a “third state” lying between existence and demise founded on cellular investigation. The inquiry into what becomes of our awareness after we pass away lacks a definitive conclusion, yet there are intriguing hypotheses.
Sam Parnia serves as an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone and oversees studies centered on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. His publication, “Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death,” delves into research in this domain, and he discussed it in a podcast at the University of Chicago. “The topic of life and death seemed rather straightforward until the advent of CPR … numerous individuals who’ve endured near-fatal instances or had their heart cease and transcended what I refer to as the threshold of death reported very vivid and universal experiences about themselves, which were termed near-death experiences,” he clarified.
Parnia points out that the term was coined because at that moment, we were unaware that humans could be revived after facing biological demise. “Hence, grounded in a belief that returning from death was impossible, they were termed near-death experiences,” he elaborated. “We no longer consider that term to be precise. The phrase we currently use is a recalled encounter of death.”