Week 1 - Near Death Experiences - Tony Tran

Thoughts about the article “Near-Death Cases…”

Although the idea of the spirit realm seems fictitious and is not fully supported by science, I can’t help but see connections of characteristics of entering the spirit realm with the normal process of life such as dreaming. Both seem to present flashback of events, people, or things in the particular person’s life. My opinion is that dreaming has only limited accessibility to accessing our memory bank that allows the consciousness to observe random flashbacks of their own life. However, during a near death experience, body functions are failing and there is a possibility that because organ functions are being slowly isolated, the brain is allowed much more functionality for the limited time that it has. This leads to neurons and signals firing primarily within the brain and not into the rest of the body which allows the circulation of memories that are being reflected.

This is where I pondered that there could be a shift in homeostasis of the consciousness like I explained during lecture. Prior to the NDE, I would believe the person is simply struggling to survive and is only thinking about how he/she is going to die. In this sense, the person is in a state of high bodily consciousness of the self that tries desperately to fix the body or succumb to the fact that they are going to die. But after the NDE, the person is simply glad to be alive. He/she simply wants to acknowledge and be aware of anything within the real world. In this sense, the self shifted into a state of more functional consciousness. This shift lowers the bodily consciousness which was in a negative state that kept failing and failing into a bodily state that I would say is more open to medical aid. Why I say this is because when the body is stressed, there are shifts in hormonal levels such as cortisol which may have been reducing the efficacy of prior medical aid. Additionally, the production of these hormones is re-allocating a significant portion of energy and resources that could have been used to repair the body. But because the body is in a more relaxed state after the NDE, this may allow a higher chance for the body to repair itself.

Question: The one thing that still baffles me is how some NDE patients say that they saw things during their NDE that they haven’t sees prior to their NDE (aka like the patient who noticed the shoes). What I want to point out is if a patient can see things that they haven’t seen, that means there is an equal probability that they could have seen something else that they have not seen before. And if they can see something that they never experienced before, there is no limit to what they could have seen relative to time. They could have seen something new 5 minutes into the NDE or 20 minutes into the NDE. But that means there is no stop to the possibility that they could see something like 20 days in the past or future. If that is the case, then theoretically, there should be an infinite number of possibilities that the person could also see something that happens in the past, present, or future that they haven’t experienced before and I cannot get that over my head.

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