I haven't slept a wink and I caught some bug on the way back here.
I guess we still have to use masks in crowded settings.
I feel like I'm having a near-death experience.
Indeed.
And this is the topic of today's video.
And I want you to know.
I will not let death interfere with my daily schedule.
I will release videos for your edification and entertainment.
Even post-mortem, death in such other trifles will not prevent me from fulfilling my duty to humanity.
Because I'm pro-social and communal and bloody sick if you ask me.
Okay, Shoshanim.
Let's delve right into someone else's near-death experience.
A few days ago, there was a fascinating study published.
Mind you, there were only four people involved. But even so, the results were nothing less than startling.
These people were having a cardiac arrest followed by, essentially, death. They died while being connected to an electroencephalogram, EEG machine.
A machine that records the various types of waves in the brain.
And in two of these four people, there was a burst of gamma wave activity.
A gamma wave is a very interesting wave.
Actually, possibly the most important wave.
Gamma wave or gamma rhythm.
It's a kind of neural oscillation. It's a frequency between 25 and 140 Hertz.
And gamma waves are correlated with what is called large-scale brain network activity. Also known as cognitive phenomena, such as working memory, attention, perceptual grouping, and consciousness.
Yes, gamma waves are the waves of consciousness.
And that's why we can modulate gamma waves via meditation or neurostimulation.
We also observe an alteration in gamma wave activity in mood disorders, cognitive disorderssuch as dementia, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.
So gamma waves seem to be super crucial.
When these people were dying, as they were dying, their heartbeat picked up and then their brain erupted with gamma waves.
It's as if they have regained consciousness at the very second of departing this world.
Now, reports of near-death experiences, and I refer you to the two books by Moody, reports of near-death experiences have been around for eternity. These are people who clinically died, whether their heart stopped, their brain stopped, they were pronounced dead, and then suddenly returned from the dead to us to tell us about their experiences.
And the experiences were uniform and almost monolithic. All over the world, different cultures, different societies, different periods in history, people reported the same, having died and resuscitated or reborn or whatever you want to call it. All of them described, or most of them described, a white light, visits from departed loved ones or meeting long deceased people, people who passed away a long time before, hearing voices, and floating above one's body, looking down as if from the ceiling, looking down upon the medical proceedings.
The attempts at resuscitation, the panic, the urgency, the emergency, the bleeping machines, the IV drips, the sweaty doctors, the nurses. It's as if, it's a kind of astral voyage, if you wish, as if these people have abandoned their bodies down there and then soared to the ceiling and contemplated the whole scene in a kind of disinterested way, as if they were watching a movie.
There were no emotional reactions.
This is the classic near-death experience. A tunnel leading to a white light meeting deceased or dead, significant others floating above one's body, hearing voices. Some of these voices carry messages, messages of encouragement.
And so the new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. And it's, to the best of my knowledge, it's the first study to provide evidence of a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in a dying brain.
There were various scientists involved, Bojijin and others, and so Mashur and others. So if you want to look it up, you can find it easily online.
Now, signatures of gamma activation were recorded before in the dying brains of animals and in people who suffered hypoxia, a loss of oxygen, following cardiac arrest.
Mashur says how vivid experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the process of dying is a neuro-scientific paradox.
"Dr. Bojijin has led an important study that helps shed light on the underlying neurophysiologic mechanisms," says Mashur.
I want to compare this near-death experience to the experience of being a narcissist. And may I remind you, this is a first-hand account.
The narcissist is in a constant state of near-death experience, constant. He never emerges. He is never resuscitated. He is never reborn. He is never resurrected. He is in a limbo area between life and death, about to die, but not yet, zombified but functional.
And so this constant state of near-death experience is perceived by the narcissist as life itself.
The narcissist has no other experience of reality, of life and of the world. He inhabits an inner landscape of internal objects. It's a kind of frozen nightmare. He is absent from reality.
In contrast, borderlines are in constant state of near-death experience as well.
But they are not absent from the world. They are absent from their inner world. So they are like mirror images. And no wonder borderlines and narcissists fit well together. It's like a lock and key.
So to summarize, the narcissist inhabits an inner landscape and is divorced from reality. The borderline inhabits reality and is divorced from her inner landscape.
In both a real estate of kind of suspended mental animation. The abused and traumatized children who become later narcissists and borderlines were not allowed to become. They were not allowed to self-actualize. These children were not allowed to separate, to individuate, to set boundaries, to recognize the distinction between themselves and the world.
The individual, the divisible.
So these children remain stuck in a phase that is partly symbiotic, partly merged and fused and enmeshed, usually with a maternal figure, and partly emergent, partly about to enter the world, about to explore reality, about to attempt to become distinct.
And yet they never make it.
Abused and traumatized children who later become narcissists and psychopaths and sorry, borderlines and adulthood, never make it into becoming persons. They don't acquire personhoods. They do not develop an integrated self.
Narcissists have no ego. That's the irony. Look it up on my channel. I have several videos about this issue.
Narcissists have no ego, no self. Same with borderlines.
And in this state of suspended mental animation, borderlines and narcissists are already dead. Their bodies have to catch up with the psychological reality, but psychologically they're dead. They're dead inside.
It's a state of emptiness, as Otto Kernberg had observed. It's a state of an empty schizoid core, as Jeffrey Seinfeld, Grannon, Winnicott and many others had observed.
At the core of the narcissist and at the core of the borderline, there is no core. There's no identity. There's nobody there. It's totally vacated. It's a void. It's deep space. It's a black hole.
And so whenever the narcissist or the borderline experience themselves, they go through a near-death experience. They are near-death because they are death-reified.
The introjects in the narcissist's mind represent significant figures. The same way the typical near-death experience patient meets up with deceased relatives.
The narcissist constantly interacts with internal objects and introjects that represent long-departed significant others. Healthy people do it also. It's the same happens with normal people, but they also interact with external objects.
The narcissist is confined, limited to, interacting only with internal objects which represent dead, departed people that abandoned him.
So the narcissist's mind is a giant graveyard. It's a cemetery of people who have passed through his life and then died or just walked off, walked away.
The narcissist's introjects and internal objects are his only reality. And he wanders among them and he interacts with them as if they were alive, but they're not alive, of course. They're figments. They're fiction.
In other words, they're all dead. And he wanders dead among the dead. Dead talking to the dead. A kind of psychic in his own world, a medium.
And he tries to revive and resuscitate and resurrect these internal objects. He tries to imbue them with life, but he has no life to give because he is not.
The narcissist was not allowed to become. There's nobody there. There's no person there. So there's nothing he can give.
Sometimes the narcissist wants to give, desperately attempts to give, but there's no giver.
Borderlines, on the other hand, depersonalize. Depersonalization is a dissociative mechanism. It's the feeling that you're not inside your body. It's as if your body does not belong to you. It's an alien, estranged entity.
Borderlines go through this experience of depersonalization in sex very often. Borderlines depersonalize whenever they're stressed, whenever they're anxious, whenever they anticipate rejection, humiliation and abandonment.
Borderlines dissociation, depersonalization, derealization and amnesia resembles very much the way a near-death experience typical patient hovers above her body and observes the resuscitation attempts.
The near-death experience patient, even mentally healthy one, divorces her body, exits her body, floats above her body, observes her body, and that's precisely what the borderline does.
The borderline clinically is in the state of near-death experience whenever she's stressed, whenever she's attacked, whenever she's anxious, whenever she catastrophizes. Near-death experience is the most common experience of the narcissist and the psychopath, and the borderline.
I don't know what's happening to me today with the psychopath, maybe because borderline is a secondary cycle.
But, okay, near-death experience is the most common experience of the narcissist and the borderline.
Both the borderline and the narcissist hear voices the same way a near-death experience patient does.
But the borderline and the narcissist do not misidentify or misconstrue their sources of the voices as external. In other words, it's not a psychotic element, it's not hyper-reflexivity.
The near-death experience patient is actually clinically psychotic at the moment of death because he believes the voices are coming from the outside. At least these are the reports given to us by people who've returned from the dead.
So there is an element of psychosis in near-death experience that is absent in narcissism and in borderline except in extremes, except in extreme situations.
In extreme situations, the borderline and the narcissist become psychotic. They have what we call psychotic micro-episodes. And there they converge with the typical near-death experience patient and they hear voices the same way he does.
All in all, the narcissist experience of life itself is an experience of death.
The borderline experience of life itself is an experience of death and they, as opposed to classic near-death experience patients, they never come back. They never have hope to be revived or resuscitated or resurrected.
In borderline, the prognosis is pretty good after age 45. The disorder itself can no longer be diagnosed.
But dysfunctional behavior patterns persist lifelong.
Still, borderline is a lot more optimistic as personality disorders go than narcissism. The narcissist is utterly beyond hope and beyond redemption.