Post by John Kenneth Muir on Jul 4, 2007 10:48:33 GMT -5
Twenty Years on the Frontier of Death:
The Death Experience and Shifting Death Iconography
By Professor A. Vincenzo
Preface: The Dream
People always get around to asking me the same question. And usually right after we first meet. Why study death? What is it about me, as both an instructor and a student that makes this subject not just irresistible, but an obsession?
I have my stock answer to that question; as all people who end up in the public eye develop official “myths” about their histories, proclivities and loves. And my story is mostly true, even if it (purposefully) glides over some of the intricacies of the subject that I hold dear to myself and therefore keep close to the vest. That’s the place in the recesses of my own personal psychology no one else really need see; the places special to me and me alone.
But the simple – and public – answer regarding my two-decade long study of the frontiers of death rests with my father. Papa is what I called him with affection since first learning how to talk as a child, way back in the early 1960s.
It’s with some sadness that I report Papa died in 2017, but before he did - long before actually - he experienced a brush with death with that changed my outlook on the subject. And more than that - paved the path for the remainder of my professional career.
It was the year 2000 – a year of a contested presidential election in the United States - that I received an unexpected and urgent call from my Mother. The news wasn’t good. My father had been rushed to the hospital following a very serious heart attack. He was in cardiac arrest even as I spoke to my mother, and I’ll never forget the timbre of her voice during that exchange. It was unsteady, but more than that – hopeless. I don’t remember her exact words, but the message was simple and crystal clear: my father might have only hours, moments - seconds to live. It’s exactly the call you dread and hope you’ll never get, but which at least part of you understands is absolutely inevitable.
I left the campus in a hurry (I remember dropping my office keys probably three times before getting out of the science center) and then raced to the hospital. The entire trip, I felt this gnawing, acidic pit in my stomach. If you’ve ever lost a loved one; or almost lost a loved one, you understand the sensation. Not to be cute or simplistic, but it is bit like excessive hunger, only heavier...deeper. And nothing can make it stop. Nothing can sate it.
When I arrived at the facility, my father was – thankfully – out of the woods. I spent the next few hours at my mother’s side and didn’t get to see Papa again until he had been transferred from the ICU to his own room. I’ll never forget my first glimpse of him post-op. I had expected him to look ragged, wasted…almost gone. And truth be told, he looked more fragile than I’d ever seen him. But when he first awoke and laid eyes on me, I saw something behind his smile and behind his glare. What I saw surprised me. It rocked me back on my psychic heels because it was so thoroughly unexpected.
It was fearlessness.
It was the satisfied, contented look of a pioneer who had taken the first steps into a new world and staked out a piece of ground there. It was the look of an explorer whose trepidation had passed; who had realized that there was nothing to regard with terror or fright or discomfort in that “new world.” I was so glad to see Papa recovered and on the mend that we didn’t talk about that look of fearlessness for some time. Months. But eventually, when he was out of rehabilitation and home safe, we had the talk I had been eager to have.
Papa had seen what exists at death’s door; at the precipice beyond death. In the lingo of the field (the so-called world of “paranormal studies”), he’d experienced an NDE (Near Death Experience). We all have some passing familiarity with the standards of the NDE thanks to decades of speculative science fiction television and film. The common elements of the NDE include a tunnel of light; a feeling of peace and serenity; and a meeting with friendly faces from the percipient’s life who have already “passed on” to the afterlife. Indeed, this is the very vision – the dream – my father shared with me. It was a reckoning with our Maker; perhaps with the universe itself, and one that was not to be feared or dreaded. It had given him hope. The end was not the end. It was a beginning.
There was life beyond death; and the NDE showed Papa the doorway to that world; to that “new” realm of human existence.
Not surprisingly given my childhood love of fantasy, I became fascinated by my father’s story; not merely because I’ve feared death since early childhood (a fact related – I’m certain – to the fact that I was raised during the age known as the Cold War; when annihilation was but a press of a button away….) I began teaching myself subjects that my colleagues and my spouse scoffed at. I learned about a decade’s worth of OBE studies; apports; Psychometry and the like. And very shortly, I began conducting my own primary research. I traveled around the world - to Toronto, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Helsinki, and Paris - to follow up on accounts I had tracked down of other people experiencing the NDE.
I learned everything I could about the history of the Near Death Experience including its beginnings in man’s prehistoric past; “visions” commemorated by Neanderthals in the Upper Paleolithic Period some 100,000 years ago and uncovered decades ago in Western Europe, particularly the Dordogne cavern complex in Southwest France.
But where my first-person catalogue of the NDE differed from other academic work regarding the subject is that I began to compile a psychological profile of those who experienced “the dream.” I began to find certain commonalities among these percipients. Each of my subjects was tested using a Weschler Adult Intelligence Test (WAIS) to start, and each scored much higher than is normal. Extensive brain scans followed, and what I discovered with my team of (volunteer) physicians was a literal (and considerable) “spiking” of activity in sections of the central nervous system previously seen to be dormant; and yet dormant in us – those who haven’t experienced the NDE.
I didn’t understand what this meant when I first undertook these studies two decades ago. I didn’t comprehend that what I was witnessing in the NDE percipients was nothing less than an awakening of the human brain – an awakening of psychic capabilities – in those who had come to experience what lay “beyond the end.” Truthfully, it took me years to realize the obvious: that evolution had taken its next protean step. Why did I miss what seems so abundantly clear in hindsight? Perhaps because those hidden psychic abilities did not truly manifest in tangible ways until the NDE – the iconography of the death experience – began to change a few short years ago. (See Chapter Three: “The House”).
It was this changing of something heretofore “concrete,” something that had been consistent throughout the human race - since prehistory – that spurred real psychic changes in NDE percipients, and led to what I believe is the next stage of the human race.
That’s the story I endeavor to tell in these pages. Of how the psychic power developed in the first generation of “new humans,” the prematurely aged ones that we now refer to as the augurs. Of my discovery of the most talented and mentally superior young woman I’ve yet encountered. A student named Theresa who – at this moment – is poised to launch what I call the Psychic Apollo Program.
And perhaps most importantly, you will read in these pages of the so-called “NDE” Rosetta Stone; a baffling case that to this day confounds and staggers experts in my field; myself included. It’s a case study of a single NDE from the 1970s. I will provide my interpretation of those frightening and inexplicable events.
You’ll read transcripts of my interview with the “percipient” that first experienced – and then altered an NDE – in the closing months of 1974. The result of this bizarre experience on the human mind? Some claim insanity and decay; but I disagree and continue to treat to the patient to this day.
What you will see exposed in these pages – and hopefully come to understand – is that something; some force outside humanity – is preparing the species for change in our reality; and perhaps for a battle with an enemy outside what we would consider “consensus” reality.
Subconsciously, I maintain, we all know this catastrophic change is coming; it’s all there in plain sight; for the reading in our combined psychic gestalt…a looming doomsday. And yet there is hope in the form of a biological, built-in response [glow=red,2,300]in us[/glow], in the human animal, that can provide our salvation; a change in our brains, a change in our physiology that I maintain we must exploit to its fullest if we hope to see the human race survive the next turbulent century. How did this come to be here? How could the answer to a future crisis be embedded in the ancient construct of our caveman brains? These are questions that are as yet unanswered.
In closing, let me offer this thought: Papa did not live to see the NDE change and degenerate. He did not live to see the “new world,” the frontier of death, turn into a nightmare world. As his sole surviving child, I see it as my responsibility to make it to the world he foresaw. The world with the light at the end of the tunnel.
Since I first began studying the frontiers of death, I believed we could get back to this paradise; but to do so, we must change as a species. There are students – youngsters today – who are ready to do that, and will build on the work you see laid out before you in this text. Will we take that challenge?
The future depends on it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Near-Death Experiences in the Upper Paleolithic Period: What the Neanderthals Saw and How They “Saw” It.
Chapter Two: The Normal NDE: Two Hundred Generations of Peace and Paradise.
Chapter Three: The House: Why the NDE Changed and What it Shows Us Now.
Chapter Four: Developing a Psychic Hierarchy: Explaining the Augurs, Psychic Astronauts and the New Psychic Apollo Program.
Chapter Five: Theresa.
Chapter Six: Explaining the Impossible: Patient Zero/September 1974.
Chapter Seven: The Next Step Beyond – Final Assessments
The Death Experience and Shifting Death Iconography
By Professor A. Vincenzo
Preface: The Dream
People always get around to asking me the same question. And usually right after we first meet. Why study death? What is it about me, as both an instructor and a student that makes this subject not just irresistible, but an obsession?
I have my stock answer to that question; as all people who end up in the public eye develop official “myths” about their histories, proclivities and loves. And my story is mostly true, even if it (purposefully) glides over some of the intricacies of the subject that I hold dear to myself and therefore keep close to the vest. That’s the place in the recesses of my own personal psychology no one else really need see; the places special to me and me alone.
But the simple – and public – answer regarding my two-decade long study of the frontiers of death rests with my father. Papa is what I called him with affection since first learning how to talk as a child, way back in the early 1960s.
It’s with some sadness that I report Papa died in 2017, but before he did - long before actually - he experienced a brush with death with that changed my outlook on the subject. And more than that - paved the path for the remainder of my professional career.
It was the year 2000 – a year of a contested presidential election in the United States - that I received an unexpected and urgent call from my Mother. The news wasn’t good. My father had been rushed to the hospital following a very serious heart attack. He was in cardiac arrest even as I spoke to my mother, and I’ll never forget the timbre of her voice during that exchange. It was unsteady, but more than that – hopeless. I don’t remember her exact words, but the message was simple and crystal clear: my father might have only hours, moments - seconds to live. It’s exactly the call you dread and hope you’ll never get, but which at least part of you understands is absolutely inevitable.
I left the campus in a hurry (I remember dropping my office keys probably three times before getting out of the science center) and then raced to the hospital. The entire trip, I felt this gnawing, acidic pit in my stomach. If you’ve ever lost a loved one; or almost lost a loved one, you understand the sensation. Not to be cute or simplistic, but it is bit like excessive hunger, only heavier...deeper. And nothing can make it stop. Nothing can sate it.
When I arrived at the facility, my father was – thankfully – out of the woods. I spent the next few hours at my mother’s side and didn’t get to see Papa again until he had been transferred from the ICU to his own room. I’ll never forget my first glimpse of him post-op. I had expected him to look ragged, wasted…almost gone. And truth be told, he looked more fragile than I’d ever seen him. But when he first awoke and laid eyes on me, I saw something behind his smile and behind his glare. What I saw surprised me. It rocked me back on my psychic heels because it was so thoroughly unexpected.
It was fearlessness.
It was the satisfied, contented look of a pioneer who had taken the first steps into a new world and staked out a piece of ground there. It was the look of an explorer whose trepidation had passed; who had realized that there was nothing to regard with terror or fright or discomfort in that “new world.” I was so glad to see Papa recovered and on the mend that we didn’t talk about that look of fearlessness for some time. Months. But eventually, when he was out of rehabilitation and home safe, we had the talk I had been eager to have.
Papa had seen what exists at death’s door; at the precipice beyond death. In the lingo of the field (the so-called world of “paranormal studies”), he’d experienced an NDE (Near Death Experience). We all have some passing familiarity with the standards of the NDE thanks to decades of speculative science fiction television and film. The common elements of the NDE include a tunnel of light; a feeling of peace and serenity; and a meeting with friendly faces from the percipient’s life who have already “passed on” to the afterlife. Indeed, this is the very vision – the dream – my father shared with me. It was a reckoning with our Maker; perhaps with the universe itself, and one that was not to be feared or dreaded. It had given him hope. The end was not the end. It was a beginning.
There was life beyond death; and the NDE showed Papa the doorway to that world; to that “new” realm of human existence.
Not surprisingly given my childhood love of fantasy, I became fascinated by my father’s story; not merely because I’ve feared death since early childhood (a fact related – I’m certain – to the fact that I was raised during the age known as the Cold War; when annihilation was but a press of a button away….) I began teaching myself subjects that my colleagues and my spouse scoffed at. I learned about a decade’s worth of OBE studies; apports; Psychometry and the like. And very shortly, I began conducting my own primary research. I traveled around the world - to Toronto, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Helsinki, and Paris - to follow up on accounts I had tracked down of other people experiencing the NDE.
I learned everything I could about the history of the Near Death Experience including its beginnings in man’s prehistoric past; “visions” commemorated by Neanderthals in the Upper Paleolithic Period some 100,000 years ago and uncovered decades ago in Western Europe, particularly the Dordogne cavern complex in Southwest France.
But where my first-person catalogue of the NDE differed from other academic work regarding the subject is that I began to compile a psychological profile of those who experienced “the dream.” I began to find certain commonalities among these percipients. Each of my subjects was tested using a Weschler Adult Intelligence Test (WAIS) to start, and each scored much higher than is normal. Extensive brain scans followed, and what I discovered with my team of (volunteer) physicians was a literal (and considerable) “spiking” of activity in sections of the central nervous system previously seen to be dormant; and yet dormant in us – those who haven’t experienced the NDE.
I didn’t understand what this meant when I first undertook these studies two decades ago. I didn’t comprehend that what I was witnessing in the NDE percipients was nothing less than an awakening of the human brain – an awakening of psychic capabilities – in those who had come to experience what lay “beyond the end.” Truthfully, it took me years to realize the obvious: that evolution had taken its next protean step. Why did I miss what seems so abundantly clear in hindsight? Perhaps because those hidden psychic abilities did not truly manifest in tangible ways until the NDE – the iconography of the death experience – began to change a few short years ago. (See Chapter Three: “The House”).
It was this changing of something heretofore “concrete,” something that had been consistent throughout the human race - since prehistory – that spurred real psychic changes in NDE percipients, and led to what I believe is the next stage of the human race.
That’s the story I endeavor to tell in these pages. Of how the psychic power developed in the first generation of “new humans,” the prematurely aged ones that we now refer to as the augurs. Of my discovery of the most talented and mentally superior young woman I’ve yet encountered. A student named Theresa who – at this moment – is poised to launch what I call the Psychic Apollo Program.
And perhaps most importantly, you will read in these pages of the so-called “NDE” Rosetta Stone; a baffling case that to this day confounds and staggers experts in my field; myself included. It’s a case study of a single NDE from the 1970s. I will provide my interpretation of those frightening and inexplicable events.
You’ll read transcripts of my interview with the “percipient” that first experienced – and then altered an NDE – in the closing months of 1974. The result of this bizarre experience on the human mind? Some claim insanity and decay; but I disagree and continue to treat to the patient to this day.
What you will see exposed in these pages – and hopefully come to understand – is that something; some force outside humanity – is preparing the species for change in our reality; and perhaps for a battle with an enemy outside what we would consider “consensus” reality.
Subconsciously, I maintain, we all know this catastrophic change is coming; it’s all there in plain sight; for the reading in our combined psychic gestalt…a looming doomsday. And yet there is hope in the form of a biological, built-in response [glow=red,2,300]in us[/glow], in the human animal, that can provide our salvation; a change in our brains, a change in our physiology that I maintain we must exploit to its fullest if we hope to see the human race survive the next turbulent century. How did this come to be here? How could the answer to a future crisis be embedded in the ancient construct of our caveman brains? These are questions that are as yet unanswered.
In closing, let me offer this thought: Papa did not live to see the NDE change and degenerate. He did not live to see the “new world,” the frontier of death, turn into a nightmare world. As his sole surviving child, I see it as my responsibility to make it to the world he foresaw. The world with the light at the end of the tunnel.
Since I first began studying the frontiers of death, I believed we could get back to this paradise; but to do so, we must change as a species. There are students – youngsters today – who are ready to do that, and will build on the work you see laid out before you in this text. Will we take that challenge?
The future depends on it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Near-Death Experiences in the Upper Paleolithic Period: What the Neanderthals Saw and How They “Saw” It.
Chapter Two: The Normal NDE: Two Hundred Generations of Peace and Paradise.
Chapter Three: The House: Why the NDE Changed and What it Shows Us Now.
Chapter Four: Developing a Psychic Hierarchy: Explaining the Augurs, Psychic Astronauts and the New Psychic Apollo Program.
Chapter Five: Theresa.
Chapter Six: Explaining the Impossible: Patient Zero/September 1974.
Chapter Seven: The Next Step Beyond – Final Assessments