:QOOK ·REVIP/WS 198 Nagel emerges from the pages of his book as a philosopher whom, even when we disagree with him, we can still admire. St.John's University Jamaica, New York ROBERT E. LAUDER Religious Experience. By WAYNE PROUDFOOT. Berkeley and .Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 263. For the last two centuries, religious experience has been a central concern of...
Article describing the author's near-death experience (NDE) in 1983 as a result of poisoning. Almost every feature of the experience has been antithetical to the author's prior background, both in childhood and in adult life, thereby providing evidence against reductionist explanations of NDE. An account is given of how the new consciousness is affected by various life-circumstances, and of its...
In Part I of this thesis, mystical experience is defined in terms of some of the classical philosophical and psychological issues which surround it. It is also connected to the general class of the praeternatural which is defined operationally as those visionary and remote perception experiences which have a quality of supernaturalness as defined by Hultkrantz. The psycho-phenomenology of...
We nonselectively interviewed 11 patients aged 3 through 16 years who had survived critical illnesses, including cardiac arrests and profound comas. Any memory of a time they were unconscious was considered to be a near-death experience (NDE) and was recorded. Seven of these children had memories that included being out of the physical body (six patients), entering darkness (five patients),...
The experimental subjects were older than the average general population, more educated and considerably experienced in drug use. They considered themselves to have benefited by their MDMA experience, with no evidence of harm. There were moderate, consistent biochemical, cardiovascular and neurobehavioral changes within normal limits that peaked between one and two hours following ingestion,...
Near-death experiences (NDEs), profound subjective experiences occurring during a close brush with death and containing transcendental or mystical elements, have been reported to reduce suicidal ideation, despite their "romanticization" of death. Among 61 consecutive hospital admissions for attempted suicide, 16 patients (26.2%) reported NDEs precipitated by the attempt. NDEs were not...
The authors report some features of 16 cases of near-death experiences that they investigated in India. After presenting brief accounts of four such experiences, the authors describe and discuss features in which the Indian cases differ from a larger sample of American cases. They note that some of these features seem to be culture-bound, but they caution against accepting this observation as...
REVIEWS the glosses and rubrics. To Gillmeister, the final disposition of CTis that of a pilgrims' anthology of allegorical stories promoting the heavenlyJerusa lem (p. 142), with The Parson's Tale its apotheosis. Some readers may favor, on the other hand, such a position as Charles Owen's, that the theological thrust of CT, originally framed by Melibee andParsT, waned as Chaucer grew more and...