Veridical NDEs

Dom Bettinelli (0:00)

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You're listening to episode 435 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about veridical near death experiences. I'm Dom Bettinelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Akin. Hey, Jimmy.

Jimmy Akin (0:32)

Howdy, Dom.

Dom Bettinelli (0:33)

Folks, be sure to stay around for the end of the episode. We'll have your feedback on our recent episode number 424, on Joseph Williamson's tunnels. But first, imagine you're lying on an operating table and your heart has just stopped. You've got no pulse, no breathing, and on the monitors, no brain activity at all. By every medical measure, you're not there anymore. Yet, once they revive you, you describe the room from up near the ceiling. You report the instruments the surgeon used, the conversations in the hallway, even a shoe on a ledge outside a window. And when people check, the details turn out to be true.

Over the last few decades, researchers have gone looking for cases where the details can be checked, and they turn out to be true. These are called veridical near-death experiences, and they found a surprising number of them. So, what makes a near-death experience veridical? What are the strongest cases on record? And what could they tell us about whether we survive the death of the body? That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World.

So Jimmy, what are we talking about today?

Jimmy Akin (1:44)

Well, today, we're looking at near-death experiences or NDEs, but from a specific angle. We covered NDEs in general back in Episode 27, so folks can check that out for the basics. And just recently, we talked about a close cousin of theirs, shared death experiences back in Episode 429

Today, we're going to be looking at what researchers call veridical near-death experiences.

Dom Bettinelli (2:10)

The word veridical may be new to some listeners. What does it mean?

Jimmy Akin (2:14)

Well, it comes from two Latin roots. One is verus, which means true, and the other is the verb dicere, which means to say or to tell. So something is veridical if it's truth-telling. It's related to the word verdict. So at the end of a court trial, the verdict is supposed to tell the truth about what happened. And more generally, veridical information is supposed to tell the truth in a context that isn't a legal one. In parapsychology, veridical information has a specific meaning. It's a perception that meets three conditions at once. The first is that the information is something the person didn't already know.

The second is that the information is too specific to be a lucky guess, so you can't chalk it up to random chance. And the third is that the information turns out to be true.

When all three happen together, you've got something that needs explaining, because the person reported a fact they shouldn't have had any normal way to know, and they were right.

Dom Bettinelli (3:21)

Where does our material for this episode come from?

Jimmy Akin (3:24)

Most of it comes from a book called The Self Does Not Die, which was put together by a Dutch parapsychologist named Titus Rivas, and two of his colleagues, Amy Durven and Rudolph Smit. And the book was published in 2016 by the International Association for Near-Death Studies, or IANs. And there was a second expanded edition of the book that came out in 2023

It covers near-death experiences where the experiencer came back with vertical information. And what makes this book unusual is the standard for what they included.

SPEAKER_3 (4:00)

The book's introduction states, ...our criterion for including a case was that a patient's report of a paranormal phenomenon during an NDE be directly confirmed by at least one other person.

Jimmy Akin (4:13)

We limited ourselves in this book specifically to such confirmed cases. So it's the paranormal information part that has to be confirmed, not just that someone had a near-death experience, you know, with the common elements like the Feelings of Peace, the Tunnel and the Life Review. You know, those don't qualify a case on their own. There has to be, for this book, something that's a checkable perception that someone else, besides the experiencer, can vouch for. That other person could be a doctor, a nurse, a family member, it could be a written record.

But the authors left out cases where they only have the experiencer's own say so. So the book is a collection of cases with independent confirmation, and there are more than a hundred of them. And for a few cases, the bar is even higher than that. For example, in apparitional cases where the experiencer is seen somewhere other than where their body is, both people's accounts have to line up.