I believe I actually stated in my very first post in this thread that I do find it terrifying. I am extremely, extremely afraid of dying. In comprehensible non-existence? That's scary as hell. But that doesn't mean I can force myself to believe in an alternative because it's convenient or comforting. It means I have to accept that my one shot at experiencing anything is through life, and also accept that my lasting impression will be how I'm remembered by others. That provides a pretty natural system of moral checks and balances too.
I can't, either. But after studying things like NDEs and ghosts and all that, I came to the conclusion that there must be something else. I had a terrible time with it, because I'm very familiar with the other side of the argument, and I have more trouble believing what I want to than anything else. I kept feeling like I was trying to fool myself. So I went around and around in my head looking for alternate explanations, but I finally came to the realization that some things are just impossible in a completely physical universe. I mean, there are explanations (and I do make myself familiar with them), but they're so limited. They only cover parts of the various phenomena, and don't even mention the parts that they can't deal with.
i saw a program about that on discovery channel once, it's imagination combined with a shortage of air in the brains, see when a person dies his brains shows some little activity after the last breath for a short period of time which will be the last part of the body that will stop functioning. the brains will suffer from a shortage of air soon and since they still work a little that person starts to hallucinate for a short moment.
normaly you die and take that one lifetime experience to your grave but when revived fast you will remember this, it's like a dream, you see things based on events you saw in your life that are long gone or things that you like to see.
i can't blame the people for actualy believing things like this though it can be very realistic and emotional. an old pal i knew nearly drowned once and saw his passed away mother reaching out for him, the next thing he knew was that he woke up on a brancard with lots of people around him. eversince he was convinced that moms gave him the will to life.
But the thing is, it's not imagination. People have been able to recount things that happened in the operating room and other rooms accurately. Corroborated by doctors. They've been able to describe surgical techniques and other things in highly accurate detail. Some say that they're just hearing what's going on in the operating room, but that never made any sense to me. I mean, it's not as if doctors describe what they're doing as they're doing it. They give simple instructions and such, but nothing that would give a patient that kind of information. And the part about seeing things going on in other rooms is totally inexplicable. And some patients have even been able to tell what doctors were thinking at the time. I remember one guy who told his doctor not to worry about a fender-bender he'd gotten to earlier that day, because the other person wasn't going to do anything about it.
Also, NDE patients are often aware of other peoples' deaths because they saw them on the other side. Something else I think is less convincing but still compelling is the way they sometimes come back with knowledge they didn't have before. The most famous case is a guy who got the name "Max Plank" and the word "quantum" in his head. He didn't know what either of those things were, so he went to the library and asked about "quantum". Of course, he was talking about quantum physics, and the first book he found was by Max Plank. Not only that, he understood it, even though he didn't know how he did. He had only a high school education, I think. He got more words in his head like that later, and they turned out to be the titles of the next books he encountered. The interesting thing about this is the fact how involved quantum physics are in consciousness studies.
If you want to learn more about this, there are plenty of books on the subject. I think the best is one of the earliest, called
Recollections of Death. It's by a cardiologist named Dr. Mark Sabom. He didn't believe in it at first, but he wanted to study the phenomenon, anyway, see what kind of patients had them, that sort of thing. There's a lot of good information in that one. It's kind of hard to find, though, since it's out of publication, but... It's just important to really look at these things closely before you write them off.
And here's what I had to say on the paranormal thread about ghosts, just for good measure:
I mean, take ghosts. You can definitely explain some things- some people are just hallucinating, some things are caused by physical events that the observer isn't aware of. But what about when many people give descriptions of ghosts that match independently of one another? What about when those descriptions match the appearances of people who have lived and died at that place? Some say that people leave behind impressions of themselves, but that doesn't make any sense. Not in a material reality. Electricity in the brain is confined within the brain, and wouldn't take on the shape of that person even if it could escape. It would just be random energy, and it wouldn't last for years and years. No matter how you look at it, even if ghosts aren't really the souls of the dead, there has to be some sort of consciousness apart from the brain for this to happen.
I've also read interesting accounts of people interacting with ghosts. One particularly interesting case I read was about a woman who's husband died. The touch lights in her home started going on and off, so she called over the author of the book (called The Case for Ghosts) to take a look at it. He had a bunch of equipment and did everything he could think of to make the lights come on from a distance, but nothing worked. Soon after, the woman told the ghost to stop bothering her and go bother his sister for a while, and it immediately stopped and her place and started at her sister-in-law's. Oh, and there was also a good story in my family. My great uncle saw his dead sister-in-law standing in the doorway one morning at breakfast. He mentioned it to his wife, but she didn't see anything. A little while later, she went upstairs and dropped dead. Normally, you might be able to say that it was a hallucination caused by grief over his wife's imminent death, but since it was so sudden, that doesn't work.
Well, that's just anecdotal evidence, but I hate when people excuse cases because of that. It happened, and you can't explain it with a material world view. At least, not without saying that it was an astronomically unlikely coincidence. There's no getting around that. Just because we can't explain something doesn't mean it's impossible. All discoveries begin with anecdotal evidence; we observe something, so we look into it more and try to understand it. Science would be nowhere without anecdotal evidence. The paranormal isn't illogical at all. We don't have proof, but then we know so little about the world. There could be a whole different level of existence that we don't even grasp yet. What's illogical is to ignore evidence and say it's impossible just because it doesn't fit your world view.
So that's what I have to say about ghosts. Either there's some impossibly elaborate conspiracy going on, or there's more to the world than a lot of people think. There's a whole lot of other stuff- NDEs, ESP, distant viewing... but you really don't even want to get me started on that.
