(2023-05-13, 08:36 PM)Sam Wrote: [ -> ]
Hi tim.
The surgeon is not talking about a neck operation, but of a femoral neck operation (on the groin) 
Thanks, Sam ! Sorry to have missed your entrance here but I've been busy and also needed a good break and also to give the forum a rest from my repetitive stuff.
This is an interesting NDE, certainly unusual anyway. Scottish writer, poet and academic, John Burnside did actually die (apparently, but he's still here of course) when he was admitted to hospital during the Covid 19 pandemic. They suspected he had covid but was in such a bad way, he was put into an isolation room and basically left to expire, because it was considered pointless trying to treat him.
The podcast narrative is tainted with a little too much aesthetic frill for my liking but if you back track enough you can get the picture. When I first heard it, I suspected that John was trying to play down his experience to please materialists, possibly (I think he said..I won't say I had an out of body experience).
However, I contacted him and we had a nice email exchange and no he isn't a materialist academic at all, so that was a surprise. Penny Sartori is in there, too, providing an 'expert view'.
BBC Radio 4 - John Burnside: From the Other Side
(2023-11-13, 05:34 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]This is an interesting NDE, certainly unusual anyway. Scottish writer, poet and academic, John Burnside did actually die (apparently, but he's still here of course) when he was admitted to hospital during the Covid 19 pandemic. They suspected he had covid but was in such a bad way, he was put into an isolation room and basically left to expire, because it was considered pointless trying to treat him.
The podcast narrative is tainted with a little too much aesthetic frill for my liking but if you back track enough you can get the picture. When I first heard it, I suspected that John was trying to play down his experience to please materialists, possibly (I think he said..I won't say I had an out of body experience).
However, I contacted him and we had a nice email exchange and no he isn't a materialist academic at all, so that was a surprise. Penny Sartori is in there, too, providing an 'expert view'.
BBC Radio 4 - John Burnside: From the Other Side
I’m not a native english speaker but doesn’t he say at 23:05 “I’m not personally going on to a better place, I’m not against that idea but I don’t have any evidence for it”?
isn’t it unusual for a NDE’er not to believe in survival of the self?
(2023-11-13, 09:10 PM)sbu Wrote: [ -> ]I’m not a native english speaker but doesn’t he say at 23:05 “I’m not personally going on to a better place, I’m not against that idea but I don’t have any evidence for it”?
isn’t it unusual for a NDE’er not to believe in survival of the self?
Without going back to check exactly what he said, I agree, that is what I remember. But...I contacted him (not to lobby him, and try to change his mind) and had a really interesting exchange and he sent me a link to a paper from Italian professor and NDE researcher, Professor Enricco Facco, who I was already very familiar with. But of course, I didn't tell him that.
Burnside still works in academia and you can't say you went to the afterlife or "heaven".. believe me (or I would hope you believe me but you are of course not obliged to) or not.
(2023-11-13, 04:00 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]also to give the forum a rest from my repetitive stuff.
You're kidding, right?
Thrilled to see you here again tim.
(2023-11-14, 02:13 AM)Ninshub Wrote: [ -> ]You're kidding, right?
Thrilled to see you here again tim.
Thank you very much, Ian !
Is there any way to see that Burnside account without signing up to the BBC website? I gather the answer is no, but just checking in case it's available in fashion somewhere else.
(2023-11-14, 04:14 PM)Ninshub Wrote: [ -> ]Is there any way to see that Burnside account without signing up to the BBC website? I gather the answer is no, but just checking in case it's available in fashion somewhere else.
Sorry, Ian, I don't think there is. It's not a long report. He was naked lying on a hospital gurney in terrible discomfort because he couldn't breathe (I think the medics thought he was already as good as dead) and then his heart stopped (he said and I think it did) and he then saw himself as "this big, huge slab of meat" and he felt detached from it
"That was me lying there, but I looked at that thing I was seeing. as it were, from the outside. This (my) body lying there. I'll never forget it. It was kind of gross to me, like this piece of meat is dying" (he later desribed it as a larval mass, moist)
Then he was surrounded by light etc and became part of it (which is familar to us all on here). This short piece is from the New Statesman but includes a larger telling of the story (i
n a moving essay for this magazine <-
click on the link below)
In the spring of 2020, the poet, novelist and New Statesman writer John Burnside found himself struggling to breathe. As many might have done, Burnside assumed this was Covid-19 – in fact, it was heart failure combined with a lung infection. When he became increasingly confused, Burnside was rushed to the nearest hospital’s “red zone”, where staff told his wife to “prepare for the worst”. Burnside wrote about these days in a moving essay for this magazine. It was not so much a near-death experience, as an experience of death and return to life, Lazarus-like.
More than two years on, Burnside is reflective. In John Burnside: From the Other Side, he explains how he felt he was surrounded by light. “Not in it, but with it, or part of it. The light was as much as me as I was – there was no differentiation… and it seemed to be everywhere, going on forever.” At the same time, he felt calm and at peace – and willing to leave the world of the living behind. He felt he was “on the point of becoming the light – dissipating into the light. I was upset that my children wouldn’t be able to see me… But it was almost like: that’s his problem. The old me.”
This remarkable programme is more than one man’s experience. Dr Penny Sartori, a senior lecturer at Swansea University who was a nurse in intensive care for 17 years, has spent much of her career researching near-death experiences (NDEs). She explains that many people describe sensations like Burnside’s. Mothers who have NDEs in childbirth report feeling acceptance about leaving their child behind – leading to strong sensations of guilt in the aftermath. Many people report a new sense of serenity that stays with them for months, even years, afterwards. These accounts have significant implications – possibly contradicting the widely held scientific belief that our consciousness exists in brain activity. To make sense of what happened to him, Burnside turns to visual art, fiction and poetry – from Emily Dickinson to William Burroughs. Still, it is his own words on the experience – in both poetry and speech – that are the most powerful.
How near-death experiences change people - New Statesman
Just as an aside, if this is just a retrospective confabulation, based on the need to fill in information gaps in the brain, as sceptics like to believe, why did he refer to what he saw in such a derogatory way with such revulsion. Surely a brain based confabulation would have been "dressed up" a bit nicer ?
