The weather at the Tel Aviv beach was as it usually is in the summer: sunny, humid, and surfers practicing during low tide. No one could have foreseen the coming danger, especially not then-18-year-old Ila Or, who was about to have a near-death experience.
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"Suddenly, a very high wave appeared, which is not common for our beaches," she recalled 26 years after the event. "It thrust me toward the wave breakers, where I got stuck, and began to swallow water and felt like I was swelling up from the inside, that's how much of it I had gulped. I realized at some point that I was drowning, and shortly after, became unconscious. I started to see my whole life in front of me, like a slideshow. Birth, kindergarten, school. I also saw my funeral.
"As I saw the funeral, I heard a drawing noise and felt that I was leaving my body and starting to ascend, slowly. At this point, I was looking at my body from above, continuing to drown, but I no longer felt pain."
Q: And what happened then?
"There was no pain. The world felt like a very unified place. I came to a tunnel that was very calm, pleasant, with a white light that led me to an unusually bright path. I saw two figures there, dressed in white, who asked me my name and if I knew why I was there."
At this stage, a kind of negotiation began for Ila's return to life, similar to other testimonies by individuals who had near-death experiences.
"I was afraid, and then they told me the good and bad things I had done in my life. I felt exposed, and when I realized that I was on trial, I started screaming in terror that I was not ready to die, that they should bring me back to life. I began to convince them that I need to have children, that my whole essence is to become a mother, and that I had so many years ahead of me. The strange thing is that there was absolutely no physical pain there.
"They kept looking at me until one of them banged the gavel and conditioned my return on dedicating the rest of my life to God. I didn't really understand what was required of me, but agreed immediately, and asked them how I would return. After all, I was stuck near the wave breakers. They said that I would experience a miracle."
According to Ila, she returned to her body soon after, while her then-boyfriend, who was with her at the beach, alerted the lifeguards.
"They kept looking for me, but it was impossible to see me. My boyfriend at the time told me that he saw a diver emerge at some point, who started searching for me near the wave breakers. After a while, he found me, grabbed me by the legs and pulled me out of the water like a child is pulled out during birth. He put me on the wave breakers to rest until I was taken to the hospital. That was the miracle that I was told about above."
Q: Did you meet the person who saved you afterward?
"Unfortunately, no. He went back into the water after and no one saw how again. People that were there tried to find him, but without success."
A near-death experience occurs when the heart stops beating for some time. It is characterized, among other things, by a feeling of leaving the body, seeing a bright light, sensing serenity, seeing a tunnel and deceased people. Most have described such an experience as peaceful and happy, with only a few recalling them as traumatic.
According to statistics, 5% of the population, or one in 20, have had brushes with death. The vast majority, "approximately 80-90% do not report anything unusual at all, while the other 10-20% report having had a near-death experience," explained Professor Janice Miner Holden, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
Q: Who is more likely to have such an experience?
"People that were scared of death, people that had other extreme experiences, such as deep mediation or grief."
One way or another, near-death experiences are known to prompt certain personality changes, such as increased empathy toward others, self-appreciation, faith, and belief in supernatural phenomena, as well as decreased interest in material possessions.
"I have identified several changes after a near-death experience in my research," Holden continued. "These include a decrease in fear of death and a change in values. From a physical perspective, it's changes in eating habits, avoiding eating meat, and less need for sleep. I also discovered another interesting thing – electrical appliances malfunction near people who had the near-death experience. There were also social changes, such as a greater risk for divorce if the person was married at the time of the event. I also identified changes in careers, such as a new-found preference for community-oriented jobs, such as teaching and counseling."
And so in the case of Ila, she became religious after nearly drowning, studied Kabbalah, and is now a therapist and couples coach conducting workshops for women about the connection between spirituality and personal development. She is also trained as an organization consultant and training developer in the IDF.
Similarly, Hila Baruch was a lawyer until her early thirties but is now a lecturer and researcher of near-death experiences and a personal adviser. Her near-death experience occurred in 2014 during what was supposed to be a routine surgery to remove a stomach cyst.
"I had pain after surgery, which later I discovered was due to internal bleeding. After three weeks, I was rushed to the hospital after having fainted. As I understand, there was some confusion with my blood test, so the doctors didn't know I was in danger. It got to a point where I would faint almost every half an hour.
"After about 24 hours, I was sent to get a CT scan and they realized I was bleeding. I started to shake during the procedure and was immediately rushed to the operating room. I kept hearing the staff and they said that I was going to die, and at some point even said the Shema Yisrael prayer. I opened my eyes and saw my deceased great-grandmother and two of my aunts. I felt peace, love, absence of physical pain and at that point, simply burst out of my body."
Q: Can you describe the sense of love that you felt?
"It was extraordinary. Imagine all the love that all the mothers in the world have for their children combined, and put that into one person, then imagine that it is not even close to one percent of what I felt. It was a boundless explosion of love."
Meanwhile, Hila continued to hear the doctors trying to save her life.
"I heard and felt what the doctor was thinking. When they found the source of the bleeding, I moved to another world. I stood in front of three old men, with white beards, and one of them said I shouldn't be there."
Hila too saw her life flash before her and had a sense of acceptance and peace. This was the moment she returned to her body, even though she did not want to. "It was like waking up from a dream," she said.
Q: Did you experience any changes afterward?
"People have this primal instinct to understand who they are. Before the incident, I tried to understand my identity, the meaning of life, and what my soul wants. If before the experience, I was in a place of personal empowerment, then today it is social empowerment. In my opinion, there is more power in the many."
So what brings about a near-death experience? According to Professor Shahar Arzy, director of the Hebrew University's Computational Neuropsychiatry Lab, it mostly occurs "during a drop in blood pressure, usually following a cardiac event, or in the rare event when one the one hand there is already a decrease in blood flow to the brain, but on the other, the rescue team manages to restore the flow before irreversible damage to the brain occurs. In this case, the temporary decrease impairs the function of areas located between the territories of the blood vessels.
"This drop causes damage to areas responsible for more advanced functions, which causes the near-death experience. For example, there is an area in the brain that is responsible for the integration of the perception of the 'I' with the body. In other words, a mechanism is required to create this unity between us and our bodies. It seems basic to us, but it's not. As soon as this area doesn't work well enough, there's no uniformity and then you can have an out-of-body experience."
Professor Yair Lampl, a neurologist from the Wolfson Medical Center, added that leading theories say near-death experiences are related to ketamine, an anesthetic that causes dissociation from emotions, sensations, memories and thoughts.
"Ketamine reaction includes very colorful hallucinations with mystical and religious elements," he explained. "It blocks glutamate receptors, brain-stimulating receptors and conductors. Due to a lack of oxygen and other factors, there is an influx of glutamate, which can cause the destruction of brain cells. The brain has a protective system against glutamate and a reaction is created by blocking the receptors with overactivity, similar to ketamine, with all the hallucinatory effects that characterize it."
Q: If so, how would you explain people seeing tunnels and white light?
Arzy: "White light means there was an injury to the blood flow, but not to the brain, but to the optic nerve sheath. This is what creates that well-known experience of seeing a tunnel. As for when a person sees his life flash before him, that is related to injury to the area that organizes our life memories."
Q: And why is it that people from completely different countries and cultures describe their near-death experiences similarly?
"Excellent question," Arzy continued." It's because all human beings, regardless of religion, race or gender, ultimately have the same general brain structure. Therefore, given a certain injury – a drop in blood pressure in this case – the brains will produce similar experiences."
Bruce Greyson, from the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, said that "study after study shows that the most common thing described after a near-death experience is an overwhelming sense of peace, well-being and joy. It's incredible because most people associate death with fear and sadness."
And yet, "there is still some disagreement in the medical community as to the cause of the experience as theories and evidence have been refuted more than once by physiological measurements conducted during near-death experiences. For example, some studies challenge the neurophysiological models, such as the accurate perception of events in reality, when the patient is unconscious and in an out-of-body perspective; or events where people who had a near-death experience met deceased individuals they had never met or heard of. I think that what we learn from the latest studies in the field is that we still have a long way to go in understanding these complex and powerful experiences, and we should not jump to conclusions too quickly."
The science of near-death experiences is sometimes approached with skepticism, like in the case of Eben Alexander, a senior US neurosurgeon and Harvard lecturer. But that changed in 2008 when he himself went through such an experience during a medically-induced coma when treated for meningitis.
In his book, "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife", which became a bestseller, he described how his body stopped functioning, but that his soul was infinite.
During his near-death experience, Alexander saw sights, and sounds and messages, while medical equipment showed that the part of his brain that is responsible for these was not active.
He described, among other things, the feeling of floating over streams, waterfalls and being in fields, as well as seeing people who danced, millions of butterflies and children smiling and laughing.
Since the event, Alexander has been challenging medical assumptions.
"The elements of a near-death experience are unrelated to brain activity, just as it was in my case, when my brain had minimal or no activity," he said. "From my and others' research, it emerged that the brain serves as a filter for consciousness, but it is not responsible for producing consciousness itself. When the physical brain is 'offline', so to speak, as it is in a near-death experience, the person's soul becomes aware of a greater consciousness that is fundamental to us all. Other types of spiritual experiences can lead to similar connections, such as meditation."
One such research is based on Alexander's experience and was published in the "Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease" in 2018. It determined that his near-death experience was not related to brain activity.
"The period of life here may also be perceived as a kind of supreme illusion. Many who have had near-death experiences describe the other side as 'much more real', one characterized by great love, which we should strive for in our daily lives," Alexander said.
Similarly, Holden, who as mentioned above is the president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, added that "some of the latest studies show that brain's default mode network [areas of the brain that work when a person rests] is deactivated while people are having mystical experiences during meditation or under the influence of the psilocybin psychedelic drug.
"The default network, along with the rest of the brain, is also off during near-death experiences. Therefore, a near-death experience may occur not as a result of brain activity, but rather because of the deactivation of such activity. This explanation, and many other explanations, lead us to the conclusion that when the brain 'moves out of the way', we have the opportunity to experience a deeper and broader reality.
"Those who've had a near-death experience feel it as very realistic, and in some cases, the things they saw have been verified as accurate by a third party. In such cases, we have no choice but to determine that the experience is realistic – subjectively and objectively."
Dr. Zion Zibly, head of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Sheba Medical Center said that researching near-death experiences is a complicated undertaking.
"We know of cases when people saw from above their bodies being resuscitated, and described what happened and who performed the resuscitation. These are things they weren't supposed to know. Recently, there have also been descriptions by women who, during giving birth, described events similar to a near-death experience. They were not close to dying, but experienced this during a normal, natural birth and also during a cesarean section."
According to Zibly, his mother had a similar experience a week before she died.
"She was sedated, and when she woke up, she told me she had seen a big door with a white light, where she was asked by two or three people why she had come. When she answered that she didn't know, they told her, 'Go back, it's too early.'
"So I certainly do not rule out these experiences. I am a doctor, head of a department, and am able to understand what happens to the body after death. But I have a hard time understanding the mental part."
Shimon Azulay, who teaches philosophy at Hebrew University says that "until about two years ago, I completely dismissed near-death experiences, but I must admit my opinion has changed. I believe there is a spiritual side to a person who is not dead. I'm a dualist, if you will. Descartes thought so, as did many other philosophers. That is, Descartes believed that we have a spiritual aspect that is not subject to the material world. [Immanuel] Kant wondered whether or not we have a soul. This is important because many times we tend to think that whoever says we have a soul is primitive or irrational.
"Both Kant and Descartes think differently from physicalism, and I think that their approaches give people an opening to believe in things that are beyond the physical reality. We should respect the logic of the experiences we go through, but question them at the same time."
In 2008, 44-year-old Maayan Sabag was studying medicine in China. She was eating out with a friend when the roof of the restaurant collapsed, from what she later learned was an earthquake that killed 70,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands more.
"When I woke up under the rubble, I saw my jaw was shattered as a result of the impact," she recalled. "I saw rays of light, I pushed myself past all the rubble and went out into ruins. It was like a scene from a movie. We arrived at a local hospital, and shortly after that, there was another earthquake of a magnitude of 7.6, which destroyed that hospital. Something in my brain refused to accept this reality because the sights were simply terrible: roads that were literally cut in two, huge sinkholes. A field hospital was set up near the collapsed hospital, and at the same time, rocks continued to fall.
"I waited there for a while, and on the third day, I felt like I was fading away. I was bleeding massively, and there I felt that my body had no more grip and that my soul was just rising up. At the same time, I heard a voice that spoke to me and did a sort of soul-searching with me, explaining to me that I can be saved and that I must gather strength and listen to him."
"I eventually made it to the hospital. I had an eight-hour operation during which all the bones of my jaw were reconstructed, and during the procedure I again experienced a feeling of my body being separated, that I was ascending, reaching an area that feels like my home that I always missed and didn't even know existed. I felt a feeling of love, belonging, and peace.
"I heard the same voice that spoke to me before and was asked whether I wanted to return to my body or pass through a door of light. I felt that I had not finished my work, that I wanted to help the world, to become a mother. I answered that I wanted to return but I did not have the strength. At this point, a horse appeared out of nowhere. My soul mounted it, and it rushed me back to my body. When I woke up, I saw all the doctors completely pale, in tears."
For brevity reasons, this article did not go into detail about the many other stories of people who had near-death experiences. For example, Nick Miller, the guitarist of the Stella Maris band, who during a concert in Haifa in 2019 collapsed and suffered cardiac arrest.
Although he did not have an out-of-body experience, he said that he felt "such peace, an unexplainable silence and a feeling of diving followed by complete silence." He even wrote a song about his experience after.
Similarly, about a year ago, Shoshi Fahima celebrated her friend's birthday during which a numerologist told her that she would "start a new life at 55."
"Twenty minutes later, I started screaming from the pain in my hand," she said. "My friend started to perform CPR on me, and after six minutes, three ambulances and two ambucycles arrived. The resuscitation lasted an hour and the fourth was very intense."
The medical staff later told Fahima that her pulse returned exactly one minute before she would have been pronounced dead. She woke up at the hospital the next morning but was later sedated and put on a ventilator for over a month after contracting pneumonia. After recovering and returning to normal, she had a recurring dream with motives that are similar to near-death experiences.
"I dreamt of ascending and meeting two people, while I was on a stretcher, sedated. I don't really have an explanation for it," she said.
More and more stories about near-death experiences are being shared in part due to famous people revealing going through them, such as Sharon Stone and the late Elizabeth Taylor.
But for some, the aftermath of their near-death experience was far from serene and peaceful. For example, Hila said that after recovering from her cyst surgery she suffered from depression for five years.
"Just imagine experiencing everything the world has to offer, and suddenly you return to being a self-aware person. The dissonance is enormous. The deeper the experience, the greater the difficulty in adapting back to reality. During the depression, I tried to find myself. Though, in the experience, I received all the through a different meaning, but it took me a while to break them down into words," she said.
Q: Would you say the way society relates to near-death experiences had an effect on you?
"I would carry around shame. I felt like I was keeping a big secret. Studies have already shown that the more accepting and understanding the initial response to a person is, the better he or she will process the experience. The way the doctors treated me was also a struggle. To this day I don't understand how they didn't ask me anything and were not interested."
Ila, who almost drowned, had a similar experience.
"I felt humiliated, people thought I had hallucinated. But since the onset of social media, awareness of near-death experiences has increased. There used to be a stigma, but not as much anymore. I think people are thirsty for these kinds of stories. There are so many such experiences, and people understand that this is not nonsense."
Maayan, whose near-death experience occurred in China, too experienced this.
"It took me nine years to tell this story, but until then I lived with great shame. I thought to myself, 'Who would believe such a thing?' I also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. I thought I would be hospitalized. I'm glad that awareness of the matter is growing in our culture, like this important article, because It creates acceptance and openness toward experiences of a different kind."
After the incident, Maayan became a lecturer and healer to help people find healing.
Q: Would you say the medical community is also becoming more open-minded about this?
"Yes. I have quite a few doctor patients, and they want and love to hear about these experiences. In this case, we have more stigma on doctors in relation to what really happens in reality."
Arzy agreed, "There is no conflict between those who had a near-death experience and the world of medicine. On the contrary, we can say that almost everyone who has had such an experience owes his life to the world of medicine."
According to Greyson, "In the 1970s and early 80s, medical professionals who heard about near-death experiences categorized them as fantasies or hallucinations related to mental illness. Today, there is already an almost universal understanding that there are certain experiences that are characteristic of people who encounter death. I do not think that there is currently a conflict between survivors of near-death experiences and their doctors, who understand that this is a common experience."
He added that understanding that this was not an indication of illness or a medical disability was a prerequisite for helping patients cope.
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