Saturday, August 1, 10AM – 12 PM.
With the development of increasingly effective resuscitative techniques, medical science has opened what some may consider a Pandora’s Box, containing reports of conscious experiences during the time patients were clinically dead. Reports of what was occurring in the room during the time doctors and nurses were striving to resuscitate the patient rule out the possibility that the experience occurred outside the time that the heart and brain were flatlined. These memories are referred to as “Near-Death Experiences (NDEs),” although cardiologist Sam Parnia, in his compelling book, “Erasing Death” prefers the term “Actual-Death Experience,” stating that the patients he resuscitates have experienced cardiac arrest and cessation of brain function, therefore by current scientific standards, are clinically dead, not “near dead.”
NDEs challenge the prevailing beliefs on the part of mainstream science regarding the nature of consciousness as chemical activity produced by – and limited to – the brain. If the brain has no activity, how can consciousness continue? The common elements of many NDEs also reveal patterns of experience in an after-death state – at least, in the minutes or hours immediately following death – implying the likelihood of survival of consciousness after death.
In our August meeting, we will discuss various types of NDE, their paradigm-shifting implications for medical science and biology, and the long-term effects of these experiences on the people who have them. Please join us!