This data has
obviously stood the test of time. The
numbers are large enough to consider the percentages observed as statistically
meaningful. As well, asking the victims
for information has likely now become routine, but that was hardly true forty years
ago.
The obvious
take home here is that in the face of eminent death the spirit steps briskly
free of the body and essentially stands by while efforts are made to resurrect
the victim. I should have understood
this sooner. After all we have induced
out of body experiences to begin with.
We already know we can do just this.
What then is
the precise role of the physical brain in terms of human consciousness and
intelligence? It certainly allows us to
sense and act upon the physical. After
that we are tiptoing around and the connection is not so obvious.
What
Does Death Feel Like? Earthquake Survivors Report Pleasant Feeling
China's Tangshan earthquake was devastating,
but survivors came away with profound experiences
By Li Ying, Minghui.org |
May 20, 2014
The universe is full of mysteries that
challenge our current knowledge.
In “Beyond Science” Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
On July 28, 1976, the monstrous Tangshan
earthquake caused more than 240,000 fatalities and 160,000 serious injuries.
Medical workers in China did case studies on the survivors, most of whom had
been buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, to try and find out
whether they had near-death experiences, and if so, how they
felt. The results were published in the journal Popular
Medicine, Issue 5 (1993).
According to their recollections, more
than half of the survivors reported that during the time they were in danger,
not only were they not afraid, on the contrary, their minds were clear, calm
and comfortable. In such a dangerous situation, there was no panic; some
people even had feelings of happiness and thoughts running rapidly through
their minds. Many different thoughts came up. At this moment, things that had
happened in their earlier lives kept flashing back like a movie and the
scenes were mostly happy ones. The recollections were of such things as
funny moments during childhood, wedding ceremonies, and achievements and awards
from work. This phenomenon is called life retrospection or “full-scale
recollection.”
Even stranger, close to half of the
people had the feeling and awareness that their consciousness or soul had left
their bodies. Some of the people equated this with “the soul coming out
from the shell.” They stressed that they
had felt their supernormal capabilities were in another dimension outside their
bodies, and not inside their brains. They
thought that their physical bodies neither had these abilities nor the ability
to think.
One-third of the people had the strange
feeling of being inside a pipe or passing through a tunnel. Sometimes, it
was accompanied with loud noises and the feeling of being pulled and
compressed. They called it “the tunnel experience.” Some people had the feeling
of getting to the end of the tunnel; they saw light and felt that “the light
would come soon.”
About one-quarter of those surveyed
experienced encountering incorporeal beings, or ghosts. Most of these
unsubstantial beings were their relatives who had passed away. It was as
though they had gone together to another world and continued to live there. Or,
they saw living friends or even strangers. It seemed like a reunion. These
“ghost-like” figures were sometimes described as being in some sort of “light”
form. Some people looked at them as having been “transformed” according to
concepts in religion.
From the survivors of the Tangshan
earthquake, inquiring researchers came up with 81 useful survey interviews.
They classified the experiences into 40 categories: looking back at one’s life,
the separation of the consciousness and the body, feeling of weightlessness,
feeling strangeness in one’s own body, feeling abnormal, the feeling of
departing from the world, the feeling of one’s body being united with the
universe, the feeling of time’s nonexistence, and many more. The majority of
these people experienced two or more feelings at the same time.
Although the survey of survivors of the
horrible Tangshan earthquake produced only 81 usable case studies of those
experiencing near death experiences, this is the most data collected among all
the research on near death experiences in the world. After their “return
from death,” most of these people remembered clearly their near death
experiences even after ten or twenty years.
No comments:
Post a Comment