A near-death experience (NDE) is an extraordinary experience reported above all by people who came very close to physical death, in a cardiac arrest, an accident or near drowning, for instance: they describe leaving their body, reviewing their whole life, or passing through a dark tunnel (cf. Grof, 2000, ch. 7). Van Lommel and colleagues also discuss reports without an immediately life-threatening situation (cf. van Lommel et al., 2001, p. 2039). That is the picture research has drawn, and it is probably the picture you have in mind. Jochen Kirchhoff puts the weight somewhere else: for him the real phenomenon is not the clinical event but a general nearness to death that already includes every approach to the Otherworld in an experience that crosses a boundary. His book Die Anderswelt (The Otherworld, 2002), from which Gwendolin Kirchhoff read aloud in a conversation with him, puts it like this:
“What is usually called a near-death experience, by the way, is only a special case of this general nearness to death.”
— Jochen Kirchhoff, Die Anderswelt (2002), read by Gwendolin Kirchhoff in “Die Anderswelt: Nachdenken über den Tod (2)”, SYMPOSIUM, 2024 (translated from the German)
#What is a near-death experience?
People who have had a near-death experience report elements of a recurring pattern: leaving the body, a review of one’s own life, and a passage through a dark tunnel. Near-death studies, a branch of thanatology, the broader study of death and dying, have described this pattern since the 1970s as a summary of many reports; it does not mean that most people experience all three elements, and in individual cases, Grof notes, some components may be missing (cf. Grof, 2000, ch. 7). Raymond Moody collected the accounts of 150 people in 1975 who had come very close to death or had been declared clinically dead (cf. Grof, 2000, ch. 4). The consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof summarises the work of Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Bruce Greyson and others like this:
“It typically begins with an out-of-body experience, various forms of personal life review, and a passage through a dark tunnel.”
— Stanislav Grof, Psychology of the Future, 2000, ch. 7
According to Grof, an encounter with a radiant divine being may follow, along with an ethical evaluation of one’s life; distressing near-death experiences, painful and frightening ones, are less frequent (cf. ibid.). Already in Moody’s accounts, many experiencers describe passing through a dark tunnel towards a bright light of supernatural beauty (cf. Grof, 2000, ch. 4). The best-known medical study of NDEs comes from the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who with colleagues interviewed survivors of cardiac arrest in Dutch hospitals and spoke to some of them again years later (van Lommel et al., 2001). Studies like these describe what experiencers report. What the reports mean is a question they do not settle.
#Why is a near-death experience only a special case of nearness to death?
For Jochen Kirchhoff, the NDE is a special case because nearness to death does not begin at the edge of clinical death. Jochen Kirchhoff understands every approach to the Otherworld in an experience that crosses a boundary as nearness to death. Any such approach is, in his sense, a near-death experience that would more accurately be called an experience of nearness to death, though he keeps the familiar term (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2002, read in SYMPOSIUM, 2024, 29:31–29:47). Thinking belongs here too. Real, existential thinking, Kirchhoff writes, lifts the thinker a little out of the material body; it is not hostile to life but goes beyond a life that wants to know nothing of its own death (cf. ibid., 30:45–31:07).
This shifts the whole concept. You do not need to have been clinically dead to know the question an NDE raises. As early as 1989, Jochen Kirchhoff wrote that we die many smaller and larger deaths in the course of an incarnation, drawing on the Tibetan teaching of the bardo, the intermediate state: “Our small deaths in life can be experienced just as wakefully and consciously as the death at the end of our physical existence” (Kirchhoff, J., 1989, Klang und Verwandlung, pp. 48 f., translated from the German). That someone lives through a life crisis as nearness to death is, from this angle, no exaggeration but an accurate description.
#What happens when death comes close?
When death comes close, life takes on a new direction. Gwendolin Kirchhoff described this moment in her lecture “Nachdenken über den Tod (1)” (Reflecting on Death, 2024): when the fear of death becomes acute, a threshold awareness arises, and death appears, in her words, like this: “it is like a cut in space, and behind it is total unknowability” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, 17:23, translated from the German). Before this threshold it becomes acutely clear where your own life force is flowing and where it is being wasted; human activity stops being arbitrary and takes on a direction (cf. ibid., 18:12–18:54).
Something else happens as well. Close to death, Gwendolin Kirchhoff says, “truth becomes more important than self-deception” (ibid., 19:37, translated from the German). Otherwise one can throw oneself into every kind of illusion, but before death “there is suddenly a sharp distinction between the real and the unreal” (ibid., 19:57, translated from the German). The will to truth is, on this reading, perhaps a child of the awareness of death (cf. ibid., 19:43).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes a change in the concern for truth when death becomes acutely present. Her account concerns the seriousness with which a person examines their life; it does not establish which interpretation of a near-death experience is correct. Her reflections on death and birth continue in Death in Philosophy.
#Are near-death experiences proof of an afterlife?
Near-death experiences do not prove life after death. Jochen Kirchhoff, too, did not take an out-of-body experience of his own in 1976 as proof: sitting at his desk, without having taken a psychoactive substance, in fully awake, clear consciousness, he saw everything around him; that, he said, was “no proof that there is another world, but it is at the very least strange” (Kirchhoff, J., in SYMPOSIUM, 2024, 26:23, translated from the German).
The common counter-position explains such experiences as hallucinations of a dying brain under extreme conditions. Jochen Kirchhoff distinguishes between proof and an indication of another reality. His reflections on nearness to death begin from the assumption that the physical, sensory world does not encompass all of reality (cf. Kirchhoff, J., in SYMPOSIUM, 2024, 5:31–7:05 and 35:44–36:13). He took up a word he attributed to Schelling: the world is half-real. And further: “And that is what one grasps when death is near: that it is not really real” (ibid., 36:09, translated from the German).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff argues in the same direction when, in a conversation with Everlast AI, she points to extrasensory perception and to reports from near-death experiences: “There are so many levels at which the bodily is exceeded by a subtler level” that consciousness cannot be confined to material sensory processes (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, 22:54, translated from the German). Alongside the question of the experience’s reality, this also raises the question of whether the physical, sensory world encompasses all of reality.
#How does a near-death experience change a person’s life?
For many people, the real work after an NDE begins only when they return to everyday life. Most people who have had near-death experiences, Grof writes, come out of the encounter with death profoundly changed, with a new system of values and a radically different strategy of life; that does not make the change easy. Near-death experiences, according to Grof, very frequently lead to spiritual emergencies, because they undermine a person’s worldview abruptly and without warning; following an NDE, people “might need special counseling and support to be able to integrate these extraordinary experiences into their everyday life” (Grof, 2000, ch. 4). Philosophically speaking, they stand in a limit situation: the old frame of their life no longer fits.
Grof’s reference to counseling and support concerns integrating the experience. In the statements cited here, Gwendolin Kirchhoff does not describe a method for accompanying people after a near-death experience. Her model of the birth process, which she herself puts forward as a thesis, is a philosophical interpretation of transitions; applying it to near-death experiences would require a further interpretive step. How the death of someone close, losing a mother, for instance, reaches into one’s own life is the subject of the essays on grief.
You will find Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s phenomenology of the fear of death in more detail in the essay Reflecting on Death, and the research field Grof’s map comes from in the entry Transpersonal Psychology. Seen this way, the near-death experience is not a glimpse through the keyhole into the beyond but the test case of a question that concerns every life: how real is what we take to be real?
#Sources
- Grof, S. (2000). Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chapter 4, “Spiritual Emergency”, and chapter 7, “The Experience of Death and Dying”: near-death experiences as a subject of thanatology, their typical pattern and the integration of what was experienced. German edition: Psychologie der Zukunft, Wettswil: Edition Astroterra, 2002, pp. 174 f. and 238 f.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1989). Klang und Verwandlung. Munich: Kösel. pp. 48 f.: the small deaths in life and the bardo.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt: Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag. Quoted from Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s reading (2024, 28:49–31:26).
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nachdenken über den Tod (1)” [Video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSltRJB88jg, 17:23–20:01.
- Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J. (2024). “Die Anderswelt: Nachdenken über den Tod (2) – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff” [Video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-secv4Z-pM, 26:00–36:30.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2025). “Sie BELÜGEN dich über das WAHRE Ziel von KI!” [Video]. Everlast AI, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ktkeUNHeaM, 22:54.
- van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V. & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039–2045.
