Losing fear, getting peace

In the present issue of SPR, Professor Rubino Pedersen ponders on his personal experience of happiness and peace after a stroke attack, preceded by a long-lasting coma. After lengthy autobiographical investigations, he writes of his discovery of the discussions of NDE, Near Death Experience, a cluster of symptoms that fit well to his own experience. In addition to this, Professor Rubino Pedersen also makes an important point about the failing communication between the research fields.

Indeed, a lot has been published about NDE, a profound, existential experience that, according to Karl Jaspers, can be defined as a kind of limit experience. It includes often shattering feelings of transcendence of space, time and perceptual boundaries. Separation of mind from body, altered perception of time, space and memory revival are among its common components. Most frequently reported are strong positive affects, such as happiness and peace, empathy and unconditioned love. Seeing others from this and the otherworld in bright light or cosmic unity are repeating dimensions of NDE. Several people have reported reception of some extraordinary knowledge of existence and of safe trespassing across the boundary between life and death. The NDE experiences are for the most positive, though also some distressing events are narrated about. Constitutive for the pattern is that the symptoms arouse after ‘nearness of death’, in the situations after trauma, shock, anaesthesia, or generally after having encountered death in one way or another. According to several researchers, the common after-effect, reported by almost all who have an NDE, is a total loss or a diminished fear of death and feelings of peace (Holden, Greyson and James 2009).

The first psychological reports of NDE were published by William James and the research team around him in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Before that similar type of experiences have been presented in