Jovitalk - Bon Jovi Fan Community - Life after death

Quote:

Originally Posted by mitchdaddy

You got the web addy 4 the site?

Closed that one to quick was astro projection stuff. Heres some others things through...
http://www.evangelical-times.org/Art...2/apr02a01.htm

Is death the end?

Britain's leading medical journal, The Lancet, has published a study which shows that many people believe that their souls left their bodies while they were 'clinically dead'.

In a two-year study in ten Dutch hospitals, doctors interviewed 344 heart attack victims. They found that 12% of cardiac-arrest survivors reported having ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) before being resuscitated.

They had experienced emotions, visions or lucid thoughts while unconscious with no signs of pulse, breathing or brain activity.

Some reported having ‘out-of-body’ experiences. One man remembered a nurse removing his dentures while he was unconscious. He believed he had seen this while floating above his body and watching the doctors working on him.

The study also showed that patients felt better about death, and more ‘spiritual’, for as long as eight years after their NDE.

Point of no return

The research will be seized on by those, academics among them, who theorise that the mind may continue to work after the brain has stopped — that the mind (or soul) can survive death.

Over the last few years, research teams from different universities and hospitals have been trying to make sense of NDEs.

Last year it was reported that doctors at the University of Southampton had spent a year studying patients resuscitated in the city’s general hospital after a heart attack.

All the people ‘brought back to life’ were, for varying lengths of time, clinically dead with fixed dilated pupils, no respiration, and no pulse.

EEG studies confirmed that the brain’s electrical activity, and hence brain function, ceases during this time. Out of 63 patients who survived, seven recalled emotions and visions while they were ‘dead’.

The survivors were interviewed within a week of their cardiac arrest and asked if they remembered anything during their period of ‘death’. Some recalled feelings of joy and peace; lost awareness of body; heightened senses; time speeded up; seeing a bright light; entering another world; encountering a mystical being or deceased relative; and coming to a point of no return.

Pushing the limits

Not all NDEs are alike. Typically, they involve feelings of deep peace, followed by sensations of floating up through a tunnel towards a bright light and into a beautiful kingdom.

But other NDEs involve terrifying accounts of being pulled downwards — towards a pit ‘inhabited by demons’. An article in The Daily Telegraph was entitled ‘Patients near death see visions of hell’. It focused on the research of Tony Lawrence, lecturer in psychology at Coventry University, who has probed the nature of negative NDEs.

There was a startling account of a woman who fought for life after a miscarriage: ‘It was an awful feeling — like I was going down a big hole and I couldn’t get up. I was going into this big pit. I was going further and further down, and trying to claw my way back up and kept slipping’.

But what do the results show? The cardiologist who led the Dutch research team, Dr Pim van Lommel, says their study ‘pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain’.

Dr Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuro-psychiatrist at London University, told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about ... a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose’.

For him, the evidence points to the existence of human consciousness without a body — in other words, a soul.

Out of their minds?

But are these people out of their bodies, or just out of their minds? Perhaps the drugs given to the patients can explain their experiences.

However, the Southampton researchers were able to rule out unusual combinations of medications as the cause, because the resuscitation procedure was the same in every case.

Other critics have attributed these experiences to a collapse of brain function caused by lack of oxygen. Yet the medical records of the Southampton cases show that none of the subjects had low levels of oxygen.

The Lancet report also mentions that epilepsy and electrical stimulation of the brain are possible causes.

Dr Fenwick says: ‘In a coronary, the brain goes down within 16 seconds and it then stays off-line until you recover slowly. Now, either these accounts arise because brain and consciousness become split or because they are a retrospective construction of the experience of unconsciousness. I would probably go for a splitting’.

Proving nothing?

Dr Parnia, a clinical research fellow and registrar at Southampton Hospital, said: ‘I started off as a sceptic but, having weighed up all the evidence, I now think that there is something going on.

‘Essentially, it comes back to the question of whether the mind or consciousness is produced from the brain. If we can prove that the mind is produced by the brain, I don’t think there is anything after we die because essentially we are conscious beings.

‘If, on the contrary, the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind, like a television will act as an intermediary to manifest waves in the air into a picture or sound, we can show that the mind is still there after the brain is dead. And that is what I think these near-death experiences indicate.’

However, Dr Sue Blackmore, a psychiatrist who has made a special study of these phenomena, declares that although the research is good work, ‘it proves absolutely nothing about the soul. All claims about this being evidence for consciousness existing without a brain are unfounded, baseless rubbish’.

Difficulty

The problem with near-death experiences is that they are exactly that — near-death experiences and not death experiences.

Does the cessation of electrical activity mean that the person is dead — or are they just in the process of dying? Body tissues are sensitive, and real death rapidly brings irreparable damage.

The fact that these patients were resuscitated means that little damage occurred and thus begs the question as to whether they actually did die.

As to the question of emotions and visions, the difficulty lies in understanding what happens to the brain when it is ‘nearly dead’. When brain cells begin to die, and brain chemicals are no longer controlled, what sort of hallucinations are possible?

The strikingly similar experiences of ‘clinically dead’ patients might simply be a common psychological phenomenon, which occurs as the mental software begins to crash.

The essential point is that such experiences provide no reliable information about an after-life.

Any true after-life experience occurs, by definition, in another dimension. We can have no confidence that the tools and methodology of science apply — the laws of that ‘universe’ would be totally different from ours.

Spiritual dimension

It is clear, therefore, that to explore the spiritual dimension, we have to use a totally different approach. Fortunately, one is available.

The Bible claims to be the source-book that God has provided to reveal something of that spiritual world. It is, if you like, a ‘dimension-crossing-communication-device’ to show us spiritual realities. This is not just theory; there are vastly more people who testify to its effectiveness than have had NDEs!

The Bible records a story, told by Jesus Christ, which touches on the whole subject of people bringing back knowledge from the grave. It goes like this:

An evil rich man and a good poor man both die. The rich man finds himself in torment and cries out to Abraham. He asks that the poor man should rise from the dead and warn his five brothers, ‘so that they will not come to this place of torment’.

Abraham replied: ‘They have Moses and the Prophets [the Old Testament Scriptures]; let them listen to them’.

‘No’, he said: ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent’.

Abraham’s response is shocking: ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead’.

Righteousness for sinners

And, of course, someone did! On the first Easter morning, Jesus Christ himself rose from the dead.

The Scriptures tell us that he came from the glory of heaven, the eternal Son of God, to live as a man and to die as a substitute. He bore our sins in his own body on the cross, says Peter, that we might be declared righteous (‘justified’) in the sight of a holy God.

Christ’s own perfect righteousness is credited to sinners who trust him as their Saviour. For he was ‘delivered up because of our offences, and was raised because of our justification’ (Romans 4:25).

But if people reject the testimony of Scripture, they will certainly not be convinced by someone coming back from the dead. This is the ironic point of Jesus’ story about the rich man and the poor man; most people didn’t — and still don’t — believe in him, though he has indeed risen from the dead.

But to those who do believe, he gives eternal life! (John 10:28).

Heres another -
http://www.iacworld.org/English/Scie...jectiology.asp

An out-of-body experience (or OBE) is the subjective perception that one is no longer in one's body, while (generally) being able to perceive it from the outside. It is sometimes associated with near-death experiences, dream states, mystical trances or occult phenomena, and psychoactive drugs, mainly dissociative hallucinogens such as ketamine, DXM and PCP.

An OBE may be contrasted with astral projection, which does not require the perception of one's own body from the outside, and which does not typically posit that one's consciousness or soul is actually travelling through our day-to-day physical reality.

An OBE may also be contrasted with dreaming, lucid or otherwise, by the intense perception of being awake and of the reality of the experience.

Not every OBE has exactly the same features, and it may be that there are several different types of OBE that have different causes and meanings. Based on collections of firsthand accounts of "spontaneous" OBEs, (those were not part of a planned program to induce the experience), such as those collected at [1], some observations can be made:

These people have really had the experiences they describe; they are not "faking" them.
They weren't in general "trying" to have the experience through auto-suggestion, hypnotic trance, etc. A lot of these people seemed frightened and/or confused by the experience; some even to the point of doubting their sanity.
There is no question that they really believed they were physically "out of body", and that this is a key feature of the experience. Even though other features of their experience might be self-described as dreamlike, the OBE part was experienced "lucidly", and was very real to the experiencers. Several described their subjective state as "very awake", "more awake than usual", etc. Some quotes:

I knew that these were not dreams, I can now tell the difference and that's what frightened me, a dream you can ignore but not an experience like these it made me want to try and find out why are these things happening to me.
Consciousness was as clear and lucid as any wakening experience.
I was very alert. It was exactly as if I was awake.
Many properties of these OBEs were similar:

In the great majority (55+) of these 66 cases, the experiencer reported being asleep, on the verge of sleep, or having been asleep directly previously. A fairly large percentage of these cases refer to situations where this sleep is not particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.).
In most of these cases, the experiencer then feels themself "wake up"; about half then note a feeling of physical paralysis:
I soon realized that I was capable of moving only my eyes. Neither my head nor fingers would budge. I remember desperately trying to move even a toe to no avail.
Suddenly I could no longer move or even lift a finger. As I was struggling to move, there was a sudden jerk and I was pushed out of my body and was floating upwards.
I had gone to bed, woke up suddenly and found that although I was fully conscious I couldn't move a muscle.
I lay paralyzed, unable to move or blink.
Then my mom woke me for school and I felt sensation slowly return to my limbs (before that I couldn't move anything).
In some cases, the feeling of being outside the body is something that is suddenly realized after the fact; they see their bodies almost by accident. In other cases, they either will themselves out of their bodies or find themselves being pulled from their bodies (these are usually preceded by the feeling of paralysis).
The OBE is not generally long; on the order of a minute or so. The experiencer may note that the subjective experience is much longer than the objective time passing.
The OBE may or may not be followed by other experiences which are self-reported as being "as real" as the OBE feeling; alternatively, they may fade out into a state self-reported as dreaming, or they may wake completely.
The OBE is sometimes ended by a fearful feeling of getting "too far away" from the body.
Many of these OBEs end with a feeling of suddenly "popping" or "snapping" back into their bodies.
I was lying in bed and I felt myself rising. This freaked me out, so I slammed back into my body.
As soon as I noticed myself still lying on the couch I was instantly shot back in my body.
I reached the floor and touched my bed in a sitting position. I whooshed back into my body.
I realized that I was floating and became very frightened. In that instant of revelation I felt a sense of great speed and an impact as though I had smashed into a brick wall. I "woke up" crumpled up at the bottom of my bed in the hotel.
I was pulled violently back into my body and I jerked.
The next moment I was fully awake and in my bed, no journey upstairs, nothing, I was back in an instant.
Some people experience spiritual epiphanies; others experience a general feeling of peacefulness and love; and still others experience fearfulness and anxiety. Finally, some experience only the OBE itself, not as a spiritual experience directly.
A majority describe the end of the experience as "then I woke up".
It's worth repeating that even those (perhaps especially those) who describe the experience as something fantastic that occurs during sleep, and who describe the end of the experience by saying "and then I woke up", are very specific in describing the experience as one which was clearly not a dream; many described their sense of feeling more awake than they felt when they were normally awake. One compared the experience to that of lucid dreaming, but said that it was "more real".

On the other hand, the basis for the belief that the experience was real was not primarily external evidence. Very few from this set of 66 considered it needful to verify for themselves that they were physically out of body by, for example, checking on events at other locations. This type of verification was not what caused them to believe that the experience was "real" in the first place. Instead, it was the quality of the experience that drove their perception of its reality, and made it different from a dreaming or illusory experience. Some quotes:

I can say one thing I remember vividly, I felt no different than in body form. This is what was so unbelievable.
I could see the details in my room and the ceiling from up close exactly as if I was seeing it in real life.
The room was bright and I was looking at a dress that was hung on my bedroom wall. My gaze was fixed on this dress taking in all its details. I knew it was not possible to see this dress from the position I was laid in bed, this frightened me again.
I knew I was asleep on the living room floor when I was floating on the ceiling because, I was in shock in the "dream" how I could feel my breast dangle downward. I was completely aware.
Only 2 of the 66 cases involved attempts to verify the experience as being "really" out of body by checking people's or objects' positions in another room.
The quality of the experiences which were strictly part of the OBE had no direct bearing on the remainder of the rest of the experience. For example, some described vivid spiritual experiences following the OBE, which continue to influence their lives. On the other hand, others describe a kind of fading into what are self-reported as dreams of no consequence. Conversely, many people report spiritual experiences during sleep or otherwise which are not preceded by an OBE.

A small minority of the OBEs were not accompanied by sleep:

I can remember walking home from junior school with my friend, and then, I saw myself in the distance walking and talking to her.
The next thing I knew, I looked straight out in the woods, and I had an OBE. I saw the lights from the back porch, I was about 100-150 feet away from the house looking at me and my friend.
The doctors did not use any anesthetic at the time because I was too young [two years old]. When they cut me open, I felt severe and intense pain and I left my body because it was too much for me to bear.
Although the above experiences were "spontaneous", some people have attempted to develop techniques to induce an OBE. Methods vary:

Attempting to fall asleep without losing consciousness. This method is generally believed to be what causes involuntary OBEs. Some who use it consider dreams to be a form of OBE in which the conscious mind is suppressed; alternatively, others believe that an OBE is a form of dream in which the conscious mind is not suppressed.
Deep trance and visualization. The types of visualizations vary; some common imageries used include climbing a rope to "pull out" of one's body, floating out of one's body, getting shot out of a cannon, and other similar approaches.
Audio/visual stimulation intended to bring the subject into the appropriate state.
Chemically induced experiences. OBEs induced with drugs are generally considered to be hallucinations (i.e., purely subjective), even by those who believe the phenomenon to be objective in general. In any event, these chemicals are often illegal and, in some cases, known to be damaging to one's health.
Electrical stimulation of the brain (see below).