Pim van Lommel: Endless Consciousness

**Korpo** · 22nd February 2012, 10:33 PM

I saw a live lecture tonight by Pim vam Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands. He has studied the Near Death Experience for many years now.

Interesting bits were amongst others:

He conducted a study amongst 344 full cardiac arrest patients, a state which modern medicine thinks means absence of consciousness. From these people, 18% reported recall of consciousness, about half of them had rich and varied NDEs. He followed up with all those people from the 18% 2 and 8 years later and practically all of them reported a significant life change because of their experience.

A cardiac arrest leads to physical unconsciousness and to a zero EEG (electrical activity within the brain) line within 15 seconds, no breathing, no blood flow within the brain. If a cardiac arrest takes longer than 37 secs the EEG will also not instantly resume after heart activity is restored. A cardiac arrest due to a heart attack is usually 1-2 minutes.

He found no significant statistical correlation between which patients would experience a NDE and...
* their beliefs
* their fear of death preceding the event
* the drugs they were given
* the length of the cardiac arrest or unconsciousness
* their previous knowledge of the concept of a NDE
* etc.

He personally concludes that the brain must be more like a transceiver, not the origin of consciousness, that consciousness exists beyond the body and that there's different ways we can tune into it.

Find the first part of a recording of the same lecture in English here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMdR8yG0NI0&t=150

There's also some beautiful anecdotes, like this one:

He reports from a medical congress on NDE, both with doctors in the audience and other people. After the first speaker had finished a doctor from the audience rose and said "This is all nonsense! I'm a cardiologist with decades of experience and no patient ever even mentioned this." Someone in the audience got up and said "I'm one of your patients. I had a NDE. You're the last person I would talk about it with!"