How close to death have YOU been...

Riding a motorcycle once. It was in the old days, when I was wild. I was careering down a residential street at 100mph or so. Way up ahead in the distance, a car pulled out from the left, heading in the direction I was going in (we drive on the left in Ireland). I pulled out to the opposing traffic lane, with the intention of blasting past him. No sweat....That is, until I realised that the car wasn't pulling away all that quickly and was drifting over towards the white line in the middle of the road. Something wasn't right - and I was now bearing down very quickly. Then it became clear. He was intending to take a right turn (across 'my' path) into a side road just a little further up from the one he'd pulled out of - which was why he was accelerating so sluggishly. Just as I realised this, he began his turn. At 100mph on a bike you don't turn, you veer ....in long, graceful (but in these circumstances, useless), arcs. Simple computation told me that I was going to T-bone right into the side of him."NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I screamed in my head.As I screamed it, the cars front end lurched downwards on its suspension. The driver must have looked in his side mirror mid-turn and literally slammed on the brakes. I can still see his front end bouncing back up from the sudden stop. I roared safely pastI've had quite a few accidents on bikes - some of which have been at high speed. I've seen most of them coming/happening, but have never, ever been so positive that I was going to die.Has anyone else been at the point of knowing they were going to die. What went through your mind, was it a nice/not nice feeling, did it change your outlook on life ...This message has been edited by iano, 24-Jan-2006 12:32 AM

How did it feel...to feel like you were actually, really... going to die...if indeed you got that feeling.(Glad your still with us btw)(topic in itself. accident proneness. If the family is together and my sister offers to make the tea and comes strolling back with a tray full of cups of tea, the whole family knows to squirm in their seats as she naviagates her way through the seated family...we've all had scalding cups dropped over us through the years. Mam and Paula (my sister) - "not to be trusted in this regard". That's a family anthem...)This message has been edited by iano, 24-Jan-2006 12:53 AM

Care to elaborate? What happened?

Wow! You should have put a warning on this. Just reading it has me in the grip of claustrophobia. I dive myself and have had a few no viz situation in wrecks - horrid feeling - but have never been more than 10 metres away from an exit. But 300m? Arrggggggh. Can you elaborate? If no cut line and completely entangled (especially so with diving gear on), what happened? What was going through your mind during the 20 minutes when you 'knew' you were going to die? Fear, sad, happy, etheral, focussed, slow-mo, flashbacks?Possibly "no fear of death" would better be described as "no fear of departing from life - which is slightly different?

"Immortal" was the way Cavediver described feeling in the period after coming face to face with death. You had it different perhaps... but a sense of heightened life.Life mostly goes along in humdrum fashion. Perhaps there is nothing like a glimpse of death* in order to drag us out of the humdrum. To elevate things. For instance, the commonly occuring sense of things happening in slow motion when facing death would seem to indicate that the brain processes at a higher than normal speed - the faster you process internal thoughts the slower external time will appear to elapse. Exposure to death, the opposite to life also seems to draw a sharper than normal contrast in this, the ultimate contrast.It is darkness which shows us how light light can be, sad which shows us how happy happy can be. Death that shows us what life is - more actually.If we follow the 'logic' then total (as opposed to partial) exposure to death, must have a collory, total life. How 'good' must life be for a person who actually dies.* the one exception to this seems to be a glimpse of total life - in the birth of a baby{AbE} If our processing speed increases due to partial exposure to death then the 'logic' above means death would cause an infinite increase in processing speed - such that time slows down to a stop. A glimpse of an aspect of eternity perhaps.This message has been edited by iano, 25-Jan-2006 12:57 AM

Omni, it may have rendered me speechless (for all kinds of reasons).But I find that for some reason I like you more.

Why is that schraf?

Maybe it would be possible to expand the 'logic' a little. When we are bored, time appears to go very slowing indeed and "time flies when we are having fun" Not physical death and life perhaps but boredom is life at it poorer side equating to a kind of death and fun being life at it's richer side - a kind of parallels to life

And to think you can fall over, crack your head against the ground and die. Just like that

...and ramped up to Pentium 8 by the sounds of it.Looking back on being certain I was going to die, I remember:- the..er... certainty of it. Not like the multitude of badly calculated risks I took at other times. They were only risks - which always involve an element of (at least to my own thinking) "I can, in theory, survive this". Memories:- this was really going to be it - I was sure to die right now- that death was awful. Not simply in the sense that I was the one who was going to do the dying, more a sense that death itself, as an abstract concept about to become real, was awful. A magnification on the kind of "uugh" feeling you get with roadkill: head thrown back, teeth eternally fixed in a silent scream. I kind of recoiled from it- a sense of me as an individual. Okay we all have that...but in a very accentuated way. I saw the 'value' of a person then. Not in a selfish way, just that everyone, beyond for example, the cut and thrust of places like EvC, is hugely valuable....and then I was past it. Vroooooooooooom. Time to smoke another jointThis message has been edited by iano, 25-Jan-2006 09:08 PM

You reading this Schraf. Some of the downsides of malehood underscored.Omni, in case God eventually does manage to haul your head out of your ass and reveal his purpose for you, read "The Cross and the Switchblade". I don't know where I got the impression from but your ministry sounds like it would be decidely a wrong-side-of-the-tracks one!

After a few times of this you start building up a reaction aginst it it. Locking the back wheel ain't so bad, you shimmy along. Locking the front is a bummer: front end exits stage left or right and you go face first into the tarmac. Experience that a few times and your brain will learn to release the front brake and the front end will magically right itself. Not that it rids you of the problem of what you were braking for in the first place however...Racing back on night with a mate on the bike. Stoned/high speed (again). He knew the way - I didn't. At a bend in the road his brakelight lit up and he dissappeared around it. I dropped anchor, locked up the front of the bike, reacted in the aforementioned way so as to gain control.... and proceeded straight on. I launched into the dark over what transpired to be a very bumpy field and fell off at about 3 mph. Laughing.The driver of a car who we'd just passed stopped to see if I was okay. He pointed to the 8ft wide gap in the solid stone wall which I had just passed through and told me that "a truck punched a hole in that wall only last week"

Ass? Its only a euphamism for the throat-slitting philosophy of denial. No offence.Unless we get some organisational EvC-er who manages to put together a "EvC night-on-the-town" you'll have to wait for heaven Omni - if you do end up there. I'd like to suspect you will.

As was mine. I've seen you around the boards omni - you know where I'm coming from. Us evangelists never switch off you see {AbE} Goes to show the weakness of the written word. Maybe that EvC reunion wouldn't be such a bad idea.This message has been edited by iano, 25-Jan-2006 09:49 PM

Wait until you see the next bit...