The Life Review

[Captain Chaos]

I am starting this as a separate thread because it is something I feel I really need to debate with a few folks, as part of pondering it.

It seems to me that it is very odd coincidence that something like 35% of people who have a near death experience undergo a life review.

I mean, if the NDE was just a wish fulfillment hallucination, you would think it would manifest in all sorts of different ways.

Instead, the NDE manifests in a fairly consistent fashion, with local variation depending on the experiencers beliefs.

If it is just caused by physiological processes, what would cause so many people to undergo a life review?

Life review - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note - this would appear to be a biased report. As always, please regard wikipedia reports with caution.

[Captain Chaos]

Here is an example of the impact the life review has upon those who have experienced it:

Revista Speak Up
Heather Sloan: Life review strongly affected me, because from then on(20), I knew every action I carry out(21) today, I am going to have to go through that review. And as I'm getting older, it's going to take a lot longer than it did, or would have done, when I was 26. So there's going to be a lot more to review, so you are very concerned as to how have I affected others and have I been of benefit to them?...

I can see an evolutionary argument for people evolving to experience life reviews, because of the powerful impact they can have. However, if that were the case, you'd think it would evolve to happen under less unusual circumstances. Prior to modern medicine, most people did not recover from cardiac arrest, after all.

[Kuldeep]

Powerful impact and unusual circmstances are definitely important factors for experiencing the life reviews or NDEs. But from the reported experiences it is very clear that the experiences falls within the faiths, beliefs and life time experiences of the life reviewer.

For example, Christian would always experience the image of lord Christ or angel flying with candle light in hand but not lord Shiva standing ready to give a boon which would be seen only by a Hindhu believer of Lord Shiva.

However, still rare cases of unexplanable experiences do occur. We have to admit that we are not in a position to explain everything that to scientifically. In our own living body we are not least aware what thought would come to our mind say after one hour!! How we can argue why of everything we experience, NDE or life review in particular???

[Captain Chaos]

I find it so damn odd that when the phenomenon of life flashing before one's eyes in periods of great peril is well documented that you so obsess over the reports of life review in the phenomenon known as NDE. The latter is reported to be more in depth than the first but then given that the trauma is far more severe and the state of consciousness of t
the victim more limited, that hardly seems surprising. To build a cosmology based on these first person accounts seems to primarily reflect a desire for a specific conclusion than any rational argument for that conclusion.

But Rick, I have not built a cosmology or reached a specific conclusion based on NDE accounts.

That is kind of my point, in many ways. I mean, whatever the correct cosmology might be, apparently we are not meant to find it out during an NDE.