Near Death Experiences

Discussion in 'Philosophy and Religion' started by MushroomDreams, Jun 10, 2004.

  1. MushroomDreams

    MushroomDreams Senior Member

    Messages:
    176
    Likes Received:
    0
    Just before my 21st birthday I overdosed and died.

    I was feeling tired and decided to lay down. I felt my heart stop beating. As I lied on the floor I could feel the ground drop from under me. I had the sensation of floating or being suspended.

    My perception of this world very rapidly faded. I had no memory of having ever existed. I was in a state of pure light and ecstasy. The feeling was so amazing. The best I can offer for a description is that I felt complete.

    I had no want, no desire, no ego, no self, no personality remained, just ecstasy. I was in the Bardo. There was no time and no self. Yet I have this memory so therefore there must have been some type of perception.

    A feeling came over me that if I don’t return I will die. With that single thought I was back. I opened my eyes and I’ve never really been quite the same.

    Now that I have shared my story- will you share yours? Have you ever had an NDE?

    Namaste
     
  2. mahasattva

    mahasattva Member

    Messages:
    30
    Likes Received:
    1
    "All that I preach is true and not false..... "
    ....Why do I do this? The Thus Come One perceives the true aspect of the threefold world exactly as it is. There is no ebb or flow of birth and death, and there is no existing in this world and later entering extinction. It is neither substantial nor empty, neither consistent nor diverse. Nor is it what those who dwell in the threefold world perceive it to be. All such things the Thus Come One sees clearly and without error." (Lotus Sutra, Chap.16)

    In the same vein:

    .."To conceive of life and death as separate realities is to be caught in the illusion of birth and death. It is deluded and inverted thinking. When we examine the nature of life with perfect enlightenment, we find that there is no beginning marking birth and, therefore, no end signifying death. Doesn't life as thus conceived already transcend birth and death?."(Writings of Nichiren, Gosho Zenshu,p. 563)

    Though I haven't experienced such the NDE, I heard the same experieces with you with my fellow Nichiren Buddhists. I heard about the experience of Richard Yoshimachi, a vice general director of the SGI-USA organization on 10 April 1993,, Mr Yoshimachi suffered a myocardial infarction while at the SGI-USA Headquarters in Los Angeles, and was immediately taken to a nearby hospital. He complained of feeling as though his chest were being squeezed. Told that they would draw some blood, he responded, 'OK', and then immediately blacked out. When he came to, he found himself surrounded by a group of doctors and nurses. The head nurse was holding his hand. While he was unconscious, his heart had stopped beating for about twenty seconds.
    In that time, Mr Yoshimachi had a remarkable experience. He explained that he found himself surrounded by total darkness in a world of complete silence. He felt no pain, and sensed nothing unusual about his heart. Nor was he aware of having fallen down. He recalls wondering to himself, 'How did I get here?' Looking down, he could see his bare feet, but could discern no surface on which he was standing.

    He surveyed the scene around him. To the right he could see nothing, but when he turned to the left, he could make out a faint light coming from somewhere behind his left shoulder. It was far away. It seemed to him as though this faint light was filtering though an opening in a wall.
    He immediately walked toward the light. As he did so, it increased in intensity. The light was a tunnel. Following it, he came out in the main auditorium at the SGI-USA Headquarters. The auditorium was a place he had been on many occasions, attending to matters on stage. He now saw himself there. A meeting was going on.

    Looking to his right, he saw the smiling faces of members who were seated. It then occurred to him that this was the SGI-USA General Meeting held three months before on 27 January 1993. At that moment he opened his eyes to find everyone staring down over him as he lay in bed.

    Mr Yoshimachi's experience sounds like a dream. But seeing light in darkness and travelling outside one's body are in fact typical of the experiences of people who have been close to death.After undergoing a week of intensive therapy, Mr Yoshimachi told the attending physician, who was a heart specialist, what he had felt while he was unconscious. The doctor responded that he knew of a number of cases where people recounted having similar experiences.

    In recent years, quite a bit of research has been done on near-death encounters. I understand that full-fledged statistical surveys are under way. In a survey conducted in the United States, fifteen per cent of Americans sampled reported having had a narrow brush with death. Of these, one in three, or as many as eight million people in the US population, reported having had some kind of 'other worldly experience' at that time.

    In the future, I would hope to see a similarly rigorous survey conducted world-wide. In a sense, whether there is an afterlife and, if so, what kind of place it is, is of far more importance than space exploration. It is one of humankind's greatest issues, for an answer to this question could completely change the thinking and way of life of people everywhere.I seem to recall that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) describes his encounter with death in his autobiography.

    In 1944, Jung had a myocardial infarction and collapsed, consequently breaking a leg. He writes that while unconscious, he had an incredible experience:
    "It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or sported dark green like oxidized silver.
    Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view -approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen"
    He remarks that the earth appeared blue. That was before the time of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-68). Gagarin orbited the earth in 1961, so it was seventeen years before that. In 1944, when Jung wrote this, no one had ever seen the earth from outer space.

    Jung says that after viewing the earth, he began to drift through space with the Indian Ocean behind him. He saw a large black boulder. The middle of the boulder was hollowed out and it became a Hindu temple. Jung entered. He describes feeling, while there, as though he had discarded all he ever knew and thought, and everything existing on the earth. It must have been a very vivid experience. This became a major impetus behind Jung's broad-ranging investigations into the world of the spirit. In fact, it seems that Jung was convinced that there is life after death.

    Dating from ancient times, there have been a number of instances, in Japan, of people nearly dying and then regaining consciousness, who have reported various mysterious phenomena. These include seeing the River of Three Crossings, having an 'out-of-body' experience, and meeting their deceased parents. While there have been similar accounts from people in all parts of the world, it is only with the pioneering work of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross that this subject has become a focus of scholarly investigation. In her 1969 work On Death and Dying, Dr Kubler-Ross details a number of actual examples of near-death experiences that she encountered in the course of providing spiritual care to the dying.

    Dr Kubler-Ross herself had a near-death experience. Describing the incident, she recounts feeling the pain of death and immediately thereafter going through a kind of rebirth. She says that her second self watched as her body approached a light and became engulfed in it, and that the instant it became one with the light, she enjoyed a state of profound peace and tranquillity. When she opened her eyes, she says, she could sense the pulse of life in all living beings, and even in insentient things such as rocks.
    'I was in total love and awe of all life around me. I was in love with every leaf, every cloud, every grass, every little creature. I felt the pulsation of the pebbles on the path and I literally walked above the pebbles, conveying to them, 'I cannot step on you. I cannot hurt you.'

    After Dr Kubler-Ross had got the ball rolling, Dr Raymond Moody, a specialist in internal medicine, collected a number of accounts of people who had been declared clinically dead and then came back to life (which he published in 1976). This had a major impact, causing scholarly research to get under way in earnest. Today interest has developed such that there is an international research body devoted to studying the issue.
    Up until then, near-death experiences had been written off as simply dreams or fantasies. But as more data accumulated, the scientific community began to think that perhaps it could not be taken so lightly.

    Near-death experiences have a number of features that seem to be universal, transcending any cultural and religious differences. Moreovei it seems there were quite a few cases in which people underwent something that directly contradicted religious beliefs they'd held for a lifetime.

    What could account for the high degree of similarity in the experiences of people from totally different cultures? From that standpoint, it is logical to infer that there is some universal fact of existence that all people encounter upon death. Furthermore, there are things about these experiences that disciplines such as psychology, pharmacology and neurology cannot adequately explain. At this stage, researchers have not yet come to any definite conclusion as to the meaning of near-death experiences.

    By the way, what does Bardo means? I know it is a Tibetan Buddhist language?
     
  3. geckopelli

    geckopelli Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,862
    Likes Received:
    2
    I had a heart attack. Not the first.

    The pain superseeded reality and ALL shattered.

    Through a hole I saw/heard my daughther on the phone with 911.

    I was surrounded by holes. I could barely keep foucused on my kid. With a supreme effort I screamed for her to come (whispered, really).

    I realized the holes were bubbles, and there were untold billions of them, each containing an instant of my life. The instant when my daughter was on the phone with 911 and I was dying was there- but I was losing it.

    I felt as if I could enter any of the bubbles and re-live my life from that point on.

    And then my kid touched me. I saw her bubble and I willed myself into it.

    I was back on the couch- alive. the pain was decreasing and my kid was hugging me.

    Whew!
     
  4. POPthree13

    POPthree13 Member

    Messages:
    383
    Likes Received:
    0
    Mushroom... I did have an experience quite like yours. I am unsure if it was just the drugs or real near-death. I had had too much, I was vomitting violently and I felt as if my heart would explode. I lay in my tent beleiving I would not wake up the next day. Either way what started as panic turned into acceptance and then ultimate peace, calm and tranquility. The state of mind was so pure and removed that I was literally ready to just move on. I had a vision of myself as some puzzle piece of light which resembled a fractal. I saw that piece leaving the earth and then I saw a vortex of light with long arms like spidery branches reaching out into the darkness. As I got closer I saw that the whole was made up of countless shapes of light which appeared fractal-like just like me. On the edges, where the arms extended into space you could make out the individual units, but as I looked nearer to the center the lines blurred and the individual disappeared. My shape snapped into place at the end of a long chain and at once I was connected to the whole. I felt my lines begin to blur...

    I can only guess I fell asleep because I woke up the next morning quite alive and every step you take after that has a bit more importance, though I no longer fear death, I am quite happy to have a day or two before it comes.
     

Share This Page

  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice