Perceiving the Impossible

From: The Crossover Experience: Life After Death - DJ Kadagian, Gregory Shushan PhD, Dr. Pim van Lomell

57% Experience Heightened Senses 

On this plane, we have five primary senses, each with its way of experiencing and interpreting the world around us. When NDErs cross over, they do not utilize the five independent senses as we understand them.

They can see clearly at immense distances, with some reporting a 360-degree field of vision.

Four of the five senses are not often used or experienced in an NDE as we understand them. It is uncommon to hear someone describe what it feels like when running their hand along the tunnel wall or dipping a toe into a rambling stream. We do not hear what a fully ripened fruit, pulled from a tree, tastes like.

Vision - Hearing - Touch - Taste - Smell. It is not that NDErs don’t experience them. It appears what they have difficulty articulating is that these senses appear to have merged. This would explain why they struggle to describe how they can taste a scent, experience color from sound, or feel all senses at once through touch. On this plane, we call this phenomenon synesthesia, a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of our senses stimulates several. When they cross over, NDErs experience this phenomenon turbocharged.

It is rare for NDErs to describe feeling gravity. For example, we do not hear of the weight of their bodies on their legs when they see or sense they are walking. Most describe the feeling of being drawn, attracted, or pushed toward a destination.

It is the case, with the historical and cross-cultural examples, that hearing and seeing are the two main senses that continue to be experienced in the other realm.

In the indigenous societies, there were often beliefs that if you taste or eat anything in the afterlife, you have to stay there forever, and that motif features in a few NDEs. This is very clearly a cultural quality that is quite possibly elaborated in the telling. This also applies to the theme that the souls of NDErs smell bad to spirits in the otherworld. 

The question for science is of course: how is it possible to experience all of these senses directly in one’s consciousness without using sense-organs?

Recorded Accounts

My field of view was all around. It was so beautiful and all the colors were unearthly beautiful. I was so happy and calm during all of my near-death experience. I have hearing loss in my life. I did not have that in death, and I could hear much better than ever in my life.

Music was not only something to hear but to feel, to taste, to smell, and to see. Thinking about it later, I realized "I" didn't "hear" any of the music through my ears; and yet, there was an impression of music filling my hearing senses and it included a whole body sensation.

I then attempted to look at myself, but could not see arms or legs. This led me to wonder how I was able to experience a field of view. I'm out of body, so to speak, yet I had vision of my surroundings.⁠

I realized that I had the power to see everything in front, behind, up and down, or everywhere at once. Without worrying where I would turn, and without needing to turn my head, my eyes could see as if in three dimensions.

When I saw the colors, it's as though I understood them. I saw them, I could taste them, I could hear them. I understood their very essence. And I realize none of this makes sense in our language, but that's what it was.