New IANDS Glossary: What is a Peak in Darien Experience?

A peak in Darien experience is a specific form of NDE (near-death experience) where the experiencer reports encounters with individuals they did not know were dead.

It’s common for NDEs to feature encounters and interactions with others, including after death communication with loved ones, spiritual figures, indescribable beings, and even pets.

But some experiencers and witnesses have also reported encounters with individuals who, unbeknownst to the experiencer, had passed away. The experiencer has no knowledge of a person’s passing prior to their NDE, and encounters this individual during said NDE. This is described by researchers as a peak in Darien experience.

In some cases, the experiencer is encountering a deceased person during their NDE that they had never met or interacted with prior. This may include family members the experiencer never even knew they had; a true biological parent, a long lost sibling, or another perfect stranger the experiencer had no prior knowledge of until encountering them during their NDE.

Why do researchers find Peak in Darien experiences so fascinating?

While most peak in Darien experiences are considered anecdotal, some are more difficult to objectively write off. In many of these cases, the experiencer has no confirmed prior knowledge of the deceased individual they’ve encountered during their NDE. And unlike most deathbed visions, peak in Darien experiences often involve accurate details about individuals the experiencer had no way of learning about or knowing.

As such, a peak in Darien experience provides strong, albeit anecdotal, evidence that consciousness may function independently of the brain, and that it may indeed survive bodily death.

There are a few important factors that lead researchers to believe there’s some merit behind peak in Darien experiences, too. For instance, these reports tend to be remarkably consistent, occurring across different eras and spanning a wide breadth of cultures.

They also involve an element of surprise —the experiencer is often confused by the encounter, or surprised to learn details about the person they had encountered. And that helps distinguish a peak in Darien experience from a hallucination fueled by memories or anxieties.

Where does the name ‘Peak in Darien experience’ come from?

The phrase peak in Darien experience has been used to describe these specific encounters since Frances Power Cobbe coined it in her 1882 book The Peak in Darien: With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body (find it here).

The phrase peak in Darien refers to a sonnet by John Keats in which he’s describing his wonderment and joy while first reading Homer’s The Odyssey after a translation from English playwright George Chapman.

The term peak in darien experience refers to a sonnet written by john keats in 1817 in which he is referring to spanish explorers climbing a panamanian mountain only to find another ocean staring back at them. — *Portrait of John Keats, by William Hilton, c. 1822*

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, 1817

Keats likens Chapman’s work to Spanish explorers who scale a mountain range in Panama with an ocean at their back, only to stand in amazement when they find another ocean on the far side. And that metaphor rather aptly describes the sensations associated with a peak in Darien experience.

In Volume 31-4 of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Professor Masayuki Ohkado, Ph.D argues that the terminology should be changed to “Encounter with Known Descendent Not Know to Have Died”, or “EKD”, and “Encounter with Unknown Descendent” or “EUD”.