How do medically dead people sometimes return to life?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
Yeah, I understand. I know. So, when you talk about after-death experiences in terms of people who have been biologically, clinically declared to be dead and yet they come back and then they come back.
So, what exactly happens in these cases? If you actually look at death from a biological perspective, death is a complicated phenomenon in the sense that earlier a scientist thought of death as an event. The person is alive now, now the person is dead. And yes, there is an event like that in most cases.
But now the mainstream medical opinion is that death is not just an event, it's a process. Because in the past, say a person would get a heart attack and if there were no methods for resuscitation or no defibrillator available for the heart to be activated again. So, the heart stopping would equate with death.
But now even if the heart stops, actually through some various means, through either mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or through electrical activation by giving shocks. Most of us may have seen in movies when a person has got a heart attack, they put an electric device on their heart and they try to electrically activate the heart, shock and activate the heart. So, whereas in the past, medically speaking, the heart stopping would have been considered death.
But now even if the heart stops, the person can be brought back to life. Because they say that, so then now currently the opinion is that when the brain stops functioning, there is heart death, there is brain death. When the brain stops functioning completely, and the brain also has different parts, and especially the stem of the brain, the basal part of the brain, when that stops functioning, there is no sign of consciousness, there are no brain waves coming from that at all, that is what is considered to be death.
But then, like in cases like Operation Sandstall, where the heart has stopped and the brain has also stopped, and still the person can be brought back. It is a dangerous operation, but it has been done quite a few times. So then the question is, from a medical perspective, right now, how exactly or when exactly that happens, that is not so easy to describe.
In most cases, they can say that now the patient is dead. But it is not so easy to determine the event of death exactly. So let me complete what I am saying.
So now from the spiritual perspective, essentially what happens is, when the soul, the soul is the source of life, the body is insentient even now. When the soul leaves the body and does not return to the body, that is when death occurs. The soul does not just leave the body physically, but leaves the body emotionally.
Okay, that means my connection with this is cut now. That is when death occurs. In some cases, just as during the course of our life, different people go through different experiences.
Some of us may have a lot of health issues. Some of us may have reasonably good health. Some of us may find ourselves suddenly in the middle of some war zone.
And some of us may live through their life mostly in some peaceful areas. Just as there is a variety in experiences that we go through during the course of our life. And this variety, the Gita's philosophy explains, that this variety in experience happens because of our own past karma.
The kind of actions that we have done, they determine the kind of situations we go through in life. So just as there is a variety in the kind of situation that we go through during the course of life, similarly at the end of life, different people can go through different situations. And some people may, by their particular karmic destiny, they may go through these after-death experiences, where they seem to leave the body, but then they come back to the body.
So these actually, these sort of experiences, what we can understand from the spiritual perspective is, firstly, they problematize the equation of life with functioning of the body and death with the dysfunctionality of the body. And even when the body has stopped functioning and biologically the person is dead, but still the person comes back to life. So to say that life is a functional body and death is a dysfunctional body, that equalization, which is done quite often, that is problematized by this.
And from the spiritual perspective, we understand that the soul can go out of the body, because the soul is separate from the body. So it can go out of the body and the soul can return to the body back also. Yes?