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Who You See Before You Die

A couple of weekends ago, I was discussing this very thing with a friend who is a nurse in an aged care facility.
We came upon the topic in an around about way as we were initially discussing Cardinal Pell's recent conviction which led us onto the topic of Catholic guilt. This then led to death and dying and what or who people see (or believe they do) before they pass.
My friend told me that in her years of working with the elderly, it was her experience that it was those who were not religious at all who died the most peacefully, often having seen deceased friends and family members before their own passing, which seemed to take away most if not all of their fear.
She told me that she had found it was the highly religious who were most fearful of death, Catholics particularly. She told me of a nun who was spending her last days in palliative care who was terrified to the point of tears of dying. I asked my friend why this would be so, as wouldn't someone who has dedicated their life to God be sure that a place was waiting in heaven for them? She told me that this poor lady was certain that she had not led a sin free life and therefore would certainly be going to Hell. She was a frail, old woman in her 90's, but died fighting and screaming to the end, literally.
It was an interesting discussion with someone who is often with people during their last weeks, days and hours.
 
She told me that this poor lady was certain that she had not led a sin free life and therefore would certainly be going to Hell. She was a frail, old woman in her 90's, but died fighting and screaming to the end, literally.
It was an interesting discussion with someone who is often with people during their last weeks, days and hours.
So much for confession and forgiveness then. She clearly never bothered to consider whether Jesus actually led a sin free life. On the other hand, she was a nun, so who knows what abominations she got up to?
 
A couple of weekends ago, I was discussing this very thing with a friend who is a nurse in an aged care facility.
We came upon the topic in an around about way as we were initially discussing Cardinal Pell's recent conviction which led us onto the topic of Catholic guilt. This then led to death and dying and what or who people see (or believe they do) before they pass.
My friend told me that in her years of working with the elderly, it was her experience that it was those who were not religious at all who died the most peacefully, often having seen deceased friends and family members before their own passing, which seemed to take away most if not all of their fear.
She told me that she had found it was the highly religious who were most fearful of death, Catholics particularly. She told me of a nun who was spending her last days in palliative care who was terrified to the point of tears of dying. I asked my friend why this would be so, as wouldn't someone who has dedicated their life to God be sure that a place was waiting in heaven for them? She told me that this poor lady was certain that she had not led a sin free life and therefore would certainly be going to Hell. She was a frail, old woman in her 90's, but died fighting and screaming to the end, literally.
It was an interesting discussion with someone who is often with people during their last weeks, days and hours.
That is a fascinating post. It shows very clearly that being "religious" and following the stick (Hell) and carrot (Heaven) approach neither stops people following their worst urges nor guarantees peace of mind as death approaches. Admittedly Catholicism offers the most extreme contemporary example of this in Christianity, but IS offers a similar perspective on Islam. Being religious and wanting to get a place in Paradise is barely disguised selfishness.
 
A friend's mother died recently - she'd had a stroke, and was in hospital and it was expected; a nurse was with her, but just when she went off to grab a drink, the mother died. I was talking to a different friend and suggested that the nurse's absence had given the woman's late husband a chance to turn up and collect her without being seen (I've obviously read too many accounts of dying people being taken off by their dead relatives.). This second friend, rather than rubbishing me, looked thoughtful and said that when her husband's uncle died, it was during a brief interlude when his wife had left the room, and perhaps that was when his late father appeared for the collection. (She also said that after the uncle's funeral, all the lights in the house were flickering during the wake, which was not normal.. She reckoned Pepe and Michel were being mischievous.)

However, the in-house Medic told me a lot of dying people actually pass when somebody looking after them pops out for a minute or two. Just a matter of timing?
 
A friend's mother died recently - she'd had a stroke, and was in hospital and it was expected; a nurse was with her, but just when she went off to grab a drink, the mother died. I was talking to a different friend and suggested that the nurse's absence had given the woman's late husband a chance to turn up and collect her without being seen (I've obviously read too many accounts of dying people being taken off by their dead relatives.). This second friend, rather than rubbishing me, looked thoughtful and said that when her husband's uncle died, it was during a brief interlude when his wife had left the room, and perhaps that was when his late father appeared for the collection. (She also said that after the uncle's funeral, all the lights in the house were flickering during the wake, which was not normal.. She reckoned Pepe and Michel were being mischievous.)

However, the in-house Medic told me a lot of dying people actually pass when somebody looking after them pops out for a minute or two. Just a matter of timing?
Maybe sparing the relatives the trauma of witnessing the deaths of their loved ones?
 
The emphasis on the word "dream" in the original posting intrigues me, as im suspicious the medic in question is being extra careful to avoid paranormal suggestions by insinuating the experience happens during sleep and therefore needn't be taken literally...when in fact wide awake 'encounters' are regularly attested to and well reported.

So well reported in fact that my awareness of them alerted me to the imminence of my own mother's death, causing me to text my siblings suggesting they needed to come by the house and see her that very day.

Although her dementia had rendered intelligible speech impossible, the carers had told me she had just said to them in clear English "I've just been down the road with Gerry. It was lovely". Gerry was my late father. On hearing this I "knew" she was about to die...which she did later that day. Thanks to my awareness of the phenomenon and its meaning she had her whole family around her.

Interestingly in later reading a book by a hospice nurse on the phenomena surrounding death, there was a passage recounting almost identical imagery from a patient.

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Which Kathryn Kurtz is this?

Katherine Kurtz?

OK, so I didn't check. Yes, the Irish author of the Deryni Books. She has her own blog, so I touched base with her. Since then, I've learned a lot more.

Firstly, about my own mentality. In the 1960s, IQ assessment was extended to children. It's done statistically, the test produces a score which is then fitted against a baseline population. The population was built according to standard statistical methods, a cohort was sought, tested for conformity to a normal distribution. That was done by means of an identical, and very long, General Knowledge test sat by all members of the proposed cohort. It was followed by an IQ test set to those accepted onto the baseline group, another one to confirm the outliers, and a final one under laboratory conditions to ensure I hadn't found a way to fix the test. I hadn't, I was the real thing, and so I was thrown back to sink or swim, with one fin tied behind my back because I could then never test. The mathematics leave an element in the denominator as (Me-me=0) multiplied together with all the other (Him-me=X) calculations, reducing the entire denominator to 0, and so rendering the result incalculable.

They also tied the other fin as well, by letting on in the Profiling Report that I was really bright. That resulted in legendary bullying (it made it into Lindsay Anderson's film If.... - one of the cast knew how I'd been treated, although it was wound back to avoid an X classification) and PTSD. However, that report does offer some baseline data, indicating my learning retention was over three time the normal.

Thus it was that I lived a life conformant only to my own observations, subjective experience. I did in fact become legendary in my sector, finding my way onto a team which won a Nobel Prize, allowing me to retire a decade early. Well, the longstanding contributions I have made to society outweigh by ten times and more the cost of my pension, so fair's fair, let others have a chance too. It's not as if it stopped when I retired.

Eventually medical needs got me gossiped about around Harley Street, a psychologist took one look and tested me anyway, using the argument that me-now and me-then are very different people, revealing a score in the mid 150s, when I was 60. That indicates a score in the 160s at peak, so it doesn't take a genius to intersect the two data sets and realise I was one of the two folk who set the 163 top marker. Or perhaps it does, I wouldn't know.

So, with the knowledge that I was cleverer than I ever thought, and information on other facets of my personality, I started looking in greater depth at how I actually think. Most people use 10-11% of their brains, I don't: a scan showed my brain is structurally normal, an EEG showed I use around 30% of it under similar circumstances. I took the kiddy-wheels off in my childhood, and never looked back. My parents gave me a genetic potential which needed to be actualised, switched on: I know exactly how and when. That's not pertinent here, the result was what is documented as a seer gift, which delivered in ever greater degrees as I gained experience. Those of you who dealt in the apocalyptic scare of the 1990s detected that - I ended up handling the demise of the Roman Catholic ArchiAssociation of the Eucharist, declared to be the universal and perpetual home of the Eucharist in the 1870s. What we were really doing was giving the can another boot down the road, under circumstances where we could not know for certain where the can was. The shrinks call it hyperperception, having seen it do its party piece during the testing.

I'm now homing in on this. One or two studies suggest my kind may experience time dilation. I don't think it is, but I'm not prepared to say so categorically either - my factual angle is that I channel, to a greater or lesser degree, something exoteric to me. I actually do mean that, if you've not seen the word, look it up. The trigger event for my seer initiation was created by the Principal of the CofE Church Army Seminary when it was in Blackheath, when he decided to check if my vocation by asking me to read the unknown: I simply cleared my channels and passed the ball upwards, dropping into deep meditation to get me as much out of the way as possible: if it was going to work, I'd be channelling something rather hairy. And work it did. Now, if you look at time as a continuum, another dimension, then that exoteric force is outside of it, and so stretching it is like a wander down the road. In Ms Kurtz' case, I checked, she experiences the same. There's no point in experimenting yourselves, because the trigger event was a clear calling, a repeated instruction with a psychologically compulsive element to it, to be at a particular place at a particular time, no questions asked. So I was, a couple of minutes early, feeling like an utter lemon because I didn't know what was about to hit me: it was very good indeed, I was answering a need which coalesced at that exact moment which exploded into the first Faith in the City program, the London Dial-a-Ride disabled transport system as part of it. I also acquired a skillset which would be my bread-and-butter while also engaged in more airy-fairy stuff on the prize-winning operation. We each have our own calling, and being presumptious about it simply makes it less likely it'll happen, whatever it is.

A further experiment in more recent times focuses on the Aspergers side of things. That's all to do with skating too near the edge of the ice, taking my brain loading towards 100%: it's not a nice clean rim, at some point 1+1=blue, or something equally incoherent, so we freeze. A lot of Aspies suffer PTSD from their inability to normalise, and that's a major cause of meltdowns. As a result, many Aspies really like techniques which amount to sensory deprivation, and so I looked at that. Now, what am I using the extra 20% of my brainpower for? I have only vestigial beta-phase sleep, I'm processing my memory live-time. I'd not have lived sane nearly 60 years if I wasn't doing that. I'm also multi-tasking far more than most: where Freud identified ego, superego and id, to which we should add the autonomous and semi-autonomous animal functions involved in breathing and pain and pleasure and all the rest of it, I've stripped things back in a Ganzfeld experiment and watched as my artistic right brain hemisphere created an iconic pattern of short coloured lines, which was immediately over-written by my factual left brain hemisphere which interpreted it as a hawk in stoop. That networking allows things which I surmise are an endemic version of linear and set mathematics to operate, making me very quick on the uptake. I've just contributed to a Cambridge University study of multilingualism in Aspies: I know where most of my languages come from, either childhood, or primary schooling, some in secondary, one through marriage. But one language utterly beats me: I found myself talking to a Flemish colleague in correct, colloquial Flemish, a language I've never studied and which I'd only ever have come across during a couple of weeks holiday decades earlier. I would go boozing with the guys, and still it would hold. The brain really can be weird at times.

Another contribution while in this area relates to the 8 year old initiation event which took the kiddy wheels off. You've heard of the standard childhood "falling" dream, particularly associated with illness. I got tired of that just stopping, so I pre-keyed my sleep to see it through. That technique uses the ideation as you fall asleep, what you're thinking of as you drift off, to allow the considerable brainpower we have to process a problem, when it's not involved in the survival skills of watching what's going on around us. That experience is what's processed in beta-phase sleep, and dreams. So, with that set, I went to sleep: and my dream resolved in the white light of zero sensory input. The white light of the near-death experience. The white light of pure Ganzfeld drop-in. White light is how the brain interprets "no signal", although I do accept that the blind truly get absolutely nothing: they may not have any reference to define white.

So. I hope this offers some other approaches to the subject. Ganzfeld work is affected by the colour of the background field, although as an advanced meditative (my work background and personal philosophy on the Christian Taoist axis gave me the same foundations and results Master Usui discovered a century ago, I test at Master level in Reiki - the Beatitudes are based on the text of the i-Ching 22nd study, "Blessed are the meek", Christ expands on Lao Tzu, two centuries before his day at the other end of The Silk Road), I find that it's only a predisposition. Just to reassure the neuronormal, Ganzfeld does not affect your normal psychology: it's a way towards the psychedelic without any drugs, and the side-effects thereof are consequentially avoided.
 
I come from a strong Catholic family. Before my grandma passed my mum said she said that it was beautiful out there. She could not see out of tbe window. This was just before she died.

I do suffer from Catholic guilt but an incident on the news kind of confirmed that something I beleive does apply to me too. When Martin McGuiness died the son of Ian Paisley forgave him and praised him for turning his back on violence. Any political opinions to my point are not relevant.

It is not tbe stupid, hateful or irresponsible things that I have done tbat count. But the efforts that I have made to rectify those mistakes and where I end up that matter more.
 
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