Emerald Vang - Week 2

This week we talked about death and the near-death experience. Professor Valverde's own experience with near-death is intriguing and opens the mind, well at least mine. I always had this conceived idea that when people die they see a light and are taken to heaven, where they are then determined for heaven or hell; that's the way it works in most films and, from what I have heard, religions. However, Professor Valverde's story does not begin with a bright light and certainly did not have any heaven-or-hell decision making. In the reading "Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment," I found the people that brushed death had similar experiences to the professor. For example, Vicki Noratuk had an out of body experience like Valverde. She claims remembering what people around her said and seeing her body from above. The reading claimed this as the state of conscious disembodiment. This version or reality of death isn't what's shown a lot in films, so it might seem fictional to others, but I believe every single word. I guess the closest thing that I've seen in film that displays disembodiment close to the description of Valverde and the article would have to be in Marvel's Doctor Strange. In the movie, Doctor Strange has a scene where he is dead and his conscious flies out of his body so that he could get help from his friend to bring him back to life. That scene has stuck with me since watching the film because it showed a different side of death even if he did have powers, which is possibly how he disembodied his consciousness, but that's not confirmed so I'm going to have to believe that it is a depiction of death. Reading this article makes me question how I think of death and I'm left to wonder, why has the world come to known the after-life differently despite all of this evidence?