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Near-Death News

Stacy claims today, that he had slipped out of consciousness from the food poisoning and began an out-of-body experience that lasted until the third day, Easter Sunday and then came to. “It was like I was in the most beautiful place I had every been in my life,” he recalled. “I had no desire to come back...” But what was most significant, Stacy indicated, was that the experience had changed his life. “I had a deep desire [after that] to seek after God's ways,” he explained.  [Read more]

"I felt very light. I felt I was traveling at high speed." Once she slowed, she saw tall figures — no faces visible — illuminated by a bright white light. And then the voice. Calm and beautiful, neither male nor female, but one betraying a sense of ... humour? "I asked if I could just visit my grandparents," Russo recalls, chuckling at her request. "But I needed to go back to my children." The tug of motherhood. The voice laughed.  [Read more]

Dole, 81, the former Senate majority leader and the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, said the accident occurred Jan. 11 at his Watergate apartment in Washington as he was picking up a suitcase and lost his balance and fell. He said he had undergone hip replacement surgery in New York the month before. His doctors told him that the blood thinner he was taking after the hip surgery had caused internal bleeding and apparently led to his fall ... Dole said he was so ill that apart from everything else his doctors did to save his life, they told him that "a higher power intervened to halt the bleeding and avert fatal complications."  [Read more]

   Related news articles of interest:

On January 15, 2004, at the age of 79, Montague "Monty" Keen, one of Britain's most prominent psychical researchers, collapsed and died while participating in a public debate on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in London. A few weeks later, Veronica Keen, Monty's wife, contacted Dr. Gary Schwartz at his University of Arizona research laboratory and informed him that she had received messages from her husband through several mediums requesting that Schwartz conduct some research with him ... Schwartz and Dr. Julie Beischel, his research associate, then designed a two phase, multi-medium experiment with four research mediums participating, one of which was Allison DuBois on whose career as a psychic legal investigator the new NBC series "Medium" is based. [Read more]

Residents of Turner County wonder whether it was a mere coincidence or an eerie phenomena that a missing man's body bobbed up in a lake just as a psychic drew near. A self-described "psychic detective" contacted by the man's family found the body in the lake after she says a feeling pulled her there. On March 19th, Lynn Ann Maker made her discovery as she waded into the lake ... Anxious to learn the fate of their loved one, Wallace's family searched the Internet for a psychic they believed could help them. They chanced upon the 33-year-old Maker, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She agreed to come to Ashburn, a farming town of four-thousand located about 150 miles south of Atlanta.  [Read more]

Imagine: You're cruising down the highway, blasting the stereo and doing your best Bette Midler imitation while enjoying the view when suddenly you are standing outside your car, which is no longer your car, but a twisted mass of metal. You try to open what was once the driver's door and your hand passes through the handle. What was tangible no longer is and you struggle to find the meaning. You hear voices, you see people all around you, but you have no idea who they are; you are not afraid, but you are terribly confused. What happened? Why is your car in a tangle? Why can the EMTs administering to someone on the ground not hear or see you? You don't know it yet, but you're dead.  [Read more]

In 1937, four-year-old Shanti told her parents that she missed her husband (of a previous life) Kedar Nath, who lived in Mathura and was a cloth merchant. She supplied his address and so much information about her previous home that the parents finally wrote to Kedar Nath, who had since remarried. He came to Shanti's house in Delhi and she "immediately" recognized the "stranger" as her husband ... This case was studied by Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, who believed that we have to return many times before achieving the perfection, which permits re-union with our creator.  [Read more]

According to this study of patients who have received transplanted organs, particularly hearts, it is not uncommon for memories, behaviours, preferences and habits associated with the donor to be transferred to the recipient ... In 1997, a book titled "A Change of Heart" was published that described the apparent personality changes experienced by Claire Sylvia. Sylvia received a heart and lung transplant at Yale–New Haven Hospital in 1988. She reported noticing that various attitudes, habits and tastes changed following her surgery. She had inexplicable cravings for foods she had previously disliked. For example, though she was a health-conscious dancer and choreographer, upon leaving the hospital she had an uncontrollable urge to go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and order chicken nuggets, a food she never ate. Sylvia found herself drawn toward cool colours and no longer dressed in the bright reds and oranges she used to prefer. She began behaving in an aggressive and impetuous manner that was uncharacteristic of her but turned out to be similar to the personality of her donor. Interestingly, uneaten Kentucky Fried Chicken nuggets were found in the jacket of the young man (her donor) when he was killed.  [Read more]

Going through a half-forgotten collection of old photographs, you're surprised to find the snap-shot of a friend you lost contact with years ago. Just then the telephone rings and the voice on the other end of the line belongs to the same person in the photo ... These are typical incidents of synchronicity. And while most people brush them aside as insignificant happenstance, some of the greatest minds in history have grappled with this universal enigma. “Synchronicity” was coined by last century's leading psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung. Fascinated as he was by it, even Albert Einstein could not understand how it worked.  [Read more]

Alexander J. Vance and his wife, Leola, made a life together for nearly 64 years. This week, they died 14 hours apart at Schnepp's Health Care Center ... The couple stayed in their home for as long as they could, until Parkinson's disease forced Alexander Vance to move into a nursing home in February. Earlier this month, Leola Vance, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, began complaining that her head hurt. It later was determined that she had bleeding in her brain. By April 15, her husband also had taken a turn for the worse and both were in a coma in a nursing home. "It was almost like a race," Phil Vance said. "They always said they wanted to go together and I sometimes think they were telepathically communicating about who would go first. But we were told she might live for several more days."  [Read more]

Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.  [Read more]

The American Journal of Cardiology reports in its May 2, 2005, issue that the Transcendental Meditation technique, a non-drug stress-reduction method, reduces death rates by 23% and extends lifespan. The first-of-its-kind, long-term, randomized trial evaluated 202 men and women, average age 71, who had mildly elevated blood pressure. Subjects in the study participated in the Transcendental Meditation program; behavioral techniques, such as mindfulness or progressive muscle relaxation; or health education. The study tracked subjects for up to 18 years. Vital statistics were obtained from the National Death Index.  [Read more]

The Palestinian terrorists, who called themselves the Egypt Revolution, demanded to go to Libya. When they were refused, the plane was diverted and landed in Valetta, Malta. There, the terrorists lined up passengers, shot them point-blank every 15 minutes, threw them down a 25-foot staircase and left them to die. When it was her turn, Pflug did one thing: Pray. "I didn't know what else to do," she said. "I just asked for life and I knew if I lived I'd be okay, and I knew if I died I'd also be okay. "When it was her turn to be shot, Pflug said a feeling of reassurance and safety washed over her. The terrorists opened the door of the plane, pressed a .38 calibre gun hard into her head and she felt something hard.  [Read more]

Many Americans pray for the health of loved ones; others turn to shamans or Reiki. Now science is putting these practices to the test ... For each of the next eight days, the healer will pray 20 minutes for the cancer patient's recovery, without the woman's knowledge. A surgeon has inserted two small fabric tubes into the woman's groin to enable researchers to measure how fast she heals. The woman is a patient in an extraordinary government-funded study that is seeking to determine whether prayer has the power to heal patients from afar — a field known as "distant healing."  [Read more]

Professor Peter Fenwick, one of the world's leading researchers into near-death experiences, has told an audience of his belief that NDEs seem to provide evidence which strongly suggests that the mind and brain are not the same ... "We need now some theories about the causation of NDEs. Now, you can't say these are transcendent experiences because the people are unconsciousness. You can't say they are psychological because the brain isn't working. You can look at physiological models as to what state the brain is in, and if the brain function won't support the experience you have to argue that mind and brain are separate."  [Read more]

It is possible to read someone's mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves. So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person's awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention. In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.  [Read more]

Two books on the mind put the human back into human beings ... These books cast light on how it is possible to have a rich mental life while living in a physical universe. In so doing, they throw up roadblocks against any push for political authoritarianism or social engineering that might arise from increased knowledge of how brains work. Far from advancing tyranny, neurobiology may be starting to provide a deeper understanding of what human freedom is all about.  [Read more]

A recent study of twin brothers had researchers doing a double take when they found a strong link between genetics and religiousness. The finding may help researchers pinpoint how “God genes” influence us as we mature. Although the families in which people grow up influence how religious they become, genetic predispositions to religiousness or spirituality become more apparent when children leave those environmental influences behind to start their own lives. Laura Koenig, the lead author of the study published in the April issue of the Journal of Personality, said, like all behavioral geneticists, she was trying to uncover the origins of behavior and how to explain the differences among people with varying degrees of religiousness.  [Read more]

Tom Brown: "In theory, is it possible to use the space between the Universes, leaving and re-entering, in order to travel many light years within our Universe, but without time having passed?" Dr Michio Kaku: "Einstein's equations give us a possibility to leap into hyper-space through a worm-hole to reach another universe. However, we don't have enough energy to open up such a hole and we don't know how stable such a hole might be.  [Read more]

Researchers have succeeded for the first time in inducing a state of reversible metabolic hibernation in mice, and they think they can do it in humans too. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists who conducted the experiments say the accomplishment may open the door to new ways to treat cancer and prevent injury and death from insufficient blood supply to organs and tissues ... While the notion of putting a human or a human organ into an oxygen-free state of biological limbo and then reversing the process at will with no ill effects may sound like science fiction, dozens of documented cases exist of humans surviving prolonged hibernation-like states with no lingering physical or neurological damage. In May 1999, for example, a female Norwegian skier was rescued after submersion in icy water for more than an hour. When rescued she was clinically dead with no heartbeat, no respiration, and her body temperature had fallen to 57 degrees Fahrenheit (normal is 98.6 F). She was resuscitated and since has made a good physical and mental recovery.  [Read more]

A lot of technology is packed into an automated external defibrillator. But using one correctly takes training. That's why a supply of nearly three dozen defibrillators is being doled out slowly. As people who work in schools, libraries and other public buildings are trained to use the life-saving devices, their buildings get one or more of the machines ... Hooking up the defibrillator's electrodes to someone who has collapsed will tell whoever is running the machine what's going on inside that person's chest. Most of the time, the machine will tell the operator that CPR is needed to revive the patient. And, as the operator works away, the defibrillator can determine how long to keep going with CPR.  [Read more]

Approximately 88,000 people are on the national organ transplant waiting list, waiting for kidneys, livers, pancreases, intestines, hearts and lungs. Nearly 7,000 people died waiting for an organ transplant in 2004 — that's almost 19 a day. They died because not enough organs were donated for transplantation. Perhaps no other surgery has generated the amount of myth, mystery and perhaps a sense of the macabre as has organ donation. If you've delayed your decision to be a donor because of a belief you've never fully explored, here are answers to some common organ transplant myths and concerns.  [Read more]

Supporters of legalizing physician-assisted suicide say a senior aide to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has told them the governor is "very open-minded" on the issue and is allowing his administration to scrutinize a bill that would bring the practice to California ... The measure seeks to allow terminally ill individuals with less than six months to live to receive a lethal prescription. A series of consultations would follow a request, and only patients able to administer a dosage themselves would be covered under the law.  [Read more]

The Earth is now absorbing so much heat from the sun that the soot and greenhouse gases that humans are putting in the air appear to be the only reasonable explanation for the warming trend, according to research released Thursday by a team of prominent climate scientists. The scientists from NASA, Columbia University and the U.S. Department of Energy determined that precise, deep-ocean measurements showed a rise in temperature that matched their computer model predictions of what would happen in an increasingly polluted world.  [Read more]

Here are 20 simple steps that can help cut your annual heat-trapping emissions by thousands of pounds ... Dishwasher tips ... Washing machine settings ... Water heater cap ... Thermostat adjustments ... Air conditioner check ... Best light bulb choices ... Water heater tweak ... Shower head switch ... Weatherstripping ... Energy efficiency ... Driving less ... MPG criteria ... Waste reduction ... Clothes washing tip for spring and summer ... Home insulation ... Good windows ... Neighborhood greening ... New appliances ... Reducing waste ... Staying on top of the issues.  [Read more]

In this section of the newsletter, P.M.H. Atwater will answer questions submitted to her from subscribers to this newsletter. Atwater's contribution to near-death studies is considered to be one of the most important as her first two books, Beyond the Light and Coming Back to Life, are considered to be the "Bibles" of the NDE by researchers and enthusiasts. Her latest books are entitled We Live Forever: The Real Truth About Death and The New Children and Near-Death Experiences. If you have a question which you would like her to answer for this column, just email your question to Kevin Williams at http://www.near-death.com/contact.html for consideration. For more information about P.M.H. Atwater's contribution to near-death studies, download her press kit here.

QUESTION:  "I just got through reading your book, We Live Forever, which is fantastic! Can you explain reincarnation? Do we keep coming back to Earth to grow our spirits or can we go to other realms in the universe? Also, 'karma' means 'action/reaction.' But, didn't Jesus say through forgiveness we burn our karma?" -- Beth