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End-of-Life Dreams

commonwealmagazine.org

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Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#61

Post by ivraatiems »

zw123456 wrote: post #14

I am an atheist, a science-based person, but I have been in the presence of someone passing a couple of times. I can tell you that, I do not care how science based you are, there is something about this experience that you simply cannot dismiss. I was with a person who I loved deeply, the details are, personal and I am going to skip over. But when she passed... Her breathing moved from the rattle to just a quiet rhyt…

Thanks for writing this. You conveyed the power of your experience well. It's not out of bounds at all. There is no rule that one can't share spiritual experiences on HN.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#62

Post by haskellandchill »

ekianjo wrote: post #48
clnq wrote: post #33

Whatever is happening, it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand. It might not be a spiritual experience, it might be delirium. But perhaps it is important step in the human mind making peace with death. And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon and anyone who tries to research it. There is nothing wor…

> And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon The medical community is a joke as a whole. They even brush off side effects because they have never heard about them before. They are as unscientific as you can go. Nowhere in hard science world do people act like that.

> The medical community is a joke

I've been reading "The Medical Detectives" and it seems like there used to be a stronger drive to seek understanding of the unheard.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#63

Post by usefulcat »

clnq wrote: post #33

Whatever is happening, it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand. It might not be a spiritual experience, it might be delirium. But perhaps it is important step in the human mind making peace with death. And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon and anyone who tries to research it. There is nothing wor…

> it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand

It's not 'doctors', it's 'people'. The width and breadth of the world is a greater challenge to our understanding than most of of are even able to comprehend. I suspect.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#64

Post by nequo »

c4wrd wrote: post #57
rakejake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky you. I don't have a garbage collector so much as a "good-memories" collector. My mind is kind enough to surface my embarrassments and disappointments from years past (some of which are objectively irrelevant) and very rarely the happy memories. Taking this mind deficiency into account, I have started aggressively taking photos and documenting happy instances as well. I think being optimistic and positive by def…

As a recommendation from someone who suffered this way too long, your way of thinking is why you only store the bad memories. I often thought “I’m just a negative person” and accepted it, but not until I decided to focus on my mental health did I realize I had to let this go. I’ve been happier each and every day since. It took almost a year or two of “fake it until you make it”, but once you’re on the other side of t…

What were the thinking patterns that you changed? What did you do to fake it in the beginning?

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#65

Post by cjohnson318 »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47

I have an aggressive cerebral garbage collector. I've forgotten all the dreams, visions and miraculous experiences that I thought were personality- and/or life-changing at the time. I've come close to dying a couple times and that's literally all I can say about it. At some point I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant. Spirit or no spirit, I want to live this life well. If there's something good…

> I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant... If there's something good on the other side of death, great...

I agree, I think you just cease to be, and that's it. Frankly, I find that terrifying; I'm not sang-froid about it at all. I totally see why people come up with buy into the idea of an afterlife.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#66

Post by LoganDark »

zw123456 wrote: post #14

I am an atheist, a science-based person, but I have been in the presence of someone passing a couple of times. I can tell you that, I do not care how science based you are, there is something about this experience that you simply cannot dismiss. I was with a person who I loved deeply, the details are, personal and I am going to skip over. But when she passed... Her breathing moved from the rattle to just a quiet rhyt…

This is one of the most beautiful comments we've seen in a long long time. Thank you so much for writing this We are also somewhat atheistic and science-based, but we choose to believe in souls anyway because... it's the most convenient word for what we want for ourselves.

We want to believe we're 8 separate people who are just in it together. We would never want to be separated from each other... but we would never want to be integrated together, either. We just are 8 souls in one body.

It is the most comfortable way for us to think about it. Those souls don't have to physically exist in the real world or in a real spiritual dimension. They are within us, inside our mind. And we are perfectly comfortable with that.

We believe that even if what you saw was just a creation of your mind... it can still be real to you. It can still exist inside your reality. Inside the realm of your mind.

-Emily

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#67

Post by belinder »

Wonderful article, thank you for sharing. My favorite part:

> “Old couples,” Kerr writes, “have much to teach us about true love. Their bond requires no big declarations, loyalty tests, or dramatic endings.… They continue to feel and believe in it even when the person through whom that love originated leaves them. For elderly patients especially, their love for their other half is who they are. Jobs, ambitions, hobbies, mortgages, and plans have come and gone. What is left and what matters is the relationships they have maintained, cherished, and tended to through a lifetime of small gestures and greetings, loving glances and humorous words, shared stories and forgiven faults.”

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#68

Post by [deleted] »

monero-xmr wrote: post #13

One reason I love mystery so much, is that rooted in the human experience is the ultimate mystery, one we will all get to know for sure - what happens when you die. Even if we extend life by thousands of years with technology, eventually we will all experience this mystery. What happens upon death is unprovable, and one of faith or logic or whatever. It’s really about gut feeling. But we will all find out, one day.

[deleted]

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#69

Post by LoganDark »

leetrout wrote: post #15
monero-xmr wrote: post #13

One reason I love mystery so much, is that rooted in the human experience is the ultimate mystery, one we will all get to know for sure - what happens when you die. Even if we extend life by thousands of years with technology, eventually we will all experience this mystery. What happens upon death is unprovable, and one of faith or logic or whatever. It’s really about gut feeling. But we will all find out, one day.

Have you experienced psychedelics? I feel like there is some relatable mystery to experience before the bodily death.

We are heavily fascinated by the concept of psychedelics. We took a small dose of LSD around two weeks ago—100μg, our very first time—and we plan to take 200μg next time.

We want to explore our mind, our identities, and... our inner world. We know we have one; we each have our own bodies within it. We just... normally find it difficult to focus on it enough to do anything with it. We want to do something useful with it; make it into a place of comfort, or a place of entertainment, or an escape from stressful situations.

Psychedelics put us into a unique state of mind where we can admire anything. Where we can be fascinated by every detail, appreciate every quality of something. Where we aren't afraid to accept things as they are, as they should be.

We are still discovering things about ourselves that we seem to have accepted despite never particularly focusing on them during our trip. Insights that we made about ourselves both on and off LSD. Our impostor syndrome significantly reduced itself, for one.

We are very excited about our next time~

-Emily (our HN profile explains our signatures)

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#70

Post by ggm »

LoganDark wrote: post #58
ggm wrote: post #3

Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside" it comes as no surprise that close to end-of-life minds come up with comforting thoughts to Shepard the close. Thats what your friends would do. If you are one of the smaller cohort without an interior dialogue, I suspect you will have the same outcome because even if unvoiced, I am confident you have more than one brain process at work. Not just the propri…

> Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside" Interesting~! We are a DID system that contains around 8 people but we don't have a very rich internal dialogue between ourselves despite the fact that we're capable of trying if we focus. What is this like for you? How rich is 'rich'? -Emily

Not that rich. It's usually a two-person dialogue. But the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Most? Above 50%. I think well above, the web disagrees.

If it's couched by most people as an interior monologue rather than dialogue, I think it stands as a distinct state which argues at a minimum 2 participants (the one listening, unvoiced?)

Sometimes mine is in schoolboy french. About remarkably pedestrian everyday things. I have often wondered if children who grow up multilingual consciously use more than one interior monologue language.(I didn't. It just seems like my inside-voice likes trying to speak in french, sometimes. I doubt it's very grammatically correct)

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