What If This Is a Collective Near-Death Experience?

What near-death experiences reveal about our moment of crisis

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

What would happen if you went to bed tonight and… died?

Not figuratively. Actually. Your breathing stops. Your heart stops.

And then, according to people who have actually been there, something rather unexpected begins.

Sam Parnia knows more about this than most. A professor of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at New York University, he specialises in the one medical emergency that all of us will face — your heart is going to stop one day — and how to bring people back.

It’s possible he’s met more people who’ve been dead than anyone else alive.

What they report is remarkably consistent. And it’s deeply relevant to the moment we’re living through.

Here comes the science bit

The line between life and death has been getting steadily more blurry with advances in science since the 1950s, especially CPR.

It used to be that “death” was defined by the moment your heart stopped. Today, advances in CPR have revealed something more complex: not a single moment, but what Parnia calls a “grey zone” between life and death. And that grey zone extends for a lot longer than you might think:

…”the process of cell damage and death in the body, including in the brain, generally starts after a person has died and does not become absolute for many hours or possibly days after death. The transition from life to what we call death, like everything else in biology, follows a continuum. No biological process is a binary, singular, black-and-white moment. Why should this be any different?”

Is your head spinning yet? Mine was. And that’s before Parnia gets started on what the process feels like from the inside — something he’s studied in depth in peer-reviewed research (like this).

It’s worth noting that the sample sizes here aren’t huge. Many people who have a cardiac arrest don’t survive; many who do, don’t remember anything afterwards. But among those who do report “recalled experiences of death”, a consistent pattern emerges.

While doctors fight to bring them back, people report that something striking happens: “the dying person’s sense of their own consciousness becomes enormously vast: like the cosmos compared with the Earth”. Many survivors describe a sudden shift into a state of heightened awareness — far more vivid and expansive than ordinary life — and a sense that their identity is no longer tied to their body.

In this state of hyperlucid consciousness, people go through a “life review”. They see the causes behind every action they took. But they also see what those actions meant for others, and not just in theoretical terms. Parnia writes:

“They recognise that they are responsible for their own actions and intentions, and they relive the downstream consequences, or domino effect, of their actions on other living beings. They relive their own actions through the eyes of the other living entity, human or animal, and deeply feel how they felt in that moment.”

What matters in this review isn’t what we believed, but what we did, and how it felt to the people around us. There’s a total absence of fear and ego. Emotions like dread, jealousy, and anger, or sensual and physical attractions, are “not at all seen” in survivors’ testimony. Instead,

“…we found only positive attributes, such as kindness, generosity, benevolence, compassion, understanding, learning, knowledge, assistance, dignity, and … humility.”

Afterwards, people come back changed for the better by the experience, with less fear of death and far higher concern for others.

The striking thing isn’t any single detail. It’s how consistent the overall pattern is.

Faith in the hereafter?

Parnia notes that in all his team’s research and interviews, “there is as much that we never hear as there is of what we do hear” — especially about religion.

No one comes back from death saying that religious belief or observance were what mattered, except in so far as they shaped how we lived. And while people do interpret and filter their experiences through their personal belief systems after they return — including encounters with a guiding presence that they may understand as God, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, an angel, or something else — Parnia writes that “we came to realise these people were all talking about the same thing”.

Above all, there’s zero support here for the exclusivist notion that one religion is right and all the other ones are wrong, or for the idea of a God who judges us. Instead, we judge ourselves, and experience our actions as others did — an experience that can indeed feel “hellish”.

These findings are perhaps challenging to dogmatic, orthodox forms of religion. But as someone who still considers themselves a Christian, I find them reassuring. Death is not an ending but a threshold. Our actions matter, and have consequences. And religions and wisdom traditions matter too, if they make those actions kinder.

Above all, the experience of death is overwhelmingly hallmarked by love — which, survivors report, is the only thing that matters in life as well.

Our collective near death experience

So what does any of this have to do with us — here, now?

One answer is that we struggle to think about death at all. As my friend and sometime co-author Ivor Williams, an end-of-life care designer, observed when we spoke on the Good Apocalypse Podcast a while back, those of us in Western societies expend a lot of energy keeping death out of our minds. When it forces itself into our lives, we tend to grapple with grief alone and out of sight rather than collectively and in public.

All of this underlines our sense that death is something awful — something to be feared. (There’s a whole area of psychology called ‘terror management theory’, which centres on the edgy relationship between our innate self-preservation instinct and the realisation that death is both inevitable and unpredictable.)

So perhaps it’s no surprise that similar dynamics emerge when we’re thinking about existential risks like climate change or nuclear proliferation, or tail risks from artificial intelligence: they raise the spectre of collective death, and trigger the same anxieties.

But what Sam Parnia’s work perhaps invites us to do is to see the moment we’re living through not as an end, but as a threshold. I don’t mean literally, in the sense of a collective version of Parnia’s “lucid hyperconsciousness” — but in a figurative sense, it’s a powerful comparison.

Because this is also a moment in which our old stories about who we are and what matters begin to fall away; a moment of revelation. And unlike in an individual near-death experience, this is something we can have a role in shaping.

Where survivors report a dissolution of the ego, we’re living through a moment where identities are destabilising, individualism is reaching its limits, and we’re beginning to glimpse why we need to see ourselves (and act) as a much larger us.

Where survivors tell of a life review, we’re living through multiple historical reckonings that lead us to recognise, often painfully, how our past actions have affected others.

Above all, perhaps, a future about which we feel intense terror and dread might yet prove to be something much more hopeful: a breakdown in one sense, but also a breakthrough. (A good apocalypse, as you might say.)

Because if what Parnia writes about in his book is even a little bit true, then the real question isn’t just how we survive this moment.

It’s what we learn from it, and what we become if we return: less caught up in fear, more concerned with others, clearer on what we’re actually here to do.

Links I liked

For more on Sam Parnia, check out this profile of him in the Guardian from back in 2013.

Also on death, Kenneth Primrose talks to palliative care specialist Dr Kathryn Mannix in the latest episode of This Examined Life — and reveals in the accompanying Substack that he himself had a near-death experience (“the memory of it is visceral and still jolts me into embracing all that I love about life”).

Last year, global electricity demand rose by 2.8% — but for the first time, all of this additional demand was met through clean power, according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026.

And that’s before we take Trump’s war on Iran into account. As George Monbiot succinctly put it, “who’d have thought a fossil-fuel shill like Trump would be the one to spark a green revolution?”

Peter Hyman wrote a great piece on the black hole that exists in government between policy nerds and spin doctors, which made me laugh and nod. We need a “story factory” to fill it, he says.