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THE PAM REYNOLDS NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
Debunkers and pseudo-skeptics claim that the phenomenon known as the near-death experience (NDE) is nothing more than an hallucination or some misfiring of the brain caused by chemicals. However, to those with an open mind, the NDE appears to be one type of out-of-body experience (OBE), an experience that suggests we have a spirit body or etheric body in addition to our physical body. Consider the case of Pam Reynolds, who, during August 1991, was operated on for a giant basilar artery aneurysm. “The doctors in my hometown of Atlanta gave me virtually no chance of survival,” she says. Reynolds, 35 at the time, goes on to say that her mother called to tell her about a surgeon at the Barrow Institute in Phoenix, Arizona who was performing a new procedure that could save her life. She was accepted as a candidate and underwent surgery by Dr. Robert Spetzler. The operation called for her body temperature to be lowered to 60 degrees, her brain waves flattened, her heart stopped, her breathing stopped, and the blood drained from her head. By medical standards, she was “dead.” While she was “dead,” Reynolds had an amazing experience. She heard a sound that she describes as a “natural D.” She felt like she was being pulled out of her body at the top of her head. “The further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became,” she relates. “I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on.” She recalls looking down at the operating room. “It was the most aware that I think I have ever seen in entire life.” She felt like she was sitting on the surgeon’s shoulder. She was later able to describe in detail the tool used by the surgeon to cut into her skull. She was able to relate a comment by a female cardiac surgeon that a certain vessels were too small to handle the flow of blood. As the surgery progressed, she became aware of a deceased grandmother calling her. “But I didn’t hear her calling me with my ears,” she explains. “It was a clearer hearing than with my ears.” She proceeded toward her grandmother down a dark shaft at the end of which she could see a pinpoint of light that kept getting bigger and bigger. As she got to the end of the shaft and started into the bright light, she recognized a lot of people, including her grandmother on her mother’s side, her grandfather on her father’s side, an uncle, and a cousin. “They would not permit me to go further,” she continues the story. “It was communicated to me – that’s the best way I know how to say it, because they didn’t speak like I’m speaking – that if I went all the way into the light something would happen to me physically. They would be unable to put this me back into the body me.” Reynolds wanted to go into the light, but, at the same time, she wanted to return and take care of her children. As the surgeons restored her blood and struggled to get her heart beating again, her uncle took her back through the tunnel. Upon seeing her body, she didn’t want to get back into it. “It looked terrible, like a train wreck,” she recalls. “It looked like what it was: dead.” It was communicated to her that getting back into her body was like jumping into a swimming pool. As she hesitated, her uncle pushed her. “The body was pulling and the tunnel was pushing,” she goes on. “It was like diving into a pool of ice water…It hurt!” Of course, the debunkers have their theories. They claim that she must have been hallucinating before or after she was clinically “dead.” As for seeing the surgical instrument (she had surgical patches over her eyes) she may have noticed it before the procedure started or have seen a similar one on a television program involving a surgical procedure on the brain and that picture was buried in her subconscious. The comment about her blood vessels may have been overhead before she was clinically “dead.” The debunkers can always find some theory to counter the spiritual implications. “Having been on both sides of this argument, I now believe that the near-death experience is not simply the result of misfires within the dying brain, but that it is a spiritual encounter,” writes Dr. Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist who has reviewed the Pam Reynolds case and many others. “Thousands of documented testimonies speak to the near-death experience as being a spiritual experience perceived to be both ‘real’ and ‘otherworldly’. – Michael E. Tymn
Sources: http://www.geocities.com/pamreynoldsus/ http://www.iamshaman.com/reports/article.asp?faq=13&fldAuto=79 Sabom, Michael, M.D., Light & Death, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1998 |
