Death

[Lune]

As I've gotten older, I've found myself more frequently thinking about my death. I have been an atheist all my life, in spite of being baptized and forced into church occasionally as a small child. I found some peace in the notion that, at best, I'd get some kind of heavenly afterlife and, at worst, total oblivion and evaporation of my consciousness. I find the Abrahamic religious portrayals of heaven and hell utterly absurd, especially hell, with little to no basis in their respective textual dogma nor in basic logic.

I had an incredible childhood and a staggeringly terrible young adulthood before finally finding peace and happiness near the end of my 20's. As I've come to know so much about the world, life, our universe, and have revisited death, I find that my outlook has changed. While total oblivion wouldn't be horrible, as it's a total lack of experience, I truly hope that's not what happens.

However, I've found what I believe to be some evidence for some form of existence beyond this dimension in the scholarly study of near death experiences. While the field and the discussion on this topic are rife with hucksters and Christians, I have a doctorate and am good at parsing the quality of evidence, and there is nonetheless some intriguing evidence that people who have a near death experience (NDE) are experiencing something unique and profound. Here are the highlights:

1. Near death experiences are similar across cultures. People tend to report roughly the same basic phenomena, with different individualistic interpretations (such as Christians reporting seeing angels or Jesus, Hindu's seeing the messenger of the Gods, and atheists seeing an "entity" or "force". This archetypal near death experience is also seen in writings dating as far back as thousands of years.

2. Common features of an NDE include the sensation of traveling through a tunnel towards light, extremely intense and typically positive emotions, meeting deceased loved ones, perceiving a 'border' or 'threshold' between life and death, and having an out of body experience in which the person perceives their surroundings. NDE's may have all, some, or none of these features, but these are by far the most common. Panoramic life-review, or "life flashing before your eyes", is also common, with a sensation of increased acuity or resolution, with people reporting the ability to experience the memories of their life, all at once, in great detail that far exceeds their normal memory.

3. NDE's matching this archetype have been experienced by children, the blind, atheists, etc, who all overwhelmingly report the experience to be immensely positive, significantly lessening their fear of death and often having positive effects on their outlook for the remainder of their lives. Interestingly, even the congenitally blind have reported the tunnel of light and other visual phenomena with individual corroboration by researchers.

4. Studies have examined chemical and electrical (EEG) hallmarks of memory formation in the hippocampus and elsewhere and compared it to known configurations associated with both real memories and memories associated with dreams, hallucinations, and abstract experiences, and found that NDE's bear all the hallmarks of a real memory of an experience rather than a hallucination.

That said, this is ultimately unfalsifiable and therefore not a scientific explanation for the phenomena. There are some neuroanatomical explanations, among others, rooted in aberrations of multisensory integration as the brain dies, but these explanations have flaws as well. The main one is that NDE's have been known to occur in varying electrochemical and cognitive states, high oxygen, low oxygen, high CO2, low CO2, heart stopped, heart beating, and even in people who have not been clinically dead, such as climbers during a fall.

The more I read about this and the more I think about it, the more I believe there is something to it. Why is the universe 13.7 billion years old and not 18 billion? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are the sun and moon the EXACT SAME FUCKING SIZE to an observer on Earth - the sun just happens to be 400x larger but 400x further away? (The odds against this coincidence are FUCKING ENORMOUS) How the fuck did we all begin as hydrogen 13 billion years ago, going through 13 billion years of stellar evolution to make all the carbon, phosphorus, calcium, iron, and such that just so happen to be able to be arranged into amino acids, phospholipid bilayers, and nucleic acids that allow biological information to pass onwards through time? The universe could have just as easily been nothing but a bunch of cold rocks.

Now, I don't believe some bearded old man is up in the clouds governing our fates, and I don't believe he sent Jesus to Israel to save only a small fraction of humanity.

I think our universe is a place where there is time. I think human beings are only capable of perceiving three dimensional space-time, but there has to be something more, some existence or dimension outside of time; there are many phenomena in physics that suggest this as well. Electrons and some other subatomic particles are thought to exist outside of time. There is even a theory that every electron is actually the same electron, as no two electrons can be in the same place at the same time.

What if our universe is a simulation, and I am some 4d entity that is dipping its toes in three dimensional reality? Ok, but what about Occam's razor? If this dimension created us, then what created that dimension? The thing is, that question assumes the existence of time. It's a question rooted in the human experience, with human perceptions and assumptions. Without time, there is no growth, there is no change, there are no sequential thoughts, causes, effects, plans, learning. An entity in a dimension outside time would look at our universe and our reality and see a flat circle or perhaps a line, with all the events of our universe happening simultaneously (Sound familiar?). In order to exist in the first place, outside of time, it would have to have always existed. Or not exist at all.

I think it's possible that when these people clinically died, they began to experience the transition back into the greater reality, beyond the third dimension, outside time. And for the majority, that transition was so euphoric, so peaceful and sublime that it changed their lives. Whether it's heaven, hell, nirvana, reincarnation, oblivion, hallucinations of a dying brain, or the end of the simulation, we can never know. But this atheist has found enough hints of evidence to hope and to believe that there might be something more than nothingness. And if not, oh well, after what appears to be a peaceful and painless transition, I won't be around to fret about it. And if it's hell, I guess I'll see you all there because even if Christians were the ones who were right, none of yall follow the actual teachings of Jesus.

TL;DR: Lune learns about near death experiences and begins to think there's a warm, euphoric light waiting for him when he dies.

So... anyone ever had or known someone who has had a near death experience? What do you think happens?