloss for religious views of an afterlife." This field is contrasted with "anomalistic psychology," which "seeks naturalistic explanations for various seemingly supernatural states of consciousness based on sound psychological and neurophysiological research." So there you have it. On the one hand, there are near-death studies, a quasi-religious movement with a hidden agenda, while on the other hand, there it is anomalistic psychology, based on "sound" research. Imagine if a parapsychologist were to summarize the situation in an equivalent fashion, saying that there is a field known as near-death studies, based on sound research, and another field, anomalistic psychology, which has a "thinly veiled agenda of providing a scientific gloss for philosophical materialism." Skeptics would probably say that this characterization is grossly unfair. Is it any less unfair when they indulge in the same tactics?

Still continuing with their overview of the general issue of life after death, the authors assert, "To accept notions such as survival after death, disembodied spirits, and a host of other parapsychological phenomena, one must also adopt some form of the philosophical doctrine known as 'dualism.' " The only reason for including this philosophical aside seems to be the authors' belief that dualism has been so thoroughly discredited that linking psi phenomena to it will discredit psi - sort of a guilt-by-association tactic. Actually, it is not necessary to endorse dualism in order to believe in psi. There are other options, including the view that everything that exists is ultimately a manifestation of consciousness ("idealism"), or that both consciousness and physical reality are both manifestations of an underlying plane of existence that incorporates aspects of both ("neutral monism"). In any event, whatever philosophical problems may be raised by the idea of psi are irrelevant to an objective appraisal of the evidence. Once again, the authors seem to have allowed their philosophical presuppositions to bias them in advance of even considering the empirical facts.

In an attempt to deal with the verifiable memories that NDErs frequently report during their period of unconsciousness, the authors assert, "During [cardiopulmonary arrest], the brain undergoes several biochemical and physiological changes, but by relying on its limited backup of stored oxygen and metabolic fuels, certain aspects of consciousness can be sustained, albeit in a somewhat degraded fashion. Thus, it is not surprising that there might be some residual memories from the time that one was dying, but not yet clinically dead."

Among the many problems with this explanation is the fact that some NDEs have occurred when the patient was indeed "clinically dead" - showing not only no heart activity, but no brain activity as well. Moreover, the higher-level brain functions are the first ones to shut down in a medical crisis, and yet it is precisely the higher-level functions that would be required in order to construct a coherent narrative out of detailed observations.

Of course, there are also many reports of NDErs who perceived details that cannot be explained by any form of normal sensory perception. Maria's NDE is one such case. Finally, after this long and most irrelevant philosophical overview, which exists only to bias the reader against NDEs, the authors get around to dealing with the Seattle case itself.

"In 1994," the article continues,

Hayden Ebbern and Sean Mulligan traveled to Seattle to visit the sites where the events surrounding Maria's NDE transpired and had several conversations with Kimberly Clark, who first reported the incident. They also attended a meeting of the support group Clark founded for people who have experienced NDE.

This is, I guess, the same group that Beyerstein disparaged in his Rational Enquirer article as "scientifically illiterate." But why should a support group for medical patients who have undergone near-death experiences be evaluated by this standard? If Beyerstein or his students visited a support group for alcoholics or overeaters, would they object that the group members did not show a sophisticated grasp of quantum mechanics and superstring theory?

The authors go on to summarize the case, pointing out that in her NDE Maria, who was suffering a cardiac arrest at the time and had to be resuscitated by an emergency rescue team, saw "chart paper streaming from the machines monitoring her vital signs ... the emergency room driveway ... [and] details such as that the [E.R.] doors opened inward, that the emergency entrance is reached by a one-way road, and that the road had a curve in it." Although Maria's room overlooked the emergency entrance, Clark told the researchers that "Maria could not have seen the driveway area from her window because it is obscured by a canopy over the entrance. And furthermore, Clark asserted, Maria had been restrained by various lines attaching her to the physiological monitors, making it doubtful she could leave her bed to look out the window."

Before we proceed to the central issue of the shoe, let's see how the authors respond to these points. They do so by speculating freely. In the quotes that follow, the underlined emphases are added by me.

Maria could have been familiar with the hospital equipment and procedures. So, like other parts of the typical NDEs, it is quite possible that [her view of the streaming chart paper] was merely a visual memory incorporated into the hallucinatory world that is often formed by a sensory-deprived and oxygen-starved brain.

Now, is there any actual evidence to suggest that Maria, a migrant farm worker, was "familiar with the hospital equipment and procedures"? How many migrant workers who perform stoop labor are familiar with such things? How many people of any non-medical background were familiar with such details back in 1977, when Maria's NDE took place?

Not pausing to consider these obvious objections, the authors proceed to Maria's vision of the emergency entrance.

A bit of reflection upon standard hospital design suggests that Maria reported nothing more than what common sense would dictate. It would strike most people as logical that the doors of a hospital emergency room would open inward as it would be awkward for paramedics to have to negotiate doors that open toward them.

Again, where is the evidence to support the notion that this migrant farm worker had the knowledge and sophistication necessary to reflect "upon standard hospital design"?

Perhaps sensing the weakness of this argument, the authors quickly add,

Maria may have picked up more direct knowledge of the scene than she was aware of, for she had been brought into the hospital through this entrance ... Although it was dark when Maria arrived, the area is well-lighted. Even if she hadn't been fully conscious and able to observe the scene as she was trundled through it (hospital officials would not confirm Maria's level of consciousness upon arrival), it only makes sense to require a one-way traffic in such areas.

Let's remember that Maria was brought in at night, in an ambulance, while suffering a heart attack. She was then hastily unloaded from the ambulance and pushed into the emergency room. She may have been unconscious at the time. She was certainly in acute distress. These are hardly the ideal circumstances under which to reconnoiter the environment.

Again possibly sensing the weakness of the argument, the authors quickly try a different tack.

Giving Clark the benefit of the doubt when she suggests that never once did Maria catch a glimpse of the entrance area beneath her window, it is still not far-fetched to assume that she could have gained some sense of the traffic flow from the sounds of the ambulances coming and going. At night, reflections of vehicle lights can also supply similar clues.

What seems to have been left out of this account is that it is not necessary to give Kimberly Clark "the benefit of the doubt," as the authors are so charitably inclined to do. According to Clark's report, there was a canopy over the entrance area which would have screened this location from Maria's view, even if she had been able to get to the window. The authors mentioned this detail earlier, but seem to have forgotten it already. Or do they think Clark was lying about a canopy? If so, it should have been easy enough for them to find out if the hospital had such a feature in 1977.

So what do we have here? Maria "could have" known about hospital equipment and hospital design, even though her background as a migrant worker makes this rather unlikely. She "could have" observed various details of the emergency room entrance, even though she was brought there in the back of an ambulance and was rushed inside while in acute distress. She "could have" observed some of the same details from her hospital room window, even though she was restricted to her bed and a canopy obscured her view of the lower levels.

Apparently the authors are satisfied that this hodgepodge of explanations has resolved the more mundane aspects of the case. "Most parts of Maria's account are neither unique nor convincing," they conclude. A reader who is skeptical of such ad hoc skeptical rationalizations might not be equally persuaded. In any event, we are still left with the issue of the shoe.

Maria, the authors report,

went on to describe being distracted again, this time by something on a third floor, outside window ledge at the north side of the hospital. Maria said she "thought her way" up to the object and discovered that it was a shoe. She described it as a large tennis shoe that was worn at the small toe and sitting with a shoelace tucked under the heel. Maria then asked Clark to search for the shoe as a way of verifying that her spirit had really been out of her body.

According to her own account, Clark could not see any shoe on the ledge from ground level. But when she went inside and began looking out the windows on the third floor, she eventually saw the tennis shoe -- though she was able to see it only by pressing her face to the glass. From that angle, she could not see the shoelace or the small toe. She was convinced that Maria could have known about the shoe and seen those details only from a perspective outside the window, looking down on the ledge.

How did Ebbern and Mulligan investigate the critical matter of the shoe?

They placed a running shoe of their own at the place Clark described and then went outside the hospital to observe what was visible from ground level. They were astonished at the ease with which they could see and identify the shoe.

Clark's claim that the shoe would have been invisible from ground level outside the hospital is all the more incredible because the investigators' viewpoint was considerably inferior to what Clark's would have been seventeen years earlier. That is because, in 1994, there was new construction under way beneath the window in question and this forced Ebbern and Mulligan to view the shoe from a much greater distance ...

The construction site had been, until 1994, a parking lot and patient recreation area. Thus, back in 1997, many people in this high-traffic area would have had the opportunity to get a better view of a shoe on the ledge than we had.

Moreover, the authors continue,

They easily placed their running shoe on the ledge from inside one of the rooms and it was clearly visible from various points within the room. There was no need whatsoever for anyone to press his or her face against the glass to see the shoe....

Having visited the scene ourselves, we determined that one did not need to be pressed against the glass to see the issue, but we did find that by assuming that position it would have been easy to discern the additional details that so impressed Clark. Looking down from that angle at the shoe we place on the ledge, we had no difficulty seeing the shoe's allegedly hidden outer side.

So we have a clear discrepancy between Clark's account of the shoe and that of the two student investigators. It seems to me that there are two ways of resolving this discrepancy:

1. Clark's account is simply wrong, either because of dishonesty or because she has unwittingly embellished the story over the years. Or ...

2. Ebbern and Mulligan did not put the shoe in exactly the same place where Clark says she found it 17 years earlier.

The authors obviously want us to accept the first option and do not even mention the second one. Yet the second possibility cannot be ruled out. If we skip ahead just a bit in the Skeptical Inquirer article, we find the authors observing in a different context, "As far as we were able to ascertain, Clark never photographed the shoe on the ledge." They also take pains to report that "Clark has not produced notes or recordings from her interviews with Maria."

Now, if Clark did not take any photographs of the shoe in situ, nor did she make any contemporaneous notes or records, then how did the students know where to place the shoe? The article tells us that they put it on the ledge "at the place Clark described." The article does not say that Clark accompanied the students and pointed specifically to where the shoe should be placed. It appears that the students were relying on Clark's verbal description alone.

It should be obvious that the visibility of the shoe, either from the ground or from a window, would vary tremendously depending on exactly where and how it was placed. For instance, if it was right up alongside the wall of the building, perhaps it would not be visible from the ground. Or if it was some distance away from the window, perhaps the telltale details would not be seen even when pressing one's face to the glass.

One detail the authors offer inadvertently lends credence to the thesis that they put their shoe in a  more visible position than the original. When they returned to the hospital "one week after placing the shoe on the ledge, the shoe had been removed, proving that it was also discernible to someone not specifically looking for it."

No doubt it was. But if the original shoe, back in 1977, was equally visible, then why wasn't it removed from the ledge before Kimberly Clark hunted it down? If people could see the shoe from both outside and inside the hospital, and it was easily retrievable, then what was it still doing there when Maria had her NDE?

The bottom line is that we have no reason to assume that the student researchers put the shoe in exactly the same place where it was found 17 years earlier. Without photographic records or detailed notes, and without Kimberly Clark's direct participation in the recreation, they could rely only on guesswork. And yet on the basis of their guesswork, they were willing to call into question Clark's recollection of the entire event.

And they were willing to do more than that. The supposed visibility of the shoe both from the ground and from the window is the key to the authors' explanation of Maria's NDE.

It is not a far-fetched notion to assume that anyone who might have noticed the shoe back in 1977 would have commented on it because of the novelty of its location. Thus, during the three days prior to her NDE, Maria could have overheard such a conversation among any of the doctors, nurses, patients, visitors, or other hospital staff who frequented this busy area....

[Moreover] it is apparent that many people inside as well as outside the hospital would have had the opportunity to notice the now-famous shoe, making it even more likely that Maria could have overheard some mention of it.

At this point, the authors have gone from saying that the shoe could have been seen from the ground or from the window to the rather more sweeping assertion that the shoe could have been a topic of conversation throughout the entire hospital. If so, it is even more peculiar that no one retrieved the shoe when it was first noticed. And it is even more peculiar that at the time when Maria's NDE was first reported to the hospital staff, no one seems to pointed out that the shoe was common knowledge. Wouldn't some alert staffer have said, "What's the big deal? Everybody's seen that shoe. We've been talking about it among ourselves for weeks. It's the most exciting thing to happen to this hospital since I started working here!"

This is, apparently, the sort of conversation that the authors imagine to have been taking place -- and that Maria, recovering from a cardiac arrest and on the verge of suffering another one, took notice of.

But what about the telltale details -- the worn toe, the tucked-in shoelace? Here the authors engage in what appears to be a bit of verbal sleight of hand. (In what follows I must reproduce some text I quoted a moment ago, but in its full context.)

Clark has repeatedly declared that the only way Maria could have known about the worn spots on the shoe and position of the shoelace was if she had been hovering outside the window -- allegedly these details were undetectable from anywhere else. Having visited the scene ourselves, we determined that one did not need to be pressed against the glass to see the shoe, but we did find that by assuming that position it would have been easy to discern the additional details that so impressed Clark. Looking down from that angle at the shoe we placed on the ledge, we had no difficulty seeing the shoe's allegedly hidden outer side.

Thus we believe we have shown that it would not have been as difficult as Clark claims for Maria to have become aware of the shoe prior to her NDE. It would have been visible, both inside and outside the hospital, to numerous people who could have come into contact with her. It also seems likely that some of them might have mentioned it within earshot.

Now, wait a minute. It's one thing to imagine that some hospital workers might talk about a tennis shoe on a third-floor ledge. It's quite another to think that they would talk about the shoe's detailed appearance -- remarking on the worn toe and the position of the shoelace. No matter how boring the life of a hospital orderly might be, I find it hard to believe that these mundane details would provide fodder for conversation around the Mr. Coffee machine. ("And did you see how the shoelace was tucked under the shoe? How about that? A tucked-in shoelace. Wow!")

The authors don't really believe that anyone on the hospital staff talked about the exact position of the shoelace. That's what I meant by verbal sleight of hand. They worked their little digression about the unusual details of the shoe into their larger discussion of the placement of the shoe, conflating the two issues.

There's also another bit of verbal trickery at work here, when the authors tell us, "It also seems likely that some of them might have mentioned it within earshot."

There's a pretty big jump being made. When exactly did this scenario make the transition from being "not a far-fetched notion" (as originally stated) to being "likely"? And just how "likely" is this scenario, anyway?

Actually, the authors themselves don't seem to find it very likely, since, directly after the sentence that ends with the word earshot, they add, "But even if we assume that none of this occurred, there are other considerations that make this less than the airtight case its proponents believe it is."

Here I thought the above scenario was "likely." Now it turns out, apparently, to be so unlikely that the authors have to immediately come up with a whole different set of explanations.

Not surprisingly, these new explanations turn out to have a lot in common with the freewheeling speculation that was used to explain -- or explain away -- Maria's vision of the hospital equipment in action and the emergency room entrance. (In the quotes that follow, I have added all emphases.)

As Clark has not produced notes or recordings from her interviews with Maria, we have no way of knowing what leading questions Maria may have been asked, or what Maria might have "recalled" that did not fit and was dropped from the record...

In talking about her NDE, Maria could have unintentionally filled in inferred details to flesh out the story. Pressed for details by someone in a position of authority, this woman of modest status could easily have succumbed to what psychologists call "demand characteristics" and, quite innocently, filled in more than she knew from direct experience...

Once Maria had reported a shoe sitting on an outside ledge, it would have been plausible to infer it was an old shoe -- otherwise wouldn't the owner had taken the trouble to retrieve it? From this, it is only a small step to assume a worn toe, not unusual in an old shoe. That the shoelace was correctly described by Maria as tucked under the heel may also have been a later addition to a story that, as we have seen, is marked with memory distortions on Clark's part.

Notice that the "memory distortions on Clark's part" exist only if Ebbern and Mulligan placed the shoe in exactly the right location. If they placed it incorrectly -- even if the location was off by just a few inches -- then Clark's story might hold up just fine. Yet on the basis of this dubious recreation 17 years after the fact, they are willing to indict Clark for a hopelessly faulty memory. And having characterized her in this way, they find it easy enough to accuse her of asking leading questions, eliminating certain testimony from the record, and adding key details to the story.

As for the claim that Maria could have simply inferred that the shoe was old and had a worn toe -- well, that Florida swampland I mentioned earlier is still available. But don't hesitate; it's going fast.

How could Clark so thoroughly fail to interrogate Maria or to accurately recollect one of the most dramatic events of her life? The authors suggest an answer. "Kimberly Clark is not a trained investigator," they say.

This, of course, raises the question of whether the researchers in this case, Ebbern and Mulligan, were trained investigators at the time when they took their trip to Seattle. Here is what we are told about the pair at the end of the article:

Hayden Ebbern is an undergraduate in the Department of Psychology and Sean Mulligan is a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

Ebbern was an undergraduate?

Are we supposed to believe that an undergraduate -- a college student who has not even earned his degree -- is a "trained investigator"? Are his powers of observation, analysis, and memory automatically assumed to be better than those of an experienced social worker at a major hospital?

At least Mulligan was a graduate student at the time, but does a grad student in the biology department have the skills necessary to evaluate the testimony of witnesses or determine their allegedly hidden motives? Are biology departments teaching interrogation techniques nowadays?

I would suggest that if a parapsychologist sent two students with comparable qualifications to investigate a controversial case, he would be roundly criticized -- especially if the students began casting aspersions on the honesty, intelligence, training, and motives of the people they were sent to interview.

The authors go on to complain that Clark "did not publicly report details of Maria's NDE until seven years after it occurred." This statement is perhaps a bit misleading, since Clark apparently told her colleagues at the hospital about the NDE as soon as she found the shoe. Nurses, doctors, and other hospital employees were reportedly all aware of the incident, which caused a great deal of discussion (and, as we've noted, no mention of any hospital-wide awareness of the shoe prior to Clark's retrieval of it). What the authors presumably mean is that Clark did not report the details in any official journal or anthology until seven years later. And this is true. Clark's report was part of an anthology about NDEs called The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives, edited by Charles Flynn and Bruce Greyson. The book was released in 1984, seven years after the events in question.

Now, I know a little about publishing. Everything takes longer than it should. Finding a publisher for a book can take a year or more, and even after the contract is signed, it can take the publisher another year or two years or even longer to get the book into print. So an interim of seven years is not terribly surprising. It can take a while even for an article to get published in a magazine. For instance, consider the very Skeptical Inquirer article we're discussing. It was researched in 1994 but not published until two years later, in 1996. If a similar delay occurred in the publication timetable of the book containing Clark's essay -- which is not unlikely -- then she actually wrote up her report no more than five years after the event, and quite possibly much earlier.

Furthermore, if a lapse of time calls her account into question, then how do the authors explain the fact that they did not undertake their own investigation of the case until a full ten years after it had been reported? If waiting seven years to discuss the case is problematic, then surely waiting seventeen years after the fact is even more so.

Besides allegedly taking too long to report the case, Clark was found to have a "cavalier attitude." How so?

When Ebbern and Mulligan asked Clark about the current whereabouts of the shoe, Clark replied that she probably had it around somewhere, maybe in her garage, but that it would be too much trouble to look for it. The cavalier attitude toward the most important artifact in the field of near-death studies struck us as odd.

Two responses are possible. First, I'm not aware of any near-death researchers who regard the shoe itself as an especially important "artifact." It is, after all, just a beat-up old shoe. What's important is the story associated with it, not the shoe itself. Second, and more important, there may be another explanation for Kimberly Clark's lack of cooperation with Ebbern and Mulligan. I submit that it is at least possible that Clark, upon meeting the intrepid pair of student investigators, sized them up as militant skeptics, strongly biased against any nonmaterialist interpretation of NDEs, researching a CSICOP hit piece. She may also have noticed that the researchers were contemptuous of her friends in her NDE support group, and were more than willing to cast aspersions on her own memory, intellectual capabilities, honesty, and motives. Under the circumstances, she may not have felt particularly interested in presenting the shoe to Ebbern and Mulligan so they could snicker at it.

The authors finish up by allowing that "perhaps" Clark "now honestly misremembers" the details of the case -- the alternative, of course, being that she dishonestly misremembers or misrepresents the details.

The motivation to defend cherished or self-serving beliefs makes it easy for unintentional embellishments to creep into key accounts as they are retold. In our discussions with her, Clark exhibited obvious emotional commitment to the spiritual interpretation of Maria's story. She has become a minor celebrity because of her involvement with it and is writing yet another, potentially profitable, book on the subject.

Unpacking this passage is almost too easy. I'll leave it to you to count all the ways that the authors cast aspersions on Clark's psychology and motives. Naturally, no skeptic could ever be motivated to "defend cherished or self-serving beliefs," or to have an "emotional commitment" to a point of view, and and no skeptic has ever become "a minor celebrity" or written a "potentially profitable" book. By the way, aren't all books potentially profitable? This is like saying that someone just bought a "potentially salable house." Why would they phrase it like that? What are they trying to imply? Gosh, I wish I knew.

The authors take a moment to disparage Clark's NDE support group, which, they claim, "bills itself as devoted to scientific research into NDEs." If so, it's a pretty unusual support group, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that the group did characterize itself this way. So what, exactly? Even if the members of the group are rank amateurs, they are hardly typical of the leading researchers in the field of near-death studies -- accomplished professionals like Michael Sabom, Melvin Morse, Peter Fenwick, Bruce Greyson, and Pim Van Lommel, who have published their research in peer-reviewed journals. (Skeptical Inquirer, incidentally, is not peer-reviewed.) In any event, Ebbern and Mulligan reportedly

were struck by the revival-meeting atmosphere. The participants exhibited a conspicuous lack of scientific knowledge and low levels of critical thinking skills. They seemed quite unaware of how to mount a proper investigation of such incidents. The appeal throughout was strictly to faith. The few mildly critical questions the visitors raised were decidedly unwelcome.

So a group of people who have experienced NDEs are met by two researchers -- one, a grad student, the other, an undergrad -- who are openly skeptical of the most meaningful, life-changing event of their lives, and the NDErs made the students feel "unwelcome." How welcome do you think Kimberly Clark would feel at a CSICOP meeting?

Perhaps it is cynical of me, but I can't help thinking that Ebbern and Mulligan would regard any gathering of spiritual seekers as having a "revival-meeting atmosphere." (From what I've read of CSICOP events, the description might be better suited for the get-togethers sponsored by that organization.) As for "critical thinking skills," well, we've seen Ebbern's and Mulligan's critical thinking skills on open display in their paper. One might argue that it is Ebbern and Mulligan who seem "quite unaware of how to mount a proper investigation of such incidents." And if the NDErs were appealing "strictly to faith," then why would they show any interest in Kimberly Clark's empirical investigation of Maria's NDE in the first place?

The authors conclude their essay in an effusion of self-congratulation:

We have shown several factual discrepancies [have they? or did they put the shoe in the wrong place?] and plausible ways [plausible? really?] that Maria's supposedly unobtainable knowledge could have been obtained by quite ordinary means. In delving into this incident, we were first disappointed [sure they were], then amused, that such a weak case should have achieved the importance it has been accorded.... Maria's story has shown us the naïveté and a power of wishful thinking in a supposedly scientific area known as "near-death studies." Once again, it is apparent why Demosthenes cautioned, more than 2000 years ago, "Nothing is easier than self deceit, for what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."

With this rhetorical flourish, which brings us back to the article's original motif of self-deception, the Skeptical Inquirer story comes to a close.

All that's left to examine is how the article has been used in a more recent skeptical assault on NDEs.

In a lengthy article debunking NDEs, Keith Augustine recounts the Maria case and the efforts of Beyerstein, Ebbern, and Mulligan to discredit it. Augustine accurately summarizes the Skeptical Inquirer piece and accepts the authors' conclusions without raising any questions about their methodology or biases. Indeed, he seems unaware of any biases.

"The [Maria] case has taken on the status of something of an urban legend," he writes. I'm not sure what this means; unlike an urban legend, the Maria case is not an anonymous anecdote but a specific story reported in print by one of the participants. This doesn't make it true, but it does raise it above the level of modern folklore about kidney thieves or escaped murderers with a hook for a hand.

Augustine apparently does not notice any of the implausibilities and logical inconsistencies in the skeptical scenarios laid out by Beyerstein et al. Nor does he mention the fact that the two investigators in the case were untrained college students.

A brief item posted by the Cincinnati Skeptics also endorses the SI article's conclusions:

Investigators have closely examined the claims made in the "Maria" case. They have found them to be invalid. It does not support NDE claims.

Again, no mention of the fact that the "investigators" were a graduate student in biology and an undergraduate student majoring in psychology.

In their debunking zeal, the Cincinnati Skeptics make an error of fact, saying that Maria "could have unconsciously heard about the oddly placed shoe or seen it on the ledge from inside the room." No, she could not have seen it on the ledge from inside the room she occupied. Even the SI article doesn't make this claim. The shoe was nowhere near her room.

I'd hoped to look at more uses of the SI article, but several Google searches for the relevant terms didn't turn up any other examples. 

Summing up, I'd like to repeat what I said at the start of this essay. I don't claim to know what happened in Seattle in 1977. I haven't visited the Harborview Medical Center. I don't know how trustworthy Kimberly Clark may be. Two readers posted comments on my blog suggesting, on the basis of her book After the Light, that she may not be a very reliable witness. I haven't read this book, but Bruce Greyson, in a generally favorable review, notes that it "contains plenty of woo-woo experiences." His summary of the contents certainly bears out this statement. Either Clark has a remarkable ability to attract psi phenomena, or she has a vivid imagination.

In any event, my purpose in writing this analysis was simply to subject a skeptical account of an NDE to the same kind of skepticism that the authors themselves advocate. There seems to be a double standard in the world of organized skepticism. A skeptic can freely indulge in speculation, tossing around "could have" and "may have" and "it is possible," without providing any evidence that any such thing actually took place. A skeptic can impugn the motives, honesty, and mental stability of his opponents. A skeptic can rely on the fieldwork of untrained students. A skeptic can spin contradictory scenarios, offering first one "explanation," then another and another, with no attempt to determine if any of these stories is true or even plausible. A skeptic can draw momentous conclusions from the re-creation of an event that took place seventeen years earlier, even though the re-creation is quite possibly flawed.

A skeptic can do all these things and more, but if a parapsychologist were to employ similar tactics, there would be hell to pay. Skeptics routinely nitpick the writings of parapsychologists, looking for any real or imagined error, no matter how trivial, and eagerly pointing out any supposedly unjustified claim or unwarranted logical leap. They don't seem to apply the same rigorous standards to the evaluation of their own writings. These are accepted uncritically, almost as Holy Writ. And psi proponents, all too often, seem willing to accept this double standard.

Maybe it's time to put the shoe on the other foot.

----------

Addendum (October 17, 2009). Just today I discovered that Kimberly Clark Sharp directly addressed the Skeptical Inquirer essay. Her response was precipitated by Keith Augustine's article "Does Paranormal Perception Occur in Near-Death Experiences?", which appeared in the June 2007 (Vol. 25, No. 4) issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. (This material appears to have been incorporated into Augustine's longer piece, "Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences," which is linked above.) Sharp's reply, published in the same issue of the Journal, is called "The Other Shoe Drops."

The article's abstract reads as follows: "Keith Augustine raises questions about my report of a case of veridical out-of-body perception during a near-death experience (NDE). His analysis is based not on my original description of the case but rather on a distorted account in a magazine written by two college students who misrepresented the facts and made unwarranted assumptions to support their beliefs."

As far as I know, Sharp's article is not freely available online. Here are some excerpts:

"I provided the whole detailed account of a woman named Maria who observed a number of scenes during her resuscitation at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in the first chapter of my book, After the Light (Sharp, 1995). The story has not changed an iota since day one, much less been embellished, even though over the course of time my memory has certainly been affected, as evidenced by the fact that I forgot about a Nike logo on the shoe. This lapse in memory was discovered three years ago when I came across a filmed re-enactment of the event using the actual tennis shoe. In fact, I let a news crew from Philadelphia copy the tape, which was subsequently broadcast throughout the Philadelphia area as part of a local news story. Others have claimed that the shoe never existed, so I am grateful that filmed evidence exists. The film shows me as much younger in very dated clothes, thus belying any suggestion that this was a recently filmed piece."

"Although I had long since forgotten their names, I do remember the time I spent with two young men from a small college in Canada. They introduced themselves to me on the telephone before attending a Seattle IANDS meeting. The boys impressed me as sincere, enthusiastic, and genuinely interested in the subject of near-death experiences (NDEs), especially that of Maria's NDE. They were especially persistent in their desire to visit the facility where Maria had been hospitalized. .... They never mentioned investigating Maria's case, writing an article, involving a third author, or planning to submit an article for publication."

"I took these two lads to Harborview Medical Center myself. I showed them from outside the building approximately where I had found the shoe because I could no longer remember which exact window it was."

"They pushed me so hard for an exact location that I finally pointed to a window fourth over from the corner. Ironically, this location became my 'truth,' but it was a window I chose in order to end the boys' discomforting persistence that I zero in on one specific spot."

" ... the boys wrote that they were unable to locate Maria, or anyone who knew her personally. In fact, they never inquired about her. I am the one who told them that I thought she was deceased, and I could have introduced them to other hospital staff who had met Maria and heard her story, if they had asked."

" ... the boys tried to discredit Maria's memories of her out-of-body experience (OBE), stating that she would have been quite familiar with the equipment monitoring her, and suggesting that her OBE was nothing more than 'a visual memory incorporated into the hallucinatory world that is often formed by a sensory-deprived and oxygen-starved brain' (Ebbern, Mulligan, and Beyerstein, 1996, p. 31, cited in Augustine). They also suggested that she could have picked up details about the emergency room entrance from means not related to her OBE. In fact, I am the one who suggested these skeptical responses to the boys, skeptical responses that I described more fully in After the Light (Sharp, 1995). I was doubting Maria's account because I had not dealt with my own NDE, and I fought hard to come to a reasonable conclusion about how Maria could have observed her resuscitation team. One feature the boys cited as conclusive regarding Maria's OBE was that she described all of the paper on the floor. In fact, that was paper flowing out of the electrocardiogram (EKG) machine onto the floor and kicked under the bed. No one ever educates a cardiac patient to that level of detail. There is absolutely no way that she would have known about the paper. It was not taught, it was not discussed, and it is never shown in television and movies depicting cardiac arrest."

" ... the boys stated that they could see a running shoe of their own at the place I described from the ground level. Of course they could; they were a half block away. When I looked for the shoe from the ground, I was following a sidewalk that hugged the building, completely unable to see something visible on the ledge a few stories above me."

"I am appalled that the boys trespassed in the hospital and actually entered a two-bed patient room and messed around with the window. Despite the fact that they specifically knew they did not have permission and had not even sought permission in the first place, they apparently had no ethical concerns about their behavior. Besides the act of trespassing, the floor they were on houses people just out of the coronary care unit and the intensive care unit, people with infectious diseases, and people who are immune-suppressed. By trespassing in these patients' rooms, they potentially endangered sick people, in addition to violating their privacy. So in other words, the boys asked readers to believe what they wrote in their article despite their having had no problem being dishonest in the first place."

" ... they suggested that Maria could have overheard some mention of the shoe, which would be difficult since she spoke very little English, certainly not the level that would have been required to comprehend the details of a shoe's appearance and location in the building."

" ... the boys said that they had no difficulty seeing the shoe's allegedly hidden outer side. I did have difficulty. Perhaps the boys somehow managed to open the window and stick their heads out."

" ... they wrote that I did not publicly report the details of Maria's NDE until seven years after it occurred. How did they define 'public'? Before that time, I had told anyone who would listen about the shoe; it certainly was not a secret. I had included the story at a nurses' conference at another Seattle hospital and had even spoken about it on a live Seattle television show. Obviously I had 'gone public.'"

" ... they suggested that I subconsciously embellished the details to bolster the case, but less than two years ago I discovered that I had in fact un-embellished the shoe. I came across an old video, mentioned above, of a re-enactment of the shoe story for a television show. The shoe used for the show was the shoe. I was shocked to see a Nike symbol on the ankle. I had not remembered that at all. As I have stated, shortly thereafter, I loaned this tape to a Philadelphia news station, which broadcast for the public to see the so-called 'nonexistent' shoe."

Source: http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/who-will-watch-the-watchers.html

Al Sullivan was a 55 year old truck driver who was undergoing triple by-pass surgery when he had a powerful NDE that included an encounter with his deceased mother and brother-in-law, who told Al to go back to his to tell one of his neighbors that their son with lymphoma will be OK.

Furthermore, during the NDE, Al accurately noticed that the surgeon operating on him was flapping his arms in an unusual fashion, with his hands in his armpits. When he came back to his body after the surgery was over, the surgeon was startled that Al could describe his own arm flapping, which was his idiosyncratic method of keeping his hands sterile...