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