Posted on 08/11/2005 8:28:30 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Howdy there From many - one;
Since that information was from a chat room. I went here:
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/experts06.html
Dr. Melvin Morse, M.D., is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington.
He has studied near-death experiences in children for 15 years and is the author of several outstanding books on the subject: Closer to the Light, Transformed by the Light, Parting Visions, his latest book, Where God Lives.
He is primarily interested in learning how to use the visions that surround death to heal grief. The stories that children have told him about what it is like to die have lessons for all of us, especially those attempting to understand the meaning of death or the death of a child.
In 1982, while a Fellow for the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Morse was working in a clinic in Pocatello, Idaho. He was called to revive a young girl who nearly died in a community swimming pool. She had had no heart beat for 19 minutes, yet completely recovered. She was able to recount many details of her own resuscitation, and then said that she was taken down a brick lined tunnel to a heavenly place. When Dr. Morse showed his obvious skepticism, she patted him shyly on the hand and said: "Don’t worry, Dr. Morse, heaven is fun!."
The photo on the left is a drawing which depicts this young girl being resuscitated by his partner, Dr. Christopher, the doctor who is working on her. She has floated above her body, and met the seated figure. She told him that the seated figure "was Jesus. He is very nice."
He wrote up her case for the American Medical Association’s Pediatric Journal as a "fascinoma", meaning a strange yet interesting case and returned to cancer research.
One night he saw Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on television describing to a grieving mother what her child went through when she died. She said that the girl floated out of her body, suffered no pain, and entered into heaven. He thought this was quite unprofessional of a psychiatrist, and vowed to prove her wrong.
He and his colleagues at Seattle Children’s Hospital designed and implemented the first prospective study of NDEs, with age and sex matched controls. He studied 26 children who nearly died. He compared them to 131 children who were also quite ill, in the intensive care unit, mechanically ventilated, treated with drugs such as morphine, valium and anesthetic agents, and often had a lack of oxygen to the brain, BUT, they were not near-death.
He found that 23/26 children who nearly died had NDEs whereas none of the other children had them. If NDEs are caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, drugs, hallucinations secondary to coma, or stress and the fear of dying, then the control would have been expected to also have NDEs. They did not, indicating that NDEs happen to the dying.
He then completed the Seattle Study, a long term follow-up of children who had a NDE and documented their transformation as adults. He again used control groups, including children who nearly died but didn’t have a NDE.
He found that having a NDE is good for you, resulting in a love for living. One girl summed up the transformation as learning that "life is for living and the light is for later."
Adults who had NDEs gave more money to charity than control subjects, volunteered in the community, were in helping professions, did not suffer from drug abuse, use many over-the-counter medications, and ate more fresh fruit and vegetables than control populations.
***He also found that they often could not wear watches as they would mysteriously break, and often had electrical conduction problems such as shorting out lap top computers and erasing credit cards.***
Finally, Dr. Morse studied the entire range of death related visions. He studied parents who had infants die of SIDS, and found that 25% of parents had a vivid premonition of the event which they often documented in a journal or diary, or by telling their doctor. He also has studied cases of shared dying visions and after-death communications.
His most recent research is on the mind-body healing aspects of NDEs. He is currently working on a project of studying immune system changes triggered by NDEs. He also is working on localizing which areas of the brain are linked to spiritual visions, and has a particular focus on the right temporal lobe as a communication link with an interactive universe.
He is currently working with parent bereavement groups to learn how to best use spiritual visions to help to heal grief. Dr. Morse feels strongly that by understanding that there is a scientific and biological component to NDEs, we can understand that the experiences are "real", at least as real as any other human perception and experience.
We must stop trivializing and dismissing death related visions as hallucinations of a dysfunctional brain, and start to understand that they are a normal aspect of the human experience. We all have spiritual intuitions and visions, now we must learn to listen to them and trust what they have to say.
Clinical research
Our study, done at Seattle Children's Hospital concluded that near-death experiences are in fact the dying experience. We studied 26 critically ill children and found that 24 of them reported being conscious while dying, and having some sort of conscious experience. Typically that involved the perception of a loving light, a "light that had good things in it".
We studied over 100 control children who were also treated with medications, had a lack of oxygen to their brain, were intubated and mechanically ventilated in the scary intensive care unit, and who also thought they were going to death. They, however, were seriously ill and not truly near death. None of these patients reported being conscious while dying or having a spiritual experience.
Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist, found that 43% of cardiac arrest patients had NDEs. Patients with long complicated resuscitations were more likely to have NDEs. He also found that patients who had NDEs frequently could accurately describe their own resuscitation in detail. In contrast, control group of patients who had cardiac arrests but no NDEs could not describe their own resuscitation with any accuracy.
Stories
I researched many stories which clearly document that there is a paradoxical return of consciousness to the brain, at the point of death. For example, Olga Gfearhardt was a 63 year old woman awaiting a heart transplant. A severe virus attacked her heart tissue. Finally her pager went off and she was called to the University of California Center for surgery. Her entire family went with her, except for her son-in-law, who stayed home.
Although the transplant was a success, at exactly 2:15 am, her new heart stopped beating. It took the frantic transplant team three more hours to revive her. Her family was only told in the morning that her operation was a success, without other details.
They called her son-in-law with the good news. He had his own news to tell. He had already heard it. At exactly 2:15 am, while he was sleeping, he awoke to see his mother in law at the foot of his bed. She told him not to worry, that she was going to be alright. She asked him to tell her daughter (his wife). He wrote down the message, and the time and fell asleep again.
Later, when Olga regained consciousness, her first words were "did you get the message?"
The story demonstrates that the near-death experience is a return to consciousness at the point of death, when the brain is dying. She was able to communicate telepathically with her son-in-law, when she seemed comatose and he asleep.
Paul Perry and I thoroughly researched her story. Every detail had objective verification. We even saw the scribbled note. Such stories have been similarly well documented for over 100 years. Frederick Meyers' classic text "Human Personality and Its Survival After Death" meticulously documents hundreds of such stories.
Stories are not enough
Stories, however, are not enough. They are convincing to those who witness them, but lose their power when told and retold. I have documented dozens of such stories, but they will not convince any skeptic of the reality of near-death experiences.
Experimental research
Science demands verifiable evidence which can be reproduced again and again under experimental situations. Dr. Jim Whinnery, of the National Warfare Institute, thought he was simply studying the effects of G forces on fighter pilots. He had no idea he would revolutionize the field of consciousness studies by providing experimental proof that NDEs are real.
The pilots were placed in huge centrifuges and spun at tremendous speeds. After they lost consciousness, after they went into seizures, after they lost all muscle tone, when the blood stopped flowing in their brains, only then would they suddenly have a return to conscious awareness. They had "dreamlets" as Dr. Whinnery calls them
These dreamlets are similar to near-death experiences. They often involved a sense of separation from the physical body. A typical dreamlet involved a pilot leaving his physical body and traveling to a sandy beach, where he looked directly up at the sun. The pilot remarked that death is very pleasant.
Not only while dying
The experiences do not only occur to dying dysfunctional brains. The Journal of the Swiss Alpine Club, in the late 1800s, reported 30 first hand accounts of mountain climbers who fell from great heights and lived. The climbers reported being out of their physical body, seeing heaven, having life reviews, and even hearing the impact of their bodies hitting the ground. They were not seriously injured.
Yale University Pediatric Cancer specialist Dr. Diane Komp reports that many dying children have near-death experiences, without evidence of brain dysfunction. Their experiences often occurred in dreams, prayers, or visions before death. One boy stated that Jesus had visited him in a big yellow school bus and told him he would die soon. Others heard angels singing or saw halos of light.
The American Journal of Psychiatry, in 1967, reported the experiences of two miners trapped for days in a mine. They were never near death and had adequate food and water. They said that mystical realities opened before them in the tunnels. They also said a third miner who seemed real to them helped them to safety, but disappeared when they were rescued.
NDEs acknowledge reality
Near-death experiences are not a denial of reality, as is often seen in drug or oxygen deprivation induced hallucinations. There are not the distortions of time, place, body image and disorientations seen in drug induced experiences. They instead typically involve the perception of another reality superimposed over this one. For example, one young boy told him the "god took me in his hands and kept me safe" while medics were frantically trying to revived his body after a near drowning. He said and understood everything that happened to him, but simply perceived something we usually don't perceive at other times in our lives.
German psychiatrist Michael Schroeter, in his extensive review of all published near-death research states there is no reason to believe that NDEs are the result of psychiatric pathology or brain dysfunction.
Not "fear" death experiences
They can occur in very young children, too little to have a fear of death to react to, infants who have no internal defense mechanisms against the concept of death. Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital report that an 8 month old had a NDE after nearly dying of kidney failure. As soon as she could talk, at age two, she told her parents of going into a tunnel into a bright light. Psychiatrists Gabbard and Twemlow report of a 29 month old who bit into an electric cord and nearly died. He told his mother he went into a room with a nice man. There was a bright light on the ceiling. He wanted to know if I wanted to go home, or come play with him.
The conventional medical explanation is that these are not real perceptions but rather hallucinations caused by the short circuiting of a dying brain. The Russian near-death researcher Vladimir Negovsky studied hundreds of soldiers who nearly died in battle. He concluded that "the fact that different people in different countries can recall similar images seen by them during dying or resuscitation does not prove life after death. It can be explained by the dynamics of the disintegrating brain."
Calling near-death experiences "hallucinations" implies that they are not real perceptions of another reality. There is no reason for this other than a disbelief that there are other realities to perceive.
At least three realities
I recently discussed these issues with theoretical physicists at the National Institute of Discovery Science. This is a consciousness think tank of national renown scholars in their individual fields. They explained to me that science states that reality is made of tiny nuclear particles, so tiny that it is unclear if they are actually matter or simply patterns of energy. All of the fundamental particles in this universe have at least two counterparts which have been documented as being "real".
These particles last for only a fraction of a second in this reality, yet they comprise the elemental building blocks of reality. In theory, there are at least three possible universes comprised of the three basic sets of subatomic particles.
Furthermore, again in theory, there is one possible universe which is called the Omega Point, in which there is no time or space, and all possible universes coexist. This is why physicists such as Ernest Schroedinger said "if you are not shocked by quantum physics, then you do not understand it".
Olaf Swenson may have seen such a timeless spaceless "Omega Point" when he nearly died of a botched tonsillectomy at age 14. He states that "suddenly I rolled into a ball and smashed into another reality. The forces that brought me through the barrier were terrific. I was on the other side. I realized that the boundary between life and death is a strange creation of our own mind, very real (from the side of the living), and yet insignificant."
Olaf felt he was floating in a universe with no boundaries. "I had total comprehension of everything. I stood at the annihilation point, a bright orange light." As I felt my mind transported back to my body, I thought, please let me remember this new theory of relativity.
Certainly the information that Olaf gained during his NDE was real. He has gone on to develop over 100 patents in molecular chemistry based on the information from his NDE.
Conscious universe?
The universe may well be a conscious universe. Many modern scientists no longer believe in a randomly generated universe from some sort of primal dust. Nobel prize winning molecular biologist Christian de Duve describes the universe as one which as a cosmic imperative to develop conscious life. The very structure of molecules which make up living creatures dictates that conscious life will evolve.
Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle agrees that the fundamental laws of the universe, which govern the creation of planets, suns and galaxies again seems to imply that conscious life will be the end result of those universal laws. Evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake goes even further, stating that there are morphic forms, patterns of energy which first exist in the universe, when then result in life.
If this is true, then it would apply to the other two universes made of the other two sets of elementary subatomic particles. Angels, devils, UFOs, and God now seem less like fairy tales and more likely to be perceptions of conscious beings in other realties predicted by modern science. Near-death experiences may simply be the clinical counterparts to what experimental physicists have found in the laboratory.
Gotta be really careful of the spiritual provenance of such apparitions. The boy didn't "die soon." God can't lie or make a mistake.
You quoted:
"36 What a foolish question! When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn't grow into a plant unless it dies first."
This is the problem with Biblical literalism. If a seed dies, it does not grow into a plant. Tt's the deinition of a dead seed. A reasonable quess is that the writer was equating being buried in the ground with death.
Many agricultural cultures have stories of a young man who is killed and is resurrected as a food plant, ofen a grain.
A couple of ideas may have been conflated. Buried people fertilize the ground quite nicely, so plants will grow well where that has happened. In addition, annual plants, which most grains are, die themselves each winter and only the seeds survive to "ressurect" the plant.
Early warning: I have to go to work early today so very few responses, if any, until tomorrow
Thanks for the detailed post.
I am not at all ready to dismiss NDEs, but the descriptions seem culture bound to me.
From the data presented, I am ready to dismiss a correlation with watches, unless a possible inverse one.
The experimental designs reported seem weak. Again, that does not mean the phenomenon does not exist, only that is has not been studied properly. And most experimental designs in the medical field seem weak when I read about them, possibly because MDs get a significantly different training than most practicing scientists.
What would be nice would be a really tight definition of being "near death" and some studies done in places like China, which does not have an underlying Judeo-Christian culture.
Since science is not "supposedly knowledge" the rest of your post does not track.
Science is primarily a procedure for analysing data.
There is a real disconnect between people who look for "truths" and those who are curious and try to figure things out. I'm not at all sure either group can communicate effectively with the other.
I don't know about "out of date" but "having knowledge" or "to know" are not the primary usage of the word "science."
If that is waht is says, then the dictionary is wrong.
Think for a moment: I know my name. Is that science? I know what I plan to do today. Is that science?
I have a long workday ahead so won't be able to do justice to this. I apologize ahead of time if it comes off terse.
Am I reading you right that you think that gravity iteslf is science?
Also that the fact of knowledge being stored somewhere (somehow) in the brain is also science?
Could you give me an example of something that, in your view is not science? Real question. I'm trying to figure out the boundaries of your defintion. In an earler post I think you said something about science having been invented to deny God.
You have a good day and I will think about your question and respond when I have the opportunity.
Evolution is attached to science for the purpose of denying the Creator.
When you do have a chance to respond, please include some information as to who you think did the attaching of evolution to science "for the purpose of denying the Creator"
In the meantime, you, also, have a great day.
And I do agree with you, that if one could "completely understand one slice of time," one would "know it all" -- meaning all of time, I gather.
That's indeed my idea, but it seems to be wrong. At least, modern physics puts limits both on how much one can "passively" observe and even upon how deterministically things will behave.
If I'd known I was doing math I would have stopped until I could get credit hours for it.
To describe the formation of the laws of the universe, you need some kind of meta-laws and where do they come from?
Don't forget that things can be unpredictable but still deterministic. That's the limitation Nature places on things like weather forecasting.
If the process is a non-linear dynamical system with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, you usually can't accurately predict the future states for very far in the future. Measurement imprecision alone assures that the model diverges from the deterministic outcome at some time "t" in the future, and the value of "t" for which the divergence from reality is significant is typically small. [Insert blantant plug for Gleick's book "Chaos" HERE]
Think "Butterflies in Borneo".....
The Game of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life for example is a simulated "universe" of cells that switch on or off depending on some very simple deterministic rules. It illustrates this problem.
Given a current state of the game of life universe, and using the rules, it is possible to predict exact future states of the game of life universe.
However the reverse is not true. Given a current state of the game of life universe, and using the rules, it is not possible to predict exact past states. This is because there are multiple possible past states that could have lead to the present state. The true past states cannot be determined.
While I cannot think of an example of this problem in our universe, it does show that even a deterministic universe might not be fully predictable given a slice of time and the laws of physics.
When my Aunt died, a cousin told us he'd seen my (long deceased) Grandmother standing next to our Aunt, and that Grandma assured everyone that our Aunt was happy and well.
Aside from being, you know, dead.
I guess it shows you don't have to be on your deathbed to converse with the dead.
The question of whether the dead can converse with the living is another matter entirely. My position on the matter is that there's simply no credible evidence to indicate that it's ever happened, my cousin notwithstanding.
200. Prime!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.