Life And Death Explained?

One in ten people claim to have had an out-of-body experience at some time in their lives.

At Out-of-body - near-death experiences, we read:

In Dr. Raymond Moody's documentary entitled, Life After Life, he interviewed a Russian scientist named Dr. George Rodonaia, who had a near-death out of body experience.

While 'dead' George visited an infant crying in a nearby room.

"George observed that no one could figure out why the infant was crying so persistently.

"But George learned while out of his body that the infant had a broken arm.

"When George returned to life, he told the infant's parents about the broken arm.

"An x-ray revealed that the infant's arm was indeed broken."


There is a question about whether or not consciousness exists outside the body.

Believers in Reincarnation would suggest that consciousness survives death.

From: paraps.l/ we learn the following:

Brain specialists, Prof. J.C.Eccles, Dr.Wilder Penfield and Prof.W.H.Thorpe have stated that the brain appears to be an organism to register and channel consciousness rather than produce it.

"The brain is messenger to consciousness", Eccles said.

David J.Chalmers Ph.D. writes in the Scientific American (1997):

Consciousness, the subjective experience of an inner self, could be a phenomenon forever beyond the reach of neuroscience. Even a detailed knowledge of the brain's workings and the neural correlates of consciousness may fail to explain how or why human beings have self-aware minds.

The Lancet of 15th December 2001 published an extensive Near Death Experience (NDE) study by Pim van Lommel, MD, cardiologist at Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, Netherlands.

He relates:

A patient saw during a NDE, besides his deceased grandmother, another man who looked at him full of love. Yet he did not know him.

More than ten years later he learned that he was born out of wedlock with a Jewish man during WW2.

This man was deported and killed.

When he was shown a photo of his biological father he recognised him as the man he had seen ten years before during his NDE


According to the Telegraph, 22 October 2000, (http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/l):

1. "THE first scientific study of 'near-death' experiences has found new evidence to suggest that consciousness or the 'soul' can continue to exist after the brain has ceased to function."

2. Two eminent doctors carried out a year-long study of heart attack survivors.

3. Their study concludes that a number of people have almost certainly had 'experiences' after they were pronounced clinically dead.

4. This suggests that the mind or consciousness can survive the death of the brain.

5. The study was based on interviews with survivors of heart attacks at Southampton General Hospital's cardiac unit.

It was published in the respected medical journal Resuscitation.

The study's authors are Dr Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and Dr Sam Parnia, a clinical research fellow and registrar at Southampton hospital.




Dr Fenwick said: "If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about the continuation of consciousness after death. It also raises the question about a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose rather than a random universe."

Four patients recounted feelings of peace and joy, heightened senses, lost awareness of body, and entering another world.

Dr Parnia, who was trained at the Guys and St Thomas' medical school, University of London, said: "I started off as a sceptic but, having weighed up all the evidence, I now think that there is something going on...
"If ... the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind, like a television will act as an intermediary to manifest waves in the air into a picture or a sound, we can show that the mind is still there after the brain is dead. And that is what I think these near-death experiences indicate."

Psychic & Spirit Magazine had an article on 'Divination The Tarot And Quantum Physics', by Cilla Conway, on Mar 16, 2005. (http://www.psychicsahar.com/l )

Conway points out that in the world of Quantum Physics we find: "There is an underlying unity: an energy or ‘field’ that exists throughout the universe....

"All matter in the universe can now be seen as interconnected by waves of energy. Matter itself is part of the same energy field – in other words there is no division between the material and the immaterial...

The 'field' "implies information exchange, as well as energy exchange, and could therefore provide instantaneous communication.

"The phenomena we call ... paranormal, such as telepathy, telekinesis,... and other oracular devices, foresight, intuition, and dreams, would just be part of this exchange, as we are part of The Field.

"As mystics have said for millennia, there is no separation. Equally important, this also corroborates the metaphysical tenet – that we create our own reality...

"Physics and mysticism are beginning to talk the same language: no longer are we considered to be a separate part of existence, nor is mind seen as separate from body. Some physicists even say that the cosmos is not only affected by consciousness, but is consciousness.

"As Lynne Taggart says, the physicists’ ‘work suggested a decentralized but unified intelligence that was far grander and more exquisite than Darwin or Newton had imagined, a process that was not random or chaotic, but intelligent and purposeful.’

Does GOD exist?

Anthony Flew, a philosophy professor who has been an atheist for more than 50 years, has decided that God may exist after all. He believes scientific evidence supports the theory that some sort of intelligence created the universe. (http://www.guardian.co.ukl/ )

Flew argues that the investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."

According to Dr Robert Beckford, a committed pentecostal Christian and a reader in theology at Birmingham University, the Bible may not have all the answers.

In a British Channel 4 documentary on 25 December 2004 Beckford said: 'The so-called law of Moses turns out to be the work of many human hands. What I once thought was the word of God was now beginning to sound like something out of Stalin's Russia.'
Beckford produced archaeological evidence to suggest that the kingdoms of David and Solomon did NOT dominate the 10th century BC, as the Bible claims.

He declared the New Testament a 'masterwork of spin written by people who were nowhere near the events they describe, all gathered by powerful editors who kept out ideas they did not like'.
Does anyone have the answers?


To Carl Jung, God may be an evolving being.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

"But the history of the mind offers a different picture.

"Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes."
French theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) argues that all things are evolving and the unity of the universe is grounded not in matter or energy but spirit.

The Buddhists keep a noble silence on the subject of God.

Taoists say that the Tao which can be described in words is not the real Tao.

Even Jesus spoke about God mainly in parables.

Bohm

Physicist David Bohm believes that life and consciousness are present in varying degrees in all matter, including supposedly inanimate matter such as electrons or plasmas.

He suggests that there is a protointelligence in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. ("David Bohm and the Implicate Order" by David Pratt)

According to The Upanishads, the Hindu New Testament:

God is within all the created world (immanent) and outside all the created world (transcendent).

God creates matter out of himself.

God becomes immanent (within all) until the end of evolution when the immanent has all again become transcendent (outside the created world).

The created world evolves into the transcendent God.
Why?

For the joy of creation.

Why is there evil?

For the joy of good arising from it.

Why darkness?

That the light may shine more.

Why suffering?

For the instruction of the soul and the joy of sacrifice.

Why the infinite play of creation and evolution?

For pure joy.

The more the lower self is forgotten in good works, and in the realisation of the beautiful and the true, the quicker becomes the process of evolution.

Amazon.com: The Upanishads (Penguin Classics): Books: Anonymous ...



WALLACE

From: http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm

In February of 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace was thinking about evolution.

Wallace was a believer in spiritualism. He saw spiritualism as the best way of accounting for the overall direction of evolution at the moral and intellectual level.

In a collection of essays that were published in 1870, Wallace claimed that natural selection was not a strong enough process to have brought about the human race.

Wallace said you needed a Supreme Intelligence.



Choosing to be happy?

Biologist Lyall Watson, in his book Gifts of Unknown Things, describes his meeting with an Indonesian shaman woman who was able to make a grove of trees vanish into thin air.

I can remember a village in sunny Java where everyone seemed remarkably happy most of the time. The people knew little of modern science, or complicated theology. Their religion was a very simple mixture of animism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.

There was no corrupting TV and there were no shopping malls. The village chief and most of the key people in the village seemed to be good guys. People seemed to think happy thoughts and to be happy.

What makes people happy?

I can think of a similar village in Malta where everyone used to appear remarkably happy most of the time. The people were not particularly well educated. Their religion appeared to be a mixture of animism and Catholicism.

In those days there was no corrupting TV and no shopping malls. But times have changed. Malta, like Indonesia, has been invaded by corrupting ideas.

Corrupting ideas?

There are a number of scientists who have come to believe in the Holographic Universe.

A Holographic Universe might explain the disappearing trees.

Knowing about the Holographic Universe will not necessarily make you happy, but it may explain why some people are happier than others.

Michael Talbot (http://holographic.l / http://www.youtube.M) is one of the people who have written about the Holographic Universe.

Here are some of the main points:

1. In 1982, at the University of Paris, physicist Alain Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances tiny particles such as electrons are able to instantly communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
2. University of London physicist David Bohm believes Aspect's findings imply that the universe is a hologram.

3. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

If a hologram of a rose is cut in half, and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image.

Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

4. Bohm believes the reason tiny particles are able to remain in contact with one another, regardless of distance, is not because they are sending some sort of signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion.

He argues that, at some deeper level of reality, such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
5. Ancient traditions and philosophies claim the connectedness of the different parts of the universe.

6. Bohm offers the following illustration:

Imagine an aquarium containing one fish. Your knowledge about the aquarium comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

You might assume that there are two fish. But as you continue to watch, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between the 'two' fish.

7. If the apparent separateness of tiny particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The particles in the human brain are connected to the particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

All of nature is a seamless web.


8. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else.

Time and space, like the images of the fish on the TV, would have to be viewed differently.

The past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

9. The superhologram must be seen as a sort of storehouse of "All That Is."

Bohm suggests the superholographic level of reality may be a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

10. Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram considered the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. Numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic file. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Every piece of information seems instantly cross-correlated with every other piece of information.

11. The brain is able to translate the mass of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is what a hologram does best.

12. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies.

These findings suggest that it is only in the holographic world of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

13. What becomes of objective reality? It ceases to exist.

14. According to the religions of the East, the material world is Maya, an illusion.
We may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, but this is an illusion.

15. We are really "receivers" floating through a sea of frequency.

What we extract from this sea and turn into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

16. Some researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena now become much more understandable.

Telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

Stansilov Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile.

During her hallucination, she gave a detailed description of what it felt like to be this reptile.

Grof came across patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree. He found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Patients with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology.

Patients gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

17. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness.

Rather, it is Consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

18. If the physical body is a holographic projection of consciousness, then each of us is to some extent responsible for our health.

Miracles may be due to changes in consciousness.

Healing techniques such as visualization may work becuase images are ultimately as real as reality.

19. In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, biologist Lyall Watson describes his meeting with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air.

Experiences like this become more easy to understand if we believe that reality is only a holographic projection.

20. Perhaps we agree on what is 'there' or 'not there'.

In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter reality.

What we see as reality is a canvas where we can draw any picture we want.

Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly make sense.

The Buddhists believe that what we are thinking now, is what we will become.

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2009/09/life-and-death-explained.html