thank you for sharing this personal experience, and of course for your compliment.

I didn’t know about the existence of people having had a ‘bad trip’, but I agree with you that this indeed would not mean that people actually went to hell, or are destined to do so.

It occurs to me that we even should be careful not to moralize the trinity of people who did not have an near death experience, had a positive experience, or a bad one. It would be too easy for some (religious?) people to argue that it has already been made up who is destined to go where after the earthly life.

Nevertheless, as you point out in your reaction, there is much more to the occurrence of near death experiences than is covered in my post. Basically, all distinct elements have been replicated artificially, while it hasn’t been possible to replicate `full’ near death experiences.

I agree with you. My mother had one of those, and she told me she could actually “see” people trying to reanimate her. Anoxia has been proposed as a possible explanation for these experiences quite a long time ago, and still looks to me like the most probable explanation. In fact, there is a tiny minority of people, probably not picked up here, who had a “bad trip” – went to hell, so to speak, rather than heaven. Does this necessarily imply there is a hell?

Many more people do not go somewhere else, they seem to “stay in one corner of the room” and observe the whole resuscitation process.
There is only one thing all these people have in common: they have a very peculiar experience, and they all had some form of anoxia – usually, but not always, brought about by a heart attack.

So jumping from there to the existence of paradise is a little preposterous.

P.S. I found you through ResearchBlogging. Nice article.

The thing is, which I indeed did not point out in my post above, is that some of the people experiencing a cardiac arrest are able to remember details of what happened during the resuscitation. According to the -blood-pressure-too-low theory, that would not be possible.

Indeed, many of the experiences can take place when blood pressure is dropping. The tunnel and the white light is a very good example of that, for it is (possibly) due to increasing anoxia in people’s retina.