It’s not unusual for the National Park Service (NPS) to issue a warning that wildlife should not be “disturbed, captured, collected,” or “touched.” But it does seem a bit strange when they say the animals should not be “licked.”
“People should not lick the Sonoran Desert toad,” said an NPS representative. The dark olive amphibian that grows up to seven inches long secrets a milky-white liquid, a toxin that gives humans about a 30-minute “psychedelic trip.” The NPS fears that people hunting the toads in search of a high could drive the species to extinction.
However, according to a research fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, the substance secreted from these toads is now being used in “studies to test whether certain psychedelic drugs might have an even stronger overlap with near-death experiences.”
“An even stronger overlap”? Yes, drug-induced euphoria and near-death experiences have already been linked, but the latest research is even more explicit in exposing the popular delusion that humans have an immortal soul that leaves the body at death.
An Unusual Cohort
An altered sense of time and reality, a sensation of “floating into the air” or “leaving the earthly world,” and a “profound sense of love and peace” were some of the experiences of a group of 31 people, mostly men from the United States and Britain, who had undergone a near-death experience and had tried psychedelic drugs.
The participants filled out questionnaires to assess things like “ego dissolution, psychological insight and memory potency.” Many reported that their near-death experiences were triggered by traumatic events, especially things like automobile accidents. The participants had also used drugs, anywhere from a few times to a hundred times. “Most had used LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.”
What the survey revealed was a “significant overlap” between participants’ experiences of nearly dying and getting high. In a paper published on August 19, 2024, researchers used these accounts to provide a comparison of the two phenomena.
“For the first time, we have a quantitative study with personal testimony from people who have had both of these experiences,” said a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium, who published the findings in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. “Now we can say for sure that psychedelics can be a kind of window through which people can enter a rich, subjective state resembling a near-death experience.”
But if psychedelic highs resemble near-death experiences, how can the latter support the idea that humans have an immortal soul that leaves the body at death?
Scientific Explanations
Many religious people believe that “near-death experiences provide evidence for life after death—in particular, the separation of the spirit from the body.” However, there are scientific explanations for such phenomena.
Some researchers claim that the body can release endorphins during a traumatic event, causing a near-death experience in which pain is reduced and pleasant sensations are increased. Similarly, anesthetics such as ketamine can produce an out-of-the-body sensation. One study from 1990 to 1995 found that people injected with the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) were observed to have “near-death and mystical experiences.” Incidentally, the body releases natural DMT at birth and at death.
Also, there are pilots who recall having something like a near-death experience during g-force training due to cerebral anoxia—a lack of oxygen to the brain!
But the most widespread explanation for these experiences appears to be “the dying brain hypothesis.” According to this theory, they are simply “hallucinations caused by activity in the brain as cells begin to die.” This explains why nearly one in five people who survive a cardiac arrest report having a near-death experience.
Testing Our Experiences
Because of the power of near-death experiences to change people’s lives, many are reluctant to call them hallucinations. After all, how could such experiences have a powerful effect if they are just illusions?
The Bible gives the answer to this dilemma. It says that our hearts are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). Thus, we must “test all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)—including our experiences, which often contradict what the Bible teaches.
What does the Bible teach about death? It is an unconscious “sleep,” from which we will awaken when resurrected (John 5:28, 29). In fact, more than 50 Bible verses compare death to sleeping. A notable one is John 11:11. Before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus says, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.”
If the soul is immortal, leaving the body at death, wouldn’t it be odd for Jesus’ friend to say nothing about what he experienced during his few days in the tomb? Yet the Gospel of John is silent on the matter—because we don’t have immortal souls that leave our bodies at death. Rather, what leaves our bodies is “the breath of life” that God gave us at Creation (Genesis 2:7). The fact that sinless Adam and Eve had to eat from the tree of life to live forever (3:22) shows that only God “has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16).
When we die “in Christ,” our lives are “hidden” with Him (Colossians 3:3). Only when He “appears” in the clouds will we also “appear with Him in glory” (v. 4). Only then, when all the sleeping saints are resurrected (1 Thessalonians 4:16), can it be said that “death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).
Though much of the Christian world is still confused by this subject—you don’t have to be! Our Bible study “Are the Dead Really Dead?” will answer more of your questions.