Surviving Death

Imagine that you’re having an accidental, spontaneous out-of-body experience. You’ve never heard of an OBE. But now, you’re communicating telepathically (mind-to-mind) and empathetically (feeling-to-feeling) with a just-deceased loved-one. That very special person has come to you in spirit form to say a last goodbye before departing to the Beyond – like that famous scene in Ghost where Patrick Swazye’s character bids a final farewell to his bereaved widow (Demi Moore). You realize that your senses and your capacity for thinking are far more powerful than they ever were in the body. Your heart is alive with wonder and love. The initial panic at seeing your shimmering, glowing spirit body is long gone.

You now realize beyond doubt that:

•  Life has a purpose – and spiritual and intellectual growth – are its mission.
•  Spirit and thought are the fundamental reality, and matter is its byproduct, not the other way around.
•  Love is the ultimate goal above all other strivings – a love best expressed through those who are near and dear.

So it happened to Scott Degenhardt two decades ago.

I congratulate you on having turned up this one-of-a-kind book – unique because the author is both a dramatic experiencer as well as a skilled and thorough researcher and writer. This is not merely another NDE book describing an experience. It is a popularly written guide that helps experiencers and their friends and families make sense of their world-changing NDEs, make good use of them, and – ultimately – transform themselves – as Scott was transformed.

As you enjoy this page-turner, you’ll get a sample of the depth, honesty and articulateness that has booked Scott on some of the largest TV and radio shows in North America, including The Phil Donahue Show and Coast to Coast A.M. And you’ll benefit from the practical experience of an individual who has worked with many NDE experiencers through his Survivors of Death Network.

So if you’ve ever wondered what lies beyond, or if any questions remain about your own NDE, or your friend’s or loved one’s – and how to best use this NDE in your life – begin your adventure here.

        This manual is dedicated to the millions (yes, millions) of people in the United States alone, and the vast numbers more worldwide, who have died and returned, only to have more questions about the meaning of life and death (Gallup, 1993). It is also dedicated to an even larger group, those who have had any kind of spiritually transformative experience (STE).
        The ideas presented here are not only mine, but are the collective experiences of many people who quest for understanding. The nearly 100 survivors of physical death who have shared with me their most personal experience of their own deaths, and countless others who have had spiritually transformative experience, have sculpted the picture presented in this manual. What they saw, in many cases, no words can describe. After the event, they began their search for the words to explain what happened, and why.
        This is intended to be an “owner’s manual” for the spiritually transformed to find validation and acceptance of their spiritual journeys. The answers to their questions should be found here as well. You will find blank pages throughout this book. They are intended to provide you with a space so as you are reading, you can make notes as you think of them. These may help you lay out new directions for your growth.
        The purpose of this manual is not to convince you that such encounters of the “other side” are real. It is written as an encyclopedia of spiritual experiences to help those who have either been through a related experience or who have an open spirit to learn more about them.
        In February of 1982 my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in May of the same year. After he died, he visited me, and I was blessed with the experience of witnessing his complete passing from this Earthly plane, including his departing through an opening or tunnel as he was called by “heavenly beings” and told that it was his time to go.
        This co-experiencing of my own father’s death changed my viewpoint of not only death, but of life as well—and in a very dramatic way. But the disbelief of family and friends led me to live in complete silence of it, never to utter a word about it again for nine years.
        Then I met a man by the name of John Ronner, who had published several books on the subject of angelic and other worldly encounters. Reading a review of his book, Do You Have a Guardian Angel?, I learned that he mentioned details of other people who had met deceased relatives. I was shocked to find that other people had been through the same experience, because I had never heard another soul mention anything remotely like my experience in the nine years since it had happened. When I met with John, he tried repeatedly to convince me that such encounters were commonplace—but people were just too scared to talk about them.
I finally took him at his word. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted proof. Was my experience just a fluke of the universe, or was it really common? I decided that if other people heard someone talking about it, maybe they would then not be so shy to share. So, everywhere I went, I began bringing up the subject of death and the afterlife.
        Once I did this at a baby shower, other times at fast food restaurants—and boy, did I get an EARFUL!  It turned out that, on average, if I were talking to four people, two of the four had either directly experienced a spiritual encounter with the other side or had an immediate family member or very close friend who had. Statistically speaking, that’s 50%. That’s what we call a majority in this country!
        So John was right. This is common. I then began devouring every book I could find on the phenomenon for which Dr. Raymond Moody coined the term “near-death experience” (hereafter referred to as NDE). I must have read about a dozen books written by Dr. Raymond Moody, Dr. Melvin Morse (a pediatrician who researched NDE’s in children), Dr. Kenneth Ring, and others. These were all written by professionals, and their descriptions document amazing similarities in everyone’s encounter with death—no matter what race, gender, or time period the subjects were born into.
        However, it was a book by an actual NDE’er that forged the course of my actions from the moment I read it. It was Coming Back to Life. Written by PMH Atwater, it described the extremely difficult journey she had through life after her death. You might think that a trip to the Other Side and all the enlightenment that it brings would be the best thing that could happen to a person. Atwater’s experience was just the opposite! She was shunned by those closest to her, and she was so radically changed by her experience that she subsequently suffered a divorce, loss of jobs, estrangement from the closest of friends, and an almost complete mental breakdown.
        I wasn’t sure what to believe—the dozen books that with rose-colored glasses describe how beautiful the NDE is, or the story of the rejection of a soul because of its spiritual enlightenment.
        I then began a quest to find local experiencers and try to hold a sort of group session. I thought that if I could get a few of these earthly transcenders together, they might be able to help one another. I know from my own experience that just finding someone else who doesn’t screw up their face in disbelief as you try to share this can make one feel whole again. It is a healing experience.
        Coincidentally, while I was trying to find these people, a local NBC news affiliate, Demetria Kalodimos, was producing a documentary, “Glimpse of Glory”, in which stories of NDE’ers were featured. I contacted Demetria and told her I was starting a group meeting for just such individuals. From that contact was born the Survivors of Death Network, and she featured our very first meeting on that documentary. That was in the summer of 1992.
        The group met for three years. Nearly 100 such survivors from all walks of life blessed each other and me with their stories and their quests for answers. During these meetings, I began to notice that the questions from different experiences were nearly all the same. So you will find an entire chapter in this manual that contains all the common questions that these travelers had—and some of the answers we came up with.
        The morning after the documentary “Glimpse of Glory” aired, I was walking to lunch when a lady ran up to thank me. She had recognized me from the show, and began repeatedly thanking me, saying that she had an NDE and had never heard anyone describe what she had been through. Seeing others on the show who had gone through the same thing made her realize she wasn’t crazy. She said that she was set free and could now get on with her life. This book is expressly dedicated to people like her.
        If you are on a quest for understanding, I dedicate this manual to you. I have a few short statements for you, and I mean them sincerely:

Forward

Preface                       

1. The Morning After   
    Back so soon?   
    Go tell it on the mountain!   
    Go hide it in the closet   
    Their Explanations   
    Better Explanations   
    We need more death awareness
    Starting your quest   

2. Your Experience   
    Angelic messages or intervention
    Encounter with deceased spirits
    What’s that smell?
    Premonitions and Pre-death visions
    Deathbed visions and
    take away apparitions   
    The cognitive sense
    Separation, the OBE
    The Life Review, what a view!
    Seeing them again!
    Go Back?
    Good death experiences
    Bad Death experiences
    Healing in the light
    Other kinds of experiences
    They are not all the same
    Causes vary
    Experiences reach beyond description
    Summary of common dying events

3. Common aftereffects and traits
    No more fear of death!
    Becoming more childlike
    Priority list has changed
    Belief structure change
    Everything’s NOT O.K.!
    differentiation
     “Psychic” abilities?
    What are dreams made of?
    Electrical malfunction junction
    Christ-like or Christ?

4. Common Questions and Some Answers
    I thought I was the only one!
    Why am I so different, am I crazy?
    Why did this happen to me?
    What purpose does the death experience serve?
    Why was I sent back?
    What am I supposed to do with it?
    Are experiences of other religions and
    cultures the same?
    How do I know it was real?
    Why don’t people believe me?
    Why didn’t he or she visit me when they died?
    What is the meaning of life?
    Statistics
    If it’s all so beautiful, why don’t I kill myself to get there?

5. Your spiritual body
    Outside the physical
    Spiritual body attributes
    Telepathy, without a doubt
    Learning
    Travel
    Spiritual name tag

6. The spiritual realm
    Angels
    Departed Loved Ones
    Gray people
    Interactive, influenced by you
    Heaven
    The barrier
    Gray area
    Hell
    Does anyone have the Time?
    Accelerated learning centers
    Other places
    Unseen Beings

7. Reincarnation
    We existed before we came here
    We continue to exist after we die
    Face the music again
    Suicide, spiritual vs. physical
    Doctor assisted suicide

8. Keep off the grass!
    Must have Dogma
    Not the God I was taught…
    Why are there so many religions?
    Sign on the dotted line…

9. What is the meaning of life?
    LOVE
    The Three L’s
    Give!
    Give Thanks
    Complaining is the opposite of praise!
    I Love hard times and hard people
    Anger has no value
    Love yourself
    Learn.  Better yourself.
    The marble lessons
    Creativity breeds learning
    Think outside of the dots!
    Harmony, not struggle.  That’s one of
    the secrets to a peaceful life.
    De-stress Recipe
    Fundamental law of Growth
    Lead sky syndrome
    You are a free agent
    We are all, every one of us, living and dead,
    and yet to be born, inseparable and One!   
    What the meaning of Life is NOT!
    Earth 101 Graduation Day
    Graduation Day (need to delete!)

10. Seeing Dad’s Odyssey Begin
      Why the caps?

Bibliography

About the author

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    The first thing you notice after you were supposedly dead is that you continue to exist. You may have seen, heard, and felt things that no words in any language can come close to describing. Just the same, while the sequence of events was somewhat unfamiliar, your awareness of your own existence was more natural and clearer than you have ever experienced in your physical body on earth.
    The idea that anyone has any kind of experience after dying, and then remembers, takes most people by surprise. I don’t understand why, though. The vast majority of people in the world profess to be Christian, Muslim, Hindu or at least to have some sort of religious belief that includes belief in an afterlife. Yet, when faced with hearing your experience, most people seem uneasy. They act as if they were listening to the ramblings of a mad person!


    You’re back now. You’ve traveled beyond your body, somehow, to some other place. But now you’re back in your body. Back in pain. Back to a place where you struggle to survive, instead of blissfully exist. Back to the place where things are often confusing. Back in debt. Back to the place where you will sometimes be hungry, tired, lonely, and miserable.
“Here” is a stark contrast compared to “There.” You were in a place where peace and a sense of wholeness were the rule, not the exception. A place where sensory perception and communication were effortless and complete. Telepathy, for lack of a better word, was the way to talk. It was more than just passing words back and forth. It was words with the complete thoughts, feelings, and meanings of the other being, all together—and unmistakable—in one package. Travel was done at the speed of thought, and by thought.
    The memories of that place you now call “Home” are still very fresh. In fact, if you close your eyes you can still see it. For many days you may even see both Here and There at the same time. And you will spend the rest of the days of this walk in life with a foot in both worlds, longing for Home.


    The first thing you simply have to do is tell someone!  You know that you have experienced a most profound series of events. Everyone is in search of the knowledge that you just glimpsed. You want to share it. And so you do. You tell your nurse what just happened. He or she will likely tell the doctor, who in response will up your dose of sedatives so you can be “relieved” of the stress of this delusion.
    Next come the confidential conversations with your family and close friends—and the looks, the stares of disbelief, or the patronizing comment “Oh how interesting….”
    There must be someone who understands you. In one last attempt to find validation and acceptance, you visit a priest or pastor. This exchange might border on frightening, as they explain, from their perspective, the possible evil of what you are describing.
    Along with the strange looks from others, you get a long string of logical explanations for the events you are trying to describe. Lack of oxygen to the brain, they suggest. Hallucinations. It’s the medicine, they reassure you.
    Shortly thereafter, they suggest that you need to stop talking about it. Sometimes it even goes as far as threats to be psychologically committed.


    Granted, this scenario may not even come close to what you went through after your return. You may very well have been surrounded by people who listened, even if they didn’t understand your accounts. And you may have had the confidence, despite the pressure of disbelievers, to share your experience with anyone and everyone.
On the other hand, maybe you never told anyone because it all seemed too bizarre to explain, and you were just plain afraid of what others might think. Whatever the reactions, chances are that you reached a point were it was far more convenient to just shut up about it.
For a small percentage of people, not only the details of their encounter but they themselves end up in the closet, completely withdrawn from society. A few people actually have been committed to mental institutions.
    Whatever you saw, no matter how brief or extensive the time you were There, you find that your whole understanding of life is so changed that you really cannot create a believable picture of it. You haven’t even figured out for yourself how to integrate the concepts that are now a part of you into your “normal” life, much less make anyone else understand. You have a new “normal,” and it doesn’t fit very well into the society of “Get all you can, and can all you get.”
What you had to tell someone has become the biggest burden in your life. Now you don’t want to talk about it anymore. You need time to think….


    Let’s take a look at the medical or biological underpinnings—the physics, you might say—of some of the “logical” explanations that are used to explain what has happened when a person is near death or has died.

•  Hypoxia – Lack of oxygen to the brain. It’s a well-known fact that as oxygen decreases to the brain, one’s vision becomes narrowed to what’s called “tunnel vision.”
•  Medication – A hallucination brought about by the medication or anesthesia you were given.
•  Your brain’s reaction to stress. At death, maybe the brain starts secreting large amounts of endorphins to create peace and pleasure. The mind makes up the beautiful fantasies you had to cope with dying.
•  There has been so much published about the NDE that society has been “preconditioned” to believe that at death you will see a Light, a tunnel, and dead loved ones. So at death that’s what you saw.
•  It was nothing more than a vivid dream.
•  Demonic encounter – Evil spirits. If your encounter didn’t fit the religious expectations of the listener, this may be his or her conclusion.
•  An “exercise in psychology”— A nice way of saying you are crazy!

    Trying to explain a spiritual phenomenon with physical means is like trying to fit an object with six dimensions into a three-dimensional box.


    The above list of explanations are put forth by people who forget that we are, first and foremost, spiritual beings using physical bodies as a mode of transportation. Fear grips them when they hear you speak of what have experienced while outside of your physical body. Death is, as an unwritten rule, a sociably forbidden topic.
Fear is a natural emotion for any of us when we encounter a situation with which we are not familiar, especially if we have no idea what it really means. We fear what we don’t understand. The fear comes from the lack of knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that the experience was bad or wrong.
    If the tunnel, and the afterlife experiences, are merely secretions of the brain to comfort the dying, then how do we account for experiences that continue when brain function has ceased? It can’t be a brain function if the brain isn’t functioning. Hallucinations from medications and brain malfunctions due to lack of oxygen both produce random and scattered delusions. Dr. Melvin Morse makes the point in his book Closer to the Light that the occurrence of any perception or awareness while the brain has shut down during coma or death defies conventional neurology:

    According to the textbooks in the field, a child with Katie’s symptoms [Katie was under water for 19 minutes, and in a coma for three days] should have the absence of any brain function and therefore should comprehend nothing. As one of the top textbooks in the field says, coma should “wipe clean the slate of human consciousness. (p. 23)

    Dr. Morse went on a quest himself to prove or disprove the theory that reactions to drugs caused the NDE visions. For a detailed breakdown of the drugs he investigated, and their psychological impact on human consciousness, refer to his book Closer to the Light. Here is a brief description from those pages:

    Thus, the side effects and hallucinations that are created by drugs are a far cry from the clarity of the STE (Spiritually Transformative Experience), the OBE (Out of Body Event) or NDE (Near-Death Experience) that you experienced. Perception was never clearer than during your experience. It’s hard to describe the things witnessed by those outside of their physical body as random and scattered when they are sometimes very confirmable. Madelaine Lawrence reported in her book In a World of Their Own: Experiencing Unconsciousness the example of one of the most famous NDEs with an OBE by Maria, which was positively confirmed:


    Instead of randomness, we see consistent and, in many cases, verifiable experiences. We’re talking about people who can accurately describe their own resuscitations and even describe things that went on while they were dead. In his book Closer to the Light, Dr. Morse gives details of how Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist from Atlanta, interviewed 32 patients about medical resuscitation while “dead.” Not one of them made mistakes describing the resuscitation. As a control group for the study, he asked 25 medically savvy patients about resuscitation, and 23 of the 25 made major mistakes in guessing how it was done. (p. 120)
The “logical explanations” may seem like sound medical and physiological responses to what happens to the body during an NDE. But they are really excuses people use to avoid having to look objectively at the real source of the experience, the spiritual aspect. When Abraham asked Jesus to allow him to come back from the dead to warn his brothers of a place of torment, Jesus told him in Luke 16:31,


    Nothing you can say to scoffers will make them believers. Moreover, it is not important that they believe! The truth is the truth, and needs no defending.

    Madelaine Lawrence noted:


    This is Lawrence’s nice way of saying that if it weren’t for the boxes we create, and live in, rejecting anything that hangs outside their lids, we might be able to get a clue. As rational “adults,” we readily condemn experiences that don’t fit within the strict boundaries of our belief system. Anything outside of these bounds just can’t be. I, personally, know two people who have been committed to mental facilities because of their insistence of their journeys to the beyond!
    Ultimately, I hope you’ll reach the conclusion that everybody else has the problem with your experience, not you. That’s the big revelation! You must come to that realization before you can move on emotionally.


    It’s unfortunate that medical training doesn’t include more study on the subject of how the nurse or doctor should handle the dying or those who have returned from dying. I have worked with professionals from several major medical communities, and I make it a point to ask them what type of training they receive on the subject of death and dying. Nearly always, I get the response, “We had a single afternoon class on dealing with the ‘dying client.’”
    Most nurses with whom I have talked tell me that doctors take the death of a patient as a personal failure instead of realizing that it may have been “graduation day” for that soul.
    If a terminally ill patient tells the doctor that he or she is being visited by deceased relatives, or tells of having been taken to a realm of light and then brought back to the hospital bed, the doctor will often give the patient more or stronger sedatives to help “relieve them” of these “troubling hallucinations.”
    By drowning it out with medication, this robs the patient physical manifestation of the spiritual stimulation that comes with the dying experience. It also shortchanges the patient’s family, who might have heard the dying patient’s story of the visitation and taken comfort from it after their loved one was gone. The doctor thinks he’s helping the patient have a “peaceful passing” when he is really depriving the patient of the full experience of the transition of passing.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for heavy sedatives if the dying person is in extreme pain, but otherwise I think the person should be left to feel the experience to its fullest. It seems to me that an unhealthy fear of death permeates our society, and that this fear is robbing everyone of the spiritual enlightenment that comes from the dying experience.
    When I ask nurses if they have ever cared for a patient who has had one of these unique spiritual experiences of leaving their body and returning, most say yes, they have had a patient mention such an experience. Doctors tend to react to the same question in a different way. They may tell you how many years they have been practicing medicine and that they would certainly know if such a thing were happening, but it isn’t.
Statistics seem to indicate that it is happening right under their noses; they just don’t seem to notice. After being more objective, some doctors are now admitting that.


    The events you encountered keep replaying over and over in your mind. The longing for Home can sometimes be overwhelming for you after having been there briefly and then forced to leave.  It’s tough, even though you know that you will eventually be back Home in what, to eternity, is the blink of an eye.
    Chris told me this about his personal quest to try to understand his travels to the other side:

    Eight years now after the experience, I have come to a point where I am only now beginning to ask the right questions. I’m sure the answers are out there somewhere. I don’t have them all, after eight years. Maybe I have 10% of the answers. But I have developed a greater willingness to share the experience. In sharing it, I can get it defined. (Degenhardt)

    You may now feel like an alien on a foreign planet after whatever it is you went through. The world is different with your “other” understanding. Your values and belief systems are completely changed. You might be at odds with your friends because of this change. You may even have a strained marriage because you aren’t the same person your spouse married. You are a deeper person spiritually, and not everyone wants to go that deep. Your whole career track may have derailed because your idea of what matters is now so different. One thing is for sure, the thirst to understand more seems unquenchable. And so the quest begins….

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Scott Degenhardt:    Scott Degenhardt is a native of the Middle Tennessee area and is popularly known for his astronomy information of current happenings in the sky. He is an avid amateur astronomer and has been involved as a search member of the International Occultation Timing Association. He helped pioneer the use of video for the timing of the eclipsing events of stellar and solar system objects. He has discovered three new binary star systems using this technique.
    This background in optics and his technical training and experience in electronics and computers has lead Scott through many interesting career paths. He has done everything from controlling the program broadcast by satellite for Country Music Television to working on spacecraft for NASA. He spent many years calibrating equipment used for testing of aircraft, spacecraft, missiles and rockets at Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee. He also spent some years on a laser research project at Vanderbilt University at the Free-Electron Laser (FEL) Center. The Free-Electron Laser is a laser that is tunable in a wide range of infrared wavelengths where no lasers currently exist. It was here at the FEL Center were Scott worked on the assembly and testing of the prototype of the monochromatic X-ray machine for MXISystems. He currently is helping in the development of the current model finding ways to improve and streamline the operation and output of the monochromatic X-ray source.
    In 1992, Scott ran across by mere chance a newspaper review posted on his church bulletin board about John Ronner’s book Do You Have a Guardian Angel. In this review, he saw where John cited examples of other people who had been visited by deceased family members as Scott had. Through his conversation with Ronner, he soon learned that this was a common occurrence that just wasn’t sociably acceptable to talk about. Scott then read a book by PMH Atwater called Coming Back to Life. She was a person that had actually been through a near-death experience. This really opened Scott’s eyes to the plight of people like Atwater and others who became social outcasts because of the change they experienced from being on the “other side”. He then felt a calling to help these transcendental travelers find each other. He started the “Survivors of Death Network” in the Middle Tennessee area, and accomplished just that. It was his interactions from that and a decade more worth of interviews and observations that spawned this book, Surviving Death. Scott continues to do media interviews to this day to shed some light on the Light!
    Scott is certified as a private pilot, loves photography,  the great outdoors, martial arts, any form of physical fitness, anything technical, and generally thinks of himself as a large collection of somewhat useless trivia. As a budding cello player, he enjoys creating musical duets with his wife, who is an accomplished pianist.