Hi All,

I go back and forth in my belief or disbelief about "surviving" death. In one month, Eben Alexander, III, MD, a neurosurgeon who experienced an NDE as a result of bacterial meningitis, will be publishing his book, _Proof of Heaven_. He wasn't religious and used to believe that the mind is what the brain does.

Not anymore.

He now believes this: http://eternea.org/My_message_from_beyond/My_message_from_beyond.htm

I hope that he's right. Our lives--our existences--are riding on it.

What I find very odd is that suffering never seems to be addressed by NDE'rs. There is so much of it. The world overflows with suffering because of external conditions, such as tsunamis and plagues, not to mention wars and abuse, and internal conditions, such as aging, bereavement, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and on and on, endlessly.

Do people "grow" as the result of suffering? I suspect not very often. Is suffering in any way good? I argue that it is NEVER good, but always to be avoided. I can find no moral purpose in suffering whatsoever: a child losing its grandmother. A mother losing her young son to leukemia. It's just unconscionable. Or the Holocaust! The sheer level of suffering and loss is just unimaginable.

If we are, in fact, souls having a mortal experience, it seems to me that these bodies are our prisons. I don't know about a heaven, but this life ultimately becomes a hell for nearly everyone. At bottom, most of us eventually and quite insistently want an answer to the question: WHY ARE WE HERE? And we hunger for a spiritual answer, not a Darwinian one that tells them that we're all nothing more than macaque monkeys flinging feces until we're snuffed out.

There appears to be no way to know.

My own belief, then, is that this life matters, because it's the only one that we know, for certain, that we've got. And that means that community, morality, relationships, adventure, fun, joy, creativity...all of these matter very deeply. In a very real sense--unless you include other species (which I do; I love dogs)--all we've got is each other, within the context of our earthly home. Our lives become exactly what we make of them, given what we've got to work with, our circumstances, and all of the other contingencies that we're confronted with.

Think about what it would be like if there were 10,000 of us that created an isolated community somewhere far away, say in northern Arizona near the Grand Canyon. No prophets. No priesthood. Instead, honest people who come together to do the best that they can. From us will emerge some leaders and many followers, some healers and many sick patients, some teachers and many students, some builders and many dwellers. We each have gifts differing. How would such a society self-organize, and under what conditions would it flourish?

I feel that our present society is just so large, with power concentrated among very small groups and resources very unfairly distributed, that it's impossible for it to thrive. But I'm more optimistic about smaller communities. If small companies are engines of economic growth, then shouldn't small communities (relatively speaking) be engines of human flourishing?

We have so much diversity on planet Earth, even among the human species, that it's easy to forget that not everyone is "white and delightsome." Not everyone is straight and destined to become a father or mother. But can't we find a way to accommodate diversity and be stronger?

I often wonder on Sunday nights--perhaps out of the dread of a looming Monday morning at work--what this existence is really all about.

And I'm reminded of Scottish theologian John Watson's famous comment...

"Be strong, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Steve

I had a near death experience that shook me to my core. Not in a hospital. In a dream. I was a rhinoceros and charged off a cliff. I was clinging to one of those little branches sticking out of the cliff wall, balanced as delicately as a rhino could be.

It sounds silly, but it felt real. And I remember looking down on myself in bed and I actually smelled pizza. Turns out, my wife was cooking a pizza downstairs, but how could I have known.

Well, I'm depressed tomorrow is Monday, but I just got off the horn with Pizza Hut and I'm already feeling better.

thingsithink Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I had a near death experience that shook me to my
> core. Not in a hospital. In a dream. I was a
> rhinoceros and charged off a cliff. I was
> clinging to one of those little branches sticking
> out of the cliff wall, balanced as delicately as a
> rhino could be.
>
> It sounds silly, but it felt real. And I remember
> looking down on myself in bed and I actually
> smelled pizza. Turns out, my wife was cooking a
> pizza downstairs, but how could I have known.

Assuming this is not a joke post . . .

You could have known because you have a nose and you were just upstairs from a Pizza baking.

I thought it was Pliny the Younger who said

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is involved in a great struggle."

Haven't googled it because I'm tired from my garage sale, so ?


Anagrammy

I would have to agree.

Assuming good faith is a good policy.

BTW, I hope the garage sale went well. How will you have the garage moved to the new buyer's home?

T-Bone

Well Pliney the Elder said to me the other day, "buy me because you need a good IPA."

Alright, I have to admit I didn't read your comment before my first reply. I was afraid it would be depressing and I do try to avoid suffering.

I understand everything you've said. I've thought about it all except creating utopia.

So, what's stopping you from creating the beautiful world you want even if its just you? We can't choose to avoid suffering. I think we might be able to choose to avoid beauty.

I tend to want to believe in life-after-death but it really bugs me when people claim to know for sure. Not so much if they have had a NDE - those people are probably closer to "knowing" than anyone. But people who are certain there is an afterlife or certain what that afterlife entails or certain life ends at death ... well those people CAN'T know for sure. I think we all need to grow up and learn to live with uncertainty. Or maybe it's just I've heard one too many testimonies of people who KNOW the church is true that I'm jaded.

But to venture a guess, I'd say the reason NDEs don't cover the meaning of life or the disasters of the world is because of the relatively short nature of NDE's. It's not like you have hours and hours to ask every question you ever had about the meaning of life. Even if you buy into the idea that time is a wibbly wobly timey wimey thing, it's still just a quickie visit, before the rescue folks drag you back into your body.

Last comment - my MIL had a couple of NDEs. In one, she only had a quick glimpse of a beautiful place. Several months later, she was at a Regional Conference with some GA, (I can't remember which one) and she got a chance to shake his hand. She told him about what she saw and asked him "Elder______, did I see the Celestial Kingdom? Did I make it?" to which he had the nerve to say "Yes, that is what the Celestial Kingdom is like. You must have your life in order." She went away very happy, so maybe that was his intent. I'm not sure he what else he could have said. But it takes a lot of moxy to claim a knowledge of heaven there is no way he could have.

. . . "meet-the-dead-relatives" scenarios, when it comes to pinpointing the brain-centered neuro-transmission causes.

One could, I suppose, always hold out for the Santa Claus option.

:)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 07:23PM by steve benson.

Gay Philosopher Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi All,
>
> I go back and forth in my belief or disbelief
> about "surviving" death. In one month, Eben
> Alexander, III, MD, a neurosurgeon who experienced
> an NDE as a result of bacterial meningitis, will
> be publishing his book, _Proof of Heaven_. He
> wasn't religious and used to believe that the mind
> is what the brain does.
>
> Not anymore.
>
> He now believes this:
> http://eternea.org/My_message_from_beyond/My_messa
> ge_from_beyond.htm
>
> I hope that he's right. Our lives--our
> existences--are riding on it.
>
> What I find very odd is that suffering never seems
> to be addressed by NDE'rs. There is so much of it.
> The world overflows with suffering because of
> external conditions, such as tsunamis and plagues,
> not to mention wars and abuse, and internal
> conditions, such as aging, bereavement, anxiety,
> depression, schizophrenia, and on and on,
> endlessly.

Do people "grow" as the result of suffering? I
> suspect not very often. Is suffering in any way
> good? I argue that it is NEVER good, but always to
> be avoided. I can find no moral purpose in
> suffering whatsoever: a child losing its
> grandmother. A mother losing her young son to
> leukemia. It's just unconscionable. Or the
> Holocaust! The sheer level of suffering and loss
> is just unimaginable.

Is it possible that the suffering we all experience is designed by our inner selves to wake us up? Unless we become thoroughly sick and tired of the suffering, we will not seriously try to find a way to escape it. The existence of universal suffering is what motivated Siddhartha the Buddha to seek for release.

> If we are, in fact, souls having a mortal
> experience, it seems to me that these bodies are
> our prisons.

Is it possible that the body-as-prison concept is an illusion, and that we might be able to escape the "bodily prison" at will, if we but seek for and practice the right tek?

I don't know about a heaven, but this
> life ultimately becomes a hell for nearly
> everyone. At bottom, most of us eventually and
> quite insistently want an answer to the question:
> WHY ARE WE HERE? And we hunger for a spiritual
> answer, not a Darwinian one that tells them that
> we're all nothing more than macaque monkeys
> flinging feces until we're snuffed out.
>
> There appears to be no way to know.

Appearances can be deceiving. Perhaps there IS a way to know. I think it is worth using some precious time to seek for a key to the secret door, that lets us down to the earth's deep core. We'll be back in time for tea, with a diamond to show thee.

Hi Steve

Thanks for your thoughtful posts. I appreciate reading about your search for meaning and your self-awareness.

I don't have much to add but I wanted you to know that I'm glad when I see you here.

When people simply refuse to accept the cold reality of death, many of them desperately latch on to the celebrated (but not cerebral) case of Dr. Eben Alexander III--a formerly comatose patient who is also a neurosurgeon and associate professor at the Harvard Medical School.

Alexander came out of a bad seven-day-blackout bout with meningitis and claimed he met God in a vision.

Red meat, no doubt, for the metaphysical-feat crowd, but not so fast. Not all professional neurologists are impressed:

"Like much of the scientific community [ya think?], Dr. Wendy Wright, a neurologist from Emory University, believes that near-death experiences are purely a function of endorphin release in the brain. 'So when these chemicals are released, these different type of phenomena can occur: a person might see a light, or experience a sense of peace or calming. Feel that they're surrounded by loved ones." Such visions, although potentially comforting to the individual, are little more than tricks of the brain,' she says."

"Four Theories On What Happens When We Die," in "The Huffington Post," under "Nothing 'Fantastic' Happens," p. 4, 23 June 2011, at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/23/what-happen-when-we-die_n_882738.html#s296717&title=There_Is_An)
_____


Now, get ready for Gay Philosopher to do what he normally does in these kind of situations: Bear his testimony about immortality and eternal life.

(Beam me back to sacrament meeting).



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 05:09AM by steve benson.

The thing that I find interesting is how the NDE experience changes those who have it. They return from their experience profoundly different people.

But if you really do think you saw your dead grandma at the end of a light tunnel, well, the Apostle Paul can tell you about seeing Jesus while walking down a road.

Or you could lose oxygen to your brain during test pilot training and travel to the Great Beyond.

Or you could smoke something funny and see lots of really cool things.

It's all in your head. Eventually you're dead.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 05:40AM by steve benson.

I had an NDE when I nearly bled out and died after surgery. I wrote the experience up afterwards, I will pull out my hard drive later and look for it. I would rather post what I wrote back then, as memories can warp. It was amazing, and felt wonderful. I was an atheist at the time and am still an atheist. If there is a god, s/he doesn't have a problem with atheists.

When I was young I had a problem with sleep paralysis which I thought was either Stan, or ghosts. When I finally realized what was going on, and was able to try study the experience without abject horror and eventually screaming myself into movement, the few episodes I had afterwards ended as out-of-body experiences. They feel amazingly real, if the feeling of "spiritual flight" could be called real. I miss them now - I have not had one since the days of sleep deprivation with my youngest child. They were triggered by stress or sleep deprivation. But I was always well aware they were taking place inside my skull (at least after I stumbled across a pile of "Skeptical Inquirer"s in the library and found out what was plaguing me). One of them ended with me lurking somewhere near the roof, looking down on my boy watching him sleep, then watching him rouse and wake up, then I slipped back in my body just as he woke - obviously I heard him and my imagination supplied the imagery. I had my husband write a number on a piece of paper and put it face up on the top of our book shelf as a test to see if I could read it during my next OOBE. Fail. IIRC I have only had one since, and I have long since removed the paper to dust up there. I should get him to replace it just in case.

Anyway, I mention the OOBEs as background to the NDE. I had had weird experiences before the NDE, and would probably be called prone to dissociative events. I had read up on these sorts of things from a skeptical viewpoint. So when it happened I had an idea what was going on. The NDE seemed to be totally different to OOBEs, but then OOBEs were essentially sleep paralysis episodes minus the terror and those two couldn't have been more different from each other either. So even though I had a "classic" NDE with "tunnel" and lights and wonderful feelings (and damn-near died), There is nothing that happened that I don't think could have originated in my brain.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 05:50AM by spanner.

It may well be in the archives. It was very interesting, and I appreciated your perspective and that you took the time to write it out. It was a very lucid picture of an experience not everyone has.

FWIW, I say no more than 'We don't know.'

Edited to add: I once lived with a man who was very troubled, probably due to childhood abuse. I believe he had a severe dissociative disorder. Based on that experience, dissociative disorders create strange, haunting experiences that do seem supernatural. Some of them very weird, even spooky, but I was told by a therapist that they occur with dissociative disorders.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 06:15AM by Lorraine aka síóg.

On Production Values:

Why o why does Dr. Alexander, MD and neurosurgeon for god's sake, feel it necessary to use the font style that every new age "practitioner" uses on their home-made business cards/brochures!?

Well, it could be worse, he could have chosen Papyrus or Herculanum...

(I'm generally sympathetic towards the experience and point of view of Dr. Alexander, but he (unwittingly) undermines his credibility by falling into new age cliche... It's so unnecessary.)

Human

I would not dismiss what the good doc had to say out of hand.

No further comment.

Materialists:

Positing brain chemistry as a hypothesis is fine as such. Now, what is the proof of that hypothesis? Somehow we always get left with the hand waving 'explanation' but nothing more. If brain chemistry can explain NDEs then have at it - replicate NDEs with fidelity and show the world. No half ass jobs, please, and I expect professional peer reviewed literature as with any science.

Spiritualists/Supernatural/NDE believers:

After all the gazillions of NDE experiences there still appears to be no hard proof of any prediction or experience whatsoever. Why not?

. . . gathered and presented to support a hypothesis. At least that's how science defines the term. The evidence amassed to structure a given theory is then weighed, observed, tested, replicated and falsified. The best theories are the ones that stand up to the most criticism.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 08:47PM by steve benson.

As a nurse for 30 years I had a patient one night that was having chest pain that quickly became a cardiac event, his wife was there at his bedside and we were all rushing around when he suddenly state "I see Jesus" and pointed to the right of the foot of his bed. You could have heard a pin drop in that room everyone stopped and just stared at him, in his distress he looked at his wife an said I really do! We all chimed in saying we believe you, and kicked it up to high gear,getting him off out floor and to CCU.

And just recently an elderly uncle of mine ( who is Baptist,btw)is in hospice with an incurable lung disease. One afternoon he got himself into the bathroom without his oxygen. When he was found he was barely breathing and no one knows how long he was down, however once his oxygen was back on he slowly came back around and asked his brother "am I dead"? When told no he seemed really disappointed. Later he was able to relate to everyone what was going on in the room while they were working on him. He also stated to everyone that " there is a whole new world out there and it's beautiful".
I could go on with other stories,I have gone back and forth on the subject but I'm leaning more on the fact these are real experiences and not dreams or some kind of dying brain activity.
Dreams and dying brains would not be able to tell you who all was involved and the conversations!
Anyway I am very hopeful .

I just think of my nana with alzheimer's, if that is not proof of the brain creating crazy realities on it's way out i don't know what is.... poor thing would be found curled in a ball in a corner sacred to move because of the big black dog guarding the way.... or the big fireplace in the corner of the room with a chimney boy piling it with coal 24/7. or the fact when she spoke to my dad she talked to him like he was 7 telling him off for throwing stones at the nurses.....

The brain can truly do interesting things when it is shutting down and dying. and that was only the tip of the iceberg of the realities of her final weeks. The only truly creepy thing she said to me was for me and my brothers to get off her bed - i had twin brothers who died as babies - of course as a TBM you know what i thought - but when u added it against the other 99% of crazy rambles it was just chance something slightly spiritual came in.

When I was in the hospital having surgery, there was an older lady in the bed across from me.

I took to wandering the halls a lot, because they told me that the more I got up and moved around, the faster I'd be able to go home.

When I'd later come back to my bed, the lady turned me into so many different characters. One time she yelled at me for coming home so late. Thought I was her son. I was like, "Uh, do I look like a man?" but of course I didn't say that. I just sort of stared at her, not knowing what to say.

Another time, she was like, "I know what you are, running around with all of those men. You stay away from my son." Again, I just stood there, not knowing what to say.

It was sad, annoying and entertaining, all at the same time.

My grandfather was a true blue jerk to everyone he came in contact with all of his life. Mean, selfish, cruel.

It was a blessed relief when he got alzheimer's. He turned in to the kindest sweetest person. The grandfather I had always wished for. He was only that way a year before he died. If there is a next life, I hope he has alzheimers in that life. I'm sure that my grandmother would wish that too. He literally drove her insane with his nasty cruel personality.

My mother used to call the nurses in her facilities, "those bitches." She hated them and was sure they were eavesdropping on her phone conversations through the vents.

She was so nasty during that period she threw (not hot) tea in the face of another resident who disagreed with her politics.

This is the same mother I told the story on some months ago how we were discussing the Jewish-Palestinian situation and she summoned our black-haired waiter in a loud voice thusly: "Hey Jew-girl, come here and tell us what you think of all these Arabs wanting equality (?)"

When I was a teenager, my sister and I would stand near some woman nearby so if mother went off, people would think we were someone else's children.

So just before CHristmas, mama said she had a terrible headache for like two weeks. After that she was the sweetest, most wonderful person. My mother died in her brain and someone else emerged. This person blew kisses at the nurses and called them Miss Sweatheart, I kid you not.

She remained like that the last three years of her life.

The experience with her Alzheimers left me with the inability to coordinate the simple facts of her brain dying in pieces with the ideas of NDE's or even a complete "spirit body."

Does got have a brain library where he records and saves the memories that made my mother who she was. Is her former testy disposition waiting for her to come get it after the rest of her body dies? Because there is no real "after-life" of the personalities with out the memory and personality you had on earth, right. You would be someone else, perhaps thirty years old and perfect, but not the self you were when you died.

I want the brain I have now, not my thirty year old brain.

See--just too many problems to be sorted out by my husband in the CK, in between his sexy time with his thousands of wives.


Anagrammy

If there is a life after death, I will strangle God with His own beard. I'm tired. Death is the greatest opportunity imaginable. Total darkness, complete silence and absolutely no television is, to me, eternal bliss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMl0-bhNcM&feature=plcp

http://peacewithgod.jesus.net/mobile/
GOOD NEWS FLASH - click above site and see how to have eternal life and get to
heaven. Dr. Eben is not a Christian yey, he says nothing of salvation, sin, redemption and the judgementJesus is the of God, which ded for his sins, was buried and rose from the dead. He is the way, the truth and the life and ony through Him can you have a relationship with the living God. Pray for him.

THANKYOU Anagrammy!

Lets be NICE to each other in our differences. In reading some of these threads I feel I am in a room full of people trying to proselatyse their own beleifs and INSTSTING that everyone agree. Vive la difference!!
We are all EX mormons!!!

. . . to you and how it explains NDEs and OBEs.

I know that can tend take the believing breeze of faithful fantasy out of your sails but, hey, this is the real world.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 07:26PM by steve benson.

"Do people "grow" as the result of suffering? I suspect not very often. Is suffering in any way good? I argue that it is NEVER good, but always to be avoided. I can find no moral purpose in suffering whatsoever: a child losing its grandmother. A mother losing her young son to leukemia. It's just unconscionable. Or the Holocaust! The sheer level of suffering and loss is just unimaginable."

I read some of "The Forbidden Religion" and then by extension read some of Anton LaVay's Sataning Bible writings out of curiosity seeing that they are set up as the antithesis of Christianity/Judaism. While there are things that I find troubling about it, there are good points. If Satan/Lucifer actually exists, according to the Luciferian doctrine the suffering is entirely unnecessary and cruel. It is basically that the creator god is punishing us all for things we can't help (being human). I have to ask how a truly just and loving god can think it's just fine to cause us such pain. If this is REALLY necessary for our growth, then we will know why we are here and have a right to have far more direct answers then we are getting. Instead, we're relying on someone with more "authority" to tell us stuff that doesn't really help at all and only makes us more depressed. We live in a world where most of us are only attractive for a short time then lose our looks within a short time yet live far longer than that. We live in a world where illness and death destroy our happiness and where money is absolutely essential for happiness. What if you can't get a job? Too bad, you live with others until they get tired of you and dump you on the street. God does not provide, the supposedly good and holy "free market" does. Whatever.

"If we are, in fact, souls having a mortal experience, it seems to me that these bodies are our prisons. I don't know about a heaven, but this life ultimately becomes a hell for nearly everyone. At bottom, most of us eventually and quite insistently want an answer to the question: WHY ARE WE HERE? And we hunger for a spiritual answer, not a Darwinian one that tells them that we're all nothing more than macaque monkeys flinging feces until we're snuffed out."

If we are here to learn things, then we will know where we came from. Instead, we're taught from children that we're NOT ALLOWED to know the unknown (somehow we're not ready or unworthy of that) and instead rely on blind faith, occassional whisperings (which can be confused with our own thoughts), a history book we can't prove is accurate and unprovable, unseen events. It also is by extension that when we pray nothing usually happens and no real miracles ever happen. When you look at it THAT way the Christian God is extremely cruel and really could care less about us. We should be allowed to KNOW why we are here. We should be able to communicate with our dead relatives, pets, etc. We should be able to understand our purpose and seek divine intervention with clear instructions on how to solve our problems in life instead of through some vague "priesthood blessing". We live in a society where as Calvin & Hobbes said "might makes right and the winners write the history books". It's no wonder so many of us that honestly considered Abrahamic religions became atheists, because it is nothing but unreliable third person accounts.

The funny thing is if this whole Judeo-Christian story IS true than like battles in the real world (such as the Civil War) both sides are being deceptive and both sides have their own propaganda to spew. Both have points they are making that are right, and both are wrong. The Luciferian plan is okay with deliberate cruelty and selfishness, which we know is wrong but apparently he is right that the whole world is cruel and unfair and that we really have no business being here. In the Civil War, the South was correct to say that they were being unfairly dictated and punished by the North for the slave trade (the slaves were being funneled through the north and the actual trade occurred there) but on the same token the South was upholding the institution, fighting to keep it and determined to keep a third world elite society structure in place that kept poor whites and slaves both down. Why else would Appalachia resist joining the South? We see that today with the right/left conflict taking a similar dynamic as it did in the 1860's. Both were wrong to be doing the slave trade in the first place, both had noble reasons for fighting for what they believed in and both were dead wrong on other reasons. You had fence sitters (which by comparison the Mormons claimed were blacks in the War in Heaven), you had those that supported the other side in the wrong place (Union sympathizers in the South). Both were telling lies to support their position and claiming unanimous support for their sides.

So basically if this war in heaven is in place, oddly enough we've got two people that have different views about humanity should live or even if they should exist. We're taught that Lucifer/Satan is a liar and deceiver, but who is telling us this? The one who we are told won the war and runs the show now. We have to worship him same as we have to admire the leader of our country and respect him. He set the rules, and it doesn't matter what we think of them because he is more powerful than us. Perhaps gods have more human qualities than we would like to imagine. If the Christian God is confident enough to prove what really happened to us and who is really right, then why is he keeping us in the dark about what the truth is? Why are the religions all contradicting each other? Why are gays so fundamentally evil according to ALL Abrahamic religious dogma? Is this why the Christian God supposedly hates gays so much because when Lucifer was originally a "good guy" he defended sexual freedom or something? It must have been a sticking point like slavery, because obviously Yahweh/Jehovah is really hung up on dictating sexual activity. It's way out there, but it's stuff to ponder. For me, being gay, I'd sure love to know why I would be the way I am and yet be so hated by the god that created me. I'd love to have some light shed on it, but if god really is like these spiteful Mormons and fundy Christians do I really have any hope? Am I doomed to hell or is that just a threat from a triumphant Jehovah to scare me into accepting his dictates?

NDE whether you believe they are real or not do NOT dictate that you must follow a religion, but yet I've heard of hellish experiences and something that isn't often discussed in NDE is the fact that there are still people trying to sway you to one camp or another even when you're dead. Unlike what they teach you there is not one line of thought going on there when you die. The souls are still trying to influence you one way or another, but apparently you're trapped in some realm based on your personality and conscious state in your waking life. People are still trying to convert you one way or another, so I guess it would make sense that a dead TBM would still be out there trying to make everyone a Mormon even if it doesn't really matter there.

The link doesn't work for me: 404 error

Very interested though!