According to your own website, you didn’t have an NDE-you had a bad dream.
We get our experiences wrong all the time; we forget them, misinterpret them, and even recall experiences that never actually happened, or didn’t happen that way (here’s an article that touches on the subject of confabulation, which is one way through which we can fabricate experiences while being convinced they actually are real; however, I can’t really say that I expect you to read it, or give it any consideration. You’ve made up your mind.).
From the DSM-IV:
I’m pretty sure lots of experiences might be interpreted as religious experiences.
My own question is about insight and understanding. Years ago I had what I would call a religious experience. In a mental state of high anxiety with no physical discomfort or threat I had what might be called a dream or a vision. The result was I went from being extremely upset and distraught to being being very content and at peace with the situation at hand. It was like being high only better. So much so that a friend commented on it saying I was almost glowing. The thing that really made an impression on me was not only the feeling of peace but a very deep understanding and insight -of the situation on a much deeper level that contributed to that peace.
I always wondered what triggered such an experience. Was it something just given to me from some outside source {my interpretation at the time} or some physiological event.
I’ve read about the God Helmet and how these types of experiences can be simulated and I know drugs can be used to help calm people. It’s occurred to me that the feeling of peace and calm might just be a chemical in the brain reacting to high anxiety. The thing I can’t figure out is where does understanding and insight come from? I get it that we can study and meditate and seek understanding , but in this case understanding and insight seemed like they were just given to me. It was like one of those aha! moments when you finally figure something out only far more profound and powerful.
As a musician I’ve had moments of inspiration that are very rewarding but this was many times more powerful than any of those. The feeling of peace similar to a high lasted at least all the next day and the understanding and insight prevented any crash or relapse into high anxiety.
One other type of experience is the inner voice. You’ll hear this referred to fairly often in religion. Gandhi talks about an experience e had while in prison where he “heard” a voice telling him what to do concerning some situation.
Spoken of here
I’ve had one experience where I “heard” the inner voice so clearly it seemed as if another was speaking even though I was alone in my car at the time. Since then I’ve tried to listen to this inner guide whatever it is, and I can say that those times when I’ve ignored it has cost me. This phenomenon is not explained by science and I surely would not call it a hallucination. It’s clearly not proof of anything external going on but still a legitimate experience. Having had it I can understand this being interpreted as a religious experience. It can feel like someone else is speaking to you and offering direction and guidance.
A very interesting story. What you experienced is not that uncommon. Many people hear benevolent voices in times of stress and need. If the voice gave you insight or information you didn’t have previously, then the origin must have been from the outside. A logical explanation.
I remember reading about someone starting to back out of their driveway when a voice in their head said “stop the car.” Shocked the driver stopped and got out to look around. He found a small child playing directly behind his car. Shaken, but grateful he took the toddler home to his neighbor’s house.
I know skeptics won’t agree, but nevertheless we all have guides that watch over us and attempt to guide us through life. Some like myself can “hear” them on a regular basis and some never hear anything.
Near death experiences are caused by death, most have no drugs in their system. The brain makes no decisions in your life. You are in control at all times. You are the boss.
While I tend to believe that we have intuitive capabilities that are unexplored for the most part I wouldn’t say insight must come from the outside. I’d say it’s something we don’t currently understand.
OK, You may think as you wish, of course, but it seems to me if you get new information from a voice, vision, or other spiritual experience, there is no place it could come from except outside. Just a thought.
On the other hand being all part of the Oneness of creation, nothing really comes from outside. We are all inside and connected or entangled as it may be.
I know while I was learning, and still learning about spiritual things there seem to be conflicting knowledge. My teachers would tell me that they would teach only what I was capable of learning so it would seem at times they were contradicting themselves.
It seems like you’ve explained it to yourself. 
I’m thinking it’s possible it isn’t really new information but rather a form of intuitive knowledge we already have and often suppress of ignore. Because it’s an unexplored part of our humanity it often appears as if it’s coming from someplace else.
This seems to me to be the obvious explanation - our conscious mind filters our observations by what seems interesting or important to us, but we still are physically seeing everything in front of our eyes and hearing every vibration that enters our ears. It would seem natural to believe that inside that big wide brain there might be parts of it that are going over the ‘not-so-interesting’ information and, occasionally, peice together an observation or conclusion that our conscious brain missed. I would be unsurprised if on occasion our self-aware brain interpreted the notification from subconscious to conscious mind of such facts as a voice.
Now, this obviously only explains cases like your brain telling you not to back over some toddler you may have overlooked when you got in the car. If the voice in your head can reliably give winning lottery numbers or something else that you could not possibly have noticed or deduced even if you were perfectly observant and infinitely brilliant, that would be interesting. (And lucrative!)
lekatt, this is the second time in this thread you’ve been called out for claiming you have experienced an out of body experience while apparently according to your own website it was a bad dream. How about responding to this allegation and either clearing it up or admitting to contradicting yourself?
It’s the most obvious when you don’t believe in the alternatives. It makes sense to me but I don’t completely discount other possibilities. From my own experience it was the profound and powerful insight and understanding that seemed to happen in just moments that really stunned me. From extreme anxiety to profound understanding and peace in moments with no changes except whatever happened in my head and heart. It 's still a mystery.
Naah, I’ve assessed the alternatives and dismissed them all as improbable, or distasteful, for various reasons related to their own explanatory failings. (Mostly the POE - a loving, all-seeing God keeps you from running over a kid, but doesn’t notify the police about crimes in progress? Say what?? Far easier to disbelieve in an omni-god than one that decides to selectively help on rare occasion but usually lets people stroll unawares into the meat grinder.)
I find it much more plausible that some people occasionally have a spontaneous emotional/mental ‘reboot’, resulting in apparent epiphanies, than that a good God is selective about such things.
Because an intelligent person doesn’t give credence to obvious misinformation coming from those that detest what he stands for.
Skeptics know so little about near death experiences that most of the time they wouldn’t know one when they heard it. But I guarantee they would know it if they had one. Czarcasm has been heckling me since the first post I made on this board. The heckling has taken many forms over the years and lately it has been continually make this false assumption over and over again.
Anyone may go to my website and read about my near death experience. But I will leave the links.
The elemental parts of a real near death experience that make it what it is the offer to continue to live by a light being or to die. Then there is the totally changed life the experience produces. I experience both of those, along with feeling the unconditional love and receiving knowledge of all creation. As well as an expanded consciousness that completely changed all my perpectives of life.
Enough, this is the last time I will respond to this question, or anything else that is self-evident.
You are “near death” when a doctor says you are “near death”-you don’t get to wake up the next morning and self diagnose.
'Nuff said.
Well, thank you for dialoguing with us in the face of derision and logic.
Once again, “self-evident” does not mean “evident only to one’s self.”
NM
Science has barely touched on the workings of the human (and other animals) brain.
I just watched a show on TV that showed how thinking (with a certain cap on) A paralized man could move a wheel chair with his brain, and a woman who had a stroke could use a computer to do things she normally couldn’t; also the reporter was put to the test of one thing and he was also able to just use his brain.
They had a monkey use a robotic arm( I think that was the name for it) and the monkey could also make the arm turn with just wanting to grab some food.
I know from personal experiences that the mind can do things to help us if we want things to happen bad enough. One can see things as well.
Once after surgery when I was in a room recovering from anesthetics I saw a slide show of beautiful pictures, when I closed my eyes, when they were open it did not happen. The doctor said the anesthetics hadn’t completely worn off.
If I was a believer I would think it was not of this world as I did when my second child was born, I had anesthetics then and I thought I had died because I had what I thought was a NDE, but the doctor told me later I was not near death. I saw the light etc. that some say they saw and what I had heard (according to the nurses) was what they were talking about while I was not fully conscious. The bright light in the room was right over my head so I can see why if I was not fully awake I could see that.
I think if a person wants to believe he had a near death experience and uses it to better his (or her) life then I see no harm; it is a personal experience and they are entitled to their beliefs.
I thank you for your post, and can’t say what kind of experience you had since it like all personal experiences it was private. But that doesn’t make them unreal or hallucinations. The near death experience is being studied by no less that thirty universities, with hundreds of doctors involved. There is a great deal more to it than someone seeing something. There is solid evidence that consciousness can and does separate from the brain and body when death happens. There are hundreds of examples on the net and in the research studies. I don’t for a minute think these doctors would be wasting their time on a fruitless search. It has been going on for over thirty years, ever since Dr. Raymond Moody published his first book. It is unfortunate that skeptics know so little about them.
I could fill the page with links, but this one says it all, between the experiencer and the surgeon. This is a real event and time will bring to the forefront where it belongs. Truth will always surface over its detractors.
For some reason, I don’t completely want to rule out NDEs as harbingers of afterlife (call it a primal fear of having my lights put out). So I’ll just observe that hallucinations can be eerily similar to real experience. If you hallucinate, say, a tarantula shinnying up your kitchen range, that doesn’t disprove the existence of tarantulas. Nor does it eliminate the possibility that one of the little fuzzbutts may actually have found hi/r way into your kitchen.
As an agnostic, I have no particular dog in the religious-visions fight, except that I would like to be there when Elvis presents Dr. Susan Blackmore with her complimentary fruit basket.