Monday, January 9, 2012

Currently reading..

Dr. Dianne Morrissey's "You Can See The Light" is actually quite good; I'm about half-way through it. (A used copy can be obtained for pennies at the usual places.) It is not a long and complicated book, but her information (particularly relating to OOBEs) is consistent with my experiences and readings.

Books describing, collating, and pontificating on the meanings of NDEs have become a New Age cottage industry. Some are better than others... The better ones simply present the experience and tend to be somewhat reductionist. The Near Death Experience is ineffable at best; then, the part that is remembered has to be somehow translated into the experiencer's vocabulary, along with the usual religious overlay. So, the more reductionist, the better.

What is novel about Dr. Morrissey's approach is that she links the NDE with common out-of-body experiences, and she argues that everyone can experience many of the features common to NDEs in the out-of-body state. I think she's right. Her descriptions of the various stages of OOBEs are both specific and extremely accurate (based on my personal experience).

As I've been reading Dr. Morrissey's accounts, I can't help but compare them to Dannion Brinkley's, whose NDE was similar to Dr. Morrissey's. His description of his NDE accounts has been challenged; and it doesn't help that he made a number of predictions of our near future (derived from his NDE visions) that have largely fallen flat. My first impression is that Dr. Morrissey's accounts are everything that Brinkley's isn't, on several levels; and this is a good thing.

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