TheBanyanTree: Philosophy, The Heart and Other Questions

[PJMoney]

I've read about people who've claimed to have experienced some sort of
personality change following an organ transplant.  I can't recall whether
these relate to all varieties of organ transplants but I must say that the
idea of someone experiencing a personality change after, say, a corneal
transplant sounds a bit preposterous.

There's quite an argument going on these days about whether the mind (soul?)
is an emergent property of the material wetware of the brain or whether it
is, indeed, immaterial.  Of course, the idea of anything being immaterial
offends those who have already made up their minds that matter is all there
is.  They've come up with all sorts of plausible-sounding, materialist
explanations for what we now call "near death experiences".  They claim
these are due to the brain being starved of oxygen, or due to the effects of
anaesthetic drugs.  Ketamine is a drug that is frequently mentioned as
causing mental effects similar to those reported by people who've had near
death experiences.

But none of these possible material causes explain how a person can see
things while their eyes are shut.  None of them explains how a person can
hear, and subsequently accurately report on, conversations going on several
rooms away, several floors away, or down in the street.       

I've had an out-of-body experience.  It happened when I was a child of about
9.  It was the middle of the night and I found myself up near the ceiling
looking down on myself as I lay in my bed.  Then my body turned over, I
found myself back in my body, and promptly went back to sleep.  In the
morning I discovered that my pillow, face and hair were all covered in
vomit.  I can only presume that the out-of-body experience was somehow
related to near suffocation.  One thing I do not presume is that I was in my
body the whole time.  The experience was too clear, too calm and too
ordinary to make me think it had anything to do with a brain going haywire. 

A year or two previously my very much larger sister had tried to suffocate
me with a pillow.  There was no out-of-body experience then; just
considerable panic and outrage on my part.

A year or two later I was anaesthetised with ether when I was about to
undergo surgery for appendicitis.  That induced a sort of spiralling,
tunnel-of-light experience but there was nothing pleasant, or out-of-body,
about it.  I was worried that I would fall off the table but then everything
faded to black. 

So I'm saying that I don't believe the mind, or soul, or spirit, is
necessarily bound to the brain.  A brain can die, I'm sure, while the mind
that "rode" on it lives on in some other way about which we can know nothing
until we come face to face, mind to mind, spirit to spirit, with the Great
Spirit, the Author of Life, from whom all life flows.  The heart is merely a
pump.