Remarkably near to downtown St. George, in a Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Murray Foubister<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAt the end of another long day of driving, I\u2019m going to content myself with offering a few highlighted passages from my recent reading of Sam Parnia\u2019s still relatively-new \u00a0book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death <\/em>(New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024). \u00a0I\u2019m just too tired to do much more.<\/span><\/p>\nYou may perhaps recall that <\/span>Dr. Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor of medicine at New York University\u2019s Langone Medical Center, where he is also director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In the United Kingdom \u2014 born in London, he is a British subject \u2014 he is director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton. \u00a0He received his medical degree in 1995 from Guy\u2019s and St. Thomas\u2019 Medical School (that is, from the Medical School of King\u2019s College London) and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007, followed by fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of London and the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.<\/p>\nDr. Parnia has described himself, by the way, as not at all religious. \u00a0That self-description may help in understanding what he has to say in the first quoted passage:<\/p>\n
\n[W]hat if death itself is not the end we have thought and assumed? What if who we are\u2014our very consciousness and selfhood\u2014is not annihilated with death? And what if science can prove it? What will that mean for us, for society, for religion, for philosophy, for how we live our lives?<\/p>\n
Many scientists consider what happens after death as mere philosophical or theological speculation. I don\u2019t agree with this position and thankfully, today this no longer needs to be the case. Using sophisticated brain technology, we can peer inside the brains of people as they approach and then transition beyond death by recording and analyzing their brain waves. Advances in mathematics, artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and computing power are allowing us to objectively analyze realities about life and death that we never could have until recently. And this research is giving us the first real-time ability to study what happens to the brain and consciousness in people as they cross from life beyond the boundary of death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
He claims that his position with respect to death and dying, and to what lies beyond them, rests upon science rather than upon received dogma:<\/p>\n
\nThere is much more to be discovered, but science does, at a minimum, suggest that our consciousness and selfhood are not annihilated when we cross over into death and into the great unknown. (8)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As so many others do who have worked in the area of what are often \u2014 though, he thinks, erroneously (see below) \u2014 referred to as \u201cnear-death experiences,\u201d he sees overwhelming evidence for what he describes as \u201ca unique hyperconscious lucid mental state\u201d that accompanies dying, and he believes that it points to the survival of the human mind or personality beyond death (8).<\/p>\n
His reading, his research, and his own interactions with experiencers \u00a0have impressed him, among other things, with the commonalities that he sees across cultures:<\/p>\n
\nThese people, having had a recalled experience of death (or RED), return with a uniform, standardized series of experiences. It doesn\u2019t matter that they\u2019ve never met or communicated with each other, or that they died in Mexico, Iran, Thailand, America, Denmark, or the United Kingdom. No matter how varied their lives, their encounters with death have a startling narrative unity. (9)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
For several years, this blog was graced with the presence of a resident atheist commentator who called himself \u201cgemli.\u201d \u00a0His principal objection to the concept of \u201cnear-death experiences\u201d \u2014 he never really managed to get beyond it \u2014 was that, by definition, a \u201cnear-death\u201d experience was not, could not be, an experience of death. \u00a0Nearly dead, he told us over and over again, is not the same thing as dead. \u00a0I think that it\u2019s partly (but not solely) for that reason that Dr. Parnia rejects the term near-death experience<\/em>, substituting in its place recalled experience of death<\/em>.<\/p>\n\nOften, people, including many scientists and doctors, say if your heart has stopped and you are alive again, then you could not have died because \u201cdeath\u201d is irreversible and permanent by definition. People have even created terms, such as clinical death<\/em>, to distinguish between people who have traversed death and returned from people with \u201creal\u201d death, in their own minds. However, this is just a play with words. It has nothing to do with biological and scientific reality. (45)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nOne of Dr. Parnia\u2019s major contentions in the study of death and resuscitation is the concept that \u201cthe liminal grey zone beyond death is vastly more expansive than recognized in the past\u201d (19). \u00a0Life and death are not simple dichotomous terms. \u00a0They are not a black and white matter. \u00a0He explains that<\/p>\n
the process of cell damage and death in the body, including in the brain, generally starts after a person has died and does not become absolute for many hours or even possibly days after death. The transition from life to what we call death, like everything else in biology, follows a continuum. (45)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nHieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), \u201cAscent of the Blest\u201d or \u201cAscent to the Empyrean\u201d. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI\u2019ve called attention on several prior occasions, here on this blog, to the early sixteenth-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that is shown above. \u00a0(The original hangs in the Gallerie dell\u2019Accademia in Venice, Italy.) \u00a0I find the image remarkable, as does Dr. Parnia. \u00a0Here is what he has to say about it:<\/p>\n
\nAs much as I like this painting, nothing about it particularly surprised me the first time I saw it. It was first shown to me by a patient who had been successfully resuscitated. He was struggling to describe the experience he claimed to have had while his heart had stopped. Eventually, he gave up and simply relied on this image. Bosch was painting something I\u2019d heard described many times, both as a doctor and a researcher focused on understanding the experience of people who\u2019ve died and been resuscitated. Over the years I\u2019ve met countless survivors who\u2019ve described a recalled experience of death. They are of all ages, beliefs, and backgrounds, yet there is a uniformity to their experiences. They all describe some variation of the scene depicted in this painting. (50)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Posted from St. George, Utah<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 At the end of another long day of driving, I\u2019m going to content myself with offering a few highlighted passages from my recent reading of Sam Parnia\u2019s still relatively-new \u00a0book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024). \u00a0I\u2019m just too tired to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":31444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29234,39341,1104,29222,903,894],"class_list":["post-114270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ascent-of-the-blest","tag-ascent-to-the-empyrean","tag-death","tag-hieronymus-bosch","tag-near-death-experience","tag-sam-parnia"],"yoast_head":"\n
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