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What Happens When You Die? Video
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
Comments
The brain is like an computer. When the Hard drive fails. It is dead and so is the data.
"Loppon Namdrol:
Causes and effects are not the same, nor are they different.
The mind that takes rebirth is not as same as the previous mind nor is it different.
This is the reason why it is possible for sentients beings to experience serial rebirth through the appropriation of an infinite series of new physical bodies over time, relatively speaking.
By saying that there is no actual rebirth, one is committing oneself to a metaphysical position called ucchedavada i.e. annihilationism. Commiting oneself to the position that there is an actual self, person, or entity that is reborn is called śāśvatavāda, eternalism.
But when one understands that one instant of mind is neither the same nor different than the next instant of mind; since they are not the same, one avoids śāśvatavāda; and since they are not different, one avoids ucchedavada — thus one can understand the truth of rebirth, karma and its result, and dependent origination in the manner in which the Buddha intended and leave off the metaphysical speculations that plague non-Buddhists about such issues. One can then also understand that since the mind has no beginning, it never arose; and since it never arose, it never ceases."
just a casual sharing.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/anoxia/anoxia.htm Near-Death Experiences Linked to Oxygen Deprivation
http://www.livescience.com/11010-death-experiences-linked-oxygen-deprivation.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/health/psychology/03shad.html?_r=1&ex=1160452800&en=095aea49e7944d84&ei=5070&emc=eta1
I meant evidence of what happens after death (which includes knowing what the mind is), not just OBE or NDE.
When I say some OBE experiences is just like the real world. I am not talking about the surrounding look alike. It's that the event took place in the OBE verified the event took place in the real world.
How can that be an evidence the brain produces the hallucination of OBE? Note that the brain is a vital organ of a human body. What if that electric zap triggers the OBE itself?
Just because an event can be triggered in different ways doesn't prove the event is fake.
Nonetheless, the debate of NDE and OBE is like debating how dream works.
It doesn't help in the process of enlightenment.
http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/index.php
The Frank Kepple Resource
http://www.astralpulse.com/frankkepple.html
There is a lot more good material on it now. Most all astral projectors are sane and serious about what they experience. Anyone can learn how to do it. There are techniques for learning to get out of your body and go to other parallel dimensions, called astral realms, or focuses, or whatever. Projectors have come up with different names for these realms.
The one thing I don't see that science has accounted for in NDE's is the really advanced nature of NDE's. Many times it's much more than just being out of body but very complicated experiences which end up changing their lives.
Such as Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander
Kind of hard to debate a Neurosurgeon who had an NDE. So he has the best of both worlds.
Peace.
OK so Oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long wrote a book called "Evidence of the Afterlife:The Science of Near-Death Experiences" which I think very clearly illiustrates why NDE's are proof of an afterlife. So the idea is that any one or couple lines of evidence given is not enough but if you combine all these together you will see that we do have proof if not strong evidence for an afterlife. So here they are.
The Nine Lines of Evidence from Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences:
1. Crystal-Clear Consciousness. The level of consciousness and alertness during near-death experiences (NDEs) is usually even greater than that experienced in everyday life even though NDEs generally occur when a person is unconscious or clinically dead. This high level of consciousness while physically unconscious is medically inexplicable. Additionally, the elements in NDEs generally follow the same consistent and logical order in all age groups and around the world, which refutes the possibility that NDEs have any relation to dreams or hallucinations.
2. Realistic Out-of-Body Experiences: Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are one of the most common elements of NDEs. What NDErs see and hear of earthly events in the out-of-body state is almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was observed or heard during the NDE, the OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations during the NDE included events far from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that near-death experiences are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain.
3. Heightened Senses. Not only are heightened senses reported by most who have experienced NDEs, normal or supernormal vision has occurred in those with significantly impaired vision, and even legal blindness. Several people who have been totally blind since birth have reported highly visual near-death experiences. This is medically inexplicable.
4. Consciousness During Anesthesia. Many NDEs occur while under general anesthesia- at a time when any conscious experience should be impossible. While some skeptics claim that these NDEs may be the result of too little anesthesia, this ignores the fact that some NDEs result from anesthesia overdose. Additionally, the description of a NDE differs greatly from that of one who experiences “anesthetic awareness.” The content of NDEs that occur under general anesthesia is essentially indistinguishable from NDEs that did not occur under general anesthesia. This is further strong evidence that NDEs are occurring completely independently from the functioning of the physical brain.
5. Perfect Playback. Life reviews in near-death experiences include real events that previously took place in the lives of those having the experience, even if the events were forgotten or happened before they were old enough to remember.
6. Family Reunions. During a NDE, the people encountered are virtually always deceased, and are usually relatives of the person having the experience- sometimes they are even relatives who died before the NDEr was born. Were the NDE only a product of memory fragments, they would almost certainly include far more living people, including those with whom they had more recently interacted.
7. Children’s Experiences. The near-death experiences of children, including very young children who are too young to have developed concepts of death, religion, or near-death experiences, are essentially identical to those of older children and adults. This refutes the possibility that the content of NDEs is produced by preexisting beliefs or cultural conditioning.
8. Worldwide Consistency. Near-death experiences appear remarkably consistent around the world, and across many different religions and cultures. NDEs from non-Western countries are incredibly similar to those that occur in people in Western countries.
9. Aftereffects. It is common for people to experience major life changes after having near-death experiences. These aftereffects are often powerful, lasting, life-enhancing, and the changes generally follow a consistent pattern. As the NDErs themselves almost always believe- near-death experiences are, in a word, real.
Wow, OK so there it is. I must agree with Jeffrey on this I think that all this is really strong evidence for an afterlife if not proof. It's inexplicable as Jeffrey says that they should be having these kinds of experiences at death. I can understand it if the experiences were uniform or incoherent or didn't make sense but many of these people have very complex experiences coherent experiences at a time when the brain must conserve. NDE's give them meaning to their lives and ultimately change their lives most of the time.
Peace and keep seeking truth.
Notions we sometimes use concerning mind, like arise and cease, or birth and death, only apply to physical phenomena.
e.g. if you have one apple and you take away one apple, you have no apples (in the space where the apple was)
but take away mind (supposing one could) and there is no space where mind was, because mind isn't an object in a space. So the notion of mind ending doesn't make sense at all. What would there be? Certainly not nothing.
The theory of oblivion is an error led to by the idea that there is a thing 'here' in the first place which could be absent, and oblivion itself is a clumsy mental image based on the modern concept of zero, or the image of darkness, or however one conceives it.
Just because we can imagine death, doesn't mean it's plausible. I have no alternative theory, but the widely accepted theory about death doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Because the deathless cannot be defined in language.
But we can get so attached to the security the intellect promises (when I get my indestructible titanium cyborg implants, I'll be immortal!), that we feel that what can't be defined doesn't exist, even if it's right here (not here).
Peace, keep seeking truth.
1. Consciousness. Pretty much incoherent point. "Level of consciousness" during NDEs is a nonsense statement. The patient is unconscious. I assume he means vivid memories. People have vivid memories all the time. "I remember that like it was yesterday." Also the fact that the elements follow the same order is evidence for an identical biological reaction to oxygen depletion on human brains, nothing else. A skeptic would say the Doctor is assigning meaning without evidence.
2. OBEs (out of body experiences) Analysis of OBE accounts actually shows the opposite of his conclusion, in that the patient never recounts details that he or she could not have known before or during the operation. The one attempt to prove OBE is real involves putting a sign high up in the operating room pointed at the ceiling where a floating body can see it, and to this day nobody who reports an OBE can tell the researcher what the sign says. This is a hallucination and has been reproduced many times using drugs.
3. Heightened Senses: Wear perfume or aftershave around a hospital and watch the patients gag on the smell. Also blind people can dream and experience hallucinations when the vision center of the brain is artifically stimulated. The vision center of the brain still exists even if the eyeball or nerves to the eye are damaged.
4. Consciousness during anesthesia. I won't say much about this other than this is known to happen and someone "remembering" an experience after gaining consciousness is not the same thing as being conscious during the anesthesia. Modern anesthesia is a complex mix of exotic drugs and sometimes causes strange effects.
5. Perfect playback: According to whom? The patient feels certain that these vivid memories are accurate and detailed. Hallucinations can be both detailed and vivid. Just ask any schizophrenic.
6. Family reunions: For the person who expects to meet their family in heaven, they do so. Since they don't expect to meet someone still living, they don't. What's that prove? That our expectation guide the experience.
7. Children's experiences. Any child old enough to communicate what they experienced during an operation is old enough to know what their culture and people around them expect to happen and a good interviewer can guide the child to say anything. This "the child is somehow untainted by the adult beliefs" myth is now known to be highly misleading. People have been put in jail and accused of satanism because "the child is too young to lie or know what that means."
8. Worldwide consistency. This is a restatement of a point made in #1, but only points to a common medical reaction. All people have brains and lungs and the same biochemical reactions. So what's the Doctor's point?
9. Aftereffects. People who experience trauma and life crisis events such as accidents or medical problems needed operations quite often show long lasting effects. Nothing like being scared you're going to die to make someone examine their life. This is true with NDE and non-NDE people. Again, this shows the Doctor is fishing for evidence and ignoring science.
Now, all I'm saying with all this is, don't confuse this Doctor's speculations with real research or scientific proof. NDEs do exist because people wake up to recount them. The last initial stands for "experience". People experience strange things when their body and brain is undergoing extreme stress. It's an experience. Some people also experience night terrors and paralysis and claim aliens abducted them. It doesn't mean this really happened. In old times and before science fiction, the same experience caused people to claim the fairys abducted them. That's an attempt to assign meaning to the experience.
The brain is the "form" part of the skandhas, and effects all other skandhas including belief and emotion and consciousness. Mess with the brain and you cause all sorts of strange things to happen to the mind.
I just got a kick out of it and thought I would share.
I have a firm belief in science, but I'll be the first to say that science only measures our natural world. Beyond that is anyone's guess. Simply put: we don't know what happens after death. NO ONE does. Saying that "your just dead" (wrong form of "you're" by the way) is every bit as arrogant and ill-informed as someone who says "There is life after death".
Besides, in my opinion, a purely materialistic universe is every bit as useless and depressing as a purely metaphysical one. There needs to be a good balance of both.
I have a firm belief in science, but I'll be the first to say that science only measures our natural world. Beyond that is anyone's guess. Simply put: we don't know what happens after death. NO ONE does. Saying that "your just dead" (wrong form of "you're" by the way) is every bit as arrogant and ill-informed as someone who says "There is life after death".
Besides, in my opinion, a purely materialistic universe is every bit as useless and depressing as a purely metaphysical one. There needs to be a good balance of both.
I've had a few NDEs as a result of the brain tumour I had 4 years ago. Twice before I was diagnosed I experienced my body starting to shut down on me as my brain was being compressed by the mass growing within. During one of them I lost control of my legs, I got up to get out of a colleagues car and I literally had to pick my legs up with my hands and move them myself, as I slowly got the feeling back in my legs I could then feel my feet dragging on the floor because my body had stopped responding as it was supposed to, later that day I was very sick and could do nothing but lie down still, I really did feel like I was dying.
The second time I had gone for a quick drink after work with colleagues and as I got up to go the little boys room I started to stumble all over the place like I was drunk, I hadn't had a drink at this time, I more or less collapsed against a wall and I remember bright white flashes in my eyes, more like a loss of vision.
The most amazing experiences however come from when I was coming around from my operation to have the tumour removed, I remember lying in a bed and as I started to gain consciousness I could feel my blood flowing around every part of my body, it was an incredible sensation and one I will never forget, I could literally feel the blood as it circulated my body and I felt like my heart rate was going through the roof. I was asking why I could feel this sensation all over my body and why my heart was beating so fast, the doctors assured me my heart rate was perfectly normal but it wasn't to me, it was like I was in a world of my own. From then and for a few days after I would get regular flashes of white light in my eyes where I would stop seeing for half a second at a time, I likened it to my eyes getting an electric shock and all I could see was the white light.
The final interesting experience I will share was after I came out of hospital, I was back at home and learning to move around again when I got a sudden incredible pain in my head, it paralysed me, I literally could not move through fear of it happening again. I felt that if I moved my body then the pain I would experience would be too much for my body to cope with so I just didn't move. It turned out I had air around my brain as a result of the operation and something I must have done had caused it to move and cause the pain.
Even now I remember these things like they happened only yesterday.
BTW the AWARE study did produce positive results for NDE's just not as solid as they had originally hoped for. The NDE'ers probably just didn't look at the sign since it was so high, or had an NDE without going to the RTZ (Real Time Zone) which would have allowed them to be able to see the sign. It's only certain specific cases we have of people that can go to the real time zone in an NDE and see what is actually going on in the emergency room. What does that have to do with anything about NDE's First of all blind people DO NOT DREAM IN VISUALS. The only blind people that dream with visuals are the ones that had sight but lost it. Also when a blind person has an NDE no doctor is going to be artificially stimulating their visual center. Also I would imagine that it would be impossible to stimulate the visual center in a way that could make any coherent meaningful experiential experience to the person. Also the blind people that do have NDE's report very coherent lucid experiences that bring meaning to their lives. It's not non-nonsensical visuals and images I would imagine you get from artificial stimulation.
One last thought here. There have been people that have been totally blind since birth, had an NDE and was full of color and lucid with an experience and came back and talk about.
Nice book on it here.
Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind by Kenneth Ring (Author), Sharon Cooper (Author), Charles T. Tart (Author) Yeah simply ""remembering" an experience" or simply just being conscious while under anesthesia is totally different than having an OBE or NDE while on anesthesia. Your saying that if you just remembered something from your childhood that you forgot a long time ago that you would not identify with it and know that it really did happen. Of course you can tell the difference between a real childhood memory and some imaginations. And even if you can't tell you can still tell if it's in the realm of possibility. At least most of the time you can tell if a memory like that is real or not, unless you have a mental condition.
After the NDE the patients are not known to be diagnosed with any mental conditions after their experience. "Hallucinations can be both detailed and vivid." is not the same as vivid recall of memories. They are two separate things. IMO for one to make this kind of experience when the brain needs to shut down and conserve makes no sense. Why the heck would it create all these great experiences with family at a time when it's fighting for it's life. This makes no evolutionary sense.
Through the study of astral projection I admit expectation can play a part in the experience but only to an extent and especially when in the upper dimensions which are more stable. If what you say is true then kids who have atheistic/ agnostic beliefs should have a bias against an NDE if the parents told them. But as research has said no culture or religion is immune for an NDE.
Physical evidence. OBEs do not generally leave burn marks on your front lawn, or scars, scoop marks or implants.
Independent eyewitnesses. Budd Hopkins has documented cases in which multiple independent witnesses claim to have seen alien abductions as they were taking place. OBEs almost always seem to be subjectively experienced while an outside observer would describe the subject's body as "asleep."
Pain during an OBE is uncommon, but sometimes experienced in abductions. During many alien abduction experience, subjects seem to have been subjected to painful procedures. This is almost unheard of in OBE literature. OBEs are typically painless, and have sometimes been used as a release from painful situations, as in the case of war prisoners undergoing torture.
OBEs can be consciously induced. Some subjects have been able to induce out-of-body experiences at will. I'm not an alien abduction expert, but to the best of my knowledge, alien abductions cannot be induced. If someone knows about cases where it can be, it deserves further study.
Surgeries or genetic experiments. Many cases of alien abduction seem to hinge around genetic experiments or surgeries being conducted by the aliens. Abductees report eggs being taken, fetuses being extracted and sperm samples being collected by the aliens for some kind of genetic manipulation. Sometimes, this is described as sexual in nature, but typically it is described as being done more objectively or scientifically than that. As far as I know, people who have OBEs never report such things. It would be interesting to study whether male abductees report the termination of alien genetic experiments after a vasectomy is performed.
Degree of Control. OBE experiencers usually have more control than abductees. For example, during an OBE, if the subject wants to float down the hallway, they typically can do so. During alien abductions, the subject often feels out of control, and often paralyzed. For example, if they are lying upon what seems to be an examination table, they may not be able to get up.
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Lastly I want to sum up here my thoughts. There were many times here that you compared the symptoms of NDE's with other things that are not apart of the NDE experience. For this I suggest you study it more.
I will leave you with this. An Atheist that acknowledges we can't just shrug off or explain away the evidence for NDE's.
Life after death
Life after death