I have rescued an old text, from 1997, whose authors are doctors Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, from the University of Connecticut, published in the specialized magazine Journal of Near-Death Studies (number 16, 1997). This extensive article analyzes a multitude of cases in which, In near-death experiences (NDEs), the blind see, as if they had sight, and not people who have been blind after birth, of which there are also many cases, but people blind from birth. Another strange phenomenon that we find in this almost foundational article is that of a case (Nancy) in which two witnesses (the husband and his new partner at the time) saw her in the double body, in the doppelganger that emerged from her when she died, while they transferred her to the operating room, and that double body had a strongly swollen face, due to edema, just like in the reality of her physical body.
Finally, and this casuistry is not detailed in the article we cited, mention the innumerable cases of organ transplantation in which the recipient begins to feel events that had occurred to the donor, without having known it; This is how they began to investigate, in heart transplants, that this organ has about 40,000 neurons, as a result of a woman who received a heart transplant from a 13-year-old boy, began to want to eat hamburgers irrepressible, which was what the young giver liked; as well as in another case, another transplant patient began to have nightmares about a man who was going to kill her, and after being in psychiatric treatment and drawing the robot portrait of said apparition, the subject could be found and had turned out to be the murderer of the donor in physical reality. Well then, with these three phenomena, let us expand a little more on the vision of the blind from birth in moments of NDE.
rumors
Doctors Ring and Cooper question the cases reported in the scientific literature and they observe that “when one begins to examine the basis of these claims, they seem to dissolve into the mists of rumors, unsubstantiated anecdotes, and other blind alleys, and even, in one case, outright fabrication.” Harvey Irwin, in 1987, was able to interview 21 blind Australians, and got three NDE witnesses, but all had peripheral or residual vision, so they were not valid to validate that the blind can see. Ring and Cooper interviewed 21 ECM protagonists. Of the total sample, 14 were blind from birth, and many did not perceive light (in the words of one of the interviewees: “I have never been able to even understand the concept of light”).
Ring and Cooper conclude: “Our findings on this question are unequivocal: blind people, even those blind from birth, report experiences that clearly fit the familiar prototype of the biblical NDE first popularized in the book of Moody, Life after life (1975). Their accounts, in fact, tend to be indistinguishable from those of sighted people with respect to the elements that serve to define the classic pattern of NDEs, such as the feelings of great peace and well-being that accompany the experience, the sensation of of separation from the physical body, the experience of traveling through a tunnel or dark space, the encounter with the light, the review of life, etc.
representations
The reported phenomena were: «In 20 interviews feelings of peace, well-being or love were mentioned; in 14, a sensation of separation from the physical body or an actual out-of-body experience; at 10, seeing one’s own physical body; on 8, go through a tunnel or a dark space; meeting other people, such as spirits, angels or religious figures, in 12; see a radiant light, in eight; hearing noises or music, in seven; to see life again, in four; meeting a border or limit, in six; and choose or be told to come back to life, in 10”. Therefore, there are clear visual representations, both mundane and supernatural.
A case of a man blind from birth: “He found himself in a huge library during the momentous phase of his NDE and saw billions and billions and billions of books as far as the eye could see. Asked if he saw them visually, he replied: Oh yes! Did she see them clearly? No problem. Was she surprised that she could see like this? Absolutely. They told me: Hey, you can’t see, and I answered: Of course I can see. Look at those books. It’s proof that I can see.”
consciential vision
In the end, the authors determine, after an exhaustive review of all the materialist or alternative theses, that it would be a consciential vision: «Obviously, it is not a simple vision, as we usually understand it, but almost a kind of apparent omniscience that completely transcends what mere vision could allow us. Indeed, what seems to exist here is a characteristic state of consciousness, which we would like to call transcendental consciousness. In this type of consciousness, of course, it is not that the eyes see anything; it is rather that the mind itself sees, but more in the sense of understanding or assimilating than visual perception as such. Or alternatively, we could say that it is not the eye that sees, but the self”. There are several postulates about consciousness and its nature. Amit Goswani’s is that everything is consciousness and then there is the journey towards duality, Larry Dossey’s talks about a single consciousness we call Mind, while the later notion of individual minds is a fiction, it is “the illusion of a separate self and the feeling of an ego possessing a separate mind’, but mere fictions of a single underlying reality, Mind. What in more mystical terms we could call Higher Consciousness.
The case of organ transplants and the consequently parallel transfers of the consciousness of others, can make us suspect that consciousness is in matter, so that even hair and nails can be used to pierce it (as in vodoo), but also that Consciousness is everything and only materializes when it collapses, like waves when they collapse into particles. Anyway, let’s see when the clever academics invent a machine for weighing consciences like the one Osiris and Anubis had.