part 1
Dang, One, I thought that read familiar! And yes, proper protocol is to attribute accurately, at the very least in quotes denoting that the words are from another source.
Dameedna again injected sanity into the conversation. Having had a life altar/altering NDE myself, and being an amateur student of that phenomenon, I would say yes, that is about the closest we can get to evidence. Two items of note about such matters:
One, it is a subjective experience only statistically verifiable in that cross-cultural studies have revealed that the phenomenon is reported with exceptional consistency wherever and to whomever it happened, that phenomenon being characteristically comprised of seven distinct phases. (Hmmmm… seven. Isn’t that interesting…) NDEers report on from one to all seven of these phases as constituting their experience, but usually from three to four of them, in various degrees of clarity.
Two, except that the “Guide” or “Being of Light” often encountered in such an experience is
sometimes named as the chief figure of that person’s religion, the so called “judgment” or “life review” stage of the experience is markedly devoid of religious context. In fact the consistent report when that stage of the experience is included, is that the two questions asked in total dispassion and lack of value judgment
by the experiencers themselves are “Did I love?” and “What did I learn?”
For more on this phenomenon, go to
near-death.com/index.html or read Danion Brinkley’s
Saved by the Light. I am particularly taken with his analysis of who or what the “Guide” actually is!
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At it’s root the debate is just another clever distinction between two kinds of knowledge. Faith and Reason.” Again, here we have a typical dualism of the kind that is rampant amongst religionists and humans in general. Yet another either/or binary-ism adhered to as foundational in the face of evidence that our living experience is by far and away deeper than such imagined polarities. The only thing clever about such a belief is that it demonstrates the kind of perceptive analysis that allows for magic tricks to be presented on stage and Original Revelations to deteriorate into religions.
At the root of any debate is the Consciousness without which we would not be aware of ideas and thoughts. As with everything, those ideas and thoughts co-exist in at least four quadrants of experience/manifestation. The restriction of our localized educations has allowed for the kinds of dualisms and factoids we habitually and blindly include in our arguments aimed primarily at self verification by judgment of others. This dynamic is failed to be addressed by the exoteric phases of the major religions which consequently become prophylactic to actual progress in self knowledge and in the building of an accurate and more true-to-fact mapping of the nature of existence.
This mapping is done most usually by faith as a default mechanism of ignorance. I don’t mean here religious faith, I mean faith in the sense of accepting functional paradigms from parents, peers, filtered experience, etc. It can and does in many cases include a religious faith inherited and rote practiced through habituation. All of these are of course, because they belong to the one professing them, thought to be the "One, True, Universal, (Catholic) and to be spread (as self justification) faith.
Such localized mapping ignores a more universal picture of Human Kind (or un-kind) such as is now being made necessary by the clash of parochial systems in the globalized communications age. At this time the “faithers” are struggling with evidence unincorporable by their beliefs in meaning, and the “Sciencers” are analyzing things in terms the are physically useful and intellectually “knowable” but which ignore interior meaning. In this polarized soup we have the struggle for a truthful and practical exegesis of our experience on the planet we are working very hard to strain beyond its capacity to sustain us.
