GentleJerk
Carrot juice pimp.
- Dec 14, 2021
- 1,372
I like to describe my 'near-death' experience as a 'partial-death' experience as 'near' implies that the death process did not begin, only came close to beginning. But having had a NDE myself, I believe that I was able to have a real glimpse of the beginning of the death process. It was still a death experience imo, the only difference between a near-death experience and complete death, is the fact that a near death experience lacks the continuity and eventual completion of the entire death process.
Many people deny the implications of near-death experiences as being just that- 'near-death' and not true death. Often I find 1) they have not personally experienced an NDE 2) they have an agenda against religious beliefs, or beliefs in reincarnation, an afterlife or heaven and hell, or 3) are likening something such as sleep or anesthesia-induced unconsciousness to a classic NDE.
What is or is not happening once death is 'fully complete' is probably only able to be comprehended by a being who has completely died, and by it's very definition can never give an account at that stage. I have my own thoughts on what this might be based on my own understanding and NDE, but admittedly they remain speculation until I am completely dead, and would be nearly impossible to communicate to others satisfactorily, so I won't bother sharing them. The term 'afterlife' is valid to me when it is interpreted as 'whatever state that is after life', and not taken in the literal sense of the word. But I don't have any comments at this time regarding a so-called afterlife, only my NDE.
One thing that troubles me is the lack of similarity in a lot of NDE's. There are often reports of religious individuals having NDE's that seem to conveniently fit in with their beliefs. These NDE's raise serious doubts for me, though I will not deny that these people had these experiences, and although some become religious after their NDE, I can't help but remain skeptical. This is because; what I experienced seemed totally divorced from any sort of beliefs I may have held or preconceptions about what might happen when death comes. It was not open to interpretation. It was an inescapable, undeniable, universal truth that affected every part of my being and involved every faculty.
I was involved in an altercation many years ago, with a group of people. I was tackled to the ground, bashed, and kicked in the head and ribs/chest. I ended up with a broken hand, two broken ribs, a fractured facial bone, and a skull fracture with subgaleal haematoma. I lost consciousness, stopped breathing, and did not have a pulse. The exact amount of time I could have been described as legally dead for is uncertain, but it was at least 3 minutes according to some people who witnessed the event and helped me.
Keep in mind that the ability to sufficiently describe what really happened in that time during my partial death experience does not exist. Human language simply does not have the capability of carrying that sort of information. Words can only paint a picture so to speak, the true reality is ineffable. No amount of words can allow another person to accurately understand it. An attempt to explain it is, at best, an art exhibition of sorts.
The first thing that I remember experiencing, the moment I was kicked in the head and lost consciousness, was a sort of inhuman and disembodied awareness that something very significant had happened, a massive change in reality, and that it had to do with the physical body being attacked and struck down. At the very beginning there was still some kind of awareness of bodily injury, as the senses and faculties began to change. But this awareness of injury seemed rather 'impersonal', less pain-orientated and more representative of a thing that exists in that strange fabric of reality that is the universal experience of every living thing.
I started to experience the usual 'barrier' between myself and the external, beginning to disappear. When usually there is an obvious difference between the self and the non-self, for instance your own arm or a chair in the room, this difference became less and less noticeable. As the ability to feel my own body began to decline, my awareness began to lose the ability to interpret where "I" ended and everything else began. This is very difficult to explain properly. In simple terms, the fundamental differences and the separation that usually exists, between myself and everything else, began to lift away.
As this barrier lifted away, so did other seemingly solid concepts such as time. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time, measured in seconds. Kairos is the subjective experience of time, it is malleable and it can fly or crawl in everyday life, you know, "sometimes a moment can seem to last forever"... but during this death experience, time seemed to begin slipping and sliding all over the place, like a person standing on a platform of slippery ice that is tilting in all directions, moving about and unable to stay in the one place.
I felt my awareness (or possibly 'consciousness') of time as usually fixed in the one place, begin to travel forwards, backwards and all over. This gave me the sensation of a sort of 'eternity' worth of time that this NDE lasted. I could not tell five minutes from a thousand years. This was accompanied by seemingly real journeys and experiences that indicated time was no longer moving along normally. Amazingly, I had some sort of awareness or 'consciousness' of the journeys that were taking place, unrestrained by the normal chronological boundaries of time. Even though in this state "I" did not have eyes, I could still "see" the events happening. I "saw" time move until my physical body was many years in the future at a moment when it was nothing but a few boney remains being partially excavated from the ground, another moment was a fleeting "memory" of the world in a state that it once existed in long before I was born- and at one point I was even able to experience a strange memory of my friends talking about me at school, on a day I was absent.
Even though the experience was, in the classical sense, almost entirely non-religious in nature, and I do not fully subscribe to any religious teachings- this part of the experience rings a bell with what the Tibetan book of the dead calls the "Bardo" or intermediate state after death. The Bardo state consists of phenomenon that have been described as "including hallucinations". In Tibetan Buddhism, this is the state from where escape from rebirth may happen for those who are advanced enough in their understanding, to recognize the 'non-nature' of material existence and remain sufficiently unattached until the window of opportunity has passed- but usually beings in the Bardo become affected by the intermediate state in a way that drives a rebirth, into a 'higher' or 'lower' realm dictated by the force of their karma. It is represented in the center of the wheel of life, as a circle half black and half white, with beings descending down guided by 'demons' and ascending up guided by 'boddhisatvas'. Taken to be truth or not, it's Interesting nonetheless.
If people are wondering why I mention religious and Buddhist stuff sometimes in my posts, it's because I have a scholarly interest in these things. I was raised in a catholic family and always questioned everything, which was not OK. I did not like going to church either and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. For a long time I was rather anti-religious, until around 18 years old I lived in a Buddhist temple for a few years. Although my interest was peaked and at first I made some changes in my life, also attending festivals and some prayer ceremonies- I simply rented a property at the monastery and I did not become an actual practicing buddhist, but I learned about Buddhism and it changed my attitude towards spiritual beliefs. It was refreshing to experience a set of beliefs that held the view of a person being capable of precipitating their own transformation and spiritual salvation instead of blind faith in some outside supernatural force... and since then I have become more tolerant and interested in these things and all religions.
Anyway, as I began to move further away from the usual circumstances of existence during this death experience, I felt myself losing more and more layers of my individual humanity and pushed very close towards a final threshold. I was a completely inhuman awareness at this point, without a body, able to sense everything from other beings and their emotions, a grandiose scale of time, to the living and non-living environment. The world and everything in it still existed in a glorious unified way, it was still very much alive, it was very loud, bright, terrifying, wonderful, and completely and utterly mad. Despite all this commotion, in the background I was sensing a very large 'something' approaching, something so large that once it arrives, everything at that point will become nothing in comparison, and it all felt so familiar. I believe this was the true, complete death state drawing near, something like the state before a person is born. Just because I don't remember that state when I'm alive, doesn't make it any less 'real'... A good example is early infant life that a person will never remember, seemingly non-existent now but still real and always there.
This was when I began to have a strange urge to find some way back out of what was happening. Whatever was happening, my last shreds of consciousness did not want to accept it and clutched onto this urge to find a way back to the norm. By this point things had already gone far beyond normal comprehension, and the next moments are so difficult to remember now, I liken them to a waking dream. But the only way I can explain it is, somehow all my unraveling layers of humanity gathered together and my entire awareness reeled back into this body. I remember opening my eyes and then taking a huge breath in, suddenly sitting up, muscles and joints slightly stiff, with the taste of blood in my mouth. There where a group of people around me scared out of thier wits, crying as they thought I was dead. They were asking all sorts of questions and yelling back and forth at each other, but all I could concentrate on was finding some water to drink. The next events don't have anything to do with the actual NDE so I'll finish up the story here.
The only other thing I will mention is how much this profoundly changed my personality and my life. And not all for the better. But one thing I see as positive is, that ever since this hapenned, I have a much greater empathy for other beings and the suffering we all experience.
Dying is a significant experience that has it's roots in life, the experience could be pleasant or chaotic and could take many paths, but death itself must be better than a flower. For a flower might please you for a moment, but it cannot bring someone deep and profound peace for a very, very long time.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, I'm hungry and my butt is numb after sitting here for a couple hours typing this out.
Many people deny the implications of near-death experiences as being just that- 'near-death' and not true death. Often I find 1) they have not personally experienced an NDE 2) they have an agenda against religious beliefs, or beliefs in reincarnation, an afterlife or heaven and hell, or 3) are likening something such as sleep or anesthesia-induced unconsciousness to a classic NDE.
What is or is not happening once death is 'fully complete' is probably only able to be comprehended by a being who has completely died, and by it's very definition can never give an account at that stage. I have my own thoughts on what this might be based on my own understanding and NDE, but admittedly they remain speculation until I am completely dead, and would be nearly impossible to communicate to others satisfactorily, so I won't bother sharing them. The term 'afterlife' is valid to me when it is interpreted as 'whatever state that is after life', and not taken in the literal sense of the word. But I don't have any comments at this time regarding a so-called afterlife, only my NDE.
One thing that troubles me is the lack of similarity in a lot of NDE's. There are often reports of religious individuals having NDE's that seem to conveniently fit in with their beliefs. These NDE's raise serious doubts for me, though I will not deny that these people had these experiences, and although some become religious after their NDE, I can't help but remain skeptical. This is because; what I experienced seemed totally divorced from any sort of beliefs I may have held or preconceptions about what might happen when death comes. It was not open to interpretation. It was an inescapable, undeniable, universal truth that affected every part of my being and involved every faculty.
I was involved in an altercation many years ago, with a group of people. I was tackled to the ground, bashed, and kicked in the head and ribs/chest. I ended up with a broken hand, two broken ribs, a fractured facial bone, and a skull fracture with subgaleal haematoma. I lost consciousness, stopped breathing, and did not have a pulse. The exact amount of time I could have been described as legally dead for is uncertain, but it was at least 3 minutes according to some people who witnessed the event and helped me.
Keep in mind that the ability to sufficiently describe what really happened in that time during my partial death experience does not exist. Human language simply does not have the capability of carrying that sort of information. Words can only paint a picture so to speak, the true reality is ineffable. No amount of words can allow another person to accurately understand it. An attempt to explain it is, at best, an art exhibition of sorts.
The first thing that I remember experiencing, the moment I was kicked in the head and lost consciousness, was a sort of inhuman and disembodied awareness that something very significant had happened, a massive change in reality, and that it had to do with the physical body being attacked and struck down. At the very beginning there was still some kind of awareness of bodily injury, as the senses and faculties began to change. But this awareness of injury seemed rather 'impersonal', less pain-orientated and more representative of a thing that exists in that strange fabric of reality that is the universal experience of every living thing.
I started to experience the usual 'barrier' between myself and the external, beginning to disappear. When usually there is an obvious difference between the self and the non-self, for instance your own arm or a chair in the room, this difference became less and less noticeable. As the ability to feel my own body began to decline, my awareness began to lose the ability to interpret where "I" ended and everything else began. This is very difficult to explain properly. In simple terms, the fundamental differences and the separation that usually exists, between myself and everything else, began to lift away.
As this barrier lifted away, so did other seemingly solid concepts such as time. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time, measured in seconds. Kairos is the subjective experience of time, it is malleable and it can fly or crawl in everyday life, you know, "sometimes a moment can seem to last forever"... but during this death experience, time seemed to begin slipping and sliding all over the place, like a person standing on a platform of slippery ice that is tilting in all directions, moving about and unable to stay in the one place.
I felt my awareness (or possibly 'consciousness') of time as usually fixed in the one place, begin to travel forwards, backwards and all over. This gave me the sensation of a sort of 'eternity' worth of time that this NDE lasted. I could not tell five minutes from a thousand years. This was accompanied by seemingly real journeys and experiences that indicated time was no longer moving along normally. Amazingly, I had some sort of awareness or 'consciousness' of the journeys that were taking place, unrestrained by the normal chronological boundaries of time. Even though in this state "I" did not have eyes, I could still "see" the events happening. I "saw" time move until my physical body was many years in the future at a moment when it was nothing but a few boney remains being partially excavated from the ground, another moment was a fleeting "memory" of the world in a state that it once existed in long before I was born- and at one point I was even able to experience a strange memory of my friends talking about me at school, on a day I was absent.
Even though the experience was, in the classical sense, almost entirely non-religious in nature, and I do not fully subscribe to any religious teachings- this part of the experience rings a bell with what the Tibetan book of the dead calls the "Bardo" or intermediate state after death. The Bardo state consists of phenomenon that have been described as "including hallucinations". In Tibetan Buddhism, this is the state from where escape from rebirth may happen for those who are advanced enough in their understanding, to recognize the 'non-nature' of material existence and remain sufficiently unattached until the window of opportunity has passed- but usually beings in the Bardo become affected by the intermediate state in a way that drives a rebirth, into a 'higher' or 'lower' realm dictated by the force of their karma. It is represented in the center of the wheel of life, as a circle half black and half white, with beings descending down guided by 'demons' and ascending up guided by 'boddhisatvas'. Taken to be truth or not, it's Interesting nonetheless.
If people are wondering why I mention religious and Buddhist stuff sometimes in my posts, it's because I have a scholarly interest in these things. I was raised in a catholic family and always questioned everything, which was not OK. I did not like going to church either and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. For a long time I was rather anti-religious, until around 18 years old I lived in a Buddhist temple for a few years. Although my interest was peaked and at first I made some changes in my life, also attending festivals and some prayer ceremonies- I simply rented a property at the monastery and I did not become an actual practicing buddhist, but I learned about Buddhism and it changed my attitude towards spiritual beliefs. It was refreshing to experience a set of beliefs that held the view of a person being capable of precipitating their own transformation and spiritual salvation instead of blind faith in some outside supernatural force... and since then I have become more tolerant and interested in these things and all religions.
Anyway, as I began to move further away from the usual circumstances of existence during this death experience, I felt myself losing more and more layers of my individual humanity and pushed very close towards a final threshold. I was a completely inhuman awareness at this point, without a body, able to sense everything from other beings and their emotions, a grandiose scale of time, to the living and non-living environment. The world and everything in it still existed in a glorious unified way, it was still very much alive, it was very loud, bright, terrifying, wonderful, and completely and utterly mad. Despite all this commotion, in the background I was sensing a very large 'something' approaching, something so large that once it arrives, everything at that point will become nothing in comparison, and it all felt so familiar. I believe this was the true, complete death state drawing near, something like the state before a person is born. Just because I don't remember that state when I'm alive, doesn't make it any less 'real'... A good example is early infant life that a person will never remember, seemingly non-existent now but still real and always there.
This was when I began to have a strange urge to find some way back out of what was happening. Whatever was happening, my last shreds of consciousness did not want to accept it and clutched onto this urge to find a way back to the norm. By this point things had already gone far beyond normal comprehension, and the next moments are so difficult to remember now, I liken them to a waking dream. But the only way I can explain it is, somehow all my unraveling layers of humanity gathered together and my entire awareness reeled back into this body. I remember opening my eyes and then taking a huge breath in, suddenly sitting up, muscles and joints slightly stiff, with the taste of blood in my mouth. There where a group of people around me scared out of thier wits, crying as they thought I was dead. They were asking all sorts of questions and yelling back and forth at each other, but all I could concentrate on was finding some water to drink. The next events don't have anything to do with the actual NDE so I'll finish up the story here.
The only other thing I will mention is how much this profoundly changed my personality and my life. And not all for the better. But one thing I see as positive is, that ever since this hapenned, I have a much greater empathy for other beings and the suffering we all experience.
Dying is a significant experience that has it's roots in life, the experience could be pleasant or chaotic and could take many paths, but death itself must be better than a flower. For a flower might please you for a moment, but it cannot bring someone deep and profound peace for a very, very long time.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, I'm hungry and my butt is numb after sitting here for a couple hours typing this out.
