I've wondered about this for years

Endorphins are powerful. Do they explain NDE? My first guess would be they do.

But I am still curious about the phenomenon of personality change in one who has passed the first critical stages and is making a recovery.

That is what was first described, right?

I read Kubla Ross years ago but my own few experiences have to do with a mother with a brain covered in amylose, and a friend...

well, that's another story. Tangent.

I was visiting H, friend of me and my husband, my ex. My ex had wandered away from him as well as me, as we weren't in his current program, excuse the sarcasm, and we weren't all as in touch as we had been. I think it was his children who told me he was in x hospital. So, I visited. He had advanced emphysema and much else, starting with complex heart and lung stuff. I was just sitting there holding H's hand and in came an m.d. The m.d. peremptorily asked me about whether or not H wanted to be resuscitated in certain conditons and I said I am just his friend, ask him, and H said, slowly, nuhhhhhhhhh.

I dunno. I think a lot of this Kubla Ross and others stuff is after the fact exultation. Not that it isn't true, but that it doesn't describe death itself.

In his novel War and Peace Leo Tolstoy describes NDE through his character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and the personality change that occurs therefrom. These passages are some of the most moving that I've ever read in literature.

Prince Andrei had been observing the chaos of the Russian troops during the battle of Austerlitz. Picking up a standard to rally the troops, he is hit in the head presumably by shrapnel from a cannonball.




Later, after the battle, Napoleon surveys the aftermath, and comes across Prince Andrei.



He has a spiritual experience, but later, after his convalescence and some amount of time, this experience becomes the past, and he is back to being his former, practical, pragmatic, dour self.

Thank you Lash - and the other comments here are illuminating and thought-provoking and I'm glad I posted my feelings on this issue because frankly for years I've wondered about it and in my occupational culture you just don't talk about these things. It's been good to read and think.

The colleague - whether he went through an NDE I'm not sure - seemed to have some sort of charisma about him when we were near him, talking with him. He seemed very peaceful but this was a little time after the event but very early in his recuperation.

Other things happened in his life when he was fully back on deck but I won't mention them as they are a bit intrusive into his privacy.

As I said, I'm not a religious person and I prefer the rational, objective explanation rather than the metaphysical but to this day I still get the feeling that he'd been "somewhere" and was still touched by that "somewhere". That feeling only strengthened when I saw him a couple of years after the event and he was "ordinary", just like any one of us.

I think we still have as yet only talked around the subject. In Goodfielder first post he says:


And Timberlanko says later:


So it's something that not only the person experiences but we perceive it as well. The question is what is it? What makes us aware of it? I'd like to, later on, talk about how it changes the witness of the phenomenon as well as what purpose, evolutionary or otherwise, persons here think it might have?

I didn't know what it was called. In my limited experience bliss seemed about right. It's what I called my own feelings and the feelings, signals, energy, charisma, voodoo hoodoo I got from others. Goodfielder said it made him uncomfortable, me too, but the discomfort does go away and is replaced with calmness, an odd serenity. Odd because it is so unlike us as a specie to be serene, to be calm, to have a center in our storm.

Joe(So. What were you saying?)Nation

I liked the "bliss" description. Seemed to fit better than serene or calm, because it seems more active and jubulant than those words imply.

Not NDE, no resucitation or out of body in the instances I think we are talking about, but certainly ill enough to have slipped one way or another, or being right on the brink. Is that correct, goodfielder?

Are there any who, having recovered from such an experience with a sound body, regret they did not end up in a place called 'heaven'?

me.

Earth is that bad, huh?

Sorry to hear that.

No, Joe, not you!

I know when he was shot he was near death and the medics said the only thing that saved him was his fitness (he was part of an elite SWAT-type unit).

The thing was that it wasn't just me who felt that charisma thing from him, my colleague did as well, that's what made me curious. If it was just me then I would say I was either conning myself or it was some sort of brain chemical reaction on my part but my colleague as well, he felt it.

yes. Now is it physical like a essence exuded, or mental telepathy, or some kind of psychic energy?

I have to be gone the rest of today. damn.

Joe

I think there's something to what goodfielder and others describe.

I wouldn't pin the whole thing on NDE---but I thought it was connected to the phenomena.

We are a lot more interconnected than we may acknowledge to ourselves or each other.

Do you know how a mother can tell her daughter is no longer a virgin--or when someone close to us is lying--or (odd here) how a dog can smell cancer--or rescue a family from a burning house--

I know those sound like a weird collection, but I think we all know these things have happened.

I have a couple--I don't feel like detailing it fully here now--(distracted, maybe later), but the things that I thought were unexplainable were three separate instances of deja vu and an urgent fright about my father.

When I was a teenager, my mother was a real estate broker and we were constantly having to drive out in the boondocks to preview property and meet people...bla bla.

I think that is what we were doing, because I was sitting in a driveway I'd never seen on a road I'd never seen, but I looked down the road and the vista was incredibly familiar. I knew I'd never been there--and I knew I HAD been there. I also knew what would happen next. A boy and his dog were about to walk over the hill and into my field of vision. I knew what the dog and boy looked like--colors, sizes, position from one another. And, then I saw them.

I don't remember if I told my mother, but later I was experiencing another deja vu and I asked the person involved what she thought of deja vu and she explained it was the feeling you had experienced something before caused by endophins firing off. I was grateful for a plausible explanation, but had to ask, "But should I know what you're going to say next?" And she said No, but I did.

Previous to that experience, I'd had another in which I knew what someone was going to say. They said what I knew they would. (In the same surroundings, positions, conversation leading up word for word... It was like a script we'd practiced with stage directions and everything. It unnerved me and those three were all I had.)

At some point in the conversation which I knew was destined for harsh words, I deviated from the script and changed the outcome.

The "feeling" of deja vu could be attributed to the endorphin thing--but knowing in advance what she was going to say? And, knowing in advance the boy, his dog, and their details...?

I had the habit of praying every night years ago at bedtime. This was a decades' old ritual with no mishap. As I was praying, the word "Daddy" came out of my mouth several times and I was suddenly panicked. I had this strong strong impression to pray for him specifically. I crawled out of bed and go on my knees and prayed in a way I never had before or have since. Just urgently.

When I felt like I could stop, I went to the phone and almost called my mother, but I was afraid if nothing was wrong either 1) I'd look like an idiot or 2) I'd worry her.

During the time that I'd felt that urge, my daddy had been assaulted responding to a domestic violence call. I won't make any other comment. Those two things happened simultaneously.

I've had other seeming instances of enhanced communication with people close to me, but some would chalk it up to coincidence--and they could be right.