BRANDED
11:41 Sun Feb 25
Re: Death
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Long article in the Telegraph today, of all places
Peter Fenwick
was working as consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Clinic in south London when, in 1976, he first heard of near-death experiences (NDEs). A year earlier an American physician, Raymond Moody, had written the first book coining the term to describe accounts of people on an operating table or in a critical condition following an accident, experiencing the sensation of leaving their body, floating down a dark tunnel towards a bright light that exudes a feeling of warmth and welcome; being greeted by deceased relatives or friends, and seeing their life pass before their eyes, before being returned abruptly to their bodies.
Fenwick had read the book, “and I knew it was all rubbish – psychobabble”. He laughs. “It was an American book! This had happened on the other side of the Atlantic, it would never happen in this country. I had to change my mind.”
A year later, a patient walked into the clinic that Fenwick held at St Thomas’ hospital and described in vivid detail having had such an experience himself. During an operation to insert a cardiac catheter, he told Fenwick, he had left his body and was watching what was going on in the theatre, although to the physicians he was apparently dead…
“I was able to look at him, discuss it with him and see in fact that this was no psychobabble – it was a real experience, and that NDEs were in fact real. This was enormously important,” says Fenwick.
It was the beginning of Fenwick’s life-long study of NDEs in which he was to become one of the world's leading authorities on the phenomenon, and the possibility that the experience proves the existence of the continuity of consciousness after death. Fenwick would dispute the word “possibility”.
“I have no doubt in my mind. Life does not end with the death of the body,” he says.
Fenwick is 88, tall, rangy, snowy-haired, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, a man whose most frequently used phrase is “How interesting!” As he talks a handsome Burmese cat slinks across the room, jumps into his lap and sits purring contentedly.
Fenwick grew up in Kenya, where his father was a coffee farmer and his “extremely loving and kind” mother, a surgeon, ran the local hospital. He grew up, he says, knowing he wanted to go into medicine. He laughs. “At prep school in Kenya, I was always playing the role of doctor if somebody was hurt; I would do the triage and then send them to see the matron.”
Educated at Stowe school and Cambridge, he planned to be a brain surgeon, changing his mind after observing an operation during medical training at St Thomas’ hospital in London.
“I suddenly realised that if you were a brain surgeon you looked down a deep, dark hole into the brain, and I could see there was no fun in that. I realised I didn't want to be a neurosurgeon, I wanted to be a neuropsychiatrist so I could talk to people and not have them unconscious while I looked into that deep, dark hole.”
He became consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley, the foremost psychiatric teaching hospital in the UK, with a particular interest in the study of epilepsy, and the nature of consciousness. He also conducted some of the first studies on the effect of meditation on brain activity. Fenwick had been an early – and now life-long – practitioner.
One of his guinea pigs was George Harrison, who had begun meditating after meeting Maharishi Mahesh, and volunteered to have his brain waves analysed. The results showed that meditation had produced the definite changes expected. Harrison, Fenwick remembers, duly signed his electroencephalogram (EEG) record before leaving. It was only later that Fenwick’s secretary pointed out Harrison’s EEG record could act as Fenwick’s pension fund if he had kept it.
“Unfortunately, when I retired 30 years later, it had vanished. Someone else had evidently recognised the value of the 50 or so metres of George Harrison’s signed brain-wave records.”
The arrival of the patient who had experienced an NDE was to completely expand the focus of his work. He applied to the hospital’s ethics committee for approval to conduct a research project, asking people who’d had a cardiac arrest if they experienced anything particular during the arrest.
“One of the glitterati of the committee rocked back in his chair and laughed at me. ‘You’re telling me that you think people who are unconscious through a cardiac arrest are having experiences? Don’t be ridiculous. No, no, no ethics approval.’ Just like that.”
Instead, with a colleague, Fenwick set up a study at a hospital in Southampton to test the phenomenon of bi-location, where patients report looking down on their prone bodies on the operating table, and, in some cases, report seeing events occurring at some distant location – the so-called veridical NDE.
Fenwick placed cards with writing and pictures on the ceiling operating theatres in the event they could be seen by patients leaving their bodies.
“Nobody ever went up and looked at the cards, except the nurses,” Fenwick says. “We told them they were on no account to climb up and look at these cards in case they moved or altered them. But it wasn't long before they were using stepladders to go up and look.”
Undeterred, Fenwick continued gathering data wherever he could find it. In 1988 he was the subject of a television programme, Glimpses of Death, talking about his work, which led to more than 2,000 letters from people claiming to have experienced NDEs.
Moody had based his book on over 150 accounts of people who had experienced NDEs. In 1995, Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth, a writer on health matters, published The Truth In The Light, an investigation of more than 300 such experiences.
Most occurred at the time of cardiac arrest during an operation, or when the person was involved in some catastrophic event. Two percent of the sample had NDEs during a suicide attempt.
It is fascinating to revisit these accounts.
One man, an ex-RAF pilot who had an NDE undergoing surgery at Manchester Royal Infirmary, described finding himself in a “landscape without form composed only of light and colour”, where he was met by “a Jesus figure”, before going on to experience a life review.
A common element is meeting deceased relatives or strangers. In some instances these figures beckon to them, in others they signal the dying person should go back, before the person snaps back into their body “as if on the end of an elastic cord”, says Fenwick.
For the ex-RAF pilot, the knowledge that he had to return to his body was “the worst moment of my life”, a feeling that brought tears that were “a mixture of terrible sadness and extreme happiness”. For a small minority, the experience may not be altogether positive. But one of the most remarkable aspects of NDEs is how transformative they can be.
‘There’s good evidence that you retain your sense of individuality, your sense of self, all the way through the process of dying’
Seventy-two per cent of those in Fenwick’s study felt they had been changed by the experience and 42 per cent said they felt more spiritual.
“Once you’ve had this experience you are changed, whether you like it or not,” Fewick says. “Because the spiritual side is opening, people often talk of wanting to help others as a result of this.”
Awakened because you realise the preciousness of life?
“No, awakened because of the actual death experience itself,” says Fenwick. “There is love, and there is transcendence – which I think is a very important word.”
This experience is cross-cultural. Many people talk of experiencing the light as a warm and comfortable environment, which Fenwick likens to “an English country garden”. People unfamiliar with English country gardens would choose different metaphors.
Hindus, he says, talk of encounters with yamadutas, or messengers of death, according to Hinduism agents of Yama, the god of the underworld.
“Well, nobody has seen a yamaduta in England. So these things are very much within the culture,” says Fenwick.
The abiding question is whether consciousness is purely brain activity – it is what the brain does, and that when the brain dies, consciousness dies with it; or whether the brain and mind are separate, and that consciousness is what Fenwick describes as “a transcendent realm” which the brain filters to produce our conscious experience of the world.
In her book Dying To Live: Science and the Near-Death Experience, published in 1993, the psychologist and researcher into consciousness, Susan Blackmore – an old adversary of Fenwick’s in debates and discussions – described the sense of a journey down a tunnel, the meeting with the light and the out-of-body experience as being rooted in anoxia, where the brain is starved of oxygen, causing random activity throughout the visual system.
“I love Sue,” Fenwick says genially. “But she’s wrong. The reductionist thinking is that there is only the brain and there is nothing beyond the brain. But quantum mechanics has given us an enlarged view of what consciousness is, and of the structure of the world that just does not fit into a reductionist framework at all.
“We live in a world that has the most wonderful things in it, and among those things are spiritual experiences. How are you going to fit that into a reductionist framework? You can't,” says Fenwick.
He pauses.
“It’s such an interesting question. What is individual consciousness? The evidence is very good that there is continuity of consciousness after death – that you retain your sense of individuality, your sense of self, all the way through the process of dying and then you will hop into a new coat, as it were. Individual consciousness as your marker on it. It’s you."
Fenwick is particularly interested in Buddhist teachings on the subject of death and dying. In many cases, the experiences described in NDEs mirror those in the mortuary texts of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bar do thos grol), believed to date from the eighth century, and meant to be read to a dying person to guide them through the post-mortem experience. It describes a light of “inner radiance” dawning in the dying mind, followed by a sense of being able to move unobstructed through “earth, boulders and mountains” and a “life review” in which the “innate good conscience” of the deceased will gather together all of their virtuous actions, counting them out with white pebbles, and the “innate bad conscience” will count out non-virtuous actions with black pebbles – at which moment, the texts maintain, “you will tremble with extreme fear, awe and terror”.
‘There is no death, I know that now.’
In 2022, Fenwick joined a group on a visit to India to meet the Dalai Lama, who talked about the Buddhist teaching on the importance of approaching death with a clear and pure mind.
“He was saying as you die you must be compassionate, which is also how you must live your life,” Fenwick says. “But better than compassion is altruism, which is being compassionate but doing things for other people that disadvantage you. Very important, that.” He pauses. “Isn’t that fascinating?”
If NDEs are no longer the subject for discussion and debate that they once were – although there are still extensive studies being conducted at the University of Virginia in America – Fenwick believes it is. The data is now, to his mind at least, conclusive.
He cites the studies conducted by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, founded by the billionaire aerospace entrepreneur Robert T Bigelow, to facilitate research into the survival of consciousness beyond bodily death.
In 2021, Bigelow offered $1 million (£790,000) in prizes to scientists, religious scholars and consciousness researchers to write an essay proving the existence of the afterlife. There were more than 200 entries.
The winner was Jeffrey Mishlove, an American clinical psychologist and author, who was presented with a cheque for half a million dollars at an award ceremony in the Bigelow Aerospace hangar in Nevada.
Mishlove began his essay with a personal anecdote about a dream when he was 25-years-old in which his Uncle Harry had appeared talking deeply about personal issues in Mishlove’s life, and from which he awoke “crying joyful tears”. It was two days later, after receiving his letter telling her of the experience, that Mishlove’s mother called to tell him his uncle had died – at the time, it transpired, that Mishlove was having his dream.
What some may dismiss as coincidence – extraordinary as it may be – the experience put Mishlove on a path that led to him becoming the first, and so far only, holder of a doctoral diploma in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited American university.
Fenwick and a small team of collaborators, including two physicists and the vice president of the Medical and Scientific Network, submitted an essay of their own. “We didn’t win,” he laughs. “How can that be, you ask.” But their essay received an honourable mention, and $20,000 (£16,000).
The experience described by Mishlove goes to another facet of Fenwick’s studies over the years – the phenomena of deathbed visions, where a dying person talks of seeing an “appearance” of a dead relative, who seems to be helping them to be less afraid as they die – and deathbed coincidences, the “appearance” of a dying person to someone emotionally close to them – often a sibling – at the time of death.
“There are many accounts of these,” Fenwick says, “which appear to involve a reaching out from the depth of the dying person’s being to form an intense spiritual connection to both the living and the dead, which brings hope of an onward journey rather than absolute finality.”
He shudders visibly at the suggestion of the word “retirement”. He continues to write and contribute to papers and to give talks on the subject of NDEs and consciousness.
“What’s interesting is the width of what I do now has decreased. I give a talk and I forget names, but since most of us nowadays seem to forget names that’s alright. But the brain is still ticking over.”
Has his research changed his attitude to his own death?
“Oh yes. Absolutely. There is no death, I know that now. There is death of the body, but there is no death of the individual person.”
And does he find that reassuring?
“No, it's just how it is.”
So, no reassurance, and no fear either?
“I don't fear it all.” He smiles. “Actually, I’m looking forward to it.”
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