Awakening to Reality · Near-death experiences and Buddhist insights
The Woman Who Came Back: Anita Moorjani and the Case for an Afterlife
Awareness beyond the hospital bed, a brother thousands of miles away, and the light that is not yet the end of the path
阅读中文版 / Read the Chinese version
A woman lies in a hospital bed in Hong Kong, gravely ill with cancer. Her family fears that she will not survive the night. Her eyes are closed. The doctors are treating a body in crisis.
Yet in the account she later gives, her world has become extraordinarily clear. She is aware of the people around the bed, of a conversation farther down the corridor, and of her brother travelling towards her from India. She feels the presence of her father, dead for a decade. She experiences herself as more alive, more expansive, and more deeply loved than she had ever imagined possible.
This is the heart of Anita Moorjani’s story. It deserves to be heard in its detail before being reduced to an argument about what must, or cannot, happen when we die.
My view is that death is not the end of consciousness. I am writing especially for readers who are atheist, agnostic, or simply unconvinced that anything continues after bodily death. You do not need to accept Buddhist teachings to examine these accounts. Begin with the reported events, ask what was checked, and consider whether the explanations offered actually account for the details. What follows is a case for an afterlife, with the evidence and its limits made visible.
The body on the bed—and the awareness that seemed to extend beyond it
On February 2, 2006, Moorjani was admitted to hospital after years of illness. In Dying to Be Me, she describes severe physical deterioration, difficulty breathing, profound weakness, and the urgency with which the medical staff worked. Her husband Danny and her mother could do little but watch and hope.[1, pp. 59–63]
Her experience of the same scene was startlingly different. Although her eyes were closed, she says she knew who entered, what the staff were doing, and how her family felt. Her account includes the monitor above the bed, the efforts to establish intravenous access, the feeding tube, and the curtain drawn around her. She remembers a male nurse struggling to find a vein and sounding as though he had almost given up.
She describes this awareness as sharper than ordinary perception. Attention did not seem confined to the direction in which her eyes could look. Elsewhere in the same account, she calls it 360-degree perception: an immediate awareness of her surroundings without the familiar restriction of a body looking outward from a particular position.[1, pp. 61–67]
Nor did she experience the body on the bed as the full extent of herself. It seemed too small to contain what she was experiencing. The pain and physical confinement had fallen away, while awareness remained vivid. She wanted to reassure her family that she was all right, but they could not hear her.
The striking contrast is between the helplessness visible to the people around her and the freedom she describes from within the experience. To them she was slipping away. To herself she seemed to be awakening into a much wider life.
The conversation down the corridor
One of the most arresting episodes concerns a conversation between Danny and a doctor approximately forty feet from her bed, outside the intensive-care room. In her recollection, the doctor explained how extensive the illness had become and told Danny that she was unlikely to survive the night. She describes both the words and her husband’s anguish.[1, pp. 63–64]
When she later regained consciousness, she says she recognised Dr. Chan and identified him as the doctor who had treated her breathing difficulties during the night. In the memoir, he was surprised: she had been in a coma, with her eyes closed. After he left, she asked Danny about the bleak prognosis. Danny’s response, as she records it, was astonishment that she knew about a conversation that had occurred down the corridor.[1, p. 80]
She also recounts identifying the nurse who had struggled to find her veins. According to the book, her brother subsequently confronted him about what he had said, and the nurse apologised, surprised that she had heard him. Over the following days she says she described procedures and conversations from around the bed, down the hall, and in waiting areas.[1, p. 81]
These details give the account more substance than a general declaration of having felt peaceful or seen a light. They concern events in the shared world, involving people who could in principle confirm or dispute them.
The memoir records Moorjani’s account of these confirmations, but there is also a separately reported witness check: researcher Janice Miner Holden communicated with Danny, who, according to a case review in the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia, confirmed the corridor incident and Moorjani’s awareness of her brother travelling to Hong Kong.[15] That is stronger than an uncorroborated memoir anecdote, although the publicly available summary does not supply a contemporaneous recording of the conversation or a blinded test. Ordinary hearing may account for some bedside details; the reported distant conversation raises harder questions about access to information and timing.
Anoop, thousands of miles away
Then there is her brother, Anoop. Moorjani says that, while her awareness seemed to extend beyond the hospital, she became aware of him on an airplane, far away, urgently travelling to Hong Kong. She felt his anxiety and wanted to reassure him. The prospect of his arriving only to find her dead affected her deeply.[1, p. 64]
The memoir supplies a second remarkable detail. Anoop was living in Pune, India. According to the family sequence she recounts, he had felt something was wrong and arranged to travel before anyone told him that she was in a coma and might be dying. Flights from Pune were full, so he booked a departure from Mumbai and made the roughly four-hour journey there by car. When Danny called Anoop’s home to urge him to come, Anoop’s wife Mona said he was already on his way.[1, p. 77]
Mona, who was Buddhist, then organised others to chant for Anita’s healing. In Hong Kong, their mother prayed for her daughter. The book brings these separate places together around the same crisis: the hospital, the home in India, the journey to Mumbai, and the flight.
When Moorjani awoke, Anoop was there. She remembers seeing his suitcase behind him. What she reports having perceived while apparently unconscious now had a counterpart beside the hospital bed.[1, pp. 79–80]
The account does not provide a controlled test excluding every ordinary way she might have anticipated his journey. Nevertheless, the later case review reports that Danny confirmed this aspect to Janice Miner Holden as well.[15] The combination of her reported awareness of the flight and his arrival is therefore of particular interest, while the timing and limits of that corroboration remain important.
The father and friend who had died
Her experience did not stop with the living. Moorjani describes recognising her father, who had died ten years earlier, and her close friend Soni, who had died of cancer about three years before. She did not portray these encounters simply as seeing familiar physical bodies. Recognition and communication seemed immediate, conveyed through feeling and understanding rather than spoken sentences.[1, pp. 66–67]
Her encounter with her father carried a particular emotional significance. During his life, cultural expectations had sometimes made their relationship difficult. In this experience, those pressures no longer stood between them. What she felt was unconditional love. She understood him to have remained connected with the family through the years after his death.[1, pp. 73–74]
With Soni, the sense of communion was so intimate that Moorjani describes their essences merging. She felt that her friend was available to her loved ones without being restricted to one location. The experience suggested to her that death had not destroyed the relationship; the separation lay partly in the limitations of ordinary perception.
She also describes a scene resembling another lifetime with Anoop. In that setting, she was the older, protective sibling, caring for him in a rural home while their parents worked in the fields. Although the scene appeared historical, she says it felt present rather than like a memory of something long finished.[1, p. 67]
These are subjective encounters, not independently verified identifications of an unknown deceased person. Yet they explain why her experience persuaded her so deeply that bodily death is not annihilation. Within it, the dead were neither absent nor merely remembered. They were encountered as living presences.
The threshold and the return
Moorjani describes reaching a boundary beyond which she understood that returning would no longer be possible. She felt reluctant to resume life in a body so damaged by illness. Then, she says, she knew that returning would not mean continuing the same ordeal: she would recover.[1, pp. 74–76]
She also describes a deeply altered sense of time. Past, present, and possible futures seemed accessible together. Her understanding of her relationships appeared as an interconnected whole. Alongside this came the recognition that she existed without the familiar labels of body, race, culture, or religion—and seemed vastly greater than the identity those labels had defined.[1, pp. 67–70]
On the afternoon of February 3, she began to awaken. Her family’s relief met the certainty she felt from the experience. The woman who returned would eventually tell her story to people far beyond that hospital.[1, pp. 79–80]
“Here I am”: boundless awareness and the recognition of Being
The extraordinary perceptions are only part of Moorjani’s account. At its centre is a discovery about what she felt herself to be. The familiar identity—an ill woman, a wife, a daughter, a person shaped by a particular culture—no longer seemed to contain her. Yet she did not experience this loosening of identity as unconsciousness or disappearance. She describes a greater immediacy of existence.
On page 69, she expresses the discovery in unusually direct terms:
“Here I am without my body, race, culture, religion, or beliefs . . . yet I continue to exist! Then what am I? Who am I?”
What remained, she writes, did not feel like a diminished remnant of the person she had been. It felt greater, more intense, and more expansive. She experienced her essence as eternal, without beginning or end. On the following page, she describes “becoming the crystalline light of my own awareness.” These are her descriptions of how existence appeared within the experience.[1, pp. 69–70]
This is why I understand an important dimension of her experience through what AtR calls I AMness: the direct, nonconceptual certainty of Being or luminous Presence. It is more than adopting a belief that one possesses a soul. In her telling, she recognised an immediacy of existence that seemed independent of the attributes through which she had previously defined herself. “I AMness” is my contemplative interpretation of these passages, rather than the terminology she uses in the book.
Alongside this recognition was an oceanic expansion. On page 64, she describes filling every space until separation seemed to disappear: “I encompassed—no, became—everything and everyone.” Her husband’s fear was experienced with such intimacy that it felt as though she became him. Later, the presence of her deceased friend Soni was experienced as a merging of essences. The centre from which she ordinarily perceived the world no longer seemed bounded by her skin.[1, pp. 64–67]
“Oceanic” is a useful descriptive word here: awareness felt vast, inclusive, and inseparable from what appeared within it. She describes an interconnectedness extending beyond people to animals, plants, mountains, seas, inanimate things, and the cosmos. Everything seemed alive with consciousness and part of an infinite Whole. Love was experienced as unconditional, requiring no achievement, conformity, or proof of worth.[1, pp. 65–70]
Her language about God similarly moves from a separate figure to a mode of existence:
“God isn’t a being, but a state of being . . . and I was now that state of being!”
She presents this as a recognition arising in the experience, rather than an answer supplied by an external voice. It belongs with her striking observation that the transition felt less like travelling somewhere else than awakening from a restricted way of experiencing reality.[1, pp. 65, 68]
In the next chapter, she offers an analogy: imagine exploring a huge, dark warehouse with a flashlight. The narrow beam reveals one small area at a time. Then the lights come on, and the contents and their relationships become visible together. This is her metaphor for the change in awareness, not a literal warehouse she visited. Returning to ordinary perception did not erase her conviction that the larger field was there.[1, pp. 71–73]
There are therefore two closely related features to appreciate: the certainty of Being beneath the familiar personal identity, and the expansive sense that everything belongs to one indivisible whole. Both can be life-changing. Whether the luminous Presence is itself seen to be empty of inherent existence is a further question, which we will return to below.
More from Moorjani’s own words: eternity, awakening, and the infinite Whole
Her account becomes even more revealing when the words of recognition are read together with the descriptions of expanding beyond bodily boundaries. On printed page 69, immediately after asking who she is without her body, race, culture, or beliefs, Moorjani emphasises that the absence of familiar identity did not mean diminished existence. She writes:
“I certainly don’t feel reduced or smaller in any way.”
She continues, describing not only increased awareness but a sense of timeless Being:
“I felt eternal, as if I’d always existed and always would without beginning or end.”
The importance of these lines lies in the recognition of existence itself. She was not merely looking at an unusually bright object, imagining a boundless space, or entertaining an idea of immortality. As she recounts it, with the usual personal attributes absent, Being was unmistakably present and seemed immeasurably greater than her ordinary identity.[1, p. 69]
Her account is equally clear that this did not feel like an excursion by a separate observer to a distant location. On page 65, she writes:
“It didn’t feel as though I’d physically gone somewhere else—it was more as though I’d awakened.”
She describes expanding through the hospital and beyond the apparent limits of time and space, encompassing both this existence and what she perceived as another realm. The same awareness of her husband’s distress and her brother’s journey was experienced within this expansion. Her oceanic Presence was not merely a vast emptiness devoid of appearances; her account includes people, their feelings, the surrounding world, and a sense of the entire cosmos belonging to an indivisible consciousness.[1, pp. 64–66]
On printed page 70, Moorjani goes beyond human relationships to describe an interconnectedness embracing living beings, plants, mountains, the sea, inanimate objects, and the universe as a whole. She sums it up with a short sentence:
“Everything belongs to an infinite Whole.”
This is the oceanic, all-pervading aspect of her account: the centre from which she ordinarily looked out onto a separate world seemed to have fallen away, while the whole field of existence was intimately included. Alongside the grandeur of this perception was a simple recognition about her own existence and worth. On the same page, she writes:
“I’m loved unconditionally, for no other reason than simply because I exist.”
The combined descriptions are important. Moorjani speaks both of an immediate recognition of Being and of a vast, all-inclusive consciousness. Through the AtR framework, the first recalls the certainty of I AMness; the second resonates with its oceanic expressions. These are interpretations of her testimony, not claims that she herself adopted AtR terminology or explicitly asserted attainment of any Buddhist stage.[1, pp. 69–70]
In her 2013 TEDxBayArea talk, Moorjani also described this expanded, nonlocal awareness in a vivid phrase: “It was like wherever I put my awareness, there I was.” She explained that she felt aware of her brother travelling from India while her body remained in Hong Kong, and described sharing consciousness with the people around her. Her later public account therefore reinforces the emphasis on all-pervading awareness found in the memoir.[26]
John Tan on two oceanic expressions of I AMness
John Tan (Thusness) describes this territory with unusual precision in Buddha Nature is NOT “I Am”. After distinguishing the strong sense of individual identity, he describes these further experiences:
“3.2 An oceanic experience free from conceptualization.
This is due to the practitioner freeing himself from conceptuality, from labels and symbols. The mind continuous disassociates itself from all labeling and symbols.
3.3 An oceanic experience dissolving into everything.
The period of non-conceptuality is prolonged. Long enough to dissolve the mind/body ‘symbolic’ bond and therefore inner and outer division is temporarily suspended.”
These distinctions help explain why Moorjani’s account cannot be reduced to a person merely seeing a light. The dropping away of identity and symbols resembles what John calls an oceanic experience free from conceptualisation. Her description of becoming everyone and everything, rather than standing apart from them, resembles his further description of oceanic dissolution into everything.[10]
John’s distinction also requires care: I AMness realisation is not merely an oceanic experience, however clear or blissful. It is the direct, doubtless discovery of Presence or Being itself—an immediate, non-inferential certainty of existence. In the oceanic mode described here, this Beingness seems boundless, infinite, and all-pervading, no longer confined to the usual sense of a person located inside a body. Moorjani’s first-person recognition of existing without the attributes of personal identity, together with her sense of becoming everything and everyone, strongly suggests this depth of recognition. Calling it I AMness remains my AtR interpretation of her testimony, rather than a classification she makes herself.[1, pp. 64–70][19]
Precisely because this discovery is so immediate and certain, it can seem, in John Tan’s words, “more real than real.” This is not simply a blissful sensation that someone later mistakes for the truth; it is the unmistakable realisation of Being. Yet without penetrating its nature, our ingrained ignorance of emptiness almost inevitably reifies that luminous Presence as the Ultimate: an eternal, independently existing Consciousness, Ātman, God, or background Source behind all phenomena. The certainty of Presence is authentic; the assumption that it therefore exists inherently is the error. John’s emphasis is not on discarding the recognition, but on deepening wisdom until the presumed agent behind experience and the projection of Awareness as an independent ground are seen through. Anatta and the further realisation of emptiness disclose that even luminous Beingness is empty of inherent existence. Such insight is necessary for liberation; it does not negate the radiance or knowing of appearances, which remain vividly present.[10][11][27]
This preserves the distinctiveness of Moorjani’s testimony: the doubtless recognition of Being, its oceanic and all-pervading expression, and a profoundly altered understanding of love and existence. Her account can be appreciated for its depth without conflating the realisation of luminous Presence with the further wisdom that realises its empty nature.
The recovery: what the book actually records
Her recovery is remarkable not only in her recollection, but in the clinical chronology reproduced in Dying to Be Me. Moorjani was admitted on February 2, 2006, after nearly four years of Hodgkin lymphoma. Dr. Peter Ko, an oncologist who subsequently travelled to Hong Kong and examined her original hospital file, reported an admission diagnosis of stage IVB lymphoma. His account sets out the severity of her condition, the treatments begun that night, and the exceptionally rapid improvement that followed.[1, pp. 97–102]
Ko describes a patient in extreme difficulty: extensive lymph-node enlargement, serious breathing problems, large skin ulcers, and failing organ systems. On the night of admission, approximately two litres of fluid were drained from her chest, and three drugs from a planned seven-drug chemotherapy regimen were started. His summary says the treating doctors considered intervention her only chance, despite the risks of chemotherapy in that condition.[1, pp. 99–100]
Then the course changed. By February 3 she had awakened; on February 4 she wanted the feeding tube removed and asked for her iPod. On February 5 she was joking with the doctors, asking whether they wanted to join the party. She left intensive care on February 6. Ko reports that much of the swelling in her face and neck had resolved, the enlarged lymph nodes had begun to soften, and she could turn her head again.[1, p. 100]
The extent of the early tumour regression is especially striking. In her original NDERF follow-up, Moorjani reported that her visibly enlarged lymph nodes had shrunk by approximately 80 percent around four days after chemotherapy began. The memoir supplies a second, clinically grounded account: on printed page 102, Moorjani describes findings that Dr. Ko drew from her hospital records. According to that account, the file documented tumours as large as lemons at admission, yet at least a 70 percent reduction in their size several days later. Ko’s separately reproduced day-by-day chronology describes substantial improvement by February 6, including the resolution of much facial and neck swelling and the softening of previously massive lymph nodes.[1, pp. 99–102][2]
These are complementary accounts of the same extraordinary early improvement, rather than conflicting claims that all cancer disappeared in four days. The approximately 80 percent estimate refers to visibly enlarged lymph nodes in the early NDERF testimony; the at least 70 percent figure is presented in the memoir as a finding arising from Ko’s medical-record review. In a 2014 CNN interview, Moorjani again described roughly 70 percent tumour shrinkage within four days. The original measurements and scans are not reproduced in these publications, so an outside reader cannot independently recalculate the percentages. Nevertheless, the claims have substantially more support than an unaided recollection: the published account incorporates a physician’s review of hospital records, a dated clinical chronology, and later diagnostic findings.[1, pp. 100–102][2][23]
The subsequent investigations further support the extent of her recovery. Moorjani recounts a negative bone-marrow biopsy and the radiologist’s difficulty locating an enlarged lymph node to sample. In Ko’s chronology, three ultrasound examinations found no obviously pathological lymph nodes, and a neck lymph node biopsied on February 27 showed no evidence of cancer. Her extensive skin ulcers also healed without the grafts that doctors had previously anticipated. These were clinical observations and test results, not merely a change in how she felt. The marrow and node samples assessed particular sites; the later whole-body CT-PET scan provided a broader assessment.[1, pp. 87–90, 100–101]
On March 9, after her second chemotherapy cycle, she went home. A week later she celebrated her birthday at Jimmy’s Kitchen. On March 26, she attended a wedding, danced, and drank champagne, before beginning her third cycle. Ko’s summary dates the clear CT-PET assessment to July 24, after six cycles; the remaining two planned cycles were stopped.[1, p. 101]
These dates distinguish the early recovery and negative biopsy from the later completion of treatment and final scan. The earlier narrative on page 90 compresses these events; the dated chronology on pages 100–101 makes clear that chemotherapy continued after the March discharge.
Ko’s conclusion was stronger than a passing expression of surprise. The book reproduces his statement:
“Her recovery was certainly ‘remarkable.’ Based on my own experience and opinions of several colleagues, I am unable to attribute her dramatic recovery to her chemotherapy.”
Ko also suggested that an unknown, perhaps nonphysical process might have affected cancer-cell behaviour. That proposed mechanism was his speculation. But his central medical judgment was emphatic: having examined her hospital file, he did not believe the speed and extent of the dramatic recovery could be attributed to the chemotherapy she received. He explicitly regarded a cytotoxic-drug explanation as unlikely. The memoir gives his reasoning and chronology, rather than merely quoting a passing remark of surprise.[1, pp. 99–102]
A different interpretation was offered by Moorjani’s treating oncologist-haematologist, Dr. T. K. Chan, in a February 3, 2007 South China Morning Post interview. Chan acknowledged that she was critically ill and that her recovery was remarkable, but attributed the improvement to emergency drainage of fluid from her chest and chemotherapy. He also noted that Hodgkin lymphoma can respond dramatically to chemotherapy, and that because she received treatment, the recovery could not scientifically be assigned to her spiritual experience.[16]
There is therefore a substantive disagreement between two physicians familiar with the case. Chan stressed that Hodgkin lymphoma can respond dramatically to chemotherapy and that emergency chest drainage probably saved her life during the initial crisis. Ko focused on how swiftly such extensive lymph-node enlargement receded while she recovered from a life-threatening state of organ dysfunction. Both acknowledged an extraordinary clinical turnaround, but they drew different conclusions about how adequately conventional treatment explained it. The medical-record findings described in the memoir warrant serious consideration alongside Chan’s explanation.[1, pp. 99–102][16]
The conclusion is not that chemotherapy cured every trace of cancer in four days: treatment continued for six cycles, and the clear CT-PET scan was dated July 24. Nor does the coincidence of treatment and the NDE tell us which factor was responsible for the rapid early regression. What the reported medical evidence does show is an exceptionally fast and substantial reduction in tumour size—described as at least 70 percent within days from Ko’s hospital-file review, and approximately 80 percent in Moorjani’s early description of the visibly enlarged nodes—followed by striking clinical and pathological improvements. That is a meaningful basis for Ko’s assessment that her recovery was not adequately explained by chemotherapy, even as Chan’s contrasting interpretation remains part of the case.[1, pp. 99–102][2][16][23]
Important distinction: The NDERF questionnaire describes a life-threatening illness rather than documented clinical death. Moorjani’s experience arose during a coma while her heart was still beating; it should not be described as recovery from brain death. [2]
Sam Parnia’s research: experiences that can be investigated
There is a natural next question: have researchers encountered comparable reports through hospital studies, rather than only through memoirs? Dr. Sam Parnia and his colleagues have investigated experiences reported by people resuscitated after cardiac arrest. Their work gives us concrete cases to consider.
In their 2014 AWARE study, a 57-year-old man described observing his resuscitation from an upper corner of the room. He recalled an automated instruction to shock the patient and described a bald, stocky medical worker wearing blue. The researchers reported that medical records corroborated people, sounds, and activities in his account. The defibrillator’s operating sequence suggested an interval extending up to approximately three minutes during cardiac arrest and CPR.[3]
This is a particularly interesting example because it concerns events that could be compared with a medical record. The arrest occurred outside an area equipped with the study’s concealed visual targets, so it was not a successful hidden-image test. Nor did the case establish an electrically silent brain through contemporaneous EEG. Its significance is the reported correspondence between remembered events and the resuscitation, with timing inferred from the equipment’s protocol.[3]
The later AWARE II study (2023) also documented recalled experiences during cardiac-arrest resuscitation and recorded EEG patterns consistent with possible cognitive activity during CPR. Its concealed visual image was not identified by any participant; one participant identified an auditory stimulus in a separate test, without a verified out-of-body observation. These findings invite further investigation, but do not verify consciousness operating independently of the brain. Cardiac-arrest research provides a useful comparison, not a direct test of Moorjani’s experience in a coma.[14]
Readers who wish to investigate the wider survival question can consult the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia overview of postmortem survival. It discusses NDEs alongside mediumship, children’s reported past-life memories, and other proposed evidence, while identifying interpretive problems in moving from unusual experiences to actual survival after death. It is a specialist overview of a disputed field, not a scientific consensus statement; individual claims should still be followed back to their original reports.[4]
Readers who would like a broader, more affirmative catalogue can also explore Evidence for the Afterlife. It gathers reports concerning near-death experiences, deathbed visions, apparitions, mediumship, and children’s past-life memories, with links to older case literature. Its author argues openly for survival, and some interpretations are speculative; the greatest value is in using it to locate and examine the individual cases and original reports for oneself.[20]
For me, the appeal of a cumulative case is that different kinds of report raise related questions from different directions. Its strength depends on the quality and independence of the underlying evidence. A detailed, corroborated observation carries more weight than a striking claim repeated across many websites. That is why the individual stories and their records deserve close attention.
Why “just a hallucination” does not settle the question
A sceptical reader may reasonably ask whether a mind in crisis can generate an intensely convincing world. The felt reality of an experience, by itself, cannot settle its origin. Neither beauty, certainty, nor lasting transformation automatically establishes that someone perceived events outside the body.
But there is another question: what if an account contains accurate information about events the person apparently could not ordinarily observe? An explanation then has to address the information, as well as the feeling of having an experience. Calling something a hallucination does not establish how a particular description came to match an external event.
In Moorjani’s memoir, the most relevant details are the exchange between Danny and the doctor down the corridor, her recognition of the doctor after awakening, and her reported awareness of Anoop’s flight. Her book records Danny’s astonishment when she repeated the prognosis: the conversation had happened away from her bed. She also describes the nurse’s surprised apology after her brother challenged him about what he had said while attending to her.[1, pp. 63–64, 77, 80–81]
These are specific claims about people, speech, and circumstances. The later report that Danny confirmed the corridor conversation and her awareness of Anoop’s journey to a researcher strengthens the witness basis beyond the memoir alone.[15] It is still retrospective testimony rather than a contemporaneously documented, blinded experiment. This is why I give the episodes serious attention while distinguishing reported corroboration from proof of perception independent of the brain.
| Account | What makes it relevant | What was checked or reported |
|---|
| Moorjani: corridor conversation | Reported access to a conversation approximately forty feet from the bed. | The memoir records Danny’s surprise. A later research review reports that Danny separately confirmed the event to Janice Miner Holden; this is retrospective witness testimony, not a timed experiment.[1][15] |
| Moorjani: Anoop’s journey | Reported awareness of her brother travelling from India. | A later account likewise reports that Danny confirmed Moorjani’s awareness of Anoop’s journey. Prior expectations and the precise timing of knowledge have not been conclusively excluded.[1][15] |
| AWARE resuscitation case | Reported observation from above. | Researchers reported corroboration against medical records. This concerned the resuscitation room, not a distant hospital location.[3] |
A separate example appears in the 2001 Lancet paper by Pim van Lommel and colleagues. A nurse recounts removing a deeply unconscious patient’s upper dentures during resuscitation and placing them on a resuscitation trolley. More than a week later, the patient recognised the nurse and described where the dentures had been put, including the trolley’s bottles and sliding drawer. The nurse also reports that the patient accurately described the room and people present, saying he had observed events from above. This is witness testimony reproduced in the paper, not a concealed-target experiment, and it belongs to the Dutch researchers’ report rather than Parnia’s.[5, p. 2041]
Such cases raise a more precise challenge than a general report of light or peace. We should ask what information was recorded, who confirmed it, when it was acquired, and whether hearing, prior familiarity, later conversation, or reconstruction could account for it. Those are questions to investigate, not explanations that become established merely by naming them. Equally, an unexplained detail does not automatically establish survival after irreversible death.
My argument is cumulative: reports of apparently extended perception deserve to be considered alongside encounters with deceased people and other evidence suggestive of survival. I find that cumulative case persuasive. Readers can examine its components without first adopting my conclusion. The strongest invitation to reconsider disbelief is a concrete account that withstands scrutiny.
Yuan Yin Lao Ren: the bardo body and the five powers
The abilities Moorjani describes also invite comparison with Buddhist accounts of the intermediate state, or bardo (中阴). Seeing beyond the immediate surroundings, hearing at a distance, directly knowing another person’s feelings, and seeming to move beyond ordinary spatial restrictions are familiar themes in teachings about the bardo being.
Yuan Yin Lao Ren discusses this in Unveiling the Heart Sutra (《心经抉隐》), in the section on the emptiness of phenomena and non-abiding. He describes the intermediate body as arising through self-grasping after the physical body has broken down, before the next birth. The following excerpts are translated from the original Chinese text:[6]
“Once a person has died, the physical body has broken down and the four great elements have dispersed. This body can no longer be used: the house has fallen apart, and one must move. At this time, because of grasping at a self, an intermediate-state body arises.”
“In this interval, the seventh consciousness, manas—self-grasping—clings to the notion that ‘I exist’; with that comes ‘my body.’ Thus, an illusory, insubstantial body arises from mind, called the intermediate-state body. The human physical body is predominantly of the earth element and is heavy and gross, whereas the intermediate-state body is predominantly of the wind element and is subtle and insubstantial. Because it is no longer enclosed by a fleshly body, it possesses the five supernormal powers.”
Here the five powers are the conventional Buddhist categories below. The right-hand column offers comparisons with Moorjani’s testimony; it does not claim that she has been shown to possess these powers in their full traditional sense.
| Traditional power | Possible parallel in Moorjani’s account |
|---|
Divine eye · 天眼通
Vision beyond ordinary visual limits | Her reported awareness of events beyond the bed and of Anoop on the airplane. |
Divine ear · 天耳通
Hearing beyond ordinary auditory limits | The conversation she says she perceived down the corridor. |
| Knowledge of others’ minds · 他心通 | Her description of directly feeling Danny’s and Anoop’s fear, rather than merely observing their expressions. |
| Recollection of former lives · 宿命通 | The scene she interpreted as another lifetime with Anoop. That scene was not independently verified. |
| Supernormal mobility and transformation · 神足通 | Her sense that awareness was no longer restricted to one bodily location. This is a looser resemblance, not a demonstration of the full range of abilities traditionally described. |
This comparison is striking because the Buddhist description makes enhanced capacities compatible with continued delusion. In Yuan Yin Lao Ren’s account, a being may be free of the gross physical body’s restrictions yet remain subject to karmic conditioning and self-grasping. The passage goes on to describe latent tendencies becoming active, attraction to appearances, and renewed birth through attachment.
Thus, extraordinary perception is not the decisive issue for liberation. In the traditional list of six supernormal knowledges, the sixth—āsravakṣaya, 漏尽通, the knowledge of the destruction of the taints—is distinguished from the first five. Yuan Yin Lao Ren explicitly makes this distinction elsewhere in the same discussion.[6]
He therefore turns the reader back towards practice while alive. In the cited passage, he urges recognition of appearances as dreamlike, without chasing, craving, or grasping at them, and concludes:
“It is precisely this accomplishment—being neither controlled by circumstances nor driven by karma—that constitutes genuine freedom from birth and death. This is called ‘non-abiding nirvana.’”
His language describes a conditioned process involving consciousness and attachment; it should not be turned into a permanent soul hiding inside the body. Nor should a near-death episode automatically be identified with the postmortem bardo. Moorjani returned to her living body, and Buddhist traditions differ in their accounts of an intermediate state. The point is a meaningful resemblance to this particular Buddhist explanation, not an established identity between the two.
For the wider argument, the distinction is valuable: testimony suggestive of survival, descriptions of unusual powers, and the wisdom that frees one from grasping concern different aspects of the path. One can find the afterlife case persuasive without mistaking survival—or even an extraordinary luminous opening—for the completion of awakening.
How Buddhist traditions differ on the intermediate state—and Ajahn Brahm on no-self
The antarābhava (Sanskrit; Chinese: 中有 or 中阴), an intermediate existence between death and rebirth, is broadly accepted in mainstream Mahāyāna traditions, including East Asian Buddhism, and in Vajrayāna, especially Tibetan teachings on the bardo. Their detailed descriptions are not identical. Classical Theravāda Abhidhamma, by contrast, generally rejects an interval between death and rebirth and teaches immediate rebirth-linking consciousness. That difference should not be inflated into the claim that every individual Theravādin rejects intermediate states: the early sources have been interpreted differently, and Buddhist schools debated the matter long before modern NDE reports.[31]
Ajahn Brahmavamso is a particularly clear example. In his recorded talk Reborn … Again! (18 June 2004), when asked whether there can be a delay between rebirths, he says it may be immediate or occur after days or years, and explicitly disagrees with Theravāda specialists who deny any interval: “There is space between rebirths.” He describes a temporary, mind-made, ghost-like existence while awaiting another rebirth. This is his own recorded teaching, not merely a second-hand attribution.[35]
An earlier recorded talk, Kamma and Rebirth (24 May 2003), makes an important distinction: he says a being may be reborn immediately into a ghost realm for a few days before another rebirth. Thus he accepts a temporary postmortem existence but does not necessarily classify it in precisely the same way as a Tibetan bardo or the classical Sanskrit antarābhava. The two talks are stronger evidence of his actual view than the earlier second-hand report and unauthenticated Q&A transcription. The online transcripts are automatically generated and may contain transcription errors; the linked recordings are the primary evidence.[36][32][33]
Equally, it would be a mistake to infer from his view of rebirth or intermediate existence that Ajahn Brahm lacks insight into anattā. His own 2005 essay, Bāhiya’s Teaching: In the Seen Is Just the Seen, explicitly interprets the final part of the Bāhiya instruction as revealing that “there is no ‘doer’, nor a ‘knower’, behind sensory experience.” He also rejects locating a self in a transcendent reality beyond the seen, heard, sensed and cognized. This is a clear teaching of no-self, strikingly relevant to the AtR distinction between vivid Presence and a supposedly independent knower behind it. A published explanation cannot, by itself, establish or disprove anyone’s private spiritual attainment; the point is that his teaching should not be caricatured as endorsing a background self.[34]
Chögyal Namkhai Norbu: why the bardo may be seven times clearer
The Dzogchen master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu offers a closely related explanation in Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Speaking with Michael Katz about the transition through death and the value of dream practice, he compares the bardo of existence—the intermediate state in which rebirth has not yet occurred—with the dream state. He explains that in these states the functions of awareness need not depend upon the physical sense organs in the same way as during waking life. He then says, in a traditional Tantric formulation:
“For this reason we have seven times the amount of clarity in the bardo than we have during our lives.”
Norbu is not saying that ordinary sleep is seven times clearer than waking, nor that the number seven is a laboratory measurement. He is describing the heightened vividness attributed in Tantra to the postmortem bardo of existence. This helps explain why Dzogchen practitioners cultivate awareness in sleep and dreams: recognising experience as it unfolds without ordinary sensory support may prepare them for the transitions associated with death. In the same teaching, Norbu distinguishes the possibility of liberation through recognition from simply continuing through the bardo under the influence of karma. [28]
Read alongside Yuan Yin Lao Ren, the point is not that extraordinary clarity guarantees enlightenment. Rather, vivid perception without the physical body and liberating wisdom are different matters. Moorjani’s account has some striking parallels with these traditional descriptions, although her near-death experience should not automatically be identified with a postmortem bardo.
Robert Aho: he did not merely see the light—he was the light
A second account brings the contemplative question into particularly sharp focus. Buddhist practitioner and author Robert Aho recounts an extraordinary near-death experience during a heart procedure in 2016, followed by a smaller episode in 2021. His account is discussed in AtR’s Near Death Experiences and Bardo: Buddhist Dies and Spends an Eternity in the Light, then Comes Back to Share this Message; his own writing also reflects on its significance.[7][8]
Not looking at the light, but recognising himself as the light
Aho had spent years contemplating death. As the heart procedure began, he thought he might not survive and waved goodbye. He then describes an instantaneous shift. He did not pass through a tunnel, travel toward a brilliant object, or see a luminous being standing somewhere ahead. In the interview, his words are unmistakable: “I became that light for an eternity.” The ordinary person he had taken himself to be was absent; there was no observer standing apart from the brilliance. He describes the light and himself as without difference.[9, 7:16–9:30]
This is a much more radical description than the ordinary NDE image of a person encountering light. He attempts to convey a radiance more intense than a million suns, yet it was not physical light painfully striking the eyes. It was a condition of boundless awareness, utter openness, love and compassion. Nothing seemed hidden; the essence of things appeared immediately evident. Ordinary spatial restrictions and the usual distinction between someone knowing and something known were not present in his description.[9, 9:30–10:49]
He also explains that this did not feel like a very long episode measured in earthly minutes. He calls it eternity because ordinary time did not apply. Rather than consciousness located inside a finite personality looking outward, he describes an all-encompassing condition of awareness extending beyond the familiar boundaries of personhood, time and space. He calls this the Source, and at various points names it the dharmakaya light—his own Buddhist interpretation of what he underwent.[9, 10:08–12:49; 21:48–22:06]
The distinction between awareness and consciousness is also noteworthy in his telling. Later, when describing the painting he made of the event, he says he was fully aware within the white light, but would not call it “consciousness” in the ordinary sense. He reserves that word, in this explanation, for the more differentiated patterns that appeared as the next phase unfolded. This is how Aho explains his experience, not an established scientific classification of consciousness.[9, 29:45–32:56]
Dimensions of existence: the Source, an energetic realm, and ordinary embodiment
Then colours, swirling luminosities, vibrations and forms resembling bubbles began to appear. At first they seemed distant and faint compared with the immensity of the light; to ordinary human perception, he says, even these subtler appearances would be extraordinarily bright. Aho connects this phase with the sambhogakaya, or what he calls the energetic dimension. He says he became aware of what seemed like an immense multiplicity of realms: other universes, parallel universes, heaven-like regions, and forms of life or possibility not restricted to our familiar cosmos.[9, 19:00–20:28; 29:45–33:35]
In his description, our enormous physical universe is merely a tiny, dim speck within a far wider expanse of possible existence. The bright Source itself is not pictured as one exceptionally large region within that expanse: he portrays it as immeasurable, beyond any perimeter. His later essay Dense Realm develops the same account, using the three kayas to distinguish limitless dharmakaya, the vast sambhogakaya-like domain of appearances, and the dense physical world associated with nirmāṇakāya.[18]
These are Aho’s own descriptions and uses of Buddhist terminology, not necessarily the technical meanings of the kāyas. In the Buddhist teaching on the bodies of a Buddha, dharmakāya is the truth body: the fully awakened wisdom of a Buddha and its empty nature, inseparable from the realization of emptiness. It is not simply the experience of immense light, or an all-pervading consciousness felt to be the ultimate Source. Likewise, sambhogakāya refers to the enjoyment body of a Buddha, rather than every luminous, colourful or energetic dimension that might be experienced in meditation or an NDE. The Dalai Lama explains this distinction in his account of the truth body and enjoyment body.[24]
Aho’s testimony of what he calls the Source, energetic realm and multiple universes can therefore be appreciated on its own terms without assuming that these experiences establish attainment of the dharmakāya or sambhogakāya in their full Buddhist sense. Nor are these descriptions independent astronomical evidence for parallel universes.[18]
Returning from timelessness and reconstructing a person
As colours and differentiated appearances arose, Aho gradually remembered that he had once been a human being. Returning to bodily life was not immediately appealing, particularly because of the chronic pain he had endured. Yet he recounts a compelling impulse of compassion: he felt he had work to do for others. He interprets this as bodhicitta, the wish to awaken for the benefit of beings.[9, 12:59–15:59]
During his perceived return through the energetic realm, he recalls mantras and mudrās that he believed he had learned in other lifetimes. It seemed to take something like a hundred years to return—his way of describing subjective duration, not a century on the hospital clock. Then came an especially revealing feature: the need to reassemble the person. Memories, the habitual sense of self, past injuries, ways of speaking and even his northern Minnesota accent seemed to be put back together piece by piece. An architect by profession, Aho likens the formation of everyday personality to constructing a building.[9, 20:42–25:07]
He describes becoming aware of hospital staff and relatives before feeling fully returned to the body. As he moved his hands and chanted, a nurse remarked that he must be a Buddhist; when he opened his eyes, he replied, “You could be right.” He later says a nurse showed him an EKG tracing suggesting about five minutes of cardiac flatline. The tracing itself is not supplied, and an EKG cannot establish an absence of brain activity, so this remains his recollection rather than independently verified physiological proof of disembodied consciousness.[9, 25:14–28:34]
Could the reported five-minute EKG strip still exist? Possibly—in the hospital’s clinical records, a stored monitor trace, or a copy retained by Aho—but its existence and present availability have not been established. I could not locate a publicly accessible image or authenticated copy of the specific tracing. The most useful next step would be to ask Aho whether he retained it and, with his consent, request the 2016 procedure and resuscitation records from the treating hospital. The key details to verify are the actual waveform, timestamps, whether there was sustained asystole versus another rhythm or a monitoring interruption, and what resuscitation was performed. Until then, “five minutes of flatline” should remain explicitly attributed to his account, not presented as independently documented fact.[9]
Why this recalls I AMness—while not establishing final liberation
From an AtR perspective, the decisive feature is not the visual spectacle of extraordinary light, nor Aho’s apparent perceptions of other realms. It is his direct recognition that he was the luminous Presence itself, not a limited body or a person standing apart and looking at a light. The infinite, oceanic, all-pervading sense of Being he describes is highly characteristic of what AtR calls I AMness realisation: a direct discovery of luminous consciousness or primordial Presence. Here “primordial” denotes the vivid, fundamental-feeling immediacy of knowing; it does not by itself assert the realised wisdom of emptiness that Dzogchen associates with fully awakened awareness. Such recognition is far more than a colourful vision, trance or conceptual belief in a soul.[10][19]
Aho himself goes beyond simply reporting a wondrous state: while explaining why he returned, he says he had “awakened in that condition” and that reconstructing his former personality meant re-entering the limitations of ordinary embodied identity. That is his own assessment of what occurred, and it gives his account a recognitional dimension quite different from merely reporting an unusual light.[9, 22:21–24:53]
AtR also makes a more exacting distinction: an I AMness realisation is not merely an I AM-like experience. A brief opening into vast, silent, luminous Presence can come and go without the decisive, doubtless recognition of Being. Genuine realisation concerns what is directly understood, with certainty beyond conceptual inference; it is not measured by the brightness of a light or the intensity of bliss. In this sense, Aho's testimony is far more suggestive of a profound recognition than an account of simply seeing light. Whether it corresponds to a stable realisation in AtR's specific sense, however, cannot be certified from an interview alone.[19]
This is where I would distinguish Aho’s realisation from the full realisation of emptiness. His description is strongly suggestive of recognition of I AMness—boundless consciousness, primordial luminous Being, the immediacy of the Source—but it does not describe the further insight that consciousness itself is empty of inherent existence, with no self-existing agent, substance or ultimate background behind appearances. On the evidence of this account, I would not identify what he calls his dharmakāya experience with full realisation of the Buddhist dharmakāya. In the AtR article featuring Aho, John Tan explicitly cautions that the NDE light can be the brilliance of ālaya rather than realisation of the nature of mind; John’s dialogue with Sim Pern Chong below explains why even overwhelming Presence at death need not disclose anatta or emptiness.[8][24]
To be fair to Aho, he also warns in his own writing against reifying the light into an object or thing. I do not mean that he necessarily believes in a solid cosmic substance, nor can an interview settle everything he may have realised. The specific distinction is that recognising oneself as all-pervading luminous Being is not yet the same as realising the emptiness of that very luminosity. The latter is the liberating insight emphasised by John Tan and, in a different Buddhist formulation, by the Dalai Lama.[25][17]
There is nevertheless a close resonance with Moorjani's account: the loosening of bodily identity, immediacy of existence, boundless love, altered time and the conviction that familiar personality does not exhaust reality. Aho himself discourages seeking death in order to reach this state; he urges practice and awakening in life.[9, 22:06–22:28]
Sim Pern Chong and John Tan: Presence after death
These Buddhist reflections give a framework for considering what may happen when ordinary bodily conditions fall away, while keeping two very different questions apart: whether awareness continues, and whether its empty, nondual nature is understood. The following is the complete 2008 exchange between Sim Pern Chong (writing as Longchen) and John Tan (writing as Thusness). It is reproduced in full, with the original spelling and punctuation preserved, from the July 16, 2022 AtR article.[8]
Originally posted by longchen [Sim Pern Chong] — complete 2008 passage
Watched the video .. a bit. Desteni is quite popular in the new age scene.
Just my opinion...
When we die, the thoughts and emotions can be dissolve in the death process... and what is left is the non-dual , all pervading experience of Presence. Here is usually when a 'being' discovered that it is not just the thought and emotion. But, the understanding is not clear here.
For those on an enlightenment path, we sort of 'experience death' before physical death. This experience of death happens many many times while still physically alive. And with gradual experiences, we understand the nature of the reality better.
In another word, we become more efficient and discard those ways of dealings that are not very helpful... Something like that...
Thusness / John Tan replied — complete 2008 passage
Hi Longchen,
Must be having a challenging time sustaining the vivid presence of non-dual experience. Just to share with you some of my thoughts:
When we die, the thoughts and emotions that are karmically linked to the body are temporarily suspended. The contrast in experience that resulted from the dissolution of the ‘bond of a body’ gives rise to a more vivid experience of Presence; although the experience of Presence is there, the insight into its non-dual essence and emptiness nature isn’t there. This is similar to the experience of “I AM”. Thoughts and emotions will continue to arise and subside with the bond of ‘I’ and ‘Mine’ after death.
Awareness is always non-dual and all pervading; obscured but not lost. In essence all manifestation, transient (emotions, thoughts or feelings) is really the manifold of Presence. They have the same non-dual essence and empty nature. All problems lie not at the manifestation level but at the fundamental level. Deep in us we see things inherently and dualistically. How the experience of Presence can be distorted with the ‘bond’ of dualistic and inherent seeing maybe loosely categorized as:
1. There is a mirror reflecting dust. (“I AM”)
Mirror bright is experienced but distorted. Dualistic and Inherent seeing.
2. Dust is required for the mirror to see itself.
Non-Dualistic but Inherent seeing. (Beginning of non-dual insight)
3. Dust has always been the mirror ( The mirror here is seen as a whole)
Non-Dualistic and non- inherent insight.
In 3, whatever comes and goes is the Rigpa itself. There is no Rigpa other than that. All along there is no dust really, only when a particular speck of dust claims that it is the purest and truest state then immediately all other arising which from beginning are self- mirroring become dust.
The two complete passages above are presented as historical reflections by their named authors. The 2008 discussion appears in the 2022 AtR source alongside later commentary, which should not be mistaken for part of this exchange.[8]
The Dalai Lama: primordial wisdom at death is not liberation
A closely parallel explanation is given in Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature by the Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron, excerpted in a separate AtR article. Discussing Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, they explain why the mere emergence of the most subtle primordial mind at death does not itself free sentient beings from saṃsāra:
Dodrup Jigme Tenpai Nyima (1865–1926) and his disciple Tsultrim Zangpo (1884–c.1957), who were great Dzogchen scholars and practitioners, said that the mere presence of this primordial wisdom within us alone cannot liberate us. Why not? At the time of death, all other minds have dissolved, and only the primordial mind remains. Even though it has manifested in all the infinite number of deaths we have experienced in saṃsāra, that has not helped us attain buddhahood. These two sages say that in order to attain buddhahood, it is necessary to utilize the primordial wisdom to realize emptiness; only that will liberate us. This is consistent with Tsongkhapa’s view.
The point is not that the primordial mind or its clarity is unreal in the sense of nonexistent. Rather, without the wisdom realising emptiness, even the manifestation of profound luminosity at death remains insufficient for buddhahood. This accords with John’s insistence that experiencing Presence and realising its empty nature are different. The passage is a Buddhist doctrinal explanation, not a medical demonstration that the mind survives death. [17]
What this distinction means
First, experiencing Presence is not the same as understanding its nature. Sim proposes that as bodily-linked patterns fall away, a powerful, all-pervading Presence may become apparent. John makes the distinction still sharper: even if Presence becomes far more vivid, its nondual and empty nature need not have been realised. An extraordinary NDE can therefore be meaningful without being identical to liberation.
Second, the suspension of body-linked thoughts is not the ending of grasping. John speaks of some mental and emotional patterns being temporarily suspended, not a once-for-all destruction of conditioned consciousness. His subsequent reference to “I” and “Mine” indicates that identification and attachment can persist. Within his Buddhist understanding, a disembodied or postmortem experience of radiance would not in itself end the causes of further birth.
Third, the mirror-and-dust example traces three different ways of interpreting essentially vivid experience. In the first, a luminous mirror is imagined to stand apart from what it reflects: an I AM-style background knower is distinguished from transient thoughts and appearances. In the second, subject-object separation can fall away in experience, yet a subtle inherent mirror remains, with appearances treated as ways for a single underlying consciousness to reveal itself. In the third, dust is not something external to a pre-existing mirror: the appearances themselves are the vividness. The point is not that all things are made of a giant metaphysical Mirror, but that there is no independent, self-existing background consciousness behind them. This is how the image is to be read alongside John’s teaching on anatta and emptiness.[10][11]
Fourth, John does not deny radiance or consciousness. His insistence that everything arising is the manifestation of Presence is incompatible with construing anatta as blankness, unconsciousness, or nihilistic nonexistence. What is relinquished is the presumed subject or agent behind experience and the reification of knowing into an ultimate, separately existing background. When the sound is heard, the sound is vividly known; there need be no extra hearer standing behind it. The vividness is not subtracted. It is no longer misconstrued as a permanent entity.[11]
Finally, brilliance can itself become a distraction. In a later reflection reproduced on the same AtR page—not part of the 2008 exchange—Sim cautions against becoming enchanted by overwhelming luminosity and connects that enchantment with habitual imprints and possible rebirth. John's earlier warning about the brilliance of Presence raises the same issue: precisely what feels most convincing can obscure the need to investigate emptiness.[8]
A borderless experience can still be misunderstood
Sim’s account of his own initial recognition adds another distinction. In Buddha Nature is NOT “I Am”, he describes a thought-free, borderless Presence that was only subsequently interpreted as I AM. For him, the experience’s certainty did not mean that its nondual and empty nature had already been understood.[10]
John’s discussion in the same compilation follows that distinction between direct experience and subsequent interpretation. Recognising Presence can be authentic, while construing it as an unchanging ground behind appearances introduces a further assumption. An oceanic sense of being everything can retain this assumption even after personal boundaries dissolve. His later description makes the direction of insight clear:
“The Presence is still fully present, nothing is denied.”
The change is that ordinary sounds, movements, and sensations disclose that immediacy themselves; a separate background is no longer required. His point concerns understanding what awareness is, rather than extinguishing awareness.[10]
Radiance is not denied after anatta
This needs to be explicit, particularly for readers encountering Buddhist no-self for the first time. In No Awareness Does Not Mean Non-Existence of Awareness, John Tan states:
“There is no denial of clarity or luminosity, it is the singling out of luminosity that is the problem.”
The compilation repeatedly distinguishes knowing from a separately existing knower. It explains that clarity is inseparable from changing appearances and their conditions. Seeing, hearing, and sensing need not be divided into an underlying Awareness and something appearing inside it. Nor must their diversity be absorbed into one ultimate substance. John’s emphasis is on experiencing their vividness without imposing that division or foundation.[11]
Thus, anatta does not leave a dead, unknowing world after consciousness has been subtracted. The presumed subject or agent behind experience is seen through, along with the reification of consciousness into an ultimate background behind everything. Radiance is fully acknowledged, without treating it as a self-existing entity.[11]
The possible continuation of awareness beyond bodily death, the interpretation of that awareness, and liberation from grasping are separate questions. This Buddhist distinction does not dismiss NDEs as possible evidence for survival; it cautions against equating even a profoundly luminous experience with the realisation of emptiness.
I AMness in NDEs: profound, but not final
There is a familiar contemplative dimension to these reports. What AtR calls I AMness realisation is not simply thinking “I exist,” watching an inner light, or temporarily enjoying a vast and peaceful state. It is a direct, doubtless realisation of Being or Presence itself: the unmistakable certainty of existence and awareness without needing concepts or inference. A luminous experience can prompt this discovery, but its occurrence alone does not guarantee the realisation. This distinction is important when interpreting both Moorjani and Aho.[19]
In my reading of NDE accounts, accounts evocative of this recognition are not uncommon, although their depth varies and cannot be classified reliably from brief descriptions. I have also personally spoken with someone who realised I AMness through an NDE. I mentioned that conversation in my earlier article, What Happens When We Die?, where I also recommended Moorjani’s Dying to Be Me. Here, “common” expresses my observation of these narratives, not a measured prevalence across all NDEs.[12]
That recognition deserves appreciation. A person may discover that awareness is not experienced as the small, frightened identity they had assumed themselves to be. The recognition can overturn the way life and death are understood. But its profundity does not make it the final realisation, nor does it by itself entail liberation.
As John Tan’s stages of insight explain, luminous Presence may still be understood as an enduring Self, Source, or underlying ground. The ordinary personality may have dissolved while a subtler assumption of inherently existing awareness remains. The absence of a familiar personal identity is therefore not necessarily the same as insight into anatta.[13]
Anatta is not merely becoming an infinite self. It concerns seeing through the presumed subject or agent behind experience, including the reification of consciousness into an ultimate background behind everything. This does not deny consciousness, radiance, or the vivid knowing of appearances. Emptiness further concerns the lack of inherent existence of all phenomena, including luminous awareness. Liberation cannot be inferred simply from the intensity of light, bliss, unity, or certainty.
This distinction is expressed succinctly in John Tan’s remarks reproduced in What Happens When We Die?:
“Blissfulness is the result of luminosity whereas liberation is due to prajna wisdom.”
His point is that a luminous experience can become another object of attachment unless its empty nature is realised.[12] It is possible to honour such an opening while recognising that further insight and actualisation remain necessary.
This also clarifies two questions that are often confused. Whether consciousness continues beyond bodily death is one question. Whether ignorance and grasping have been uprooted is another. Evidence for an afterlife would not, by itself, establish liberation from samsara.
The case becomes larger than one story
What makes Moorjani’s account compelling is the combination: reported awareness beyond the bed, the corridor conversation, recognition of medical staff, her brother’s journey, encounters with deceased loved ones, and a recovery that attracted medical interest. Each feature raises different questions. Together, they give a serious reader more to consider than a generic story of comfort in a crisis.
For an atheist or agnostic reader, I see such accounts as genuine reasons to reconsider the assumption that bodily death necessarily ends all experience. What matters is not simply that Moorjani described a luminous and deeply moving state, but that she also reported knowledge of events apparently beyond ordinary access: her husband’s conversation with the doctor, the conduct of hospital staff, and her brother’s journey. These details can be compared with witness accounts, just as prospective resuscitation research asks whether specific memories correspond to identifiable events. Such reports do not, individually or collectively, force a conclusion of survival; nevertheless, they make it a serious question for investigation rather than one to be dismissed simply because the experiences are extraordinary. A strong cumulative case requires carefully distinguishing the original testimony, subsequent confirmation, alternative explanations, and what remains uncertain.
There is also a separate line of inquiry in children’s reported memories of previous lives. For a brief introduction to those investigations and the question of verification, see The Children Who Should Not Know: A Case for Rebirth. These cases do not verify Moorjani’s experience, but they bring another body of material to the larger question of continuity beyond one lifetime.
For Buddhists, however, the investigation need not stop with reading other people’s accounts. The tradition also teaches that rebirth can be known experientially through meditative cultivation. In the Mahāsaccaka Sutta (MN 36), the Buddha recounts entering the fourth jhāna and, with the mind purified, steady, and collected, deliberately directing it toward recollection of previous lives. He describes recalling successive births with their circumstances and details, then directing the mind toward knowledge of the passing away and reappearance of other beings. These are described as distinct knowledges developed with concentrated mind, not as conclusions reached solely by faith or philosophy.[21]
I have also described modern practitioners’ reports of such recollection on AtR. Sim Pern Chong (Longchen), whose discussion with John Tan is reproduced above, has recounted what he understood as detailed memories of previous lives, including a vivid scene as a soldier moving through a bombarded field in Europe. He described the cold, the physical exertion, the rifle, and the intensity of reliving the scene—not merely a vague mental picture. He has also related recollections of practising as a Tibetan Buddhist monk and of perceived karmic connections with people in his present life. As explained in my article On “Supernatural Powers” or Siddhis, and Past Lives, some of these recollections arose through samādhi and jhāna, experienced as an unusually vivid, whole-body remembering.[22]
Such first-person recollections are not the same kind of evidence as independently documented historical identification, and attaining the fourth jhāna does not automatically confer past-life memory. The Buddhist point is that these capacities are held to depend on cultivation and conditions; one may investigate through practice rather than accepting or rejecting them in advance. Nor is recollecting past lives equivalent to awakening: the Buddha’s account proceeds beyond remembrance and the vision of rebirth to the wisdom ending the taints. John Tan and Sim’s caution about luminous experience applies here too—unusual knowledge does not itself uproot self-grasping.[21][22]
An afterlife need not mean an eternal, unchanging soul. Within a Buddhist understanding, continuity and rebirth can be considered through dependent origination without positing a permanent self that travels intact from body to body. And continued existence should not be confused with the end of suffering.
For readers who have not yet read Dying to Be Me, I warmly recommend the complete book. I read it from beginning to end many years ago and found it deeply interesting; I trust many others will find it just as absorbing. The full memoir gives the events, relationships, and aftermath considerably more room than an article can. Its reach has also grown: the publisher’s description of the 2022 tenth-anniversary edition reported more than one million copies sold worldwide in 45 languages, while a 2026 biography published for Anita’s appearance at Beyond the Brain reports over two million copies worldwide in more than 45 languages.[29][30]
The invitation is therefore both to investigate and to practise. Investigate what these people report. Attend to the details that could be checked. Allow the possibility that familiar assumptions about consciousness are incomplete. Then turn the inquiry towards the self we take for granted, the awareness we may absolutise, and the grasping that continues even after a profound opening.
If death is not the end, the implications reach into this life: how we meet one another, how we care for those who are dying, and how seriously we take the work of awakening.
The light may change everything. The path still asks us to understand it.
Sources and further reading
- Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing (Hay House, 2012), especially chapters 7–11, printed pp. 59–102. The narrative is drawn from the memoir; page numbers refer to the printed edition, not the PDF viewer. These are memoir claims, including the conversations and medical summary reproduced there.
- NDERF, “Anita M NDE,” including follow-up questions and answers. Primary testimony on the reported perceptions, treatment chronology, and distinction from clinical death. Not an independently audited medical case report. The approximately 80% figure is the early reported visible-node reduction; in the memoir, Ko’s review of the hospital records is described as showing at least 70% tumour-size reduction within several days.
- Sam Parnia and colleagues, “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study,” Resuscitation 85 (2014), 1799–1805. See pp. 1802–1803 and Table 2 for the corroborated resuscitation account.
- Psi Encyclopedia, “Post-mortem Survival” (Society for Psychical Research). Survey of major lines of inquiry, competing interpretations, and unresolved evidentiary questions. Specialist secondary overview; not proof of postmortem survival.
- Pim van Lommel and colleagues, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001), 2039–2045. Nurse’s dentures account, p. 2041; full-text mirror.
- Yuan Yin Lao Ren, 《心经抉隐》 (Unveiling the Heart Sutra), opening discussion, “诸法皆空，不住相故，无所得故,” especially printed pp. 16–17 (PDF pages 24–25). English excerpts translate the cited original Chinese passage; the online edition has a minor wording difference in the intervening sentence about karmically conditioned appearances. The five-powers comparison is editorial, not a comparison made by Yuan Yin Lao Ren with Moorjani.
- Robert Aho, “Beginning at the End,” Timeless Luminosity. Author’s own account identifying his 2016 NDE and its relationship to his writing.
- Awakening to Reality, “Near Death Experiences and Bardo: Buddhist Dies and Spends an Eternity in the Light, then Comes Back to Share this Message” (July 16, 2022). Primary AtR archival location for the complete 2008 Sim Pern Chong / John Tan exchange reproduced verbatim above, and for Sim's separate later comments about enchantment by luminosity. Also includes Robert Aho material.
- Robert Aho interview transcript (the automatic transcription renders his surname “Ajo”). Timestamps identify passages used; paraphrases preserve his account without adopting all of his medical, metaphysical, or doctrinal interpretations.
- Awakening to Reality, Buddha Nature is NOT “I Am”. John Tan’s writings and dialogues; Sim Pern Chong’s account of borderless Presence.
- Awakening to Reality, No Awareness Does Not Mean Non-Existence of Awareness. John Tan’s explanations of radiance without reification.
- Soh Wei Yu, “What Happens When We Die?” Includes Soh’s personal report about an NDE-related I AMness realisation and John Tan’s distinction between luminosity and liberating wisdom.
- John Tan (Thusness), “Thusness/PasserBy’s Seven Stages of Enlightenment.” Framework for the editorial contemplative discussion, not an assessment by John Tan of Moorjani.
- Sam Parnia and colleagues, “AWAreness during REsuscitation—II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest,” Resuscitation 191 (2023), article 109903, DOI 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2023.109903. Prospective in-hospital cardiac-arrest study using audiovisual testing, EEG and cerebral-oxygenation monitoring. No positive visual target identification; one correct auditory stimulus selection in the implicit-learning assessment.
- Titus Rivas, “Near-Death Experiences – Paranormal Aspects,” Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research) (created 2021; updated October 10, 2026), section “Anita Moorjani.” The author reports that Danny confirmed the corridor episode and her awareness of Anoop’s journey in personal communications with researcher Janice Miner Holden. This is independently reported witness testimony, not a published transcript of the interview or a prospective test.
- Hazel Parry, “A remarkable recovery, but was it mind over matter or modern science?” South China Morning Post, February 3, 2007. Contemporary reporting based on interviews with treating oncologist-haematologist T. K. Chan and reviewer Peter Ko; records their different interpretations of chemotherapy, emergency chest drainage and the speed of recovery.
- Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron, “Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā” excerpt in Awakening to Reality, from Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature (The Library of Wisdom and Compassion, vol. 3; Wisdom Publications, 2019), cited on AtR as Kindle p. 372. Publisher details. The quotation corresponds to the excerpt republished by Awakening to Reality. The source gives a traditional Buddhist account of death and liberation, not empirically verified evidence about the postmortem mind.
- Robert Aho, “Dense Realm,” Timeless Luminosity, March 26, 2026. Aho’s own later description of what he calls the light of dharmakaya, the energetic/sambhogakaya dimension, multiple universes and the relative physical realm. Autobiographical, interpretive testimony, not independent verification of those cosmological claims.
- Awakening to Reality, “I AM Experience/Glimpse/Recognition vs I AM Realization (Certainty of Being).” Distinguishes temporary experiences and glimpses of Presence from doubtless I AMness realisation; cited for the AtR interpretive framework, not to certify Robert Aho’s attainment.
- Spiritual Development, “Evidence for the Afterlife.” An explicitly pro-survival, wide-ranging compilation linking to NDEs, deathbed experiences, apparitions, mediumship, and past-life case literature; its conclusions and speculative arguments are the author’s own. Recommended for further case discovery, not as a substitute for verifying underlying evidence.
- Majjhima Nikāya 36, Mahāsaccaka Sutta (The Longer Discourse to Saccaka), translated by Bhikkhu Sujato. The Buddha describes the fourth jhāna and then three successive knowledges: recollection of past lives, the passing away and rebirth of beings, and the destruction of the taints. A canonical Buddhist account, not a modern controlled experiment.
- Soh Wei Yu, “On ‘Supernatural Powers’ or Siddhis, and Past Lives,” Awakening to Reality. Includes Sim Pern Chong’s own description of a vividly remembered soldier scene, Soh’s accounts of Sim’s past-life recollections through samādhi and jhāna, and a citation of MN 36. First-person contemplative testimony; not independently verified historical identification.
- CNN, Anderson Cooper 360 / CNN Special Report interview segment featuring Anita Moorjani, December 23, 2014. Moorjani describes about 70% tumour shrinkage and removal of supportive tubes within four days. This is a later first-person interview, separate from Ko's review of hospital records described on printed p. 102 of her memoir.
- The Dalai Lama, “Rebirth, Recognition and Tradition” (2011), Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Explains the dharmakāya as the enlightened mind of a Buddha and its emptiness, and the sambhogakāya as the Buddha’s enjoyment body. Used to distinguish the traditional meanings of the kāyas from Aho’s autobiographical terminology.
- Robert Aho, “Why Bodhicitta?” Timeless Luminosity. Aho’s own explanation of the light he calls the Source or dharmakāya, including his explicit warning against reifying that light as a “thing”. This clarifies his intention but does not independently establish the doctrinal status of his attainment.
- Anita Moorjani, “Dying to be me!” TEDxBayArea, TEDx Talks (published November 30, 2013). Moorjani’s own public retelling of feeling present wherever she directed attention and of sharing consciousness with others; supplementary first-person testimony alongside Dying to Be Me.
- Soh Wei Yu, “Reality, I AM, nondual, anatta, karmic constructs and mental proliferation: a conversation with John Tan,” Awakening to Reality (May 1, 2020). See John Tan’s exchange of April 24, 2020, especially his description of direct verification of I AMness and the feeling that this reality is “more real than real,” followed by discussion of the need to see through the background witness.
- Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light, edited and introduced by Michael Katz (Snow Lion Publications, 1992), “An Interview with Norbu Rinpoche,” p. 51, concerning the bardo of existence, its analogy with dreaming, and the traditional teaching of sevenfold clarity. Read the relevant text; publisher background. The statement describes a traditional teaching, not a measured scientific ratio.
- Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing, tenth-anniversary edition (Hay House, 2022), publisher description reproduced by Shakespeare and Company. Reports more than one million copies sold worldwide in 45 languages at the time of that edition.
- Beyond the Brain 2026, speaker biography of Anita Moorjani. Explicitly attributes over two million copies worldwide and publication in more than 45 languages to Dying to Be Me itself, not to the author’s combined catalogue; the figure is from a 2026 speaker biography.
- Encyclopedia of Buddhism, “Antarābhava”; see also academic study of Saṅghabhadra and the intermediate state. Distinguishes broadly accepted Mahāyāna/Vajrayāna accounts from the mainstream Theravāda Abhidhamma rejection; historical and doctrinal generalizations allow for exceptions.
- 2005 discussion of intermediate existence, reproducing an earlier second-hand report of Ajahn Brahm’s acceptance of antarābhava. This is not a verbatim quotation from Ajahn Brahm.
- Circulated bilingual Q&A transcript attributed to Ajahn Brahm, discussing bardo and a ghost state. Recording provenance unverified; it should not be treated as definitive evidence of his exact technical position.
- Ajahn Brahmavamso, “Bāhiya’s Teaching: In the Seen Is Just the Seen” (May 2005), especially “The Final Part of Bāhiya’s Teaching,” pp. 5–6. His own published account explicitly rejects an independent doer, knower or transcendent self behind sensory experience; no inference about independently verified attainment is required.
- Ajahn Brahm, “Reborn … Again!” (recorded 18 June 2004; remastered podcast publication 10 March 2024). Original recorded talk and AI-generated transcript; in the audience Q&A he explicitly affirms a period between rebirths and describes a temporary ghost-like, mind-made existence. Automated transcription may be imperfect.
- Ajahn Brahm, “Kamma and Rebirth” (recorded 24 May 2003; podcast release 17 June 2023). Original recorded talk and transcript; he describes immediate rebirth into a temporary ghost realm followed by a later rebirth. Distinguish this classification from a doctrinally identical Tibetan bardo.
Source note: This article distinguishes personal testimony, witness corroboration, clinical assessments, research findings, and Buddhist interpretation. Page references for Dying to Be Me refer to the printed 2012 English edition.
