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Near Death Experince (Encounter )

M

Mdm Tang

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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3969188605147769651#



The NDE of an Arts Professor54:05 - 5 years ago
The astounding story of Arts Professor Howard Storm who had a near-death encounter while still an atheist. He relates his story of being dragged to the brink of hell by evil spirits & calling out to Jesus to save him. The video takes us through his experience and the answers he received during the NDE about the future of the USA(00:24mins) & the World(00:34), about heaven(00:39), and about other Worlds(00:49). By Red River Productions. (Remixed to include only Howard Storm’s story.)
 

drifter

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
http://skepdic.com/nde.html

The term 'near-death experience', or NDE, refers to a wide array of experiences reported by some people who have nearly died or who have thought they were going to die. There is no single shared experience reported by those who have had NDEs. Even the experiences of most interest to parapsychologists--such as the “mystical experience,” the “light at the end of the tunnel” experience, the “life review” experience, and the out-of-body experience (OBE)--rarely occur together in near-death experiences. However, the term NDE is most often used to refer to an OBE occurring while near death. Both types of experience have been cited to support belief in disembodied spirits and continued existence after death.

One of the early popularizers of the idea that the OBE is proof of life after death was Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004). She is well known for her work on death and dying, although she eventually claimed that death does not exist. Death, she thought, is one of several possible transitions through permeable boundaries, whatever that means. At one point in her career, it meant dabbling in spiritualism and inviting a medium to channel the dead to have sex with grieving widows.* Kübler-Ross wrote of her own OBEs (hallucinations?) with "afterlife entities":

I saw myself lifted out of my physical body. ... t was as if a whole lot of loving beings were taking all the tired parts out of me, similar to car mechanics in a car repair shop. ... I had an incredible sense that once all the parts were replaced I would be ... young and fresh and energetic....

People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist.*
Despite her reputation as a scientist and a medical doctor, bringing in a guy to have sex with your clients is considered unprofessional in some circles, even if the guy wears a turban. When some of the widows developed vaginal infections after these sessions, it looked as if Kübler-Ross's reputation as an expert on scientific evidence for the afterlife was damaged for good. Fortunately for the movement, it had other advocates who, by comparison, are paragons of virtue, integrity, and sanity.

Raymond Moody (1944-), an M.D. and psychology Ph.D., is considered by many to be the father of the modern NDE movement. He coined the expression 'near-death experience' and has written several books on the subject of life after life. He is well known for his compilation of a list of features that he considers to be typical of the near-death experience. According to Moody, the typical NDE includes a buzzing or ringing noise, a sense of blissful peace, a feeling of floating out of one’s body and observing it from above, moving through a tunnel into a bright light, meeting dead people (saints, Jesus, angels, Muhammad); seeing one’s life pass before one’s eyes; and finding it all so wonderful that one doesn’t want to return to one’s body. (The typical experience he describes does not, however, include trips to the body repair shop or sexual encounters with spirits.) This composite experience is based on interpretations of testimonials and anecdotes from doctors, nurses, and patients. Characteristic of Moody’s work is the glaring omission of cases that don’t fit his hypothesis. If Moody is to be believed, no one near death has had a horrifying experience. Yet, "according to some estimates as many as 15 percent of NDEs are hellish" (Blackmore 2004: 362). Reports of Christians meeting Muhammad or Muslims meeting Jesus or Jews meeting Guru Nanak, if they exist, have not been publicized.

There are numerous reports of bad NDE trips involving tortures by elves, giants, demons, etc. Some parapsychologists take these good and bad NDE trips as evidence of the mythical afterlife places of various religions. They believe that some souls leave their bodies and go to the other world for a time before returning to their bodies. If so, then what is one to conclude from the fact that most people near death do not experience either the heavenly or the diabolical? Is that fact good evidence that there is no afterlife or that most people end up as non-existing or in some sort of limbo? Such reasoning is on par with supposing that dreams in which one appears to oneself to be outside of one’s bed are to be taken as evidence of the soul or mind actually leaving the body during sleep, as some New Age Gnostics believe.

What little research there has been in this field indicates that the experiences Moody lists as typical of the NDE may be due to brain states triggered by cardiac arrest and anesthesia (Blackmore 1993). Furthermore, many people who have not been near death have had experiences that seem identical to NDEs, e.g., fighter pilots experiencing rapid acceleration. Other mimicking experiences may be the result of psychosis (due to severe neurochemical imbalance) or drug usage, such as hashish, LSD, or DMT.

A 13-year Dutch study led by Pim van Lommel and published in Lancet found that 12 percent (or 18 percent, depending on how NDE is defined) of 344 resuscitated patients who had experienced cessation of their heart and/or breathing function reported an NDE. If the cause of the NDE were purely physiological, the researchers reasoned that all of the patients should have had one because of their similar plight. Psychological factors were ruled out by the researchers, as were the medications taken by the patients. However, the researchers believe that

neurophysiological processes must play some part in NDE. Similar experiences can be induced through electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe (and hence of the hippocampus) during neurosurgery for epilepsy, with high carbon dioxide levels (hypercarbia), and in decreased cerebral perfusion resulting in local cerebral hypoxia as in rapid acceleration during training of fighter pilots, or as in hyperventilation followed by Valsalva manoeuvre. Ketamine-induced experiences resulting from blockage of the NMDA receptor, and the role of endorphin, serotonin, and enkephalin have also been mentioned, as have near-death-like experiences after the use of LSD, psilocarpine, and mescaline. These induced experiences can consist of unconsciousness, out-of-body experiences, and perception of light or flashes of recollection from the past. These recollections, however, consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE. Further, transformational processes with changing life-insight and disappearance of fear of death are rarely reported after induced experiences.

Thus, induced experiences are not identical to NDE...*
The Dutch researchers seem to be assuming that no significant life-insight changes occur in people who have had induced NDE-like experiences. They cite no evidence that this is so. In any case, the proper conclusion should be that the effect of induced experiences is not identical to the effect of "natural" NDEs.

We can't assume that those who report NDEs had an NDE. Nor can we be sure that only those who report having had an NDE actually had one. Two of the participants in the Dutch study first reported having an NDE two years after their close calls with death. It is possible they constructed false memories. Stories of the alleged typical NDE have been reported widely in the media. Experiences after the NDE might be used to construct an NDE after-the-fact. It is possible that others had NDEs but don't remember them due either to brain damage, to different abilities in short term memory, or to the timing of their experience vis-à-vis when they regained consciousness. The only significant factor between the NDEers and non-NDEers in the Dutch study, according to van Lommel and his colleagues, was age: those who had NDEs tended to be younger. This is partly due to the fact that older cardiac arrest patients are more likely to die than younger ones, but it may also be partly due the fact that younger brains are more likely to have better short term memory functions than older brains.

The Dutch researchers found other significant differences between those who reported the NDE and those who didn't, but they occurred after the experience. "NDErs had become much more empathic and accepting of others since their NDE than had the non-NDErs. And NDErs had become both more appreciative of the ordinary things of life and much less afraid of death than had the non-NDErs."* This difference certainly supports the claim that the NDE is a profound and potentially life-altering experience. It does not, however, support the Dutch researchers' contention that it provides important evidence for consciousness existing outside of the brain.

Moody, on the other hand, is sure that NDEs are evidence of consciousness existing separately from the brain. He thinks that NDEs prove the existence of life after death. Skeptics, on the other hand, believe that NDEs can be explained by neurochemistry and are the result of brain states that occur due to a dying, demented, extremely stressed, or drugged brain. For example, neural noise and retino-cortical mapping explain the common experience of passage down a tunnel from darkness into a bright light. According to Susan Blackmore, vision researcher Dr. Tomasz S. Troscianko of the University of Bristol speculated:

If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer....the tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger....If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light. (Blackmore 1993: 85)
Blackmore attributes the feelings of extreme peacefulness of the NDE to the release of endorphins in response to the extreme stress of the situation. The buzzing or ringing sound is attributed to cerebral anoxia and consequent effects upon the connections between brain cells (op. cit., 64).

Dr. Karl Jansen has reproduced NDEs with ketamine, a short-acting hallucinogenic, dissociative anaesthetic.

The anaesthesia is the result of the patient being so 'dissociated' and 'removed from their body' that it is possible to carry out surgical procedures. This is wholly different from the 'unconsciousness' produced by conventional anesthetics, although ketamine is also an excellent analgesic (pain killer) by a different route (i.e. not due to dissociation). Ketamine is related to phencyclidine (PCP). Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines - they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, is much shorter acting, is an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anaesthetic for children in industrialised countries and all ages in the third world as it is cheap and easy to use. Anaesthetists prevent patients from having NDE's ('emergence phenomena') by the co-administration of sedatives which produce 'true' unconsciousness rather than dissociation.*
According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with some god, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.

While neural activity might explain bright lights, buzzing noises, and hallucinations, there are some aspects of some NDEs that remain puzzling. Some people who are thought to be dead, but are actually just unconscious, recover and remember things like looking down and seeing their own bodies being worked on by doctors and nurses. They recall conversations being held while they were "dead." Of course, they weren't dead at all, but they feel as if their mind or soul had left their body and was observing it from above. Those who have had such experiences--and they are many--often find them life-altering and defining moments. They are convinced such experiences are proof of life after death by a disembodied consciousness. But are they? It is possible that a person may appear dead to our senses or our scientific equipment but still be perceiving. The visual and auditory perceptions occurring while unconscious-but-perceiving may be produced by a variety of neuronal mechanisms. In fact, we now have evidence that patients who appear brain dead may in fact be capable of conscious thought. In 2006, scientists in the UK and Belgium did an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) on a woman in a vegetative state and found that parts of her brain showed activity when she was spoken to and asked to think about things like playing tennis.

The scientists were startled to find that her brain patterns, when she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis or moving around her home, displayed the same activated cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of the healthy volunteers.*
It is possible that the soul leaves the body, but it is not necessary to posit a soul to explain these experiences. In any case,

we do not yet know whether NDEs take place just before the crisis, during it, just after it or even during the process of trying to describe it to someone else. If clear consciousness were really possible with a completely flat EEG, this would indeed change our view of the mind/brain relationship, but so far this has not been conclusively demonstrated. (Blackmore 2004: 364)
Blackmore wrote that in 2004 but, as noted above, in 2006 scientists demonstrated brain activity in someone in a vegetative state, which is not identical to a flat EEG but which indicates that some machines might detect brain activity while others do not.* Thus, those researchers who claim that their patients have memories of experiences they had when they were dead (as Dr. Michael Saborn does of musician Pam Reynolds) may be mistaken. Just because their machines don't register anything cannot be taken as proof positive that a person is dead, nor can it be taken as proof positive that the patient isn't aware, on some level, of what is going on around her. Unconscious patients may hear what surgeons and nurses are saying, even if the hospital machines aren't registering any brain activity.*

Furthermore, NDE stories are now known to a large audience. Thus, when new stories are told about going into the light, etc., one has to be concerned that these stories may have been contaminated. They may reflect what one has heard and what one expects. Such experiences are still subjectively real and may have profound effects on a person, but they should not be taken as strong evidence of separation of body and spirit, much less of life after death. (In any case, making extraordinary claims that can't be disproved won't hurt Dr. Saborn's book or Reynolds's record sales, a fact that has not escaped the attention of the webmaster of the near-death.com page promoting the sale of Saborn's book and Reynolds's CDs. Granted, the page is not on par with the unseemliness of Kübler-Ross's turbaned man standing in for the spirits of dead husbands, but the page doesn't do anything to encourage belief in the professionalism or reliability of Saborn's reports.)

One way to avoid contamination of stories has been developed by University of North Texas professor Dr. Jan Holden.* She designed an experiment in which a laptop computer that opens flat hangs from the ceiling with the screen facing away from the floor. Her husband developed a software program that produces a series of animations. If a patient claims to have been floating above her body on the operating table, then she ought to have seen the computer screen and be able to report on what she saw. Dr. Bruce Greyson has apparently been using this protocol for a few years but so far has not reported anything of interest.

Finally, Raymond Quigg Lawrence (Blinded by the Light) thinks that NDEs are the work of Satan. Perhaps, or they may be telepathic communications from doctors, nurses, or others in attendance when the subject is near death, or they may be mixed memories composed after waking up and hearing others talk about what was happening while one was near death, or they may be recollections of subconsciously recorded data overheard while in a groggy state. At this point in our knowledge, to claim that NDEs provide strong evidence that the soul exists independently of the body, and that there is an afterlife awaiting that soul that just happens to coincide with the beliefs and wishes of the near-death experient, seems premature.
 

kryonlight

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
I think what near death experiences prove is that consciousness is non-local and is not an emergent property of the electrical nerve signals.
 

god_zeus

Alfrescian
Loyal
drifter needs near death experience to open his heart chakra

or he should at least take up some kind of course that teaches astral travel or OBE

sometimes I feel I am lifted and suddenly 'someone' hold my hand and fly out of the window
but I woke up
 

drifter

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
drifter needs near death experience to open his heart chakra

or he should at least take up some kind of course that teaches astral travel or OBE

sometimes I feel I am lifted and suddenly 'someone' hold my hand and fly out of the window
but I woke up

whahahahaha...you want near death experience its easy ...give a some dose of LSD or some stalks of magic mushroom and you will experience enlightenment straight away :wink:
 

zeebjii

Alfrescian
Loyal
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The NDE of an Arts Professor54:05 - 5 years ago
The astounding story of Arts Professor Howard Storm who had a near-death encounter while still an atheist. He relates his story of being dragged to the brink of hell by evil spirits & calling out to Jesus to save him. The video takes us through his experience and the answers he received during the NDE about the future of the USA(00:24mins) & the World(00:34), about heaven(00:39), and about other Worlds(00:49). By Red River Productions. (Remixed to include only Howard Storm’s story.)

Why must these people before telling their fairy tale stories always claim to be atheists?
 

drifter

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
Why must these people before telling their fairy tale stories always claim to be atheists?

to proof what they said are real and they are not delusion ..if not kena laugh by other ppl for being crazy ....paiseh mah :wink:
 

chorut

Alfrescian
Loyal
I'll believe it if I experience it myself. I don't spend my time watching videos of someone else explaining what he or she experiences.

What's so different from NDE and dreaming?
 
M

Mdm Tang

Guest
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Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.
But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.
"According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent," Alexander writes in the cover story of this week's edition of Newsweek.
So what exactly does heaven look like?
Alexander says he first found himself floating above clouds before witnessing, "transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer like lines behind them."
He claims to have been escorted by an unknown female companion and says he communicated with these beings through a method of correspondence that transcended language. Alexander says the messages he received from those beings loosely translated as:
"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."
"You have nothing to fear."
"There is nothing you can do wrong."
From there, Alexander claims to have traveled to "an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting." He believes this void was the home of God.
After recovering from his meningitis-induced coma, Alexander says he was reluctant to share his experience with his colleagues but found comfort inside the walls of his church. He's chronicled his experience in a new book, "Proof of Heaven: A neurosurgeon's journey into the afterlife," which will be published in late October.
"I'm still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience," Alexander writes. "But on a deep level I'm very different from the person I was before, because I've caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right."
 

SteadyPunPIPI

Alfrescian
Loyal
drifter needs near death experience to open his heart chakra

or he should at least take up some kind of course that teaches astral travel or OBE

sometimes I feel I am lifted and suddenly 'someone' hold my hand and fly out of the window
but I woke up

Hi bro what is chakra?
 
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