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Comment by myheadasplode | Hacker News Reader

I encourage everyone interested to check out Dr. Bruce Greyson's book After. It's a scientific look at various NDE cases. This study mentions patients being unable to identify images on an ipad, but the book mentions other cases where patients were indeed able to describe imagery they wouldn't have otherwise been able to observe. I find NDEs to be a real frontier of science, no matter what's actually happening - whether it's hallucination or real consciousness outside of the body (e.g. nonduality, Advaita, etc). Fun stuff!

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> book mentions other cases where patients were indeed able to describe imagery they wouldn't have otherwise been able to observe

Quite an extraordinary claim, any evidence of this?

The Parnia study is the most systematic effort to date to establish highly rigorous evidence for this phenomenon.

One of the problems with the study is the expectation that the patient, in their hypothetically discarnate state, will pay any attention to the tablet, which is just one of many artifacts in the room.

I certainly don't pay attention to many such details in mundane life. I just made myself a cup of tea and put the cup onto my nightstand, but without looking, I cannot tell you which cup I chose and how is it decorated. I was distracted by something else when preparing it.

And dying people are probably more distracted than people who make tea. Most people who describe their NDEs in hospitals tend to concentrate their narration on other people, e.g. the team trying to resuscitate them.

Plus the headphone audio setup seems extra wrong to me. If you want to test hearing abilities of people who claim that they are outside their bodies, why use a device that sits on their ears?

And as I understand the article, it has failed to do so. The near-death patients had no idea what the tablet was showing.

That's correct. (Granted, failure to demonstrate the phenomenon does not rule it out.)

Can you say more about how advaita / nonduality are related to this? Still struggling to get my head around those ideas.

Me too, my friend (although a hardcore nonduality person would say you don't get your head around the ideas so much as experience them directly).

This is all anecdotal but a lot of NDE/OOB experiencers describe feelings of oneness and a singular connection with all matter and beings that they gain upon "leaving" the body and lose upon re-entering it. A lot of modern day non-dual seekers similarly describe their locus of perception post-awakening as being distributed through the entirety of the room that they're in as opposed to just the spot behind their eyes. Even MPSimmons' description of his experience in another comment mirrors what teachers like Angelo Dilullo (himself an anesthesiologist) describe.

In other words, nonduality says that there's just one consciousness/point of view that we falsely interpret as fragmented (ie mine, yours, the surgeon's, the table's, the chair's). People who report NDEs/OOBs use language that suggests the same.

In a very non-woo way, I think nondual perception and this line of experience is truly fascinating and I wish there were more scientific resources devoted to its study.

Wild stuff!

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