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Post by turbonium on Feb 4, 2006 21:40:59 GMT -4
But floating above one's own body and looking down upon it, as alleged in NDE's, isn't exactly a phenomenon explainable within what we know regarding the "real" five-sense world. How do we know, if it is legit, of course, that NDE's aren't just "Stage 1" of death?
I agree with Peter, in that I'd like to see some more solid evidence for these NDE's. I won't say I dismiss the entire possibility outright - but more documented, verifiable studies would seem to be in order...
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Post by turbonium on Jan 25, 2006 3:47:40 GMT -4
Turbonium said: In what sort of detail were they dead? ;-) LOL! Got me!
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Post by turbonium on Jan 25, 2006 1:35:18 GMT -4
One NDE I have heard in which there seems to have been something too it, was a woman that the surgeons had to actually kill to operate on.
Was this case documented? I've read about a few cases that have been substantiated very thoroughly., verified by numerous reliable witnesses. Those are the cases I find to be the most intriguing - how could these people accurately describe events at the time they were "dead" in such detail?
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Post by turbonium on Jan 25, 2006 1:26:52 GMT -4
If not, and it’s something uniquely human (or uniquely primate, or whatever), then someone, somewhere, had to be the first person with a soul, from a simple point of view of evolution
This leads to the larger, overall issues we cannot answer. How can time ever have a beginning?
If the Big Bang Theory did initiate the creation our universe, then what existed before it? One current theory is called the "M-Theory"...
"...proposing that the Universe has 11 dimensions, six of them rolled up into microscopic filaments that can, for all intents, be ignored....The action of the Universe takes place in five-dimensional space. Before the Big Bang occurred the Universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces...One of these sheets is our Universe; the other, a "hidden" parallel universe. "
Yikes! Well, by comparison, I suppose any delving into the possibility of a "soul" that exists after death is a relatively small step into the unknown!
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Post by turbonium on Jan 21, 2006 0:11:10 GMT -4
Not necessarily, you can base your belief on reasoning from indirect evidence. As iamspartacus says, there seems evidence that consciousness is an effect of having a complex brain, so if the brain stops working, consciousness stops too.
But that's the point - it is still only a "belief". Even if that belief is based on "indirect evidence", it still does not prove that is what actually happens after we die.
Consciousness is only one state of the mind. There is also the unconscious (including the dream) state, the subconscious (psyche below the level of awareness), and possibly the superconscious state ( the combination of spirit, soul, memory, and uniqueness). It's believed by some that we continue to exist after death in a superconscious state.
Certainly to this point there is no indisputable evidence for what occurs after death. The closest may be the many documented cases of near-death experiences (NDE's). The events I find most most interesting are the ones where a patient in an OR was clinically dead for several minutes, then "returned" to life - that is, they regained a heartbeat and other vital life signs. The patients claimed later to have "floated" over their bodies, and observed the hospital staff in their efforts to revive them.
The interesting part of these stories is that during the NDE's, the patients were able to point out precise details of what was happening during the time they were clinically dead. In one example. a patient saw himself be declared legally dead by one doctor in the OR, then be sent off to the morgue. He then saw another doctor arrive and resuscitate him by pounding his chest and using adrenaline injections. The details were verified by the hospital staff that was present at the time.
There are many other similar cases that were later corroborated by those present at the time of death, or NDE's. Of course, there are a wide range of experiences reported by the many people who have "died" and later "come back to life". Some have reported experiencing nothing at all, others believe they were headed towards a "blinding white light", and so on.
I should point out, however, that I don't think that NDE's such as "floating" above one's body prove we "exist" after death, even if what they claimed to have seen was verified by others present at the time. These events may actually be some type of yet-unknown phenomenon, that does not relate in any way to an "afterlife". Who can really say for sure?
At any rate, I find that it makes for a fascinating subject.
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Post by turbonium on Jan 19, 2006 4:57:40 GMT -4
well I was thinking that 'other' means that you do have a belief or idea and 'unkown' means that you just don't knowThe options are all beliefs or ideas, no? Technically, if "unknown" was an option, we would all have to choose it. Unless someone has evidence I've never heard about to prove they actually "know" what happens!
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Post by turbonium on Jan 18, 2006 3:48:18 GMT -4
Then why did you not give the option ,,'Unknown'?
That was the reason I added "Other". LunarOrbit got the point. But if you want to get picky about it, I guess it could have been speciifically added to the list.
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Post by turbonium on Jan 17, 2006 0:37:37 GMT -4
The "God" thread spurred me to start up this poll. I'm curious as to what the members think about one of the greatest "unknowns".
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Post by turbonium on Jan 12, 2006 23:33:52 GMT -4
No, I knew that was what Peter meant. I just mentioned a few locations where situations have occurred.
During the time spent on actual business activities, such as on-site demonstrations for surgeons, or trade shows, meetings, etc., everything goes absolutely fine. It's during "off-time" from these things when the trouble has arisen.
Without going into details of the events, they would often occur at social gatherings - maybe at the hotel lounge, or touring the city during the day. Being in the medical device / research engineering field, many of my co-workers are intelligent people...what one may call "eggheads". But they tend, as a group, to not be terribly shrewd in social interactions. In fact, many of them are quite naive in certain "real world" situations, so to speak. If you read the comic strip "Dilbert", you might have an idea as to what I mean.
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Post by turbonium on Jan 11, 2006 2:41:33 GMT -4
Sounds like you go on interesting business trips!
To say the least! NYC, LA, New Orleans (2 years ago), and San Francisco are a few of the more "memorable" ones in recent years.
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Post by turbonium on Jan 10, 2006 3:55:06 GMT -4
As for turbonuim's first story, maybe it was a little more that coincidence, maybe subconsciously (or even consciously) he picked up on the fact that the house was a "bad scene".
Sometimes people give me a sense of being "bad news" nothing I can 'put my finger on' just a sense and this usually turns out to be correct. I don't think it's ESP.
It is something very difficult to explain - that "sense of danger" one feels for no reason one could point out. I think your example is part of what we call "street smarts" - being able to "read" people who are around them. It may be due to subconciously identifying subtle clues certain people exhibit that others may not sense.
On a few business trips, I've veered co-workers away from trouble that they couldn't sense. Some of them may have ended up in a hospital, or penniless wearing a barrel on the return flight, if I hadn't intervened!
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Post by turbonium on Jan 7, 2006 8:43:17 GMT -4
If you look lustfully at a woman from behind, she will often spin round and glare at you, despite her apparently having no way of knowing she is being looked at and from what direction. This is "sixth-sense" I don't know - it may well be a case of the standard five senses being used..... Have you considered that she may hear your heavy breathing, smell your profuse sweating, and feel the drool that drops on the back of her neck?
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Post by turbonium on Jan 7, 2006 4:53:34 GMT -4
Turbonium -Don't ignore that your death in the dream was very different from how that family died. It could just be a coincidence. Also it's common for people to forget their dreams, IIRC people don't remember most of their dreams so it's quite possible to did have that or a similar dream on other occasions. For every case like yours there are many more cases of people who have dreams like that and nothing happens. My dad is elderly and in poor health. My sister keeps on having "premonitions" of him dying. Unfortunately sooner or later one of them will come true. Incredible coincidences do happen. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died the same day, and that day happened to be July 4, 1826 the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence which Jefferson wrote with the assistance of Adams and a few others. This is only one of several ways the two men were associated. Earl Warren was succeeded as Chief Justice by Warren Earl Burger. About a month ago two sons of a sheriff in the US died in separate car crashes the same evening. He drove by the wreck of one (without knowing it) on the way to the other. Yes, it's true that the dream was not of a fire in which I was killed. The similarity between the two "events" was that it was a dark feeling of death I had the night before the fire, and the next morning when I felt an urgency to leave. I won't discount the possibility of it being a fantastic coincidence. But it still leaves me wondering, as it likely always will..... Another event happened not to me, but my grandfather and uncle during WW II. My mother, the sister of my uncle, told me this story - and she has never been one to make up or embellish a story or its details. One day in early November 1943, my grandfather was in a board meeting when he suddenly stood up, ran to the window and said (paraphrasing), "Oh my God, I hear an airplane crash diving!" As he kept staring out the window, he repeatedly asked the other people in the room, (again, paraphrasing) "Can't you hear that airplane in distress?" Everybody else in the room said they couldn't hear anything at all. They hadn't a clue over why he kept ranting on about this "airplane crashing". It was later found out that at the exact time and day my grandfather was doing this, my uncle (his son) was involved in training exercises over the east coast, when the fighter plane he was piloting crashed, instantly ending his life. This is not an incident that I believe can be easily explained as a remote coincidence.. My grandfather was a doctor by profession, always very calm and reserved. He had never acted in this manner before. His son had been in the service as a Flight Sergeant for over two years before the accident occurred. In my view, there seems to exist certain "senses" that at least a small percentage of humans (if not all) possess which are not yet understood, and remain largely unidentified. Of course, I could be wrong........ Btw, Kiwi, I have also had similar "deja vu" types of experiences in my life. They were also very trivial events, and I have no explanation for why they happened, either.
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Post by turbonium on Jan 6, 2006 0:58:18 GMT -4
I think you’ve described a classic problem with trying to examine supernatural events. Namely, focusing on events that did happen and not the hundreds of times you’ve had a sense of dread and nothing happens. If you take the non-events into account then these kind of supernatural phenomena don’t lift their heads above random chance. Especially dubious to me are premonitions. I just don’t see how you can get information about an event before that event actually occurs. What generated the information (it can’t be the event because the event ain’t happened)? And then there's the problem of how that supposed information was transmitted and received. Spare me! I understand your point about only noticing the bad events in "hindsight" because something subsequently happened that seemed to "link" them, while forgetting about the many other times you felt "a sense of dread" because nothing else happened (at least that you noticed). It's a very valid rationale for many of these things. However, I really should have described more clearly how I "felt" on the two occasions I mentioned, because they really were quite distinct from any other similar moments I've experienced. The first event was about 20 years ago. I was staying overnight at the home of a girl I'll call "Susan", whom I'd just met a few days earlier (ahem..in my young wayward days of foolishness). The house was shared by "Janet" and her two kids. Earlier that evening we sat in the living room, which had a very unique coffee table. It was handmade, with a round top of solid wood planks, each of them about 5 or 6 inches square. It was very impressive looking. The dream (nightmare) that I experienced was an extremely real-feeling and vivid event in which I was being, well, murdered.. I have never previously or since this had a similarly horrid nightmare, nor of anything else that has seemed so "real" by comparison. I awoke with the same sickening sense of "darkness" about the environment. I just felt an overwhelming urgency that I had to leave the house immediately. Two days later, I grabbed my Monday morning newspaper off the front porch. On the front page was a large photo showing the interior of a house gutted and blackened from fire. My friggin' jaw dropped because the only object identifiable in the destruction was a round table with a thick wood planked top. The article confirmed it was the same house, and had been destroyed by fire the night after I was there. "Janet" and her two children died in the fire. Of course, it wasn't a classic "premonition", defined as a prediction of a specific future event. I've never had this happen to me. Claims by others that this has happened remains "dubious" to me, as well. However, if I had ever experienced anything close to this nightmare on other occasions, it could easily explain the event as "random chance" - where, from one out of the hundreds of similar times, they seem to be linked by noticing a subsequent event. But, (and thankfully), I haven't ever had the same heightened sense of "dread" that I did that night and morning. If it really was "random chance", the odds of it happening would be quite staggering. The only one time ever in my life where I think I'm actually dying for real in a dream, and the next night three people die in the house I had the dream...
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Post by turbonium on Jan 3, 2006 3:42:44 GMT -4
I might have felt foolish posting this topic in years past, but as I get older (I mean "mature" ) I find it unimportant to worry about being heckled over such things. Some may see it all as complete nonsense, because of the huge industry existing with phony "psychics", etc. on TV, newspapers, so-called "Prophecy" websites, and in little "Tarot Card Reader" or "Crystal Ball Reader" type of shops just off your local Main Street. While I agree 100% with this view regarding the overall "scam" industry, one area outside of this has proven, even if only to myself, to be worth mentioning. First, it's obviously nothing "provable" in the basic definition of offering tangible, supportable evidence. How can one prove a "sense" or "feeling" that warns you to not "do this", but to "do that" instead? Two separate times some years ago I experienced a very displeasant, "dark" feeling during the time when the people I was with, or soon to be with, met tragic fates. I should also note there were a couple of other things "psychic"-related. I won't go into the details of these events right now, but I was interested in knowing - have any others here experienced anything along these lines? Most here like to stick with scientific or "down to Earth" topics, which is why I thought it might spur something quite far from the usual threads.
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