A person on the operating table. The heart stops for a few minutes, the team fights for him, and in the end he comes back. And as he recovers, he tells something strange. He saw himself from above. Passed through a tunnel. Felt a calm with no name, met a light. And when he returns to the body, he’s completely convinced it was real, more real than the room he’s lying in now.
Stories like this recur, across different cultures, from people who never knew each other. The resemblance between them is intriguing. And here too, as always, the question isn’t only what people experience, but what may and may not be concluded from it.
What science knows, and where it’s careful
Start with the solid part. Near-death experiences are a real, documented phenomenon. People genuinely report them, and the reports are consistent enough to be studied. This is neither an invention nor a lie.
What science can say is that there’s a correlation between these experiences and extreme states of the brain: lack of oxygen, the release of certain substances, unusual activity in areas tied to body-sense and memory. All of these could, in principle, produce a sense of floating, a tunnel, calm. But here we have to stop and be honest in both directions. On one side, “there’s a correlation to a brain state” doesn’t mean “we’ve proven it’s only an illusion.” On the other, “the experience felt very real” doesn’t mean “so it’s true.” An inner sense of certainty, even the strongest, is not evidence of what actually happened. We learned that already from the dream.
Where it leaps into interpretation
And here is exactly where the minefield begins. Some say: the experiences prove there’s life after death. And some say: the experiences prove it’s all in the head, just the chemistry of a dying brain. Both sides claim more than the data give.
What can honestly be said is more modest. The experiences are real as experiences. They’re consistent. Their cause is still unclear, and whether they’re a “window” into something or a “product” of an extreme state stays open. This isn’t a lazy tie, it’s simply the real state of knowledge as of today. Anyone who closes the question one way or the other does it out of belief, not out of data.
What tradition offers
The intuition that there are moments of passage in which the link between who we are and the world weakens, without who we are disappearing, is ancient and shared by many traditions. Descriptions of passage, of light, of meeting, appear among different peoples, sometimes in strikingly close language. In the Jewish phrasing there’s talk of a soul departing, of a moment of parting, in images it’s very common to read as a picture and not as testimony. Not a scientific statement about what happens in the brain, and obviously not evidence of what’s beyond it. It’s an entirely different language that maybe feels out the same place: that there is a threshold, and that something in it is experienced as a passage and not as an end. We point at the resemblance between the descriptions, and leave it to you to decide whether it hints at something shared, or only at a human brain built much the same everywhere.
To close
Go back to that person who came back from the table and was convinced what he saw was more real than the room. His certainty is entirely real. Whether it testifies to the world or to the brain is exactly the thing no one yet knows how to settle, and anyone who claims to settle it for you is selling you more certainty than they have.
So, to close, a question: when an experience feels more real than ordinary reality, what does that teach you, about what lies beyond, or about how much the sense of “real” is itself something the brain produces?