Penny Sartori and Near Death Experience
September 3, 2016 12:45 PM Subscribe
Penny Sartori has a PhD in Near Death Experience. Her website. Her book on Amazon. A short article in the South Wales Evening Post. An interview with Gordon White on the Rune Soup blog-podcast.
thorzdad, I would be interested to hear about your experience, if you're willing to share.
posted by smoke at 4:31 PM on September 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by smoke at 4:31 PM on September 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I highly recommend this podcast. Gordon White is an excellent host and has hosted a delightful assortment of fascinating guests.
I would not, however, recommend his blog posts, unless you are partial to jaw-dropping batshittery such as Ebola denialism and sekrit ancient artificial structures on the moon. To say nothing of the unhealthy levels of Hillary ("Killary") hate...
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 4:46 PM on September 3, 2016
I would not, however, recommend his blog posts, unless you are partial to jaw-dropping batshittery such as Ebola denialism and sekrit ancient artificial structures on the moon. To say nothing of the unhealthy levels of Hillary ("Killary") hate...
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 4:46 PM on September 3, 2016
I get the impression the batshittery is performance art. The artistic value of his archonology series is quite high. It's David Icke lizard people stuff done in a fashion that Icke could only dream of doing. I have no idea what his motives are but I think maybe what he doing with it is showing off. It is uneven though and some of it is really bad.
Not at all relevant to the Penny Sartori material of course. The feature which most intrigued me was her working as an Intensive Care nurse (that is a rapid burn out job) for fifteen years before she decided to go to graduate school. It was her experiences with dying patients in the ICU which fired her interest in NDE's. The best take in the interview: "the nurses have much better stories on this than the doctors."
posted by bukvich at 6:10 PM on September 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
Not at all relevant to the Penny Sartori material of course. The feature which most intrigued me was her working as an Intensive Care nurse (that is a rapid burn out job) for fifteen years before she decided to go to graduate school. It was her experiences with dying patients in the ICU which fired her interest in NDE's. The best take in the interview: "the nurses have much better stories on this than the doctors."
posted by bukvich at 6:10 PM on September 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
thorzdad, I would be interested to hear about your experience, if you're willing to share.
I could have sworn I posted about it in another thread somewhere, but damned if I can find it. Watch this space. I'll write it up and post it here a little later.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:22 AM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
I could have sworn I posted about it in another thread somewhere, but damned if I can find it. Watch this space. I'll write it up and post it here a little later.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:22 AM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
Okay. This might be a bit lengthy...
We were new to town and were renting a home out in one of those suburbs out in the country. The kind where someone leveled-off a cornfield and planted homes. Big yards and absolutely no streetlights, so nights were wonderfully pitch black. At the time, we had out bed situated with the head underneath the window that looked out onto our enormous, empty back yard. Looking out the window at night was to look out into near nothingness, it was so dark. Only the few porch lights and occasional room lights would clue you in that there were homes out there behind us.
We had gone to bed, and quickly fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, though, I awoke, not quite feeling right. I just felt...odd. A bit confused. I looked over to the clock on my nightstand to see what time it was and became even more confused. I could clearly see the bright red LED numerals, but damned if I could make any sense of them. It was like trying to read Martian, or something. Nothing made sense.
Still feeling out of sorts, I sat up in bed and looked around the bedroom. As far as I could tell, all was right. It was, of course, pretty damned dark in there, but the faint shadows looked correct anyway. Then, for whatever reason, I turned my attention to the window over our bed. There, where the dark window should have been, was a large flat square of the most perfect white I had ever seen. Utterly white. And glowing so bright (which was kind of odd in itself because, though this thing was shining so brightly, it wasn't illuminating the room.) And, it felt palpable. Real. Alive.
An almost the instant I saw this white light, this feeling washed over and through me. The only word that I have ever been able to describe this feeling is "bliss." It was so warm. So loving. So accepting. It was complete happiness and contentment on a level I really can't describe. I became enraptured by this light. And, I moved toward it. It just drew me in. And, the closer I came, the more amazing I felt. Eventually, I had made my way to the head of the bed and found myself inches from it. I started reaching my hand up and was hair's breadth from touching it when a thought crossed through my head...
"Oh. Shit. I'm dead."
As soon as I had completed that thought, I felt myself backing away from the light and settling back down into bed and falling back asleep, only to be rattled awake once more to a hysterical wife. She was beating and beating on me and screaming my name and imploring me to wake up. I don't exaggerate saying she was hysterical. I have never seen her before or since in such a state of panic and fright. I woke up and tried to calm her down, and asked what was wrong. She told me I had stopped breathing and she couldn't revive me. She claimed to have been beating on me for several minutes (but, you know how funny your sense of time can be in emergencies.) I asked if she hadn't seen me get up and move around the bed for who knows how long. No, she said, I was just lying there, inert and not breathing.
So, that's the gist of it. Who knows what really happened? If it was a mere dream, it was unlike any I had ever had before or since. And, of course, there's the part where I wasn't moving or breathing and my wife couldn't wake me. To this day, she doesn't like hearing the story. We only recently told our now-adult kids the story (we were not yet parents at the time of the event.)
The event left me feeling very empty. As I said, I just don't have the words to adequately describe how I felt moving into the light. When I think about it, I can still feel a whisper of what it was like, and that mere whisper is beyond description. There's a real sense of feeling cheated, because I came back. I need to feel it again. It's somewhat jaundiced me to real life, in that nothing I can ever experience here can come close to being in the light. I want the light again. Maybe even need?
Last December, when I was sitting bedside with my mother, as she was in her last minutes, I thought about the light and if she was going there. I hoped she was. She more than deserved to have that.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:00 PM on September 4, 2016 [18 favorites]
We were new to town and were renting a home out in one of those suburbs out in the country. The kind where someone leveled-off a cornfield and planted homes. Big yards and absolutely no streetlights, so nights were wonderfully pitch black. At the time, we had out bed situated with the head underneath the window that looked out onto our enormous, empty back yard. Looking out the window at night was to look out into near nothingness, it was so dark. Only the few porch lights and occasional room lights would clue you in that there were homes out there behind us.
We had gone to bed, and quickly fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, though, I awoke, not quite feeling right. I just felt...odd. A bit confused. I looked over to the clock on my nightstand to see what time it was and became even more confused. I could clearly see the bright red LED numerals, but damned if I could make any sense of them. It was like trying to read Martian, or something. Nothing made sense.
Still feeling out of sorts, I sat up in bed and looked around the bedroom. As far as I could tell, all was right. It was, of course, pretty damned dark in there, but the faint shadows looked correct anyway. Then, for whatever reason, I turned my attention to the window over our bed. There, where the dark window should have been, was a large flat square of the most perfect white I had ever seen. Utterly white. And glowing so bright (which was kind of odd in itself because, though this thing was shining so brightly, it wasn't illuminating the room.) And, it felt palpable. Real. Alive.
An almost the instant I saw this white light, this feeling washed over and through me. The only word that I have ever been able to describe this feeling is "bliss." It was so warm. So loving. So accepting. It was complete happiness and contentment on a level I really can't describe. I became enraptured by this light. And, I moved toward it. It just drew me in. And, the closer I came, the more amazing I felt. Eventually, I had made my way to the head of the bed and found myself inches from it. I started reaching my hand up and was hair's breadth from touching it when a thought crossed through my head...
"Oh. Shit. I'm dead."
As soon as I had completed that thought, I felt myself backing away from the light and settling back down into bed and falling back asleep, only to be rattled awake once more to a hysterical wife. She was beating and beating on me and screaming my name and imploring me to wake up. I don't exaggerate saying she was hysterical. I have never seen her before or since in such a state of panic and fright. I woke up and tried to calm her down, and asked what was wrong. She told me I had stopped breathing and she couldn't revive me. She claimed to have been beating on me for several minutes (but, you know how funny your sense of time can be in emergencies.) I asked if she hadn't seen me get up and move around the bed for who knows how long. No, she said, I was just lying there, inert and not breathing.
So, that's the gist of it. Who knows what really happened? If it was a mere dream, it was unlike any I had ever had before or since. And, of course, there's the part where I wasn't moving or breathing and my wife couldn't wake me. To this day, she doesn't like hearing the story. We only recently told our now-adult kids the story (we were not yet parents at the time of the event.)
The event left me feeling very empty. As I said, I just don't have the words to adequately describe how I felt moving into the light. When I think about it, I can still feel a whisper of what it was like, and that mere whisper is beyond description. There's a real sense of feeling cheated, because I came back. I need to feel it again. It's somewhat jaundiced me to real life, in that nothing I can ever experience here can come close to being in the light. I want the light again. Maybe even need?
Last December, when I was sitting bedside with my mother, as she was in her last minutes, I thought about the light and if she was going there. I hoped she was. She more than deserved to have that.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:00 PM on September 4, 2016 [18 favorites]
They were initiated into the mysteries which it is right to call most blessed, which we celebrated whole in ourselves and untouched by the sufferings that awaited us in later time, with the gaze of our final initiation on whole and simple and untrembling and blessed apparitions in a pure light, being ourselves pure.
Plato Phaedrus 250b8-c6
posted by bukvich at 6:20 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
Plato Phaedrus 250b8-c6
posted by bukvich at 6:20 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
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Sure, it's all probably just starving neurons going crazy before they finally die, but it's damned vivid and real. Whatever it is, you can't come away from the event unchanged.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:25 PM on September 3, 2016 [9 favorites]