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Near Death Experiences?

...JR

Scholar
J
Joined
Nov 21, 2005
Messages
82
Most of what I have read concerning this subject seems to point to a purely neurological explanation concerning glutamate, NMDA receptor blockers, and agmatine,with the work being done by Dr. Karl Jansen.

Yet it seems there are still critics who feel that this doesn't discount the validity of it being a sign of the after life.

Is there any real debate to be had here and is there more to this that I am not realizing...perhaps other possible causes?
 
Some of the explanations seem motivated by a desire to debunk the subject rather than seek the objective truth .I get the impression that some folks would refuse to accept the second coming by talking about mass hallucination .
Trouble with a subject like this is the subjective nature of the evidence .But if you can't accept the evidence of your own senses then how can you accept the result of anything since all you see and feel is only the result of your brain intrepreting electrical inpulses .
Bottom line , I suppose , must be that it's unlikely , but you never know .
 
I once had a near life experiance. But it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
 
I like Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
 
Hearsay and NDEs

Is it just me or does it seem that there are no personal experiences of NDEs, but we know someone who knows someone who had one?

A friend of mine told me of her sister's near-death experience in a car crash that left her convinced of the afterlife; a nurse friend told me about a patient, clinically dead in the ER who afterwards described to her how he watched the doctor and nurses working to resusciate him, recognizing her as one of the team.

Closer to home, my mother had congestive heart failure and went into respiratory arrest one night. The last thing she remembered was the medics wheeling her to the ambulance. Her memory kicked in days later in the hospital. Later after her bypass surgery, she told me she saw no lights, no tunnels, no deceased loved ones. She just blanked out. Happily, she's still around to discuss this.

Do you see what you expect to see? If you are only near death, but not really, sincerely, dead, is the experience something like paraphilia or the strangulation Buddhist monks undergo to reach new heights of meditation? Does the brain create a movie for you when the chemical mix is right?

Since nobody who has really died is going to tell us what that is like--I guess we'll have to stick with the scientific explanations.
 
I'm sure you've heard of the occurrences where people who were dying on an operating table have floated above their bodies and watched the doctors working on them below from a third person's perspective. Whether this has, in fact, happened could be substantiated by their describing things they could not have otherwise seen while on the operating table, i.e. describing things that could only be seen from above like labels on equipment or documents on a cabinet. Is anyone aware of this ever happening or if this has ever been studied?
 
Dr. Who said:
I'm sure you've heard of the occurrences where people who were dying on an operating table have floated above their bodies and watched the doctors working on them below from a third person's perspective. Whether this has, in fact, happened could be substantiated by their describing things they could not have otherwise seen while on the operating table, i.e. describing things that could only be seen from above like labels on equipment or documents on a cabinet. Is anyone aware of this ever happening or if this has ever been studied?
Click to expand...
That's an urban myth; no one who's had a NDE has actually been able to describe anything in the OR they could not see from their vantage point on the table, etc. The symptoms of NDE are actually those of acute hypoxia, and further damning is the fact that no one ever sees the gods from other religions; they always see their own god. IOW, the NDE matches their expectations of the afterlife. This sounds suspiciously like ex post facto rationalization of the perfectly physiological phenomenon of hypoxia. NDE afficionados are going to have to do a lot better than that to even start to be credible.
 
homer said:
Some of the explanations seem motivated by a desire to debunk the subject rather than seek the objective truth .I get the impression that some folks would refuse to accept the second coming by talking about mass hallucination .
Click to expand...
Mass hysteria is normally the most likely explanation for all such "group visions" such as Fatima, etc. Just look at the emotional frenzy of the Haaj, for example, where hundreds even die. Not exactly a rational gathering, is it? A few years ago, Haaj pilgrims exhibited mass pareildolia when one pilgrim claimed that the clouds in the sky spelled out "Allah", and everyone else instantly agreed; thousands of people, gazing in awe at a cloud!
How would a claim of the Second Coming by Xians be any different?
 
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