Death!

[Burnt State]

Last thoughts on death: sorry Steve but half of this post is a video I made for a social agency years ago. It focuses on three different kinds of deaths in my life. Maybe you can watch it at work? I know I posted it elsewhere but it makes much more sense being here in this thread.

And then, finally, we all know the great master's words, from a son to a father, to rage, rage against the dying of the light, but truly, this is my favorite bit of writing about childhood, death and time:

Fern Hill
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I must say, that this forum has been a real time consumer. I mean forget trying to crunch through the ideas behind both the Consciousness & Paranormal threads but the amount of posts I still have to read.....But this forum has been a great learning space of exchange with a good community heart in many ways. Hope Nameless and Trainedobservor come back soon. But I've got work to do, miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep and all that jazz. See you all soon enough. I'll do my best to lurk.

 

[Constance]

Our modern boogymen--who or what are they?

Always so difficult to characterize the current zeitgeist while living in its midst. One, if old enough, can only compare memories of society past. These must be always taken with one's own grain of salt because so much is warped by subjectivity of more youthful perception and the passage of time. The best we can do, perhaps, is compare and statistics for well documented behaviors. And even here, conclusions are plagued by subjective analysis and values changing between generations at an ever quickening pace.

Having said that--suggestions for books, blogs or whatever offering good dissections of the current time ghost are welcome. Almost gone, I think, are cinematic meditations of what makes current society tick of the kind that were so popular and insightful during the 1950's. Still, there is no shortage of inquiring minds that want to know. smcder, if you would care to re-construct your thoughts in purple, we would like to hearing them.

I'd like to add two observations, both fairly obvious. The first is that the fear and terror images that come up for people including children seem to arise in what gets propagated in dominant media (historically and more than ever now). I remember two volumes of Grimm's fairy tales our family had when I was a child, both beautifully bound books with intricate illustrations. What I most remember about them was the dreadfulness of those illustrations, many depicting in painterly style small children whose bodies were covered by insects, reptiles, and amphibians. What was my mother thinking? I bought and read for my child cozy and adorable tales such as those written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter that presented life's complications gently in the lives of small mammals, frogs, ducks, etc., and similar encouraging stuff. Around the same time I read Bruno Bettelheims's book about why fairy tales that are frightening are good for children, arguing from a deep psychological viewpoint that these prepared children for life. He might have been right for all I know.

The other thought is one that occurred to me again today -- the consummate terrors being presented to children in blockbuster movies about variations on how the world will come crashing down on us and be obliterated any day now. Television seems similarly filled with horrors against which we are helpless. This is insane and unthinking in my opinion; it can't help but destroy the confidence of children in a stable world in which they can hope to live decent lives. There are no prominent efforts I've seen joined that attempt to stop it.

 

[Constance]

I must say, that this forum has been a real time consumer. I mean forget trying to crunch through the ideas behind both the Consciousness & Paranormal threads but the amount of posts I still have to read.....But this forum has been a great learning space of exchange with a good community heart in many ways. Hope Nameless and Trainedobservor come back soon. But I've got work to do, miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep and all that jazz. See you all soon enough. I'll do my best to lurk.

Thank you for the Dylan Thomas poem. I gather from the end of your post that you're going to take some time off from active posting here and, while I certainly understand, I'm sorry to hear it. I need to do that too (many projects unattended to and even major housework), and I too find it difficult to stop reading all these interesting discussions. Do lurk and keep in touch.

 

[smcder]

Our fascination with Horror movies in general is rather interesting as they are all about death, are they not? Expressed in all the sleepaway slumber slasher flicks, with Freddy, Jason, Franky, Chucky and good ole Michael Myers stalking us with finger blades, slingshots, knives and machetes, is our perpetual and absolute dread fear for our own mortality. It's what stops Hamlet from doing away with himself with his bare bodkin because, death, and what might come after, is something that troubles the will deeply as no one has returned from that undiscovered country to share what, if anything, comes next.

Personally, I don't feel that we've done well with either celebrating or respecting the dead, nor have we integrated death properly into the cities of the living. Sure there are our cenotaphs, monuments, obsidian walls, and falling water into holes in the centre of the city, not to mention all those improvised road side shrines following the latest crush of metal into flesh. But do the dead live with us, really? What do these markers really mean aside from saying, once upon a time so and so was born, lived, loved if they were lucky, then died. That's it, and nothing more. Nevermore.

I posted those images from films and tv series where The Dead are suddenly among us, as it's truly confusing. We don't know what to do with them really. We're struck dumb by the dead, like that character at the end of James Joyce's seminal short story, where all the living and the dead are united, for a brief ponderous moment, in the mind of that narrator. We just don't know what to do with them at all.

And so, like Kurtz, standing in that doorway at the edge of life and death, he cries out, "The horrror, the horror." Because that's all we've got. We journeyed out across the Nihilist River, after killing god and the planet, and now we rub dry thumbs together, wandering in underwater chambers till sea girls wrapped in seaweed wake us and we drown.

I wonder if Delacroix is implying that really, at the end of it all we still want
to hang on to whatever weak branch might keep us from the inevitable?

 

[smcder]

Philosophical horror is the genre I alluded to, literary nihilism ... seems to tie in with the zombie theme, as a way of easing people into a nihilistic/hedonistic culture through the media but it also seems to show a revolt when that consumerism becomes ravenous.

Thomas Ligotti - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Stagger Lee]

Regarding death in horror movies.. as far as slasher flicks are concerned, I don't consider that real horror. No blood need be spilled on screen to make a good horror movie. I have watched, what could have been a good horror movie, turn really bad and distasteful.

 

[boomerang]

Sorry, they are gone ... I'll start over:

the modern image of man as meat and number (Francis Bacon's paintings, the bureaucracy of genocide) man as biological robot - man as meat and machine in particular is key to the zombie craze.

the horror the hero has of seeing others bitten and infected to turn into a zombie is matched by his/her realization that he, unbitten - is simply a piece of meat and a biological robot, that there is no difference in the mindless hordes of zombies who do nothing but consume and the deterministic systems of neurons and gristle that are still considered human, whatever that means. The hero cannot escape his body and the body is going to die and rot.

The horror of the audience is then sublimated into a nihilistic consumerism ... and they find themselves strangely hungry after the film ends.

Your observations are salient and thanks for sharing. If I correctly comprehend your view of what makes post modern man tick, what we are learning about ourselves as extensions of the natural order is increasingly dis-comforting:

We are walking bags of self-replicating chemicals grubbing for survival on an unremarkable ball of mud and rock that is periodically subject to cosmological house cleaning by cataclysmic collision with giant rocks from the sky. No--not golden thunderbolts imparting wisdom from a higher consciousness. Nothing so meaningful. Just big, mindless rocks. Here is fuel for nihilism. What could be more meaningless than to see one's entire species obliterated by a giant piece of hurtling garbage?

Our most intimate personal domain--the mind and its precious free will--has been proven experimentally amenable to fundamental alteration by chemical or other means. "We" are amenable to re-shaping by the technology we have created. The immediate intentions with which we ceaselessly thrust and parry with our world are now shown to have been chambered from some mysterious inner neurological realm for a measurable fraction of a second before the trigger is pulled in action.

Our machines grow more cognitively capable by the day. We must wonder if we are creating our masters or perhaps eternal soul mates in silicon, as per Kurzweil.

Are we even partly on the same page? I suppose what I am saying is that the heart of modern man has not yet been able to process what the mind has created.

and they find themselves strangely hungry after the film ends.

A very astute observation ! There is precious little nutrition for the heart and mind in American art and entertainment these days.

 

[boomerang]

The other thought is one that occurred to me again today -- the consummate terrors being presented to children in blockbuster movies about variations on how the world will come crashing down on us and be obliterated any day now. Television seems similarly filled with horrors against which we are helpless. This is insane and unthinking in my opinion; it can't help but destroy the confidence of children in a stable world in which they can hope to live decent lives. There are no prominent efforts I've seen joined that attempt to stop it.

It's almost as if the book and movie industry, striving to appeal to a particular youthful demographic, has been painting in ever darker and shades over the last few decades until the whole genre is left without contrast. Like trying to paint a ghastly work only in the color black, so there is ultimately no meaning at all.

There was an observation by the great fantasy author Ray Bradbury decades ago decrying this trend. His take was that great writing may perfectly justify making the reader sick. But only if, by its conclusion, it also makes the reader well again. I think this is a very valid point.

 

[smcder]

Your observations are salient and thanks for sharing. If I correctly comprehend your view of what makes post modern man tick, what we are learning about ourselves as extensions of the natural order is increasingly dis-comforting:

We are walking bags of self-replicating chemicals grubbing for survival on an unremarkable ball of mud and rock that is periodically subject to cosmological house cleaning by cataclysmic collision with giant rocks from the sky. No--not golden thunderbolts imparting wisdom from a higher consciousness. Nothing so meaningful. Just big, mindless rocks. Here is fuel for nihilism. What could be more meaningless than to see one's entire species obliterated by a giant piece of hurtling garbage?

Our most intimate personal domain--the mind and its precious free will--has been proven experimentally amenable to fundamental alteration by chemical or other means. "We" are amenable to re-shaping by the technology we have created. The immediate intentions with which we ceaselessly thrust and parry with our world are now shown to have been chambered from some mysterious inner neurological realm for a measurable fraction of a second before the trigger is pulled in action.

Our machines grow more cognitively capable by the day. We must wonder if we are creating our masters or perhaps eternal soul mates in silicon, as per Kurzweil.

Are we even partly on the same page? I suppose what I am saying is that the heart of modern man has not yet been able to process what the mind has created.



A very astute observation ! There is precious little nutrition for the heart and mind in American art and entertainment these days.

"Are we even partly on the same page? I suppose what I am saying is that the heart of modern man has not yet been able to process what the mind has created."

That's a good way to put it - Nietzche's novel about the murder of God might be the first piece of modern philosophical horror. Prophetic too and we are still living in the time of that prophecy ...

I believe we have choices still. I also question the dominant religion of unlimited progress - Perhaps someone will nail a list on The Church of Kurzweils Door ... ;-)

 

[boomerang]

Perhaps someone will nail a list on The Church of Kurzweils Door ... ;-)

That's priceless !

 

[Tyger]

Came across this today -

First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study: Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible
First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study - Telegraph

TEXT: "Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

" “We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

" “But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

" “The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

" “He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

"Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and 140 said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

"Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up."

 

[Polterwurst]

Came across this today -"

It's the AWARE study. I've been waiting for the results since September of last year. From what I have read just now, it's a study of around 1500 cases of people who were resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

Allegedly, around 30% experienced nothing, more than 40% had experiences which didn't quite match the criteria for a classic NDE, only a few per cent did have them.

The main question was if it could be verified that people were aware while they were clinically dead. Which could be done if the out-of-body-phase which is sometimes reported, really occurs and is not only a subjective experience.

Seems the case you quoted above is the only one in which evidence pro veridical OBEs turned up (the sounds that were "heard").

Sigh. The sceptics are going to love it. Only one of 1.500. Talk about anecdotes.

 

[Tyger]

It's the AWARE study. I've been waiting for the results since September of last year. From what I have read just now, it's a study of around 1500 cases of people who were resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

Allegedly, around 30% experienced nothing, more than 40% had experiences which didn't quite match the criteria for a classic NDE, only a few per cent did have them.

The main question was if it could be verified that people were aware while they were clinically dead. Which could be done if the out-of-body-phase which is sometimes reported, really occurs and is not only a subjective experience.

Seems the case you quoted above is the only one in which evidence pro veridical OBEs turned up (the sounds that were "heard").

Sigh. The sceptics are going to love it. Only one of 1.500. Talk about anecdotes.

I don't think the article is talking about the same study - or you misunderstood. I merely quoted one story but here is more of what the article said - and note that the number of cases studied is far higher than 1,500.

TEXT: "Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and 140 said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated. Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened. Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering. “Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best. “Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events. “And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.“These experiences warrant further investigation. “ "

 

[Polterwurst]

I had read about the AWARE study coming out with results in a german source. Seems that they got the number wrong. Or maybe I misread it, although I could swear an hour ago it said 1.500. Now it's 2060, which would make it the "biggest ever NDE study" indeed.

They quote the same case from Southampton with the two bleeps being "heard", which means there would have been perception three minutes into cardiac arrest etc. According to the german article, AWARE is being conducted in America, Great Britain and Australia. Dr Sam Parnia, who is quoted in the article you linked, is the spokesman.

There is no mention that only 330 survived, though. That would make the study much smaller, apart from being tragic and a disturbingly low success rate.

I guess it's all just too early and rumours, numbers and fragments of the study are flying around. Better wait for something more official.

 

[Tyger]

Like Caesarean section births, when time of birth is chosen, it stands to reason that time of death would be chosen, too. It's been inevitable - and it's taken a long, hard road for those who saw acknowledgement of this as needful, like Dr Kavorkian, who did jail time. In fact, letting someone pass-on when the time comes has long been an unspoken understanding in medicine and religion. Even in Catholicism there were recognitions that there are times when one must honor death. The last few decades got crazy about this but it looks like we are coming to a time when the terminally ill will have the choice to pass-on in dignity.

Cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 29, has scheduled her death for Nov. 1
LINK: Cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 29, has scheduled her death for Nov. 1 - The Washington Post

TEXT: "Brittany Maynard carries a prescription in her wallet. It was written by a doctor in Oregon, one of five states with legal protections for terminally ill patients who want to end their suffering. And in three weeks, she plans to use it to die.

"Maynard has chosen to die Nov. 1 in her bedroom in Portland, Ore., surrounded by family — her mother and stepfather, her husband and her best friend, who is a physician. She said she wanted to wait until after her husband’s birthday, which is Oct. 26. But she is getting sicker, experiencing more pain and seizures, she told People in an exclusive interview. “I’ve had the medication for weeks,” she wrote in an op-ed for CNN. “I am not suicidal. If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms.”

"On New Year’s Day, Maynard, 29, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Nine days later, doctors performed a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of her temporal lobe to keep her tumor from growing. She was given up to 10 years to live. Then in April, doctors learned that the tumor had returned. Her initial diagnosis was elevated to a stage 4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. And the prognosis was grave — only six more months.

"Maynard qualified for physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, one of ahandful of states that permits it under its Death with Dignity Act. Since it was enacted in 1997, 1,173 people in the state have had prescriptions written for lethal medications. Only 752 of them have used the drugs to die as of 2013."

 

[smcder]

Like Caesarean section births, when time of birth is chosen, it stands to reason that time of death would be chosen, too. It's been inevitable - and it's taken a long, hard road for those who saw acknowledgement of this as needful, like Dr Kavorkian, who did jail time. In fact, letting someone pass-on when the time comes has long been an unspoken understanding in medicine and religion. Even in Catholicism there were recognitions that there are times when one must honor death. The last few decades got crazy about this but it looks like we are coming to a time when the terminally ill will have the choice to pass-on in dignity.

Cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 29, has scheduled her death for Nov. 1
LINK: Cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 29, has scheduled her death for Nov. 1 - The Washington Post

TEXT: "Brittany Maynard carries a prescription in her wallet. It was written by a doctor in Oregon, one of five states with legal protections for terminally ill patients who want to end their suffering. And in three weeks, she plans to use it to die.

"Maynard has chosen to die Nov. 1 in her bedroom in Portland, Ore., surrounded by family — her mother and stepfather, her husband and her best friend, who is a physician. She said she wanted to wait until after her husband’s birthday, which is Oct. 26. But she is getting sicker, experiencing more pain and seizures, she told People in an exclusive interview. “I’ve had the medication for weeks,” she wrote in an op-ed for CNN. “I am not suicidal. If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms.”

"On New Year’s Day, Maynard, 29, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Nine days later, doctors performed a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of her temporal lobe to keep her tumor from growing. She was given up to 10 years to live. Then in April, doctors learned that the tumor had returned. Her initial diagnosis was elevated to a stage 4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. And the prognosis was grave — only six more months.

"Maynard qualified for physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, one of ahandful of states that permits it under its Death with Dignity Act. Since it was enacted in 1997, 1,173 people in the state have had prescriptions written for lethal medications. Only 752 of them have used the drugs to die as of 2013."

I read that article too or a similar one just before I saw you posted it.

I wondered what the process is? Surely you wouldn't go to Walgreens and pick up a lethal dose and carry it around with you ...? I assume some process is activated and a physician shows up or you check in to the Hospital? Or is it DIY?

How does insurance deal with this? Who has responsibility if you don't die ... ?

Does a physician have a right to refuse? Or is it on a volunteer basis? I can see that getting low status on a physicians list ... and if they leave the state where it's legal will that affect the ability to practice in another state?

I could see it ending out with a not very motivated and possibly impatient resident in attendance.

Do you have a certain amount of time to carry the process through?

A lot of questions. Will there be end of life specialists to provide counseling? Look at how hospice quickly became a business. Hereabouts anyhow.

I think of my experiences having pets put to sleep. There is a business aspect. There is part of me that feels like I should do it myself, that it's my business but I can't not conceive of it as an act of violence.

How does a parent or spouse conceive of their role in the death of their loved one? In the article I read it sounded like everyone was on board but I'm sure that would rarely be the case.

I also struggle to reconcile the cases where aggressive interventions done by conventional medicine create these situations in the name of life at any cost. Thorny. Just as we prolong life and with it increase the risk of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders.

On the other hand, having this way out available would affect the doctor and patients decisions - if I faced an extremely risky procedure that might give me a few months or leave me in a vegetative state, I might more likely gamble on it if I knew I could pull the plug if something went wrong.

And what sort of reasoning might an ambitious doctor employ on his side of the table?

Finally, if I can't afford the meds or my insurance won't pay without physician approval (or I have to take the generic??) but I've decided it's time, can I take matters in my own hands in whatever fashion I see fit without penalty or are we setting up another gap or discrepancy? Will there at least be a choice of drugs for personalized service? I think here of Edward G Robinson in Soylent Green.

And have we figured out an utterly painless method? If so why don't we use that for executions? Do set and setting come into play?

Why should I be forced to spend a thousand or ten thousand to end my life and possibly leave my family to argue payment out with an insurance company? Can you imagine paying something like that off month after month for years?

I also wonder once the die is cast how many people think of one last thing to be done but they are already adrift? Will someone have the responsibility to make sure you are aware of all the possibilities? Or is it caveat emptor?

The study you posted on brain activity after death makes you think.

Anyway lots of questions here and I've thought of more since starting this post, but no easy answers.

 

[smcder]

Immortality Project

Questions about personal immortality are central existential concerns that know no geographical or cultural bounds.

Such questions include:

• whether and in what form(s) persons survive or could survive bodily death
• whether and to what extent persons’ beliefs about immortality influence their behavior, attitudes, and character
• why and how persons are (at least pre-reflectively) disposed to believe in post-mortem survival
• whether it is in some sense irrational to desire immortality
• and more besides.

Recently the scientific, philosophical and theological communities have paid serious attention to these themes. Interest in these issues is reflected in the popular press as well. Such interest in the project themes inside and outside the academy signals the present time as an auspicious one to launch a unified, organized, and open-minded project that will
(1) stimulate research from across the disciplines in attempt to make progress on these themes
(2) disseminate this research to an especially receptive public.
As project leader, John Martin Fischer, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, seeks to foster such progress primarily by issuing requests for research proposals to fund scientific, philosophical, and theological projects that advance understanding of immortality and belief in immortality, and of how each of these is relevant to the way we live our lives at present.
In addition, the project will include public events and popular-level publications, including essay prizes, aimed at raising awareness of ways in which this topic can be understood and further investigated through careful empirical, philosophical, and theological means. A translation component is intended to provide German-language scholars with more resources for investigating some of the issues above.

 

[Polterwurst]

An article on the AWARE study results from the Daily Grail:
AWAREness Beyond Death? | The Daily Grail

 

[smcder]

An article on the AWARE study results from the Daily Grail:
AWAREness Beyond Death? | The Daily Grail

Straight from the horse's mouth:
Informationen aus erster Hand

AWARE Study

Dr Parnia gives AWARE Study 2014

 

[Constance]

An article on the AWARE study results from the Daily Grail:
AWAREness Beyond Death? | The Daily Grail

Thanks for that link, Polterwurst. Especially for this part:

Nevertheless, the AWARE study does survey a variety of aspects of the NDE beyond just veridical perception, allowing other possible insights into its mysteries. For instance, from the data so far Parnia has also been able to put forward a possible reason for why so many people that are resuscitated don’t remember having a near-death experience. Noticing a correlation between the length of cardiac arrest and whether an NDE was reported, Parnia suggests that “if a cardiac arrest event is relatively short, then the post-resuscitation inflammation and disease that normally engulf the brain and cause widespread damage (including damage to the memory circuits) are also relatively mild by comparison to someone with a prolonged cardiac arrest”. As such, says Parnia, those who report detailed near-death experiences may do so “simply because they had suffered less damage to their brains and specifically the memory circuits in the days and weeks after the cardiac arrest”.
For now though, Parnia and his colleagues are continuing to collate data from the cases on their files since 2008, and once finalized will publish their results in a reputable medical journal. They will then amend any problems with the study that they have noticed in this initial phase: for example, they hope to provide funding for a dedicated member of staff at each medical centre who can attend every single cardiac arrest, possibly with a tablet computer displaying a random target image that they can place in an elevated position in the room, and who would be able to follow up with each patient within days of their resuscitation.

For the rest of us, we’ll just have to wait and see if Sam Parnia and his AWARE colleagues can uncover evidence that the minds of those who die really do ‘leave’ their bodies. If they do, the discovery would perhaps rank among the greatest discoveries in science, up there with the paradigm-shattering ideas of Copernicus and Einstein. Mind would no longer be seen as arising from the brain, and our perception of ourselves and our part in the universe would be forever changed.

For extended discussion of the scientific evidence suggesting that consciousness might survive death, grab the ebook or paperback editions of Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife, available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

You might also like:

• Top Five Phenomena That Offer Evidence For An Afterlife
• The Great Afterlife Debate
• Telepathy Between the Dead

What Parnia writes in the blue-highlighted text above is relevant, I think, to the spontaneous OBE I experienced at age 21. I'll link, if I can find it, the report on it I offered to a website devoted to NDEs and OBEs for background on the circumstances. I think I included there the fact that the OBE took place about three months after I was in an automobile accident and underwent surgery the next morning to close up a gaping hole in my forehead. I did not experience an OBE as the car in which I was the front-seat passenger skidded on ice and struck the trunk of a large tree. I experienced a remarkable slow-down of my perception of time as we headed for the tree, calmly saying to myself that we were going to hit it. An hour later in a downtown ER I did not have an NDE, nor do I remember having one during the surgery the next day. I might have had an OBE during the surgery, however, since it became clear to me later that I must have been aware of what a friend of mine (a med student) experienced during the surgery, at which he attended. As I found out several more months after the surgery from another friend, who was a med student and was also present at the surgery, the first fellow passed out while observing the copious blood flow from the opening in my forehead on which the plastic surgeon was working. I was not aware after the surgery that I had been mentally out of the body during the surgery, but I now think I must have been because of the curious circumstances of the spontaneous OBE three months later. I'll describe these circumstances in a subsequent post.

I reposted your link in the Consciousness and Paranormal thread today, here:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2 | Page 67 | The Paracast Community Forums