Kenneth Ring: Life At Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980. Pp. 310. $11.95, cloth, ISBN 0-698-11032-3

Book Review – Karlis Osis
(From Journal of Parapsychology, 1981;45:350-352, reproduced with permission)

The initiative of research on the mysteries of death is slipping out of the hands of parapsychologists, as indicated by this outsider's book and the forthcoming string of others by Sabom, Schoonmaker, and Lundahl. Kenneth Ring teaches psychology at the University of Connecticut, and his research was fully supported by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. Ring takes pains to draw a line between himself and us – the quibble-ridden field of parapsychology. While that certainly gives him the advantage of a fresh start and new perspective, it also leads to a deficit of sophistication in some respects.

The book is based on interviews with 102 patients who survived a close brush with death. The state of the patients differs from the sample studied by Haraldsson and myself (Osis & Haraldsson, 1977). In Ring's cases, the persons were, in a sense, unconscious; that is, they at least appeared to be unconscious to the observers. Our main results came from conscious patients. The 102 interviews were rated on a 29-point scale by three judges, who discriminated between "non-experiencers" (53) and "core experiencers" (49) on the basis of the characteristics of cases in the studies by Raymond Moody (1975). Of those 49, 22 were "moderate experiencers" (scores 6-9) and 27 were "deep experiencers" (scores 10-24). The selection of cases on the basis of a rated syndrome rather than single criteria, is a welcome, innovative approach. However, are Ring's criteria optimal for separating the wheat from the chaff? Not necessarily. For example, I personally would not think that having a "sense of entering a dark region" would mean much more than perhaps a blackout of one's conscious awareness of the environment. Yet, with Ring's scale, the presence of this item in the account could provide up to two-thirds of the points needed for inclusion in the "core experiencers" category.

Maybe permissive criteria were necessary to increase the sample size to 49 – which is still very small for any kind of a survey. Ring readily admits the grave numerical limitations of his sample, but then proceeds with his statistics anyway. Some of the analyses which cut the data into relatively large chunks – e.g., just into male-female categories – seem sound, but I do not know what to make of his splitting the data into many categories or performing analyses of interactions between variables. Some of Ring's analyses could be unintentionally misleading, in the event that the reader should forget to watch for "wrong numbers" in cells which are too small.

The most reliable part of the book is the verbatim presentation of the interview material. There is an abundance of juicy quotes throughout the book. They are well organized around the main themes of Ring's qualitative analyses and provide for excellent, sparkling reading. The reader has ample opportunity to become immersed in the data, to encounter the experients, and then judge for himself what comes out of it. In this sense, the book is a real gold mine and a must, not only for parapsychologists, but also for anybody who has something to do with the terminally ill, be it in practice, in the hospital, or in the family. Regardless of what stand one takes on the survival issue, these experiences can be very moving and enriching. I remember a young, well-educated mother from Kentucky saying to me, "Isn't it strange that I learned what life really is about only now that I am terminally ill and had these near-death experiences?"

Ring presents a novel grouping of the experiences in five sequential stages with increasing depth: peace and cessation of pain, body separation (OBE), entering the darkness, seeing the light, and entering the light. This final stage involves paradisiacal imagery, meeting dead relatives and religious figures "there," etc. It would be a neat road map indeed if it fit the data. I am afraid, however, that this is not the case. We have numerous accounts of patients seeing religious figures or dead relatives right in the hospital room, feeling neither as though they are out-of-body, nor having transcended "dark regions," etc. But Ring's basic idea of a sequence might be worth systematic exploration; for example, correlating the length of cardiac arrest with experiential qualities in much larger samples. There are prolonged "clinical death" cases on record with enormously enriching experiences, as well as those which have little impact on one's personality. It could be analogous to the Biblical workers in the vineyard: the latecomers (one-minute cardiac arrest cases) might have the same experience or "pay" as those whose cardiac arrest lasted 12 minutes.

Ring's cases involving out-of-body experiences (OBEs) might be the most interesting to parapsychologists. While most of the out-of-body experiences which he quoted are vague, in some cases patients reported "seeing" from above how their anesthetized bodies, lying on the operating table, were worked on. Here is an account one patient claims she told her surgeon:

‘I saw what you were doing, I saw you lean over to Cliff [doctor who assisted] to get some instruments and I saw how you were pointing around and I could see you standing here and Cliff was standing on this side of the table. . . . Cliff was giving you this instrument and you were doing this to me and, all of a sudden, all these people rushed over to me and they started sticking needles in me and doing all these things. "That's when you died," [said the doctor]. Come on, how did you know that? Did Cliff tell you that?" And I said, "No, that's the only thing I can remember." And he said, "That's really freaky." ‘ (p. 50)

Well, it becomes even more "freaky" when we learn that this anesthetized patient also reported being able to "visualize scenes taking place outside the room itself" and even "seeing" the future. (p. 51)

What can we make of it? Ring cautiously says, "I furnish this material here mainly for its suggestion that in near-death states of consciousness, apparent spatial limitations may be transcended" (p. 51). That sounds revolutionary enough to perk up most health professionals, and general enough to please most parapsychologists. Actually, Ring speculates a lot and at much higher altitudes than is customary in our journals. He does not go as far as survival, but stops on his high road rather close to it: "On the basis of the separation hypothesis [OBE], however, I do endorse the proposition that consciousness (with or without a second body) may function independently of the physical body" (p. 233).

I personally think that Ring's contribution is not as limited as the small sample of 49 may suggest. He is a very creative innovator in the search for hypotheses. The material is fractioned in many novel and enlightening ways. Plenty of new, well-thought-out questions are asked from the data. In this respect, the book is an invaluable source for future students of near-death experiences.

Life At Death is charmingly written, exciting for the layman, and precise enough for the professional.

Karlis Osis (1917-1997)
American Society for Psychical Research
New York, NY 10023
USA

References

Moody, R. A. (1975). Life after Life. Covinda, G. A.: Mockingbird.

Osis, K. & Haraldsson, E. (1977). Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses: A Cross-Cultural Survey. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 71:237-259.

© 1981 Parapsychology Press