Sam Parnia
Near-Death Experiences and Shamanic Initiation: When Clinical Death Meets Ancient Ceremony
Here is something that should stop you mid-step: a Dutch cardiologist and a Siberian shaman, separated by five thousand miles and five thousand years of cultural context, are describing the same journey. One speaks in the language of peer-reviewed cardiology journals.
Cardiac Arrest and Consciousness: Pim van Lommel's Prospective Study
In 2001, the Lancet — one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world — published a study that should have transformed neuroscience. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, and colleagues reported the results of a prospective study of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors:...
Near-Death Experiences: What Clinical Data Reveals About Consciousness and Brain Death
The near-death experience (NDE) is one of the most well-documented anomalies in clinical medicine — and one of the most systematically ignored. Approximately 10-20% of people who survive cardiac arrest report detailed, vivid experiences during the period when their brain showed no measurable...
Spiritual Perspectives on Death
Every wisdom tradition humanity has produced has placed the question of death at its center. Not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be encountered — the threshold experience that defines the boundary of ordinary consciousness and, according to virtually every spiritual tradition,...
Death, Dying, and Conscious Transition
Death is the most reliable teacher available to a human being and the one most consistently refused. Every spiritual tradition places death at the center of its curriculum.
Stanislav Grof's Spiritual Emergency Framework: When Awakening Becomes Crisis
In the standard medical model, a person who hears voices, sees visions, experiences the dissolution of their identity, believes they are connected to a cosmic intelligence, or feels that reality has fundamentally shifted is mentally ill. The diagnosis is psychosis, the treatment is antipsychotic...