The topic of near-death experiences has always fascinated me, ever since I was a child. It ties in to my personal belief in the afterlife. Just as people don't have scientific proof that NDEs are real, nobody (as far as I know) has been able to prove that they don't occur. Personally, in my own biased opinion, I believe 100% that they are real and that the soul and/or the conscience mind survives when the body dies. But the handouts that Prof. Borrowdale has given us on this subject have been most intriguing and informative on both sides of the subject.

I was actually surprised to see how many adults in the US alone have had these experiences (13 million, and those are just documented cases). I worked that out to be about 1 out of every 22-23 adults. I really cannot decipher why some people have them and some don't, besides the obvious theory that not everyone "gets that close" to death in order to have one. Some religious individuals might even think that some people don't have NDEs because they simply don't believe in them, or are too evil to pass into the light. I've heard both theories.

As for the cause of an NDE, I've heard from several scientific sources that NDEs are, in fact, simple hallucinations projected by the dying mind. I saw an NDE segment several years ago on a show called 'Unsolved Mysteries', and one of the scientists interviewed claimed that an NDE was brought on by endorphins in the brain, released by the body in order to block out the unpleasantness of death. Personally, I side more with the spiritual theories than I do the scientific ones.

I believe that NDEs can really change lives. One case is that of Dannion Brinkley (I don't remember his name being mentioned in any of the handouts, so forgive me if he was and I missed it). On the NDE episode of 'Unsolved Mysteries', he was profiled. Apparently he was a bully growing up, but it was the NDE (judgment in front of God, as he later explained it in the book he wrote on the subject), a result of being struck by lightning, that drove him to change his ways. He now gives seminars on NDEs and death itself, and speaks out for the rights of hospice patients. So even though we don’t have scientific proof that NDEs are real, NDEs seem to be powerful for the majority of people that have them.

I am trying not to be scared of death itself. I am more concerned with the idea that death will come sooner than I’d like it to. Once it comes, that’s it. There is no going back. But I hope that when it does happen, the journey to the other side isn’t painful or stressful. I do hope it’s more like the experiences we’ve read about. Perhaps that is why NDEs happen to certain individuals, so they can share their experiences with the rest us and prepare us for what will happen when we die.