Mary from Ipswich has this question: "What are near death experiences and what significance do they have for us? Can they help us understand our lives better? Are they helpful in other ways to the living?"

A near death experience is a phenomenon which can happen to people during an operation, for instance, or a traffic accident or in the early stages of drowning, when they slip into a clinically dead state and report on this experience in similar ways.
People who have firsthand experience of a near death experience say that they were able to leave their physical body; that they passed through a sort of tunnel where they saw a bright light, met with the deceased, saw their whole past life in fast forward and experienced boundless love in the form of a luminous figure, which they identified with Christ, God or a ball of energy.

People who are reanimated after being declared clinically dead also report a ongoing sense of their own identity, a feeling of an all-encompassing understanding and the universal awareness or certainty that they are a part of the universe, of visions of wonderful landscapes, an altered sense of time and feeling of gravity, the impression of high speed, the vision of a boundary and a phase of return to waking life.

In medical terms, the causes of near death experiences can be explained by brain cells dying off or a change in the blood supply to the brain during the dying-off phase. The experiences are interpreted as hallucinations produced by the lack of oxygen to the brain of the clinically dead person. Pilots and astronauts who often undergo high acceleration and thereby lose consciousness report similar “perceptions”. Similar hallucinations are experienced under the influence of LSD.

Based on a representative poll of 4000 Germans, just under 5% of the population have had a near death experience. The 5000 year old epic of Gilgamesh contains such reports, although there were no methods of reanimation then. At the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) reports of near death experiences from all over the world are examined by experts in different fields. The German representative, the doctor, neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Michael Schröter-Kunhardt, maintains that it is very possible that NDEs indicate the existence of a life after death.

Created: 01:01 PM | Author: Jörg Dahlmann | Category: Current questions  |  Comments [0]