….." Hi again,I have been involved in another discussion about Near Death Experiences and my latest entry to that forum might be of interest, especially since it gives a more detailed description of the NDE and also takes up some of the objections which some of the more materialist members of the forum had brought to bear against the valididty of NDEs as accurate reflections of some aspect of human experience. So here is my posting from that forum:
I kind of wonder whether I should get into this, because I know the powerful resistance (even fear) of those who think this is all nonsense, but since I had a very detailed NDE in 1966, I might as well. I have had hallucinations because of illness and medical drugs, have had lucid dreams and ordinary dreams, as well as many experiences in meditation of what one might call `transcendance` but the NDE was nothing like any of those. It is quite distinct as a life experience, and had a profound effect on my life – actually changing the direction of my life completely. I had intended to become a minister in the United Church of Canada and instead got a PhD and became a university English Professor, exploring the roots and dynamics of creativity and the relationship between consciousness, culture, ideology and art. Also, one would think that the possible oxygen deprivation of these experiences (NDEs) would cause some brain damage and thus a decrease in IQ, but quite to the contrary, it seemed as if my abilities were increased by the experience and I was able to achieve intellectual things which had been beyond me before the NDE. In the ten years from June 1966 to June 1976, including the seven months in hospital in 1966, I was able to complete a BA, MA and PhD from three different universities, teach full time for four years at three universities, get married and have two children. The NDE gave me an impetus to achieve which I did not have at all before that. Hallucinations do not have that kind of effect.
Below I quote the description of the NDE from The Thomas Book, a book I wrote about the NDE and its aftermath, which was published in 2009, ironically after a severe case of viral encephalitis which wiped out most of my memory. After that illness I had to rebuild my memory banks and my ability to write, since I could not sign my name, copy numbers from a bill to a cheque or remember the names of people I had known for years before the encephalitis in 1991. I used meditation to recover my memory and wrote about that experience as well as providing a text book to learn that kind of healing meditation in The Prayer of Silence (2011). That these experiences are put into books does not support the argument that they are being exploited to make money. Rather they point to the tremendous motivation to share the experiences because they are seen as evidence of hope in life in a world which tends to denigrate anything which suggests hope beyond the bare minimum of materialist reductionism.
After the encephalitis, with its severe memory loss, and while I was still suffering from its effects, a neuropsychologist at the University of Regina ran me through a whole battery of tests, including IQ tests. He said that the tests demonstrated a pattern of memory loss which is specific to encephalitis. One would expect in that state of still suffering from memory loss and from the effect of the serious brain damage from the illness that my IQ would have been reduced considerably. When I asked him what my IQ was he said, `I don`t know.` I asked, `What do you mean, you don`t know, you did a whole battery of IQ tests.` (They involved many different kinds of IQ.) He replied, `I can`t measure your IQ because you topped out on all my tests. It is like trying to measure the temperature in a hot room when your thermometer only goes up to a level which is lower than the temperature in the room and you don`t know how much higher the temperature actually goes.`
I asked Buddy what IQ has been measured with these tests and he suggested that the highest he had heard of, off hand, was 220. If that is the case, then my IQ, in spite of the NDE and the encephalitis is somewhere above that, it would seem.
This is not to boast, but to point out that many people who have NDEs have the same experience, of having their intellect suddenly expanded in ways they had not been aware of before the experience. It is as if the NDE opens intellectual doors which had been closed before that experience. Again, hallucinations do not do that……
(Bruce Fraser MacDonald PhD)
