Neuroscientist Publishes NIH Article on God

[Insightful27]

This reading was assigned to me in class, I can't believe that this got published in NIH. It is a near death experience of a neuroscientist of 20 years. Must read.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6170087/

"Communication there goes light years beyond our simplistic linear thinking, beyond the bottleneck of linguistically constrained awareness we experience in these physical bodies in the earthly realm."

"I came to see that unconditional love has the potential to bring infinite healing."

[Breakingthewall]

Interesting. A guy named Eben III who has a son named Eben IV doesn't seem to be very given to mystical delusions. I imagine them having dinner in a suit and tie at home and speaking formally between long silences.

[CoolDreamThanks]

Interesting, he mentions an awareness of a Trinity, like described in Christianity or ACIM:

"I was aware of a strong sense of the three of us – a Divine Being beyond all description, the brilliant orb (a translator or interpreter, perhaps?) and my conscious awareness, which by now was joined with all of consciousness throughout the multiverse, transcending a limited personal consciousness."

Divine Being - God the Father.

Brilliant orb - the interpreter - the Holy Spirit. 

"Being the Communication Link between God and His separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets everything you have made in the light of what He is." (ACIM, T-8.VII.2:2) 

Conscious awareness - Son of God.
 

[Breakingthewall]

1 hour ago, CoolDreamThanks said:

Interesting, he mentions an awareness of a Trinity, like described in Christianity or ACIM:

"I was aware of a strong sense of the three of us – a Divine Being beyond all description, the brilliant orb (a translator or interpreter, perhaps?) and my conscious awareness, which by now was joined with all of consciousness throughout the multiverse, transcending a limited personal consciousness."

Divine Being - God the Father.

Brilliant orb - the interpreter - the Holy Spirit. 

"Being the Communication Link between God and His separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets everything you have made in the light of what He is." (ACIM, T-8.VII.2:2) 

Conscious awareness - Son of God.
 

There are three that are one: one the infinite being, the limitlessness that is because it's limitless, two, the total expression of absolute potential, the infinite flow of form, infinitely interconnected, that is one and multiple, and three the singular form manifested,  seemingly separate and finite, actually interconnected in totality and infinite in its infinite cycles. The three are one, but at the same time, they are three. 

None is more real than the other; they are different facets of the whole, all of them absolute, inevitable, and complete. Each contains the others, since they are all the same.

Edited Wednesday at 02:10 PM by Breakingthewall

[Oppositionless]

3 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

There are three that are one: one the infinite being, the limitlessness that is because it's limitless, two, the total expression of absolute potential, the infinite flow of form, infinitely interconnected, that is one and multiple, and three the singular form manifested,  seemingly separate and finite, actually interconnected in totality and infinite in its infinite cycles. The three are one, but at the same time, they are three. 

None is more real than the other; they are different facets of the whole, all of them absolute, inevitable, and complete. Each contains the others, since they are all the same.

Father : the absolute 

Son : consciousness

Holy Spirit : divine intelligence 

what do you think about that breakdown?

[Leo Gura]

24 minutes ago, Oppositionless said:

Father : the absolute 

Son : consciousness

Holy Spirit : divine intelligence 

what do you think about that breakdown?

[Oppositionless]

44 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Damn I really thought I cooked with that one.

[Breakingthewall]

1 hour ago, Oppositionless said:

Father : the absolute 

Son : consciousness

Holy Spirit : divine intelligence 

what do you think about that breakdown?

I don't see that. You could say that the father is the total potential, but that of the divine intelligence and conciousness I don't see it. It's how they explain in ACIM, but I think that this book is basically wrong. It's a scam that a smart guy did and it's a lie in it's origin, when they said that was channeling. Sure. It's a 2.0 Bible written by a scholar of Eastern mysticism pretending it was written by a woman who knew nothing about it. Typical of spirituality: lies.

There are 3 aspects of the reality, the absolute formless that is potential of any forms, all the infinite forms that are that potential developed, syncronized , that is, interconnected being a whole that flows, and the cyclical line of experience that is one possibility manifested in evolution, and all of them are infinite and absolute. It's not like I know it by a kind of revelation, it's just logic. What else could be? It's impossible.

Divine intelligence is the consequence of the fact that everything that appears must be synchronized infinitely, that's mean total intelligence , and conciousness is the the change manifested, and the change is the relative movement of the reality reflecting in itself. How else could be?

Edited Wednesday at 06:46 PM by Breakingthewall

[Leo Gura]

There is no fucking father!

YOU ARE GOD.

[Breakingthewall]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

There is no fucking father!

YOU ARE GOD.

It's just a figure of speech. And it would be necessary to clarify what God is, since God necessarily has to be everything, therefore he cannot be anything concrete, and if it is nothing concrete, it cannot have will, only inevitability.

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

And it would be necessary to clarify what God is,

This dude just posted a real Awakening:

 

[Insightful27]

I emailed this to my philosophy professor and asked if this was evidence against materialism, here is his reply (he is a materialist) 

I was tempted a few years ago to write something about this very question, but I never did, though I was satisfied that the reports of people with NDE’s could be explained consistently with materialism.

For there to be a problem for materialism, there needs to be conscious experience at the same time as there is no brain activity of a kind sufficient (given materialism) for conscious experience. So it’s not enough to show that at some time the patient’s brain exhibited no activity, and at some time the patient had a conscious experience; the two times must be the same.  But it’s very hard to pinpoint the times of the two things.

It is not true that brain activity simply ceases entirely when the heart stops, but as far as I can tell it’s very hard to determine how far relevant brain activity has entirely stopped after someone’s heart has stopped, in part because we don’t really know which brain activity is relevant to sustaining conscious experience, and in part because we can’t easily tell what, if anything, is going on deep in the brain of someone in the ER. Apparently, though, some brain activity  continues for a surprisingly long time—several minutes—after the heart stops.

And it’s hard to say when the conscious experience reported by a patient actually took place. There seem to be two ways in which we might tell. First, we might take the patient’s word for it. But if someone is revived and reports having had certain experiences five minutes ago (or whatever), we can’t just assume that their sense of when they had the experiences is correct. After all, when you remember your dreams, you typically can’t say when you did the dreaming, and even if you had a sense that it was some time ago, rather than just now, that might sense well be inaccurate. Second, we might find a match between the content of the conscious experience reported (for example, what the patient seemed to hear) and sounds (e.g., of human speech) actually made while the patient was unresponsive. If the match is surprising enough that we take the experience to have been veridical (e.g., the nurse spoke of her dog, Felix), then we have a time for when the experience occurred. However, we’ve all seen TV shows of people in the ER “dying” and being revived, so we can easily imagine what might be said in such circumstances; that’s why the match has to be surprising. I’m skeptical that the match is ever that surprising.

There is a skeptical literature on NDE’s and their significance for materialism. An activist scholar named Keith Augustine has written on the topic, but I’m sure there are others. For some psychologists, NDE’s are just an interesting psychological phenomenon to investigate; they’re not gunning for materialism. For all I know, there’s experimental work too.

Let me add one more thing. If conscious experience occurs in the absence of any brain activity at all, then not only is materialism false, but so too are those forms of dualism that take certain kinds of brain activity to be (merely) causally necessary (and sufficient) for conscious experience. The snag is that these are the most plausible forms of dualism, since they accommodate the fact that ordinarily, as far as we can tell, we enjoy conscious experience of different kinds only when our brains are undergoing certain kinds of activity. Dualists would need to explain why, ordinarily, my auditory cortex has to be active for be to have auditory experiences , but not in the case of NDE’s. There is already a problem for dualists to explain what the brain does for the mind if the mind is immaterial; but the problem is aggravated if NDE’s are experiences in the absence of all brain activity.

Edited Wednesday at 07:10 PM by Insightful27

[UnbornTao]

Materialism is essentially believing in magic -- not in a good sense.

Edited Wednesday at 07:17 PM by UnbornTao

[Leo Gura]

Materialism is blindness to magic 

[Breakingthewall]

18 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

This dude just posted a real Awakening:

 

He hasn't broken the final barrier. He perceives reality as an infinite mind imagining a purposeful human experience. He speaks of fear, of how different the ineffable divine experience is from the ordinary human experience. He's still trapped in his mind, inside a bubble, only his bubble is wider than the normal human bubble.

In time, he'll realize that there's something wrong; there's a vibration of dissatisfaction in the background, a roller coaster ride that sometimes takes him up and sometimes takes him down; there's something that doesn't quite fit. If he's intelligent, he'll see where the trap lies, where the is the limit that he is creating 

Then, if he has enough balls, the total opening will occur, and he, now and forever, will be the unfathomable, what he always was. There will be no restlessness, no tears, no fear, there will be absolute plenitude. 

Look, it's absolutely impossible that a mind is creating the reality because a mind is a closed bubble that contains the reality. You can twist is as much as you want, but it's impossible. The only cause is the openess, the absence of limits, and the only purpose is the inevitability of the absolute potential with the absolute drive given to it by the inevitable fact that nothing limits it. That's God, and right now I'm totally aware of it. The ultimate reality is just absence of limits, and to realize of we must break all the limits until absolutely nothing remains, then the constriction release and the glory opens. 

And I'm 100% sure that this guy didn't do it. He can do, but he must be absolutely honest with himself, if not he will be stuck 

Edited Wednesday at 07:23 PM by Breakingthewall

[Oppositionless]

On 4/23/2025 at 2:10 PM, Insightful27 said:

I emailed this to my philosophy professor and asked if this was evidence against materialism, here is his reply (he is a materialist) 

I was tempted a few years ago to write something about this very question, but I never did, though I was satisfied that the reports of people with NDE’s could be explained consistently with materialism.

For there to be a problem for materialism, there needs to be conscious experience at the same time as there is no brain activity of a kind sufficient (given materialism) for conscious experience. So it’s not enough to show that at some time the patient’s brain exhibited no activity, and at some time the patient had a conscious experience; the two times must be the same.  But it’s very hard to pinpoint the times of the two things.

It is not true that brain activity simply ceases entirely when the heart stops, but as far as I can tell it’s very hard to determine how far relevant brain activity has entirely stopped after someone’s heart has stopped, in part because we don’t really know which brain activity is relevant to sustaining conscious experience, and in part because we can’t easily tell what, if anything, is going on deep in the brain of someone in the ER. Apparently, though, some brain activity  continues for a surprisingly long time—several minutes—after the heart stops.

And it’s hard to say when the conscious experience reported by a patient actually took place. There seem to be two ways in which we might tell. First, we might take the patient’s word for it. But if someone is revived and reports having had certain experiences five minutes ago (or whatever), we can’t just assume that their sense of when they had the experiences is correct. After all, when you remember your dreams, you typically can’t say when you did the dreaming, and even if you had a sense that it was some time ago, rather than just now, that might sense well be inaccurate. Second, we might find a match between the content of the conscious experience reported (for example, what the patient seemed to hear) and sounds (e.g., of human speech) actually made while the patient was unresponsive. If the match is surprising enough that we take the experience to have been veridical (e.g., the nurse spoke of her dog, Felix), then we have a time for when the experience occurred. However, we’ve all seen TV shows of people in the ER “dying” and being revived, so we can easily imagine what might be said in such circumstances; that’s why the match has to be surprising. I’m skeptical that the match is ever that surprising.

There is a skeptical literature on NDE’s and their significance for materialism. An activist scholar named Keith Augustine has written on the topic, but I’m sure there are others. For some psychologists, NDE’s are just an interesting psychological phenomenon to investigate; they’re not gunning for materialism. For all I know, there’s experimental work too.

Let me add one more thing. If conscious experience occurs in the absence of any brain activity at all, then not only is materialism false, but so too are those forms of dualism that take certain kinds of brain activity to be (merely) causally necessary (and sufficient) for conscious experience. The snag is that these are the most plausible forms of dualism, since they accommodate the fact that ordinarily, as far as we can tell, we enjoy conscious experience of different kinds only when our brains are undergoing certain kinds of activity. Dualists would need to explain why, ordinarily, my auditory cortex has to be active for be to have auditory experiences , but not in the case of NDE’s. There is already a problem for dualists to explain what the brain does for the mind if the mind is immaterial; but the problem is aggravated if NDE’s are experiences in the absence of all brain activity.

I think he's missing the whole point. It's not really relevant whether consciousness occurs when the brain stops working. It's much more interesting to look at the phenomena itself, consciousness becoming infinite and omniscient, and attempting to explain how that's possible. 

Edited Thursday at 09:06 PM by Oppositionless