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 I was born, roughly a thousand years ago, in
San Francisco (hint: Babe Ruth swatted the
last of his 714 home runs a few months before
I was first swatted on my behind) and grew up
in the Bay Area, mostly in Oakland. I went to
the
University
of California at Berkeley, majoring eventually
in
psychology for lack of anything better to
do. Upon graduating, still reluctant to work,
I elected to go to graduate school and attended
the
University of Minnesota, as a student in
social
psychology, for three years before transferring
to
UCLA for
my final year (because the professor under whom
I was studying took a position there, and like
a good little duckling, I followed him out to
L.A., leaving the land of a thousand snows behind).
However, I obtained my Ph.D. from the University
of Minnesota in 1963.
By that time, I was a young assistant professor
of psychology at the
University of
Connecticut where I remained on the faculty
until 1994. At that time I retired from teaching
though I continued to work at the university
as a Professor emeritus until December of 1996
when I moved back to the Bay Area where I’ve
been ever since, leaving snow behind forever.
Forty years in the winterness was enough for
me!
When I arrived at UCONN (as everyone calls it),
I was hired as a social psychologist, but by
the end of the sixties, my interests had changed
and began to veer toward what were then called
“altered
states of consciousness” and the newly emerging
field of
transpersonal psychology, which was concerned
with their study. In 1972, I first came across
an article that dealt with what we today know
as
near-death experiences (NDEs), though that
term was not used until 1975, when Raymond Moody’s
ground-breaking book,
Life
After Life
appeared. It was actually
that book that galvanized my interest in NDEs
and shortly after reading it in 1976, I determined
to look into this intriguing phenomenon myself.
The research that I carried out, with the help
of various graduate and undergraduate students,
over a period of about twelve months, beginning
in 1977, led to my first book on NDEs,
Life at Death, which was published in
1980. After that, there was, to resort to one
of my many clichés, no turning back. In any
case, by then some of us early NDE researchers
had formed an organization whose aim was to
professionalize the study of these experiences,
and by the end of 1980, I was asked to take
it over and expand it. That was how the organization
now known as
The International Association for Near-Death
Studies came into being.
Many years later, I wrote up a brief account
of the founding of IANDS for that organization,
so for those of you who might be curious to
know more about its beginnings, here’s the story:
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 Late in 1980,
John Audette, who, while living
in Peoria, had been single-handedly
running the NDE organization that
was soon to become IANDS, asked
me if I would take it over for a
year so that he could concentrate
on doing some NDE research of his
own. In December he came to visit
me in Connecticut and we made the
transfer then. I decided to rename
the organization The International
Association for Near-Death Studies,
establish a journal, and generally
do things my way (we didn't have
a board to worry about then!), and
with the help of John and
Bruce Greyson (now the longtime
editor of
The Journal of Near-Death Studies)
and a horde of good-hearted student
volunteers, I did.
I first
approached my department head at
the University of Connecticut and
managed to get an old unused office
(we eventually needed three) to
set up shop, and then I recruited
a bunch of my students to help run
it. A then-graduate student (now
an English professor) named Steve
Straight was one of my main assistants,
and he edited the newsletter,
Vital
Signs. In those days before desktop
publishing, everything had to be
done by hand. We would stay up all
night doing paste-up to get the
newsletter out on time. Then, several
volunteers and I would crowd into
the office, affix labels, munch
pizza, and cart the things over
to the Post Office and send them
out. A student of mine, Leah Andrews,
with her faithful dog Partner, ran
the office then and helped me with
the mountains of correspondence
that soon started flooding in. A
dreamy art student named
Ned Kahn
(who later became a world-famous
environmental artist and MacArthur
grant recipient) designed the IANDS
logo. We had fun, we had a wonderful
esprit de corps, though some
weeks I worked a hundred hours between
running IANDS, teaching at the university,
and shooting my mouth off at lectures
around the country. I was young
then. We had a ball, and we didn't
spend a cent on salaries. That was
what IANDS was like in the early
days. Nothing would have been possible,
though, without the tireless and
devoted help of those students. |
 Meanwhile, once IANDS was off and running,
so was I – to do more research. During a
sabbatical in the early 1980s, I wrote most
of my next book,
Heading Toward Omega,
which was published in 1984. I continued
to teach, write and research NDEs for the
next several years until 1987 when I got
detoured by an interest in UFO encounters,
mainly because the aftereffects of these
experiences seemed to be very similar in
many ways to those of NDEs. So I ventured,
with considerable trepidation, into the
professionally dubious field of UFO studies
and spent the next several years sojourning
with the investigators who were then active
in this area, finding my strongest sense
of colleagueship, oddly enough, with those
who, while taking the experiences seriously,
did not take them literally. Eventually,
in 1992, I published a book,
The Omega Project, on my research, which did emphasize
the similarities in the people who reported
either NDEs or UFO encounters and suggested
reasons for their commonalities. Its findings
and conclusions did not exactly endear me
to the UFO community, and having spent more
time there than I had ever imagined, I gladly
decamped in 1993, leaving both the true
believers and the snows of Kilimanjaro behind.
It was good, finally, to return to the familiar
and welcoming ground of NDEs, and for the
next few years, I continued with renewed
interest to publish and lecture on the subject,
particularly once I retired from teaching
after which time I was able to go on various
long lecture tours abroad as I was no longer
yoked to the requirements of an academic
schedule.
It was during this time that I began work
on my last two NDE-related projects. One
was my research on NDEs in the blind, which
I undertook with a graduate student, Sharon
Cooper (now, after having received her doctorate,
a counseling psychologist in Connecticut),
and which eventuated in our book,
Mindsight,
which was published in 1999 (a slightly
revised version is due out in January, 2008).
The second resulted in my last major book
on NDEs, a kind of summing up of the major
insights I have gleaned from my years of
study, which I entitled
Lessons From The Light and which was originally published
in 1998 (though it has come out in various
updated versions since, the last of these
appearing in 2006). On this book, I had
indispensable help from my longtime friend
and collaborator,
Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino.
By this time, I knew I was winding down
(or is it “up”?) my professional work, and
in 2000, I published what was more or less
my "farewell address" to the NDE field in
an article in
The Journal of Near-Death Studies. At that point, I folded up
my tent and put myself out to pasture.
 No, actually, I didn’t – I just did other
things with my life. I was now living in
California and decided to follow some other
pursuits and professional interests. Most
of these won’t interest most of you who
have bothered to consult this web site,
but, in brief, I wrote a couple of books
on classical music (composers, really) and
a few memoirs (though I didn’t publish these);
I even collaborated on a screenplay, but
it never made it to the silver screen.
In 2008, I became very interested in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, went to
the West Bank to see things for myself
and eventually collaborated with a
Palestinian colleague on a book about
the lives of Palestine, based on stories
we collected from contemporary
Palestinians. It was published in 2010,
under the title
Letters from
Palestine:
Palestinians
Speak Out about
Their Lives,
Their Country,
and the Power of
Nonviolence.
Nevertheless, I have continued all these
years to maintain my contacts with selected
friends, colleagues and NDErs from my life
as an NDE researcher and author, and have
even involved myself lately, mostly covertly,
in various NDE-related projects. Most
recently (as of the summer of 2014), in
the last year or so, I have been working
with several other authors, including a
couple of NDErs, on their NDE-themed
books, as a kind of combination editor,
mentor and soi-disant agent. This has
been very rewarding for me – sort of
like being a grandfather where you have
all of the pleasures of doing something
worthwhile but none of the
responsibilities.
All the
same, I had long resisted the idea of establishing
a web site of my own since I was happy with
being just another nameless old duffer enjoying
the good life out in California. Invisibility
and anonymity have its pleasures, you know,
and I had grown very fond of them.
But, what the hell! In the end, I succumbed
to blandishments I could not refuse, so
here I am. And that’s the story. Where it
goes from here, who can say? I’m only going
along for the ride, but don’t seem to be
in control of the vehicle. All I know is
that I never left NDEland behind.….
Kenneth Ring
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