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People often think about death as some kind of positive non-existence when in reality death can’t by definition be experienced. If it feels like something then it’s the process of dying people are talking about. Not being dead. I believe the closest thing to death we can “experience” is general anesthesia and the people who have gone thru that know there’s nothing to experience. Just a teleportation from one moment to another.
This actually makes me believe in some form of “rebirth”. Not in the sense most people think about it but since consciousness can only experience being but not “not being” then it seems very likely that death just means that your experience moves from one place to another. If there’s a break in between you can’t experience it. You just can’t help but keep having experiences.
Really interesting stuff. Sam Harris made a fascinating podcast about this subject. As a subscriber I can give free links to the full episode if you’re interested. Just send me a PM.
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Sam Harris believes in life after death?
No and even if so then not in the way any religion describes it.
You literally just said he did!
Edit: I may have been too quick to say that
You mind showing me the quote where I said that?
I may have misread or misunderstood, but it sounded like you said Sam Harris believed that somehow you experienced a form of “rebirth”, where you appear somewhere else after death, and talked about this on a podcast.
If that’s not what you meant, I apologize, that is how I understood what you wrote.
What a great post. Thank you for sharing it and all the best for you!
Incredible story. This is making me reflect on a lot of things. I’ve had the same feelings re: projection of the mind, and I feel much calmer hearing this. Thank you so much for sharing.
Check out the Law of One for some funky spiritual stuff. There might be something in there that makes sense of this reality for you.
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First time you got shot? Either where you live or where you work is not a place where I would want to be.
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I didn’t plan on doing that, but thanks for your review nonetheless. If there was a button asking for if the review was helpful, I would press it
I suffered a traumatic brain injury as a pedestrian who didn’t look both ways. My answer isn’t very fun but I technically qualify as I had to be resuscitated on scene.
I was in a coma for a few days and then–despite being conscious and over time regaining awareness, then vocalization, then even conversational speech–I wasn’t writing any new long term memories for a couple of months. My experience of that dark period, to the extent that it isn’t nothing, is pretty vague. The memories of months preceding injury are pretty blurry until the injury which I don’t remember and then the next I remember is being tied to a hospital bed and chewing on the Posey mitts. I remember some hallucinating in that period, one instance is an ordinary piece of a day interacting with nurses and therapists but perceiving everything as if drawn in the Family Guy cartoon. I post-hoc interpret that memory as a vague basically dream state that got mashed in with a Family Guy memory.
So no, no afterlife experience or memories of the other side.
I don’t want to discuss the incident in detail because it was very traumatic, but long story short, I had a near-drowning incident when I was 12 (technically not a drowning because I survived). I was technically dead for several minutes.
I saw nothing. total blank. I remember flashes of struggling to get to the side of the pool one moment, and flashes of waking up in an ambulance the next. then it cuts out again, and then I woke up in a hospital room with tubes in all my holes (plus some tubes in new holes) and surrounded by my mom and brothers.
I would not really compare it to dying, but having had seizures, you can appear dead and then wake up really disoriented and scared. Your brain basically shuts off for a moment.
I used to work with adults who had seizures and it was terrifying to watch but we did what we had to do for them. But I was always curious what it was like for the person experiencing the seizure. Like, what exactly do you remember? If you don’t mind going into detail, if not, I’m sorry I asked.
Do you remember falling to the ground and then your consciousness jumps to waking up and there’s nothing between?
I didn’t feel it coming on, the first thing I remember is someone helping me. They thought I was dead. I was unconscious on the ground with eyes open, hit my head on the floor and bit through my tongue so I was bleeding from the mouth. Everyone thought I was dead. When I woke up I had no idea where I was or what happened so I was very agitated. At least for the type of seizures I have, its like an on-off switch. There are other types though.
I witnessed this once years ago during the start of a class I was attending. Girl from the back gets up and starts walking towards the door, mumbling. She seemed off, so I stood up and asked if she was okay. She fell straight back and I tried to catch her but failed. She foamed at the mouth and started turning blue. I had no idea what to do. Medics show up and the class clears out, but I stayed because she basically half fallen on me. When she woke up she looked straight at me and said “hi.”
I don’t know if this counts. I had a stroke while I was sleeping. I had very vivid nightmares that night, almost the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. It’s made me terrified of dying in my sleep. If my final experiences are going to be like that I absolutely do not want to go out in my sleep.
“He died peacefully his sleep” is something people only say for catharsis.
You mind if I ask what those nightmares were about?
I don’t remember, I just remember it being horrible. Nothing religious or anything like that. Realizing I lost one of my eyes took over memories of the dreams.
Night terrors are still top of the list for nightmares though.
My dad did. He’s never fully went into every detail, but he has talked about it in bits in pieces over the years and he said quite a bit as I was struggling with the passing of my mother. From what I know he had a major heart attack and there was a point where the chest pain just… stopped and one second he was there and the next second he just wasn’t. He described it as like, leaving his body in some way and being surrounded by light, warmth and peace. He apparently met and was hugged by family members and relatives he hadn’t seen in years. He’s always been pretty limited beyond that, but from what I gather it felt like they were there to greet him briefly but didn’t have the expectation for him to stay with them. Kind of like “hey, we’re here but it’s not time yet” in the way he’s talked about it.
There’s been claims in the family he has always been hesitant to talk about but apparently he saw relatives there that died long before he was even born and was able to recognize these dead relatives in extremely old family photos. I don’t know how true that is, but whenever anyone in the family tries to discuss it he actively avoids the conversation.
This is the stuff religion is made of.
Too bad religion always gets twisted into being about eternal suffering and killing unbelievers and whatnot.
I agree. Unfortunately people become very dogmatic with organized religion, and it’s often taken in a simplified way that humans can understand. It’s scary but truthfully, there are facts about the universe that humanity does not know nor understand, isn’t meant to know or understand, and likely will never know or understand.
Seeing my own mothers passing and the unexplained events that occurred towards the end of her life, I do believe my dads story and what he experienced. I have my own woo woo beliefs beyond that though, specifically that the “light” people see might be the true incomprehensible form of whatever being made this universe.
I lost my mom this year. She lost her mom as a child and was the last of her siblings to go. I hope they were there to greet her. She was really looking forward to that.
I hope my mom is with her dad.
FYI, there is a community, [email protected], if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.
Some fat, white old dude that wears all red and rides a sled in the sky stole my birthday.
I didnt actually die, but I came pretty close. I lost a ton of blood, started tk get tunnel vision, blacked out, then there was nothing, then I regained consciousness after getting a transfusion. Not sure how long I was out, but they said I was white as a sheet.
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Same. I am between believing in souls or not, so this is a topic worth pondering.
You might be interested about reading experiences of general anesthesia and split brain experiments aswell then. It’s really weird how human consciousness works.
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This is exactly why I always wonder. I recall reading every single comment on a Reddit’s thread (at least 2000 comments)
Maybe you fall a bit more agnostic then?
Not sure that atheism excludes belief in life after death, tbh. We’re all alive right now with no god, after all.
Well, i am, but I’m still not sure about the rest of you.
Actually, now you come to mention it…
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There’s just a gap in my memory like going to sleep and not dreaming. The waking up was brutal though. I had zero context of anything around me but my brain was still fully functioning. It was weird.
I imagine that’s how the first true ai will feel. It still will “know” information, how to speak, etc, but it will have no idea wtf is going on
Oh, I can assure you with the utmost confidence that you were not dead for half a hour. If you’re going to make something up, at least do a little googling beforehand.
Technically it is possible if the reason for cardiac arrest was hypothermia. The longest documented time between cardiac arrest and resuscitation is almost 7 hours. That’s where the old adage “No one is dead until they are warm and dead.” comes from.
It’s also possible if you get cpr the entire time like we did.
“Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.” Fascinating. I suppose I stand corrected on many points here. Thanks for the link!
For the record, I still roundly call bullshit on OP’s claim here :) Feels like dying in a snow drift or something would be a detail they’d include.
I didn’t want to include the cause of death because it seems even more outlandish and unbelievable than the duration of death, and the cause of death essentially deanonymizes my account. But I guess this username is already toasted from being used too much so I added evidence to my op.
Dude. I stand corrected and I apologize. I am generally incredulous on the internet as a rule, and I figure my defenses were particularly high given the sort of woo-woo shit that comes with a post like this.
Sorry. If it counts for anything I learned a metric fuckton from this exchange.
No worries bro. I got way more upset than I needed to. We’re good, my friend.
I really should start lying and say I saw the matrix or something. Give the woo-woos an aneurysm.
I can assure you I was. I was getting CPR the entire time. Maybe don’t run your mouth without knowing the full story?
I wasn’t the only one that went down in this accident either, the other kid was out for 38 minutes. Again, CPR the entire time
And if you’re wondering why they kept trying cpr for so long, it was because they were our teachers and the SRO who all knew us.
Can you define “death” in the context of your question? I feel you might have referred to some forms of reversible coma.
I was sitting in nothingness, in front of me a meticulously sorted grid of worlds. I was in the process of putting earth back into its place when I woke up. For the next couple of minutes I was convinced that I’m literally god.
I’ve been very lucky and haven’t come close to death (yet), but I have had some dream experiences that resembled NDEs.
I tried three times to control what I dreamed about. The dreams weren’t like dreams, is the best way I can put it - they were very short, very vivid, and clearly linked to the “intention” I’d requested. The second dream featured a pair of strangers trying to tell me something.
The last one, I went down a long tunnel (like a storm drain) and ran into people who, indeed, drove me out and told me I shouldn’t be there. After that, I wasn’t able to do it again.
Unsure if just weird dreams or if I actually got too close to something. The thing that makes me think there might be something in NDEs, tbh, is the stories palliative care nurses seem to have.
