accidents, near-drowning, heart attacks, or cardiac arrests during operations. Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Bruce Greyson, and others have done extensive research of this phenomenon and have described a characteristic experiential pattern that typically includes a life-review, passage through a dark tunnel, personal judgment with ethical evaluation of one’s life, encounter with a radiant divine being, and visit to various transcendental realms. Less frequent are painful, anxiety-provoking, and infernal types of NDEs. In our program of psychedelic therapy with terminal cancer patients, conducted at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, we were able to obtain some evidence about the similarity of NDEs with experiences induced by psychedelic substances. We observed several patients who had first psychedelic experiences and later an actual NDE when their disease progressed (e.g. a cardiac arrest during an operation). They reported that these situations were very similar and described the psychedelic sessions as an invaluable experiential training for dying (Grof 1976). The most extraordinary and fascinating aspect of NDEs is the occurrence of “veridical” out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), a term used for experiences of disembodied consciousness with accurate extrasensory perception. Thanatological studies have repeatedly confirmed that people who are unconscious or even clinically dead can have OOBEs during which they observe their bodies and the rescue procedures from above, or perceive events in remote locations. Current thanatological resarch now focuses on confirmation of some preliminary observations of these experiences occurring in congenitally blind persons. Classical descriptions of OOBEs can be found in spiritual literature and philosophical texts of all ages. Modern thanatological research thus confirms the descriptions in the TibetanBook of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), according to which an individual after death assumes a “bardo body” which transcends the limitations of time and space and can freely travel around the earth. Veridical OOBEs do not occur only in the context of near-death situations, vital emergencies, and episodes of clinical death. They can emerge in the sessions of powerful experiential psychotherapy (such as primal therapy, rebirthing, or Holotropic Breathwork), in the context of experiences induced by psychedelics (particularly the dissociative anesthetic ketamine), and also spontaneously. Such events can represent isolated episodes in the life of the individual, or occur repeatedly as part of a crisis of psychic opening or some other type of spiritual emergency. The authenticity of OOBEs has also been demonstrated in controlled clinical studies, such as the experiments of the well-known psychologist and parapsychologist Charles Tart with Ms. Z. at the University of California in Davis (Tart 1968) and perceptual tests conducted by Karlis Osis and D. McCormick with Alex Tanous (Osis and McCormick 1980). OOBEs with confirmed ESP of the environment are of special importance for the problem of consciousness after death, since they demonstrate the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body. Ac14 (12) Stanislav Grof
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