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She giggled. “But then, it was kind of neat, because I didn’t have to worry about bumping into anything.”

One could argue that all of Vicky’s “observations” could be explained by assuming she was partly conscious during her out-of-body experience, and her hearing painted the images in her mind. She heard a male and female voice. The female doctor confirmed the next day that the doctors had discussed blood on her eardrum—an auditory, not visual, detail. Vicky’s ears could have detected them shaving her hair and assumed it had been cut short in places. And her description of her wedding ring—white gold, with tiny orange blossoms around the diamonds—proved nothing since she had no doubt touched it thousands of times.

But if any part of Vicky’s account is true, if she did “see” for the first time, it is the kind of evidence that smashes paradigms. On that operating table,Vicky found herself with a radically different way to perceive, a new “spiritual” sense that leapt into action the moment her brain was disabled.

That new sense is what Kenneth Ring calls “mindsight.”

“The mind sees,” he explained. “It’s not the eyes that see. It’s like a spiritual sight or a spiritual awareness.”

Ken Ring, who is professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Connecticut, began investigating near-death experiences in 1977. Occasionally he stumbled across stories about blind people suddenly seeing objects for the first time.

“I felt if this was actually on the level, this would be a dramatic demonstration of the brain-mind split,” Ring said, referring to the idea that the mind can operate independently of the physical brain. If he could find a case in which a blind person could accurately describe the environment, as verified by other people,“that really would be—I won’t say a clincher—but a very strong argument for the authenticity of these experiences.”

Ring never found his airtight case, but he did come to believe in a sort of spiritual perception. He tracked down thirty-one cases of blind people who had reported near-death experiences and inquired whether they had visually accurate (veridical) memories of those experiences.10 Eighty percent reported visual perception—and of those respondents, two-thirds were blind from birth. Of his thirty-one subjects, fourteen reported an out-of-body experience, in which they claimed to visualize details in the operating room, their bedrooms, or other physical settings.

None of these stories makes a perfect case that consciousness continues when the brain has shut down. Still, the fact that all these subjects described the same perplexing type of vision does raise a startling possibility: somehow,Vicky Bright and others seem to have been catapulted into a new level of consciousness, where they found new resources to understand reality—in their case, sight that perceives in finer detail than ordinary vision. And the special case (of the blind) might hint at a more general principle: perhaps an encounter with death catapults you and me and anyone with all five senses into a different sort of perception of the universe. Being sighted, we cannot imagine what that is, any more than Vicky Bright could imagine seeing her shorn hair and her wedding ring before she glimpsed them in her out-of-body experience.

On any given day, you may be perfectly content to putter along in “normal waking consciousness,” as William James had it, affixed to this familiar reality by your name, family, job, the opinion of others, your worldview, your bad knee, and your preference for strawberry ice cream.

“These are all things that keep you in this zone of ordinary waking consciousness,” Ken Ring explained. “But if you nearly die, if you fall off a bridge, if something happens that shocks you, then [ordinary consciousness] falls away and you are for a moment aware of something else, something greater, something truer.”

You perceive, he asserts, with “a kind of spiritual sense.”

I was jolted by the language, not because it was foreign but because it wrapped around me like a soft, familiar sweater. Raised