“For instance, the religious figures may be different — a Christian would see Christian figures, a Buddhist would see Buddhist figures, Hindu gods and goddesses would appear in a Hindu’s N.D.E., and so forth…”

J. M. Fischer

For J.M. Fisher, the big question is: “Do N.D.E.s provide a proof of heaven? Or hell?”

J.M. fisher, who is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside concludes:

“Most N.D.E.s depict a journey toward an imagined guarded realm, but not a successful passage to it. Just as in the literature on living forever, such as the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” or myth of Tantalus or the quixotic search for the Fountain of Youth, we come ever so close, but in the end we don’t quite make it. In N.D.E.s we get right to the gates, but we don’t go through; we get right to the edge of the universe, but we stop there.”

I have never had a N.D.E. Here is what I think about them:

1. Life after death is a stupid concept. However, the concept of mindful dying is valid, just as mindful living is.
2. Possible explanation of what people describe as “the light” at the end of the tunnel [a vision shared among many N.D.E. subjects]: the quantification of life into energy.

via GIPHY

3. I agree with the conclusion of many who say you relive your entire life in seconds or milliseconds., smashing the idea there is something as time.

4. The N.D.E.s are not life as we know it, but they are not death either, something Professor Fisher goes along with.

5. The Akashic Records may well be a valid thing. How do you access them: there’s no simple answer to give.

6. To answer the question, “What is Consciousness” we can start by asking: what is not consciousness ? Consciousness is not mind…

7. As Richard Kelley says in his interview, Is there a God is a rather moot point.

8. What’s the reason for being here ? “It’s just part of the drama. If we saw everything that we’re doing, we would know we’re not here.” – Richard Kelley

9. “While you were doing doing the dream, you had no idea it was a dream. Same thing here. It’s the other way around.” -RK

10. To find “peace” without going through a N.D.E. you can start by accepting that your life is a movie already produced, script and stuff, scene-by-scene, take-by-take. Watch it as the spectator in the theater seat. You will find yourself in the spectator seat sooner or later. Think about it: if you accept there is a God, isn’t God [already] the one watching your movie from his seat ? Probably got his Cola and popcorn, too…

Time is not going anywhere. People minds are. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest problem is that we perceive time linearly. What if, rather than a countdown towards death, we’re heading towards birth instead ?

For one thing, the child doesn’t keep trace of time like we do. From rise and shine until the dead of the night, we don’t seem to be having enough time. We are starved of time.

The question is really like iteration math in Excel spreadsheets, since the statement is made by an adult. By making the statement that time is slipping fast, you are also applying an adult construct to what a child might experience. And since experience is subjective…

Let’s assume for a moment that you are a child. You have little or no concept of time. What now ? Time won’t be “fast” or “slow”, you can’t really meaningfully measure the child’s assessment of time.

Quote of the day: “If you operate out of the straitjacket of logic, you remain a clown in the circus of life.”- Sadhguru

Jordan Gaines Luis at Scientific American talks about the “holiday paradox” -“the brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.”

We estimate the length of an event from “two very different two perspectives: a prospective vantage, while an event is still occurring, or a retrospective one, after it has ended“.It appears the “retrospective perspective” gains more as we age simply because we are not adding up new experiences. The brain grinding mill has to go over something, and in the absence of prospective experiences keeps going over retrospective experiences over and over again. That’s why career changes can be positive.

Some people talk about the “ratio theory”: For a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their entire life. For a 50-year-old, however, one year is only 2% of their life. I don’t buy into that, because, once again, it’s viewing time as a linear progression. If you have exponential growth at some point in your life, you’ve broken that linear progression.

The world teaches you time is a progression towards decay. It is not.

Time is like water in a river. There’s plenty of it, and you can never step into the same water twice. Emily Dickinson’s statement : “Forever is a series of NOWS” has a connection to the quantum theory.

Buy why do old people seem to remember what they did when they were 12 or 20 like it was yesterday ?

Some people have a condition named HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) which is “like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories, each one sparked by the appearance of present-day stimuli.” (Total Recall, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, The Guardian, 8 Feb. 2017, ) Does HSAM account for the huge number of old folk recall superpower ?

Perhaps the biggest mistake old people make is that they live vicariously, aka living though younger people’s lives, their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. Why say that ? Because vicarious living doesn’t exist in nature. In the wild, animals don’t surrender their lives to the young. Neither should you.

Until next time,

Your Man,

Max Cantor