Mystical Knowledge and Near-Death Experience

Abstract

There is inherent irony in the conceptual relationship between Near Death Experience (NDE) and the mystical: death is not normally the means by which an individual seeks mystical insights even if, in analogical language, death is a metaphor representing transformation. There is immediate tension in the suggestion that dying is a possible condition for certain types of mystical knowledge, or a necessary circumstance for life-changing perceptions. The major proviso for such knowledge is that the individual not die but return to life animated with a new vision of what-is. This tension between near death and a return to altered life is rarely mediated by choice-who would choose physical death as a means for mystical knowledge? And yet, the literature clearly illustrates that dying persons have NDEs that are highly transformative, even transcendent, so in a very basic sense, death is not prohibitive of mystical knowledge. By death, I am referring to the clinical descriptors of death: no heartbeat, no respiration, no eye-reflex, no measureable brain activity. However, dying is a process, a dynamic series of biological stages and degrees of subtle loss and increasing paralysis, which may, under optimal circumstances, be halted and result in revival and resuscitation. It is this in-between phase of neither fully alive nor fully dead that provides an opening to alternate landscapes whose transphysical contours suggest a much more vast and complex realm of human perceptions than currently recognized by normative physicalist accounts of embodied awareness.