Quotes from Marjorie Hines Woollacott

NDEs seem instead to provide direct evidence for a type of mental functioning that varies "inversely, rather than directly, with the observable activity of the nervous system." Such evidence, we believe, fundamentally conflicts with the conventional doctrine that brain processes produce consciousness, and supports the alternative view that brain activity normally serves as a kind of filter, which somehow constrains the material that emerges into waking consciousness.[

found that with less effort in meditation, I could relax into a quiet, aware state much more easily.

My experience of meditation was different from one day to the next, but a common thread emerged: the way I felt afterward. I began to experience a quiet satisfaction from my daily practice of quieting my mind.

The word that comes to mind is "equanimity." After meditating, I was better able to watch what happened around me without jumping into reactions.

There is a level accessed in meditation that is beyond the neuron. This level has many names; one we could use is infinite awareness.

Dr. P. was diagnosed with a massive tumor in the parts of his brain involved in integrating visual sensory information and binding it into a whole scene. It is this "binding" capacity that allows us to recognize the sum of the parts as a person or a fire hydrant or a hat. Like other patients with this problem, Dr. P. could easily identify individual sensory stimuli but had lost the visual processing circuitry that binds these separate features into a recognizable whole.

suggest that the meditation and near-death experiences reported by many are glimpses into a higher reality—and by this I mean a reality more subtle than the one to which our nervous system usually has access. At those moments in our lives when the mind has been quieted, we may indeed go "beyond" our nervous system's usual capacities. Then the consciousness within us, freed from perceiving the machinations of the mind, is able to perceive its own expanded form.