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A new study suggests your consciousness carries on after your heart stops beating. WE know we are dead when we die because our brains keep working to make us aware of what's happening around us, haunting new research suggests. Top medical experts have forever been at loggerheads over what happens when humans die, with anecdotal evidence of bright lights and flashes reported by people who have 'come back' being the cause of much debate. However a new study suggests your consciousness carries on functioning after your heart stops beating and your body movements fail. This means you are essentially 'trapped'...

I knew unequivocally and with no misinterpretation I was between states of being. I could continue on towards the next realm/state of being, though the feeling was one of returning, or I could go back to where I had just come, though again the feeling was more akin to returning. Both states of being or direction were vaguely familiar, though at that point nothing was known with absolute clarity, just an understanding or knowing of familiarity and comfort.

When the final history of America’s war on terror and the combat role in the Middle East is told, it will be the individual stories of veterans like Sunbury’s Joshua Mantz, a 2001 Shikellamy High School graduate, that resonate long after our soldiers have come home. Few who knew Mantz in high school would be surprised that after surviving a sniper’s bullet in Baghdad, and following his recovery, 10 years of insidious trauma including thoughts of suicide, he would now be transformed by his experiences into a nationally known speaker, dedicating his life to helping others understand PTSD through lectures,...

A registered nurse who worked in ICU for years and later went into hospice work has logged fascinating deathbed accounts, including glimpses of hell and Heaven and a vision of Jesus that is among the most compelling we have read in this realm of alleged mystical encounters.The nurse, Kelley Jankowski, a mother of six who lives in Maryland, kept a journal and took meticulous notes after listening to what those dying were telling her and has recorded them in a splendidly written, vivid, and credible book, An Army in Heaven -- consoling indeed!There are stories of the simple process...

Many of us have had to or will have to do it — make the painful decision to pull their loved one off life support. The Pellettiere-Swapp family had to, but their story took a turn that some call miraculous. “Everything can be taken away. You can wake up one day and everything is fine, and then your life is a mess,” Steven Pellettiere-Swapp said. “Keep your family close and don’t let them go.” His advice comes after a heartbreaking and amazingly miraculous ordeal he and his family recently experienced. “I don’t consider it a miracle but everybody else, that’s...

Near-death experience Many stories of those who tell of the phenomenon often don’t reflect what we know through Scripture Msgr. Charles Pope 9/16/2015 Question: I read a book by an author who had a near-death experience and claims that God told him that one’s belief system was irrelevant. This seems like New Age indifferentism. Can you comment on near-death phenomena and what this author said?— Bob Tisovich, Ely, Minnesota Answer: Near-death experiences (NDEs) seem to be a rather widely reported phenomenon with certain common features. One has an “out of body” experience with a reported capacity to see oneself...

Palliative and intensive care units at hospitals have a close relationship with death, giving rise to many experiences that defy any rational explanation. Patients who foresee the exact time when they will die; others who seem to decide for themselves the day and the hour, moving their death forward or delaying it; family members' prophetic dreams or presentiments on the part of third parties who, without even knowing that someone has been brought to the hospital or has suffered an accident, are certain that he has died. Only healthcare professionals who work closely with terminally ill patients know first-hand the...

FORT WORTH(CBSDFW.COM) — Doctors can’t seem to explain it, but one Texas family is sure it was the hand of God that brought their son back to life. 17-year-old Zack Clements is a strong, healthy and outgoing high school athlete. He goes to school and plays football at Victory Life Academy in Brownwood, Texas. It was there last week the teen suddenly collapsed while running in P.E. class. He was rushed to the hospital where doctors worked to revive him. According to Clements, “they said I was without a heart beat for 20 minutes.” When doctors finally got a pulse,...

A short video presentation of Plato's (Socrates') Allegory of the cave.

The new research could help doctors to quickly identify patients who are aware despite appearing unresponsive and unable to communicate. Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK have identified hidden networks in vegetative patients that could support consciousness, even when a patient appear to be unresponsive. There’s been a lot of interest lately into how much patients in vegetative states, such as comas, are aware of their surroundings. Recently, research involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning has shown that even patients who are unable to respond or move are able to carry out mental tasks, such as imagining...

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World's Largest-ever Study Of Near-Death Experiences ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2008) — The University of Southampton is launching the world's largest-ever study of near-death experiences this week. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is to be launched by the Human Consciousness Project of the University of Southampton - an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the human brain, consciousness and clinical death. The study is led by Dr Sam Parnia, an expert in the field of consciousness during clinical death, together with Dr Peter Fenwick and Professors Stephen Holgate and Robert Peveler of the University...

Friday, February 04, 2005 Hallucinatory Neurophysics Everyone knows what it's like to experience the hallucinations that accompany certain kinds of drug use (among other mind-altering contexts) -- if not from direct experience, at least from depictions in movies and literature. We've seen the colorful, swirling patterns, or the illusory tunnels stretching before us. It turns out that hallucinations are by no means random; there are certain recurrent patterns reported by people who experience them. These patterns were studied by Heinrich Kluever in the 1920's and 30's, and classified into four different structures: spirals, spokes, honeycombs, and cobwebs. Subsequent work has...

Beyond brain death Beyond brain death Pam Reynolds' near-death experience Michael Sabom is a cardiologist whose latest book, Light and Death, includes a detailed medical and scientific analysis of an amazing near-death experience of a patient named Pam Reynolds who underwent a highly unusual operation in which the patient is "flatlined" in order to perform a particular operation - in this case, brain surgery. A portion of this case is summarized below. Thirty-five year old Pam Reynolds was being operated on for a giant basilar artery aneurysm. A weakness in the wall of the large artery at the base of...

‘Everything Is Ready Now’: A Near-Death Experience by RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS April 4, 2015 [America's Pre-Eminent Lutheran Theologian And Convert To Catholicism Writes...] NOTE: The following piece is excerpted from an essay, “Born Toward Dying,” that originally appeared in the February 2000 issue of First Things and became the basis for the book As I Lay Dying: Meditations upon Returning. The operation took several hours and was an unspeakable mess. The tumor had expanded to rupture the intestine; blood, fecal matter, and guts all over the place. My stomach was sliced open from the rib cage down to the pubic...

Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie "Heaven Is for Real", about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and...

A Catholic priest from Massachussetts was officially dead for more than 48 minutes before medics were able to miraculously re-start his heart has revealed a shocking revelation that will change everything you once believed. The 71-year-old cleric Father John Micheal O’neal claims he went to heaven and met God, which he describes as a warm and comforting motherly figure. Father John Micheal O’neal was rushed to the hospital on January 29 after a major heart attack, but was declared clinically dead soon after his arrival. With the aid of a high-tech machine called LUCAS 2, that kept the blood flowing...

Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher, has announced that it will stop selling “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” by Alex Malarkey and his father, Kevin Malarkey. The best-selling book, first published in 2010, purports to describe what Alex experienced while he lay in a coma after a car accident when he was 6 years old. The coma lasted two months, and his injuries left him paralyzed, but the subsequent spiritual memoir – with its assuring description of “miracles, angels, and life beyond This World” – became part of a popular genre of “heavenly tourism.” Earlier this week, Alex...

Nearly five years after it hit bestseller lists, a book that purported to be a six-year-old boy's story of visiting angels and heaven after suffering a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up. "I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," Alex Malarkey wrote. He continued, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never...

LifeWay Christian Stores has come under fire for selling a book based on a boy who claimed he visited heaven and who is now saying that the story is false. The book, titled The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, has been available since last year and tells the story of 6-year-old Alex Malarkey who suffered a horrific car accident in 2004. The crash paralyzed Alex and it was unlikely he'd survive after slipping into a coma. He awoke two months later and claimed that angels took him through the gates of heaven to meet Jesus. Malarkey addressed the validity...