Photo by infomatique

By Mary Jaksch

What happens when we die? Does consciousness remain? What is the purpose of life?
New research into near-death experiences leads to some startling conclusions.

“You have got to tell all the old people so that they won’ be afraid to die!” five-year old Chris told his doctor after he had been resuscitated after drowning.

His father lost control of his car he was driving at night and plunged into the freezing waters of a river near Seattle. As they sunk into icy waters, his mother managed to pull his older brother to safety, but it took another fifteen minutes to rescue Chris. When he was brought to shore, his breathing had stopped and there was no heart beat.

Miraculously doctors managed to resuscitate Chris. When he woke up, he told them:

“I went into a huge noodle when I died, well it must have been a tunnel because I don’t think noodles have rainbows in them.”

What Chris experienced was a Near Death Experience, or NDE. This is a pattern of events people can experience when come close to death. These are some of the features:

• feeling comfortable and free of pain

• a sensation of leaving the body, sometimes being able to see the physical body while floating above it

• the mind functioning more clearly and more rapidly than usual

• a sensation of being drawn into a tunnel or darkness

• a brilliant light, sometimes at the end of the tunnel

• a sense of overwhelming peace, or absolute, unconditional love

This is how Grace Bubulka-Hatmaker, a nurse, experienced her NDE:

As I neared the warm, glowing radiance ahead of me, I felt pure ecstasy. I was in the beginning of the light. I was part of the light…It was as if I had come home. I had come home to the beginning of not just me but the beginning of all eternity.

According to traditional science, when the hearts stops beating and breathing comes to a standstill, the brain shuts down and consciousness ceases. That school of thought believes that without the brain, consciousness is impossible.

A new study tests a different theory: that consciousness is not confined to the brain, and the mind can continue to exist even when the brain ceases to function.

This study is known as AWARE and is led by Dr. Sam Parnia, the leading scientist currently studying Near Death Experiences. It will examine 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest and involves the collaboration of 4 major medical centres through Europe, Canada, and the U.S.

During a cardiac arrest all three signs of clinical death can be present: absence of spontaneous breathing and heartbeat, as well as loss of neural activity in the brainstem and the cerebral cortex. Then follows a period of time in which medical efforts may be able to restart the heart and reverse the dying process.

Here’s a mystery:

Some people wake up after resuscitation and describe near death experiences. Even though - according to medical knowledge - no thought processes can be going on during a loss of brain activity.

Laurelynn Martin was at the height of a promising tennis career when she had a routine surgical procedure that went catastrophically wrong. Here’s her account:

The nurse helped me slide onto the operating table and gave me a motherly look. “Don’t worry. We’ll make this a most pleasant experience for you.”

With those reassuring words, I drifted off to sleep. I awakened and found myself floating above my body, looking down, watching the attempts of the medical team trying to revive the lifeless form below. The surgical team was frantic. The color red was everywhere, splattered on their gowns, splattered on the floor, and a bright pool of a flowing red substance, in the now wide open abdominal cavity.

I floated up through blackness where there was no fear, no pain, but instead a sense of well-being. I was enveloped by total bliss in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance. In the distance, a horizon of glorious white, golden light beckoned me forward.

As the brilliance increased and the rays stretched to meet me, I felt that time, as we know it, was nonexistent. Time and existence were a blending and a melding of the past, present and future into this one moment. Every part of my being was satisfied with an unconditional love beyond description.

The experiences of Laurelynne and of others show that people having a Near Death Experience are lucid and are able to reason and remember. This has led Dr. Parnia to say:

Recent medical studies in cardiac arrest patients have indicated…that the mind and consciousness may be what remains of us after death.

What can Near Death Experiences teach us about the purpose of life?

Many people who have experienced NDEs say that they were shown the purpose of life. These life lesson are remarkably similar. Take Laurelynn Martin’s experience, for example:

The message was - love. Above and beyond anything else, one must first learn to love oneself non-judgmentally and unconditionally. Then one will actually love all people and all things the same way.

I realized how important people were in life, how important it was to accept them and love them. All events in your life are significant. To bring an understanding of all things, even the experiences which you consider insignificant, will bring you to places of great awareness and compassion.

If love is the main purpose, how could our life reflect that?

What are your thoughts on near death experiences and what they might mean for how we live our life? Please share them in the comments.

(Best commenter in November and December wins 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris 7CD set!)

Related articles and websites:

Is There Life After Death?
Past Life Regression: Evidence of Life After Death
Interview with Dr. Parnia
Horizon Research Foundation
Article by Dr. Parnia
The Amazing Power of the Spirit

Images:
Light at the end of the tunnel by Jenny Downing
Door opening by hamed saber
Grass by tristram brelstaff

Photo by procsilas

Are you out of shape? When our body is out of shape, it usually means that our life isn’t quite on track. I know that when my fitness sinks, some superfluous kilos start to collect around my middle, and my energy sags - my life is out of balance.

I would like to share with you a model of how to get back into shape. I’m trying it out personally at the moment, so I’m not telling you about it as an expert, but as someone who is experimenting with the best way to do it.

I’m trialling a painless way of getting back into shape

What, you think that’s impossible?

Maybe you’re right, but I think we can find a way to change so gradually that we hardly notice.

Personal growth should always include two aspects: kindness and joy.

Both of these together make up a good life. In terms of getting back into shape, kindness means that I pay tender regard to myself. So, I don’t bully myself, or create pain, or force myself to do what makes me unhappy. It means that I am respectful of my own feelings and experiences and that I guide myself with kindness towards a good life. And, of course it means that I try to be considerate towards others. My focus on joy means that I want to enjoy what ever I do.

Is it possible to get back into shape whilst being kind to ourselves?
Or is “No pain, no gain!” the only way.

The difficulty of establishing a new habit is that whenever we initiate change, we give ourselves a fright. As  Andy Ryan, an expert in collaborative thinking explains:

Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain….If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do.

The important thing is to get back into shape very, very gradually.

There is a very interesting Japanese philosophy called Kaizen which focuses on continuous but small change.

The philosophy of Kaizen was formulated in Japan following World War II. The word Kaizen means “continuous improvement”. The original kanji characters for this term translate as follows:

kai means ‘change’ or ‘the action to correct’.
zen means ‘good.

Kaizen is a concept that can be applied in every aspect of life. Most of all, Kaizen is used as a philosophy in manufacturing. As Steve Hudgik explains:

Kaizen involves every employee in making change - in most cases small, incremental changes. It focuses on identifying problems at their source, solving them at their source, and changing standards to ensure the problem stays solved. It’s not unusual for Kaizen to result in 25 to 30 suggestions per employee, per year, and to have over 90% of those implemented.

For example, Toyota is well-known as one of the leaders in using Kaizen. In 1999 at one U.S. plant, 7,000 Toyota employees submitted over 75,000 suggestions, of which 99% were implemented. These continual small improvements add up to major benefits.

Continuous, incremental change is a great model for personal growth.

If I look at my life, one of my weaknesses – as well as a strength – is a gung-ho approach approach to my own personal growth. Gung-ho works, but it comes at a cost. It worked well when I stopped smoking. I was a heavy smoker in my twenties, but then I stopped smoking from one day to the other. But the gung-ho approach to change lacks kindness and, though it may be helpful to let go of addictions,  I think it’s not so useful for establishing long-lasting wholesome habits.

One of the areas of my life that I want to improve in the next four weeks is fitness. I’ve just come back from a long stay in Buenos Aires and I’ve lost a lot of my usual fitness, as well as putting on a couple of kilos. I want to experiment with Keizan to see how to get my body back into shape so gradually that it’s an easy and pleasurable experience.

I’ve chosen uphill running as my main fitness exercise. Uphill running has two advantages, it is a fantastic cardio-vascular workout, and it is gentle on the joints. My main focus is on improving my fitness, but you can apply my strategy of getting back into shape to other areas of your life.

If you want to change your body shape, for example, it would mean that all that matters is that you start losing weight very gradually - even if it’s just 50 grams a week.

The plan I first set myself is to run for 1 minute the first day, and then increase the duration for one minute each day. I’m now on day 5 and here is my experience:

The first day was easy. In fact, I had to stop myself from running longer than one minute. Days two and three were also reasonably comfortably. But on day four and five the run suddenly seemed long and difficult – which is the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve.

I’ve now changed my plan as follows:

Increase my run by 30 seconds per day.
After missed days, I step down the duration of exercise by as many half minutes.

The reason I’m spelling out how I’m getting back into shape is so that you can join me in this challenge. Chose an area of your life that you want to improve. It may be that you want to lose weight, or establish a meditation habit, or get up earlier in the mornings. You can use my Keizan method to form a new habit.

I’ll let you know how I get on and what I learn from my experiment. Please join me and  share what it is you want to change in the next four weeks. I look forward to reading about your thoughts and experiences in the comment section. In this way we can encourage each other!

Here are two related articles I wrote about establishing new habits:

Are You Sabotaging Your Plan to Exercise More?

How to Establish Habits the No-Sweat Way

Photo by Sir Mervs>

Is there a magic answer to stress? Is there a way we can achieve more AND be less stressed? In his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen outlines ways to do just that.

For a long time I thought that productivity is a killer of creativity. So I never investigated how to be more productive. But I have changed my mind since reading Getting Things Done. We are much more creative if we’re not stressed. Since focusing on GDT, I’ve doubled my writing output whilst halving my stress levels.

I also started to use a software scheduling program called OmniFocus (for Mac users) which is based on GTD. Read the rest of this entry »