by poppers 52 Replies latest jw friends
Mulan,My gut feeling is that your childhood experience was a genuine OBE (but then, who am I to say). Others have a way destroying one's ability (especially children's) for genuine experiences such as OBEs because they "know better", and make one question one's own experience.
I agree with you. The other one, when I was having my baby, I believe was a hallucination caused by the drugs. At least I think that's what it was.
Yet there was a problem with this interpretation. Such hallucinations could occur only if the brain maintained some function.
Sounds like a dream, and those happen very quickly. Most dreams only last a few minutes but can seem like they take hours. Perhaps this seemingly long experience happened in only a few short moments while her brain was still semi-active.
Yes, I'm a skeptic. IMO there's nothing wrong with wanting hard evidence before believing in something. Science has shown that, under controlled tests, NDE/OBEs do happen even when there is no danger of dying. The same effects are experienced: tunnel, light, feeling of calm, floating above your body, etc.
Our brain plays tricks on us all the time when we're asleep. Dreams seem very real. Why is it so hard to believe that brains would do the same thing when it's deprived of oxygen, dying, etc?
i see myself in dreams a lot, sometimes i see myself sleeping, sometimes i see myself as myself looking in the mirror, sometimes i just find myself laying there dead, but i think this is more just a dream than any outer body experience as i am still alive, there are times though where i have gotten up in the morning and remembered doing something surreal in the night and i still don't know if i really did it or if it was in my dream... i tend to think it's just my vivid imagination and my dreams which often play tricks on me.
I recently read an article on Salvia divinorum. It was claimed that the consumption of this substance leads to out-of-body experiences.
Yes, oddly enough I did have one. It was while I was in the stream room at Bally's, relaxing and enjoying the heat, not thinking about anything, and all of a sudden I felt 'me' leaving my body and looking at 'me'. It was awesome - I couldn't wait to try it again the next day, but the steam room was broken :( When the steam room was fixed I tried it again but nothing unusual happen. I guess when you anticipate things they don't happen, you just have to let it happen spontaneously. After trying to figure out why it happen I narrowed it down to the 'purple' package tea I had at Starbucks before I went to work out that night. In any event it was a pleasant experience.
Rem said: I'd like to see the evidence of this claim - not just a Reader's Digest summary. There is no point in taking an extraordinary claim seriously if there aren't the goods to back it up. I sense some exaggeration in this account, though there is no way to prove it because the evidence is conveniently missing.
So what sort of evidence are you looking for? What sort of evidence would convince you that she was telling the truth?
Dreams seem very real. Why is it so hard to believe that brains would do the same thing when it's deprived of oxygen, dying, etc?
She just happened to have an accurate dream of what was really going on around her? Come on, you can't be serious. How on earth do you explain that she described them working on her groin when in fact they were? How do you explain that she correctly described the surgical saw as a toothbrush? I find that sceptics are more religious in their beliefs than any churchgoer. To call someone a liar or insist that they were simply dreaming or hallucinating because there's no rational explanation to their experience doesn't show much of an open mind.
Any chance one of you "out of the body" class can just fly out and get me a beer?!
Mary,
We don't have any evidence - this is just an anecdote. The surgeon has access to all of the medical device logs that would show for a fact whether there was no brain activity or not. We are just going on hearsay here.
Frankly, what you find extraordinary, I find quite normal. They were working on her groin and she said that? A toothbrush for a surgical saw? Am I supposed to be impressed?
Do you know how many times this lady had been in surgery before? Maybe she read about the procedure? Maybe the doctor briefed her on the procedure beforehand. There are way too many variables to claim this as some type of paranormal event when there is really nothing extraordinary about it.
A Reader's Digest summary does not give us enough evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
I believe it takes faith like nothing a skeptic posesses to maintain a belief in the paranormal on such scant evidence.
rem
The surgeon has access to all of the medical device logs that would show for a fact whether there was no brain activity or not. We are just going on hearsay here.
Well it appears as though Dr. Spetzler, the surgeon who worked on her was interviewed for this article as he's quoted through out. I think the part where it says "...Spetzler gave the order to bring Reynolds to "standstill"--draining the blood from her body. By every reading of every instrument, life left Reynold's body..." indicates that no brain activity was registering on any of the instruments. When she "returned" and told Dr. Spetzler all that she'd seen and experienced, he replied "You are way out of my area of expertise." And 12 years later he still doesn't know what to make of it.
Frankly, what you find extraordinary, I find quite normal. They were working on her groin and she said that? A toothbrush for a surgical saw? Am I supposed to be impressed?
I was.
Do you know how many times this lady had been in surgery before? Maybe she read about the procedure? Maybe the doctor briefed her on the procedure beforehand. There are way too many variables to claim this as some type of paranormal event when there is really nothing extraordinary about it.
Rem, you and I have been down this road before. What you're saying then is that she's got to be either lying or exaggerating her claims. I for one, don't automatically believe that she is, but there's no proof either way.
What I found interesting, is that the article went on to say:
"...While most medical researchers wouldn't be caught dead uttering the word soul, some find the idea that NDEs are triggered by the failing brain to be inadequate. They speculate that NDEs may be evidence not of an afterlife, but of something just as stunning: Consciousness does not reside solely in the brain.
In a study published in December 2001 in the British medical journal The Lancet, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel recounts the NDE of a clinically dead 44-year-old cardiac arrest victim. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital, where doctors restarted his heart with defibrillators. A nurse removed the man's dentures so a breathing tube could be inserted in his throat. Once stable, the man was moved to intensive care. A week later the man saw the nurse who had removed his false teeth and recognized her--though during their only prior encounter, his condition had ranged from coma to clinical death. "You took my dentures out of my mouth" he told the nurse and went on to describe accurately other details he claimed his disembodied self had viewed." [the article goes on to describe other NDE's].
Both van Lommel and the British researchers believe that these findings suggest consciousness could exist in the absence of a functioning brain. "You can compare the brain to a TV set," says Dr. van Lommel. "The TV program is not in your TV set." So where is consciousness? Is it in every cell of the body? "I think so" says van Lommel. "We know that each day, 50 billion cells die." He points out that this intensive cell turnover means that eventually, almost all the cells that make up "me" or "you" are new. And yet, we don't perceive ourselves as being any different from what we always were. "There must be a kind of communication between all our cells" he says. In other words, all our cells--not just brain cells, but trillions of others....."talk" to one another in a kind of network that keeps our experience of consciousness going seamlessly even as billions of cells die and billions are produced. If that's so, then those cells still alive when someone is declared brain dead may perceive events that are otherwise inexplicable." This hypothesis may lead us away from the idea of NDEs as evidence of an afterlife. But it opens up fascinating horizons and a Pandora's box of it's own."
No one has all the answers, but I don't think it's right to assume that these people are simply lying. If the above hypothesis was ever proven, that consciencness CAN exist outside the human body, then we'll all have to re-think our views of NDEs.
Three times a week at the Hall.
