The Truth in the Light

Dr. Peter Brooke Cadogan Fenwick - President of the Scientific and Medical Network - is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Natural Science. He obtained his clinical medical experience at St Thomas' Hospital.
Career

Peter was a senior lecturer at King's College, London, where he worked as a consultant at the Institute of Psychiatry. He was the Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at both the Maudsley and John Radcliffe hospitals, and also provided neurophysiology services for Broadmoor Special Hospital. He worked with the Mental Health Group at the University of Southampton, and held a visiting professorship at the Riken Neurosciences Institute in Japan.

Peter was the president of the Horizon Research Foundation, an organisation that supports research into end-of-life experiences. Before this he was the President of the British branch of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

Peter has been part of the editorial board for a number of journals, including the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, the Journal of Consciousness Studies and the Journal of Epilepsy and Behaviour.

Near-death research

Fenwick's interest in near-death experiences was piqued when he read Raymond Moody's book Life After Life. Initially sceptical of Moody's anecdotal evidence, Fenwick reassessed his opinion after a discussion with one of his own patients, who described a near-death experience very similar to that of Moody's subjects. Since then, he has collected and analysed more than 300 examples of near-death experiences.

He has been criticised by the medical community for claiming that consciousness can survive bodily death, but Peter argues, and the evidence supports, that consciousness may be more than just a function of the brain.

"The plain fact is that none of us understands these phenomena. As for the soul and life after death, they are still open questions, though I myself suspect that NDEs are part of the same continuum as mystical experiences.

Fenwick and his wife, Elizabeth are co-authors of The Art of Dying, a study of the spiritual needs of patients as they approach death. The Fenwicks argue that modern medical practices have devalued end-of-life experiences, and call for a more holistic approach to death and dying. In 2003, Fenwick and Sam Parnia appeared in the BBC documentary The Day I Died. In the documentary Parnia and Fenwick discussed their belief that research from near-death experiences indicates the mind is independent of the brain.

Most of us at the very least wonder about our own immortality and many people are convinced that there is something beyond death, beyond the blackness of the grave. In Western Judaeo-Christian culture we absorb from an early age the idea that virtue now has its own reward - later. We are taught that the universe is essentially moral and that there are absolute human values.

But increasingly, science presents us with a picture of a much more mechanical universe in which there is no absolute morality and man has no purpose and no personal responsibility except to his culture and his biology. We no longer live in an age when faith is sufficient; we demand data, and we are driven by data. And it is data - data that apparently throws some light on our current concepts of Heaven and Hell - that the near-death experience seems to offer.

The near-death experience (NDE) is intriguing for two major reasons. First, it is very common and secondly, it is cross-cultural. The results of one NOP survey in America suggest that over 1 million Americans have 'seen the light'. Any experience that is so common must have had some influence on the way we think about life and death. Indeed, it could be the very engine that drives our ideas of an afterlife.

Many people believe that in the NDE we are given glimpses of Heaven (or Hell). But it is just as reasonable to assume that it is the NDE itself which may have shaped our very ideas about Heaven and Hell.

The experiences described in this book are all first-hand accounts from people who wrote to me or to David Lorimer, chairman of the International Association of Near Death Studies (UK), after a television programme, radio broadcast or magazine or newspaper article made them aware of our interest in near-death experiences.

We asked 500 of those who wrote to answer a detailed questionnaire about their experiences. Our aim was to gather in a standardised format as much detail as we could about the NDE, the people who have experienced it and the effect that the experience has had on their lives.


It is from this database that the statistics quoted in this book have been drawn, and the accounts given to me by these people and by others who have written to me since then form the basis of the book. But their accounts provided much more than mere statistics. Each one was special in its own way, and provided a personal testimony which I found both moving and utterly sincere. It is very seldom that an author can so truthfully say that without others a book could not have been written - in this case, without these people there would, indeed, have been no book. I feel privileged to have been allowed to read their accounts, and I am grateful to everyone who, by being willing to share their experience with me, has helped in this search to find the truth in the light.

Peter Fenwick
London
December 1994

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. What is it Like to Die? 2. Virtual Reality -How Real is the Real World? 3. Out of the Body 4. The Darkness and the Light 5. Coming Home 6. Visions of Paradise 7. 'It Wasn't My Time to Go' 8. The Life Review 9. Transformation 10. Psychic Powers 11. Looking For a Pattern 12. Children and the Light 13. The Road to Hell 14. Let's Be Rational About This 15. Mind Models 16. The Dying of the Light 17. What the Dying Tell Us 18. Beyond the Grave Bibliography/References Index