What insights can Brian D Smith provide on near-death experiences?

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are one of the strongest lines of evidence that consciousness survives the body. They occur in roughly 5% of the population—tens of millions of people worldwide—and across all belief systems and cultures. The core patterns are remarkably consistent: separation from the body, overwhelming love, life review, meeting beings of light, and a sense of “home.”

Materialist explanations like hallucinations, drugs, or oxygen deprivation do not adequately account for the clarity, veridical perceptions (accurate details seen or heard while clinically “dead”), and lasting life changes that follow. NDErs almost always say the experience was “more real than real” and come back less afraid of death, more loving, less materialistic, and often with spontaneous healings or radical life redirections.

NDEs also strongly support what I teach in my work: we are eternal beings, death is a transition not an annihilation, and love is the fundamental reality. You do not have to have an NDE yourself to benefit from them. Simply studying them (what Ken Ring calls the “benign virus”) can reshape your view of life, reduce fear of death, and deepen your sense of meaning and connection.

If you are grieving, NDEs offer credible, experiential evidence that your loved one is not gone, only gone from your sight—and that something beautiful and loving awaits all of us.

Would you like insights on NDEs as evidence for the afterlife, or more on how they help with grief specifically?