Thanks. I'm glad it has been well received (so far...)

Ad astra per aspera

Actually there had been investigations/research done into NDE's. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross comes to mind as well as Prof. Raymond Moody and Dr. Michael Sabom whom I mentioned above. The problem is, that the topic is often considered metaphysical or parapsychological and thus something not to be taken serious.

Raymond Moody - near-death experience research

In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody's best-selling book entitled Life After Life focused public attention on the near-death experience like never before. It was Moody who actually coined the term "near-death experience." You can read more about Dr. Moody at his website. Moody is also the author of the following books, The Light Beyond, Reunions, Life After Loss, Coming Back, Reflections, and The Last Laugh, 

Moody recorded and compared the experiences of 150 persons who died, or almost died, and then recovered. His research describes the results of decades of inquiry into the NDE phenomenon. He outlines nine elements that generally occur during NDEs.

and
Michael Sabom - near-death experience research

Michael Sabom, M.D., is a cardiologist whose first book, Recollections of Death, is considered to be a landmark in the field of near-death research. He is a leading authority with over twenty years in the field. In 1994, he founded the Atlanta Study which is the first comprehensive investigation of its kind into NDEs. Its purpose was to document the life-and-death dramas played out in operating rooms and hospital beds - and the simultaneous events unseen by medical personnel but reported with astonishing clarity and conviction by nearly 50 individuals who returned from death's door. Dr. Sabom's latest book, Light and Death, shares with the world his findings from the Atlanta Study. Sabom, also a born-again Christian, scrutinizes NDEs in light of what the Bible has to say about death and dying, the realities of light and darkness, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Below are the findings from Sabom's Atlanta Study.

We're at the d'OH! stage of understanding the brain, never mind the mind.

It was recently discovered Kim Peek, the basis of The Rain Man, lacks a corpus callosum - that little bit that connects the two hemispheres.  Ain't got one.  According to the neurophysiology I learned as a youngster that would mean he's either dead or a vegetable.  Admittedly he doesn't exhibit a full range of human response.  And So What?  

And that is the question: at what point does human experience, and the experience of human experience, trump expectation and description of human experience, and the experience of human experience?  Until we can Falsify previous paradigms and heuristics there is no way to give rise to More Better explanations based on More Better Theories.

 

No one could have predicted

A pint at the pub - that's where I have been.  Wasn't expecting to come back to so many comments.

tiagoantao:

Our human cognitive ability might be not enough to understand the universe

I think that is a really interesting point and probably one that many wouldn't like to put forward as being possible.

For me, I don't think I am looking for an answer to what the experience was because although I can't explain it, it doesn't matter - no answer could change the impact it had on me.

I'd certainly be interested in seeing a diary that expands on these thoughts!

Ad astra per aspera

It is often said, a map is not a territory. But a territory is not a map just as well. To comprehend, we need to build (or use) a map. A territory like the whole universe can hardly be comprehensible. Or at least, no one will ever able to prove that he knows everything.

Maybe we do not really have "our own limitations", in the sense that our brain in principle can deduce anything that can be concluded by any kind of rational thinking. But there may be limitations of "any rational thinking", but we still may need to go beyond for mere survival. We may need to consider conspiracy theories in dealing with enemies; we may need to outright believe that global cataclysms will leave survival chances. A feasible next step in the evolution of scientific method could be building up discipline of working with plenty of poorly verifiable (or falsifiable) models. More models (=maps) would have to be allowed, at least in dealing with burning economical or ecological problems. Occam's razor and immediate empirical testability won't be the only factors in ranking models; we may value richness of connections, concreteness of guidance, degree of inspiration. Even "story-telling" explanatory power can be most valuable if broad communication of a theory is important.

And more patience with verifying those models. Say, even in "perfectly scientific" physics, what the new CERN Large Hadron Collider  is supposed to do is to test 30-years old theories. How much time should we give to test a social theory? Something like 70 years? We may also have to learn uncertainty. I think that human desire for certainty is overestimated. People are able (and love) to gamble as well.

I suspect that models of NDE's (in particular) will hardly be free of hardly testable features. So far, my model is similartly simplistic as the rational "brain processes" model. I see an evolutionary significance of NDE's: it is not only birth, growth and procreation that are genetically-neurologically planned in detail. Getting old or dying must be particular routines as well. If that helps to make the "good choice" even in just a fraction of occurrences, that is already significant. (In general, I am still impressed by Timothy Leary's eight-circuit brain model, popularized by Robert Anton Wilson.)

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. ...

Sir Arthur Eddington

One of my favorite quotes. I have always believed it to be essentially true.


I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears

Precisely what I've been nattering on about here for a couple of years ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

It turns out both from physiology and the psychology disciplines emotions are a necessity for cognition.

Implying, those that have greater connections between the two hemispheres and better connections between the frontal Temporal and posterior Frontal lobes have better grasp of Reality -- whatever that is -- then those without such pathways.

Since women, in general, have more neural pathways than men the implication can be made women have a better grasp of Reality -- whatever that is -- than men.

Therefore, the average woman is more likely to have a better grasp on Reality -- whatever that is -- than the average man.

Therefore, under Indeterminate Epistemological situations one is better off to accept the average woman's grasp of the situation than the average man's.

Conclusion: If you are a guy, Shut Up and listen to what {Fran, In Wales, metavision, Barbara, Sam, ElaineinNM...} tells you.

QED.

:-)

No one could have predicted

Sounds a lot like what I do in my work, some of it coming from NLP. Actually I worked with a boy who had a phobia of fireworks, and by changing the internal markers and the narrative of what fireworks mean, he is now able to watch fireworks again.

What he says sounds a lot like NLP which has used the creation of new narratives for quite a while - it's called 'change history' or in what goes in the same direction 'Reframing'.

You might want to read Robert Monroes book Journeys out of the Body. :-)

Robert Monroe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Allan Monroe (October 30, 1915-March 17, 1995) was an advertising executive from Virginia who became known for his research into altered consciousness. His 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body is credited with popularizing the term "out-of-body experience". In 1978 Monroe founded The Monroe Institute, which carried on his work after his death. ^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

There is no theory in which, from which, meaning can arise.

This isn't exactly so. In the Bhagavad-Gita, or Song of God, as translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, with introduction by Aldous Huxley, C. 1944 & 1951 by the Vedanta Society of S. California, the authors present a similar situation and an underlying philosophy that supports that situation.  
From Huxley's Introduction:

More than twenty-five centuries have passed since that which has been called the Perennial Philosophy was first committed to writing; and in the course of those centuries it has found expression, now partial, now complete, now in this form, now in that, again and again.  In Vedanta and Hebrew prophecy, in the Tao Teh King and the Platonic dialogues, in the Gospel according to St. John  and Mahayana theology, in Plotinus...among the Persial Sufis and the Christian Mystics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance--the Perennial Philosophy has spoken almost all of the languages of Asia and Europe....But under all of this confusion of tongues and myths...there remains a Hihgest Common Factor, which is the Perennial Philosophy in what may be called its chemically pure state.

-Skip-

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
 First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness--the world of things and animals and men and even gods--is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all paratial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.
 Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning.  This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
 Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul.  It is possible for a man if he so desires, to identify himnself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
 Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Others have said that on the level of the self, time and distance do not exist.  I have had certain experiences waking, dreaming and under the influence of psychoactive agents that are congruent with these doctrines.  I immediately see congruences with the experiences described by Crazy Horse above.

The situation:

In the Gita dialog there are four speakers: King Dhritarashtra, Sanjaya, Arjuna and Krishna.

Dhritarashtra is blind.  The sage Vyasa (who is tratitionally supposed to be the author of the Gita) offers to restore his sight in order that he may watch the battle of Kurukshetra.  But Dhritarashtra refuses.  He cannot bear to see his kinsmen killed.  So Vyasa confers the psychic powers of clairvoyance and clairaudience upon Sanjaya, who is Dhritarashtra's minister and charioteer.  As they sit together in the palace, Sanjaya describes to his master everything he sees and hears on the distant battlefield.

My wife has had experiences with the voice described by In Wales.  She also experienced a psychic visit by a friend and teacher in a dream state which she described to me as electrifyingly real.  The next day he called to ask her if if she saw him when he visited her the previous evening!

I believe that direct experience is primary and while our culture encourages us to reject what we cannot understand, that it is important to cultivate an ability to hold on to inexplicable experiences pending the development of an understanding in which they can be explained.  It is really not so hard to do.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The term Synchronicity probably applies here, but what that means scientifically?

A scientific question would be one answerable by the scientific method. And since that sound tautologic, I will give an example of what I consider a good question to the study described in the diary.

Can people experiencing a NDE percieve and later remember things viewed from an angle that they would have no access to otherwise?

And then you can device a test as:

European Tribune - 'Woo-woo' vs science

The current research programme involves placing artwork in emergency rooms/operating theatres that can only be viewed from high up, in an attempt to verify whether or not reported out of body experiences have any substance to them. (Excuse the pun).

If the test turns out positive, then you can go on and modify it in different ways and see if you can learn about boundary conditions for the phenomena. What this means or what it is can not be answered, only how it manifests. What you want to call whatever you find for - soul, ESP, quantum-information transfer or simply witchcraft - is very much a part of the scientific canon, but not of the method.

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I'm also glad In Wales did.

But she wrote that she saw her body in the bed,  That at least hints that "something" left the body behind, something with consciousness.  Could be "attempts by the brain to make sense of inchoate stimuli caused by random firing of neurons during REM sleep." or it could be something else.

Me screaming "Let go Joe" over and over at the moment of my father's painful death across the country, out loud in an empty hallway at the top of my lungs, however, did involve the body.  Suggesting there's more to the eye than meets the eye, et. al.

Skennah Kowa

But In Wales has described her experience very clearly and trying to rewrite it for her with a different perspective would not be her experience anymore.  I think honoring the original and letting the owner decide its meaning, is what matters.

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

I am utterly convinced that it was not a dream and nor was it dream-like.  I've had hallucinations before and it wasn't like that either. That is about as much as I can say with certainty, but I did 'leave' my body and look back on myself.

There wasn't a 'he' behind me any more than my home disappeared into the light as I opened the door.

But the clarity of the voice is not something I have never 'heard' for real which is another thing that strikes me about it, looking back.

I was very accepting of the experience at the time and still young enough that the boundaries were still blurred between what 'can' be real and what can't. I possibly still believed that swallowing cherry stones would make a tree grow in my stomach.  

I think what adds another dimension to it is that I was a child and not an adult which limits the possible construction of narratives around the experience.  I'm not saying that the brain didn't construct something ie why a 'he' and not a gender neutral or female presence, why the journey towards the voice, why the life review, why the very clear message that I am here for a reason?  

I was told in words (not through telepathic understanding) that it wasn't time for me to go and that I had to go back. I didn't 'consciously' choose to live within the context of the narrative, I chose to be 'good' as a result of the experience. Perhaps that translates to a fight to stay alive as I was dying, through whatever the NDE was.

All I can give you is what I recall, and given that I didn't speak to anybody about it for years, the 'narrative' is entirely as I perceived it at the time and held in my memory.

Ad astra per aspera

I could accept your explanation fully for what is called Lucid Dreaming, but not for NDE's or OOB's. These are very different qualities to them, though I never had an NDE, I do know that OOB's and Dreams are very different experiences - the Lucid Dreams might have a narrative, but the OOB and I assume the NDE is just different.

It looks really interesting, thanks.

Ad astra per aspera

kcurie:

Regarding your near death experience, it has nothing to do with science, it can not be explained or not not explained or qualified or disqualified or even interpreted in the framework of science.. it has nothing to do with science...

beautiful...

what i find so liberating about what you say, is that it makes me confront some social conditioning that i have imbibed along the way somehow that tries to dictate that something that science has not understood yet is beyond the pale, 'out there', or 'woo-woo'.

this assertion, however subconscious, has conditioned some of my attitudes, sometimes in rebellion against it, in that i recognised a certain insecurity in human nature that makes us crave certainty, however illusionary, as a fixed point, a north star, against which every supposition is aligned.

this is how groupthink can be so destructive, as it offers a kind of herd-pleasure, during which one's critical intelligence can easily abdicate, following someone else's lodestone...

science, like some octopus, likes to stick its probes and tentacles into and around everything and 'regularise' it by attaching it to some certainty, some predictability, some set of laws, so then it can be 'safe' to acknowledge, 'sanely' etc.

problem being, science reverses its opinions all the time!

it's natural to catalogue, pigeon-hole, quantify and summate, and perhaps eventually the states of mind/soul in wales, crazy horse and others describe here will one day be as mysterious as a phone call, which in turn would have seemed impossibly fanciful to most cavemen.

most of us couldn't write a scientific paper on how a phone works, but we make calls blithely every day.
unfortunately, if a mind is raised on too much (false) certainty, it goes into spasm while trying to embrace something too abstract for its cognition, and even locks down and even strikes back, threatened that its foundation may be rocked by something that hitherto has resisted scientific explanation.

there's an amusing irony i find about ET, in its earnest desire for rigor, spending countless computer man/hours debating the finest points of complex, arcane, financial constructions of diabolical import, all based on disastrously misconstrued axioms and assertions as arrogant and results as inhumanly uncompassionate as any weird cult you could name!

yet...

god forbid we stray too far off the beaten track...

i also find it fascinating how much interest there was in rg's tarot series, how until jerome 'banned' astrology how much people opened up about all sorts of interesting stories about themselves around that most unscientific of subjects.

it looks to me that by sticking to the subjects under the rubric of ET, we get very few females interested to stick around or do more than lurk, which has brought on the interesting conversations when fran opened that box on friday, and that while we can have long, fun-packed threads on very 'male' subjects, all well and good, but there's a plethora of human interest stories that presently is somehow squelched by a somewhat insecure fear we won't be seen as Serious People^TM if we go into woo-woo land.

me, i live there, so no biggy!

...but i didn't come to ET for some kind of affirmation of my spritual beliefs, i came because of some very wry, astute, occasionally visionary commentary on hard-core issues like energy, finance, ponzi schemes, and political skullduggery.

but i stayed for the shoe-blogging, putin beefcake pics, and because like any self-respecting masochist, i enjoy having my tender, fluffy lttle soul getting slapped around by hardcore rational materialists on a gleefully debunking roll...

/snark

ET wants to be all things to all people, and i think it's fun to play with it, as it forms under our fingertips. my guess is that we're all much more interesting than we're letting on, and that we've got the male part sussed and solid, and should listen to the women more, allowing ET to flower into its future as an E-zine with all kinds of quirky weirdness to balance out the d-r-y analyses that are always educational, but relentlessly left-brain much of the time.

...and then maybe rg will come back and play with us more often again!

* this is not a criticism of ET, i love(d) it just the way it is/was, just an observation of how it's trying to morph into something more colourful sometimes, and an attempt to describe the forces in play encouraging or holding back that change.

thanks for your story, in wales! it was beautiful, did i say that already?

:)

ET, where the rational and the fantastic collide...

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Regarding your near death experience, it has nothing to do with science, it can not be explained or not not explained or qualified or disqualified or even itnerpreted int he framework of science.. it has nnothign to do with science...

We don't have the tools needed to even attempt a full understanding of the operation of the brain. We might someday.

The best argument I've seen against ever having an understanding of the brain (I think Sven has brought it up before, and I have seen it elsewhere) is "the brain can't understand itself." I don't agree with it, but it's interesting to consider.

you are the media you consume.

Nicely written Helen and not a bad way to sort the different pieces together. It's an analogy that drifts in and out of reality since the tool is a mimic of the original to some extent. And, just as we know so little of the components of the tool set (my mind gets tickled by quantum entanglements, like this: INVISIBLE HAND, AND A QUICK ONE AT THAT, we are way behind where we should be in knowing about the original.

The evolution aspect is interesting, isn't it? The theory is, as you have stated, that 'evolution has no interest...'. But if evolution is the remainder of the selected people who did a certain action for some survival-positive reason(s), then those who do the last-second data dump for some purpose, carried/carry that trait forward. And upload of things to remember? things to forget? as the essence comes again into corporeal existence.

Can't be faith, lest it would remain unquestioned.

Thanks for putting the thoughts down.

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

Very complementary and very interesting points, Helen.  Parts of your comment are like time-lapse writing for me and it would make a fantastic diary (ies) on their own, don´t you think?

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

As a sidenote:

Helen:

Memory seems to be a bridge. It's incredible to understand how memory works : Strangely so much like a modern computer with transitional memories (RAM) that we hold onto for the day that are downloaded by REM sleep into permanent storage (HDD), dreams being the editing/contextualisation process. Then there is the more subtle background process whreby memories that are unused get put into offline storage, accesible only by triggers (metatags) not under conscious control (Fran's dissociated memories of ptsd).

I describe it thus not to mechanise and cheapen it, but because it is how I visualise my wonder of it.

We often use our most advanced machines to describe ourselves, and clockwork just does not cut the advanced-test anymore.

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those with science backgrounds use the word ´woo woo´ for everything-else-in-life that´s not a basic group of sciences

Wrong. Try again.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

I am also surprised that those with science backgrounds use the word ´woo woo´ for everything-else-in-life that´s not a basic group of sciences, as if it were almost scary to them

I've met a handful of science absolutists in the professional world, but there aren't any on here that I know of.

you are the media you consume.

I used the word woo-woo to capture the broad (outside ET, not necessarily within previous discussions here) disregard for 'things that science can't explain' - and as I have said already my diary was an attempt to get discussion going in a way that didn't resort to invalidating the experience I had, just because there  is no scientific way to explain it properly.  

I feel that contributions have been interesting and fair even if nobody has changed their opinion on anything - which wasn't something I set out to do anyhow. Nobody has treated my experience or diary with disregard, which is all I can ask for.

I don't appreciate any attempt to use my diary as a means to attack people who don't agree with you and I ask that the discussion in this bit of the thread ceases please.  If you have an issue with what I have said here then email me, but I don't want this thread to turn into a argument which will spoil an otherwise really decent set of contributions in the comments.

Ad astra per aspera

Who amongst you know what the fook is going on, why you're here!

Me ! :-) An old man with a big beard revealed what's going on to me:

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living."

And a man with a big moustache revealed why I'm here, to mature (finally):

"Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play."

:-)

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice. Blog - Nice Experience