The relationship between Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and psychedelics has fascinated me. Every time I’ve heard someone describe their NDE I can’t help but think about trip reports: the sense of connectedness to everything, feeling loved, seeing a bright light. This article provides a definition and some context regarding NDEs.
My experience with psychedelics as well as many others have some of these features as well as a sense of transformation. Psychology Today describes this sense of transformation well in an article about the similarities between psychedelics and NDEs.
As it happens I have a writer friend who has experienced an NDE and was privileged to get their story. What follows is an interview by e-mail.
Q: How did this happen? What led up to your Near Death Experience (NDE)?
Briefly, it was a misdiagnosis of an intestinal problem that ended up becoming peritonitis. Kind of like my spiritual paisans, Enrico Caruso and Rudolph Valentino, who both died of peritonitis. Except I survived it because medicine was a lot more advanced by the 1990's.
By the time the doctors figured it out I was almost gone. I remember saying goodbye to my family, thinking they were in the hospital room. But nobody was there. I was hallucinating.
Ultimately I spent over thirteen hours on the operating table. I was gone for a while, but I had a great surgeon who tethered me to this world. Afterward I recall all these doctors standing around discussing how it was that I was alive. The surgeon said this was the worst case he had ever seen.
Q: What was it like? Did you see the light that people with this experience often mention?
Well, yes. It was an intense experience. Looking back on the whole experience, one thing that strikes me is how immediate and vivid it was. It didn’t feel like a dream. It also didn’t feel like it rose from the ground of a dream. If you’ve had “lucid” dreams you might know what I mean, there was no transition point where I became conscious or felt like anything but my everyday mind was involved.
I was able to think and reason normally.
But what I was conscious of was, first, just a surrounding darkness. I somehow knew that this darkness, which wasn’t frightening at all, was infinite. It was like being one still point of consciousness floating in infinity. Bodiless.
Then I saw a point of light that was very small, but it grew slowly larger as I got closer to it. I had no sense of motion. It was more that it seemed to get closer the more I concentrated on it.
As it got closer I began to realize that it was another being there with me in the darkness, and it was communicating something. Not through words but a feeling of total acceptance and love. My religious background is Catholic, so I was thinking, you know, is this Jesus I’m meeting? Having read a lot of Thomas Merton, I also thought, hey, it could be Buddha.
It strikes me as very funny now to think of my efforts to reason within this situation.
But this feeling was profound. Remembering it, even now decades later, it moves me to know that such a relationship between two beings is conceivable. However you might want to interpret the physical reality or unreality of the experience. That lasted a while, I couldn’t say exactly how long because time really didn’t seem relevant.
Finally my attention shifted and I became conscious of the darkness around me again. But now it was entirely different. The light that was there before me was one of an infinite number of other lights. It was like an infinite field of living stars, each “star” fully communicating this intense feeling of love to every other star.
Once again, it was this feeling of infinity but now it was an infinity filled with light and love. I use the term infinity because that’s what came to my mind at the time, but I could probably say something like the ultimate ground of being. Considering the dire circumstances I was in, what I saw at this moment was that mercy that underlays the foundation of everything.
That thought is only relevant because I came back. But I was happy to bring the memory back.
That’s the gist of things. I know some people say they get guided tours of Heaven, but I didn’t see anything like that. No gold pavements or emerald walls. I also don’t interpret this experience in terms of the Beatific Vision, which would be very presumptuous. A few years after this I did read Dante’s “Paradiso,” and aspects of his vision felt pretty familiar. So I feel most comfortable thinking of this in terms of a poetic vision of the Eucharist, of being a part of the Body of Christ, or as an emblem or symbol of that.
When I eventually woke up in the ICU, what I had experienced remained as I said, very vivid, as it does to this day.
Q: Did you think you had met God?
No. First that would have been a very unmerited grace. Also, I didn’t have any interest in starting a cult or misleading people with my private revelation. This is the first time I’ve written or spoken about this.
I saw my NDE as a very valuable revelation. I hope I do not make it sound too clinical in my description. To feel all these things was almost unimaginably intense.
Q: Have you had experience with psychedelics? If so, how would you compare them to a NDE?
I haven’t used anything heavy. I did have a pretty wild experience smoking marijuana. I saw a spiral galaxy slicing through the roof of the room I was in, and one of the walls became a window looking out on a lovely park with animals and trees.
I also tried smoking salvia once at a rave. That was quite amusing. I saw green eclipses moving across people’s faces. I looked down at my arms and hands moving and they reminded me so much of insect antennae that I couldn’t stop laughing.
I’m susceptible enough to these substances that I wouldn’t want to overdo. I recommend people be responsible in all things. Probably the most “visionary” experiences I’ve had, throughout life, have come as dreams.
In terms of actual psychedelics, I have tried microdosing psilocybin. I found that to be a positive experience. It helped, I think, with focus and energy, similar to a large dose of B vitamin but better. Speaking strictly for myself, I would microdose again.
I will say one reason I'm willing to talk about this now is because I've noticed parallels with others' psychedelic trips.
Q: Did the NDE change your life?
Yes. Obviously, it didn’t make me a saint. That would have been nice.
But it made me appreciate life more. It made me more comfortable with my own eccentricity. There are a lot of everyday social banalities that can seem intimidating, like worrying about getting a dirty look from someone you don’t even know. You can walk around with your back up all the time, and I often would fall into that.
That seems incredibly trivial in respect of infinite mercy.
So, after I was more inspired to pursue creative endeavors with less embarrassment. Before that experience I thought I would like to become a writer, and sometimes made painful efforts in that direction, wrestling with my insecurity. Afterwards I just wrote and forgave myself my trespasses. That’s also how I learned to edit myself.
On another level entirely, and more importantly, it left me with more compassion for others. This is very hard to talk about. As with most people past a certain age, I have had to sit with friends and loved ones who are dying. There have been moments when I’ve been able to find words or gestures that were of some comfort.
I don’t know, that last paragraph sounds incredibly egotistical as I read it back. What I’m trying to say is that nothing is more important than human kindness and respect. That’s what I’ve learned from life and death, together.
Whew! Enough! Diana, thank you for the anonymity! I hope I’ve answered your questions satisfactorily.
Thank you for sharing your remarkable story with the world!