"I dedicate this book to the powers of darkness and light. Without both, Creation’s story would not exist, nor would we. The swings of Creation’s pendulum between these two great polarities enable growth to occur. I witnessed this truth when I died. Researching that edge—the one between life and death—defined what I had witnessed. The bigness of forever lies in the eyes of near-death experiencers. I've had the privilege of looking through thousands of them, including my own.
"People forget that the vast majority of near-death experiences emerge from situations of violence or trauma. A typical experiencer contends with body damage (sometimes severe) and the immediacy of recognizing that ‘here’ (where they are now) is not the same as ‘there’ (where they once were). No matter how ecstatic or terrifying the experience may be, what comes next is usually confusion, maybe anger, as most of us didn’t want to come back. We wanted to stay where we were.
"The phenomenon captures public attention as none other. It is soul-stirring in the way it reminds even the most staid that home, our true home, is not a joke. It exists, and it is real.
"Who among us can be certain if all near-death experiencers were fully dead? Many revived or were resuscitated after clinical death; some were close to death; others, in a split second of utter fear, were convinced they were going to die but didn’t (called a ‘fear’ death).
"We’ve known for some time that five minutes without oxygen is fatal to brain cells. Yet dying itself takes longer to occur because cell death isn’t an event, it’s a process. An exception is with humans who are exposed to extreme cold or who drown in icy water. It is possible for them to benefit from hypothermia, a survival response that automatically lowers body temperature enough to slow cell death.
"There is little argument among researchers that, on average, most near-death experiencers, adults and children, go without vital signs (pulse, breath, brain waves) for between five and twenty minutes. Amazing as this may seem, considering how quickly brain damage can occur after cessation of vital signs, even more amazing is that usually there is little or no brain damage afterward; rather, there is brain enhancement. You heard me right: Individuals return to life smarter than before. Sometimes this enhancement can be quite dramatic, especially with young kids. In my own work, I discovered so many who had revived in a morgue—maybe an hour, maybe six hours after having ‘died’—that I no longer came to regard this as unusual.
"I admit a bias here. Being a three-time near-death experiencer myself, it would take a lot to impress me as concerns ‘the dead come back,’ yet impressed I was when I met a man who had revived while being cut open during an autopsy after a full three days of being a corpse in a freezer vault."
P. M. H. Atwater, Near-Death Experiences: The Rest of the Story (Hampton Roads, 2011).
No comments:
Post a Comment