Is it pertinent to prepare for more experience upon death of the body?

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Is it pertinent to prepare for more experience upon death of the body?

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Post by William »

How A Near-Death Experience Converted This Catholic To Islam | Hamza Yusuf & Jordan Peterson

[34:30…44:00]

Preparation for death.


What are your thoughts on this subject?

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Re: Is it pertinent to prepare for more experience upon death of the body?

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Fear of Death Spurs Belief in Intelligent Design
When faced with the thought of death, people are more likely to believe in intelligent design, the idea that life on Earth and other features of the universe can be explained by an "intelligent being" guiding the process, a new study finds.

"People want to see science as providing their life with greater meaning, and on the surface, intelligent design does that whereas evolution does not," said study researcher Jessica Tracy, of the University of British Columbia. "It might help explain why there is such intense widespread support for intelligent design."

Thinking about death is known to have many psychological impacts. These impacts protect us from the fear of leaving this world. "We try to forget most of the time that we are mortal," Tracy told LiveScience. "It's impossible to forget, it's real, it's out there, it becomes harder and harder to deny that."

Often fear of death is tempered by a religious belief in the afterlife or the soul, but none of the ideas (intelligent design, evolutionary theory and naturalism) supposedly hold religious overtones or claim the existence of an afterlife. Still, belief that life is guided by a creator is enough to help dull this fear of mortality, Tracy said.

"The whole reason we have religion is that it is comforting. Intelligent design is doing something very similar," Tracy said. "Traditional science's goal isn't to comfort; there really is no goal other than to understand."



The basics

Intelligent design is the idea that some parts of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection and evolution. It is similar to creationism, the idea that God created the Earth and all of its inhabitants, but is often framed as a scientifically valid theory and makes no mention of who or what this "intelligent cause" is, doesn’t mention the afterlife and doesn't explicitly espouse a religious ideology. It is not based in science.

Evolution is the scientifically supported idea that all of Earth's creatures developed spontaneously and through a process called natural selection, in which the best genetic traits get passed down to offspring.

A Gallup poll in 2010 found that 40 percent of Americans still believe in creationism — a literal interpretation of the Bible that says humans were created by a Christian God less than 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent of Americans believe that humans were "intelligently guided" into being by a creator, while only 16 percent reported accepting evolution.

Thoughts about death

Tracy ran several studies testing the effects of the fear of death (primed by instructing study participants to think and write about their death) on belief in evolution and intelligent design.

After thinking about death, the participants were instructed to read over passages from either intelligent design proponent Michael Behe or by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. More than 1,600 participants answered a variety of questions about their feelings on intelligent design, religion, evolution and the authors of the passages — rating their agreement with each theory.

Some of the participants also read a passage by Carl Sagan on naturalism, the belief that even without a creator, human life still has worth and meaning.

In general, researchers found that when confronted with thoughts of death participants liked the idea of intelligent design more (or the idea of evolution less) than when they thought about the pain of a dental visit. The effect was small, but statistically significant.

The researchers also found that they could reverse this effect by following the intelligent design and evolution passages with the passage by Sagan. So even for those primed to think about death who showed a stronger acceptance of intelligent design, that effect went away after they read Sagan's passage. The only group that didn't show this was a group of natural science students. They responded to thoughts of death by increasing their support of evolution.

Inspired intelligent design

"What intelligent design does explicitly say is there is a purpose to human life. ... That we are here for a reason and there is a larger purpose to it," Tracy said. "That's an incredibly different idea than evolution."

If people fear the emptiness of an evolution-based worldview, perhaps stressing a naturalist option is important when discussing evolution. "Teaching people that science or a naturalist view can be meaningful makes people more interested in the theory that has actual scientific validity even when they are in a state of existential anxiety," Tracy said.

The study was published in the March 2011 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
{SOURCE}

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Re: Is it pertinent to prepare for more experience upon death of the body?

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Do people who have NDEs fear death?
At some stage, you will die. You may not know the time, date or circumstance of your death, but you do know it’s inevitable. Contemplating this fact can be uncomfortable. It evokes anxiety and fear in most people.

But not those people who have had a near-death experience (NDE). NDEs are extraordinarily profound mystical or transcendental occurrences, during which the boundaries between space, time and normal perceptual awareness become blurred.

They can include elements such as travel through a tunnel, seeing a bright light, an out-of-body experience, and meeting deceased others and spiritual beings.

They are typically reported by people who have had a close brush with death, or have died and been resuscitated. Recent research suggests they occur during the time period when physical functioning is severely compromised or non-existent.

Not all people who have a close brush with death or who are resuscitated have an NDE, nor do those people, on the whole, lose their fear of death. So, it is rather curious that people who have had an NDE typically report a complete loss of the fear of death.

Why is this so?

Perhaps it is the paradoxically pleasant nature of the experience. Many people report feeling overwhelmingly positive emotions during their NDE, including peace, unconditional love and joy.

In many Western cultures, thinking of death can be so disturbing that unspoken taboos exist. We rarely talk about death, and keep it hidden within the far-reaches of the psyche.

Yet, some people who have had NDEs suggest the apparent experience of death is an altogether pleasant one that should not be feared.

{SOURCE}
Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics
The great majority of near-death experiences (NDEs) reported publicly over the past four decades have been described as pleasant, even glorious. Almost unnoticed in the euphoria about them has been the sobering fact that not all NDEs are so affirming. Some are deeply disturbing.

Few people are forthcoming about such an event; they hide; they disappear when asked for information; if inpatient, they are likely to withdraw; they are under great stress. What do their physicians need to know to deal with these experiences?

Varieties of Distressing Near-Death Experiences
We have documented three types of distressing NDE: inverse, void, and hellish.1 The brief descriptions below illustrate the types. All examples are from the authors’ files unless otherwise indicated.

Inverse
A woman in childbirth felt her spirit separate from her body and fly into space at tremendous speed, then saw a small ball of light rushing toward her: “It became bigger and bigger as it came toward me. I realized that we were on a collision course, and it terrified me. I saw the blinding white light come right to me and engulf me.”

The Void
An NDE of the “void” is an ontological encounter with a perceived vast emptiness, often a devastating scenario of aloneness, isolation, sometimes annihilation. A woman in childbirth found herself abruptly flying over the hospital and into deep, empty space. A group of circular entities informed her she never existed, that she had been allowed to imagine her life but it was a joke; she was not real. She argued with facts about her life and descriptions of Earth. “No,” they said, “none of that had ever been real; this is all there was.” She was left alone in space.

A woman who attempted suicide felt herself sucked into a void: “I was being drawn into this dark abyss, or tunnel, or void…. I was not aware of my body as I know it…. I was terrified. I felt terror. I had expected nothingness; I expected the big sleep; I expected oblivion; and I found now that I was going to another plane … and it frightened me. I wanted nothingness, but this force was pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go, but I never got beyond the fog.”

Hellish NDE

A woman who hemorrhaged from a ruptured Fallopian tube reported an NDE involving “horrific beings with gray gelatinous appendages grasping and clawing at me. The sounds of their guttural moaning and the indescribable stench still remain 41 years later. There was no benign Being of Light, no life video, nothing beautiful or pleasant.”

A woman who attempted suicide felt her body sliding downward in a cold, dark, watery environment: “When I reached the bottom, it resembled the entrance to a cave, with what looked like webs hanging…. I heard cries, wails, moans, and the gnashing of teeth. I saw these beings that resembled humans, with the shape of a head and body, but they were ugly and grotesque…. They were frightening and sounded like they were tormented, in agony.”

These NDEs are traumatic in their realness, their rupturing the sense of worldly reality, and the power of the questions they raise. Three common responses cut across all experience types: the turnaround, reductionism, and the long haul.

The Turnaround: “I needed that”

Movement toward a dogmatic religious community is common in this group. Clinical social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp observed, “All the people I know who have had negative experiences have become Bible-based Christians…. They might express it in various sects. But they all feel that they have come back from an awful situation and have a second chance.”

Fear may remain a powerful influence, but a strict theology may offer a way out.

Reductionism: “It was only …”

As a response to a distressing experience, reductionism has been described as the “defense [that] allows one to repudiate the meaning of an event which does not fit into a safe category” and to “treat the event as if it did not matter.”

A woman whose anaphylactic reaction precipitated an NDE with both loving and frightening elements concluded, “There are actual rational explanations for what I experienced…. The brain, under stress, releases natural opiates that stop pain and fear…. Lack of oxygen disrupts the normal activity of the visual cortex…. Too much neural activity in the dying brain causes stripes of activity…. Our eyes, even closed, interpret those stripes of activity as … the sensation of moving forward in a tunnel…. There are more brain cells concentrated in the middle of the cortex than on the edges so as we get closer to death, the brain interprets all those dense cells with their crazy activity as a bright light in the middle of our visual field. It’s all very scientific.”

Reductionism provides a temporary buffer to mask questions and anxieties, but does nothing to resolve them.

The Long Haul: “What did I do?”

Other experiencers have difficulty comprehending or integrating terrifying NDEs. These people, years later, still struggle with the existential implications of the NDE, “I had an experience which has remained with me for 29 years…. It has left a horror in my mind and I have never spoken about it until now.” And, “After all these years, the nightmare remains vivid in my mind.” “For some reason, [31 years later] all the memories are back and vivid…. It’s like living it all over again, and I don’t want to. I thought I had it all resolved and in its place, but I’m having a really bad time trying to put it away this time.

“I just buried the whole thing as deeply as possible, got very busy in civic affairs, politics…. It seems pretty clear to me now, though the specifics aren’t in place, that there’s some core issue that still needs dealing with.”

This group is often articulate people haunted by the existential dimension of their NDE, searching for a cognitively and emotionally grounding explanation. They find a literal reading of the event intellectually unacceptable, but reductionist explanations only assign a cause without addressing meaning. They struggle to make sense of the distressing NDE without destroying them (and their trust in the workings of the world) in the process.

More than others, these experiencers enter psychotherapy, some for many years, though without data, this may indicate nothing other than openness and financial means. Too often physicians prescribe medications to mask questioning and dismiss the NDE as fanciful or pathological; therapists will not address the matter or leave the client feeling blamed or romanticize spirituality and cannot deal with its dark side; and clergy have no idea what to say or reject the experience outright.

{SOURCE}

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Re: Is it pertinent to prepare for more experience upon death of the body?

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Why this oft taboo subject needs to be understood in some less sweep-under-the-carpet way - re death as subject.
______________

There’s antimony under her eyes and a pyramid over her head
There are jewels in her hair and gold on her wrists
Her White Warrior rides with The Queen of The Dead
There’s a faint smell of afterlife filling her wake
Anubis stands at her side
The cobra coils awaiting her kiss but her cold lips have already dried
And now she’s gone over to afterlife
To be in the Book of the Dead
She won’t need her body to nurture her soul
Prepared and preserved upon its deathbed.
So the symbols I etched on the back of my mirror
Became my philosopher’s stone
If I talk to the dead, then they must all be living
Together? Forever? Alone?

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