BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
A Collection of Near Death Experiences
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
on Sunday, April 14, 2019
by Jared Adams
I’m going to start right off with a firsthand account of a near death experience.
On December 6, 2017, a woman who had recently given birth to a new baby suffered a pulmonary embolism. She experienced cardiac arrest, and subsequently, a near death experience. The following is an excerpt from that experience.
“the light began in the corner of the room near the ceiling, just behind my husband. My energy began leaving my body and flowing into the light….I began having visions of my life, not just this one but every life I had ever lived. I was shown key points in my lives. I then was given visions of the bad things I had done, as well as the good. My good seemed to outweigh the bad; although in past lives, I had done some pretty appalling things. I did encounter familiar energies of loved ones who had passed from this lifetime and other past lives. They were not physical matter, just energy. I knew them instantly and they knew me, especially those who had been with me in other lives beyond this one.
These visions came from within my subconscious and I understood things that I couldn't possibly have known. I was not met by another entity who claimed to be 'god.' I suddenly was well-versed in the knowledge of how the universe works and where dark energy and matter come from.
I was shown a small portion of what my future holds as my purpose in this life was revealed to me. My purpose is to love and be loved and to teach and be taught. I am to be a beacon for those like me, those who have experienced a life-altering reality and are seeking understanding. I was to raise my children to lead from their hearts and accept all of humanity to help them seek balance and understanding.”
This experience, which I found in a collection of many hundreds of experiences, is not unique. Near death experiences, or NDEs, have been documented for nearly as long as history has been recorded. Spanning across thousands of years, seemingly unrestrained by culture or geography, these experiences are often life-changing, and they bear striking similarities to each other.
People may describe a bright light, and a feeling of being pulled upwards through some kind of tunnel. People who have had these experiences are often greeted by deceased loved ones, appearing whole and healthy. Sometimes those loved ones share words of wisdom and advice. A feeling of profound love, wholly accepting and unconditional, is often reported. Images of a pristine garden or a great tree are sometimes described. Also, a knowledge that our experience of time is limited and incomplete is often reported. And, finally, an explanation is given to experiencers this is “not their time” and they must return to complete their mortal lives here on earth.
While it may be tempting to dismiss such visions as a trick of the mind, the similarities, clarity, and frequency of these events, coupled with experiencers belief that what they’ve seen is veryreal, makes the study of NDEs compelling.
I, like most of us, have given a fair amount of thought to the nature of life on earth. I’ve been particularly drawn to the concept of the eternal soul. I was born with a healthy skepticism for just about everything, and that prevented me from accepting religious doctrine at face value. Anything that I was going to believe, I wanted to come to that conclusion on my own. From a young age, I was drawn to the spiritual and enjoyed pondering difficult questions. My Dad has told me that at the age of 3, I would grill him about the reason for life and questions about existence. Later on, when I was maybe 12 or 13, I remember a time when my family was on vacation. It was summertime, and we were somewhere in New England, I can’t remember where, trudging through a forest on a path adjacent to a bubbling stream. It was a hot day with a bright blue sky and puffy white clouds that you could see through the trees. It was then, carefully picking my way along that stream, that I had my first feelings of true panic about the fact that one day, I was going to die. It was bracing. Deeply unpleasant. Seemingly out of nowhere. And I couldn’t seem to shake the fear. It was like a presence in my guts.
That fear stayed with me. Sometimes it was sharp and deep, other times dull and tucked away. Mostly I tried not to think about it.
But that fear also had the effect of strengthening my curiosity. It deepened, transformed into a real drive. I started to think more about the nature of life. Where does it come from, where does it go. I wanted very much to believe in something that would set my mind at ease, but that relentless skepticism wasn’t going to go in for that. Not without something compelling to attach that belief to. For a time, I tried to comfort myself within the realms of science that was well understood. I told all my loved ones repeatedly that in the event of my untimely death that I wanted to be buried wrapped in canvas or at most a pine box, and that I wanted a tree planted over me. I had a poetic notion that if my body could help to feed a tree, then in a way I’d become a part of that tree. I found comfort in that idea. But I also felt like I was doing my best to whistle in the dark. Like maybe there was a deeper answer.
Eventually, my curiosity led me to NDEs. I’ve always been deeply intrigued by the commonalities that many religions share. The experiences and beliefs that transcend a single faith or culture, and perservere through the centuries. Reverend Craig talked about that idea last week, comparing the enduring, eternal truths of religion to the passing transient practices- the fads of religion. Like those enduring truths that stand the test of time, I found in my readings that Near Death Experiences are a part of our human story that remains fairly consistent. They transcend time and religion. From the dogmatic person…to the agnostic…to the atheist, they appear.
Before I learned all of that, my knowledge of NDEs had been largely anecdotal. Everyone has heard of the white light, and stories of people at death’s door who have seen long deceased loved ones, who impart words of comfort, before being sent back to finish life here on earth. Like many scientifically minded people, I was skeptical. I didn’t see how those experiences could exist in the framework that I understood. These were just the kinds of things they showed in sitcoms when one of the lead characters had a heart attack. There they’d be, in a haze of light, perhaps a white robe, standing on a cloud. Even as a kid, when those kinds of things came on the TV, I felt like I was being pandered to, and I readily accepted that people who professed to have had these experiences were hallucinating.
Over time, though, I became more curious. The world of NDEs really cracked open for me when, on a day when that fear and panic had returned more powerfully than usual, I did an internet search, looking for a compilation of experiences. I came upon just what I was looking for at n-d-e-r-f.org, a website for the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Here I found the mother lode. An enormous collection of NDEs.
As I read, I discovered that the depth and frequency of these experiences defied simple explanation. I was frankly shocked, particularly at the similarities between them. And these were long, complex experiences, being repeated over and over in the accounts on this website. Over a time that spanned decades, from people all over the world.
The majority of these visions were profoundly vivid, mind broadening experiences. People again and again reported that they had felt themselves slip away after a fatal or near fatal event - they were transported. They felt as if they’d been shown deeper truths about the nature of life, love and happiness. Truths that they were able to, in part, bring back with them. Many learned about the nature of time and space. Even about their specific purpose here on earth. Honestly, a great deal of what I read on this website could have come right out of a U…U…pamphlet - descriptions of an interconnected web of life, the knowledge that our choices emanate outwards in great ripples that effect us all. A great oneness. Other parts of the experiences seem to verify newish ideas in the world of science, about the nature of reality - specifically that it doesn’t take shape until it is measured or observed. That time is just one of many dimensions, and that perhaps though we experience life as a linear progression, the truth (pause) and the nature of causality, may be quite different than the way it appears to us.
Oftentimes people were shown that burdens they carried needn’t be carried. That the judgment and even hatred they felt for themselves and others was a mistake. Heavenly sensations, depth of wisdom expanding instantly. The more I read, the less NDEs sounded like a fluke of an oxygen starved brain. The people who have had these experiences speak earnestly about them. Many feel they have been given a glimpse into a broader picture of what it is to be human and the further journeys that await our souls. I began to realize that in dismissing these accounts, I had unwittingly passed judgement on thousands of people - the vast majority of whom were obviously speaking thoughtfully, and in their right minds, with no apparent desire other than to share what they had seen and learned.
In 2015, a woman named Joyce Hawkes was cleaning her apartment when a window with a leaded frame fell from a mantle and struck her on the head. I want to take a moment here and mention that I essentially picked these NDEs I’m sharing at random from a large collection. That’s how similar many of these experiences are - I didn’t even have to cherry pick them.
If you’re so inclined, I encourage people to go home and check out nderf.org.
Here is a short excerpt from Joyce Hawkes account:
I had no spiritual beliefs, no belief in an afterlife, God or any religion. I had never heard of near death experiences nor had any interest. I would called that fantasy.
I was not thinking about any of this as I whizzed down a long dark tunnel toward a light that was drawing me to itself. I was not thinking about anything at all, nor was I afraid. I was just there with all of this happening so fast.
I remember slowing down, without choice, at the entrance to the lighted place and amazed to discover my mother and grandmother standing to the right and greeting me with so much love. They communicated to me in some way, certainly without words or hearing, but clearly inside my mind. I was astonished to see them healthy and middle aged, happy and so full of love and recognition for me. I would take any blow on the head to have had the assurance of their consciousness. What a gift.
I then passed into the place of light: rolling hills, grass, flowers, blue skies and vibrant with color. What amazed me was the intensity, brilliance, and clarity of the color and that it seemed to be emitting from within each aspect of the landscape. The grass glowed green. It was so beautiful. It was so very beautiful.
Suddenly I was in the presence of a Being of Light. I could not see the face, could communicate, but not in words or pictures even - in some connection of oneness. I felt joy so deep that my whole self leapt with gratitude; I felt peace; I felt awe and belonging. I felt everything about my life and me was known, understood and not judged. I was profoundly loved.
So I read more and more of these NDEs, I started to get pretty excited. That skeptical, rational part of my brain was applying Ockham’s razor to the sheer volume and depth of what I was reading, and the door to something belief-adjacent began to emerge in my mind.
But I wanted to be sure to look at it from every angle. What about the other side of it? What do scientists think about NDEs? After all, many present day scientists assert that consciousness is a creation of the brain, and experiencers often claim that what they experienced happened when their brain had ceased to function. Many in the scientific community feel that this casts more than a little doubt on the experiences. Other scientists argue that there is little basis for the assertion that consciousness is created by the brain. It could be that the brain and the body are hardware, and consciousness actually derives from something else entirely. That sense of self, the “I AM”, that we all feel remains one of the great mysteries.
That mystery is compounded by documented experiences in which people who are medically brain dead report having been aware of things around them, often from a higher vantage, looking down on themselves. Many of these people are then able to recount events that took place in their hospital rooms while they were clinically gone. Conversations that nurses had, words of grief from loved ones. Even what people were eating down the hall in the hospital cafeteria.
Recently, science has been taking a bigger crack at understanding this phenomenon. A study by the group “Aware” (standing for awareness during resuscitation) recently concluded a study of over 2,000 patients who had undergone cardiac arrest. The findings were inconclusive, but a few cases did suggest that people undergoing out of body experiences COULD on occasion perceive events both auditory and visual that had taken place while the patient was no longer living, before they were brought back to life through heroic measures. We have no ready explanation for how this is possible, but the body of evidence for the phenomenon is growing.
While it may be tempting to think of these events as mystical or fantastical, perhaps it is simply a case of the bewilderment of a young species that is faced with a science it doesn’t yet understand. We once believed the sun was pulled across the sky by a chariot. We believed that the world was flat. In recent decades, we’ve discovered that the universe is expanding at a phenomenal speed, not static as we once believed. Staggering truths are now discovered at such a rate that we have trouble keeping up with it all. And just maybe we’re on the cusp of a new understanding, something that has been glimpsed and intuited by our great prophets, thinkers and religions. I like to imagine a future where science and religion unite - when the spheres can coalesce as our understanding deepens. For my part, I have a few words of comfort for my 12 year old self, but since he isn’t here anymore, I’m happy to share them with you.
I’ll finish with an excerpt from one more NDE. Again, if these interest you, there are literally hundreds of them to read through on n-d-e-r-f.org.
I felt like I was rushing at light speed through a tunnel. I felt warm as the pain left me, at peace with myself and the environment around me.
Unconditional, pure love radiated all around me, and into me. LOVE covered me like a warm blanket from an unknown source.
Angels surrounded me and I was teleported to the center of a vast golden field. I could hear the most beautiful music and I could feel it moving through me. The breeze blew against the tall golden wheat stalks, and as it did I could feel the spirit of all things living around me: animals, plants, the elements. I was one with them. I looked up and saw a huge ball of light that cast the purest, warm light all around me and felt God touch my skin. He knew me, he loved me no matter how imperfect my Earthly life had been. I was perfect and whole, I felt no pain. The angel took me up higher, and I felt like I was soaring endlessly. I could see a huge waterfall with no beginning and no end. Love and peace reigned here. I sensed the presence of loved ones that had passed on. We moved over the golden field, and at the end of it, was a country fence, and beyond that was an enormous tree with a canopy of gold leaves. When the breeze touched the leaves, they would fly off the tree's branches in the shape of colorful birds of all varieties. There was a lake beside it, and it flowed on both sides of the boundary. I looked down into the water, and it had a gloss like liquid mercury. But when you look through it, you can see the people that are living on earth.
So May It Be.
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
on Sunday, April 14, 2019
by Jared Adams
I’m going to start right off with a firsthand account of a near death experience.
On December 6, 2017, a woman who had recently given birth to a new baby suffered a pulmonary embolism. She experienced cardiac arrest, and subsequently, a near death experience. The following is an excerpt from that experience.
“the light began in the corner of the room near the ceiling, just behind my husband. My energy began leaving my body and flowing into the light….I began having visions of my life, not just this one but every life I had ever lived. I was shown key points in my lives. I then was given visions of the bad things I had done, as well as the good. My good seemed to outweigh the bad; although in past lives, I had done some pretty appalling things. I did encounter familiar energies of loved ones who had passed from this lifetime and other past lives. They were not physical matter, just energy. I knew them instantly and they knew me, especially those who had been with me in other lives beyond this one.
These visions came from within my subconscious and I understood things that I couldn't possibly have known. I was not met by another entity who claimed to be 'god.' I suddenly was well-versed in the knowledge of how the universe works and where dark energy and matter come from.
I was shown a small portion of what my future holds as my purpose in this life was revealed to me. My purpose is to love and be loved and to teach and be taught. I am to be a beacon for those like me, those who have experienced a life-altering reality and are seeking understanding. I was to raise my children to lead from their hearts and accept all of humanity to help them seek balance and understanding.”
This experience, which I found in a collection of many hundreds of experiences, is not unique. Near death experiences, or NDEs, have been documented for nearly as long as history has been recorded. Spanning across thousands of years, seemingly unrestrained by culture or geography, these experiences are often life-changing, and they bear striking similarities to each other.
People may describe a bright light, and a feeling of being pulled upwards through some kind of tunnel. People who have had these experiences are often greeted by deceased loved ones, appearing whole and healthy. Sometimes those loved ones share words of wisdom and advice. A feeling of profound love, wholly accepting and unconditional, is often reported. Images of a pristine garden or a great tree are sometimes described. Also, a knowledge that our experience of time is limited and incomplete is often reported. And, finally, an explanation is given to experiencers this is “not their time” and they must return to complete their mortal lives here on earth.
While it may be tempting to dismiss such visions as a trick of the mind, the similarities, clarity, and frequency of these events, coupled with experiencers belief that what they’ve seen is veryreal, makes the study of NDEs compelling.
I, like most of us, have given a fair amount of thought to the nature of life on earth. I’ve been particularly drawn to the concept of the eternal soul. I was born with a healthy skepticism for just about everything, and that prevented me from accepting religious doctrine at face value. Anything that I was going to believe, I wanted to come to that conclusion on my own. From a young age, I was drawn to the spiritual and enjoyed pondering difficult questions. My Dad has told me that at the age of 3, I would grill him about the reason for life and questions about existence. Later on, when I was maybe 12 or 13, I remember a time when my family was on vacation. It was summertime, and we were somewhere in New England, I can’t remember where, trudging through a forest on a path adjacent to a bubbling stream. It was a hot day with a bright blue sky and puffy white clouds that you could see through the trees. It was then, carefully picking my way along that stream, that I had my first feelings of true panic about the fact that one day, I was going to die. It was bracing. Deeply unpleasant. Seemingly out of nowhere. And I couldn’t seem to shake the fear. It was like a presence in my guts.
That fear stayed with me. Sometimes it was sharp and deep, other times dull and tucked away. Mostly I tried not to think about it.
But that fear also had the effect of strengthening my curiosity. It deepened, transformed into a real drive. I started to think more about the nature of life. Where does it come from, where does it go. I wanted very much to believe in something that would set my mind at ease, but that relentless skepticism wasn’t going to go in for that. Not without something compelling to attach that belief to. For a time, I tried to comfort myself within the realms of science that was well understood. I told all my loved ones repeatedly that in the event of my untimely death that I wanted to be buried wrapped in canvas or at most a pine box, and that I wanted a tree planted over me. I had a poetic notion that if my body could help to feed a tree, then in a way I’d become a part of that tree. I found comfort in that idea. But I also felt like I was doing my best to whistle in the dark. Like maybe there was a deeper answer.
Eventually, my curiosity led me to NDEs. I’ve always been deeply intrigued by the commonalities that many religions share. The experiences and beliefs that transcend a single faith or culture, and perservere through the centuries. Reverend Craig talked about that idea last week, comparing the enduring, eternal truths of religion to the passing transient practices- the fads of religion. Like those enduring truths that stand the test of time, I found in my readings that Near Death Experiences are a part of our human story that remains fairly consistent. They transcend time and religion. From the dogmatic person…to the agnostic…to the atheist, they appear.
Before I learned all of that, my knowledge of NDEs had been largely anecdotal. Everyone has heard of the white light, and stories of people at death’s door who have seen long deceased loved ones, who impart words of comfort, before being sent back to finish life here on earth. Like many scientifically minded people, I was skeptical. I didn’t see how those experiences could exist in the framework that I understood. These were just the kinds of things they showed in sitcoms when one of the lead characters had a heart attack. There they’d be, in a haze of light, perhaps a white robe, standing on a cloud. Even as a kid, when those kinds of things came on the TV, I felt like I was being pandered to, and I readily accepted that people who professed to have had these experiences were hallucinating.
Over time, though, I became more curious. The world of NDEs really cracked open for me when, on a day when that fear and panic had returned more powerfully than usual, I did an internet search, looking for a compilation of experiences. I came upon just what I was looking for at n-d-e-r-f.org, a website for the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Here I found the mother lode. An enormous collection of NDEs.
As I read, I discovered that the depth and frequency of these experiences defied simple explanation. I was frankly shocked, particularly at the similarities between them. And these were long, complex experiences, being repeated over and over in the accounts on this website. Over a time that spanned decades, from people all over the world.
The majority of these visions were profoundly vivid, mind broadening experiences. People again and again reported that they had felt themselves slip away after a fatal or near fatal event - they were transported. They felt as if they’d been shown deeper truths about the nature of life, love and happiness. Truths that they were able to, in part, bring back with them. Many learned about the nature of time and space. Even about their specific purpose here on earth. Honestly, a great deal of what I read on this website could have come right out of a U…U…pamphlet - descriptions of an interconnected web of life, the knowledge that our choices emanate outwards in great ripples that effect us all. A great oneness. Other parts of the experiences seem to verify newish ideas in the world of science, about the nature of reality - specifically that it doesn’t take shape until it is measured or observed. That time is just one of many dimensions, and that perhaps though we experience life as a linear progression, the truth (pause) and the nature of causality, may be quite different than the way it appears to us.
Oftentimes people were shown that burdens they carried needn’t be carried. That the judgment and even hatred they felt for themselves and others was a mistake. Heavenly sensations, depth of wisdom expanding instantly. The more I read, the less NDEs sounded like a fluke of an oxygen starved brain. The people who have had these experiences speak earnestly about them. Many feel they have been given a glimpse into a broader picture of what it is to be human and the further journeys that await our souls. I began to realize that in dismissing these accounts, I had unwittingly passed judgement on thousands of people - the vast majority of whom were obviously speaking thoughtfully, and in their right minds, with no apparent desire other than to share what they had seen and learned.
In 2015, a woman named Joyce Hawkes was cleaning her apartment when a window with a leaded frame fell from a mantle and struck her on the head. I want to take a moment here and mention that I essentially picked these NDEs I’m sharing at random from a large collection. That’s how similar many of these experiences are - I didn’t even have to cherry pick them.
If you’re so inclined, I encourage people to go home and check out nderf.org.
Here is a short excerpt from Joyce Hawkes account:
I had no spiritual beliefs, no belief in an afterlife, God or any religion. I had never heard of near death experiences nor had any interest. I would called that fantasy.
I was not thinking about any of this as I whizzed down a long dark tunnel toward a light that was drawing me to itself. I was not thinking about anything at all, nor was I afraid. I was just there with all of this happening so fast.
I remember slowing down, without choice, at the entrance to the lighted place and amazed to discover my mother and grandmother standing to the right and greeting me with so much love. They communicated to me in some way, certainly without words or hearing, but clearly inside my mind. I was astonished to see them healthy and middle aged, happy and so full of love and recognition for me. I would take any blow on the head to have had the assurance of their consciousness. What a gift.
I then passed into the place of light: rolling hills, grass, flowers, blue skies and vibrant with color. What amazed me was the intensity, brilliance, and clarity of the color and that it seemed to be emitting from within each aspect of the landscape. The grass glowed green. It was so beautiful. It was so very beautiful.
Suddenly I was in the presence of a Being of Light. I could not see the face, could communicate, but not in words or pictures even - in some connection of oneness. I felt joy so deep that my whole self leapt with gratitude; I felt peace; I felt awe and belonging. I felt everything about my life and me was known, understood and not judged. I was profoundly loved.
So I read more and more of these NDEs, I started to get pretty excited. That skeptical, rational part of my brain was applying Ockham’s razor to the sheer volume and depth of what I was reading, and the door to something belief-adjacent began to emerge in my mind.
But I wanted to be sure to look at it from every angle. What about the other side of it? What do scientists think about NDEs? After all, many present day scientists assert that consciousness is a creation of the brain, and experiencers often claim that what they experienced happened when their brain had ceased to function. Many in the scientific community feel that this casts more than a little doubt on the experiences. Other scientists argue that there is little basis for the assertion that consciousness is created by the brain. It could be that the brain and the body are hardware, and consciousness actually derives from something else entirely. That sense of self, the “I AM”, that we all feel remains one of the great mysteries.
That mystery is compounded by documented experiences in which people who are medically brain dead report having been aware of things around them, often from a higher vantage, looking down on themselves. Many of these people are then able to recount events that took place in their hospital rooms while they were clinically gone. Conversations that nurses had, words of grief from loved ones. Even what people were eating down the hall in the hospital cafeteria.
Recently, science has been taking a bigger crack at understanding this phenomenon. A study by the group “Aware” (standing for awareness during resuscitation) recently concluded a study of over 2,000 patients who had undergone cardiac arrest. The findings were inconclusive, but a few cases did suggest that people undergoing out of body experiences COULD on occasion perceive events both auditory and visual that had taken place while the patient was no longer living, before they were brought back to life through heroic measures. We have no ready explanation for how this is possible, but the body of evidence for the phenomenon is growing.
While it may be tempting to think of these events as mystical or fantastical, perhaps it is simply a case of the bewilderment of a young species that is faced with a science it doesn’t yet understand. We once believed the sun was pulled across the sky by a chariot. We believed that the world was flat. In recent decades, we’ve discovered that the universe is expanding at a phenomenal speed, not static as we once believed. Staggering truths are now discovered at such a rate that we have trouble keeping up with it all. And just maybe we’re on the cusp of a new understanding, something that has been glimpsed and intuited by our great prophets, thinkers and religions. I like to imagine a future where science and religion unite - when the spheres can coalesce as our understanding deepens. For my part, I have a few words of comfort for my 12 year old self, but since he isn’t here anymore, I’m happy to share them with you.
I’ll finish with an excerpt from one more NDE. Again, if these interest you, there are literally hundreds of them to read through on n-d-e-r-f.org.
I felt like I was rushing at light speed through a tunnel. I felt warm as the pain left me, at peace with myself and the environment around me.
Unconditional, pure love radiated all around me, and into me. LOVE covered me like a warm blanket from an unknown source.
Angels surrounded me and I was teleported to the center of a vast golden field. I could hear the most beautiful music and I could feel it moving through me. The breeze blew against the tall golden wheat stalks, and as it did I could feel the spirit of all things living around me: animals, plants, the elements. I was one with them. I looked up and saw a huge ball of light that cast the purest, warm light all around me and felt God touch my skin. He knew me, he loved me no matter how imperfect my Earthly life had been. I was perfect and whole, I felt no pain. The angel took me up higher, and I felt like I was soaring endlessly. I could see a huge waterfall with no beginning and no end. Love and peace reigned here. I sensed the presence of loved ones that had passed on. We moved over the golden field, and at the end of it, was a country fence, and beyond that was an enormous tree with a canopy of gold leaves. When the breeze touched the leaves, they would fly off the tree's branches in the shape of colorful birds of all varieties. There was a lake beside it, and it flowed on both sides of the boundary. I looked down into the water, and it had a gloss like liquid mercury. But when you look through it, you can see the people that are living on earth.
So May It Be.
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