The Book Depository Consciousness Beyond Life by Pim van Lommel
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Description: Consciousness Beyond Life : Paperback : Harper Collins Publishers Inc : 9780061777264 : 0061777269 : 05 Sep 2011 : Explains how people who are clinically dead can have a transformative experience, illustrating the stories of people who have gone through a Near Death Experience (NDE). This title states that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions, and shows that consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body. The Book Depository Consciousness Beyond Life by Pim van Lommel - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780061777264
MPN: 0061777269
GTIN: 9780061777264
Author: Dr. H. A. Jones
Rating: 5
Review: Consciousness Beyond Life: The science of the near-death experience by Pim van Lommel, M.D., HarperCollins, 2010, 466 ff. More evidence of cosmic spirit from a cardiologist By Howard Jones Dr van Lommel is a Dutch scientist and physician who worked as a cardiologist in Holland from 1977 to 2003. In 2001, he published in the medical journal `The Lancet' a ground-breaking study on `Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest'. This book is the English translation of a book originally published in Dutch in 2007 on the same subject. There are now several books on the market (for example, those by Sabom, Fenwick, Fox) dealing with NDEs and the closely related OBEs. Most of these present anecdotal accounts of visions from patients who undergo some medical trauma (often heart attacks or cardiac surgery). The stories are verifiable in that they agree with the known facts surrounding the event. Most of these books interpret NDEs as indicating connection with some extra-corporeal spiritual state. In some cases, this cosmic energy is regarded as divine. What can be stated with certainty is that NDEs and OBEs indicate an ability of the human mind to undergo experiences that are not explainable by traditional science. There are also books on NDEs by materialist scientists who dismiss any spiritual interpretation of these events and attempt to explain them purely in terms of human physiology (for example, Michael Marsh). Those authors, like Marsh, who attribute such events to a momentary hallucination in patients as they revive are clearly factually mistaken. Van Lommel's book is a convincing account of the study of over one hundred patients during more than twenty years practice who suffered cardiac arrest and were judged to be clinically dead (sometimes for five minutes or more) but who were resuscitated. This study therefore reaches the same conclusion as Michael Sabom, Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, or Mark Fox. As van Lommel says here, these experiences `cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis or oxygen deprivation.' NDEs may not prove the existence of God or the afterlife, but they certainly show that there is a dimension of the natural world that requires more than just materialist scientism to explain it. This book should give hope and encouragement to anyone who fears death as the end of their existence. It shows that the individual does survive in a spiritual state even when the physical signs of life are extinguished. The book concludes with several pages of Notes, a 23-page Bibliography and a detailed Index. Dr Howard A. Jones is the author of The Thoughtful Guide to God (2006) and The Tao of Holism (2008), both published by O Books of Winchester, U.K.; and The World as Spirit published by Fairhill Publishing, Whitland, West Wales, 2011. Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience by Mark Fox The Articulate Dead: They Brought the Spirit World Alive by Michael Tymn Recollections of Death by Michael Sabom
Author: Mikeyman
Rating: 2
Review: Van Lommel's claims concerning Near-Death Experiences (NDE) and the extrapolation to life after death involve the hypothesis that human consciousness exists outside the human body, in some external invisible dimension, which can communicate with the owner's brain and which can continue to support such consciousness after the permanent death of said brain. According to him, only external consciousness can explain how sensory experiences can appear to be created and stored during clinical death, for subsequent recall. He provides lots of what he obviously feels is reliable supporting evidence and he attempts at great length to give a description of how his external consciousness hypothesis is supported by Quantum Mechanics. Thus, he aims to have his hypothesis accepted by presenting it, and the supporting "evidence", in what seems, on the face of it, to be a scientific way. But right from the introduction he derides scientists in general as being closed-minded in not accepting his hypothesis. My take on this is that it is Van Lommel himself who, having fallen in love with his own hypothesis, fails to realize that it he who is being closed minded in not considering the glaring flaws in his methods. He chastises scientists for ignoring his evidence, by regarding it as mere anomalies. But he fails to realize that he is focusing on those anomalies but ignoring the main body of evidence. The main body of evidence being that, by his own admission, most subjects who had been clinically dead did not have an NDE and that among those who did have an NDE, only a small minority had the type of NDE on which he bases his external consciousness hypothesis. For his hypothesis to be taken seriously, he needs to explain why most people did not have an NDE or else not the type of NDE that supports his hypothesis. External consciousness does not appear to be able to explain that obvious piece of mainstream evidence. But his most serious failing, IMO, is that he does not attempt very seriously to discount more worldly explanations such as the NDEs being created during the descent/ascent into/out of unconsciousness. His assumption that the NDE was created during clinical death causes everything that he says to become a circular argument.
