Kelly of the Phoenix
Well-Known Member
Pretty sure dying distorts perception.
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Morphine for the Dying
- Thread starter Windwalker
- Start date
Kelly of the Phoenix
Well-Known Member
That is chemical restraint and bad.
As I said before, this is not to debate the merits of the belief, but to address those who do believe it facing a choice about the dying process. I very specifically did not want this thread to be derailed by arguments about whether the believe is valid or not, who has evidence, what constitutes a good belief, etc. Those are debates outside the focus of this thread.
That said however, since I feel satisfied with most of the responses to this thread and feel my questions and concerns have been addressed by most....
Regarding "proof". Again, who cares? I'm not making a case to say this is what others should also believe as some objective reality that we use the tools of empiricism to discover. These are by nature subjective. What you originally had said is that my views were based upon ignorance. And that is simply false in my case. They are based upon how I internalize and understand my own personal experience.
Views based upon experience, are not remotely the same as blind speculation based upon ignorance. Experience is information. Ignorance is a lack of information. My views are informed from my own direct experience, as it is for anyone about anything in their lives, God or otherwise.
It's interesting that you describe that as something being 'witnessed". This suggests you see it as something that is external to ourselves. I think this is likely the source of the discoconnect for you in your thinking, with what I am saying. It is not something I witnessed. It is something I experienced internally, subjectively, within myself, and from that everything I see in the world was illuminated by and with that experience.
Think of it like feelings of profound love and joy within yourself. When you experience that inside yourself, everything you see, and think outside yourself, is illuminated through that perceptual lens. So too with the experience of the Divine. It wells up from the deepest unimaginable part of ourselves and explodes forth like Light, and everything is experienced, both internally and externally by that state of being, through that state of transcendent consciousness. I had the impression that you understand what higher states of consciousness are about?
Immersion is a great word. Transformation. Transfiguration. Transrational. These all touch upon the nature of that experience. And there is no way possible to say that that is the same as "an argument from ignorance". That is why I said "phooey".
Do you believe that was my intent? I don't believe anyone can know what the taste of an orange is through rational debates. The only way to know what that is, is to taste it yourself. Until then, it's your problem to try to figure out if their descriptions of the taste of an orange is real or not. And the "argument from ignorance" is actually what the one who's never tasted an orange is making in challenging the descriptions or those who have.
It's fascinating to me how you, and a couple other posters imagine I am trying to prove God in this. I see that as a knee-jerk reaction probably coming from the sins of our own past, trying to be little apologists for God beliefs in defense of our belief choices, and projecting that on others.
My only objection here was you saying my views are based on ignorance. I have experience, and that is not a lack of information I draw from for myself. My ideas about it, are not fixed or static. But I do reject dull materialist "explanations" for it, as more just rationalizations to explain it away, to minimize it, rather than being anything that begins to address the depth and import of such experiences. Be those as they may be, it does not change the reality of the experience itself.
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Or it could actually reveal the truth of living in that moment. I do believe that personally. Spiritual awakening, is also a dying to the egoic self.
anna.
but mostly it's the same
I don't think they give it out as a matter of course, and that's having seen both of my parents through hospice care. I understand what you're saying though and you're not alone in it, so perhaps reading some people in the field of medicine and hospice care may be helpful to you. Here's one, and there are a lot more at the link.
David Frechette
Registered Nurse at Hospice Care
Does morphine kill patients in hospice care?
As an R.N. with 21 years experience working in Hospice care, I can tell you that, as long as it is given in a prescribed and “safe” dose (ie within hospice dosing guidelines), morphine does not directly cause death, or even “hasten” death. However, I have at times come across people who have this “false understanding” about morphine (usually lay people, but once in awhile even medical professionals, including a few physicians, have expressed this fallacy). They might get this idea from opinions they have read or heard. Also, they may have had direct experience observing or perhaps even assisting in caring for a person who was in hospice care and close to death….and then after receiving a dose or 2 of morphine, the patient may have expired within minutes (or even an hour or two), and the observer might have “jumped to the conclusion” that the dose of morphine had the effect of causing or hastening death. In philosophy, there is a “fallacy” which, in Latin, is written: “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” . Just because one specific event follows another does not necessarily mean that there is a definitive “cause/effect” relationship at work. In my personal experience, people who are actively dying due to a terminal disease will die at around the same rate with or without a dose or two of an opiate. The morphine simply helps the person to be a little more comfortable while “nature takes its course”. Of course, if a person is given a large overdose of just about any medication (but especially opiates) it can result in death. Also, if a person is highly allergic to morphine, they could have an anaphylactic response, possibly resulting in death. But for the record, if given in a prescribed and “responsible” way, morphine does NOT kill hospice patients. Lastly, I would recommend checking out the Quora section related to questions about medical care (and about “hospice” in particular). I recently read a few commentaries written by other hospice professionals (RN’s, physicians, etc.), and I found them to be interesting, well-written and informative.
I actually did not have any concern that it hastens death, but I can see how some might imagine that. I didn't imagine that myself however. My father's transitioning stages took place over 3 full days, and they periodically came in giving him morphine under the tongue. I didn't see any hastening there. My mother passed on the same day she began her transitioning, within a matter of maybe 8 hours or so, as she had already started the process during her sleep. She had told me the night before she just wanted to go in her sleep, and I told her that would be okay for her to do that, essentially giving her permission, which is what I felt her asking in saying that to me. They gave her morphine as well.
Where I am unclear is just how much the morphine they are being given affects their minds. Perhaps small doses relieves whatever discomfort they may experience, and not make the 4 sheets to the wind. I don't really know the answer to that.
anna.
but mostly it's the same
Hmm. Well, I've had morphine in the ER and it didn't have any cognitive affect on my mind. That's anecdotal, so keep on with your research, hopefully there's info out there that will give you the answers you seek.
PureX
Veteran Member
The ignorance I was referring to is the ignorance inherent in the human condition. And that is an ignorance that cannot be overcome by 'belief'. Like it or not, you are as succumbed to that ignorance as any and all of us are. The only honest way to deal with it is to just accept it as a fact.
But ultimately, we humans have no "direct experience" of anything. We are 'beings' that exist within our brains, which are then trapped within our bodies, behind the 'firewall' of our senses. And all of these forms of existential abstraction keep us apart from the great 'what is'.
I often argue with philosophical materialists, who would assert that if someone takes an hallucinogenic drug and "sees God" that we can know they didn't really see God because we know what they saw was an hallucination of God caused by the drug. And my response is that just because we know how the 'vision' happened does not mean that it did not happen. Or that it was not a vision of God as they are just blindly presuming. But I would point out to you that the opposite is equally true: that not knowing how a vision of God could or has occurred does not automatically mean that it was a vision of God that occurred. There is just too much that we don't know to honestly make such presumptions.
I do. But I also know that I am not capable of comprehending such an experience. Not honestly. I apparently possess the capacity to experience, it, but I clearly do not possess the capacity to comprehend the experience. I can only marvel in awe and wonder.
How do you know you aren't buying into a spell cast by your own endorphins? How could you possibly tell?
The sun shines down, hard, on a tree in the middle of an open field. The tree blocks out the sunlight, beneath it. The grass growing beneath the tree, in the shade, stays cool to the touch of a small boy's hand. Does the small boy now know the truth of the sun?
I don't think you're trying to 'prove God'. But I think you may have 'fallen for' your own belief in God to the point where it ceases to be an act of faith, and becomes an act of pretense. If I'm wrong, so be it. If I'm right, so be it. As a fellow human, I simply offer that the observation that the grass is cooler under the tree on a sunny day. What that says about the sun we will each have to determine for ourselves.
We are all ignorance. And profoundly so. I see no reason for anyone to take issue with this unless they are trying to maintain the delusion that we are not.
Experiences are just experiences. They come, they go. We consider them, we evaluate them, we are wrong about them almost always, but we keep on trying to be right. Such is the human condition. We fulfill our duty to existence by being what we are. Which is profoundly ignorant most of the time about almost everything.
It's a great gift; this profound ignorance. And we should treat it as such. Because it's also the gift of awe, and wonder, mystery, and freedom of choice. Which is why I try to avoid falling for my own "beliefs" too much.
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Your original comment to me in post #41 said, "It's an argument from ignorance. Any ideas we have about death are just supposition." You are here now speaking of a philosophical ignorance inherent in the human condition. Why bother to claim that my view of consciousness beyond the body is an argument from ignorance, when everything on earth is?
With that logic, so is what you are saying here now is, "just supposition". It's rather pointless. It sounded to me like you had an idea that I was claiming facts, when I was speaking of my personal views based upon my own experiences. Of course my ideas are not absolute. I've never claimed otherwise. But we all take our own experiences, and form our views based upon those. What's the point in even bring that obviousness up?
I have posted countless posts saying that everything we believe to be true about something, is all a matter of a mediated experience. No one can know the direct truth of something, the "in itself" of something. I say this mainly to the neo-atheist who thinks science has a direct line to absolute truth. They claim their beliefs, that science supports for them are 'reality". I know better than this.
I do not claim that my views of it are absolute. But when I say I had a "direct experience", I mean exactly that. It was not the experience of someone else. It was a firsthand experience. I directly had an experience. It's not supposition or speculation, based upon a lack of experience or ignorance. That is all I meant, and do mean. I do understand that any and all subsequent ideas I may have about that direct experience, are mediated by the filters of my mind and the limitations of language. I always hold my views a provisional, modifiable, flexible, etc, because of that fact. How I have thought about it over the years, has in fact changed because I allow for all of that.
I'm kind of surprised after years of me posting here, you know so little about how I think about these things. For instance, this is a great thread from many years ago that says exactly these things: The Impossibility of Scriptural Authority
Sure. I only ever said that this has shaped how I have come to view things. I am not, did not, will not claim this is "evidence" of some idea of God or the afterlife I have as objectively factual. Not sure why you make the assumptions you are, other than some projection of something you fear in yourself from your own past? Have I ever claimed otherwise to your knowledge?
Personally, my ideas about it, hardly begin to touch the depth of what the experience actual was for me. No words, no concepts, can possibly begin to talk about it. That's why it is best described as "ineffable" beyond words, beyond description, beyond comprehension. It goes beyond mind and belief. I absolutely love how Meister Eckhart put is, "I pray God make me free of God [concepts and ideas about God], so that I may know God in his unconditioned being". "Not knowing", is the key to Awakening to what is. Not holding it with the mind conceptually. I more than understand this.
Yet, that does not mean we cannot say anything at all about the experience! We just understand that 'fingers pointing to the moon, are not the moon itself'. Most "believers" make that mistake, thinking their beliefs reflect the actuality itself.
Nor do I. Nor have I ever once claimed otherwise. But there is a difference between comprehension, which is a function of the conceptual mind, and apprehension, which is a function of experience. I don't comprehend the Divine, but I certainly do apprehend it through experience, which leave 'uncertainty', as it should be. Only the 'true believer' places the Divine inside of their conceptual, theological frameworks, or boxes. I do not.
But you also know that that experience is really real, as dear Einstein himself so wonderfully stated:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
- Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies
- Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies
That is what I mean, and I hope you yourself recognize as valid. In the end it is Mystery, the Unknown, yet "really exists". That is the difference between apprehension, versus comprehension. Comprehension is a mediated affair, through our 'dull faculties', while apprehension knows it "really exists". It's not a mental speculation. This is describing direct, or 'firsthand experience'. This is exactly what I mean by that.
I have no doubt those are involved, as they are in any experience of anything in life, from the simple and mundane, to the profound and transcendent. How do you know you really love your wife, and it's not just your chemicals putting you under a spell? Or that you believe life is beautiful, is not just an illusion?
How do you know, you are are actually alive even? This sort of argument is ultimately just intellectual, and silly. We take these things are true, even if we don't really understand that all of it is just vibrating strings at some level, and has no actual reality as we believe it does. But who really lives life like that? Do you? If so, don't stop at things like NDEs. Go all the way, and don't believe anything at all is true, including the chair you are sitting on. That's a great exercise in deconstructing reality for the sake of expanding perception, but at the end of the day, you still have to do the laundry, right?
You are wrong, and I fail to see anything in what I have said that would lead you to imagine I have "fallen for [my] own belief in God". I am quite aware my beliefs about the Divine, are just those: beliefs. Mental constructs. But they are, fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself...
Irate State
Äkta människor
I mean if your thing is letting humans suffer.
Besides you already made the giving birth statement, and got a pretty good rebuttal.
Not sure how anyone possibly could take what I said as saying make humans suffer. It was only always and ever, about personal choice. Interesting how people hear things like this that was not said. Backgrounds with fundamentalist thinking projecting onto others?
My point is, like with childbirth, maybe there is something that we miss by getting doped up when going through natural processes. That's all. If someone is having extreme pain, like dying of cancer, I see no issue with that. Why do you think I do? That's the real question here.
Irate State
Äkta människor
I think you also twisted what I replied but n my first comment.
And if you ask me what I think you do is not very clear. Had I have to throw an answer I'd say there's a Pascal's wager behind your op.
No. My OP was simply this. IF you believed that your transition into death was not the end, but simple a change, then that question might have relevance to you to ask. If it did not, then it might not, but it also might, as maybe grandpa Joe as an atheist wants to be lucid in saying his last farewells to the family, rather than loopy and floating in a sea of narcotics.
You see? It's only about personal choice, based on your own personal views, and possible reasons beyond making that choice. Never, as some blanket thing shoved down people's throats. This has to do with one's personal faith facing death, not a "should" for everyone as a matter of course.
Fallen Prophet
Well-Known Member
No - I do not think that has any bearing. Everyone is going to die. Nothing can "cloud" that experience.