Not to predend that humans have imaginations and dreams, but I can fit a lot of time in my nighttime NDEs. Who’s to say that your entire NDE, which felt like it took minutes or hours or days, didn’t all actually happen in an instant?
I believe the common assumption is that such things might happen while the disoriented brain is dropping into or restarting from a state of oxygen deprivation. (Which also explains the trippy indescribability.) There’s not any reason to think that it happened while your brain had no activity with which to support (or remember!) your fantastic journey.
Sure there’s evidence of what happens boichemically when a person has one but that’s all it’s evidence of…biochemistry. It is not necessarily the entire explanation; might be, might not be. You seemed to have closed your mind like a steele bear trap that anything can exist outside of your tight, specifically defined paridigm.
Before you start using terms like “magic” we should agree on a meaning so as to avoid confusion. To me magic is the wicked witch of the east type stuff. I would use the word “mystical” (to have conscious awareness of an ultimate reality).
But let’s take a step back and approach it this way: To date there have been somewhere in the neighbor of 13-15 billion people that have lived and are currently living. I believe it would be fair to say that more of those peoples believed in some sort of after life, soul concept, living and aware universe, etc.
Now here’s you, a guy sitting in front of a computer screen, putting down his theory/belief that cannot ultimately be proven one way or the other. You can only say, “with the data that is currently available, we reach this conclusion…” If someone begs to differ or comes up with a different viewpoint you are saying that billions and billions of people are wrong and you are right. Sounds like a scientific variation of the Christian Fundamentalists routine, but slicked up with a new, fancy paint job.
So are you right and billions of people wrong because they don’t have the same take as you?
It sounds like you presume to know the mind/nature of/total workings of the Universe. Pretty cool.
I didn’t say it is untestable, only that with the current scope, range and purview of the SM it can’t be done. Unlike yourself, I am also open to other possibilities. Your theory may well be the be all/end all, total, complete, absolute finished product, case closed…or it may not be.
Billions of peoples throughout the history of man, past, present and future, have some kind of perception, belief, theory or opinion on the mysterious/mystical/metaphysical aspect of existence. You, one guy, are saying that they are all wrong and you’re right. That is presuming to know the mechanics of all existence in toto. Nice job if you can get it.
Jake, no one is sayng they know how everything works.
I know you had a dream at best. I’m sorry, you do not have a soul.
I never thought I had one either, but I’ve sold it to at least 12 or 13
fellow pub patrons.
I think what you are succumbing to is simply “I had a weird experience
and OTHERS tell me it’s an NDE.”
You must have heard of NDEs befor you claim you had one.
Did you weigh that into the equation? I thought I had one too. Nope.
Fair enough. Whether you, yourself, said the words “fact or belief” is hard for me to remember because I’m trying to keep up with many posts from many people. What it gets down to is this: The Skeptics perception is that a person is an electrically charged group of particles that are cohesively bound together. And according to this biochemical/mechanical model, once the charge is gone, that’s it, that’s all there ain’t no more. No soul, no life force, no nothing, case closed. I’m saying, "Yes, that could be right, but it could also be only a part of something more.
To cut to the chase I’m going to do this: My stance is basically like Einstien’s and Marcello Truzzi’s.
Einstien - The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.
Basically, an Amazing Randi type skeptic is saying that I’m right and all of the billions of people past, present and future, who do not agree with me are wrong.
Oh, please. A refusal to accept baseless assertions that violate known physical laws isn’t closing your mind. Where. Is. Your. Evidence ?
Magic is magic is magic. Calling it “mystic” doesn’t make it any less nonsense.
And billions of people have been wrong about all sorts of things; reality isn’t a popularity contest. And all of those billions of people have and had zero evidence for their beliefs. And no, a bunch of unsubstantiated claims by people who can’t even agree with each other does not qualify.
Garbage. Christianity is based on nothing but hallucinations, lies and a book of the collected myths of primitives. Science is based on facts - an immense amount of them.
There is an immense amount of evidence for the idea that life is just biochemistry; NONE for anything else. There is NO evidence that souls and afterlives and gods and all the rest are even possible, much less true. I have no more reason to believe in your foolish “theory” than I do to believe that Obama is actually Sauron.
Those billions of people are religious, and are therefore by definition fools. At least on any subject touched by their religion. Being a fool is part of the essence of being religious; religion is the denial of reality, of logic, of judgement.
All humans that are alive posses the attribute of existence. There is ample evidence that when the biochemical/electrical process shuts down or shorts out that that person will no longer possess the attribute of existence; that’s it.
In Newton’s time his theory of laws of motion and universal gravitation was thought to be the complete picture. It was just a matter of fitting all the pieces together. He warned about this: Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton’s best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”
Einstein came along and rocked Newton’s world. Then Heisenberg and others came up with the uncertainty principle. Einstein doubted "spooky effect at a distance. Now we’ve got guys postulating string theory, quantum loop gravity and the Higgs bosson God particle. Now teleportation is becoming a reality along with spooky effect at a distance and stopping light in its tracks.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/01.24/01-stoplight.html
Every era has paradigms or models by which they formulate the concept of reality. There is an inherent, built-in dynamic of brilliant people who push the boundaries out by intuition (you probably scoff at that, too) insight hunches, theories yet to be proven. There is also an inherent, built-in group of dogmatic funamentalists who resist change. Every new concept, idea, theory is first ridiculed, and when it starts gaining ground it is attacted, sometimes viciously, and when a tipping point is reached it finally accepted. r
Here’s how it breaks down: your perception, based on verified biochemical data, is that life is nothing more than chemistry and electricity. Once that shorts out, that’s it. And because of that, therefore, there is nothing else. You are trying to make a causal connection where there is none.
I say to you the same thing you say to me: prove that your model is the complete, total, absolute, supreme be all-end all to to this thing we call life or existence. Prove that to me. All you can objectively say is that so far, there is no data to support the mystical, metaphysical model.
So basically, you, a guy in front of a computer screen are saying that the billions of people, past, present and future, that don’t accept your model and percieve like you are “dead” wrong. That mindset reminds me of guys like Jerry Falwell, et al.
So let me ask this again: Do you think you’re right and all of the billions of people who who don’t subscribe to your model are wrong?
Exactly. And therein lies the very nature of the scientific argument. Essentially it says, “right now, we just don’t know. We would like to know, and maybe one day with enough data we will, but right now, we’re not putting our collective cocks on a block.”
Since I actually like my cock, I’m happy to go along with that.
You said you are not claiming that you know how everything works and they you say I had a dream at best. In order to say I had a “dream at best” is claiming to know how that whole process works in toto with the information you have available to you. You only know the biochemical aspects on this side of the stick which may or may not be all of the facts.
Right now I need two things from you:
prove to me that once the biochemical process shuts down there is nothing more.
Do you think that you are 100% right with your perception and billions of other that don’t have your perception are wrong?
And in this case, that would be you. You can’t simultaneously be a bold defier of orthodoxy, and then turn around and justify your position by saying that billions of people agree with you. The “there is no such thing as a soul” IS the unpopular viewpoint.
“They laughed at Einstein !”
“Yeah, but they laughed at Bozo the clown too.”
Mystical claims like yours are firmly in Bozo territory, not Einstein territory.
That’s ridiculous. Of course there’s a connection; if there’s nothing there but biochemistry, then of course there’s nothing else. By definition.
I can also say that throughout history, the people who make mystical claims have always been wrong. And I can also say that the evidence is that such claims are simply impossible. And I can say that the people who make such claims can’t even agree with each other. And I can also say that there’s simply no reason to consider such mystical claims as being necessary to explain anything.
And I have never said that my “model is the complete, total, absolute, supreme be all-end all to to this thing we call life or existence”. I’m saying that yours is stupid, irrational, baseless, worthless, and has as much chance of being true as the Flying Spaghetti Monster has of being the Supreme being. And I’m saying that if and when my view of the world is superceded, it won’t be by a mystical one like your unless we collapse back into primitivism.
Again, garbage. Falwell and his fellow believers push mystical nonsense for which there is zero evidence; I am following the known scientific facts. Science has a long history of discovering the truth; mystical claims, like your and Falwell’s have a history of millenia of being wrong.
And the fact that so many people disagree with me is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT. What matters are the facts, not the number of people who are ignorant or fools.
Of course. Considering that those billions of people don’t even agree with each other, the chance of them being right is zero. And unlike every single one of them, I have facts on my side. They have none at all.
Again; there is not only no evidence for such things as gods and souls; there’s no evidence they are even possible. Going by the evidence, they are impossible.
You are the one making the claim that something exists; it is your job, not theirs to come up with evidence.
Irrelevant; once again, numbers don’t matter. A billion fools are still fools.
It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard of, too. My take on it is that it could have been the real deal mystical or it could have been a biochemical process. Either way it was staggering and real in the sense of how it affected me. The mechanism and process by which it was initiated is not as important to me as the moment of total clarity I had. It was cool while it lasted but I no longer have that total clarity, just an awareness that I did have it. Kind of like taking acid.
That’s funny. I thought you said that your experience wasn’t anything like taking drugs before. Massive amounts of all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. Some taken before your NDE, most taken after. Nope, I can’t see how that could possibly effect your perception of your experience during the event, or your memory of it afterwards.*
*FYI-that was sarcasm.
I hear what you are saying but I don’t sit happily in the middle hedging my bets 50/50. I operate on a fluid, situational continuum that never closes the door at either end. The people here that don’t perceive there is anything else have closed the door, deadbolted it shut and pounded nails into the frame.
Just because I don’t close the doors at either end doesn’t mean that I won’t lean one way or the other on different matters. Take Sasquatch, for instance. I lean toward the skeptic side because in all this time no one has found skeletons, scat, blood, fur, etc. All they’ve ever produced is some funky, short, out of focus video and people’s testimonial.
With UFOs I tend to lean a bit toward the side that believes there is some validity to it because of the sightings that can’t be explained away by using simple explanations. In this area the modern day, Amazing Randi type skeptic has a cookie cutter template that they apply to every instance:
a lie
hallucination
innocently mistaken
weather anomaly
top secret military air craft
weather balloon
flares
(if there are more, please, by all means, add to the list)
The one thing I have never heard an AR typed skeptic say is, "It could also be a for real alien space craft.
So I will take varying degrees of stance on a situational basis while never ruling anything out for sure. Unless, of course, an alien knocked on my door and came in for some trumpets and tea, then I would absolutely rule out skeptics on this matter.
I am surprised at this thread, but glad it is here. I have had an near death experience and put up a web site with hundreds of experiences on it. What you say is true. The experience is transcendent in nature, and you become aware of everything. I would be glad to talk to you about your experience either privately or here. But here on this board NDEs are not welcome. I have noticed several other posts here of experiencers. It is really good to see people talking about these and looking for answers.
If a classification of people who are virtually always wrong don’t qualify as “fools”, then I can’t think of anything that does. They aren’t just fools, but some of the most foolish fools ever, to fall for garbage with such a track record of failure as mysticism.
The problem is that it is very difficult to provide evidence of experiences. One can provide evidence of an event, but not necessarily the evidence of an individual’s experience of that event. For example, a beautiful woman walks into the room. It just so happens that she is my ex, who I might still be in love with. My experience of this event would be completely different to the experience of my current girlfriend, who is also in the room. Both of us have had an experience, but they are vastly different, and there is no evidence to compare.
As far as I know, there is evidence of the activity called dreaming. Electrodes and whatnot can be attached to the brain and register the activity that produces the dreams. However, I’m not aware of any machine or technology that can transcribe that activity onto a screen, so that all can see the dream pictures. We all dream, but we cannot see each other’s dreams.
So, we are stuck with hearsay. We can only go on what the person who has the dream tells us about the pictures. This doesn’t, however, negate the fact that something has happened, and something has been experienced. It is the value and the meaning we attach to that experience that we all seem to end up fighting about.
Which, in my mostest humble opinion, is speculation and pointless. We are all going to get that answer one day, so what is the point in endlessly speculating?
This goes for NDE’s as well. It is an intensely personal, private and unquantifiable experience. The mistake we make is to try and share NDE’s like we share our favourite DVD’s. The fact is we cannot share them, they are currently not available on disc anywhere. At most we can relate the experience, and hopefully find those who have had similar experiences, but we cannot share the actual, individual experience.
