The Mays write: Some NDErs report interacting with another person’s physical
body during their NDE. These interactions take two different forms.
“Sensing” the neural electrical activity in the
other person’s body is one form.
For example, Raymond Moody personally resuscitated a woman:
“I saw her have a cardiac arrest and immediately started heart massage. She told me later that while I was working on restarting her heart, she was going up above her body and looking down. She was standing behind me, trying to tell me to stop, that she was fine where she was. When I didn’t hear her, she tried to grab my arm to keep me from inserting a needle in her arm for injecting intravenous fluid. Her hand passed right through my arm. But when she did that, she later claimed that she felt something that was the consistency of ‘very rarified gelatin’ that seemed to have an electric current running through it. I have heard similar descriptions from other patients.”
Moody is the author of Life after life in which he coined the term near-death experiences. This particular case indicates that as his patient passed her nonmaterial hand through Moody’s physical arm, she perceived a subtle resistance as a “very rarified gelatin” consistency. She also perceived a kind of electric current running through his arm, suggesting that she sensed the neural activity in his arm muscles as he moved to insert the IV needle. Moody has heard other similar cases.
“Triggering” neural electrical activity in the other person is a second form. One example comes from 7-year-old NDEr Jerry Casebolt whom we mentioned earlier. He reported that while out-of-body, a German shepherd sensed his presence in a playground outside the hospital. The dog playfully jumped up and barked at him until the Light Being accompanying Jerry told him to stop his “childish” diversion. Back in the hospital, Jerry observed a frail lady in a bed near the nurses’ station. The old lady probably had dementia and would periodically yell out that she hurt, that she was too cold or too hot. The other patients in the area were startled when she yelled out unexpectedly and were agitated. Jerry (called ‘Gary’ in the narrative) felt obligated to do something to “fix the problem.”
“He floated over to her bed. He tried tickling her nose with his finger. Surprisingly, after a few attempts, Gary appeared to be successful. To her, it may have felt like a feather or a chilly breeze, but to Gary it was a finger. Reflexively, it made her sneeze. As long as she was sneezing, she wasn’t hollering.”
In a personal communication, Jerry told us that he repeated two more times tickling the lady’s nose until she sneezed.
“Gary was amused with himself and the [other] patients welcomed the change, at least at some level. Several of them sighed with temporary relief from the noise. ... The Light Being did not approve of Gary’s ‘childish’ antics any more than the incident with the dog. It turned Gary away from the old lady and sternly transmitted ‘That is enough’.”
These two types of interactions between the NDEr’s nonmaterial “body” with another person’s physical body are evidence of interaction specifically with neural structures, inducing both phenomenal sensations in the NDEr and neural activations in the other person. Both of these types of cases support the idea that the mind can interact specifically with neural structures in the brain.
Robert G. Mays, BSc and Suzanne B. Mays, AA, “There is no death: Near-death experience evidence for survival after permanent bodily death.” An essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies addressing the question: “What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?” Footnotes are omitted from these excerpts but are in the full text available from the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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