A measuring tape is a great way to find the true length of a 2×4 wooden board. But it won’t tell you how many gallons of water are in your bathtub.
No one measurement, or group of measurements, will suffice to find truth in all situations. Lets look at the problem of consciousness, or psyche, or mind, or soul, or spirit, whatever you wish to call it.
Consciousness is who you are, and science says it resides in the brain. OK. If consciousness resides in the brain then it must be biological, and it must die when the brain dies. So we look at the brain, and find that brain cells look pretty much alike. It seems “memory” would take up a lot of brain space, but we can’t find memory anywhere, does it have a color? Do we look for red for memory, green for thoughts, where are the thoughts?. Well we have looked over 100 years at the brain, and can’t find consciousness anywhere in it.
So, we just assume it’s there, but we can’t see it. Maybe brain mapping will tell us where it is, so scientists start mapping the brain. A problem arises, the maps don’t match, and then when a portion of the brain is damaged, another portion takes over to continue the function. How does the brain do that?
Enter the near death experience. Surgeons and medical doctors noticed their patients recalling strange stories after they were revived from cardiac arrest. One doctor Raymond Moody decided to study this strange phenomenon with the permission of the doctors and hospital. When he completed his study and published a book, his peers were outraged, and kept him from working as a Psychiatrist for the rest of his life. Dr. Elisabeth Keubler-Ross spent her whole life studying death and dying. She came to the same conclusion that Dr. Moody did. Consciousness is spiritual, and Spirit does exist without the body.
I think Pam Reynolds will become the benchmark of near death experiences. Here is an event that was experimental surgery. It was monitored and taped with every modern device of medicine.
Stopped heart and no brain waves
A mother of three, 35 year old Pam Reynolds lay on the operating table in the summer of 1991 with a life-threatening bulge in her brain.
Doctor Robert Spetzler, the director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix had arranged for Pam to be hooked up to a brainstem monitoring machine. And other machines tracked Pam’s heartbeat, temperature, breathing and other vital signs. Additionally, Pam’s eyes were taped shut. Pam was also under anesthesia. Doctor Spetzler had to stop Pam’s heart which caused all bodily signs to cease.
Shortly after Doctor Spetzler turned on the surgical saw to begin cutting through Pam’s skull, Pam felt herself “pop” outside her body and hover above the operating table to a position where she could hover over Doctor Spetzler’s shoulders where she could observe the operation on her motionless body below.
From this position she saw Doctor Spetzler working on her with a saw which looked to her like an electric toothbrush. Pam heard and reported later what nurses in the operating room had said and exactly what was happening during the operation.
A little while into the operation, Doctor Spetzler ordered that Pam’s blood begin to drain from her body. Still every monitor attached to Pam’s body registered “no life”.
Pam found herself going from monitoring the operation above the table to traveling down a “tunnel” which had a light at the end. At the end of this tunnel Pam could see her relatives and friends waiting, including her long-dead grandmother. Time and all worries seemed to stop for Pam.
It wasn’t long, however, before a “dead” uncle led her back to her body.
Reentering her body felt to Pam like “plunging into a pool of ice”.
BIBLE PROBE COMMENT:
THE ABOVE STORY was reported in the August 2003 Reader’s Digest.
What is important about this story is that with no brain wave function, no heart function, and blood being drained from her – Pam’s is a case that rules out any “hallucinations” from chemical or psychological reasons. Combine this with the preponderance of evidence from thousands of similar near death experiences – and any thinking person would have to be led to the belief that the “soul” is cognitive, and that it survives death….
Read Near Death Experiences (NDEs) here.
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