Death

What is death and do you fear it? Or the question is can you cheat death? Some view death as the grim reaper others view it as fate. But isn't defying fate cheating death? I have cheated death many times but because of it It seems to be constantly following me like my number is up. I would like to think that death is like the threads of faith a keeper of souls kind of like an accountant or watchdog. The only difference is that he watches the living so perhaps while alive the world does not become over populated but not even death is able to stop this from happening. Some people view the grim reaper as the angel of death and perhaps that is what he is. Since we have angels for everything else there must be something of a higher power that guides the souls to the right places. When you die many have seen the light at the end of the tunnel while others have seen souls screaming and being burned. Perhaps death is just a guide perhaps when you die you can chose to follow him or stay here. We may never know this answer till we die. Although we mourn and we fear it this is something that must happen to all of us so that some souls have a chance to reincarnate as some cultures believe or while others have a chance at life. Nobody knows what death is like till they have flat lined and perhaps even been brought back to life such as threw cpr. Some have said that after death the soul does not leave the body for at least 3 days some even say the brain stays alive for a long time. So in reality maybe your body is dead but the brain alive so perhaps you are dreaming while you are in a coffin perhaps your brain is still alive. Many people feel that when you die that's it there darkness no light, no free will, just emptiness this may be even my worst fear. To die and have nothingness. However we know there is life after death even because look at the photography our organization takes of apparitions, ectoplasm, orbs, faces etc. We cannot always chose when its time for death to come around even if we avoid it now sooner or later it will happen. Sudden deaths like murders, car accidents and dramatic events are not always meant to be and sometimes death does not chose that fate for you therefore what we have then is a lost soul because death cannot guide you to where you will head when the afterlife begins.

Copyright By

AngelOfThyNight-Rick

 
  Talking to the Dead

A few years ago, while my wife and I were on a spiritual journey through the arid State of Arizona, we received word that my mother was dying.

We were living hand-to-mouth in those days, and it took a great effort to scrape together enough cash to make a trip across a few hundred miles of mountains to visit her in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That was the last time I saw her in this world. She died a few weeks later. We were unable to return until after her remains were cremated and only the mourning family members were left.

I was deeply saddened about this. I felt robbed of a chance to touch her face one last time and say good-by. It was something personal that I needed to do. The contemporary and worn-out description for this is "closure."

It was at about this time that I was using a home training course, offered by The Monroe Institute, in Faber, Virginia, to enter a higher mental state. The program, which used special musical sound called "Hemi-Sync," listened to through a headset, taught us to do a variety of nifty things including self healing, self-improvement, and out-of-body travel.

Within weeks after mother's death, I achieved my first out-of-body experience. I felt myself fly up out of the room where I was listening to the tape, and found myself in an apartment directly above the one we lived in. I remember seeing a bright green carpet and a lamp with a red shade. I thought I imagined what I saw until I had a chance to visit that apartment, and confirmed that the room above my bedroom had green carpet and a lamp with a red shade.

Experimentation with more out-of-body travel in the weeks after this brought me face-to-face one day with my mother. I was amazed to find her looking radiant and young, a woman in the prime of life. She was happy and glad to see me. The world in the astral is a silent one, however, and no words were exchanged. We spoke telepathically, which was just fine. The Monroe tapes also teach you the basics for that kind of communication. You visualize pictures in your mind rather than speak words aloud.

At the same time, my wife, Doris, who can communicate with the dead through a form of writing, treated me to several personal sessions with her. Mom said she was so surprised at the relief she felt after so many weeks of illness and suffering. She said she was suddenly "cured," and could breath again. And she did not feel pain. But she seemed to think she was still among the living.

It was not long after this that Mom understood that she was dead. She said she was in a very nice place where she thought she would wait for Dad. She also said she was worried about Dad because he had stopped taking his vitamins. When I asked my father about this, he was shocked. He said it was true, he had quit taking the daily regime of pills she had insisted that he consume while she was alive. Obviously the dead can see what we are up to, even though we rarely ever see the dead.

Mom didn't wait a long time in that state. The last time I made an out-of-body visit, she was dramatically changed. She was almost pure light and was so bright I had difficulty looking at her. She said she was preparing to leave soon, and was going on into the light. When I left her that time, I knew I would never see her again, but it was not a sad parting. There was something about her journey that made me very happy. I have since realized that this light she entered is the great energy we call God. It is where we all come from and where we all should return after we leave these bodies.

It is because of this experience, and because of my wife's ability to communicate with the dead, that we have become very comfortable with death. It is not a terrible thing to die. It is the simple passing from this existence into another.

The tragedy about the death experience, however, is that most people do not understand it. The church has done a thorough job of implanting a fear of death into anyone who comes in contact with religion. All this talk about judgment and eternal damnation by fire after death has implanted a sense of horror at the thought of leaving this body. It is all a big lie.

Because of the erroneous teachings of the church, the world is filled with ghosts. Ghosts are the spirits of people who do not realize they are dead. They continue to go through their daily activities as if they are still among the living. That the people around them are unreceptive to their presence does not seem to make much of a difference. Perhaps that is because most of us live relatively lonely lives while in this existence anyway.

When she discovered that she could talk to the dead, Doris also discovered that the dead are anxious to talk to us. They have things they want to tell us.

Our son, Aaron, moved into a very haunted building a few years ago. He said the building was filled with the spirits of the dead. Because he is psychic, he frequently saw shadowy figures passing through walls, heard strange sounds in the night, and even spoke to some of the spirits.

Because he understood death, Aaron was not afraid of the ones he shared the building with. Instead, he experimented with ways of communicating with them. One of the methods he used was a tape recorder. He would leave the recorder on for long periods of time, ask questions of the spirits, and let them answer. When he played the recordings, if you turned the sound to its highest level, you could hear faint whispering of voices. The spirits were speaking and he was recording them.

Aaron's equipment was not the best, and it was almost impossible to understand any message left on his recordings. But a priest in Argentina, Fr. Brancois Brune, uses a similar method of recording messages from the dead.

Brune is one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of "Trans-Instrumental Communication." He possesses thousands of taped voices from dead people who he says have communicated with their relatives through a variety of modern electronic devices.

The priest claims that anyone can capture these voices. All you need is a good tape recorder, a new tape and a microphone that can capture background noise. Brune suggests praying before each session. We found it is necessary to use a form of prayer to order other life forms to leave so that the voices of the dead can be heard. Without this, the messages may come to you from entities other than the dead. Turn the tape recorder on, ask a question, and then allow about a 30-second silence to get your answer. Then ask other questions. After doing this a few times, rewind the tape and just listen. If you are lucky, the priest says you will hear answers to the questions.

Brune says most sounds are like whispers that are difficult to understand. But he says there are exceptional cases in which words can clearly be heard, as thought they were transported through a telephone line.

The priest believes that some of the voices are coming from Hell because he has heard howling, screaming, crying and appeals for help. I think I know the reason for this.

In his explorations of the astral, Aaron discovered that there is both a heaven and a hell, but only because a lot of humans believe in these places and have used their collective consciousness to create them. But there is no reason for anyone to go to either place. They are both traps created by the church. We were always supposed to return to the light, not move into fire and brimstone, or a city full of religious ornaments made of gold and silver. Our destiny was supposed to be much more than this.

But there is something even more terrifying happening.

We are living in a time of great spiritual warfare. The war that has been raging in the astral has become so violent it has spread to our third dimensional plane on Earth. This war is the last great battle, the so-called apocalypse. Not only are we destroying our planet, but the war has destroyed the astral world. I think this is why my mother moved on into the light so quickly. This is the message the dead had for Doris. Everything there is in chaos.

To die now is to go into total darkness. Without knowing the way, or without someone to guide you, it is impossible for the dead to find their way into the light. This is not a good time to die.

There is a red cloaked one, known to the ancients as Huktuctu, and to the Christians as Satan, who is busy devouring souls. To die now is to be lost for eternity. You don't go to hell. Once dead, you are in danger of having your soul, that spark of light that is God in each of us, torn away. Once it happens, the person that was you dissipates as a speck of nothing.

This is the fate of billions of foolish humans on this planet who choose to avoid love and make war. This is the fate of billions of foolish humans who chose the love of money over the love of the planet that feeds and nourishes them.

Visit the author's web site at www.jamesdonahue.com

The Grim Reaper 

By Montrous.com

The garb of Death or the black mourning robe, which the first references are found in the early fifteenth century, is very close to the robe of the priest or monk who officiated at the death bed. It is interesting to note that the dead body itself was never garbed in black -- the colour of the winding sheet or shroud seems always to have been white.

The scythe is an image that reminds us that Death reaps the souls of sinners like the peasant harvest corn in his field. Each movement of the scythe brings thousands of souls.

In Greek mythology, Chronos (Cronus) was the king of titans and the father of Zeus.  He was also a harvest god called Father Time and carried a sickle which is a tool used in harvesting grain. The Grim Reaper carrying a scythe are directly derived from Cronus. The myth of Chronos eating his children was used in a poetic sense for time devouring all things, as in the old saying "nothing lasts forever."
The three Greek words that were either related originally or related through confusion later were: Chronus (meaning "time"), Cronus (the god of harvest before the Greek gods took over), and corone (meaning "crow"). Little wonder then that we often see a crow accompanying the Grim Reaper.

Have We Lived Before? 
Just what is the nature of humankind? This same question, framed in dozens of different approaches, was asked repeatedly of Edgar Cayce. His answers-insights into our relationship with God, one another, and ourselves-have served as a foundation for comparative studies between the East and the West for decades. 

From Cayce's perspective, we are not simply physical bodies or even physical bodies with souls, but are instead spiritual beings who are currently having a material experience. As souls, we have manifested in the earth in order to learn lessons that will enable us to return to our former state of spiritual awareness. At the same time, one purpose we all have in common is to bring the spirituality of the Creator into the earth. 

A soul can choose to be born into either a male or a female body in any given lifetime or, as Cayce called it, an incarnation. A soul selects that environment (parents and family, location, personal obstacles, etc.) which will best allow for the learning of lessons it needs for completeness. The goal is to fully express love in all the challenges which physical life offers. One's experiences are subject to the choices made with free will. As one grows, he or she learns-or rather remembers-his or her true relationship with God and one's heritage as a spiritual being. With free will, we can turn the challenges life presents to us into stepping-stones toward growth, or we can see them as obstacles and stumbling blocks. Either way, we reap what we have sown. We constantly meet the consequences of previous deeds and attitudes. 

One frequently misunderstood concept regarding reincarnation has to do with karma. From the standpoint of the Cayce material, karma is not destiny; it is only memory. These memories are generally unconscious and influence our abilities, our faults, even our relationships with others, but with free will we can meet this memory as a positive or a negative experience. Karma provides us with the potential to learn a lesson we need in order to grow at a soul level, and free will determines whether or not we choose to learn it at this time. The choices we make determine the next set of potential experiences we encounter. 

Much more than simply a concept that applies to a limited segment of the world, reincarnation is a philosophy that has-at one time or another-been embraced by all the major religions of the world. It's a concept that can allow us to have compassion for one another because ultimately we are all equal-there is only one God, and we are all His children. 

From Cayce's viewpoint, it doesn't really matter if an individual believes in reincarnation or not. For some it can be a helpful concept, for others confusing. The main purpose is to allow individuals to become aware of their true spiritual nature and their ultimate relationship with one another. In fact, if we can think for a moment about the one person in our life whom we love most of all. then we will get an inkling of the goal of reincarnation: to be able to love every single soul, even ourselves, with the very same love. 

Adapted from: 
Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records
by Kevin J. Todeschi 

There are several possible definition of death according to one’s point of view. We can distinguish the physical death from the spiritual one’s. A short conclusion is that death escapes all definitions, it is the great Unknown, the ultimate truth. Monstrous does not want offense this mysterious entity and mainly focus on the macabre which is the representation of death by humans.

 

Spiritual death

A classical point of departure in defining death, seems to be life itself. Death is perceived either as a cessation of life - or as a passage on the way to a continuation of life by other means. A logically more rigorous approach, would be to ask "who dies" when death occurs. In other words, the identity of the dying is essential in defining death. But how can we establish the dying entity's unambiguous and unequivocal identity?. Death escapes all definitions, it is the great Unknown, the ultimate truth.

 

Social death

A person is not fully dead, Hertz argues, until the proper rituals have been completed.

 

Physical death

·The cessation of normal body functions. In legal terms defined as "brain death", i.e., loss of higher cortical functions.

The irreversible loss of both components of consciousness, arousal and awareness.


Before the discovery that the heart could be resuscitated, people assumed that death came when the heart ceased to function. With resuscitation came the uneasy feeling that what appeared to be death might merely be coma, overdose, or shock. Such fears in the 19th century led to the recently deceased being watched for a period of days, and to crypts and coffins being made 'escapable'.

This century saw the rise of defibrillators, artificial respirators, and organ transplants. It became clear for medecine, that only the brain was immune to resuscitation or replacement, leading to a focus on the brain as the 'vital' structure separating life and death."

In 1965, the term "brain-dead" was coined when a renal transplant took place using organs donated from a patient with no recorded brain function. In many countries brain stem death is considered legal death, even if the body is kept alive with artificial means. This opens up for organ transplants of heart, liver and lungs, where the donor has to be dead.

A 1981 President's Commission found that cessation of blood flow, lack of respiration, and loss of full brain function defines death. But because the body can be kept alive by only one primitive part of the brain -- the brainstem -- confusion remains. Cases like anencephalic babies -- born without the more evolved parts of the brain but with beating hearts and functioning organs -- raises the question as to what constitutes life, as well as what defines death.

Some argue that higher brain function command personality, memory, and consciousness which constitutes the personhood," or cognition. Therefore, anencephalic infants and brain-dead patients maybe considered as organ donors.

 

Macabre

Macabre is a French word that makes its first known appearance in the fourteenth century, in a fragmented poem by Jean Le Fevre; Je fis de Macabre la danse. The term is supposed by some sources to have developed from Maccabee, the name of the Christian martyrs who by tradition invented the prayer of intercession for the dead in Purgatory. Macabre was a word created to describe the interaction of the dead, or death, with the living, and with this uncanny shudder retains this use to this day.

 

Reincarnated or Disencarnated?
- not only do I see them, but I talk to them'
By Valerie Dean

Valerie Dean is a Johannesburg psychic whose ability was tested by the South Africa Society for the Study of the Paranormal and she was given an A-Plus rating.
"Ghost stories are fabricated, they have a practical explanation. Ghosts do not exist."

So say the scientists and the cynics. Which puts me in a rather ambivalent situation as I have a logical and often cynical mind myself and yet I have not only seen and talked with ghosts but have never been particularly surprised by the fact.

I feel as at home with ghosts as I do with people, some are nice, some are not. Some are even boring, like people, when they have a lot on their minds and want to talk about it.

Ghosts (I would rather call them disincarnated beings but that would get very boring) do exist, they have feelings, they can communicate on a human level.

I have many stories to tell of ghosts both seen and unseen but perhaps a run-through of the logic which leads to my lack of shivers would be in order.

If you believe in life after death, and particularly in reincarnation, after the body dies, the spirit goes out of it. When people look at a dead body they always comment that the person is no longer there. An empty shell left behind.

So where does the person go?

"You are not the body" is an often quoted statement made by Sri Sathya Sai Baba. The body is a vehicle through which the soul experiences the lessons of life on earth.

Why should the person we know disappear into a puff of smoke when the vehicle breaks down and is assessed as a write-off? (Amongst other things, I am also in insurance!)

Ideally, the soul travels from the earth plane to another existence on another level, closer to God. After being on holiday for a while, it comes back to earth in another body, for another stay in the school-house of the world - or this is what I, together with two-thirds of the world's population, believe.

However, whether or not one believes in reincarnation, it seems only logical to accept that the person - the personality - lives on. Not so ideally, they may not want to leave the earth existence, through attachment - love, hate, fear, worry, greed, whatever.

So they hang around and can make their existence known and it's not always howling, chain-clanking bed-sheets, it's just whatever their personality is.

Another explanation for a different kind of 'haunting' is strong energy fields left behind. Where a traumatic experience has occurred, the very strong energy that is emitted can remain long after the soul has moved on and away. This energy is often the cause of unexplained supernatural incidents.

 

New Research Backs Life After Death

 
The first scientific study of "near-death" experiences has found evidence that consciousness or "the soul" can continue to exist after the brain has ceased to function. The findings by two British doctors, based on a year-long study of heart attack survivors, could provoke fresh controversy over one of the world's most enduring enigmas: is there life after death?

Based on interviews with survivors of heart attacks at Southampton General Hospital, the study is to be published in the medical journal Resuscitation next year. The study's authors, Dr Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and Dr Sam Parnia, a clinical research fellow and registrar at Southampton Hospital, stress that more research is needed.

"These people were having these experiences when we wouldn't expect them to happen, when the brain shouldn't be able to sustain lucid processes or allow them to form memories that would last," Dr Parnia said.

Dr Fenwick said: "If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about the continuation of consciousness after death. It also raises the question about a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose rather than a random universe."

During the study, 63 cardiac arrest patients survived and were interviewed within a week. Of those, 56 had no recollection of their period of unconsciousness. Seven survivors, however, had memories, although only four met the strict medical criteria for assessing near-death experiences.

These four recounted feelings of peace and joy, time speeded up, heightened senses, lost awareness of body, seeing a bright light, entering another world, encountering a mystical being and coming to a "point of no return". Three described themselves as non-practising Anglicans while the fourth was a lapsed Roman Catholic.

By examining medical records, the researchers said the contention of many critics that near-death experiences were the result of a collapse of brain functions caused by lack of oxygen was highly unlikely. None of those who had experiences had low levels of oxygen.

Researchers were also able to rule out claims that unusual combinations of drugs were to blame because the resuscitation procedure in the hospital unit was the same in every case.

Dr Parnia said: "I started off as a sceptic, but having weighed up all the evidence, I now think that there is something going on.

"Essentially, it comes back to the question of whether the mind or consciousness is produced from the brain. If we can prove that the mind is produced by the brain, I don't think there is anything after we die because essentially we are conscious beings.

"If, on the contrary, the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind ... we can show that the mind is still there after the brain is dead. And that is what I think these near-death experiences indicate."

Bishop Stephen Sykes, Professor of Theology at Durham University and chairman of the Church of England's Doctrine Commission, said the findings were "absolutely fascinating.

"I do not find them surprising, however, as I believe life is much more mysterious than we usually think it is," he added.

"For theologians, the soul is far more than consciousness or the mind. But these findings challenge the crude idea that when a person's brain dies, that, as far as the person's existence is concerned, is that."

The Bishop of Basingstoke, the Rt Rev Geoffrey Rowell, another commission member, said: "These near-death experiences counter the materialist view that we are nothing more than computers made of meat."

• Story originally published by •
The Sunday Telegraph / London via The Sydney Morning Herald / Australia - October 25 2000

" Quote "

The True Meaning Of

Life Is To surpass death.

That is where your journey

begans!

 
Immortality

Juan Ponce de León, who travelled on Columbus's second voyage, searched Florida in 1513, hoping to find the fountain of youth.

The myth is stil active 400 years later and in Florida maybe more than anywhere else.

There are numerous attempts made by science  to slow the process of aging and it is still a common belief that the fountain of youth maybe find someday. Avoiding the looming shadow of death has been the popular pursuit for many medical researchers.

How to prolong human existence? How to extend the boundaries of an ordinary lifespan? Gabrielle Boulianne of the University of Toronto discovered that fly life spans could be increased up to 40 percent by inserting a gene in motor neurons to make them produce more superoxide dismutase. This enzyme prevents the alteration of excess oxygen in cells into harmful substances, a sort of "cellular rusting.". Pycnogeno is supposed to drastically counter aging by eradicating those pesky free radicals which are harmful to cells, a free radical being an organic compound in which some of the valence electrons are unpaired, occurring as a normal byproduct of oxidation reactions in metabolism. DHEA, Conenzyme Q10 and many more promess to stop the death clock. Cryonics is another modern way to gain an extra life in the future against the loss of the current one.

Organ transplantation is limited until we design artificial organs as there are always more people in need of organs than there are donors. People's religious beliefs may stop them from donating organs. Even if this is not the case, families may find the prospect of having their deceased loved ones, to put it crudely, chopped up, rather shocking.

Increasingly, we hear the Greek Tithonius myth applied to the contemporary aging story. In this immortality parable, a beautiful young man asked Aurora, the goddess of morning, to make him immortal. She does. He ages continuously. Finally, pitying his never-ending dissolution, she makes him into a grasshopper.

Instead of making the oldest of the old into grasshoppers, Society and medicine have produced a population of disabled including the million or more nursing home residents so disabled that twenty-four hour care is required, and the ten thousand individuals existing in irreversible vegetative states. National estimates reveal approximately one- quarter of the aged to be in need of some type of long-term care. The American Hospital Association estimated in 1991 that some 70 percent of all deaths are somehow negotiated or timed.

Death is indispensable to nature and evolution. Without death there would be no emergence of new individuals with genes better adapted to the changing environment. Without death there would be no room for new species to emerge.

Without death there would be no mating, no birth, no parenting, no family warmth. Death is the price we pay for the enjoyment of love between man and woman, love between parent and child. Even if medical technology allowed us to abolish death tomorrow, the world would become impossibly overpopulated, not to mention that people might start getting bored.

 
Misfiring Brain Tied To 'Out-Of-Body Experiences

 - Their stories are the stuff of creepy movies and daytime TV: Hospital patients resuscitated on the operating table speak of being drawn toward a brilliant light, or looking down on their own bodies and the doctors working feverishly to save their lives.

What induces these brief, haunting images?

A new study suggests these "out-of-body" and "near-death" experiences may be influenced by a portion of the brain misfiring under stress.

The paper, which describes one patient's visions while she was being evaluated for epilepsy, does not wrestle with issues of the soul.

Nor, researchers said, do the brain-mapping results entirely explain these strange reports.

The researchers point to a processing center in the brain known as the angular gyrus. The angular gyrus is thought to play an important role in the way the brain analyzes sensory information to give us a perception of our own bodies. When it misfires, they speculate, the result can be visions of floating outside of ourselves.

The findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"We do not fully understand the neurological mechanism that causes OBEs," conceded the study's lead researcher, neurologist Dr. Olaf Blanke at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland.

Skeptics of OBEs said the experiment goes a long way toward providing a scientific explanation for what some believe is a paranormal phenomenon, even if the study is based on only one patient.

"Since all of our brains are wired in a similar manner, there is no reason to think that stimulation of this brain region in other patients will not corroborate the finding," said psychologist Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptic Society, which seeks to debunk alien abductions, ESP and other claims.

"It's another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain," Shermer said. "In reality, all experience is derived from the brain."

Other researchers were less dismissive of the possibility that OBEs might be real. They described the experiment as modest but interesting.

Neurologist Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia said the experiment does not necessarily prove that all OBEs are illusions. He said it is possible that some OBEs occur in different ways than the scientists suspect.

The Swiss researchers mapped the brain activity of a 43-year old woman who had been experiencing seizures for 11 years. They implanted electrodes to stimulate portions of her brain's right temporal lobe.

The temporal lobe, which includes the angular gyrus structure, is associated with perception of sound, touch, memory and speech.

Blanke suspects that the right angular gyrus integrates signals from the visual system, as well as information on touch and balance.

When electrical stimulation was applied, the patient reported seeing herself "lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." She also described herself as "floating" near the ceiling.

Millions of people have reported OBEs, but relatively few have been clinically analyzed.

Last December, the British medical journal Lancet published a Dutch study in which 344 cardiac patients were resuscitated from clinical death. About 12 percent reported seeing light at the end of a tunnel, or speaking to dead relatives.

Other researchers have suggested that OBEs occur as brain cells die from lack of oxygen, or when the brain releases pain-reducing chemicals called endorphins.

• Story originally published by:
www.azcentral.com / AZ - Sept 18.02