Interesting NDE's Thread

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I'm putting this out there because it's a topic that makes people uncomfortable. Sometimes being made uncomfortable is a healthy thing.

To share some of the reasons why the topic of NDE's makes me uncomfortable:

1) We're dealing with a world that came about by Darwinian evolution. The core value is survival of the fittest - if not outright dog-eats-dog it's competition on the genetic level, ie. make the grade with the opposite sex (ie. something too complex to ever just check off a to-do list and largely based on factors set at birth), or face the annihilation of your genetic material - about the only level that nature can give you a pass or fail grade on. Being 'spiritual' in ones teens or 20's is a terrible idea because if you embrace love, empathy, and trying to see the world the the eyes of a new aged guru you're a probably doormat and opportunities will be taken away from you and given to people who are stronger, leaner, meaner, and have less scruples about stepping on heads. In that context mid-age maudilinity and hormonal difficulties as one's endocrine system degrades doesn't even make much sense as an excuse either. In summary - the world, under normal circumstances, works exactly the way it should if physicalists were absolutely 100% correct in the context of what we are, where we came from, what our consciousness is based on, and what will happen to it when we die.

2) When people have these 'realer-than-real' experiences they're practically hug-bombed under. It's a universe that might have some tough parent elements but when they'e there it's fully comforting, fully reassuring, and these people tend to bring things back with them - often - that are anomalous such as the types of recovery they have from their illnesses and accidents and they bring with it the injunction as well to live in love, to be love, and to spread it as far and wide as they can.

The disconnect is more than palpable. I could go on about the hell that early and mid 20th centuries were for Europe and Asia. I could go on about how the quest for truth, for anyone born much before the last few centuries, was tantamount to attempting such inquiry on date-rape drugs considering the cultures they had to live in. That and - we in the west really, seriously, don't know a thing whatsoever of real anguish unless we've been unlucky enough to be under the dominance of a rare variety of tyrant and abuser. For this world to be what it is, for it to be what it's been for hundreds of millions of years and for the 2nd piece - ie. the NDE experience - to be just as actual, it's a chilling thought. In that case what people are encountering are either a) a set of deity or system of deific manifestations that doesn't pass Epicurus's requirements test or b) there's something deeply sadistic in all of this to the very core. To even try to jam these two pieces together - ie. the world as we know it vs. the world beyond as NDE'ers explain it, is like trying to ram together to very strong positive or negative electromagnets. Daunting to the point that it's almost beyond human capacity to make such a reconciliation.


My curiosity is fueled by a few things. Any good animal worth its salt, me included, needs to know the nature of its environment. To throw away information on ideological grounds seems antithetical to what we've been programmed for all these millions of years. Also I see where there's so much of this boiling under the surface, constantly, that I don't think it'll ever really stop no matter how vogue or even plausible opinions to the contrary become. You can try and beat the terrain down with bulldozers and maps but the map and the territory still aren't the same thing. If it doesn't fit well into our current understandings of physics or neurology well, that's embarrassing but it seems like nature hasn't cared much for embarassing our dignity and conceptions of ourselves as a race all these centuries and millenia and it doesn't seem like nature will have much more reverence for our current theories than it has with anything else.

You would think also, us being a product of evolution (this is no shot at it - I fully agree with the record as we understand it as well as the 'throw life against the wall and see if it sticks' approach that it's taken), that a near brush with death should really have someone closer to being under police watch than being taken to a psych ward and fed haldol for a schizophrenic break. Under what we know of the world a guy in his 20's or 30's after a close brush with death should realize that he hasn't worked nearly as hard as he could at dominating the social hierarchy, climbing to the top of the heap, and if not going all out Ghengis Khan at least trying to sire as many children as he can, if not literal then figurative, so his name goes unforgotten as long as possible. Similarly a young woman who has a close brush with death should realize more than ever that she only has one shot at receiving genetic material from a guy at the top of society and she'd probably instantly drop whatever average-ish guy she might have settled for to pursue her hypergame more seriously than she might have pursued a bachelors or masters degree. Nothing of the sort happens, really it's closer to Timothy Leary's 'tune in and drop out' in a lot of ways which makes no evolutionary sense whatsoever.


So with that lengthy note aside I'll start the thread. This isn't the best example, lecture, or talk out there on the topic, it's at least par, but it finds itself in a whole series or litany of such lectures and videos that - for all that we know of the human brain and the state of the human condition - shouldn't exist on their own, let alone be a 'thing' well-known enough to have an acronym that doesn't need introduction or explanation.

Another one that I checked out this week. I think the primary value in this one is showing the dichotomy in just how different the psychology is in the world we're used to, as well as its practical needs, held up against the style of thinking and being that exists in the zone being explored here.

One might argue that this guy had experiences before his NDE so he could be schizophrenic. Possibly, possibly not, and the challenge perhaps is that schizophrenia, especially of a highly functional type, masks quite well as religious experience. The question then becomes - is that because religious experience is fundamentally a momentary laps into schizophrenia or, if you go the Huxley route, blown filters allowing what would have been religious experience in in a chaotic/disordered manner? That's an easy question to respond to if you have a particularly strong belief one way or another, a lot more challenging if you're trying to hash it out without jumping to conclusions.

I got a laugh out of this one being local. Regardless the pattern's the same - cardiac arrest, meeting the in-laws, and there was some talk about defibrillation and the time his brain was without oxygen although I don't know how much that really means or how accurate that was but the suggestion seemed to be that his recovery and the quality of his recovery were inexplicable. The last part, if true, is interesting because unusually strong recoveries, even medically inexplicable in quality, tend to go hand in hand with these.

Not an NDE per se but after-effects studies. Sometimes 20 point jumps in IQ, other times baffling recoveries, still other times savantism with academic fields or musical instruments that the person's never played or studied in.