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Near-Death News

When Deb Foster died in a San Diego hospital, she found herself on a stairway surrounded by cats and dogs and mesmerized by a celestial blue sky, the likes of which she had never seen on Earth. When it was Mary Clare Schlesinger's turn, she hovered above her bed in the intensive-care unit, watching her husband and daughter react in shock and fathomless grief at the thought of her passing. Beverly Brodsky said she went on a spectacular journey through a tunnel of intense light, a magic ride with angels and a shapeless God to a place of perfect knowledge, wisdom, truth and justice. All three said the journeys on which they embarked while "clinically dead," a period of a few moments when their hearts stopped, transformed their lives and left them with no fear of death.  [Read more]

[Note:  The full version of this article can be read online by registered Discover Magazine subscribers or purchased by Discover.com members]

After emerging from a coma caused by bacterial meningitis, young Jamie Untinen sketched her resuscitation by pediatrician Melvin Morse's partner David Christopher. The figure with the red shirt is Jamie floating out of her body. She said the rainbow represented “who I am and where I am to go" ... Eight-year-old Crystal Merzlock nearly drowned and was without a heartbeat for 19 minutes. She later drew this sketch of her near-death experience, depicting herself in heaven. She told pediatrician Melvin Morse that she recalled hearing someone say that she must return to help with her baby brother (pictured below the blue line), who was born months after the incident ... As Newberg and D'Aquili point out in their book "Why God Won't Go Away", “the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.” They use the brain-scan findings to explain the interconnected cosmic unity that the Buddhists experienced, but the results could also explain what Morse calls the “universal, unifying thread of love” that people with near-death experience consistently reported ... None of this work is without controversy, but an increasing number of scientists now think that our brains are wired for mystical experiences. The studies confirm that these experiences are as real as any others, because our involvement with the rest of the universe is mediated by our brains. Whether these experiences are simply right temporal lobe activity, as many suspect, or, as Britton's work hints and Morse believes, a whole brain effect, remains an open question. But Persinger thinks there is a simple explanation for why people with near-death experience have memories of things that occurred while they were apparently dead. The memory-forming structures lie deep within the brain, he says, and they probably remain active for a few minutes after brain activity in the outer cortex has stopped. Still, Crystal Merzlock remembered events that occurred more than 19 minutes after her heart stopped. Nobody has a full explanation for this phenomenon, and we are left in that very familiar mystical state: the one where we still don't have all the answers. [Read more]

Dr. Peter Fenwick, a Neuropsychiatrist from the Institute of Psychiatry, is an expert on workings of the brain that appear to fall outside conventional understanding. He presented his latest findings to the Festival of Science, taking place this week at the University of Salford. Current knowledge about the human mind cannot explain how prayer works - suggesting that the mind has unknown powers that can reach out and affect other people. Dr. Fenwick said, "These are very good studies, properly done. Subjects who are unaware they are being prayed for can be significantly helped. [Read more]

[Note: The following NDE is interesting because the experiencer acknowledges having a NDE but is unaware that he was outside of his body.]

Bellany, 63, described an eerie "near-death" experience. He passed out, and friends described how he went blue, he said. "They thought I was away, I had actually gone." But when he woke in hospital, he was convinced he had simply got up from the street and walked to the exhibition. "I [thought I] just walked up to the Mitchell, because it was only about 200 yards away. I saw all the people were there, and I said, 'Look, he won't be long'. "I remember speaking to two or three people there, and the organisers, the people who run the gallery. I said I had better go back and tell them to hurry up. "I just went up and told them we would be on our way. I must have been dead when this actually happened. I was absolutely positive I had done this and was telling everybody. It was about four days later that my wife, Helen said, 'You didn't go anywhere'."  [Read more]

[CAUTION: This article deals with people who perform the Native American ritual of body suspension called O-Kee-Pa to experience NDEs. The photos are in this article are very graphic.]

And there it was at the end of a short dark tunnel, a great shimmering ball of white light!! It radiated intense waves of love like I'd never felt before. This incredible love was directed at me -- personal and totally non-judgmental, unconditional, accepting. I passionately wanted to be swallowed up by that Light. In rapid telepathic communication, the Light spoke. It said: “Hello. I'm you and you are Me. And I'm as close to God as you'll ever be. I am the One who made you and I am the One who will take you back. I brought you here. Remember the book? I am always here to guide you regardless of the form in which you see me”. I asked the Light, “Do you always appear like this?” “No,” it replied, “I appear in any form you think I can appear”. Again I asked a question, “Is there only one of you”? The Light shimmered again and answered. “Of course not. Everyone has a White Light, but all of us are One. And One of us is powerful enough to create or destroy a world or universe. Let me show you”. I cannot describe what happened then. I was led on a fantastic tour of things made and not made and music that accompanies it all into a Divine Order. I pleaded with the Light to embrace me. It said no, do not come closer. If I was embraced, I could not go back. The Light told me I had to return to my body and work through it until my task was finished. What task? The next thing I knew, I was back in the darkened garage laying on the floor with Davy Jones and Joe by my side. They said I had hung deathlike for twenty minutes. [Read more]

What goes on in a woman's brain during orgasm has been scientifically revealed for the first time - almost total blackout and sheer pleasure. The findings partially explain the mystery of what is referred to as "la petite morte" or "the small death" in classical works. Researchers using brain scans found they could identify women who were "faking it" because during a true orgasm the cortex, which controls the conscious part of the brain, shuts down completely ... "Do you say to a women, 'here is a near-death experience we'd like to help you achieve in order to get an orgasm'; or do you say 'this is so wonderful, it takes you out of yourself and we'll help you get there?'" [Read more]

Television medical dramas which suggest patients are regularly brought back from the dead are portraying "a terrible distortion of reality", doctors warned yesterday. Shows such as ER, Casualty and Holby City often depict characters being revived by cardiac pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), through manual first aid or electronic pads in hospital. But doctors at the British Medical Association annual conference yesterday said fewer than half of patients whose heart stops in hospital survive, of which only a third live to be discharged. If they suffer an attack in the street, the situation is worse, with only 2 per cent surviving.  [Read more]

When we look at our dreams, there's a tendency to see them in psychological terms. How do you make a connection between dreams and spirituality? All of the world's major religions speak in one voice on this question. They tell us that human beings are in more direct communion with the divine in our dreams than during any other state of consciousness. There is, in other words, an ancient, archetypal connection between dreaming and communion with whatever language a tradition uses to describe the divine, whether it's God, the goddess, the ancestors, the spirits or what have you. In addition to that, there's a sense [in religious traditions] of the dream world as being a means of access to the nonmaterial plane.  [Read more]

[Note: The following is a sneak preview of an article appearing in the September / October edition of Venture Inward Magazine]

Reviewed by Henry Reed. The Afterlife Experiments Reveal Love. What if you could have a scientific reason to believe what you already in your heart know is true? "The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life after Death" (Pocket Books) by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D. offers such a gift for those who know that life is eternal, that the soul survives death of the physical body. A professor at the University of Arizona, Dr. Schwartz's groundbreaking, double-blind experiments have attracted a lot of attention. His methodology removes all the skeptics' objections to survival research except one – that he does such research in the first place. As a scientist, Dr. Schwartz likes to develop hypotheses and test them. He believes that his work offers evidence that supports the hypothesis that living info-energy systems, once created, continue indefinitely – i.e., that there are eternal souls. He doesn't say he has “proof” of life after death. How can you prove to someone else, he asks, that you love a particular person? Not by what you say, nor by what you do, because those words and actions could be motivated by something
other than love. You just “know” inside that you love that particular person, but how do you “prove” it to someone else? That's one problem. Another problem is this: How do you know that you are correctly interpreting what you experience as “love”? ... [Read more]

Is there good evidence for reincarnation? Researchers say yes... [The evidence includes:] The concept of reincarnation - that our souls may experience many lifetimes over centuries, maybe even thousands of years - has been present in virtually every culture since ancient times ... Past Life Regression Hypnosis ... Illnesses and Physical Ailments ... Phobias and Nightmares ... Physical Appearance ... Children's Spontaneous Recall and Special Knowledge ... Handwriting ... and Birthmarks and Birth Defects. [Read more]

Over time, James' parents say he revealed extraordinary details about the life of a former fighter pilot -- mostly at bedtime, when he was drowsy. They say James told them his plane had been hit by the Japanese and crashed. Andrea says James told his father he flew a Corsair, and then told her, "They used to get flat tires all the time" ... Andrea says James also told his father the name of the boat he took off from -- Natoma -- and the name of someone he flew with -- Jack Larson. After some research, Bruce discovered both the Natoma and Jack Larson were real. The Natoma Bay was a small aircraft carrier in the Pacific. And Larson is living in Arkansas .. He said James told him he had been shot down at Iwo Jima. James had also begun signing his crayon drawings "James 3." Bruce soon learned that the only pilot from the squadron killed at Iwo Jima was James M. Huston Jr. Bruce says James also told him his plane had sustained a direct hit on the engine. [Read more]

Jewish past lives of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are presented on the web site of respected reincarnation researcher, Walter Semkiw, MD, to commemorate the birthday of Anne Frank, which is June 12. The reincarnation case of Barbro Karlen / Anne Frank is also presented ... Recent reincarnation research, including two cases studied by Dr. Stevenson at the University of Virginia, demonstrates that from one incarnation to another, facial features, personality traits and linguistic writing style remain the same. Multiple independently researched cases that demonstrate these phenomena are compiled in Dr. Semkiw's book, “Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited.” [Read more]

In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal's 125th anniversary with a look forward -- at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today. A special, free news feature in Science explores 125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century; accompanying the feature are several online extras including a reader's forum on the big questions. These questions include: What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness and How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved? When science can define consciousness it will be easier to prove scientifically whether or not consciousness survives bodily death. [Read more]

Therapists who swear that hypnosis can help their patients now have more evidence to back their claim. A study of brain-scan images shows that hypnosis can indeed alter cognitive activity after subjects have come out of the trance state, and that this can help them concentrate on certain tasks. In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, hypnotized subjects outperformed their peers at a classic test of mental focus. And scans pinpointed the area of the brain responsible for this lasting effect. [Read more]

Your private thoughts may not be so private. Scientists from Japan and the United States have figured out how to read a person's mind by remotely measuring brain activity, extracting information of which the subject is not even aware. Science fiction? No. It's real. So far it's pretty rudimentary stuff in that the mind-reading machine can only identify visual patterns a volunteer can see or has chosen to look at. But the researchers are hopeful that the approach will eventually probe into a person's awareness, focus of attention, memory, and movement intention, report New Scientist and Scientific American. [Read more]

Swiss scientists and IBM have announced plans to create a detailed digital model of a neocortical column, a tiny but crucial area of the human brain. Professor Henry Markram ... says the simulation will "phenomenally" accelerate the pace of neuroscience research. "Some experiments, just to study one pathway, may take us three years to complete. With this model, we could do them in a day or even a couple of hours," he said. Under the Blue Brain project, IBM is building a custom version of its Blue Gene supercomputer with 8,000 processors, each of which will simulate the behaviour of one to two neurons ... "This whole machine will be converted into one tiny little column, simulating about 10,000 neurons," said Markram.  By comparison, the human neocortical column, which measures about half a millimetre wide and two millimetres long, contains between 50,000 and 70,000 neurons, with five to 10 kilometres of "cables" connecting them. The entire human brain contains about a million of these columns. [Read more]

A University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center scientist has developed the world's first three-dimensional holographic movies. Harold Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, was cited by Popular Science magazine's list of the top five "great ideas for the future," featured in the June 2005 issue, for his invention, a table-top black box that plays three-dimensional holographic video footage ... "An important next step is to take our proof of principle technology that we have now and move it into a commercial entity," he said. "We think the two initial markets will be in medical visualization and military applications, such as heads-up displays for helmets and military aircraft and coordinating battlefield information." Garner said long-term entertainment applications of the technology could include 3-D multiplayer games, theme park, advertising displays, and "Holo TV."  [Read more]

Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to "teleport" a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet. Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic "atoms". Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.  [Read more]

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated. Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind. The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets rid of the famous paradox surrounding time travel. [Read more]

"Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall. This is an intelligent book about a very complicated subject. Randall, a leading American theoretical physicist, believes that the three dimensions of space we see around us are not the whole story. There are other, higher dimensions, which may explain why gravity is so much weaker than magnetism - making it possible, for example, for us to stick things on fridge doors. She refers to these higher dimensions as "passages", and her explanation of them takes us through chapters such as 'Entryway Passages', 'Restricted Passages', 'Voluminous Passages' and even a 'Profound Passage' - all of which is apt to raise a snigger from any Julian Clary fans ... Randall takes us through "grand unified theories", which attempt to connect particles in a single model, but which have the snag of predicting that every atom in the universe will ultimately evaporate. She leads us on to superstring theory and "brane worlds", which picture particles as tiny vibrating filaments and the universe itself as a giant wobbly sheet. [Read more]

Why the Matrix? Why did the machines do it? (Human brains may be many things, but efficient batteries they are not.) How could they justify a world whose inhabitants are systematically deceived about their fundamental reality, ignorant about the reason why they exist, and subject to all the cruelty and suffering that we witness in the world around us? ... The existence of unnecessary evil is one of the most powerful arguments against the belief that the world was created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God. Theologians have spent centuries trying to answer it, and with very questionable success. But the problem of evil is only a problem if one assumes that the world was created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being. If one assumes instead that the creator was not perfectly good, and perhaps not even omnipotent, then it would be much easier to reconcile the view that our world was created with its seemingly obvious ethical shortcomings. What about you? You're not all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. But what if you had the ability to create this kind of Matrix, would you do it? Even if you would not have chosen to create a world like this, there are many other people who do not share your scruples. If these people had the ability to create Matrices, some of their works might well look like the world in which we find ourselves. [Read more]

According to Choi, the study of thanatology, which up to now has been almost non-existent in Korea, lies in achieving "right dying." "Thanatology is the scientific study of death which emphasizes the idea that death is not an extinction of life but the transition of life. Many see this transition as a rite of passage that should be undergone consciously and with dignity,'' Choi said ... At the seminar, Choi announced his paper on the theme of near-death experiences, claiming it is not a groundless notion. "In Western countries, it has already been considered as a subject for positive research, an only way to approach the real substance of death and newly establish attitude of Koreans toward death, who often excessively adhere
to death,'' he said. [Read more]

Breakthrough. Seven years later, in 1959, the real breakthrough came. Friedrich Jurgenson, a Latvian-born artist and documentary film producer, was recording birdsong at night in the woods near his home in Mölnbo, Sweden, for a documentary film he was making. On playback, he noticed a man's voice speaking Norwegian and discussing the nocturnal habits of birds. Despite the striking coincidence of subject, Jurgenson thought that somehow his recorder had picked up a normal radio transmission. But he was shaken when, recording again some weeks later, he captured another, female voice. The voice enquired: “Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?” Friedel was Jurgenson's pet name, and he immediately recognised his mother's voice. She had died four years previously. Now convinced that he had established a link with the beyond, Jurgenson carried on recording, capturing hundreds of discarnate voices, speaking in numerous languages, many of which appeared to respond to him personally and which he identified as deceased family members and friends. Jurgenson published his findings in the 1964 book "Voices from the Universe," attracting attention from other researchers, including Dr. Hans Bender, head of the parapsychological research unit of the University of Freiburg. Bender put his own team of scientists to work on the voice phenomenon, and their results – recordings of voices speaking recognisable words obtained by using blank tapes and normal tape recorders in a silent environment – seemed to vindicate the reality of Jurgenson's experiments.  [Read more]

In the months after David Golebiewski's 19-year-old daughter was killed in a car crash, grief consumed his life. He couldn't go to the restaurant where his daughter had worked, and he spent five hours a day in Internet chat rooms with other parents who lost children. Doctors say Golebiewski was suffering from "complicated grief" -- a condition some hope will soon be recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. [Read more]

LifeNet, a non-profit agency that coordinates organ and tissue donation started a Web site in 2003 coordinated with the Department of Motor Vehicles. It provides information and an opportunity for people to register as donors online. Every person has the potential to save seven lives when they die by donating their heart, liver, pancreas, two kidneys and both lungs, LifeNet spokeswoman Dena Reynolds said. One person can also enhance the lives of 50 people in need of tissue donations, such as cornea replacements or skin for burn victims. The shortage of organ donors exists because many people don't document their wish to be a donor or believe in widely-held myths, Reynolds said. [Read more]

[James] Randi had for decades used his insider's knowledge of the flim-flam trade to humiliate a generation of occultists. Chief among his trophies was Uri Geller, an Israeli-born, disco-era mentalist who claimed, among other things, that he had the ability to soften metal and move a compass needle with his mind ... Since that glorious display of public humiliation, the Amazing Randi has taken on levitators, psychic surgeons, dowsers, and astrologers ... To us, Uri Geller seemed small-time: The enemies we had in mind were fundamentalist ideologues, like the ones on the Kansas school board who have tried to demote evolution in the science curriculum. That's the conundrum of the modern skeptics movement: Intelligent Design theorists and deniers of global warming may very well be phonies and scoundrels, but no one is going to debunk them in the classic sense. You can't reveal their hidden microphones or mimic their tricks with sleight of hand. Intelligent Design, after all, is an attempt to recast (even to "rebunk") Creationism in scientific terms. The best weapon against it isn't dramatic exposé, but scientific argument. So a change in tactics makes sense for the movement.  [Read more]

The autopsy released Wednesday on Terri Schiavo backed her husband's contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding she was severely and irreversibly brain-damaged and blind as well. It also found no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused before she collapsed. Yet medical examiners could not say for certain what caused her sudden 1990 collapse, long thought to have been brought on by an eating disorder. [Read more]