Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about consciousness, death, and the research we explore together
Near-Death Experiences
What exactly is a near-death experience?
It is an unusual experience, often with mystical or spiritual elements, which takes place on the brink of death and then recalled by an individual when they recover.
Many NDEs take place after injury and particularly during medical operations when an individual often leaves their body and undergoes Out Of The Body Experiences.
Many NDEs contain similarities such as leaving the body, travelling down a tunnel or passageway into intense light after which there are meetings with other beings, travel in idyllic surroundings and sometimes teachings.
Are NDEs just hallucinations caused by a dying brain?
This is a widely-held view by scientists and medical professionals. NDEs are often attributed to a dwindling oxygen supply to the brain or other chemical changes occurring at the end of life. However, there are alternative explanations.
The rationale offered by those studying occult and esoteric traditions is that consciousness is neither produced by nor confined to the brain. Therefore, even when there is no brain activity consciousness persists in non-physical realms such as the astral plane.
Over the past decades, thanks to improvements in medical techniques, many people who would have previously died from illness or injury have survived. A significant proportion of these report NDEs.
Far from being hallucinatory, many people see these as very real experiences and in many cases these can have a profound transformational effect. Sometimes people with no previous spiritual aspiration are utterly changed by the experience. In some instances NDEs have led to major changes in beliefs and lifestyle with deeply materialistic people abandoning their careers or possessions.
Many NDEs have strikingly similar features with individuals leaving their bodies, moving down a tunnel or passage into intense light where they are met by wise beings or family members and shown beautiful landscapes.
Can anyone have a near-death experience?
NDEs have been reported across all continents by people of all ethnicities, ages and social groups regardless of their religious beliefs. For the vast majority it is pleasant experience but seems to have deep and lasting effects on all those who experience these states.
Dr Melvin Morse, a paediatrician studying children, commented: ‘It doesn’t matter who has the experience – marines, punk rockers, real-estate agents, corporate executives, housewives, ministers or holy men – they are all transformed by their exposure to the light.
Shared Death Experiences
If I go into the afterlife with my loved one in the Shared Death Experience, is there any risk that I won’t come back?
No, the Shared Crossing Research Initiative’s has deeply analyzed over 500 share death experience accounts and while some experiencers report seeing a boundary beyond which they cannot go, no one has reported concern about their ability to return to their human life.
What is the difference between and Shared Death Experience and a Near-Death Experience
The phenomena in each the NDE and SDE are quite similar because each is encountering the post-mortem reality but from a slightly different perspective. In the NDE the experiencer is typically having a personal brush with death while in the SDE the experiencer is gaining access to this same post-mortem reality by, as it were, observing or accompanying the transitioning soul/spirit as they journey into and through this post-death reality.
Who has SDEs? Why do some people have them and others not?
Why some people have SDEs and others don’t is a great mystery and currently under investigation by the Shared Crossing Research Initiative. Most shared death experiencers have a strong relationship bond with transitioning soul/spirit.
Experiencers tend to identify as spiritual and value mindfulness and open-mindedness. Experiencers tend to have an acceptance of death as natural part of life.
After-Death Communications
What are after-death communications?
An after-death communication (ADC) occurs when a person unexpectedly perceives a deceased person through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, or touch. Very commonly, people who have an ADC (called recipients) simply sense the presence of the deceased. They know exactly where they are in space, as if they had a certain density, almost physical though invisible.
ADCs occur during wakefulness, during sleep, when falling asleep (in a hypnagogic state of consciousness) or upon waking up (in a hypnopompic state of consciousness).
ADCs are:
• Spontaneous: contacts allegedly initiated by the deceased, without initiation by or solicitation from the recipients;
• Direct: without intervention of spirit mediums, EMDR, hypnosis, the use of devices (Ouija, Instrumental Transcommunication, ITC, etc.), or an otherwise mediated contact.
ADCs are much more than just a fleeting perception of the deceased (contacts usually last only a few seconds, or a few minutes at most). In the eyes of the recipients, the mere fact of having an ADC is in itself a message: that deceased loved ones still seem to have the ability to manifest themselves, implying that they continue to exist in another world beyond human understanding.
In addition, a large majority has perceived personalised messages from the deceased. The most common message – and undoubtedly the most important one for family and friends – is the information that they have survived the death of their body, that they are alive and well.
Messages usually convey love and comfort. The deceased reassure their loves ones of their support during the difficult period of mourning and beyond. They encourage them to emerge from their sadness, offering a prospect of a future reunion. When the relationship between the recipient and the deceased was conflictual, the contacts often serve as requests or offers of forgiveness.
Who experiences an ADC and when? We may all have an ADC at some point in our lives, following the loss of a significant other or unrelated to a death. These contacts occur completely unexpectedly.
The preconceived idea is that they take place when bereaved individuals, in deep despair, implore their loved ones to manifest themselves. This does not match the research findings. We cannot cause an ADC at will, nor can we deliberately make it happen.
They typically occur when the recipients are busy with their daily life, working, chatting with a friend, or doing homework with their children. They expect nothing, hope for nothing, and are often overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the experience they receive as an unexpected gift.
ADCs often occur very soon after death, as if they serve to help the recently bereaved cope with the shock of their loss. They offer immediate and deep comfort, allowing them to realise that although the physical body has reached the end of its journey, the consciousness (or essence, soul, etc.) of their loved one has survived physical death.
Approximately half of all experiences occur within a year of death, with a high concentration in the first 24 hours and up to seven days after the passing. Other contacts take place with decreasing frequency from two to five years after death.
However, ADCs can occur much later, sometimes even decades after the demise, although they are rarer. For those who are hoping for a contact with a loved one that has not yet happened, do not be discouraged, because it may still happen, sometimes as an unexpected gift that you no longer expected.
The fact of being a believer, agnostic or atheist does not in any way influence the nature of the ADC, nor the probability of experiencing it. A pre-existing belief in the survival of consciousness after physical death is by no means a prerequisite for experiencing an ADC.
To date, science is not (yet) able to explain how these experiences occur, nor why a large number of people have them and others do not.
How common are after-death communications?
Perceiving the deceased seems to be an inherent human ability. Reports of spontaneous after-death communications have been collected on all continents and apparently go back as far as historical records can take us into the past. Perhaps the earliest of all recorded ADCs purportedly occurred in 1963 BCE in ancient Egypt (Bourke, D. (2024), Apparitions at the Moment of Death).
ADCs are common, with an estimated prevalence of between 30 and 35% of people experiencing one or more ADC during their lifetime. This figure rises as high as 70 to 80% among bereaved individuals (Streit-Horn et al., 2022).
Given the frequency and nature of these experiences, it is time to move away from calling them anomalous, unusual, exceptional, or paranormal and to recognize them for what they are – common, normal, natural and healthy human experiences.
It is important to normalize these contacts, so that recipients can freely share them with others, if they so wish, without fear of being stigmatized in any way.
As long as ADCs remain a hidden phenomenon, experienced by many but rarely discussed in the media or public discourse, it will be difficult to talk about one’s own ADC. This must change, as we can all benefit from these positive, enriching and transformative experiences.
Could these experiences just be grief-induced imagination?
This is the first explanation that comes to mind. When we lose a loved one and we believe, or at least hope, that there is life after death, we naturally feel the desire, even the need, to receive a sign from them, a final message, a last word of love. The grief is so deep, their physical absence so painful, that we desperately long for that last contact.
Should we therefore assume that ADCs are merely an illusion, self-generated by people deeply affected by the loss of a loved one? An unconscious compensation due to the grief of bereavement? Research tells a different story and refutes the main argument put forward by materialists, who consider ADCs to be mere grief-induced imaginings or hallucinations.
A long-term, large-scale international investigation currently underway, involving more than 1,300 participants to date, has demonstrated that in many circumstances, grief cannot be the trigger for the ADC.
Just over a quarter (27%) of survey participants were no longer grieving, or had never grieved the perceived deceased (Elsaesser, 2023). Also, there are cases where recipients claim to have been informed of the death of a family member or friend by the recently deceased himself or herself (21% of survey participants). These experiences precede the announcement of the death (by the hospital, family, etc.).
The time for tears will surely come, but at the time of the ADC, they were not yet in mourning.
Another form of spontaneous contacts are ADCs for a third party, when the recipient, who is not grieving for the perceived deceased or doesn’t even know him or her, perceives a communication intended for a third person who is bereaved, typically a family member or a friend. The messages to be transmitted usually serve to inform the beneficiary that the deceased is alive and well.
In other circumstances, when recipients perceive an unknown deceased person (which happens in a small minority of cases), they are obviously not in mourning, and yet the ADC occurs.
These different types of situations demonstrate that recipients are not always in mourning and that grief cannot be the trigger for ADCs in these circumstances.
Recipients learn an essential lesson during the contact, namely that it is not a final goodbye or a last word of love. ADCs enable recipients to become fully aware that the bond with their loved one has not been severed by physical death, but that it endures.
Their relationship continues, albeit in a transformed and metamorphosed way. ADCs are the brief, rare and precious materialization of this ongoing bond that nothing can ever break.
It is this information and the intensity of positive emotions felt and perceived by the recipients that give ADCs their full meaning and profoundly transformative nature.
Mediumship & Survival
How do you study mediumship scientifically?
Real-world experiences happen in complicated circumstances, and this makes it difficult to be sure of the causes of the effects we see. The scientific method is a way of simplifying situations so that relationships are easier to discern.
Researchers speculate about the alternative ways in which an effect might be produced and seek to impose conditions in the experiment that make those alternatives unfeasible. For example, it is conceivable that the medium might respond to nonverbal feedback from the sitter that signals which information is accurate and which is inaccurate, or the sitter might even volunteer information in order to help make sense of cryptic or ambiguous messages.
Researchers might therefore decide that the medium can have no direct contact with the sitter, so that these channels of communication are not available. If the reading nevertheless proves to be accurate, then it cannot be explained away in these ways.
Scientific research also seeks to simplify the outcomes of studies, for example by quantifying qualitative data. Rather than providing the sitter with the reading that was intended for them and asking whether they believe it was accurate, a researcher may provide the sitter with a number of readings and ask them to rank them in order of accuracy.
If post-mortem communication is possible, then we might expect the intended reading to receive a higher average ranking than the decoys. By running a sufficient number of experimental trials, statistical analyses can be used to determine whether the results go beyond what we would expect from chance coincidence alone.
What evidence suggests consciousness survives death?
Taken collectively, research with mediums suggests that under controlled conditions they may be able to produce information that is more accurate than would be expected by chance alone. However, parapsychologists are also open to the possibility that a medium might acquire this information through telepathy from the sitter (or other friends and relatives), or through clairvoyance from the environment, which could also account for impressive mediumistic communications.
Of particular interest are features of the messages that appear to capture something distinctive about deceased loved ones and their relationships with us. These may include particular mannerisms, verbal expressions, or interests that seem especially characteristic of the individual.
In some cases, communications may also allude to life events that occurred after the person’s passing, suggesting an ongoing awareness of and interest in the lives of loved ones. Greater weight may also be given to communications that include “ungoogleable” information, such as highly personal or long-forgotten reminiscences.
Some striking cases appear to involve the expression of skills or aptitudes not shared by the medium, such as creative writing, artistic ability, or the capacity to play chess at a high level. These features may be more readily attributed to an intelligent discarnate personality than to telepathy or clairvoyance on the part of the medium.
How can I tell if a medium is genuine?
Of course, there are individuals who may pose as mediums and use deception to take advantage of vulnerable people seeking ways to cope with loss, but this is true of most professions. It is wise to remain cautious, while also being open to the possibility that a medium may be sincere.
It is advisable to avoid disclosing identifying information in advance of a reading, for example when booking a sitting, given how easily detailed personal information can be found via social media. This may include significant anniversaries, addresses, and the names of family members.
You may also wish to ask whether you can make a recording of the reading. This allows you to later verify what was actually said, rather than relying on recollections that may be influenced by how the information was interpreted during the interaction. For example, a reference to a “person in uniform” might initially be associated with a relative who served in the army, but could equally refer to someone who wore supermarket overalls.
A recording also makes it possible to assess whether messages become more specific over time, or whether they repeat information that was previously volunteered. Such patterns may be indicative of “cold reading.”
Ultimately, each individual must make a personal judgement as to whether the communication feels authentic and whether it provides any sense of comfort or meaning.
Reincarnation Research
How do researchers study reincarnation?
There is a range of techniques for studying this. Some people, often through trauma, spontaneously recall elements of past lives. A very important technique used increasingly since the 1950s is the use Past Life Regression in which hypnotism is used to help people recall past lives.
Initially developed for therapeutic purposes, PLR was shown to yield very definite benefits for illnesses and long-standing pain.
One person experiencing decades of acute stomach pain which doctors could neither diagnose nor cure was regressed and recalled a life in which he had been brutally struck in the midriff with a rifle but.
Other researchers such as Dr Ian Stevenson studied birthmarks in children recalling past lives and concluded after many years of research into police and medical records that a significant proportion corresponded to wounds or injuries which the child reported from a previous existence.
What makes a reincarnation case convincing?
There is a range of techniques for studying this. Some people, often through trauma, spontaneously recall elements of past lives. A very important technique used increasingly since the 1950s is the use Past Life Regression in which hypnotism is used to help people recall past lives. Initially developed for therapeutic purposes, PLR was shown to yield very definite benefits for illnesses and long-standing pain.
One person experiencing decades of acute stomach pain which doctors could neither diagnose nor cure was regressed and recalled a life in which he had been brutally struck in the midriff with a rifle but.
Other researchers such as Dr Ian Stevenson studied birthmarks in children recalling past lives and concluded after many years of research into police and medical records that a significant proportion corresponded to wounds or injuries which the child reported from a previous existence.
Do all cultures believe in reincarnation?
No. The three Judaeo-Christian religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not include rebirth as part of their belief system. They insist that humans only have a single life. Reincarnation was initially taught by the Christian church as a core belief but was banned by the ecclesiastical authorities in the sixth century. Nevertheless, up to a third of Christians do believe in rebirth.
Reincarnation is central to both Buddhism and Hinduism which teach that humans are born hundreds or thousands of times on The Wheel of Life before reaching liberation and graduating from the need for a physical body. Many ancient spiritual traditions such as the Australian aboriginal people and some native American tribes believe in rebirth.
Terminal Lucidity
What is terminal lucidity?
Terminal lucidity (also sometimes referred to as a “pre-mortem surge,” “end-of-life rally,” or “paradoxical lucidity”) is a temporary, unexpected episode where a terminally ill patient, who may have been non-communicative or deeply cognitively impaired for some time, suddenly regains alertness, speaks coherently, recognizes family members, and may even have a burst of physical energy.
It may occur in patients with dementia, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, end-stage cancer, heart disease, stroke and other end of life diagnoses, which are usually associated with irreversible pathology.
Terminal lucidity is a surprising exception, as the person rallies before they pass away.
When does it happen and how long does it last?
The duration varies greatly from person to person and there is no way to predict the exact length of the episode. It usually occurs in the last days to weeks of life. It can last anywhere from minutes to hours, or in rare cases, a few days.
If an individual has a lucid episodes that isn’t followed closely by death, it is called paradoxical lucidity, as the person suddenly gets better, even for a short time. In terminal lucidity the return to normal cognitive function is temporary, and the patient usually declines and passes away shortly after the episode.
Does it happen to everyone?
No, not all patients experience terminal lucidity. Published research reports in which healthcare workers were interviewed, suggest it occurs in a minority of cases, with some studies indicating it may happen in around 10% of dementia patients.
What are the signs of terminal lucidity?
During terminal lucidity, a person may interact with their friends and loved ones as they did before their disease progression made this difficult or impossible.
A person experiencing terminal lucidity may:
- React to loved ones after being previously withdrawn and disengaged
- Speak coherently after long periods of being unable to communicate
- Express wants and needs, like asking for a favorite food or to speak with a loved one
- Recognize people they had not recognized for some time, including family members and old friends.
- Remember past moments in their life and happily recount them to others
- Participate in a favorite activity, like singing they haven’t done in years
It may be as if your friend or family member has returned to their “true self.” And for a short time, you can communicate with them in ways you thought you’d never be able to experience again.
What does it mean when it happens?
It is widely considered a sign that death is very near, often occurring within hours or a few days before passing. Some health care workers also have said that it is a sign that consciousness may survive death, as it may occur in conditions with severe brain lesions and pathology. It is important for family members and caregivers to understand that it is not a sign of miraculous healing or recovery, which can be a source of confusion and false hope.
What should I do if my loved one experiences it?
Hospice providers and medical professionals recommend cherishing the moment. It offers a precious, final opportunity for meaningful communication, allowing you to exchange words of love, gratitude, or forgiveness. Caregivers can use this time to connect, listen, or simply be present with their loved one as they were before their illness.
What causes it?
Researchers are still unsure of the exact cause. There is no definitive scientific explanation, and the phenomenon is difficult to study because it is unexpected and brief. Current research, partly funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), aims to better understand the underlying neurobiology and potential mechanisms, which could provide insights into the relationship between consciousness and brain function at the end of life.