u/Hip_III

Deathbed visitations are where the souls of deceased relatives and loved ones are reported to come to visit a person hours or days before they die. Such visitations may occur in very frail people just before their death, and are often a source of great comfort to these people.

Interestingly though, I have not come across any accounts of deathbed visitations appearing to a healthy person who died suddenly and unexpectedly (such as from a car accident, a heart attack, and so forth).

It is often assumed that from the perspective of Heaven, all the past, present and future of our physical world can be viewed. But if Heaven can see into our future, why wouldn't people who die unexpectedly also receive deathbed visitations?

Why do you only hear of deathbed visitations in people whose vital signs have deteriorated to such a degree that death appears obviously imminent?

In the case of deteriorating vital signs, anyone can predict that death may be forthcoming, even without being able to peer into the future. So one assumes that deceased loved ones in Heaven may pick up on this deterioration, and come to visit to provide comfort.

But does the fact that no deceased loved ones come to visit a person just before they die unexpectedly indicate that even Heaven does not know that this person is soon to die?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Virology/comments/1wrbwb1/could_the_current_epidemic_of_generalised_anxiety/

Something I have often wondered about is the scope and coverage of Heaven. Is there a single Heaven that covers all planets in the universe? Or perhaps one Heaven per galaxy, covering all the planets in its galaxy? Or does each planet with conscious life have its own Heaven?

One thing I have noticed with NDE accounts is that in the afterlife realm, it is common to meet deceased relatives and loved ones, sometimes even deceased pets, and sometimes divine or spiritual beings. However, meetings with alien species from other planets is not generally reported. No little green men with four eyes are observed in Heaven. Now if Heaven covered all the planets in the galaxy or covered the entire universe, you might expect it to be bustling with alien souls.

So does this mean the afterlife humans enter into is exclusively for conscious beings from Earth? Or is it simply that in Heaven, you only hook up with deceased people that you know from your life?

It's interesting that during an NDE, after the initial earthbound out-of-body phase is over (the phase where you may visit living loves ones on Earth), the transition into the heavenly realm typically involves rapid travel through a long tunnel, or involves rapid travel through vast distances of space. The fact that you seem to travel to Heaven suggests that the afterlife might have some physical location within the universe. Maybe there are many heavens, scattered throughout the physical cosmos.

Some 30 years ago, I had a genuine encounter with the disembodied soul of a relative who had died in hospital just a few hours earlier. Such events are termed an after-death communication (ADC), and are not that unusual.

The ADC I had was so strong, so blatant, so palpable, that it could not possibly be mistaken for anything else, and could not possibly be just an overactive mind imagining things that are not really there.

The ADC I experienced was not a voice in a dream, nor some unexplained sound at night, but a totally unmistakable sensed presence of that relative in front of me in my bedroom at night while I was awake. I sensed the presence of the relative as strongly as if she were there in body — in fact even stronger than that, because it was an intense, intimate connection of minds that occurred at the level of pure consciousness, rather than something happening through my senses. The whole encounter probably lasted for no longer than 30 seconds before she departed my presence; but I was totally startled, mesmerised, bewildered, and almost frozen with shock as it was happening.

Now some will argue that experiencing a sensed presence can be a mental health phenomenon similar to hallucinations. This of course is true, and I have considered this as a possible explanation. However, I have never had a sensed presence experience before or after that one incident, and I have never suffered from hallucinations or any similar mental health issues. Nor was I suffering from any grief at the time, so my emotional state was completely calm and normal, and the experience could thus not be put down to perturbed emotions.

Thus I think my experience was a genuine ADC, and not a mental health event.

From this personal experience, I am utterly convinced that the soul survives death. Though of course that soul survival evidence does not necessarily imply that God exists. Nor does it imply that we continue to exist as our normal personality after death; it may be that soon after departure from the body, the soul gets subsumed back into some universal mind, and personal identity is lost, or at least diluted into something greater. So while I can say for sure that the soul survives death and departs the physical body, I cannot extrapolate much beyond this to say what happens in the longer term.

My direct empirical experience contrasts to religious faith. Religion teaches that the soul survives death; but even religious people will often question this, because even the most religious are not without their doubts. But when you encounter a disembodied soul yourself, as I did, it is a very different matter. Then the survival of the soul is no longer just an article of faith, but becomes empirical evidence. I feel immensely grateful to be given this experience, because it totally changed my perspective. Though unfortunately this is empirical evidence that you cannot share with others, except those who have had a similar ADC experience. So I fully appreciate that unless you have this experience this yourself, you are unlikely to believe it when recounted by someone else.

Let me say though that that I have studied hard science (I have a BSc in mathematics and physics, and an MSc in cognitive science), so I know how to be scientific and skeptical. I personally do not believe in the miracles detailed in any religion, and nor do I believe in things like UFOs, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, and suchlike. Nor do I necessarily believe in any of the things that religions teach. So I am not someone who is gullible, or someone who is prone to believing in improbable things. I mention this in order to hopefully convey the idea that I am a reliable witness, and that the evidence I observed for soul survival stands up to all the scientific scrutiny I gave it.

However, I know full well that without it being verified by others under lab conditions, experiences such as mine do not stand any chance of being considered scientifically valid. Which is very unfortunate, because I have no doubt my experience was genuine, an event that if I could prove, would revolutionise our perspective and understanding of the world. Yet I have no means of proving this in a way acceptable to science.

I have chatted to other people who had these experiences, in what appear to be genuine cases, but they do not seem that concerned that they cannot be reproduced in the lab, or demonstrated in a scientific manner. But it bothers me, because I believe in the scientific method and I believe in the scientific progression of our understanding of the universe.

I should add that I think most cases of what are assumed to be ADCs are not genuine. Or at least, most instances do not provide incontrovertible evidence for the survival of consciousness after death. For example, many people say they saw a deceased loved one appear in a dream, where the deceased spoke to them, or gave them a message. They then claim this was an ADC, and that this was the soul of the relative visiting them. But in fact a dream does not provide any evidence at all for a genuine ADC, because in your dream your mind can conjure up anything, including the voice and appearance of a deceased loved one.

By contrast, my ADC occurred while I was awake and fully conscious. And these are the only type of ADCs that I think can be genuine. Because unless you have some mental health issues, your mind is not going to be conjuring up these sensed presence events while you are fully awake.

Other people may attribute physical events in the world to an ADC. For example, some unusual noise they hear in the middle of the night, or some strange coincidence that happens to them, they may believe are signs from a deceased loved one. But I discount these sort of things as genuine ADCs, because I think encountering a disembodied soul only occurs at the level of mind, via direct mind to mind connection, and is not something that occurs in the physical world. Thus anything you perceive through your physical senses is not an ADC, in my view. I think you only become aware of the presence of the soul of a recently-deceased person at the level of pure consciousness. I also suspect that disembodied souls do not hang around long after death. So I think these ADCs can only occur in the hours immediately after death.

Do atheists actually understand that the Abrahamic faiths are religions of higher consciousness?

Whereas the pagan religions that came before them are founded on base instincts, especially the African origin pagan religions.

Note: to understand this post, you have to know what consciousness and higher consciousness are. Consciousness as in the hard problem of consciousness. Higher consciousness as in the enhanced conscious awareness that can be obtained from mindfulness meditation.

Never heard of the hard problem? Then you will probably not understand this post. Never tried mindfulness meditation or read about its effects? Then this post may be equally beyond you. But if you are familiar with these things, then read on.

With higher consciousness, it is consciousness itself that becomes in command of the mind, as the executive controller, rather than the wayward base instincts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time doing mindfulness meditation will tell you that is creates a more poised disposition, it makes you more calm and collected, an in control of your own mind, as well as the stressors that life throws at you.

God can even be viewed as a metaphor or focus point of higher consciousness. Focusing on the concept of God is one way that you might increase higher consciousness.

And monotheism also enhances higher consciousness, because by its nature, consciousness is all encompassing and overarching phenomenon of mind, spanning all aspects of the mind. So one God that rules all is metaphor for the overarching nature of consciousness. Whereas the multiple deities you find in paganism, one for each of the instincts or emotions, emphasises the ragtag of base unruly instincts humans have, rather than the in control force of higher consciousness.

This is why the religions of higher consciousness tend to have a problem with sex, because sex is one of the strongest base instincts, and can thus be detrimental to the development of higher consciousness as an executive controller, if sex becomes an obsession (as anyone who has ruined a good marriage or relationship by foolishly having an affair can testify).

Base instincts like are fine in animals, but humans have the capacity for greater mental refinement. The Buddhist religion is also one of higher consciousness, demonstrating that you do not need to have a God to align your psyche to higher consciousness.

Why am I posting this? Because some atheists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In their antagonistic stance towards religion, they fail to see the important features religion that can help create a civilised society, and help raise the levels of consciousness in humanity.

I had what I consider to be a startling and genuine after-death communication (ADC), that occurred five hours after the death of a relative in hospital. That ADC I detail in this post.

This ADC I had was so strong, so blatant, so stark, that it could not possibly be mistaken for anything else, and could not possibly be just an over active mind imagining things that are not really there. The ADC I experienced was not a voice in a dream, or some unexplained sound at night, but a totally glaring sensed presence of that relative, right in front of me while I was awake. I sensed the presence of the relative as strongly as if she were there in body — in fact even stronger than that, because it was an intense, intimate connection of minds that occurred at the level of pure consciousness, rather than something happening through the senses.

Now some will argue that experiencing a sensed presence can be a mental health phenomenon similar to hallucinations. This of course is true. However, I have never had a sensed presence experience before or after that one incident, and I have never suffered from hallucinations nor any similar mental issues. So I think my experience was a genuine ADC, and not a mental health event. Thus from this personal experience, I am completely convinced that ADCs do occur. I have also come across similar accounts of ADCs from other people that seem to me equally genuine.

However, I am sceptical about many accounts of ADCs, especially those which occur weeks, months or years after the person died, as I suspect the soul may have long since departed the earthly realm at that point, having transferred to the heavenly sphere. Once in Heaven, I suspect the soul can no longer communicate with the living. My hunch is that communications between disembodied souls of the recently deceased and the living can only occur when these souls are still roaming the earthly sphere in the hours just after their death.

My hypothesis is based on reports from people who have had an NDE report, as the following explains:

Numerous NDE reports indicate that the souls of the (temporarily) deceased individual having an NDE do not hang around on Earth for long. Often it is reported that during an NDE, the individual's disembodied soul will view the scene of their death (eg, a hospital room, car accident, etc), and then may briefly visit loved ones at different locations on Earth.

During these visits to living loved ones on Earth, I suspect there may be the opportunity for an ADC to occur, provided that the living person has a receptive mind that can tune into the spiritual dimension (I imagine that the more mystical or spiritually-inclined people will detect disembodied souls more readily).

But in all the NDE accounts I have come across, after this brief time roaming around the Earth, the soul will then depart the earthly realm, and travel to the heavenly sphere, typically through a long tunnel with a light at the other end, or sometimes travelling through vast distances of space at lightning speed in order to reach Heaven.

I have never come across any NDE in which a disembodied soul in Heaven is reported to have communicated with living beings back on Earth. Rather, during their NDE, individuals report communicating with deceased relatives in Heaven, or with divine or spiritual beings in Heaven, but never with living people on Earth.

I have not seen one NDE where there is communication between Heaven and Earth. So there may be no channel of communication between souls in Heaven and people living on Earth.

Once the soul arrives in Heaven, it may also lose interest with the situation on Earth. Indeed, we have heard in many NDE reports that once in Heaven, the individual's disincarnate soul may forget what it is like to be human. The individual having an NDE often reports that in Heaven, they took on a form of consciousness that was different to human consciousness. So once in Heaven, souls may not even be able to relate to the human condition, let alone communicate with living humans.

Thus in conclusion, I suspect that a genuine ADC may only occur in the hours just after death, while the disembodied soul still roams the Earth, but do not occur in the weeks, months, or years that follow a death, because at that stage, the soul has entered Heaven.

This is my theory anyway. What do others think?

I completely accept that life emerged and became more complex over billions of years through evolutionary processes. And I completely accept that Darwin's concepts of natural selection and sexual selection are important drivers of evolution.

However, I wonder if there are additional physical mechanisms at play that contribute to evolution's ability to produce increasingly complex and sophisticated lifeforms. What I have in mind is that evolution might somehow be exploiting the quantum level of reality in ways that are not yet understood.

For example, it is established that quantum entanglement can operate not only over spatial distances, but also over temporal ones. So this might be something that evolution could exploit to create increasingly sophisticated and perfected organisms. I am not sure how, but we know it is possible to perform complex computations at the quantum level, and indeed, the race is on at present to develop quantum computers which exploit the quantum level of reality for this purpose. These computers harness quantum entanglement in their operation. Could nature also exploit natural quantum computation for its own evolutionary purposes?

Perhaps the quantum level of reality might offer evolution some sort of testbed in which it could check out the viability of its random designs before implementing them in a living organism.

Why might the conventional Darwinian mechanisms of mutation, selection and inheritance appear insufficient? Well, there are approximately 3.2 billion base pairs in the human genome, and the development of a new biological structure would require specific changes at many different genomic locations. The chances of all of those changes occurring simultaneously by chance would be astronomically slim.

Thus the argument is that it happens not at once, but incrementally: first, one mutation appears that confers a survival advantage, so it is passed down through the generations; then the next genetic change appears, providing further advantage, and is also passed along. And this proceeds until the genetic changes contributing to the new biological structure have accumulated.

But even this incremental approach seems difficult to reconcile with the evolution of highly complex structures, because it would require that each evolutionary stage (each successive genetic change) on the way to creating the new genetic blueprint for the biological structure results in an increased survival advantage, even though the genetic design is only partially completed.

This would be equivalent to building a car, and expecting the car to function fully even when it is only half built.

Now I know that new genes are also acquired by routes other than simple base-pair mutation. Genes in single-celled organisms may be acquired by horizontal gene transfer or introduced by viruses, such as bacteriophages, and in more complex organisms viral genetic material can become incorporated into the germ line, as occurred with ancient retroviruses and endogenous retroviral sequences.

And then there is endosymbiosis, where two organisms may enter into a long-term symbiotic association, eventually resulting in the incorporation of one organism into another. As is well known, mitochondria and chloroplasts were probably descended from free-living bacteria that were incorporated into other cells and eventually became permanent organelles.

Nevertheless, I still have nagging doubts that the mechanisms currently recognised by evolutionary biology can explain every aspect of the emergence of biological complexity, and I wonder whether there may be additional physical mechanisms involving quantum phenomena that have yet to be discovered.

Most of what humans do is performed automatically, that is to say, unconsciously. For example, when we wake up and make our morning coffee, we are so familiar with this daily routine that we complete it automatically, without any conscious awareness in the process.

Similarly, when we drive a car, most of the time we do it automatically and unconsciously. We are usually thinking about something else while driving, or maybe looking at the scenery.  

It is only when some gnarly situation arises on the road that we suddenly apply our full conscious attention to handling it. As a survival instinct, we instantly apply our full mental conscious resources to navigate through the challenging circumstances.

We tend to think that we are conscious all day long, but perhaps in reality, we spend most of the day in an unconscious state, with consciousness only appearing fleetingly when we face a difficult situation that we cannot handle on an unconscious basis. 

Indeed, the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky famously said that "man is asleep". He pointed out that people live, work and react mechanically, operating under the illusion that they are fully conscious and in control.

Those who study consciousness (as in the hard problem of consciousness) tend to assume that consciousness is a phenomenon that is with us throughout our waking hours. 

But the reality is that full conscious awareness generally only appears when we are flummoxed by the situation facing us, because it is too difficult or challenging to handle automatically, so consciousness is summoned to try to resolve the situation.  

"The magnitude of loss is about 18% of the dopamine nerve terminals on average".

Does anyone else get this annoying pop-up box?

Any suggestions on how to get rid of it permanently gratefully received.

This is the pop-up which appears on every product page on eBay:

https://preview.redd.it/ols8qdwh6geh1.png?width=609&format=png&auto=webp&s=c89f3ad2ba03c557cafe6a4af3445949a95239d8

URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1097/OPX.0000000000001965

DOI: 10.1097/OPX.0000000000001965

PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36705713/

I'd very much like the full paper of this study. Thanks very much.

Ayahuasca means "the vine of the dead", and in Amazonian shamanism, the brew is believed to allow the soul to detach from the physical body and enter otherworldly realms, where it can communicate directly with deceased ancestors, as well as other entities.

Has anyone experienced such communication with deceased friends or relatives while on an ayahuasca?

If so, did you afterwards interpret this as a hallucination, or was there any evidence to suggest that you had a genuine meeting with the soul of the deceased?

In its Greek roots, the word atheist breaks down into:

a: which is prefix meaning "without" or "not"

theós: meaning "deity" or "god"

But when you look at the arguments of atheist online, their focus is on countering or debunking the doctrines religion, rather than directly attempting to counter the possibility of a Heaven in which God resides, and the survival of consciousness after death in this heavenly environment.

In this respect, an atheist might better be described as athreskos (to coin a term), which in its Greek roots, breaks down into:

a: which is prefix meaning "without" or "not"

thréskeia: which is the closest term the ancient Greeks had for religion.

So most atheists might in practice be athreskoi (the plural of athreskos) — people who do not believe in the doctrines of religion.

It might be argued that athreskeia (my term meaning the philosophy which opposes the doctrines of religion) plays an important role in the world, by exposing religion for a manmade set of ideas about God and Heaven (as opposed to the truth about God and Heaven, if this can be known).

But then atheists should make their position clear: that they are against manmade concepts of God and Heaven found within religion.

Interestingly, individuals who say they have direct knowledge of Heaven though a near-death experience (NDE) often also end up opposing religious doctrines, as their heavenly experience does not line up with what religions teach. So these people might also be accurately described as athreskoi, along with many atheists.

Frankincense resin is traditionally burnt as an incense in Catholic and Orthodox churches, and of course, frankincense was one of the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus.

Historically, frankincense used as an incense in temples across ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East.

I have found that taking around 5 drops of frankincense essential oil internally (diluted in around 15 ml of cooking oil) increases my spiritual feelings and spiritual consciousness within about 2 hours.

Of course, the effect is subtle, but noticeable, and may help attain deeper states of meditation.

I guess you could also administer frankincense essential oil via an aromatherapy burner, but I have not tried this method.

I seem to remember at least two NDE accounts where when walking through luscious paradisiacal meadows in the heavenly realm, it was reported that the flowers move aside as you place your feet down, so that they are not crushed beneath the foot?

Has anyone else come across such NDE stories of fields of flowers parting beneath the feet as you walk? Please post a link if you have it handy.

I wonder if this is a common occurrence in NDEs. If it is, then it would be another characteristic that is unique to NDEs, and not found in dreams.