Posted 14 January 2007 - 02:06 AM
Personally, I await death eagerly. Don't get me wrong here, I don't believe in God in any form, and I'm certainly not arrogant enough to feel I would get into Heaven if it did exist after. I am a very scientific person, but I have a profound desire for the reality of the supernatural. Bit of a mix really.
At least, that's what you may think. In fact, I believe in the pure power of the human mind. Placebo medicine is proven effective in many cases, and the field of psychology is very interesting and developing at an incredible rate. Thousands of years ago people's unadulterated belief in Jesus' divinity has etched him into our minds and societies forever. For me, it is clear that the countless phenomena witnessed by countless people globally every year are products of their own minds. I do not, however, think that makes them any less real.
This is where I start getting on to death, but first, a little about sleep. When we sleep we dream. No arguing; we dream, but sometimes we just dont remember. Dream memory works in a similar way to real memory, in that unusual events are more likely to be remembered than those that are commonplace, thus a dream about a huge green blob-monster is more likely to remain in our minds when we wake than a dream about walking down the road. This is why we "dream less" as we grow older, our imaginations become less active, so our dreams become more "normal" and thus fewer are remembered. Thus the technique of lucid dreaming was born, where a person falls asleep with the intention to dream, and stays conscious throughout. This is obviously a greatly contracted description of the technique, and I can assure you it is not as easy as it seems. Skilled lucid dreamers are capable of making an hours sleep last countless days in "dream-time".
I believe that the brain, when starved of oxygen, starts to direct our consciousness into a lucid dream-state. This explains our fainting when we asphyxiate, and also why we apparently see the tunnel of light, just before we die. In this way, at the moment of death, we can spend the rest of eternity in a paradise of our minds' own construction, condensed in that infinitesimal instant before brain-death. I feel it quite neatly ties up the end of life; something to look forward to, without the need for a belief in a higher being of any kind.
I should add that since I wrote that first bit, I have died.
I was in hospital, before an operation to have a portable electrocardiogram implanted in my chest. The doctor needed to take some bloods, so she put a canular (sp?) in my arm, inside of the elbow as usual, and took the bloods. Thing was, she opened the canular before the vial was properly inserted, so I had a venous bleed everywhere.
Now, this wouldn't have been so bad, had I been in a bed. As it was, however, I was in a chair, which did not have a collapsing back, so when I passed out a few minutes later, I couldn't be laid flat.
I don't know how much you all know about fainting, but the reason the body does it is to make blood flow to the head easier, when the brain is deprived of oxygen. So my brain was obviously oxygen deprived for longer than it should have been, and I died.
And guess what? I was resuscitated immediately.
I suppose you want to know my experience of that instant? Well, perhaps you don't care, and of course this is my belief so I can't discount the fact that it could be my mind showing me what I want to see (especially having espoused the power of the dying brain all those months ago), but I saw images flashing before me. But by gum they were going fast, totally indecipherably, though I am pretty sure they were images, not just flashing and dancing colours. More pertinantly, it was absolutely terrifying. Exactly as I'd expect living an eternity in an instant would be. My brain did not expect to come back from that, and timelines crashed together.
Like I said, it may just be my mind showing me what I wanted, or a misinterpretation based on my beliefs, but to me, it's at least a shred of evidence, irreproducible as it may be.
