5 - The Seat Of The Soul Hypothesis

A twenty-eight-year-old patient told me a sad but wonderful tale about her near-death experience as a child. Her family told me the rest later, including premonitions of her own death.

June had had a cardiac arrest at the age of five during surgery to repair her heart valves and to install a pace-

maker. She often talked about her near-death experience, mainly because it was such a beautiful event that it always seemed to be with her.

Although she was deeply anesthetized during the surgery, she suddenly found herself floating above the doctors, watching them as they worked. She could recount details: the appearance of certain instruments, for instance, and the fact that one of the doctors was right-handed and the other left-handed.

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Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But less than a century ago, men and women did not have access to the puzzle boxes within themselves. They could not name even one of the 53 portals to the soul.

—Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan

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When the doctors began their procedure to restart her heart, she found herself leaving the operating room and traveling down a long tunnel. At the other end, she was bathed in light, a bright warm light that she always described as "the Light of God." As she told her husband, Don, "I was never afraid again after I experienced the light. I know that I can die at any time, and yet I have no fear."

It was the experience of this light that gave her such a positive outlook on life. Without it, much of her life would have been dark. Her parents died when she was young. Her sister died of a drug overdose at the age of eighteen.

June knew that pacemakers sometimes stop working, causing heart failure, but she didn't dwell on it. "I was more afraid than she was," said Don. "She had no fear because she had seen the light."

The day before she died June was having a cup of coffee at her kitchen table, when her dead sister appeared. She stood before her and announced, "June, it's time to go." Then the apparition sat down across the table and drank a cup of coffee. When the apparition finished, she simply got up and left the house.

June felt that she couldn't tell her husband what had happened. Instead, she called the aunt and uncle who had raised her and told them about the peculiar occurrence. "I am going to die, and I just wanted to say good-bye," she said. Then she called her two brothers. She told them not to mention their conversation to her husband until she died because it would be too upsetting for him.

She simply told Don how happy he had made her. She was glad to have such a beautiful home and a wonderful child. Nothing could have made her happier.

That night she died in her sleep because her pacemaker failed. Her heart simply stopped.

Story after story, puzzle after puzzle, case studies like this one come along.

Do these mysterious tales prove the existence of a higher plane? Do they prove the existence of the soul, a part of us that leaves the body, flies up that tunnel, and, well, goes to heaven?

Science has long debunked the spirit because of its intangibility. For the past hundred years, neuroscience has concentrated on exploring the intricate connections between brain and body that allow us to walk, breathe, and use the senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling.

Most neurologists are not interested in studying consciousness. Denying the existence of the soul, scientists define the brain as limited to neuron and electrochemical reactions that cause observable behavior. To admit to more would be to confess that there is more to the human mind than simply the brain.

Philosophy Of The Soul

The soul has been widely defined throughout history. Some societies have believed that the soul represents the highest of human thought, and therefore, it is most abstract and difficult to define. Others have believed that the soul represents the source of life itself, while others have considered the soul only to be the source of afterlife.

Democritus, a fifth-century Greek philosopher, felt that life was sustained by "psychic atoms" that were spread throughout the body but were controlled by the brain, which contained "the bonds of the soul." Plato theorized that the

soul had three parts—intellectual, irascible, and sexual—but only the first aspect had the virtue of immortality.
Galen, the first-century Greek physician, agreed with Plato, but went further. He divided the soul into several functions. All of our motor and sensory abilities were attributed to the soul as were "rational" functions such as imagination, reason, and memory.

The Catholic Church appropriated and developed Galen's concept of the soul, even offering opinions as to where the various functions were located in the brain. There the issue rested for almost fifteen hundred years, researchers and philosophers keeping their opinions to themselves regarding the soul lest they offend the doctrines of the church.

French philosopher Rene Descartes offered the viewpoint that is dominant in the Western world today. He felt that the body was a machine composed of bones, blood, muscles, nerves, and skin and controlled by the brain. The soul, according to Descartes, was something only found in human beings and not in animals. It couldn't be divided into parts the way Plato said it could. It was unique, immaterial, and immortal. This theory was called dualism.

Many accepted the dualism of Descartes then, and many still accept it today. Many accept only half of the dualistic argument, the half that says the body is a machine.

Scientists who fit into that category are known as "behaviorists," researchers who believe that all human and animal functions can be explained by observable behaviors. For the most part, they see man as nothing more than a complex animal or machine. Indeed, throughout history many have sought to create an artificial man. About a century after Descartes, Jacques de Vaucanson, a builder of automatons, and a French physician named Claude LeCat even went so far as to make a duck that could flap its wings and digest seeds.

The soul was not discussed by those who studied the brain and the body because it could not be observed. French physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie even put forth the notion in the eighteenth century that the soul could easily be removed in most men without losing much of the man himself—if they could find the soul, that is.

The invention of the computer seemed further to vindicate the behavioral approach. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most brain scientists considered philosophy to be "silly" and unrelated to the real work of discovering the circuitry of the brain. The self-conscious philosopher, rather than attempting to understand the soul as philosophers had since the days of Plato, took up the question of whether computers would ever be able to think or have emotions.

To a great extent, this type of thinking persists today. Richard Restak, the acclaimed neurologist who wrote a book entitled The Brain, states that there is no "seat of the mind" and that the entire concept of mind or soul is a philosophical fallacy, nothing more than a literary device.

Restak even goes so far as to state that he attempted to find the soul in the brain by using a very sophisticated imaging machine known as a PET scanner. Since he doubted that he could photograph the soul with this machine, he concluded that it must not exist. That was his method of "proving" his hypothesis that man is a soulless creature, at least according to the PET scanner.

I must hasten to add that many researchers in the medical profession feel, deep down in their heart, that there is a soul. I remember one of my professors at Johns Hopkins University telling me that "When I say, 'I went for a walk today,' I know I am simply describing to you a behavior that my fellow scientists can quantify. But I know that there was more to my walk than just my legs moving. I know that some inner force decided to go for a walk and that that same inner force enjoyed the flowers and birds and the beauty of nature; thoughts that science will never be able to measure or quantify."

That statement came from a rigid behaviorist with whom I spent hundreds of hours quantifying the exact frequencies of sounds that monkeys can hear.

When I reflect on what he said, I remember the works of Wilder Penfield.

The Father Of Neuroscience

Wilder Penfield is widely recognized as the father of neurosurgery. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins, he is responsible for much of our current understanding of brain function.

Among other things, Penfield did extensive "mapping" of the brain in the 1930s and forties. To do this, he electrically stimulated various areas of patients' brains during neurosurgery. He was able to do this with the patients under local anesthetic because the brain only perceives pain from the rest of the body and has no ability to feel pain itself. During the procedures, with the patients fully conscious and alert, he would prod different areas electrically and carefully document what happened.

For example, electrical stimulation of the motor cortex would result in movement of the arms or legs. Other areas were documented as being responsible for speech, hearing, vision, and so forth.

Penfield, like many of his medical cohorts, thought for many years that there was no soul or independent consciousness in human beings. He believed that the neurons of the brain could explain all human behavior. Basically, what you see is what you get—three pounds of gelatinous neurons wrapped in a bony skull, the same "soulless" stuff Restak saw on his PET scanner.

At his farm in rural Canada, Penfield used a large rock to illustrate this belief. On one side of the rock, he painted the Greek word for "spirit." On the other side, he drew the outline of a human head with a question mark where the brain should be. He connected the two figures with a solid line linked to the Aesculapian torch, representing medical science. To him, this image meant that questions about the existence of the soul had been answered by science. As far as Penfield was concerned, brain studies could ultimately explain everything about the mind and body.

Fifty years later and in frail health, Penfield changed his mind. He put on six sweaters to keep out the bitter Canadian winter and trudged out to the rock that he had painted with such assurance so many decades earlier. With fresh paint, he crossed out the solid line between the brain and the spirit, replacing it with a dotted line and a question mark. It became a visual reminder that all of his work with the brain had still left many unanswered questions about the mind and the soul. As he said in his last work, The Mystery of the Mind, "I came to take seriously, even to believe, that the consciousness of man, the mind, is NOT something to be reduced to brain mechanism."

Penfield went on to say that determining the connection between mind and brain is "the ultimate of ultimate problems."

After years of observing human brains in conscious patients—which went beyond the work of his peers who arrived at their conclusions through psychotherapy or by examining brains of experimental animals—Penfield believed that something differentiated the mind from the physical brain. As he wrote:

"Taken either way, the nature of the mind presents the fundamental problem, perhaps the most difficult and most important of all problem?. For myself, after a professional lifetime spent in trying to discover how the brain accounts for the mind, it comes as a surprise now to discover, during this final examination of the evidence, that the dualist hypothesis (the mind is separate from the brain) seems the more reasonable of explanations.

"Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit!

"Possibly the scientist and the physician could add something by stepping outside the laboratory and the consulting room to reconsider these strangely gifted human beings about us. Where did the mind-call it the spirit if you like—come from? Who can say? It exists. The mind is attached to the action of a certain mechanism within the brain. A mind has been thus attached in the case of every human being for many thousands of generations, and there seems to be significant evidence of heredity in the mind's character from one generation to the next and the next. But at present, one can only say simply and without explanation, 'the mind is born.'"

Pondering the ultimate of ultimate questions, this physician-philosopher asked himself the question: "What becomes of the mind after death?

"That question brings up the other question so often asked: 'Can the mind communicate directly with other minds?' As far as any clearly proven scientific conclusion goes, the answer to the second question is 'no.' The mind can communicate only through its brain-mechanisms. Certainly it does so most often through the mechanism of speech. Nonetheless, since the exact nature of the mind is a mystery and the source of its energy has yet to be identified, no scientist is in a position to say that direct communication between one active mind and another cannot occur during life. He may say that unassailable evidence of it has not yet been brought forward.

"Direct communications between the mind of man and the mind of God is quite another matter. The argument in favor of this lies in the claim made by so many men for so long a time that they have received guidance and revelation from some power beyond themselves through the medium of prayer. I see no reason to doubt this evidence, nor any means of submitting it to scientific proof.

"Indeed, no scientist, by virtue of his science, has the right to pass judgement on the faiths by which men live and die. We can only set out the data about the brain, and present the physiological hypotheses that are relevant to what the mind does.

"Now we must return, however reluctantly, to the first question: When death at last blows out the candle that was life, the mind seems to vanish, as in sleep. I said 'seems.' What can one really conclude? What is the reasonable hypothesis in regard to this matter, considering the physiological evidence? Only this: the brain has not explained the mind fully."

After fifty years of studying the living brain, Wilder Penfield realized that the answer to the question, "Is there a soul," was more elusive than ever.

Perhaps the soul does not appear on the latest machine invented by man to study the brain. I believe that by looking carefully at the work of neuroscientists one can conclude that there is within the human brain, an area that is genetically coded for out-of-body experiences, tunnel experiences, and much of what we know as the near-death experience.

Finding The Source

After the Seattle study, in which we determined that a person must be on the brink of death to have a near-death experience, we asked ourselves another question: What is the relationship of NDEs to hallucinations and other psychic phenomena?

We researched the medical literature and found that NDEs are unique. No other hallucinations, visions, or psychic phenomena are identical to NDEs. I have to say that I was surprised. I assumed that I would find many drugs that mimicked the experience. I was mystified to find that marijuana, psychedelics, alcohol, narcotics, anesthetic agents, Valium, lack of oxygen to the body, or severe psychological stress did not cause NDEs.

A form of gas therapy called the Medune mix did cause experiences similar to NDEs, but I believe that was because patients actually were near death from being forced to breathe a high concentration of carbon dioxide. This was done in the name of psychotherapy in the 1940s, as a possible cure for depression and other mental disorders. Treatment was halted when the expected results didn't occur.

Our research stumped me. I was not alone in my inability to find drug or psychological causes for NDEs. A number of researchers, including Raymond Moody, psychologist Kenneth Ring, and even astronomer Carl Sagan, could find no common pathway to explain the near-death experience— except near death, that is. Moody, the first medical doctor to study the near-death experience, concluded in a 1988 Psychology Today article that "for years I have been trying to come up with a physiological explanation for NDEs, and for years I have come up empty-handed."

My first hint of a solution to this problem came when I was casually discussing NDEs with Art Ward, former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Washington. Ward is a great thinker, a surgical artist, and a crusty old man whose shoot-from-the-hip style causes many junior residents to cower in fear. He is not given to metaphysical thinking; "hard science" and just the facts are his domain. Yet when I described NDEs to him, he was already very familiar with them. He had heard them recounted from many of his own patients.

Ward remembered one patient who experienced every trait of the near-death experience while Wilder Penfield poked an area of his brain with an electric probe. As part of the patient's brain was stimulated, he had the sensation of leaving his body. When another area close by was stimulated, he had the sensation of zooming up a tunnel, and so forth.

Ward thought that the area Penfield was probing was the right temporal lobe. He felt that some very interesting experiments could have been conducted had they thought of them at the time. For instance, they might have devised ways to see if these people were really leaving their bodies. Unfortunately, said Ward, nobody thought of it at the time.

This was an intriguing lead. Our team of researchers began to examine Penfield's work. Buried in a forty-year-old textbook, we found clear reference to areas of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, produced out-of-body experiences. At times patients on his operating table would say, "I am leaving my body now," when he touched this area with an electric probe. Several reported saying, "I'm half in and half out."

The area he was "mapping" was the Sylvian fissure, an area in the right temporal lobe located just above the right ear. When he electrically stimulated the surrounding areas of the fissure, patients frequently had the experience of "seeing God," hearing beautiful music, seeing dead friends and relatives, and even having a panoramic life review.

This was an exciting find. Up until this point, the existence of archetypes was only a theory from psychotherapist C. G. Jung, who described them as being psychological phenomena present in the genetic makeup of all people, regardless of race, creed, or color.

We were stumped. We had confirmed the specific area of the brain where NDE's occur, but we didn't know what was actually happening when they occurred.

Someone proposed that this experience was a defense mechanism, a way for the body to fool itself into believing that it was surviving death. That theory made sense to a point,

but it didn't explain the reason that these experiences were so consistent from one NDEer to the next. After all, why would a person on the brink of death almost always have an experience that was so similar to what another person on the brink of death experienced? Why were they leaving their bodies, zooming up tunnels, seeing beings of light, and all those other things? Why weren't they having experiences so individual that they couldn't be categorized? That the distress of near death causes a neurological response almost explains it. But there is some research that couldn't be ignored.

The research on out-of-body experiences, which about twenty-five percent of NDEers have, represented very compelling evidence that something was leaving the body.

We discussed the research of Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist who has done some fascinating work on out-of-body experiences and people who almost died of cardiac arrest. In these experiences, a person in a near-death crisis claims to leave his body and watch his own resuscitation as the doctor performs it in the emergency room or during surgery. Sabom had thirty-two such patients in his study.

Sabom asked twenty-five medically savvy patients to make educated guesses about what happens when a doctor tries to get the heart started again. He wanted to compare the knowledge of "medically smart" patient with the out-of-body experiences of medically unsophisticated patients.

He found that twenty-three of the twenty-five in the control group made major mistakes in describing the resuscitation procedure. On the other hand, none of the near-death patients made mistakes in describing what went on in their own resuscitations. This presented very strong evidence that these people were actually outside their bodies and looking down as they said they were.

Sabom's research represented excellent empirical evidence of a life out-of-body, or at least an extremely sensitive sixth sense. So did many of the stories we had heard from patients and other doctors.

Dr. William Serdahely at the University of Montana Medical School told us the remarkable story of an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy.

Jimmy was fishing from a bridge when he slipped from his perch on the railing and hit his head on a rock in the water below. The doctor's report says that Jimmy had stopped breathing and was without a pulse when a police officer pulled him from the deep water in which he had floated facedown for at least five minutes. The policeman performed CPR for thirty minutes until the hospital helicopter arrived, but he reported that the boy was dead on the scene when they started the rush to the hospital.

The boy lived. Two days later, he was out of his coma.

"I know what happened when I fell off that bridge," he told his physician, who related this story to us. He proceeded to describe his entire rescue in vivid detail, including the name of the police officer who tried to resuscitate him, the length of time it took for the helicopter to arrive on the scene, and many of the life-saving procedures used on him in the helicopter and at the hospital.

He knew all of this, he said, because he had been observing from outside his body the entire time.

It was not my intent to assess whether or not these children actually left their physical body during their near-death experiences. In every case in which children could provide details of what was going on outside their body at a time that they were unconscious, it was astonishing to me how accurate these details were. If two female physicians attended the resuscitation, the child would accurately report that fact. If they were nasally intubed, they were able to report that.

If they were taken to other rooms for X-rays or procedures, again, they were always accurate in their descriptions. This does not mean that they were actually outside their physical bodies, however, as comatose patients simply may have better abilities to perceive what is going on around them than we have previously understood.

Yet there is one case in which a teenager told me a fantastic story that was so unusual it had to have been an out-of-body experience. Rhonda was a fifteen year old who went into severe allergic shock as the result of an X-ray procedure. She was having an intravenous pyelogram to assess her kidney function. She suffered a cardiac arrest as a result of an allergic reaction to the radiopaque material used in the procedure.

When interviewed a year later, she told me that suddenly the room was dark. She could see herself illuminated by a soft light. She felt that she was floating above her body, perhaps on the ceiling. She saw her father pick her up and throw her over his shoulder and run to the emergency room. She said the radiologist was running after him. She was then resuscitated in the emergency room.

I interviewed the hospital personnel who were involved with the case, and all agreed that her description was accurate. Certainly a reasonable explanation for the accuracy with which she reported the unique events of her resuscitation is that she was actually out of her body during it.

Most NDEs involve leaving the physical body and traveling to the light. When this teenager told me of being carried by her father to the emergency room, I thought that this case would certainly be the exception to the accurate reports of other children. Yet when I investigated it, I found every detail she described to be true.

In 1986, when it came time to publish our findings about the anatomical location of near-death experiences, we entirely ignored the spiritual implications. We all agreed that bridging the gap between psychology and neurology was a big step in itself. As the head of neurology said, "Let's leave out any of that metaphysical stuff we were talking about." It was felt to be too controversial, too "far out."

The Soul Hypothesis

Our paper was published in 1986 in the American Journal of Diseases of Children without the words "soul" or "spirit" appearing anywhere in it. Afterward, some of us continued to discuss this area of the brain in a different light. We began to ponder several questions: Does this information demystify the near-death experience? Does the fact that we know where the experience originates make it more a reflex than a spiritual experience?

We ultimately answered "no" to this question. Like Wilder Penfield and others who had done brain research, we now knew where in the brain a certain action took place; we didn't know why.

There are many other examples of genetic imprinting within the human brain, and none of those functions is any less valid for being inborn. For instance, we are all born with the capacity to learn language. This built-in language analyzer enables us to learn the language of our society. This ability to analyze language is genetically part of our brains, although it is strongly influenced by environment. Which is why the French speak French and Americans speak English with an American accent.

Birds are another example of animals that have genetically printed information in their brains. They are born with a detailed map of the night sky that is somehow passed to them through genetic tissue. Birds do not need to learn what the sky looks like; they come equipped with an inner map of the heavens. Using planetarium's that can project a changing night sky, scientists have demonstrated that birds raised in labs and never exposed to the night sky are born with a "memory" of the stars that enables them to navigate.

Rather than diminish the NDE, we should consider the metaphysical ramifications of the phenomenon. As Penfield said: "I have no doubt the day will dawn when the mystery of the mind will no longer be a mystery. But I believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion, in man's study of man, until the nature of the energy responsible for mind-action is discovered."

Confirming The Theory

When my research team published its report on the anatomy of the near-death experience, we were contacted by a group of neurologists in Chile who had been studying the same thing. They had arrived at the same anatomical conclusions that we did, that near-death experiences were generated by neuron activity within the Sylvian fissure. By examining the effects of a wide variety of psychoactive drugs, lack of oxygen, epileptic seizures, and altered states on the brain, the Chilean researchers pinpointed the same area in the brain as being the site of NDEs.

But exactly what did that discovery mean? They were as stumped as we were. They called for research that would study NDEs in the light of visionary experiences, for example, Paul's ecstatic visions and claims of astral travel. But for now, they said, "We are on the right path in separating physical elements from metaphysical ones."

I was excited to learn that two independent research teams had arrived at the same conclusion. Frankly, there were times when I worried that our anatomical theory was completely incorrect. Learning that other scientists had reached the same conclusion independently told us that we had at least discovered the circuit boards of mysticism. In our hearts, some of us believed strongly that we had discovered the seat of the soul.

The Heavenly Mind

As so frequently happens, children can sum up difficult concepts with a few innocently spoken words. Such was the case with one child who spoke to researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross about death and the nature of the soul.

During a visit to Seattle, Kübler-Ross described a seven-year-old boy who asked his mother to turn off the oxygen so that he could finally die after a three-year battle against leukemia. "Turn off the oxygen; I don't need it anymore," he said. "It is my time."

He had experienced a pre-death vision of what heaven was like. The vision revealed that his grandfather would be waiting for him. Despite his illness, he was excited about going to heaven.

When he was asked what heaven looked like in his vision, he tried his best to explain it: "It's sort of like if you went through another passageway ... you walked right through a wall to another galaxy or something. It's sort of like walking into your brain. And it's sort of like living on a cloud, and your spirit is there, but not your body. You've left your body. It is really like walking into your mind."

This boy's experience represents the soul as being the place where the material and the spiritual worlds meet, a perfect description really for a soul that is rooted in the brain. For him, there was no contradiction between believing that heaven is in his mind and that he can leave his body and meet his grandfather in heaven.

There was no contradiction for Dr. Penfield, either. In one of his lectures on the brain, he tackled the question of the soul with a directness frequently used by senior statesmen to attack thorny issues. He readily admitted that the energy source that powers the mind is a total mystery. It fills us with the fire of life, and in the end, the wind of death blows it out like a candle, said Penfield. Then what happens?

"It is clear that, in order to survive after death, the mind must establish a connection with a source of energy other than that of the brain," said Penfield. "If during life (as some people claim) direct communication is sometimes established with the minds of other men or with the mind of God, then it is clear that energy from without can reach a man's mind. In that case, it is not unreasonable for him to hope that after death the mind may waken to another source of energy."

I love this quote, both for what it says and for what it implies. It says that the mind is one thing, the brain another, and that the brain cannot do what the mind does. It implies that people may communicate through the mind's energy with other people and/or God. And that when the body dies, the mind may be forced to rely upon another source of energy for its existence.

Is the near-death experience the beginning of the soul's journey to another source of energy? Maybe. If Penfield had questions about the nature of the soul, then I feel comfortable having them too. After all, he spent years mapping the brain and studying its functions, and yet he was unable to locate the source of the awesome energy that powers all living things.

It left him somewhat frustrated, but accepting of the mystery of life: "It is obvious that science can make no statement at present in regard to the question of man's existence after death, although every thoughtful man must ask that question," said Penfield. "Whether the mind is truly a separate element or whether, in some way not yet apparent, it is an expression of neuronal action, the decision must await for further scientific evidence."

"I'm Alive!" - A Case Study

I have another story from one of my own patients. When I am wondering about the mysterious nature of the soul and the unknown energy that sparks our lives, I think about this case. It happened to a boy I'll call Ben. This "boy" is now a forty-seven-year-old policeman, but when he was fourteen, he developed a serious case of rheumatic fever and was hospitalized for weeks at Boston Children's Hospital.

His situation continued to worsen, until one day he began experiencing severe chest pains. They became worse and worse until he could ignore them no longer. He remembers speaking to the nurse and saying that something bad was happening. He saw her run from the room to get a doctor, and then he noticed something strange: He was able to follow her. He floated behind her as she explained the situation to a doctor and then followed them as they ran back into his room to look at his body. He realized that he was looking at his own body, hovering above the whole scene like a dispassionate observer.

He looked down and saw that he was linked to his body by a silver cord that was attached to his foot. That was the only connection that he seemed to have. A few seconds earlier he had been in severe pain. Now he was floating painlessly above his body while doctors and nurses began their life-saving cardiac resuscitation.

While he watched what was going on below him, he suddenly felt as though there had been a great increase in his intelligence. He became aware of two Beings of Light, one on either side, who stayed with him as he peacefully watched the frantic scene below. He says that the presence of these beings gave him a sense of peace, love, and understanding. It wasn't as though he "knew everything," Ben now says. "It was more like I suddenly realized that life is a lot more simple than most of us think."

The doctors were losing Ben, or at least his body. They had tried everything they knew and were now pushing a long needle into his chest to inject his heart with epinephrine. As he watched this desperate procedure, the Beings of Light on either side of him asked if he wanted to stay on earth or go with them. "I want to stay," he said, watching as the doctors waited for the epinephrine to kick in.

The beings left, and Ben watched as the doctors gave up and pulled a sheet over his face. He could hear people talking in the hallway, consoling the doctors and nurses who had just lost their young patient. A student nurse remained at his bedside, softly crying. She had worked with him throughout his long hospitalization, and they had gotten to know each other quite well.

Suddenly, the Beings of Light reappeared and told him he could return to his body. Ben could hardly believe it. He thought he was dead, and from the looks of things, he was. Now the two spirits told him that he could return to his body, a body that had been left for dead by his physicians.

With what felt like a hiccup, Ben was back in his body. He threw the sheet from himself, pulled the needle from his chest, and shouted, "I'm alive!"

Recalling the story of Ben makes me realize how shallow is our understanding of the spiritual. We search and search for the source of spiritual experiences, mapping the brain to find where these phenomena occur. For the most part, we forget that it isn't so important how they happen as it is that they happen.

The great psychologist William James said that such mystical experiences as NDEs are so personal that they are beyond words. As he put it: "They are pure and simple, an experience of Light."

The source of this light may forever remain a mystery.