Proof of Heaven

Though the experience is as old as history, “the near-death experience”
(regardless of whether it was seen as something real or a baseless
fantasy) only became a household term fairly recently. In the 1960s, new
techniques were developed that allowed doctors to resuscitate patients
who had suffered a cardiac arrest. Patients who in former times simply
would have died were now pulled back into the land of the living.
Unbeknownst to them, these physicians were, through their rescue efforts,
producing a breed of trans-earthly voyagers: people who had glimpsed
beyond the veil and returned to tell about it. Today they number in the
millions. Then, in 1975, a medical student named Raymond Moody
published a book called Life After Life, in which he described the
experience of a man named George Ritchie. Ritchie had “died” as a result
of cardiac arrest as a complication of pneumonia and been out of his body
for nine minutes. He traveled down a tunnel, visited heavenly and hellish
regions, met a being of light that he identified as Jesus, and experienced
feelings of peace and well-being that were so intense he had difficulty
putting them into words. The era of the modern near-death experience
was born.
I couldn’t claim complete ignorance of Moody’s book, but I had
certainly never read it. I didn’t need to, because I knew, first of all, that
the idea that cardiac arrest represented some kind of close-to-death
condition was nonsense. Much of the literature about near-death
experiences concerns patients whose hearts stopped for a few minutes—
usually after an accident or on the operating table. The idea that cardiac
arrest constitutes death is outdated by about fifty years. Many laypeople
still believe that if someone comes back from cardiac arrest, then they
have “died” and returned to life, but the medical community long ago
revised its definitions of death to center on the brain, not the heart (ever
since brain death criteria, which rely on crucial findings of the patient’s
neurological examination, were established in 1968). Cardiac arrest is
relevant to death only in terms of its effect on the brain. Within seconds
of cardiac arrest, cessation of blood flow to the brain leads to widespread
disruption of cooperative neural activity and loss of consciousness.
For half a century, surgeons have routinely stopped the heart for