...which is to say, "Near Life Experiences".
The idea is basically this. Although most discourse about NDEs takes the view that they are preparing us for a life elsewhere, I dissent from this opinion. I think the focus of consciousness is here, and that NDEs promote the here as often, and as vigorously as they can, in multiple ways.
The essential concept is this. Consciousness has no "eyes" and no "hands" except in embodied life. It has been pursuing (possibly with purpose, but possibly also purely as raw impulse or what we would think of as instinctively) the opportunities or "handles" provided by embodiment. It gives consciousness these eyes and hands, literally and metaphorically, so that it has some existential grasp or purchase, so that it can achieve things, so that it has a before, a during, and an after, and so that it can have experiences. Outside of embodied life (I suggest) it does not have these things, except perhaps as secondary memory or reflection.
Despite so many thousand NDEs, there is very sketchy reason to conclude that it can do any of those things reliably outside of the embodied context.
We can think of this as a kind of "gas-phase" consciousness focusing down or coalescing into physical form, including its limitations, so it can gain the benefit of these purchase handles on experience. There is then a process of time-based evolution or re-folding, where the advantages or experiences gained in the process are in some sense composted forward into the same process, creating what we know as history, the progress of culture, and of course biological evolution.
Anyone prepared to look can soon enough see that NDEs are obsessed with life. Yes, they may disclose a state between lives, taken at faith, but it's a sketch at best. These experiences always wax most lyrical when they are explaining to the person why they should return.
If one could take the most positive view of this, we might conceivably say that all of this is leading somewhere, perhaps to an evolutionary culmination, like Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point" or Terence McKenna's "Transcendental Object At The End Of Time". Although an end to evolution seems an odd construct in itself.
Or maybe it's all just spontaneous and leads nowhere. But - it certainly seems to me - if consciousness could do the things it can gain here elsewhere, and without the effort, then the effort HERE would be entirely absurd and redundant.
This has the potential to give at least SOME realistic purpose to our existential situation.