Consciousness is something neither science nor philosophy can adequately define and it takes a living being to experience it, so to explain death and what’s hidden after it, we may need someone who spent a short while medically dead.
A man who died twice for about two minutes at a time, once from a motorcycle accident, once from an overdose of painkillers, gave an insight into his experience.
On the sensation of death, he said: "I had no idea, it was just black emptiness. No thoughts, no consciousness, nothing. It was just all black. I would describe it as when you take a nap. A short nap with no dream, you wake up and it feels like you've been sleeping a long time, when in reality it's only been about 15 minutes.”
"The doctors told me that I was dead. So if they wouldn't have said anything I would've just thought that I took a dreamless nap."
On the sensation of dying, he said: "The first time was right before the accident and the only thing in my mind was 'oh fuck'.”
"The second time I had no idea. I was in pain and all of a sudden there was nothing, just no life. Then I was awake and in pain again."
On whether the different causes of death yielded different experiences, he explained that “the two experiences were exactly the same. The only difference is that the accident one, I remember the seconds before a lot more clear. The second time, I was in so much pain that I wasn't really fully aware of my surroundings if you understand what I mean.”
On other people's reports of near-death experiences, he noted that in their cases, their minds were still active. “What they experienced was just a sort of dream.” On being told he had died, he said: "Well my first reaction was 'Omfg, that's fucking cool! Now I can tell my friends that I've been dead and come back to life etc' but most of those thoughts were the morhpine talking.”
"Then reality sets in, and I realized that I could have been dead right now. This is when I started to understand how serious my situation really was.”
“But the thing is that I do not fear it anymore, I know now that death is nothing worse than sleeping. When you die, you just stop existing, nothing to worry about!"
On religion and the afterlife, he stated: "I have always been an atheist, but I have always had a part of me that hoped there was a God or Heaven or something greater than us. I mean, who wouldn't want there to be a Heaven?”
"I am still an atheist, and now I know that there is no such thing as God or Heaven. At least not for me.”
"I am an Atheist, and always will be. But I believe that your belief is your belief. The only thing we can share is our own experiences and let people make up their own mind. People need to stop forcing their own beliefs onto others."
On approaching life after death, he said that all he wants is to have fun and make other people’s lives better as much as possible.