[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Continued:

I’d like to end by telling you about the experience of an old friend of mine, the violinist Paul
Robertson, who was leader of the Medici Quartet. About six years ago Paul had an aortic
aneurysm. During a half-hour operation to repair a tear in his aorta, Paul was under general
anaesthetic and unconscious. His heart was stopped and his head cooled to prepare his brain for a period of brain oxygen starvation.

After his recovery, he wrote a book. Paul writes that he was fully aware that he was dying, moving from this state to experience of the potential unification of his consciousness with that of the universe. ‘As I lay there waiting,I felt myself die – beautifully, ecstatically, transcendentally. I saw Eternity and shed the whole of myself joyfully in order to become unified with it.’

Paul recovered, and despite all medical predictions that he would be badly damaged and
would certainly never play the violin again, he did eventually manage this too. He lived
another five years and during this time we talked a great deal about death and dying. His
description of what it felt like to die was, I thought, beautiful and void of fear. When he did
actually die, in 2016, his wife and family were with him and his wife told me what happened
shortly before he died. ‘Paul woke up (slightly) from a deep ‘sleep’ and told me I must let
Peter Fenwick know that ‘there is nothing new – we’ve all been there before!’’
So what is my final conclusion? Are these experiences, so widely reported and with so many features in common, hallucinations? They are so widespread and similar that we need to go
beyond our reductionist materialistic science to find an explanation. What can we say about
the consciousness that seems to transcend and go beyond human life? Only that it appears
to be a multi-dimensional space, full of energy, positive emotion and information.

Source (Perceptions of Beyond the Near Death Experience
and at the End of Life Dr. Peter Fenwick)