Comparison Of Near Death Experiences

After surviving a life-threatening experience, many people report an extraordinary experience. Due to the growth of technology and the increased research of resurrection, near death experiences are becoming more common. Each person’s experience during a near death experience may be different though similarities have been drawn between the content of near death experiences and the effect on patients. This could be due to “the subjective nature and absence of a frame of reference for this experienced lead to individual, cultural, and religious factors determining the vocabulary used to describe and interpret the experience” ( Van Lommel et al 2001). Near death experiences have been reported in circumstances such as cardiac arrest, shock in loss of blood, near drowning, attempted suicide, and apnea. Though near death experiences are most often reported after situations where death was unavoidable;
serious traffic accidents, mountaineering accidents, or isolations (Van Lommel et al 2001).
Several theories have developed for the etiology of near death experiences; physiological changes in the brain, psychological reaction to approaching death, or a combination of such reaction and anoxia, or it could be lined to changing states of consciousness. In each religion they have a different way to explain near death experiences, for the most part it is parallel to the religions own claim of what happens after death. Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity describe life after death in different ways, therefore they describe near death experiences differently. Each of these religions follows their beliefs on reincarnation or the idea of heaven to describe the events that occur during a near death experience. In Buddhism near death experiences have played a key role in both the Tibetan and Japanese traditions. The near death experiences explained in Buddhist traditions are parallel with those in the writings of the Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Descriptions of near death experiences follow closely to what is stated in the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, for example “near-death experiencers report looking down on their bodies, observing the distress of their relatives, and the activities of the medical staff (Badham 1997). As stated in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the “ person's 'consciousness-principle gets outside its body' he sees his relatives and friends gathered round weeping and watches as they remove the clothes from the body or take away the bed” (Badham 1997). A large majority of near death experiencers report seeing a radiant light, in which they feel a loving presence and sometimes a name of religious significance to the experiencers own religion. Another popularly reported experience is a review of their past life with a range of mental images. The Tibetan Book of the Dead states “the dying person seeing the radiant, pure and immutable light of Amida Buddha before passing into what is explicitly described as a world of mental-images, in which whatever is desired is fulfilled, and in which everything that is seen is in form an hallucination reflecting the karma of the percipient” (Bardham 1997). The being of light that many experiencers report in accordance to their own tradition is parallel with the Tibetan Book of the Dead as it states that the Dharma kaya (The Divine Being) of clear light appears in whatever shape will benefit all beings. This Divine Being is said to welcome the experiencer with limitless compassion into the life beyond. People of the Buddhist tradition are not fearful of death, as it is the rebirth to another life death is accepted as inevitable. For this rebirth karma is used as the driving force of determination, parallel to the Bardo stating that the experiencer is judged based upon past deeds.