Those who believe they have seen beyond the grave and into the afterlife are not alone.
Though experts in psychological, medical and religious fields differ on what the meaning and cause is behind near-death experiences, people of all walks of life have had them.
According to research from the International Association for Near Death Studies, 10 percent of patients who experience a cardiac arrest in hospital settings have a near-death experience. The association, which is comprised of about 50 scientific study groups of near-death experiences, estimates the number of living Americans who have had such experiences to be in the millions.
One of the more famous examples of a man who reported the hereafter is Don Piper, who was in Gainesville Monday for a monthly Christian men’s luncheon at First Baptist Church’s activities building. A story on his presentation appeared in Tuesday’s Register.
Piper, a Baptist minister from Pasadena, rejects the use of the term “near death experience” for what he went through, claiming to have been dead for about 90 minutes following a car accident on a Lake Livingston bridge in 1989.
In the last pages of “90 Minutes in Heaven,” his New York Times Bestseller book, Piper wrote “All these years later, it’s still not easy for me to relate what happened. Several times I tried to write this myself but couldn’t ...”
Piper said it was the prayers of concerned believers that allowed him to be brought back to life. For three years, he said, he didn’t talk about the experience, and he did not begin to write the book until recent years.
The tale of a brush with death and a subsequent vision of a world not like our own is a difficult subject for many people to discuss. Several Cooke County residents who have reported near-death experiences wished not to have their stories published in the Register for a variety of reasons.
Others aren’t so shy as to keep their story a secret, but haven’t sought publicity for their accounts, either.
Kay Raney, a Rosston area resident, is one who has told select friends and family members her tale, but few others. She said she stayed silent about her experience for many years throughout her childhood.
“My friends are going to be calling me after they read this!” she said, of her decision to share her story with the Register. “... I don’t tell people about all this, so people don’t look at me and call me a crackpot.”
Raney said when she was a five-year-old girl living on a farm east of Muenster, she and her sisters were on the roof of a barn with the intention of jumping off to see if the wind would catch their dresses like parachutes upon descent.
A loose nail on the roof caught Raney’s dress as she lept from the roof, causing her to land awkwardly and break her arm.
“It was a pretty bad break, so they took me to the hospital,” she recalled. “They put me on ether.”
She described an out-of-body experience, hovering over her body briefly before being shrouded with darkness.
“I could see my body on the operating table, as I was floating up and looking down on what was going on. I saw four doctors and a nurse, and the anesthetist,” she said. “I didn’t see them before, but then I could see them as plain as day.
“Then it was like suddenly I was being drawn under quicksand, covering me with darkness. All of the sudden I began to go through a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel I could see the brightest light I’ve ever seen in my life.”
She said two beings appearing as elderly females took her hands on each side and walked her to the light, announcing their intention to help escort her to the end.
“I was walking with them down the long tunnel and toward brilliant white light when I stopped and said, ‘I don’t want to go. I want to go back to my mother and daddy,’” she said. “When I said that, they just looked at me and smiled, and instantly I was transported back through that tunnel back toward my family. And then I woke up.”
Raney said most accounts she has heard since that day have been positive, but as a five-year-old girl she was frightened.
“I’ve heard people later on say it was a pleasant thing, but it wasn’t for me. I hadn’t lived my life, yet, and wanted to go back,” she said. “I never heard those kinds of stories before, and it was never something I had heard about from anyone. It was before we had TV.”
Years later she recalled various television specials and news features about near-death experiences and “light at the end of the tunnel” stories. She was surprised at how much they lined up with her own recollection.
“A light bulb went off in my head when I saw those stories and I said, ‘That happened to me!” she said. “I’m not sure if it was the ether’s effect or if it was genuine. But since I have a spiritual leaning, I believe that affected my life in such a way that it made me want to be more spiritual, and made me want to live my life in a way that I would go to that light again one day.”
A faithful member of the Prairie Point Church of the Nazarene in Prairie Point she said the experience — whether it was spiritual or chemically induced — has reminded her to have faith.
“It’s helped me to remember that God does exist, and remind others that Jesus is waiting at the end of that bright light,” she said.
She said that brightness coincides with descriptions of radiating, divine glory in the Bible. She noted in Exodus 33:21-23, Moses hid himself “in the cleft of the rock” to catch a glimpse of God’s back, after God told Moses he would die if he were to see Him face-to-face.
That brightness was also described by a Denton resident, recalling the account of his now-deceased father.
Eric McCrary, 30, said he was sitting with his father, Newman McCrary, on a bench at a Wal-Mart in Marshall. His father told his son what he saw during a coma a year and a half prior.
“He was diabetic and had a coma,” McCrary said, of his soft-spoken father. “It’s kind of weird — it took him about 15 minutes to tell a five minute story. Broke down and cried while explaining it ... It seemed like he was really there.”
McCrary said his father, who later died in 2004 from a heart attack, described heaven as “really white, and brighter than anything you can imagine.”
He wasn’t forthcoming with exact details, McCrary recalled.
“But the emotion behind it was incredible,” he said.
An organization which studies near-death experiences (as they call them for short “NDEs”) says its not unusual to have feelings of doubt, fear or confusion afterward — enough to cause the person who had the experience to hold off on talking about it.
For some it is a traumatic experience, but the great majority report feelings of joy, comfort and amazement.
According to a frequently-asked questions pamphlet from the International Association for Near Death Studies, it helps for those who have experienced such an otherworldly journey to talk about it.
“First, realize that you are not alone and you have not lost your mind,” the pamphlet said. “Millions and millions of people from all over the world and from ancient times up through this very moment have had similar experiences. Thousands of people in the last 24 hours alone have had an NDE. An NDE is an extraordinary experience, but it happens to ordinary people, and it happens frequently.
“You may want to tell the world about your NDE, or you may want to think about it, possibly for a long time, before trying to say anything. You will probably feel frustrated trying to find words to describe it, and fearful that no one else will understand. But there are many resources available to you.
The association has a list of resources listed on its Web site (listed below). The association is non-denominational and does not favor one religion or another.
And then there are skeptics.
According to the Nov. 20, 2006, issue of Discover magazine, Zen Buddhist psychiatrist Rick Strassman of New Mexico proposed a theory that traces spiritual experiences such as an NDE to a single compound: dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
In Strassman’s book “DMT: The Spirit Molecule,” he proposes that DMT secreted by the human brain triggers “mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences and other exotic cognitive phenomena,” the article said.
DMT was used by Amazonian Indians in South America in the form of ayahuasca, the article claimed — a hallucinogenic tea used in ritual sacraments. Although DMT is a controlled substance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that members of a religious group in New Mexico can ingest the tea for religious purposes, the article claimed.
DMT, when injected into the body, triggers an extremely powerful hallucinogenic trip lasting less than an hour, the article said. And it occurs naturally in the human body in small traces, particularly in the blood and the brain.
Strassman suspected that DMT might be produced in the pineal gland, a minute organ deep in the brain, the Discover article said.
Piper refuted earlier studies on NDEs attributing the phenomena to oxygen depravation and other factors.
“It comes down to this: Until some mere mortal is dead for a lengthy period and subsequently returns to life with irrefutable evidence of an afterlife, near-death experiences will continue to be a matter of faith, or at the very least, conjecture.
“But then, as one of my friends would say, ‘What else is new?’”
On the Net:
Don Piper Ministries:
www.donpiperministries.com
The International Association for Near Death Studies:
www.iands.org
For more information telephone (01274) 431814
(Original headline: Minutes in Heaven )
