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London researcher Karl Jansen, M.D., Ph.D., and Member of the Royal College
of Psychiatrists, is the world's leading expert on ketamine. He has
studied ketamine at every level: from photographing the receptors to which
ketamine binds in the human brain, while earning his doctorate in clinical
pharmacology at the University of Oxford, to publishing papers on his discovery
of the similarities between ketamine's psychoactive effects and the near-death
experience during his study of medicine in New Zealand. The following
is an excerpt from his book Ketamine: Dreams and Realities which demonstrates how near-death experiences and ketamine experiences
can be identical. The person interviewed was a man who lost his wife in
a fire, had a NDE while trying to rescue her, and had an identical NDE
while taking ketamine for the first time a week later.
I had a near-death experience about 6 days before the first time I took
ketamine because my then partner died. She had a party at her flat
and the flat caught fire. I got out of the flat and thought that
she was out as well, but she'd been really drunk and she'd slipped and
fallen and pushed the room door shut. I got out and shouted, "Christ,
she's not here!" and went back up. The flat was full of thick
smoke. I thought, "Right, what you do is you get down on the
floor and crawl along the corridor." But there was no air there.
I crawled along and couldn't see anything. I could hear her and I
was trying to push open this door but I couldn't. I was overcome
with smoke, and clink! The next thing it was like white light and
then everything going very fast. All these sounds and things sounding
far off and very close and far off, then whoosh! You're out of your
body and there was all this light. All this sounds really crap, like
one of those 1940s Old Testament films ... It all happened so quickly.
The next thing, it's very bright, you're out of your body, flying through
the night and there's light, there's light. Er, well, it's pitch
black and there's light - that's a better way of describing it. You
go into the light and you just feel that everybody who has ever died is
there. Not heavenly choirs as such, but there's certainly a lot of
people around you and you get waves of concern. And the next thing
was swoosh! And it was back to the everyday world very quickly.
When I came back it was so abrupt, and I was fine really - I had a very
narrow escape. Your first impression would be that you fly up in
the air but that can't be. I'd have laughed at myself ten years ago
for saying this kind of thing ... So I had an out-of-body experience and
then I got hauled out of the flat by ambulance guys who put an oxygen mask
on my face. My partner was on a life-support machine from the Saturday
until Monday, when they switched the machine off. I had acquire the
K a week previously for the party, but didn't do it until a few days after
she died. It was the first time I had taken K. I had the flat
to myself. Everybody was out and I sat in the front room on a big
comfy chair and just took this stuff. Within about 5 minutes I was
out of my body. I was still numb after what had happened. It
was like being outside of myself but still there. I could smell this
perfume she used to wear. I could sense her all round me. It
was like a way out and it was exactly like the out-of-body thing.
It was very upsetting and it did shake my atheism, very much so.
It made me aware of it not being the end when all this ends. I tried
K again quite a number of times and the same thing happened every time.
It was like this pure consciousness. I hadn't any shape. You
could fly and you could actually travel although you are still in the same
place. You are in the place where everybody is who has ever died.
It's this big entity. It's not like an old guy with a beard.
It's this sense of energy that everybody who has ever moved on is there
together and it was like she was looking after me. Precisely the
same thing happened with the K as happened in the (burning) flat, which
to someone not expecting it would be pretty scary. It was exactly
the same. I thought that I would never find anybody again and why
hadn't I died as well, why hadn't I managed to get her out of that room?
I thought it was my fault, I blamed myself for ages. I had a half-hearted
idea of taking loads of pills and not waking up but what's the point in
that? I've already been to that place once and they wouldn't have
me then, so why would they have me the second time? Concerned friends
and parents made me go into counseling and therapy and to see psychiatrists.
I was put onto various things like Prozac, but I was finding that my own
"extra treatment" (the ketamine) was doing me a lot more good
because K is very cathartic. I was doing it because it made me feel
better, except the first time when it was quite a shock. It made
me feel a lot less unhappy knowing that she was still there in one way
or another. It would have taken a lot longer for me to recover if
I hadn't taken K because it gets ride of a lot of hurt instantly ... It's
very reassuring in a way.
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