Beverly Gilmour, 100s of NDE and a New Insight About Consciousness |350|

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Beverly Gilmour, 100s of NDE and a New Insight About Consciousness |350|
by Alex Tsakiris | May 23 | Consciousness Science, Near-Death Experience

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Beverly Gilmour has a rare medical condition that has caused her to experience 100s of NDEs.

photo by: Skeptiko
On this episode of Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris: We’ve established [the medical part of your experience], tell us about the spiritual phenomenon…

Beverley Gilmour: If you said, “Why have you been having them?” I’d say it’s about our evolution, it’s about learning and every now and then we get these odd cases like mine thrown in and it gives science, it gives the medical profession, it gives us all an ability to look deep into something that interests us and that might have answers, and spiritually, one of the things that I often hear, if you don’t believe that an NDE is a real event and you say it’s caused by false memories or illusions, I can say, without any hesitation, that’s absolutely not the case.

Stay with us for Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s show a very interesting, challenging account from someone who’s had just an unbelievable number of near-death or real-death experiences.

Beverley Gilmour, as you’ll hear in this show, has experienced 30 years of more or less continuous, often near-death experiences, what she’s gained out of that, the message that she has is, I think, quite controversial or at least it will be for some people. There’s definitely a strong Jesus angle to her experience, but she also has an insight in terms of consciousness that is quite unique and quite interesting as well and could have implications for near-death experience research and consciousness research in general.

I was extremely skeptical going into this interview, and I have to say, I’m less skeptical coming out. I don’t know what to make of everything that Beverley has to say and you’ll hear that in this interview as well, but I’m not too quick to dismiss what she says either.

I hope you enjoy my interview with Beverley Gilmour.
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

Do you think Beverley "encountered Jesus" during an out-of-body NDE experience, and what does it mean to even say that?
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

Do you think Beverley "encountered Jesus" during an out-of-body NDE experience, and what does it mean to even say that?

I haven't listened to the podcast yet but based on your question this came to mind. At 57 minutes into this podcast at Buddha at the gas pump with Rick Archer, his guest Baba Shiva discusses what is going on when an enlightened guru appears to a disciple after they have dropped their body and become absobed into universal consciousness.
https://batgap.com/baba-shiva-rudra-balayogi/
 
Gilmour's conception of postmortem existence has some shades of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who of course is another figure who frequently went into trance and who wrote down his purported conversations with Jesus and spirits.

Contra conventional Protestant orthodoxy (but not without precedent in the Christian tradition overall), Swedenborg taught what you might call "salvation by character" rather than by faith in the classical Protestant sense of belief/trust without the requirement of "works." Each person who entered the spirit world had the opportunity to evolve in a heavenly or hellish direction. Similarly, Gilmour states, "If you don’t teach yourself the values between good and bad, then when you pass over, you don’t seem to be able to understand those questions that you’re being asked about your truth, you seem to be retaliating from them all the time."

I found another interesting parallel on her blog, where she writes about encountering the spirit of a serial killer. His apparent form is grotesque, reflecting his distorted and evil state of mind. Gilmour writes, "Its features were twisted, disjointed at ever[y] angle, and its Spiritual body was embedded with dark, crusted scales. Its eyes were large, of different sizes, and out of proportion to the top half of its Spiritual body. They were black – reflecting pools of torment and pain." Swedenborg also contended that the inhabitants of the lower realms would manifest to others in misshapen bodies.

Just exploring the phenomenology here, as I am neither a Swedenborgian nor willing to make pronouncements about the ontology behind her experiences...
 
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(but without precedent in the Christian tradition overall)

Assuming that's meant to be "not without precedent"? Referring to the Pelagian heresy right?

Also I like this idea that on the other side you encounter an enchanted world where moral/mental states have influence on one's experience of the reality beyond the boundary of a body's subjective, sensory experience. I suspect such a thing would be confusing to many of us on this side of the purported Veil given the penchant for seeing the immaterial as basically a ghostly kind of matter.
 
Corrected, thanks.

No, I wasn't referring specifically to Pelagianism. Pelagius apparently taught a strong free-will soteriology (doctrine of salvation) in which human beings are intrinsically endowed with the capacity to achieve moral perfection by themselves. The rest of the Christian tradition has responded that this makes the person and work of Jesus, and the idea of God's grace, to be superfluous. Swedenborg himself spoke of the role of divine grace, and said that the good we do is actualized through a spiritual "influx."

We Protestants are still trying to get past Martin Luther's criticism of legalistic religion in which one earns one's way into God's beneficence. But Catholic and Orthodox theology take a different approach. Everything is rooted in grace and God's initiative, for God is always, ever, and only disposed in our favor, but that grace then enables us to participate in the process of making ourselves righteous. The Orthodox use the term synergism - salvation is accomplished through the cooperation of humanity with God. That makes it easier for both traditions to conceptualize the possibility of varying states of being in the afterlife as well as postmortem repentance and the viability of praying for the dead that they may turn from darkness to the light.
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

Do you think Beverley "encountered Jesus" during an out-of-body NDE experience, and what does it mean to even say that?

Don't know what to make of the Jesus angle, my suspicions are that he is such a huge part of many people's religious beliefs that he manifests to such people when they pass as they are likely to 'go along with it'. It smooths their transition. If they are familiar with Jesus that would make sense.

Is it really Jesus? Yes, I think that it probably is, if any of us are 'real'. What is real? I think consciousness can manifest in lots of ways, probably in ways that we can't even imagine. If I were to meet Jesus in a nde, although I have no affinity to any religion, I am sure I would show fitting respect to this being. Funny that, I just instinctively feel that it would be 'the natural thing to do'.

The episode promised more than it delivered as far as I am concerned. I'm not surprised though, that has become a familiar tale. God keeps us guessing, but I'm not complaining.
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

Do you think Beverley "encountered Jesus" during an out-of-body NDE experience, and what does it mean to even say that?

My opinion is that "Jesus" is defined by people like her. We can infer the creation and design of the universe from scientific observations, but everything we know about what God and the afterlife are like come from people who have mystical experiences.

I read the transcript but I still have two questions: What does Beverley say she has learned from her experiences? And does she ever bring through verifiable information that she would have no normal way of knowing?
 
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I have only listened to part of this (at least so far). It sounded to me that she was having OBE's, rather than NDE's - some people do report feeling stuck half in the body and half outside. Also can anyone frequent repeated cardiac arrests, as she claims?

Maybe the value of a podcast like this, is to help remind us that there is a lot of wacky, poorly documented stuff on the edge of the field :(

David
 
True but it was a serious question not sarcasm - though I can appreciate why you might think it was lol

Jurgen says that he only reports things that fulfil certain criteria, something like fully alert consciousness being one of them, as I recall. I believe he's genuine, but that doesn't mean that I totally believe what he writes. I just don't know. Until I have such an experience for myself, I cannot truly know.

It is as 'evidential' to me as many other things. My feeling when reading your post yesterday was "I just don't feel like any more arguing". I was feeling despair at humanities plight. Sorry if it made you feel 'worse', that's the last thing we need at the moment. :)
 
Not to be disrespectful, but she didn't actually answer Alex's questions. What are the prophecies? No answer except some guy is gonna go to jail for following a dark path. Jesus flew her around the earth? Jesus said why don't you trust me?

I totally missed any new theory of human consciousness.

I'd like to know what sort of medical condition repeatedly causes her heart to stop? Does she still have it? Would love to hear from an MD about it.

Why wasn't she used for some science? Like the paper on a shelf experiment up above everyone that only she could see when she left her body?

Then she starts talking about DNA? huh? The secret is in our DNA? Wait, what?

I listened to a lot of the interview twice. I didn't learn anything. Still wondering what the prophecies and new understanding of consciousness are.

The best I can see is that these are OBE's as mentioned above.

Thanks. Peace.
 
Jurgen says that he only reports things that fulfil certain criteria, something like fully alert consciousness being one of them, as I recall. I believe he's genuine, but that doesn't mean that I totally believe what he writes. I just don't know. Until I have such an experience for myself, I cannot truly know.

It is as 'evidential' to me as many other things. My feeling when reading your post yesterday was "I just don't feel like any more arguing". I was feeling despair at humanities plight. Sorry if it made you feel 'worse', that's the last thing we need at the moment. :)

No you didn't make feel bad. We all have different perspectives. Personally I'm not big on unsupported reports because although they may be honest their interpretation is subjective and in this type of case, difficult to assess.
 
No you didn't make feel bad. We all have different perspectives. Personally I'm not big on unsupported reports because although they may be honest their interpretation is subjective and in this type of case, difficult to assess.

I hear you, but I personally think that it'll be necessary to incorporate these type of reports into science sooner or later. Seems to me loads of so called hard science is not at all hard, some of the theories in cutting edge physics for example appear to be fantasy just as surely as many people will see Jurgen's report.
 
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I hear you, but I personally think that it'll be necessary to incorporate these type of reports into science sooner or later. Seems to me loads of so called hard science is not at all hard, some of the theories in cutting edge physics for example appear to be fantasy just as surely as many people will see Jurgen's report.
That's true but we can have whatever theories we like in physics, however if they can't be demonstrated to be true, they remain just that don't they? I can't see how this type of report as it stands can lead anywhere. I have been wrong before (quite often actually lol).
 
I hear you, but I personally think that it'll be necessary to incorporate these type of reports into science sooner or later. Seems to me loads of so called hard science is not at all hard, some of the theories in cutting edge physics for example appear to be fantasy just as surely as many people will see Jurgen's report.
I can understand your despair just after the hideous attack in Manchester.

I think it is worth makings a distinction between reports such as hers, that may be explained by a more comprehensive theory of reality, and reports that are also clearly evidential before we have such a theory.

David
 
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