The Day I Died
This documentary features in-depth case studies of Near Death Experiences including a dramatic veridical (verifiable accurate) out-of-body experience, the most recent research studies, and balanced interpretations of NDEs from both skeptical and “believer” perspectives – virtually everything an inquiring mind would need for an introduction to NDEs.
One of the best documentaries made about Near Death Experiences, by the BBC. Featuring many top scientists that have studied Near Death Experiences and other related incidents.
The BBC has refused to replay this documentary, and has stopped it from being sold as a dvd. They don’t want to get accused of supporting ‘fringe’ theories.
Watch the full documentary now (playlist) – alternative source at Veoh.com
Good doc.
Scientific and supernatural paradigms.
Nothing to do with religion.
But, waiting for the religee’s inevitable comments.
Haha, the challenge is on…
Liked this doc especially the quantum view of the brain’s link to consciousness.
Some topics that would have added more to the doc would have been: the commonalities of the experiences and what shapes them eg. “western” societies preconceived ideas, studies from various cultures with different attitudes towards death like indiginous tribes or isolated groups of people with less influence from ‘western’ ideas, children, or atheists vs belivers
They didn’t talk to people who had less positive experiences both during and after their NDE. Book: A Farther Shore by Yvonne Cassone(?) looks at some of these experiences.
Another doc that examines these topics would be great.
Yes, I agree. A very good documentary. I’d give it a 9+ for effort.
But, Mr. Razor, why would you think that the “religees” would add anything but more truth and genuine insight to this life after death topic? ;-)
I would have like for this documentary to have gone deeper and had investigated and reported on “resurrections” where people had been dead for extensive time periods and not just near death experiences alone.
@ Charles B:
Howdy, Charles, good to see you back!
How was your holiday?
What truth and genuine insight can you add to this topic?
:D
Very good doc.
I can see how christians would devour NDE and I only hope they don’t practice it like rapture.
The one thing that all these NDE’s have in common is that their dying process was slower. It’s morbid, but I wonder if people that have a near instant death are able to have this type of conscious awareness outside of their bodies. Of course, the likelihood that they could come back and share with us is pretty slim…
And if cryonics ever reaches fruition? What would those patients recount about the missing years?
This was great. I’ve never actually watched anything about this subject, which in itself is odd since my sister reported having a near death experience when she was 5 years old. Due to parental neglect she climbed a tree unobserved and fell from a tree a story and a half to two stories tall, to land on a neighbor’s driveway.
I don’t know if she validly died that day, if all of her functions actually ceased. I’ve never asked her because of the nature of her experience; she says that she sat on the lap of Jesus and described a tunnel of light. This was now decades ago and it is not a subject that comes up. Everyone in my family have gone differently ways in terms of religion after having been forced as children and teens to attend church regularly by an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive parent.
The doctors said she would be a vegetable. She would never regain speech. She had plates put in her head to hold her brain and skull in place. She had to wear a helmet for years and see a speech therapist constantly, but she regained full use of her limbs quickly. She stutterer for years and was teased mercilessly, but she’s one of the sweetest people you would ever meet despite what she has had to overcome.
She just graduated from a prestigious university with a masters, has a job working with children, and just gave birth to a son with her husband of a year.
What I do remember about what she told me of her NDE is that she experienced an overwhelming sense of warmth and love in it and i think that it helped her cope with the aftermath of the accident, the recovery.
In my own teen years I was in a car accident and was found hanging out the passenger’s side window (I had been driving)of my totaled car. After being airlifted in a helicopter (of which I’ve had a flashback of recall, enough to know that I thought I was in an ambulance at the time)I regained consciousness hours later in a hospital at some point before or after surgery for a short period of time and I just remember the red haze of pain surrounding everything along with an inability to remember anything that had happened. To this day I do not know what caused the accident; could have been anything on a windy country road in the winter at night(in deer country). I received a level 3 concussion which caused total memory loss of the accident and what led up to it, also lacerations all over my body, severe whiplash, my ear was cut mostly off (mind your dangly earrings :) ladies) and my neck was slit to the point that one more millimeter and I would have bled out.
What I learned. Death isn’t really something to be feared-your body takes over and at the point that it doesn’t, i.e. when you start to not be dying and the medics are on you anyways, that’s usually when they start hitting you with the old warm fuzzy friend morphine, who makes the pain not go away but at least seem interesting. In my case when my brain only thought it was dying,I lost the memory of the experience, in my sister’s case, when her body knew it was dying, her mind created an experience that drew on everything good to had to use and there she was on Jesus’ lap. I think that the Dimethyltryptamine released into her brain at the point that her body thought she was dying caused her to hallucinate. I believe that death is a process of changes in consciousness releasing us into what I like to think of as the over soul or even the Greater consciousness, the energy source , that all life is part of and draws upon. I only came to this conclusion after my car accident. Before that I was a christian baptist. Being exposed to the powers of a person’s mind and the possibility of losing it all changes a person. This recount of several person’s experiences reaffirmed some of my conclusions. Death is simply another one of the many different exhilarating experiences we get to enjoy in this life. It is not something to be feared or used by the those in power as control. It is a natural process and the only preparation needed is to try and cherish the life you have because its the inner voice that gets you in the end if things aren’t agreeable to your own personal conscience. Other than that,if you don’t die and you’ve just suffered a disfiguring accident, good luck because its the recovery process that’s a *****.
wow. Sorry this was so long winded. I got really into it.
Lovely docu, very inspiring, thank you :)
Two questions I have are;
Why are NDE’s so selective? If you are going to make the case that they are proof of an afterlife then why does olny such a small percentage actully expierence this?
How come they olny seem to happen to people of a catholic/christian culture? Do hindu’s and muslims and toaist expierence the same thing?
Totally absorbing as well as fascinating; thanks for posting.
Some people no matter how much evidence there is, just do not want to believe, so no amount of evidence will be able to convince them.
However, from science we know that energy never dies, it only changes form and once the physical body dies and decomposes the core, the real self (consciousness or the soul) is free.
Those who choose to reject all notions of spirituality are denying themselves so much about understanding what life is really about that I feel sorry for them, because they will stumble through life believing life is just about acquiring material things and will put their joy in this. However material things are ephemeral and will not help one live a meaningful or fulfiling life.
These Near Death Experiences are to help people know that this physical life is a very small part of the big picture and without knowing that there is no such thing as death, we will never properly understand why we are on this earth.
To Allan (above) – NDE’s have been experienced by people of all cultures, those with religion and those without (read Ray Moody’s Life After Life).
Once again Vlatko, another excellent documentary; you are the best!!!
@ Platoson:
I agree with what you are saying.
I have read “Moody’s Life after Life” and countless publications as such. Over the years.
Have formulated many speculations and theories, concerning said subject.
Have also, if not mastered, at least tried to understand, the latest in scientific research and forthcoming theories.
To Platoson
I`m sure they have been expierenced by people of all cultures. The point I was trying to make is that none of these other cultures were explored in this documentary. My guess as to why not is because they present a narrative which goes against the one presented.
A lovely documentary. Thank you, it could not have come at a better time for me and my family. We only learned yesterday that my 34 year old son has terninal cancer. We as a family are not religious but very spiritual if that makes any sense and have alway’s believed that death was the biggest lie ever told it has helped me cope this morning when every one has had to go to work and collage and I am alone for a few hours before I go to the hospital to visit Raymond. Thank you once again
The topic firmly falls into the same category as miracles and UFOs. These things happen to believers only. If you dare look closer into the anecdotes, any objective evidence curiously vanishes. Otherwise, why not bring an atheist on the show to report his or her NDE and startlingly accurate OOBE observations (testified by reliable witnesses, of course). That would make so much more interesting TV than the usual band of fools and hand-waving cranks as shown in this programme.
BTW, there was an episode of Penn and Teller’s “********” in which they caused those NDEs on demand by cutting off the blood flow to the brain in a rig used for training jet pilots. In other news, there are some people who asphyxiate themselves in order to experience a (sexual?) high. Also, there is a theory which predicts massive amounts of DMT release from a dying amygdala (I hope I remember the gland name right). Interesting that such down-to-earth experiments were not mentioned here at all, isn’t it?
Actually, NEDs do not happen only to “believers.” There are many documented cases of atheists who have experienced an NED. That to me is what makes NEDs interesting. The phenomenon seems to stretch over a wide variety of people.
Chris K, I’m not talking about hallucinations, mystical feelings, talking to “higher beings” etc. These are easily explainable and you obviously don’t need an NDE to experience them (a good dose of shrooms is enough). I’m talking about the “flying out of body and recalling all the facts correctly afterwards” phenomenon, for which there is NO credible evidence from non-believers whatsoever.
Silkop, I’m fully aware that some NEDs can be explained as hallucinations. Shoot, I hallucinated on a good dose of salmonella once and it was amazing what I thought was occurring. I’ll openly admit that NEDs are fraught with hype. I think keeping an open mind means looking past the glitz and considering the possibilities. When someone who was declared dead awakens and can recount an incident that happened in another room, or the next town over, it gives one pause.
Chris K, the problem is that it’s not “WHEN someone can recour”, it’s “IF someone can recount”. There are no documented cases beyond what we’ve been shown in this doc, and what has been shown is very unconvincing indeed.
Even if we accept the phenomenon as having been observed (and that’s quite a leap), then the next step would be to look for plausible alternative explanations that don’t require all current science to be thrown into wastebasket. Such as: how likely is it that the patient could have seen the bone saw before/after the op (perhaps on TV?) or has just guessed it? Has the patient reported other information that has turned out dead wrong or ambiguous? Does the patient generally believe in afterlife or accept the (naive) concept of soul-body separation? Does she suffer from psychologic problems that would make her prone to confabulation? And so on and so forth.
The film does a very poor job at discussing these topics. Susan Blackmore appears in the usual “token skeptic” role, while all the rest is trying to push through the incredible hypothesis. It works because lay people can be persuaded into believing incredible things that 1) they want to believe 2) for which they don’t realize the ramifications.
However, the reality is uncomfortably interconnected. You can’t just flip one bit of it without simultaneously having to flip bits elsewhere. Basically, if there was anything there like mind without body, it would be popping up everywhere (and could be used to make reliable predictions), not just in a few people’s anecdotes.
silktop,
there are more studies that have gone into these and obe’s (out of body experiences not ocurring due to a near death state) which give evidence far beyond this doc that brings a paradigm that can look at a human being as being composed of composite elements beyond that of physical and physically derived elements. Many many books have been written on the topic, i suggest you read one.
Also because of the nature of the phenomena, it is to me nearly impossible to go past that of anecdotal evidence, as it is either due to a nearly dying, a natural ability or through long term development of these abilities so how do u expect a blind/double blind type of experiment exactly?
one last thing the idea that this particular idea ‘throws out all of current science’ is a gross misinterpretation of what is being said, it is simply looking at certain elements of reality as not having a foundation in physical matter, a view that some scientists already hold. In no way is this trying to debunk gravity or atomic structure.
I agree with @Nobodies Right:
According to Quantum Physics, We, the whole Universe come in and out of existence, at Planck time, or Planck speed. Planck time is basically the speed of light broken down into fractions of a second. we are here and than we are not here.
Our collective consciousness holds us bound in this reality at this vibrational level. This is science, not some esoteric paradigm or agenda.
Our reality fluctuates, vibrates if you will, it is not just one unbroken fluid motion.
We envision our progress in time, called our now’s approx. 30 times per second.
An unsolvable intriguing topic that will always peak the human interest because we all have to face death at some point.
I have not had a near death experience per say, but yet have experienced some of these things and maybe you have too.
The experience of having your life pass before your eyes…freaky how you can remember a series of unrelated chronological events in a short time frame. Extreme sports can bring that on.
Everything going white and having tunnel vision…getting your electolites out of balance will cause that and you find yourself falling on the floor or the flip side of that everything goes black when you faint and when you wake up it’s the reverse everything is black and then you have tunnel vision and then perfect vision is restored.
The feeling of being detached or disconnected to ones self.
A religious experience where you feel
I’m not saying people arn’t having NDE just that our body/mind ‘s can react to stress in peculiar ways.
A religious experience where you feel enveloped by gods love.
i recommend NDEs to all arrogant persons, believers or non-believers. they will be good experimental subjects. and if the experiments are inconclusive, they’ll change their lives anyway. and the world will be a better place to live in.
I would love to have a NDE, if I didn’t have to nearly die in the process!!! I think all NDE’s that support my personal bias and beliefs should be believed, all others should be considered “highly unlikely”! ;-)
But in all seriousness, you have to take each person’s experience and weigh it with the reality of demonic influence, God’s influence, and just our own human capacity to understand them both.
Linda, hoping the best for you and Raymond.
Hi T-Dog
Thank you so much for your thought’s at this very hard time for my son and our family he is going through chemo at the moment wether it work’s or not we will not know untill they have finished the course which will be in 7 months if I have learned anything it is to be positive about all this and not treat it as a death sentence thank’s again for your kind thought’s
Linda
Oh, Linda, I missed your post before. I’m so sorry to hear about your son, Raymond. This is Easter Sunday. I will pray for you and your son tonight. No, even terminal cancer is not a death sentence. I’ve known at least 4 people personally that were healed of cancer (all in different and unique ways), including my own dear mother. Full cancer healings and remissions are becomming more and more common. Keep hope alive.
If you want to know a website where you can request prayer, (and we do pray there) you can e-mail me at somethingnovel@yahoo.com and I’ll get back to you. I rarely check that e-mail address as it’s been spamed a lot, so include “prayer for Raymond” as your subject line if interested so I can find it.
Blessings.
Charles B.
The Lady trying to disprove it is such a buzz kill. People are just trying to think maybe there is something after death and she has to butt in and ruin it all, hah. Thanks lady.
Linda–I’m sorry to hear that, my step-dad was going through the same thing, it was very hard on the family. He is in a better place now though. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.
maybe a dose of logic is in order here.
for what it’s worth i believe that these experiences are real for the people who have them for they recount things that they ought not be able to recount.
…moving right along though…. you’ll notice i just said that ‘i believe’. this is a statement that should tell you that its a matter of faith. belief in god is a matter of faith. pure faith at that. this is because god cannot be prooven or disprooven with current scientific knowledge/understanding.
perhaps there is a life-energy that our brains can tap into but our current scientific instruments cannot.
some centuries ago there were only 4 chemical elements but now we know there to be over a hundred of them. perhaps there are more than the types of energy than what we’re aware of. how can we know what we know unless we know it. a bit of a circular argument i know.
i think that rather than bully each other into thinking one way or another lets ask and seriously look for answers.
…. seek and ye shall find ….. isn’t that how it goes ?
cheers guys :D
Again even if there is a unique spirit/soul that makes us at the deepest level ‘who we are.’ This does not prove any religion. True faith is the opposite of true knowledge, and science is the best way of knowing. If there is anything to be known about NDE then science will state what we know, and continually refine it’s self through skeptical/critical thinking – something religion has only does every couple hundred (or thousand?) years via bloody revolution. So if you say I must believe something, anything I will say I believe in the power of experimentalism, free thought, logic, science, the struggle for truth and it’s refinement…
So when you talk about ‘God’ existing or not you should really ditch all the cultural connotations and talk about the divine, mind, spirit, soul, emotion, empathy… Even deists should ditch the word ‘God’ as the monopoly for higher experience and use words like omega or supreme intelligence. Free thinkers should differentiate themselves from the insane who think they have a special ‘birth right’ or connection to the divine as revealed in thousand year old writings which contain stories that in any ‘non divine book’ would be considered disgusting or horror.
Most organized religion will use such phenomena to enforce an authoritarian hierarchy, and close the minds of people who then silence each other through group dynamic peer pressure. So the ‘Spiritual aspect’ is best experienced not alone with a text or in large groups but one on one in a discussion between two people who have a relatively equal balance of power. Online anonymous of artificial identify may actually be the best place for true discussion of important issues because the weak are protected by a veil and the truth will emerge rather than be silenced.
No matter what – empathy for people should be put above faith in our value rankings. One of the main reasons my life has been so miserable is because of my parents and then my brain washed brothers putting (faith in their version/interpretation of god and his dictates) above relationships with individuals, even the ideal of love, help and understanding for family members takes second place. This means that there can be no true love, learning, understanding, reciprocity, or joy.
I agree with the lady who said “Death is an illusion. Death is a downright lie.”
Bull. All Bull. Nothing but Bull. (and I’m being kind)
Absolute tripe!
There is nothing waiting for you after death. You are all alone in a cold, dark universe!
Allow me to copy one of my posts about death here:
“If I am my brain, an organized collection of bio-mechanical energy, then when I die, my brain, (almost immediately), will go from order to chaos. Disintegrating into a dis-organized mess, incapable of being me anymore.
TO those that say “energy never dies so your soul never dies— science,— the laws of thermodynamics…” etc. I say, that is true, but there is a difference between energy organized by neurons and synapsis, and free-range (for a silly but not inaccurate term), dis-organized energy.
My computer uses electricity to perform amzingly complex tasks, (like play Dragon Age: Origins!), but if I smash it, the energy remains- out there- but with no organizing principle it can no longer play games and calculate numbers.
The energy can be re-used by ANOTHER computer, but there is no memory of when it was “my electricity”.”
—————
Also, allow me to quote the mortician that buried my parents having just come back from a huge symposium of international morticians:
“Americans are the only people in the history of the world to think that death is optional…”
Grow up, people! You are gonna die! And that is the end!
From Randy, quote: “Grow up, people! You are gonna die! And that is the end!”
That is just a belief and not a proven fact so please do not state it as if it is true.
There is no proof that anyone ever died. There is circumstantial evidence of course in the fact of a Life-less body. However, all that is proof of is a Life-less body. It proves that the Life which animated the body no longer does so. It is proof that Life has left the body.
It is not evidence, let alone proof, that the Life ceases to exist.
Randy, as you promote a belief of death rather than the fact of Life, I ask, in all seriousness – are you a member of some death cult?
I’m just askin’ …
@ Intbel:
I have said this on other posts. There is no “oblivion”. It is not a thing.
Try to imagine a state where nothing exists. Such a state is impossible, even contradictory, since the concept of existence is necessary to apprehend it. Therefore existence exists necessarily, even if nothing else exists. That means life is eternal.
It is our concept of linear time, that makes us think there is nothing after.
“All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”- Bill Hicks
Occam’s principle seem to have been forgotten in the concluding remarks. Besides the one stated (that we might have to study mind and brain separately), the simplest future course of study would be to have a better understanding of the definition of death itself. In all these NDE, “clinical death” is what is used. But, we do know that a lot of our bodily functions continue to carry-on for upto several minutes (even hour) after clinical death (otherwise, there would have been no revival of the people who experienced NDE). So, this assumption that brain is completely dead at the time of (or a couple of seconds after) clinical death is very very shaky! This is the assumption that lead to the separation of mind and brain.
When detached limbs may be successfully reattached after 6 hours of no blood circulation… and bone, tendon, and skin can survive as long as 8 to 12 hours without blood… it would be grossly incorrect to say that the whole of brain stops functioning just after a few seconds of no blood circulation (~ clinical death or cardiac arrest).
@ Life.Is.The.Alien
I don’t think you understand how a deist really feels, alot of deitst feel like they have a personal connection to this being, supper intelligence or god. A personal connection that might be similar to that which most people have with their mother, hardly anyone who has grown up with their mother could call her (and actually think of her) as just another female human. Maybe you can denounce her, but she’ll never be a random person in the eyes of the kid.
People who have never known their mothers (born atheists in this analogy), are ofcourse a different kind, they will see other mothers, and even their own mother (if they happened to meet her without realising) as just another women. There is no personal connection there.
A big part of the inabilty of both atheists and creationists to understand each other is caused by this. Someone will never be able to tell you that someone is your mother, or that someone isn’t your mother, no matter how many facts or arguments you use, you can’t create or destroy such a bond with arguments.
Ontopic:
Is there any data on what kind of NDE’s non-christians get? Do atheists have random visions of light and warmth, or do they also see things commonly associated with christianity?
What do buddhists see? Do people in remote regions who have never heard of christianity see?
Questions like that seem to be very important to me, to possibly eliminate some options: Do they come from what the one experiencing it wants to see? expects to see? gets to see? (from some outer source) Or if they are simply random impulses which are later on interpretated.
All of these experiences are merely chemical reactions occurring in the brain. Imagine all of these people are explaining an intense drug trip. All of these claims suddenly sound ridiculous don’t they? These sort of “visions” of heaven and holiness and warmth and comfort can all be replicated by taking some DMT. I understand it’s difficult to approach this without a longing for it to prove to you once and for all that God really is there watching your every action and just waiting for you to join him in eternal bliss, but, for a moment, attempt to do it.
@ Bartholomew.
I know the feelings you describe are similar to a D.M.T. trip but not every one taking D.M.T has the same trip I have had a few trips with D.M.T and here’s how it went suddenly the wall’s start to become one and then the hyrogliph’s start to appear then the floating sensation and the presance of some peacful being beside you and then the breakthrough the space bunnie’s looking at you as if to say where did you come from. No one who has had a N.D.E. has ever came back and said the met the space bunnie’s I am a nurse and deal with death on a daily basis we dont know what happens when we die but it is the one thing we all have in commen it is going to happen to us all one day as for the space bunnie’s that is my name for them as they look starteled when they see you as if to say it is not your time why are you here have you enjoyed a trip yourself if so I would love to hear your experiance.
Linda ;-*
These events have intrigued me very much over the years. Personally, I have been “dead” on three different occasions from diabetic complications. I did not have these insightful, beautiful, or even frightening experiences. It was a definite fact I was dead on all three occasions, for the record.
My family and friends had speculated that maybe I didn’t have any near-death experience phenomenon or cognitive reaction because it has not been my time to go. Maybe I still have things to do in this existence. If that were the case, I wondered why that was not conveyed to me when I was “dead” and before I was brought back? As with so many things, it is mysterious and we won’t really know until it’s really the final dance.
I can say that I have not been able to express what the events were like. There has not been any way for me to describe what I felt or better yet, did NOT feel. In short, I can tell all of you I have experienced what I think was oblivion. The problem is…I can’t explain well enough what “oblivion” felt like or was as an experience. I simply “was NOT”. There was no “me” or “feeling”, or “observing”, or “fear, joy, rapture, love, hate”. I simply no longer existed. Sort of like my consciousness had simply been absorbed back into the Big Everything. I have definite memories before I passed out and even vague clips and blips of the times I was “out”.
There are those three separate points in my existence in this reality (or whatever you need to call this consciousness) where I have absolutely no recollection, feeling, memory, or anything resembling consciousness. I have been through more surgeries than most people and been under heavy anesthesia and drugs frequently, but I STILL had some kind of consciousness during those supposedly blacked out and incoherent times. I still KNEW I “was” and I existed. The three times I died, I “was not”. See why it’s so hard to explain oblivion? :)
I don’t feel bad about how it worked out for me. I don’t fell cheated because I didn’t have a NDE. Actually it is somewhat of a comfort to know that possibly I might just not be feeling or experiencing anything at all when I finally die. I’ve sort of felt it was rather arrogant of humans as a species to feel that we were so special and deserving above everything else in existence in this great, huge, endless universe that we should HAVE to have an afterlife or anything else once we’ve run our course. So many religions condemn other religions to hell because they don’t believe in the same representation of their version of a God/Gods. Hell should have been full a long time ago considering the potential for sentient beings somewhere else in the universe or even parallel universes.
The can of worms can be enormous for things of this nature! :)
Just be good to each other and be satisfied.
Can science prove why gravity works? Why rely on science when they are just as bad as church? (Believe my theory/doctrine cuz I HAVE PROOF!!) The best quote I’ve heard thus far is … “Seek and ye shall find” Personally I analyze every possibility I can imagine.
My point? What doesn’t make sense now, could in the future. And what does make sense now, could be completely the wrong assumption. People who ignore possibilities hinder their own understanding.
As for NDE’s why can’t they exist?
Who said?
What is their motive?
If they can exist, why?
How?
And why is it important to YOU?
Ask yourself these questions and more. Post your assumptions or questions, so others can be provoked to think even more too.
If you wish to PUSH a BELIEF however, it is your freedom of choice. And everyone else’s freedom of choice to ignore you.
Happy Hunting :)
@ Philosophocles
…. well said …. :D
I am thrilled that quantum theories are being used to explain our consciousness. I’ve been curious about “life-after-death” for years and have always been skeptical of any sort of religious beliefs. I believe we are simply pinned down to this specific dimension while we live in these bodies then once we leave we return to being one again. Call it heaven if you’d like but I’d prefer to think of it as being one with God, meaning the all encompassing consciousness of everything at once.