Pim van Lommel's Essentia Foundation statement on NDEs & cardiac arrest

We also very much need to keep hold of the fact that a full NDE can take place in a healthy and normal-functioning brain. It is by recognising this that we see the brain does not cause NDE's, since they take place without any abnormality as well as in complete shutdown.

Yes but I think you may be referring in the main(?) to fear death experiences? Car crashes (just before impact etc) and falls down mountains? Whilst these are interesting, they are rarely (there are exceptions) sources of veridical evidence that might convince the sceptic that something extraordinary has occurred. 

In fact the reverse happens. They use these to rubbish the reports from people that have actually died, by inferring that what they experienced can all be experienced by someone who was nowhere near dead or anything like it.

since them occurring during cardiac arrest makes them inherently remarkable and very hard to explain.

Didn't understand the first bit but this is precisely what is so perplexing about them. And also the fact that they are remembered, when cardiac arrest is a massive insult (short term memory destroyer) to the brain (apparently they tell us) and nothing at all should be remembered.

Tim, I appreciate your point of view. I think you and I approach this topic with different interests and consequently different emphasis. For myself, it has always been the spiritual or mystical component which interests me most of all. This mirrors my personal experience of such things as dreams or answers to prayers and other experiences. Really, none of this is veridical, but it has been of the highest value and significance in my life.

There have been other things in my life which have been veridical, and these certainly shifted my viewpoint over what was possible within this reality - certain things which broke accepted scientific beliefs. So I do see the importance of the veridical material. But I don't consider it necessary or even possible for everything to be verified, and likewise It would be disrespectful to dismiss experiences of other people simply because they didn't happen to have any handy witnesses available to corroborate things. Life is just too varied to expect that.


As for 'fear death' there is a possibility of that term to be used in a misleading way, for example there may be simply be surprise rather than fear. There are other circumstances, perhaps when a person reaches some sort of critical point in their life, which may trigger some profound experience. Another area of what I call the normal brain function is the shared death experience, where a person is present at the passing of someone else. These are rarely veridical, unless there are multiple people simultaneously involved, but I would not want to disregard these simply on the grounds of it being something shared between two people, only one of whom survived to tell the tale. There is a richness to life that should be talked about, and too much emphasis on 'proof' would be limiting, in my opinion.

As I say, it's just a perspective, a point of view. I don't think there's any right or wrong in these matters.

Tim, I appreciate your point of view. I think you and I approach this topic with different interests and consequently different emphasis. For myself, it has always been the spiritual or mystical component which interests me most of all. This mirrors my personal experience of such things as dreams or answers to prayers and other experiences. Really, none of this is veridical, but it has been of the highest value and significance in my life.

There have been other things in my life which have been veridical, and these certainly shifted my viewpoint over what was possible within this reality - certain things which broke accepted scientific beliefs. So I do see the importance of the veridical material. But I don't consider it necessary or even possible for everything to be verified, and likewise It would be disrespectful to dismiss experiences of other people simply because they didn't happen to have any handy witnesses available to corroborate things. Life is just too varied to expect that.


As for 'fear death' there is a possibility of that term to be used in a misleading way, for example there may be simply be surprise rather than fear. There are other circumstances, perhaps when a person reaches some sort of critical point in their life, which may trigger some profound experience.  Another area of what I call the normal brain function is the shared death experience, where a person is present at the passing of someone else. These are rarely veridical, unless there are multiple people simultaneously involved, but I would not want to disregard these simply on the grounds of it being something shared between two people, only one of whom survived to tell the tale. There is a richness to life that should be talked about, and too much emphasis on 'proof' would be limiting, in my opinion.

As I say, it's just a perspective, a point of view. I don't think there's any right or wrong in these matters.

I don't disagree with most of that, Typoz (there are a couple of things though, but I don't want to pursue it). 

However, you're maybe inadvertently equating me (and what I think) with the scientific necessity to narrow down precisely what is being studied, hence only cardiac arrest experiences. (Parnia and his colleagues) 

I'm just trying to explain the field, it isn't necessarily my point of view, you see (it might be and then again...). I'm not sure how else I could have explained it. It doesn't matter what I think anyway.

An afterthought? I don't understand your reasoning process, how you reached that point of view.

An afterthought in the way that when people think of NDEs, the first thing that occurs to them isn't that they happen outside of cardiac arrest. And the research and discussion around them very much focus on their happening in cardiac arrest since it's the hardest to explain. It's not a bad thing, just not many people think about it.

What happened to Aware II? I thought it had concluded in 2017 but there's nothing published on it..

What happened to Aware II? I thought it had concluded in 2017 but there's nothing published on it..

As far as I know, AWARE II is still ongoing.
However, a quick online search found two relevant pages:


Originally published 11 Nov 2019
Abstract 387: Awareness and Cognitive Activity During Cardiac Arrest


And at the Aware of Aware site, this page:
https://awareofaware.co/2019/11/13/first...-aware-ii/

On that page, the comments from Tim may be of interest.

(I don't recall whether or not Tim of this forum has previously posted about this here, might be worth checking for that.)

I 'google translated' this recent interview with Pim Van Lommel. It's not quite perfect, I suspect, but it seems (at least) pretty accurate.


He calls the people with near-death experiences his greatest teachers. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel (79) is convinced that death is not the end of who you are, of your essence. "We will never find out where consciousness comes from."

Fokke Obbema  29 December 2022, 10:20

His life would have been completely different if he had not read a book in 1986, at the age of 43, with the title: Return from Tomorrow. The American psychiatrist George Ritchie tells about his double pneumonia in his student days. At the hospital, Ritchie had been pronounced dead and he already had a  sheet over him, until a nurse suggested trying an adrenaline injection into his heart at the last minute. After nine minutes he came 'back from the dead'. In his book, Ritchie recounts in detail the spectacular journey he made through time and space in those nine minutes.

Cardiologist Pim van Lommel was deeply impressed and had to think back to an event from 1969. As a cardiologist in training, he was then present at one of the first, successful Dutch resuscitations after a cardiac arrest. The medics present congratulated each other, but the patient appears to be 'deeply disappointed'. The man talks about a tunnel, colors, a beautiful landscape – the term did not yet exist, but he had a near-death experience (NDE). Van Lommel: 'I had never forgotten that, but had never done anything with it'.

Ritchie's story (provided the inertia) to get him moving. How often do such experiences occur, what is their content and how can they be interpreted, are the key questions for him. A first exploration among fifty patients immediately yields twelve stories: 'Not only did I wonder that there were so many, but also their content touched me.' In the end, his research, started in 1986, which resulted in a publication in The Lancet in 2001. Central finding: Out of a group of 344 patients who survive CPR after cardiac arrest, one in five patients has experienced a near-death experience. Thanks to the world-famous magazine, Van Lommel is world news for a while.

His personal views on his profession, science, but also on life and death have changed as a result of his NDE research. Raised in a secular Gooi family ('a privileged, intellectual environment') in which death was seen as the end of everything, he is forced by the stories of his patients ('my teachers') to revise fundamental views.
In 2003, at the age of 60, he took early retirement to write his book Endless Consciousness. This has now been translated into eleven languages and 350 thousand copies have been sold. As a 79-year-old, he still works two to six hours in his stately mansion in Velp, Gelderland, because NDE questions and testimonies keep coming to him. 'I'm going to continue with it because I think it's important that this story is told. It provides a different view of our existence.'

What fascinated you so much in near-death experiences?
'Scientifically, they stimulated my curiosity, because they went against what I had learned, namely that consciousness is the product of the brain. If that were the case, then in a cardiac arrest you would not be able to have memories and experiences, no emotions, no clear thinking, in short, no consciousness to experience. Because everything falls away within twenty seconds: the blood flow, every electrical activity in the brain. The prevailing view is that electrical activity is a prerequisite for consciousness. But the special thing now is that people who go through an NDE experience a much clearer awareness – they can talk for a week about what they have experienced in a few minutes of cardiac arrest.

'I was also fascinated on a human level. Patients told me their stories with great intensity, they felt that I was really open to them. In terms of content, their stories were different, but there were common elements in them, such as seeing their whole life again, contact with deceased loved ones, stepping outside their bodies, euphoric experiences of love, the loss of time and space, seeing through the past and future.'

Your interest in near-death experiences also evoked resistance and skepticism.
'I hardly had any resistance in the research phase. Within my partnership of cardiologists, not everyone was happy with it, but it was not a source of tension. I did it in my own time. And besides: if you are busy with something full of your heart, it does not matter that some people have problems with it, do they?
'Criticism has occasionally kept me awake. Our publication in The Lancet was accompanied, without my knowledge, by a comment by a scientist who claimed that our findings could also be explained by hallucinations or oxygen deficiency in the brain. Incorrect, I was very unhappy about that. But in principle, I can handle criticism well. When brain scientists turn against me, I just think: they're attacking the messenger.'

You assume the existence of a 'non-local consciousness'. Can that ever be proven?
'The big problem with current materialistic science is that only what you can measure, falsify, replicate counts. But what you feel and think, your emotions and your thoughts, that cannot be demonstrated objectively. Thus, consciousness falls outside the usual field of vision, because it takes place in a different dimension than the physical world. But that's not to say it's not there. I believe in postmaterialistic science in which subjective experiences are taken seriously. In the consciousness research of the last fifteen years you see that becoming increasingly important. The resistance to it is motivated by fear.'

What are scientists afraid of?
'That they have been wrong all their lives. It is beyond their frame of mind that consciousness is separate from the body and that there is no beginning or end to it. If they admit it, their entire worldview is turned upside down. Man, and certainly the scientist, likes to stick to dogmas and concepts. What gives him a foothold in existence, he absolutely does not want to lose.'

Wasn't that also true for you?
'For me, curiosity was paramount. My definition of science is: asking questions with an open mind. Forget the dogmas, forget the concepts that lead to tunnel vision. I have no fear. That also has to do with the disappearance of my fear of death. If it is no longer there, you have no fear of life.'

So how do you look at death?
"It is the end of your body, but not the end of who you are, not of your essence, your consciousness. I used to think: it's the end of everything, because that's how I learned it at school and during my studies. My new insight means that I have no fear of life either. Fear of death is also a fear of life: the fear of the unknown, of what is to come, that is gone.'

For you as a cardiologist, it must have been a big step, embracing an afterlife.
'I'm not saying that either, I'm talking about a consciousness after death. Life is a biological principle and that ends with the death of the body. So there is no life after death, but there is continuity of our consciousness.'

From your background, that remains a big step.
'That's right, that was completely new, I didn't grow up with that. But through my research, my interest in existential questions has also grown. I have undertaken a tour of all kinds of sources. In particular, I wanted to know: if consciousness is not a product of the brain, what is it?'

Where did you consult?
'The people with near-death experiences have been my greatest teachers. They have set me on the path to see it as something much bigger, thanks to their experiences with an expanded consciousness. If channel 1 is open with us, channels 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also open with them. They can receive all kinds of extra information outside of their senses, they often have a heightened intuition and sometimes see things in the future.
"The notion that consciousness is non-local, I have also encountered in the Upanishads, thousands of years old Hindu scriptures. In it you can read that there was never a time when the mind was not there. But I also found it with Plato who sees the body as the temporary carrier of an immortal soul. Or in the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, who talks about the Akashic field, in which past, present and future are stored.

"Elsewhere in the world you will find people who live with the firm conviction that death does not stop, just as they live with their ancestors with whom they have contact through a shaman. We have forgotten that in the Western world. My wife and I have met such people in Tibet and in India. There it is much more accepted. With us you threaten to become an outcast because of an NDE, in India you are congratulated with it.
'That tour of all kinds of sources helped me – it has increasingly fallen into place. The insight about a non-local consciousness is nothing new, as has become clear to me, only in this part of the world we have lost sight of it.'

Does your break with traditional science also stem from your lack of fear of death?
'I think so, yes. The vision of death determines how we stand in life, wrote Dag Hammarskjöld (former Secretary-General of the United Nations, ed.).'

What does that mean in concrete terms?
'From people with an NDE you can learn that life is about how we deal with each other, with nature, with animals, with the earth. And how important unconditional love and empathy for yourself are. So life is not about a nice house, an expensive car and four times a year on holiday. You learn that everything is connected and that your consciousness is part of a larger whole. What you do to someone else comes back to you, for better or for worse.'

Have you taken a different view of God?
"I don't use that word myself, but if people use it for the highest state of consciousness, I can follow them. Although that state goes far beyond our imagination. But people can call that God, I understand that.'

So the question of whether it exists, you don't answer?
'No, but I am convinced that the highest form of consciousness exists. There are degrees of consciousness, I don't know exactly how that works. The source of life, its mystery, we will never be able to understand. Just like we never find out where consciousness comes from.'

That is a firm statement.
'That is simply beyond our capabilities. As soon as you start to explore consciousness, our consciousness remains the limiting factor. It is fundamental to me in the universe, the source of all matter, but where does it come from? You won't find out. You cannot come out of consciousness and beyond consciousness, because you are in it. My insight now is that it is endless and the source of everything.'

Cardiologist Pim van Lommel: 'There is no life after death, but there is continuity of consciousness' (volkskrant.nl)

[Ninshub]

Thanks for the effort, tim.

Thanks for the effort, tim.

No worrries, Ian. I could have polished it up a bit based on what I know he is saying (from past interviews) but I only made a  couple of slight adjustments, which were obvious.