Posted on 10/08/2012 3:01:21 PM PDT by WilliamIII
As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
... In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
[Don’t forget the feasting!]
In my case it would be a Mexican restaurant that never closed.
For those who know Christ as Savior, He promises that
we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:8)
Unfortunately for this man, whatever "being" disguised as a woman that was talking with him told him that there is nothing he can do wrong, and he has nothing to fear. I hope at some point before he actually dies, someone is placed in his path who will give him the cold, hard facts about his condition and his eternity.
snip
My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.
Catholic ping! Continue reading at the above link.
Yes. I find it interesting that no one mentions the streets of gold. The few stories I’ve read of such things come across as an episode of “my Little Pony”. Feeding sugarcubes to unicorns.
The even fewer “hell” stories are worse. They range from bad reworkings of “Inferno” to bad reworkings of “Hellraiser”.
“And lighting fast Free Republic’
There are some things even heaven doesn’t have.
LOL!!
“Near-death is not death. Death is what you don’t come back from.
Hallucinations are not a vision of Heaven.”
It is appointed unto man once to die, after that the judgement. (Once)
That’s in the book of Hebrews, don’t have time to look it up - back to the Cardinal game.
What gives this away as something other than an other-worldly experience is the author’s description of seeing and hearing. Sight and hearing are facilitated by the organs of the body and the brain. If there is a means of perception in the world beyond, I can’t help but think that it will be on a completely different level.
Interesting that his experience contained the Buddhist
“Void, blissful and shining”.
Everyone is worried about where we go when we die,
few ask about where we were before we were born...
Hang on for a tick!!! Downward Spiral and Further Down the Spiral are GREAT! Tell me Reptile is a bad song!
As Aristidies the Rhetor said when speaking of the
Eleusinian Mystery, “Where was there ever greater
disparity between seeing and hearing?”
I always enjoy the joke about the guy who was allowed to bring one thing with him to Heaven. He brought a suitcase full of gold bars.
Everyone in Heaven laughed at his insistence on bringing a suitcase full of paving material.
Btw, ‘Every Day is Exactly the Same’ seems like a song about living in a police state. Listen again, to the lyrics, withwi
An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates. St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an engineer. You are in the wrong place.”
So, the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.
One day, God calls Satan up on the telephone and says with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”
Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and there’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.”
God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake. He should never have gotten down there; send him up here.”
Satan says, “No way.” I like having an engineer on the staff, and I’m keeping him.”
God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”
Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”
Heaven’s real, all right. No one in this family will ever forget the experience of being with my husband’s grandfather when he died a couple of years ago. He was one of the most dear, God-loving men I have ever known, and during his last days in the hospital, the Lord gave him glimpses of what was to come. He would take our hands and tell us he couldn’t even find the words to describe what he was seeing, and that he couldn’t wait to go. The atmosphere in that little room was like that of a worship service....even the doctors and nurses tiptoed in and out, and one nurse told my MIL she had never felt anything like it.
Looking back, I think God did it as much for us as for him, so we’d have the assurance that he would be okay.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me. I know this one!
Ok, but there’s got to be hot chicks and high-caliber guns, or I’m not goin’. :)
Ping....
So heaven is unimaginable. For you, you should add. Some people have good imaginations. I can even imagine it not existing.
Heaven for me will be wherever Jesus is. Everything beyond that is icing on the cake...just as it is here! :-D He’s really quite wonderful.
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