Parnia's Life-Review Elements

Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., is a resuscitation scientist, who is an international leader in nearth-death experience (NDE) research and a New York Times bestselling author. In his book Lucid Dying (2024), Parnia describes a ground-breaking, scientifically rigorous study that he and his associates conducted internationally. This study, which was reported on in Scientific American, among other publications from around the world, demonstrates that consciousness (the soul) survives the death of the body.

The near-death experiencers who experienced life reviews frequently reported the following elements:

Reviewing a recording of life. Nothing appears hidden—all thoughts, intentions, actions, inner states, and emotions throughout life appear to have been grounded and stored in a person’s consciousness and are recognized to have mattered.
The indescribable. Being in the presence of a compassionate, loving, “perfect” and luminous being.
Hierarchy of knowledge. People recognize higher levels of knowledge and wisdom, which relate to having higher fields of perception to understand those truths.
Whatever good and whatever harm that I have done was to myself. People recognize that harming others ultimately reflects back on the person themselves and vice versa.
Relive life events and experience each moment. Specifically, people are able to re-experience themselves in all events in their life from the most mundane to the most extreme.
Need to do better: not as good as I thought. People come to judge their true worth as a human being based on the principal of ethics and morality. They recognize their purpose in life had been to improve themselves as a true human being.
Being in other’s shoes. People examine their experiences in life from multiple perspectives, including those of the people they affected.
Evaluation of actions and inactions in life. Not only actions are evaluated but also at times when people could have done something positive for others but did not.
Domino effect. This effect reveals the impact and downstream consequences of people’s actions – both good and bad—on people’s lives. They appreciate, as one person said, “how big an impact my seemingly small actions had on a big scale.”
A different value system. People discover that seemingly insignificant actions in ordinary life, such as giving someone a helping hand, have been far more valuable than many of the things that people (and society) present as being important.
A reason and cause and effect underlying all events. People appreciate that everything that has happened during their ordinary day-to-day life had a reason. Specifically, they recognize that the principal of cause and effect, which governs everything else in existence and is the cornerstone of science, also applies to events in their lives.
Higher overall purpose in life. People wished they had understood and appreciated their higher purpose throughout their lives, so they could have lived their life more meaningfully and shaped their destiny better. As one person said, “I saw that I alone am in charge of my destiny.”

Dr. Parnia concludes this list of Life Review elements, “Overall, there is a recognition that life had comprised an education, with the purpose of helping people gain knowledge about how to improve as a human being. [Dr. Parnia’s italics]”