1
Materialism, the theory that only matter exists, emerged around 2,500 years ago in India and Greece, partly as a response to religious dogmatism. Over the past two centuries, this relatively new worldview has itself become dogmatic, increasingly dismissing the older spiritual ontologies – which assert the existence of an immaterial reality that is more fundamental than the material one – as superstitious and unscientific.
I was born into American materialism in the 1980s. My Taiwanese parents weren’t religious or openly spiritual. When I was three, strapped into a child seat in my parents’ car, I repeatedly cried, ‘I don’t want to die!’ after my dad braked hard to avert an accident. At three, I seem to view death as a painful transition to a lonely oblivion – a belief I’d likely absorbed from TV. My parents didn’t mention death to me until I was six, when my mom’s dad died.
My mom and I flew to Taiwan for the funeral. A large black moth, which had appeared the day my grandfather died, was resting on his coffin above his head. It stayed there for seven days, until the burial, when I carried the then-dead moth in a box to the cemetery. In my thirties, my mom told me her dad had worshiped the Daoist deity Xuánwǔ, and that the moth was a rare species known to gather at the deity’s temple every year around the deity’s birthday. ‘There are many supernatural things we cannot explain,’ said my mom in an email about this.
When I was a child, however, my mom didn’t discuss paranormal phenomena with me. My dad, a physics professor, dismissed nonmaterialist viewpoints. School and culture also taught that only matter ‘matters’. Except for a few openly Christian peers whom I viewed as superstitious – and once or twice when I attended an all-Chinese/Taiwanese church as an adolescent, and late in middle school when I began to listen to punk bands which criticized organized religion – I didn’t encounter anything soul-related during my childhood.
By high school, I was indifferent to death, which I now vaguely imagined as a dreamless sleep. As a gloomy, alienated teenager, I was more concerned about life, specifically my own life. This continued into my twenties, when I often joked, with varying amounts of seriousness, that I wished I were dead. My dissatisfaction with life motivated me to search for a deeper, more enchanting reality, but nothing I read or experienced was able to non-temporarily convince me there was one, and so I remained by default a materialist, like seemingly all my peers.
The subcultures I’d gotten involved in by my late twenties – literary fiction, mass media, recreational drug use – generally did not believe in such a thing as a spirit world. The lack of this belief renders life absurd for many people, leading at best to a playful sort of existential humanism, and at worst to suicidal depression, nihilistic hedonism, or the endless pursuit of money and power. I coped with the meaninglessness of existence by creating and consuming dark-humored art and, when that wasn’t enough, by taking drugs.
In my thirties, recovering from a three-year pharmaceutical drug addiction, I finally began to encounter undeniable-seeming evidence for the existence of the higher-dimensional reality that cultures throughout history have centered in their worldviews, and now at forty-one I believe I’m an embodied soul that death will release into that mysterious realm. This essay examines the two main factors in my spiritual development: my DMT trips and the near-death experience (NDE) literature.
2
DMT is a simple compound produced by myriad species of plants and animals, including humans, where it is thought to regulate inflammation, neuroprotection, tissue regeneration and other physiological processes. Its psychoactive effects were identified in 1956 when Hungarian psychiatrist-chemist Stephen Szára injected himself with it intramuscularly. Chemist Nick Sand is credited with discovering, in 1964, that DMT could be smoked in its free-base form. A sufficient dose, injected or smoked, results in a ‘breakthrough experience’, sending the user into what a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports called ‘an entirely “other” but no less “real” world or dimension’ for around five minutes. It was Terence McKenna, the late psychedelic optimist, who interested me in DMT. ‘You cannot imagine a stranger drug or a stranger experience,’ he said.
The first time I smoked DMT, in 2012, I was an inexperienced smoker, unaccustomed to having smoke in my lungs. Smoking it alone in my room from a glass pipe, I didn’t inhale enough for anything to happen, except for some cranial buzzing sensations.
The second time, seven months later, when I was thirty, my room disappeared and I left space and time, interrupting my continuous experience of life since birth. I was suddenly so far removed from my prior situation as a person in a body that my Earthly existence seemed like a vague myth. I’m not sure where I went, but at one point I felt 50,000 years away from my life. Immediately after the trip, I typed:
i should have expected this unexpectedness but by its quality it’s definitively not able to be expected
the experience of dmt is unexpected . . . but it’s not that . . . it eludes even that definition because naming it would give one the illusion of it having a connection to the word, which would mean allowing oneself to expect it
it’s outside language, except by being outside language it can’t be described, or to describe it would be to kill it
it’s an entity that resists description in language
While typing those four lines – in which I seem to have been trying to describe how I felt being in the spirit world – I sensed I’d already forgotten most of the trip. As I continued typing notes about the unexpectedness of the experience, I remembered that at one point during the trip I’d intuited that it was possible while on DMT to leave Earth forever, and had stressed to myself to remember this intuition so that I would never smoke it again.
My impulsivity and chronic boredom back then, weak and dysphoric at the tail-end of my pill addiction, led me to smoke DMT a third time eight days later. I entered a nonmaterial reality on this trip too. There, I interacted with a formless entity in a cryptic way that felt as intense and relational as sex, but wasn’t sex. After, I noted that I wanted to ‘smoke as much as it takes to be in the space it puts me into to completely go there’, but I had none left and didn’t try to get more.
Over time, I increasingly associated DMT with the sensation of being 50,000 years away from my life. This made it seem risky and unappealing. What if I got lost while disembodied? Would Tao Lin die or go insane? Looking back, I now think it was my ingrained neuroticism and feeble spirituality that made me interpret my first three DMT trips so self-disempoweringly, as hazardous and perilous: There are no known fatalities from smoking DMT, and I’ve personally become saner (less neurotic, less compulsive) after each trip.
In 2015, during an interview with KCRW’s Bookworm, the host asked me what I thought about ‘the soul’. I blanked. My DMT trips – despite showing me that I could exist and think and feel without a body – apparently had not deepened my understanding of immateriality enough to give me extemporaneous thoughts about the soul. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising, given my three decades of materialism, focusing almost entirely on concrete reality.
Two months later, an internet friend who was visiting NYC asked if I wanted to smoke some DMT she’d extracted herself from plant material. I did. I wanted to try it with my improved mental health, two years out of my pill addiction. In preparation, I created an area in my studio apartment where I could smoke the DMT while seated. I don’t remember what happened during this trip – except that I traversed a region of burbling, involuting, screw-shaped organisms – because right after the five-minute trip, I became paranoid for two-plus hours that my friend who’d brought the DMT and was seated on my sofa was a government agent. But I made a video of the trip, and in the video, seated cross-legged with open eyes, I look alert, amused, amazed, and perplexed, but not troubled or scared.
Smoking DMT – an activity that felt more like entering a magical portal than using a drug – enticed the loner, the autobiographical writer, the aspiring mystic, and the curious truth-seeker in me. It allowed me to explore the mystery of existence safely, inexpensively, and privately, at home, by myself. By revealing disembodied consciousness and an immaterial reality, it cast doubt on my born-into materialism. As a substantial challenge – to undergo and to describe – in my easy contemporary life, it benefitted my mental health. Despite these positives, I needed extra motivation to actually seek out and smoke it again, due to the severe eeriness of the experience, sending the soul into the unlanguageable unknown.
Special motivation arrived eight years later, last May, when I was researching dreams for a nonfiction book about healing my mental and physical illnesses. Endogenous – body-produced – DMT is speculated to induce the visions in dreams; I thought that I should investigate this hypothesis by smoking DMT again. I messaged a chemist friend and he mailed me some DMT he’d acquired an unknown number of years earlier from the dark web. After considering the age and inexact providence of his DMT, I decided to order plant parts and extract fresh DMT myself; I looked forward to learning this skill.
But then two weeks later, on July 6 2023, around noon, in a depleted state after completing my daily writing work, I somewhat impulsively decided to try the DMT, which was hard and orange, like the other DMT I’ve smoked. I weighed 50 milligrams, put it with some tobacco in a glass pipe, sat cross-legged in my yard (I lived in Hawaii by then, alone on the Big Island with two cats), lit an organic beeswax wick, and used the wick to vaporize and inhale all the DMT, half-assuming it wouldn’t be enough to cause me to fully leave my body. I had only a vague idea of what a 50 milligram dose would do – I’d long forgotten what doses I’d used in the past.
As material reality began to vanish, I internally panicked. I wasn’t ready to leave the world! I knew I should have prepared first by looking up dosages and setting a time a week or so in advance for the trip, but I also knew that if I’d prepared I might’ve convinced myself not to do it. I quickly exhaled to try to reduce the amount of DMT that would reach my brain. My last clear memory is of seeing the DMT-tobacco smoke and feeling my lips and the rest of my body and the world disappear.
3
People tend to exaggerate when telling stories, but exaggeration seems impossible with DMT. People say the DMT breakthrough is like ‘zooming through a tunnel’ or ‘being shot out of a cannon’, but to me these descriptions are massive understatements. What feels so incredible is that the ‘tunnel’ has no physical direction: suddenly, the most me part of myself – my mind or soul, which normally never left my body – was shockingly and disturbingly far away from the universe.
My new reality didn’t look or sound like anything because I had no eyes or ears, and yet it wasn’t dark or quiet; it was dense with abstract, dynamic, discombobulating phenomena, which I perceived with presumably nonhuman senses. My main feeling was an almost unbearably poignant understanding that this place, this experience, was it, the fundamental thing I had to reckon with, my forgotten home. I seemed to be somewhere older than time. I felt as though I was sobbing from awe and humility.
My heart rate, back in the universe, was probably as high as if I’d been jogging for five minutes. In a 2023 study at Imperial College London – informally called DMTx – scientists extended the DMT breakthrough to half an hour by continuously administering the drug through an intravenous drip. Heart rates peaked after two to three minutes, dropped to standard levels by fourteen minutes, and remained there for the remaining sixteen minutes, suggesting the initial terror and anxiety gives way to calmness as one acclimates to disembodiment.
But in a five-minute trip there isn’t time to acclimate. I seemed to be interacting with an entity who wasn’t in this world but was the world. It seemed to want to lure or seduce or cajole or otherwise languagelessly convince me to join it, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. Was this the creator of the universe? I don’t think so. Maybe it was the living substrate of the spirit world, naturally exerting an attractive force toward soul-me. Or maybe it was my soul’s reflection. One DMTx participant described a ‘mirror’, beyond which was another world. Maybe I was ‘looking’ into this mirror, and unwittingly ‘seeing’ my soul.
‘This isn’t what I expected at all,’ I thought, as I’ve thought every time I’ve smoked DMT. Even though I had two prior breakthrough trips, I was still extremely surprised, in part because it would take probably ten or twenty trips to begin to familiarize myself with this place, and in part because the DMT world is indescribable. Trying to convert the experience into a language made for another world – as I’d done for my DMT trips – distorts and obscures the already muzzy memory of what happened, so that when it happens again it feels even more surprising, like encountering a scent after spending months trying to draw it.
Overwhelmed, I tried to give myself up in humility, to relax into passivity, but I couldn’t because I was involuntarily engaged in an intimidating interaction with a disquieting somethingness. Before smoking, I’d told myself to just observe and explore and mentally take notes, but once I was there this seemed impossible, mainly because my life, which I could barely remember, seemed so insignificant that doing anything for it felt absurd, like wanting to bring back information from a rainforest to use in a game of Tetris.
I don’t remember how my interaction with the entity-world resolved, or what else happened while I was disembodied, but when my yard began to reappear, radiating a paranormal light like in a Kirlian photograph, I sensed I could fly; when I tried, I found myself crawling across my grass. I sat and rubbed my thighs, repeatedly saying ‘my body’ and ‘I smoked DMT’. After a while, I was resting on my stomach, staring at a high-tech, fantastical world filled with busy entities.
‘This is incredible,’ I said quietly after realizing I was staring at my grass, which I’d never seen from this close. I could see more details than ever before (probably because my soul, which I’d later learn has better vision and awareness than my body, was still slightly disembodied). Tiny insects I’d never noticed before were zooming around the jungle-like environment. Parts of grass were turning brown, dying. As the DMT rapidly wore off, the grass started to look mundane again.
‘I love my body, and this world,’ I murmured. ‘I love this world,’ I repeated self-consciously, feeling like I was trying to convince myself that this realm of people and planets and stars was my ideal home. I felt safe and comfortable here in my body as Tao Lin, but this was not where I ultimately wanted to be, I seemed to know.
‘Māyā, illusion,’ I thought multiple times, lying in my sunny yard amid layered birdsong and the sporadic buzz of flying insects. I normally didn’t think the word māyā, a term used in Hinduism and Buddhism to represent the belief that the physical world is an illusion. Many cultures viewed the universe as a lie, I knew.
Compared to where I’d been, the universe seemed limited and somehow artificial. Despite its complexity, it felt suspiciously simple, like an extremely advanced multiplayer online role-playing game – a world which was ontologically dependent on (wouldn’t exist without) its ‘container world’, the spirit world, similar to how Moby-Dick and World of Warcraft wouldn’t exist if the universe didn’t exist.
In the days that followed, I came to feel that I was hiding here in the physical world, like a child who hides in a computer game to escape a more consequential reality. But I also felt that I wasn’t really hiding, that hiding was just how I was playfully terming my situation, which actually had a more mature and mysterious purpose.
This fifth DMT trip was more spiritual than my previous ones due, I think, to my increasing familiarity over the past eight years with the concept of the soul, mainly through (1) my research into Indigenous cultures, who practice animism (the belief that all things, living or not, have a nonmaterial aspect) and shamanism (in which psychedelics and other tools or methods are used to temporarily leave the body) and (2) my continued immersion in the work of Terence McKenna, who wrote:
We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow onto matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.
After this trip, I became unconvinced that DMT causes the visions in dreams (when I wake from dreams I don’t feel like I’m on DMT, and my dreamworlds feature familiar people and are hazy and backgroundless, like sketches, less real than life, unlike DMT trips, which seem realer than life), and more convinced that I was a body-riding soul, not a fleeting, brain-generated consciousness.
4
Four months later, during a trip to New York City to give a reading and be on a podcast (my first time leaving Hawaii since moving here in late 2019), I told my friend Brad about my DMT trip, how it had convinced me that I was a soul from the pre-birth, post-death world. We discussed the bewildering ineffability of DMT phenomenology – how we didn’t trust other people’s elaborate, concrete-detail-filled accounts of their DMT trips – and Brad recommended I read about near-death experiences (NDEs).
Two months later, in January 2024, I read my first NDE book, Life After Life (1975), in which physician-psychiatrist Raymond Moody coined the term ‘near-death experience’ to describe when people return from the afterlife with memories – a widely known phenomenon that didn’t have a catchy name in English until then. Analyzing around 150 cases, Moody found that regardless of the experiencer’s beliefs, their accounts of dying were similar to one another and also matched reports of the near-afterlife by Plato, the Bible and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
As a materialist child, hearing about NDEs on TV (Oprah often discussed them) and seeing them featured on tabloid covers, I’d assumed they were the hyperbolic stories of a small number of ultra-religious people. Now, researching them with an interested mind, I was startled and heartened to learn that they’d occurred across cultures throughout history; that they happened to atheists and materialists; and that they were common, with current estimates stating that one in twenty Americans will have an NDE.
The near-death literature is massive. There are hundreds of NDE books just in English, written by near-death experients and a range of researchers – doctors, academics, religious and secular people. After Moody’s book, I read Closer to the Light (1990) by pediatrician Melvin Morse, who found that the NDEs of kids as young as two matched adult NDEs despite their having little-to-no cultural conditioning. I read On Life After Death (1991), a collection of essays by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who by 1982 had examined 20,000 NDEs. ‘This experience is the same for everyone regardless of whether you are an Aboriginal of Australia, a Hindu, a Moslem, a Christian, or an unbeliever,’ she wrote.
Like DMT users, NDErs often stress that they can’t adequately describe their experiences. The initial stages of NDEs are somewhat easier to articulate because they occur in physical reality, but as the experience progresses, it becomes increasingly ineffable. With this in mind, here is what generally happens in a full NDE:
Pain, discomfort, and anxiety vanish. You see your body and realize you’re dead. You feel more alive than ever before. Your thoughts are quicker and clearer than usual. ‘I felt free from my brain!’ said a woman quoted in After (2021) by psychiatrist Bruce Greyson. People who were born blind describe seeing for the first time. Some people report seeing in every direction at once. ‘Three hundred and sixty degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher,’ said a woman quoted in ‘Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind’, a 1997 study which proposed that people gain a ‘supersensory kind of knowing’ when they leave their bodies – a ‘transcendental awareness’ that is later called ‘vision’ due to ‘the necessity of linguistic transformation’.
You seem to be outside of normal time. You can fly and move through walls. You go where you want to go by thinking of a person or a place. ‘When I wanted to see someone at a distance, it seemed like part of me, kind of like a tracer, would go to that person,’ said a woman quoted in Life After Life. ‘And it seemed to me at the time that if something happened anywhere in the world that I could just be there.’
You make accurate observations near and far from your unconscious or clinically dead body. NDE researcher Kimberly Clark Sharp documented the case of a woman named Maria who had a heart attack and, after being resuscitated, correctly described a dark blue, left-footed shoe with its shoelace under its heel on a third-story window ledge outside the hospital. The Self Does Not Die (2023) includes 128 such cases of veridical observation.
You can read people’s minds, but you don’t seem able to communicate with them, and so you begin to feel lonely. But then dead relatives and/or friends and/or unfamiliar souls – sometimes called ‘spirit guides’ – appear and interact with you telepathically, happy to see you. You feel as if you’re being welcomed home. You encounter only the souls of dead people. Some people encounter the souls of people they thought were alive but whom they later learn recently died.
Then you traverse a ‘tunnel’ – which, like the DMT tunnel, seems to be a lower-dimensional metaphor for non-physical motion; some researchers propose that the tunnel is imagined retroactively to explain how one went from one situation to another – toward a being of incredibly bright white light.
This entity has been called an angel, a being of light, Guanyin, Jesus, Kali, Muhammad, and many other names. It shows you a three-dimensional replay of your life – the famous ‘life flashing before your eyes’. In the past, this had seemed to me mundane and unimpressive, a brief, chaotic, involuntary remembering; now, reading first-hand accounts of the phenomenon, it seemed mind-bogglingly magical.
The life review comes in varied forms, or is remembered differently by different people – some people re-experience every second of their life, others review just the highlights or access certain scenes at will. The review can start at birth or move backward in time. You don’t just observe your life; you think what you thought, sense what you sensed, feel what you felt, and experience what you made others think and feel. Often, all this happens simultaneously from your perspective, a third-person perspective (like a movie camera), and the perspective of other people.
Some people report inhabiting animal perspectives. A woman in Impressions of Near-Death Experiences (2023) felt the fear of a guinea pig she’d thrown onto a sofa as a child after it bit her. Dannion Brinkley, who worked as an assassin for the US military, felt the ‘joy’ of a goat he’d freed from a fence, and the ‘sorrow and pain’ of a dog he hit with a belt. Brinkley also relived his ‘kills’ from the perspectives of his victims, feeling the grief of their relatives, whom he’d never met. ‘In many cases I even felt the loss their absence would make to future generations,’ he wrote in Saved by the Light (1994).
Is every object, motion, emotion, thought, and sensation preserved in a way that allows it to be re-experienced from any perspective? Or is the universe a finished, enterable work of art that exists inside the spirit world as novels, movies, computer games, and other lower-dimensional simulations of life exist inside the universe? Or – more likely, in my view – might the true explanation for the life review be subtler and more complex than either of these premises?
A man named Tom experienced being a man he’d attacked at age nineteen. Tom had said something sarcastic to the man, who reached into Tom’s truck and slapped him. In response, Tom hit the man thirty-two times. In After, Tom recounted, ‘I came to know that he was in a drunken state and that he was in a severe state of bereavement for his deceased wife. In the life review, I saw the stool in the bar where that man had his drinks. I saw the path that he took down the street for a block and a half before he darted from behind that vehicle into the path of my truck.’ Tom’s attack caused the man’s head to hit the pavement, almost killing him. Tom drove away.
The light being doesn’t judge. ‘When he came across times when I had been selfish, his attitude was only that I had been learning from them, too,’ said a person in Life After Life. Judgment comes only from yourself. The light being emits an all-encompassing, unconditional love that is ‘unimaginable, indescribable’. You feel the happiest you’ve ever felt while in the light of the being, who seems to emphasize the importance of two things in life: loving others and acquiring knowledge.
You approach a point of seemingly no return. Then a dead relative or unfamiliar voice informs you that it’s not your time to die, and you reluctantly return to your body. The physical world is painful, restrictive, and unhomelike compared to the spirit world. It’s like ‘living on the head of a pin’, wrote Brinkley. Pam Reynolds, a singer-songwriter who had an NDE in 1991 during a brain surgery in which she was drained of blood and cooled to fifty-eight degrees, said in an interview with NBC, ‘It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling to be free of it,’ regarding her body. When she refused to return to it, her dead uncle pushed her, and it was like ‘diving into a pool of ice water’.
NDEs may seem dreamlike because they involve impossible events, but experiencers say their NDEs were realer than both dreams and life itself. ‘This was more real than anything on Earth,’ said a woman in After. ‘By comparison, my life in my body had been a dream.’ This is what I felt after my fifth DMT trip – life by comparison was unreal, ephemeral, a mere simulation of some higher reality, as dreams hazily simulate life.
Around 80 percent of NDErs don’t reach the life review, and the sequence of events, or memory of the sequence, varies. But everyone seems to be describing the same general experience. This is not due to prior expectations – only 33.6 percent of NDErs were aware of NDEs before their own experience, and just 12.7 percent said it was ‘consistent with their beliefs’, according to a 613-case sample from an online NDE database (NDERF) created by oncologist Jeffrey Long, author of Evidence of the Afterlife (2011).
In many NDEs, the light being is the most memorable deity-level entity, but people also encounter other deities. In Greyson’s research, almost 90 percent of experiencers met ‘some kind of divine or godlike being’, and only one-third of these people were able to identify the being as ‘an entity consistent with their religious beliefs’. One person, who’d attended many religious services across different faiths throughout his life, said he met a being who ‘looked like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings’.
Materialist and atheist NDErs tend to relinquish their beliefs, while spiritual NDErs adjust theirs, with many abandoning what Moody called ‘the reward-punishment model of the afterlife’. Greyson wrote, ‘Many experiencers describe adopting a form of nondenominational spirituality since their NDEs, in which all religious traditions are valued but no one religion is given precedence.’
NDEs, I now understood, were not an extension of religion – stories created to support or rationalize one’s beliefs. Instead, they appeared to predate religion and may have been one of the main inspirations – along with other mystical experiences, induced through drugs, trance, fasting, and other methods – for the formation of religions, as Gregory Shushan argued in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions (2018).
Shushan cited more than thirty cases of Indigenous groups crediting NDEs for their afterlife beliefs, including the Kagoro in Nigeria, Māori in New Zealand, Lipan Apache in Texas (who told of a man who died, returned to life, and said ‘everything is fine’ in the afterlife because people there ‘live better than we do’), and Saulteaux of Eastern Canada, who recounted the story of a man who, after spontaneously reanimating after being dead for two days, said:
But even daylight here is not so bright as it is in the country I had visited . . . It is not right to cry too much for our friends, because they are in a good place. They are well off there. So I’m going to tell everybody not to be scared about dying.
5
I shared my research with my parents, who’d moved back to Taiwan when I was 23, during our weekly FaceTime calls. I explained that NDEs suggest we’re deader now, on Earth, than we’ll ever be; that death is not destructive but metamorphotic, transforming us from clumsy caterpillars into free-flying moths and butterflies; and that psychic abilities – such as telepathy, telekinesis, bilocation, clairvoyance, prophecy, paranormal healing, psychometry, psychoenergetics, and astral projection – are real or at least possible.
At first, I felt a bit sheepish talking to my parents, who are in their seventies, about death. I didn’t want them to mistakenly think I anticipated them dying soon. My dad often stated that he wanted to live until 90. We rarely discussed death, which seemed somewhat taboo; in the past, when I’d referenced my own death, my mom had said things indicating I shouldn’t do that, seeming to think I could invoke my own death.
But I soon became comfortable discussing death with them through the lens of near-death experiences. My dad mostly stayed quiet, commenting sometimes in a rote, non-argumentative way that NDEs were lies told by Christians, but my mom was engaged and talkative, sharing highly relevant stories about her parents.
Her dad, whose funeral I’d attended when I was six, became deathly sick when he was sixty. My mom and three of her siblings were seated around his bed. Suddenly, the lights blinked off and on, and a wind blew through the room. My grandfather got out of bed, went to his Xuánwǔ altar, wrote a message, and collapsed. The message said he’d been granted twenty-four more years to live. He died twenty-four years later, on Xuánwǔ’s birthday. Being accurately told the date of your death occurs in some NDEs, I knew from my research.
My mom told me about her mom, who died in Taiwan in 1979 – four years before my birth – after my mom had moved to the US. My mom learned of her mom’s death from a telegram and cried all night. In the morning, washing her face, she heard her mom call her name. A week later, back at work waitressing at a Chinese restaurant called Aloha, she served two women she had never met before. Even though the women were unaware of her mom’s death, one of them told her that the spirit of an old woman was standing beside her.
One night, my mom encountered her mom in a dream. Smiling in a purple gown, my mom’s mom told my mom that she was going away now. Later, my mom asked her sister in Taiwan what their mom had worn in her coffin; she’d worn a purple gown.
I asked my mom if she’d told me these stories when I was a child. She couldn’t remember. I couldn’t either. She said if she’d told me back then I wouldn’t have believed her. I wasn’t sure if I would have or not, but I knew I did now.
6
A month into my NDE research – a few days after my mom received Life after Life and Closer to the Light from me in the mail – my parents’ toy poodle, Dudu, died at age 16. Dudu had been mostly indifferent to other dogs; she’d been closest to my parents, my aunt, and me. I’d written extensively about her in my fourth novel, charting how we gradually became friends. Since my last visit to Taiwan in 2019, I’d seen her weekly on FaceTime. She was always with my parents on the sofa during these calls.
NDEs helped us process Dudu’s death. Hinduism, Jainism, animism, and many other religions believe animals have souls, and people sometimes report meeting their dead pets during NDEs. My parents and I wondered if animal souls were as advanced as human souls. My mom was doubtful. I liked to believe they were; in the previous month, I’d enjoyed feeling closer to my two cats by considering them my equals, soul-wise.
The morning after Dudu died, a small moth – a type I had never seen in my four years in Hawaii – flew to my computer while I was working outside under a covered patio. It landed on my computer screen near the subject line to an email to my mom titled ‘Dudu’. This was the first time a moth had ever landed on my computer screen. It stayed there for around two minutes. I photographed and recorded a video of it, and then it flew toward me, landing on my shirt on my chest before flying away.
The incident reminded me of the black moth that had rested on my grandfather’s coffin for seven days. Maybe souls can temporarily control insects, and they choose moths because butterflies and dragonflies don’t maneuver well in non-expansive spaces, and because other indoor insects – cockroaches, flies, ants, mosquitoes – are usually shooed away, killed, or ignored.
On FaceTime with my parents later that day, I saw my dad cry. I’d never seen him cry. He wiped away a tear from under his eye and stood and walked out of view, returning after a few minutes. Later in the call, he said he’d heard Dudu bark that morning, waking him. Dudu’s death seemed to have softened his materialism, which has always been tempered by his playful imagination, which he expressed near the end of the call by creating a Dudu-shaped mannequin from Dudu’s clothing and toys.
Seven days after Dudu’s death, my mom saw a tiny moth on the wall above the stove in her tenth floor apartment in Taipei. The moth stared at my mom with one shiny, glinting eye. This was strange, my mom said, because normally one does not see a moth’s eyes. The ‘Dudu moth’, as she called it, flew to various areas of the kitchen and then left.
After this event, my mom’s ‘unbearable ache’ dissipated and she ‘started to feel calm and peaceful’, she told me in an email, adding, ‘I believe she came back to say goodbye and she finally left us completely, goes on to her next happy and healthy life, good thing is we will all see her again.’
7
My NDE research, which continued over the following months, helped me understand my DMT trips. Both experiences take place in a hyperreal, revelatory, strangely familiar reality in which long-seeming stretches of time pass within just a few Earth minutes, such as my 50,000-year intimation and, for example, the case of Elizabeth Krohn, whose NDE lasted what felt like two weeks during a few unconscious minutes after being struck by lightning. Both experiences produce lasting positive changes – greater self-worth, appreciation for nature, and spirituality; reduced depression, death anxiety, and interest in status and possessions. There are, however, two major, telling differences between the experiences:
- NDEs tend to feature loving, mostly familiar entities and a predictable set of events and locations, unlike DMT trips, which occur in many disparate locations – participants in DMTx and DMT studies from the 1990s reported visiting a village, a realm of numbers, a ‘high-tech nursery’, circus-like realities, a space station, a place with twirling DNA-like things (which I think I traversed on my fourth trip), and an ‘alien laboratory’ – populated by unfamiliar, preoccupied entities, including aliens, clowns, elves, chinchillas, reptiles, mantises, stick figures, formless beings (I’ve only met these on my trips), and androids.
- In NDEs, souls linger in the universe before moving on to the periphery of the spirit world, while DMT seems to abruptly transport users directly into the spirit world proper, bypassing the above-body hovering, the loved ones, the light being, and the life review.
These differences make me think that NDEs – the older, more natural exit from matter – are like flying home and going through customs and being welcomed by expectant friends and family, while DMT is like teleporting desultorily into unforeseen locations in a foreign country. This would explain why breakthrough DMT trips are scarier and harder to comprehend and recall than NDEs.
Another reason why DMT trips are often uncomfortable and chaotic may be that the soul remains connected to the body and its dysphoria and limitations. One DMTx participant described meeting ‘gingerbread-men-like’ beings who would look at the back of him, as if to check if he was still attached to his body. In NDEs, the body is usually completely dead, allowing the soul to leave it behind as a soulless object.
In the 1990s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman gave sixty volunteers intravenous DMT. Prior to doing this, he speculated that the body produces psychedelic levels of DMT at death, facilitating the soul’s departure. But in only two of his subjects did ‘themes of death and dying clearly dominate the sessions’, he wrote in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000). This finding, along with my reading of the NDE literature, leads me to believe that endogenous drugs do not generate the death process as revealed in NDEs, but that the dead body simply loses its hold on the soul, letting it go – much like how we automatically return to reality after finishing a novel.
After all, no known drug or mix of drugs reliably produces omnidirectional vision, controllable out-of-body experiences, telepathic interactions with other souls, or replays of life from multiple perspectives. Even if such drugs existed, they wouldn’t work on a brain that had no electrical activity. Most NDErs have no heartbeat, blood flow, or neuroelectric activity during their NDE.
Materialist neurosurgeon Eben Alexander was in a coma for seven days in 2008 with a brain infection; instead of dying or suffering permanent brain damage, as his physicians predicted, he returned with detailed memories of ‘a rich spiritual odyssey’, as he wrote in a 2017 essay titled ‘My Experience in Coma’. He made a full recovery, abandoned materialism, and wrote that based on ‘neurologic exams, scans and laboratory values’ taken while he was unconscious, his experience could not have been a hallucination, dream, or drug effect.
To me, the view that endogenous drugs mediate death and NDEs is too focused on physical mechanisms, overlooking that the soul – a transcendent entity – may be capable of leaving the body as freely as we change clothes, without assistance from the clothing. But if souls are so adept in disembodiment, why do they seem to often ‘malfunction’, prematurely leaving bodies in up to 15 percent of people who are near death? Probably, I think, because NDEs are not malfunctions. They seem to be a built-in, benevolent feature of existence, tempering the difficulty of embodied life by reminding us that we are spiritual beings from a better reality.
8
As a child, I feared death; in my twenties, I often wanted to be dead; in my thirties, recovering from drug addiction and materialism, I returned to not wanting to die. Now, at 41, I’m back to wanting to die, but out of wonder and curiosity instead of sadness and despair. Paradoxically, my calmly excited anticipation of death will probably extend my life, by allowing me to better enjoy it, soothed and charged by my growing belief that dying will be like waking from a harsh dream.
‘The more we fear death, the faster we will die,’ wrote Chinese nutritionist Zheng Ji two years before he died at age 110. Fear of death ruins life. A hike in nature would not feel good if I believed I’d be nonexistent or punished after it; I’d be too worried to enjoy anything. But if I knew the hike would be followed by more (non-punishing) experiences, I would be free to explore my surroundings and memorize details and sensations to bring into the rest of existence.
Studies have found that simply learning about NDEs can improve mental health by increasing appreciation for life and decreasing fear of death. For me, smoking DMT and reading about NDEs has made life seem less like a stressful, inscrutable test and more like a casual adventure in an explorable work of art, a partially self-created novel-movie-game with a rewarding surprise ending, returning us to the glorious home that we forgot we had when we left it.
The theory that judgment awaits us in the afterlife seems suspiciously human, a cultural overlay, imposed to better control people. It’s a deeply unfortunate deception, instilling dread, anxiety, and a general sense of inhospitality by portraying the divine as crude and impersonal, relating to us primarily through enticements and threats. It’s also a predictable deception. I’m not surprised that religions which developed during the social chaos of the past six millennia, a time of institutional hierarchies and chronic war, contain teachings that serve non-spiritual purposes.
Most-to-all religions seem to have wrapped the first-hand evidence of NDEs in layers of truth-costumed speculation. Ancient Egyptian funerary texts grew elaborate over millennia, detailing rewards and punishments. Contemporary forms of Buddhism have eighteen hells. Daoism’s source texts do not mention hell but today some Daoists believe in an underground hell called Diyu. Medieval Christian accounts of NDEs are filled with hellish imagery. In Otherworld Journeys (1988), Carol Zaleski wrote that the Cistercians – a Catholic order founded in 1098 – ‘were especially sensitive to the propaganda value’ of NDEs. ‘Did they feel that their pious mission justified spinning any tale that might trick the infidels into faith?’ wondered Zaleski.
In the 1400s, when Christian missionaries began to try to convert Indigenous groups, many resisted, preferring their own, often NDE-derived beliefs. In 1634, for example, the Innu of Eastern Canada told the French Jesuit Paul Le Juene that they got their knowledge of the afterlife from two people from their community who’d been there. In Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, Shushan writes, ‘On the basis of that evidence, they contended that Le Jeune’s statements about heaven and hell were incorrect, for all “go to the same country, at least, ours do”.’
For some people, the life review may seem hellish – Brinkley, for example, wrote, ‘From the moment it began until it ended, I was faced with the sickening reality that I had been an unpleasant person’ – but this is a non-tortuous, non-punitive ‘hell’ which constitutes a tiny portion of the afterlife, not the entire afterlife. Religions tend to reduce the entire spirit world into a reward or punishment for embodied life – a universe-centric view that is not supported by NDEs and DMT trips. These experiences suggest that, if anything, the physical world would be the prize or penalty for behaviors done in the spirit world.
NDEs conflict to some degree with seemingly all religions, but they do not, in my view, refute these religions. Instead, they act as source material to correct the cultural distortions which have persistently simplified and darkened the human condition. The source material strongly suggests that the older, realer, and more foundational of the two known worlds is also the better one, or, in other words, that we are existentially enveloped in magic, mystery, and love.
9
NDEs do not refute religion, but they do refute materialism. This is good news. Materialism seems to have egregiously underestimated the size and complexity of reality. Microbes are far less complicated than animals (the next higher form of life), and so it may be too for worlds – the universe might be a scant unicellular bacterium compared to the talking, dreaming trillion-celled spirit world. This metaphor is not meant to belittle the universe, but to raise the spirit world – which materialism completely denies – closer to its actual splendor.
If life were a commercial flight, materialism would deny that anything exists outside the plane, rendering the flight baffling, grim, and maddening, being stuck in a seat with a little screen showing movies and TV shows, unsure of your origin or destination. When I flew from Hawaii to New York, I recognized the flight as a brief, purposeful phase, and so I was able to enjoy it despite its discomfort. I knew I was returning to my life on Earth, and so I didn’t try to advance my status among passengers and crew, accumulate possessions, or hoard resources.
People ride planes to travel quickly. Why do souls come to the universe? Maybe living a life is like reading a novel or playing a computer game – educational, recreational. Maybe embodiment is a rite of passage, like the vision quest in Native American cultures. A car accident victim quoted in Impressions of Near-Death Experiences described life on Earth as seeming, from the spirit world, ‘like a deportation to a strange and isolated island that was unpleasant’.
Maybe the universe is a school in which each life is an ultraspecific class. Pam Reynolds, who doubted her morality as a Christian, recalled thinking, as she moved toward the light during her NDE, ‘I wonder if I deserve to be here; I’m not a perfect person.’ Her dead grandmother laughed and said, according to Reynolds, ‘You were a child sent away to school. As a child, we expected that you would spill your milk. It’s the manner in which you clean it up that gives us cause for pride.’
Embodiment probably has multiple overlapping functions, including, I imagine, to enhance a soul’s normal, disembodied existence: spending time in a difficult lower-dimensional world – with vision reduced to two eyes, movement to two legs, cognition to one brain, memory to one life – seems like it would strengthen the soul, or at least cause the soul to feel and function better when it gets home, much like how we feel better after we exercise, spend time in a sauna, or undergo some other challenge or ordeal.
According to Greyson, who edited the Journal of Near-Death Studies from 1982 to 2007, near-death experients say souls come to the universe to learn to love despite conflict because there’s no conflict in the spirit world. Robert Monroe, who popularized the term out-of-body experience, argued that souls enter bodies to accumulate emotional knowledge, satisfy curiosity, and learn (1) how to control matter, (2) the ability to analyze, and (3) a ‘system of measurement’ involving pain and pleasure.
I suspect the whole truth is stranger and more spiritual – based on nonmaterial, nonhuman processes and concerns – than we can imagine, much less understand or convey. For now, I choose to listen to the light being at the beginning of the afterlife. It says we should love and learn. Due to what I’ve learned, existence no longer seems like a brief, panicky thing, demanding rightness. It has complexified into something truer and much greater – an unknownly long, multi-reality-spanning mystery.
Illustration by Tao Lin
