To make an end is to make a beginning
2002-10-29 || 9:47 a.m.

I certainly wasn't planning to write another entry quite so soon today but there was a programme on TV that I just have to comment on.

It was a debate on near death experiences. One guy was saying he would not deny how vivid these experiences are to people and undoubtedly they cause some to make major life changes but you cannot draw conclusions that apply to all humanity from them.

Well I follow his logic and on a certain level I agree with him: that one personal experience cannot be the basis for a common experience of all humanity but then again are not all experiences common to humanity?

But there was another guy, some research fellow from Southampton University. He came out with that old chestnut that near death experiences tell us about the clinical process of brain death.

Well that is utter rubbish. It is utter rubbish because what it fails to take into account is instances when people report what was happening around them. If the eyes are closed and you are unconscious you should not be able to see what is going on around you. Fair enough, maybe you will say you can still hear and feel. But what about when someone reports something from outside the room they are unconscious in? When they say they have travelled out of their body and they tell what someone was doing in another room, what they saw on the roof or what someone they know was doing miles away? How can this be the clinical process of brain death? Surely the only conclusion you could draw is that there must be a mind and a brain, there must be some aspect that does not need the brain to function.

I am not explaining this very well.

The one thing I always find odd though and no-one has ever satisfactorily explained it, is the point why would the brain do this? What would be the point of imagining another realm, another place if it was all just not true. Surely then, we would just die in the same way we fall asleep and know no more.

I find this logic, this explanation that the brain conjures up this dying experience to be startlingly ridiculous to the point of insanity.

After all, the simplest explanations are usually correct and if some people say they have experienced it, why can we just not believe them and accept that at the time they interpreted it as meaning a certain thing and it follows, therefore, that it probably did mean this.

The trouble with retrospect and other people's analysis is ego.