“Glimpses of Eternity” by Dr. Raymond L. Moody
“GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY” – By Dr Raymond L Moody, October 1, 2010 ISBN
#ISBN-13: 978-0824948139
/
http://www.amazon.com/Glimpses-Eternity-Raymond-Moody/dp/0824948130/ctoc
——————————————
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research-part-1-61547.html
– Part #1 of 3 –
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: 30 YEARS OF RESEARCH! / EVERY ARGUMENT AGAINST
LIFE AFTER DEATH BY THE PSEUDO-SKEPTICS, NUTTY DEBUNKERS and GENERAL,
ALL-PURPOSE HATERS IS ADDRESSED IN THIS EYE-OPENING, BOMBSHELL, TOUR DE
FORCE PIECE! –
By Stephanie Lam, Epoch Times, Tuesday, October 4, 2011
/
http://nhne-pulse.org/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research/
NEAR-DEATH FLASHPOINT: JANE KATRA, Ph.D. in Public Health, who also
spoke at the conference, said that she became sensitive to vibrations
and electromagnetic fields after her NDE, and it was difficult for her
to adjust to living in her parents’ house because she became able to
hear various things from different rooms.
Grandma was just resuscitated. She wakes up and tells you a bizarre
story of coming out of her body and going to heaven. Has she developed
psychosis? Was her brain damaged from the lack of oxygen?
After over 30 years of research, scientists have concluded that this is
NOT the case. Instead, they think that this phenomenon is something
today’s science is yet to understand, and that it is an opportunity for
the advancement of science.
The phenomenon was coined near-death experiences (NDEs) in the 1975 book
“Life After Life” by Raymond Moody, M.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy and
psychology. NDEs generally include cognitive, affective, paranormal, and
transcendental experiences.
Examples of NDEs include experiencing a change in one’s perception and
way of thinking, feeling peace or calmness, gaining extrasensory
perception (ESP), going through a review of one’s life and seeing the
effects of one’s actions on others, a feeling of leaving the body,
seeing deceased people and other beings such as angels, and feeling as
if one has entered another dimension.
NDEs are encountered by people of all backgrounds, and most studies find
the prevalence of NDEs to be 10 – 20% of people who have come close to
death. Interest in studying NDEs was sparked after the publication of
Moody’s book.
Then in 1981, the International Association for Near-Death Studies
(IANDS) was founded “to promote responsible, multi-disciplinary
exploration of near-death and similar experiences, their effects on
people’s lives, and their implications for beliefs about life, death,
and human purpose,” according to the IANDS Web site.
The INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR NEAR-DEATH STUDIES, Inc:
http://www.iands.org/
On Sept. 2 – 4, IANDS organized a conference in Durham, N.C., for NDE
researchers to present their findings.
“IMPROVED MENTAL FUNCTIONS WITH AN IMPAIRED BRAIN!”
Bruce Greyson, M.D. and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies
at the University of Virginia, said NDEs are reliable because the
accounts by near-death experiencers (NDErs) of these events remain
unchanged over time. He compared a group of NDErs’ accounts about their
NDEs made 20 years apart and found that they remained closely identical
over time.
Greyson believes that NDEs are an indication that the mind is
INDEPENDENT of the brain because impaired brain functions would be
expected during the clinical situation that the NDErs underwent, but his
research found NO corresponding impairment of mental functions in NDErs.
“In most cases, people’s mental functioning is better in the NDE than
[it] is during our normal waking life,” Greyson said during an interview
with The Epoch Times.
“Their thinking is faster, is clearer, is more logical, they have more
control over their chain of thought, their senses are more acute, their
memories are more vivid.
“If you ask somebody about their near-death experience that happened 15
years ago, they tell it as if it happened yesterday. If you ask them
[about] other experiences from their life at the same time, they are
very fuzzy memories, if they have any at all.
“[...] When you think that these experiences, which are characterized by
enhanced thought processes [that] takes place when the brain is NOT
functioning well or sometimes not functioning at all since it is in
cardiac arrest or deep anesthesia — times when brain science would tell
us that you shouldn’t be able to think or perceive or form memories –
it becomes quite clear that we CAN’T explain this thing on the basis of
brain physiology.”
Eben Alexander, M.D., a neurosurgeon who also spoke at the conference,
had an NDE that’s a case in point. He contracted acute bacterial
meningitis, which damages the neocortex, in 2008 and went into a coma,
spending six (6) days on a ventilator.
The glucose level of his cerebrospinal fluid was 1 mg/dl (milligram per
one-tenth of a liter), while normal levels are between 60 and 80 mg/dl.
When the level drops to 20 mg/dl, the meningitis infection is considered
severe. For days after the coma, Alexander struggled to speak and recall
memories before the coma. No one with this kind of severe brain damage
is expected to fully recover.
However, during his NDE, Alexander had such vivid experiences involving
multiple senses, such as vision, hearing, and smell, that he said he
couldn’t describe how AMAZING it was.
“My brain right now — I think it recovered pretty well — could not do
anything close to what my brain was doing,” Alexander said. “How does a
dying brain end up getting far, far more powerful and able to handle
these tremendous loads of information instantaneously and put it
altogether?”
“SHARED DEATH EXPERIENCES”
Another phenomenon related to NDEs is shared death experiences, in which
a person close to a dying person experiences something with the same
characteristics as NDEs.
Moody first heard about shared death experiences in 1972 from a medical
professor of his. The professor’s mother had a cardiac attack, and when
she was trying to resuscitate her mother, she felt herself leaving her
body and saw her body resuscitating her mother.
As her mother died, she saw her mother in spirit form, and the spirit
met some beings, some of whom she could recognize as people whom her
mother had known. Then, her mother and the other people were sucked into
a tunnel.
After over 30 years of research, Moody estimates that shared death
experiences are as common as NDEs. As he studied more of these cases
over the years, he found that the features of shared death experiences
are similar to those of NDEs.
One of the most common features of shared death experiences is that the
shared death experiencer sees the spirit of the dying person, which
appears as a transparent replica of the person, or an oval or sphere of
light [OBLATE SPHEROID] leaving from the head or chest of the dying
person’s physical body, Moody told The Epoch Times in an interview.
Sometimes, the bystander would also experience the life review of the
dying person. A woman in Georgia was documented as having talked with
her husband’s spirit as she saw his life review when he was dying, and
she also saw a being that identified herself as the miscarried daughter
she and her husband had lost.
Moody thinks that shared death experiences act as strong evidence for
the view that THE MIND EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY OF THE BRAIN, because the
people experiencing them are in no way having impaired brain functions
at the time.
“All of the features that I identify as the initial near-death
experiences that I studied years ago are also present in people who have
these experiences at the bedside, who incidentally are NOT ill or
injured,” Moody said during his presentation at the conference.
“There’s nothing wrong with the oxygen flow to their brains, and yet
they have identically the same experiences that I hear from people who
did come close to death.”
Even stronger evidence, as Moody recounted during the interview with The
Epoch Times, was the case of a priest and a nun in South Africa who had
a car accident together and who both had cardiac arrest followed by an
NDE. After they were resuscitated, both recounted the experience of
leaving their bodies and going into a light together with identical
details.
With the amount of research over the past 30 years, Moody said that
“there has now been a genuine — and I would underline ‘genuine’ –
solid step toward rational comprehension of the afterlife.”
Similarly, Greyson said, “The science of near-death experiences is much
further advanced now than it was 30 years ago.”
However, Greyson thinks that there is still more to do in the area of
near-death studies, especially with the modern tools and techniques that
we didn’t have before, and he expects that in the future, we will learn
more about the causes of NDE.
“I think we have just scratched the surface of NDE,” he said.
“Some people with a religious or spiritual background will talk about
the experience being given to us as a gift or coming from some
supernatural cause, and I don’t know how to express that concept in
scientific terms yet.
“But I think that science is a dynamic enterprise, NOT a static one, and
I think sooner or later we will find a way in scientific terms to talk
about something beyond the physical or psychological that is ordered in
a way that we demand scientific concepts will be.
“I think the major advances in the future will be along the lines of
what role the NDE plays in people’s lives and personality development,
and establishing values and beliefs and attitudes and different ways we
can help people benefit from the near-death experience.”
——————————————
RELATED WEB SITE LINKS:
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES:
“GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY” WITH Dr RAYMOND MOODY:
/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flBmpCJFo-8 [10:10 min]
/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=791VWrH1wG0 [20 min]
“ON MATTERS OF LIFE and DEATH” WITH Dr RAYMOND MOODY:
/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNbTdm0-Uq4 [9:00 min]
DOCUMENTARY “AFTERLIFE” WITH Dr RAYMOND MOODY:
/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvNDrZv8HwE [10:30 min]
NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE RESEARCH FOUNDATION, Dr JEFFREY P LONG’s,
http://www.nderf.org/
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES and THE AFTERLIFE:
http://www.near-death.com/
The MICHAEL NEWTON INSTITUTE FOR LIFE BETWEEN LIVES HYPNOTHERAPY:
http://www.newtoninstitute.org/
/
http://www.spiritualregression.org/
/
http://www.near-death.com/newton.html
/
http://nhne-pulse.org/resource_pages/near-death-experiences/
——————————————
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research-part-2-61827.html
– Part #2 of 3 –
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: 30 YEARS OF DETAILED RESEARCH! –
By Stephanie Lam, Epoch Times, Tuesday, October 4, 2011
/
http://nhne-pulse.org/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research/
It was 1993. Kathleen Elmore was driving through an intersection and a
truck came at her from the left. “That doesn’t look good,” she thought.
“Dying does not hurt,” Elmore said as she recounted the experience at
the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference
this year.
“That whole immense, huge impact felt like somebody just kind of tipped
me on the shoulder, and I went straight up.”
Elmore said that her consciousness went 50 or 60 feet up into a
beautiful white light where she felt “incredible love” and heard
beautiful music. There she met three beings who are “beyond angels,” she
said, and who had helped plan her life before she was born. She had a
conversation with them while watching people rescuing her down below.
After she came back to life, she gained the ability to see the energy
around the earth and people’s collective consciousness, she said.
Episodes that people experience when they are clinically dead or close
to clinical death are dubbed near-death experiences (NDEs) in the 1975
book “Life After Life” by Raymond Moody, M.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy
and psychology.
The book has drawn academics to study the phenomenon, and led to the
foundation of IANDS in 1981 to facilitate near-death research. On Sept.
2 – 4, near-death experiencers (NDErs) and researchers gathered in
Durham, N.C., to share their experiences and findings over the past 30
years.
In Part #1 of this series, we mentioned that Eben Alexander, M.D., had
an NDE while his brain was damaged by acute bacterial meningitis; and
that Bruce Greyson, M.D. and director of the Division of Perceptual
Studies at the University of Virginia, reported that NDErs’ mental
functioning is, in most cases, better during the NDE than usual, and
that they can still remember their NDEs very accurately 20 years after
the event.
In this part, we look at the validity of NDEs through their aftereffects
on NDErs.
“The STUDY OF AFTEREFFECTS”
During his talk at the IANDS conference, Greyson mentioned that some
“pseudo-skeptics,” as he calls scientists not open to NDE discoveries,
believe that the NDE phenomenon is not something that can be studied
scientifically because NDEs are not something material, and they canNOT
be measured.
Greyson argued that there have been a lot of studies done on emotions,
though they are not known to be of material existence.
“Are love and fear material?” he asked. “There’s certainly a lot of
scientific research about these things. We can’t see them, but we can
certainly measure the aftereffects, and from their effects, we learn,
scientifically, a lot about them.”
In scientific study, there are many things that we measure indirectly.
For example, physicists’ study of dark matter is NOT through the direct
observation of its existence, but through indirect means such as
calculating the discrepancy of a cosmic body’s mass estimated in
different ways.
Last week, NASA announced that its Kepler mission confirmed the
existence of an invisible planet, Kepler-19c, by observing the orbit
cycle of a nearby planet, Kepler-19b, which is seen to be influenced by
an unknown gravitational force.
The Kepler team also published a paper in the journal Science on Sept.
16 about the discovery of the planet Kepler-16b orbiting two low-mass
suns. The discovery was made from eclipses, some of which were due to
the two suns obscuring one another.
Using the bubble chamber as an analogy, Greyson argued that NDE can be
studied scientifically. A bubble chamber is a vessel in which subatomic
particles are made to pass through a liquid, leaving a trail of bubbles
on their tracks.
The particles are too small and move at too fast a speed for us to
observe, but by observing the bubbles that form around their tracks, we
can learn about them. Similarly, Greyson said, we can learn about NDEs
from their aftereffects.
“For true scientists, the ultimate authority is experience, not theory,”
he said.
Some may think that NDErs must be religious to start with, and their
experiences could be their imagination. However, there are NDErs who
weren’t religious before their NDEs, and Greyson has found that one of
the aftereffects of NDEs is a lowered religiosity. Interestingly, NDErs
also generally have an increased spirituality after their NDEs.
Another thing that Greyson has found in his research is that, contrary
to what most would expect, NDErs are more inclined to use logical
thought after their NDEs than before their NDEs.
Apart from psychological changes, electromagnetic aftereffects are
widely reported. When some NDErs wear wristwatches, the batteries run
down very quickly, or the watches keep a faster or slower time than
normal. Some NDErs make light bulbs go out, or TVs and radios might
change stations when they pass by. Greyson mentioned that one NDEr
cannot be detected by automatic doors.
JANE KATRA, Ph.D. in Public Health, who also spoke at the conference,
said that she became sensitive to vibrations and electromagnetic fields
after her NDE, and it was difficult for her to adjust to living in her
parents’ house because she became able to hear various things from
different rooms.
These aftereffects of NDEs make it difficult for one to deny NDEs as
real experiences, because mere hallucinations or being close to death
would not bring such effects.
Greyson and Mitchell Liester, M.D., are starting a study on the
electromagnetic aftereffects of NDEs. Following the data collection from
a questionnaire, they will conduct studies measuring NDErs’
electromagnetic fields and effects on watches.
——————————————
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research-part-3-62098.html
– Part #3 of 3 –
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: 30 YEARS OF DETAILED RESEARCH! –
By Stephanie Lam, Epoch Times, Tuesday, October 5, 2011
/
http://nhne-pulse.org/near-death-experiences-30-years-of-research/
How do you prove or disprove near-death experiences (NDEs), which are
entirely of a spiritual domain?
While near-death experiencers (NDErs) claim that their experiences of
leaving their bodies, going to heaven, and seeing deceased people and
heavenly beings, and so on, are real, many scientists insist that these
are hallucinations due to critical biological states such as the lack of
oxygen in one’s brain.
Yet there is another group of scientists who, after over 30 years of
research, ended up with evidence supportive of NDErs’ accounts.
In the first part of this series, we discussed shared death experiences,
in which someone close to a dying person experiences something similar
to NDEs.
Raymond Moody, M.D., Ph.D., told The Epoch Times that shared death
experiencers generally see the spirit of the dying person leaving the
body, and may see them meeting deceased people, experiencing a life
review, going to another realm, and so on.
“All of the features that I identify as the initial near-death
experiences that I studied years ago are also present in people who have
these experiences at the bedside, who incidentally are not ill or
injured,” Moody said during his presentation at the International
Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference this year.
“There’s nothing wrong with the oxygen flow to their brains, and yet
they have identically the same experiences that I hear from people who
did come close to death.”
This, Moody thinks, overturns the conventional scientific hypothesis
that NDEs are hallucinations caused by critical states in the brain.
However, it still does not provide solid proof that NDErs’ accounts are
TRUE.
Yet, there are other documented cases the validity of which is difficult
to disprove using conventional scientific explanations. For example,
there are cases when NDErs see deceased relatives who they did NOT know
had died, or whom they hadn’t even met.
Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, M.D., had such an experience during a coma
caused by acute bacterial meningitis. During the IANDS conference, he
recounted that, at certain points during his NDE, he experienced being a
speck on a butterfly’s wings, and was accompanied by a being whom he
regarded as a guardian angel.
Being an orphan, Alexander did not know about his biological siblings
until recent years, and by the time he got into contact with them, one
of his sisters had already died. One day after his NDE, he looked at a
photograph that his siblings gave him, and found that the “guardian
angel” was the sister who had died.
Another interesting case, described by Moody during an interview with
The Epoch Times, involved a priest and a nun who had a car accident
together in South Africa. Both of them were resuscitated from cardiac
arrest and described a joint NDE of leaving their bodies and going into
a light together, with identical details.
“VERIFIED NDE ACCOUNTS”
There are also NDE accounts that are directly verified. NDE researchers
Robert and Suzanne Mays recounted several such stories at the conference
and during an interview with The Epoch Times.
One case involved a man severely injured in a car accident on a foggy
night. He reported rising out of his body, flying over to a house, and
jumping up and down and yelling for help outside a window of the second
floor. A man heard the NDEr and called the police.
After the police came, another man w
