Further Thoughts On The Moral Aspect Of Near-Death Experiences

I've written about the moral dimension of near-death experiences (NDEs) in the past. I recently received the following comments in an email:

I was just rereading a couple of your posts, especially one in which you mentioned inconsistent moral values in NDEs. The post isn't specific about what values they are. In the classical sense, people after an NDE say their values emphasize being loving, less materialistic, serving others, and obtaining knowledge. This pattern cuts across not only NDEs but shows up also in studies about recovery from cardiac arrest, life-threatening illness, traumatic injury, and major life shocks (bereavement, divorce, any personal cataclysm). What's your take on this?

Also, what moral values do you see reflected after distressing NDEs?

Here's my response:

Here are several points I'd make about the moral dimension of NDEs, and only some of these points are directly relevant to what you brought up:

- From what I know of the subject, it does seem that there are some widespread consistencies in the moral effect NDEs have on the experiencers. Your point about similar characteristics in people who have had other experiences (cardiac arrest, etc.) is significant. Though I consider NDEs paranormal, it wouldn't take something paranormal to produce the moral changes that result from NDEs, as far as I know.

- The moral changes produced by NDEs that can be classified as widespread are of a vague nature. It's not as though we're seeing all experiencers or the vast majority of them adopting a particular position on, say, capital punishment, abortion, or women's rights. If there were a widespread agreement that a being of light or some other relevant entity is communicating the same highly detailed moral message to every experiencer or the large majority of them, that would have more evidential significance. Instead, what we seem to be getting is a lot of vague notions of love, being less materialistic, etc. Surely there are some more specific details that can be identified in the moral message that people are associating with NDEs. I suspect all experiencers would agree that torturing children for enjoyment is something that should be avoided, for example. But they probably all or almost all agreed on such issues before their NDEs. Even if they didn't, it wouldn't take much to bring about such an agreement. The moral agreement that exists among these experiencers is highly vague.

- The moral changes you've referred to seem to be what we'd expect to follow from a wide diversity of interpretations of NDEs. It's not as though one interpretation is singled out as the one that's implicated by these moral changes. Whether you consider an NDE highly objective, highly subjective, Divine, or demonic, you'd expect that NDE to encourage people to be less materialistic and to be more concerned about obtaining knowledge, for example. I hold the view that NDEs are highly subjective, but that they're paranormal and offer minimal evidence for an afterlife and the nature of that afterlife. Other people view NDEs as highly objective, as if they tell us what to expect when we die with a high level of precision. Those are two significantly different views of NDEs. But both views would predict moral changes in the experiencers along the lines of less materialism and more concern for other people. Even somebody who views NDEs as hallucinations of some sort and not paranormal could argue that they encourage us to reevaluate our moral standards. Even a hallucination can remind us of, and cause us to think more deeply about, something more real that's ahead, or might be ahead, when we die. A wide diversity of views of NDEs could produce the moral changes in question.

- Something I wonder about, which I haven't yet studied to any significant extent, is how much the experiencers' moral changes go against their culture. For example, do we see many experiencers in Hindu or Islamic parts of the world adopting what those of us in a place like the United States would consider a more loving view of women? Or is the notion of love encouraged by NDEs so vague that it tends to remain within the parameters of a culture, without doing much to transform the culture?

- I know less about the moral changes that occur after negative NDEs than I know about the changes that occur after positive ones. I'd expect there to be some differences. I'd expect more urgency among experiencers of negative NDEs, more humility, more self-criticism, and more carefulness about what changes they should make in their lives, for example. I'd expect a mixture of helpful and harmful changes among experiencers of negative NDEs. They might become more self-critical in a generally healthy way, yet view themselves as more sinful than other people in a way that isn't healthy. As I said in one of my posts on negative NDEs, I think those epxeriences are roughly comparable to having a nightmare. They're more significant than a nightmare in some ways, such as in their vividness and rarity. But they don't necessarily imply that a person has gone to Hell or some equivalent or will go there in the future. A person could have a negative NDE, then die and go to Heaven the next day, even if no significant change occurred in his life between the two experiences. A person with a healthy relationship with God could have a negative NDE. However, I doubt that most experiencers hold that view of the experience when it occurs and in the immediate aftermath, so they tend to treat it as some sort of experience of Hell or a foretaste of it. It might be something like a foretaste of Hell in some cases. God might use a negative NDE to warn a person, for example. But I see no reason to think that negative NDEs as a whole should be viewed that way. I think most people who have a negative NDE would view the experience differently than I do, though, at least initially, so their moral changes would reflect that different view.

- The level of agreement on moral issues among experiencers of NDEs is sometimes exaggerated. In Chris Carter's Science And The Near-Death Experience (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2010), Neal Grossman writes in the foreword: "Every near-death experiencer is convinced that the purpose of life is to grow in our ability to give and receive love. And NDE researchers - as well as mediumship researchers - have themselves come to this same conclusion, but academic life is the opposite of loving." (xv) Carter gives a more qualified assessment later in the book: "If there is any consistent message that is brought back by those who have a classic NDE, it is this: after death there is more, and the purpose of life is to grow in love and knowledge." (123) Carter includes qualifiers like "if", "classic" NDEs rather than all of them, and "knowledge" added to love. Grossman's comment about "every near-death experiencer" is surely wrong, and I doubt that even Carter's more qualified assessment can be reliably attributed to even a majority of experiencers. How many of them even comment about the purpose of life in a context related to their NDE? Among those who do think they know the purpose of life based on their NDE, how many are just going by their own impressions, intuitions, etc. rather than any explicit message they were given in the NDE? Yes, there's some significance in vague impressions that people get from their NDEs, but we should distinguish between vague impressions and explicit messages. How many experiencers were given an explicit message in their NDE about a purpose to life like the ones Grossman and Carter describe? Probably a distinct minority.

- As far as NDEs differ in their religious implications (e.g., one promotes Christianity, while another promotes Hinduism), they differ in their moral implications as well. Religions often agree on moral issues, but they disagree as well. If somebody is going to say that it doesn't matter much whether an NDE is monotheistic or polytheistic, for example, is he also going to say that it doesn't matter much whether the NDE implies a higher or lower view of, say, women's rights or children's rights? That's one of the points I have in mind when I say that people who promote the religious plurality of NDEs should also consider their moral plurality. It's not as though theological issues, which many people don't consider to be of much importance, are all that's at stake in the diversity of NDEs. Morality is at stake as well.

- Is there a judgment (or life review or whatever else we would call it)? Different NDEs answer that question in different ways.

- If there's a judgment, what's the nature of it? Again, we get different answers from one NDE to another. A Christian NDE might have a judgment with different standards than we find in a Hindu NDE, which differs from an atheist's NDE. I've heard of NDEs that involved a judgment by a relatively high standard, which left the person judged with a deep sense of shame, regret, etc., even if the person judged apparently wasn't much different than the average person. But other NDEs I've heard of seem to involve a lower standard of judgment, so that the person judged only senses some sort of mild correction or no correction at all. As far as I know, there isn't any difference in the moral character of the people experiencing the NDEs that would explain these differences. Rather, it seems that the judgment standards are different. There's nothing even close to one standard that we're finding across all NDEs or even the large majority of them. For example, contrast the more negative NDEs (hellish ones and heavenly ones that involve a stricter judgment) to Eben Alexander's NDE. I think he's generally credible. I suspect he did have an NDE along the lines of what he describes. But some of the comments he's made about his NDE are highly problematic in this context we're discussing. In a recent interview, I heard him claim that he was told in his NDE that "there's nothing you can do wrong". I doubt that Alexander misspoke, because I heard him say the same thing in a second interview. If I'm remembering correctly, he's also made comments suggesting universalism, that everybody goes to Heaven. Even if he hasn't, I know that other experiencers of NDEs have. I'm willing to give Alexander, or the being who allegedly communicated with him during his NDE, the benefit of the doubt on the "there's nothing you can do wrong" comment. The comment seems to imply that no behavior is immoral, that nobody will be punished for doing wrong, etc. That's a message that people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin would find encouraging. But I suspect that Alexander either didn't mean his comment to be taken that way or hasn't thought through the implications of it. Maybe he meant the "you" in "there's nothing you can do wrong" to refer to him in particular rather than all people, meaning that he'll always be in good standing with Heaven (or some other entity), whereas other people might not be. I don't know. But the general impression I come away with when I hear people like Alexander is that their NDE promotes a highly permissive view of morality.

- And I want to expand on a particular element of that. Think of the contrast between an NDE that promotes universalism and one that involves somebody going to Hell and thinking that Hell lasts forever. Some people who have negative NDEs come away with the impression that it would be eternal, if it hadn't been interrupted by a return to this life. That doesn't seem to be consistent with the universalistic NDEs. This difference among NDEs can be classified as a theological and philosophical disagreement among them, but it can also be classified as a moral disagreement. There are some moral dimensions to issues like universalism, the eternality of Hell, and what level of punishment is just.

- NDEs don't just promote different views of morality in their judgment scenarios. They also promote different views of morality in other contexts. In Eben Alexander's case, his experience of being told "there's nothing you can do wrong" didn't occur during a time of judgment. Similarly, other NDEs have involved moral messages outside of their judgment scenes. Some NDEs have implications for when life begins, for example, thus making them relevant to moral issues like abortion. If a being you encounter in an NDE tells you that life begins at conception, that's one thing. If your NDE involves seeing souls enter a body several months into pregnancy, that's something else. I've come across NDEs that have characteristics like those that make them relevant to moral issues. And sometimes they contradict each other in that context.

- Then there's the issue of the differing character traits of the people involved in NDEs. Who has a positive NDE and who has a negative one? The experiences don't seem to line up with the moral character of the experiencers. Somebody who seems to be worse has a positive NDE, whereas somebody who seems to be a better person has a negative NDE.

- Though I think some of the moral changes that occur among experiencers of NDEs are for the better, there are some changes for the worse as well. I'm thinking especially of people who have had positive NDEs. I wouldn't characterize all of them this way, but some seem to view their relationship with organized religion as a sort of one-way street. A religion like Christianity should be sitting at the feet of those who have experienced NDEs, to learn from them. Christian doctrine needs to be corrected if it isn't in line with NDEs, even if it just isn't in line with that particular person's NDE. In reality, the evidence we have for Christianity is better than the evidence we have for an NDE-based view of the afterlife. It's Christianity, not the NDE, that's in the driver's seat. NDEs and their experiencers have a place at the table. They should be heard. Communication between Christianity and people who have had NDEs should be a two-way street. They should listen to each other. I do think Christians can learn some things from NDEs, and not just reinforcements of what they already believed. I might write a post on the subject someday. But the point I'm making here is that some people who have had a positive NDE seem to think too highly of themselves and their experience and its evidential significance. They seem to not know much about the evidence for Christianity. They don't seem to have much awareness of the need to reconcile their experience with a vast network of other evidential considerations. The NDE community seems to have done well so far in integrating NDEs with other fields. There's a lot of helpful consideration of how NDEs relate to healthcare, counseling, etc. But there are other areas where the process of integration hasn't gone so well. Organized religion, primarily Christianity, isn't respected as much as it ought to be within the NDE community. The work that's been done so far to relate NDEs to fields like religion and philosophy has been far from sufficient. A lot of experiencers of NDEs, particularly people who have had a positive NDE, think too highly of themselves and what they've experienced. The NDE community not only hasn't done enough to correct that tendency, but even encourages it at times. A lot of people are being coddled who should be corrected instead. I see a lot in NDE literature about respecting people, not questioning the experiences of people who have had NDEs, etc., and those themes are appropriate to some extent. But they can be taken too far, and they have been. They need to be accompanied by more of a willingness to correct the errors of those who have had NDEs, more encouragement for them to be humble about their experiences, and more effort to make people aware of the vast amount of evidence relevant to the afterlife and related issues that exists outside of NDEs. It's true that NDEs change people for the better in some ways, but not every change is for the better. Part of the problem here is that researchers aren't looking in all the right places when they evaluate the changes that occur in people who have had NDEs.