The Life of Psi

Readers should take note of a new section in Chapter 6 entitled “Psi Phenomena.” We have discussed parapsychology in previous editions but have been very critical of the research and skeptical of the claims made in the field. And although we still have strong reservations about most of the research in parapsychology, we find the recent work on telepathy worthy of careful consideration.

(From the Preface to Introduction to Psychology by Richard L. Atkinson – 1990: quoted in The Spiritual Brain, page 169) 

In science, the acceptance of new ideas follows a predictable, four-stage sequence. In Stage 1, skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much the idea challenges conventional wisdom. In Stage 2, skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely weak. Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important, but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined. Stage 4 is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy.

(Dean Radin: The Conscious Universe – page 1)  

In 2002 I read a fascinating book on parapsychology by H.J. Irwin. My recent reading of another intriguing book, The Spiritual Brain, triggered a memory of that experience.

Irwin’s book is a rigorous examination of the work done up to that point in the field of parapsychology. I was still working in the NHS at the time and swimming against all the powerful reductionist currents of thought flowing along the broad estuary of mental health work.  Reading this book was yet another attempt to find a sound empirical basis for my scepticism about materialism.

That sounds like a futile ambition, you may think. But I am not alone in cherishing that hope. Beauregard and O’Leary quote Eccles and Robinson with approval in The Spiritual Brain as saying (page 125):

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.

So that makes five of us at least.

Where a nonmaterialist explanation works well

What reactivated my interest of more than decade ago was Beauregard and O’Leary’s list of things that a nonmaterialist perspective can explain better than a materialist one (ibid.)

For example, a nonmaterialist view can account for the neuroimaging studies that show human subjects in the very act of self-regulating their emotions by concentrating on them. It can account for the placebo effect (the sugar pill that cures, provided the patient is convinced that it is a potent remedy). A nonmaterialist view can also offer science-based explanations of puzzling phenomena that are currently shelved by materialist views. One of these is psi, the apparent ability of some humans to consistently score above chance in controlled studies of mental influences on events. Another is the claim, encountered surprisingly often among patients who have undergone trauma or major surgery, that they experienced a life-changing mystical awareness while unconscious.

My clearest memory of Irwin’s book concerned precisely the massive amount of meticulously generated evidence in favour of psi, especially in terms of subjects’ accurately predicting random numbers at a level slightly but consistently above chance over thousands of carefully controlled trials.  Not a dramatic finding, perhaps, not like apparently successful mediumship or seemingly bending spoons on television, but in an important way more compelling and significant than any of those because all possibility of fakery had been eliminated to leave it beyond all reasonable doubt that something materialists couldn’t explain was going on.

Rear-guard materialism

Most materialists, little to their credit or credibility, resolutely refused to look carefully at the evidence as they knew in advance that such findings were impossible and must be the result of fraud or sloppy methodology. So much for science’s supposed openness to all evidence. In fact, it has always been blinded by its current paradigms, so there is really no surprise here either.

Beauregard and O’Leary quote a particularly startling example of materialistic zealotry. Grossman tells of his encounters with materialists about NDEs. He recalls one snatch of dialogue which they quote (page 166)

Exasperated, I asked, “What will it take, short of having a near-death experience yourself, to convince you that it’s real?” Very nonchalantly, without batting an eye, the response was: “Even if I were to have a near-death experience myself, I would conclude that I was hallucinating, rather than believe that my mind can exist independently of my brain.”

There’s no arguing with such intransigent dogmatism – in the face of the evidence that I am convinced exists but which it refuses to examine, such an attitude is bordering on the delusional. What makes it all the more bizarre is that the evidence for psi has been conducted with a rigour and extensive sample size that would be the envy of many a mainstream researcher. Beauregard and O’Leary summarise the findings as follows (pages 170-171):

Psi is not a form of magic. It is a low-level effect demonstrated in many laboratory studies—one that materialism does not account for. . . . Generally, the studies show that people sometimes get small amounts of specific information from a distance that do not depend on the ordinary senses. . . The experimental subject is asked to influence the [Random Number Generator’s] output by “wishing” for 1’s or 0’s. A small but stable effect has been shown over sixty years of tossing dice and RNGs that is reliable irrespective of the subject or the experimenter and remains when independent or skeptical investigators participate.

Not many experimental findings survive, for example, their attempted replication by sceptical experimenters. That in itself argues for something valid as well as seriously strange going on. Sadly we meet the same kind of scientistic dogmatism once again. They quote (pages 171-172) from Dean Radin‘s The Conscious Universe – which I read so long ago I’d completely forgotten it:

Skeptics who continue to repeat the same old assertions that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, or that there are no repeatable experiments, are uninformed not only about the state of parapsychology but also about the current state of skepticism!

For source website see link

A Blinding Double-bind

Radin also points out the resulting double bind with blistering clarity (quoted on page 173):

If serious scientists are prevented from investigating claims of psi out of fear for their reputations, then who is left to conduct these investigations? Extreme skeptics? No, because the fact is that most extremists do not conduct research; they specialize in criticism. Extreme believers? No, because they are usually not interested in conducting rigorous scientific studies.

I have taken his book down off my shelves and placed it on my desk to read again.

Beauregard and O’Leary conclude (ibid.):

Psi must find its place within an evidence-based paradigm of physics, psychology, and neuroscience. However, working out and testing a hypothesis for psi faces some obstacles in a materialist environment. . . .

They are clear that the effect is small (page 167):

The stubborn problem turns out to be a small statistical effect from controlled laboratory studies, the psi effect, a general term for telepathic and psychokinetic phenomena.

And they are suitably cautious about the hypotheses we can build upon this robust but tiny effect (page 177):

Regarding psi, we can assume one of two things: (1) every single instance of psi is a direct interference in nature, presumably by a divine power from outside the universe; or (2) the universe permits more entanglement than the materialist paradigm does.

They favour the second idea. I would be delighted if this were to be more seriously investigated by mainstream researchers and the findings were then to be integrated into a more spiritual model of reality. The days of materialist domination are numbered, I feel: I’m just not sure how many more there are – whether it will be millions or merely thousands.

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Consciousness beyond Life – a review (1/3): problems of scepticism

My father in Civil Defence circa 1940 – fourth from the left

As Frederik van Eeden put it back in 1890: “I am more convinced than ever that the a-priori rejection of and refusal to examine unfamiliar and unusual phenomena is the greatest foe of scientific progress.”

(Consciousness beyond Life - page 264)

In 1898 James wrote that the brain’s role in the experience of consciousness is not a productive but is instead a permissive or transmissive role; that is, it admits or transmits information.

(Consciousness beyond Life – page 307)

Here we go again!

I continue to find myself in the grip of the near death experience (NDE) issue. Exactly why it matters so much to me is not completely clear. It may in part be to do with my sister having died before I was born. She was twelve years old. It was 1939 and the war was just about to start. I was born just before the war ended and grew up in the double shadow of my parents’ grief and a world seeking to come to terms with the experiences of the blitz and the holocaust.

Later, when my father was dying, in an incident that I put down to morphine at the time, atheist that I was, he woke from his sleep when my mother called his name thinking he had died. ‘Oh, Mary,’ he said with infinite sadness, ‘why did you call me back. I was somewhere so beautiful I did not want to leave.’ Being a man of few words, he said no more. However, after my mother died and we sold the house, the people who had bought it said they were rather unnerved to wake one night in the master bedroom to find a gaunt and tall old man leaning over the bottom of the bed as though to see who was asleep in it.

On top of that is a feeling, which never completely goes away, that I am in exile – from where or why I have no idea, though I could fill in the blanks quite easily, but not from memory. Whatever the real reason, NDEs and what they might mean is an issue that fascinates me.

How could I resist reading Pim van Lommel’s book?

I am not concerned to discuss those aspects of this fascinating book which deal with areas that have already been well-trodden on this blog, for example the elements of a typical NDE, the alternative neuro-scientific or narrative-tradition explanations. I want to focus instead on what I regard as his main theme and the mainstream resistance to it, which leads him into areas that previous texts I have read do not deal with in such depth. Also I do not intend to go over his explanation of the studies he and others have conducted, though they are interesting in their own right and confirm the authenticity of the experience in so far as that is possible to do at present.

Does consciousness have a biological basis at all?

I have never been an overly religious person. I am reluctant to tell many people this incident but was compelled to write to you after reading this article. Three years ago also my father was murdered. After three weeks the police came to a standstill and put out a call for help in the newspaper. I dreamed of my dad three nights in a row. Each night he told me to look in the files and gave me specific instructions. After the third night I called the head of the ATF who was working on our case. He must have thought I was a real crackpot. But I had looked in my dad’s files. In my dream he had given me a date and a name. Sure enough, the name was there. The ATF agents contacted that person, and he gave the police the names of the people who were involved in my father’s murder. I really can’t give you any more details on this—we haven’t gone to trial yet and there is a gag order issued. I don’t claim to be psychic. I don’t have any idea why these things have happened to me. But it makes me wonder and curious.    

If this story can be believed, and the thousands of others like it, then the question that inevitably arises is the one at the head of this section: Does consciousness have a biological basis at all?

Van Lommel believes it does not, in the sense of consciousness being created from matter. He marshalls both evidence and theory to back up his position. The next three posts attempt to give a sense of part of his argument.

Making the Idea Plausible

Pim van Lommel

He is acutely aware that his case is regarded with profound suspicion by the majority of mainstream scientists. He looks at the impact that this has both on the treatment of evidence and on the way we receive the accounts of those who have experienced an NDE. He quotes Kuhn for a key component of mainstream science’s response (from the introduction):

The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn claimed that most scientists are still trying to reconcile theory and facts within the routinely accepted (materialist) paradigm, which he describes as essentially a collection of articles of faith shared by scientists. All research results that cannot be accounted for by the prevailing worldview are labeled “anomalies” because they threaten the existing paradigm and challenge the expectations raised by this paradigm.

He argues – and I am not sufficiently expert in quantum theory to judge the strength of his case here – that quantum theory has altered the balance of the argument significantly (ibid.):

According to some quantum physicists, quantum physics accords our consciousness a decisive role in creating and experiencing perceptible reality. . . . . . This transforms modern science into a subjective science in which consciousness plays a fundamental role.

As a result of the implications of quantum theory and supported by his own research and that of others, he strongly feels (ibid.):

On the basis of prospective studies of near-death experience, recent results from neurophysiological research, and concepts from quantum physics, I strongly believe that consciousness cannot be located in a particular time and place. This is known as nonlocality. Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension that is not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time.

To help lame-brains like me to keep up, he brings in a helpful analogy that is being used quite widely by those of this point of view (ibid.):

Our brain may be compared both to a television set, receiving information from electromagnetic fields and decoding this into sound and vision, and to a television camera, converting or encoding sound and vision into electromagnetic waves. . . . . . The function of the brain can be compared to a transceiver; our brain has a facilitating rather than a producing role: it enables the experience of consciousness.

Mainstream Resistance

Even though I find this picture of the mind-brain-consciousness relationship quite plausible now, after my decades of wrestling with the implications of this research, most practitioners of medicine and psychology within the system find it too hard to swallow. Van Lommel describes an incident at a conference on NDEs (page 9):

After a few presentations on NDE and somebody’s personal story, a man got up and said, “I’ve worked as a cardiologist for twenty-five years now, and I’ve never come across such absurd stories in my practice. I think this is all complete nonsense; I don’t believe a word of it.” Whereupon another man stood up and said, “I’m one of your patients. A couple of years ago I survived a cardiac arrest and had an NDE, and you would be the last person I’d ever tell.”

And that is a huge problem for those who have such experiences. The following example is not untypical and should be seen as providing strong though admittedly anecdotal evidence (page 32):

During my NDE following a cardiac arrest, I saw both my dead grandmother and a man who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know. Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who’d been deported and killed in World War II. My mother showed me a photograph. The unfamiliar man I’d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.

Van Lommel feels we should treat these types of account with respect (page 44):

I am of the opinion that people who have had a near-death experience and who are capable of putting their experience into words can teach us a great deal about the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. Finding an explanation for the cause and content of the near-death experience is a major scientific challenge.

The consequences of contempt

When we are contemptuous and dismissive, this can impact negatively upon the individual with the experience as well as on the progress of science in this area (page 51-52):

The process of accepting and integrating the NDE cannot begin until people feel capable of sharing their thoughts and feelings. With immense perseverance, often aided by positive reactions from those around them, people learn to live according to their newfound insights into what matters in life. . . . . When someone first tries to disclose the NDE, the other person’s reaction is absolutely crucial. If this initial reaction is negative or skeptical, the process of accepting and integrating the NDE typically presents far greater problems than if this initial reaction is positive, sympathetic, or neutral. Evidence has shown that positive responses facilitate and accelerate the integration process. In fact, without the possibility of communication, the process of coming to terms with the NDE often fails to get under way at all.

The research indicates the scale of the problem (page 62):

Sutherland’s study shows that when people tried to discuss the NDE, 50 percent of relatives and 25 percent of friends rejected the NDE, and 30 percent of nursing staff, 85 of doctors, and 50 percent of psychiatrists reacted negatively.

The impact of this is harsh (page 64):

It is very difficult for NDE survivors to explain to others how and why they have changed so much. What follows is a period of intense loneliness coupled with feelings of depression at the rejection of what they perceive to be the most impressive experience of their life.

This is in spite of the fact that a more positive attitude is immensely beneficial (page 66):

The results also show that the higher the percentage of positive responses to their personality changes, the better the NDErs were capable of dealing with the problems. That said, at the time of the survey, more than half remained incapable of communicating effectively about their experience. The absence of unconditional love in human relationships also continued to be a problem for more than half of the respondents.

If we are to shift from this negative and damaging virtual consensus, with what are we going to replace it? That will have to wait for the next post.

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‘Proof of Heaven’: a review

Eben Alexander

The Great Being saith: The man of consummate learning and the sage endowed with penetrating wisdom are the two eyes to the body of mankind. God willing, the earth shall never be deprived of these two greatest gifts.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, page 171)

Thanks to Kristine’s comment on my sequence of posts about near-death experiences (NDEs), I have read a compelling book: Proof of Heaven.

Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon with a dramatic conversion experience behind him. Seven days shifted him from sceptic to believer in the afterlife. Experiences he had had as a medic were completely reconstrued (page 87):

. . . . a coma patient was a kind of in-between being. Neither completely here (the earthly realm) nor completely there (the spiritual realm), these patients often have a singularly mysterious atmosphere to them. This was, as I’ve mentioned, a phenomenon I’d noticed myself many times, though of course I’d never given it the supernatural credence [before].

His recovery, his NDE apart, was to be a minor miracle (page 89):

. . . they did not know of anyone making a full recovery from bacterial meningitis after being comatose for more than a few days. We were now into day four.

The fact that he is now talking and walking let alone writing this book was highly improbable, verging on downright impossible (page 92):

The few who survive a case as severe as mine generally require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives.

I’m not going to include any plot spoilers in this review. Though the book has been sniffed at by sceptics who feel Eben has gone soft in the head, I can assure you his experience was truly remarkable and his account of it sober and convincing.

Well, I would be convinced, wouldn’t I, since he confirms all my biases. I can only say that I do expose myself to the writings of those with whom I disagree, fighting my confirmation bias at least to that extent, but their arguments always seem to fall short of what I regard as measured and weighty (see below for more on that).

Coming out of Coma

Instead of recounting the experience in itself, I’ll pick up the narrative from when he comes back into the body and focus on what his experience could be said to have demonstrated. About his return from his coma he writes (page 117):

My mind—my real self—was squeezing its way back into the all too tight and limiting suit of physical existence, with its spatiotemporal bounds, its linear thought, and its limitation to verbal communication. Things that up until a week ago I’d thought were the only mode of existence around, but which now showed themselves as extraordinarily cumbersome limitations.

He acknowledges that on his return he was also the victim of something (page 118) called ‘ICU psychosis.’ However, he does not agree that this state accounts for his NDE experience (ibid.)

Some of the dreams I had during this period were stunningly and frighteningly vivid. But in the end they served only to underline how very, very dissimilar my dream state had been compared with the ultra-reality deep in coma.

The whole coma experience had been totally convincing (page 130):

What I’d experienced was more real than the house I sat in, more real than the logs burning in the fireplace. Yet there was no room for that reality in the medically trained scientific worldview that I’d spent years acquiring.

This is where he spells out the problem he now has with what I have called ‘scientism‘ in the pages of this blog (page 132):

I can tell you that most skeptics aren’t really skeptics at all. To be truly skeptical, one must actually examine something, and take it seriously. And I, like many doctors, had never taken the time to explore NDEs. I had simply “known” they were impossible.

Among the reasons he has for being convinced  of the reality of his own experience and the validity of its implications is his view that the illness he had was as close to death as you can get (page 133):

Given all of this, bacterial meningitis is arguably the best disease one could find if one were seeking to mimic human death without actually bringing it about.

He finds all the usual candidates that sceptics adduce to explain away an NDE, such as anoxia and drug/temporal lobe effects, completely unconvincing. Also, as he was utterly unaware of any of the literature on NDEs, he had no expectations to subtly influence his experience, and in any case, as you will see when you read his account, his experience was untypical in certain key respects. He outlines the explanation which he regards as the most plausible reductionist candidate (page 142):

The final hypothesis I looked at was that of the “reboot phenomenon.” This would explain my experience as an assembly of essentially disjointed memories and thoughts left over from before my cortex went completely down. Like a computer restarting and saving what it could after a system-wide failure, my brain would have pieced together my experience from these leftover bits as best it could.

He find this also unconvincing (ibid.):

Everything—the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow—suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work.

This is what makes the NDE which resulted from a coma induced by bacterial meningitis so compelling as evidence. There were no higher brain functions to stitch together the kind of coherent experience he went through and could recall in such rich detail. He is scathing now about this panoply of reductionist pseudo-explanations (page 142-143):

The more I read of the “scientific” explanations of what NDEs are, the more I was shocked by their transparent flimsiness.

There was for him no escaping the probability that what he had experienced was real (page 144):

. . . when I added up the sheer unlikelihood of all the details—and especially when I considered how precisely perfect a disease E. coli meningitis was for taking my cortex down, and my rapid and complete recovery from almost certain destruction—I simply had to take seriously the possibility that it really and truly had happened for a reason.

He puts the basic reason very simply (page 144): ‘Medically speaking, that I had recovered completely was a flat-out impossibility, a medical miracle.’

Source Website

The Nature of Consciousness

This leads him to look at an experience whose true significance he had missed when viewing life through the lens of his sceptical persona (page 146):

Many others have seen that astonishing clarity of mind that often comes to demented elderly people just before they pass on, just as John had seen in his father (a phenomenon known as “terminal lucidity”). There was no neuroscientific explanation for that.

It is a short step from such a perspective to the even more radical revision of his concept of consciousness as a whole (page 150):

Far from being an unimportant by-product of physical processes (as I had thought before my experience), consciousness is not only very real—it’s actually more real than the rest of physical existence, and most likely the basis of it all. But neither of these insights has yet been truly incorporated into science’s picture of reality.

This links in with ideas I have explored elsewhere about consciousness as the ground of being. Which leads us back (page 152) to the core problem of scientism again!

Those who assert that there is no evidence for phenomena indicative of extended consciousness, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are willfully ignorant. They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts.

His point about the astonishing fact that consciousness exists is also one that I have tackled before, both on my blog (see links in this sentence) and in the lion’s den of the Birmingham Medical School (page 154).

There is nothing about the physics of the material world (quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, etc.), and specifically the intricate structure of the brain, that gives the slightest clue as to the mechanism of consciousness.

In fact, the greatest clue to the reality of the spiritual realm is this profound mystery of our conscious existence.

The Great Being

I’d like to close with his carefully worded observation about the nature of God, which describes the sense he had of being closely connected in his NDE with that Great Being while at the same time this entity was nonetheless inherently beyond his comprehension and totally irreducible to anything he could ever comprehend (page 106):

While in the Core, even when I became one with the Orb of light and the entire higher-dimensional universe throughout all eternity, and was intimately one with God, I sensed strongly that the creative, primordial (prime mover) aspect of God was the shell around the egg’s contents, intimately associated throughout (as our consciousness is a direct extension of the Divine), yet forever beyond the capability of absolute identification with the consciousness of the created.

All in all this is a carefully written and rigorously examined account of a truly extraordinary experience whose reality I do not doubt, even though it is just the testimony of one person. I recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in this aspect of life.

Amit Goswami on Consciousness as the Ground of our Being

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Changes of Mind (1/3): a review

When I first read Jenny Wade’s book, Changes of Mind, I was carried away when she hypothesises that the highest possible stage of the development of human consciousness is Unity Consciousness. As ‘unity’ is a Bahá’í mantra, this was enough in itself to guarantee my complete attention and disarm my disagreements.

But there was more. This level of development was the last of nine. In Arabic numerology nine is the numerical value of the word at the core of the name of this Revelation: ‘Bahá.’ I was entranced. I wrote ‘Brilliant!’ inside the front flyleaf after I’d finished the book.

Because my recent reading of Dabrowski (see three earlier posts) has sensitised me to the possibility of categorising levels of consciousness and perhaps even character development, I decided to re-read her book.

I have decided this time round that it is brilliant (for different reasons though) but flawed.

Still brilliant after all these years

Why do I think this? My reasons fall into three main groups for present purposes: near death experiences, lateralisation of brain function, and the drivers of transitions from one level to the next.

The first topic is, in my view her weakest, and why I feel the book is flawed. Her treatment of this topic does not stand up well after reading Mark Fox’s thorough examination of the issues.

Her reflections on lateralisation and its relationship with the development of consciousness are intriguing and will probably prompt me to revisit Iain McGilchrist to check them out more thoroughly, but as it stands I resonate strongly to what she says. She maps out her levels of consciousness against the back drop of lateralisation and mounts a compelling argument for the value but extreme difficulty of achieving a proper balance in our lives between the operation of the two hemispheres of the brain. But more of that in the next post.

Her most interesting observations to me at present relate to the way that her model maps closely onto Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration in key respects. She analyses, in a more close-grained fashion than Dabrowski, which kind of conflict and discomfort spurs us to move up from the comfort zone of our present level of consciousness to the next step up the ladder of awareness.

David Bohm

It is probably only fair to add that I am completely incapable of properly evaluating the foundation of her thesis in Bohm’s work on the implicate order as I simply do not understand Bohm’s thinking well enough. You may well wish to stop reading at this point if you feel I have totally disqualified myself from commenting on her other lines of thought.

My simple summary of what I think she means in terms of Bohm is this. There is a hidden order and a visible one. Both are inextricably intertwined. The visible, or perhaps more accurately, the accessible order is the material world as we commonly experience it. The hidden order (though transcendent, timeless and placeless) is also expressed in and through the physical world here and now. Our highest self exists fully realised already in the hidden order but remains invisible to almost all of us. The purpose of our lives is to come to a realisation and expression of and identification with that self, consciously in the visible order. When we do so all ego and desire will fall away, and self in any sense we currently understand it fades away completely. If we fail, in her view we are reincarnated again to have another go. Moving up the levels of consciousness is primarily about cleansing the lens of perception so that we can experience in its true nature what is currently hidden from us.

For those of you who have continued reading, we need to look slightly more closely at the first of the themes I mentioned, and later at the other two in even greater detail.

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs):

One of the key problems here is that she fails to recognise, from the evidence available to her at the time, that NDE-type experiences are not uniquely linked to close encounters with death as she contends (page 324) on the basis of evidence drawn from Morse. Fox’s access to the RERC data enabled him to recognise the common elements between so-called NDE experiences and other mystical and spiritual states where there was neither a threat to life nor any kind of trauma. She does though accept (page 239), but more cautiously than Fox, that ‘near-death consciousness . . . appears to share some characteristics of Transcendent consciousness.’

She also rather too uncritically accepts a long list of core elements (pages 225-226), something about which Fox’s critical re-examination has caused me to be rather more sceptical.

Given that NDEs are very much secondary to her main thesis and her treatment of the issue covers a mere 24 pages out of her total of 341, it is perhaps not too surprising that it falls short of Fox’s focused and thorough treatment.

It certainly does not seriously blemish the overall case she is seeking to make. More of that next time.

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Near-Death Experiences Revisited (3/3): And then what?

I had some conversations with the Light. The Light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images and signs. I asked the Light, “What is going on here? Please, Light, clarify yourself for me. I really want to know the reality of the situation.” I cannot really say the exact words, because it was sort of telepathy.

The Light responded. The information transferred to me was that during your life after death experience your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before the Light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have a chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not.

(From the NDE Story 
of Mellen-Thomas Benedict - for more see YouTube video below)

Two Main Elements

The last post, after looking at the issue of whether there is a real experience here or just a story, paused before looking at two examples of so-called core elements of the Near-Death Experience. Though widely known, their exact significance has been hard to pin down. Mark Fox continues his exploration.

1. The Being of Light

It has long been understood that the meaning people place on this part of the experience is strongly influenced by their background culture and the nature of their religious beliefs. He quotes Badham quoting Evans-Wentz (page 71):

To appeal to a Shaivite devotee, the form of Shiva is assumed, to a Buddhist the form of the Buddha Shakya Muni; to a Christian, the form of Jesus;  to a Muslim the form of the Prophet; and so far other religious devotees, and for all manner and conditions of mankind a form appropriate to the occasion.

He accepts (page 106) the theoretical ‘possibility . . . . that there is more than one light.’ However, Badham’s position clearly makes sense to him (page 107):

. . . that some sort of transcendent core being is encountered by everybody but interpreted by them in accordance with their respective cultural backgrounds.

He explores certain problems with that which it would be impossible to deal with at length here but can be summarised by saying that there is quite a degree of variation in the interpretations given to this part of the experience. Some even feel the light has no personality at all. It therefore remains a possibility that too facile a conclusion that it must be Christ or Muhammad or the Buddha needs to be avoided.

Even so the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) data is illuminating here (page 299):

[In previous studies] the light appears to fulfil the function of a judge, divine presence, psychopomp, or identifiable religious figure. This was clearly not the case with the RERC study, in which the light manifested or contained an identifiable presence, personality or role in only two out of the thirteen CE  accounts in which it figured. However, analysis was complicated by the fact that whilst the definite and recognisable presence was only manifested in the light on two occasions, a very significant number of other respondents – no less than eight out of the remaining eleven – reported usually overwhelming sensations of love, peace or calm either within or coming from the light indicating that it was the source of a range of identifiable feelings and therefore in some sense the possessor of personality.

The Tunnel

The tunnel with the oncoming light has formed a central element in the neuroscientific explanation of the NDE. Even in its simple form, though, the explanation has been challenged by Peter Fenwick and others. The RERC data allows for even more doubt to be cast upon it (page 262):

What should be done with accounts that included descriptions of the seemingly similar – perhaps identical – experience but which words such as ‘void’, ‘whirlpool’, ‘passage’ or ‘shaft’ to describe it? Nowhere here it is absolutely clear that a tunnel is being described. Neither is it clear that in each case the feature is black or dark.

He feels that their sheer variety casts serious doubts on a neuroscientific explanation.

There is another equally interesting dimension (page 276-277):

Before moving on, mention must be made of the curiously high incidence of descriptions of outer space encountered in this phase of the investigation. . . . . . At the very least, however, we have a total of five CE and non-CE accounts out of a total of 24 which describe an encounter with some sort of darkness motif in terms seemingly suggestive of a visit to outer space: more than 20% of the total.

It is for this reason that he feels that his study must part company with previous accounts (page 278), ‘having found descriptions of tunnels to be in the minority, having also found that other descriptors are more frequently chosen as preferred ways of describing experiences of darkness, voids and – in some cases – transitions to other realms.’

The Impact

Before we consider what all this might mean, there is one other important element to consider: the effects these experiences have upon the lives of those who have lived through them. While a strong effect on the person afterwards does not prove the experience is ‘real’ it certainly adds weight to that possibility.

Starting with Hampe in 1979 Fox reviews the traces of this theme at various places in his book (page 59):

Hampe draws attention to the transformative effects of such experiences and the possible therapeutic application of his discoveries, devoting a chapter to the ways in which exposure to such experiences may have beneficial results of the field of medicine, pastoral counselling, and for the clergy generally.

The close links with other forms of spiritual experience also becomes apparent (page 83):

[Cressy notes parallels with mystical experience] drawing attention to the transformative effects produced in the lives of both mystics and NDErs as a result of their experiences. Here, she notes, changes in the sense and meaning of the self reported by NDErs and mystics are similar, including increased feelings of self-worth and enhanced feelings of love for mankind.

Obviously therefore these after-effects are to be found in the accounts of the RERC archive. There is one particularly beautiful example (page 285):

Since the phenomenon, I have had a sense of belonging, as if I were related to every rock, tree, flower, mountain, cloud, animal and person. I am truly concerned about them and I feel a great love for everyone and everything in the universe. In other words, I am in attunement with my world, which is the whole world.

So what?

Carl Jung

So where exactly does all this richly varied but closely linked body of evidence leave us. For Fox there is a core issue (page 345):

In the light of the recognition that testimonies to NDEs are all we possess, near-death researcher Robert Kastenbaum is surely right to draw attention to the crucial issue of whether an NDE is, in fact, an experience or a report of experience.

There follows a complex consideration of this question, all the twists and turns of which are too many to include here. Instead I’ll just pick up briefly on two basic threads.

He looks at Kellehear’s theory that NDEs depict a kind of ‘transcendent society’ (page 354). He feels that as such they will appeal to many people in the West.

. . . . in its implied criticism of many of the dominant values of modernity such as competition and selfishness and its promotion of others such as spirituality and humanism, it has a post-modern appeal: it shares post-modernity’s loss of faith in many of the grounding convictions of modernity, including those which have exploited and oppressed the human spirit in the name of greed and the obsession to acquire.

He also considers Grosso’s work, which is rooted in Jungian archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious (page 357):

NDEs, like archetypes, contain the cross-cultural consistency that the collective unconsciousness bestows, combined with the cross-cultural variation which their location in time and space inevitably creates.

He feels this last possibility has great explanatory power and points the way towards future avenues of fruitful research.

In fact, the main emphasis of his concluding chapter revolves around encouraging researchers to sink their sometimes acrimonious differences and buckle down to a serious and prolonged investigation of this phenomenon, pooling their knowledge as they go rather than each school prizing their own perspective to the exclusion of all others. His most eloquent advocacy of this deserves quoting at length at the conclusion of this series of posts (pages 344-45):

Narrative theology can explore ways in which emplotment turns experience into story. Psychology of religion can make its own contributions to exploring naturalistically the aetiology of the NDE, responding and contributing to the valuable insights provided by secular neuroscience. Sociology of religion can investigate the social and cultural forces that call forth the need for new myths when old myths lose their power. Philosophy of religion can test the epistemological accuracy and phenomenological cogency of the claim that a common core underlies the variety of reported religious experiences across cultures, including, of course, the end NDE. And so on.

I suppose in a way I have copped out here and told you where this all leaves him while remaining silent about where I find myself right now. Perhaps there’s only really time for one brief observation. When confronted by the question ‘Is any of this true ?’ I remember the words of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh (Gleanings: LXXXII):

Thou hast asked Me concerning the nature of the soul. Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel.

It therefore seems inevitable that something so transcendent would be experienced by people in many different ways, all of those ways representing an aspect of the reality of that experience. The same would therefore apply to all parts of the spiritual realm. That the descriptions vary while containing a core of common resonance is precisely what you would expect. So for me this thorough and dispassionate treatment of this all-important subject confirms me in my feeling that something real but ineffable is being described.

And I am speaking as someone who found the idea of an immortal soul one of the most difficult ideas to accept when I became a Bahá’í. I simply couldn’t understand why beings so seemingly inconsequential when compared to the awesome glory of the universe as whole should have been gifted with something so precious. It was far easier to accept the idea of God in the Bahá’í Writings as an unknowable Great Being whose consciousness had brought this all into being and was holding it in place. But that is another story for another time, I think.

Postscript

A comment from Kristine on a previous post pointed me in the direction of Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven. The experience he describes has a bearing on almost all the issues dealt with in this sequence of posts. In the New Year it is almost inevitable that I will write about it.

Edited Extracts

Extraneous material cut out of interview from Mellen Benedict speaking on coastam with George Noory 

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Near-Death Experiences Revisited (2/3): Some Complications

I am still myself, a person of no importance, but I feel I should like to say a few things before passing along. I feared death, but then that was natural. I was timid, and even feared life and its pitfalls. So I was afraid of being killed and was sure it would mean extinction. There are still many who believe that. It is because extinction has not come to me that I want to speak to you. May I describe my experiences? Perhaps they may prove useful to some. How necessary that some of us should speak back across the border! The barriers must be broken down. This is one of the ways of doing it. Listen therefore to what I have to say.

(From the story of Private Dowding as told through Wellesley Tudor Pole)

In the previous post we started to look at the problem of defining the so-called core elements of the near-death experience. We barely scratched the surface. Now to dig a bit deeper.

Narrative Aspects

Even while some were seeking to define what these elements were, taking it for granted that there was a real reconstructable experience at the root of these accounts, others were not so sure at all of that.

Take Couliano, for instance. Mark Fox looks at his treatment of ‘otherworldly journeys.’ We will be returning to the kinds of experiences he looks at which do not involve a close encounter with death. For the moment I would like to focus on a different point he is concerned to unsheathe.

He finds a ‘common and notable feature’ which is more of a contextual consideration than a ‘core element.’ This concerns (page 79):

. . . the relationship between the complexity of the experience and complexity of the conditions in which it is embedded. In short, he observes, the more complex the tradition, the more complex the experience, and complex traditions tend to produce complex interpretations of experience.

This leads on to a key point that calls into question exactly how we should interpret the presence of clusters of core elements if in fact we find them (ibid.)

The word intertextuality suggest the influence of one text, or narrative, upon another, in such a way that certain details of plot or characterisation in one maybe accounted for by the influence of the plot or characterisation of another.

In terms of Couliano’s position, Fox explains that there are two options (page 81):

The first is that a common core exists which becomes shaped in accordance with cultural  and linguistic expectations and interpretations (that is, a simple set of rules suffices to shape it into a recognisable narrative). The second is that no such core exists and instead an inherited set of rules, motifs and conventions is passed along traditions – perhaps between traditions – which gives rise to consistently encountered motifs that can be located firmly within the genre.

The second option plainly confronts the possibility that there may be no core experience to start with so it would be pointless to try and define it.

Zaleski, whom he quotes later (page 86), has clearly made her mind up that this is the case:

. . . Interpretation runs throughout any given experience. The possibility of any “raw, preconceptual, pre-linguistic experience” is therefore ruled out a priori. In short, there is no common core to religious experience – the NDE included – because there can be no common core.

Fox does not agree that this conclusion is inescapable. He goes on to look at Sutherland’s work (also see YouTube interview at the end of the post). She writes (page 99):

The fact that [NDErs] have been to another realm could be said to form part of the deep structure of the experience, whereas the description or interpretation of what they encountered can be seen to form part of the surface structure. I would argue that it is in terms of these surface structures that cultural conditioning could have an influence.

After looking at a substantial body of subsequent work he concludes (pages 138-139):

The current chapter has… demonstrated: (a) the existence of discernible core NDE features in the absence of any awareness or expectation of their occurrence, (b) the presence of unexpected elements to NDErs’ experiences, (c) a strong suggestion of commonality of NDE motifs such as the traversing of darkness towards light both within and across cultures, and (d) outstanding problems in accounting for the mechanisms whereby language shapes or creates experiences such as those of mystics and NDErs.

Point (b) strongly suggests that expectation cannot be governing people’s experiences which somewhat dents the culturally influenced narrative version of events. One vivid example will have to suffice here (page 132):

At the time of my NDE I was a practising Roman Catholic. Had I died I will most certainly have expected any visions I had would have related to my faith, and then if I was to see a being of light I would have related to Jesus or Mary are an angel. As it was, when I suddenly found myself in this gentle glowing  light and standing a little below the three beings above me, they appeared as young Indian men, and, though they were dressed alike in high-necked silver-coloured with silver turbans on their heads, I thought they were young Indian Princess, all Rajas.

To try and root this analysis in firmer ground he moves to a different body of evidence altogether.

Crisis and Non-Crisis Experiences

Sir Alister Clavering Hardy (1896-1985)

Fox is a member of the research committee of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) at the University of Wales. He had access to over 6,000 accounts of religious experiences whose collection was begun by Alister Hardy in the 1920s. Ninety-one usable accounts of NDE-type experiences were found among the 6,000: this number may seem small but compares very favourably with the samples previous books on the subject have had available to draw upon.

There is a catch though. Not all the experiences occurred in a near-death situation. Fox therefore relabelled the whole group as Crisis Experiences (CEs). However, the problem did not end there. There was a significant number of other experiences that had the characteristics of an NDE but occurred in situations that were neither near encounters with death nor even crises. It did not, however, seem appropriate to ignore them. There were 59 in all. He labelled them non-CEs (page247:

. . . a large number of accounts existed in the archives in which no life-threatening crisis event was either present or recently past, and yet in which  there appeared a range of traditional NDE elements, including out-of-body experiences, tunnels, lights and so on. In fact, as was to become apparent, there were more of these accounts than CE account.

The very fact that so many experiences existed that were so similar in content but so different in context raises interesting issues. One of the most telling of these for an anti-reductionist like me relates to the strong doubt it casts upon neurological explanations of the NDE experience (page 276):

. . . . recognition that NDE features such as the darkness or tunnel motif frequently occur within a wide variety of non-life-threatening contexts requires that any neuroscientific theory called upon to explain them must do so within these contexts also.

Fox does not argue that the neuroscientific perspective is dead in the water, but he does seem to feel their boat is leaking badly. There will be even more interesting refinements to our understanding of what this group of experiences means when, in the next post, we look at the evidence as a whole in relation to two prevalent elements: the Being of Light and the Tunnel.

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