A Change of Heart: está lido.
entre os pareceres finais que alguns médicos vão tentando esboçar, recorto este.

Larry Dossey, who offers several possible explanations, is a physician of internal medicine and the author of, among other books, Recovering The Soul and Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the practice of Medicine. He is also executive editor of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.

« The possibility that a living person might take on the personality traits, behaviors, and even memories of a deceased individual is an ancient concept. This is the idea behind reincarnation, the belief that there is a continuity between individuals living and dead.

Can donated organs mediate such a continuity? And if so, how? The biologist Lyall Watson, in his book The Nature of Things: The secret Life of Inanimate Objects, proposes that physical items with which we are intimate contact can somehow take on our "emotional fingerprints" and store our thoughts and feelings. Later, under the right conditions, they can come to life, as it were, and act in surprisingly lifelike ways. Watson has collected a vast array of examples suggesting such an effect - cars starting up by themselves and driving off, for examples, and objects such as rings, jewelry, and dolls that behave as if they were alive.

If inanimate objects can store our feelings and thoughts, why not our own body parts? But how this might happen is not clear.

Far more likely, in my view, is that the consciousness of the donor is fundamentally united with the conciousness of the recipient, which enable you to gain information about your donor. Receiving the donor's heart did not actually cause a mechanical transfer of experiences from one person to another, but somehow intensified a mental connection that was already present.

Surveys show that most people experience, at least occasionally, phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. And many of us have experiences suggesting that our minds are indeed united (...) We are gradually arriving at a picture of conscoiusness that I call «nonlocal mind» - what our ancestors called The Universal Mind, or the One Mind. In this view, the mind is not limited by time or space; it cannot be localized or confined to individual brains and bodies, or even to the present. At some dimension of consciusness we are all united as a single, seamless whole. But most of us prefer ti retain the idea that we are solitary individuals, isolated physically and nentally from everyone else.

Throughout history, however, people have discovered ways of realizing their mental connections with others. Sometimes physical objects serve this purpose, as in a ring that helps two lovers realize their unity(...) Some palm readers acknowledge that the palm is merely a device, a go-between that allows the palmist to enter that realm of consciousness where information about another person can be accessed. I wonder: could the heart that you received have been functioning as a palm, enabling you to focus attention in a dimension that would normally be closed to you, and to gain information about your donor?

I also wonder: are other organ recipients having similar experiences? Before it became acceptable to speak of them, we believed that near-death experiences were rare. But when people who underwent ressuscitation in modern hospitals were surveyed, it turned out that these experiences were actually rather common. Post-transplant experiences such as yours may also be more widespread than we think.»