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I really really want to belive in life after death...my heart believes, but my brain fights it.
my question is...what do folks think of NDE? also, I've been knocked out for procedures and do not have any recollection of the experience which makes me worry that if I cant remember being knocked out for an endoscopy then I really will be toast during the big KO.
Is being KO'd for a procedure any indication to what will happen during death???
hope not!!
It really doesn't matter. Just make the life you know the best it can be for you and those close to you. If you do this, if there is a god or afterlife, I cannot perceive any such being punishing you for eternity.
I certainly don't buy the explanation that NDE are a form of dreaming. I dream every night, and wake up forgetting them instantly. People with NDE remember the experience in great detail even years after the event.
Yes, and it's not unusual to report that the remembered experiences are transformative as well.
But there are many different kinds of dreaming. People who make the effort can remember their dreams, usually via beside journaling. People can have lucid dreams, over which they may exercise greater or lesser degrees of control. People dream in black and white and in color. People have dream-like states induced by drugs, drug reactions, strokes, etc.
Dreams that you remember tend to be just like memories you find it easy to retrieve -- they are the dreams with high emotional impact. If you were having a strong positive or negative emotional response to the dream you are more likely to recall it after returning to normal consciousness.
At least some percentage of NDEs, potentially all, are simply strong responses to the engagement of that part of the brain that governs feelings of transcendence, the sense of non-duality, etc. These kinds of feelings and experiences can be induced by stimulating a very specific location in the brain.
It's intriguing to me that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists all have NDEs and they all tend to see, at the end of the Tunnel of Light(tm), what they expect to see based upon their belief-systems. There are even reports of negative NDEs, experiences of hell and the like, occurring in people who fret a lot about such things. This lack of consistency in the NDE experience tends to argue for NDEs being based on pre-existing beliefs and assumptions, not upon what actually exists in another reality. That's the simpler explanation than suggesting that the afterlife just configures itself to your expectations. Either way, NDEs then become uninteresting to me because they are not reporting a stable objective reality -- they are not reproducible.
There is even a type of "induced" NDE-like experience which can be triggered with guided eye movements in something like 70% of people. It's used in PTSD treatment and grief counseling -- allowing one to find "closure" by "meeting" people who have died and hearing comforting messages that the deceased are okay, that the person being treated is forgiven for things they feel they need to be forgiven for, etc. These are very vivid for many who experience it, and can be very healing and releasing and can provide a sense of closure. But they can be triggered pretty much at will by someone who knows how to do it and there is no evidence that it's anything but people's subconscious generating subjective experiences.
Human consciousness is much more elaborate and creative than we generally realize.
I really really want to belive in life after death...my heart believes, but my brain fights it.
my question is...what do folks think of NDE? also, I've been knocked out for procedures and do not have any recollection of the experience which makes me worry that if I cant remember being knocked out for an endoscopy then I really will be toast during the big KO.
Is being KO'd for a procedure any indication to what will happen during death???
hope not!!
NDE's are NOT the same as the death experience. However NDE's do give some insights. As a matter of "fact" (some will not like that!!!) most of us travel in our sleep state almost every night. The great pity is that almost all of us have no recall of that, or at best a very vague and confused recall.
The most useful descriptions of the afterlife have come from gifted mediums. And there is little wonder the orthodox Christians have scared their flock away from this, because these sources prove that there does not exist a church that can give you an exclusive benefit. Atheists are treated no worse and no differently that an ardent Baptist, but if the Baptist spends his life bashing gays, and the atheist looks after orphans, the atheist will be far more happy with where he or she starts out. As also the notion that you will be magically transformed into a perfected personality flies in the face of the evolution that is all around us.
Human consciousness is much more elaborate and creative than we generally realize.
Absolutely!!!!
If any one wonders, they should read the amazing book on human- elephant communication in "The Elephant Whisperer" and if you research what happened after the death of Laurence Antony its even more amazing. They knew when he had died, and came to pay their respects. No passing visit, they stayed for three days, and then left all together.
I don't think most worry about death the worry is more about how. I don't worry about death because I didn't worry about birth. Life is short. Live it.
I really really want to belive in life after death...my heart believes, but my brain fights it.
my question is...what do folks think of NDE? also, I've been knocked out for procedures and do not have any recollection of the experience which makes me worry that if I cant remember being knocked out for an endoscopy then I really will be toast during the big KO.
Is being KO'd for a procedure any indication to what will happen during death???
hope not!!
I believe that some people have the ability to sense the spiritual world and some don't yet. So I believe that those who do have the ability beyond the 5 senses are the ones who experience NDE's and those who don't, don't experience anything when they are "near death".
There are so many spiritual experiences of all kinds. Physical sensations, physical interactions with spirits, communication with spirits, information that is incredible that comes from them, and some people experience themselves as other people (reference to past lives memories) and some have dreams which predict things before they happen. (and they happen later). And more. So many claim that their loved ones are communicating with them from "the other side".
There is so much that we don't know and so many questions that it's better to assume that we really have no idea what happens after death (instead of claiming that we die and that's it).
To claim this - is being shortsighted. It's people who are very limited by the 5 senses who say this. They have no ability to perceive or believe in anything that requires more than 5 senses. So to them nothing else exists. But they are not the only people in the world. There are many of us who CAN function with more than 5 senses. And WE say that this life is NOT all there is.
I would not believe in NDE's for a single moment were it not for ONE inescapable, unexplainable fact: thousands who have had them are able to recount EXACTLY what happened in the OR down to the minutest details even when they had no EEG, no EKG, no blood flow, and no respiration. They were able to recount who said what, who did what, what instruments were used, what was going on in waiting rooms among family members and other such details that are absolutely impossible to counter with such flimsy statements as "the brain releases chemicals". Any doctor will tell you that a brain totally under anesthesia doesn't know the first thing going on in an OR, let alone a body that is clinically dead.
I have been under anesthesia for brain surgery that lasted three hours and I can tell you that they told me, "You're going to be slipping into unconsciousness in a few moments," and the next thing I knew the doctor was saying to me, "Wake up. The surgery's over". I had no recollection or knowledge of what happened in that three hours, and I had pulse, respiration, heart beat, and brain waves the whole time.
Try to imagine a person having none of those vital signs being able to recount everything going on, and always from the vantage point of floating above the OR at that.
It's unreal to me that people can continue to deny the reality of NDE's, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence. The simple truth is they don't want to believe, and not wanting to believe means they cannot let themselves believe.
I would not believe in NDE's for a single moment were it not for ONE inescapable, unexplainable fact: thousands who have had them are able to recount EXACTLY what happened in the OR down to the minutest details even when they had no EEG, no EKG, no blood flow, and no respiration.
A few clear problems here.
The first and most egrigious is that you are assuming that the experiences they recall happened DURING this period of "no EEG, no EKG, no blood flow, and no respiration.". This is not a safe assumption. It could well be that the experiences were had on the way into, or out of, these time periods. NDE fetishists however simply WANT to believe it happened in the "down time" period because this, in their mind, supports what they WANT to believe.
The second is that I am not even sure what you mean by "no blood flow". When the heart stops we either restart it quickly or we use artificial means to restore blood flow. A patient with absolutely no blood flow for a sustained period of time is not having an NDE. Such a patient is DEAD and will not be later recounting any experiences to you. The same is true of respiration.
A third issue is that I am not expectant that you even understand what "no EEG and no EKG" even means. The machines we use measure specific activity in the brain. When these machines measure no activity this does not mean there is NO activity in the brain. It just means the activity we are specifically seeking is absent. Many NDE fetishists act like being "clinically dead" in this regard means "totally dead". It does not. Your error is like going into a yellow and green room with an instrument which detects the color red, and declaring that the room is colorless because you can detect no red.
It seems therefore that your only support for "NDE" and what you think "NDE" means is your misunderstanding of what "clinically dead" actually means coupled with your assumptions about when and how experience ocours.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
always from the vantage point of floating above the OR at that.
Do you have evidence that it is "always" so or did you just make that up?
Also as I mentioned to you before.... how come these floating people never show up in a single controlled study where unmissable objects entirely incongruant to their environment have been placed in said rooms? They claim they are floating about yet they somehow manage to miss unmissable objects placed around for their benefit.
Ok I can imagine easily SOME people missing them. But the fact not one single controlled study I am aware of has come back with a SINGLE case of a floater identifying these objects has got to set off some warning bells in even your head despite how desperately you want to believe all this stuff is true.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
It's unreal to me that people can continue to deny the reality of NDE's
Few, if any, people are denying anything of the sort. I absolutely agree NDE occurs. It is quite common. What we are denying is what you claim NDE means or what your explanations for them are. NDEs exist and are well substantiated and documented. YOUR interpretation of them however is entirely unsubstantiated in even the smallest way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
The simple truth is they don't want to believe, and not wanting to believe means they cannot let themselves believe.
Actually the "simple truth" is that you really really DO want to believe your explanation for NDE and your wanting to believe means you cannot let yourself not believe it.
1. are you a licensed physician? You keep saying "we' don't use that kind of equipment". If you're an MD I will give more thought to your replies because you're obviously an expert of some sort.
2. if all this is simply the product of the brain, then why are so many prominent physicians such as Pim van Lommel, Sam Parnia, Kenneth Ring, Melvin Morse, Michael Sabom, Jeffrey Long and a dozen other prominent physicians studying these experiences so intensely. They are trying to get studies funded but powerful atheistic interests want these experiences squelched; they represent a pertinent ideological threat to the non-religious milieu that science tries to maintain. Why would these Dr's be so interested in them if they thought, or the evidence led them to believe that these experiences were all bogus creations of the mind?
The questions you pose I cannot answer. I'm upfront about that. I can just say that we wouldn't see a predominantly atheist group of physicians wasting their time and efforts studying these NDE's if there was absolutely nothing to them.
Nozz, you were inquiring about why there are no studies. Here, poke through this transcript of an interview between Skeptico host and Jeffrey Long, MD;
Quote:
I began work on Evidence of the Afterlife, the Science of Near-Death Experiences. This is by far the largest scientific study of near-death experience ever published. It has over 1,300 near-death experiences and because we’re studying so many near-death experiences, we have the ability to come to some understandings about near-death experience that we just simply couldn’t come to before with less extreme data than we have now. I might add, the near-death experiencers, not only are there so many of them, but the questionnaire they fill out, the current version, has 150 questions. It’s also a huge number of near-death experiencers studied and they’re also studied in enormous depth.
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