Tina Hines had just left her Phoenix home and was about to take a hike with her husband when she collapsed. Her heart stopped and she had to be resuscitated six times en route to the hospital. She was dead for 27 minutes, and apparently had a near-death experience that made her believe that heaven was real.
When she finally was revived, she couldn’t talk, but gestured for paper and pen. She promptly scrawled the message above that seems to say, “It’s real.”
“It was so real, the colours were so vibrant,” she later said. She also said she saw a glowing figure she thought was Jesus standing near a gate. Many people have undergone near-death experiences. Some have religious-related experiences, such as Tina’s, while others describe a tunnel of light, and deceased family members greeting them.
But if you think these experiences are proof of the existence of life after death, think again, say mainstream scientists studying NDEs. Predictably, they say it’s all in the activity of brain synapses that they say are enhanced near the time of death. They’ve got proof by studying brain activity of rats just before they died. You can read about it here. It certainly would be interesting to know what the rats are experiencing. Certainly not Jesus. But maybe the big celestial mama rat. Who knows.
More on the science from Dr. Jim’s Borjigin of the University of Michigan, author of the 2013 rat-brain study. “Like ‘fire raging through the brain’, activity can surge through brain areas involved in conscious experience, furnishing all resultant perceptions with realer-than-real feelings and emotions….However, for those instances where experiences may occur around the time of cardiac arrest – or beyond it – these new findings provide further meat to the bones of the idea that the brain drives these fascinating and striking experiences.”
Fortunately, there are also scientists who look beyond brain functions and are interested in studying evidence of life after death, rather than ignoring or denying it, which are common positions of neurologists. These outlier scientists say that experiences such as Tina’s are her interpretation of a real after-life experience. In other words, the afterlife is both real and subjective.
In fact, people who don’t believe in an after-life and have near-death experiences might experience just what they believe. Many years ago, I was present when the actor Cary Grant mentioned that he had a near-death experience. (He mentioned that after talking about his LSD experiences.) I asked him what it was like. Grant made it clear he didn’t believe in an afterlife, and said what he experienced was “nothing.”
That might be an initial experience. But Grant and others like him might eventually consider if there is nothing, why am I experiencing anything? At that point, they might start experiencing ‘something.’
Tina and Brian Hines. Below, Tina’s niece Maggie Johnson got a tattoo of the message.
lucky lady… LUCKY man
make that OBE/NDE in my comment above – thanks!
thanks so much for this intriguing story on a topic spoken of/written about far too infrequently – having experienced an OBE/NDE myself, especially interesting comments –
So good to see you, Jenean.
NDE are real and fascinating to read about..
I agree!
Happy Fourth! Uggo on the military dictatorship fandango in DC!
I haven’t read “Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s NDE and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All” by Krohn and Jeffrey Kripal. Have you? The reviews say he comes up with some sort of revolutionary alternative model about how NDEs are about the future?
Uggo for sure. I like Kripal’s work, but haven’t read this one. Will have to take a look! That’s an intriguing concept, though!
I have not had an NDE but this past Spring the night my younger brother passed I had a dream where he came to me in a younger version of himself (The coat he was wearing and his longish hair were from the seventies) and asked me to tell his wife that he did not want to go and he could not find his way back. Just strange.
Really interesting. Something similar happened to me, Sharon – it was a college friend. I dreamed and he and I met on a hill and were jut talking when he suddenly said, “Trish, I have to move on.”
The next day, a mutual friend called to tell me John had been killed in a car accident.
Wow. Really makes one a believer. Thanks for sharing.
Yours is really powerful because he appeared as a younger version of himself!
I find it interesting that scientists discount NDE’s based on the fact that rats experience something too, that to me gives MORE proof that they are real. A rat is a living animal and they have souls too.
I drowned when I was 16 and went to the light, it was beautiful and didn’t hurt your eyes BUT my guides would not let me go and boy did I want to go. My guides kept, gently guiding me to look down and describe what I saw – a girl on the beach, someone performing CPR then I noticed she had the same bathing suit as I did and then WHAM I was back in my body, in horrible pain, couldn’t catch my breath, water coming out of my eyes etc and the lifeguards yelling ” she’s alive”!
All I could think was ” what just happened?!”
Thus was in 1974, before people were really talking about NDE and so I was very confused. I remember though how much I wanted to go into that light.
There’s more to this but I’ve given you the condensed version.
No one can tell me it wasn’t real!
Tht’s around the same time Raymond Moody’s book came out, I think. I can see how it would’ve been confusing, no one to explain stuff!