2/2019
Near Death Experiences- Why Are They Increasing, & What Do They Tell Us? (pt.2)
By Dr. Dave DiSano
Reports of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) seem to be everywhere. Dozens of books, movies, TV shows and testimonies all over the internet of people reporting instances of being consciously aware of leaving their bodies when pronounced dead, and returning to them when being revived. Two questions I have encountered in my research is, why have the accounts of NDEs been increasing over the last few decades (Is there a spiritual revolution occurring?), and, what are NDEs telling us?
The first question is the simpler to answer. NDEs have been reported since the beginning of recorded history. Instances of individual’s consciousness leaving their bodies and returning to it have been recorded in nearly all cultures world-wide. The Chinese, Buddhists, Islamic, India, South American, Middle Eastern and North American Indian cultures have all documented individuals having had these experiences for the past few thousand years. So, why have the testimonies appear to be increasing? Is it that we are better connected now via global communication? Or, is there a ‘spiritual revolution’ going on? (I would like to think so!). But no, the answer is much simpler.
Prior to the 1960’s if an individual died through an accident such as a drowning, there was little information on how to revive them. Methods such as rolling them over a barrel or using a fireplace bellows had very little success (and are usually not handy when needed) in reviving people. So, few instances of people returning from their death experiences occurred. However, a new science was developed in the 1960s called Cardio-Pulmonary-Resuscitation (CPR). In 1963 the American Heart Association endorsed this new technique of reviving people after they have stopped breathing and when their heart may have stop beating. We now are able to bring people back from their death experience, and since that time reports of individuals being out of their bodies while being clinically dead have sky rocketed world-wide.
Millions of people are dying each year and are being revived and returned to life. Studies report that anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of these individuals that have died and been revived are reporting being conscious of their death experience. Dr. Sam Parnia (see my first article; Near Death Experiences: Are They Real?), who has done extensive research in resuscitation science states that the percentage of individuals reporting NDEs would be closer to 100 percent except that the drugs individuals receive during operations sedate the brain to where they do not remember the experience of leaving their bodies. The answer to the question of why are NDEs increasing, therefore appears to be quite logical. Today we have the ability to bring individuals back from the dead. It is not a spiritual revolution, or is it?
People that have NDEs report amazingly similar experiences, verifying again that they are real. What then have people experienced when they left their bodies? The first and most common revelation they report is that life does not end when the physical body dies! That we are in fact eternal, even spiritual beings. When they transition further beyond their death experience, they describe seeing beings of light, seeing deceased relatives, sensing extraordinary feelings of compassion and love, and getting a revelation of life’s purpose. They are no longer afraid of death and feel a greater appreciation for life. When they continue in life they are often more altruistic, loving and less religious and more spiritual (they are not concerned with religious dogma or rules but they now feel connected to a divine loving force). They believe in a divine purpose for life, that our consciousness is eternal and they often believe in reincarnation.
An interesting Netflix movie in 2017 was The Discovery, starring Robert Redford. In the movie Redford was a scientist that ‘discovered’ absolute proof that there is life after death. That when people died that went to an alternate reality and life. Unfortunately in the movie people used this discovery to leave their present life if they were not happy with it, and the world-wide suicide rate skyrocketed. What the discovery lacked was a realization of life’s purpose. Why we are here on Earth and what spirituality teaches us.
This is just the opposite of what the spiritual revelations of NDEs tell us. People who have had NDEs report experiencing a greater love and feeling of purpose of life and the hereafter. That everything happens for a reason. That there is a divine purpose for it all! So, in fact we may be entering into a spiritual revolution thanks to those who are having NDEs and one by one transforming how we view life and death! For more on the above check-out our book, Divinely Touched: Transform Your Life (2011), it connects science, metaphysics, religion and spirituality and discusses the purpose of life and what happens when we die!
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1/2019
Near Death Experiences ~ Real or Not?
By Dr. Dave DiSano
Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) have been continually in the news and appear to have been increasing over the past few decades (more on that in pt.2). I believe the general public as well as most medical professionals view them as hallucinations and dismiss them as fiction. Hollywood loves the phenomenon and there have been a number of movies about NDEs over the last 30 or so years. I even remember an episode of CSI-Miami a few years ago where one of the main stars of the show solved a crime due to her NDE. So, what exactly is a NDE?
NDEs occur when through a trauma, an individual is clinically dead, the individual’s heart stops beating, they stop breathing, they lose consciousness, they experience a remembered experience of leaving their lifeless body, and then return to it regaining consciousness when revived. These incidences have occurred when people have had heart attacks, illnesses, drowned, died on operating tables or died in other traumatic accidents.
The term Near Death Experience was first coined by Dr. Ray Moody, a psychiatrist who started collecting accounts of patients reporting conscious experiences after they were pronounced clinically dead and revived. In 1975 he published Life After Life, after having collected over 150 accounts of people describing their NDEs. A contemporary of Dr. Moody’s, Dr. Kenneth Ring, a professor from the University of Connecticut continued NDE studies, started The International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) in the late 1970’s and published Life at Death in 1980, describing his experiences with collecting accounts of NDEs. A favorite of mine is Dr. Ring’s 1998 book, Lessons From The Light. In this work he summarizes 20 years of his research on NDEs and discusses what people have learned from their NDE, connecting their experiences to spirituality (more on this in part 2).
A more recent work on the NDE phenomenon, that answers the question of whether NDEs are real or not is Dr. Sam Parnia’s 2013 book, Erasing Death, The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Dr. Parnia is a MD that specializes in resuscitation medicine. He has researched and taught how to correctly apply resuscitation techniques to revive people that have stopped breathing and/or whose heart has stopped. He also founded and directs the AWARE Study (AWAreness during REsuscitation), that attempts to prove NDEs are real through clinical documentation of the experiences.
A great point Dr. Parnia makes in his book is that the term Near Death Experience is very misleading. He describes what modern medicine considers as a death experience and states that in most cases people that have NDEs are not “near death” they are clinically dead. He believes a better term for those that die and are resuscitated back to life is an Actual Death Experience (ADE). They have met the medical profession’s definition of being clinically dead, but then they have been revived, their consciousness has returned and they are able to describe their death experience.
The main question then, when discussing are NDEs real or not is, what is consciousness, and can it exist outside of the physical body? By consciousness I mean our soul or spirit, the “I am-ego” part of our mind. To date the medical profession has not been able to explain what our consciousness is. They know what the brain does and can map all the regions of it, but they have only theories as to how consciousness operates. As we prove that our consciousness is independent of our physical bodies, we can then prove that our existence does continue after death. Thereby even proving the spirit dimension/world is real and perhaps even that reincarnation is real!
In Dr. Parnia’s AWARE study, along with South Hampton University in England, he found that in a period of 4 years in the cardiac units of 15 hospitals in Great Britain, involving 2000 patients that had to be resuscitated back to life, 40 percent reported conscious experiences when they were clinically dead. They were able to actually describe what was going in in the operating room often from different perspectives than lying on an operating table. Dr. Parnia states that their experiences are real, that consciousness can exist outside of the body.
Dr. Parnia discusses and dismisses biological explanations such as lack of oxygen in the brain causing hallucinations or seeing “the light.” He reports just like in Ray Moody’s and Kenneth Ring’s accounts that the NDE experiences are verified. That the individual’s accurate accounts of what is taking place during and around them, even conversations in waiting rooms, at the time of their NDE actually happened. He believes that our consciousness functions independently of any chemical or electrical activity of the brain. Dr. Parnia concludes that NDEs are real, that our consciousness can exist outside the body, he is just not sure for how long it exists independent of the body before it does not return. He believes that our consciousness is fueled by some yet undiscovered energy and questions whether it ever dies!
There are millions of accounts of NDEs to date and Dr. Parnia’s research provides clinical evidence that people having NDEs are not hallucinating. Science is based on replicated results and when we have millions of testimonies of NDEs and clinical research like Dr. Parnia’s, we can safely come to the conclusion that our consciousness functions independent of our body or brain and that death is merely a transition to another realm of awareness not an ending to our life! So, if NDEs are real, why are they increasing, and what do they tell us?
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Is It God’s Fault? Why Are We Here?
By Dr. Dave DiSano
I recently attended a spiritual cinema night at a spiritualist church we attend occasionally. The film was Ram Dass: Fierce Grace that was an excellent biography of Ram Dass’s life. For those of you that are not that familiar with Ram Dass, he is a spiritual teacher and author who was born Richard Alpert (April 6, 1931). His 1971 book Be Here Now was instrumental in bringing the teachings of the far East to the US in the 1970’s. He is known for his personal and professional associations with Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s, for his travels to India and his relationship with the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, and for founding the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. However, he had a stroke in 1997 and since that time he moved to Maui and although he continues to write and teach he rarely leaves the island. He stated in the film that his stroke was a test of his spirituality.
I would like to state that I hold Ram Dass in the highest esteem for what he has accomplished in his writings and teachings. However, I was extremely disappointed in the film when he was counseling a young lady who was going through a difficult time. She was questioning why God let this tragedy happen to her? Ram was asking her guiding questions (like a proper psychologist should) eventually letting her come to the conclusion that we will never know “God’s will!” Typical advise a priest, rabbi or minister might give. That God is all knowing, and only he knows why bad things happen to good people. Not the advice I believe a spiritual guru would give, or lead someone to.
In my experience, Spirituality believes that our souls are eternal, that when we die we transition to the spirit dimension, and at that time we are able to review our life learning why in fact, we have had challenges along the way. What we learn is that those challenges are placed in our life by us, not God! The reason we come back to the Earth dimension is to learn and grow our souls through our life experiences. We are in charge of our own spiritual evolution through our free will. Before we come into this life we place certain challenges in our life so we might grow our souls by dealing with, or overcoming those challenges. Someone who dies of alcoholism, a drug overdose, or even suicide will come into their next life with the same challenges in their life with the intent not to make the same mistakes.
It is very easy to “blame” an “all knowing God” for our misfortunes in life, rather than believing it is our own design. The first distances us from a spiritual connection, the later brings us into acceptance of life’s challenges! In the film, Ram Dass may have been acting like a good psychologist, but he was a very bad spiritual guru!
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My Journey
By Mary DiSano
When reflecting about my healing and spiritual journey over the past few years I now know that I didn’t “find” my journey it found me! As I stated in the preface of my book, at seminars all over the country, and on national radio and TV shows it was not one I was looking for. Being a public speaker, writing a book, being a healer, or having a mission to change people’s minds on mental illness couldn’t be a further thought from my mind. All I wanted was to feel better and have a “normal” life. But like so many that are pulled into a fire in life, I realize now that everything happens for a reason. As the late Robert Schuller states, “It didn’t come to break you. It came to make you!”
My “journey” began when doctors couldn’t find any cures for my physical ailments. Sure they had some “explanations” like maybe it’s a virus or it’s this or that, or, you’re psychotic! So as others have done when not getting any answers, I went on my own quest to cure myself. At first it seemed like one coincident after another of how I was led to different healers. As if I started out crawling (out of a dark and scary cave) then learned to walk, and now I am running in the light!
My journey led me to healers from around the world, shamans and light-workers as I began learning about things I never even imagined. How these ancient healing methods have been curing people since the beginnings of civilization. How psychics can connect to the spirit dimension and give me answers of what is happening. I entered the New Age and Metaphysical world. A world I had no knowledge of, or didn’t give a second thought about, or even believed that any of it was real before my journey began!
Sure I may have seen movies like Ghost, or the Ghost Whisperer on TV where people were being affected by the spirit dimension or they were talking to psychics. But like most, I just thought of it as entertainment, it’s Hollywood, it’s not real. Dr. Dave makes a point in our seminars that phenomenon like this is a lot like UFO’s, unless you have seen one, it may be hard to believe in them. This is how I felt about guardian angels, entity possession or psychics. I didn’t believe in any of it because I had no experience with it. But all that changed on my healing journey!
When a light-worker began working on me and I felt better, when I was led to shamans and I began to feel better, when psychics started telling me things about my life that they could not have possibly have known, I began to become a believer. This was my walking, because I now started my research into New Age and Metaphysics. I became an avid reader. And one book led to another, just as one healer and one psychic led me to another.
I realize there were no coincidents in my life. It was all happening for a reason. Just like meeting Dr. Dave when my journey started, it all happened for a divine reason, in God’s perfect timing. Dr. Dave is a psychologist that started out in science education. So when he investigates things he does so with research and data. So when shamans and light-workers began healing me and when psychics were telling me what was going on, and that I had amazing healing abilities myself, and why I was being attacked by the spirit dimension because they were drawn to my “light,” Dr. Dave began his own investigations as to whether this was real or just “in my head!”
What we both discovered was that it is in fact real! We can be negatively affected (both physically and mentally) by negative entities, also known throughout history as entity possession. Psychics can tap into energy waves and connect to past or future events. And, consciousness can exist outside the body. I discovered this through firsthand experiences with healers and psychics, and through the 200 New Age books I’ve had read the past 5 years. Dr. Dave discovered this by verifying what had happened to me was real by connecting New Age, Metaphysics, historical data and quantum physics to the psychic phenomenon I experienced. His research proves that consciousness can exist outside the body.
My journey today is not one I had planned (at least that’s what I thought) but one that I now believe is divine. If I can help one person understand what they are going through, that they are not crazy, that they can be healed physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually in non-traditional ways, then all I went through was worth it. There are forces out there that are causing people to be sick that doctors have no clue on how to deal with. I now realize that I was led through all that I have been through to change people’s minds on physical and mental illness causes, and help them get help when traditional medicine can’t. And, so far my guardian angels have told me that I have helped thousands!
Join us for seminars in Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale this Winter (see our event page!)
