I Stood at the Mouth of Hell: A Near-Death Out-Of-Body Experience[1]

Introduction

This dossier is the result of an interview conducted by the author in September of 2019. It documents an incident that occurred in 1971, in rural West Virginia. Names have been changed and personally identifiable information has been omitted out of respect for the interviewee’s privacy.

The interviewee is a male of mixed ancestry. He is approximately sixty years of age at the time of the interview. He self-reported the following information as to the reliability of this account. He does not use illicit drugs or abuse prescription medications. He has never been diagnosed with a mental condition, nor has he been prescribed medication for any. The medications he takes regularly are not anticipated to have any influence on his lucidity or his ability to accurately recall events from memory. He is a recovering alcoholic and has been sober for eight years. He presently has no substance abuse or dependency concerns.

During the interview he did not appear to exhibit any serious failings of memory or of his ability to express himself. He appeared lucid before, during, and after the interview. He provided complete, coherent responses to the questions posed. He was not paid, offered, or promised anything in return for relating this account. He requested his personal information remain confidential.

Witness Report

If you knew when and where I grew up, you’d think I’d be the least likely person to witness anything remotely exciting in terms of the supernatural. That stuff happens to other people, the type you read about in the tabloids. It doesn’t happen to real people, and certainly not me. 

I was the product of my father’s second marriage. I say that figuratively. I don’t think my parents ever got married; they just lived together like they were. Hell, I reckon they couldn’t get married anyway because dad never divorced his wife, not that this technicality stopped him from shacking up with my mom.

By the time I was born, dad’s best years were already behind him. He was in his fifties; his sons by his first wife were grown men gone off to make their living. Mom was twenty years younger than he. I’ll never know from this side of eternity, but I’d wager he’d always had it in mind to make moves on the woman who’d become my mother; he just had the decency to wait until his sons were adults before breaking it off with his wife—for whatever that’s worth. His wife hated him until her dying day, not just because of his infidelity, but because he left her for a Black woman.

Around this time also, dad’s health started to go into decline. Thankfully, he had been frugal with his money. He took an early retirement and purchased land up in the mountains. 

That was where I grew up.

Small though it was, our little homestead was mostly self-reliant. It had to be—our nearest neighbor was a mile away. This distance proved to be a godsend. Mixed families like ours were uncommon. The sight of my parents walking arm in arm in public occasionally drew hard stares from passersby, especially when we were new in town. 

We kept to ourselves, but we weren’t hermits. Dad quickly became well-liked in town. Eventually, the community took a shine to mom as well. While there were still social norms we did not dare contravene, for the most part we got along.

About twice a month we’d drive into town; oftener, if there was a big to-do scheduled. But if there was an occasion we didn’t miss for the world, it was Sunday service. 

Dad was a fallen-away Methodist. He’d been raised in a strict household. Somewhere into his upbringing he’d developed a taste for smokes, whiskey, and women who weren’t his lawfully-married spouse. Where he did not compromise, however, was on his relationship with Jesus. He was a devout churchgoer notwithstanding his personal failings.

When I got old enough that I had to attend grade school, my dad drove me into town every day. He’d shoot the breeze with his friends until dismissal hour, when he’d pick me up and we’d start for home.

Now fast-forward to me at seventeen years old. My dad had since stopped driving, so he gave me his old Chevy pickup to run errands in town. I’d been driving for three years by then and was pretty confident behind the wheel.

There was only one way down the mountain to town. It was the route my dad would take when he used to drive me to school. We drove it every day. By the time I was old enough to drive it myself, I’d traveled that road several thousand times. I’d practically committed it to memory. 

Being a mountain road, it was narrow and dotted with switchbacks. About two-thirds of the way down, it dead-ended at a T-intersection. You were expected to come to a full stop, then turn ninety degrees to continue along the way. Assuming you couldn’t stop to make that turn, there was a big tree opposite the direction of your approach. Later, a giant sand berm was set up past the tree so you wouldn’t drive off the cliff if your brakes went. 

Of course, none of the locals ever made a full stop there. That stop sign was for out-of-towners who weren’t used to mountain driving.

It was about midday when seventeen-year-old me was coming down the mountain. My mind was on autopilot as I drove along my familiar route. The car ahead of me was stopped—complete dead stopped—at the intersection. 

I realized this too late and mashed the brake to the floorboard.

My pickup didn’t respond. 

Time slowed to a crawl. 

I had the presence of mind to cut the wheel sharply left, jerking the truck out of its collision course. The tail started to break loose so I cut back to the right, but I was going too fast. Even with the wheel turned to lock, the front tires kept plowing forward.

I avoided hitting the car in front, but now I was headed over the side of that cliff. 

Next thing I knew there was a sharp, earsplitting noise, like someone banging on the roof of my truck with an aluminum bat, then it was lights-out.

Suddenly, my eyes opened.

I was lying facedown. I did a push-up to stand but my left hand slipped off whatever had been supporting it. I flopped over in that direction and fell a few feet, landing on my back with my head beside the pickup’s wheel well. 

That drop knocked the wind out of me. I stayed down for a little while to catch my breath, then got back on my feet. 

The other car was gone. The road was empty except for me, my pickup, and the tree. 

I got the notion that something wasn’t right. I could not remember hitting the tree.

In fact, hadn’t I missed the tree?

And the berm?

By my reckoning, I should have awoken at the bottom of the valley—except that nobody wakes up from a fall like that one.

And yet that wasn’t what had happened. The dents on the truck’s fender told the story better than I could. The pickup had bounced off the tree like a pinball bumper before hitting the sand berm. 

My eyes darted so quickly from the truck to the tree to the berm that I had overlooked an important detail. Between the berm and the tree was me—that is, another “me,” a “me” apart from the one taking this all in. 

This other “me” lay motionless, his upper half strewn across what was left of the hood and his legs hanging over the dashboard. At his middle was the windshield frame, the jagged bits of glass still in it looking like the fangs of a man-eating monster. 

He—I?—had not worn a seatbelt. The pickup was from an era when factory lap belts were optional equipment. 

Realizing that it was me lying atop the wreck crushed the wind out of my lungs. 

I was at a loss for what to do. 

Should I run back home for help? Should I head into town and call a doctor? 

Regardless of which I chose, I’d have to bring my body with me. But, as quickly as I’d decided that, a new question cropped up: if I’m here, and my body is there, how do I take my body somewhere it can get patched up? 

“Simple,” I thought. “I’ll just get back in my body.”

I know it sounds crazy, but at the time it made all the sense in the world. Since I’d been knocked out of my body, I might be able to “get back in” if I lay down atop it.

I went to the driver’s side of the pickup. As I drew close, I got the impression that somehow I’d entered the truck without touching the door, as though I’d moved through it like how a ghost passes through walls. Once I was in the driver’s seat, I stretched out through the windshield frame to lie down “into” my body. 

My body did not move out of the way as I entered it. Instead, it felt like I was melting into the space my body occupied. The closest I can come to describing this is like when you put on a jacket. You enter its space and it becomes part of you, moving as you move; except that my body was so perfectly tailored to me that there is no way to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

I spent the next few minutes lying facedown on the wrecked pickup. I tried not to move out of fear that if I did, my body wouldn’t hook back up to me. I even held my breath a while before realizing I wasn’t breathing, and neither was my body. 

My plan wasn’t going to work. My body was dead. Already I missed being alive. Dying felt a lot like breaking your favorite wristwatch—sometimes, the damage is too great to ever repair and the best you can hope for is to get a replacement approximating what you had, except that last part doesn’t work with bodies. Break yours, and you’re not getting another. 

I shimmied backward through the windshield frame and sat down behind the wheel. Predictably, the truck’s engine refused to turn. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was how quiet everything had gotten. 

I stepped out of the truck to take stock of my surroundings. There were no cars on the street, no birds flying by. Even the sun was gone. I was stuck in a moment frozen in time, like a scene in a photograph. 

The sky was an endless expanse of gray. Off in the distance, some of that grayness began to leech out of the sky and fall like bands of rain. But this was no rain I’d ever experienced. Wherever the rain touched, the color bled out of the landscape until it was indistinguishable from the sky. 

The rain had not yet arrived where I stood—my truck was still the faded maroon color it had always been—but the clouds were coming fast. There was a clear line in the valley below where the rain had yet to reach, and that line was headed toward me. 

I couldn’t fathom why, but that rain spelled danger. I backed away from the truck, then looked both ways up the road for shelter. There was none. Setting my eyes ahead once more, I realized that the storm had gained ground in those seconds I had glanced away. It was right on top of me. 

The downpour came like an avalanche. This was no ordinary rain. What fell from the sky hit like a solid mass. It wasn’t water, either. It was densely-packed fine powder, like fly ash from an incinerator, and it was on fire.

If I weren’t already dead, I’d have thought that downpour killed me. It crushed me flat under a press of smoldering ashes. They got everywhere—my eyes, my mouth, my nostrils. I screamed—big mistake—and they got into my lungs.

Trapped under the weight of that downpour, I wanted to writhe from the constant, whole body pain, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t have space enough to breathe. As this was happening, I became aware that I was moving downward—lying on my back, being hauled downward, as though the ash that engulfed me were in a hopper.

All of a sudden the bottom gave out and I fell flat on my back against a hard surface. Weakness hit my bones like the marrow had been sucked out.

The life in me was gone. Yes, my body was dead; but now that part of me that made me live was dead too. I felt many times heavier, and not just because my innards were stuffed with burning sawdust. I tried to get my feet under me, but like a man half asleep, I lacked the coordination and slumped down again.

Dangerous things began skulking at the periphery of my field of vision. Each time I cut my eyes toward one for a better look, it darted back a step, becoming indistinguishable from the shadows all around. These things didn’t want to be seen, but they made sure I knew they were there, stalking me. 

I took to calling them “vultures” despite that they never got close enough for me to tell what they were. The name was fitting—I was dead, they circled around me, and when the time was right they’d pick my carcass clean. 

Mind, these were not birds. An ordinary vulture does what it does because it’s an animal. The creatures that encircled me were malevolent. They could have killed me at any moment but didn’t because they so reveled in my fear.

All of a sudden the crowd of vultures began to let up strange and terrifying noises. They had been deathly quiet when I arrived, but my presence had agitated them. In a span of moments the air rang with the chirping of insects. Then, as if building to a crescendo, came the bleating of goats, the barking of dogs, and the roars of lions. The crowd whirled around me like aborigines around a bonfire, every so often lunging at me as if threatening to pounce and tear out my throat.

There was a flash in the sky like lightning. The vultures retreated from me as the light in the sky became a fixed point. Then that point of light streaked to the ground. 

In the light was a man. He was very tall—easily ten feet in height—and was dressed in a brilliant white robe. His garment ran down to his ankles, leaving only his head, hands, and feet exposed. The parts of him that were not covered gave off a golden light that came from inside him and shone out through his skin. I could not make out his face. Raising my eyes to meet his was like looking into the sun. 

Bending down, he took me under the arm and helped me to my feet. 

For the first time since getting caught in the rain of ash, I got a look at my environs. I was someplace else. Incredibly, I’d been transported through the ash from my home on the mountain to some other place. 

The sky was purplish-black. Giant clouds of churning soot blotted out all light from above. These clouds had an oily sheen to them. Whenever lightning flashed, the clouds’ outlines shone with a diseased yellow-green glow.

I’d never seen a sky like that in my life. It was awful and unnatural. I read somewhere that the dinosaurs went extinct when a meteor hit the earth and the dust this kicked up blacked out the sun for ages. If that actually happened, then it might have looked like what I seeing. Just watching the sky made me sick to my stomach. This place was an offense to nature. This place was death.

The ground was a barren wasteland. Nothing could live here. There was no soil, only slate pebbles the size of my thumb as far as the shadowy horizon. Each stone was flat, rough, and sharp.

The tall man began to walk away. I followed him.

Before long I realized that the land had begun to slope upward. Eventually, the ground became so steep that it was difficult to keep my footing. With each step, my feet slid down with a cascade of slate pebbles beneath them. I dropped to my hands and knees, dragging myself up the slope like a rock climber. The pebbles cut me everywhere—little tugs at my clothes and nicks at my skin. It was like climbing up the surface of a cheese grater. I felt their sting, but no blood flowed.

The tall man did not have any trouble walking up the mountain. He was ahead and above me, walking erect while I crawled a distance behind. His feet touched the ground but did not appear to disturb the rocks. He kept the same slow pace as when we started our climb. By how deliberately he moved, you’d think he were a pallbearer at a funeral.

We had traveled for some time in silence until the land rose to beyond thirty degrees in slope. By now I was clawing for handholds. It’s a wonder those sharp stones didn’t lop off my fingers from how I gripped them. They did cut me to ribbons, though. My body was crisscrossed in fine red lines where the stones had sliced into me, yet I did not bleed.

The tall man crested the summit ahead and began walking down the other side. Not wanting to be left alone, I climbed faster, despite my exhaustion. Reaching over the hill’s peak, I hauled myself the rest of the way up. I rolled over onto my back and lay there, utterly spent.

Now the tall man stood above me. He had stopped here as though he knew I would not be able to go further on my own. As before, he bent down and helped me to stand.

A terrible heaviness set into me once I was back on my feet. My lungs were weighted down from inside, and this caused my tired legs to buckle. I knew from having lived in the mountains that the higher up you went the thinner the air got, but this place was different. The air was heavy. Breathing this air was like breathing water. It filled you and weighed you down. Its presence in your lungs crowded out any space for breathable air. 

I was suffocating. With my lungs full of that heavy vapor, only the very tops of my lungs had room to take in air. I took breaths like a man taking little sips from a cup. Each breath was only enough to keep me going but left me frantic for more, except there was no more.

With the tall man’s arm slung under my shoulders to keep me on my feet, I limped the rest of the way to our destination. We stopped before the gaping black pit of a dormant volcano crater. Its inside was blacker than black. People think that black is empty and cold like outer space. This was not outer space, and this was not that type of black. 

The pit was not black because it was empty. It was black because it was so crammed full of… of things that those things all got crushed together into a giant ball of… I couldn’t tell what. If you’ve ever ridden on a crowded bus where you can’t so much as turn around, you might begin to get the idea.

Nor was the pit cold. The things in the hole were packed so tightly that the crater gave off an unbelievable dry heat. Just glancing over the edge felt like sticking my head into a blazing oven, except there was no visible fire anywhere. 

My eyes juddered in their sockets. All the saliva in my mouth dried up. My tongue swelled to double its size and stuck to the inside of my mouth. I feared I might choke on it. I hadn’t said a word since arriving and now I wanted to beg the tall man to take me away from here.

I couldn’t. I lacked the breath to speak above a whisper. That whisper died in my throat, never getting past my swollen tongue, which blocked any breath from getting through. 

Assuming I could speak, I could never manage to shout over the noise of the wind. Here at the summit, the wind was neither hot nor cold, but it was loud and powerful. A stadium full of people at a ballgame could not match the noise of the wind.

And yet, despite my inability to speak, the tall man seemed already to know what I had meant to tell him. While I could not see his face, his posture put on that he was listening intently to anything I might have wanted to say to him. He raised a hand, palm out as if to demonstrate something, and directed my attention to the sky.

Against the purple-black clouds, something like a projector screen at a movie theater opened up in the sky, unrolling like a scroll. The tall man and I watched as on the screen appeared images of my life. These images moved in real time and in living color, but there was no sound. It was as though somebody had recorded a silent film of my life. Taking a closer look at the images, I noticed that they had not been captured from my point of view; rather, I saw myself in those images from the perspective of someone standing close to me.

Realizing this, I turned to face the tall man, who at that moment shifted his gaze to meet mine. I could feel his eyes on me despite that his face glowed bright as the sun.

A verse from Hebrews came to mind, the one that mentions the “cloud of witnesses.”[2] God sees everything and knows everything. It’s safe to say He witnesses everything. But the verse refers to a multitude of witnesses, that is, more witnesses than just God. 

Who are they? 

Angels. 

The tall man was my guardian angel. 

That notion didn’t originate from me, either. I had never believed in guardian angels until then, but when he revealed this to me, it felt like a bedrock truth that I should have grasped sooner. Since then, if you were to ask me whether guardian angels exist, I’d answer “yes” as fast as if you’d asked me whether the sun is hot. 

I meant to ask my guardian angel: “Why have you brought me here?” but my dry mouth could manage only a wheeze. Knowing what I had intended to say to him, he directed my attention back to the sky. Scenes from my life were still playing out in the clouds.

What I saw there was not flattering.

I became awfully self-conscious. Imagine if someone filmed you doing terrible things and then played that film back for an audience with you present. My stomach fell to my feet. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. The angel held me fast. When I tried to cover my face, he held my arms down at my sides.

I could not bear watching myself doing those shameful things. It only made matters worse that my guardian angel stood at my shoulder, watching alongside me. My mind was astir with excuses, none of which I could voice. Assuming I could, they would not have amounted to anything.

Shame of a different sort began to well up in me. Yes, it was undeniably me who was guilty of these things; but now I was standing next to the very person who counseled me not to commit those acts. 

The feeling was not exactly an “I told you so” sentiment; it was worse. 

Imagine shooting the bird at a traffic cop while you speed past him, only to crash into his buddy’s squad car parked around a blind turn. You should have known better than to carry on like that. Not only is that officer the one who’s going to call you an ambulance, he’s the one who’ll appear in court to ensure the judge throws the book at you.

The wind fell silent. The scenes from my life playing out in the sky faded away. The angel separated from me. From out of the back of his tunic sprouted a pair of magnificent wings. They fanned out above and behind him to their fullest extent. His wings were huge, like an eagle’s but much bigger, and brilliant white. With a single beat of his mighty wings he was airborne, and then he was gone, having vanished into the churning black clouds. 

I looked back down into the crater.

“Was this hell?” I thought to myself. 

I had never given serious thought to the idea that hell existed, much less that I’d go there. 

Hell was for bad people. 

Praise God, I was no Caligula. I never killed anybody. 

What’s more, I’d accepted Jesus as my savior. He paid the price for me not to go to hell. 

This couldn’t be hell because hell is not where I belonged.

Then what was this place? Because if it wasn’t hell then it sure could pass for it.

I became aware of a new sound. It was faint, coming from far away. Maybe it had been there the whole time and I couldn’t hear it over the howling of the wind, but now that the wind had stopped, the noise was clearly audible. I couldn’t tell what the noise was at first, but it grew steadily louder as it approached.

Screams were coming from inside the crater.

I glanced over the side again. As before, it was as black as a bottomless hole. I could see nothing down there. Still, the noise coming from it was deafening. It sounded like a hundred thousand people were in the crater letting up a confused jumble of mourning, angry yells, and tortured wailing. I couldn’t make out any words in particular, but somehow I knew that in that noise were blasphemies of the worst kind. 

Suddenly, something like a veil was pulled violently away from the crater. At first I had believed the crater to be black as far down as I could see, but this was an illusion. Something had obscured my vision to what lay within, as though a stretch of black fabric had lain in the crater to conceal what was beneath. With it gone, I beheld the pit cram-packed with people. 

They were naked and sickly; men and women ashen in complexion, with sunken eyes and ribs showing through their skin. I might have mistaken them for corpses, if not for the fact that they were moving and wailing. 

They lay every which way in a giant pile of wriggling bodies. Some were head-down with their legs sticking out; others were right side up and submerged to the hip; still others were sideways with only the right or left side of their bodies exposed. For all the bodies I could see on the surface, there had to be many, many more beneath them.

And yet, for how tightly they were packed, an orange light shone up from the crater. Leaning in for a closer look, I saw that the bodies were partially translucent. The orange glow that shone through them originated from the magma at the volcano’s heart.

They were savaging each other. Each kicked, clawed, bit, and tore at his neighbor in a futile effort to escape the fires that were roasting them from below. Their bodies were torn ragged from the abuse, and yet I could see no blood coming from the wounds. 

The people in the crater dipped, then swelled like a wave at sea. They rose up as a single mass and vomited out of the crater’s mouth, arms outstretched to pull me in. 

Terror iced my spine. If they got ahold of me, I would never again see the light of day. They would pull me down, down, down, into the smoldering lungs of hell.

Just then a solid shaft of piercing light shone through the dark clouds above. It formed a column with me at its center. The presence of the light caused those in the pit to shrink back into the volcano crater. I looked up, and just as quickly had to shield my eyes. The light was so intense I could feel it prickle my skin. It grew in strength until it blotted out everything I could see.

The next thing I knew, I was no longer on that desolate mountainside. I was facedown atop the wreck of my truck, lying half in and half out the windshield. Déjà vu came on hard, but I scarcely had a chance to reflect on that because my head throbbed something fierce.

I shuffled backward into the driver’s seat, then slanted the rearview mirror to get a look at myself. My face was split open from the hairline to the bridge of my nose—I still have the scar. Other than that, I was unhurt, which was a miracle in itself. I could not say the same for the truck, which was a total loss. The fenders were wrapped so tightly around the tree you’d think that the truck had stood there for decades and the tree had grown up through it.

Leaving the truck behind, I walked the rest of the way into town. Once there, I rang my parents to let them know what had happened to me.

“What exactly had happened to me?” I asked myself.

These days, with the benefit of many years of hindsight, I still can’t rightly say. 

This much is clear to me, however.

Now that you know when and where I grew up, you probably still think I’d be the least likely person to witness anything remotely exciting, except these things actually do happen to real people, and they happened to me. 

Analysis

This account relates an out-of-body experience. Out-of-body experiences (OBE’s) are “experiences in which a person seems to be awake and sees his body and the world from a location outside his physical body.”[3] They exhibit three characteristics:

(i) disembodiment (location of the self outside one’s body); (ii) the impression of seeing the world from an elevated and distanced visuo-spatial perspective (extracorporeal, but egocentric visuo-spatial perspective); and (iii) the impression of seeing one’s own body (autoscopy) from this perspective.[4]

OBE’s are related to another phenomenon, the near-death experience. “Near-death experience (NDE) is a phenomenon that occurs when a person loses consciousness and senses a disconnection from the world around them.”[5] These are more fully described as follows:

1) that during NDEs individuals have sensory perceptual experiences that are not possible according to the materialist framework in which consciousness is solely produced by the activity of neurons in the brain, and 2) that NDEs lead to a fundamental change in their understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in the place of the sacred in their lives.[6]

The first element in the passage quoted above can be taken as having a double meaning. The first is that empirical observation of a clinically dead person would lead one to believe that this individual is incapable of having any kind of sensory perceptual experiences; yet, upon resuscitating, OBE/NDE witnesses have reported particular details of their physical surroundings they otherwise should have been oblivious to while unconscious. The second is that OBE/NDE witnesses have also perceived the material world in ways that would have been impossible during wakefulness—color-blind witnesses have reported seeing colors, deaf witnesses have related hearing sounds, and blind witnesses have told of their being able to see, all while their bodies were unconscious.[7]

There has been much scholarship on the topic of OBE/NDE. One of the forerunners in this field is Dr. Raymond Moody. He identified trends in witness accounts, many of which have since entered the popular culture: the “dark tunnel,” the “being of light,” a review of one’s moral choices while alive, and the experience of reuniting with friends and family who had predeceased the witness.[8]

Another prominent investigation into the topic was the AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation), commenced in 2008. Over the course of four years, lead investigator Dr. Sam Parnia sampled 2,060 cardiac arrest patients of whom 140 survived to be interviewed. His findings indicate that consciousness persists in the absence of clinically detectable consciousness.[9]

There is also the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF).[10] Founded in 1998, the foundation collects self-reported data from OBE/NDE witnesses, and is one of the largest databases of its kind. Its founder, Dr. Jeffrey Long, is a medical doctor and author of several books on the topic. After scrutinizing accounts reported to NDERF, he observed that the content of OBE/NDE phenomena tends to be consistent regardless of the individual witnesses’ religion, upbringing, or country of origin.[11]

At first blush, it may appear that belief in OBE’s and NDE’s run afoul of the Catholic worldview. This becomes especially true given how the subject is often broached from either a New Age or a Gnostic perspective.

It has been known since antiquity that a human being is a body-soul composite.[12] A body without its soul is dead.[13] Death is the moment at which the soul is separated from the body. When death occurs, a soul goes before Christ for its individual judgment.[14] The soul is then immediately judged worthy of either heaven or hell, both of which are permanent and mutually exclusive.[15] There is no coming back, in the bodily sense, from either fate.[16] A body separated from its soul will be reunited only at the last judgment.[17]

In light of these observations, the Catholic understanding would appear to militate against the OBE/NDE phenomenon. Particularly: it is not anticipated that a witness should recover from an NDE that produces an OBE. This notwithstanding, scientific research supports the existence of both OBE’s and NDE’s. That is to say: there is ample firsthand, empirical evidence of OBE/NDE phenomena, and in each such recorded instance the witness survives to relate the experience. 

How might this incongruity be resolved? One must begin with the understanding that whether there is life after death is a question science is not equipped to answer.[18] This, in part, is due to the challenge of laying down what physical death means:

The reason no scientific technique can directly identify the moment of death is quite simple: the soul is a non-corporeal, spiritual life-principle which cannot be observed or measured or weighed using the tools of empirical science. The presence or absence of the soul can be ascertained only by observing certain biological signs that indirectly attest to its presence or its absence.[19]

For the sake of this discussion, let death mean permanent, irreversible death of the body. By definition, death produces an OBE by virtue of one’s soul departing the body. An NDE occurs when an event that would otherwise have caused death results only in the near occasion of death.[20] Ergo, if one were to recover consciousness after experiencing an NDE, he cannot be said to have died; however, it can be said of him that he almost died. This is so because an NDE can only be judged such after the fact of its occurrence. If the witness does not resuscitate after experiencing a presumed NDE, then what has transpired is an actual death experience. 

A genuine OBE occurring during an NDE must therefore be a temporary separation of the soul from the body from which the witness recovers consciousness upon the two rejoining. Alternatively, if the soul and body do not separate during these phenomena, a genuine OBE/NDE can still be said to have occurred if the event produces in the witness: (1) the impression of disembodiment, (2) the persistence of consciousness despite one’s body being asleep, unconscious, or similarly unresponsive to physical stimuli, and (3) a sensory perceptual experience not otherwise possible in light of how the material brain is understood to influence consciousness. Since time immemorial, Catholics have borne witness to phenomena like these, calling them visions and religious ecstasy. Understood thusly, OBE/NDE phenomena do not appear to conflict with Catholic teaching. 

While OBE’s often occur in the context of NDE’s, this is not always the case.[21] An OBE may occur in the absence of an NDE. Scripture records a number of events resembling OBE’s, and at least one that may have occurred during an NDE.

Writing to the Corinthians, St. Paul recounts being taken up to the third heaven, the place where God dwells.[22] A pious tradition maintains that this occurred after he was attacked and left for dead in Lystra.[23] The language St. Paul uses in describing this event sets out its mystical nature. His reference to this place as the “third heaven”[24] distinguishes it from the air where birds fly[25] and the cosmos where the stellar bodies are.[26] Paul was transported there by a mysterious means, though could not tell whether he was “in the body, or out of the body” when this occurred.[27] He calls this being “caught up.” His terminology is similar to that used in his first epistle to the Thessalonians, wherein he describes how the faithful shall be “taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air…”[28]

The events recorded in the Book of Revelation tend to indicate that St. John witnessed them through an OBE. He informs his readers that he was on the island of Patmos[29] when he received “[t]he Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to make known to his servants the things which must shortly come to pass…”[30] He “was in the spirit on the Lord’s day”[31] when the revelation occurred. With this introduction, he evidences that he was physically in Patmos, and that he was transported “in the spirit” to witness the events he recorded.

Aside from Scripture, a number of potential OBE/NDE phenomena are recorded in Sacred Tradition. Below are a few.

Thirteenth-century mystic St. Thomas Aquinas was no stranger to supernatural events. While in religious ecstasy, he was witnessed levitating bodily, during which time he remained oblivious to the world around him until the vision concluded. Near the end of his life, he was given the rare grace of engaging Jesus Christ in direct conversation. 

These factors—levitation akin to the spirit being lifted from the body, insensibility to one’s physical surroundings during a period of religious trance, and information of religious significance being imparted during the phenomenon—all tend to suggest that Aquinas had an OBE with some characteristics of an NDE, albeit not the danger of death. The event was clearly supernatural and of religious import. What is more, OBE witnesses often report the sensation of being lifted up or out of the body. Aquinas’s physical levitation can be taken as an external sign of what he witnessed spiritually. 

Nineteenth century churchman St. John Bosco received a vision of hell in a dream.[32] His account is peculiar in that a physical consequence occurring during this purported OBE—a burn to his hand—carried over after he had roused.

He recounts having been shown hell by a guide who likely was his guardian angel. To demonstrate the reality of hell, and that this vision was no mere nightmare, the guide ordered him to touch the outermost wall of hell. The saint protested, arguing that to brush against the wall would scald his hand terribly. Eventually, the guide seized his hand and pressed it to the wall, which caused the saint excruciating pain. He awoke screaming, sitting up in the bed where he had lain the night before. The hand that his guide had placed against the wall was so badly burned that the skin peeled in the ensuing days. 

In 1916, the Fatima visionaries reported a number of events which may also have been OBE’s given the high degree of physical sensory detail captured in these accounts, particularly their vision of hell.[33]

In light of the foregoing, belief in OBE/NDE phenomena does not of itself run afoul of Catholic principles. Nonetheless, caution is to be employed when approaching the subject. False mystics abound. One must not be credulous but should instead gauge the credibility of the witnesses, the phenomena, and circumstances. Furthermore, demons can counterfeit religious visions through OBE/NDE and other means. The authority to determine whether such events are genuinely supernatural rests with the Catholic bishop of the diocese where those events occur. Should anything revealed in an OBE/NDE run contrary to the established teachings of the Church, the content and source of that experience should be regarded with the greatest suspicion.

It should be noted that the OBE/NDE phenomena discussed thus far occurred without the witness actively seeking one. It speaks to the genuineness of a supernatural event that the witness did not labor to produce it. 

This brings up another reason to be on guard: all too often, OBE/NDE phenomena are discussed in the context of astral projection. Put simply, the aim of astral projection is to willfully produce an OBE. The practice is extraordinarily dangerous. 

First, intentionally generating an OBE is akin to sorcery. It constitutes an illicit means of obtaining knowledge unknown to the user (i.e., occult knowledge).[34] This is a grave sin. St. Paul mentions it specifically in his discussion of practices abhorrent to God.[35]

Second, hallucinogenic drugs are sometimes relied upon to produce or enhance the desired OBE. Of late, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) appears to be in fashion. DMT has strong psychedelic properties. It can alter a person’s thinking, perception, and emotions. It has been known to produce auditory and visual hallucinations. Some DMT users take the drug for ostensibly religious purposes; for instance, to induce the “dead man’s trip.” In this same vein, it is not unheard of that users might ingest toxic substances with an aim toward improving the OBE. The rationale here is that the closer one gets to having an actual death experience, the better the OBE will be. This misguided thinking has caused the unfortunate deaths of many.

Third, when one seeks to willfully produce an OBE, bias is introduced. It is not impossible for an authentic OBE to occur following one’s efforts to induce the phenomenon, such as through a drug trip. However, should something resembling an OBE transpire, the witness may be inclined to conclude the event was genuine when instead it might have been a dream, a hallucination, or some other natural phenomenon of this ilk. 

It bears mentioning here that what is experienced during an altered state of consciousness brought about by such means as drugs or transcendental meditation is not the same as what is experienced during an OBE. Reported OBE’s tend to exhibit details consistent with other OBE’s notwithstanding the personal circumstances of the witnesses. They also demonstrate narrative elements. While it is true that OBE’s often appear to be hand-tailored to the individual witnesses, common elements—such as meeting one’s ancestors—are present across OBE accounts. This stands in contrast to the enormous variance between the reported contents of drug trips and states of altered consciousness, and among both of the former when compared to OBE’s in general.

An OBE is therefore not the product of neurons randomly firing in reaction to an ingested hallucinogen; it is not an altered state brought about through meditation and breathing techniques. The scientific data show it to be something else. Thus, an OBE should not be thought of as something that can be produced by natural means, because natural means believed to cause the phenomenon instead produce something entirely different.

This is to say nothing of possible demonic intervention. Not only can demons fool a person into thinking an actual OBE has occurred, they can also influence the content of the experience. Demons can manipulate the event to make it look like anything they think will further their agenda. Thus have witnesses reported OBE’s wherein they claim to have made contact with their ancestors, alien life forms, spirit guides, religious figures, and even God Himself.

St. John of the Cross warns that taking purportedly supernatural events at face value is dangerous. It is more likely than not that such extraordinary phenomena, if not strictly natural in origin, will be demonic in nature. The same holds true for OBE’s and NDE’s. Catholics are exhorted to approach the supernatural with prudence.[36] The safest method of addressing a purported OBE is to regard it as a dream. God is indeed capable of communicating to us in dreams,[37] but not all dreams should be thought of as coming from God. 

Building on this point, John of the Cross also teaches that, because God is omniscient and omnipotent, He will get what He decrees. This is not to say God violates a person’s free will; rather, that God does not work pointless miracles. If God produces a genuine supernatural event for someone, it is because God intends this gift to foster the individual’s faith. 

Ergo, OBE’s and NDE’s should be regarded in a like manner to dreams, and if the content of the OBE/NDE should produce an increase in the witness’s faith, then the experience will have been put to good use.

Footnotes

[1] The events reported in this dossier are presented as true; however, no guarantee is made as to their veracity. To the extent the facts appear to take on a supernatural nature, the reader is advised that supreme authority to discern facts of this kind rests with the Catholic Church.

[2] The Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version, Hebrews 12:1.

[3] Bünning, Silvia and Olaf Blanke. “The Out-of Body Experience: Precipitating Factors and Neural Correlates.” Progress in Brain Research, vol. 150, 2005, pp. 331-350, 605-606.

[4] Id.

[5] Johnson, Sharona. “Near-Death Experience in Patients on Hemodialysis.” Nephrology Nursing Journal: Journal of the American Nephrology Nurses’ Association, vol. 42, no. 4, July-August 2015, pp. 331-336.

[6] Woolacott, Marjorie and Bettina Peyton. “Verified Account of Near-Death Experience in A Physician Who Survived Cardiac Arrest.” Explore, vol. 17, no. 3, May-June 2021, pp. 213-219.

[7] Miller, J. Steve. Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language. Acworth: Wisdom Creek Press, LLC, 2012.

[8] Moody, Raymond A. Life After Life. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1975.

[9] Parnia, Sam, et. al. “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study.” Resuscitation, vol. 85, no. 12, December 2014, pp. 1799-1805.

[10] NDERF.org.

[11] Long, Jeffrey and Paul Perry. Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011.

[12] 1 Corinthians 15:44-45. “If there be a natural body, there is also a spiritual body, as it is written: The first man Adam was made into a living soul…”

[13] James 2:26. “For even as the body without the spirit is dead; so also faith without works is dead.”

[14] Hebrews 9:27. “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment…”

[15] Matthew 25:31-46.

[16] Daniel 12:2.

[17] 1 Corinthians 15:51-52.

[18] Hagan, John C., ed. The Science of Near-Death Experiences. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017.

[19] Haas, John M. “Catholic Teaching Regarding the Legitimacy of Neurological Criteria for the Determination of Death.” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 2011, pp. 279-299.

[20] There is some academic dispute as to whether what NDE witnesses experience is actual, permanent death from which they recover, or something short of actual, permanent death. In the case of the former, recovery ought not to be possible; yet, in just about any NDE case the witnesses resuscitate after appearing to be dead. Thus, the controversy is over the permanence of death as it is understood, and whether to call “death” a condition from which a person can be resuscitated. These views of death contrast sharply with “clinical death,” which is a physician’s judgment that a person has died based upon the absence of observable vital functions. Depending on the method a physician utilizes, a patient may be declared clinically and legally dead while still alive. 

[21] Martial, Charlotte, et al. “Fantasy Proneness Correlates With the Intensity of Near-Death Experience.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 9, no. 190, June 2018.

[22] 2 Corinthians 12:1-4. “I will come to [speak of] visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not: God knoweth), That he was caught up into paradise, and heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter.”

[23] Acts 14:18. “[A]nd stoning Paul, drew him out of the city, thinking him to be dead.”

[24] Psalm 10:5. “The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord’s throne is in heaven.” See also Psalm 13:2: “The Lord hath looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there be any that understand and seek God.”

[25] Psalm 103:12. “Over them the birds of the air shall dwell…”

[26] Psalm 8:4. “For I will behold thy heavens, the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast founded.”

[27] 2 Corinthians 12:2.

[28] 1 Thessalonians 4:16.

[29] Revelation 1:9.

[30] Revelation 1:1.

[31] Revelation 1:10.

[32] Bosco, John. Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco. Charlotte: TAN Books, 2012.

[33] Thigpen, Paul. The Saints Who Saw Hell and Other Catholic Witnesses to the Fate of the Damned. Charlotte: TAN Books, 2019.

[34] Leviticus 19:31. “Go not aside after wizards, neither ask any thing of soothsayers, to be defiled by them…”

[35] Galatians 5:19-21.

[36] 1 John 4. “Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”

[37] Job 33:15-16. “By a dream in a vision by night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, and they are sleeping in their beds: Then he [God] openeth the ears of men, and teaching instructeth them in what they are to learn.”