Free Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences by Jeffrey Long, Paul Perry Page A

absolutely no scientific or medical explanation for consciousness existing apart from the body. The fact that OBErs report seeing and hearing at a time when their physical eyes and ears are not functioning could have profound implications for scientific thinking about consciousness. The scientific community may now need to wrestle with a profound question: What does it mean to experience sensory perception without the use of the physical senses?
    Many hundreds of NDEs that include out-of-body perception have been shared and posted on the NDERF website. Here are some more examples:
    Thaddeus, a physician, had a blood infection that was threatening his life. As he lay in an isolation room at the hospital, suddenly his perspective changed:
    Lying on my back. Awake. Suddenly I am looking down at myself from the ceiling. My position is reversed; that is, my head is opposite to my feet on the bed. I see myself very clearly. I have normal vision. I am presented with making a decision. No voice. Just “knowledge” that I have a choice. The choice is stay or go. There is absolutely no value to either choice, which surprises me.… A sense of absolute calm. I choose “stay.” Immediately I am back in my body.
    In the summer of 1971 Diane was with her husband in northern Georgia. They were rafting the Chattahoochee River. She was with eight people in a large raft when it flipped and she was held beneath the rapids by the churning action of the water. Stuck beneath the mighty force of the river, Diane ran out of air, blacked out, and then had this remarkable experience:
    The next thing I knew I was a hundred feet above the river, looking down at the raft stuck against the rocks below. I saw the two men in the raft looking for me to come out from underneath. I saw the other woman, who had been in our raft, downstream, clinging to a rock. I watched my husband and my teenage sister, who had rafted without incident down the rapids ahead of us, come running back up the hill to find out why all the debris was floating down the river. We had taken everything out of their raft and put it into ours in case they flipped over, but they went down so easily, we just jumped in to follow them down. From above, I watched my husband climb onto a rock in the river. He couldn’t hear what the two men still in the raft were shouting to him over the roar of the water. He had no idea where I was or what had happened, but he knew I was missing. He looked as if he wanted to jump in to try to find me, and I suddenly found myself at his side, trying to stop him because he wasn’t much of a swimmer and I knew there was no point. When I reached out to stop him, my hand went right through him. I looked at my hand and thought, oh, my god, I’m dead!
    … The Being of Light told me it was my choice to stay or go but that there was more for me to do in that life and it wasn’t quite time for me to leave. Still hesitating, I was told that if I chose to go back, I would be given certain knowledge to take back with me to share with others. After much discussion, I agreed to go back and suddenly found myself in front of a tall, cone-shaped building—so tall it seemed to go on forever. I was told this was the Hall of Knowledge. I entered the building and flew, spiraling upward, through what appeared to be shelves of books, like in a library, many millions of books, and I flew through them all. When I reached the top, I burst through it into a kaleidoscope of colors and, at the same time, my head popped out of the water. I was downriver about ten yards from the raft.
    I immediately became aware of where I was and grabbed for the nearest rock. I was able to pull myself up, and I coughed up a lot of water. I was in a state of shock but needed no medical attention. I don’t know how long I was under the raft; no one was looking at their watch at the time. It could have been three or four minutes; it could have been ten. There was no time where I had been.

FUTURE