Clinical death occurs when the heart stops beating and the blood stops flowing. Clinical death precedes biological death by 4-6 minutes, whereas clinical death is reversible with intervention, but biological death is not.
Since religion is always the opposite of what we hear, so it is with its death. Christianity is biologically brain dead, but it’s members are pumping on the chest of the corpse and counting compressions as heart beats while claiming a code save. Not sure if you’ve ever done CPR, but it takes a lot of energy, resources and strength to keep a clinically dead person from slipping off into biologically dead. It’s a tiresome process that requires you pass off to other rescuers to keep compressions efficient.
Ceasing resuscitation efforts is difficult at times. Family and friends often urge you to keep trying, go one more round on the algorithms to get a shockable rhythm for a chance of spontaneous heart beat and respiration. At some point you have to call it off. Religion has been in asystole for quite some time, but the members are too attached and too full of need to recognize their beating a dead horse—one that is biologically and clinically dead. It’s time to lay this one to rest.
TheCommonAtheist 
Great analogy. My faith had been dying for years. When it finally died, I didn’t want to believe it. I tried to keep resuscitation efforts going as long as I could, hoping for some sign of life. But it was too late.
Just like when a person dies, you don’t want to believe it’s true. You think you see that person while walking in a crowd and have to do a double take to see if it’s really them. I swear I still see my faith some days but I have to remind myself it’s gone and that the Deja vu that I feel sometimes when I think I see it, is just part of the grief process. Healing can only begin when you admit that it’s dead.
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We only needed on point to be true. That’s all. Nothing!
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The paramedic speaks!
Nice one there.😎
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nice analogy
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After watching a White House press conference is my brain clinically or biologically dead? Or both? 😀
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All three
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All three? So it’s biologically dead, clinically dead and both biologically and clinically dead? Maybe my math is a little off, but I count two. 🙂
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Or just him? That’s three but I’m counting wrong. Working in the sun I can’t read my screen well
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Killer analogy, man. Thanks for sharing. And to all the desperate hangers on I say: It’s okay to stop pumping. There is nothing wrong with you, and everything right with you, for moving on. Peace.
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“That” heartbeat stopped many, many years ago and as amazing as it seems — I lived on!
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Your analogy is quite nice, and I have been uselessly saying similar things to my theist friends for years. But the real reason I am replying to this post is something I have been struggling with this very day. Do you, as a medical professional, have a word for the state of life between clinical death and biological death? I happen to need such a word to demonstrate how physical life can be differentiated from spiritual life.
Thank you.
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I don’t recall a specific word as the two phases are separate in nature and often hard to distinguish between the two. That fine line where clinical death wisps into biological may have a term in those areas of research, but I’m not aware of it. After reading your comments here and elsewhere, I too lean to reincarnation as the means to “spiritual” advancement. But I’m not there currently. I don’t believe it requires a god, but is a natural order of energies and the cosmos. I tend to think if there was a god a he “created” this world, it is not natural, and I see nature as a self propagating phenomenon, not a synthetic creation outside of what we would observe had god not “created” this artificial world. Make sense?
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Hey. Jim
Makes total sense to me. Not swure if you think I am saying a god made the universe, I am not. But what I am saying is a particular lifeform, the one I am presently calling LIFE, took advantage of this u8niverse, and used it to help advance itself.
I did not say any of this earlier because I was awaiting your reaction to my words. This being is not a god, but was in a state on unawareness at some point, just like a new-born or even a pre-birth baby.
It was alone, parentless, and living off the energy of the cosmos. And as I said to you at one point, I cannot tell you the exact process, that did not come through with the other information I did experience, but the feeling in my gut, which I trust implicitly, is that what LIFE knows is only what life is teaching it. What we are teaching it.
How does that sound to you?
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BTW, it is unfortunate that not even you can give me a name for the state of life I am seeking. I tried mind-life, but that has been used otherly. But some kind of descriptor is desperately needed, something that others who use the English language can at least envision if not understand. (This is where I see christ making his big mistake. He did not have the words in his language for reincarnation or karma, nor did he truly understand them, so he used existing words in Hebrew (or whatever he called his birth language at that time), and allowed his apostles to translate them into words in other languages, or even post-apostle writers, who understood the concepts even less. Reincarnation became reborn, or born again, and karma was turned into sin.
Meanwhile, while what I call the concept Oriental trio called karma in Sanskrit was something someone devised to help scam people out of their hard-earned rupees. Obviously, while I do accept reincarnation, and indeed understand, I do not accept karma as anything in my extra-earth belief situation.
Feel free to ask any questions, that is how I come to most of my insights, trying to answer the questions I cannot think to ask myself.
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Also, when I click your avitar your page says it’s blank. You have a link?
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https://rawgodsspiritualatheism.wordpress.com should get you there.
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Here’s some ideas for a word or phrase. Entropic phasing, shift, juncture, or entropic step. We’ll make one up if we have to but these were cooking in my brain the last hour.
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Thanks, but I am trying to write my essay for a 5th grader, which is what I had to do while visiting schools as a social worker. It was also useful when working with people with developmental difficulties.
For now, I have to focus on learning the difference between clinical death and biological death. Does that situationhave anything to do with a permanent vegetative state, where a patient is kept alive by mechanical or other means though their brain shows minimal activity, or no activity at all?
Meanwhile, would voluntary life vs involuntary life have any meaning? I doubt it, just braionstorming like you…
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Really the difference comes down to semantics. Dead is dead. For a short time it’s reversible, but without intervention the outcome is the same. As far as life support, the decisions are often made based on potential for recovery or spontaneous respiration and circulation. If they can or can’t stay alive without assistance, and so forth.
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Well, thank you for trying. I am trying to get at the levels of life and death between semantics and subjective decisions. I might not ever get there, but I have to try to satisfy my own curiosity, if for nothing else.
What I am looking for is the difference between life and death. It is usually only an instant, my favourite saying on this subject is that death is always just an microsecond away, but even a microsecond can be a long time, depending on whatyou are trying to do. In bobsleding a millisecond can change gold into a silver metal, or vice versa. I want to split that “atom” if I can, though this is not something just anyone can do in a laboratory, and I am not in a lab. I have only my mind and my perception to work with, lol.
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I feel like there is a moment exactly as you’re talking about. Like a syncopal episode where you black out, then circulation kicks back in. There is a second in between where many things can happen.. or not. The difference between life and death is a little blood back to the brain but who knows where takes you. It definitely is not biological death, but near clinical and back.
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I have been reading on the internet, and tried to find the difference I am looking for in the medical concepts of clinical death, and brain death or biological death. My problem as a layman is that those seem to express a matter of time, but not a matter of being concious. Conciousness seems to me to be the true test of life. While physical life is a matter of process, the difference between concious ability and no concious ability is the real heart of the matter. Even if it is the ability to think, and nothing else, the thinker is alive, the non-thinker is dead.
But, can those situations be measured by humans or their tools? I know brain activity is a marker for death, though not a biological marker, still is it brain waves that describe thought, or something else?
I know in my experience, as I alluded to on your blog about the principles of LDS, when I inhabited my physical body I knew I was there, yet when was I was away from my physical body I was somewhere altogether seperate from my body, though the path between the two was apparently always known (and called the silver cord in buddhist philosophy–and probably hinduist and jainist philosophy as well). And that is kind of the point I am looking for.
To expand a bit on that experience, if I may, it felt like the energy that was me was sinking into the mass of energy (a new oxymoron?) that was LIFE. But part way through the process I chose to return to earth rather than wait for my next incarnation. Both occasions I had to visit LIFE I made that same decision. The difference was, the abrupt awareness that another bit of joining with LIFE, or a third vit to LIFE, would end in my being unable to continue on as the person I am today, and the consequence of such a decision would be for my body to be a vegetable until it ran out of biological life. Or, in other words, mind dead. Not just mind- or mental-death, but consciousness death. The me that is talking to you would have disappeared from the annals of existence, though the energy that had been me would still more or less been alive inside the group consciousness.
I don’t know that I can explain it any better in English, but that was the decision I had to make. Both times I decided to stay alive on earth, but I never touched LSD again from that day forward, though I cannot say that I have not been tempted to do do many times in my life since then.
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I understand your experience felt very real. I included a Outer Body Experience in a post a while back where the guy described looking at himself sleeping in bed. He had come home exhausted from a long day of work and partying and passed out on the bed. He saw himself laying on the bed, and described the pillows and the green bed spread, and that’s when it occurred to his wife, and then researchers that he imagined the entire thing. His wife had changed bedspreads and what was actually on the bed was a red blanket, but he had recalled the green one in his OBE he had seen in the morning. He had left the room dark when he came in, as to not wake his wife, and had no idea the bed had been changed. Another detail is he remembered seeing the dog on the bed, but the dog had spent the night outside in the kennel. It literally was a dream that he observed of himself. It may be your encounters with LIFE are an anticlimactic you. But keep writing. I’m super interested in your experience here and would like to learn more if I can.
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My experience was not an NBE, or an OBE (though I used to be able to astral travel when I was younger–also called soul travel). My experience was a Through The Mind” or “Out The Mind’s Door,” if it was anything. It started inside the brain, out through a whole in a brick wall in my brain (obviously a mental metaphor, but it happened both times, I could see the LSD molecules moving the bricks), down a tunnel (the first trip was a long one, not knowing how far I was going–the second as far but not as long), arriving in the most incredibly beautiful location where senses were all mixed up (seeing with sound, hearing with eyes, feeling with no fingers) amidst the most beautiful classical music I could ever hope to hear–with a limitless scale–coloured notes, psychedelic chords, (please note: I “hate” classical music,) with more colours and colour-combinations than two hundred rainbows to make the mind expand to universal size, and softness of touches to make bushy new-born kitten tails seem like sandpaper, all done without a body to sense any of this, or any solid or even vapourish matter to encounter. Ever so slowly the “not-body” that was me was sinking into a pool of life-beings that were being melded together by a cosmic current of spirituality and love. Words were thoughts appearing in my mind like telepathy, booming into me, admonishing me for being there ahead of my time–despite the feeling that time as we experience it did not exist there. Either I had to leave, or stay and be reincarnated in a new body. I chose to leave, and I moved at what had to be light-speed back along the tunnel that led to my brain. The wall in my brain was being repaired as the LSD molecules lost their power, and the “i” that was me slipped through it and landed splat inside a mass of ooey-goes cold flesh that could only be my body. (That ended my first experience.) My second experience started more or less the same way, up to the point of the words in my mind. This time I was told if I don’t want to change my mind about staying, I should not ever return there until my time on ——– had ended. If I came back again I would not be able to leave. This time there was no rush of light-speed, and the hole in the brick wall was but one brick-size. I scraped my mind as I went though the angstrom-wide hole and landed splash in my body again. I never did LSD again.
The first experience lasted about three hours by my bedside clock. The second experience took about 45 minutes. After both experiences my mind was shaking like a a shrimp in a tidal-wave, and I fell into dead sleeps that lasted hours. Each time when I woke up I felt like I had been blowing around in a hurricane, but I recovered with hot tea and a homemade KD breakfast.
There was no way I could have imagined any of that, and they were not hallucinations. I know that inside of me, and actually Eric Burdon of the New Animals sang of a similar experience. There is no doubt in me that whoever wrote and scored that piece of musical terror and bliss had a very similar experience to mine.
But it does not surprise me that no one wnts to believe those experiences were real. Nor does it surprise me that I had lingering side-effects and flashbacks for ten years after. Also, it took me almost 40 years to come to terms with some of the knowledge that leaked back with me, and in all actuality it still happens in the present. Something will happen, as your desire to hear all about it, brought me back again to those two amazing nights.
Go to “New York 1963, America 1968 BY Eric Burdon on YouTube, or much better if you can hear it on vinyl, and listen closely to the song from the lines “Saturday night was a big, Big EXPERIENCE… I wanna be free, baby, I wanna be free…” onwards. My first experience just happened to start on a Saturday night…
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RG, as I was reading this last description of your experience, I couldn’t help but wonder … if it was such a beautiful, moving, and life-altering event — and you are certain it wasn’t just related to the affects of the drug — why are you hesitant to return? Do you not trust your experience? From what you’ve written, it sounds like what some might refer to as “heaven.”
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Heaven is exactly what some people might think it would be, but there is no heaven. Except once absorbed into the pool of LIFE there would be no thinking done, as the thinking-being would no longer exist as an individual. That said, the group mind would probably think it too was/is heaven, but pieces of that group mind would still be returning to the physical plane with the birth or beginning of every new life in the universe, or wherever all life exists that we here cannot comprehend.
But, the reason I will never do LSD ever again, unless it is on my deathbed, is because this particular incarnation of me which you know as rawgod (no capitals) would be left uninhabited and vegetablized. I am here for a purpose, just like everyone (read all living beings) else IMO, and were I to forego that purpose just so my essence could be in a heaven for awhile would be irresponsible to that very life inside me, which makes me responsible to all living beings.I hope by saying this no one thinks I am saying I am special in some way to everyone else, because this is everyone’s purpose, no more no less. We are all equally special, even while we are all equally miniscule in comparison to not only the universe around us, but to the cosmos, which is the word I use to mean the realm inhabited by LIFE.
This vision I have of the cosmos, I never had before I had my LSD experiences. Nor did I have it right after I had those experiences. It took years to absorb all the information that tagged along with me as I slowly processed/still process it. And it is taking years to understand it.
If I am wrong, if my experiences were hallucinations or whatever, I doubt they would have affected my entire existence as they have. But, I am more than willing to entertain that possibility, which is why I try to always add the qualifier, In My Opinion, to most everything I write or say. There are approx 7.6 billion people on this planet we call home, and some octillion or decatillion living beings here, not counting whatever else there might be in the universe. That is how many versions of truth there are on the physical plane, IMO.
Truth is relative to our experience.Ten people will witness an event, and there will be ten descriptions of that event. Some descriptions will match on particular pieces of an event, or maybe even most of that event, so we take those descriptions to be true. But were we the causer of the event, we might know something that no witness knows that would change that truth. IMO, truth is always relative because it is subjective, no matter how objective we think we are being. This too is a result of of my “experiences,” because I used to believe in a “capital T truth.” On this plane of existence, I no longer believe that.
But everyone else is allowed to have their own opinion. I might disagree, and I might even get argumentative, but really, deep inside, I don’t want to do that, though circumstances can interfere with my intentions.
One other thing that I learned from my experiences is to ask people not to accept anything, and I mean anything, I communicate as gospel truth. I believe each living being has to learn about life for themselves, because that is the only way for you to be sure it is your truth, even if it is nobody else’s. You can use someone else’s experience or truth as a guide, but for me, to have someone walk in my footsteps would be a tragedy. Somewhere along the path something would get misunderstood, or misinterpreted, and I do not want that to happen.
And something I have not said lately in any of my comments, please do not think that the life I spell as LIFE is any kind of a god. It is just the ultimate group mind that I can presently see in my vision. It knows as much as we know, and nothing more. It experiences only what we bring back to it as our experiences. It has no power over anything, or any one. Its body, if it could be said to have one, is made of what we think us as chaos. There is no fate, no destiny, no karma, there is just discovery and learning. There is plenty of making mistakes, taking of evolutionary dead ends. And there are plenty of questions to be answered, and we on the physical plane are helping to answer some of them.
This is the vision, the experience I brought back with me from LIFE. Most likely I have parts of it wrong. Almost certainly I have parts of it wrong, because I am filtering through my own lifelong experiences. And that is where every other living being comes into play. You too are adding to the experiences of yourself, your Self being a group mind, your SELF being the mind of LIFE. Together we are learning, and together we are understanding, IMO.
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Meanwhile, we should probably take our conversation off CA’s comment section. (Though I do not care who listens in.) You can write me at gewcolo@gmail.com to continue.
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