Notice Board

The Religious Studies Department and the Khan Islamic Studies Endowment Fund presents

The Near Death Experience - Fact, Fallacy or Myth in the Making?

Guest Speaker:  Prof. Anne White (Religious Studies, University of Calgary)
Day/Date:  Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Time:  7:00 p.m.
Location:  C-620 (University Hall)

Carl Jung once stated that death was psychologically as important as birth and for that reason, if seen in correct psychological perspective, was not an end but a goal. Sadly, in our secular death denying modern culture, little is done to address the anxiety that many people experience when faced with their own prospective demise or that of a significant other. Psychologically, in our acts of avoidance of the inevitable, we tend to ignore the deep mental and spiritual processing of one of the most important events of our lives – that being death. The question of the Near Death Experience (NDE) and the claims of those who assert they have experienced this phenomenon stand often in stark contrast to those who refute any accounts of the NDE’rs. The fact is that no matter how much controversy or explanation is presented, the reality of the NDE for many of those who have experienced this event represents a life-changing shift in spiritual perspective. Indeed, in many ways, when the experience is respectfully examined it becomes evident to the researcher that for one who has undergone the trauma of this very ‘different’ state of deep consciousness it is often closely associated with the mystical and transcendental. Thus it forms the basis from which the human imagination, spiritual inspiration and psychic experience become real in the context of religion in the making