Unsurprised by Hieronymus Bosch?

Last updated on: January 3, 2026 at 9:56 pm by Dan Peterson

0 Comments

Unsurprised by Hieronymus Bosch? 2026-01-03T21:56:01-07:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Remarkably near to downtown St. George, in a Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Murray Foubister

At the end of another long day of driving, I’m going to content myself with offering a few highlighted passages from my recent reading of Sam Parnia’s still relatively-new book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024). I’m just too tired to do much more.

You may perhaps recall that Dr. Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where he is also director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In the United Kingdom — born in London, he is a British subject — he is director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton. He received his medical degree in 1995 from Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Medical School (that is, from the Medical School of King’s College London) and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007, followed by fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of London and the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Dr. Parnia has described himself, by the way, as not at all religious. That self-description may help in understanding what he has to say in the first quoted passage:

[W]hat if death itself is not the end we have thought and assumed? What if who we are—our very consciousness and selfhood—is not annihilated with death? And what if science can prove it? What will that mean for us, for society, for religion, for philosophy, for how we live our lives?

Many scientists consider what happens after death as mere philosophical or theological speculation. I don’t agree with this position and thankfully, today this no longer needs to be the case. Using sophisticated brain technology, we can peer inside the brains of people as they approach and then transition beyond death by recording and analyzing their brain waves. Advances in mathematics, artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and computing power are allowing us to objectively analyze realities about life and death that we never could have until recently. And this research is giving us the first real-time ability to study what happens to the brain and consciousness in people as they cross from life beyond the boundary of death.

He claims that his position with respect to death and dying, and to what lies beyond them, rests upon science rather than upon received dogma:

There is much more to be discovered, but science does, at a minimum, suggest that our consciousness and selfhood are not annihilated when we cross over into death and into the great unknown. (8)

As so many others do who have worked in the area of what are often — though, he thinks, erroneously (see below) — referred to as “near-death experiences,” he sees overwhelming evidence for what he describes as “a unique hyperconscious lucid mental state” that accompanies dying, and he believes that it points to the survival of the human mind or personality beyond death (8).

His reading, his research, and his own interactions with experiencers have impressed him, among other things, with the commonalities that he sees across cultures:

These people, having had a recalled experience of death (or RED), return with a uniform, standardized series of experiences. It doesn’t matter that they’ve never met or communicated with each other, or that they died in Mexico, Iran, Thailand, America, Denmark, or the United Kingdom. No matter how varied their lives, their encounters with death have a startling narrative unity. (9)

For several years, this blog was graced with the presence of a resident atheist commentator who called himself “gemli.” His principal objection to the concept of “near-death experiences” — he never really managed to get beyond it — was that, by definition, a “near-death” experience was not, could not be, an experience of death. Nearly dead, he told us over and over again, is not the same thing as dead. I think that it’s partly (but not solely) for that reason that Dr. Parnia rejects the term near-death experience, substituting in its place recalled experience of death.

Often, people, including many scientists and doctors, say if your heart has stopped and you are alive again, then you could not have died because “death” is irreversible and permanent by definition. People have even created terms, such as clinical death, to distinguish between people who have traversed death and returned from people with “real” death, in their own minds. However, this is just a play with words. It has nothing to do with biological and scientific reality. (45)

One of Dr. Parnia’s major contentions in the study of death and resuscitation is the concept that “the liminal grey zone beyond death is vastly more expansive than recognized in the past” (19). Life and death are not simple dichotomous terms. They are not a black and white matter. He explains that

the process of cell damage and death in the body, including in the brain, generally starts after a person has died and does not become absolute for many hours or even possibly days after death. The transition from life to what we call death, like everything else in biology, follows a continuum. (45)

Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), “Ascent of the Blest” or “Ascent to the Empyrean”. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’ve called attention on several prior occasions, here on this blog, to the early sixteenth-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that is shown above. (The original hangs in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Italy.) I find the image remarkable, as does Dr. Parnia. Here is what he has to say about it:

As much as I like this painting, nothing about it particularly surprised me the first time I saw it. It was first shown to me by a patient who had been successfully resuscitated. He was struggling to describe the experience he claimed to have had while his heart had stopped. Eventually, he gave up and simply relied on this image. Bosch was painting something I’d heard described many times, both as a doctor and a researcher focused on understanding the experience of people who’ve died and been resuscitated. Over the years I’ve met countless survivors who’ve described a recalled experience of death. They are of all ages, beliefs, and backgrounds, yet there is a uniformity to their experiences. They all describe some variation of the scene depicted in this painting. (50)

Posted from St. George, Utah

History and Religion

Travel and Religion

Uncategorized

Ascent of the Blest

Ascent to the Empyrean

death

Hieronymus Bosch

near-death experience

Sam Parnia

Previous Post

January 2, 2026

Palm Springs, Prophetic Parallels, and the Passing Scene