Woman who died found afterlife different from Catholic version

A woman lawyer who died for a span of time in the operating table found the afterlife different from the Catholic version.

I died on a operating table and entered third state between life and death - what I saw was VERY different to what I'd been taught by the Catholic Church | Daily Mail Online

 

The woman in question, Nanci Danison, (2007) Backwards: Returning to Our Sources, believes, or claims to believe, she experienced a portion of the afterlife. Mebbe so, mebbe not. Of course we know lawyers never lie, but most folks experiencing hallucinations think they're real. People who write such books become rich and famous overnight. Her experience came at a good time for a lawyer in her sixties looking toward retirement. And who could disprove it? The five books and multiple DVDs from her experiences have brought in a tidy sum. Whether true or false, NDEs don't prove the existence of an afterlife, nor give us an accurate idea of what such a place is like.Why a Near-Death Experience Isn’t Proof of Heaven | Scientific American

This isn't the first case of a trip to heaven after temporary "death". I'm glad you put "death" in quotation marks, but maybe you should have done the same with "died". You're talking about the difference between clinical death (no pulse, heartbeat, or breath) from which people can be resuscitated,, and actual death, from which folks don't ordinarily come back to tell tales. The alternative explanation is hallucinations resulting from a brain that's shutting down. What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain | Scientific American Can Science Explain Near-Death Experiences? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10158795/ NDEs may result from disruption of the temporal parietal region of the brain, which gives us our sense of embodiment, and the "tunnel" imagery of many NDEs may result from slowed blood flow impacting the retinas. Near-Death Experiences Or to cintinued brain activity after "clinical" death.https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/health/near-death-experience-study-wellness/index.html Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife), based on his "near-death experience" (NDE) during a meningitis-induced coma reported “a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes” who offered him her unconditional love. Neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris subjected the book to extensive criticism in Waking Up:A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. He notes significant similarities between Alexander’s NDE and those that can be induced by anesthetics such as ketamine. A study of 58 patients reporting NDEs found that 30 were not, in fact, close to dying, but just thought the were. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PII0140-6736(90)92780-L/fulltext "From a lack of oxygen affecting the visual system to a brain struggling to make sense of strange emotions; from the drug-like triggering of reward pathways and a host of cultural expectations. Being close to death (or believing that you are) is a unique physiological and psychological experience. It is little wonder that it produces such a confusion of sights and sounds."Near-death experiences: Fact or fantasy?

One of the more interesting trips in this regard was that of philosopher AJ Ayer, the skeptical atheist who was a leading proponent of Logical Positivism which rejects all propositions that can't be empirically verified. Much to his chagrin, he had an NDE similar to the others, except that instead of the white light at the end of the tunnel, his was a red light. (Uh ,oh). Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

 

To be defined s having had a near death experience, a person would have had a period in cardiac arrest. During low oxygen levels in the brain, very strange things happen, which can best be defined as dreams. For some reason, when we wake up out of a dream things are very vivid, but after a visit to the bathroom they have completely gone. However, there are certain dreams that we remember for years.
At the moment, doctors see no valid reason for spending time and money studying all this. But who knows, things may change.

 

Dreams, NDE-s, meditations, psychedelics and every other trance inducing method shows an array of different subjective experiences. So you can find NDE reports fitting almost any religious and spiritual narrative there is.

So it is obviously not a very reliable tool of acquiring objective knowledge.

I tend to approach this things from a Jungian POV - neither dismiss those experiences, not take them as a measure of objective universal truth.

 

If we humans were meant to know that there's an afterlife or in fact actual gods--we would not be so mystified about the situation if those questions were somehow provable. If the tiny electrical impulses that sustain life as we define it are somehow "transferable" into another dimension after a certain period of------blah, blah , blah-------never mind the hypothesizing--humans have needed and still DO need an "all powerful god " to snap our shit out of such destructive, murderous ways that have gone on for too damn long.