Near Death Experiences…really?
Nobody warns you, before you nearly die, that the whole affair will be such a colossal administrative letdown. You go in expecting Revelation—capital R, trumpets, the full Cecil B. DeMille production—and you come out with a bumper sticker. “Love one another.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Be present.” I have received more actionable intelligence from fortune cookies.
At least those come with lottery numbers.
Near-death experiences, or NDEs as the industry prefers to call them—and make no mistake, it is an industry, a robust one, with its own conferences and hierarchies and premium merchandise tiers—have been documented since antiquity and commodified since approximately 1975, when Raymond Moody published Life After Life and effectively handed several thousand people a business plan.
The formula has not changed materially in fifty years. You die (briefly, technically, partially—the qualifications multiply with each retelling). You travel through a tunnel toward a light. Dead relatives appear, looking inexplicably younger and better-dressed than they ever managed in life. A Being of Light materializes, radiating unconditional love and a notably vague agenda. You receive a life review. You are told it is not your time. You return, weeping, to write a book.
The tunnel, I have always thought, is the most suspicious element. Every single account features a tunnel. Not a meadow, not a waiting room with outdated magazines, not a DMV-style queue—a tunnel, every time, regardless of the experiencer’s culture, religion, or prior architectural preferences.
The light at the end is invariably described as “more beautiful than anything I have ever seen,” which raises the obvious question: if you cannot describe it, perhaps the Oprah appearance should wait.
But the Being of Light is where things really go sideways. It arrives without credentials. It communicates without language. It emanates love on a frequency no earthly instrument has yet detected. And despite apparently having access to the complete ledger of human existence, the one thing it consistently declines to share is anything useful.
No medical breakthroughs. No climate solutions. No tip on the third race at Belmont. Just warmth, acceptance, and what amounts to a very expensive therapy session with no follow-up appointments.
“I was told”—and note the passive construction, note how responsibility for the content is gently outsourced to the cosmos—”I was told that love is the most important thing.” Yes. Thank you. The ancient Greeks got there slightly ahead of you, but we appreciate the confirmation. I was also told, by my grandmother, repeatedly, at dinner, that I should eat more vegetables. She did not require a near-fatal cardiac event to transmit this information. She had a telephone.
| OFFICIAL NDE QUALITY ASSURANCE CHECKLIST (v7.4) | |
| Criterion | Status |
| Tunnel with light at the end (not a freight train) | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Deceased relatives—preferably the beloved, not the estranged uncle who owed you money | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Indistinct Being of Light (gender-neutral, non-denominational, policy-compliant) | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Life review presented as cinematic highlight reel, embarrassing moments tastefully omitted | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Overwhelming sensation of love and peace (quantified as “more than words can describe”) | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Told to “go back, your time is not yet” | ✓ CONFIRMED |
| Actionable intelligence: next week’s lottery numbers, weather forecast, stock tips | NOT AVAILABLE |
| Revelation of God’s actual name | NOT AVAILABLE |
| Any information that could not fit in a Hallmark card | NOT AVAILABLE |
| Book deal upon return (pending) | ✓ CONFIRMED |
The competitive dynamics of NDE culture deserve their own chapter in some future anthropology textbook.
Visit any support group, any conference, any comment section beneath a YouTube video entitled “My 11 Minutes in Heaven (FULL STORY),” and you will encounter the quiet, devastating one-upmanship of people who have suffered greatly and cannot help comparing notes.
Someone saw their deceased mother. Someone else saw their deceased mother and a golden city. A third person saw the golden city, the mother, Jesus (described as “very tall, very calm, and surprisingly good teeth”) and received a personalized message about their specific life purpose. The woman in the corner who merely floated above her hospital bed and felt a general sense of peace has learned to keep quiet at these gatherings. She is the NDE equivalent of someone at an Iraqi war stories dinner who was stationed at a base in Germany.
There is an entire spectrum of NDE prestige, and the market has priced it accordingly. A simple tunnel-and-light nets you a chapter in a compilation volume and perhaps a slot on a regional radio program. Add a deceased relative with a specific message, and you’re looking at a podcast appearance and a GoFundMe for the book. Throw in a verified medical flatline, a prophetic vision that subsequently came true, and a meeting with a figure “consistent with descriptions of Jesus or a similar Being,” and you are in the hardcover tier, the speaking circuit, and the Netflix documentary conversation.
The afterlife, it turns out, is a seller’s market, and sellers are advised to have something more dramatic than a warm feeling and a revised attitude toward gratitude.
What strikes me—as a man who has spent considerable time around people in extremis, in circumstances where death was not a metaphor or a spiritual opportunity but an urgent operational problem—is not the sincerity of these accounts. Most of the people who report NDEs are telling the truth as they experienced it.
The brain under mortal stress is doing extraordinary things, and what it produces is evidently vivid, emotionally transformative, and felt more real than ordinary reality.
I do not doubt the experience. I doubt the interpretation. I doubt the packaging. I doubt, specifically, the Being of Light’s communications strategy, which appears to have been designed by the same committee that writes corporate mission statements: everything sounds profound, nothing is falsifiable, and no one is ever held accountable for the vagueness.
“You are loved unconditionally.” Wonderful. By whom? For what purpose? Under what circumstances might this love be demonstrated in a concrete, measurable way?
“Your life has meaning and purpose.” Terrific. Could you be more specific?
“You must return and share what you have learned.” And what, precisely, have you learned? “That love is real.” We have covered this. We covered this in the second paragraph.
At this rate the afterlife’s contribution to human knowledge is running roughly equal to a motivational poster in the break room of a mid-size insurance company.
The books are the thing, though. Always the books. Every NDE eventually becomes a book, and the books are indistinguishable from one another in the way that all comfort food is ultimately indistinguishable: the ingredients are identical, only the backstory varies.
Someone nearly died. They went somewhere extraordinary. They came back changed. They want you to know — and this is the part they really want you to understand, the part that required the near-death and the tunnel and the Being and the whole dramatic apparatus—they want you to know that you should be kinder, more present, more grateful, more loving, less attached to material things, and more focused on what really matters. The book costs $27.99. The audiobook is $34.99. The weekend retreat, where you will experience exercises designed to awaken your own inner light without the inconvenience of cardiac arrest, starts at $1,400.
I am not, let me be clear, opposed to people surviving terrible things and finding meaning in the aftermath. Survival is its own achievement. Meaning-making is a noble and necessary human activity, and if a few minutes of clinical death reorganizes someone’s priorities in productive ways, then the universe has done more efficient work than most therapists charge for.
What I am opposed to is the theology—the baroque, unearned, merchandise-enabled theology that has accumulated around these experiences like barnacles on a very spiritual hull. The bureaucratic disappointment of it.
You have been, briefly, to the other side of existence. You have met a Being of radiant, unconditional, omniscient love. You have been shown the full arc of your life and the fundamental nature of reality. And you have brought back: a vague feeling, a changed demeanor, and advice that could have been generated by any sufficiently motivated greeting-card algorithm.
Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the lesson really is that simple — that the universe, in its infinite complexity, arrives at something a kindergartener could have told you.
Perhaps the tunnel and the light and the Being are just the elaborate delivery mechanism for a message so obvious that we need to nearly die to hear it.
Or perhaps, and I say this with the affection of someone who has stood at enough gravesides to know how thin the membrane is, perhaps the experience is real and the reporting is human, which is to say imperfect, self-serving, shaped by what we want to have been told, and edited—gently, unconsciously, or lovingly—into something that will sell.
Either way, I’m putting “lottery numbers” on my advance directive. Just in case.
Joe Broadmeadow
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