Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Not sure what the ERE community thinks of NDEs in general but I have been fascinated with them for as long as I can remember.

Nanci Danison had (by far) the most interesting experience I have ever encountered and when I first listened to her, everything she said made sense to me. Her experience was exactly the type of afterlife I had envisioned as being the most accurate.

Some key points.

- We all are characters in the mind of Source (God, some might claim).
- Source is an all seeing mental energy construct that has no physical properties, yet knows every mental fact/piece of info that is to be known. It cannot, however, have physical experiences. The closest we could come to describing it is "consciousness".
- Source created (essentially) unlimited mental characters (souls) and physical characters (humans, animals, etcc...) within this Universe (and possibly others) so as to have physical experiences through them.
- Humans are not the same thing as souls. Most humans have souls (some do not) and all humans go through times when they have no soul (coma, certain sleep cycles, NDEs, etc...)
- Humans can live without a soul and have all the characteristics that humans display (intellect, emotions, etc...) except for self-awareness, which comes from the soul. So if you are self-aware, you are a soul not a human.
- Souls can enter into a human/animal and share their life with them. The soul will still retain some of its characteristics (namely creativity, unconditional loving {although this is watered down}, etc...). The soul will, for the most part, not remember that it is a soul. The entire point of the merger is to live the life of the human, however, it can go through an awakening process where it can exert some influence on the life of the human (for the better). Some might call it spiritual growth.
- Source does not judge, not even upon death. Source is unconditionally loving (even of what we deem the most wretched of human actions).
- Upon death, we might enter another physical experience (human, animal, plant, rock, gas nebula {or even on another planet}) or we might merge back into Source. The choice is ours.
- We retain our individuality upon death.
- Heaven is essentially a state of eternal mental peace that is the natural state that we enter upon death.
- Hell does not exist. The only form of 'consequence' upon death is the reliving of every moment of your life, feeling the emotions a second time (and also the emotions of those you affected). The only reason for this is that the life you live as a soul/human combo is shared with other souls so they may have the same experiences you had. Sort of like downloading.
- Religions essentially sprang up through fear as a way to explain a scary world and are still fear based. There are truths hidden in them but they have been warped beyond repair at this point.

Everything is an objective experience to be enjoyed with love. There is no other point to physical life. That is the main message I get from her experience, and its what I have always believe to be true. I find it to be extremely comforting.

Her youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyZtQv ... wmjPwRs3rw

There are people out there that claim she is a money-grubbing con artist (since she charges for her books/webcasts), but feeling that I have a pretty good judge of character I judge her to be telling the truth to the best of her ability. To that end, I have not purchased anything from her. Much of her material is free.

On top of that, I don't know many money hungry lawyers that would quit their (quite lucrative) day jobs to start conning people on the fringes of a topic that most people have never heard of.

Would love to hear others thoughts on her/NDEs in general.

I'm always highly skeptical of stuff like this. I lean toward this type of explanation:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ear-death/

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arc ... es/386231/

Everyone wants their life to be important and to mean something. A near death experience (I'm writing it out, as I don't like non-standard abbreviations. They just make reading comprehension more difficult.) is obviously traumatic and we want it to mean something, but that doesn't have to be the case or even common. Thus, there is a danger that we completely make this stuff up or it's just chemical actions firing in our brain.

Let me just refer to the ERE bible (errrr, I mean book).

Emotional goals for someone aspiring to be a Renaissance man are to:...
not be subject to emotional manipulation or engage in wishful, magical thinking, believing things are true becuase he would like them to be true...

Better not be hoping for that afterlife then

@Chad, I think the first article nails it, we humans are very well adapted to attempt to make sense of things, without that ability we wouldn't be so successfully manipulating our environments. Where we get it wrong, is when we don't have a lot of experience, or opportunity to learn more. Its not exactly ethical to study this a near death experience in a controlled manner, so we will likely never really understand the near death experience.

It sounds very plausible that the near death experience is our attempt to make sense of an unusual experience framed by our culture's references around what happens after death, i.e. moving towards the light, being free of the body etc. For those unlucky enough to be faced with their mortality in such a dramatic way, its no wonder that it has such a powerful and dramatic effect on beliefs which are in turn reinforced by popular beliefs.

vexed87 wrote:Better not be hoping for that afterlife then

Ha, yea personality types drawn to ERE would probably be skeptical of NDEs and I definitely agree that we will never know what is happening.

We can use scientific analysis to attempt making sense of it, but I think science has its limits and declaring it to be merely the bodies reaction to a sudden shock to be a bit bland and limiting. There are plenty of accounts of people experiencing things while dead that aren't scientifically possible during death. Obviously we need to take their word for it, but its still there.

Some scientific points that give some small weight to the belief in life after dead.

- Conservation of energy - energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed. The energy in your body (particularly the energy field around your heart) is not destroyed when we die. It simply transforms to something else within the closed system of the universe.
- Our perceptions are limited by our 5 senses. Anything beyond that is unknown. I think of it in terms of a computer - they only have certain inputs and outputs. My computer is completely unaware of the wind blowing outside simply because it lacks the input channel to detect it. This suggests there is a very limited amount to which we are aware.
- Quantum mechanics gives suggestions that support some of what Nanci talked about. Quantum entanglement/higgs boson might suggest a holographic universe. In the "traditional" sense, 99% of atoms are actually empty space, what we feel as solid is, in fact, simply an energy field made of wave functions. It makes sense that our own individual energy dissolves into this energy field when we die. What are mental actions/thoughts, but simply energy signals in the brain? Nanci's (and others) description of Source being a massive mental energy field fit with this quite well.

Some other thoughts I have churned up over years of pondering this.

What part of me...is me? I think the only thing that comes close to answering that is that I am my awareness/thoughts, and nothing more. I have often sat and looked at my arm or my hand or my foot and wondered if my hand was conscious of itself? If you really let that question churn in your mind you start down a very exciting rabbit hole. Sometimes when I look at the DW, I think to myself "where are you in that body?". This has been pondered by great thinkers for millennia and we still don't and probably won't know the answer. My best guess is that our awareness is the result of something outside of our perceptions that is interacting with the energy/matter of this universe.

Consciousness is one of the few areas that science has trouble with and I think that's for good reason. It falls outside of our human perceptions. Science is a tool that is only good so far as our perceptions allow us to use it.

Neither quantum mechanics, string theory, nor classical mechanics and electromagnetism give any suggestions that support any of this---however, since science is instrumentalist in nature, neither does it aim to. This talk of electric fields, holographic universes, and entanglement reminds me a bit of the quantum woo discussion of a few years back.

You know, when I read the title, I thought Nanci Denison was some financial advisor type who was advocating that we open up NDE accounts, perhaps to supplement our 401(k)s or other such vehicles.

Having not opened such an account, I can't really speak to it although I wouldn't deny that people have had such experiences.

I agree that we should not assume that we are capable of sensing everything there is to sense or that we can necessarily invent machines that can do it for us. Yet a lot of public discourse relies on this assumption.

This illustrates the problem, and why we don't know what 95% of the universe consists of: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/dark-matter-t ... es-gillies

But I don't think we can just grasp at quantum or other physics theories and apply them directly to human experiences.

As an aside, that was once of the more frustrating things about science for me and one of the reasons I did not ultimately pursue it -- almost all of the easily observable/discoverable things were discovered in the 19th Century or shortly thereafter, with the exception of things in places that are difficult to get to. Everything today is about creating better sensing machines to validate or invalidate theories that seem to multiply on shelves or in papers. Experimental progress on largely theoretical subjects has become very slow and expensive and pretty sterile. Not like the adventures of Alfred Russel Wallace.

@Dragline - For physics, I'd say move that up to about 1970ish with the formulation of the Standard Model. Otherwise, you nailed it. "Everything" since then has been about more experimental precision, alternatively string theory with zero utility, or filling in existing gaps (what I did).

PS: Don't get too frustrated about so-called dark matter. It may be that our current gravitational theory simply doesn't work very well at very large distances.

Yeah, I keep wondering if the nebulous label "dark matter" will someday go into the historical dustbin with things like "aether".

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=51&v=6eqCaiwmr_M

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

Ha! Okay, apologies in advance then

http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/ (quantum woo, press "reionize electrons" at the top for a new one)
http://snarxiv.org/ (same thing for particle physics, compare to the real one at http://arxiv.org/list/hep-th/new)

PS: If anyone knows what kind of data structure is used to generate these things please PM me. I have a ton of ideas
PPS: A lot of this goes back to the Sokal Affair. For anyone interested in epistemology and modern philosophy and perhaps the state of academia, I recommend thoroughly googling this. He also wrote two books about the whole deal.

To the OP point, I think maybe we can agree on the following quote:

Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu’s answer: it’s all in how you think.
– “The Liezi”, ancient Taoist text attributed to Lie Yukou (c. 400 BC)

And from the scientific perspective which is definitely one way of thinking although a particular way of thinking that is logically self-consistent as well as being consistent with a stupendous number of observations of reality (<-the part of the universe we can all agree on) that is a way of thinking that comprises the best possible understanding of "observable reality"(*)... a rather large number of events do "merely co-occur" because there's absolutely no way that ripples can physically and scientifically connect them. Any assertions and speculations to the contrary have no scientific basis.

That doesn't mean we can't discuss them or that they don't have value.

I simply object to the attempt to tie it into the various branches of physics.

(*) Which brings us back to instrumentalism as it science only concerns itself with events that are objective in the sense that both you and I would agree that they exist. IOW it's not possible to do science on anything that can't be somehow observed by at least one other person.

Well I am not so proud that I can't admit I'm not a scientific expert. They were simply some connections I had made, incorrect or not. I figured this thread would turn into a pinata .

I like that quote by Yukou and would agree with that.

I don't know, I find it a little too convenient that the revelations of a NDE match up exactly with the beliefs of a particular religion.

Most NDEs do not contain any religious artifacts actually. The majority are just a feeling of peace/love, sometimes meeting deceased loved ones and going through a tunnel/light source.

A few go into much more detail and are quite a bit more interesting.

My interest in them stems from my belief that something as complex and wonderful as the world/universe we inhabit couldn't have just happened on its own and that there are realities beyond the one we know. A guiding hand, if you will, was needed to set it in motion. On the other hand, I am not religious in the slightest.

@BeyondtheWrap - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

cmonkey wrote:
My interest in them stems from my belief that something as complex and wonderful as the world/universe we inhabit couldn't have just happened on its own and that there are realities beyond the one we know.

I happen to agree with you. But I don't think I would look for scientific explanations for such things. You would either need to look to religion or some form of existentialism -- look at the philosophy of Karl Jaspers if you are not inclined towards religion.

I have had an experience like this one (no, I was not near death or in any danger whatsoever), for which I have no rational or scientific explanation:

"The reason why this light was blinding and neutralizing was that there was and could be simply nothing in it of sense or imagination. When I call it a light that is a metaphor which I am using, long after the fact. But at the moment, another overwhelming thing about this awareness was that it disarmed all images, all metaphors, and cut through the whole skein of species and phantasms with which we naturally do our thinking. It ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth, as if a sudden and immediate contact had been established between my intellect and the Truth Who was now physically really and substantially before me on the altar. But this contact was not something speculative and abstract: it was concrete and experimental and belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love.

Another thing about it was that this light was something far above and beyond the level of any desire or any appetite I had ever yet been aware of. It was purified of all emotion and cleansed of everything that savored of sensible yearnings. It was love as clean and direct as vision: and it flew straight to the possession of the Truth it loved.

And the first articulate thought that came to my mind was: “Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven!” It lasted only a moment: but it left a breathless joy and a clean peace and happiness that stayed for hours and it was something I have never forgotten.

The strange thing about this light was that although it seemed so “ordinary” in the sense I have mentioned, and so accessible, there was no way of recapturing it. In fact, I did not even know how to start trying to reconstruct the experience or bring it back if I wanted to, except to make acts of faith and love. But it was easy to see that there was nothing I could do to give any act of faith that peculiar quality of sudden obviousness: that was a gift and had to come from somewhere else, beyond and above myself."

Merton, Thomas (1998-10-04). The Seven Storey Mountain (pp. 311-312). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Dragline wrote:Another thing about it was that this light was something far above and beyond the level of any desire or any appetite I had ever yet been aware of. It was purified of all emotion and cleansed of everything that savored of sensible yearnings. It was love as clean and direct as vision: and it flew straight to the possession of the Truth it loved.

And the first articulate thought that came to my mind was: “Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven!” It lasted only a moment: but it left a breathless joy and a clean peace and happiness that stayed for hours and it was something I have never forgotten.

At risk of violating Hyman's Maxim, that sounds a lot like Level 2-3 psychedelic experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedeli ... nce#Levels

Well, the only thing I had injested that morning was a cup of coffee. But I never know what DW might have put in it.

She did not have the same experience, though.

Sounds like an interesting experience. Did you find that reference by Thomas Merton before or after the fact?

Many years after -- almost a decade now, in fact. I just finished reading the Merton book in the last week and when I got to that part I said to myself, "Hey, that sounds familiar."

Dragline wrote:Well, the only thing I had injested that morning was a cup of coffee. But I never know what DW might have put in it.

She did not have the same experience, though.

DMT can be synthesized naturally in the body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimeth ... enous_DMT0

But that's not really my point. What I am getting at is that If an organic explanation exists then a metaphysical explanation becomes even more unlikely. Not impossible. Not proven wrong. Just very far fetched.

Actually, I would keep my mouth shut if belief in the metaphysical explanation was harmless. It is not harmless.