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Near-Death News

  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

  Sept. 18 - 26, 2005: P.M.H. Atwater's "Sacred Journey Carnival Cruise" - Puerto Rico, U.S. & British Virgin Islands. Call (800) 624-7718 for reservations.

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

I was visiting my neighbor Don, a retired fisherman, when he got talking about an old school friend who nearly drowned after falling through the ice while clamming. When the lifesaving crew reached him, his buddy punched the first rescuer in the head. Later, he told Don that he had heard glorious music, seen bright lights and felt warm and content. He was more than a little ticked at being pulled back onto the dark, freezing shore. "After that he wasn't afraid of anything," Don told me. Hertz, our electrician, used to be a logger. He once was hit by a falling tree and had what he knows was a vision of the next world. He says he felt completely free as he hovered above the people who eventually brought him back to life. Hertz is Catholic and seems to accept death better than most of us do.  [Read more]

In that instance, Clack felt the sensation of rising out of bed, pain-free, moving into "the pure white light. I could feel the warmth of the light, the cool freshness of the air rushing around me, the sweet scent of a field of wildflowers and the most beautiful soft music I had ever heard." "Without question, I was entering paradise, but as I did, I was also seeing myself lying on the bed below and watching the doctors and nurses frantically trying to resuscitate me and stop the blood flow." When it occurred to her that leaving her family and new baby would not only be a shock but a hardship, she came back to that "aching body, convulsing and begging them to let me go back." That experience has enabled her to know the material values of the world aren't as important as family and love..  [Read more]

Howard Storm spent three years at the United Theological Seminary in Dayton and became pastor for the United Church of Christ ... He will then devote himself to a non-profit he calls Mission to Belize. The focus is on the Mayan village of San Victor, situated in a flat stretch of cane country about a mile from the Mexican border. "If the people there were any poorer, they'd be dead," Howard said ... Every other month or so, Howard puts together teams of whoever wants to go - a batch of 50 from Brossart and Holy Cross high schools is heading down for 10 days in June, followed by church groups from Evansville and Mason ... On an early visit there three years ago, he asked the people what the village needed most. "The universal answer was, 'We need a church,'" he says..  [Read more]

Most people say they believe in an afterlife. Over the centuries artists, poets and philosophers have struggled to capture celestial splendor in words and images. It seems that we are all anxious to believe in heaven as a blissful resting place, a kind of reward for all our earthly labors -- yet few of us know much about it -- and it's clear that people have questions. Books dealing with the subject like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and "Left Behind" are perennial bestsellers. So why is it that we are so interested in what happens after we die? Is heaven a particularly Western obsession? And what are the important differences between how other faiths understand the afterlife? Exploring life after death, human notions of immortality.  [Read more]

Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, works on near-death experiences. Fenwick is also chair of the Scientific and Medical Network, which held its annual Mystics and Scientists conference last weekend. Charla Devereux, of the network, says: “Research into the paranormal is becoming more accepted by the scientific establishment, particularly among younger academics. There will always be scepticism, but that's no problem as long as minds aren't closed. And on the other side there is still a lot of flakiness. So it can be difficult walking a central road to get the best from both sides.” Patricia Robertson has conducted triple-blind experiments on mediums alongside Professor Roy. She says: “We are convinced that some mediums can impart to a sitter information about people who have died that they couldn't possibly know in any normally accepted way. I'm not saying that it comes from the dead, but the most plausible explanation is that the information is coming from the deceased personalities.” [Read more]

Scientists writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience have described their experiments with a completely blind British man who "possesses an apparent sixth sense that lets him recognize emotions on people's faces." This 52-year-old lab subject somehow uses a part of his brain not normally used for sight to process visual signals linked to emotions. When the scientists showed him images of circles and squares, he could only guess at what they were at an accuracy no greater than chance expectation. But when he was presented with photos of happy, sad or fearful human faces, his accuracy rate became uncanny, far beyond chance. Brain scans taken when he was sensing the faces showed an activation of the brain's right amygdala, which responds to non-verbal emotional signs.  [Read more]

With a reputation as a painter of spirits and angels, near-death experiencer Peter Teekamp is auctioning coincidence on eBay. Convinced after a lifetime of connections and discoveries that his life's work was meant to help make the point in a powerful way that we have all been here before. Teekamp believes the only way to illustrate that fact is with the physical evidence of more than 200 of his paintings and 250 drawings dating back to the early 1970'S ... As completely ironic and unbelievable as it sounds, in December 2003 Teekamp discovered and purchased what is believed to be a century-old Gauguin masterpiece charcoal drawing. The unsigned charcoal is understood to be one of the first Tahitian Gauguin compositions that was said to have 'not survived' ... The phenomenal chains of coincidence and well-researched art and quotes from Gauguin come in the form of a manuscript, a journal filled with sparks and Hollywood-style magic that read like pure fiction and yet all 100% true. In addition to the mystical Teekamp art collection and the publicized Gauguin drawing, this one-of-a-kind auction adds a bonus gift to the successful bidder of 50% net book royalties for the next five years for the yet unpublished true story.  [Read more]

A three-decade-old Indo-American research project suggests reincarnation might actually be a scientific fact ... Bangalore's National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) and the University of Virginia have been studying and documenting reincarnation since 1974. The three-decade-old research is now throwing up results. “We now have enough evidence to believe in reincarnation,” says Dr Satwant Pasricha, head of department, clinical psychology, NIMHANS ... One of Pasricha's early subjects was Naresh Kumar. He was born in 1981 in Baznagar, a village near Lucknow. By the age of four, Naresh was talking of a past life. He called himself Mushir Ali, and said he had lived in a nearby village, Kakori and had died in a road accident while carrying mangoes in his horse-cart. The researchers thought it was significant that Naresh's favourite game as a child was to tie a rope to his bed and pretend to drive a horse-cart. When Naresh's parents took him to Kakori, he said he recognised Mushir Ali's family, friends and relatives. The researcher points out that Naresh was born with a depression on his chest — and Mushir Ali's post-mortem report said he had been hit at the same spot.  [Read more]

A documentary film about Hopkinsville native and renowned psychic Edgar Cayce won the Directors' Choice Award Sunday at the 11th annual Sedona International Film Festival in Sedona, Ariz. "Edgar Cayce, Beautiful Dreamer" was also selected as the "Festival Favorite" and "Most Thought-Provoking Documentary" during the four-day event ... The hour-long documentary traces Cayce's life from his birth near Hopkinsville in 1877 to his death in Virginia Beach, Va., in 1945. Using his skills as a clairvoyant, Cayce is credited with more than 14,000 medical diagnoses and readings while under hypnosis. He is known worldwide as the "Sleeping Prophet."   [Read more]

Will an asteroid hit Earth this century, threatening to end all life as featured by such disaster movies as "Armageddon"' and "Deep Impact?" Experts point out there is no cause for public concern as an actual collision is very unlikely despite recent reports on the substantial odds of an asteroid catastrophe in the mid-2030s. "Current risk analysis of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), including 2004 MN4, indicates that no Earth encounters are of big concern for this century,'' said Yonsei University professor Byun Yong-ik. Byun added that NEAs have constantly passed nearby or sometimes hit the Earth for the past 4.6 billion years after the solar system was formed and there is no reason to worry now.  [Read more]

Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century. By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can't digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives, or opt for an older look if they get bored. Of course, everyone will be required to go in for age rejuvenation therapy once every decade or so, but that will be a small price to pay for near-immortality. This may sound like science fiction, but Aubrey de Grey thinks this could be our reality in as little as 25 years. Other scientists caution that it is far from clear whether and for how long science can stall the inevitable. [Read more]

Japanese entertainment giant Sony has patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see movies and play video games in which they smell, taste and, perhaps, even feel things -- the patent, which is based only on a theory and not on any invention, marks the first step towards a “real-life Matrix”. In the science fiction film of that name, cyber-reality is projected into the brains of people via an electrode feed at the back of their necks. In Sony's patent, the technique will be entirely non-invasive -- it will not use brain implants or other surgery to manipulate the brain. The patent has few details, describing only a device that will fire pulses of ultrasound at the head, to modify the firing patterns of neurons in targeted parts of the brain. The aim, it says, is to create “sensory experiences”, ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds.  [Read more]

One problem is that there are too many definitions! And getting these four guests to agree on what consciousness is and what causes it, is a fun but hopeless task that is revelatory at the same time. These four leading brain scientists couldn't even agree on at what level a simple "memory" was stored, whether as a gross "brain circuit," at the synapse between nerve cells, or in the microstructure of the nerve cells as some sort of quantum effect. But why should it be any different now? Philosophers have debated the "mind-body problem" and the existence of "free will" for thousands of years. However, never before have we been in a position to examine the brain with such precision. Even as we begin to understand the deep science that underlies our cognitive processes, there is no letup in arguments whether we are anything other than automata, just reacting to stimuli -- vastly more complex than a bacterium to be sure -- but fundamentally little different. [Read more]

Computer scientists at the U of A have already created technology allowing people to sit across from three-dimensional recreations of each other, even though in reality they may be thousands of miles apart ... Imagine a world, for example, where professors of surgery transmit hand and scalpel movements, as well as what they see while operating, thousands of miles across a computer network, where it is recreated in an operating room ... Families separated by travel will spend meals together through what is called "telepresence," said Boulanger. "You would wear special goggles - and we're working on that - which would allow you to see your wife sitting in front of you, having a day-to-day conversation. In the future you will have virtual encounters like this, people you want to be part of a meeting sitting beside you virtually and having a conversation."  [Read more]

The surprise indie hit film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" tackles some of life's biggest questions, without really answering them: Where have we been? Why are we here? Where are we going? Part documentary, part feature, it's a quirky film that draws parallels between the mysteries of quantum physics -- a mind-expanding field whose findings suggest many so-called laws of science are a lot less ironclad than we once thought -- and some of humankind's most vexing spiritual queries.  [Read more]

A legislative committee Tuesday approved a measure modeled after an Oregon law that would allow the terminally ill to end their lives with a doctor's assistance ... Supporters said the measure would give people with no more than six months to live the choice to end their lives with a self-administered drug prescribed by a physician ... Former Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts testified for the bill, saying Oregon's assisted-suicide law — the only one of its kind in the nation — has been used sparingly and properly and has led to better care for people facing death. "The law has broad and deep political and public support in our state," she said. [Read more]

I want Terri Schiavo to die because I believe she's earned it. I don't view death as the end of the journey of a human soul. I view it as a transition ... I cannot believe that it is God's plan that the life experiences of a man; wisdom gained, lessons learned and love experienced, should, upon death, disappear as if they never were. I believe that there's something to follow the life we know on this Earth; and I believe that most of the people fighting to keep the body of Terri Schiavo alive feel the same way. These feelings give rise to some questions of my own; questions for the devoutly religious people who are fighting to keep Terri Schiavo alive. Do you believe in God's promise of everlasting life? Do you believe that the reward for a life well spent on this Earth is a life with God in heaven after you die? If you do, then a few more questions if you will. Do you believe that the human soul can make the transition to everlasting life while the human body that carried that soul through life clings to life on this Earth? If you do, then you must surely believe that Terri Schiavo has earned and is already enjoying her reward in heaven. That being the case, why is it so important to you that the now-unneeded body of Terri Schiavo is kept alive?  [Read more]

Dr. Ronald Cranford, a brain death expert at the University of Minnesota, represented Michael Schiavo at a 2002 court hearing, testifying that he was convinced Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. Cranford said medical providers could face additional legal and ethical issues in coming years as a large portion of the country's population passes retirement age. He said many Americans, including himself and his wife, may refuse to enter a nursing home even if their health is declining. "That's a controversial issue, but it's a fact of life," he said. In North Dakota, a bill awaiting Gov. John Hoeven's signature, would combine parts of the states existing laws for living wills and durable powers of attorney for health care. Wetzel and others who supported the measure say it will make the delicate matter of registering how one wants to be cared for in one's final days less confusing. Jane Voglewede, a lawyer for MeritCare Health System of Fargo, said widespread publicity about the Schiavo case has left many North Dakotans with the incorrect perception that medical, legal and ethical questions about withholding or ending life-sustaining treatment are unsettled. Many of those issues have been decided, she said. It was the lack of a binding document showing Schiavo's medical wishes that made the case difficult to resolve, Voglewede said. "It's not whether or not you can do this. It's whether she made her wishes clear," Voglewede said..  [Read more]

For the sake of your family, download the "Five Wishes" Living Will now. The Five Wishes Living Will is unique in that it is valid in 36 states and was created by the nation's leading experts in end-of-life care with the help of the American Bar Association. It serves the function of BOTH a living will AND a durable power of attorney so you don't need to have both. And it is void of "lawyer speak" and is very easy to use. All you have to do is check a box, circle a direction, or write a few sentences. The Five Wishes Living Will has  been featured on CNN and NBC's Today Show and in the pages of Time and Money magazines. Newspapers have called "Five Wishes" the first "living will with a heart."  [Download the PDF]

  At the NDE Online Store you can find NDE products such as books, documentaries, movies, music, magazines, and journals. More NDE media products are coming.

The author explains the science of events such as UFOs and abductions, mystical and psychic phenomena, and the near-death experience -- events that shouldn't exist in a 3-D world, but which happen everyday. An advancement of the classic theories of R. M. Bucke and P. D. Ouspensky, this book presents the larger framework of space and time necessary for understanding how psychic phenomena happen and why some people experience it while others don't. In the tradition of recent bestsellers "The Holographic Universe" and "The Field," independent scholar Violette explains why a 3-D worldview simply doesn't work and why expanded consciousness is the missing link in current extra-dimensional theories. [Read more]

Visions and out-of-body experiences are not uncommon, but few have been experienced in such depth, and articulated with such clarity, as those of Jaap Hiddinga. He began to have them as a young child, and out of the thousands he has accumulated since then he presents here some of the most powerful. They range from the Christ awareness that came into the world at the birth of Jesus to travels in other dimensions, in other times, in this universe and beyond. Along the way he raises questions and suggests answers about the origins of Christianity, the nature of the quantum world, the links between the earthly and spiritual worlds, and the future of humanity. [Read more]

The forty short reflections in this book address the ways in which we face the prospect of death and loss. The first twenty reflections are designed to be read by (or to) anyone living with a life-threatening illness; the other twenty are reflections on living with grief, especially bereavement. Each reflection is based on a single story drawn from one of three sources: Dr. Kellehear's professional experience with individuals living with dying or loss; his own experiences and stories from childhood; and the retelling of some of the great myths and legends about life, love, and death, selected from around the world-from Ireland to Japan, from Melanesia to China. These reflections are stories about how we can make the most of life in the shadow of death and loss. They are designed to instill hope and meaning in the difficult times that can accompany human mortality. [Read more]

The longer we live, the more people around us will die. This book helps us tell the truth - to ourselves, to the dead, and to each other. Revisiting the deaths of many people she has known including loved ones, casual acquaintances, children and adults, friends and enemies - prize-winning journalist Anneli Rufus gives powerful, eloquent voice to everyone who has ever lost anyone and whose reactions wouldn't fit into the standard template of "feel sad, cry, then get over it." [Read more]

In 1952, an American housewife under hypnosis recalled living a previous life in eighteenth century Ireland as Bridey Murphy. This case became widely publicized and sparked a Western interest in reincarnation that continues today. With arguments supporting and debunking the validity of the famous Bridey Murphy case and the plausibility of rebirth, how can one intelligently decide if reincarnation is fantasy or truth? Examining the debate from viewpoints of science, religion, psychology, and logic, J. Allan Danelek helps readers understand this controversial issue from all sides. He takes a discerning look at past life regression, scientific explanations, common religious/philosophical objections, and reincarnationist concepts in Gnostic Christianity. Danelek also poses theories that explain the mechanical process and purpose of rebirth. [Read more]

Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: How much physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible? Mind-body reduction is required to save mental causation. But are minds physically reducible? Kim argues that all but one type of mental phenomena is reducible, including intentional mental phenomena, such as beliefs and desires. The apparent exceptions are the intrinsic, felt qualities of conscious experiences ("qualia"). Kim argues, however, that certain relational properties of qualia, in particular their similarities and differences, are behaviorally manifest and hence in principle reducible, and that it is these relational properties of qualia that are central to their cognitive roles. The causal efficacy of qualia, therefore, is not entirely lost. According to the author, then, while physicalism is not the whole truth, it is the truth near enough. [Read more]

The renowned psychic Sylvia Browne and her son explain for pet owners what animals experience when their life on Earth is over and what is waiting for them when they return home to the other side. Popular questions such as "Does my pet miss me?" "Did he know I loved him?" "Can he hear me when I talk to him?" "Can he come back to visit me?" and "How will I be able to find my pet when I go home?" are answered. The story begins when the spirit of Sylvia Browne's dog, Jolie, leaves her body and goes home to live on the other side. Jolie runs, jumps, and plays with her eternal friends all around the world, devoid of the pain and suffering she was experiencing on Earth. This is a comforting account of a pet's journey through one life and onto the next that explains how animals enjoy eternal happiness right alongside the people who love them. [Read more]

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IANDS in the Spotlight

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Odds and Ends

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Last modified on July 10, 2006

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