http://www.near-death.com/religion/islam.html
Do I "believe" in NDEs? What you presumably mean to ask is do I believe the metaphysical explanations of NDEs which attribute them to a life after death are accurate? A tantric practitioner on this forum is fond of saying that NDEs "are real." This completely overlooks the fact that assigning meaning to the experiences had during an NDE is a process of interpreting what the substance of the experiences actually is. Some attribute the experience to parting with their bodies in an experience that is like death. Since nobody comes back from true death, these assertions are uninformative. Nobody knows what it is like to be truly dead. There's a kind of circularity here: NDEs are like death; we know what death is like because of NDEs. It is nothing more than an assumption about what life after death would be like. Alternative, medical interpretations abound. Most attribute the experiences to a common brain reaction to specific circumstances. There is little to differentiate that interpretation from the one which says naively, "NDEs are real." The few accounts which challenge the medical interpretation, NDEs where patients had experience of their surroundings while they were "out" are equally challenging to the afterlife view, as they have radically different themes (see for example veridical NDEs such as the case of Pam Reynolds). And such veridical NDEs admit of a whole other class of explanations (separation of consciousness and the body; clairvoyance [aka remote viewing]; telepathy). As it turns out, there is MRI support for the position that OOBEs invoke the hallucinatory apparatus of the brain. So for any of these explanations, the "reality" of what is occurring in NDEs and OOBEs is simply unknown.
But you will find a lot of proponents of the afterlife interpretation. Part of this no doubt is a result of the fact that these experiences tend to be filled with emotion. It's hard to disregard highly emotional experiences, so people tend to become deeply invested in the explanation of their experience. (It's worth noting that studies have shown that a third of all NDEs occur in people who aren't in any kind of life threatening situation. These people report the same themes, heavy emotionality, and so on as people who have gone through life threatening situations.) Here in the West, we are conditioned by culture to associate certain themes with the afterlife. If these themes occur in NDEs, it may be natural to presume that NDEs reflect these same themes because the experience is in some sense a real experience of the afterlife. (Though having read several NDE accounts, there's as much divergent material as there is that which converges on traditional afterlife accounts.) Ignoring for the moment that it's possible these afterlife themes had their origin in NDEs in the ancient past, this is concluding that the cultural themes associated with the afterlife are in fact accurate, with no justification for assuming the cultural ideas are in fact accurate.
Do I "believe" in NDEs? What you presumably mean to ask is do I believe the metaphysical explanations of NDEs which attribute them to a life after death are accurate? A tantric practitioner on this forum is fond of saying that NDEs "are real." This completely overlooks the fact that assigning meaning to the experiences had during an NDE is a process of interpreting what the substance of the experiences actually is. Some attribute the experience to parting with their bodies in an experience that is like death. Since nobody comes back from true death, these assertions are uninformative. Nobody knows what it is like to be truly dead. There's a kind of circularity here: NDEs are like death; we know what death is like because of NDEs. It is nothing more than an assumption about what life after death would be like. Alternative, medical interpretations abound. Most attribute the experiences to a common brain reaction to specific circumstances. There is little to differentiate that interpretation from the one which says naively, "NDEs are real." The few accounts which challenge the medical interpretation, NDEs where patients had experience of their surroundings while they were "out" are equally challenging to the afterlife view, as they have radically different themes (see for example veridical NDEs such as the case of Pam Reynolds). And such veridical NDEs admit of a whole other class of explanations (separation of consciousness and the body; clairvoyance [aka remote viewing]; telepathy). As it turns out, there is MRI support for the position that OOBEs invoke the hallucinatory apparatus of the brain. So for any of these explanations, the "reality" of what is occurring in NDEs and OOBEs is simply unknown.
But you will find a lot of proponents of the afterlife interpretation. Part of this no doubt is a result of the fact that these experiences tend to be filled with emotion. It's hard to disregard highly emotional experiences, so people tend to become deeply invested in the explanation of their experience. (It's worth noting that studies have shown that a third of all NDEs occur in people who aren't in any kind of life threatening situation. These people report the same themes, heavy emotionality, and so on as people who have gone through life threatening situations.) Here in the West, we are conditioned by culture to associate certain themes with the afterlife. If these themes occur in NDEs, it may be natural to presume that NDEs reflect these same themes because the experience is in some sense a real experience of the afterlife. (Though having read several NDE accounts, there's as much divergent material as there is that which converges on traditional afterlife accounts.) Ignoring for the moment that it's possible these afterlife themes had their origin in NDEs in the ancient past, this is concluding that the cultural themes associated with the afterlife are in fact accurate, with no justification for assuming the cultural ideas are in fact accurate.
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