Lord Parnia

Whenever I read parts of this article by Keith Augustine, I feel my hopes for survival after death being smashed smithereens. And for good reason. In my opinion, this article is a better argued and more comprehensive defense of the annihilation hypothesis than exists anything published in defense of the survival hypothesis. Take this simple fact I learned for instance just now- Greyson and colleagues have discovered a statistical correlation between the time passed since an NDEr has had their experience, and the depth of the experience. This indicates that the experiencer tends to embellish the story as time goes on.

Augustine writes, “The AWARE study is designed to find out whether or not any of these NDErs will be able to accurately report the complex images that appear as hidden visual targets visible only from the ceiling. Parnia explicitly states that the purpose of the study is to “settle this debate once and for all” (Taylor 24), adding that “if no one sees the pictures, it shows these experiences are illusions or false memories” (Dreaper). The study has been encouraged by both skeptics of and believers in a survivalist interpretation of NDEs.”

My only question is whether Sam Parnia will become the official spokesperson for atheistic materialism after observing the null findings of his study.

In trying to find more information about cardiac arrest and the NDE, I found an argument more powerful than that I had read by Augustine. This comes from Gerald Woerlee and it severely undermines the idea the cardiac arrest survivors in Pim Von Lommel’s study were certain to have flat EEGs. This is because, as Woerlee describes, nobody stands around observing people in a hospital having a cardiac arrest. They are doing chest compressions and moving a couple of liters of blood through the body. I can understand how Woerlee is so emotionally outraged at the lack of attention paid to what is actually happening during these cardiac arrests. Read what he has to say about cardiac arrests and the NDE, and I don’t think it is possible to think the same way about it ever again.

“Accordingly, statements claiming that all people are unconscious, and all people have a “flat EEG” while undergoing active cardiac resuscitation are pure speculation, and likely to be quite incorrect.”- Gerald Woerlee

Update: I have found the article, and it was published in 2008 by Jason J. Braithwaite, not Augustine. There is a whole section on EEG and NDE. I don’t know what to make of the claims or what scientific consensus would be on the speculations. In part he says:

“However, the emerging evidence is somewhat unhelpful for the survivalist. Tao, Ray, Hawes-Ebersole, and Ebersole (2005) compared EEG activity from surgically implanted electrodes placed in or around deep sub-cortical regions of epileptic patients, with cortical EEG electrodes placed on the scalp of the same patients. The results were quite surprising. Tao et al. showed that for 90% of cases, large amplitude paroxysmal firing needed to recruit 10 cm² of brain tissue in order to show up against background cortical EEG traces. In other words, large seizure-based activity was being recorded by the surgically implanted electrodes (indexing clear and widespread brain-seizure activity) which was completely absent from scalp-based EEG traces until it propagated through and excited 10 cm² of brain volume. This is a considerable amount of brain tissue.”

“Furthermore, a recent study that employed both EEG and brain-imaging (fMRI) techniques to explore seizure processes found significant increases in localised cortical neural activity (indicative of a seizure) in the fMRI BOLD (blood-oxygen-level dependant) response, which was completely absent from the EEG data (Kobayashi, Hawco, Grova, Dubeau, & Gotman, 2006). This is particularly striking in that this occurred despite the fact that the intense seizure activity occurred in a region where EEG electrodes were closely spaced. Kobayashi et al. note that this is striking as the EEG completely missed the most intensely discharging region despite the fact that this region was also located at the cortical level.”

Bruce Greyson, one of the open minded skeptics regarding the near death experience has said that there is not enough evidence proving or disproving the afterlife. He says he would not be surprised either way. I agree. Part of me feels as if the NDE must be caused by endogenous brain activity. I suspect that Karl Jansen’s idea that the brain in trauma or perceiving trauma or under other circumstances will release neurotransmitters which cause some sort of blockade effect which leads to an experience more profound than any externally introduced hallucinogen such as LSD, is a very reasonable hypothesis.  The other half of me thinks that psi is probably true, consciousness is real and probably has some sort of property independent of space-time and thus is easily imagined (or by nature must) go beyond the degree that materialists confine it. But with comments Chopra provides like, “when there was no measurable activity in the brain, when they were in fact brain dead” despite such measurements not even being part of the Dutch study and not being fully understood, the biased perception comes through- Chopra begins the whole thing insisting that the brain does not create consciousness.

Always with the professional believers like Chopra there is some element of their beliefs that betrays good sense. Someone may have rational views towards psi experimentation and then make some statement about how the evidence for RAMTHA is incontrovertible. I get exactly the same feel from Peter Fenwich who seems very reasonable for a while and then jumps to some pretty wild rationalizations about the elements of the NDE that seem to me extremely unlikely and not supported by the bulk of the accounts.

Michael Shermer is so sold on the idea that the brain does everything that he states that neurons create consciousness as a solid fact. Maybe he’s right, but how can such a conversations have any meaning when both contestants write conjectures as if they are facts, and are so blinded by their own bias that they don’t even notice when they say it? Neither is open to the others conclusions. In the end, we just don’t have enough evidence either way. I would not be surprised by either of these “astonishing hypotheses”. But upon learning which one is true, I would be stunned.

I despise the man who saved my life.
A man who just happened to be there when I fell ill.

Someone I would have preferred to be anybody else.

A faulty human being who happened to have the life-saving skills required, who was at the right place at the right time. Or, shall I say – the wrong place at the woefully wrong time? Ah, had he only been truly the hero. The kind that are life-saving yet gentle, big-hearted, gloriously good-looking, and perfect.

Do I seem ungrateful? Sometimes I think I am. There lies the rub. This man has presented for me an engaging dilimma I can do without.

Why would I be so shockingly ungrateful? Don’t shake your heads at me just yet. I believe I have a point to make.

You see, I knew this guy for a few years before this Life-Saving Event unfortunately came about. He is a fellow-employee at a Truck Stop out in the middle of nowhere – on the high-desert plains of the great state of Wyoming. I knew him only as a casual aquaintence, you see, I tried to avoid him at all costs.

Irritating son of a bitch.

He tends to be a bully to those employees he doesn’t care for, or who seem to come across as bully-bait. He’s arrogant, self-centered, full of himself, and carries about an inflated ego. I’m not sure if that sentence gives a complete picture.

Being a manager further aggravates his feelings of superiority, and places him in a position where he can take advantage of his power to hire. He regualrly hires sweet, young things (shapely blondes) and surrounds himself with them. He is a relentless flirt when summer traffic brings in hoardes of scantily-clad girls. He also comes on to co-employees, as long as they are youthful, shapely, blond and naive. Yet the conundrum with this is his looks. The man is butt-ugly. Well, maybe I should re-phrase that with, not very good-looking. Handsome he is not. He also lacks charm, tact, education, and sometimes intelligence.

Before someone jumps to his defence, questioning the “sin” in a man’s natural inclination to notice sweet, young things: he’s got a wife and kids at home. His wife is a stunning beauty, and quite devoted to her butt-ugly husband. Why the two ever hit it off I’ll never know. I assume pity may have played a large role – but pity would burn out fast, wouldn’t it? Being married to him puts her in the unenviable poistion of having to live in a town that is officially a ghost town – one of many along the Pony Express Trail and across a landscape of failed mines. Her husband is also an icon. He is the second generation to devote his life to this glorified truckstop on the Wyoming desert. Its a place he can go where everybody knows his name. Its his home.

As for me, I came into the picture much later. He was literally raised at the truck stop, living in employee housing on-property through most of his life. His parents both earned their living here, and so Marcello simply fillled his father’s shoes when he came of age to work. There was just really no other way, it was convenient and everybody knew him. Perhaps he never really intended to commit a lifetime to this place, but at the point I arrived he was nearing his twentieth year of steady employment.

Before my first day at work at the tourist section of this truck stop, I was pulled aside and warned about Marcello. He was that well established. I rest my case….

Perhaps I should soften the blow by saying, I intensely dislike the man. Nonetheless, if it weren’t for leaving my body I probably wouldn’t be having such a difficult time wrangling with the “life-saving” and “hero” issues.

Having an experience such as that sets me even further apart than I’ve already felt most of my life. It was an experience that forever changed me. It set me on a journey to find “the truth”, it empowered me so that I was able to question, for the first time in my life, the beliefs I was raised with. It released me from a consuming fear of death. And suddenly, the people I was surrounded by became spiritual beings that would soon enough transcend the physical and move on. I felt a powerful love for everyone – yet I had no patience for them. I had no patience for the petty things they quarrelled over, the bitterness they felt for their lives, the anger they so readily expressed toward each other. I acquired an ability to see the burdens they carried with them; to hear stray, distracted thoughts, to see auras surrounding them in all colors – from the brilliant, bursting white rays glowing around children; to the anemic, fading embers of adults.

I also became aware of something most would find sinister. Many times throughout my work days, people would walk through the store overshadowed by death. I knew they would soon transition. My soul would stir – responding to the nearness of a fellow-traveler, and to the appearance of The Presence that would usher them into a place I was turned away from. In so many ways, I cringed with envy. But it was the children that were most difficult for me to cope with. I anticipated their parents’ agony, and would realize that despite what I knew awaited us all, I, too, would wail in grief at the loss of a loved one – especially a child. As the Overshadowed person passed me, I felt the Presence pause ever so briefly before me, as if I were recognized, as if in greeting. The memory of that moment I spent outside my body would overwhelm me, and my spirit would stretch, my soul would pine, as though I were homesick for a place I had experienced only in passing. For now, this place here on earth, where I spent a lifetime, was most foreign, and the flight outside my body was intensely familiar. I missed it desperately. I wanted to go back home….

The daily arrival of Marcello into the tourist center had the same effect on me. It was a torturous feeling, every detail came back to me, and I’d become angry at him for having brought me back. Marcello eventually came to symbolize for me my struggle to re-adapt to the heaviness of life back in the physical, and the yearning I supressed to simply go back to that place out of space and time. A place of supreme comfort, supreme acceptance, supreme love, supreme peace…

I have presented myself in an ambiguous light. At once bitter about my return – centering that bitterness on one individual – and suddenly at peace with my life, basking in re-newed vision, driven to seek spiritual knowledge, and desiring to reach out to my fellow earth-dwellers. This is exactly how I feel, as though I have been neatly rent in two.

And then there’s the shape-shifting. Just kidding.

A man who just happened to be there when I fell ill.

Someone I would have preferred to be anybody else.

A faulty human being who happened to have the life-saving skills required, who was at the right place at the right time. Or, shall I say – the wrong place at the woefully wrong time? Ah, had he only been truly the hero. The kind that are life-saving yet gentle, big-hearted, gloriously good-looking, and perfect.

Do I seem ungrateful? Sometimes I think I am. There lies the rub. This man has presented for me an engaging dilimma I can do without.

Why would I be so shockingly ungrateful? Don’t shake your heads at me just yet. I believe I have a point to make.

You see, I knew this guy for a few years before this Life-Saving Event unfortunately came about. He is a fellow-employee at a Truck Stop out in the middle of nowhere – on the high-desert plains of the great state of Wyoming. I knew him only as a casual aquaintence, you see, I tried to avoid him at all costs.

Irritating son of a bitch.

He tends to be a bully to those employees he doesn’t care for, or who seem to come across as bully-bait. He’s arrogant, self-centered, full of himself, and carries about an inflated ego. I’m not sure if that sentence gives a complete picture.

Being a manager further aggravates his feelings of superiority, and places him in a position where he can take advantage of his power to hire. He regualrly hires sweet, young things (shapely blondes) and surrounds himself with them. He is a relentless flirt when summer traffic brings in hoardes of scantily-clad girls. He also comes on to co-employees, as long as they are youthful, shapely, blond and naive. Yet the conundrum with this is his looks. The man is butt-ugly. Well, maybe I should re-phrase that with, not very good-looking. Handsome he is not. He also lacks charm, tact, education, and sometimes intelligence.

Before someone jumps to his defence, questioning the “sin” in a man’s natural inclination to notice sweet, young things: he’s got a wife and kids at home. His wife is a stunning beauty, and quite devoted to her butt-ugly husband. Why the two ever hit it off I’ll never know. I assume pity may have played a large role – but pity would burn out fast, wouldn’t it? Being married to him puts her in the unenviable poistion of having to live in a town that is officially a ghost town – one of many along the Pony Express Trail and across a landscape of failed mines. Her husband is also an icon. He is the second generation to devote his life to this glorified truckstop on the Wyoming desert. Its a place he can go where everybody knows his name. Its his home.

As for me, I came into the picture much later. He was literally raised at the truck stop, living in employee housing on-property through most of his life. His parents both earned their living here, and so Marcello simply fillled his father’s shoes when he came of age to work. There was just really no other way, it was convenient and everybody knew him. Perhaps he never really intended to commit a lifetime to this place, but at the point I arrived he was nearing his twentieth year of steady employment.

Before my first day at work at the tourist section of this truck stop, I was pulled aside and warned about Marcello. He was that well established. I rest my case….

Perhaps I should soften the blow by saying, I intensely dislike the man. Nonetheless, if it weren’t for leaving my body I probably wouldn’t be having such a difficult time wrangling with the “life-saving” and “hero” issues.

Having an experience such as that sets me even further apart than I’ve already felt most of my life. It was an experience that forever changed me. It set me on a journey to find “the truth”, it empowered me so that I was able to question, for the first time in my life, the beliefs I was raised with. It released me from a consuming fear of death. And suddenly, the people I was surrounded by became spiritual beings that would soon enough transcend the physical and move on. I felt a powerful love for everyone – yet I had no patience for them. I had no patience for the petty things they quarrelled over, the bitterness they felt for their lives, the anger they so readily expressed toward each other. I acquired an ability to see the burdens they carried with them; to hear stray, distracted thoughts, to see auras surrounding them in all colors – from the brilliant, bursting white rays glowing around children; to the anemic, fading embers of adults.

I also became aware of something most would find sinister. Many times throughout my work days, people would walk through the store overshadowed by death. I knew they would soon transition. My soul would stir – responding to the nearness of a fellow-traveler, and to the appearance of The Presence that would usher them into a place I was turned away from. In so many ways, I cringed with envy. But it was the children that were most difficult for me to cope with. I anticipated their parents’ agony, and would realize that despite what I knew awaited us all, I, too, would wail in grief at the loss of a loved one – especially a child. As the Overshadowed person passed me, I felt the Presence pause ever so briefly before me, as if I were recognized, as if in greeting. The memory of that moment I spent outside my body would overwhelm me, and my spirit would stretch, my soul would pine, as though I were homesick for a place I had experienced only in passing. For now, this place here on earth, where I spent a lifetime, was most foreign, and the flight outside my body was intensely familiar. I missed it desperately. I wanted to go back home….

The daily arrival of Marcello into the tourist center had the same effect on me. It was a torturous feeling, every detail came back to me, and I’d become angry at him for having brought me back. Marcello eventually came to symbolize for me my struggle to re-adapt to the heaviness of life back in the physical, and the yearning I supressed to simply go back to that place out of space and time. A place of supreme comfort, supreme acceptance, supreme love, supreme peace…

I have presented myself in an ambiguous light. At once bitter about my return – centering that bitterness on one individual – and suddenly at peace with my life, basking in re-newed vision, driven to seek spiritual knowledge, and desiring to reach out to my fellow earth-dwellers. This is exactly how I feel, as though I have been neatly rent in two.

And then there’s the shape-shifting. Just kidding.

The following videos are priceless, encapsulating the very essence of the debate over the NDE. A greater concentration of veridical claims in one room never have I witnessed before and a drama by an NDEr who clearly doesn’t want to be alive. My favorite parts are when the NDEr laughs to herself when the camera happens to be on her as someone suggests the experience was not on the up and up. And the part where the audience cheers at the idea that the whole experience is a product of nothing but the dying brain. A show like this can occur in the UK but not here in America. In the UK people tend not to favor religion, though they are very much into new agey things. In America the audience of a show like this would never reveal overt skepticism or negativity towards religious claims and they would tend to use the experiences to support their Christian fundamentalism. Put down whatever you are doing and watch. Pay very close attention to the first video at the 6:55 mark.

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Original Link

A near-death experience, or NDE, is a profound psychological event that may occur to a person close to death or who is not near death but in a situation of physical or emotional crisis. Being in a life-threatening situation does not, by itself, constitute a near-death experience. It is the pattern of perceptions, creating a recognizable overall event, that has been called “near-death experience.”

Across thousands of years and in cultures around the world, people have described powerful experiences that follow this general pattern with its common features. At its broadest, the experiences involve perceptions of movement through space, of light and darkness, a landscape, presences, intense emotion, and a conviction of having a new understanding of the nature of the universe.

An NDE may begin with an out-of-body experience—a very clear perception of being somehow separate from one’s physical body, possibly even hovering nearby and watching events going on around the body. An NDE typically includes a sense of moving, often at great speed and usually through a dark space, into a fantastic landscape and encountering beings that may be perceived as sacred figures, deceased family members or friends, or unknown entities. A pinpoint of indescribable light may grow to surround the person in brilliant but not painful radiance; unlike physical light, it is not merely visual but is sensed as being an all-loving presence that many people define as the Supreme Being of their religious faith.

A near-death experience may include few or several of the common features. Many accounts of experiences include only one or two of the common features, but those were so powerful they created permanent changes in people’s lives.

The emotions of an NDE are intense and most commonly include peace, love and bliss, although a substantial minority are marked by terror, anxiety, or despair. Most people come away from the experience with an unshakable belief that they have learned something of immeasurable importance about the purpose of life. Overall, the entire experience is ineffable—that is, it is beyond describing; even art and metaphor cannot capture it. The effects of an NDE are often life-changing, and its details will typically be remembered clearly for decades.

What causes a near-death experience

In a scientific age, it is only natural that people want to understand the biological or psychological origins of experience, and a variety of neurological and chemical explanations have been proposed as the cause of NDEs: lack of oxygen, excess of carbon dioxide, seizure activity in the temporal lobe, the effect of drugs such as DMT or ketamine, hallucination, psychological avoidance of death, normal shutting down of brain activity, and a dozen or more other possibilities.

No scientific explanation so far has satisfactorily accounted for all aspects of NDEs or their effects. For example, numerous patients who were being clinically monitored and were known to be well oxygenated have later reported having an NDE during that time; drugs are not a factor in all NDEs; the characteristics of sleep disorders and NDEs are not identical. Hallucinations are highly individual and produce confusion and hazy memories, exactly the opposite characteristics of near-death experiences, which tend to share characteristics and be remembered vividly for decades as being “realer than real.” For every medical cause that has been put forward, there are reasons the NDE researchers say, “Not quite right.”

Further, despite reports that scientists have been able to induce NDEs through the use of drugs or electrical stimulation to the brain, none of the reports has been altogether convincing. The reports have been based on a partial similarity to a limited aspect of NDE, or they have involved very few people—sometimes only a single individual—in an experiment that does not really replicate a full NDE, or the aftereffects do not coincide with those of a true NDE. After decades of investigation, researcher and psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, MD, has reported, “No one physiological or psychological model by itself explains all the common features of NDE.”*

Thousands of documented NDEs challenge mainstream Western thinking and belief systems. Expectations about an afterlife may be challenged, and some people abruptly develop radically new interests and abilities after an NDE. One subject of debate is whether consciousness (mind) resides exclusively in the physical brain. For example, many people who have had an NDE accurately report events that occurred around their bodies when they were unconscious or even clinically dead—in at least one case, when clinical monitoring clearly showed no brain activity. Some NDEs have revealed family secrets, such as the existence of a never-mentioned sibling.  According to the prevailing belief system of industrialized societies, these things are scientifically impossible.

Although no relationship has been found between religious orientation and the likelihood of having an NDE, numerous studies have reported a significant correlation between the depth of an NDE and the importance a person subsequently places on religion or spiritual activity. For some, this is because they believe they have had a glimpse of Heaven and now believe absolutely in the existence of God and life after death. For others, it is because the NDE convinced them beyond question of the purpose of life as expressed in religious or spiritual teachings about love, service, and the reality of “something more” beyond physical existence.

Curiously, there has been no major study of the relationships between near-death experiences and the origins and teachings of the major religions.

- – - – - -

*Greyson, B. (2001). Posttraumatic stress symptoms following near-death experiences. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 71, 368-373.

I Don’t Know why most wait for death to make peace with God and man.

I do know, it is far more pleasant to Rest In Peace today.

I am enjoying the smell of dinner cooking.

The case of “Pam Reynolds” is a scam and a lie. She was demonstrably nowhere near standstill when her OBE began. The propagation of the mythology of the Pam Reynolds case by the those like Michael Sabom is simply negligent. It has been known all along that the OBE/NDE did not happen anywhere near the standstill procedure. Surprisingly, we have been lied to all this time. Outright. Knowingly.

The Pam Reynolds case was but a simple case of a woman having an OBE during anesthesia nowhere near standstill. This is not unprecedented. People become aware during anesthesia by the thousands each year. There remain some extremely interesting facts surrounding her ability to correctly identify some elements of the procedure, but it is not at all justified to say that it is impossible to have happened without an actual out of body perception.

Including this, Keith Augustine with his 2008 update goes into detail about cases of NDE OBE which describes things inaccurately in the environment just as sleep OBEs do. They seem to be the same experience. I strongly doubt that Parnia will find a single person who even sees that there is a sign above the OR, leave alone seeing what it actually is.

Can we really know what is going on in the brain during the NDE? This article originally published in Skeptic magazine 2008 has challenged many of my assumptions. According to the article, deep brain activity can result in vivid realistic hallucinatory narratives with no cortical activity. It also gives evidence to suggest that EEGs commonly do not register this deeper subcortical brain activity even when it is in seizure! I have no way to verify the veracity of these claims or whether the references are speculative or objective. I suspect much of this is debatable, since we need more understanding of the dying brain.

I wonder if OBEs are literally seizures of the brain. In all, we don’t really know what the state of the brain is during the NDE, it is impossible to say that ones brain is “dead” at a given point. One thing I tend to agree with the article about is that Sabom, Parnia and Van Lommel tend to greatly oversimplify the reality behind the dying brain. The only thing that would prove it is total veridical perception of something impossible to otherwise know. Have a look- Article.

I am all “wee-wee’d up” about a recent discovery I made in researching OBE’s. This guy to the left is from Russia and his name is Michael Raduga. He is a master OBEr, “Founder of the School of Out-of-Body Travel”,  travelling lecturer, and get this………………………………

He does not believe that OBEs are real. He thinks they are all “in ones mind”. This is the first person I have ever heard of who has really mastered this thing and come to the conclusion that it is all in his mind. He states on his website that for the first two years he explored the OBE state he was convinced it was proof of the afterlife. After two years, and after doing all sorts of experimentation he came to the personal conclusion that it *probably* is not. He seems to be open to the possibility that there may be something of consciousness that may be out of body, but he refers to his classic OBE states as “simulations”. Meetings with deceased loved ones? “Simulations”. Visitations by extraterrestrials? “Simulations”. He believes that NDEs, alien abduction and all the rest are identical “simulations”.  Needless to say, he can’t see target locations or items.

Funny just a day or two ago I wrote that I have never heard of someone who was adept at this who didn’t believe it. Now I have.

This guy comes across as sharp as a tack. Unfortunately, I think that he might have the wrong business plan. If he wants to sell books and lectures he needs to say “this is all REAL!!!!”

You can view his website or read the excellent online book he has written:

“The practice of phase states of the mind is the hottest and most promising pursuit of the modern age. Unlike in the past, the notions of “out-of-body travel” and “astral projection” have already lost their mystical halo, and their real basis has been studied in minute detail from the most non-nonsense approach.”

Recently I have found myself trying to come up with materialistic explanations for the claims of NDErs seeing things accurately out of body. I find myself seriously asking “how did Mrs. Z cheat exactly?”. We have only a few possibilities as follows:

a.) All OBEs are mental simulations and have nothing to do with the observable world. All accounts of veridical sight are fabricated, embellished or fraudulent.

b.) OBEs are generally just hyper-realistic dreams, but there is a certain psi component that occasionally allows one to see the physical environment clearly, like miss Z, Maria and her shoe, Pim van Lommel’s denture patient,  Pam Reynolds, etc.

c.) dream state OBEs are dreams and death state OBEs are real.

What else? I find c almost impossible to believe because very many NDE OBEs are described identically as sleep state OBEs with roaring sounds, popping out of the head and so on. One possibility is that the emotional vibrancy and alertness surrounding the death experience enhances clarity and increases the focus and likelihood that the experiencer actually sees something in the environ clearly. It could be that someone like miss Z is an exceptionally rare person who can actually see. I doubt it. Seems that the odds of Charles Tart’s random baby sitter somehow just happens to be the only person ever to live who can actually verify the act of seeing out of body is either an astronomically improbable event, a miracle designed by the powers on high who intentionally made sure she disappeared, or a bunch of bullshit. I suspect the latter, strongly.

As for the letter choices, I am so very tempted to go with a. But a handful of accounts seem so compelling that I can’t completely give up the possibility that some aspect of it is real. I suppose when Sam Parnia converts to atheism in a year or two after his study is published, we will be closer to an answer.

Todays reflections are about: Departure. In the moment of death what happens? For the Zen Buddhists it is an utmost important event, when the spiritual body separates from the physical one. Can we imagine it like an out-of-body experience, with the exception that the spirit wont re-unite with the body again? Post Lectum: Imagine a prayer being an offering of energy from the material world to the spiritual one, which includes a picture of the desired future. Daily Thoughts by Mon Rasz 07/2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hX9BDJVEmo

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9woem_dt017-departure-daily-thoughts-by-m

Tags: Buddhism, daily, death, departure, discussion, NDE, near death experience, OOBE, out of body experience, reflections, spiritual, thoughts, world, Zen

Todays reflections are about: Departure. In the moment of death what happens? For the Zen Buddhists it is an utmost important event, when the spiritual body separates from the physical one. Can we imagine it like an out-of-body experience, with the exception that the spirit wont re-unite with the body again? Post Lectum: Imagine a prayer being an offering of energy from the material world to the spiritual one, which includes a picture of the desired future. Daily Thoughts by Mon Rasz 07/2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hX9BDJVEmo

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9woem_dt017-departure-daily-thoughts-by-m

Tags: Buddhism, daily, death, departure, discussion, near death experience, NDE, out of body experience, OOBE, reflections, spiritual, thoughts, world, Zen

This is the most disingenuous hatchet job I’ve seen Penn and Teller do. They pretend to examine the NDE and remain intentionally ignorant about key aspects of it. The whole thing is treated as if an obvious result of “lack of oxygen”. The garbled and meaningless hallucinations of fighter pilots are equated with fully lucid experiences “more real than anything on earth”. This whole video sequence was story-boarded on a spiral bound notebook laying on Penn’s lap while he was taking a shit the diameter of a coke can and scribbling away without the slightest degree of knowledge or research.

Wednesday Night November 4, call in to chat about

your favorite Psychic and Paranormal Topics.

Do you love Ghost Stories?  Wonder if there

is life after death.  Have you had an NDE?

Do you wonder if you astral travel in your sleep?

Do you get Premonitions, or Dreams that foretell the

future?

Just wanna chat with Toroto’s Best Psychic, Betsy Balega?

Then call me at 646-915-9574.

Lines open at 9 PM. Wednesday, November 4th.

I just want to know: will I ever be able to relax?

I am on edge all of the time, over little things, over nothing. I feel like I’m walking on a fraying tightrope, over a pit of snapping alligators, with no safety net to save me if—when—I fall. I feel like those neurotic dogs you see from time to time, endlessly chasing their tails; they have no idea why they’re doing it, clearly, but they’re driven, they must, do it nonetheless.

I hate this. I hate when the panic stifles me, paralyzes me, so that I can’t do anything that I need to do. Someone once said to me, “Well, wait a minute, anxiety makes it so you can’t sit still, so you have to be doing something, so how can you not be getting something done?”

Because there is no one-size-fits-all blanket cover panic attack, that’s how. Or why. Because it depends on a million other factors, and not just the mental health articles whose titles you skim online.

If the manic phase of bipolar mania has me in its teeth, I can’t stop doing things. I can’t. I will go until I quite literally drop from pain and/or exhaustion. And if the RSD [Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Disease] I live with is also in high gear on a high-anxiety mania day, I’m screwed, because on the one hand, I have to move, I have to do things, but on the other hand, I’m dealing with swollen and/or discolored limbs, intense skin sensitivity, and pain that is so excruciating that I can’t even bear to take a shower or brush my hair.

When my husband’s blood pressure was up high once more at a recent visit to his pain physician (he, too, is disabled, but his injuries were on the job), his medical provider said he needed to go see his family doctor and that she would forward documentation of his blood pressure measurements. “I don’t have a family doctor yet,” my husband said and she shot back, “You’ve been telling me that for months.”

I jumped in and explained the bizarre and complicated situation we’ve been in with our Medicaid and food stamps applications for over six months now, all thanks to Medicaid fraud and identity theft, committed by persons eager to destroy our lives just a little bit more.

What I didn’t, couldn’t, say was, that it’s still going on is my fault. There’s a stack of papers on my desk that I need to sign, fill out, fax or send back in that will get the process completed, only some days, my anxiety is so bad, I can’t do anything, can’t deal with anything. Some days, the anxiety is so paralyzing I can’t bear to walk across the street to my mailbox, or if I do, I can’t bear to open any mail. Some days, it’s so intense that I can’t hold a conversation nor put together a coherent thought. Some days, it’s so bad that rather than call the electric company to make payment arrangements, I will have to put it off so that I end up having to go to a local charity agency for assistance, where I have to stand outside in line two hours before they open, because it’s just that bad.

I can’t wait until I can get to a psychiatrist again, even though I’ve only ever had one really good one, one that I felt I could trust, one that understood me. The last one I had was through a low-cost clinic where we used to live, and she was a real prize.

The first thing she said to me after reading my file was, “Well, I have chronic anxiety, but I know how to control it without meds. If I’m driving when it happens, I just pull over to the side of the road and take a few deep breaths.” I said that if that worked for her, she’d never experienced a true panic attack.

The psychologist she referred me to for “talk therapy” (gods, what a waste!) was an innocent young thing who might be a really good therapist one day, after she’s lived a bit and got some real-life experiences under her hand bag. That naïve young lady said to me one day, “I saw the bumper stickers on your car, so you’re a Wiccan, right?” In point of fact, I am not a Wiccan; I am a Pagan. Before I could respond, she went on, “I know what that’s all about. I have a friend and she does rituals ‘n stuff.”

Rituals ‘n stuff?

One thing that this young woman did encourage me to do was take up a craft to help distract my mind from hysteria-inducing trains of thought. I had always wanted to learn to knit, so I bought some basic instruction books and supplies and started knitting. On approximately my third appointment with Ms. I Can Control My Anxiety Without Meds psychiatrist, I had brought my knitting with me, as my appointments with her almost never started on, or even nearly on, time.

I was stuffing it into a bag, this little scarf I was working on, when she walked into her office. She didn’t even ask if she could see it, but grabbed it from me, sat down at her desk, proceeded to heavily criticize my work (I knew it wasn’t perfect before she started in), rip out several rows of stitches and tell me she’d show me the right way to do it because, “I can knit in the dark. I used to practice at boarding school after lights out when I was a girl. This is just awful.”

Whoopee for you.

She didn’t stop to consider the effects of her actions on a patient who has serious self-esteem issues, let alone how it would affect my anxiety. I took the knitting home and put it in a box, and did not even try to knit anything for the next two years.

While I was waiting to be transferred to another psychiatrist, the apartment complex we lived in at the time experienced a serious fire, courtesy of some kids playing in their mother’s boyfriend’s home meth-lab experiments. It traumatized me so greatly that I couldn’t get myself to leave the house for a couple of weeks afterwards. I mean, I couldn’t even step outside the door to go to the mailbox or look at a sunset or BBQ some steaks on the porch. During that time, I needed a refill of the Klonopin that she prescribed me (because, in her words, only “drug addicts ever take Xanax and pain medicine of any kind at the same time”. I know; whatever), so called and spoke with her assistant. I had called several days earlier to reschedule my appointment, and had missed none prior to this. When I asked for the refill, I didn’t even ask for a whole month’s supply; I was only asking for enough so that I could get through one of the worst prolonged panic attack episodes I have ever experienced to date.

Her reply was that if I wanted more medicine to cope with my anxiety, I would have to beat my anxiety.

Huh?

I never went back to her again.

Twice, it’s been so bad that I have tried to get myself hospitalized in order to get help.

The first time was shortly after the apartment fire incident. It was after hours and the on-call nurse told me to go to a local twenty-four hour mental health crisis agency, so I did. They acted like I was a criminal, and confiscated my purse and yelled at me for not bringing all of my medications with me. Then they shut me in a little room for a couple of hours. When someone finally came in to see me, it wasn’t a doctor or a nurse or even a psychologist. It was just a regular staff member. Keep in mind that I had filled out no paperwork, given no information beyond my name, that I was having a severe panic attack, and that I wanted to be admitted as an in-patient for psychiatric care.

Oh, yeah, I had also been asked if I had health care coverage. I did not.

This non-medical staff person told me she was sending me back home because my case wasn’t serious enough. What it really came down to, I learned, was that I didn’t have health insurance.

A year ago, we had just learned that the house we had been buying on contract was never the property of the person who “sold” it to us, and that we were in all likelihood going to lose a large, large, large chunk of money and our home. It was a really dark, terrible time, and I had a series of horrible panic attacks. The climax came one day on my way home from a local food pantry when I was sitting at a stoplight and this thought crossed my mind: “I don’t want to exist. I just don’t want to exist anymore.”

That scared me badly. Since a prolonged NDE [Near Death Experience] as an infant, Death has not been something I would willingly seek or embrace. No, I didn’t have a bad NDE, quite the opposite (sometime, I’ll try to write about that), but it did drive me to grab Life and hang on tight.

So, having a thought like not wanting to exist scared me enough that I drove straight to the nearest hospital, and went to the ER. There, the triage nurse hustled me to a room as a “possible threat of suicide”. Four hours later, no one had come in to see me, barring the registration clerk who’d popped in for paperwork. Nothing like inane questions about medical insurance and assets you don’t possess when you’re in the grip of a horrific panic attack.

I tried going to the nurses’ station for help. I tried flagging a doctor down in the hallway. Finally, I went to a payphone in the lobby and called the hospital operator, and asked to speak to the manager of the Emergency Department.

That person came straight down to the ER, walked back into my room with me, and fetched a nurse. She stayed with me until the doctor came in to talk to me, but said she’d come back and check on me shortly. I really appreciated her efforts then, but things didn’t get any better. The doctor asked me why I was having a panic attack, and I tried to explain in as few words as possible. He kind of stood there, toying with his lower lip and said, “Well, okay, we’ll get you something to calm you down.” I begged to be admitted; I told him I knew I needed serious psychiatric help. When he left the room, I was under the impression that I would be admitted, and I felt so relieved.

Then a nurse came in, gave me some miniscule dose of Adavan, and handed me my discharge papers. I was incredulous. I was standing there, bawling my eyes out, begging to be admitted to their psych ward (which they did have), when the ER manager popped back in. Apprised of the doctor’s decision to discharge me, she patted my shoulder and said, “Well, honey, if you’re not going to have health care coverage, you’d better hope that we elect some people who will make medical insurance available to all Americans in this next election, otherwise, you probably won’t ever get any real help.”

And that was it. I was sent on my way with a “checklist for panic attacks” that included such gems as “don’t forget to breathe” and “avoid stimulants and stressful situations”.

Why it is so hard to get help for mental health problems? Good help? Good medical care, period?

Our Medicaid and food stamps applications are in process now; I’ve finally managed to get nearly everything that they’ve requested back to them, but I have to wonder, given my experiences with mental health care providers to date—even when I did have excellent medical coverage—will it ever matter?

« La grande soirée du paranormal » s’intéresse aux témoignages spectaculaires de ceux qui croient aux manifestations de l’au-delà, mais également aux avancées scientifiques qui peuvent expliquer certains de ces phénomènes dits « paranormaux ». présentée par Damien Hammouchi

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Le 28 octobre prochain, Damien Hammouchi présentera un nouveau numéro de « La Grande Soirée du Paranormal ». Elle sera consacrée aux expériences autour de la mort.

La mort fait partie intégrante de la vie. Paradoxe certes, mais réalité humaine ! S’il existe aujourd’hui quelques certitudes autour de la mort, trop de questions restent encore sans réponse. Que savons-nous de la mort ? Comment avons-nous appris à vivre avec ? Mais surtout que se passe-t-il après ? Nos reportages et nos invités aborderont ce thème sans tabou. Depuis la Préhistoire, les hommes organisent des rituels funéraires. Nous verrons comment ces rites sont devenus un moyen de supporter l’insupportable. Quel est cet aller-retour aux frontières de la mort que tant de personnes décrivent ? On l’appelle communément « Expérience de Mort Imminente » (EMI).

Nous écouterons des témoignages saisissants et apprendront où en est la recherche scientifique sur ce phénomène.

-Sarah Mercier : anthropologue et présidente de l’International Association Near Death Studies (IANDS).

- Jean-Jacques Charbonier : anesthésiste-réanimateur, auteur de « Les Preuves scientifiques d’une vie après la vie » (Editions Exergue, 2008)

- Nicole Dron qui a vécu une expérience de mort imminente (EMI) durant une opération chirurgicale Inconnue dont personne n’est jamais revenue, la mort ne cesse d’intriguer les vivants : certains n’hésitent pas à essayer de communiquer avec des esprits de défunts autour de séance de spiritisme.

Nous recevrons des spécialistes :

- Jacques Peccatte, président du Cercle Spirite Allan Kardec de Paris.

- Henri Vignaud et Yonelle Delle : médiums qui effectueront tous deux une séance en plateau pour tenter de communiquer avec un défunt.

Marie-Chantal Benoît viendra témoigner de son long travail de deuil suite à l’assassinat de son mari sous ses yeux. Elle dit pouvoir communiquer aujourd’hui avec lui.

Christophe Barbé nous expliquera pourquoi la survivance de l’âme est pour lui, une réalité incontestable. Tout au long de l’émission, l’écrivain Bernard Werber, nous donnera ses opinions et convictions sur ces sujets.

Retrouvez les sites des invités :* Jean-Jacques Charbonier : http://jean-jacques.charbonier.fr/

* Sarah Mercier : http://www.s17production.com/

* Bernard Werber : http://www.bernardwerber.com/

* Nicole Dron : http://www.nicoledron.com/

* Christophe Barbé : http://www.christophebarbe.com/

* Marie-Chantal Benoît : http://www.mcbenoit.com/

* Henri Vignaud : http://henry.vignaud.free.fr/

* Jacques Peccatte : http://www.allankardecparis.com/

Site de Direct8 :  http://www.direct8.fr/

Last friday, CNN had an article titled ” Doctor Says Near-Death Experiences are in the Mind”.

The gist: These so-called near-death experiences (a misnomer actually; you are clinically dead) are simply chemical activity in the brain – nothing more.

This organic theory for NDEs is absolutely loved by atheists. The message? There is no after-life; death is final.The message to the sub-concious? Live it up. Do what you want. There is no God, therefore no sin, and no judgement (the bane of the liberal mind). This is why liberals abhor judgement in the real world – being suspicious of Muslims, denying (or trying to explain away)  black crime statistics, gay relationships, and fatherless children – all those involve a judgement. To have a judgement, you must have a right and wrong to base that judgement on. To have a right and wrong, invites guilt and the possibility of having to give up a very pleasurable behavior – or making a painful observation of someone, including the self. That’s intolerable, to the liberal atheist mind.

The converse is, of course, that there is, in fact, life after physical death. This theme is obviously central in the three major religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism –  all of which involve a God – and therefore, judgement and accountability. This is unacceptable to the atheist mind, which I find to be largely liberal politically. If you are living what these religions consider an un-holy life, and there is a God, then you’ll find a very conflicted individual; you have an entity with absolute power over your future versus your sinful, selfish desires.  Conflict is something the mind does not  like, so it of course seeks to resolve it. Some people will change their sinful behaviors, finding this gives the most pleasurable result, and/or less painful. Others, like atheists, simply try to destroy the possibility of God to lessen the conflict – no God, no conflict.

But what of these NDEs and the atheist’s organic explanation of them? I’ll let you read the article to see those explanations. The mistake these skeptics consistently make is, this could be an explanation, therefore, it is the explanation. For example, during brain surgery, a surgeon can use a mild electrical probe to stimulate a place on the brain, and the patient will have an experience – it might be the taste of an orange, hearing a bell, smelling a rose – all of which in fact are not happening, but the perception is still real to the person. Normally, these perceptions are reality-based; a person really is smelling a rose, or tasting an orange, and not having their brain stimulated by the probe. The atheist would argue that what is actually happening is the probe sensation, and the person would argue that the actual event is occurring, and they are experiencing it. Because the atheist can reliably replicate the experience on the patient, that is the real cause of their experience, not actually experiencing a smell or taste. Incidentally, you see this in the man-made global warming mania – it looks like man is causing global warming, so it is that way.

What these NDE deniers always seem to forget to address is the reports that some of these people make of actually witnessing events occurring in reality that they should not be able to, since they are clinically dead – a component of which, is the brain ceasing to have any electrical activity. What explanation can a denier give when a person can relate, once they come back to life, of what a nurse said or did, or what unfamiliar medical instruments a doctor used on them, while they were “dead”?  Some even report traveling to another place – a room next door, or even to their home – and actually reporting what happened there with accuracy. That can’t possibly happen even in the (essentially) dream state that NDE deniers contend is the cause of NDEs.

Being a christian, I of course, believe in the after life, and therefore, these NDE accounts make sense. When you don’t want there to be an afterlife – and therefore the possibility of God (and gasp, judgement!) then you do everything you can to try to explain away these experiences.

Echt waar heus gebeurd:

Een paar uur nadat de 65-jarige Rae Kupferschmidt  uit Lake Elmo (Minnesota) een zware hersenbloeding kreeg, brachten artsen haar familie het slechte nieuws: ‘hersendood’. In overeenstemming met Rae’s codicil werd de beademingsapparatuur losgekoppeld en was het verder wachten op haar dood. Vrienden en familie waren gebeld voor het laatste afscheid.

Dochter Lisa, verpleegster van beroep, wreef liefdevol een ijsblokje over moeder’s droge lippen en was eigenlijk nog niet eens verbaasd toen die haar lippen tuitte en er zachtjes aan begon te sabbelen. Sabbelen is een instinctieve reactie, wist Lisa, die diep in de hersenstam wordt aangestuurd door een deel van het brein dat mogelijk nog niet was aangetast. Maar toen het volgende ijsblokje praktisch uit haar vingers werd gezogen, informeerde ze voor de zekerheid toch maar even of er iemand thuis was: “Mom… Mom, are you in there?” De reactie deed de familie achteruit deinzen: Rae had duidelijk geknikt en een enkeling meende dat de koude vochtige lippen zelfs “Yes” probeerden te zeggen…

Lang verhaal kort: de artsen werden gewaarschuwd en men bracht de doodgewaande op een holletje naar de OK, waar operatief een verkeerde klodder bloed uit het pannetje werd geschept. Inmiddels loopt Rae weer vrolijk tussen de levenden rond. Of dat een zegen is valt nog te bezien.

Van haar kortstondige coma kon mevrouw Kupferschmidt zich niks herinneren. Oh ja, ineens toch wel, engelen en wit licht en liefde en dat soort shit weer natuurlijk – je zal toch Amerikaan wezen en ergens eens níet een opportunity in ontdekken (zucht): “I still don’t know what my task is here on this Earth, but I know God’s not done with me yet. How else could you explain everything that has happened to me?”

Jaha, daar sta je dan, als Jood of Moslim of Hindu of nog erger zijnde, wel mooi even met je mond vol tanden hè?

Tegen Good Morning America verklaarde Rae onlangs: “God’s got something for me to do. When I learn it, I’ll unfold it and follow it.” Kennelijk heeft God er machtig weinig haast mee Rae en haar familie duidelijk te maken dat je niet altijd alles moet geloven wat de dokter zegt…

Article at CNN health gives a few perspectives on NDEs.

Angel Radio with Dr. Kelli

Kelli works with the angelic realms, the ascended masters, council of light and many other Divine beings of light working in the spirit of love and oneness. She uses her Divine connections to the angelic and spiritual realms to channel information for healing and guidance as needed.

Angel Radio with Dr. Kelli The Angel Whisperer
Call-in Number: (646) 200-4671
Website: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/TheAngelwhisperer
]]> http://ghostlynotes.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/nde-%e2%80%93-just-a-dream/ Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:25:14 +0000 WFMeyer http://ghostlynotes.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/nde-%e2%80%93-just-a-dream/

A CNN article tells the near-death-experience story of Laura Geraghty, who suffered a sudden heart-attack and was clinically dead for 57 minutes

At that point, Geraghty says, her body died. She remembers watching the scene unfold — as if from above.

“I floated right out of my body. My body was here, and I just floated away. I looked back at it once, and it was there.”

Geraghty says she saw deceased loved ones, her mother and her ex-husband.

“It was very peaceful and light and beautiful. And I remember like, when you see someone you haven’t seen in a while, you want to hug them, and I remember trying to reach out to my ex-husband, and he would not take my hand. And then they floated away.”

Next, she says, she was overwhelmed by “massive energy, powerful, very powerful energy.”

“When that was happening, there were pictures of my son and my daughter and my granddaughter, and every second, their pictures flashed in my mind, and then I came back.”

Dr. Kevin Nelson, a Louisville neurologist who studies near-death-experiences claims they are part of the dream mechanism of the brain.

But people like Laura who’ve lived through this experience claim it is something much more than just some dream mechanism.

Bob Schriever of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association says, “Why are so many people dreaming the same thing? How can so many people, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced this, how can we all be dreaming the same thing and describe the exact same thing?”

You can read the entire article here: Doctor says near-death experiences are in the mind

For even more info you should check out the Near Death Experience Research Foundation

Seeing deceased loved ones

A free, on-line book and statistical report on Near-Death Experiences is now available at www.NearLifeExp.com. The book is entitled “A Measure of Heaven.” It’s an on-line ebook.

The web page displays both a book and a statistical report.
If you are interested in spiritual matters, and the afterlife (heaven) then you might get something out of this.

You can see a short video on the subject at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR5U8rZKevg