Trying to restructure the blog so that we can have separate discussion sections, and in doing so all posts seem to have been moved here. Scroll down past the first few posts and you will see the last “blog” post and all others below.
May take me a few days to get it sorted!
Ignore this, just messing about.
I am creating this separate thread to discuss personal beliefs about the structure of the spiritual dimension and how that should affect how we behave…also known as religious belief. For many this kind of discussion is not wanted, hence the creation of separate thread/page for those who do want to get into it. Don’t read this if you don’t like religion or are offended by religious beliefs or positions. If you do engage, please keep it respectful (one of the reasons I have chosen to avoid this subject is that it generates strong passions). I will shut it down if it gets nasty. Having said that, disagreement using reasoned argument is encouraged!
I will start.
I am a Christian. I called myself a Christian into my teens more through my cultural upbringing, than any deep conviction. My views were typical of anyone growing up in Western Europe during that time…the church was boring, and riddled with hypocrisy, but Jesus was generally a decent chap, along with lots of other religious figures like The Buddha, Mohammad, Moses, Brahma etc.
When I was about 17 I had an experience which happened during my sleep but was much more than a dream. A brief summary is that I awoke, everything was very normal…not like a dream. I felt compelled to say the Christian prayer – “sorry I ignored you [Jesus], sorry I hurt you, myself and others, please forgive me and become my Lord”. My bedroom disintegrated before my eyes and I found myself in the presence of a being of pure love. I cannot say how long I was there as the moment felt outside of time. It was the most perfect experience of my life. When I awoke I did not repeat the prayer and continued as I had been, but more open to the faith of my culture than I ever had been.
About 18 months later, when I was 19, I visited a Pentecostal church with my girlfriend of the time. There I encountered the Holy Spirit (what Christians believe to be the temporal form of God on earth since the death of Jesus) in a way that I had only experienced in that dream until that point. I was overwhelmed with the sense of God’s loving presence.
A short while later I made the decision to say that prayer in real life, but was unable to physically form the words with my voice. It required deliverance from a darkness that had been oppressing me, causing suicidal thoughts among other things, before I was free to say the words. That was the moment I was “born again” in spirit.
Since then my faith has only deepened. I had a period in which I did question things, largely due to the fact that my writing did not take off in the way I had hoped and believed that God had led me to understand it would. As a result I dug really deep into the questions around the origin of life.
By this point I had gained a Ph.D. in organic medicinal chemistry and was an expert on the biochemistry of DNA and proteins, so was qualified to pursue this line of enquiry. My findings confirmed without any doubt that life could not possibly have emerged from inorganic matter by natural means, and to believe so was foolishness/delusion in the extreme. As a result I concluded that a creator or God existed, despite being disappointed with the outcome of my writing endeavours, and I just had to roll with my situation. Moreover, the evidence from the words attributed to Him in the Bible and from my personal experience of walking with Him convinced me that Jesus was exactly who the gospels claim he is…God the Son Of Man, God in the form of a human, and the only guaranteed path to eternal life.
39 years of being a Christian, attending various churches, talking to people of other faiths, visiting non Christian countries, researching NDEs, reading about origin of life research, and thinking deeply on these subjects has led me to conclude that I am on the right path. I do not believe that God/Jesus is exclusive in that I believe that anyone who truly seeks God will find him, but I am also of the view that those who reject Jesus as he is presented in the gospels (as opposed to represented by other Christians) are on a sticky wicket from an eternal perspective. I understand why many people reject Christianity because of the (mis)behaviour of some christians, but to reject Jesus himself is a whole different ball game.
As for the fact that reports from some NDEs seem to contradict the teachings of Jesus – specifically that some people come back having been told that all people go to heaven – it is also reported that some people end up going to Hell which instantly contradicts these heaven-only NDE reports and these internal contradictions from accounts have caused my view on NDEs to evolve into a position that they may not be exactly what people have come to believe them to be…including my former self. While I believe that these experiences are authentically experienced by NDErs, I am now of the view that there is a degree of deception or delusion going on in the dimension they find themselves in. I’m not sure which of those it is, not sure how it happens, and not sure why it is happening…but I have thoughts on that latter point related to maintaining the necessity of free choice (something I expand on in detail in my book Did Jesus Die For Nothing).
That is a summary of my faith. Feel free to post what you believe. Feel free to ask me questions about my beliefs, or even challenge them, but always maintain respect for each other and consider that we are all on a journey of discovery and often at different stages of understanding.
(If Ms Martial sees this picture, I hope she takes it in the spirit of fun it is intended…maybe she was a fan of these blokes if she is old enough to remember them…I was not).
I started this blog primarily to discuss clinical research into NDEs. Sam Parnia’s AWARE studies have formed the backbone of such research over the past 2 decades, but there is a new kid on the block and her name is Charlotte Martial (thanks Z for the heads-up). Below is a link the latest interview with her:
https://nautil.us/the-new-science-of-the-near-death-experience-1279957
Martial approaches the subject from a different angle to Parnia, specifically she is clearly a physicalist and unfortunately, I believe this prejudices her work. Parnia, while apparently a dualist, at least attempted to maintain some impartiality and retain an open mind as to what was causing NDEs…he allows for a physiological explanation while stating that the evidence defies this. Martial does not allow for non-physiological causes at all. This necessarily means that all of her discussions and conclusions will be framed by this thinking, forcing her to interpret the data in one way only, even if logic dictates otherwise. It is also possible that it may also influence her presentation of the actual data too. This is something that we observed in extremis with Jimo Borjigin who went beyond just allowing bias to enter discussion, to the point where she completely “misrepresented” her data to create an entirely false conclusion (which was lapped up by the media)…specifically she claimed that there was an increase in brain activity DURING cardiac arrest in coma patients when her own raw data clearly showed that it happened PRIOR to Cardiac arrest, and that by the time the heart had stopped beating all notable EEG activity had ceased. On this point, Martial sets out her stand on more solid ground from the start.
Moreover, unlike Borjigin who never actually researched NDEs, but rather looked at neurological output around the time of death in rats and coma patients, Martial has been running a study similar to the AWARE studies, interviewing patients after resuscitation and it seems that she has now garnered enough data to publish.
From the interview this is a summary of the data she has:
We tracked 180 patients, and of those, 12 had near-death experiences. Our preliminary results suggest that the brains of patients who had near-death experiences showed greater complexity than those who did not.
and
what we observed is that as soon as several days after the acute severe crisis, we can see memory change in terms of content of the experience, which challenged what was found in the retrospective literature.
Some features appeared, and some others disappeared in their memories. For instance, you can have someone who doesn’t report an out-of-body experience upon awakening, however, two months later, the person does report it.
By now readers of this blog will be familiar with the idea of headline hype. What I mean by that is that the headlines about a study, even sometimes the title, over-egg the actual findings that can be drawn from the data. Sometimes there is [innocent] conflation of data, such as in Parnia’s recent AWARE study in which he seemed to merge data from his prospective observational clinical study with retrospective reports from his database, and from this you get headlines that are spuriously related to the data. In the case of Borjigin, it goes way beyond that. Headlines and statements in the press are designed to draw attention, and in this case in the first paragraph we are obviously drawn to the words:
Our preliminary results suggest that the brains of patients who had near-death experiences showed greater complexity than those who did not.
Given the fact that she says this is the first time that EEG data has been collected in patients who have had NDEs, the implication is that she has managed to link EEG output associated with high level brain activity with actual NDE reports. If this is true, then this is definitely a step beyond what was achieved in AWARE II which also collected EEG data in patients undergoing CPR. In that study there was high level brain activity in some patients, but none who later reported an NDE. BUT while the wording of her statement seems to imply that Martial has this kind of data, will the reality survive rigorous scrutiny? Key questions to consider when she publishes her data:
With regard to the report of at least one OBE, she states that the patient did not recall the OBE until an interview 2 months later. It is great that there was an OBE (if it is a proper OBE), but depending on the content, it is definitely open to accusations of corruption – not deliberate necessarily, but of the notion of false memory creation. This piece of data will be of greatest interest of all to me.
How long will we have to wait?
As is the case in research, I would expect that a publication would be preceded by an abstract at a conference, and that given her increased press activity, that is likely to be in the near future. The spring conference season runs till early July, then things tend to die over the Northern Hemisphere summer, before resuming in the Fall. Given the data she is already talking about, I suspect that she will have submitted her abstract to at least one or two conferences, and deadlines for submission are usually about 3 months prior, so we may get something as early as June, but may have to wait till the backend of the year. I put money Z will spotting it first! I will set up a PubMed and other alerts though as this certainly has the potential to be the most important study in this field since AWARE II.
I just wish she would adopt a more open-minded approach though. It would actually be in her interests if she wanted to sell books or gain publicity one day, although that is not a good reason to bias research of course. The fact is there is a massive interest in the area of spirituality among younger people today, and unless her data absolutely rules out the possibility of NDEs being the result of non-physiological origins, she should avoid presenting it in that light, as she does in this interview. She completely shuts down the possibility of non-natural causes, and I seriously doubt that the data proves this to be the case as it is extremely hard to prove a negative. It would better that she adopted the nuanced position that Parnia does…namely she could say that while this data supports the NEPTUNE model for explaining NDEs, it is still possible there are other causes, and there remain many accounts of NDEs that defy natural explanation.
Frankly no one is going to give a monkey’s about her NEPTUNE model except a few Guardian-reading cranks, since it is not really that different from previous attempts to explain NDEs as being the result of neurotransmitters. These attempts have been thoroughly debunked by the likes of Greyson, and even Parnia. The NEPTUNE model has the added weakness of being linked to the theory that NDEs are a form of Thanotosis:
“Basically, we suggest the NDE is a defense mechanism for coping with a life-threatening situation. It permits the person to disconnect from the environment, from the surroundings, to be absorbed into a more peaceful mental experience.”
The interviewer does a pretty decent job of highlighting the obvious flaws in that approach. The last thing you want is to be peaceful in a life-threatening situation…normally it is fight or flight, and while playing dead (Thanatosis) may suit some creatures in certain situations, they are not actually going through physiological death, they are just “scared to death”. The way she answers that is to claim that the psychological outcomes of NDEs are usually positive and that this may have evolutionary benefit:
for some at least, have psychological benefits. A lot of people who experience NDEs say it’s life transforming. It allows them to evolve and change their own behavior or beliefs. We suggest that the NDE arises when you don’t have any other kind of escape. So there is this fight-or-flight mechanism, but when neither fight nor flight is possible, this alternative would arise
I hope that was her just making it up on the spot as it not a very robust theory.
Ultimately her whole NEPTUNE model and accompanying theory suffers from a whopping great big flaw. Prior to the 1950s the overwhelming majority of people who had CAs stayed dead. It was only through the invention of CPR that people were able to come back (this coincided with the massive uptick in reports of NDEs). If the proximity of physiological death triggers an NDE, and prior to the 1950s physiological death meant permanent death, then whatever processes occurred immediately before CA would have no evolutionary benefit because they wouldn’t have survived. Given that her theory specifically relates to people who had CA (she states this explicitly), and given our collective knowledge of how these experiences are generally associated with CA, the whole evolutionary benefit theory collapses. Without this her NEPTUNE model is just previous [debunked] arguments about neurotransmitters.
No, it would be better for her if the data allowed for a non-natural explanation as well. The world is shifting – we are entering a post-materialistic age. I know so many scientists who accept that there is more to what we observe than just the natural explanations that science has thus provided and either believe in a “spiritual” explanation or that we are living in a simulation.
Given her answer to the final question about NDEs being real, I hold zero hope for such a Damascus moment:
When you meet entities or when you feel as though you’re out of your body, those are non-ordinary states of consciousness caused by disturbed perception. So you don’t actually meet your father in a tunnel of light, for example. But near-death experiences are real in the sense that the person who reported it did have this vivid and intense subjective experience
She is stating as fact they are physiological. She had better make sure that her data absolutely supports that position, or I suspect she may end up with egg on her face like Borjigin.
As always, if you haven’t already visit my book website (click on image below) and buy one from Amazon (or other e-retailers)
Thanks Paul for letting me know about this IANDS podcast with Charlotte Martial, the consciousness researcher from Liège University in Belgium (Liège is a top European university – when I was doing my Ph.D. I collaborated with them on anti-viral projects)
Firstly, it is not a great interview as the interviewer doesn’t seem to understand her position, or properly listen to her. She is a physicalist, and nothing that she has seen in her research has changed that position, so when he asks her at the end about the shift in understanding to a post materialistic world, he is barking up the wrong tree! As a result he doesn’t really challenge or probe her position, which is disappointing. Anyway, key relevant points:
She refers to her publication back in May last year that we discussed previously that proposes a model explaining NDEs physiologically. She makes the same fundamental mistake as Borjigin from Michigan by stating that the observed EEG activity is occurring during Cardiac arrest (CA). It is not. The EEG and neurotransmitter data she is referring to in humans is all before CA in patients who were in comas and whose EEG were isoelectric by the time they entered full CA. In rats there was EEG for maybe 20-30 seconds post CA. After that, nothing. In none of these studies was any patient recollections collected, so everything is speculative at best, but in reality it is worse than that.
There is no brain activity during CA, and therefore no observations can be made or new memories can be formed in the brain. Her hypothesis is that the NDE memories are created during this period (prior to CA) when the brain becomes hyperactive while starved of oxygen, but that theory has been debunked over and over again, not least in instances of sudden CA where there was no period of oxygen deprivation in the brain prior to CA. I have always said that the activity they have observed when patients or rats were basically suffocated, is the brain screaming at every system in the body to get oxygen moving around, but these are very different circumstances to the vast majority of NDEs that follow a different path, usually involving sudden death and CA, followed by immediate loss of consciousness. This is why more and more I am of the view that Sam Parnia’s acronym – REDs – recalled experiences of death, rather than Near Death, are superior when it comes to discussing these phenomenon in a research context.
They also talked about her ongoing AWARE-like study and why nobody has seen the hidden targets (they ignored the HCP validated OBE in AWARE I or the fact that so few even survived to be interviewed). Her explanation is that is scientifically impossible to observe things outside of ourselves while unconscious, so they will never see a hidden target. She said that the scientific explanation for OBEs is that the brain is conflating observations made before becoming unconscious with false memories of events – they are overlaying what they remembered about the environment prior to CA with new memories that didn’t happen. Of course when you look at some of the OBEs reported over the years, particularly those in the Titus Rivas book, the Self Does Not Die, this explanation falls apart.
Her AWARE-like study is ongoing, but she doesn’t expect there to be a hit for this reason. She is open, but her fundamental baseline position is that there is no afterlife…let’s see if we can change that!
CALL TO ACTION – for those of you who believe in the afterlife and God I am going to ask you to do something unsual…I am asking you to pray. If you are Christian, then pray specifically to Jesus, but if you have a general belief, then pray to God/the great spirit/the being of light etc. This is really important. I think that while Charlotte Marshall is obviously a materialist, I also think she is open to new evidence, but the only evidence that would challenge her worldview would be scientifically validated empirical evidence. It is a shame that she does not regard the testimonies of hundreds of patients and attending HCPs of observations of events/objects that could only be observed if the person’s consciousness had actually left the body as valid empirical evidence, but she is a scientist who seems only to regard scientifically produced evidence as valid. To this end she has created an experiment similar to the AWARE study (but really with the objective to disprove OBEs), and the only way that her worldview would shift is if there is a hit in her study. I say it is set up to disprove NDEs being real because she is only intending to recruit 100 patients, and as we know from previous studies, this is nowhere near enough. However, I mention in my book that it would delicious irony if the study set up by a sceptic to disprove NDEs would be the one that actually had a hit. Well let’s pray for it. I want you to pray the following, and try to remember to do it frequently:
“Dear God/Jesus/etc, I know you are real, I know that my soul will survive death, but so many people don’t and that this is a bad thing for them and for the world as their thinking is only focused on the material and passing. At the moment there is no scientifically validated evidence supporting the understanding that the consciousness can survive death, and that without such evidence it is hard to convince a materialistic world this may be true, therefore please allow at least one person in Charlotte Martial’s study, who has a full CA with no ECG and EEG, to observe the hidden target (s)and recall it accurately, and for this person’s testimony to be validated and presented publicly by Marshall.”
Simple. I believe in the power of prayer, and I believe that while it is vital that free choice is maintained, at the moment the lack of a scientifically validated OBE presents a very real barrier for some who might otherwise be inclined to believe. Hardcore sceptics will still dismiss it, but for those who have “eyes to see and ears to hear” it may be enough to spark their wider curiosity.
“God, please throw us a bone!”
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I am sorry I have been somewhat absent of late, but I moved from the UK to New Zealand in August and started a new job in September. We bought a new house in October and then had to unpack a 40 foot container recently. Been chaos, but there is a story I want to share with you around this…it relates to my faith, so stop reading now if you get wound up by such things, but it is Christmas, so I get to be a Christian here today! It’s long, you might want to make a cup of tea first.
A year ago, I was sitting outside in my backyard on a cold winter’s night by a campfire having a cigar and a Bailey’s when I heard a scream coming from inside our house.
I jumped up, ran inside, and up the stairs worried something had happened to my wife. I found her on the floor curled up in a ball crying. She was surprised to see me as she didn’t think I would have heard her because it was on the other side of the house from the garden. I sat down next to her and asked her what the matter was.
She eventually told me she was screaming at God! She had been desperate to move back to NZ for years, but opportunities in my field are very rare over here, and corporations won’t even look at someone outside of the country normally, as evidenced by the lack of response to the applications I had made.
Anyway, I went straight on LinkedIn (again) and there was a job I was perfectly qualified for based in Auckland, so I applied, mainly just because I wanted to at least feel like I was trying. I didn’t really have any hope.
This was the beginning of December last year. A week later I was offered an interview which was a complete shock. Maybe, just maybe…
We prayed and prayed into it, asking only for God’s will…not just what we wanted, because the situation was complex.
By the end of January, I had a job offer, we had buyers for our house and a number of other things had happened that gave us a certainty that God was “behind the move.” Things seemed to align supernaturally; the house buyers were even from our church. We booked our flights for mid March and began the process of moving.
Now, for those who live in the UK, you may be aware that house sales are not legally binding until the very last minute. Our buyers, despite being Christian, started messing us about in mid February, then the company who offered me the job started to move the goalposts, expanding the role to East Asia, something I was very unhappy about…and yet we had felt so certain that God was behind this because some of the crazy coincidences and our continual prayer for his will.
About 3 weeks before we were due to move I had a bit of a breakdown because of the whole situation with our house, and the thought of spending the remainder of my career at airports. Also, I was feeling bad about leaving my Mum in the UK (the “complexity”). My wife said “let’s pull out”. We did. Neither of us was happy about it as we had felt certain “God was behind the move”, and we had both on balance felt it was the right thing to do, but going ahead no longer felt right either. We decided to still go to NZ for a holiday as by this stage neither of us had jobs in the UK (we’d both quit our existing positions), and the flights and AirBnBs were booked.
A few days before we went I got a message from another company. Quick rewind – in the period between starting to feel nervous about the move, and cancelling, I had applied for another job in NZ that had come up and I told them I would be moving to NZ in March (which was true at the time), but I’d forgotten all about it when we pulled out of the move. Anyway, they wanted to interview me.
We discussed it and decided “why not?” We are going anyway, and maybe “God really does want us to move.” (This is how we think as Christians!).
We went to NZ for a month, and I had a series of interviews. It was our last weekend in the country, I was down to the last two in the process, and I got a call from the company saying they had chosen the other person. We were absolutely gutted. Our hopes had been ripped from us, yet both of us had felt so strongly that “God was behind the move.”
As people who put every step of our lives into God’s hands, we declared that God does not disappoint, he had not just allowed us to believe we would be moving to NZ but had actively encouraged us to believe it would happen. At the airport we were miserable but kept saying…this is not how God works, we will be coming back to live, and soon…it is one thing us praying for stuff and not getting it, but quite another putting it in God’s hands, circumstances coming together miraculously to point one way, then having them ripped away. We kept lifting ourselves with this statement of faith “God does not disappoint.”
Just over two weeks after getting back to the UK, my wife had been able to get her old job back and I was at home alone, and I ended up having a row with God. I said I could no longer say to my wife that God is not a God who disappoints as I have been disappointed for over 20 years with the outcome of my writing. There were many similarities between the situations. I had given my writing to God many years ago, I had even said I wanted to walk away from it because it was a massive ball-ache and perennially thankless, but he kept on producing signs, sometimes absurdly miraculous immediate answers to prayer, that kept me going. Then I had started to resign myself to the idea that my writing had achieved its potential and his purposes, but at the same time I had felt that he had led me to believe that I would be much more successful, so much so that I would be able to make a good living out of it. As a result, I have been disappointed with the outcome.
This was why I said to God that I could no longer say to my wife that he didn’t disappoint…he had allowed me to believe that my writing would really come to something more than it had. I said to Him that I would tell Kirsty that night that I no longer believe this and we had to accept we weren’t going to NZ any time soon.
Then I felt this familiar internal voice, gently say to me… “hold fire, give it a few days.” “End of the week, no more!” I replied to that voice…I know – bonkers.
The next morning, I got up early, as I do, shuffled down to make myself breakfast, started eating my cereal, then opened my emails on my phone.
“Dear Orson, the candidate we offered the position to is no longer going to take it, would you…”
Here we are in New Zealand 6 months later finding new buyers for our UK home, 4 months into a great job, now living in a house we fell in love with on the internet 2 years ago, a dream house that we could not have afforded then, but due to property prices going down in NZ and up in the UK and the pound doing well, we were able to buy now.
We were right to declare “God does not disappoint.” But here’s the kicker.
What do you think I thought after what happened? I spent a whole afternoon “contending” with God that I was disappointed with my writing, that I was certain he had allowed me to believe more was going to happen than has happened, so how could I say any longer that he doesn’t disappoint? How do you think I would react to the fact that the very next morning he reopened the door to NZ?
Of course I’m bloody well going to link the two! Of course I am going to connect things and therefore believe he was saying “you will not be disappointed with the writing” and of course I am going to believe that massive things are yet to come, and sooner rather than later. Moreover, I know that God knows I would make that connection, thereby reinforcing the sense that it is his will for me to believe this…and he will not disappoint.
So, if you got this far, and have read this, I am going to declare that God will not disappoint me when it comes to my writing – that big things, maybe massive things, are coming. I am not writing any new books at the moment, so it will be with one of the ones already out there…maybe one of the novels…that would be my dream, but it just has to be one of them. You will be witnesses to the outcome of this. Some might argue that I am testing God, but that is not what is happening here. I am so confident that something big is about to happen after this sequence of events, and my experience of walking with God, that I want the people here who have who eyes to see and ears to hear, to witness him working and come to faith if they haven’t already.
God does not disappoint…a you will see.
Apologies for the delay in creating this post, but I recently moved from the UK to New Zealand, starting a new job at the same time, so I have been somewhat distracted!
As the eternal hunt for a scientifically validated OBE in an NDE continues (slowly), and the realisation dawns on researchers that it may be many years before such an event occurs, the community is required to continue to rely on human validation. This paper is an attempt to create a tool that seeks to objectively measure the reliability of these “humanly verified” NDEs. Thanks Paul for alerting us to this article
The development of the vNDE evidential strength scale followed the Delphi Method using feedback from a panel of experts. The process involved circulating a draft scale among 11 experts for review and revision in two rounds, allowing time for detailed input and fostering consensus. Initially, the scale covered seven criteria; after expert discussion and consensus (80% agreement), the final version included eight well-defined criteria, each designed to rigorously assess aspects of the near-death experience and its verification.
The final scale contains eight items, covering critical aspects such as the timing of the investigation, the experiencer’s physical and medical state, the occurrence of cardiac or respiratory arrest, the degree of third-person verification, possibility of sensory explanations, the number of verified and erroneous perceptions, and the clarity of recalled perceptions. For each criterion, evaluators are required to provide both a rating and a written justification, lending qualitative depth to the scoring process.
Scores from each of the eight items are summed, resulting in a total between 0 and 32. This total score is then mapped to one of four predetermined levels of evidential strength (very low, low, moderate, or strong) aligned with the quartiles of possible scores. The highest tier, “strong,” requires not only a high total score but also a high rating in third-person verification, ensuring robust evidential support.
The vNDE Scale was validated by having 13 experts and three AI language models (ChatGPT v.4, Gemini Pro, and Mistral Medium 3) independently apply it to 17 potential veridical near-death experiences (vpNDEs) detailed in nine peer-reviewed papers (most people would be familiar with these cases that have been discussed here and on the web extensively). The selection of cases was based on strict inclusion criteria, ensuring each paper provided sufficient detail and had undergone peer review. AI raters were included to assess the feasibility of automating the scale’s application and to help counterbalance possible human biases, particularly where personal beliefs could influence scoring. Out of 13 experts, 11 completed the evaluations (with two collaborating on a joint response), while the AI models followed a standardised prompt to apply the scale to each case using the relevant sections of the papers.
In summary the vNDE scale they created had 8 different evidential criteria, each with their own rating scale (from 1-4), which contributed to an overall score (max 32) reflecting the quality of the evidence supporting the veracity of the OBE within an NDE.
Given the baseline requirement of the cases being presented in peer reviewed journals, and also the requirement for an independent witness, the quality is already higher than many. However, this scale refines things further to determine if the sum of evidence reported and presented is strong or not in relation to the NDE being reliable evidence of an independent consciousness or not.
Below is the kind of output that was generated:
What is notable is that in the majority of cases a consensus of specific strength was not reached (e.g. strong vs moderate). However when adjacent levels were considered (e.g. strong or moderate), things improved. There was reasonable consensus within the AI models, and between AI and humans, although some wild discrepancies as well.
Given the fact that the tool failed to create consistent precise consensus between the expert assessors, it is clear that the ability to quantify the levels of strength is not quite objective enough, and allows for subjective inter-assessor interpretation. It also shows (once again) that AI while promising, cannot be fully relied upon to replace humans, even for a task that it should be ideally qualified to perform.
Having said that, in the absence of an OBE verified using electronic equipment like in AWARE II, this is about as good as it gets for now. Further refinement of this tool creating better alignment between expert assessors will no doubt lead to a fully validated tool that can be incorporated in future research.
The other outcome of this study is the fact that AI and the expert panel agreed that the three top cases in the table above had strong evidence to support the validity of the OBEs. We should bank that for now and use these three as exemplary examples of well documented OBEs with third party witnesses. I am glad that the AWARE I OBE is in this group.
Lastly I just wanted to cover a recent poster presented by the Parnia lab at AHA recently (thanks Z). It is somewhat related to the previous article, so worth shoving in here:
Background: About 10% of cardiac arrest survivors experience vivid Recalled Experiences of Death (RED) marked by clear awareness and a sense of life review, which can enhance quality of life. Although often dismissed as hallucinations or dreams, this study uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to objectively distinguish RED from dreams and drug-induced states.
Hypothesis: NLP can differentiate RED accounts in cardiac arrest patients from other altered states based on thematic content, informing our understanding of consciousness during clinical death.
Methods: Researchers analyzed 3,700 anonymized first-person narratives: 1,245 RED, 1,190 dream, and 1,265 drug-induced reports, using keyword filtering and transformer-based models (Longformer for narrative classification; BERT for RED theme identification).
Results: The Longformer model achieved 98% validation F1-score and 100% holdout accuracy, accurately classifying all holdout drug narratives without needing substance names. The BERT model identified RED-specific themes with 90% validation and 87% holdout F1-scores.
Conclusion: Transformer-based NLP can effectively distinguish RED from other experiences, revealing distinct and structured patterns, and providing an objective method for analyzing survivor narratives and related psychological outcomes.
Parnia’s utilisation of artificial intelligence to analyse the narrative content of two distinct types of experiences—Recalled Experiences of Death (RED) and those induced by drugs or dreams—demonstrates that AI is capable of reliably distinguishing between authentic near-death experiences and other altered states. Although the outcomes are inherently influenced by the subjective prompts provided to the AI models, the findings nonetheless reinforce the view that REDs are unique and fundamentally different in character from both “natural” and “artificial” hallucinations or experiences.
Moreover, this approach contributes to the development of more objective methodologies for differentiating between these reports. By leveraging AI as a tool for analysis, it becomes possible to more clearly separate genuine REDs from other experiences, supporting the argument that these phenomena possess distinguishing features that set them apart from ordinary dreams or drug-induced perceptions.
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I have made a few comments or mini-posts about reality before, but the more I think about it the more I believe it is like an onion, and purposefully so.
As I have said before, our experience of reality is an illusion. That is factually true.
As a reminder, the first layer is the perception of the physical world around us. It does not exist as we perceive it to exist, it is quite literally a trick of the light (and electrostatic repulsion). Anyone who has studied chemistry in school will be familiar with the structure of an atom. It has a nucleus that consists of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a ”cloud” of electrons. It is not really a cloud, but rather a number of electrons moving in orbits. In some atoms just a handful, in the heavier ones, dozens, moving around the nucleus in specific defined paths. The speed of “movement” creates the impression of a cloud, just like the cartoon legs of road runner.
Anyway, to avoid getting bogged down in science or detail, all these sub-atomic particles (electrons neutrons etc) are incredibly small, and yet when groups of atoms come together to form molecules, and then these molecules combine to form structures they take on the “appearance” and “sensation” of solidity, however, this appearance and sensation is illusory. The “appearance” is the result of light of specific wavelengths being absorbed by the electrons, and since they move incredibly fast they look solid, and the sensation is due to repulsion of charged particles. If you were to freeze the movement of all electrons, humans would become invisible because the space the subatomic particles take up is ludicrously small. In fact, if you were able to overcome the electrostatic repulsion and squish all the sub atomic particles (everything) that make all the humans on earth together, then the whole of humanity would occupy the space taken up by a solitary sugar cube!
That is why the world we see can be described as an illusion. But that is only the first layer of the onion.
The second layer is the illusion that those particles occupy a specific place in time – in other words that they actually occupy space at all. This is the illusion that quantum mechanics begins to expose. Now I do not understand quantum mechanics to any deep level, and will probably make a fool of myself here, but as part of my undergraduate studies I was forced to solve Schrödinger’s wave equation. This equation speaks to the dual nature of matter, and that electrons and photons etc can be both wave and particle. But there is more. The location of an electron and properties of an electron are not determined until the electron is observed. Now I am going way out of my lane here, but from my understanding this is the heart of Schrodinger’s cat problem, and the argument between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, in which Einstein was forced to admit in the end that the properties of matter are not determined until they are observed. Extending this into metaphysical terms, reality is conscious observation.
I see each of these layers of the onion as layers of consciousness in which we may be able to exist, and progress to. This is in line with many religious understandings, including the Christian one (in my father’s house there are many mansions…). Is this place I was invited to experience the centre, or is there another layer? This is where the Far Eastern religious traditions and the middle eastern ones, specifically Christianity diverge. The centre of the onion in Eastern traditions is the merging of all consciousness, whereas the Middle Eastern ones are the co-existing of individual consciousness in a created paradise with the ultimate creator consciousness.
This is the essence of the second layer of the onion and hints at the true nature of the fundamental problem. The world, the universe in which we live is not real as we understand it to be, and we don’t really fully understand what it is. (I believe a part of the illusion is creating a conundrum that is distracting for superbrains so they don’t find the real answer- if nothing of this is real, then neither is the maths that points to it not being real!). This leads many “superbrain” scientists to engage in speculation on the nature of our experience, inevitably leading to philosophical idealism…everything is just consciousness…and they may have a point. However, without a central reference, or an understanding of any source of this realm of consciousness, this thinking can be destabilising. These people, being supremely smart, turn their nose up at perfectly suitable explanations provided by some religions because they believe only thick people believe that superstitious nonsense (when I say thick, I mean people like me who only have 1 Ph.D.). They want to come up with something clever. A few are really really clever leading them to be humble and see that we already have adequate explanations that fit the observations.
Anyway, it is clear that science is on to something, even if the discoveries ultimately point to the futility of science. NDEs provide confirmation of the illusory nature of this layer of the onion. Virtually every experiencer says that once they leave this realm, they enter another realm which feels much more real. They come to recognise that the earth “realm” is not in fact reality but some sort of “learning” or “testing” environment. It must therefore be created for that purpose. A created illusion designed to fool us that this is the only reality unless we seek truth…it seems that this world is designed to find truth seekers, the kind of people who come to this blog, the kind like Neo in The Matrix who knows there is more to life than just the observable world.
Often these experiencers describe the realm they enter as having a translucent quality. This means that light can pass through things, although it is diffuse. In other words, the world they see there better reflects the true nature of “reality”. This advanced form of reality is also an illusion, although maybe in this realm it is not illusory as in a trick, but clearly so. The objects that people observe are obviously not solid, and therefore what are they? I believe that just like here they are the result of a creative imagination, only in that next place we are allowed to see that the objects we observe are really just images to enjoy or help us to understand or relate to. Does our consciousness create them, or are they created for us?
This NDE world is the third layer of the onion. Beyond that we can only speculate, but my own experience, which I describe in a small passage in my book linked below, may point to another layer, possibly the centre of the onion. In my experience I met God. It was a place, but I couldn’t see or feel anything physically I could only feel emotions (pure love) and be conscious. I existed in the most perfect form. I was an individual point of consciousness, surrounded by many other conscious beings, but focused entirely on one of those beings…God, a being of pure and infinite love.
NDEs do not answer these questions as people come back with differing and contradictory understandings of the answer to this. I believe they are meant to. We are not supposed to know the precise answer to that question here. Here we are meant to find key truths for ourselves. That is a part of the “process”…the purpose of that “process” may be to learn, or it may be to sort, again your belief about that will be determined by what belief system you adhere to, but they can’t all be right.
This was not written with the intention of it being an advert for my book, but rather than “preach” in this post, I refer you to my book on why I believe Jesus is right on this, and in fact the answer to all of this. I do not prove it, and as I explicitly state in my book, the evidence is such that you can choose to believe a number of different explanations for the “onion”, but I do point out that choosing the wrong explanation may have dire consequences.
If you are genuinely curious about why I made my choice the way I did, then get a copy of the book, the Kindle version of which I am giving away for 48 hours from midnight Saturday (PST).
Also, as always, please post your thoughts on this…it is quite a deep, almost esoteric, subject, it is after all the essence of the question around the meaning of life.
I have created Audible versions of my two NDE books. These are narrated by Amazon’s AI voice, so it can be a bit quirky at times, but it does the job (and it was free!).
I have also made the Kindle versions of my 3 recent books available for free for 48 hours from now. Fill yer boots!
As always, if you read or listen to my books, and you like them, please please please at least rate them, or better still, write review.
I know it is not NDE, but its related to the nature of reality so if you are interested in this fascinating subject, and my views on it after writing a book on the subject (DNA:The Elephant In The Lab), then please click on one of the links below and listen/view Darren and I discuss this subject. The evidence is extremely clear…life could not emerged by random natural processes and was most likely the result of intelligent initiation:
YouTube – https://youtu.be/QV6IfrAfQ_Q
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/episode/29cO91HyuQVPZs6rkPKaRJ?si=Gh89UZXrRfijiVonQrWgkg
Also please sign up to Darren’s Patreon site. He creates a lot of excellent content on subjects that are of interest to many of us on here.
YouTube memberships: https://youtube.com/@SeekingI/join – Early Access, Access to Discussion Groups, Access to Exclusive Non-Podcast Videos.
Patreon: https://patreon.com/c/SeekingI – All the above minus the non-podcast videos
Finally, as always, if you haven’t already, please support what I do here by buying (and reviewing) one of my books by clicking on the image below:
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