Nærdødsoplevelser ændrer dit liv

[Kall, Mogens]

N�rd�dsoplevelser �ndrer dit liv
10. april 2013 kl. 10:57

http://videnskab.dk/kort-nyt/naerdodsoplevelser-aendrer-dit-liv

N�rd�dsoplevelser �ndrer folks liv. De f�les mere virkelige end den 'normale' virkelighed og giver derfor nogle helt nye
perspektiver p� tilv�relsen. Det viser et nyt forskningsprojekt, if�lge Livescience.com.

[Jan Rasmussen]

"Kall, Mogens" <Jesus.lov...@gmail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
news:5167d278$3$32105$1472...@news.sunsite.dk...

A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html

When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible-a journey to the
afterlife.

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific
world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father's path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at
Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near
death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys
described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it
receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe
trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn't mean they had journeyed
anywhere real.

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn't
begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands
of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there
who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided.
But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the
neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe
in consciousness after death.

I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of
the scientist I am.
Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire
cortex-the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human-had shut
down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon,
determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E.
coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state
were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body
unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue
treatment, my eyes popped open.
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind-my conscious, inner
self-was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria
that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a
dimension I'd never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain
was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension-in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences
and other mystical states-is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally
in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of
consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief,
wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever
traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under
minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of
minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not
while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration
of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological
examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way
that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the
hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had
been conscious during my coma, but-more importantly-the things that happened during that time. Toward the
beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply
against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher than the clouds-immeasurably higher-flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky,
leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.
Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these
words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on
this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.
A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings
were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they
soared along, was such that they had to make this noise-that if the joy didn't come out of them this way then
they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain
that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the
silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what
they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of
it-without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that
you couldn't look at anything in that world at all, for the word "at" itself implies a separation that did not
exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and
intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly's wing.

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I
remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown
tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately
patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of
butterflies were all around us-vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up
around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman's outfit was simple, like
a peasant's, but its colors-powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach-had the same overwhelming,
super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five
seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far.
It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these,
beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all
those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood
that it was true.
I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real-was not some fantasy, passing and
insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I'd say they ran something
like this:
"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."
"You have nothing to fear."
"There is nothing you can do wrong."
The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game
I'd been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.
"We will show you many things here," the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving
their conceptual essence directly into me. "But eventually, you will go back."
To this, I had only one question.
Back where?

A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of
the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world
around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.
Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting
questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?
Who am I?
Why am I here?

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light,
color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was
that they didn't simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that
bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn't thought like we experience on earth. It wasn't
vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate-hotter than fire and wetter than
water-and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have
taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet
also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed
to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of "interpreter" between me and
this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself
was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to,
the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close
to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.
"There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ..."

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.
I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone-even a doctor-told
me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some
delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my
life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.
What happened to me demands explanation.

Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity-that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world
of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the
universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.

Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined
by unity, it is also-I now know-defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is-I have come to
see with both shock and joy-the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very)
different ways.

I've spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I
know that many of my peers hold-as I myself did-to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex,
generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the
unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies
broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating
the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as
clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

I don't expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old
scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply
took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be
constructed in its place.

I learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and talk to others-people,
that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley, and our two sons-about what had happened to me. The looks
of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would have
getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was
down.

One of the few places I didn't have trouble getting my story across was a place I'd seen fairly little of
before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh
eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I'd seen in the
world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like
waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked
the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God
even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I'd learned of as a child in Sunday school.

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not
faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the
body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a
new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual
in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all:
truth.

Jan Rasmussen

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Rado skrev:

> korrekte. A "must see"...

Det er bare to personer der snakker. Det beviser ikke noget.

--
Bertel
http://bertel.lundhansen.dk/ http://fiduso.dk/

[Matthias H. Matthiessen]

Om jeg har haft en n�rd�dsoplevelse ved jeg ikke, men fik dog hjertestop
under en operation i lokalbed�velse.
Jeg s� hverken sv�vende engle eller andre sp�ndende ting, som nogen
p�st�r de har set.
Jeg tror ikke jeg har �ndret mig efter den oplevelse.
Under operationen stod sygeplejersken pludselig og ruskede mig i armen.
Hallo - er du der?
Ja, selvf�lgelig er jeg det! T�beligt sp�rgsm�l!
Nah- du har alts� lige haft hjertestop og vi m�tte st�de dig to gange.
Det gav fire fine br�ndem�rker p� overkroppen.

Nu her bagefter siger jeg, at hvis man kan d� p� den m�de, s� fint med mig.

Hilsen Matthias

[Max]

Hej Matthias

> Jeg s� hverken sv�vende engle eller andre sp�ndende ting, som nogen
> p�st�r de har set.

Det er ogs� min opfattelse at det at d� er temlig opreklameret.

--
Mvh Max

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Rado skrev:

> Næh, men hvis det hun siger er sandt (og det ser jeg ingen grund til
> at tvivle på) er det temmelig god evidens for at folk der har en NDE
> er i stand til at se og høre ting der foregår rundt omkring dem, også
> langt væk fra hvor de befinder sig.

Hvis alt det som folk siger, er sandt, så sker der ufatteligt
mange sære ting rundt omkring.

I videnskabsgruppen må man nok forlange lidt bedre dokumentation
end uunderbyggede udsagn.

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Max skrev:

> Det er ogs� min opfattelse at det at d� er temlig opreklameret.

Men du m� dog indr�mme at reklamen har ganske god effekt. Hvilken
anden branche kan prale med 100 % tilslutning over hele jorden?

[Max]

Hej Bertel

> Men du m� dog indr�mme at reklamen har ganske god effekt. Hvilken
> anden branche kan prale med 100 % tilslutning over hele jorden?

Ja, et godt eksempel p� hvad en marketingafdeling kan udrette :)

--
Mvh
Max

[Pettersen,Roald]

Followup-To: dk.livssyn
In dk.videnskab on topic: "Nærdødsoplevelser ændrer dit liv"

>> I videnskabsgruppen må man nok forlange lidt bedre dokumentation
>> end uunderbyggede udsagn.
>

> Der er ingen der har sagt det her skal være dokumentation for noget,

NDE er dokumentation for ingenting.

[Claus E. Petersen]

Den 12-04-2013 11:21, Kall, Mogens skrev:

hvad skete der med dk.livssyn.newage?

- cep

[Glenn]

NDE mere detaljeret end virkelige h�ndelser?

Overraskende NDE-forskning:

University of Li�ge (2013, March 27). Memories of near death
experiences: More real than reality?. ScienceDaily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130327190359.htm
Citat: "...
The results were surprising. From the perspective being studied, not
only were the NDEs not similar to the memories of imagined events, but
the phenomenological characteristics inherent to the memories of real
events (e.g. memories of sensorial details) are even more numerous in
the memories of NDE than in the memories of real events.
...
Certain studies have put forward a physiological explanation for certain
components of NDE, such as Out-of-Body Experiences, which could be
explained by dysfunctions of the temporo-parietal lobe. In this context
the study published in PLOS ONE suggests that these same mechanisms
could also could also 'create' a perception - which would thus be
processed by the individual as coming from the exterior - of reality. In
a kind of way their brain is lying to them, like in a hallucination.
These events being particularly surprising and especially important from
an emotional and personal perspective, the conditions are ripe for the
memory of this event being extremely detailed, precise and durable.
..."

Glenn

[Jan Rasmussen]

"Jan Rasmussen" <1@1.1> skrev i en meddelelse news:51820a25$0$289$edfa...@dtext01.news.tele.dk...

> "Kall, Mogens" <Jesus.lov...@gmail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
> news:5167d278$3$32105$1472...@news.sunsite.dk...
>> N�rd�dsoplevelser �ndrer dit liv
>> 10. april 2013 kl. 10:57
>>
>> http://videnskab.dk/kort-nyt/naerdodsoplevelser-aendrer-dit-liv
>>
>> N�rd�dsoplevelser �ndrer folks liv. De f�les mere virkelige end den 'normale' virkelighed og giver derfor
>> nogle helt nye perspektiver p� tilv�relsen. Det viser et nyt forskningsprojekt, if�lge Livescience.com.
>
> A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html
>

En artikel der s�tter nogle tal p� og kommer med en mere biologisk forklaring.

Why science is taking near-death experiences seriously
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/399692/Why-science-is-taking-near-death-experiences-seriously

SOME people report seeing angels, late relatives or deceased pets.
Others claim to have reviewed every moment of their lives, to have
looked down on their bodies from above or to have had
conversations with God. Many of them speak of moving up a tunnel of white light.

By: Simon Edge
Published: Wed, May 15, 2013

Fay Weldon says the feeling of being drawn towards a bright light can be rationally explained
"In one I saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and there was certainly an extraordinary sense of
warmth, communality and progress," said the novelist Fay Weldon this week. The 81-year-old was describing two
near-death experiences she had in hospital following heart problems. "The other time I saw pearly gates in
garish, Hindu-type colours. They were double-glazed and when they were pushed back I got a rather convincing
glimpse of the other side."

This isn't the first time she has described the afterlife but she always gets attention because she was once a
prominent atheist who has lately become a Christian.

For believers the phenomenon she is describing seems to offer proof of life after death with a tantalising
glimpse into the afterlife before the patient is plucked back by doctors. The notion of looking down on one's
body also suggests it's possible for the self to exist independently of physical flesh and blood, boosting the
idea of a soul.

A huge number of people of widespread beliefs and cultures have reported such phenomena for centuries and it's
becoming more common as resuscitation techniques improve. Researchers in the US claim to have counted 13
million adult near-death experiences in their country alone.

Since the Seventies doctors, psychologists and scientists have sought to record the cases in a bid to explain
what's going on. Some have wanted the afterlife conclusions to be true, some have wanted to debunk them while
others have had near-death experiences and want to know more.

"It's important to acknowledge that people really do have these experiences," says Dr Susan Blackmore, an
academic psychologist who is one of Britain's scientific authorities on the subject. "They're memorable,
extraordinary and life-changing. All sorts of people have them and they can happen to anybody under certain
circumstances.

"Because they are the most vivid things that have happened in their lives, people are often convinced their
soul has left their body and they've gone to heaven. But it doesn't prove they have. It's just their
interpretation."

In 2001 a group of Dutch doctors interviewed 344 patients who were resuscitated after cardiac arrest. Only 62
of them (or 18 per cent) reported a near-death experience. The finding puzzled the doctors. If there was a
purely physiological or medical reason for the experience they would have expected most patients who had been
clinically dead to report one.

A more recent study published in the journal Neurology compared 55 people who'd had near-death experiences
with 55 people of the same age and gender who had not and found that the former were more likely to have
blurred boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. The rapid eye movement (REM) associated with the dream sleep
state tended to intrude into normal wakeful consciousness. This suggested the phenomenon is biological rather
than spiritual.

In 2002 the journal Nature reported the case of a woman who had a very rare form of epilepsy. Her doctors had
to insert electrodes under the skin on her scalp and into her brain and they found that if they stimulated a
particular spot it distorted her body image, making her think she was bigger or smaller or outside her body.
They could control this by changing the amount of stimulation or moving the electrode slightly.

"That made a big difference because we know which part of the brain is responsible," says Dr Blackmore. "We
also know that when you're suffering severe shock or lack of oxygen this particular area can start random
firing. That goes some way to pinning down the out-of-body experience." Scientists have also been able to
explain for some time why people think they're going down a tunnel.
"The inhibitory cells that stop too much firing going on in the excitatory cells are sensitive to lack of
oxygen or to psychedelic drugs," says Dr Blackmore. "If they stop doing their job you get a random firing,
with lots and lots of cells towards the middle of what you're looking at.

"So it's like a bright light fading out towards the outside. As the experience progresses there's more and
more of that happening and you get the sense of movement."

A DDS Dr Blackmore: "It's brighter than anything you have ever seen because it doesn't involve your eyes,
which is why people describe it as wonderful light, and it doesn't hurt your eyes because they're not
involved."
The later stages of the experience, where people meet angels or visit other worlds, are less common and seem
to be dependent on cultural or religious expectations. If you believe in St Peter you may well meet him at the
pearly gates but if you don't you are unlikely to.

What could potentially upset this rational explanation is people coming back from the brink of death and
telling doctors things they could only have known if they really were watching what was going on, for example
accurately describing who entered or left the room. But Dr Blackmore is sceptical. "If any of these stories
held up to scrutiny, then I'm wrong," she says. "But I used to investigate each of these dramatic cases
whenever they arose and every time I discovered there wasn't any corroboration."

Knowing what it's like to nearly die means it's reasonable to assume that's also what it's like to fully die.
We can expect the feeling of whooshing down a tunnel with a rush of joy and possibly looking down on ourselves
and greeting long-lost relatives. The moment of death could be far better than we expect, whether or not there
is an afterlife.

The downside is that only about 18 per cent of us can expect to experience it.

Jan Rasmussen