An excerpt from a chapter of Carl Sagan's book, "Broca's Mind" - The Universe of the Benign, in which Sagan hypothesizes that these reports of people who have undergone clinical death originate from the memory of their own birth experience
William Woolkitt died and went to heaven. At least that's how it seemed to him. Before he was taken on a stretcher to the operating table, someone reminded him that the surgical process involves a certain risk. The operation was crowned with success, but just as the unconsciousness began to wear off, his heart fluttered. And the man died. It seemed to him that he had left his body in some form and was able to look down and see a pitiful mass, covered only by a sheet and lying on a hard and merciless surface. He composed himself only for a moment, looked over his body for the last time - from a high height, apparently - and continued a kind of upward journey. A strange darkness permeated all around, but at that moment it became clear to him that things were becoming clearer now - looking upwards, one might say. Then a river was hurled at him from afar. He was flooded with light. He entered a kind of radiant realm and there, directly in front of him, he noticed the silhouette, brilliantly lit from behind, a large god-like figure, which he now approached effortlessly. Walcott tried with all his might to discern the divine face...
then woke up In the room, the surgeons put the ventilator on him and brought him back to life at the last minute. In fact, he had a queen at his heart and according to some definitions of this process, which is not sufficiently understood, he was indeed among the dead. Wolcott was sure that he was dead, that he got a glimpse into the afterlife and verified Judeo-Christian theology.
Similar experiences that doctors and other people have recounted have occurred all over the world. These perithanatic (meaning, on the brink of death) apparitions befell not only people educated in conventional Western religion but also Hindus and Buddhists and skeptics. There is good reason to assume that many of our conventional ideas about life after death were drawn from such near-death experiences and handed down over the years from generation to generation. You have no news more interesting or more refreshing than that of the traveler who returned, from the report that there is a journey and there is life after death, that there is a God waiting for us and that in our death we are expected to feel a sense of gratitude and the elevation of reverence and exaltation.
For all I know, it is possible that these experiences should be taken for granted, as a confirmation of the religious belief that has received such crushing blows from science in the past centuries. Personally, I would be happy if there were life after death - especially if they would allow me to add to and learn about this world and other worlds, if they would give me an opportunity to discover how history will develop in the future. But being a scientist, I must also think of other possible explanations. How is it possible that people from all eras, from all eschatological views experience the same type of near-death experience.
We know that it is possible to induce similar experiences, with a high degree of permanence, in different cultures, using psychedelic drugs. Out-of-body experiences can be induced by dissociative anesthetics such as ketamines, the illusion of flight can be induced by atropine and other alkaloids, and these molecules, derived from, for example, Datura, have been routinely used by European sorcerers and North American curanders (healers) to To experience through them, in the midst of religious ecstasy, a sense of the sight and flight to the heights of the sky. MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine) tends to induce a regression of age, and to revive experiences from the period of youth and childhood that we thought were long gone. (DMT - dimethyltryptamine) induces micropsia and macropsia, a feeling of a shrinking or expanding world, respectively - something similar to what happened to Alice in Wonderland after she obeyed the instructions on Small bottles that read "eat me" or "drink me".
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) induces a sense of merging with the universe, like the identification of Brahman and Atman in Hindu religious belief.
Is it possible that the Hindu mystical experience was trapped within us by the very nature of our creation and boiled down to only 200 micrograms of LSD to come into full expression? If something like ketamine is released in times of life-threatening or near-death situations, and people returning from such an experience always provide the same self-report about heaven and God, father, isn't there some common denominator for Western and Eastern religions, being naturally intertwined within the neuronal architecture of our brains?
It is difficult to understand why evolution should select minds predisposed to such experiences; After all, we have not seen anyone die or fail to produce offspring due to lack of mystical fervor. And didn't the experiences induced by drugs as well as the revelations on the brink of death arise but from some evolutionary defect in the neural network within the brain, one that generates by chance from time to time other images of the world? I think that this possibility is completely unacceptable, and perhaps it is nothing more than a desperate rationalist attempt to avoid a serious and real confrontation with mysticism?
The only alternative, as far as I can see, is that every human being, without exception, has already experienced a being like that of those travelers who returned from the land of death, the feeling of flight: the departure from darkness to light: a journey during which one can feel, at least sometimes and dimly, a heroic figure. Flooded with light and glory. There is only one common experience that fits this description: birth.
Carl Sagan, Broca's Mind Sefrit Ma'ariv, 1978, translation: Dr. Naomi Carmel
More on the subject on the science website
