![\"Where](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2025\/06\/Hodgkin_Building_2_Guys_Campus.jpg\")
<\/a>I\u2019ve just finished reading the 2024 book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death<\/em><\/a><\/span> (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), written by Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D. \u00a0I found it both enjoyable and fascinating. \u00a0I may even re-read it, and I heartily commend it to the notice of anybody who is interested in the problem of consciousness and\/or in near-death experiences (or in what Dr. Parnia himself prefers to call \u201crecalled experiences of death\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n As I mentioned here before, <\/span>Dr. Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at New York University\u2019s Langone Medical Center, where, additionally, he serves as director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He also directs the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton, in England. \u00a0He received his medical degree in 1995 from the medical school of King\u2019s College London and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007. \u00a0He also received fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of London and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.<\/p>\n As I extract notes from my reading of Lucid Dying<\/em>, I\u2019ll probably share a number of them here. \u00a0Dr. Parnia\u2019s subjects are thematically linked but widely varied, and many passages in the book screamed out to me for sharing. \u00a0I quote a pair of them right now that I\u2019ve pretty much chosen at random (among the passages that I marked) for inclusion here. \u00a0In the first, Dr. Parnia is quoting Dr. Nenad Sestan, M.D., Ph.D., who is Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Comparative Medicine, of Genetics, and of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School:<\/p>\n \u201cThere are two great mysteries of science . . . \u00a0[The first is:] Who we are and what we are as a species. \u00a0[The second is:] How you get thought in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n I would add that there is a third great mystery in science, and in life, and that it is the natural successor to our question of self and thought: What happens when we die, and does our \u201cself\u201d persist in any recognizable form after our death? . . . \u00a0The AWARE-I and AWARE-II studies [which Dr. Parnia led] have hinted at the astonishing possibility that consciousness and the \u201cself\u201d are not annihilated when we cross into the grey zone of death. \u00a0Instead, the self and the consciousness is liberated through the mechanism of disinhibition. \u00a0People gain access to what had been a vastly larger entity of their own consciousness, which in this seemingly liberated state can take in information in the form of knowing, even though normally it would not be possible for the dying or dead human to see, hear, or witness events. \u00a0Yet people consistently report it. \u00a0This suggests human consciousness is like a field of energy (like electromagnetism) that is tethered to the body and brain and interacts with them, yet is not produced by them. \u00a0This is an astonishing proposition, but less so when you consider the sheer power of a human brain, an unfathomably complex organ that we are still exploring and charting, like an unknown ocean or solar system, together with the mystery that is itself like a universe, human consciousness. \u00a0(220-221)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dr. Parnia is unimpressed with attempts to reduce consciousness or mind to the physical brain:<\/p>\n This limitation of all the brain-based theories has led some to suggest consciousness may in fact be an irreducible scientific entity in its own right, similar to many of the concepts in physics, such as mass and gravity, which are also irreducible entities. \u00a0Other discoveries, such as the discovery of electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century or quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, were also inexplicable in terms of previously known principles. \u00a0(236-237)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For whatever little it may be worth, I myself have come to lean tentatively to the notion that consciousness or intelligence is an irreducible element in the universe. \u00a0On this understanding, consciousness or intelligence or mind would not need to be explained, indeed could not be explained, as a result of other components or other factors. \u00a0It is, properly speaking, basic.<\/p>\n This new item has just been posted on the moribund and thus never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: \u00a0\u201cThe Heartland Versus Mesoamerica: Part 8: Putting People on the Map: Overall Correlations,\u201d<\/a> written by Brant A. Gardner<\/a><\/p>\n Has anybody else heard anything about this? \u00a0I haven\u2019t. \u00a0The article was published in the independent Amsterdam-based Moscow Times<\/em> yesterday (3 June 2025), but the alleged blacklisting is supposed to have been announced more than a month ago, back on 29 April 2025: \u00a0\u201cRussia Blacklists Brigham Young University and German NGO as \u2018Undesirable\u2019\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n As these materials, which have recently been retrieved from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u2122, redundantly demonstrate yet again, theists simply won\u2019t leave the rest of humanity alone and in peace:<\/p>\n \u201cElder Cook Tours \u2018Lifesaving\u2019 Food Redistribution Charity in London: The Felix Project serves tens of millions of meals each year\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cPresident Johnson Sees Church\u2019s Impact on Sri Lankan Families:\u00a0The Relief Society General President observes UNICEF programs for women and children\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cEmergency Response Centre Opens in Barbados:\u00a0The new resource, backed by WFP and the Church, enhances disaster preparedness and response\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cLatter-day Saint Receives Polar Star Medal Recognition in Mongolia\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a>
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n