The Near Death Experience

As resuscitation technology advanced during the last several decades, more people than ever before were brought back from the brink of death.

In the mid-1970s, Dr. Raymond Moody coined the term near-death experience (abbreviated as NDE) to describe the unique state of consciousness many of these patients described.

Their NDE occurred when death was imminent or when they were actually clinically dead - without breathing or heartbeat.

And although each patient's NDE was unique, certain elements were commonly reported: a sense of profound peace and well-being; perceiving their body from an outside position and accurately witnessing resuscitation efforts; rapid movement through darkness toward intense light; entering that light and being flooded by knowledge about one's life and the nature of the universe; joyful reunion with deceased loved ones; and a decision (by oneself or others) to return to one's body.

Near-death experiencers (NDErs) often consider the experience to be the most profound of their lives. Afterwards, they almost always report a complete loss of the fear of death. Often, they also feel deeply changed in their attitudes toward life, work, and love - yet such changes may disrupt their lives and relationships. They may feel a need to discuss their NDE and its aftermath, but find no one in whom they can confide. Both experiencers and the medical or religious professionals they have turned to for help usually feel in great need of information and support. Providing such support and information is one of the major missions of IANDS.

A second mission of IANDS is to help develop reliable, scientific knowledge about the near-death experience. Doing so can be controversial, because many aspects of the near-death experience challenge traditional assumptions in psychology and medicine. For example:

If brain tissue has been assumed to die when deprived of oxygen for more than 8 minutes, how can we account for the revival of persons 30 or more minutes after their clinical death, exhibiting enhanced rather than diminished mental powers? * Once a person's brainwaves have ceased, indicating that all mental activity has stopped - perceiving, thinking, and remembering - how do we explain her accurate perception of events going on around her 'deceased' body (both sight and sound), and her accurate reporting of events taking place even at significant distances from her clinically-dead body? * If we regard experiencers' perceptions of dead relatives as just imaginary "wishful thinking," how can we explain their accurate description of relatives previously unknown to them, yet later verified by living relatives and by civil documents? * If the spiritual component of the near-death experience could be explained away as just an extension of the person's pre-existing belief system, why have confirmed atheists come back after their NDE convinced there is a God? And why have religious believers returned from their NDE with un-orthodox changes to their prior dogmas?

To support studies that might answer such questions, IANDS was founded in 1978 by psychiatrists Raymond Moody and Bruce Greyson, cardiologist Michael Sabom, sociologist John Audette and social psychologist Kenneth Ring. Since then, sister organizations have been created overseas in Australia, Japan, India, Great Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Scandinavia, Hungary, and Slovenia.

In fulfillment of its research mission, IANDS publishes the quarterly peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies . It recently also produced a Near-Death Experiences Research Bibliography on CD-ROM, enabling purchasers to locate a huge variety of articles published about NDEs between 1981 and 2001.

For the general public, IANDS produces the quarterly magazine-and-newsletter, Vital Signs, which prints first-person accounts of near-death experiences, movie and book reviews pertaining to NDEs, issues confronting professional counselors of near-death experiencers, summaries of hot debates going on among scientists about NDEs, and readers' views on the moral perspectives stimulated by near-death experiences.

To assist medical and counseling professionals who have clients that are near-death experiencers, IANDS makes available a series of educational pamphlets, including:

• Aftereffects of Near-Death Experiences
• Caring for the Near-Death Experiencer: Considerations for Caregivers
• Distressing Near-Death Experiences
• Children's Near-Death Experiences and
• Near-Death Experiences in the Terminally Ill.

And for the general public, including new near-death experiencers, IANDS has created more brochures, including:

• Caring for the Near-Death Experiencer: Considerations for Experiencers
• The Impact of Near-Death Experiences on Grief and Loss
• The Experiencer's Guide to Psychotherapy,

plus an extensive, informative website at www.iands.org.

In addition, IANDS supports over 50 "Friends-of-IANDS" community groups in the USA and Canada, where experiencers can safely share the extraordinary dimensions of their experience and its continuing after-effects on their lives. Non-experiencers are also welcome to participate in these discussion groups.

IANDS' only paid staff is one-half-time "angel" at its main office (near Hartford, Connecticut ). Dedicated volunteers and donors accomplish virtually all of IANDS' activities. Current projects, for which IANDS welcomes both volunteer labor and monetary contributions, include:

• Preparing its next annual conference, to be held near Chicago in June 2004. The conference theme will be Creativity and the Near-death Experience, celebrating how NDEs have spawned artistic pursuits in people with little or no previous inclination to play music, make art, or write poetry or other literature.
• Developing a professional curriculum about NDEs for use in medical schools and by other health-care professionals seeking knowledge about how to respond appropriately when clients have an NDE.
• Transcribing near-death experiences and scientific lectures on NDEs.
• Producing the next phase of the Near-Death Experiences Research Bibliography.
• Publishing a book of IANDS' collected educational brochures.

IANDS' nonprofit status means that contributions to it are fully tax-deductible under US law. Anyone wishing to learn how to support IANDS' activities is welcome to contact its central office at 860-882-1211 and visit its website at www.iands.org. With persons being resuscitated every day, more people are becoming NDErs; yet many mysteries of the NDE remain to be understood. So the need for IANDS' services is expected to continue well into the future.

By The International Association for Near-death Studies (IANDS)