'A New Science of Heaven'
by Robert Temple
Chapter 16: The ‘Death Flash’ and the ‘Life Flash’
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“It has been said that at the moment of death, a flash of light is emitted by the body. There are many reports of this. It applies to all living organisms, not only to people. The evidence concerning this flash of light is extensive, and the speculations concerning it have entered into works of fiction and film.
This is one of the most important details about the relationship between the physical body and any animating plasma body that may co-exist with it. It is what has come to be known as the death flash.”
“All living organisms emit low-intensity light; at the time of death, that radiation is ten to 10,000 times stronger than that emitted under normal conditions. This ‘death flash’ is independent of the cause of death, and reflects in intensity and duration the rate of dying. The vision of intense light reported in near-death experiences may be related to this death flash, which may hold an immense amount of information. The electromagnetic field produced by necrotic radiation, containing energy, internal structure, and information, may permit the continuation of consciousness beyond the death of the body.
This is clearly very important information. Considering how terrified most people are of dying, you would think that this information would be more widely circulated, if only to assuage people’s anxieties. But strangely, few people have heard about it. This is puzzling to me. I think it must be because we live in a world today where intellectuals, mainstream social opinion-formers and mass media all subscribe to a rigidly materialistic view of life, and are intolerant of anyone who challenges this arid position in even the slightest way.”
“Obviously it is impossible to carry out laboratory experiments on dying people in order to look for mists, so it is difficult to imagine how this phenomenon can ever be ‘scientifically proved’, no matter how many accounts exist. It is easy to debunk such accounts if one has fixed ideas that no such thing can happen. It is equally easy to believe everything if one has fixed ideas that anything of that kind is possible.
I have no personal experience of this. I only sat beside a dying person once, the author Rosamond Lehmann, but I summoned a doctor and left before she actually departed a short while later. (Ironically, she had a passionate belief in the survival of death and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.) It is because people essentially believe what they like when evidence is subjective that I have excluded my own subjective information from this book.”
“Does the life of the soul end with death? What should we expect beyond the threshold of this world? These problems, which have always beset mankind, are again making their appearance on the European intellectual horizon. Religions and esoteric knowledge have always taught that death is much more than merely a transformation of living material into dead material. Now that recollections of people who have experienced clinical death [NDEs, or near-death experiences are here referred to] are becoming accepted as real, the question of survival of some vital elements is entering the realms of science.
Many of the physicochemical processes occurring at the time of death are known. These changes proceed in linear fashion with the gradual process of destruction and decomposition. The Gas Discharge Visualisation technique, however, goes beyond the classical biochemical approach, to reveal some aspects of energy and information in the living body. This being so, it became of great interest to find out how this changes after death. In this way we might gain information of how the transition from the dying state to death takes place.”
“Light has been always intrinsically related to the creative power that gives birth to life. Indeed, the cell division, fertilization of an egg and the death of the cell are accompanied by PE [photon emission]. Light is considered as the unitary purposive principle which engenders the Universe [he does not say by whom, but he is presumably referring to some religious traditions and possibly the views of some scientists, especially in light of what he says next about photosynthesis] and that has the nature of first cause. It is an ultimate source of energy on Earth and a driving force of photosynthesis and other photobiological processes …
Recent findings suggest that biophotons convey hidden information coded in the spatiotemporal parameters of the electromagnetic field, such as a degree of coherence … Therefore biophoton emission might deliver important information about the onset and the end of life processes … If necrotic PE [photon emission] appears to be a universal phenomenon … announcing the end of biological life, then its measurements could be a new criterion of biological death.”
“When considering a burst of light as weak as that of the ‘death flash’, we need to keep in mind that light can be stored, inside one of these photonic crystals, also called a ‘light crystal’. These crystals exist at the upper end of the nano-scale, meaning they are about the size of viruses. In laboratories, light crystals have been fabricated in one, two, and three dimensions. One of the reasons why so much work has been done on this is because people wish to use them to construct ‘optical computers’, by which is meant computers that employ photons for the purposes of computation.”
“The neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth Fenwick in their 2008 book The Art of Dying speak of the ‘smoke’, ‘grey mist’, or ‘white mist’ that leaves the body at death. An informant named Penny Bicliffe told them about what she witnessed when her sister died:
I saw a fast-moving ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ appear to leave her body by the side of her mouth on the right. The shock and beauty of it made me gasp. It appeared like a fluid or a gaseous diamond, pristine, sparkly, and pure, akin to the view from above of an eddy in the clearest pool you can imagine … It moved rapidly upwards and was gone."
“A physician named Dr R.B. Hout was present at the death of his aunt and witnessed the following:
My attention was called to something immediately above the physical body, suspended in the atmosphere about two feet above the bed. At first I could distinguish nothing more than a vague outline of a hazy, fog-like substance. There seemed to be only a mist suspended, motionless. But, as I looked, very gradually there grew into my sight a denser, more solid, condensation of this inexplicable vapour.
Then I was astonished to see definite outlines presenting themselves, and soon I saw this fog-like substance was assuming a human form. The features of the face were very similar to the physical face, except that a glow of peace and vigor was expressed instead of age and pain.
The eyes were closed as though in tranquil sleep, and a luminosity appeared to radiate from the spirit body. There was a silver-like substance streaming from the head of the physical body to the head of the spirit body, The colour was a translucent luminous silver radiance. The cord seemed alive with vibrant energy. I could see the pulsations of light stream along the course of it, from the direction of the physical body to the spirit ‘double’. With each pulsation the spirit body became more alive and denser, whereas the physical body became quieter and more nearly lifeless.
Hout said that when the pulsations stopped, various strands of the cord snapped. When the last connecting strand snapped, ‘the body rose to a vertical position, the eyes opened, and a smile broke from the face before it vanished from my sight.’19”
“What does all of this mean? We have flashes and signals to do with when physical life begins and when physical life ends. It appears that these are points when our plasma selves activate and deactivate our physical bodies. But what remains constant must be our bioplasma selves. Bioplasma bodies do not ‘wear out’ through physical wear and tear, it is the physical bodies that do that...."
“Crucial to the development of how these quantum computers work is the way they use plasma – another instance of plasma acting as a gateway for effects to emerge into the macro world.
Are we now able, from the vantage point created by the development of machine intelligence and quantum computers to look at our own evolution and particularly the evolution of our intelligence, in the light of plasma?
In the next chapter, we will expand our understanding of how universal fields not only influence our consciousness, but also help create it. We will also address the issue of consciousness in the Universe as a whole.”
by Robert Temple
Chapter 16: The ‘Death Flash’ and the ‘Life Flash’
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“It has been said that at the moment of death, a flash of light is emitted by the body. There are many reports of this. It applies to all living organisms, not only to people. The evidence concerning this flash of light is extensive, and the speculations concerning it have entered into works of fiction and film.
This is one of the most important details about the relationship between the physical body and any animating plasma body that may co-exist with it. It is what has come to be known as the death flash.”
“All living organisms emit low-intensity light; at the time of death, that radiation is ten to 10,000 times stronger than that emitted under normal conditions. This ‘death flash’ is independent of the cause of death, and reflects in intensity and duration the rate of dying. The vision of intense light reported in near-death experiences may be related to this death flash, which may hold an immense amount of information. The electromagnetic field produced by necrotic radiation, containing energy, internal structure, and information, may permit the continuation of consciousness beyond the death of the body.
This is clearly very important information. Considering how terrified most people are of dying, you would think that this information would be more widely circulated, if only to assuage people’s anxieties. But strangely, few people have heard about it. This is puzzling to me. I think it must be because we live in a world today where intellectuals, mainstream social opinion-formers and mass media all subscribe to a rigidly materialistic view of life, and are intolerant of anyone who challenges this arid position in even the slightest way.”
“Obviously it is impossible to carry out laboratory experiments on dying people in order to look for mists, so it is difficult to imagine how this phenomenon can ever be ‘scientifically proved’, no matter how many accounts exist. It is easy to debunk such accounts if one has fixed ideas that no such thing can happen. It is equally easy to believe everything if one has fixed ideas that anything of that kind is possible.
I have no personal experience of this. I only sat beside a dying person once, the author Rosamond Lehmann, but I summoned a doctor and left before she actually departed a short while later. (Ironically, she had a passionate belief in the survival of death and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.) It is because people essentially believe what they like when evidence is subjective that I have excluded my own subjective information from this book.”
“Does the life of the soul end with death? What should we expect beyond the threshold of this world? These problems, which have always beset mankind, are again making their appearance on the European intellectual horizon. Religions and esoteric knowledge have always taught that death is much more than merely a transformation of living material into dead material. Now that recollections of people who have experienced clinical death [NDEs, or near-death experiences are here referred to] are becoming accepted as real, the question of survival of some vital elements is entering the realms of science.
Many of the physicochemical processes occurring at the time of death are known. These changes proceed in linear fashion with the gradual process of destruction and decomposition. The Gas Discharge Visualisation technique, however, goes beyond the classical biochemical approach, to reveal some aspects of energy and information in the living body. This being so, it became of great interest to find out how this changes after death. In this way we might gain information of how the transition from the dying state to death takes place.”
“Light has been always intrinsically related to the creative power that gives birth to life. Indeed, the cell division, fertilization of an egg and the death of the cell are accompanied by PE [photon emission]. Light is considered as the unitary purposive principle which engenders the Universe [he does not say by whom, but he is presumably referring to some religious traditions and possibly the views of some scientists, especially in light of what he says next about photosynthesis] and that has the nature of first cause. It is an ultimate source of energy on Earth and a driving force of photosynthesis and other photobiological processes …
Recent findings suggest that biophotons convey hidden information coded in the spatiotemporal parameters of the electromagnetic field, such as a degree of coherence … Therefore biophoton emission might deliver important information about the onset and the end of life processes … If necrotic PE [photon emission] appears to be a universal phenomenon … announcing the end of biological life, then its measurements could be a new criterion of biological death.”
“When considering a burst of light as weak as that of the ‘death flash’, we need to keep in mind that light can be stored, inside one of these photonic crystals, also called a ‘light crystal’. These crystals exist at the upper end of the nano-scale, meaning they are about the size of viruses. In laboratories, light crystals have been fabricated in one, two, and three dimensions. One of the reasons why so much work has been done on this is because people wish to use them to construct ‘optical computers’, by which is meant computers that employ photons for the purposes of computation.”
“The neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth Fenwick in their 2008 book The Art of Dying speak of the ‘smoke’, ‘grey mist’, or ‘white mist’ that leaves the body at death. An informant named Penny Bicliffe told them about what she witnessed when her sister died:
I saw a fast-moving ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ appear to leave her body by the side of her mouth on the right. The shock and beauty of it made me gasp. It appeared like a fluid or a gaseous diamond, pristine, sparkly, and pure, akin to the view from above of an eddy in the clearest pool you can imagine … It moved rapidly upwards and was gone."
“A physician named Dr R.B. Hout was present at the death of his aunt and witnessed the following:
My attention was called to something immediately above the physical body, suspended in the atmosphere about two feet above the bed. At first I could distinguish nothing more than a vague outline of a hazy, fog-like substance. There seemed to be only a mist suspended, motionless. But, as I looked, very gradually there grew into my sight a denser, more solid, condensation of this inexplicable vapour.
Then I was astonished to see definite outlines presenting themselves, and soon I saw this fog-like substance was assuming a human form. The features of the face were very similar to the physical face, except that a glow of peace and vigor was expressed instead of age and pain.
The eyes were closed as though in tranquil sleep, and a luminosity appeared to radiate from the spirit body. There was a silver-like substance streaming from the head of the physical body to the head of the spirit body, The colour was a translucent luminous silver radiance. The cord seemed alive with vibrant energy. I could see the pulsations of light stream along the course of it, from the direction of the physical body to the spirit ‘double’. With each pulsation the spirit body became more alive and denser, whereas the physical body became quieter and more nearly lifeless.
Hout said that when the pulsations stopped, various strands of the cord snapped. When the last connecting strand snapped, ‘the body rose to a vertical position, the eyes opened, and a smile broke from the face before it vanished from my sight.’19”
“What does all of this mean? We have flashes and signals to do with when physical life begins and when physical life ends. It appears that these are points when our plasma selves activate and deactivate our physical bodies. But what remains constant must be our bioplasma selves. Bioplasma bodies do not ‘wear out’ through physical wear and tear, it is the physical bodies that do that...."
“Crucial to the development of how these quantum computers work is the way they use plasma – another instance of plasma acting as a gateway for effects to emerge into the macro world.
Are we now able, from the vantage point created by the development of machine intelligence and quantum computers to look at our own evolution and particularly the evolution of our intelligence, in the light of plasma?
In the next chapter, we will expand our understanding of how universal fields not only influence our consciousness, but also help create it. We will also address the issue of consciousness in the Universe as a whole.”