What has been most persuasive for me is the affect of the people who I've seen talking in videos about their experiences. They are matter-of-fact, not trying to convince others, not afraid of seeming silly or soft-headed (woo-woo), etc. But your point is also well taken, ww, so I think you're right about the credibility of the 9 year old. In the same way, my mother's father was a chemical engineer who would have been one of the last people in my personal experience to have ever admitted to anything woo-woo. So when he told my mother he had had an NDE, I found it incredibly convincing. This man would never have admitted something like this, even to his daughter, unless there had been something really real about it. Yes, rt, some dreams have that quality of realness, but that brings in the other aspect of NDE reports that make them credible: the deep wisdom and powerful love that accompany the stories. Where did this come from? Many of the people who were reporting their NDE had never had a spiritual experience before, how did they access this understanding? Something happened.Webwanderer wrote:Not trying to be argumentative here, but people can convince themselves of most anything with the right conditioning and motivation. The point is that a nine year old in the 1960's would have no way to have absorbed the type information into his/her brain to have hallucinated the experience that he had. It is clearly indicative that such experience could not be the result of an oxygen starved brain. The argument simply won't work.Enlightened2B wrote:For me, I've noticed that it's the convincing nature of their stories and most of all and most importantly, how convinced they, themselves are,
If it cannot be some bizarre inexplicable brain function, then what is left? The best answer is that it most likely reflects a non-physical origin of being. I can think of no evidence to contradict it. That it is not a single event, and happens repeatedly, is yet more evidence of a genuine non-physical origin.
WW
Now for an NDE link from a completely different kind of source--the New York Review of Books. In their latest edition they have a survey of books about NDEs.The author describes himself as a skeptic but comes to the (to him) surprising conclusion that some of the first person accounts are sincere tellings of actual experiences:
Most of these narratives, however, despite details that may strike one as bizarre or just plain silly, are clearly sincere, and a number of them are cogent and convincing. That is, the reader—or at least this reader—is convinced that they represent a reality the author experienced and remembered. The range of backgrounds is very wide, the life stories and lifestyles dramatically divergent, and the tone of most of them generally unruffled and confident. And though accounts of heaven tend to pall after one has read thirty or so of them, the real-life stories of the narrators are frequently absorbing and often moving…
The recent spate of NDE books offers something more concrete: contemporary first-person reportage. If their authors are not liars, something happened to these people. But what? Can what they report, however unlikely it sounds, be reconciled with science, so that we can respect the phenomenon while rejecting its literal manifestations? These are questions for a second article.