What happens after we die – if anything at all – is a question that has plagued humanity for all time, but one man who says he ‘died’ for six minutes when he was a child claims to have the answer
A man who ‘died’ for six minutes has revealed the shocking scenes he claims he saw in the afterlife.
Humans have always been preoccupied with the question of what happens to us after we die – and in recent years researchers have increasingly been searching for answers, using cutting-edge technology.
Despite our natural curiosity, no conclusive answer has ever been found. However, many people who have been to the brink of death and come back again have claimed to have insight into the matter of the afterlife, returning with experiences or visions that, they allege, occurred during or before being resuscitated.
One man posted on Reddit an eerie tale of what he claimed occurred during his own near-death experiences, and while anonymous social media posts like this aren’t verifiable, his story captured the attention of hundreds of readers.
The user claimed that at age 15, he suffered from ventricular fibrillation on what was just a normal day, causing his heart to stop for six minutes, and in that time had a terrifying vision of what he believes awaits us in the afterlife.
“During my visit, I learned things about our universe that I wish I hadn’t,” the user wrote. “It began with light. Blinding, white, pervasive. It bathed me, calmed me. It was everything they tell you about. Beatific, welcoming, the stuff of spiritual experiences.”
However, things quickly took a turn for the young man, who felt as though he was being lifted upward and entering a series of gates. “I arrived in a place without dimension, a place beyond reality. It only made sense while I occupied it. I don’t believe a corporeal being can make sense of the astral plane, something about its intangible existence defies translation.
“So what I came away with were more impressions than images. I was not alone. Several life forces enclosed me upon my arrival. At first, because of my Christian upbringing, I believed them to be angels. In my incorporeal form, I made the spiritually-equivalent gesture of opening my arms, anticipating their embrace.
“Instead, I felt myself shackled by their powers, like a collared dog. Humiliation and terror came over me. These were not the ethereal beings I’d been led to believe await us. These were cruel, unsympathetic overlords by whom I was fettered.”
The man claimed the creatures mocked him and informed him that the human world was something of a ‘soul-farming’ exercise for a kind of higher being, that then upon death used human souls as ‘slaves’ in their dimension – all while toying with and torturing the man.
Eventually, his heart was restarted by the doctors working on him in the hospital he had been taken to, and when he told his loved ones about his vision, they told him the likely cause was trauma from the near-death experience, which combined with his young age was likely heavy.
Despite not being listened to by those around him, the man never stopped believing in what he saw, and hundreds of commenters replied to his post – some with their own near-death insights, and others with spiritual perspectives.
The man is by no means the only person to have claimed to see visions during near-death experiences, Amber Cavanaugh hailing from Canada, has claimed that she saw her husband “weeping” over her body after having two strokes at age 43, in a kind of out of body experience, and that she visited the “meeting point” of heaven and earth – per the Daily Mail.
Whilst the veracity of this particular story will never be known, new research has shown that at the point of death, the brain can experience a “storm” or “surge of activity” – even in those who had been on extended life support, for six minutes or more.
As reported in the Guardian – those researching near-death tend to fall into three camps: the physicalists, whose research looks into death from a biological perspective, the parapsychologists, who tend to work along the line that consciousness can exist beyond death in some form, and outside the brain itself, but that is the organ through which humans receive it.
Finally, there are the spiritualists, who reportedly tend to err towards religious understandings of life after death, and who are most likely to believe that those – like the man on Reddit – are actually entering some kind of divine afterlife.
Research undertaken by neurology professor Jimo Borjigin showed in one case different sections of a patient’s brain became incredibly active as she was removed from life support and went into cardiac arrest. “In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation.
“So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place.”
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