Near Death Experiences: Mystical or Medically Explained?

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When I was one year old I died for about one minute. A doctor performed CPR and brought me back to life. Of course I have no memory of the experience. So I guess I had an NDNE (Near Death Non-Experience). I do remember hearing my mom talk about it to a friend of her's when I was around six years old and I asked her if I'd gone to heaven. My mom said, "I don't think so honey, because you are alive right now."

At six this confused me. As far as I understood it, if you were a good person and died you went to heaven. And using my six year old's logic I reasoned that since I had received X-mas presents from Santa every year I must be a good boy. So, why wasn't I in heaven? At six I hadn't put two and two together and realized that according to the stories about heaven you had to die permanently to get into the joint. Good thing for me I was brought back to life by the doctor.

My family was semi-religious. My mom was an active member of the Seven Day Adventist church and my dad had been raised Irish Catholic, but was more of an agnostic. I didn't attend church much as a kid, but I did go to a few big Seven Day Adventist revivals. And both sects were a big part of the lives of my relatives.

By Junior High though I think I had given up on religion. I was a big fan of heavy metal groups like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, AC/DC etc and I wasn't going to let any religion tell me I couldn't listen to those bands.

In college though I became interested in Buddhism and began meditating daily. In 2007 at the age of 37 I had what the Hindu and Yoga traditions call a Kundalini Awakening during a group meditation session.

While I don't believe these experiences are mystical anymore at the time it was a very profound experience that led me to seek out a "guru" and I eventually joined his Yoga cult. You can read about those here if you are interested.

My Kundalini Awakening

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Seven years of that, though some of it was pretty amazing, led me to become a fence sitting atheist. I call myself a fence sitting atheist because even though I'm about 98% convinced that these experiences happen in our heads and when we die that is it, game over, there are still some stuff like NDEs that I find interesting.


Recently I watched this clip about Sebastian Junger's NDE. I have mixed feelings about JRE, but I do respect and admire Sebastian Junger as a journalist and writer. He says he is eventually going to write a book about NDEs. I definitely plan on reading it once he releases it.

While the above video very interesting, personally I feel like the latter half of this video provides a far more likely explanation for NDEs.

REM Intrusion probably explains a lot of the experiences I had when I was in the Yoga cult as well. But then again Dr. Greyson makes some very compelling arguments as well. So, I guess I won't know until I know. Or if there is nothing after death, don't know.