People who undergo near-death experiences (NDEs) sometimes
report that they perceived from an out-of-body perspective things that happened
while they were medically unconscious. Occasionally they even give
astonishingly precise information such as the conversations among the surgical
staff – information they couldn’t have known by normal means. Such veridical
reports beg the question: how were these people conscious when they were
unconscious? Gita wisdom explains that unconsciousness is a state of
consciousness. The Bhagavad-gita (02.17) indicates that consciousness is the
energy of our spiritual essence – the soul. This energy radiates through the
body, enabling us to be aware of our surroundings and of ourselves. Our
consciousness goes through four states depending on how far it extends outwards
from the soul. When consciousness extends through the subtle body to the gross
body, that state is our standard wakeful state, known as jagruti. When
consciousness extends only till the subtle body, that state, called svapna, is
the state of normal sleep. When consciousness doesn’t extend even up to the
subtle body, that state is called sushupti, deep dreamless sleep. When
consciousness gets redirected to the spiritual level, that state is called
samadhi, spiritual trance. NDEs occur at the svapna level of consciousness. The
trauma of NDEs causes the soul along with the subtle body to temporarily
separate from the gross body. Because the consciousness of near-death
experiencers no longer extends to their physical body, they report their own
surgery from an onlooker’s perspective, not the operated’s perspective – they
see themselves being cut, yet don’t feel pain. Veridical NDEs comprise persuasive
scientific evidence for the Gita teaching that our consciousness comes from a
non-physical source. What some near-death experiencers perceive briefly – that
we are more than our bodies – we all can realize clearly by raising our
consciousness according to the Gita’s yoga teachings
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