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“I Was Home:” Near-Death Experiences and Reincarnation

“I Was Home:” Near-Death Experiences and Reincarnation

Last updated on: September 13, 2026 at 7:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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“I Was Home:” Near-Death Experiences and Reincarnation 2026-09-13T19:42:06-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A view of the village of Ringgenberg b. Interlaken, in Switzerland’s Berner Oberland region (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I happened across a comment the other day from an intelligent but deeply disaffected and now completely non-communicant Latter-day Saint that included this (to me rather astonishing) passage, in which he summarizes the Church’s program of ministering brothers and sisters (formerly known as “home teachers”):

you are expected to invite “ministers” into your home to snoop and make sure you aren’t breaking their made-up rules for how to live your life like a joyless prig.

No thanks.

I have to admit that his remark is so utterly foreign to my understanding of home teachers and “ministers” (I’m not overly fond of the latter terminology) that, even days later, I find myself marveling at how . . . well, frankly, at how warped and dyspeptic and bizarre it seems to me. I can’t recall ever feeling that the ward teachers or home teachers or visiting teachers or ministering brothers and sisters were there to snoop or to spy on me. Nor, when fulfilling my own assignments in visiting members of my wards over the years, have I ever viewed snooping or spying as any part of my role. Not a primary part nor a secondary part nor a tertiary part. Nor have I ever, ever, viewed the lifestyle of a committed and faithful Latter-day Saint as that of “a joyless prig.” Wow. If his words, cited above, really describe the view that he held while still active in the Church, and possibly even the disdain and contempt with which he came to view his fellow Latter-day Saints, I’m not at all surprised that he’s left it. (For a recent expression of my own attitude toward home and visiting teaching and “ministering,” see “What a Swiss Pastor Saw in the Church That We Sometimes Miss” in Meridian Magazine.)

Cove Fort Historic Site (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

A twenty-five-second preview of tomorrow’s installment of Becoming Brigham is available for you right now. Have a look! TRAILER for Ep. 34—Feed Them, Don’t Fight Them?

And don’t forget to watch our current episode, which went up last Tuesday: “From Stolen Shirt to Open War?”

The Utah Shakespeare Festival’s Randall L. Jones Theater, where we attended a matinee performance of Something Rotten! (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

It would be difficult to imagine a play that is more different from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which we saw at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City on Friday afternoon, than Something Rotten!, which we attended on Saturday afternoon. And yet both were superbly performed, and we enjoyed both of them a very great deal. Something Rotten! is absolutely hilarious. (Thanks to the Ashton Family Foundation and the Andrea Golding Legacy Foundation for sponsoring it!) The 2026 Festival season is nearing its close and I’m sorry that the Shakespeare plays are all finished, but I recommend both of these to you. If you can find the time and the means, I don’t think that you’ll be disappointed.

The Cedar City Utah Temple was dedicated in 2017 by President Henry B. Eyring. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Prior to Something Rotten!, my wife and I and our friend (who had driven down to Cedar City with us) attended the Saturday 10:00 AM endowment session in the Cedar City Utah Temple. As always, when I attend the temple, I feel that the day will be a good one no matter what else happens and no matter what else I do or don’t do. And it was.

The night before, the three of us were joined by a longtime friend of mine and my wife’s — he attended our wedding in the Salt Lake Temple — for dinner. His mother, a retired child psychologist who is now ninety-eight years old, plays Broadway tunes on the piano in the foyer of the Randall L. Jones Theater before most if not all of the matinee and evening performances in that building, so we were pleased to be able to visit with her again, too. I owe a great debt to her, to her late husband (a physician), and to their family generally: Many years ago, before I was married, they took me along with them to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which they regularly attended when they were living in the Bay Area in California. I enjoyed it so much that I resolved, if I could swing it, to make regular attendance at a Shakespeare festival a tradition in my future family, as well. And then, as it happened, I married a theater major. So that was no problem at all!

The home of the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University (from the university’s website)

I think that I’ll share with you the abstract of a recent article and just a tiny bit of my thinking about part of the article’s thesis: John C. Gibbs, ““I Was Home:” Near-Death Experiences and the Reincarnation Hypothesis,” Journal of Near-Death Studies (2025) 43/1

ABSTRACT: In describing their transcendent or comprehensive near-death experiences (NDEs), many people recollect feeling that they were “home,” indeed, had returned home. In this article, I explore the question of whether the “returning home” impression implies that humans reincarnate. I address the topic of reincarnation not as a religious doctrine but as a hypothesis amenable to scientific inquiry. The reincarnation hypothesis finds support from convergent lines of evidence pertaining to terminal lucidity, deathbed visions, and, especially, past-life memories. Paradoxical issues and problematic content challenge the ordinary conception of reincarnation as journeys in linear time. Challenges notwithstanding, I conclude that “I was home” in NDEs points to death and birth as ontological transitions and to a spiritual—interconnected souls—reality underlying human bodily existences.

Given my Latter-day Saint beliefs, the feeling that is frequently expressed among those who have undergone near-death experiences that they had gone “home” during their NDEs is naturally rather striking. For obvious reasons, I’m inclined to agree with them. However, John C. Gibbs, a professor of developmental psychology at Ohio State University, goes for a form of reincarnation as an explanatory hypothesis rather than for a simple antemortal existence of the human personality in the manner that I, as a Latter-day Saint, would obviously favor.

I have two principal reasons for not welcoming the hypothesis of human reincarnation: (1) It’s incompatible with my own theological precommitments, which I hold for a wide range of mostly independent reasons. (2) Even apart from my own doctrinal convictions, I simply don’t find reincarnation in its commonly-understood form to be at all satisfying or consoling. For a human person to lose his or her memories and identity at death and then to be incarnated again without them doesn’t seem to me preferable in any significant way to the notion that, although the material that had once composed human bodies may eventually be recycled in the form of a rose bush or a patch of grass, human memories and identity are flatly obliterated at death. In either case, personal identity and memory — i.e., what really matters — is lost.

That said, there are some seeming evidences for reincarnation or the transmigration of souls (e.g., apparent memories of past lives) that deserve attention and that, from my point of view just as much as from the viewpoint of those who reject human survival of death altogether, demand explanation. I have my thoughts on that subject, which I’ll likely write up someday.

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