Near-Death Experiences
People come back from the edge of death with something to tell. How should a Latter-day Saint weigh those accounts — and what has actually been revealed about the world they describe?
Almost everyone has heard one. A person’s heart stops, they are revived, and they describe leaving the body, meeting someone who had died, seeing a light, being told it was not their time. The accounts are often sincere, and many come from people with no reason to invent anything. So what do we make of them?
The honest answer has two halves, and both matter. The doctrine of what waits beyond death is revealed and firm. The individual accounts are not doctrine, and the Church has never made them so. Keeping those two things apart is the whole of wisdom on this subject.
What Has Actually Been Revealed
Start with what we know rather than what people report. Alma had this explained to him directly, and he says so.
“Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body… are taken home to that God who gave them life. And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.”
That is the framework. The spirit continues, fully awake and fully itself. It goes somewhere. The righteous enter paradise and rest; others wait in a place where the gospel is still preached to them, because God has not finished with anyone at the moment their heart stops.
Notice that this is not a description of a light at the end of a tunnel. It is a description of a CONDITION — who you are when you arrive, and what happens next because of it.
Why the Accounts Ring True in Part
A great many of these experiences report the same handful of things. The person is conscious apart from the body. They meet family who died before them. They feel an overwhelming love. They are told to go back.
None of that contradicts anything revealed, and some of it fits the doctrine closely. We teach that the spirit is a real person independent of the body, that families continue, and that God is love. So should a Latter-day Saint be surprised when a dying man reports exactly those things? Not particularly. We would expect it.
And the scriptures contain their own accounts of the veil opening. Paul knew a man caught up to the third heaven who heard things unlawful to utter (2 Corinthians 12:2–4). Joseph F. Smith saw the redemption of the dead in vision, and that vision is canonized (Doctrine and Covenants 138). The heavens are not sealed. That has never been the question.
Where Care Is Required
The question is not whether a person had a real experience. The question is what that experience establishes, and for whom.
“But, behold, verily, verily, I say unto thee, no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses.”
This is the order God set, and He set it early. Revelation for the whole Church comes through the prophet who presides over it. A revelation given to you is given FOR you — for your family, for your stewardship — and it is real, and it is precious, and nobody should talk you out of it. But it does not become doctrine for everybody else merely because it was vivid.
So when an account adds details the scriptures never gave — the layout of the spirit world, a timetable for the Second Coming, who is saved and who is not — that is where to slow down. Not because the person is lying. Because a private experience, filtered through one mind and remembered afterward, is not the channel God uses to teach His Church.
There is a plain test for anything of this kind, and it is the same test as always. Does it lead toward Christ, toward repentance, toward keeping covenants? Or does it lead toward a book deal, a following, and a teacher who now knows something the prophets do not?
What Such Experiences Cannot Do
Three Limits Worth Keeping
- They cannot establish doctrine. The standard works and living prophets do that. An experience is measured against doctrine, never the reverse.
- They cannot replace the ordinances. No vision of the next life removes the need for baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost, or the covenants that follow.
- They cannot settle another person’s standing. Reports about who was found in glory and who was not are the least reliable part of any such account.
Hold those three and the accounts become what they ought to be: encouraging, sometimes moving, occasionally a comfort to somebody grieving — and never a substitute for the gospel itself.
The Warning Nobody Wants to Hear
Some people take these stories as reassurance that the manner of a life does not much matter, since everyone seems to be met by love regardless. That reading does not survive contact with the scriptures.
“Ye cannot say, when ye are brought to that awful crisis, that I will repent, that I will return to my God… for that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world.”
Death does not improve a man. It does not sand off what he BECAME while he had a body. Whoever you have made yourself into is who arrives, and that is the strongest reason of all to take repentance seriously now rather than counting on a warm welcome later.
If You Have Had One
Then you have something sacred, and you are under no obligation to prove it to anybody. Sacred things are usually kept quietly, shared sparingly, and cheapened by argument.
And if somebody you love has told you theirs, believe that they experienced something real, without needing to accept every conclusion they drew from it. Those are two different acts, and you can do the first without the second.
The gospel does not ask us to be credulous, and it does not ask us to be cynics either. It asks us to measure everything by what God has revealed through His prophets, and to hold on to whatever is good.
See also What Happens After Death?, The Gospel Is Preached to the Dead, and The Resurrection.