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While I concur with your opinion, citing Wikipedia isn't particularly credible. Middle-school kids aren't even allowed to cite Wikipedia in book reports.
Sorry I didn't meet the standards of scholarship typical of the Unexplained Mysteries forum ... Here's the Encyclopedia Brittanica definition:
We had a customer in her late 80s, and one day she called us and said she'd been in the hospital. She said "I died ... Twice!"
She had gone to lunch with a friend and started feeling really ill in the car. So, she asked her friend to drive her straight to her doctor's office. By the time they got there, she collapsed in the parking lot and paramedics were called. Her doctor and his staff also ran out to the parking lot.
The paramedics revived her after losing her two times, and then she went to stay in the hospital for a while. I believe she had heart surgery.
After recuperating in the hospital, she went home. A while later, she went to lunch with her daughter and told her that one of the paramedics was a girl with extremely long hair that she saw bent over her and that she saw her hair hanging down while she was working on her. Then she told her daughter that she didn't like it when they took her shirt off in broad daylight.
Her daughter was shocked and asked how she knew any of this since she was unconscious in the parking lot, not to mention dead. She said she saw it all when she was looking down. (She told me "It wasn't pretty.") And then it hit both her daughter and herself, that she was out of her body watching the whole thing. She realized that she was looking down at the whole scene from up in the air. She saw the paramedic with long hair from behind and saw herself (shirtless) from above.
She also later mentioned to her doctor that she didn't like it when they took her shirt off, and he looked at her funny and said "We didn't think you'd remember that."
I asked her if anyone was with her when she was out of her body, like her husband who had died a year or two earlier. And she said "NO! And with everything I've done for him!" We both laughed.
Interesting how it seems like it's always anecdotally a friend, a relative, or a patient. Never the person themselves.
Sorta like ghosts and urban legends...
Not necessarily. I've had supernatural (for lack of a better term) experiences that I don't share often because there are a lot of skeptics and it can be frustrating talking about it.
But at the same time I have a good friend who's a very level headed, non-religious guy, who is a skeptic among skeptics who told me about a time when he encountered a ghost, and I tell that story often.
This might divert the thread a little but what I find really interesting is that, according the people who have had deep NDE's we can actually plan our afterlife. Swedenborg, a seer who wrote extensively about the afterlife said that it was revealed to him by Spirit Guides that there are different levels of heaven, each more wonderful than the last, but at the very least level is beautiful beyond words and contains delights beyond our wildest imaginations. According to Swedenborg, and verified by numerous NDE's, we will be married to the guy/gal of our dreams who's perfectly suited for us, enjoy sex, live in gorgeous mansions, in communities with like-minded people in various dimensions depending on our preferences and spiritual growth. These communities will be more dense at the center according to how much people want to interact with others and then thin out as people move outward from the center depending on individuals desire for solitude to whatever degree. That's just the beginning. In essence each community will look like a spiral galaxy.
I've watched hundreds of videos on YouTube about NDE's. What strikes me most is two things:
1. their consistencies in what happens whether they are christian, skeptic, atheist, buddhist etc.
2. their superlatives in describing the other world; eg "a beauty beyond anything words can describe" "I felt a love so deep, so profound it's like love on this earth times a trillion".
Indeed, some have said we mustn't get carried away by these descriptions because if everyone understood exactly how wonderful the afterlife is we'd all be committing suicide to get there and that's a no-no.
And that is why life after death is a mystery. It has to be a mystery either way --life or nothingness. If the answer is found it will not bode well for mankind.
It includes ongoing reader-submitted accounts of NDE's. The archived stories date back to around 2000 and they come from many different cultures. One intriguing aspect is how seldom "religious" - or lack of - aspects often don't match the narrator's religious beliefs and background. It goes both ways - persons who are religious report experiences with a lack of imagery/content that matches their beliefs, and persons who are not religious report unexpectedly transcendent content/experiences.
I read them with an open mind, have no reason to judge them as true or not. Certainly it's evident that most people (whether religious or not) absolutely believe their own experiences were real.
NDEs can be induced by being subjected to high g-forces in a centrifuge. Also, the experiences sound strikingly similar to what those on a DMT trip experience, which apparently occurs in the brain naturally iirc. So I don't doubt that people do experience NDE's, but I don't for one second think that they are experiencing anything other than the natural effects of oxygen deprivation and/or chemical reactions occurring in the dying brain.
NDEs can be induced by being subjected to high g-forces in a centrifuge. Also, the experiences sound strikingly similar to what those on a DMT trip experience, which apparently occurs in the brain naturally iirc. So I don't doubt that people do experience NDE's, but I don't for one second think that they are experiencing anything other than the natural effects of oxygen deprivation and/or chemical reactions occurring in the dying brain.
Inducing the phenomena doesn't incontrovertibly disprove that NDEs are more than a function of the mind. Inducing neither proves or disproves.
I have read that blackness is what a large number of people experience because they do not expect and are not open to a life beyond death. Think about it, if you did not believe in a life after death, and there was one, then you would be in a place with nothing... until you suddenly realised that you were conscious. Only then would you start to question, and only then (I have read) are you open to another being able to contact you. It seems as if you almost have a black enclosure around you stopping anyone from helping you until you, yourself realise that you are not 'dead'.
Of couse this is as likely to be wrong as anything else. However, it makes sense to me, partly because I have had a conscious OBE 2x in my life where I found myself floating by the ceiling after falling asleep on the sofa. I also believe that we astral project at night and go somewhere. All the occult books say that astral projection is possible and normal for all of us but not many can do it consciously. I certainly cannot at the moment, I wish I could.
There is so much that the occult societies and ancient religions know which the orthodox religions do not acknowledge to the average person. I have a feeling that in the Vatican Library there are many books which detail this kind of thing, but thats just a hunch.
Anyone believing that the NDE is caused by the brain producing certain chemicals, needs to remember/investigate the doctor (Norway/Sweeden/perhaps?) who was in a skiing accident and was eventually found by the rescuers. They kept her body temperature at something like 10 degrees C (which is what it was when they found her under the snow) and then slowly warmed her back up. Her brain started to work and now, a couple of years later, she is back working at the hospital where she used to work before the accident. They use the freezing process in heart surgery now in the USA when anaesthetic would be dangerous to the person.
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... Here's the Encyclopedia Brittanica definition:
