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Posted: 12-10-2012 00:22 Post subject:

Found one instance of the 'hidden test signs' ...

Penny Sartori (then a nurse in Wales) conducted a five-year study of NDE experiences in an intensive care unit. Among other things, she put a hidden symbol in the patient's room, situated so that it could only be seen from above.

The most striking NDE case arising during the study provided a number of interesting results, but they did not include a report of the hidden symbol. To the fair, the patient (once recovered / resuscitated) said he hadn't looked back in the direction of where the symbol had been place. The publication focusing on this case is available online at:

http://inicia.es/de/luisfountain/archivos/a-prospectively-studied-nde.pdf

Sartori (who's since earned her PhD for her NDE research) has a website:

http://www.drpennysartori.com

Posted: 12-10-2012 00:37 Post subject:

Follow-up note ...

It appears that (in the broader context of the study; beyond the single case cited above) Sartori also placed playing cards in positions (e.g., atop cabinets) where they could only be seen from above.

Apparently none of the patients reporting OBE-style NDE's reported having seen the hidden cards.

Posted: 12-10-2012 12:00 Post subject:

Posted: 14-10-2012 09:20 Post subject:

Let’s not be shy about the afterlife
Why are we so wary about investigating the premonitions and spiritual experiences that surround death?
By Jenny McCartney
7:00PM BST 13 Oct 2012

I’ve noticed that the first time small children get a whiff of the concept of death, they can’t stop talking about it. Suddenly they’re like junior barristers, and their questions are notably to the point. Does it hurt? Where do you go? Can you come back?

If you start, hesitantly, to reply – in what must seem a maddeningly vague way, given the whopping impact of your initial news – that after you die you carry on somewhere else (Dawkins, if you’re reading this, back off for a minute) the children are straight into the practicalities. What do you get to eat? Who’s there? Can the people here see you?

I can’t say I blame them, really. Revelations don’t come much bigger than the one saying that on some as yet unknown day each of us is going to depart this world, and no one will see us again in this life. I’ve had over 40 years to get used to it and it still shocks me. And yet, in contrast to the pleasingly direct, investigative approach taken by children towards the matter, most adults spend their time ignoring it and hushing it up.

Our modern Western culture is largely taken up with the prolongation of life and the avoidance of death. That’s a very reasonable notion to some extent, since most of us enjoy life and would like to have as much of it as possible. But a by-product is that the worried dance of denial about our own mortality makes the final stage of life much harder, bleaker and lonelier for dying people and their families.

We treat the deaths of others either as a piece of gross personal negligence or an outlandish case of bad luck. That is perhaps why I found the recent Newsweek essay by Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon who does not seem noticeably wacky, to be rather cheering. Dr Alexander contracted a very rare form of bacterial meningitis, which put him in a coma for seven days and effectively shut down his brain. When he recovered he described an experience which had apparently convinced him that an afterlife existed. It was of the lavishly conventional kind, with fluffy clouds, shimmering beings, and a beautiful blue-eyed guide – which has come as a gift to those who are predisposed to mock Dr Alexander as some kind of nut. Presumably they would have respected his account more if his vision had been less baroque.

In any case, we can probably all agree that a professionally well-respected man, who was not normally delusional, somehow had – while at death’s door – an overwhelmingly positive experience which profoundly altered his view of the afterlife. Why that occurred, or what it might signify for anyone else, is of course open to heavy debate.

Yet if one listens to the lectures and discussions of Dr Peter Fenwick, it becomes apparent that Dr Alexander’s is not an isolated experience. Dr Fenwick is a leading neuropsychiatrist who is an authority on near-death experiences, and has written a book called The Art of Dying which advocates the importance of “a good death”. Studies led him to conclude that near-death experiences occurred in a percentage of patients who had undergone cardiac arrest and had no pulse rate, heart rate or brainstem reflexes prior to their resuscitation. He described the discovery “that people have mental states which are present in the absence of brain function” as of “astonishing” importance to science. It has, he says, opened up a discussion on the nature of consciousness and even “the potential for a continuation of life after death”.

I listened late at night to one of Dr Fenwick’s online interviews. He seemed eminently serious: scholarly, articulate and not prone to stating exaggerated conclusions. Dr Fenwick had expended much professional time and thought collecting data from the dying, and examining their experiences and those of their loved ones. He spoke with confidence about certain phenomena which quite commonly occurred around death, such as “premonitions” by an individual or someone close to them that their death is approaching, or a dying person reporting the vision of a dead relative or spouse coming to collect them. (Interestingly, the “guide” figure varies according to one’s culture.)

I have no idea why such phenomena might happen, or indeed whether they might have a physical or psychological explanation. The fact is, however, that many people are aware of them, but are almost embarrassed to discuss them in case they are dismissed as crazy: they speak of them privately, to friends. We are taught that such things belong to the slippery, shameful realm of unreason. Yet while superstition is a deep, dark bog, science has sometimes assumed a rather blinkered resistance to lines of inquiry that might conceivably collide with spirituality: Dr Fenwick is in a minority. We are still in the dark about death, and it’s the biggest thing that happens to us. Why, unlike our children, are we not brave enough to ask it many more questions?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/jennymccartney/9606158/Lets-not-be-shy-about-the-afterlife.html

Posted: 13-08-2013 01:02 Post subject: