Deconstructing the near-death doco,"After Death"

The (relatively) new big-budget documentary on near-death experiences

After Death was released by Angel Studios in Oct. 2023.

This documentary was a formidable reminder for me as to the power which both art and science may exert on one’s beliefs.

The film was documenting a series of people who have undergone near-death experiences (NDEs), as well as a few researchers of this phenomenon. They’re exploring a subject matter whose final ontological status (i.e. are these people really witnessing some post-humous paradise?) has, to say the least, not reached any consensus. That is, if one is to be intellectually honest, and not immovably decree that ‘there’s nothing to see here folks!’ about the NDE’s implications.

So, on the scientific front, I was able to analyse the claims (expounded below), largely relinquishing the reports to the material realm… but not wholly satisfactorily.

As per art, this abiding ambiguity remained too: it was evidently of high production value, and so this lent itself to bombastic cinematography and high-fidelity testimony reconstructions. And as such, on one hand this is simply one component of so-called ‘cognitive film studies’, i.e. how film reciprocally interacts with human psychology, in this case a kind of elaborated ‘trick of the light’ in which the viewer may be convinced of the content by virtue of the sheer sensorial intensity (much like the hyper-reality ascribed to many psychedelic experiences). But on the other, I found myself caught between this more cynical view and a more inspired one for the sovereign capacity of an artistic work to gesture toward something… else. A genuine something about which, just maybe, experiences like the NDE offer us a whisper.

Another reflection on how the such an art/science tension may interact may that in contrast to the much wider treatment of experience afforded by such documentary journalism, doing justice to the baroque structure that many anomalous experiences exhibit - I have a suspicion that reductionist accounts have an uncanny proclivity to cherry-pick so as to arrive at a far narrower picture than its totality. Qualitative analyses, which I like to champion in my research, lend themselves to the former. Reasons for the latter are beyond the scope of this article, but naturally the lower reliability of subjective report is a reason for paying less attention to the alleged anomalies. (Personally, I’ve a predilection for it being a psychological defence mechanism against the proverbial chaos unleashed by data not yielding to the closed-system finitude of materialism)

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All this said, let us delve into the presented narratives, shall we?

Dale had an NDE in which he was floating about in the air (classic), saw the bodies of others around (possibly veridically, but this isn’t mentioned, annoyingly), and then began to follow an ambulance, retrospectively identified as that which he was in (again, perhaps he correctly perceived the surrounding area, but this isn’t reported).

I find the fact that he articulates an extensive out of body experience (OBE) in which he’s trailing the ambulance like some tenacious, etheric tailgater is very interesting. It may well be that in his state of so-called ‘disconnected consciousness’ (which NDEs are properly categorised), there is enough connection to his external environs that sensory data is still accessible to his altered brain-state and thus drive the content. Much like a dream, or indeed coma, where obvious correspondences can exist between one’s interior experience and the exterior goings-on. This is owing to the brain as a prediction machine, attempting to explain sensory info. by its prior predictions, and updating its internal world-model on the basis of such novel info. - in turn actively generating perception.

So, he hears sirens, maybe feels some defrib’ing, and constructs a model of an ambulance.

But… why would it manifest so precisely as one might expect if his consciousness was somehow temporarily ‘dis-embodied’? Flying just short of the ambulance as if his ‘silver cord’ were snagged on the door just as it were heading for the heavens. Why not a dream-like remodelling of what being in an ambulance may actually look like from within?

This may be owing to other extensive research demonstrating certain brain regions, roughly the parietal cortex - but usually more specifically the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), involved in multisensory integration - to be implicated OBE-resembling phenomena. I more cautiously suffix this with ‘resembling phenomena’, as AFAIK there has not been any entirely duplicated OBE such as that Dale describes (or innumerable other NDErs) via manipulations/clinical indications of the TPJ. But granted, the sense of part or all of one’s body being dislocated in sense-space is reproducible.

So, it may be that these two theories co-participate. A model of experience is informed by the available sense-data, but one in which the binding of the locus of consciousness with the body schemata is disintegrated… A kind of ‘out of body experience’? But not quite one of transcendental dualist metaphysics.

Howard Storm is a well-known NDEr who’s published his account which echoes the very peripheralised minority (at least 14%) of experiencers reporting distressing - or in some cases damn-right harrowing - NDEs.

When he was on a museum trip with his family, he started to feel a ‘fire’ burning from within his abdomen. In fact, his stomach had perforated. When death started to encroach ever-closer, he started to perceive ‘demons disembowelling’ him.

Given the comparativity of NDEs & psychedelics, it could be, in part, that the original seed of his near-death trip, the searing of his viscera, set the tone for his ensuing hellish NDE. At least anecdotally I’ve observed a small number of such NDEs triggered by similar conditions involving the percept of burning (much like fever dreams). But a study on NDEs of burn victims didn’t quite show such classic infernal scenes - though many of them were still distressing, and the Asian population studied would have their own culture-bound envisionment of hell.

While he was an atheist, and later attributed his rather stereotypical hellscape scenario to such disbelief and devil-may-care attitude to his moral comportment, there is no evidence that being an atheist is more likely to render you hell-bound upon your (near-)death. But prior belief, expectation - or indeed readiness - can certainly help drive the qualitative content of what one experiences (precisely as with psychedelics, not only given their sensitivity to suggestion, but where level of preparedness has been linked with challenging trips).

This reminded me of a participant of mine during a field study I co-conducted on DMT experiences, BW. He was an avowed materialist psychiatrist. And his experience was one of the few challenging trips we observed, centring around a disturbing regression to a terrified child. Another participant of ours, incidentally on the opposing end of the spectrum of belief, had been part of the Brazilian Barquinha mediumistic, ayahuasca-using church for many years. He reflected that this exhibition of primordial fear when in the throes of the DMT space, versus his own comparative equanimity, was because BW didn’t have the requisite mental tools. In fact, he loaned from the Bible the oft-spoke line regarding ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’. Anyone could just as well quote the Tibetan book of the dead; the structure of your psyche when contending with these exotic states can make the difference between the dark of night and the light of day.

Storm admitted that when he was a nipper, he conceived of Jesus as a superhero (Superman had been invented to deliberately mirror the messiah, but you can clearly see that the Christ’s character was not so dissimilarly engineered). He said when had nightmares, he’d call on JC to chase away the lions, tigers & bears. Storm called him "my big rescuer”… No wonder, then, that in his NDE it all reanimated, picking up seemingly just where it left off: A theophany of the anointed one, followed by his scattering of the demons, flying up, up & away from the darkness, held secure in his arms, and even scared he'd fall - just like with Cal-El (that vehicle of God) himself.

So, we can see, as with many later-life non-believers, there was still plenty for his mind to recover from his younger, more conditioned years.

Also, not only are the phenomenological dimensions and neural correlates overlapping between dreams / REM states and NDEs anyway - but given the nature of his own repeated childhood nightmares, it may make some sense why he then went on to have have an NDE showing many parallels, in the fashion of so-called ‘state-dependent memory’.

The parallels of having Jesus himself swoop down and save him - superheroic salvation - is exceedingly recurring amongst NDEs. If not JC himself, then another refulgent light which plucks them from the clutches of some inferno or chasm of some void. This is the Deus ex Machina motif - a descriptor for the ancient Greek theatrical (& actual) device whereby a God was hoisted from behind the stage to save the day at the 11th hour. A component of culture embedded in our popular psyches to later be deployed in the theatre of mind again and again, like that self-same machine of old? Or perhaps the device itself was an emanation of an archetype, a representation of something which has been part of the human experience for a long, long time… This flickering dialectic between experience and belief is something Jeff Kripal has written on in terms of many exceptional experiences, and Greg Shushan has expressly as per NDEs. Both illuminating the real possibility that primary experience informs culture & belief - not solely the other way round.

The question obviously remains as to, well, where would said primary experience hail from itself? Consistent principles of the brain are an obvious option. In the Deus ex case, someone having a lucid-dream-like altered state pleas to be rescued from their suffering, and presto, an intrinsic suggestion drives the unfolding journey. The Jungian concept of the enantiodromia (‘opposite roads’) is resonant here too. This is where extremities resolve into their antithesis, where a nadir experience, for instance, suddenly transmute into an experience of its zenith. Neurally, this could be linked to the grinding machinations of the default mode network (DMN), which when it has exhausted itself (perhaps literally in a neuronal energetic sense), one emerges into that beatific liberation. This process itself can also be conceived of as the law of karma, and its exhaustion, in its neural instantiation…

Back to Howey. He eventually went on to have that classic ‘life review’. In fact, it was manifestly communicated to him that “There are people here who have recorded your life and they want to show you". Personally, complimentarily to my unwillingness to be negligent about ordinary explanations, sometimes I’m struck by specific content which just feels eerie. Which I simply think would be naïve to enclose in an explanatory box. And that statement is one small example.

Storm expressed deep regret and disappointment at his being reminded of the manipulativeness he exhibited and his being hell-bent (as it were) on achieving material success.

I took umbrage with these supposed beings of light at this. Storm also witnessed memories of his being psychologically forced into becoming emotionless & dissociated due to his daily regimen of being physically & emotionally abused at the hands of his father. I’ve in fact always been bemused (if entertaining their veridicality) by these entities’ insistent, and consistent, emphasis on ethical conduct in life - usually flunked by the sheepish experiencer - in light of how I imagined these allegedly hyper-evolved celestials to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of neural determinism & free will. Perhaps they leafed through Sopolsky’s recent tome, Determined? Surely they should be beacons of understanding, in their appreciation that so much of human behaviour (possibly all of it if one is a hard-core determinist) is at the mercy of genetics, epigenetics, adverse experience, etcetera, etcetera.

It was as if these spiritual beings were like spiritual bypassers. Refusing to acknowledge the depths of personal hardship this human being has endured - and thus constrained whatever freedom he may (or may not) have had, such that surely he should be granted some margin of error for the errors of his ways. Instead, they had a preference for an expectation that he be the wellspring of light and light which escapes us all…

On the other hand, (again if fancying their actuality) this onus on personal responsibility and freedom in the face of death, in unmistakable existentialist fashion - indeed writers like Carol Zaleski have also depicted the crystal clear evolution of NDEs from ones of punitivity to ones of Rogerian unconditional positive regard - bodes well for the reality of free will! Perhaps they truly know something we (at least those of us free-wheeling still on the free will fence) do not.

Or perhaps it’s all an act. A theatrical conjuring - either by these beings, or our psyches themselves - to impute the necessary impetus in us to change our ways. A kind of mild transgression of the Trekky prime directive by interdimensionals to steer mankind to beneficent ends, or an evolutionarily conserved adaptation to optimise an organism’s prosociality for the benefit of the species? In fact, there’s recent evidence that psychedelic use inspires such altruism, which may even be predictive of less death anxiety…

Relatedly, and echoing my suspicion of spiritual…spiritual bypassing, the beings there effusively transmitted to Storm the importance of love. That it is “God’s plan”.

Storm, I think well within his sovereign human right, responded that it is not so simple! His frustration echoes many writers before me directing attention to the strangeness of the sheer platitudes more often than not conveyed by these NDE entities. Entities which, you might presume, are the evolutionary product of aeons of cosmic complexification, and might know a thing or two about nuance. This said, Michael Pollan expressed puzzlement at the ‘hallmark card clichés’ of communiques about love during psychedelic trips - and yet he reconciled it as their being clichés for a good reason. They might well be true.

Storm had some right to kick up a storm with these sky gods. He railed that after his NDE, talking about it and striving to spread the good news of the gospels had the converse effect of alienating everyone from the infallible Good Book!… In his defence, given the palpable Christian overtones of his NDE, you can empathise with his confusion as to why it wasn’t quite working. (But who knows how he went about such evangelisation… see 1:20-30 here for one of my favourite comedy moments in TV: Peter's 'Bible bashing' Dad, Family Guy). Then again, what I would contend (not humouring the Christian universalism, as much as being open to the NDE’s veracity) is that the integral revelation was one about love - and the religious tropes were either his own expectations, or these higher agencies leveraging such expectations to drive the content of his encounter.

But despite all this, the general suspicion that love on its own isn’t quite enough is a justified one. Love is, really, a skill. The modes, practices and paradoxes of which must be learned, through experience, to be navigated. This, or there certainly exists natural geniuses of love.

Moving on to another experiencer.

This was a Korean young man. He described encountering God who was a ball of light which turned into a triangle! Funnily enough, despite this peculiar divine descriptor, one article from China described several NDEs with deities as similar geometric light-forms. Also see here for an NDE involving an encounter with God and triangles of light.

His NDE was precipitated by being aggressively hit over the head (somewhat ironically, given his resultant NDE…) in order to incapacitate him while he was in the middle of trying to off himself. This is somewhat (darkly) humorous in another sense too. In certain regions of West Africa, some indigenous groups in fact bludgeon their initiates to a half-dead state - that is, inducing a near-death experience… This may be a smoking gun for supporting the theory that other shamanic rites are an attempt at replicating genuine NDEs. As well as it being rather curious, given that in broad strokes the African indigenous tend to demonise (literally) folk returning from the dead. But there’s not scope for that here (you can consult Shushan’s book here for that).

Another intriguing thing about the case is that prior to this incident, he’d spent an entire summer waking and baking; more high than he was not. He ended up with classic THC-induced psychosis, seeing demonic spirits, as well as his Asian grandfather acting not quite like the humble sage, but rather issuing command hallucinations to kill himself as part of some twisted Mephistophelean pact. Thus we have a rare NDE of someone who had hitherto been in an acute psychotic state. The remarkable thing being - the content of the NDE was utterly symptomless… I noted this in some of my NDE participants in a survey I analysed, which I briefly mention alongside some theories at the end of a talk here. And as per psychedelics, which as mentioned mirror NDEs, a flurry of recent papers have emerged suggesting the potential of psychedelics in psychotic conditions (see here for the latest).

Near-death experiencer, number #4 please.

Now this NDEr was none other than Pam Reynolds. Perhaps the NDE equivalent of William James’ Mrs. Piper. James, the founder of the American Society of Psychical Research, famously said of this medium that she was his white crow, i.e. that single exception that proves the rule. Reynolds was subjected to what was at the time an extremely risky and experimental surgical procedure, in her case for an aneurysm, called ‘hypothermic cardiac arrest’ - in which she was anaesthetised, her body cooled down, her blood being drained, & her heart stopped. A controlled state of transient clinical death… And she reported a very profound NDE.

I’ll restrain myself from going into it. It’s a heavily debated case, which (to be frank) can get rather tedious. But do check out an interview convo’ I had touching on it (here, or here).

In essence, she reports a litany of things she claims to have witnessed in her OBE during the experience which marry very impressively to the actual particularities of the procedure. Even if we entirely forget that she was clinically dead, she also had her eyes and ears firmly masked and blocked. If this was any living, conscious person, if they were in that position and still accurately reported specific goings-on in an adjacent room - there wouldn’t be, if one were being reasonable, a reasonable explanation. But she had a consciousness-ablating drug administered, bloodless brain and a stalled heart to boot…

Importantly, her brainstem still registered ‘event related potentials’ upon hearing tones being emitted through earphones, as a safeguard against brain death. That said, no neuroscientist on Earth would concede that such residual activity of milliard year-old brain nuclei could mediate complex conscious experience, let alone her profound NDE.

My final analyses would propose that even in this dire (medically-induced) state, if the body detects that it may be dying (which, matter-of-factly, it would here be justified in doing so) a program of endogenous psychedelic-like neurotransmitter release and neuroelectric activity is instigated. Again, I wont go into the finer details here, but you can look at a comprehensive enough explication in a couple of papers of mine in which I conversed with NDE pioneer Bruce Greyson, here & here)… If there had been an EEG attached to Reynold’s head - as there had been in a recent ground-breaking study of the dying human brain (n.b. technically not a near-death experience) - we could have shed some final illumination on this controversial case…

Another rather celebrated NDEr is Mary C Neal, also featured. I wont speak much about the bells & whistles of her striking tail either, as I’ve already done so in my similar analysis of the Netflix show Surviving Death which you can see on my Medium, here. The only peculiar thing I’ll mention is that the most compelling thing, for me, was that the beings of light she encountered communicated to her that her teenage son was going to unexpectedly die. Indeed, he did later tragically pass away in a skiing accident. Fulfilling the prophecy… However, in After Death, she said that she was ‘surprised at hearing of her son’s death’.

Yes, a mother upon hearing this - even if she knew full-well that it was on the horizon - may well still express shock. But her phrasing did seem odd… It may well be that she tried to forget about it, consciously pushed it to the recesses of her mind until it became unconscious. But would that even register as surprise? More horror at the precognition coming to fruition, after all. Perhaps she never recalled it immediately after the NDE, and only upon hearing of it did the memory resurface for her to subsequently exclaim the entities’ communication. In this case, anomalous psychologists / ‘sceptics’ like Chris French would have a field day, decreeing that this is thus an obvious candidate for false memory, a post-hoc insertion of later-acquired information into the original experience. Other newer research also points to some false memory amongst NDErs… But to me, it makes zero sense why her brain would retrospectively concoct such a thing.

I’m disconcerted at this discrepancy, because a) my whole Medium article pivoted around this otherwise compelling element, but b) more seriously, it was not only deeply moving in how it manifested, but there are some potentially telling considerations if it did happen at least the way she originally said it did:

For instance, if one attempts to adopt the so-called ‘super-psi’ hypothesis, that it wasn’t other beings but just the innate precognitive capacity of her psyche, the question lingers - as it always does for the super-psi debate - why would the message be very specifically and elaborately communicated via a construction of other sentient agencies? Other than this, if not magical powers, but merely a product of her own hallucinating mind - why on God’s green Earth would any Mother concoct an NDE in which there was a premonition of her beloved son’s demise?

TBC…

Martha was just 4 years old when she drowned and had her NDE. The catch with this one is - she is congenitally blind… She reported minute details about what she claimed she saw in her NDE state: her disembodied eyes were able to resolve feathers on a birds wings, and features of a telephone poll…

Again, this is a whole subtopic beyond the scope of this post. But NDEs in the blind were originally studied in Ring & Cooper’s 1999 book, Mindsight. Up to 2 3rds of the congenitally blind reported NDEs which a) were consistent with other NDEs, and b) they were described with visual language and claimed to be visually experienced.

This is a head-scratcher. The authors settled on it being a genuine out of body perception, ‘transcendental vision’. Indeed, if anyone considers NDE-OBEs as legitimate, then it’s pretty ‘immaterial’ (pun intended) if they had functioning eyes/retinas or occipital systems. The mode of perception must either way be non-physiologically mediated… But while they had themselves considered synaesthesia as a possible explanation (the blending of the senses, which has also been confirmed to be chemically, transiently induced with psychedelics, mostly audio-visual under LSD), I still think this is one of the better suggestions. If the NDErs underwent a very novel sensorial experience, without any reference-point for what all this ‘seeing’ malarkey people keep talking about is, they could well put 2 & 2 together and consider it sight. Then again, I do think level-headed enough folk can discern the difference between an entirely novel organ of perception, and a mixture of ones already accustomed to.

How is not a question for now - but they were undeniably experiencing the world in a very, & possibly fundamentally, novel way.

Finally, we have Don Piper.

Piper said, with the pang of chagrin, to paraphrase: "‘I wish I had died, I wanted to be in heaven. I saw my grandchildren and children graduate, which was glorious… but nothing compares to heaven’

To me, this more than typical response makes some sense if one adopts the naturalistic interpretation. See my 2 papers I linked above in conversation with Greyson as to why - essentially, endorphin, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin floods being a neurotopia anyone would wish to bask in for eternity. Though I also suggest evolutionary reasons for why still many others do wish to ultimately return - namely, it’s because of their realised need to take care of their offspring… In an interesting twist, however, beta-endorphin release in a parent was the best predictor of their attachment with their child (and specific to the role the parent exhibited, e.g. playmate with the father, see Machin, 2018). So, such neurochemistry can under some conditions be a source of ecstatic escape, or the reason to sacrifice paradise for the bond with their tykes on Earth.

But if we circle back to the spiritual bypassing accusation I made earlier (I really hope I don’t get divinely smitten for that!) then I find it rather tragic to accept that any beings on that other side, any agents of the cosmic Adjustment Bureau, would permit, as it were, Piper’s revelling in such mystical bliss at the expense of his loved ones, at the cost of disconnecting him from his earthly life & relationships.

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All this said & done, for all we know of NDEs (more than we’ve ever known), a gulf remains.

It’s like the meta-problem - the new model of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness - the enigma of why we find consciousness so enigmatic in the first instance. Perhaps with death itself, that most reconfiguring of transformations of our mind, therein also lies an interior chimera.

One whose truth is still as abidingly elusive as ever…