From a Catholic site, but doesn’t shed much light on things:
catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/new-research-confirms-life-after-death.html
religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/19/proofs-of-heaven-popular-but-not-with-the-church/
I’m extremely skeptical of these experiences myself. After all, as the blog article states they are called near death experiences for a reason: the person did not die. I, personally, don’t believe we enter heaven or have the kind of encounters described until after we die. I don’t believe there’s any coming back to live this life as we know it, although I do believe God allows those who have passed on, for one reason or another, to, at times, visit one of the living in spirit.
I believe, and I may be wrong, of course, that near death experiences are neurochemical reactions, possibly preparing the body for actual death so death will be peaceful rather than frightening. I believe that is why they are so similar. Signals of hunger and sleepiness are all similar, too.
If we are going to put faith in these experiences as encounters with the afterlife, don’t we also have to give some credence to the stories of people who say they know someone who has been reincarnated? I recently saw an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” in which a grandmother promised a granddaughter she would return to her somehow - these people were Christians, not believers in reincarnation. The granddaughter went on to give birth to a daughter. When the daughter was very young, she accompanied her mother to the grocery store and said, “This is where I came to shop with Nettie.” Nettie had been her grandmother’s best friend, with whom she did, indeed, shop. Reportedly, she also know of a tea shop where she would have tea every day and even knew one of the longtime waitresses there. Of course, to believe all this, one first has to believe that the people are telling the absolute and complete truth, and that they aren’t consciously or subconsciously embroidering it in some way, probably due to wishful thinking.
People desperately want absolute proof that an afterlife does, indeed, exist. I don’t believe they’ll ever get that absolute proof in this life because that would then negate the need for faith. I do, however, believe in an afterlife; I just don’t believe near death experiences are experiences of that afterlife. Other people hold very different ideas, of course, and that’s fine. We all have to come to our own conclusions.
I just don’t believe they are experiences of the afterlife because the person did not actually die. That’s not to say that I don’t believe some of the great mystics didn’t glimpse the afterlife. I believe they did, but their experiences are quite different and dissimilar to some extent.