Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 31, 2026 • 7 Comments
Afterlife Research, Understanding Reality
O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works Thy hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy pow’r throughout The universe displayed!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
When thru the woods And forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds Sing sweetly in the trees;
When I look down From lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook, And feel the gentle breeze,
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885;1949)
Four years ago, my husband had surgery for a minor intestinal issue. When he woke up in recovery with me holding his hand, my beloved looked stark and stricken; he was horrified. He could barely even get these words out, but he told me in a voice that was feeble with fear that he hadn’t had a near-death experience while he was under general anesthesia, so that meant that there is no life after death. Now he faced only blankness forevermore. When I realized that he was serious about this – and getting that through my head took some minutes – I told him that, wait a minute darling, of course your lack of an NDE meant nothing of the kind! Most people who have general anesthesia don’t have near-death experiences at all; and remember, my love, I’m an expert on the afterlife!! But no matter what I said to him, he was inconsolable. And now, to keep our peace, we just don’t talk about it at all. He must have seen something on television, or read something in The Wall Street Journal; and as Jesus wisely tells us, no one is a prophet in her own village. So of course he doesn’t believe his own wife! And, yes, many near-death experiences are deeply exciting, they feel profoundly real to their experiencers, as if they very well could have involved a journey to the afterlife. And no matter what experts might say to them, there are NDE experiencers who will happily tell whoppers and produce real lifelong terrors in people, just to gratify their own egos.
My dear ones, the plain fact is that most people never in their lives have Near-Death Experiences! Until the mid-nineteen-seventies, no one had even heard the term, for heaven’s sake; yet everyone went to the afterlife just fine. Some of those associated with The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), of course, might wish that the truth were otherwise, but they accept and propound the fact that death is always a one-way trip. Anyone who claims otherwise, who insists that he “died and then came back to life”, or that she “was dead for seven minutes and saw amazing things in the afterlife, and then came back to life”, is telling a fabricated story. The evidence is overwhelming that death is always a one-way trip, and it cannot be reversed. Let’s talk about how we know that fact for certain:
Near-death experiences are beautiful, dream-like temporary visits, usually to the third level of the astral plane, that are hosted for you by your spirit guide. NDEs generally happen when your material body is briefly uninhabitable for some reason, The third level of the astral plane is the first safe and lovely level of the astral, just above this material reality, and it is indeed extraordinary! It’s love-drenched and full of beautiful and sweet scents, sounds and colors, so those who find themselves briefly there can be forgiven for thinking they have landed for a moment in the afterlife. But my dear one, look behind you. Are you trailing a silver cord? Well then, you haven’t died, after all. You are having a near-death experience, and you must stay well away from the afterlife and carefully follow instructions!
At this point, for me the most enjoyable thing about continuing to read popular science magazines is seeing how much more flexible the youngest scientists have become in their thinking. Oh my goodness, every week there are more, and ever more new ideas that these young folks are daring to risk! For one surprising example, we find homo naledi, a newly discovered human relative with a brain just one-quarter the size of ours. And we learn to our abject astonishment that these little guys lived in South Africa just two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, or thereabouts; at a time when there also were humanoids in Africa in our family tree that were pretty similar to ourselves! And, amazingly, these little guys buried their dead very deep in almost inaccessible caves, in ways that suggested that they mourned their dead, and that they cared for them, even to the same extent that we might have done, which strongly suggested some level of spiritual understanding on theil part.
And we talked last week about intelligent design. Of course, intelligent design that begins only far along the road of sophistication, when a lot of the earliest and most difficult problems have long since been solved, seems rather pointless to me, since there must have been a Designer if we have reached this point; but nevertheless, let’s see where some of the brightest researchers are on their intelligent-design walk, just for giggles. And Rupert Sheldrake is our favorite British YouTuber on all sorts of consciousness-related topics. There are some weeks when I find so many great articles to share, that sometimes I will feel like doing only that, just sharing articles. But still, I wish that more of this would interest my husband! It”s odd that so many men of his generation still think that their wives don’t know much at all….
When Christ shall come,
With shout of acclamation, And take me home,
What joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow, In humble adoration,
And there proclaim, My God, how great Thou art!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885; 1949)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
This link is like a week old, but better a week later than never!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfT5FCzBmwI
Thank you, my very dear Adrian! Yes, these three are quite wonderful, and the fact that they are able to write about God so definitively is truly a new thing in the world, Stephen Meyer is my favorite of the three. He comes from a Christian tradition, however, and the next thing will be when someone writes about the primacy of Consciousness, and is believed. That will be the day!!
Hello dearest Roberta,
Sorry to hear your good husband was deflated because he didn’t have an NDE in hospital. You are right though, many people who are anaesthetised don’t have these kind of experiences.
I wish people would relax a bit about these things because everyone is different and doping someone out does seem to obscure many such experiences anyway.
Having spent time with hospice patients suffering chronic conditions, I’ve known those who have had – what would you call them? – PDEs. This is just the name I give them: Pre-Death-Experiences. I suppose I mean visions of deceased loved ones appearing to patients shortly before they die.
I remember one sick 11 year old boy who saw his deceased mother, on an off, for a few weeks before he passed. Only the boy himself could see her.
She would put him at ease and talk and joke with him. It soon became apparent that this little guy was very happy to be dying, as he would soon be safe in the arms of his mother.
It felt to onlookers in that hospice room as if the child’s mom had come with an express purpose; to take his fear of death away and prepare him for transitioning to ‘something.’ This is the feeling we had, all of us, upon discussing this event later.
I guess Roberta, once we lose the fear of death we handle end-of-life situations better. It’s that old fear of mortality thing that is the root insecurity of humankind. It is behind so many desperate and tragic things that we do. Once we dispel this terror by some kind of evidence of life, of the endurance of ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ after physical death, then the whole human world will change for the better.
I would argue that the research you and your colleagues have done does reveal ‘proof of concept’. There is evidence for human consciousness existing out of the body that has already been found. However many everyday people block such ideas, because they will only believe in something informed by institutional science. And that is simply relying on material, atheist, science dogma to give away its very identity, to admit life after death exists. And we know mainstream science won’t do that..
Thank heavens some younger scientists are now opening up to ideas of consciousness and energy beyond the dogma of their forebears.
I know one thing: Once an afterlife communication device is proven accurate, everything will change.
Such a discovery would see an end to the existential nihilism that plagues, that curses humankind. 🙏🏼👍📡
Oh my dear so beautiful Efrem, you are exactly right! The fear of death tends to dispel naturally as we come closer to the event, which is a very blessed thing, and how wonderful that fact is. Especially for children!! Yes, it truly would be wonderful indeed to have some sort of real afterlife communication device! We all used to think that something like that was soon on the way. And devoutly to be wished!!
Roberta,
As a retired anesthesiologist, I found your husband’s disappointment in not experiencing something akin to a near death experience to be a bit unusual. Most people are pleased to remember nothing about their surgery. One of the things anesthesia providers fear is that a patient will have awareness under anesthesia. This is quite rare, but can be very disturbing for all involved. A “normal” general anesthetic should be one of complete amnesia for the surgical procedure (except when the surgery and anesthetic is concluded and the patient emerges from the effects of the anesthetic agents). Preoperatively, patients should be apprised of the risks associated with anesthesia, and the risks vary with the type of technique used. Awareness is a risk, but it’s very low. There have been accounts of NDEs in which the patients were anesthetized and placed in a state in which they were in circulatory arrest with no brain blood flow, deliberate hypothermia, and were also given drugs to bring the brain to an electrically quiescent state. Having been involved in some of those cases there is NO WAY that memory formation or awareness could occur. The intraoperative electroencephalography registered NO brain activity. I never saw a patient with intraoperative awareness after a case such as that. However, in at least one NDE case, it apparently did occur. This is a fascinating and well-documented case that defies the materialist paradigm of awareness/consciousness.
So anyway Roberta, let your husband know that he’s in the vast majority of patients who DON’T have intraoperative memories or NDE-like experiences with anesthesia.
Thanks again for the blog post. It’s encouraging to see that more scientists are starting to delve more into topics that have interested people for years but were forbidden to be openly discussed. Science does advance (in spite of itself) when enough seemingly inexplicable data is compiled and examined without prejudice.
Efrem,
Very nicely put! I agree that the fear of death drives humanity in directions that are extraordinarily maladaptive. Death is also the universal threat that motivates violence of every sort. Wars would most likely cease to exist or be greatly diminished if the fear of death was extinguished. People without the fear of death are extremely unnerving to their adversaries! The vast majority of people are unlikely to familiarize themselves with the subject of the afterlife. It takes awhile to do some reading, and most importantly, requires some willingness to be open-minded and less fearful of appearing “wacky” to acquaintances and family. Your thoughts regarding a device that would allow communication with people in the afterlife would almost certainly do a great deal for many people to rid themselves of the paralyzing fear of death. The societal implications are great food for thought!
For a couple weeks now I’ve been in conversation elsewhere about the topic of NDEs . Even in circles where one might expect understanding I still found someone speaking in terms of “returning from the dead”. I did what I have been doing for a long time now. I tried my best to explain things simply but I expect there will be continue to be misunderstanding.
I’m now less concerned about misunderstanding than I used to be however because experiencing an NDE, or simply reading about them, may trigger a personal search for information about life, death and what follows – maybe even what preceded all of them.