Very cool article on Near Death Experiences.

posted by The Vidiot @ 5:04 PM Permalink

I like the approach.

The world, on the face of it, is made of two ingredients: thoughts and things. A brick, for example, is, on the one hand, a fact in the world and, on the other, a combination of all my feelings about bricks in general and this brick in particular. This is generally regarded as a very odd state of affairs. My thoughts and feelings are as real to me as the brick, but they don’t seem to be made of the same stuff. Indeed, they don’t seem to be made of any stuff. The belief that they aren’t, that the world is made of two different substances — bricks and thoughts of bricks — is called dualism. Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts. Dualism means that the mind and the brain are not made of the same things and therefore in theory, they can be separated, as in NDEs.

When I had my brain surgery, right before I was woken up, I was in the most pleasant place. Mr. Vidiot and I were holding hands and we were looking at art and there was music and wow, it was awesome and soothing and there was a door that led to what must've been another room and it was so brightly lit that I couldn't see what was in it. I started to walk towards it when I was yanked back into my miserable body and the guy who was working on me was saying "Did you see that? Her heart went tachy for a bit there."

Was it a NDE? I don't know. But if I was that close to death, my brain sure was taking good care of me, making it so I wouldn't panic. If death is anything like that pleasantness, there's nothing to fear.

Labels: blogtopiates, NDE, near death experiences