Saturday, September 21, 2013

Dr. Maurice Rawlings: To Hell and Back

I recently finished reading the book To Hell and Back by Dr. Maurice Rawlings who as an atheist cardiologist resuscitated people who had visions of hell rather than a sweet, white light greet them.

A friend pointed me to this video on YouTube.  It reprises some of the key points in the book.

4 comments:

MAX Redline said...

Terrible video quality. Interesting conversion, though. Never having died, as yet, it's interesting to see what others say.

I have personally disproved one long-cemented meme, however: that as death approaches, your life passes before your eyes. Mine didn't. On the other hand, I proved (to my satisfaction) a different scenario: as death approaches, time slows. In the real world, I had approximately one second. In my world, however, I had plenty of time to consider various scenarios, and select the option that I suspected would cause me the least amount of additional harm. It worked.

T. D. said...

Yes, the video is poor and pixelized at certain points.

The flexibility of time is interesting. My experience agrees with yours, Max. Time does slow for thinking and choosing even though in my case the event, a car crash, didn't slow enough to affect the speed of the car itself just my responses to it.

The experiences of the people are central in this video. In the book Rawlings includes them but focuses a lot on analysis. For instance, whether the experience is good or bad the usual case is that the person will forget it if they do not talk about it soon after. In a way, it's like dream memory. A dream can be so intense, and yet if you don't nail it down soon after the dream, you will completely forget it.

MAX Redline said...

Some of these folks didn't want to forget, then. Probably a good idea.

T. D. said...

Right, Max. In the book Rawlings makes the point (which is also clear in the stories the men tell) that the experience utterly changed their lives. They decided to live differently after and consciously relived the experience in order to fuel that change.

Rawlings says that a radical change happens rarely if ever with good/heavenly clinical death experiences because they seem to affirm the life the person is living.