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Near-Death News

  March 18, 2005:  Nursing Seminar in Franklin, Tennessee - Presenters include: PMH Atwater, Pam Kircher, Dannion Brinkley, Henry Reed

  March 30 - April 3, 2005:  27th Annual EDEC Conference in Albuquerque, NM - Association for Death Education and Counseling's annual conference

  April 22 - 27, 2005:  7th Conference on Science & Consciousness in Santa Fe, NM - Presenters include: Gary Schwartz, Stanislav & Christiana Grof, Charles Tart, Lee Baumann, Peter Russell, and Joseph Chilton Pearce

  May 14 -15, 2005:  International Parapsychology Conference in Istanbul, Turkey - Presenters include: Gary Schwartz, P.M.H. Atwater, Janet Cunningham, John Palmer

  May 20 – 29, 2005:  SSF-IIIHS International Conference Montreal, QC, Canada - Presenters include: Raymond Moody, Melvin Morse, Joyce Hawkes, Sean David Morton

  June 24 - 27, 2005:  ASSC Annual Conference, Pasadena, California - Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness' annual conference

  August 17-20, 2005:  TSC Annual Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark - Toward a Science of Consciousness annual conference

  Sept. 8 - 10, 2005:  IANDS Annual Conference, Virginia Beach, Virginia - "Message and Meaning: Using the Near-Death Experience as a Tool for Living."

  Sept. 16 - 18, 2005:  CEP Annual Conference, Oxford, UK - Consciousness and Experiential Psychology annual conference

  Visit the NDE Events Around The World page for more conference info.

For those of you fortunate enough to watch the UK's premiere documentary channel (BBC), one of the best NDE documentaries ever produced will be shown on March 18, 20, and April 13, 2005. The documentary features the NDE testimonies of Rev. Gordon Allen and Pam Reynolds -- two extraordinary people who experienced two extraordinary NDEs. Someday I hope the BBC will make this documentary available for sale worldwide. [Read more]

Life after death has been chronicled in a new book from Revell entitled "90 Minutes in Heaven". Immediately after being killed in a car accident nearly fifteen years ago, Don Piper went to heaven. EMTs on the scene determined he had been killed instantly after a semi had swerved into his lane, crushing his car. But Piper was unaware of the chaos swirling around his body on Earth - he knew only that he was surrounded by loved ones and friends, magnificent light, a sense of pure peace and the most glorious music he had ever heard. "When I died, I didn't flow through a long, dark tunnel. I had no sense of fading away or of coming back. I never felt my body being transported into the light. I heard no voices calling to me or anything else. Simultaneous with my last recollection of seeing the bridge and the rain, a light enveloped me, with a brilliance beyond earthly comprehension or description. Only that. In my next moment of awareness, I was standing in heaven," writes Piper, in 90 Minutes in Heaven. [Read more]

The fact that McClatchey got to the hospital alive was amazing enough. What happened next made medical history. "He was so unstable that he would literally be shocked, go back into regular rhythm long enough to start to wake up and then he would fibrillate again, and lose consciousness and we'd have to shock him again,” Dr. Wilmer said. In the first hour, McClatchey's heart stopped 50 times and he could see it coming. "I remember seeing the heart monitor. It's kind of amazing to watch your own heart ….And you know you have about three or four seconds before you're gonna black out," he said. [Read more]

The Rotary Club has purchased seven defibrillators – which are used to interrupt cases of sudden cardiac arrest – and is working with local business owners to have the devices installed on their premises, with employees trained to use them ... The Rotarians' goal, said Steve Johnson, the program's committee chair, is to save lives ... Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is usually caused by an electrical malfunction of the heart called ventricular fibrillation: a quivering of the heart muscle that makes it unable to pump blood. Once that circulation stops, a person quickly loses consciousness and the ability to breathe. The success of resuscitation drops by about 10 percent with each passing minute, and after 10 minutes in cardiac arrest, a person's chance of survival is only about 2 percent. [Read more]

Felled by a would-be assassin's bullet, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church lay close to death as he was rushed to a hospital. Floating near unconsciousness, Pope John Paul II forgave his attacker, yet somehow remained confident that he would live. "Oh, my God! It was a difficult experience," the pope recalled. Finally passing out in the hospital as doctors frantically gave him blood, he nearly died: "I was practically on the other side," John Paul said. These are some of the most personal, emotional passages from a new book by the pope, due to be released today, in which he writes for the first time about his feelings in the hours after the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt. A Turkish gunman shot John Paul as he rode in an open car through St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. [Read more]

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A judge gave Terri Schiavo's husband permission to remove the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube in three weeks, handing him a victory in his effort to carry out what he says were his wife's wishes not to be kept alive artificially ... The Schindlers do not believe their daughter is in a persistent vegetative state as court-appointed doctors have ruled. A leading Vatican cardinal also has weighed in on behalf of keeping Terri Schiavo alive. "If Mr. Schiavo legally succeeded in provoking the death of his wife, this would not only be tragic in itself, but it would be a serious step toward legally approving euthanasia in the United States," Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio on Thursday. [Read more]

A study in the July 24, 2003 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine surveyed a group of Oregon hospice nurses and reported that one-third of them had at least one patient who had refused to eat or drink in order to hasten death. Furthermore, the nurses rated 92% of these patients deaths as good, meaning they were peaceful, with little apparent suffering and pain. [Read more]

  Read the following related news articles:

She is a best-selling author known for novels about vampires. He is a minister who says he has seen and talked with angels. Anne Rice and Howard Storm have never met, yet they are working together to promote Storm's book, "My Descent Into Death: A Second Chance at Life" ... While in the hospital, Storm says, he had a near-death experience that didn't fit the stereotypical version — the one in which people experience a bright light and the presence of love. Instead, Storm says he was viciously attacked by creatures he sensed were once human. During those attacks, he says, he heard a voice telling him to pray. Storm knew no prayers but began murmuring lines from the 23rd Psalm, the Pledge of Allegiance and The Star-Spangled Banner. Then, he says, he was in the presence of Jesus and angels. [Read more]

Not long after Carin Cunningham's dad died of cancer in October 2003, she and other members of her family began having dreams about him. Dreams that left her looking for answers. After the first one, Cunningham woke up feeling like her father, Frank Caravita, was still alive, because he looked healthy and because it hadn't felt like a dream. Describing the incidents as vivid visits, Cunningham said that during one dream her father hugged her, and she actually felt the hug. “I can't even tell you the emotions,” she said. “You just know they're still around. It's very comforting. You feel this joy.” The Hillcrest Avenue mom and teacher began looking for information on the Internet and came across a Web site called www.griefdreams.com, which was seeking submissions for a book, titled “Grief Dreams” by T.J. Wray and Ann Back Price. [Read more]

Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise could rewrite the physics rulebook if his newest creation lives up to the claims of its supporters, who apparently include MIT engineers and French government officials. "The Angel Light," they say, makes solid objects transparent ... His newest creation would, literally, change the way physicists view the world around us. The 8 ft long Angel Light, looking like a sci-fi laser cannon, came to Hurtubise in a dream, as he says do most of his inventions. "I saw it, the whole casing and everything, and I saw what it could do," he told a Canadian newspaper. "I had the same dream three times, and by the third time I had it in my head and I started to build it." [Read more]

What is it that triggers the brain to produce a religious experience? Jerome Burne investigates ... For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or “intimations of the divine”, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore “altered states”. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn't the experience of being “at one with the universe” just be the result of brain cells firing? [Read more]

Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground. A new theory suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex, described by some scientists as part of the brain's "oops" center, may actually function as an early warning system -- one that works at a subconscious level to help us recognize and avoid high-risk situations. While some scientists discount the existence of a sixth sense for danger, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has identified a brain region that clearly acts as an early warning system -- one that monitors environmental cues, weighs possible consequences and helps us adjust our behavior to avoid dangerous situations. "Our brains are better at picking up subtle warning signs than we previously thought," said Joshua Brown, Ph.D., a research associate in psychology in Arts & Sciences and co-author of a study on these findings in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science. [Read more]

He said scientists have been able to teleport quantum particles for some time now, and the conference posed the question if the same could be done to a human body with its conscience. Barber said there were debates regarding the relationship between consciousness and quantum matter. Many argued consciousness was something more complex than matter because it enables the way we "formulate our experience." He noted Karl Pribram from Georgetown University said "things" in the brain need to be thought of as "wave forms" rather than plain matter. Others suggested the duality between matter and consciousness, which could make the prospect of human teleportation feasible. Barber says in his report - soon to be published in the English Journal of Conscious Studies - that scientists and neurologists "thought consciousness a case of matter and energy," and the artists saw it as a "virtual reality where our attempts at explaining sensory input creates something new from shared archetypes and metaphors." [Read more]

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When John Jay Harper's best friend, George, an optics physicist, died of a heart attack in 1987, at age 40, Harper went to Alabama and served as a pallbearer at the funeral. The two men had met two decades earlier, while assigned to the U.S. Army Missile Command in Germany, and had become fast friends. George's death sent Harper into an intense grieving process. Seven months later and 2500 miles away at his new home in Silverdale, Washington, Harper awoke about 4 o'clock one morning to find an image of George standing over him in the master bedroom ... Though the act of seeing George's image only lasted a couple of minutes, for Harper the passage of time felt like a glimpse at eternity. It was a life altering experience, a mystical awakening, that plunged Harper into ever deeper realms of scientific and esoteric research consuming the next 15 years of his life. [Read more]

"Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, " says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan. "Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness." ... Says Clinton Kilts, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, "There is nothing that you do, there is no thought that you have, there is no awareness, there is no lack of awareness, there is nothing that marks your daily existence that doesn't have a neural code. The greatest challenge for us is to figure out how to design the study that will reveal these codes." [Read more]

Ian Sample asks leading scientists what comes next ... We will invent our successors ... We will understand the human mind ... The existence of parallel universes ... We will change our genetic makeup ... We will find out if we are alone ... Humans become a collective intelligence ... We'll understand thoughts and feelings ... The end of the individual ... What if God lives in a part of our brain? ... What it means to be a person ... Conscious machines ... Higher dimensions ... Humans are less miraculous than we thought. [Read more]

There have been attempts at clearing up the phenomenon, which some people see as evidence for the belief that after death the soul passes to another body, whether human or animal. One point of departure for researchers has been that a deja vu experience is linked to an experience in a dream that has been half or totally forgotten. Two French writers on the topic, Marc Tadie and his brother Jean-Yves, point to this in their book "Le Sens de la Memoire." It is characteristic of the experience that one is certain for a moment that one has lived through this experience before, but can simply not remember at what point in time. "In a dream the consciousness can move freely in a space without limits, in which past and future blend," the two Tadies say. In a contribution last year to the German magazine Gehirn & Geist (Brain and Spirit, published by Heidelberg) reference is made to research into memory processes conducted by John Gabrieli and his team at Stanford University in California. [Read more]

According to the study guide, "What the Bleep" proposes that there is no solid, static universe 'out there,' waiting to be comprehended by our probing minds, but that reality is so mutable, it is affected by our very perception of it." The proposal is based on a widely accepted tenant of quantum mechanics - physics at the subatomic level - that describes the bizarre nature of electrons. Electrons, it so happens, act like both waves and particles. As waves, they have no precise location. They're more like fields of probability. As particles, they stop being like probability fields and collapse into solid objects that have a place in time. Even more bizarre, according to the study guide, quantum physics shows that "unobserved electrons act differently than measured ones. When they are not measured, electrons are waves. When they are, they become particles." "What the Bleep Do We Know" poses a question engaging to spiritual seekers like Rae: What if human consciousness can collapse the possible into the actual? [Read more]

The Global Consciousness Project is in the process of developing data that suggests that there is a level of human emotion or thought that can collectively affect random number generators, and that it is at least somewhat predictive of large scale negative events, especially those that are human-generated, such as the attack on the US World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. If the data remains consistent, then it could be that scientists will be able to predict the future. More importantly, it will mean that each of us, on some level, knows at least enough about the future to sense when something big is about to happen. Individually, this awareness is apparently quite weak. Collectively, though, if scientists can find no conventional explanation, then it would seem that it is measurably strong. [Read more]

Some scientists suggest it is time for the poles to reverse ... Jeremy Bloxham of Harvard University told scientists at last year's meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the Earth's magnetic field decreased by 10 percent during the past 150 years. There is a real, albeit slight, chance that it could disappear entirely. The consequences would be far worse than having to rely on GPS alone for navigation. The sun is forever kicking cosmic sand in our face in the form of electrically charged particles. The magnetic field diverts them, producing the astonishing northern and southern lights. Without the magnetic field, the planet would be a much more hostile place. [Read more]

  Read more about the Pole Shift predicted by NDErs:

In this section of the newsletter, P.M.H. Atwater will answer questions submitted to her from subscribers to this newsletter. Atwater's contribution to near-death studies is considered to be one of the most important as her first two books, Beyond the Light and Coming Back to Life, are considered to be the "Bibles" of the NDE by researchers and enthusiasts. Her latest books are entitled We Live Forever: The Real Truth About Death and The New Children and Near-Death Experiences. If you have a question which you would like her to answer for this column, just email your question to Kevin Williams at http://www.near-death.com/contact.html for consideration. For more information about P.M.H. Atwater's contribution to near-death studies, download her press kit here.

QUESTION:  "I am a 54-year old male and suffered a near fatal air crash when I was 25. During the incident, the helicopter of which I was a crew-member was caught in a downdraught as we flew over a cliff. The aircraft was thrown down the escarpment and dropped almost 1,800 feet in 4-5 seconds before regaining flight, missing the ground by approximately 100 feet. During this ordeal, I had the sensation of slow motion thinking where my whole life and loved ones in it went through my thought processes. At the end, I knew death was imminent yet instead of panic there was a complete acceptance of what was about to occur and a complete peacefulness. The only sense I was aware of was sight as I saw the blade going around above me. The peace I felt was as if I had already passed over. Is there a hidden message that I cannot fathom in this experience?"... Tony

P.M.H. Atwater'S REPLY:  First of all, let me say that it is common for an individual in a life-threatening situation, child or adult, to have an out-of-body experience and/or find his or herself engaged in a life review. You never mentioned an out-of-body experience, but you did a life review. Because these two elements occur with such frequency to people, they have been trivialized by scientific and medical investigators as a mere artifact of the brain, not to be taken seriously. What we find in near-death research, however, is that ... [Read more here]

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This is one of the greatest NDE stories ever told. It was first released on July 10, 2000, and now a second edition will be released this February 15th. Not since Betty Eadie's "Embraced by the Light" has a NDE story been so utterly different from most others or more compelling. Perhaps no one but Howard Storm has fallen to such great depths, then risen to such great heights, and lived to tell about it. Rather than being welcomed by light beings immediately after death, Howard was tortured by monstrous beings of depravity. But a simple childhood prayer allowed him to be rescued by Jesus himself and be taken to heaven. As it was with Betty Eadie, Howard's story is a great message of hope and a great message of redemption. Anne Rice, who wrote the Foreword of Howard's book, had this to say about it: “This is a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others. This is a book you will quote in your daily conversation. Storm was meant to write it and we were meant to read it.” Anne Rice read the manuscript and was so overwhelmed, she volunteered to provide the foreword. [Read more]

Lionel Maithri was born in Sri Lanka and at the age of seven he had a cosmic consciousness experience which implanted in him a source of inner energy to find answers to all his questions. His life was completely changed by this experience, but he was frustrated at that time by his inability to verbalize what he experienced. In 1993, he had a near-death experience during a by-pass surgery which enhanced his spiritual development process. Details of these experiences and their impact on his life are described in this book. This book is a synthesis of his deep knowledge and wide experience. His aim is to share with all others his own experience of what has helped him in self-development throughout the course of his life. [Read more]

Do aspects of our personality survive our physical body? The fruit of many years research and experience by a world expert in the field, Is There an Afterlife? presents the most complete survey to date of the evidence, both historical and contemporary, for survival of physical death. This evidence includes the study of mediumship, poltergeists, the electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) and much more. David Fontana also looks at the question of what survives, and has some particularly interesting insights to share on the subject of consciousness. Could consciousness be, as suggested by recent brain research and quantum physics, primary to rather than dependent on matter? Fontana completes this fascinating book by discussing the possible nature of the afterlife, the common threads in Western and Eastern traditions, group souls and reincarnation. [Read more]

The ancient teaching of the Iroquois Native Americans is that dreams are experiences of the soul in which we may travel outside the body, across time and space, and into other dimensions -- or receive visitations from ancestors or spiritual guides. Dreams call us to remember our sacred contracts and reclaim the knowledge that belonged to us, on the levels of soul and spirit, before we entered our present life experience. Robert Moss was called to these ways when he started dreaming in a language he did not know, which proved to be an early form of the Mohawk Iroquois language. From his personal experiences, he developed a spirited approach to dreaming and living that he calls "active dreaming." This book is at once a spiritual odyssey, a tribute to the deep wisdom of the First Peoples, a guide to healing our lives through dreamwork, and an invitation to soul recovery. [Read more]

Cosmologists agree that the universe arose suddenly out of absolute nothingness. But how? And how did it unfold with such painstaking precision? As biologists continue to probe the cell, the more amazed they are at its intricacies -- complexities so staggering that they confound all naturalistic attempts to explain life's origins. Could it be that the world looks designed because it really is designed? In his most powerful and fascinating book yet, award-winning journalist and former atheist Lee Strobel uncovers compelling evidence for intelligent design from the fields of cosmology, physics, astronomy, biochemistry, DNA research, and the