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Media Watch for January 2003 (Issue 14)
Scientists Ponder Evidence of Survival and NDE’s. The reverend Sharon Snowman told us of a recent report in the British Journal Nature that has proven to be rather controversial amongst Spiritualists. It seems that a team lead by Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at Geneva University Hospital, Switzerland, has discovered a specific location of the brain, which when stimulated, causes the patient to have what appeared to be an Out of Body Experience (OBE). Neuroscientists often argue that out of body and near death experiences are nothing more than a malfunction of the brain. These findings would seem to support that argument.
Naturally, a number of Spiritualist-minded people have pointed out to us that there is also good research that contradicts these findings, as illustrated in the following two items.
Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies. A British scientist studying heart attack patients says he is finding evidence that suggests that consciousness may continue after the brain has stopped functioning and a patient is clinically dead. Dr. Sam Parnia, one of two doctors from Southampton General Hospital in England who have been studying so-called near-death experiences (NDEs), told Reuters in an interview. “The studies are very significant in that we have a group of people with no brain function ... who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to function. We need to do much larger-scale studies, but the possibility is certainly there to suggest that consciousness, or the soul, keeps thinking and reasoning even if a person‘s heart has stopped, he is not breathing and his brain activity is nil” By Sarah Tippit for Reuters.
Lancet Article on NDEs. We previously reported on an article titled “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands” that was published in volume number 358 of The Lancet. The Lancet is one of the world’s most respected medical journals. Lancet publishing this article has caused quite an uproar in the medical community.
The article sites a study by Dr. Pim van Lommel and colleagues of Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem and is available at www.thelancet.com online. The results showed that medical factors could not account for the occurrence of NDEs. Although all patients had been clinically dead, most did not have an NDE. The researchers noted that, “If purely physiological factors had caused the NDE most of our patients should have had this experience.” The paper states that induced NDE experiences are not identical to spontaneous NDE experiences. It questions, “How clear consciousness outside one’s body can be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG? … Furthermore, blind people have described veridical perception during out of body experiences at the time of this experience.”
Comment: The scientific community is making an honest effort to understand the nature of Self and the reasons for often-reported experiences that seem to suggest the survival of consciousness after physical death. These studies do not really contradict one another. If your training is based on the belief that consciousness is the result of the evolution of the brain, then it is natural for you to assume that all functions of consciousness are dependent on the brain. However, if your training also includes the understanding that consciousness (Self) exist outside of the brain, then the same evidence will tell you that you have only found the part of the brain that hosts a particular function of Self in the physical world.
The Power of Prayer. David Marshall was sitting in a small class of church students led by the minister, the Rev. Charles Harding, with the room dark and the session coming to an end. David wrote, “At the time my wife had been on the other side for a number of years and my son, who was about 42 years old, was dying of AIDS out in California. As I rose to turn on the lights I said to my wife in a prayer, ‘Take him by the hand and lead him over the threshold.’ I was wondering if she received my message and as I stood up to go turn the lights on I got a very strong aroma of Channel #5 perfume, which was her favorite. I always gave it to her for a Christmas present. At that moment I realized the power of prayer was working. The next day I received a telegram telling me my son had died.”
EVP not just Voices. An AA-EVP member who records Electronic Voice Phenomena wrote to us saying that he always uses two tape recorders at the same time and captures sounds that would have been missed otherwise. For example he was walking with a friend down a gravel path. On tape A, you can hear both of them walking, but on tape B you can clearly hear what sounds like four or five people walking. He mentioned that the coyote was an animal on his animal totem and wrote that they often hear coyotes when they go out. One evening there were no coyote sounds but when one of the tapes was played back you can clearly hear many coyotes howling away. He wrote, “So many people keep their ears open for voices and don't notice little things like these. I believe that a lot of spirits have never taken human form so they will not always speak in words. I guess since I am 1/4 Cherokee Indian I have always had a lot of respect for all living things so I am not surprised to find them in my recordings.”
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