Near Death

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Thoughtful
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Near Death

Post by Thoughtful » Wed May 15, 2019 10:36 pm


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RubinHighlander
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Re: Near Death

Post by RubinHighlander » Thu May 16, 2019 7:05 am

Why wait until you have a cardiac arrest or are on death's doorstep in a convalescence center crapping your diapers? You can go and see and experience the other side right now!

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... es-and-dmt
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redjay
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Re: Near Death

Post by redjay » Thu May 16, 2019 7:35 am

NDE information. A confirmation bias I am happy to indulge (I ignore any data which suggests it's biological).
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Re: Near Death

Post by RubinHighlander » Thu May 16, 2019 7:39 am

redjay wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 7:35 am
NDE information. A confirmation bias I am happy to indulge (I ignore any data which suggests it's biological).
Are you saying the confirmation bias is on the side of the science trying to explain it or on the side of the 2-3% of cardiac arrest patients who claim it as a metaphysical experience?
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alas
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Re: Near Death

Post by alas » Thu May 16, 2019 8:29 am

redjay wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 7:35 am
NDE information. A confirmation bias I am happy to indulge (I ignore any data which suggests it's biological).
I don’t ignore data suggesting that it is biological, but simply have not found a explanation that works. I have had a trauma induced out of body experience, I worked with rape and child sexual abuse victims who have had similar experiences. The NDE research includes several where the person was not actually dead, just scared out of their wits and experienced what we would call a near death experience if they had actually been physically injured, such as during a car accident. There is not yet an explanation that fits the facts for these experiences. So, I study the whole subject looking for a scientific explanation that actually fits the data. Scientists can produce some of the experience, as in the link to the psychology today article above about the drug that produces a spiritual experience, but doesn’t have all the most significant parts of the NDE. The author of the article quotes one guy who says this evidence (of drugs) proves that it is all chemical changes in the brain, but then the author goes on to say that this statement is unfounded because there is no evidence of these chemical changes, and the experiences are not the same, just similar in a few respects. So, no, you cannot have a drug induced NDE, because the drug experiences do not have the same markers and are seldom life changing, while near death experiences are most often life changing.

So far, nothing actually explains the experience of NDE. They can induce parts of the experience or explain parts, but so far nothing actually explains the whole experience. They can not even explain why someone out of body sees from a perspective different than their physical body, which is the biggest clue someone is out of body.

The psychologists cannot explain any of the dissociation disorders. We just have a name for the experience. Why do identities split? Why do people go out of body during trauma? It is actually quite common, but what actually happens?

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StarbucksMom
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Re: Near Death

Post by StarbucksMom » Thu May 16, 2019 8:50 am

I’m actually fascinated by NDEs and believe that (some) are legit.

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redjay
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Re: Near Death

Post by redjay » Thu May 16, 2019 11:22 am

RubinHighlander wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 7:39 am
redjay wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 7:35 am
NDE information. A confirmation bias I am happy to indulge (I ignore any data which suggests it's biological).
Are you saying the confirmation bias is on the side of the science trying to explain it or on the side of the 2-3% of cardiac arrest patients who claim it as a metaphysical experience?
The confirmation bias, I am referring to is my own preference for data that indicates that NDEs suggest life after death. Which is not to say that the researchers and commentators don't bring their own biases into how they examine and present the phenomenon.

All lies and jest, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
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RubinHighlander
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Re: Near Death

Post by RubinHighlander » Thu May 16, 2019 1:04 pm

redjay wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 11:22 am
All lies and jest, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
I like it!

I've tried to keep an open mind but my significant mistrust of religion and how I've been duped in the past with emotional confirmation bias has caused me to lean more toward science. It's like taking any psychedelic substance, artificial or otherwise; the visions experienced there can be interpreted by the traveler that they physically went to another realm and actually talked to entities not of the waking reality. It's ultimately inconclusive as to weather it was all in the mind or an actual physical portal to another dimension or existence.
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Rob4Hope
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Re: Near Death

Post by Rob4Hope » Thu May 16, 2019 2:10 pm

Science does support several things, including the effect consciousness has on matter and energy.

Quantum mechanics wouldn't even exist were it not for some of this science.

In the realm of reality, it is impossible to say current explanations explain NDE events. One of the rather convincing arguments in favor of NDE events being "out of body" are the veridical ones -- when some third party corroborates information that could NOT have been known unless the NDE happened and the person involved retained the information.

There are too many of those to just discount the topic. The literature is VAST and rather convincing. Some of its crap...I'll warrant that...but some is pretty sound. Throw that in with the massive debate happening know in science of "consciousness" and you may see some text-books AND RELIGIOUS books getting re-written in the next decade or so.

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Re: Near Death

Post by dogbite » Thu May 16, 2019 3:11 pm

Brian Cox on ghosts
Let’s move on to some sillier questions. One time you said that the Large Hadron Collider disproves the existence of ghosts. But what if ghosts were made out of dark matter, like axions?


BC: It’s missing the point. In order to have a ghost, there must be some thing that interacts with the matter in your body. Whatever that thing is constructed out of, then it has to interact strongly with matter at the energies with which we observe the world now—room temperature. Axions wouldn’t do that at this energy. A classical ghost, or a soul, would have to interact strongly with the body.


We have a very precise understanding of how matter interacts and we see no evidence at these energies of matter interacting with the Standard Model. I’m sure there will be new interactions, but they will be very subtle and visible at the highest energies. But that doesn’t help you when it comes to your body, or a ghost floating through your bedroom

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Re: Near Death

Post by Rob4Hope » Fri May 17, 2019 12:15 pm

dogbite wrote:
Thu May 16, 2019 3:11 pm
Brian Cox on ghosts
Let’s move on to some sillier questions. One time you said that the Large Hadron Collider disproves the existence of ghosts. But what if ghosts were made out of dark matter, like axions?


BC: It’s missing the point. In order to have a ghost, there must be some thing that interacts with the matter in your body. Whatever that thing is constructed out of, then it has to interact strongly with matter at the energies with which we observe the world now—room temperature. Axions wouldn’t do that at this energy. A classical ghost, or a soul, would have to interact strongly with the body.


We have a very precise understanding of how matter interacts and we see no evidence at these energies of matter interacting with the Standard Model. I’m sure there will be new interactions, but they will be very subtle and visible at the highest energies. But that doesn’t help you when it comes to your body, or a ghost floating through your bedroom
These scientists need to get things together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY

This guy has something to say, and it appears matter IS affected by consciousness. I think Brian Cox is somehow equating ghosts with 'matter'. What if there is something completely different? Cox is grounded in 'scientific materialism' as are many others, and it stifles discovery.

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Re: Near Death

Post by dogbite » Fri May 17, 2019 2:06 pm

Seems to me to indicate that superposition applies to wave particle duality and that there is yet undefined arbitrariness in our particle and wave defintions. What we call waves and particles are more fundamentally excitations of fields which may resolve such things further. Such fields are also described as probability waves so there are more things to resolve certainly.

In any case, these interactions are energetically measurable. And as Cox points out there would have to be a high bandwidth (thus strong interaction) interface between a soul and the physical matter of the body(brain) at temperatures and energies compatible with life.

Further, this interface would have to be damaged or impaired through brain injury and disease across the whole organ.

We know that this interface would be susceptible to magnetic distortion.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FMR_T0mM7Pc

We know it is suceptible to chemical distortion by blocking or adding chemicals to the brain. We can turn it off with anesthesia. We can stop it uploading memories.

So we know where this interface would have to be and what it would have to be interacting with.

This places stringent limits on where and what the interface would have to be involved with.

Alternate theories are fine and should be considered. But the value in theories are what testable hypotheses drop out of them. There is an infinite set of alternate possibilities that generate no testable hypothesis. So what criteria do you propose to filter them in a meaningful way?

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Re: Near Death

Post by MalcolmVillager » Sat May 18, 2019 8:25 am

This is a topic that fascinated me as a TBM and still intreages me now. There are strong opinions in both camps (they do or don't happen).

My heart wants to believe in afterlife and overlapping spaces between mortality and whatever exist before/after. My brain is extremely skeptical.

I have arrived at apathy as I dont see consistent, predictable, or uniform patterns with it all. Christian's have Christian NDE's, Buddhist and Hindus see their version of deity and eternity when they cross over. It tells me that whatever it is, only interacts with our cerebrum. The only parts that NDEers recall or explain have to do with the human brain, memory, paradigm, etc...

So if that is the only baseline, is there really something else there? I dont know. Does it matter? It it cannot be predicted, planned, or relied upon I have a hard time making it part of my world view (universe view).

Let the dead bury the dead. Let the spirits rule over the spirits. Let the quarks influence the quarks.

To an extent this may be a part of the current God of the future shrinking gaps. Maybe we will have greater understanding someday. At that point, this God (unexplainable occurence) will be another predictable and explainable event.

Fun to consider. Not worth getting committed to.

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Re: Near Death

Post by dogbite » Sat May 18, 2019 2:27 pm

MalcolmVillager wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 8:25 am
This is a topic that fascinated me as a TBM and still intreages me now. There are strong opinions in both camps (they do or don't happen).
Just as a clarification, I dont question the experience actually. Clearly the system laid down memories of experience. I question the interpretation of the experience.

Death doesnt seem to mean what we commonly think. What used to be called dead may be revived now. Japanese hospitals put heart attack patients into hypothermia we used to consider dead to give the doctors hours more time to work on the heart without brain damage.

Stopping the heart doesnt stop life immediately. We just recently restored "life" to pig brains that were four hours outside of the pig and support just with a nutrient solution. Not brain activity but the cells were active again.

Death isn't an on off switch. People approaching death begin system shutdown days in advance. The stories of the veil wearing thin correlate to this early stage shutdown.It may be causal, we dont know. Uncertainty is what we have. Not definite meaning.

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alas
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Re: Near Death

Post by alas » Sat May 18, 2019 9:26 pm

dogbite wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 2:27 pm
MalcolmVillager wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 8:25 am
This is a topic that fascinated me as a TBM and still intreages me now. There are strong opinions in both camps (they do or don't happen).
Just as a clarification, I dont question the experience actually. Clearly the system laid down memories of experience. I question the interpretation of the experience.

Death doesnt seem to mean what we commonly think. What used to be called dead may be revived now. Japanese hospitals put heart attack patients into hypothermia we used to consider dead to give the doctors hours more time to work on the heart without brain damage.

Stopping the heart doesnt stop life immediately. We just recently restored "life" to pig brains that were four hours outside of the pig and support just with a nutrient solution. Not brain activity but the cells were active again.

Death isn't an on off switch. People approaching death begin system shutdown days in advance. The stories of the veil wearing thin correlate to this early stage shutdown.It may be causal, we dont know. Uncertainty is what we have. Not definite meaning.
It isn’t just when the person is dying. I worked with rape victims and child sexual abuse survivors. They were not near death, so body not shutting down. But many of the child sexual abuse victims had experiences that if they were near death, we would call it a NDE. But out of body experiences were common. Less common were more complicated experiences, like being comforted by the dead grandma. In all my psychology training, we never covered that. But she was out of body, while her body was being abused, and it was exactly like a near death experience where they are greeted by loved ones who have died before. She was positive it was real. It is a form of disassociation.

So, extreme stress causes a flood of chemicals that can do strange things to the brain. The hyper awareness of NDE might be the same as the hyper awareness of trauma. Repeated trauma over time can physically change the structure of the brain, and talk to any PTSD sufferer and they will tell you that trauma is life changing. NDE also life changing.

Is a NDE a disassociation disorder. Psychologists do not understand things like how the mind splits into several personalities for disassociative identity disorder, or how people go out of body. So, are NDEs just a very complex way we disassociate?

I have always been kind of fascinated by this similarity.

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Re: Near Death

Post by Rob4Hope » Mon May 20, 2019 7:25 am

I would love to hear a response to Dean Radin's experiment I posted above.

The one thing I can say for absolutely certainty is this: science can NOT explain consciousness. Nor can they explain the interaction between consciousness, whatever that is, and the world, particularly things like the "observer affect".

How can someone thousands of miles away affect the measurement of a system in a closed box, simply by thinking about it? Radin's research is rather intriguing. The ONLY conclusion I draw at this point is there is more to learn. There is a LOT more to learn. And with that in mind, I am not willing to just brush aside what NDE people report as happening.

On a personal note, I have 3 close friends who had full blown NDE and OOBE experiences. One has burns over 70% of her body,...we are talking 3rd degree burns. Like i've said before, the only part of her that is real are her eyes; the rest of her face has been rebuilt. Anyway,...she had an extended experience multiple times as she was in the burn center having her dead flesh scraped off. Horrific experience!

Folks, what she describes is way more than a hollucination. ESPECIALLY what she explained about the conversations and things happening in different parts of the hospital she visited while her body was being scraped and she was gone. Did her "spirit" or "soul" or "consciousness" or "astral body" or whatever leave her body? Did she have a clairvoyant experience where somehow her senses were able to etherally visit somewhere else? Maybe it was a type of ESP? Just maybe something happened we don't fully understand yet? ...

I have no idea.

This much I know. She was able to describe, in detail and accurately, things happening outside of her room in places SHE WAS NOT. How did that happen?

Someone must have come into the room and said: "Hey, at this exact time while you were showing dead on the table, there were these people in the other room who were having this conversation,...and they were saying this and this. They were sitting here and here. And this magazine was on the table here. And the clock was here,....etc. Oh, and buy the way, tell everyone this when you come around in 30 min,...and make it a big lie so that everyone will be freaked out and believe you. OK? "

Yeh right!....BA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!. Lets go the conspiracy route. That is the best way to explain this away,..right?! And, lets use a woman who just had her flesh scraped from her body to do it. I mean, after all, the screams just arn't enough,...right?

Sorry for being direct folks. But I get frustrated when there is so much skepticism that disregards or tries to explain away experiences that can't be so easily discounted.

Are we so freaked out by the possiblity there is something we don't understand that we are willing to play mental gymnastics to hold onto beliefs that support our personal version of bias? I openly confess I did that for 40 years with the LDS faith. I am someone who did that....I wanted the TSCC to be true SO BAD I was willing to do or believe anything I could constrain. So, I guess it makes sense to me why similar bias would come into play when dealing with NDE events.

I confess,...openly,...willingly,...with vulnerability,...I DON"T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS WOMAN!. But, somehow, through some way we don't understand, she (and MANY others) knew what was going on in that room. And it wasn't a conspiracy.. The sample was not tainted with cross-contaimination.

The best explanation I have yet to hear is that consciousness can exist outside of the human body; that it is something we don't fully understand yet; and it is intelligent, self aware, and able to perceive and retain information. Whether that is what we are talking about with NDE, I don't know. But at the moment, it is the most consistent and simplest answer to the question involved.

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Re: Near Death

Post by Arcturus » Wed Jun 05, 2019 8:32 pm

Rob4Hope wrote:
Fri May 17, 2019 12:15 pm
These scientists need to get things together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY

This guy has something to say, and it appears matter IS affected by consciousness. I think Brian Cox is somehow equating ghosts with 'matter'. What if there is something completely different? Cox is grounded in 'scientific materialism' as are many others, and it stifles discovery.
Thanks for sharing this Rob4Hope. Fascinating.
“How valuable is a faith that is dependent on the maintenance of ignorance? If faith can only thrive in the absence of the knowledge of its origins, history, and competing theological concepts, then what is it we really have to hold on to?”
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dogbite
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Re: Near Death

Post by dogbite » Thu Jun 06, 2019 12:35 pm

In my reading I've come across secondary statements that they've identified the part of the brain that locates the self in the body. These statements don't identify the region by name. I've not been able to Google it up.

It seems that the trauma stories of Alas are in the same vein as the burn account that a detachment occurs so the horror is affecting some one other than them.

I dont pretend that science has explained consciousness. I dont pretend that science has explained everything.

What we do know is that consciouness is not a direct apprehension of reality. It only builds a lossy model and uses that.

Even in the OOB events the consciousness interacts with matter in the same ways as a body does which raises difficult questions.

It sees, usually with human style binocular vision the same way we do which means its interacting with reflected light photons, particles, matter. Which requires the blocking of the absorbed particles. At a minimum there would be dark spots visible to the rest of us where this absorbtion is occurring. It is detectable by physical means.

We should never go blind or need corrective lenses. If it's not light, then why is the vision in conventional color and bound by walls and surfaces?

It hears. Hearing is the sensation of high (compression) and low (rarefaction) pressures, in air generally. This is another matter interaction and detectable by the reflections or diffraction in the interrupted wave around the sensing apparatus. The soul is then detectable by physical means. and you can't hear in a vaccuum.

We should never experience hearing problems.

The OOB soul lays down memories. It maintains a time sense. The hypothalmus is the key to physical memory. If the soul is instead or also a memory tool of seemingly better fidelity then there are many ramifications.

Why is a soul-only experience accessible physically? The experience never traversed the pathways for the memories we access otherwise. So this means we have access to a better memory system.

So brain injury should not impair recall.

Anesthesia should not interrupt exterior sensation and memory, nor the internal clock.

Alzheimers should not exist.

Since a soul can interact with matter sensorialy, why does a soul need to attach to a body in the first place? The body is extraneous.

These arguments don't disprove a soul nor that NDE/OOB experiences don't happen. But to accept the stories as meaning specific things about the nature of our existence ramifies into things well beyond the spirit, usually with physical effects not considered or understood by the teller.

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alas
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Re: Near Death

Post by alas » Fri Jun 07, 2019 10:53 am

dogbite wrote:
Thu Jun 06, 2019 12:35 pm
In my reading I've come across secondary statements that they've identified the part of the brain that locates the self in the body. These statements don't identify the region by name. I've not been able to Google it up.

It seems that the trauma stories of Alas are in the same vein as the burn account that a detachment occurs so the horror is affecting some one other than them.

I dont pretend that science has explained consciousness. I dont pretend that science has explained everything.

What we do know is that consciouness is not a direct apprehension of reality. It only builds a lossy model and uses that.

Even in the OOB events the consciousness interacts with matter in the same ways as a body does which raises difficult questions.

It sees, usually with human style binocular vision the same way we do which means its interacting with reflected light photons, particles, matter. Which requires the blocking of the absorbed particles. At a minimum there would be dark spots visible to the rest of us where this absorbtion is occurring. It is detectable by physical means.

We should never go blind or need corrective lenses. If it's not light, then why is the vision in conventional color and bound by walls and surfaces?

It hears. Hearing is the sensation of high (compression) and low (rarefaction) pressures, in air generally. This is another matter interaction and detectable by the reflections or diffraction in the interrupted wave around the sensing apparatus. The soul is then detectable by physical means. and you can't hear in a vaccuum.

We should never experience hearing problems.

The OOB soul lays down memories. It maintains a time sense. The hypothalmus is the key to physical memory. If the soul is instead or also a memory tool of seemingly better fidelity then there are many ramifications.

Why is a soul-only experience accessible physically? The experience never traversed the pathways for the memories we access otherwise. So this means we have access to a better memory system.

So brain injury should not impair recall.

Anesthesia should not interrupt exterior sensation and memory, nor the internal clock.

Alzheimers should not exist.

Since a soul can interact with matter sensorialy, why does a soul need to attach to a body in the first place? The body is extraneous.

These arguments don't disprove a soul nor that NDE/OOB experiences don't happen. But to accept the stories as meaning specific things about the nature of our existence ramifies into things well beyond the spirit, usually with physical effects not considered or understood by the teller.
Perhaps the “soul” of a person with Alzheimer’s does remember, but the person with Alzheimer’s cannot access those memories until they separate from the body?

People with poor vision report good vision during the OOB or NDE. Blind people have come back from an OOB or NDE and while they were out of body, they could see. Deaf people have reported that they can hear during the out of body time. And sometimes in OOB or ND experiences the vision is not the same as our physical vision. The biggest difference is the perspective things are seen from. It is often an overhead view point. And people have see and read things they could not see from their physical position. They report seeing through walls or long distances or being able to see what they desire to see by just thinking about it. So, there are differences between our physical vision and our “soul” vision, and our physical hearing and “soul” hearing.

Movement is very different though. In “soul” movement there is nothing like walking from place to place, but people report floating up through ceilings and flying, or just desiring to go somewhere and being there.

I have no idea why the differences or how the body interfaces with consciousness or why “soul” memories would be laid down in our brains while our brains have no electrical activity because the instruments show us as “brain dead”.

But having been out of body, I know it is not like a hallucination, but I can’t say what really happened. And why are trauma experiences when the person is wide awake of dissociation and going out of body so much like near death experiences when the person is unconscious and goes out of body? Is a puzzlement.

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Re: Near Death

Post by deacon blues » Mon Jun 10, 2019 11:16 am

NDE’s, and especially incidents of out of body travel could be used as evidence for something. I like to think that there is something to them. My TBM wife and agnostic son couldn’t care less, so it’s good to see some discussion about them. Thanks for the thread. 🤗🤔
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