Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [102]
The Perfect Death
A brief brush with death is the Hail Mary of altered consciousness: it’s risky, but if it works out, you score big.Visions, peace, and serenity, light and love, unity with all things, dramatic personal transformation: everything that psychedelics or temporal lobe epilepsy, meditation or spontaneous mystical experiences offer, you can find in one near-death experience.Which is not to say you should stick a fork into an electrical socket; most people do not return from the edge of death. But it does explain why I found the three hundred people gathered in Houston such an embarrassment of riches.
The 2006 conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies marked a watershed moment for the movement. Host ing the conference was M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the premier cancer hospitals in the world. After years toiling on the outskirts of science, this endorsement by a world-class medical center tickled the near-death folks to no end. The participants at the conference—the subjects and scientists alike—were like a tour group watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and suddenly being invited inside to dine with the queen.Yes, I thought as I settled into my comfortable seat in the hospital’s ultramodern auditorium, near-death experience has arrived.
Near-death experiences have always been with us, but not until recently have they been mentioned in polite company. It took the book Life After Life, which was first published in 1975, to crack the dam of embarrassed silence and allow all those repressed stories to gush out. And gush they did—with such force that scientists began to divert them into different categories: the stages and elements of near-death experiences,2 who gets them,3 why they get them, how people are transformed, and various psychological, physiological, and neurochem ical explanations, or, rather, the failure of all those explanations to explain away the caress of death.
In the past three decades, scientists have conducted more than forty studies of nearly 3,400 near-death experiencers. Articles have appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as The Lancet, Nature, Brain, and American Journal of Psychiatry, as well as the subject’s flagship publication, Journal of Near-Death Studies. Most of these studies are fairly rudimentary. The problem comes down to money: Who is going to fund this research? As a result, a small band of researchers has toiled with barely enough bread and water to sustain them, compiling stories and statistics, until they have now amassed a fairly large body of research.
If one were looking for the Mona Lisa of near-death experiences—perfect and mysterious, each stroke masterfully executed—I would point to the story of Edward Salisbury. I met Edward on the first day of the conference in Houston, a tall, lanky man partial to checked shirts and black leather vests. His salt-and-pepper beard was neatly trimmed, his black hair sat flattened docilely against his head.When he spoke to me, he gazed kindly but unswervingly into my eyes. Those eyes held me hostage, as did his story.
On December 29, 1969, Edward was driving to see his fiancée in a new Firebird convertible. He was twenty-six, a young executive at Coca-Cola, driving too fast for the wet, winding roads of Atlanta’s suburbs. His car hit a curb and suddenly—BANG—he felt as though he’d been hit by a swinging door from behind. His car plowed into a tree and in the next instant, Edward was “merging” with the tree, going up its arteries and popping out on top, twenty-five feet above the road.
“As I looked around—it was like I was looking off a balcony—I said,‘That car looks like mine,’ ” he recalled.“I looked a little closer and there was this body slumped over the steering wheel. And I realized, Hey, that’s my body! If that is my body, then who am I? How did I get here? And in the next instant I was sucked away