Question from Chris:
There are many near death experiences where the person goes to heaven and comes back. http://www.bettybowers.com/neardeath.html
How does this happen?
Are they making it up or what?
There are stories of people with the brain completely shut off so that there is no memory or ability to dream.
Any help would be great and I love your web site. Keep up the great work.
Answer by SmartLX:
Betty Bowers’ site is down right at the moment, but Bowers herself is actually a fictional character in a larger satire of fundamentalist religion called the Landover Baptist Church. There are plenty of real people with similar claims though.
Perhaps some are making it up for their own reasons (to make money selling books about their experiences, for example) but many are just describing what they think happened. Dreams and hallucinations during periods where the brain is almost dying can produce experiences which to the victims are indistinguishable from real supernatural out-of-body events.
The problem with the claims of zero brain activity is that if they’re telling the story, their brain function obviously returned at some point. Brains go through transitional states; between the initial loss of consciousness and the total cessation of brain function there’s at least a short period of partial brain function, and between restarting the brain and regaining consciousness there’s another period of partial function. If a claimed NDE happens in one of these two transitional periods, an unconscious victim with no sense of time might later think it happened right in the middle. It doesn’t make for good evidence of personal experiences not requiring brain function.
As I said in the previous post, I had a huge argument about this five years ago, and little has changed since then. Check it out if you like.