“Without eyes and ears, the free flying soul is as dark and silent as the mind of a person who has gone blind and deaf. ” – JAN STENGREN, Physicist.
Are “Near Death Experiences” anything to do with the mystical experiences of reality that are the subject of this Blog? I’ve never thought so.
Now a letter in The July/August issue, 2015, of ATLANTIC MONTHLY by Jan Stengren, who has a Masters Degree in Physics from the University of Lund in Sweden, seems to explain why.
NDE’s are usually about bright lights, human like figures sending you back to the world because you’re not ready yet, about sounds, and colours. None of those appeared in any of my experiences. Now Mr Stengren offers a scientific suggestion as to why this may be so:
He writes, “Assuming for the sake of argument that the soul or mind actually does leave the body and floats high above, as NDErs claim, how does it see and hear?” He says there are no “sounds” in the real world for the soul to pick up, there are only sound waves. It is our ears that turn sound waves into sounds.
Neither is there any imagery or colour, he says. The lens in the eye focuses light and creates an image, and the cone cells in the retina turn colourless wave lengths of light into colours.
“Without eyes and ears, the free flying soul is as dark and silent as the mind of a person who has gone blind and deaf. The only imagery would be memories from the past, real or fantasised – the stuff dreams are made of.”
Mystical Experiences of Reality 