Top Neurosurgeon ‘Spent Six Days in Heaven’ During A Coma

[Hammer of Los]

...

I don't mean to mock you yathrib.

Not at all.

It's just the WiH materials can drive a person mad.

...

[Twyla LaSarc]

To make things even more complicated: Friends who have done Ketamine have told me of states where one can live an entire life during a trip and wake up back to 'themselves'.

I remember seeing a program once that involved a young man who slipped on ice, hit his head and claimed to have lived an entire other life in another time while he was out (a matter of minutes).

These things happen and the explanation seems to be either really cosmic or relatively mundane.

I always wonder if I will seem to die in this life and wake up somewhere else and discover this life was just an altered state formed from cerebral trauma. It would certainly explain a lot.

[Hammer of Los]

...

If you look carefully, you will see that the extra mundane causes manifest in the physical realm in a manner in which it is always possible to cite the material causation only.

Thus subtle extra mundane causes and effects can always be reduced to the purely material, if that is the only focus of your enquiry.

But without consideration of the non material, your ignorance will persist indefinitely.

So yah boo sucks to the materialists.

...

[Belligerent Savant]

I remember seeing a program once that involved a young man who slipped on ice, hit his head and claimed to have lived an entire other life in another time while he was out (a matter of minutes).

These things happen and the explanation seems to be either really cosmic or relatively mundane.

I always wonder if I will seem to die in this life and wake up somewhere else and discover this life was just an altered state formed from cerebral trauma. It would certainly explain a lot.

Calls to mind an Ambrose Bierce short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was also adapted into a short film :

A text of the story is here --
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/375/pg375.txt






SPOILER below, for those not familiar with it --

It is the tale of a man who is about to be hanged, and at the last moment, the rope magically breaks and he plunges into the water, and manages to escape. The first ten minutes or so of the film are the moments leading up to the hanging. No words are spoken, and the focus is almost entirely on the ritual and detachment of the executioners. It is clear from the onset that the person about to be hanged has not had a trial, and has had no time at all to come to terms with his fate. Desperate and confused, he can only focus on his surroundings, as he still hopes for a final chance of escape. In one of the very last moments, he cries out for who we can presume is his wife... and we realize that he will not only lose his opportunity to say goodbye to her, but she will probably never know what became of him.
By some miracle however, the rope snaps as he falls into the water, and manages to escape from the firing of his executioners.
The final revelation that the entire escape existed only in the mind of the protagonist could have easily been a cheap twist in the vein of "it was all a dream type ending", but it is actually very affecting (on screen and in print). I think this is in part because it disrupts our perception of time and space. The timeline of the "escape" probably runs a few hours in the mind of the character, and takes up two thirds of the running time of the film. In "real time", the entire imagined event actually only takes place within a fraction of a second, from the moment that the protagonist falls to the point that the rope gives in, presumably resulting in an instantaneous death."

[Hammer of Los]

...

Fascinating.

Reminds me of Babbacombe Lee.

Oh yes.

Once again we peer into the Rock Pool of Galadriel.

Hanged man was I;





...

[Iamwhomiam]

Ah, my sweet love Sandy Denny! Boy did we have a lot of fun together. Thanks for the good memories, HoL.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Let's meet on the Ledge, my friend.

...

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertai ... ked/66772/

A book called Proof of Heaven is bound to provoke eye rolls, but its author, Eben Alexander, had space in a Newsweek story and on shows like of Fox & Friends to detail his claims. Read into those endorsements — and nearly 15 million copies sold — whatever you will, but in a big new Esquire feature, Luke Dittrich pokes large holes in Alexander's story, bringing into question the author's qualification as a neurosurgeon (which is supposed to legitimize his claim) and the accuracy of his best-selling journey.

In his book, Alexander claims that when he was in a coma caused by E. coli bacterial meningitis, he went to heaven. Of course, Dittrich's piece is not the first time that Alexander's text has come into question. In April, Michael Shermer at Scientific American explained how the author's "evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven." But Dittrich calls into question not what Alexander experienced so much how he did. While Dittrich looks at legal troubles Alexander had during his time practicing neurosurgery, perhaps the most damning piece of testimony comes from a doctor who was on duty in the ER when Alexander arrived in 2008. Dr. Laura Potter explains that she "had to make the decision to just place him in a chemically induced coma." But that's not how Alexander tells it, according to the Esquire investigation:

In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he spent seven days in "a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis." There is no indication in the book that it was Laura Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that induced his coma, or that the physicians in the ICU maintained his coma in the days that followed through the use of anesthetics. Alexander also writes that during his week in the ICU he was present "in body alone," that the bacterial assault had left him with an "all-but-destroyed brain." He notes that by conventional scientific understanding, "if you don't have a working brain, you can't be conscious," and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn't possess a brain capable of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience.

I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious.

"Yes," she says. "Conscious but delirious."

In interviews in the piece, Alexander asks Esquire's Dittrich not to bring up the discrepancies in his story. The neurosurgeon-turned-author's Twitter account has been silent this morning, but he told the Today show that he stood by "every word" in the book and denounced the magazine story as "cynical" and "cherry-picked."

Read the rest of Dittrich's story, which is behind a small paywall.

(I'll just take their word for it.)

[slimmouse]

Just listened to some interesting commentary from the M.U guys with regards to Alexanders testimony, which is available here,

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/07/e ... -universe/

From there, I got the following link to a presentation to Lars Van Pimmel, ( who I reference in my own little book wrt NDE's),




38mins

For anyone interested in this kind of stuff, this comes from the Daily grail website, which I have never come across previously, but which looks really interesting to discerning minds.

http://www.dailygrail.com/