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When people refer to \u201cNear Death Experiences\u201d in a spiritual context they are generally referencing a phenomenon that happens across cultural, religious, and social contexts where people who are close to death experience some sort of numinous experience. What exactly an NDE consists of varies from experience to experience, but there are some common themes:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The themes match up enough with Latter-day Saint thought that I\u2019m open to there being something there. People who have undergone NDEs often experience major positive changes to their life outlook and priorities afterwards, valuing relationships and spiritual matters more than this-worldly concerns. For a small minority their purported glimpses of the other side are darker.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n NDEs are common and well-established enough that they are one of those extremely rare spiritual experiences that lend themselves to empirical investigation and are considered legitimate and real by scientists (and not in the same way that you can find a handful of scientists willing to take ESP seriously, for example).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n NDEs are a real thing, now <\/span>what<\/span><\/i> they are is what divides the believers from the naturalists, with more naturalistically inclined people attributing them to some explosion of chemicals that might happen near death, and more spiritually inclined people attributing them to more spirit than body. Of course, per my Latter-day Saint beliefs, maybe it\u2019s both. Among believers they can be controversial, since it provides an extra-institutional mechanism for divine knowledge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As a natural believer, my sense is that they are indeed glimpses of the other side, but that they are glimpses. Highly personal, impactful lessons of basic truths (love, the presence of others, reviewing our life), but not every detail experienced in an NDE is gospel truth. That would be quite difficult logically, because in many cases the NDE components follow patterns from the person\u2019s respective religion, so Catholics might see Mary or Muslims might glimpse Jannah. Still, I\u2019m willing to grant NDE experiences a certain extra consideration for what the afterlife is like, even if I don\u2019t feel personally bound by any one interpretation, but taken as a whole the phenomenon seems to sit right with me as a message from the other side.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We Latter-day Saints in particular have well documented cases of NDEs in our early as well as more contemporary history.\u00a0 Dr. Top from the BYU religion department <\/span>wrote an excellent synopsis<\/span><\/a>. One late-hand source even suggests that Joseph Smith may have had an NDE when he was being tarred and feathered, and a more contemporaneous source (Willard Richard\u2019s diary) records Brigham Young as having an NDE.<\/span><\/p>\n\n