It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly.

Tits or get off my butterfly wing, biatch.

Jesus, Aliens, whatever. A lack of evidence or understanding is not evidence of magic.

Sorry, folks. The afterlife is an eternity waiting on a Cinnabon line at O'Hare during a snowstorm on the day before Thanksgiving.

Jormungandr: This makes me think of that Dr. MacDougall and his measuring the weight of the dying back in 1907. Of the six tests he performed, four showed a drop in weight, one was interfered with by people opposed to his research and one patient died while he was still adjusting the scale. I wonder if such experiments could be repeated today, we have much more sensitive equipment now. People die all the time in hospitals of long term illness so it shouldn't be too hard to find someone who is both dying and willing to have their bed on a scale while they do it.

/I'd do it!

Maybe you could even capture these souls in jars and make them fight. Like Pokemon.

I once went through this after dying on the operating table.

There was a huge room, only it seemed very little, with high expansive beams made out of some sort of transparent material, which was glowing. I was surrounded by dolls of various heights and colours. They began their revolting work. They resembled hideous torturers, blood flowing on their hands as they dug ever more deeply into the frigid corpse of a girrafe and pulled out its innards, like white cooks gutting a goose. Around their arms coiled the intestines-green-yellow snakes-and faeces dripped on their coats-a warm, putrid fluid.

They punctured the bladder, the cold urine in it glistening like yellow wine. They poured it in large bowls, and it reeked of pungent, acrid ammonia. Then suddenly, there was the sound of some angelic violin, only the violin was made out of the screams of a thousand tortured frogs.

There was a fog clearing, and suddenly I was surrounded by Justin Beibers, a trillion of them, shrieking the shriek of the damned, and then they merged into one while the room became like ice. The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and a dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the not-violins. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown.

Suddenly, the Beiber-thing spoke! "For the love of heaven,' he said nervously, 'don't give my idea such real importance! There's no proof that existence is possible outside of our three ordinary dimensions. Just as we've never discovered any two-dimensional beings from the world of surfaces, or one-dimensional beings from the linear world, we must be indiscernible to beings, if there are any, who live in worlds having more dimensions than ours. I'm in no mood to give you a lesson in hypergeometry, Paulseta, but I'm sure of one thing: there are spaces different from ours."

I wept at this. 'Oh, why did I have to listen to you?' I yelled at the Beiber-thing. 'Now I fear for you. That thing I see poking out of the floor and following me with it's shriek is not a thing. That is a Beiber! It's the thing people fear above all others, in every sea in the world. It's a dreadful and mysterious beast, more cunning than man. For reasons that perhaps no one will ever know, it chooses its victim, and when it has chosen a man, it pursues him for years and years, for a lifetime, until it devours him. And the strange thing is that nobody can see him but the victim himself and blood relations.'

Suddenly, almost on cue, a Nickleback CD began to play from some sort of celestial hi-fi.

To listen to The Nickleback was to lose one's will to the band and forever be the creature's slave. Obedient, the victims rise from the beds, leave the security of their homes and go out in nightclothes, like sleepwalkers, heading toward that band of Hell, which rejoiced in any new prey. The victims go to the band, oblivious of the mud that squelches under their feet, not realising they are padding through the marsh. And the creature will draw back, retreating further to lure its prey into the slimy depths that capture and swallow its victims without mercy.

It was like the noise of a million ears rupturing at once. Terrible, frantic, really annoying.

I started to drift back to the operating table then, and new with certainty that within every living thing is a starlike piece. Those within human beings are bright, and those within children are the brightest of all. As people age, the starlike parts grow dim as though with distance, except in the cases of certain geniuses and halfwits. As I awoke, I asked the surgeon what the time was.

He looked at me, and quietly mumbled: "It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Partying partying yeah. Partying partying yeah."

I am sometimes concerned that I never made it back from the afterlife at all.

My experience of the afterlife may not tie in with the good Doctor's, but it's perfectly valid.

nmemkha: Now who is the one being pedantic?

No one. They're generally meaningless words. You could've said "blompablump" instead and made yourself approximately as clear. "Spirituality" seems to encompass everything from feeling good on a sunny day to communing with alien mind energy crystals.

It's becoming rather clear that you're just a moron. I'm sorry about this, but everything you write seems to have a slick layer of "not quite up to the level of discussion" smeared all over it, which considering the level of discussion is rather sad. Maybe you'll be reincarnated as something smarter in the future.

meta1hed: xanadian: Mugato: /how come no one has near death experiences of Hell, anyway?

Because *that* is truly an invention of man, meant to keep us under the thumbs of the ruling elite.

23 Minutes in Hell

So please...remember to give money to your church, or you're going to hell.

Neelix calls bullshiat.

ELF Radio: RAAAARGH SHUT UP ALL YOU WEAK, SNIVELING BABIES WHO THINK LIFE HAS MEANING OR SOME GAY SHIAT LIKE THAT. WE ARE ANIMAL-MACHINES THAT SPRANG INEXPLICABLY FROM NOTHING AND WE EAT AND FARK AND DIE AND THAT IS ALL. NOTHING ELSE EXISTS AND ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHER WISE IS A LAME DICK WHO CANT DEAL WITH REALITY.

WHY DONT YOU FAIRIES GO BECOME REPUBLICANS AND VOTE FOR MITT ROMENY IF YOU BELIEVE THIS NANCY QUEER AND HIS HALLUCINATROY BULLSHIAT.

Lucid and logical counterpoint, presented politely and with civility. You've convinced me with your persuasiveness.

/assbag

SpectroBoy: I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

You know how I know he isn't a scientist?


Hint: One personal subjective experience is NEVER a basis for science.

I assume that, as a scientist, he'll be replicating the conditions to confirm his observations.

also, i'm glad to see the "this guy is full of shiate and wants to sell his book" is covered.

The brain tries to make sense of the data it receives. The result is always a subjective experience even while awake.
We are not souls observing a single universe through the windows of our eyes.
We are billions of brains developing billions of imperfect models from the incomplete reports of our senses.

EyeballKid: Newsweek: Just Throwing Some Shiat on a Wall and Seeing What Will Stick.

Newsweek: Oh God Please Buy A Copy We're Starving Here. Jerry Mows Lawns on the Weekend Just To Get By. I Have 9 Credit Cards Maxed. We'll Talk About God, Sex, Football, American Idol, Whatever You Want

I had the exact same experience where i realized that the whole universe was less than a speck. It happened in a second. I was tripping balls

AbbeySomeone: Attitudes like yours are why more people don't share their experiences. If it hasn't happened to you or it's something you can't imagine or understand it isn't real, right?


And by "share" you mean charging $10 on Amazon, correct?

logistic: Although I considered myself a faithful Christian

Loses any trace of credibility at this precise point. Not arguing one way or another, but his opinion is nixed by this statement.

You didn't finish the sentence. I was so more in name than in actual belief. So according to the Bible, he wouldn't be in heaven, he'd be in Hell!

/how come no one has near death experiences of Hell, anyway?

Babwa Wawa: You're not going to know jack sh*t until you are dead. Dead-dead, not "turned-off dead". Anyone claiming certainty on the matter is either delusional or a charlatan. When you've got a book deal like TFA, I'm banking on the latter.

Just the fact that he didnt "Die Die" as you'd have it doesnt mean that just him surviving alone is a miraculous outcome. (notice, I didnt use the word "miracle"). As a fellow scientist by education, I found the article to be at the very least interesting and I have no reason to attack him or others for his change of belief based on his own individual observation.

You've posted twice in this discussion already - are you so afraid of something you cannot believe or so angry that you dont want to let people find calming words about their own death, even if it is misguided? What's the harm in letting others have their own beliefs, even you must acknowledge that after death it wont matter and wont change the outcome of their beliefs they hold while alive?

Interesting article. Good find, subby