Veridical NDE as the ultimate evidence

January 5, 2026

Hi All!

It is quite some time ago when I posted my last contribution to this forum. There were all sorts of circumstances, mainly to do with my health, why I somehow forgot all about Psciencequest, but when I ran through the multitude of the websites I had visited through the years I all of sudden encountered this Forum again. And yes, I am ready to again contribute my views and possible expertise for scrutiny by you, dear participants of Pscience Quest!

Okay, here we go!

I am pleased to announce a major achievement regarding the book The Self Does Not Die that my collaborator Titus Rivas and I (and the late Anny Dirven) published via the International Association for Near-Death Studies in 2016. This book focusses mainly on the so named Veridical Near-Death Experiences, a type of experience which is about highly truthful observations made by the experiencer during the period that he/she is clinically dead. That is: no hart beat, no breathing, no measurable brain activity...  In short, a condition which will undeniably lead to real death if not medically interfered with - resuscitation and all that.

Over the years The Self Does Not Die enjoyed a relatively large audience: more than 6000 copies have been sold thus far. Two English as well as two Spanish editions have been published and also one Italian edition. Currently we are working on a third edition, hopefully becoming available sometimes this or next year.
In all it contains 128 cases which is considerably more than the 78 we started with in the original Dutch version published in 2013.
In due course I will highlight some of the most spectacular cases we encountered, and which make abundantly clear that most likely conscienceness operates independently of the fysical body and apparently appears to "live on" after the fysical body dies.

Well, our findings seem so convincing to many scholars, even more enlightened skeptics, that pretty recently the book received two awards:
1. from the Scientific and Medical Network(SMN) for the year 2024, and
2. from the Parapsychological Association of America, also for 2024.

As for the SMN, this is an organisation of over 3000 academics and medical scientists from all over the world, with their head office in London. Their verdict: an important and very rigourisly researched work!
As for the PA, their verdict is similar.

Of course, Titus and I are extremely pleased with this, as we see,  scientific recognition.

Hence, the veridical NDE is so far the best evidence for the reality of this phenomenon, and realisation that (fysical) death is not the end of the soul.
Best wishes to all, and... watch this space!

Smithy

Very good to hear from you, @Smithy ! I'm glad your work has received recognition. Looking forward to hearing more.

Thanks Typoz! That makes me feel welcome!

Now, as promised I will present on this forum some tellling cases as presented in our book The Self Does Not Die.
To  begin with, a few months ago I had a dispute with a skeptic who refused to take veridical NDE's seriously. All hallucinations, and/or lost memories... and more of that crap.
As the man happened to be a man of numbers (working every day in finances) I then confronted him with case below:

"The twelve digit number

The documentary Beyond the Light highlights a case reported by Norma Bowe, PhD, a professor in the College of Education at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and a registered nurse. When Bowe was employed as a nurse in ERs and ICUs, she dealt with many patients. She was regularly confronted by fatalities.
In the neurology ICU, she once encountered a patient with a stitched-up head wound who had had an OBE. The woman came to Nurse Bowe’s unit in a coma. She remained in a coma for several weeks. During that time, she had a cardiac arrest from which a team resuscitated her after repeated attempts in the ER. When the patient came out of her coma, she was unhooked from the apparatuses that had kept her alive. The patient claimed that she had had an OBE, during which she had observed the room from above. Because Bowe was familiar with this kind of story, she did not attach much significance to it, and so she was only half-istening to the patient. The patient, however, turned out to be suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that centered on remembering numbers, and this feature did catch Bowe’s attention. The patient compulsively tried to commit to memory every number she came across. The woman claimed that during her OBE, she had imprinted in her memory the serial number of the respirator, which was to be found on the top of the machine. At the time, respirators were some six feet in height. The patient chanted the number, comprising 12 digits. Bowe and her colleagues wrote the number down but thought no more of it.
One day, the respiratory specialist came to take the machine from the room because the patient did not need it any more. A custodial staff member was therefore called to dust the top of the respirator. A ladder was needed to reach it. The man who dusted the machine proceeded to read out exactly the same number as the one the patient had observed from above. (Bowe seems to imply that this happened after she had asked for the number, although it can also be understood that the custodian simply recited the number of his own accord.)"

So far... I confronted the skeptic with this case:
You are a man of numbers, so then you will understand that guessing correctly a number of 12 digits is a chance of one trillion to one. You still think that this is just a hallucination?
The man shut up in embarrasment...

More cases to follow.

Smithy

Thanks Typoz! That makes me feel welcome!

Now, as promised I will present on this forum some tellling cases as presented in our book The Self Does Not Die.
To  begin with, a few months ago I had a dispute with a skeptic who refused to take veridical NDE's seriously. All hallucinations, and/or lost memories... and more of that crap.
As the man happened to be a man of numbers (working every day in finances) I then confronted him with case below:

"The twelve digit number

The documentary Beyond the Light highlights a case reported by Norma Bowe, PhD, a professor in the College of Education at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and a registered nurse. When Bowe was employed as a nurse in ERs and ICUs, she dealt with many patients. She was regularly confronted by fatalities.
In the neurology ICU, she once encountered a patient with a stitched-up head wound who had had an OBE. The woman came to Nurse Bowe’s unit in a coma. She remained in a coma for several weeks. During that time, she had a cardiac arrest from which a team resuscitated her after repeated attempts in the ER. When the patient came out of her coma, she was unhooked from the apparatuses that had kept her alive. The patient claimed that she had had an OBE, during which she had observed the room from above. Because Bowe was familiar with this kind of story, she did not attach much significance to it, and so she was only half-istening to the patient. The patient, however, turned out to be suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that centered on remembering numbers, and this feature did catch Bowe’s attention. The patient compulsively tried to commit to memory every number she came across. The woman claimed that during her OBE, she had imprinted in her memory the serial number of the respirator, which was to be found on the top of the machine. At the time, respirators were some six feet in height. The patient chanted the number, comprising 12 digits. Bowe and her colleagues wrote the number down but thought no more of it.
One day, the respiratory specialist came to take the machine from the room because the patient did not need it any more. A custodial staff member was therefore called to dust the top of the respirator. A ladder was needed to reach it. The man who dusted the machine proceeded to read out exactly the same number as the one the patient had observed from above. (Bowe seems to imply that this happened after she had asked for the number, although it can also be understood that the custodian simply recited the number of his own accord.)"

So far... I confronted the skeptic with this case:
You are a man of numbers, so then you will understand that guessing correctly a number of 12 digits is a chance of one trillion to one. You still think that this is just a hallucination?
The man shut up in embarrasment...

More cases to follow.

Smithy

Im sorry but this account sounds ridiculous . “The man shut up in embarrassment”? … yeah ok.

so the custodian was called in to “dust off” the machine and either spontaneously decided to recite the serial number out loud at the same time the nurse was present . Why would he do that. Or she asked . 

lol

the custodian would remove the machine . Not walk in with a duster 

and if she has OCD, I’m to believe her soul, now disembodied, would still have OCD , to need to remember the numbers , then come back to the body and have an urge to recite the numbers ?

what ?

Hello Bill,

There is nothing ridiculous about it. It happened, period!

However, your criticism is justified.

What you have seen is the report in the first edition of our book. I overlooked that, sorry. 

Because for the second edition we made some additional queries, and added the results to the story.

"When the worker arrived [to remove the machine] the nurses asked if he would not mind climbing the top to see if there was a serial numner up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that there was indeed a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off the layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited."

In response to a chat on August 13, 2020, whether the NDE story of the lady who could read the serial number of respirator was 100% real, Bowe wrote:

"Absolutely real. Yep. It really happened... She [the patient] said that while she was "clinically dead", that period of time when her heart had stopped, that she floated to up to the top of the room and was looking down. That is how she saw the number on the machine. "

Okay, I hope this will satisfy you.  If not... ah well... can't do much more about....

Smithy

I also consider veridical data to be an ultimate form of evidence. Thank you for compiling all of that into a book, and congrats on your recognition.

I'm sure you have considered some of the following, and I would love to hear your opinions.

1. At what point do you think these memories are formed? With the brain being offline, what we understand about memory consolidation no longer applies. Edit: And just this morning Sky Labs was announcing new data on how 'instant memory' is formed. I also had to think of the Remote Viewing memory 'unfolding' after it arrives in a bulk or compressed format.

2. What would you estimate the number of possible "telepathic" transfers of data to be, if these people are then getting the veridical data from others who were present at the time? This would open up a possible "other" method of getting this type of data, since the people supplying this data were in an obvious altered state of consciousness. The perspective or view from the person supplying this data could then also be a processing or consolidation memory, patched together in a way similar to dreams. At that point, the actual time of consolidation has nothing to do with the NDE time, because transfer of data is aligned with the time the person observed that data. The NDE subject would likely perceive this data as having a past and being aligned with the time the original person observed it.

3. Has anyone looked at other parts of the body for activity during this time, such as reactivity in Meridians?

The only issue with reading the 12 digit number, that I can fathom, is that this is not actually an unknown thing, but it is somewhere in the mind of someone, whether they remember it or not. So, if telepathic transfer is a thing, or a record of everything is made at some level, a Medium or Telepath could likely pick it out of the Akashic records, or the memories of the living.

As you can see, I am leaning towards other methods of gleaning this information or having these experiences. This is not based on any science experiments I know of, but on my own experiences in receiving information.

Thanks Warddurward!
Gee, this is quite somethingh you are bringing up here!
Let me think about it.

Soon I will also post another highly interesting case.

Cheers - Smithy

Hallo Wardduward,

Thanks again for your long response.

To be honest, I found it somewhat overwhelming. Anyway, I will try to form an answer to your points.

Re point one... I have no real idea where and when these memories are formed. I only know they ARE formed and next placed in the physical brain.

Re point two... What you are saying here sounds very much like "Super PSI", a hypothesis that long ago was proposed but, as far as I know, is not taken seriously any longer by most researchers into the paranormal. It really seems too far fetched to consider the possibility of a remote someone who just happens to know that that twelve digit number, and whose memory of that number was just picked up by the subject of this story.
Besides, she was very adamant that she had become aware of that number while her "self" was floating around in her hospital room. There are too many of such stories in our book The Self Does Not Die, to believe that her experience was strictly unique.

Re point three... I am not aware of anyone looking at other parts of her body, such as reactivity in Meridians. This was an ordinary hospital not one specialized in acupuncture or something like that.

Re your last comment... I do not think that telepathy could explain all this. Therefore the details are too complicit. From what I know about telepathic observations is that they are usually rather vague...

Well, I am afraid I did not answer your questions to your full satisfaction. I am sorry for that.

Cheers - Smithy

Hello All!

As promised I now present another case in our book The Self Does Not Die:

CASE 3.33 Howard

Critical care physician Laurin Bellg, in Appleton, Wisconsin, headed up the team that was treating a chronic alcoholic who had had a cardiac arrest, a patient she called Howard in her book Near Death in the ICU (Bellg, 2015). She administered magnesium to him, but he also needed to be defibrillated. Only after four attempts did he once again show a normal heart rhythm, even though he still had no pulse. Apparently, a portion of his intestines had been removed two days earlier because, as a result of his alcoholism, the blood vessels had become diseased and occluded.

The operation had been successful, but afterward he began having withdrawal symptoms. Following resuscitation, he was placed on a ventilator, and it was not until five days later that he was sufficiently recovered to begin to be weaned off of it. Meanwhile, on the ventilator and thus unable to talk, he had tried to convey something about an NDE but got no further than spelling out the words “green shirt” by pointing to the letters on a letter board and then pointing at Dr. Bellg. At that moment, she was indeed wearing a green shirt but did not understand why this fact was significant.

Once the patient was off artificial ventilation and able to talk, he described who had been present at his resuscitation, what they had worn, and what they had said. The events he perceived had occurred when he certainly must have been unconscious. Bellg was particularly impressed by the detail of his visual observations, which he had made from up above. He provided a thorough description of the resuscitation from the beginning.

Early in his NDE, Howard felt himself shoot out of his head:
I felt myself rising up through the ceiling and it was like I was going through the structure of the building. I could feel the diff erent densities of passing through insulation. I saw wiring, some pipes and then I was in this other room. It looked like a hospital but it was different. [ . . . ] It was very quiet and it seemed like no one was there. There were individual rooms all around the edge and on some of the beds were these people, except they were not people, exactly. They looked like mannequins and they had IVs hooked up to them but they didn’t look real. In the center was an open area that looked like a collection of work stations with computers.

Dr. Bellg wrote:
That’s when my jaw really dropped. I stole a look at the nurse who looked equally surprised. What we knew that Howard didn’t, is that right above the ICU is a nurse-training center where new hires spend a few days rotating through diff erent scenarios. There are simulated hospital rooms around the perimeter with medical mannequins on some of the beds. In the center there is indeed a collection of workspaces with computers. I was amazed, but I was all in and I wanted to hear more.

Then Howard also correctly recounted exactly what Bellg had said during the fibrillation. His attention was drawn most by a lime-green shirt that she had worn that day. She was wearing the same shirt again on the day when Howard had tried to communicate about his NDE by means of the letter board.

So far this report. Naturally, this was not accepted by various skeptics. I also had some questions. On August 22, 2016, Laurin responded thus:

"Skeptics frustrate and amuse me. I have come to accept that people who are determined not to believe, won't believe.  They miss the point - the transformative nature of what happened to these people and its ability to change them.  We won't ever be able to prove definitively at his point in our human evolution, so I have stopped trying.  The real power of these experiences is how what happened changed the experiencer. We know that.  Skeptics don't understand that.

For the record, that learning center is restricted and you can only get in through the hydraulic doors if you activate an electronic pad with your badge that has a key-card built into it.  The key-card is programed by security specifically for you and your job.  For instance, my badge won't let me into an operating room because I am not a surgeon and have no business being there. 
On the rare occasion I am called to the OR to do a bronchoscopy, a surgical assistant meets me at the door, hands me protective clothing and I wheel my bronchoscopy cart to the head of the patient - the part that is not sterile.

Howard had never been in our hospital for treatment, but even if he had, patients don't have badges with keycards so he wouldnt have been able to get into the learning center.
I don't recall his job, but he didn't work locally. He was from a town an hour northwest of us. We are a large referral hospital and pull in the very ill patients from five other smaller hospitals in our region. But again, If the skeptics are asking about his job to make the supposition that perhaps he had worked on the room when it was being built, the fact that Howard was still able
to describe his resuscitation and what I was wearing speaks to its validity.
Even if they consider that, it's powerful proof. But they won't - they're skeptics. They have made a choice to disbelieve and are likely always to be skeptical unless they have a direct personal experience themselves. That's why I just tell the stories and don't try to prove it. It will always be hard to prove for people who have decided not to believe."

As regards some other criticisms Laurin wrote this to me that she always asks a patient whether she may write down all the details of the patient's NDE.  And will next check these details with the patient and witnesses. This makes it solid proof.

Again, this is one of the most compelling cases in our book The Self Does Not Die. If some people still won't accept it as fact... that's too bad then...

Okay - this will be all for the time being. I hope for some sensible comments.

Cheers - Smithy

That's a very interesting case. It reminds me of an attempted explanation of these phenomena that I used to hear. Sometimes it was claimed that during the NDE the person was simply picking up telepathic impressions from the living people around them, in effect viewing the world through the eyes of the people nearby. But that explanation falls down, usually because there is no living person viewing the scene from somewhere up near the ceiling or an upper corner of the room. Even more so in this case of Howard since he visited another part of the building and observed things there. It makes more sense to simply listen to his own account, that his consciousness or self moved around, feeling himself passing though the different material structures of the building and actually visited that place.