Peter Sellers and the Case of the Missing Near-Death Experience
“I saw an incredibly beautiful bright loving white light above me. I wanted to go to that white light more than anything.”
The British actor Peter Sellers was one of the world’s great comedic geniuses. Like many comedians — and creative people in general — he was also a complex and sometimes very troubled human being, with psychologically crippling low self-esteem.
In 1964, at only 38 years of age, Sellers suffered a series eight heart attacks over a period of just three hours. They were brought on by his use of amyl nitrate, a drug commonly known as poppers. The fumes of the liquid are inhaled in order to produce a rush caused by an immediate increase of both heart rate and blood flow. Poppers are often used to intensify sex, and this was Sellers’s reason for using it. While he was reportedly in search of “the ultimate orgasm,” his own insecurity also played a role. Newly married to the Swedish actor Britt Ekland who was seventeen years his junior, he later joked, “When a 38-year-old bloke marries a 21-year-old bird, he needs all the help he can get.”
In any case, as a result of the heart attack, Peter Sellers had an NDE. After he was resuscitated his doctor later told him that he had been clinically dead for two minutes. He later recounted the experience to actor Shirley MacLaine, who quoted him as saying:
Well, I felt myself leave my body. I just floated out of my physical form and I saw them cart my body away to the hospital. I went with it. I was curious. I wondered what was wrong with me. I wasn’t frightened or anything like that because I was fine; and it was my body that was in trouble. Then I saw Dr. Kennamer come. And he felt my pulse and saw that I was dead. He and some other people pushed down and up on my chest. In fact, they pummeled the shit out of me…literally, I believe. They did everything but jump up and down on me to get my heart beating again. Then I saw Rex shout at somebody and say there was no time to prepare me for heart surgery. He commanded somebody to carve me open right there on the spot. Rex took my heart out of my body and massaged the hell out of it. Did everything but toss it up in the air. I was so curious watching him. He just refused to accept that I was dead.
Then I looked around myself and I saw an incredibly beautiful bright loving white light above me. I wanted to go to that white light more than anything. I’ve never wanted anything more. I knew there was love, real love, on the other side of the light which was attracting me so much. It was kind and loving and I remember thinking, “That’s God.” I tried to elevate myself toward it as Rex was working on my heart. But somehow I couldn’t quite make it.
Then I saw a hand reach through the light. I tried to touch it, to grab onto it, to clasp it so it could sweep me up and pull me through it. Then I heard Rex say below me, “It’s beating again. I’m getting a heartbeat.” At the same moment a voice attached to the hand I wanted to touch so much said, “It’s not time. Go back and finish. It’s not time.” The hand disappeared on the other side and I felt myself floating back into my body. I was bitterly disappointed. After that I don’t remember anything until I regained consciousness back inside my body.
When MacLaine told him that she’d read about similar experiences, Sellers was relieved: “You don’t think I’m crazy?” he asked her.
Judging by his description, the experience was obviously profound for Sellers. But unlike the majority of NDEs, it seems that it lacked the powerful positive transformations that so many people report after reviving. For one thing, by all accounts Sellers did not become a kinder, better person. Nor did he gain the spiritual or metaphysical clarity reported so many NDErs, and in fact it seemed to confuse him even more for he added, “ever since I came back, I don’t know why, I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do, or what I came back for.”
The real mystery, though, comes in the form of a video interview from a 1970 episode of Ireland’s The Late Late Show in which he talks about the same experience:
There are many things that are puzzling about this video. First are the discrepancies between what Sellers told MacLaine and what he told the TV interviewer. To MacLaine he made no mention of defibrillators, or of the doctors being shocked along with him and flying into the air. To the interviewer, Gay Byrne, he didn’t describe the horrific heart massage procedure he earlier claimed he underwent.
More significantly, in the interview he specifically denies having had an out-of-body experience, and makes no mention of the being of light or any other NDE elements — though he does show knowledge of them. When the interviewer asks, “Do you wonder where you were?” Sellers says that at the time of the NDE he was thinking, “When am I going to see heaven, when am I going to see angels, when am I going to see whatever. I don’t know.” He then speculates that “the transition time wasn’t long enough” or that maybe he “wasn’t really dead” and that there wasn’t enough time for the soul to leave the body. He also jokes about the doctors in white gowns flying into the air with the white light behind them, an obvious reference to NDEs.
So, which account is the true one? Did Peter Sellers have an NDE as he told MacLaine, or was it “just like going to sleep” as he told Byrne?
The clue may lie in the timing of the accounts, and in Seller’s concern about looking “crazy.” By the time he talked to MacLaine about the experience in 1980 it was ten years after the TV interview. He’d by then had 16 years to think about it and process it. Rather than risking his reputation as an actor and subjecting himself to ridicule by telling the world about this little-known “freak” phenomenon, with MacLaine he was talking to a friend in private, a friend who was notably open-minded about spirituality and extraordinary experiences.
Another clue may lie in the faraway, almost dissociative look on his face beginning at around 1:07 — just as he claims, “I have no other recollection of it.” According to psychologists one of the tell-tale signs that a person is lying is that they don’t blink and will sometimes have a fixed stare. Sellers doesn’t blink for a full seventeen seconds — which is longer than it sounds (try it!). He also pauses before answering, his words become hesitant and less focused, he hunches slightly and becomes still, his facial expressions change, and he moves from speaking very slowly to very rapidly — all possible signs of lying.
It’s also important to remember that NDEs weren’t as rooted in the popular imagination as they are today, and Raymond Moody’s landmark book Life After Life wouldn’t be published for another five years. So Sellers’s knowledge of the phenomenon is either just another indication that even before Moody NDEs were more widely known than suspected — or that his account to MacLaine was the more accurate one. (Though it also seems an unusual thing for an interviewer in 1970 to have asked about in the first place).
The alternative is also possible, of course: knowing MacLaine’s interest in spiritual matters, and with “near-death experience” a household term by 1980, Sellers may have invented the account for her benefit. It’s even possible that he did it as a private in-joke, thinking it was funny to invent this “crazy” story to a friend who would be particularly invested in hearing it. After all, this is a man who arranged for Glen Miller’s “In the Mood” to be played at his funeral, solely because he knew that his fellow comedians Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe hated it. Sellers delighted in the fact that they would have to sit there forced to listen to the whole thing in respectful funerary silence.
While there’s no way to tell for sure, I’m inclined to believe that Peter Sellers had an NDE as described to Shirley MacLaine. The fact that he recounted it to her in 1980 might be significant, for he died in July of the same year (this time for good).
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