Death!

[Constance]

"OEM guy"

What does OEM stand for?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

The usual definition is Original Equipment Manufacturer. So in printer ink, OEM consumables are those made by the company who made the printer, such as HP, Xerox or Epson.

 

[Constance]

Thanks for the clarification, Gene.

 

[Burnt State]

As I'm reading this thread, it's late but it has got my attention. Too much death, brushes with it and watching others struggle through its dark waters, leaves it as a pretty raw topic, though it is something you are simply compelled to live with. What other options are there after all?

Steve, once again opening up boxes marked "do not look." this is going to be very interesting...

So until there's time to build more words to frame death and lower it into the depths of the thread I just want to take time to pause for Constance, for sharing her personal, private experience with death, as I know following the death of a loved one involves a lot of stumbling through the forest of grief. It takes something very unique to pull you out of that numb languor. To come back to the celebration of life, following such a death, is a testament to the spirit of the joy life holds, even in its fragile bits and pieces.

thank you very much, Constance, for giving that piece of you. more peace to you.

 

[smcder]

Calculating the cost to others is an impossible task. Equally impossible would be calculating the benefit to others. It would be something you'd be required to wrestle with as time wore on. Immortality implies the ability to heal completely from injury, returning to your ideal state. Mental and emotional issues would be things you would have to wrestle with over time, but the presumption is that your brain is defect free. I don't think an absence of physical defects would constitute changing you from who you are unless the defects you had to begin with were so extensive that repairing them would literally change you to a degree that nobody, including you, would recognize you as yourself anymore. Such changes would essentially constitute a whole rebirth, in which case, there would be no point in this as a mental exercise.

This brings up an interesting point with respect to the idea of continuity of consciousness and personal identity. Suppose we do float out of our bodies after they stop working. By what standard do we determine our identity? It seems to me that all that would be left, at least hypothetically is memories, and perhaps personality, although those qualities in an individual have been mapped to regions of the brain, so I'm not sure how we would retain personalities and memories after we float up out of where they are stored. For any of that to work we'd have to assume that we're not really here in the first place because the external world is an illusion.

Not so fast ... I'm not sure cost/benefit calculation is impossible - although it's refreshing to hear you make an absolute statement ... at any rate I could argue somewhat that any moral decision is ultimately impossible - at any rate, it's not practical to base our sense of right and wrong on outcomes ...

but we know for example that living in America costs something like 40 times the planetary resources that living in a third world nation does ... now we can balance that in various ways and argue it forever - but imagine me now living forever at that rate of consumption and arguably an ever increasing rate because being immortal as you define it and perfect in mind and body, what's to stop me from becoming a monster or simply a resource hog with thousands of offspring and increasing material benefit (no estate taxes) - eventually I could tip the genetic balance of an increasing area of the planet single-handedly (or at least have fun trying!!) ... because I would just become smarter and smarter if I half way applied myself ...

... another thing we can say is that life is a zero sum game in the sense that I occupy a space or niche as a human being and my existence has implications for the life around me, for other human beings - by being immortal, how many lives do I eclipse, how much animal protein and plant protein go into making my body? And why should I live forever, genetically unchanging instead of allowing a stream of people and associated organisms to grow and evolve? And what happens if people figure all this out and unable to kill me, confine me indefinitely in prison where I can only consume minimal resources? The basis of law involves the finitude of human life as the estate tax shows ... they helps prevent any one family from over accumulating wealth ... now we have to have a law where if I live forever I am prevented from accumulating too much wealth?

And if I am to repair every defect and illness my metabolism must be considerably greater than a normal human - because we carry many defects that have biological costs and because in order to repair our bodies successfully, we may have to repair them extremely rapidly - if I'm shot a dozen times in the heart - that takes a huge amount of energy to repair (and how does that work, do I eat a whole LOT right then in order to do that or cannibalize from other body parts and fix those later ... ?) ... so already I'm consuming more than normal.

Also this statement:

Mental and emotional issues would be things you would have to wrestle with over time, but the presumption is that your brain is defect free.

... is loaded brother ... I don't know anyone without mental and emotional issues - I do know some who seem to have so few that they actually have trouble relating to others - everything is so cut and dried and simple to them that they get frustra- ... well, you see what I mean ... equally I don't think of those who do as necessarily having a defect in the brain - you could argue a properly functioning brain has these "issues" ... and good luck tying brain function down to all of this anyway ...

And as far as not being who I am, you miss my point - my limitations in body and mind are who I am ... happy families are all alike and unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way to paraphrase ... perfect/immortal people I suspect would be very much alike or become so and I argue monstrous ... and who would they relate to anyway?

So I think the desire to live forever may be a very telling one.

There are many possibilities raised in your second paragraph above - and many assumptions made ... and many have been discussed in the C&P thread at length.

Another question .. is my immortality in my genes to be conferred in whole or in part on my offspring ... subject to the vagaries of recombination ... ?

 

[smcder]

As I'm reading this thread, it's late but it has got my attention. Too much death, brushes with it and watching others struggle through its dark waters, leaves it as a pretty raw topic, though it is something you are simply compelled to live with. What other options are there after all?

Steve, once again opening up boxes marked "do not look." this is going to be very interesting...

So until there's time to build more words to frame death and lower it into the depths of the thread I just want to take time to pause for Constance, for sharing her personal, private experience with death, as I know following the death of a loved one involves a lot of stumbling through the forest of grief. It takes something very unique to pull you out of that numb languor. To come back to the celebration of life, following such a death, is a testament to the spirit of the joy life holds, even in its fragile bits and pieces.

thank you very much, Constance, for giving that piece of you. more peace to you.

Very beautifully noted, Burnt.

 

[mike]

My first thought was Death..... by unga bunga.

Im happy to expand for those that havent heard this one

 

[Constance]

Thank you, Burnt. I appreciate your empathy and thoughtfulness. And the pause, for Annie.

 

[Burnt State]

My daughter's name is Ani. Our brush with death with her in the ICU this past spring rocked my world in a way that I haven't been destabilized since watching my father drown. I have not really properly processed that part of the hospital experience as she is here and is monitored closely as hypoglycemia is always just around the corner, so life has this edge to it that does not provide a cushion to take time to deal with what happened. In fact, to be honest, I prefer not to think about that part of the experience and tend to just block that out altogether, as I have found that death and close calls with it tend to have the power to pull me underwater, and then I'm just useless to everyone. Not to sure if it"s my mindfulness training that has allowed me to simply accept things as they are or if my brain simply made an executive decision to not be plagued by that which is beyond my control, but either way, the path always leads forward and I work hard not to look backwards anymore.

I spent a lot of time looking backwards after my father's death and I lost a tremendous amount of time. In fact I was just plain lost for quite a while over that death, even though I had a living family right in front of me. Traumatic experiences associated with such events...I don't know - Sudden Death just rearranges our priorities sometimes in ways we are never quite prepared for as we were never really given any tools previously to know how to deal with it. As a society, I feel our attitudes around death are not that healthy, mostly because we don't talk about it much and fail to share, heal or know how to integrate such an experience into our lives.

 

[smcder]

My first thought was Death..... by unga bunga.

Im happy to expand for those that havent heard this one

Duly noted ... folks just do a search for "unga bunga" on the forum ...

 

[smcder]

I'm not afraid of death either, ufocurious. My own brush with it occurred when I was 21 as a car I was riding in skidded on ice and barreled toward a large tree. Funny thing is the way my sense of time slowed down radically as we approached that collision. I had a good view, from the front passenger seat. I thought during this approach, very dispassionately, that "we are going to hit that tree." No panic; very like the attitude of the second consciousess whose thoughts or voice I overheard during my spontaneous OBE four months later. And indeed during the OBE I was not alarmed, merely surprised (and intrigued) to find myself (my consciousness) up in the far corner of the room observing my body from behind. [note: it seemed inert, lifeless, out of time though it still sat at the desk across the room reading; 'I', near the ceiling across the room, did not feel connected to it] Similarly, my dispassionate thought on the race toward impact with the tree (in a period of time that seemed to be drawn out, to drag) seemed to occur in another part of my mind from my normal state, a different state of mind from my ordinary one. The radical slowing of time seemed to be a way of communicating with me, something like: 'Pay attention. This is important.'

Seven years ago I experienced the greatest possible loss for me, the death in a car accident of my then 21-year-old daughter, center of my life, keeper of my heart. The shock and grief at losing her presence here with me took several years to resolve, with help from a transpersonal psychologist in grief therapy but moreso from immersing myself in reading for three years the research in mediumship, NDEs, OBEs, reincarnation, and pastlife regression, and most of all because of the communications I received from my daughter, four of them vividly physical and a succession of less dramatic sensing of her presence at various times since then. I have no doubt remaining that our consciousnesses survive the death of the body. This evolving certainty has been a gift that is still giving, that enabled me to continue in living a positive and even joyful life here. I wish everyone who loses the presence here of a child or other deeply loved person could know what I know.

You are right, ufocurious, that what we have to fear is suffering here, our own and that of others. Our natural goal should be, and at our best often is, to relieve as much as possible of the suffering of all living beings here in this life.



Death in sleep is certainly to be preferred but, from what I have read in the different literatures I mentioned above, the transition out of the body is instantaneous and not at all frightening -- the dislocation of one's consciousness out of the body without pain or alarm but only a sense of the marvelousness of it -- and also a feeling of acceptance and perfect calm. This OBE is a key element of a majority of NDEs in which one's consciousness observes one's body from a position high in the room (sometimes not recognizing its own body at first), and in which one sees the people in the room, hears (and later remembers) what they've said, travels into the hallways and waiting room seeing and overhearing more, and eventually leaves the environment moving outward into the near environment or through a tunnel-like structure. Reading many NDE accounts confirms a marked similarity in the sights, sounds, and interactions that ensue and the changes that an NDE effects in those who have experienced one. Similar experiences have been recorded in human history. They occur frequently these days for some reason, no doubt partially because people can be revived/brought back more quickly with modern medicine, but possibly also because of an intervention from beings on the other side who seek to re-open the minds of the majority in our time that have been closed by the dead hand of materialist thinking trickled down from materialist science and philosophy. A similar phenomenon occurred in the age of extraordinary mediumship investigated by the SPR and similar researchers in other countries.

There are many good directions to go from here ... one thing I'm immediately curious about is the second consciousness:

"No panic; very like the attitude of the second consciousess whose thoughts or voice I overheard during my spontaneous OBE four months later."

I know you've mentioned it before, in the C&P thread and as a dispassionate or calm inner voice, I believe - I've experienced this voice too in times of inevitability ... it seems to me to be my inner voice but with a certainty or finality, a kind of authority in that sense and that tells me what is going to happen (recognizes the inevitability first in my head) ... is it like that?

 

[smcder]

The impression I've gathered from reading in 4 of the 5 subject matters I named above [i.e., with exception of OBE research which concerns experiences taking place here] is that discarnate consciousnesses do not experience stasis or boredom or live in memory of the most recent embodied life. Individual development continues after a period of adjustment to living without a physical body and in the company of consciousnesses now transparent to one another (including those of discarnates known in the life just left, those with whom one has incarnated in the past, and also others previously unmet). Spiritual development continues, especially for those who go over in states of psychic distress, for the newly separated consciousness is still imbued with negative emotions or, worse, guilt for transgressions committed in the body. In the 'life review', one experiences everything again but including the recognition of the negative effects of one's words and actions on others. In a sense the environment is like a hospital (for those in need of healing of the spirit or soul) and like a school for those ready to participate in further learning and development. Not 'boring' at all. As challenging as one wishes to make it, in an atmosphere without conflict or pain. It seems that concern with the world one has immediately come from continues, and individuals sharing common interests and knowledge work together on the further development of their disciplines and also attempt to communicate what they've learned back to people still in the body. That discarnate SPR scholars and scientists did so is evidenced by the Cross Correspondence(s) and by what they themselves reported they were doing through mediums in various countries. Physicians, philosophers, scientists, and artists sometimes succeed in introducing new information and insights into the minds of their still-embodied peers. FWH Myers's major study Human Personality and the Survival of Consciousness includes many such cases of sudden and unsourceable inspiration, knowledge, and insight reported by the still-embodied individuals concerned. As they sing in the islands, 'don't worry, be happy'.

Cross Correspondences is another good direction to pursue.

FWH Myer's book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death is available here, free, in several formats:

Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers - Free Ebook

This part of the experience, the life review:

"In the 'life review', one experiences everything again but including the recognition of the negative effects of one's words and actions on others."

"The transformative effect is in fact so statistically uniform in comparison with other areas of demographic study that some near-death experience investigators point to it as much as to experiencer accounts' detail as evidence for the empirical reality of the phenomenon itself. "

This is extraordinary to me ... and is noted in cases where this information didn't seem to be of much concern to the individual during their life. Further, experiencers sometimes avoid unethical actions in order to avoid the pains of this life review in the future. Let's take a mainstream viewpoint - that this is a psychological experience, something that happens in the brain ... what we'd need to show is the evolutionary benefit or other mechanism of a life review at the time of death.

 

[Wade]

My position on death probably has more to do with the circumstances of my upcoming demise. I have no real interest of living any longer than is expected of me, for I'm one of those that believe there is an existence for us beyond this reality. Not heaven or nirvana necessarily but being that I'm pretty much an explorer, I would welcome the opportunity to see what does lie beyond and if by chance I'm wrong and there is nothing for us beyond death there will be no regrets because apparently I won't have a consciousness to realize that.

If death came quickly and without a lot of pain and I was in full control of my facilities I wouldn't fear death, but if I was in a plane that was going down tumbling out of control, yes I would be afraid of dying, not so much of death but going out that way, as I sometimes wonder if your emotional state at the time of your demise doesn't have something to do with your afterlife.

Now THIS would be a way to go out, here's another famous soliloquy.

Note the difference between the way Rick Deckard was responding to his apparent death and the way Roy Batty responded to his.

For whatever reason I've always had a pragmatic response to death, I do morn the loss of young people... which is interesting because for all I know the death of someone that didnt have the chance to realize their full potential could also work out in society's favor (a dreadful sentiment but true)

Also I lost my mom a few years back and aside from a crying jag at the airport when I went back to California I was very moderated in my response to her death, a fact which caused no little guilt for some time. I had to wonder why I didn't mourn her death more than I did, I had no reason to not do so, we had a solid relationship and it wasn't like she was suffering, she wasn't bed ridden or anything and years of medical procedures and medicine had taken their toll but she was dealing with it. During the whole time I was like a emotionless drone but shortly after the funeral I had missed my original flight and the next one out wasn't for 7 hours it gave me time( at the airport) to pause and reflect while waiting and during that time I did break down several times, but I think it was less a personal loss than hearing about the impact she had on many others, including people that were strangers to me and that I didn't even know existed. (Mostly itinerte servicemen)

 

[Polterwurst]

Like Raymond Moody, I think I'm going to be surprised. And like G.R.R. Martin, "I'd sooner go to Middle Earth". The many subjectively colored NDE reports seem to indicate that at least for a moment, we get to create our own private afterlife, maybe like a lucid dream (although it's often described as even more vibrant and real). So maybe it's going to be like "the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" for me. What follows - if anything - I've no idea, though. All I know is that my own experience (with two cases indicative of reincarnation) was undoubtedly real and not wishful thinking. It turned me from near-nihilist into near-believer.

 

[boomerang]

I must put in a quick plug for Elisabeth Kubler Ross's "On Death And Dying". It's the first treatise I happen to have read by someone who spent many hundreds of hours with people during and at the moment of their demise.

I can recall sitting quietly with my wife as her mother's life ebbed away. The elderly lady was utterly non-lucid a good 99 percent of the time, with short but notable periods of a few minutes at at time when a sudden sense of focus would come over her. It became apparent that she was upholding what seemed to be her side of a lucid conversation. My wife would look me in the eye and say: "She's talking with aunt so and so" or whatever. This has left a lasting impression.

I later mentioned this to a lady who does extensive work with hospice. She confirmed this to be a very common occurrence.

 

[Constance]

My daughter's name is Ani. Our brush with death with her in the ICU this past spring rocked my world in a way that I haven't been destabilized since watching my father drown. I have not really properly processed that part of the hospital experience as she is here and is monitored closely as hypoglycemia is always just around the corner, so life has this edge to it that does not provide a cushion to take time to deal with what happened. In fact, to be honest, I prefer not to think about that part of the experience and tend to just block that out altogether, as I have found that death and close calls with it tend to have the power to pull me underwater, and then I'm just useless to everyone. Not to sure if it"s my mindfulness training that has allowed me to simply accept things as they are or if my brain simply made an executive decision to not be plagued by that which is beyond my control, but either way, the path always leads forward and I work hard not to look backwards anymore.

I think it's wise not to dwell on your terror during your child's {Ani's } ER and hospitalization crisis. I don't think it's necessary to relive that terror again and again and again; re-engaging and remembering it repeatedly serves no good purpose for anyone. After several months I stopped reliving my anguished experiences of that world-altering night; I would turn away from doing so and concentrate on what I was learning about NDEs, imagining Annie's finding herself out of her body at the site of the accident and unafraid, feeling the consummate sense of peace the NDE experiencers describe at that stage, and then the experiences that follow. And by then I had more to think about on the basis of the contacts she was making me with and within me, the power of her efforts to break through with evidence of her survival. .

I spent a lot of time looking backwards after my father's death and I lost a tremendous amount of time. In fact I was just plain lost for quite a while over that death, even though I had a living family right in front of me. Traumatic experiences associated with such events...I don't know - Sudden Death just rearranges our priorities sometimes in ways we are never quite prepared for as we were never really given any tools previously to know how to deal with it. As a society, I feel our attitudes around death are not that healthy, mostly because we don't talk about it much and fail to share, heal or know how to integrate such an experience into our lives.

Witnessing your father's death by drowning had to shake you very deeply, despite, as you say, having a living family right in front of you. I was present at my mother's death after her long illness with terminal cancer and to an extent that kind of death is easier to accept since one is well-prepared for its inevitability. In fact, we all felt a sense of relief in her release from great suffering that required continuous morphine for several months. I was with her for her last three days and late the last night, while she still appeared to have no awareness whatever, I gently squeezed her hand again and this time she squeezed back.* We don't know how much consciousness remains in people in comas or under deep sedation. Good to know and remember.

I'm sorry that you had to be there to witness your father's sudden death, Burnt. It had to be a heart-searing experience. During the half-year I knew my mother was going to die, I would be overtaken frequently with panic and grief. I learned to let it break me inside, to feel my feelings fully at times when I was alone, so that I wouldn't let it all show in my daughter's presence. She was in fourth grade at the time and would have been overwhelmed if I was overwhelmed. I think it's important to know that one can get through these experiences so long as one takes time intermittently to feel one's feelings fully. The only way beyond it is through it, but in stages one can endure. Feelings ignored, placed at an abstract distance, or denied do not disappear but continue to affect us and in damaging ways the longer we refuse to enter into them. But this can't be sustained constantly. It's a long process in which we best take what we can stand for the moment. Learning what we can, from many sources, about the likelihood that our loved ones survive in some form and are not lost to us forever {for me a certainty by now} helps enormously, and this thread therefore might serve a very useful purpose.

*One more small thing people need to know. In situations like my mother's (in nursing or retirement homes, hospitals, and hospices) the medical staff know when the dying process has begun, notify the family, and withdraw intravenous fluids. I objected to this but was informed that this is done so as not to prolong the process and any continuing pain or suffering of the patient. They do use and provide for family members and friends small square sponges attached to Q-tip-like sticks and cups of water with which to moisten the lips and gum tissue of the dying person. This prevents the discomfort of chapping and drying out of the lips and mouth, satisfies thirst sufficiently for comfort, and I think is probably deeply satisfying in a fundamental physical and psychological way given the usually sustaining effects of water experienced in life. There's not much we can do for our loved one's at that point, but we can do that.

Speaking of that, I have to add my daughter's experience when my father died years later. I hadn't taken her along on the last trip to Wisconsin when I knew my mother's death was imminent because I thought she was too young to go through the experience. But she insisted on coming with me when the nurses called to tell me that my father (then 95) had pneumonia and would die within days. She was 17 years old then and stricken to see her grandfather lying in bed with oxygen tubes in his nostrils and weakened (not his usual wide awake and jovial self), but she went immediately to his side and proceeded to hold his hand, stroke his forehead, look deeply into his eyes, and say all the right things. I don't know how she knew them; she sensed what he needed to hear -- encouragement and love, and that everything would be okay. Soon she went to his bureau (the one brought from my parent's bedroom when my mother needed round the clock nurses and my father could not manage alone, the visiting nurses advised us), and brought over to my father a photograph of him and my mother in their prime, out for some special occasion. Annie held the photo where he could see it and told him that 'grandma is waiting for you, she's looking forward to seeing you'. His eyes lit up with joy as they conversed about this. He was transformed. My sister and I also had the sense to tell him, when Annie was out in the hall crying, that we would be fine, that we were grown up and strong, that it was okay to go on to mother. (This is what hospice nurses advise since parents and grandparents are reluctant to leave, try to hold on thinking their children can't manage without them.) While Annie was in the hall being comforted by one of the nurses, the hospice nurse assigned at his beside marveled at Annie's sensitivity and natural insight into what her grandfather needed to hear, said she had natural gifts for nursing, especially hospice nursing. Annie was and is a marvel, a miracle for me. Later in the evening, while applying the moistened sponge to her grandfather's lips, she remembered how much he had enjoyed his gin martinis and said to my sister that she should run over to her apartment and bring back some gin to soak the sponge in. The hospice nurse approved and my sister was back in a trice with a small jar of gin. Our father was delighted with the taste of it, smiled and laughed. We all did.

He died peacefully the next morning, while we were still asleep at my sister's apartment. I've heard that parents and grandparents will often wait until their children are gone before they let go of this reality.

 

[Constance]

Like Raymond Moody, I think I'm going to be surprised. And like G.R.R. Martin, "I'd sooner go to Middle Earth". The many subjectively colored NDE reports seem to indicate that at least for a moment, we get to create our own private afterlife, maybe like a lucid dream (although it's often described as even more vibrant and real). So maybe it's going to be like "the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" for me. What follows - if anything - I've no idea, though. All I know is that my own experience (with two cases indicative of reincarnation) was undoubtedly real and not wishful thinking. It turned me from near-nihilist into near-believer.

"the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise"

That's magnificent poetry, Polterwurst. Thank you for it.

Would you tell us more about your experiences indicative of reincarnation?

 

[Constance]

I must put in a quick plug for Elisabeth Kubler Ross's "On Death And Dying". It's the first treatise I happen to have read by someone who spent many hundreds of hours with people during and at the moment of their demise.

I can recall sitting quietly with my wife as her mother's life ebbed away. The elderly lady was utterly non-lucid a good 99 percent of the time, with short but notable periods of a few minutes at at time when a sudden sense of focus would come over her. It became apparent that she was upholding what seemed to be her side of a lucid conversation. My wife would look me in the eye and say: "She's talking with aunt so and so" or whatever. This has left a lasting impression.

I later mentioned this to a lady who does extensive work with hospice. She confirmed this to be a very common occurrence.

Yes. I first heard about this from my mother-in-law. She and the whole extended family I came to know after marrying my now ex-husband had lived in Hungary, leaving under duress at the end of WWII. Years ago she and I were sitting and talking in her kitchen in Milwaukee and she was describing the deaths of family members and others as she was growing up and later raising her children. They had vineyards and made wine, had extended families and friends in the village they had lived in for generations. Except for medical emergencies dictating a trip to Budapest, people died at home, attended by family members who had long witnessed the conversations the dying held with deceased family members. Hospice nurses and hospital nurses have also witnessed these conversations and in some reported cases have also seen the apparitions seen by their patients. I read that Kubler-Ross also encountered one of her deceased patients who visited her in the hallway and conversed with her in her office at the hospital where Kubler-Ross worked. In fact, I read that text but don't remember the source title.

This is a good place to mention that dying persons in a coma, otherwise massively sedated, or long without apparent memory and interaction with others sometimes become inexplicably lucid and talkative in the hours before death, as reported by doctors and nurses.

Related to this is a striking phenomenon recently discovered by technicians and doctors attending the turning off of life-support systems of persons considered to be brain-dead. Pim von Lommel reported experimentation undertaken in hospitals in the Netherlands in which EEGs were hooked up to such patients before and during the cessation of life-support which demonstrated a sudden and dramatic increase in brain activity lasting several minutes after life-support was turned off. This data is presented toward the end of his book on NDEs, perhaps in an appendix. Here's a link to the book, which can probably be read in part at Google Books:

 

[Constance]

. . .This part of the experience, the life review:

"In the 'life review', one experiences everything again but including the recognition of the negative effects of one's words and actions on others."

"The transformative effect is in fact so statistically uniform in comparison with other areas of demographic study that some near-death experience investigators point to it as much as to experiencer accounts' detail as evidence for the empirical reality of the phenomenon itself. "

This is extraordinary to me ... and is noted in cases where this information didn't seem to be of much concern to the individual during their life. Further, experiencers sometimes avoid unethical actions in order to avoid the pains of this life review in the future. Let's take a mainstream viewpoint - that this is a psychological experience, something that happens in the brain ... what we'd need to show is the evolutionary benefit or other mechanism of a life review at the time of death.

It is extraordinary. I think it signifies that consciousness does continue beyond the death of the body in a continuing evolution of mind, spirit, soul, subjectivity. There could be no physical evolutionary benefit of vivid and total life review and learning from it at the point of the death of the individual body. The widespread (perhaps universal) changes in values and behaviors of those returning to the body following NDEs are perhaps the most persuasive evidence that these experiences are real.

 

[Constance]

There are many good directions to go from here ... one thing I'm immediately curious about is the second consciousness:

"No panic; very like the attitude of the second consciousess whose thoughts or voice I overheard during my spontaneous OBE four months later."

I know you've mentioned it before, in the C&P thread and as a dispassionate or calm inner voice, I believe - I've experienced this voice too in times of inevitability ... it seems to me to be my inner voice but with a certainty or finality, a kind of authority in that sense and that tells me what is going to happen (recognizes the inevitability first in my head) ... is it like that?

I think it strongly suggests at least the participatory nature of consciousness, that others, or other parts of ourselves, appear at times of crisis. In the rush toward collision with that tree, the calmly serene presence that took over my consciousness might always have been a resident part of my consciousness, emerging only when needed, or a discarnate being familiar with me and somehow connected enough with me to know when I am in a crisis. Many people have experienced an inner (or an outwardly heard) voice expressing a specific warning in time for them to avert a disaster for themselves or others. Even animals are able to transmit such warnings, demonstating prescience that might come from within themselves or from elsewhere.

In the OBE, I first found only myself, my consciousness, up in the corner, across from the large room (a photo studio) in which I'd been sitting and reading in preparation for a class. I was surprised but completely calm. I stayed in that position for a while, getting used to the strangeness of this relocation, observing myself (body) from behind and somewhat off center. Then my point of view gradually moved along the ceiling, still near the top of that wall, toward the left, centering my perspective on my body, noting my blue tweed coat still draped over the chair I'd been sitting on, at which point another point of view on my body became apparent to my left (or within the left region of my consciousness). I overheard her saying, it seemed to herself but possibly also to me, that "she [referring to my unconscious body] is a mess" or "in a mess." But her tone was unconcerned; the implication was that my temporary separation from my body was 'no big deal'. I had the impression that she was long familiar with me (part of my being), maybe assigned to me, and that she had, as she saw it, been summoned to my aid for no pressing purpose. Then she faded out and I quickly returned to my body (I don't remember how; I was just suddenly there, back in almost normal operating condition). But when I was relocated in my body I did become somewhat shaken, realizing that something extraodinary had just happened to me. I packed up my books, grabbed my coat, and went directly to the University Counselling Office, described what I'd just experienced, and was sent to a neurologist, who found no physical explanation for the experience and prescribed a tranquillizer. And that was that. I didn't know anything about consciousness or paranormal experience at that point in my life and did not have the sense to pursue these subjects then. But the experience remains as vivid as it was when it happened nearly 40 years ago.