Dr. Pim van Lommel responds by referring to the knowledge verified by brain research. “The issue is not whether there is some immeasurable activity somewhere but whether there is any sign of those specific forms of brain activity that, according to current neuroscience, are considered essential to experiencing consciousness. And there is no sign whatsoever of those specific forms of brain activity in the EEGs of cardiac arrest patients.”
NDE research supports the conclusion that: “the current materialistic view of the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too restricted for an under-standing of this phenomenon. There are now good reasons to assume our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced conscious can be experienced separate from the body.”[1]
One NDE survivor writes: An overwhelming feeling of love came over me, not the earthly feeling I was quite familiar with, but something I can’t describe. Above me I saw a bright light, and on my way there I heard beautiful music and I saw colors I’d never seen before. As well as the feelings I just described, I had the impression that this was a different dimension altogether. And if anything was missing it was our earthly conception of time!
Other NDE survivors, like my father, met deceased loved ones. Another survivor says: During my NDE following a cardiac arrest, I saw my dead grandmother and a man who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know. Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who’d been deported and killed in World War II. My mother showed me a photograph. The unfamiliar man I’d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.[2]
In more than one NDE report, a blind person ‘sees.’ A seventy-year-old woman suffering a cardiac arrest, who had been blind since age eighteen, was able during her out-of-body experience to watch the doctors and nurses resuscitating her body. Psychiatrist Raymond Moody reports: “Not only could she describe what the instruments used looked like, but she could even describe their colors. The most amazing thing about this to me,” Moody says, “was that most of these instruments weren’t even thought of over fifty years ago when she could last see.”[3]
[1] Pim van Lommel, “Pathophysiological Aspects of Near-Death Experiences,” in Mahendra Perera, Karuppiah Jagadheesan and Anthony Peake, editors, Making Sense of Near-Death Experiences, 90, italics added.
[2] Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 27-29, 32-33.
[3] Raymond A. Moody, The Light Beyond, 134-135.
No comments:
Post a Comment