An interesting discovery and thought process comes to mind of a doctor I did some research on recently regarding his scientific studies and thoughts on the subject of LIFE after DEATH. Given my investigations into the Paranormal, I cannot tell you now often that one question turns up during my Paranormal Investigations.
I would like to share some findings and let you yourself be the judge.
Life after death
WHAT IS REALITY. The world is full of nearly unbelievable but true stories. Stories about karmic occurrences, life after death situations, predetermined destiny or coincidence and moments of intuition.
Those stories can be found in medical reports, newspapers, insurance reports, police documents and many other reliable sources. ‘What is Reality’ taps into this vast source of true documented stories and selects the most breathtaking. This written piece explores the universe to find out what lies between reality and the spiritual dimension.
CASE STUDY: LIFE AFTER DEATH (ONE)
Leon Huygen was born blind. On July 11th 1994 he was the victim of a burglary in his own house where he was shot in the head. He was pronounced dead by the first police officer to arrive at the scene of the crime, but the paramedics were able to resuscitate Leon Huygen.
Later on officer N.J. Engelwood and his fellow officer A. Liebermann reported that they had seen Mr. Leon Huygens float upwards and hover above his body for a while before disappearing through the ceiling.
Talking to the police himself Mr. Huygens could describe in every little detail what had happened in that room. He knew the exact number of people that had been there, knew exactly what they had looked like even what clothes they wore, yet he was still blind.
CASE STUDY: LIFE AFTER DEATH (TWO)
A lady Jeanette is surprisingly relaxed when she talks about the time she died and left her body.
“I do not want to die again in the near future because I still have too much to do,” she says. “But I have no fear of death.
“People see the pain and suffering of dying and equate that with death – but they’re not the same. Death is the progression of life.”
Jeanette , a 43-year-old student nurse from Eastbourne, had a near-death experience in 1979 when she was just 18-years-old. It was triggered when a blood clot in her leg broke up into seven pieces and clogged the main vessels in her lungs, starving her body of oxygen. The doctors were certain that she would die. She did – but then returned to tell the tale.
“The first thing I noticed was that the world changed,” says Jeanette , “The light became softer but clearer”. Suddenly there was no pain. All I could see was my body from the chest downwards and I noticed that the time was 9:00pm. I was not scared nor did I feel uneasy.
“In an instant I found myself looking at the ceiling. It was only a few inches away.
“I then went on a little journey around the ward and along the corridor to see what others were doing. One was writing on a notepad. It never occurred to me that I was dying. It was a lovely experience and very, very serene.”
Jeanette then began the journey that many others before her have reported – being drawn into a long dark tunnel suffused with light at the end. “Everything went fuzzy,” she says. “I found myself being drawn into a tunnel shaped like a corkscrew, it was taking me down and down, further and further into the tunnel. Towards what seemed like a beautiful warm and welcoming glowing light at the bottom.
“All I wanted to do was reach the beautiful lights at the bottom. The longing was so powerful but so gentle. I knew I desperately wanted and had to be there. But then a voice shouted at me: ‘Come on, hey you, you silly old cow it’s not time yet!’
“I was suddenly like a slingshot returned back into my body – it’s all a little unclear as I lay there– all I can say is that I remember seeing the clock again and it was 9:20pm. The next thing I was aware of was waking up a few days later, surrounded by equipment and feeling terrible. Later on I realized that the voice I’d heard was my grandmother’s. She’d died when I was three years old.”
For decades near-death experiences like Jeanette’s have been written off as delusions by scientists and the mind itself s imagination. They are dismissed as no more than the last dying twitches the brain. Modern science has no place for mysticism and the paranormal. But now a groups of investigators are challenging the scientific establishment by launching a major study into near-death experiences. This in my mind will settle once and for all those questions of whether there truly is life after death . Without a shadow of doubt I say of course there is.
“We now have the technology and scientific knowledge to begin exploring the ultimate question,” Most like I started off as a skeptic but having had been told of such experiences and having weighed up all the evidence I can find it is evidently clear that something is going on.
Speaking in the terms of “Life after Death” is not always possible when it comes to those in the scientific field given that we cannot speak from an after death position. However there is now evidence that consciousness may carry on after clinical death.
Several scientific studies have suggested that the mind – or ‘soul’ – lives on after the body has died and the brain ceased to function. One study published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal found that one in ten cardiac arrest survivors experienced emotions, visions or lucid thoughts while they were clinically dead. In medical terms they were “flatliners” or unconscious with no signs of brain activity, pulse or breathing.
About one in four people who have a near-death experience also have a much more profound – and sometimes disturbing – experience such as watching doctors try and resuscitate their own bodies. These ‘out-of-body experiences’ often include seeing a bright lights, traveling down a tunnel, seeing their dead body from above, meeting deceased relatives and then telling of those experiences and events that were taking place after they were declared dead, only to explain the very event to others after returned to living.
A most impossible occurrence you would think, given they were not there, dead in fact and unable to supposedly see or feel anything, due to their death. But how can they that experience such things come to explain what was happening those few minutes after death regarding, who said what and what was going on in the next room? How is that possible?
Research in America has uncovered even more bizarre results. Blind people who underwent near-death experiences were able to see whilst they were ‘dead’ ?– even those who had been blind from birth. They did not experience perfect vision, often it was mostly out of focus or hazy vision they experienced, as if they were seeing the world for the first time through a thin mist. But the vision was sufficiently clear for them to watch doctors trying to resuscitate their clinically dead bodies.
A Doctor Sam Parnia having previously studied near-death experiences was published in the prestigious medical journal Resuscitation. His team rigorously interviewed 63 cardiac arrest patients and discovered that seven had memories of their brief period of ‘death’, although only four passed the Grayson scale, the strict medical criteria for assessing near-death experiences. These four recounted feelings of peace and joy, they lost awareness of their own bodies, time speeding up, they saw bright lights and seemingly entered another world, encountered a mystical being and faced a “point of no return”.
According to modern medicine all of these patients were effectively declared dead. Their brains had shut down and no thoughts or feelings were left possible. There was certainly no possibility of brain activity required for dreaming or hallucinating.
To rule out the possibility that near-death experiences resulted from hallucinations due to the brain had collapsed through lack of oxygen, Dr Parnia rigorously monitored the concentrations of vital gases in the patients’ blood. Crucially, none of those who underwent the experiences had low levels of oxygen.
He also ruled out claims that unusual combinations of drugs were to blame because the resuscitation procedure was the same in every case, regardless of whether they had a near-death experience or not.
Dr Parnia. stated that “skeptics will always attack our work and I’m OK with that given “That’s how science progresses.
What is clear is that something profound is happening. To say that the mind – the thing that is ‘you’ – your ‘soul’ if you will – carries on after conventional science says it should have drifted into nothingness.” Is obviously not the case.
Dr Parnia states that every near-death experience is subtly different but that they all share eight or nine key features, whatever their nationality, culture or religion of the patient. These include intense feelings of calmness, traveling down a long dark tunnel, being drawn into an intense loving light, seeing their own dead body from above, and meeting long-deceased relatives and or friends. A few experience are of where they are drawn, petrified, into a dark swirling well of bitterness, hatred and fear are often reported.
There are cultural differences in these experiences. Tribal people may report paddling in a canoe down a long dark river for three days towards the sun, for example, rather than floating down a tunnel towards the light. The experience, whatever the cultural differences, usually have a deep and long lasting effect. It often leaves behind a legacy of profound spirituality and removes the fear of death.
“The worst thing is coming back from the dead,” says one man who had a near-death experience following a cardiac arrest in 1991. “If dying is anything like the experience I had then it’s not a problem.
The person concerned was rushed to hospital in July 1991 following a heart attack. He survived the initial attack and within hours was chatting with his family at the bedside.
“I was talking to my wife and eldest boy when I felt a little pinch in my chest,” says the man “The next thing I knew I was traveling down a long corridor in a medieval looking house. I was astonished. It was very real and lucid. I thought to myself ‘what the hell’s going on?’.
“I came to a fork in the corridor and there I knew that I had to make a decision. One branch was a dark and longer corridor. The other was brightly lit and appeared friendly in some way, so I floated down that one.”
The man then found himself in a form of euphoria. He was in front of a beautifully laid landscape bordered with a waist-high white picket fence. He was instantly calmed and soothed by warm and beautiful translucent light.
He then became aware of his parents, who were behind the white fence, smiling broadly at him. Strangely, they were in their thirties appearing younger and despite the fact that they had both died in their seventies.
“I moved towards a gate in the fence but my father gave me a look that I knew meant ‘don’t come through the gate’, so I didn’t. No words passed between us. I then found myself moving backwards faster than I arrived through the corridor and that in itself was very disturbing.
“Green-grey gargoyle-like figures were staring at me from the roof,” the man said. “One, with a face like an evil goat, began to move towards me. All of the warmth and cosiness left and I was terrified. A moment later I saw the face of an angel – it was a nurse from the hospital. It turned out I’d had a cardiac arrest.”
Cardiac arrest survivors like this man are tailor-made for Dr Parnia’s study. Scientists know that within seconds of the heart stopping the brain has shut down completely. The patient is effectively dead and there is no chance of dreams or hallucinations mimicking a near-death experience.
As soon as a patient slips into a cardiac arrest, Dr Parnia’s team will move quickly into action. The first priority will be to get the patient’s heart beating again. Equipment being used during the resuscitation will have symbols placed on top of it in such a way that they can only be seen from above. Other symbols will be placed around the patient’s body.
Surviving patients will then be gently quizzed about their experiences when they regain consciousness. Those that claim to have left their bodies will be questioned in more detail to see if they can identify the symbols.
Dr Parnia has designed the experiments to be completely secure. He is only too aware that critics will tear his work apart if he leaves even the slightest doubt about the rigor of his team’s efforts and protects his credibility vigorously. Even the exact experimental details are shrouded in secrecy.
“We can’t run the risk of prejudicing the experiment,” says Dr Parnia. “I won’t even know some of the details. We have a researcher who will be hiding the symbols on the equipment. Somebody else will be doing the interviews with the patients. It’s what’s known as a double-blind trial. It prevents scientists from unconsciously altering the results of their experiments.”
Other scientists acknowledge Dr Parnia’s formidable reputation and the care he takes over his experiments but are still skeptical about his aims.
A doctor who has herself had a near-death experience but since written it off as a delusion, says such experiences “probably result from random firings in the brain.”
“I think that people have near-death experiences not when they are flat lining but when they are drifting into or out of consciousness,” she says. “Having said that, I’m curious to know the results. If they are positive then they could change the world.”
Because of the implications of his work – and the potential for ridicule from his fellow scientists – Dr Parnia is being very cautious in the claims he is making for the study. He is not trying to prove that we all die and go anywhere. He is instead trying to find out whether the mind continues to function after the brain has effectively died, or at least ceased to function.
If the mind does continue after the brain has died then this will prove, by default, that the ‘soul’ is independent of the body. Dr Parnia will have proven that the mind – in essence, the soul – continues to live after the body has died.
“It comes back to the question of whether the mind or consciousness is produced by the brain,” says Dr Parnia. “If we can prove that the mind is produced by the brain then I don’t think that there is anything after we die. If the brain dies then we die. It’s final and irreversible.”
“If, on the contrary, the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind, like a television will act as an intermediary to manifest radio waves into a picture or a sound, then we should be able to show that the mind is still there after the brain is clinically dead. That will be a significant discovery.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that there’s life after death because I’ve seen the other side,” says As one lady stated “I don’t believe in a benevolent God. I’ve seen too much suffering for that but I’m very spiritual.
“I saw my daughter suffer for four years with cancer. She died when she was only 17. I know she has gone to a better place.”
Makes for some interesting reading doesn’t it ? ..Is there Life after Death?
In my experience I would say that’s a profound YES there is and many investigations into the Paranormal would also suggest YES.
HOW else are those that have passed communicating with me and many others?
OF COURSE THERE IS.
I believe that there is a place for us after we leave this earth and it could very well be within “That Space Between”.
“For all those would be friends that will talk about me when ive left behind my physical body..Be careful what you say because I will hear and see you:)”
Shazz@ThatSpaceBetween© copyright 2012