The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studies

One of the things on my to-do list has been trying to take an even deeper plunge into the study of the “near death experience”.

I was wondering if anyone has suggestions for books?

One of the things I'm particularly looking for are papers and studies in the science and medical literature.

It's clear to me (tho of course I'm open to alternative arguments) that the NDE and the stress-induced-vision has had enormous influence on the development of religions and esoteric systems - it probably is the seminal source for the whole shebang.

Death and enlightenment - natural partners, I think.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

A worthy study, though I think religions have not paid much attention much less been spawned.

There is a NDE international group, one could search. They probably have a bibliography.

I don't know about “science” approaches, but I think there was a doctor who compiled NDE accounts from children….

Keep us posted on your finds and thoughts.

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

1Vector3 >>> I think religions have not paid much attention much less been spawned.

Well, current-time religions don't look at it much, that would lead to a memetic competition that they would tend to lose.

In general, current-time religions avoid addressing anything that might lead peoples thoughts away from the storyline they are selling. Current religions engage in a constant struggle against unfranchised mysticism and experiences - and that struggle leads to the endless pattern of sectarian splits, charges of heresy, and so on and so forth.

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However, I can't say I have any kind of proof that near-death and stress-induced visions in humans in the last few hundred thousand years led to the stories of afterlifes, spirits, gods, and the like that became religion.

I do think it's highly likely that those stories and ideas came from near-death experiences, tho. An early human nearly dies, and comes back and tells stories of meeting his dead ancestors in a blissful vision. These stories become popular over time - and near death experiences, and pain-induced visions were more common.

At some point, about 85-65,000 years ago, humans start to care for the dead differently - ritual burial appears for the first time (that we can find). And the first evidence for religion appears.

What do you think was the cause of religion?

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Hi Bill…
I found this book to be very illuminating (although very dense as well).

http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248011733&sr=8-1

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Holy smokes, 65 bucks, might wanna check that one out of the library, lolz.

Can you remember a point or two you found particularly thought provoking?

Like, what's his model of 'irreducible mind'? I always cringe when I see the word 'irreducible' in content like this, tending to think that it's misused as a lazy metaphor for “spititual”.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Bill, I never thought much about the role of such experiences wrt ancient religions, but your hypothesis sounds plausible to me as one contributory factor to the rise of “religions.”

I'm sure there is no THE cause of religion, and I'd have to think for awhile before attempting to give my impression of how religion arose for human beings. I do go with those who say that some impulse toward something beyond our physicality or even our minds, seems innate; experiences of that something come in many forms, but are very common. Religion seems to be the collection of both those experiences and the stories people made up about those experiences. 

And then the power-grabbers co-opted it. Religions in the beginning were probably nature-worship, Great Mother kinda stuff. I resonated with Jean Auel's take on all that, in her Clan of the Cave Bear series.

What do YOU think?

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

hey bill, here's one theory on the roots of religion: Julian James and The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral mind…


you must be aware of the entheogin hypothesis too………….


no nde exp. but i've had quite a few  experiences in the stan grof 3 modes of transpersonal knowing………


i suspect the tibetan book of the dead would be a good reference to the nde……..

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Oh yeah, I read the Jaynes book almost 20 years ago, and wrote a long critique of it, but have forgotten the details. It's a good mind-stretcher even if one doesn't agree totally. A perspective no one else has ever forwarded, that I am aware of, so a good part of a full education about the world of the mind.

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

hi om, yeah, that's my understanding of his theory too. it didn't get much acceptance within general academia, although i kind of thought it was an interesting hypothesis……enjoying your thoughts on intersubjectivity by the way……

i forgot to mention that my own fav. for the cause of the whole shebang is astro-theology….the sun is the only god we know of for sure, without which we are all dead as can be………

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Thanks, andrew!! I'm enjoying that thread too.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti tried that bit a long time ago, and were I guess ahead of their time, because their entire “new culture” was destroyed/dismantled after her death (which was after his.)

Interesting to speculate, though, how far back the roots of sun-worship go. It appears that woman-fertility-earth worship was first. I think.

Namaste,
OM

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

I meant to add, that Jaynes was describing an experience of consciousness that is “alien” to modern mind, thus academics of all people would resist actually trying to understand what he was talking about. They don't wanna go there, even for an instant, outside their identification with their cognitive minds…..

Of course, that's an overgeneralization.

I was in Princeton at the time, and was so taken by the book I wrote a multi-page response which probably included some questions and disagreements. I actually went to his office and gave him my paper, and got a very chilly reception. Perhaps he was suffering from rejections already, and not able to be open…..

But I digress from the NDE topic…..

OM

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Yes, I enjoyed Jaynes quite a lot - altho, usually mentioning Jaynes is academic death, much like mentioning Reich.

I have always liked Jaynes model of consciousness, “a metaphored “I” in an analog simulation of the world”, or as he puts it, “a metaphor I in an analog world”.

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I also think the entheogens, the drugs, are likely one of the biggest influences in the invention of religion and ESPECIALLY the invention of the esoteric traditions.

But the content of the nde - the meetings with dead relatives and loved ones, the light, the experiences of “heaven” and “hell”, is strikingly similar to the content of most religions.

And the content of the drugs seems less common in popular religions. Altho, one would have to do a lot of study to confirm or deny this. A “quantitative analysis” of religious content.

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What I'd like to read about nde's is a study of them made without 'cherry picking' the best stories, which is a pattern I grew suspicious of in teh popular books I've read.

I want to read a few hundred near death experience stories that were collected as fairly and randomly as possible.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

bill said: What do you think was the cause of religion?


sure, but there seems to be variants to that theme here……


so  om, astrotheology isn't just about the sun, it's about how 'archaic' people made stories about the sky and it's content. and certainly the moon played a big part of that story; hence the lunar calendar and it's ties with matriarchal societies……


correct me if i'm wrong but jayne's was saying what bill is saying about  'archiac' people and their experiences with death. it certainly makes sense to me that people of antiquity would literally hear the voices of their loved ones shortly after their passing, and our culture calling that psychosis today; but perhaps they heard those voices as a part of their typhonic stage experiences……even today children talk to imaginary friends…………


i don't think bill is too far off on his idea, i would only add that the death experience was one of several factors that lead to religious belief…….


and i hate to state the obvious but the emergence of religious belief may be because there is a god……..

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

All good thoughts. Thanks for the clarification, andrew. I have read some of those myths or stories, mostly in stories about those times, so, obviously colored by contemporary consciousness. But there is one series about archaic people written if I recall correctly, by a native North American (Eskimo) woman. I would have to hunt down the exact titles, but it's something like Brother Sun, Sister Moon, but there are other books with similar titles. This is a series. It comes FAR FAR closer to capturing the archaic mind than Auel's books, from my brief skimming of several of the books. And of course there is Linda Lay Shuler writing about the Anasazi, who were more like Purple-Magenta; I enjoyed her series as well. All three series, though, were HIGHLY researched, so they do have some credibility as accounts, not just as fiction from a much later stage of development's “Kosmic address.”

Anyway, those all say a lot about ancient religious beliefs, though perhaps not about their origins.

Bill, I don't know whether that doctor's book about children's NDEs was “selections,” almost certainly so, but I bet he and others would open their files to a serious researcher on the subject.

I'm sorry andrew no disrespect or disagreement at all, but your last sentence has me ROTFL, almost literally, not from its content but from its internal structure, vaguely mathematical…. It is so magnificently — I can't find the right word— epistemologically elegant????

Blessings,
OM

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

And a rueful laugh about the Reich comment, Bill. I actually hadn't realized Jaynes was/is an academic pariah. He WAS at Princeton, after all !!! And probably a full prof at that!!

Sigh.

OM

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

ah gosh om, who woulda thunk it!lol

by the way, it does make sense in a way that moon/goddess worship happened first because of the correlation between moon and menstrual cycles, and fertility rites. that was at least very close to home in the 'archaic' mental structure, although if i had of been alive at the time i might have found a way to worship the sun at the same time, and some of those folks probably did.:)

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

No but I will write an article at some point about when my teenage son died and how I travelled out of the body and journey with him for 8 hours (our time)  through a series of worlds in the Bardo.

Regards Tony

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Oh Tony. I am looking forward to that article…

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Nicole
It's a big task to do but I need to document it for various reasons, personal as well as being a study in conciousness

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

I hear you - both important reasons, and thus I hope that you feel the space to take all the time you need to write it out as thoroughly as necessary.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Your teenage son?  My goodness, I thought that you were still just out of your teenage years yourself.  I am so sorry about your son.  Okay, gotta go and cry now.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

In the summer of 1978 I was a Marine lance corporal stationed at Camp Pendleton, California.  Like most Marines, I was in peak physical condition and, as far as I knew, wasn't suffering from any medical maladies.  Thus, I have no idea what caused my death.

The indident occurred on a balmy, summer night after a long, grueling day of physical punishment.  Following dinner and a well deserved shower, I flopped limply into bed for a good night's rest.  This night, however, I didn't just sink into bed; but rather, I fell right through it and found myself hurtling through space towards a brilliant white orb.

My first sensation was that of traveling faster than the speed of light.  And, even though I still had the sensation of having a body, it dawned on me that I'd left my physical shell.  I couldn't see or reach out and touch this new body, but it was there nonetheless, as was a luminescent presence that filled the space around me.  A few moments into the experience I thought to myself, “What's happening?”

“You would call it dying,” a masculine presence responded, “In a few moments you're going to have to make a decision to either return to the body or proceed on into the light.  If you continue on, you will not be returning to your body.”

I suppose that at that point I should have felt unnerved or even frightened by the goings on, but I wasn't.  The reality was that I was still totally myself.  My thoughts and memories were intact and I still had what felt like a body, I just wasn't afraid or in pain.  In fact, I'd never felt so at peace or so loved in my life.  The light I was moving towards was literally radiating love.  It wasn't like anything I'd experienced while in a physical body.

My thought, in that instant, was that continuing on into the light was a real possibility.  It was certainly inviting.  However, before I could make that decision a review of my life began to take shape.  I didn't see a see a series of events or anything like that; rather, I began to get a sense of what my life had meant up till that point in time.  That's when I heard myself say, “No, I can't go yet.  I have way to much left to accomplish.” 

It was weird, really.  I heard the answer I'd given but it didn't seem to be my voice speaking.  The sound seemed to originate from somewhere outside myself, like my soul had answered for me.  Regardless, I knew that I'd made my choice and began consciously willing myself back into physical form. 

Initially I struggled against the energies propelling me forward.  It was a bit like trying to stop a speeding car by simply willing it with mind.  However, after what seemed like an eternity, my forward momentum eased and I reversed trajectory, slamming back into my bdoy with a force strong enough to sit me bolt upright in bed.  Then slowly, with eyes wide and heart pounding, I glanced around the dark and eerily quiet room.  Nothing.  Just the pounding in my chest and the chirping of the crickets outside.  I'm not sure how long I listened, but after a time, I leaned back into my pillow, drew a deep breath and wondered silently about what had just happened.

This time no one answered my thought and none was necessary.  I now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was a spiritual being having a human adventure …not the other way around.  This, however, was just a glimpse.  A forshadowing of things to come.   

      

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Thanks for posting this, I will come back to it Bob and have a good slow read of it later

Tony

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Wow, Bob, what a share. That sure is a classic experience, and I know a researcher would want to know whether you ever heard of the phenomenon of NDE before this experience. I am betting NOT.

And was there ever any medical indication that you actually “died?” Heart damage, etc? One possibility that occurs to me from your description is electrolyte depletion. A hard physical day without electrolyte rebalancing/replenishing can be fatal via that, though I don't know the exact mechanism.

Well, we're glad your soul made the choice to return!

Your post brings up the possibility, nay, probability, that others within this very community have their own experiences to share. Bill, you might find a way to do your own research here! Then you'd have stories that haven't gone through someone else's selection process.

Cool conversation in this little cafe!

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

You're correct Om,  I'd never heard of such a thing before nor did I know anyone I could share it with.  I tried to do so with my girlfriend at the time but she kind of looked at me cross eyed.

As far as what happened physically I have no idea what happened.  And, regarding your idea about reaching out to the larger Gaia community, it would be interesting to see just how common this experience might be.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Bob,

That is one interesting experience you had!

I'm curious about how it affected your career. Did you become a SNAM i.e. a Sensitive New Age Marine? Was there a conflict between your job and your new insight about love etc.?

Bill,

I'm fascinated by this topic too. I agree that the cherry-picking is a problem. Another writer described someone's hellish NDE, so there needs to be objectivity.

I'm also interested in weird experiences in general, not just NDEs. Many people have had weird experiences, and I wonder if there's a book on that. I'd be interested in hearing anything “WEIRD”. Especially anything that contained information (statements) about the big picture of life and reality.

Of course, life is already weird, but you know what I mean.

Regards,
Martin Gifford.

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

Martin, there are so many sources, but hard to track down and search for. Just hang out in the right places and you'll find a lot!! In the Integral Pod there is a thread about magpies that has some personal accounts. And check out groups like Altered Realities.

And yes, I too have heard of one or two hellish NDE's.

Bob, I did a site search here on Gaia for “near death experience” and there are hundreds of discussion group posts, and blogs, quotes, and 31 books, some of them clearly on the topic! The subject awaits a researcher!!

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

No, I did not become a sensitive new age marine.  In fact, aside from realizing beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was a spiritual being having a human experience, little changed. 

I was still depressed about being here.  I was angry that I'd decided to come back.  The contrast that that glimpse of love had provided only increased my despair.  Only now, I had no fear of death.

By the way Martin, if you enjoy the unusual, you might like to read God Came Knocking on my blog.  It delves into what unfolded following the NDE,

Be well,
Bob  

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

I just found this thread and this group as a result of finding the thread.  I recently joined a website dedicated to people that have experienced an NDE.  If you are not already a member, you may be interested in checking it out.  Here is a link: 
http://www.nderf.com/phpBB2/index.php
If you have not had an NDE, what you can read is limited.  If you have, then you can join and let them know and they will clear you to join the group of other experiencers. 

Re: The "near death experiences" - suggestions for books & studie

I have almost died a few times, so I have had my share of wierd experiences.  In fact, because at least one of these times occured when I was an infant, I have memories of things that occured that could not have happened while in a physical body.  So, I may have actually died then and come back, I just don't remember it.  I was told that I almost died when I was a baby and that a nurse that lived with us did something to bring me back around.  However, I have loads of “wierd” experiences that occurred when I was perfectly healthy and just walking down the street, sitting in my room, meditating, or whatever.  It seems, if I did die then, I brought a bit of “over there” back over here with me.  I have tried to write them all down.  But, they seem very, very hockey when I do. But, I have another experience where I had something like an NDE and right afterwards, I did almost die.