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Re: Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife
by
SkRRJyTC
on 11/10/2012, 19:51:29 UTC
Are you saying this from experience or only by definition?  If I told you I meditated and left my body, would you tell me what I experienced wasn't real, even if I said it was?

Yes.  It is by definition, not real.

"Hallucinations involve sensing things while awake that appear to be real, but instead have been created by the mind."

You either have to accept that it was a hallucination, or decide that it wasn't a hallucination and was in fact real.

There is no such thing as a 'real hallucination'.

Do you accept that experience of the hallucination was real?

The experience was really created by the mind.  It existed.

It was not real.

So then youre saying something can exist without being real. With that logic we could infer that heaven exists through his "hallucination" of it. If we want to go down that route then we can say that every experience is created by the mind and therfore all experiences exist but are not real, i.e music, relationships, movies, conversations etc...

The big difference you seem to be misunderstanding is the source of the experience.  Was the experience caused by our interpretation of real external stimulus?  Or was it caused by the brain itself?

Here's another definition for you.  Words mean things you know...

"A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space."