Waggoner 1 Michael Waggoner Kellie Fischer English 101 10 December 2011 Near Death Experience A Galaxy Far, Far,

Away, or Closer Than We Think? Even though a near death experience can become a quite compelling revelation to the existence of a metaphysical world or other dimension, there are many things about its very nature that make it supernatural, unexplainable, or irrefutable by scientific process. My near death experience started in Spirit Lake, Idaho. I was about sixteen years old and on a camping vacation with my grandparents. I had wandered into town and met some girls and we had started drinking, Southern Comfort is very strong when you are 16 years old. Back at the campground, the girls and I were deep in conversation and had decided to take a canoe trip out on the lake. After we were approximately half a mile offshore and quite intoxicated, we tipped the canoe over into the middle of the lake. The fun time was over and I was going to swim to shore. The locals were making fun of the city boy and I did not feel safe. After swimming approximately one hundred feet my bell-bottom pants, studded leather vest, and tennis shoes were weighing me down. I looked back and was dreadfully far from the canoe and the girls, yet, even farther was the shoreline, which seemed to me an un-attainable goal. I began to sink. I remember trying to get to the top of the water and could see the moon above the waterline, I was sinking. It seemed I was in a room, the top of the water was the ceiling, and I was floating downward. The ceiling was getting farther and farther away and I knew I was not going to get back to the top. There was a moment when I somewhat just gave up and floated down into the

Waggoner 2 depths of the water. I remember seeing a headline of the Spokane Chronicle Spokane Boy Drowns in Spirit Lake Idaho. In what seemed like minutes, I felt voices. I could hear them talking but for some reason could not understand the words, like they were speaking a foreign language. Then as if they suddenly started speaking English, I heard, You have things to do, and it is not your time. Suddenly I was on top of the water and right next to the canoe! I could not believe it. I was so far from the canoe, and even weirder, the details of what had just happened escaped me and seemed so fuzzy for a minute, but one thing was certain, I was grasping the side of the canoe and would not let go. After many minutes of silence I asked the girls what had happened. The girls said I had swum very far away, they kept calling me to come back, but I would not listen. They knew the safe place was by the canoe, holding on to something buoyant. They saw me sink, and were worried, but could do nothing without risking their own lives. I was too far away to get to quickly. Then they said suddenly I was below them! They said I came up right next to the boat! I can never explain the events of that day, but ever since, I have had a much deeper respect for life and peoples reasons for being. What were the voices I heard? What did I still have to do? Why was I so important? Those were the questions I have spent my life trying to answer. If you have never had an experience like this it is hard to explain, and even harder to make others believe, that these things do occur. There is no evidence you could show or prove of your experience that would be undisputed by scientific standards. I believe there are other dimensions that live inside of our current dimension. Andrew Grant works for Discovery Magazine and interviews Brian Greene, Professor at Columbia University. Brian Greene explains this in the simplest terms,

Waggoner 3 When two protons collide, as they will be doing quite frequently in the Large Hadron Collider, some of the debris created from the collision might be ejected out of our familiar dimensions and crammed into the others. We could notice that by detecting missing energy in our dimensions. The energy would seemingly disappear, but in reality it would just go to a place that our detectors dont have direct access to. (qtd. in Grant 1) Likewise, the energy of our souls, or the thing in us that is somewhat measurable, our spirit, our personality, can escape this dimension, seemingly disappearing from this worldly existence, and slip into another. I believe these extra dimensions are somehow connected to our world because they are a part of our world. Brian Green is one of many scientists who are working on proving the existence of these extra dimensions and he may be a lot closer than we think to prove they are there. Think of our entire planet and all things in time that have ever happened and all the events of the past, all the settings that make our Universe the way it is, wrapped up in tiny balls all over the fabric of our space. (Fig. 1) A proton weighs 1.673 x10-27 and the weight of an electron is 8.9278 x10-30, these things, being extremely accurate, if changed in even the most minute of amounts, change things in our Universe in ways that would make our Universe nonexistent. There are about twenty-one settings that make our Universe the way it is. These settings are stored in these little balls that are interconnected, and they are so small that millions of them fit into an electron.

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Fig. 1. In a Micro-cosmic world small dimensional shapes are attached to the fabric of our space, inclusive to themselves, they contain the settings that make our Universe the way it is. These extra dimensions in space are a possible place our soul energy travels to during near death experiences. In the book Spook, by author Mary Roach, Professor Bruce Greyson tries to find some proof of near death experiences. In the years of research, and after spending many hours detailing the events of the near death experiences of several heart defibrillation patients, even Professor Greyson has found that there is no evidence he can rely on for substantial proof of another existence. The only case that had significant information from a formerly credible source turned out to be of a fraudulent nature; Readers are advised to disregard entirely the . . . Appendix, in which a case of a blind woman who purported to have a NDE is described . . . We discovered, to our chagrin, that this case has fraudulent aspects. Dr. McGill, who offered this

Waggoner 5 account to us in good faith, now believes she was deceived by the woman in question. (277) Whether you are a person who has had an experience yourself, a professor studying the possibilities of where there is, or a professor studying the people who claim these events have happened to them; one thing is for certain, science will always have a hard time with this subject. The very nature of the near death experience has metaphysical implications, and the quantum mechanics of these events are just now being understood. The book Spook has many case studies throughout its scores of pages. Many of them come close to finding evidence but cannot seem to reliably find it and reproduce the events with any predictability. Maybe that is because when you cross over, you are gone and cannot come back. People who experience near death experiences go somewhere, I was there, yet, I do not think it is the end of the trail but more of a foyer to the other side of life. There are many things about near death experiences that make them supernatural, unexplainable, or irrefutable by scientific process. Maybe some things we presently are not intended to know.

Waggoner 6 Work Cited Figure 1. 11c.gif . http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/11c.gif. 22 Nov. 2011. Web. Grant, Andrew. The Man Who Plucks All the Strings. Discover Magazine. Kalmbach Publishing Company. 9 Mar. 2010. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. Roach, Mary. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.