Near Death Experiences

[Rob_in_Oregon]

About 25 years ago, I started reading, “Embraced by the Light,” a book about the author’s NDE. She described herself as flying feet-first toward Heaven, accompanied by lots of animals. When she meets God, He tells her that all the different religions of the world contradicting each other is part of His divine plan.

The problem? If God is the Author of contradiction, there is no permanent truth in Him. He therefore cannot be reliably known or trusted, and none of our information about him can be relied upon. Jesus is the Savior of the world, and He also is not. Hell exists, and it also does not.

Some NDE’s seem to be valid, but we must be careful. If it contradicts what has already been revealed, it cannot be legitimate.

Animals in Heaven, anyone?

• Rob in Oregon

 

[hellopeople]

About 25 years ago, I started reading, “Embraced by the Light,” a book about the author’s NDE. She described herself as flying feet-first toward Heaven, accompanied by lots of animals. When she meets God, He tells her that all the different religions of the world contradicting each other is part of His divine plan.

The problem? If God is the Author of contradiction, there is no permanent truth in Him. He therefore cannot be reliably known or trusted, and none of our information about him can be relied upon. Jesus is the Savior of the world, and He also is not. Hell exists, and it also does not.

Some NDE’s seem to be valid, but we must be careful. If it contradicts what has already been revealed, it cannot be legitimate.

Animals in Heaven, anyone?

• Rob in Oregon

I don’t think this is necessarily true that if religions contradicting each other are part of his divine plan than there is no permanent truth in him. Maybe each religion has what is needed for salvation and everything that contradicts other religions is not important.

 

[Rob_in_Oregon]

The author of “Embraced by the Light” made it clear that she thought it was God’s intention that religions contradict each other. God wills division and confusion? Although I’m certainly no scholar, that’s not consistent with the theology I have studied. God cannot be the author of something that is wrong. I think it IS important.

Does God intend for Mormons to believe that their men, after death, become gods ruling over their own planets? They do teach that, and it’s obviously wrong. Is that what God wants? Is it unimportant that Mormons believe this?

Perhaps it can be said that religious confusion is something that God permits, but does not intend, like people using their free will to choose bad things. And, God can allow bad choices to ultimately bring about good. But “Embraced by the Light” goes beyond that, implying that God wills the confusion. At least, that was my impression.

• Rob in Oregon

 

[kestrel36]

I myself have trouble believing in religion, but Im trying to find my faith and there may be something to these stories. I read a book about NDEs and people definately say it is not the same kind of experience as dreaming. Right now some doctors are doing experiments to verify if people are having a real experience or just having some side effect of a brain shutting down. I personally am waiting on the results.

 

[vz71]

Right now some doctors are doing experiments to verify if people are having a real experience or just having some side effect of a brain shutting down. I personally am waiting on the results.

There is much anecdotal evidence that there is some validity to the claims.
People have awakened with trivial knowledge of events or surroundings that they were supposedly dead during and could not witness.

one case in particular I read about years ago had to do with a man that was awakened after death and had clear memory of seeing a shoe on the ledge near the roof of the hospital. The shoe was in fact found where he said it was. And there was no way he could have known of it or seen it beforehand.

That being said, a fair amount of caution is still in order as we still have no idea who or what is providing the information to us at this time.

 

[flyingfish]

NDE’s… a motive for beleif? Discuss

I don’t think so. A significant percentage of people who have NDE’s aren’t actually near death, but simply think they are. Also, the content of NDE’s varies from culture to culture (Hindus will see the Hindu god of death, Christians might see Jesus, Japanese people see long rivers and flowers). Children sometimes see their pets, favorite toys, or their parents/teachers who are alive.

Also, pilots undergoing training will sometimes lose consciousness and have an NDE-like experience due to g-forces or something.

infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html A really long and well references summary of NDE’s from a skeptic’s perspective.

 

[kestrel36]

Yea, Ive read about the pilots. I think it is significant to point out that though the pilots experience tunnel vision and other associated things like pleasant feeling they still report it didnt have the same lucidity of reality. However NDEs seem to report that there is little to no difference between reality and what they experienced. From what Ive read also it isnt so much that other cultures see hindu gods as much as that is how they interpret the beings they encounter. Though Im still waiting to find the results of the AWARE study. I think if they come up empty then it will be safe to say this is something produced inside a dying mind. Unfortunately I believe the study results wont be out for at least another year.

 

[flyingfish]

Yea, Ive read about the pilots. I think it is significant to point out that though the pilots experience tunnel vision and other associated things like pleasant feeling they still report it didnt have the same lucidity of reality. However NDEs seem to report that there is little to no difference between reality and what they experienced. From what Ive read also it isnt so much that other cultures see hindu gods as much as that is how they interpret the beings they encounter. Though Im still waiting to find the results of the AWARE study. I think if they come up empty then it will be safe to say this is something produced inside a dying mind. Unfortunately I believe the study results wont be out for at least another year.

It obviously depends on what you read. Many people who study NDE’s have a vested interest in proving the existence of an afterlife.

Aside from Gods, some people see imaginary beings from fantasy tales as well as people who are alive. Here are some examples of NDE’s from the link above:

(15) One of the most bizarre types of NDEs are the ‘meaningless void’ experiences that often occur during childbirth. In a typical case, a 28-year-old woman became unconscious when given nitrous oxide during the birth of her second child, but when her blood pressure suddenly dropped, she reported:

I was aware … of moving rapidly upward into darkness. Although I don’t recall turning to look, I knew the hospital and the world were receding below me, very fast… I was rocketing through space like an astronaut without a capsule, with immense speed and great distance.

A small group of circles appeared ahead of me, some tending toward the left. To the right was just a dark space. The circles were black and white, and made a clicking sound as they snapped black to white, white to black. They were jeering and tormenting—not evil, exactly, but more mocking and mechanistic. The message in their clicking was: Your life never existed. The world never existed. Your family never existed. You were allowed to imagine it. You were allowed to make it up. It was never there. There is nothing here. There was never anything there. That’s the joke—it was all a joke.

There was much laughter on their parts, malicious. I remember brilliant argumentation on my part, trying to prove that the world—and I—existed… They just kept jeering.

“This is eternity,” they kept mocking. This is all there ever was, and all there ever will be, just this despair…

Time was forever, endless rather than all at once… Yes, it was more than real: absolute reality. There’s a cosmic terror we have never addressed (Greyson and Bush 102).

(5) Journalists Hiroshi Tanami and Takashi Tachibana originally presented an investigation of 46 Japanese NDEs on NHK television (Morse 70; Tachibana Vol. 2 90). Tachibana subsequently expanded the investigation to that of 243 NDEs (some individuals reported multiple NDEs) discussed in the Japanese-language book Rinshi Taiken (Near Death Experience)[25], which includes a section on the cultural differences between Japanese and other NDEs (Tachibana vol. 2 80-91). The study confirmed that Japanese NDErs often report “seeing long, dark rivers and beautiful flowers, two common symbols that frequently appear as images in Japanese art” (Mauro 57).

Tachibana had noted that, unlike Western NDEs, the “light is not a personal (or personified) existence… [It] is an indescribably beautiful and natural light, yet is just light” (Tachibana vol. 2 81, trans. O. Carter), and that there was not a single instance of a Japanese NDEr having any sort of communication with the light. Nevertheless, occasional similarities between these Japanese NDEs and typical Western cases are fascinating exceptions to the general rule of cultural diversity.

(7) In the South Pacific region known as Melanesia, the province of Western New Britain lies just east of mainland Papua New Guinea. Here even the hunter-gatherer culture of the Kaliai cannot escape the influence of Western globalization. In her survey of near-death experiences from this region, anthropologist Dorothy Counts found that the NDE world “is a land that is described as having factories and wage employment. It has an appearance that reminds me of the view approaching Los Angeles from the air” (Counts 130).

By contrast, the dominant religious imagery of India is Hindu, and predictably NDEs from India typically involve encounters with recognizably Hindu religious figures. Satwant Pasricha and Ian Stevenson provide us with the following case from one of the largest surveys of non-Western NDEs conducted so far:

Four black messengers came and held me… [T]he clerks had a heap of books in front of them… Yamraj was there sitting on a high chair with a white beard and wearing yellow clothes. He asked me, “What do you want?” I told him that I wanted to stay there. He asked me to extend my hand. I don’t remember whether he gave me something or not. Then I was pushed down [and revived] (Pasricha and Stevenson 167).

(3) In his 1982 study Recollections of Death, Michael Sabom found a rather bizarre case which also suggests that NDEs are hallucinations. In case I-21, Sabom’s subject reported feelings of peace, bodily separation, traveling through a dark void, and encountering a light after a heart attack (Sabom, “Recollections” 197, 204, 206). The NDEr also encountered “four unknown nurses” who interrogated him “about possible ‘subversive activities’” (210).

 

[flyingfish]

Some more:

(5) In a case from the RERC archives (RERC account 3583), a hospitalized woman had an unusual NDE that started as an out-of-body experience. After moving through the ceiling, instead of seeing her Australian hospital from above, she reported finding herself on a Russian battlefield “piled with dead men,” Russian tanks, and machines. Then she found herself in a hospital run by nuns where a screaming woman giving birth was silenced by nuns “stuffing a pillow on to her head to stop her cries” (Fox 283). Next she reported being back in her hospital bed and feeling ill, wondering if her NDE was a hallucination caused by medication.

(7) Sometimes a prototypical NDE will incorporate terrifying hallucinatory features. After skidding on black ice, wrecking his car, and pulling out other passengers, a student collapsed and had to be resuscitated at the scene of the accident. While on life support in the hospital, he had two heart attacks and reported the following distressing NDE:

I was in a tunnel and sensed I was travelling towards a brightish light hidden behind a bend in the cave… I felt I was simply floating—I did not have the use of my arms or legs at all…

As I passed round the bend in the cave I saw a giant Dracula-type of mouth opening. I say ‘Dracula’ because there were two monstrous fangs with blood dribbling off them… I gained the instant impression that if I proceeded towards the mouth, it would shut and the teeth would slice me in two and kill me (Fenwick and Fenwick 190-191).

(10) In other NDEs sentient plants are encountered—one woman reported worrying about the flowers she was stepping on in her NDE, when the flowers telepathically communicated to her that they were alright! (Fenwick and Fenwick 86-87).

(4) The Fenwicks cite an intriguing case of a childhood NDE which lacked the most common element of the classic NDE—feelings of peace or euphoria—where a living person was also present in the experience. When Richard Hands was 9 years old his appendix was removed but complications led to an NDE:

The first [image I recall] is of looking down on a body on the operating table, being fussed over by green-clad surgeons and nurses. I couldn’t actually see the face—someone was in the way—but I assume it was mine. This image is particularly vivid, and despite its goriness is not associated with any pain or distress, even in recall.

[Then I saw] a blackness with a p(name removed by moderator)oint of light far off in the distance. I feel drawn towards the light, but there is a terror and a feeling that I do not wish it to pull me towards it. My [living] mother is with me in this scene, trying to pull me back from the light. There is also a wind rushing past, towards the light (Fenwick and Fenwick 173).

There’s definitely a lot of variety there that makes me think it’s most likely that they are hallucinations rather than images of a real afterlife.

 

[Garyjohn2]

There’s definitely a lot of variety there that makes me think it’s most likely that they are hallucinations rather than images of a real afterlife.

The variety doesn’t convince me at all they are just hallucinations. (although that is a possiblity). Most of these sound like they can very practically be an experience of purgatory, being neither extremely hellish nor heavenly…tho that one with the void and the clicking circles sounds like a version of hell to me. I think the afterlife would be many, many times more complex than this life. For this reason, variety doesn’t convince me either way…we don’t know what its like over there!

 

[kestrel36]

Different people seem to define NDEs using various criteria. I personally believe that in order to have a NDE you must have cardiac arrest. It appears some reports come from people whos heart didnt actually stop. This is pointed out in several books on NDEs. So perhaps people that go unconsious and would otherwise die never quite make it to cardiac arrest, yet report a NDE. So like everything there is confusion and debate on what qualifies.

 

[flyingfish]

The variety doesn’t convince me at all they are just hallucinations. (although that is a possiblity). Most of these sound like they can very practically be an experience of purgatory, being neither extremely hellish nor heavenly…tho that one with the void and the clicking circles sounds like a version of hell to me. I think the afterlife would be many, many times more complex than this life. For this reason, variety doesn’t convince me either way…we don’t know what its like over there!

Different people seem to define NDEs using various criteria. I personally believe that in order to have a NDE you must have cardiac arrest. It appears some reports come from people whos heart didnt actually stop. This is pointed out in several books on NDEs. So perhaps people that go unconsious and would otherwise die never quite make it to cardiac arrest, yet report a NDE. So like everything there is confusion and debate on what qualifies.

Well, the problem with NDE reports generally is that not all NDErs were actually near death, and in many reports their medical condition actually was not reported.

You’re trying to tell me that all NDE’s that don’t fit into a particular mold (of I guess the Western NDE with Christian imagery?) weren’t real NDE’s? I find that a curious contention on your part. I guess those Japanese people who saw rivers and flowers and an impersonal light weren’t really NDErs?

Either way, I would not be surprised if people who were actually near death had some NDE features in common that those who weren’t dying didn’t have. But the fact that so many people, whether they’re in cardiac arrest or not, have these vivid hallucinations casts doubt on NDE’s in general.

If it’s possible to hallucinate (while having medical crises) an endless void with mocking circles telling you your life never existed, or your favorite toy talking to you, or a living relative talking to you, or Hindu deities, or nurses interrogating you, or a Soviet battlefield then why should I believe that the people who see Jesus and dead relatives aren’t hallucinating as well?

Personally I already find it very hard to buy that our minds can survive brain death. Our memories, our thought processes, they’re all in our brains.