Dr. Melvin Morse and the New Paradigm: NDEs are REAL EVENTS

I want to begin this post with Kalana’s story. These are the words of Dr. Melvin Morse, from his website melvinmorse.com:

“Kalana was ravaged with disease since birth. By age four, she required a heart and lung transplant, done at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital in 1994. At seven years of age, her body started rejecting the organs. At one point, she nearly died and was resuscitated.  While still in the Intensive Care Unit, she used an Magna Doodle to communicate as she still had a tube in her lungs. At one point, a doctor came into the room, and her mother told her “Kalana, this is the doctor who saved you.” Kalana shook her fist angrily and sketched “God saved me”.

“After she recovered, she told her mother that she was up in the corner of the room, looking down at the doctor working on her. She talked with “angels in a tunnel with a special kind of light.” It felt good to her, and she wanted to lie down and rest. The angels told her that she could rest for a little while, but then had to go back.
She was told “we will come for you when the time is right”.

On their way home from the hospital, Kalana and her mother saw a strong ray of light coming out of the gray clouds. It touched the earth. Kalana told her mother that someone had just died. Her mother tried to give her a scientific explanation for the stream of light, but Kalana was insistent. She said it was the same light as in the tunnel. When they arrived home, they got a message that another child from their area who had been terminally ill, had just died.

Kalana died several months later. Her mother has given me permission to show the picture of her Magna Doodle message and her story, so that other parents can learn what Kalana experienced.”

Kalana’s story touches me tremendously. In fact, all the stories of children’s near death experiences affect me in a special way. I was one of those children who had an out-of-body experience, although whether or not I was near death is an open question. I was seriously ill; I believe that I was close to death based upon the conversations I heard and the tremendous emotional scarring my parents endured during those terrifying years when I was in and out of the hospital. Sadly, I was not transformed by my experience the way other children have been. In fact, I am terrified of dying to the point where sometimes I simply can’t function. I learned more from the profound sadness of my parents and how it forever altered their lives, than I learned from watching my body on the operating table.

I desperately wanted, and still want, to be “transformed by the light,” but perhaps I never experienced the light. The result of spending my childhood either in a hospital or sick at home is a belief system that I am trying to change. These are the lessons of the sick kid: you are never safe, and fear and suffering await you at the end. Of course, as an adult, I understand that the frightened child has a tremendous amount of power over what I think. I also understand that my poor, sick, “inner child” is not the best judge of reality and is still operating under the influence of terror and sadness. What I see in children who had a true “near death experience,” is a confidence and security that I don’t have. They know something intuitively and instinctual that I have to figure out intellectually. I am far behind them in my spiritual growth and development. I move towards that enlightenment at a snail’s pace; it’s amazing to me how events of forty years ago can still hold such sway over us, defining our thoughts and emotions long after the events ended.

Dr. Morse displays the following quotes on his home page, quotes that merit thought and discussion:

“I don’t “believe in” NDEs! Instead, it is my scientific conclusion that near death experiences are real. Our right temporal lobe permits the opening of a quantum connection with nonlocal reality, at the point of death.

Children who have experienced this “quantum connection” describe it as a “light that had a lot of good things in it” (age 5), or “I saw the sun and it had a happy face for me” (a 3 y/o),”you’ll see, Dr. Morse, heaven is fun”(age 7), most intriguingly, “I went into a huge noodle when I died, well it must have been a tunnel because I don’t think noodles have rainbows in them.(age 5).

My (Dr. Morse’s) research, as well as the research of many others, clearly documents that we are conscious, aware, and have an expanded sense of consciousness beyond the boundaries of our body, at the point of death. This is true even if the dying person seems comatose.  Therefore, consciousness is not dependent on normal brain function.

Why is there any controversy that consciousness survives the death of the brain?

All of the many researchers published in mainstream scientific and medical journals agree it is true. The opposing point of view can be summarized as “I don’t believe it!” The reason they don’t “believe” it is that it doesn’t fit into the current scientific materialistic world view. This is why we need a new paradigm, and this is why we are now giving workshops and demonstrating the New Mind Technologies. People are not going to “believe it” until they see it for themselves.”

“THE FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGE OF NEUROSCIENCE TODAY IS TO UNDERSTAND HOW CONSCIOUSNESS CAN PERSIST AT THE POINT OF DEATH, EVEN IN DYING DYSFUNCTIONAL BRAINS” (Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, at the University of Virginia.)

I can’t explain how amazing this is. Even though my own out-of-body experience did not “show me the light,” it did accomplish this: I understood, on an intuitive level, that “I”, Kirsten A. Thorne, was not wholly or even mostly contained in the body on the operating table. In fact, I learned rather conclusively that my consciousness was far greater than what was expressed through my brain. So where does the fear come from? I think, in part, that we are most afraid of the unknown. We do not know what it will feel like to be a consciousness without a body, or to possess a body that has little to do with the one we currently inhabit. We don’t know exactly where we go, or how we get there; it’s difficult to imagine speaking to one’s “dead” relatives again. The idea that we can move over great distances by will alone, that we can create our reality any way we choose, or that we can reincarnate is overwhelming if true, a silly fantasy if false.

I am concerned that there is a fantasy element to the afterlife. It sounds too much like wish-fulfillment, too much like a reflection of our anxieties and hopes in there here and now. I don’t want to believe something that isn’t true–and the descriptions of the afterlife are all anecdotal, even though that doesn’t make them untrue. I want to commit myself to a truth, not a fantasy or a dream. I want existence to be REAL, not suffused by hallucination or in any way resembling a dream. The only affirmation that Dr. Morse and others in this small group of scientists on the “other side” of the mainstream can make is this: consciousness survives the death of the brain. That’s incredible and awe-inspiring, but also a little scary. I don’t know what it means–none of us do–and in that area of uncertainty, I live my life. I suppose that life itself, in any form, is a mystery. I don’t understand why I’m here now, or why I was here before, or why I should persist after I’m dead. I’m still not clear on the Point, and if I am unwilling to turn to religion, then I may never understand the point, or the message.

The journey and the desire to know drive us onward . . . but is there an end point to our ignorance? For Dr. Morse’s critically ill children, the answer is yes. For me, I am still wandering in the dark, while those lucky others carry the Light within.