Crossing over

Dear all,

Paul Robertson was a famous British musician, one of the world’s leading violinists and the founder of the Medici String Quartet; he died last month, but what makes him rather different from the rest of us is that he had died four years ago as well --- and he recorded those experiences in a book, Soundscapes: A Musician’s Journey through Life and Death.

Four years ago Robertson’s main artery snapped, he was rushed into emergency care, doctors discovered a hole in the wall of his aorta and although they tried to save his life, they didn’t expect him to make it. He writes that he then experienced death "As I lay there waiting, I felt myself die -- beautifully, ecstatically, transcendently."

Robertson was in surgery for eight hours, and for 34 minutes of that time his heart was stopped by a South American blowpipe poison, curare. At the end of the operation, to patch and repair his aorta he was put in a medically-induced coma. After three days the doctors tried to revive him but he wouldn’t come round.

As Robertson lay in a coma for three weeks, he had 17 rather strange near-death experiences which he described vividly in his book (these ranged from being at a medieval pig slaughter and lying on the deck of an underwater ship of the dead to watching a TV programme with Woody Allen), he says that all 17 visions started off with a feeling of bliss and ecstasy but became more difficult or prone to difficulty as they progressed.

Neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick, who has written the foreword to Robertson’s book, is a leading researcher on NDEs and he says that the awareness of a boundary is a strong feature of such experience: it is "common in near-death experiences for the experiencer to come to a border and realise that if he crosses it, he will not return." Other common features of such accounts are out of body experiences, a feeling of floating and ecstacy, going towards light and seeing dead relatives. This was also the case in a study in the medical journal The Lancet of 344 heart patients resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

This is certainly similar to what a young colleague of mine told me after he suffered a major heart attack a few years ago: he spoke of a lovely, bright light that he was being drawn towards. Another friend said that when he had a heart attack, he could see a tableau, a sort of silent film, him lying motionless on a bed and his mother -- who had been dead for many years -- sitting by his side praying. A spiritually inclined, wise man later interpreted the dream-like vision as a case of my friend’s mother having interceded for him -- of her having appealed successfully that it was not yet his time.

But that’s the thing with NDEs -- they are all hearsay. We try to tabulate and analyse the accounts as data but, as with the Lancet study, there could be so many other factors common to cardiac arrest or anaesthesia which have a bearing on the experience. But what is fascinating about Roberston’s account is how after his coma, his non physical senses were heightened "I instantly knew if someone compassionate entered the ward, even if I could not see them".

Certainly a spiritual awakening took place: Robertson writes of wanting to live without deceit as "accumulated deceit especially self-deceit, proves a cruelly heavy burden when the call comes to travel lightly, as it must".

Certainly thought-provoking…

Best wishes,