Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

[kmaherali]

Prophets and Imams are chosen ones. In Dua we recite Muhammad Mustafa and Ali Murtaza. Did Prophet or Imam talked about their experiences of NDE? I am writing about common man and not con man. NDE is a recent phenomenon. It was not common 100 years back.

Prophets and Imams convey the messages of the nature of the hereafter. The NDEs convey the same messages as well. If you have gone through the entire thread you would know that even Ismailis have had experienced NDEs and encountered the Imams during the experiences. There would certainly have been NDEs during the Prophets time but they would not have been investigated as they are now. This may be because of the availability of latest technologies to resuscitate life before death. Perhaps NDEs are meant to provide the proof of the hereafter to the age based on science.

[swamidada]

Prophets and Imams are chosen ones. In Dua we recite Muhammad Mustafa and Ali Murtaza. Did Prophet or Imam talked about their experiences of NDE? I am writing about common man and not con man. NDE is a recent phenomenon. It was not common 100 years back.

There would certainly have been NDEs during the Prophets time but they would not have been investigated as they are now. This may be because of the availability of latest technologies to resuscitate life before death. Perhaps NDEs are meant to provide the proof of the hereafter to the age based on science.

There are hundreds of thousands of hadiths available, but non mentioned NDE. What latest technologies have to do with NDE. Do Neuro scientists implant any chip in brain of a man in coma and hang a tape recorder in his neck. how they listen the dialogue in between light man and man in coma. This is all hallucination. A person at the gate of a palace have not entered the palace and is talking about the things inside the palace.

[swamidada]

Prophets and Imams are chosen ones. In Dua we recite Muhammad Mustafa and Ali Murtaza. Did Prophet or Imam talked about their experiences of NDE? I am writing about common man and not con man. NDE is a recent phenomenon. It was not common 100 years back.

If you have gone through the entire thread you would know that even Ismailis have had experienced NDEs and encountered the Imams during the experiences.

There are around 15 million followers of Hazar Imam, there may be few such cases. Some missionaries also coined such stories also. But in my opinion it is mere imagination and out of love. When such a person reached the gate of heaven did Imam said go back yet your time is not up. I have heard personally from very sick persons near death 'Mowla achi ne mu(n)khe khan(n)i vinjhe'. This is because of unbearable burden of illness and Imam as last resort as a savior.

[kmaherali]

When such a person reached the gate of heaven did Imam said go back yet your time is not up.

YES YES YES There is one good example. Nasser Babu who is the author of the well known book: Marifat na phool had a near death experience and he met Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah and he was told to go back and spread knowledge..As I said you haven't read the whole thread let alone read the books I have indicated.

[kmaherali]

There are hundreds of thousands of hadiths available, but non mentioned NDE.

Rumi's favorite flute player, Hamza, happened to die. Rumi sent some dervishes with grave-clothes to prepare the body. He himself came later to the house. As he entered the room, he spoke to Hamza, "Dear friend, get up!" And immediately Hamza sat up saying, "I'm here!" He reached for his flute, and for three days and nights sweet music came from that house. When Rumi left, life went from the corpse again, and he was buried.

Source: Say I Am You RUMI
Poetry Interspersed with Stories of Rumi and Shams translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barkes

Above is the NDE that happened during Mowlana Rumi's time. If it happened during Rumi's time, it could have happened during the Prophet's time as well.

Below is an example of another Ismaili NDE

Another anecdote before I return to the first one, There was a MukhiSaheb of Baitul Khayal in Kitchener, in 1976, who passed away for a few minutes and then came back and had to be brought to Toronto for a bypass. As he was recuperating in a hospital in Bayview, a friend of mine who is a doctor and a missionary was doing his rounds in this hospital. The Mukhi recognized the doctor as an alwaez and called him over and told him that he has passed out for a few minutes the other day. The doctor replied that was true and the hospital staff had to revive him and were successful. To which the Mukhi said that he was not interested in that but wanted to narrate what had happen to him as he passed out. The Mukhi said that as soon as he left his body, Hazar Imam was waiting for him and held him and took him to a place he could not describe but said it was out of this world. Hazar Imam then asked if he wanted to stay in this beautiful place and the Mukhi replied in the affirmative. Hazar Imam asked him again the Mukhi replied that he wanted to stay. Hazar Imam asked him the third time and he said yes to which Hazar Imam reminded him that he had a daughter of 10 years on the earth and that she would need him. Hazar Imam told him to go back, educate his daughter so that she stands on her own two feet and that the Imam would call him thereafter and offer him the same place or higher. The Al-waez was happy to hear the anecdote and asked if he could narrate it in his waezes to which the Mukhi said OK.

Some 17 years thereafter, the Mukhi came to Toronto from Kitchener and went to see the Al-waez (Doctor), who now had his own practice in Toronto. The Doctor’s secretary informed the Doctor that someone from Kitchener had come to see him and want only 2 minutes of his time and that he was not sick but wanted to convey to him a very short message. The Doctor told the secretary to allow the Mukhi in and so the Mukhi went in and reminded the doctor of the incident some 17 years back and then told him that he was that Mukhi. The Doctor was happy to see him again. The Mukhi informed the Doctor that he had educated his daughter and that she was now a doctor and was on her own two feet. Well, the Doctor thought maybe the Mukhi just came to inform him that the Mukhi had fulfilled what the Imam had told him to do. So the Doctor gave the Mukhi mubaraki for fulfilling the Farman of the Imam. The Mukhi responded by saying that he had not come all the way from Kitchener just to inform him that he had educated his daughter. The Mukhi said that he come specifically to see the Doctor again to inform him that in 3 days time the Mukhi would be returning back to the place the Imam had promised him earlier. The Doctor was stunned and surely 3 days thereafter the Doctor heard an announcement that an Ismaili in Kitchener had passed away and that was the Mukhi. The point to remember is that souls when the leave this world, go to a far, far, far better place to the extent that they forget the ones that they have left behind. The physical relationship does not exist BUT, all souls come back everyday to Jamat Khana, they used to attend, in morning and the evening, to complete their Bandagi. They see their relatives but will not try and make contact as their live in the spiritual world and see us as their siblings with the Imam as our Mother and Father both. If a soul in the physical world has advanced spiritually, they can communicate with these deceased souls that come to Jamat Khana. As for souls coming back to Jamat Khana, well you find this in the Ginans. Having said that, your deceased relatives will intervene with the Imam for you, if you are going through problems. So come to Jamat Khana everyday for these souls become happy to see you!

[swamidada]

When such a person reached the gate of heaven did Imam said go back yet your time is not up.

YES YES YES There is one good example. Nasser Babu who is the author of the well known book: Marifat na phool had a near death experience and he met Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah and he was told to go back and spread knowledge..As I said you haven't read the whole thread let alone read the books I have indicated.

Basic question. Is Marifat na phool about NDE? Let me quote a paragraph.
Chapter 1 unfolded some of the ideas about “Consciousness,” and we saw that the gradually evolving consciousness can lead the human mind to freedom from limitations. This section will take us still further in our studies of self-consciousness, and we shall particularly follow an evolutionary approach to this problem. Now this evolutionary approach to the problem of self-consciousness, which truly bestows upon man a creative personality, requires for its understanding and better appreciation a brief review here of the process of the evolution of life upon this planet.

Above paragraph suggests, it is about CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PROCESS OF THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE.
In my posts I have suggested that so called NDE is coming from subconsciousness. It is hallucination or mental disorder.

[swamidada]

There are hundreds of thousands of hadiths available, but non mentioned NDE.

Rumi's favorite flute player, Hamza, happened to die. Rumi sent some dervishes with grave-clothes to prepare the body. He himself came later to the house. As he entered the room, he spoke to Hamza, "Dear friend, get up!" And immediately Hamza sat up saying, "I'm here!" He reached for his flute, and for three days and nights sweet music came from that house. When Rumi left, life went from the corpse again, and he was buried.

Source: Say I Am You RUMI
Poetry Interspersed with Stories of Rumi and Shams translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barkes

Above is the NDE that happened during Mowlana Rumi's time. If it happened during Rumi's time, it could have happened during the Prophet's time as well.

Did Rumi's type of such event happened at time of Prophet? You wrote, "could have happened", but not sure. There is no mention of NDE in Hadiths.
NDE is defined as few moments of interaction and not 3 days as mentioned in Rumi's story. Darvesh with spiritual powers will say. "QUM BI IZNI ALLAH" AND NOT QUM BI IZNI". Even Prophet Essa said, "QUM BI IZNI ALLAH" AS QURAN MENTIONED.

[swamidada]

Kmaherali wrote:
Below is an example of another Ismaili NDE

"Another anecdote before I return to the first one, There was a MukhiSaheb of Baitul Khayal in Kitchener, in 1976, who passed away for a few minutes and then came back and had to be brought to Toronto for a bypass. As he was recuperating in a hospital in Bayview, a friend of mine who is a doctor and a missionary was doing his rounds in this hospital. The Mukhi recognized the doctor as an alwaez and called him over and told him that he has passed out for a few minutes the other day. The doctor replied that was true and the hospital staff had to revive him and were successful. To which the Mukhi said that he was not interested in that but wanted to narrate what had happen to him as he passed out. The Mukhi said that as soon as he left his body, Hazar Imam was waiting for him and held him and took him to a place he could not describe but said it was out of this world. Hazar Imam then asked if he wanted to stay in this beautiful place and the Mukhi replied in the affirmative. Hazar Imam asked him again the Mukhi replied that he wanted to stay. Hazar Imam asked him the third time and he said yes to which Hazar Imam reminded him that he had a daughter of 10 years on the earth and that she would need him. Hazar Imam told him to go back, educate his daughter so that she stands on her own two feet and that the Imam would call him thereafter and offer him the same place or higher. The Al-waez was happy to hear the anecdote and asked if he could narrate it in his waezes to which the Mukhi said OK."

In my opinion it is a good example of warming up of Iman of Jamait by a doctor missionary. It is an anecdote in which neither Mukhi's name is mentioned nor Missionary doctor's name. How to verify this episode. Is this event mentioned some where in hospital's manuals?

[swamidada]

satgur kahere: ujad kheddaa to feer vase
ane neerdhanee-aa dhanvant hoy
pann ek acha(n)bo aa(n)khee-e
bhaai muvaa na jeeve koi re.....................75
The True Guide says: The deserted village will rehabitate and the poor will become rich. However, there is one astonishing sight. Brother, nobody can come to life(physical) after dying.
Saloko Nano; Pir Sadardin

[swamidada]

When such a person reached the gate of heaven did Imam said go back yet your time is not up.

Nasser Babu who is the author of the well known book: Marifat na phool had a near death experience and he met Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah and he was told to go back and spread knowledge..As I said you haven't read the whole thread let alone read the books I have indicated.

Marifat na phool is a compilation of some lectures of Nasser Bhagat. He has talked mainly about consciousness, evolution of life, and life after death but no mention of NDE. The NDE result is derived from an anecdote about his passing out and an encounter with MSMS. Did Nasser Bhaghat mentioned this encounter himself?

[kmaherali]

The NDE result is derived from an anecdote about his passing out and an encounter with MSMS. Did Nasser Bhaghat mentioned this encounter himself?

Are you saying the the well known anecdote witnessed and related by many is a lie? How about the published book written by Azmina Suleman about her own experience?


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/09734 ... e&n=283155

[kmaherali]

In my opinion it is a good example of warming up of Iman of Jamait by a doctor missionary. It is an anecdote in which neither Mukhi's name is mentioned nor Missionary doctor's name. How to verify this episode. Is this event mentioned some where in hospital's manuals?

Not everyone who has NDEs want to broadcast their experiences and hence very few NDEs are actually reported or investigated. Hence there have been far too many experiences since ages but have not been reported explicitly. Hence the need to be anonymous about it. However some individuals because of their backgrounds such as medical doctors feel compelled to share and explain their experiences for the benefit of others and have published books. Some are given instruction to share their experience for the benefit of others. For example Azmina Suleman was shown a pen indicating that she should write about it. I strongly recommend you read her book if you have not done so.

Ultimately it is a matter of personal judgement whether to believe or not.

[kmaherali]

satgur kahere: ujad kheddaa to feer vase
ane neerdhanee-aa dhanvant hoy
pann ek acha(n)bo aa(n)khee-e
bhaai muvaa na jeeve koi re.....................75
The True Guide says: The deserted village will rehabitate and the poor will become rich. However, there is one astonishing sight. Brother, nobody can come to life(physical) after dying.
Saloko Nano; Pir Sadardin

This verse talks about ultimate death not NDEs. It is about dying before dying (mutu kabla mutu) as in Ginan verse:

abadhu sab avagunn tajo treevennee nahaavo
ane anhad naad bajaa-o
kahe peer shamsh jeeva(n)t mareeye
to avarth janam na paao....................................4

O slave! shun all the misdeeds and focus your concentration on the
region joining the ingla pinglaa and sukhmannaa force channels.
Then you will initiate, play or hear celestial sounds. Peer Shamsh says
that if one dies while still alive, he will not have to take up further births.

http://heritage.ismaili.net/node/22794

[swamidada]

satgur kahere: ujad kheddaa to feer vase
ane neerdhanee-aa dhanvant hoy
pann ek acha(n)bo aa(n)khee-e
bhaai muvaa na jeeve koi re.....................75
The True Guide says: The deserted village will rehabitate and the poor will become rich. However, there is one astonishing sight. Brother, nobody can come to life(physical) after dying.
Saloko Nano; Pir Sadardin

This verse talks about ultimate death not NDEs. It is about dying before dying (mutu kabla mutu) as in Ginan verse:

abadhu sab avagunn tajo treevennee nahaavo
ane anhad naad bajaa-o
kahe peer shamsh jeeva(n)t mareeye
to avarth janam na paao....................................4

O slave! shun all the misdeeds and focus your concentration on the
region joining the ingla pinglaa and sukhmannaa force channels.
Then you will initiate, play or hear celestial sounds. Peer Shamsh says
that if one dies while still alive, he will not have to take up further births.

http://heritage.ismaili.net/node/22794

Doctors declared the man is dead, and after 40/50 minutes he came into his senses and told a story. you have to believe what he is saying or to dismiss it because there is not witness. what he said is one sided. Now how to prove it? Once the soul is taken out of body by angel of death it is done, or we accept that angel made a mistake, and if angel made a mistake he should be fired by highest authority. God's life and death system is accurate and precise.

[swamidada]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2 ... rlife.html

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

[swamidada]

The NDE result is derived from an anecdote about his passing out and an encounter with MSMS. Did Nasser Bhaghat mentioned this encounter himself?

Are you saying the the well known anecdote witnessed and related by many is a lie? How about the published book written by Azmina Suleman about her own experience?


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/09734 ... e&n=283155

A reference about book you mentioned from amazon. It shows different perspective to near death experience.
"A Passage to Eternity brings a uniquely different perspective to the whole genre of Near-Death Experiences. It delves into the more mystical dimensions of the spiritual realm, that challenges the reader to open up to a transcendental reality that exists just outside our present range of conscious experience".
Looks like the book is about MOUTU QABL UN TAMOUTU.

[kmaherali]

Real-life stories of out-of-body experiences, encountering a special light, greeters from the afterlife, life reviews, tunnels, and 360-degree vision--are all part of this intriguing look at near-death experiences (NDEs) by one of the world's noted authorities, P.M.H. Atwater. Atwater shares her amazing findings, based on her sessions with more than 4,000 adults and children, and over 40 years of research; a breathtaking culmination to a successful and controversial career.
Atwater examines every aspect of the near-death phenomenon: from first-hand accounts of survivors experiencing flash forwards, waking up in morgues, and developing psychic abilities, to stunning cases of groups experiencing NDEs together. Atwater offers statistics from her findings to show the distinctive common patterns that people experience, as well as the common aftereffects and how it changed their lives.
She also explores the physiological and spiritual changes that result from near-death experiences and looks at the connections between the NDE experience and what is often called "enlightenment." Near Death Experiences provides a glimpse of not only what lies beyond the veil of our temporal existence, but points to what--or who--we really are and what we are meant to be.

https://www.amazon.com/Near-Death-Exper ... 157174651X

[swamidada]

I was in coma, Dr. beside my bed declared I am clinically dead. I started flying in a light tunnel with speed of light. At the end of tunnel there was no stop sign, no barrier, no one to receive me. I crossed the tunnel and by somersaulting fell on ground. I shouted 'uui ma bhaandha jurri piya'. I got up looked around no one was there. I thought it was my judgement day. God should be sitting on throne. there should be line of angels and huurs beside Him as well prosecutor and attorneys. All of sudden I heard some one saying in thundering voice, " why are you here". Humbly I replied Sir, doctor sent me here. The voice roared "Dr, ki tou esi ki...they keep issuing death certificates, are they nuts. The voice ordered go back still you have 10 years. I requested, Sir 20 years. Jata hai ke nahi and I felt some one kicked my butts so hard that I was back in my hospital bed. Dr. was still there, I told doc, look I have pain in my back I need MRI. Next day after my MRI hospital management gave me bill of $1500. My insurance refuse to pay the bill. This NDE proved very costly for me. Now who will pay my MRI bill Kmaherali or Admin.

[kmaherali]

Near-death experiences offer a glimpse not only into the nature of death but also into the meaning of life. They are not only useful tools to aid in the human quest to understand death but are also deeply meaningful, transformative experiences for the people who have them.

In a unique contribution to the growing and popular literature on the subject, philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin examine prominent near-death experiences, such as those of Pam Reynolds, Eben Alexander and Colton Burpo. They combine their investigations with critiques of the narratives' analysis by those who take them to show that our minds are immaterial and heaven is for real. In contrast, the authors provide a blueprint for a science-based explanation. Focusing on the question of whether near-death experiences provide evidence that consciousness is separable from our brains and bodies, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin give a naturalistic account of the profound meaning and transformative effects that these experiences engender in many. This book takes the reality of near-death experiences seriously. But it also shows that understanding them through the tools of science is completely compatible with acknowledging their profound meaning.

[swamidada]

Near-death experiences offer a glimpse not only into the nature of death but also into the meaning of life. They are not only useful tools to aid in the human quest to understand death but are also deeply meaningful, transformative experiences for the people who have them.

I wander, look at the title cover. One is at the end of tunnel, followed by 2 others, and outside tunnel 2 more just to enter the tunnel. looks like it is a continuous flow of 2 at a time in tunnel. Then there is an image of angel of death with long wings bigger than angel. There is a NAKED WOMAN shown and some one is trying to catch her. Hmm naked woman. Can you explain the presence of naked woman in title cover. It is all imagination,
hallucination, subconscious. Have some one seen the face of death?
I have read about few cases, found few things common in all cases. Coma, Tunnel, light man, sent back. Almost same script narrated by so called dying persons. Scientist should come up with some different scripts to create fun.
In Ginan it is said: MARNA HAI RE ZARUR (WHEN TIME IS UP HAVE TO GO, NO OTHER CHANCE OR NDE)

HAATH GHASEY NE DUSASA MELEY
JEEB LAREYE TARA DEEDHA
GHAN(N)ERO GHAN(N)ERO PRAN(N)I ROWA NE LAGIO
SHAH JI SUU(N) CHALIYO KHOTO RE

[swamidada]

Is Death Real? New Experiments Raise Important Questions On What It Means To Die
Esther Landhuis
Sun, December 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM CST
amber joglar's eyes for the death story
Is Death Real?Trevor Raab
On December 9, 2013, 13-year-old Jahi McMath was checked in to Oakland Children’s Hospital in California for a routine tonsillectomy. She had sleep apnea and her parents believed that having her tonsils removed would improve her life, her sleep, and her relationships with her classmates. Each year, more than half a million people in the United States get this procedure. The vast majority have no complications. McMath was not so fortunate. About an hour after waking from the surgery, she started spitting up blood. In the middle of the night, her oxygen-saturation levels plummeted. Medical staff started working frantically to intubate her, but McMath’s heart stopped. As Rachel Aviv reported in a chilling 2018 New Yorker story, it would take several more hours to restore her heartbeat and breathing.

Two days later, doctors declared McMath brain-dead. But with her body still warm and her skin still soft, her family disagreed. They fought in court to keep her on a ventilator. Eventually they raised enough money through a GoFundMe campaign to airlift McMath to New Jersey, one of the only states that allows families to refuse a death declaration on the basis of their religious beliefs. Nourished through a feeding tube and supplied with supplemental hormones, McMath’s body continued to grow and develop—and even began menstruating.

In 2018, Jahi’s family’s attorney announced that she had died of complications from liver failure. Only then, five years after the tonsil surgery, “were all parties in mutual agreement that Jahi had in fact died,” says Michele Goodwin, chancellor’s professor and director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at UC Irvine School of Law. “It was quite the controversial case.”

And it’s not the only such case. Over the last 70 or so years, declaring death has gotten progressively messier. Scientific advances such as ventilators and life support have made it harder and harder to find the line between being a person and being a body. Now, mind-blowing experiments in pigs, and the development of a souped-up life-support system called OrganEx, are reinvigorating a decades-old debate about how our lives end. While OrganEx is not yet available for use in humans, it was able to reverse some of the cellular changes associated with death in pigs. What does that mean? In studies, when pigs were hooked up to the system after being dead for an hour, they looked lifelike, their hearts restarted, and they even moved. But were the pigs still dead? And if a treatment like that ever makes it to humans, what happens to the next Jahi McMath?

THE DEAD CONTINUE TO LIVE
The technology that kept Jahi McMath looking alive for five years is one of the first threats to death as we know it, the modern ventilator. Ventilators, which started appearing in hospitals in the 1950s, save lives by pushing air into a patient’s lungs when the person no longer can breathe on their own. Their invention also created an ethical dilemma: If bodies could breathe indefinitely without recovering or decaying, when were doctors legally allowed to pronounce them “deceased?”

In 1968, a committee of experts met at Harvard Medical School to discuss the matter. The existing criteria for determining death were based on the ways people had died for centuries. When breathing stopped and a person had no pulse, they were no longer alive. Now, the group proposed adding a second criterion, the absence of brain activity. It made sense: The brain holds power over other organs, and controls breathing. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, a way to fix a nonfunctional brain.

The timing of this decision wasn’t coincidental. Just one year prior, in 1967, doctors had performed the first heart transplant. In addition to relieving the burden of prolonged, meaningless treatment, the new brain-based approach to defining death could also ward off controversy over when doctors could retrieve transplant organs. If an organ donor’s brain was dead, their organs were fair game.

A legal entity called the Uniform Law Commission, which is charged with clarifying and stabilizing complicated laws across the country, formalized the brain-death criterion in 1980. Most U.S. states have since adopted it. According to this law, a person is dead if they meet one of two conditions: “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions” or “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.” Over time, brain death became the more popular definition of biological death, and doctors codified this view in a 2019 position statement by the American Academy of Neurology. Ninety-three percent of the organization’s surveyed members agreed that brain death is the equivalent of circulatory death.

Yet there have been rare cases, most conspicuously Jahi McMath’s, where medical interventions have successfully maintained a person for years after their brain no longer worked. “[Jahi] indeed went through puberty,” says Alex Capron, an expert in health policy and medical ethics at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and Keck School of Medicine. If that’s true, and some endocrine functions can persist without brain activity, there’s room for critics to argue that the current standards are incomplete. And that was before scientists started trying to reverse the dying process in pigs.

AN ACCIDENTAL BREAKTHROUGH
Yale neurobiologist Nenad Sestan researches genes that control how neurons grow and form connections in the developing brain. To perform these studies, he orders slices of tissue from brain banks around the world. Eight or nine years ago, a specimen from London missed the plane. The extra day it took to arrive was presumed to be catastrophic: Cells die after several minutes without oxygen. It’s one of the first things Sestan recalls learning in medical school.

But Sestan had already noticed that this wasn’t always the case. On several occasions, someone left a brain slab out a few extra hours before moving it into fluid for experiments, yet Sestan had still managed to recover living cells. So when the overdue brain arrived from London, Sestan asked one of his postdoctoral fellows to dissect a piece of it and let it grow in a petri dish containing cellular nutrients. “Maybe something will be there alive,” he said.

It worked; some cells grew. And then it worked again on a second brain the researchers sliced and recovered to make sure the results weren’t a fluke. Sestan started to wonder: If living cells could be preserved from a dead brain, why not try to revive the whole organ?

Using assorted pumps, heaters, and filters to circulate a custom-made blood substitute, Sestan and his coworkers cobbled together a now-patented perfusion system, which they called BrainEx. They achieved stunning results. In a 2019 paper, the team described how BrainEx revitalized key features of pig brains retrieved from a slaughterhouse. Four hours after the pigs had died, neurons were firing, blood vessels were functioning, and the brain’s immune cells were chugging along.

After the BrainEx paper came out, scientists and physicians inundated Sestan with ideas about what to do next. “Nenad was like, ‘Well, we should try definitely to answer as many questions [as we can] at once by trying to do this on the entire body,’” says David Andrijevic, MD, a research scientist who joined the lab at Yale shortly before Sestan published the BrainEx study.

Expanding from BrainEx to a whole-body version, which the lab called OrganEx, presented several challenges as the team began the scale-up. In an isolated brain, you don’t have to deal with blood clotting and immune reactions, for example. Revamping the system took about three years.

At its core, OrganEx functions like extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, which is also called life support. It has a pump that mimics heart function and an oxygenator to mimic lung function. But OrganEx also includes a blood-filtration unit, plus additional pumps, tubes, and sensors, to make real-time measurements of metabolites, gases, electrolytes, and pressures. Then, there are the mixtures that the system pushes into the body: a priming solution to correct electrolyte and pH imbalances, a cow-derived hemoglobin that carries oxygen, and about a dozen drugs—anti-inflammatories, anti-oxidants, antihistamines, antibiotics, and several neuroprotective agents.

Basically, OrganEx adds a sort of cellular life support to traditional ECMO. It also revives the body more slowly. When cells have been deprived of oxygen for a while, suddenly connecting them to fresh blood can begin a cycle of stress and damage that kills them, a problem called ischemia-reperfusion injury. What you want instead is a kind of slow reanimation, a gentler process of reviving cells that have already begun to die. If that were possible, doctors might be able to extend the amount of time an animal could be dead before recovering. It might make more organs from more bodies recoverable for transplantation.

It’s “ECMO on steroids,” Sestan says. He’s only half joking. OrganEx does contain a steroid, dexamethasone, although it’s not one that bodybuilders would find useful.

THE PIGS WERE DEAD
When it came time to test OrganEx on pigs, Sestan and his team at Yale anticipated a long day. It took about five hours to prepare solutions and ready the machines and another seven hours to conduct monitoring and measurements on 10 pigs. They worked on one animal at a time, each sedated and kept fully anesthetized. The scientists put a tiny electrode through a square-inch hole in each animal’s chest and touched its heart to induce cardiac arrest. Two monitors, one for the heart and one for brain activity, showed flat lines. The pigs were dead.

One hour passed. Then the real test began, as the scientists connected each motionless animal to the OrganEx system or, as a control, to a standard ECMO. The experiment was set to run for the next six hours, but the first and most obvious changes happened about a half hour in: Heart monitors connected to four out of five OrganEx-treated pigs began to light up. Peaked lines started moving in pulses across the screen. “It was like, whoa, whoa, what should we do now?” says Andrijevic. The hearts’ electrical activity had resumed spontaneously, without chest compressions or other obvious lifesaving measures.

The researchers peered into the pigs’ chest holes. “We saw it with our own eyes,” Andrijevic says. In every OrganEx pig that showed electrical activity on the monitor, the heart itself was visibly contracting. (None of the five animals in the ECMO-treated group showed any electrical activity or contractions.)

After six hours of perfusion, the researchers administered a euthanasia drug and disconnected the machine. They examined tissue from the pigs’ vital organs—including the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and brain—under a microscope. The cells’ shape and organization looked noticeably better in OrganEx samples compared with the samples from pigs given ECMO. Other tests showed restored activity of specific cellular repair genes after OrganEx treatment.

OrganEx was so effective that some changes were obvious to the naked eye. Treated pigs lacked typical signs of death such as muscle rigidity (rigor mortis) and purple discoloration (livor mortis). “The animal looks different,” Sestan says. “Trust me. You just see it.”

An illustration showing how the OrganEx “blood” is delivered to vital organs an hour after death. Unlike current treatments, OrganEx revives the cells more slowly, a key factor in reviving dead cells. Marin Balaic
When asked what else happened during the experiment, Andrijevic paused, then struggled for words: “What has raised a lot of eyebrows is…I’m not sure if you have noticed it, because we have tried, like, not to… We have mentioned it, of course… the ‘movements.’”

Andrijevic and his coworkers had performed a routine procedure during the perfusion. In preparation for imaging the brain, he says, they snaked a catheter into the pig’s neck and squirted contrast dye into the carotid artery. It’s a procedure that makes it easier to see blood vessels on an x-ray.

However, when the dye shot through the tube, something startling happened: The 70-pound slab of flesh appeared to turn its head. “It was just a few seconds. It was not like the animal was trying to walk out,” Andrijevic says. Yet it was not just a twitch either. Andrijevic calls it a “complex” movement and says it suggests that OrganEx perfusion can restore neuromuscular junctions, where nerves and muscle fibers meet.

“What does it mean?” he asks. “We’re not sure.”

LIFE, EXTENDED
Scientists are still puzzling over what the OrganEx results mean. The experiments were performed in animals and have years to go before they could affect human medicine. Still, at a cellular level, they may show that death may not proceed as quickly or as finally as once thought. For the person who collapses from a heart attack and remains on the ground for 10 minutes, the findings raise a key question: How dead are they, really?

Nowadays, if someone’s heart stops beating from disease or from a heart attack, they only have a 10 to 20 percent chance of making it out of the hospital alive, says transplant surgeon Robert A. Montgomery, MD, PhD, who directs the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. He has personally beat those odds. Before receiving a heart transplant at his own hospital in 2018, he needed resuscitation on seven occasions after suffering cardiac arrest from an inherited condition that weakens the heart muscle.

Montgomery now wonders if death could be “reversible” in situations like his own. One could imagine using OrganEx instead of ECMO to intervene after a cardiac arrest “before restarting the heart and hitting the brain with warm blood,” he says. Without the reperfusion injury that ECMO can cause, survival rates could improve.

Problem is, the idea of reversibility hits right at the heart of the debate about the medical definition of death. According to a recent article in the Daily Beast, one question that cropped up when the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) met over Zoom to debate death again in March was whether to call it “irreversible” or “permanent.” Seema Shah, JD, a bioethicist at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, who attended the ULC’s virtual forum, says it can be hard to know what “permanent” means if you can restore function in cells. “That starts to call into question the different practices that we do,” she says.

Lest this all sound like a thought experiment, consider that hospitals must constantly make difficult decisions that depend on whether a patient is really, truly dead. These are life-and-death choices made about your children, your parents, you. How much time, for example, should a doctor spend trying to save a dying patient? Which technologies are they required to try? When are organs available for donation? “If you want to transplant a heart, the longer you wait, the more damage will occur,” Shah says. “But if that heart is removed from one person and put into another, then that raises [another question]: If this heart can work in another body, why couldn’t it have worked in the body from which it was removed?”

Medical teams must make these decisions quickly, under immense pressure, which means health disparities tied to age and race can surface, as documented in reports by the National Academy of Medicine and similar health organizations. Jahi McMath, for example, was Black, and her parents reported evidence of physician negligence in the hours before her death. “If the hospital had been more compassionate, would we have fought so much?” Jahi’s grandmother told Aviv in the New Yorker article. Part of the reason it was so hard for her family to believe she was dead may have been the amount of effort doctors appeared to put in (or not) to save her while she was alive.

Even if it were available for use in humans, OrganEx almost certainly would not have mattered in McMath’s case. Still, it’s possible to picture a future in which it is used to preserve organs against the wishes of a family, used too late, or not used at all. Imagine the impact if the system ever caused the kind of head movements in a loved one that the Yale researchers observed in pigs. Ultimately making the right decisions under these circumstances won’t rely on the scientists who develop the new technology, but on philosophers, academics, and the law. As Shah puts it: “Is the way we determine death based on a legal construct, a social determination, or a biological fact?”

For now, it’s often based on a lack of brain function, but you don’t have to go far in the history of medicine to know that nothing lasts forever. Maybe not even death.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00592.html

[Admin]

HONESTLY THIS IS FRIGHTENING. i AM HAPPY THAT MY AGE WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO LIVE AT TIMES WHERE THERE WILL BE UNCERTAINETY ABOUT PEOPLE'S TIME OF DEATH.

[swamidada]

Business Insider
Scientists saw a surge in brain activity in dying patients that could finally help explain mysterious near-death experiences

Grace Eliza Goodwin
Sun, June 4, 2023 at 7:21 AM CDT

The brain may live on for a short period of time even after the heart stops. What this means for human consciousness is still up for debate.
Scientists observed a surge in brain activity in dying patients even after their hearts stopped.

The activity consisted of gamma waves, which are associated with lucid dreams and hallucinations.

Scientists say their observations may help explain bizarre reports of near-death experiences.

Scientists saw a surge in brain activity in dying patients. It's one of the very few times where researchers have had the opportunity to measure brain activity in humans immediately before and after "death."

The researchers say it could help explain the bizarre phenomenon that so many people report during a near-death experience, like leaving the body, floating above it, or seeing memories of their lives flash before their eyes.

Near-death experiences, "challenges our fundamental understanding of the dying brain," the researchers reported in the study, which was published last month. So, research like this is critical for building a clearer picture of the human experience near death.

How scientists measured human brain activity near death
The four patients in the recent study were comatose and removed from life support, with their families' permission. At this point, electroencephalogram sensors measured the patients' brain activity as they went into cardiac arrest.

The researchers found that two out of four of the dying patients experienced a swell of gamma waves — the brain activity associated with lucid dreams and hallucinations — even after their hearts had stopped, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

Scientists have long thought that the brain dies with the rest of the body, but the latest study suggests that people may retain a certain level of consciousness that lends to dream-like, out-of-body experiences as they die, Vice reported.

"The discovery of the marked and organized gamma activities in the dying brain suggests that [a near-death experience] is the product of the dying brain, which is activated at death," the lead author of the study, Jimo Borjigin, told Vice.

"As far as I am concerned, our study may be as good as it will ever get for finding neural signatures of near-death consciousness," Borjigin told Vice, adding that the "only thing better than this is to have the patients survive to tell the tale that correlates with the detected neural signatures."

Borjigin has observed this same type of surge in brain activity in previous studies on dying rats, but it has historically been very difficult to examine in humans.

That said, Borjigin aims to collect more data on dying human brains in the future to better understand the human death experience, per Vice.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 00146.html

[kmaherali]

Hi Karim,

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And with these three experts in particular, their combined knowledge and varied backgrounds create a powerful, unparalleled experience for the rest of us (You can read more about them below!).

So if you are interested in what the information carried back to us from Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) means for how you live your current life and how you consider your future…

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Karen Newell Quote
Or the power of specific practices and sounds to increase your resonance and aid in your exploration of non-physical realms…

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Tuesday, June 20th at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern

wisdom and guidance
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Here’s a bit more about how Dr. Alexander’s, Karen’s and Suzanne's backgrounds inform what you’ll discover in the presentation:

eben
Eben Alexander, MD, was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He experienced a transcendental Near-Death Experience (NDE) during a week-long coma from an inexplicable brain infection that completely transformed his worldview. A pioneering scientist and modern thought leader in the emerging science that acknowledges the primacy of consciousness in the universe, he is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe.

suzanne
Suzanne Giesemann is a highly respected spiritual teacher and medium. She has written 13 books on spirituality and life after death, and her transition from senior military officer to her current life is featured in the award-winning documentary, “Messages of Hope,” based on her own memoir. She is also the founder of “The Awakened Way” teachings and was included on the 2022 Watkins list of the100 most spiritually influential people on Earth.

Karen Newell
Karen Newell is an author and specialist in personal development with a diverse body of work that rests upon the foundation of heart-centered consciousness. As an innovator in the emerging field of

brainwave entrainment audio meditation, Karen empowers others in their journeys of self-discovery by demonstrating how to connect to inner guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness and develop intuition. She is co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, and co-author with Eben Alexander III, M.D. of Living in a Mindful Universe.

Join Eben, Karen, and Suzanne for ‘Wisdom & Guidance From Beyond
the Veil’

In Service,
Steve

Steve Farrell
Steve Farrell
Worldwide Executive Director
Humanity's Team
www.humanitysteam.org

P.S. You really don’t want to miss this fascinating program. You’ll even hear about the information gathered from substantiated past life experiences of young children!

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[swamidada]

INSIDER
I've studied more than 5,000 near death experiences. My research has convinced me without a doubt that there's life after death.

Kelly Burch
Updated Tue, August 29, 2023 at 4:54 AM
Jeffrey Long is a radiation oncologist in Kentucky.

He's also the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.

He says studying near-death experiences has made him a better cancer doctor.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jeffrey Long. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Thirty-seven years ago I was an oncologist resident, learning about how best to treat cancer using radiation. These were the pre-internet days, so I did my research in the library. One day, I was flipping through a large volume of the Journal of the American Medical Association when I came across an article describing near-death experiences.

It stopped me in my tracks. All my medical training told me you were either alive or dead. There was no in-between. But suddenly, I was reading from a cardiologist describing patients who had died and then came back to life, reporting very distinct, almost unbelievable experiences.

From that moment, I was fascinated with near-death experiences or NDEs. I define a near-death experience as someone who is either comatose or clinically dead, without a heartbeat, having a lucid experience where they see, hear, feel emotions, and interact with other beings. Learning more about these experiences has fundamentally changed my view of the universe.

Near-death experiences have common threads
When I finished my residency, I started the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. I started collecting stories from people who had NDEs and evaluating them with the mind of a scientist and doctor. I made opinions based on evidence and came into this as a skeptic. But in the face of overwhelming evidence, I've come to believe there's certainly an afterlife.

No two NDEs are the same. But as I studied thousands of them, I saw a consistent pattern of events emerging in a predictable order. About 45% of people who have an NDE report an out-of-body experience. When this happens, their consciousness separates from their physical body, usually hovering above the body. The person can see and hear what's happening around them, which usually includes frantic attempts to revive them. One woman even reported a doctor throwing a tool on the floor when he picked up the wrong one—something the doctor later confirmed.

After the out-of-body experience, people say they're transported into another realm. Many pass through a tunnel and experience a bright light. Then, they're greeted by deceased loved ones, including pets, who are in the prime of their lives. Most people report an overwhelming sense of love and peace. They feel like this other realm is their real home.

I haven't found any scientific explanation for these experiences
These experiences may sound cliché: the bright light, the tunnel, the loved ones. But over twenty-five years of studying NDEs, I've come to believe that these descriptions have become cultural tropes because they're true. I even worked with a group of children under five who had NDEs. They reported the same experiences that adults did—and at that age, you're unlikely to have heard about bright lights or tunnels after you die.

Other people report seemingly unbelievable events, which we can later confirm. One woman lost consciousness while riding her horse on a trail. Her body stayed on the trail while her consciousness traveled with her horse as he galloped back to the barn. Later, she was able to describe exactly what happened at the barn because she had seen it despite her body not being there. Others who hadn't spoken to her confirmed her account.

I'm a medical doctor. I've read brain research and considered every possible explanation for NDEs. The bottom line is that none of them hold water. There isn't even a remotely plausible physical explanation for this phenomenon.

I've also studied fear-death experiences, like near-miss car accidents
I take a particular definition for NDEs. The person must be unconscious. But there's another type of phenomenon that fascinates me too: what I call "fear-death experiences."

These are situations when you feel your life is in imminent danger. It might be a near-miss car accident or a sudden fall. These people generally don't experience the tunnel and light, but they often report their life "flashing before their eyes."

While some people with NDEs report these life reviews, they're more common with fear-death experiences. People even recall events from toddlerhood that they can't consciously remember but that we can later confirm by talking with family members and others.

Studying NDEs has made me a better cancer doctor
While I'm passionate about NDEs, my day job still revolves around helping patients fight cancer. I don't tell my patients about my NDE research. And yet, my work with NDEs has made me a more compassionate and loving doctor.

I'm able to help my patients face life-threatening diseases with increased courage and passion. My goal is to help them have more healthy days here on Earth. But I firmly believe that if and when they pass, they will be at peace.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/iv ... 33458.html

Note: Death is imminent, Dr. Jeffrey long is talking about consciousness

[kmaherali]

Dear Karim,

Join us tomorrow to discover your promising journey towards living a more empowered, harmonious, and compassionate life utilizing the wealth of information that lies beyond the veil.

Tune in TOMORROW, Wednesday, January 10th at 9am Pacific / 12 Noon Eastern for host Charissa Sims’s eye-opening discussion with esteemed neurosurgeon and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Eben Alexander and brain-entrainment expert Karen Newell about how to “Unlock the Mysteries of the Afterlife.”

During Eben, Karen, and Charissa’s conversation, you will hear the undeniable evidence of the afterlife that has emerged from Near-Death-Experiences, including the proof that our relationships with loved ones, guides, angels, ancient masters, and even pets continue after death.

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During tomorrow’s program, Eben and Karen will share the extraordinary evidence for “primacy of mind,” which is the idea that the mind came first and exists beyond the physical confines of the brain, and how to use specific sounds to shift into the “theta" state of awareness—promoting healing and rejuvenation and improving memory and creativity.

This is a wonderful opportunity to ask Eben and Karen any of the burning questions you have about near-death-experiences or the incredible benefits of binaural beat meditation via the chat. Be sure to join us in the Humanity’s Team Viewing Room tomorrow to unlock the answers you want about life after this plane!

We are excited to share these insights with you and have much more in store tomorrow.

Save this link to join us in the Humanity’s Team Viewing Room!
https://api.humanitysteam.org/email/lin ... id=1133163

In Service,
Steve


Steve Farrell

Executive Director
Humanity's Team

https://humanitysteam.org

[kmaherali]

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

Listen to this article, read by Samantha Desz
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As he moved to touch his father, Kerr felt a hand on his shoulder. A priest had followed him into the hospital room and was now leading him away, telling him his father was delusional. Kerr’s father died early the next morning. Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada. And the priest, he feels, made a mistake, one that many other caregivers make, of dismissing the moment as a break with reality, as something from which the boy required protection.

It would be more than 40 years before Kerr felt compelled to speak about that evening in the hospital room. He had followed his father, and three generations before him, into medicine and was working at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, where he was the chief medical officer and conducted research on end-of-life visions. It wasn’t until he gave a TEDx Talk in 2015 that he shared the story of his father’s death. Pacing the stage in the sport coat he always wears, he told the audience: “My point here is, I didn’t choose this topic of dying. I feel it has chosen or followed me.” He went on: “When I was present at the bedside of the dying, I was confronted by what I had seen and tried so hard to forget from my childhood. I saw dying patients reaching and calling out to mothers, and to fathers, and to children, many of whom hadn’t been seen for many years. But what was remarkable was so many of them looked at peace.”

The talk received millions of views and thousands of comments, many from nurses grateful that someone in the medical field validated what they have long understood. Others, too, posted personal stories of having witnessed loved ones’ visions in their final days. For them, Kerr’s message was a kind of confirmation of something they instinctively knew — that deathbed visions are real, can provide comfort, even heal past trauma. That they can, in some cases, feel transcendent. That our minds are capable of conjuring images that help us, at the end, make sense of our lives.

Nothing in Kerr’s medical training prepared him for his first shift at Hospice Buffalo one Saturday morning in the spring of 1999. He had earned a degree from the Medical College of Ohio while working on a Ph.D. in neurobiology. After a residency in internal medicine, Kerr started a fellowship in cardiology in Buffalo. To earn extra money to support his wife and two young daughters, he took a part-time job with Hospice Buffalo. Until then, Kerr had worked in the conventional medical system, focused on patients who were often tethered to machines or heavily medicated. If they recounted visions, he had no time to listen. But in the quiet of Hospice, Kerr found himself in the presence of something he hadn’t seen since his father’s death: patients who spoke of people and places visible only to them. “So just like with my father, there’s just this feeling of reverence, of something that wasn’t understood but certainly felt,” he says.

During one of his shifts, Kerr was checking on a 70-year-old woman named Mary, whose grown children had gathered in her room, drinking wine to lighten the mood. Without warning, Kerr remembers, Mary sat up in her bed and crossed her arms at her chest. “Danny,” she cooed, kissing and cuddling a baby only she could see. At first, her children were confused. There was no Danny in the family, no baby in their mother’s arms. But they could sense that whatever their mother was experiencing brought her a sense of calm. Kerr later learned that long before her four children were born, Mary lost a baby in childbirth. She never spoke of it with her children, but now she was, through a vision, seemingly addressing that loss.

In observing Mary’s final days at Hospice, Kerr found his calling. “I was disillusioned by the assembly-line nature of medicine,” Kerr told me. “This felt like a more humane and dignified model of care.” He quit cardiology to work full time at the bedsides of dying patients. Many of them described visions that drew from their lives and seemed to hold meaning, unlike hallucinations resulting from medication, or delusional, incoherent thinking, which can also occur at the end of life. But Kerr couldn’t persuade other doctors, even young residents making the rounds with him at Hospice, of their value. They wanted scientific proof.

At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010, a research fellow, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a family member who, before his death, experienced visions — a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his brothers.

The study wasn’t designed to answer how these visions differ neurologically from hallucinations or delusions. Rather, Kerr saw his role as chronicler of his patients’ experiences. Borrowing from social-science research methods, Kerr, Banas and their colleagues based their study on daily interviews with patients in the 22-bed inpatient unit at the Hospice campus in the hope of capturing the frequency and varied subject matter of their visions. Patients were screened to ensure that they were lucid and not in a confused or delirious state. The research, published in 2014 in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, found that visions are far more common and frequent than other researchers had found, with an astonishing 88 percent of patients reporting at least one vision. (Later studies in Japan, India, Sweden and Australia confirm that visions are common. The percentages range from about 20 to 80 percent, though a majority of these studies rely on interviews with caregivers and not patients.)

In the last 10 years, Kerr has hired a permanent research team who expanded the studies to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening the researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions. They can occur while patients are asleep or fully conscious. Dead family members figure most prominently, and by contrast, visions involving religious themes are exceedingly rare. Patients often relive seminal moments from their lives, including joyful experiences of falling in love and painful ones of rejection. Some dream of the unresolved tasks of daily life, like paying bills or raising children. Visions also entail past or imagined journeys — whether long car trips or short walks to school. Regardless of the subject matter, the visions, patients say, feel real and entirely unique compared with anything else they’ve ever experienced. They can begin days, even weeks, before death. Most significant, as people near the end of their lives, the frequency of visions increases, further centering on deceased people or pets. It is these final visions that provide patients, and their loved ones, with profound meaning and solace.

Kerr’s latest research is focused on the emotional transformation he has often observed in patients who experience such visions. The first in this series of studies, published in 2019, measured psychological and spiritual growth among two groups of hospice patients: those who had visions and a control group of those who did not. Patients rated their agreement with statements including, “I changed my priorities about what is important in life,” or “I have a better understanding of spiritual matters.” Those who experienced end-of-life visions agreed more strongly with those statements, suggesting that the visions sparked inner change even at the end of life. “It’s the most remarkable of our studies,” Kerr told me. “It highlights the paradox of dying, that while there is physical deterioration, they are growing and finding meaning. It highlights what patients are telling us, that they are being put back together.”

ImageA photo illustration of two silhouettes: one person and one dog.

Credit...Photo illustration by Amy Friend

In the many conversations Kerr and I have had over the past year, the contradiction between medicine’s demand for evidence and the ineffable quality of his patients’ experiences came up repeatedly. He was first struck by this tension about a year before the publication of his first study, during a visit with a World War II veteran named John who was tormented throughout his life by nightmares that took him back to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. John had been part of a rescue mission to bring wounded soldiers to England by ship and leave those too far gone to die. The nightmares continued through his dying days, until he dreamed of being discharged from the Army. In a second dream, a fallen soldier appeared to John to tell him that his comrades would soon come to “get” him. The nightmares ended after that.

Kerr has been nagged ever since by the inadequacy of science, and of language, to fully capture the mysteries of the mind. “We were so caught up in trying to quantify and give structure to something so deeply spiritual, and really, we were just bystanders, witnesses to this,” he says. “It feels a little small to be filling in forms when you’re looking at a 90-something-year-old veteran who is back in time 70 years having an experience you can’t even understand.” When Kerr talks about his research at conferences, nurses tend to nod their heads in approval; doctors roll their eyes in disbelief. He finds that skeptics often understand the research best when they watch taped interviews with patients.

What’s striking about this footage, which dates back to Kerr’s early work in 2008, is not so much the content of the visions but rather the patients’ demeanor. “There’s an absence of fear,” Kerr says. A teenage girl’s face lights up as she describes a dream in which she and her deceased aunt were in a castle playing with Barbie dolls. A man dying of cancer talks about his wife, who died several years earlier and who comes to him in his dreams, always in blue. She waves. She smiles. That’s it. But in the moment, he seems to be transported to another time or place.

Kerr has often observed that in the very end, dying people lose interest in the activities that preoccupied them in life and turn toward those they love. As to why, Kerr can only speculate. In his 2020 book, “Death Is but a Dream,” he concludes that the love his patients find in dying often brings them to a place that some call enlightenment and others call God. “Time seems to vanish,” he told me. “The people who loved you well, secured you and contributed to who you are are still accessible at a spiritual and psychological level.”

That was the case with Connor O’Neil, who died at the age of 10 in 2022 and whose parents Kerr and I visited in their home. They told us that just two days before his death, their son called out the name of a family friend who, without the boy’s knowledge, had just died. “Do you know where you are?” Connor’s mother asked. “Heaven,” the boy replied. Connor had barely spoken in days or moved without help, but in that moment, he sat up under his own strength and threw his arms around her neck. “Mommy, I love you,” he said.

Kerr’s research finds that such moments, which transcend the often-painful physical decline in the last days of life, help parents like the O’Neils and other relatives grieve even unfathomable loss. “I don’t know where I would be without that closure, or that gift that was given to us,” Connor’s father told us. “It’s hard enough with it.” As Kerr explains, “It’s the difference between being wounded and soothed.”

In June, I visited the adult daughter of a patient who died at home just days earlier. We sat in her mother’s living room, looking out on the patio and bird feeders that had given the mother so much joy. Three days before her mother’s death, the daughter was straightening up the room when her mother began to speak more lucidly than she had in days. The daughter crawled into her mother’s bed, held her hand and listened. Her mother first spoke to the daughter’s father, whom she could see in the far corner of the room, handsome as ever. She then started speaking with her second husband, visible only to her, yet real enough for the daughter to ask whether he was smoking his pipe. “Can’t you smell it?” her mother replied. Even in the retelling, the moment felt sacred. “I will never, ever forget it,” the daughter told me. “It was so beautiful.”

I also met one of Banas’s patients, Peggy Haloski, who had enrolled in hospice for home care services just days earlier, after doctors at the cancer hospital in Buffalo found blood clots throughout her body, a sign that the yearlong treatment had stopped working. It was time for her husband, Stephen, to keep her comfortable at home, with their two greyhounds.

Stephen led Banas and me to the family room, where Peggy lay on the couch. Banas knelt on the floor, checked her patient’s catheter, reduced her prescriptions so there were fewer pills for her to swallow every day and ordered a numbing cream for pain in her tailbone. She also asked about her visions.

The nurse on call that weekend witnessed Peggy speaking with her dead mother.

“She was standing over here,” Peggy told Banas, gesturing toward the corner of the room.

“Was that the only time you saw her?” Banas asked.

“So far.”

“Do you think you’ll be seeing her more?”

“I will. I will, considering what’s going on.”

Peggy sank deeper into the couch and closed her eyes, recounting another visit from the dead, this time by the first greyhound she and Stephen adopted. “I’m at peace with everybody. I’m happy,” she said. “It’s not time yet. I know it’s not time, but it’s coming.”

When my mother, Chloe Zerwick, was dying in 2018, I had never heard of end-of-life visions. I was acting on intuition when her caregivers started telling me about what we were then calling hallucinations. Mom was 95 and living in her Hudson Valley home under hospice care, with lung disease and congestive heart failure, barely able to leave her bed. The hospice doctor prescribed an opioid for pain and put her on antipsychotic and anti-anxiety medicines to tame the so-called hallucinations he worried were preventing her from sleeping. It is possible that some of these medications caused Mom’s visions, but as Kerr has explained, drug-induced hallucinations do not rule out naturally occurring visions. They can coexist.

In my mother’s case, I inherently understood that her imaginary life was something to honor. I knew what medicine-induced hallucinations looked and felt like. About 10 years before her death, Mom fell and injured her spine. Doctors in the local hospital put her on an opioid to control the pain, which left her acting like a different person. There were spiders crawling on the hospital wall, she said. She mistook her roommate’s bed for a train platform. Worse, she denied that I loved her or ever did. Once we took her off the medicine, the hallucinations vanished.

The visions she was having at the end of her life were entirely different; they were connected to the long life she had led and brought a deep sense of comfort and delight. “You know, for the first time in my life I have no worries,” she told me. I remember feeling a weight lift. After more than a decade of failing health, she seemed to have found a sense of peace.

The day before her death, as her breathing became more labored, Mom made an announcement: “I have a new leader,” she said.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Mark. He’s going to take me to the other side.”

She was speaking of my husband, alive and well back home in North Carolina.

“That’s great, Mom, except that I need him here with me,” I replied. “Do you think he can do both?”

“Oh, yes. He’s very capable.”

That evening, Mom was struggling again to breathe. “I’m thinking of the next world,” she said, and of my husband, who would lead her there. The caregiver on duty for the night and I sat at her bedside as Mom’s oxygen level fell from 68 to 63 to 52 and kept dropping until she died the next morning. My mother was not a brave person in the traditional sense of the word. She was afraid of snakes, the subway platform and any hint of pain. But she faced her death, confident that a man who loves her daughter would guide her to whatever lay ahead.

“Do you think it will happen to you?” she asked me at one point about her dreaming life.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” I replied, not knowing, as I do now, that these experiences are part of what may await us all.

Phoebe Zerwick, the author of “Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt,” is a North Carolina-based journalist. She teaches journalism and writing at Wake Forest University, where she directs the journalism program. Amy Friend is an artist in Canada whose work focuses on history, time, land-memory, dust, oceans and our connection to the universe.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/maga ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

NY Post
I’m a hospice nurse — this is what happens in the distressing moment before death
Brooke Kato
Sat, March 23, 2024 at 10:36 AM CDT·

A hospice nurse has revealed the things every person does before they die.
At death’s doorstep, nearly everyone does the same thing, a hospice nurse has revealed.

Maria Sinfield, from Lancashire, England, said people typically call out for their loved ones during their “frightening” final days.

“From a very personal point, I was with my dad when he died and he called out for his mom and dad as though they were there,” 64-year-old Sinfield, who works at Marie Curie, told the Daily Mail.

“Some people are accepting that they are dying, but you can find other people may not be,” she added, saying that some people express regrets about things they didn’t say or do.

One patient, she recalled, wanted to speak with a family member with whom they had not spoken in a long time.

“They were really distressed prior to that and seeing the family member really made a difference, just to know that person was there,” she said.

People may also feel distressed, restless or confused as they near the end of their life, sometimes hallucinating.

“Sometimes confusion can happen when someone has been deep asleep,” she explained. “In those last few hours that person could have lost consciousness, and then wake up from that, because that’s what naturally happen, and then wake up in what seems like a strange environment.”

But most people just need someone to talk to, she noted. Sitting with family members can calm their anxiety and make them comfortable, she continued, and that the simple “symptom management” is vital during end of life care.

“There’s a real balance of ensuring that we are giving that person the best quality of life that they can possibly have,” she said.

As they approach death, patients tend to slow down, eat less, grow more tired and could even experience changes in their behaviors, which can cause concern among family members, although it’s normal.

“You gradually see over those last weeks and days, somebody really slows down and becomes very fatigued easily. Families might notice that the person sleeps more,” she said.

“Often the person is not using as much energy, they are not being as active, so they need less food and drink.”

“There’s a real balance of ensuring that we are giving that person the best quality of life that they can possibly have,” Sinfield said. Pixel-Shot – stock.adobe.com
“There’s a real balance of ensuring that we are giving that person the best quality of life that they can possibly have,” Sinfield said.
At the very end, typically in the last few hours of their life, Sinfield said a person’s breathing will change to become more shallow, slow and may even sound like “rattling,” which can be “very distressing” for family to hear despite not being painful for the patient.

“Sometimes when that breathing changes and the person has lost consciousness and they are not able to speak to the family anymore, they are unable to clear the secretions in the mouth or in the throat,’ she said, explaining the “rattling noise.”

Death is a natural part of life, but some people are scared of it, she said. But, as a nurse, instead of using euphemisms to soften the discussions around death, she would rather be “honest” and speak openly.

“I talk to families very openly about what to expect when their loved ones dying. I use that language as well,” she explained. “Families often want to protect their loved ones from death because they are frightened.”

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 34951.html

[kmaherali]

She Re-Wrote Her PRE-BIRTH CONTRACT During Her Dark Night Of The Soul

Podcast guest 1129 is Rev. Sue Frederick, author, ordained Unity Minister, clairaudient, Soul Regression Therapist, and master numerologist. She was recently here about 3 months ago and during that time she had a major illness and she didn’t even know that she had. She returns today to catch us up with what happened and how she got better. Sue channels messages from guides and departed loved ones to help people heal grief and find purpose. She uses Sacred Numerology and mystical information in her books and teachings.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLVP-l-khYI

[kmaherali]

Pilot DIES in Crash & Lands In HEAVEN | Near Death Experience

Near-death experience guest 900 is Captain Dale black, who went to Heaven during his near death experience following a horrific plane crash.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIYBecgLdnY