Usually people who go beyond death and have Near Death Experiences prefer to call themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious,” since organized religion will often seem too confined or limited for what they have experienced. However, while experiencers will sometimes object to using the word “God” it is clear that if we look behind the disagreements of how to interpret God, what this name points towards has very clearly something to do with what people experience in their NDE.       

If you want to call the light God. I have no trouble calling it God. To me it was God and it was for a long time. Now, I think of it as a greater consciousness that we are all part of or something like that. But that can be called God too, so I don’t have any difficulty calling it God.

   Here David agrees to call the light God but he clearly also tries to open up the concept, which is something that we often find with people who have NDEs. Generally in NDE research, NDErs tend to use the term a “being of light” and while they will use God to describe this form of being, it is to be understood as God in a very broad sense. Rather than an experience of God that fits a particular religion, NDErs will have an experience of God in a sense that is spiritually neutral and bigger than any human conceptual understanding.

   It is only natural to human nature to use the tools available to us, especially if our ability to comprehend is pushed to the limit as in the NDE, and therefore, many people will use their religious background to makes sense of the experience. Few NDErs or certain people will go so far as taking the NDE beyond a level of certainty and use the experience as evidence of a specific religious tradition or its dogma.

   Still the fact remains that most NDErs and by far the majority of the research holds firm that ‘God’ is spiritually neutral and to be understood very broadly. In remembering that our language and comprehension is limited, what these people experience is something beyond a conventional understanding of God – as something behind God.        

   Next to the 80 percent agreeing to call what they experienced “God,” I also found that two thirds of the NDErs in my study would agree to call this “the Light of God.” I should here mention that most studies will use the term “the Light” because the category of God and religion has been left out of many studies. I was, however, as 80 percent of the NDErs in my study not against using the term “God.”