A line from Liber LXV reads: “let me die before the hour, falling dead into thine infinite stream,” clearly evincing an enthusiastic embrace dissolution and being smothered in the kisses of Nuit. Yet current research indicates that you might be able to dip in and out of said stream. According to a BBC feature:
“With Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland, College Park, he [Peter Rhee] has shown that it’s possible to keep bodies in ‘suspended animation’ for hours at a time. The procedure, so far tested on animals, is about as radical as any medical procedure comes: it involves draining the body of its blood and cooling it more than 20C below normal body temperature.
“Once the injury is fixed, blood is pumped once again through the veins, and the body is slowly warmed back up. “As the blood is pumped in, the body turns pink right away,” says Rhee. At a certain temperature, the heart flickers into life of its own accord.”…
“We’ve all been brought up to think death is an absolute moment – when you die you can’t come back,” says Sam Parnia, at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. “It used to be correct, but now with the basic discovery of CPR we’ve come to understand that the cells inside your body don’t become irreversibly ‘dead’ for hours after you’ve ‘died’… Even after you’ve become a cadaver, you’re still retrievable.”
Read the entire article here: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140704-i-bring-the-dead-back-to-life
Now of course some may regard hanging on to a particular incarnation overlong akin to holding onto your flip phone and throwing away that free offer to get a free iPhone that shows up in the mail.
Thanks to Soror Hypatia for the tip!
