Heaven is Real?

This relates because it could possibly influence ideas for our own vision of Felaryan Heaven. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raeburn/newsweek-heaven-cover-story_b_1958795.html

Anyway, apparently a brain surgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander was brain dead in 2008 for a whole week. When they were going to pull the plug, he popped back (a medical miracle in and of itself) but the shocking part was that he had memories of events in a meta-physical world during this period where shouldn't have had any brain activity at all. Though his experience in the afterlife has differed from some other people's though. Honestly this begs a lot of questions:

Does heaven actually discriminate between religious and non religious people?
Does heaven reflect your personality, what you believe, your behaviors, and what you did in your life to be an experience all your own?

I think at its most basic level, its fun to think about. I plan on getting the book though ("Proof of Heaven") and reading it. I'd like to know what other people think about it.

The fact that he used the term "dimension" to describe the place he visited seriously undermines his credibility. I let it go in non-scientific contexts like fantasy universes, but the fact is that a dimension is not a world or a universe. The term for those is "parallel universe", "brane", "space", or even "plane" if you like, but it is never correct to call it a dimension. A dimension is a property that a universe can have, a direction in which space can be occupied and motion can occur independently of other dimensions. And real scientists should know that.
Also: he had a certain way of thinking for years and then changed his mind... because of a personal experience. He's a neurosurgeon - he should know that the mind is not to be trusted, especially in situations where it is unconscious, starved of oxygen, in a sleep-like state, or otherwise more liable than normal to come up with crap. Sure it's possible Heaven exists. But it's not proper science to conclude that it does based on a single eyewitness account, even if it's your own.

Would dimension really be inaccurate? Saying its a "parallel world or universe" implies that with technology you could in fact travel there. Of course "there" implies place, which a dimension may or may not have. A dimension is more accurately stated as an "Aspect or feature of a situation, problem, or thing." Inferring that being brain dead is indeed a problem or situation, "dimension" might not be technically inaccurate.

As for being a neurosurgeon, the fact remains that he experienced activity while he was brain dead. That alone throws all sense of science out the window. How can you experience something, much less remember it when you're brain dead?

I'm sure being the scientist he is, and having grown up in a scientific world, that he's not just acting out of shock and awe still after four years or so. Out of any of us, I'm sure he weighed the situation, analyzed what happened to make sure there wasn't some problem he over looked. To be fair, afterlife experiences have happened a lot, he just never believed in them - thought they were a simple impossibility as was said in that article.

Oh, it seems the real article is here on the daily beast.

I dunno, I seriously doubt this happened.

If he DID find a Heaven of sorts, then why did he come back to life? Did God say "time to go back, monkey! enjoy your flight!" and then he tosses him to earth at a billion miles an hour?

IT might've been something else, idk.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

As for being a neurosurgeon, the fact remains that he experienced activity while he was brain dead. That alone throws all sense of science out the window. How can you experience something, much less remember it when you're brain dead?

Near death experiences, and the study of them, is nothing new. A great deal of time and money has gone into it, and their are many theories from how brain activity can create these items to the belief that there is a human 'soul' in the form of quantum information the rejoins dark matter / energy in the universe. The idea that this throws science out the window, however, is beyond silly. We do not understand the mechanics of the human mind, but we do know that they are mechanics.

However, point of fact - if he were brain dead, no activity what-so-ever, he wouldn't remember anything. Period, dot, end. His brain was still working on some level that provided for the writing of reference locations, ie, memories. While portions of the brain were not functioning as his medical scans show, we do know things like a conscious mind shows reverberation. However, he certainly wasn't tested for this or anything else likewise, because the equipment hooked up to him was not to study him, it was to monitor him and the treatment provided. As Through the Wormhole's episode on this explains, it is rather difficult to be able to plan the study of near-death and death (ethically).

His argument against the science is also faulty, given that his claims to why science can't explain what he experienced is only one of many prevalent theories. More than likely, he's made the mistake that many people, including scientists, have made - forcing your theory to match the end result, regardless of other data available that contradicts it.

Point being, believe what you want to believe for faith. All people require faith in something to be functional, but that faith needn't be in a mythical god or goddess. It can simply be in one's self, though many would call it egotistical to do so. But don't ever assume or speak to assume that science cannot explain it. We, the silly humans, cannot yet explain it. There is a league of difference there. At least he does acknowledge that current understanding of the brain can't explain the experience - which is accurate. It can't be proven conclusively one way or another currently. But I assure you, science holds an explanation for it - and science's explanation won't come in the form of a glowing blonde girl.

The unfortunate, and to me, angering portion of this is that rather than trying to study it, he's simply assumed an explanation for it based on an interpreted experience. Because he 'experienced' it, thus it must be true. His one perspective must be right, and it is promoted as such by media - just like Pons and Fleischmann. This is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to the fall of higher civilization. Read - what happened to civilization in / after the 12th century. History does not repeat itself, it rhymes; indeed.

Yeah I agree he proberly wasn't really truely braindead, more likely his brain was still operating on a level that we have yet to build machines to detect.

Or, at the least, he might have generated those memories when he woke up or shortly before. The mind's tagging system for which memories occurred when is far from infallible, and people have been shown to inadvertently make up memories of past events on multiple occasions.

This is true, and we do not know everything about the brain, but don't forget that the one part of the brain that specifically governs thoughts and memories was shut off. So maybe instead there is some kind of thing in the brain that was still functional yet not detectable by current mechanics that was still active, but that sort of thing feels more like grasping at straws to me in the desire not to believe, which is what we'd have to do on either the science side, or not. Though I have no knowledge if they did anything or not to him while he was in his coma, though I assume he was just left there because that point its basically whether or not the brain decides to reactivate itself. Though once again I do not know. Though judging by what type of person he is or was, it would seem too out of character to simply make this all up for the sake of it. If he did that'd be some imagination.

I suspect that no matter how much we find out about the human brain, this kind of thing will always be labelled as too outlandish or fantastical to be true. I mean, that's how we are, right? We're cynical creatures by nature I think until we experience it ourselves. Personally I'm eager to believe what he said was true, and there's my bias, but its not something I care greatly enough about to get defensive over.

On another note, I found the things he wrote about what he saw truly fascinating.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

This is true, and we do not know everything about the brain, but don't forget that the one part of the brain that specifically governs thoughts and memories was shut off.

Negative. There are several parts of the brain that control memory and the recollection thereof. While the cerebral cortex (the so called 'gray matter' of the brain) plays roles in just about everything, it's not the generator of them. It serves to separate and connect various portions of the brain together. It consists of 3-6 layers (depending on where in the brain we're talking about), and is believed to be what gives us perception and grasp of abstract / complex thought. However, it is not solely nor dominantly responsible for memories, or recollections, or etc. It is a map and a road and a line of communication that allows the generation of a bigger picture. His statement in the article relates his idea that the attack on his cortex, causing it to be 'off', meaning that he couldn't 'perceive', is why this is impossible scientifically. He further extrapolates that this is unlike any other test subject (that he knows of, at least he does make that declaration) and that it's viable because he was under intense medical scrutiny, implying also that it was the same sort of scrutiny as these other individuals. And why you have to call BS on it.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

So maybe instead there is some kind of thing in the brain that was still functional yet not detectable by current mechanics that was still active, but that sort of thing feels more like grasping at straws to me in the desire not to believe, which is what we'd have to do on either the science side, or not.

I'm not sure I understand your point in the last bit here, it seems a contradiction to itself. Are you saying that regardless it is something to take on belief / faith since you can't prove the existence? IE: I can't sense a quark, I just have to believe that it's there, kinda thing?

Archmage_Bael wrote:

Though I have no knowledge if they did anything or not to him while he was in his coma, though I assume he was just left there because that point its basically whether or not the brain decides to reactivate itself. Though once again I do not know. Though judging by what type of person he is or was, it would seem too out of character to simply make this all up for the sake of it. If he did that'd be some imagination.

He was in his coma for 7 days, awakening on the 7th day. Nowhere near enough time to set up a scientific study, not that anyone's even attempting to say it was done. The references this alludes to is something else as well - let me be clear. I don't think he made it all up for the sake of it. I think he's profiting on other people's weakness when it comes to death, by attempting to capture elements that people hold dear whilst playing up to things they recognize and associate with. In this case mainstream Abrahamic religious rhetoric.

So, back to the imagination / making it up bit. Like I said, I don't think he's 'making up' the imagery. I think it's quite possible he could have 'seen' such things. What I do not think is possible is that God or any other such device caused them - his mind, under great duress, caused them and he has associated what he 'experienced' with religion. He even describes how during his 'experience' he didn't think of it as heaven, as angels, etc. It simply was. It wasn't until after waking up that 'he knew'.

Many people have had / experienced 'near death' experiences. Some of them are quite vibrant and detailed, though most accounts are like spiritual presence, a white light, sensations of flying; basic, feel good stuff. This has been scientifically evaluated to a decent extent, and, *gasp*, replicated. It turns out, if you expose a person to certain things while they're wired up (such as oxygen deprivation to the brain) you can indeed cause them to experience these feelings / events, and even better, you can see it happening.

The article also alludes to these. However, they try to pass them off by saying these other events occurred when activity was still shown to be present. Well, I kinda have to go 'No duh, Sherlock' on this one - again, it's not exactly ethical to intentionally try to kill off your human test subjects just to prove points and validate theories. Studies that have involved near-death experience and replication have to be conducted in very controlled, very careful circumstances monitored by medical personnel, in a hospital / immediate care environment, and administered only up to maximum predetermined 'safe' levels.

He of course didn't receive any of this testing. The doctors were not running an experiment on his body, they were trying to save his life. It was not something setup to see what would happen under controlled conditions. He had E.coli bacteria attacking through his blood-brain barrier. Scientific studies were the least of anyone's concerns. One would argue rightfully so, unless perhaps he'd signed for turning his body over to science when he died and being that close to a death proclamation (and being removed from support).

Archmage_Bael wrote:

I suspect that no matter how much we find out about the human brain, this kind of thing will always be labelled as too outlandish or fantastical to be true. I mean, that's how we are, right? We're cynical creatures by nature I think until we experience it ourselves. Personally I'm eager to believe what he said was true, and there's my bias, but its not something I care greatly enough about to get defensive over.

On another note, I found the things he wrote about what he saw truly fascinating.

Too outlandish, too fantastical? Hah, I personally laugh out loud at such a notion. Have you not seen the images of galaxies colliding, billowing forth their guts in apocalyptic but gorgeous scenery against an infinite backdrop that not only invokes the deepest romantic imagination stirrings, but also calls into question everything we know because we can visibly see dark matter continuing onward as though it collided with nothing? Mother nature has proven time and time again that she is far better than we silly human beings credit her for.

The images he experienced are not the issue - his interpretation of those images, on the other hand, is a discredit to the notion. He calls out that with his cortex 'shut down', the current prevaliing theories of consciousness must be thrown to the wind, and he will spend the rest of his days searching for the true meaning of human perception and how we are much more than a physical entity. This is human ego at its very worst masquerading as something pure - we are human, we think, we are, we exist, and because we've yet to find anything else like us, we are special snowflakes worthy of being above all other things.

Without going too off board with my soapbox here, we silly humans continually apply boundaries and borders to what we perceive to be, and as a result lose out on the greater notion. We have to identify, understand, associate, and rationalize. Something cannot simply be - and this is ne'er more true than when nature is involved. Man likes to think there is some grand design, some plan to make it all worthwhile, some system of order and balance. Science long ago disproved this as well *cough*second law of thermodynamics*cough* - one only needs to look at our universe, and see that nature seeks not order and balance, but chaos and chance.

I have a quick question! But before I ask I would like to say its an interesting idea the man has about the afterlife and stuff. I myself am rather skeptical of most of those accounts myself, I've heard too many that even with my feeble mind can prove false ^^ but yeah onto my question!

If nature is chaotic and can't be rationalized, how can science work? Wasn't that the point of science so people could explain rationally what was happening in the world? I mean don't they try to prove the laws of nature, if nature had no reason at all and was actually chaos I would think the laws that we discovered would be thrown out the window. Like one day gravity would repel everything instead of pull. Nature seems pretty orderly to me as well perhaps things aren't cookie cutter like it happens the same way all the time but it has checks and balances. Like ecosystems with predator prey relationships. They go up and down but still maintain a balance even with extinctions something else rises to to take the others place. I think that really the most chaotic thing nature has produced is us.

You have done research then I have I'm sure ^^ so I figured I'd ask. I haven't taken many science classes in college or anything (because I'm majoring in English ^^) but my professors of science have all said that science can find the answers and reasons for things. They were no way trying to imply that there was a designer in any sort of matter quite the opposite. I was wondering maybe I'm using a different defintion of chaotic and order than you meant I just wanted clarification is all ^^

Unfortunately Saen_Kel I do not have the ability to answer a question like that. Though yes, you're probably right about it...

As for aethernavale - well at this point I'm just gonna stop arguing. I was more or less willing to continue it because our posts were relatively short, but I have no desire whatsoever to continue. I do not want to spend the time to do research that would yield a valid enough response and also to equal your posting size. Really I just wanted to talk about the prospects of what he said he saw and wrote, why we find them interesting or not, generally everything but whether or not it was true what he experienced. (I'm not saying God was the cause of it, nor did he.)

An argument like that will clearly have no end until we find a sure answer, which would never happen with a subject like this anyway. Especially because how people cling to science when it is incapable of answering all your questions.

Though to answer a question of yours near the bottom of your post: I don't find galaxies colliding fantastical at all, I find it beautiful, and horrific. Of course though that's just my opinion. I apologize for any possible sarcastic tone you may have read into this.

Saen Kel wrote:

I have a quick question! But before I ask I would like to say its an interesting idea the man has about the afterlife and stuff. I myself am rather skeptical of most of those accounts myself, I've heard too many that even with my feeble mind can prove false ^^ but yeah onto my question!

There is no reason to be skeptical of the accounts themselves. Sure, maybe one or two people make things up to garner further attention, to milk it out, what have you, but it is documented that people can 'experience' these things or stuff similar to it. Cases have been replicated in different people under controlled conditions. It just also happens to be documented that an outside force isn't the contribution causing the experience; what they are 'experiencing' isn't actually happening except inside their mind.

Saen Kel wrote:

If nature is chaotic and can't be rationalized, how can science work? Wasn't that the point of science so people could explain rationally what was happening in the world?

You confuse the meaning of the words. Something can be rational, real, defined. Rationalization, on the other hand, isn't a word so strictly defined. While the word's structure would imply a relation to the rationale, it unfortunately means something completely different where society is concerned. In fact, what specifically it means is determined by exactly what your are discussing. As much as I hate wiki quoting, it is the best quick reference I have to provide to you. See this link.

Saen Kel wrote:

I mean don't they try to prove the laws of nature, if nature had no reason at all and was actually chaos I would think the laws that we discovered would be thrown out the window. Like one day gravity would repel everything instead of pull. Nature seems pretty orderly to me as well perhaps things aren't cookie cutter like it happens the same way all the time but it has checks and balances. Like ecosystems with predator prey relationships. They go up and down but still maintain a balance even with extinctions something else rises to to take the others place. I think that really the most chaotic thing nature has produced is us.

Again, you're confusing / assuming items here. You interpret order and balance to mean a system of rules. Thereby drawing conclusions chaos is the antithesis of order and balance and the system of rules, chaos is anarchy; thus it can have no rules.

Not so much.

Examine the definition of chaos and realize that it is talking instead about randomization, that being probability and statistics. This of course is where chaos theory stems from, an area still under active debate / research given its implications. However, one should also note that the extremists of chaos theory proposition aren't much better than the extremists of theism.

Thus, gravity is not going to one day stop working unless something causes it to fail. Something would have to change in the fundamental application of the model to cause it to do so. Just because nature prefers randomization doesn't mean that it can break laws doing it - the speed of light being one of the best (currently known) models of this. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Except, now we think we have proof something might. Does that mean that nature breaks its laws? No, it means humans had the law wrong to begin with. The idea that nature is broken and will suddenly, without explanation, change itself is at best anthropological; trying to explain something that isn't a human as if it were. Which is religion in a nutshell.

Nature can be explained; that is not to say the same thing as nature is ordered and balanced. It is theorized that at one point there were equal parts matter and antimatter in our universe - yet now matter reigns supreme (well, baryonic matter in it's small little section of total stuff). Why is this so? If the universe were perfectly balanced and orderly, this 'balance' of matter and antimatter should never have changed.

Yet it did.

Ecosystems, you mention. That has a natural cycle, establishes a balance, an equilibrium, if you will, no? In point of fact, let us examine an ecosystem. It is, by definition, a system of living and nonliving components interacting with internal and external stressors. Now apply the concept of entropy and the idea of the second law of TD to it as a closed system. Entropy is an expression of disorder, or shall we say, randomness. All closed systems in thermodynamics increase in entropy to reach equilibrium. This process reduces the state of the initial order of the systems. Equilibrium then is defined as the state of maximum entropy, that is to say, constant. One can conclusively and correctly state that as entropy increases, uniformity increases. Circular no? Balanced, orderly? Well, that depends now doesn't it?

Saen Kel wrote:

You have done research then I have I'm sure ^^ so I figured I'd ask. I haven't taken many science classes in college or anything (because I'm majoring in English ^^) but my professors of science have all said that science can find the answers and reasons for things. They were no way trying to imply that there was a designer in any sort of matter quite the opposite. I was wondering maybe I'm using a different defintion of chaotic and order than you meant I just wanted clarification is all ^^

In conclusion, I think you're just confused by the usage of the terms.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

As for aethernavale - well at this point I'm just gonna stop arguing. I was more or less willing to continue it because our posts were relatively short, but I have no desire whatsoever to continue. I do not want to spend the time to do research that would yield a valid enough response and also to equal your posting size. Really I just wanted to talk about the prospects of what he said he saw and wrote, why we find them interesting or not, generally everything but whether or not it was true what he experienced. (I'm not saying God was the cause of it, nor did he.)

You called this thread "Heaven is Real?", after the title of the article. He states in the article, and I quote:

Quote :

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

So yeah. He definitely did. Not convinced?

Quote :

One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.

There's more. No need to beat the dead horse though.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

An argument like that will clearly have no end until we find a sure answer, which would never happen with a subject like this anyway. Especially because how people cling to science when it is incapable of answering all your questions.

Science is more than capable of answering all of my, and our, questions. Current understanding of science, though, is ginormously lacking. One could even say the scale is of Felaryan proportions. And so long as people stay more interested in creating little blue pills to give themselves 4 hours of fucky-sucky time, making their dicks bigger, etc, rather than spending the energy, money, and time doing something constructive - like I dunno, figuring out how we can live longer than a pathetic 100 years, or claiming that the search for such a thing is playing God itself - we will instead have people filling in these blanks with anything else available that helps them complete the mystery for themselves.

And that's not to say it's a bad thing. While I find Abrahamic religion to blow chunks, I think the mythos of the poetic and prose eddas has some total badassery in it. If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big. And awesome.

But don't ever stop acknowledging that it is a dream. Stabs once told me that I couldn't build a Reya. Well, he's right. I acknowledge that my imagination is just that. I'm not going to be able to build a living, breathing, 150' Reya.

Yet I am totally having a form of Reya built right now. I can compromise.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

Though to answer a question of yours near the bottom of your post: I don't find galaxies colliding fantastical at all, I find it beautiful, and horrific. Of course though that's just my opinion. I apologize for any possible sarcastic tone you may have read into this.

I imagine you would find it fantastical if you lived in a place and / or time not up on our current knowledge. The point being, is that you - in my opinion - attempted to postulate that cynicism of man led to the idea that what he 'experienced' was too fantastical and outlandish to be true. Which is just BS. The issue again is not the experience itself, but the irrational conclusions made from it; particularly by someone who claims to have knowledge to prove that there simply isn't any other way what he 'experienced' can happen within the realm of 'science', but yields the ultimate 'truth' instead. (Which was also stated in the article, at the end. By him.)


Let me leave you with this:

To answer all of that in short: there will never be an answer so long as people are going to keep insisting that science can explain it, yet we do not have the technology. See the problem? We're debating about something to which we do not even have the instruments necessary to prove our points. We can only theorize, and therefore this entire argument is moot.

Its arguing for the sake of arguing right now. Please find something else to talk about other than whether or not what he experienced was true/make-believe/in his mind/out of his mind/whatever, or go somewhere else. I have no more desire to talk about something that cannot be proven. This time, I will admit, I'm fairy pissed off at what you're doing here - so if you don't mind, I'm going to take a break.

Bael, if you're going to take a break, don't say it out loud, just do it. Also...

Archmage_Bael wrote:

This relates because it could possibly influence ideas for our own vision of Felaryan Heaven. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raeburn/newsweek-heaven-cover-story_b_1958795.html

Does heaven actually discriminate between religious and non religious people?
Does heaven reflect your personality, what you believe, your behaviors, and what you did in your life to be an experience all your own?

I think at its most basic level, its fun to think about. I plan on getting the book though ("Proof of Heaven") and reading it. I'd like to know what other people think about it.

That's what you got from Aethernavale: what he thinks about this. Exactly what you asked. For what it's worth, he feels strongly enough about it that he burst out of the gates of Hades after like half a year of inactivity to post wall after wall of text on how people are making a bunch of woo out of this, speaking quick and dirty.

But back to the topic, Bael, 'cause I know it gets to you when we ignore your original topic... well, I don't think there's much to go on with this. Some guy came back and said he saw butterflies, and light beings. Maybe we can make some fauna for Heaven that looks like big fucking butterflies or mantas made of light, but that's about it. If I've read the article right, he didn't mention what Heaven was like for anyone else than himself, or the effects of your religion.

I'd just like to add something to what Stabs posted. Since this is the forum for General Discussion about Felarya, shouldn't this topic be more relevant to Felarya, like what Stabs said, use it to flesh out Heaven? If this is just to talk about a neurosurgeon seemingly coming back to life despite being brain dead, then shouldn't this thread be in the Off topic discussion forum?

Even if what he experaiced was the afterlife, it brings the question of why he came back to the world of the living to begin with, as it's commonly accepted that once passed on, you don't come back.

Yeah I may have been being a little stupid there. Sorry aether, you responded with valid points, I just didn't feel like getting into a long debate about it. If I was a little snappish I apologize. (Something not many do online. )

Anyway, I was hoping to be more philosophical about this, and draw ideas from that, or what he said. I'm sure the book he wrote would have some crazy ideas to use to flesh out heaven. The whole senses being combined thing, for one, is fascinating.