Miss Taken wrote:Fortigurn. My husband has drawn similar conclusions to you. We had our first ...ahem...heated debate on our honeymoom of all places, about George Ritchie's book. 'Return from tomorrow'.
http://www.near-death.com/ritch.html
Thanks, I'll have a look.
Some of these people have been pronounced dead because there was no brain activity, no pulse, and obviously no heart beat. I don't know how else you can define death. To all intents and purposes they were dead, using the perhaps limited sophistication of hospital monitoring equipment.
That is defined as 'clinically dead', which means that there are no perceptible signs of life using standard tests for standard signs of life. It does not mean that life has necessarily ceased. Where there is consciousness, there is life.
Some had their eyes covered, but could see perfectly and describe what had happened with senses that were s*** down.
This isn't actually verifiable. What we can say is that some had their eyes covered, but had a later recollection of observing events which took place while they were unconscious and sightless.
The brain is astonishingly good at constructing realistic experiences and memories from the barest scraps of sensory data. An alarm clock ringing might wake you up within 5 seconds, but inside that timeframe your brain can incorporate that auditory data into an existing dream (or generate a new dream incorporating it), contextualize the sound and provide a rational explanation for it within the dream, provide an experience which appears to take at least half an hour, and convince you that the entire experience is utterly real - until you actually awake.
Emergency rooms are noisy places. There is a vast amount of auditory data to which the brain has access, as long as the auditory system is functioning - and the sense of hearing is apparently the last sense to be lost prior to death. A dropped surgical instrument could easily provide sufficient data for the brain to create a 'dream' which presents the event visually in order to contextualize and explain the sound, and if the brain was receiving auditory data, then it would hear plenty which informed it that it was in an emergency room, providing a logical foundation for a rational explanation of the sound as a dropped surgical instrument.
I read one description of an NDE in which a man said that while he was 'out of his body' he wanted to tell the doctors not to give up, and was trying to indicate to them that he was alive. The description went on to say that the doctors later said that they had in fact been negative about his chances at that point.
This seems remarkable. But it is possible that the man heard the doctors' negative prognosis, and responded emotionally as a result. In response to this stimulus, the brain constructed an environment in which the man was able to attempt to advise the doctors that he was still alive. Unable to communicate in any other way, the brain attempted to give the illusion of capacity to communicate. Interestingly, the man did not claim to have heard the doctors' negative prognosis during the 'out of body experience', which suggests that he was not receiving the information at a conscious level.
I think 'some' of the experiences are explainable but there is a minority of cases that even the doctors will admit that they cannot explain.
Yes, I noticed that.
Just out of interest I download an astronomy picture each day, and this one particularly interested me.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070318.html
It's probably lazy research!, but my experience in life has taught me that there is more to life than this physical universe.
I'm open minded about the whole thing..
As a Christian, I am convinced that there is more to life than this physical universe. I just don't believe that our lives extend beyond this physical universe.