In her Heaven, Christine wore a long pale blue gown and trod barefoot on warm grass. When she met her grandparents, they were old people. The grandfather — so it looks — was wearing a diaper.
I saw the movie “What Happens When You Die” over YouTube.
Christine Stein had a car accident on her way to work. In hospital, her heart stopped and purportedly — she died.
Where do we go now: there are ponies and a few young deceased people too, in Christina’s paradise. There is no place to read or write in view.
It is typical to have a shaded terrace, covered in ivy or jasmine, says architect Eleni Psyllaki for the ■Gardenista. Her story is about gardens in Greece.
With regard to probability, life after death is possible and yet not certain. Mortal matter is unable to reveal immortality.
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About life he said,
Earthly reality may show some heuristics for the lasting or eternal form. Mortality yet cannot demonstrate immortality; like under water, you don’t really smell the roses.
Near death and medical condtitions
The following is not to pretend insight into anything supernatural. It is to compare stories on near-death with known medical conditions.
“Love”
Sjæl og Videnskab, a Danish production, does not bring any hope for heavenly intellectual pleasures.
It promises impressions of intense luminosity and some overbearing effect that select people may call “love”. By standard, feelings are not vegetative. Bodily — are ■sensations.
Pim van Lommel yet says that near death does influence emotions, and thus it can “enrich personality”. He emphasizes that hallucination does not change affect, whereas near death brings a lasting effect, thence to be “a truly spiritual experience”.
Jacqueline Landau felt “love” for the “light” she saw in her near death. Although it was the first time in her life she saw it, the attraction for the luminosity was as strong as to have her volitionally focus and think about her son, to stay with life on Earth rather than the “light”.
The medical conditions worth browsing here might be:
■Wikipedia: Pseudobulbar affect;
■Wikipedia: Cerebral hypoxia.
Brain death
Ms. Landau suffered a cardiac arrest. Peter Fenwick of the King’s College insists that such arrest is enough to pronounce death. It stops brainstem reflexes; the ceased brainwork cannot produce hallucination, and the experience has to be spiritual.
History of cardiopulmonary resuscitation reaches back to the 18th century, reports ■Wikipedia.
Nobody has ever recovered from brain or brainstem real death.
■Wikipedia: Brainstem death
■Wikipedia: Brain death
“Luminosity”
It is not only Ms. Landau to report impressions of strong luminosity, with a near-death condition. The intensity has been also described as “millions of suns”, and never could have been real. The persons would have lost their eyesight. Optic nerves might produce the effect.
■Wikipedia: Optic nerve
Eyesight or visualization
Vicky Brazon was reportedly born blind, “never saw light”. Her near-death luminosity is varicolored, darker than “a million suns”. She saw shapes as flowers, and “was able to see all around herself”.
There is not much geometry in rustic landscapes, and humans have developed architecture. People can write sheet music before playing it for the first time. Brain associative abilities explain, you do not have to see it before you imagine it.
Ms. Brazon says she remembers a ring shining, from the time of her brain surgery. That would have been a reflex of light on a delineated shape: maybe this is memory.
It is not probable a doctor or nurse would have had jewelry in the operating room. Jewelry is strictly forbidden, the reason to be also the medics’ safety.
Further, persons of standard eyesight report directional visualization also for near-death. “Seeing all-around” may have come with childhood trauma.
Ms. Brazon possibly lost her eyesight when she was little: children look in all directions a lot, in early stages of walking. Trauma would have made that the most prominent association.
It might have been in her early childhood she saw the shine of a ring. Was it a car accident? People usually move their hands about unless seated or holding the wheel.
Ms. Brazon reports having heard what the medics were thinking. Ability to read medical minds would be useful to medical students as well as translators of medical texts. In reality, she might have experienced a deja entendu, similar to the more known deja vu.
Memory or association
To form a memory, the brain needs to integrate neural work in real time. If there is chemistry or physics to make it difficult, the brain may stay with secondary or gnostic areas to make an association rather than a memory.
Vicky Brazon does not say she felt of heard her head being shaven. She says she saw it. In making an association, the human cortical priority for eyesight would favor visualization — and here the brain would attach the shine of jewelry.
“Miraculous healing”
I do not trust the narrative by Penny Sartori and Karen James, nurses. The patient purportedly regained control over his spastic hand, after near death. Reports of “self-healing” would include even cancer remissions, but these would point to hypoxia as stimulant to apoptosis. Spasticity would require the opposite, tissue nourishment; low oxygen is not the resolve.
■Wikipedia: Hypoxia
■Wikipedia: Apoptosis
“Understanding”
Some people say they “understood everything”, during their near-death experience. We may enjoy this brief video on Greek gardens, before we wonder on the enduring problem of finiteness in human perception.
We people may use words and phrases as “never-ending” or “everlasting”, but we do not really understand a space that would not end anywhere. The usual human trick is to end the inquiry somewhere comfortable, or give the endless object of thought a symbol too.
Mathematicians do it on a regular basis. Their infinity ∞ yet does not embrace all there possibly might be in universe and life, as simply nobody knows that. The mathematical infinity is really just an indefinite.
Near death has not brought any answer to that real infinity. You do not get to understand everything with a near-death experience.
Human brains and finiteness
Think there is a fish tank, and we are making observations on the fish. The fish is in a tank, in a room, in a building, in a geographical area, and somewhere in a country. Whatever outer border we think, we cannot really envision “all the out there” for the fish, just as we are unable to figure this out for ourselves.
Here, even a specialist on cosmic endlessness would picture the universe as Swiss cheese ― with a thin, yet rind.
The mind after death
When Chris French of the University of London emphasized there was no evidence the mind could go separate from the brain, one might even pity there was no question from the audience if he embraced atoms and Antiquity with his view — there was no evidence for atoms. More, what he would call an atom today is not the definition. Properly, an “a-tomos” is something you cannot split.
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Said Honeybee, the soul indivisible would be warded off within partible physics. It would act like a bridge — although not of stone, and each soul would open own — as nothing could go another way.
A tip
I enclose a tip here I got in high school with curricular training: if in a condition of limited consciousness or fainting, but we have an aspect of awareness remaining, we try to press our tongue against the palate or teeth. People happen to choke on own tongues.
We force a breath, like we wanted to say something.
Staying where I began ― mortal matter cannot provide a principle on immortality ― I’ll continue with my “chores”: people say you can talk in the After.