1. The near-death experience
People who come through something that threatens their life, such as a road accident, a serious illness or a lightning strike, and people pronounced dead by a doctor who then revive, often describe a strange and magnificent journey undertaken while they were unconscious, or so-called "dead". This is known as the "near-death experience".
A great many books and films record such cases. The person sees themselves lying on a bed, on the ground or in an ambulance, with people around them working to save them, apparently unable to see them or hear what they say. They can move about at will, even travelling to the homes of distant relatives and friends. Then, after a stretch of confusion, a dim tunnel appears, with a light at its mouth that leads them toward a bright and beautiful world, where relatives and friends who have died may be waiting to receive them. Some mainstream brain scientists suspect these are hallucinations produced as the brain shuts down under a lack of oxygen.
Yet many cases clearly record that the person's brain was already injured to the point of showing no neural electrical activity at all. There is an excellent video on YouTube, Life After Life (Chinese edition), which presents six of the two thousand near-death cases collected by Dr. Raymond Moody.
People of faith believe this is the soul leaving the body and going to the spiritual realm of their own tradition: a Christian arrives in heaven, a Buddhist in the Western Pure Land, and looks around inside it, only to be sent back at the end to the body in this world, because the span of their life had not yet run out. And so they revive, and can tell the story of what they went through.
2. The strange phenomenon of the life review
One curious feature of the near-death experience is that the person can see the small details of their whole life flash past in front of them, from birth to the moment they are said to have died. For some it surrounds them like a 3D hologram; they are at once the onlooker and the participant in their own life. They can also see how the various decisions they made spread outward, like ripples raised on water, and touched the people around them.
Friends and students of mine have had this experience too, always in the face of danger to their life. My elder brother told me that he once lost his footing and fell over backwards, head first. In the few seconds it took, the scenes of his life flashed past in front of him. Fortunately he was not hurt.
Another was a schoolmate from my primary school days, who graduated from the air force academy and retired as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force. He told me that as a young fighter pilot he twice had an aircraft fail on him, and as he had to decide in the moment whether to eject, the life review appeared and the scenes of his life raced past in front of him.
The third was a student taking my course on human potential. He was riding a motorcycle and struck a barrier that had been left in the middle of the road; he was thrown into the air, turned over once, and came down in the opposite lane. Luckily there was no traffic coming the other way, which saved his life. As he turned in the air he began to review his life, slowly at first, one frame at a time, then faster and faster, and before he landed in the opposite lane he had reviewed the whole of it. Plainly, every appearance of the life review comes at a moment when life is under threat and death is close.
3. How might the life review in a crisis be explained?
This puzzled me for more than a decade; I had no idea how to account for it. Then in 2014 I put forward "complex spacetime" and the "quantum mind" as a way to approach the riddles of the universe at large, medium and small scales, from dark matter and dark energy to faster-than-light quantum entanglement, psi abilities and the physics of consciousness, and some ideas gradually came into focus. What, for instance, does the time axis of imaginary spacetime, the spiritual realm, actually mean? The time axis of a four-dimensional spiritual space seems to carry no meaning: "past, present and future" exist all at once, and what appears to matter is only the order in which the virtual images of events occur, scattered across different positions in space.
In 2017, while writing a foreword for a book by a mainland author, Genius on the Left, Madman on the Right, I came to a piece called "The Four-Dimensional Worm", and the answer suddenly presented itself. The author interviews a seventeen-year-old psychiatric patient who describes a creature living in four-dimensional space, a four-dimensional worm, and reports its view that human beings, seen through its eyes, are themselves no more than wriggling worms.
And indeed, on Einstein's theory of relativity, if you look along the time axis in four-dimensional spacetime, we humans move from place to place continually but stay largely confined to the neighborhood of home and office. Seen from the four-dimensional spiritual realm, the track of our virtual image looks exactly like a wriggling worm. That a young man who never went to university could arrive at such an insight, and that a four-dimensional worm was the one who taught it to him, is hard to credit and quite wonderful.
So my proposal is this. When a person is close to death and their life is under threat, the soul takes fright, and its first move is to flee and leave the body. Once the soul has left the body and tunnelled into the spiritual realm, it travels along the virtual image of its own body at that moment, the head of the four-dimensional worm, in a "form-to-form imprint": one image after another, rewinding in the order in which past events occurred, moving quickly backward until it reaches the virtual image just after birth. In other words, it walks the whole of a life again and sees it once more, until the person comes to and the soul returns to the body. On this account, we have a theoretical way of explaining the life review that comes in a crisis.
