Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (7/7): Revisiting Other Themes

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

I’ve ended up spending more time than I expected going over Living in a Mindful Universe. This is partly to be explained by the strength of the resonance for me of its central idea – that, as Amit Goswami expresses it ‘consciousness is the ground of all being.’ But there is a bit more to it than that. Alexander and Newell also touch on various other themes and ideas that are also of concern to me. So, in this final post of this sequence I’m going to flag them up without going into too much detail.

Stepping Stones

First there is the idea that suffering is far from being a meaningless torment. I’ve recently visited this idea in my review of Nineteen, Adam Robarts’ moving memoir of his family’s experience of his son Haydn’s dying of cancer.

The idea that there is much of value to be derived from painful challenges bookends his pages. Almost at the very beginning he writes:[1]

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “He who tastes the most bitter is the greatest of men.” In other words, only by withstanding the hardest of hardships can you hope to rise to greatness. After years of observation in China, I will generalize and say that this concept is a deeply ingrained aspect of life within Eastern societies. In contrast, Western societies seek to avoid pain and suffering wherever possible. The primary goal is to seek pleasure.

And almost at the end he writes:[2]

Looking back on my life before Haydn’s journey of suffering, it feels to me that I lived in a relatively unconscious or semiconscious state. This journey became a real wake-up call—to notice more, love more, be more conscious of the bounties that are raining down upon every one of us at every moment.

Alexander and Newell are more or less on the same page:[3] ‘Life continues to present challenges that helped me to grow. As I do this, I become more aligned with my higher self and more authentic to my true nature, as can we all.’

They also use the same term as Shoghi Effendi employs:[4] ‘Life lessons are stepping-stones that can be accomplished in an individual life, leading toward the grander lessons.’ And here is Shoghi Effendi’s explanation:[5] ‘We Bahá’ís can always, with the aid of Bahá’u’lláh, Who is ever ready to strengthen and assist us, turn our stumbling blocks into stepping stones.’ And Alexander and Newell use the term more than once:[6] ‘We can all come to see the hardships in life, illness, and injury as the stepping-stones on which our souls can grow and ascend toward that oneness with the Divine.’

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Paris Talks endorses this idea, it seems to me, using a different metaphor:[7]

 The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness.

The close correspondence between Alexander and Newell’s take on this and what we find in Nineteen is unmistakable:[8]

I often encountered parents who are grieving the loss of a child. Most often, no matter how far along they are in the grief process, these parents tell me their child seemed to have immense strength in the face of imminent death – in fact, they often report the child to be the greatest pillar strength holding the family together around such a tragic loss.

And all this matters if humanity is collectively going to arise to the challenges that currently confront us (page 631):

Just as each person’s soul grows through the hurdles and challenges of life, humanity is meant to face these challenges together, all to catalyse our growth to unprecedented levels. . . As more of us come to know that truly we are all eternal spiritual beings, the world will become far more harmonious and peaceful.

Health & Nature

I’ll just mention briefly the book’s emphasis on the importance of the spiritual in both taking care of our health and enhancing our sense of the value of nature, before moving on in slightly more detail to the issue of reincarnation.

Alexander and Newell see spiritual approaches as an essential component of recovery:[9]

When the fundamental problem is one that’s more deeply spiritual, it needs spiritual addressing, not only biochemical. While medication might be necessary in some cases, exploring the benefits of some sort of spiritual practice is a must.

Faith in the process of healing is crucial, in their view:[10]

Belief is cited as the first of six steps to healing – the belief that one can be healed. . .  [T]his is the underlying power of any treatment and . . . suggests that ultimately all healing might be attributable to the mind, whether through conventional western medicine or through alternative approaches.

So, the spiritual, in their view, is not to be discounted:[11] ‘I have come to see that any true vision of health must include not only the physical, mental, and emotional realms, but, most importantly, the spiritual.’

And as for nature, they are on the same page as Karen Armstrong in her book Sacred Nature. Alexander quotes Karen Newell as describing nature as a pathway to the truth:[12]

“We can all learn valuable lessons from nature. Nature is an expression of God, or, if you prefer, of the creative force and intelligence in the universe. Since we are created by the same power as nature, we can use nature as a mirror in which to reflect on truths about ourselves.”

Reincarnation:

I’m not going to make a meal of this as I have blogged about this more than once.

I don’t quite get Alexander and Newell’s take on this when they describe reincarnation as[13] ‘the best way to reconcile the omniscient, omnipresent, and infinitely loving deity’ with ‘the suffering of innocent beings allowed in our world, especially children and animals.’ From my point of view the idea of recompense or redress in the afterlife is at least as good if not better.

I accept that there is experiential evidence that supports the idea of reincarnation including the idea of in-between lives planning:[14]

Among other things, this body of data suggests that we actively plan each of our lifetimes, including choosing our parents and physical bodies, and selecting the challenges (such as illness and injury) and gifts that will most effectively teach us that which we came here to learn.

This is of course not the same as karma:[15]

This was not the kind of instant karma, “eye for an eye,” or punishment from a judgemental God . . . this was a decision made by her soul in order to learn from direct experience in the life she was currently leading.

This body of experiential evidence I also acknowledge includes such data as:[16]

. . . stored emotions or feelings carried over from our previous experience . . . that are triggered by experiences in our current life. . . . . When we experience something, whether it’s from a previous life or this life, we form certain beliefs. These beliefs are often related to problems and thus are typically self sabotaging.

Various considerations, over and above the fact that the Bahá’í Faith very much teaches that we do not reincarnate, counts against its literal reality. My doubts predated my decision to choose the Bahá’í Faith as my spiritual path.

First of all, for now at least, there is my basic scepticism about a literal interpretation of all accounts of spiritual experiences including the reincarnation data. There is something genuinely happening that needs explanation, but I am concerned that settling on any existing interpretation of the facts is fraught with difficulties.

I very much do not want to upset anyone who is a believer in reincarnation. In fact, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, whose teachings I am attempting to follow, advised that ‘we should try and avoid controversial issues . . . if possible.’ However, this is an issue that keeps bouncing across my consciousness and has done so again in this book.

It seems to me that all that we have to go on when it comes to verbal descriptions of transpersonal experiences is basically metaphor. As an NDE contact of Bruce Greyson’s described, the process of conveying such experiences, it’s like trying ‘to draw an odour using crayons.’

This is partly why one of my most important mantra is John Donne’s advice: ‘Doubt wisely.’

William James brilliantly expressed a crucial truth:[17]

For James, then, there are falsification conditions for any given truth claim, but no absolute verification condition, regardless of how stable the truth claim may be as an experiential function. He writes in The Will to Believe that as an empiricist he believes that we can in fact attain truth, but not that we can know infallibly when we have.

I cannot know for sure that what I believe I know is truth. Almost nothing is what it seems. I am also aware that an aversion to the idea of any kind of return to material life may be rooted in my traumatic early experiences of hospitalisation.

So, nothing that I say on this issue is said dogmatically. It’s just how I see this matter at this moment.

For Donne’s poem see link lines 76-82

I understand the wealth of evidence that exists as Mishlove points out:[18]

 The most solid reincarnation evidence comes from the totality of the 2,500 cases in the database, instead of from the strength of particular cases.

In spite of a wealth of evidence, there are other considerations in addition to the dangers of taking descriptions literally. I have explored a lot of the evidence and am aware that we need to find at adequate explanation for it, rather than dismiss it out of hand.

I really welcomed Mishlove’s model:[19]

Archetypal synchronistic resonance is, to my knowledge, the most sophisticated, published alternative to reincarnation. However, in my foreword to James Matlock’s book, Signs of Reincarnation, I acknowledge that reincarnation is a more fitting explanation than archetypal synchronistic resonance regarding data from children. The patterns in the reincarnation data, which I will discuss next, are too strong to ignore.

. . . Recollection is first person, not as if children were watching someone else in a movie. They feel as if their consciousness is continuous with the earlier lifetime they recall.

I was disappointed at his backtrack and for reasons that I’ve explored on my blog before (see Link) I felt that it was not totally convincing.

As I explained there, Matlock’s perspective did not change my mind, but I respect his careful review of the most convincing evidence and his preference for letting the evidence shape the theory not the theory warp the evidence.

He summarises his basic position near the end of the book by stating:[20]

The workings of reincarnation are often presumed to lie in metaphysical obscurity. In reality, as I have tried to show, the process is probably fairly simple, at least in outline. The stream of consciousness that animates a body during life continues into death, and persists through death, until it becomes associated with (possesses) another body, generally one not yet born. The consciousness stream is composed of both subliminal and supraliminal strata, the former bearing memories and various traits we may subsume under the heading of personality, the latter representing conscious awareness. Once in possession of its new body, the reincarnating mind customises it by adding behavioural and physical effects through psychokinetic operations on its genome, brain, and underlying physiology. At the level of conscious awareness, there is a reset, as the mind begins to interact with its new body and brain. Amnesia sets in, the subconscious blocking conscious memory of the past in what it considers to be its own best interests. The influence of the past is expressed behaviourally, however, and at times the subconscious permits memories to erupt into conscious awareness.

I thanked him also for pointing me in the direction of another model that seems at first sight to map more closely onto my own perspective:[21]

The [Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance – Mishlove & Engender 2007] model emphasises the hidden nexus of meaning underlying seemingly disparate events and may have some utility in explaining unverified past-life memories, past-life regression, and past-life readings that tap into a client’s mind if these relate to deep psychological processes and psychic connections between people rather than to the memory of previous lives.

Matlock feels this model is inadequate to explain ‘solved reincarnation cases.’

The middle paragraphs of the second of two posts on reincarnation show how closely my sense of the matter corresponds to the clause in bold.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, in their excellent book Past Lives, have a whole section on this very issue. They refer to[22]  . . . the ‘Cosmic Memory Bank.’ They describe ‘field theories’ and refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of ‘morphic resonance.’ They add:[23]

If memories (information) are held in this way they would exist independently of the brain and therefore be accessible to another brain which ‘resonated’ with them.’

A model along these lines is still my preference, even though Mishlove is clearly a convert[24] to reincarnation, and even though I’ve ploughed through some of Stevenson’s work and Matlock’s sophisticated theory as well.

For now, suffice it so say that I cannot see quite why the strong sense of affinity between a deceased consciousness and a newly generated one that the Fenwicks describe could not psychically impact upon a developing foetus just as strongly as a migrating soul in itself might do. The only data that needs some explanation are the experiences people report of a soul in transit visiting them to declare where they intend to be reborn. Given that communications from a spiritual realm tend to be experienced in ways that are influenced by culture and explanations of them should seldom be taken literally, that may not blast a hole in my hoped for theory below its waterline.

I think that’s more than enough.

Coda

Despite the reincarnation caveat, I hope this sequence conveys that I have found Eben Alexander and Karen Newell’s book deeply engaging as well as immensely helpful to me in making my sense of the spiritual dimension more coherent. I have no hesitation in a strongly recommending it to anyone who wants or needs to explore this area more fully.

As I think I mentioned earlier, reading their book has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. It tested my mind’s sight, gave me a prescription for a new and improved lens for my heart, which has greatly enhanced my ability to see many spiritual truths more clearly.

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 25.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 200.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 397.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 507.

[5]. Light of Divine Guidance (Vol. 1) – page 149.

[6]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 625.

[7]. Paris Talks – page 178.

[8]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 553.

[9]. Op. cit. – pages 543-44.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 587.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 595.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 604.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 479 – my emphasis.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 493.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 497.

[16]. Op. cit. – page 506.

[17]. David C. Lamberth William James and the metaphysics of experience – page 222.

[18]. Beyond the Brain – page 33.

[19]. Op. cit. – page 34.

[20]. Op. cit. – page 258.

[21]. Op. cit. – page 233 (my emphasis).

[22]. Past Lives – page 278.

[23]. Op. cit. – page 279.

[24]. Beyond the Brain – page xiv.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (1/7): synchronicities & NDEs

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

This is likely to be the most complex and ambitious attempt to integrate and express my understanding of some of these issues that I have ever undertaken. I mustn’t overload it though or the sequence might sink

As if all this was not already enough, in the interests of synchronicity I’m afraid much more needs to be said before I even start to describe the main trigger to this attempt.

Post-Covid I had been attempting to reconnect with friends and former colleagues after a long lapse in communication, but been pretty sluggish in taking any kind of consistent action.

Interesting Synchronicities

The first event of interest here was a conversation with an acquaintance of my wife’s in town. She inadvertently dropped into the conversation that I was – or, perhaps more accurately, had been – a psychologist. The next day he texted to say that a psychology friend of his from abroad was wondering whether he could help her find out how to get work in that field in this country. It was proving difficult. When she first asked him he hadn’t a clue how he could help. After my wife dropped the hint he got in touch.

This triggered me to get off my procrastinating backside and contact a former colleague who not only was a psychologist but, as I knew, had a number of European friends in the same boat as the lady asking for help.

He kindly agreed to consult with her and see if he could help in any way. I thanked him and suggested we meet for coffee, which we did soon after. For two hours upstairs in the All Saints café we were immersed in in a deeply enriching exploration of spirituality, the afterlife and consciousness. I wish we had recorded what we discussed as I can’t remember half of it. But that’s not the main point here, but I will be sharing some of the material we covered later on this blog, I expect.

The day after we’d had the conversation and exchanged emails about how enlightening we had found it, a friend in Australia phoned and during the conversation asked me if I had any videos on NDEs. I explained that I preferred reading to watching, and apologised for not being able to help.

Within hours of that call, I got an email from the former colleague with an attachment. It was an essay by Jeffrey Mishlove titled Beyond the Brain:
 the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death. I’ll be touching on some of the content later but what is most relevant now is that is contained 71 links to videos on NDEs and closely related issues.

This is by no means the first experience I have had of synchronicity. There are many times in my life when I had read a book on a particular topic, usually consciousness related but not always, and within days someone asks me to help them understand exactly that topic and its implications for their current situation.

Even more importantly my discovery of the Bahá’í Faith depended upon finding a particular book in the Hendon Library, which I would not have dreamed of bothering to borrow if I had been able to find anything else to take away to compensate me for my trudge through the snow and bitter wind on a winter’s day.

Not surprisingly, the essay reactivated my exploration of NDEs once more, as well as enabling me to share 71 video links with my Australian friend.

As though to make sure my research was definitely reactivated at this point, I was also asked to make some comments on a draft text that was replete with quotations from the NDE literature.

Following the various threads, both in terms of reading the essay and watching two hour-long videos (yes, I really did break my pattern and do that!), not only left me with some new insights, which I will explore soon, but also flagged up a book by Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, Living in a Mindful Universe. That book will be my main focus in this sequence alongside an exploration of the way some of my previous insights map onto or complement their perspective.

Hearticulture

Early in life I had thought my interest in books meant I should be focusing on literature. Later I came to realise books were definitely not my calling for their own sake. My interest had always really been in what made people tick, in addition to our heart beats that is. My joke with my wife, who is a keen gardener and therefore a horticulturist, is that my specialism is hearticulture. 

This, though, involves not patronisingly treating other people as plants, but rather, as I also joke, practising heart-to-heart resuscitation. We’re all in danger of spiritual suffocation in this material world. The links between breath and spirit are close. Heart to heart resuscitation, it must be emphasised, is a reciprocal process, not a one-way street. We all need to work at helping everyone we meet to breath in the spirit. 

That’s why I’m grateful for Alexander and Newell’s book — Living in a Mindful Universe — which has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. The book has tested my mind’s sight, given me a prescription for a new and much improved soul-lens, which is greatly enhancing my ability to see spiritual truths more clearly, and hopefully helping me be a better hearticulturist, if that makes sense.

I want to get to the bottom of the mind. That will not happen, of course, before I die, but I’d like to pothole down as deeply as I possibly can.

Near-Death Experiences

When I was about 11 years old I fell seriously ill. In the poem Solitude I recently tried to capture the experience I’d had:

At the time I bought into delirium as an explanation, but the experience has stuck in my memory in a way that other periods of delirium never have, even more recent ones. I don’t think this alone has been the trigger for my almost 40 years of unrelenting exploration of consciousness.

My well of pain revelation at the Encounter Group weekend in London in the mid-seventies certainly played its part. Clearly my mind was not what it had always seemed to me till then. From that point on various forms of therapy, Buddhist meditation, the study of psychology and existential philosophy, all focused on the nature of the mind, catapulted me towards the Bahá’í Faith where I met the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that set the core of the puzzle that bewildered the psychologist in me at the time:[1]

. . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.’

He went on to add: ‘This explanation, though short, is complete; therefore, reflect upon it, and if God wills, you may become acquainted with the details.’ Reflect upon it I certainly have: how well acquainted with the details I have become remains to be seen, I think.

My experience of the Bahá’í Faith has been very much a quest. I am travelling the Bahá’í path, my understanding influenced by all the twists and turns I’ve just mentioned that shaped my perception. I know I will never be truly a Bahá’í in this material life but I can at least try to inch closer to a truer understanding of spiritual truths.

The book I am about to explore has reinvigorated my desire to explore and understand all this far more deeply. In the process of sharing its impact, I will be going back to the Bahá’í Writings, poems I have been affected by, and other texts, to re-examine them with what I hope is now my keener gaze.

Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander’s NDE

Before we plunge more deeply into the book, we need to briefly go back to the experiences I have blogged about in my posts on Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. Certain aspects are clearer now.

For example Mishlove explains how improbable during his coma was any kind of conscious experience, and afterwards how unlikely was he not only to survive, but if he did survive to have anything remotely like a full recovery of cognitive functioning:[2]

Bruce Greyson examined the medical records, over 600 pages, with two other physicians. Puss from a rare infection filled Alexander’s cranium. His Glasgow Coma Scale result indicated minimal brain function. The three physicians all agreed there was less than a one percent chance of survival and no possibility of a normal recovery. As Greyson describes… ‘This guy was as dead as you can be without having his heart stop.’

Not only that, but his recovery, in the light of Greyson’s data on his extremely dire brain state, would seem to be unique:[1]

. . . Any physician realises the basic impossibility of a complete medical recovery, and yet that is what happened. I have discovered no cases of any other patients with my particular diagnosis who then went on to benefit from a complete recovery.

One of the most moving aspects of his story for me, not suprisingly given my sense of connection with the sister who had died four years before I was born, was his discover of the identity of his companion during his NDE:[2]

Another interesting slant on his recovery he deals with in this book is how his memories returned:[5]

Most personal life memories returned by three weeks after awakening from coma. All prior knowledge of physics, chemistry, and neuroscience . . . returned progressively over about two months or so. The completeness of my memory return was quite astonishing, especially as I thoroughly reviewed my medical records and held discussions with colleagues who had cared for me, and I realised just how ill I had actually been.

Memory

What was even more astonishing than the return of his basic memories, was that[6] he  ‘[e]ventually, . .  came to realise through subtle evidence over the next few years that, in fact, [his] memories had come back even more complete than they had been before [his] coma.’

He goes into the specifics of some, such as:[7]

In expanded states of awareness, I have recovered memories going back very early in life, and these have included the realisation that the perceived abandonment by my birth mother, initially on day eleven of my life when I was hospitalised for ‘failing to thrive,’ was an event that was so dramatic and shocking that it left scars that are still apparent in my psyche.

His has led him to see memory in a different light[8]:

Just as filter theory allows that the brain is not the producer of consciousness, likewise, we use the brain to access memory from an informational field . . that exists outside of it.

According to Alexander, all systematic scientific attempts to identify the exact location of memory in the brain have failed:[9]‘. . .  The mechanism and location of long-term memory storage remains a complete mystery.’

There will be more on filter theory later. This is enough for now before we take a long look at the idea of a Universal Mind next time.

References:

[1]. Some Answered Questions – LV.

[2]. Beyond the Brain:
the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death – page 25.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 37.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 49.

[5]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 63.

[6]. Op. cit. – page 146.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 379.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 487.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 653.

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Dreamproof (2/2)

Part 2 (Part 1 came out last yesterday)

George Herbert — image adapted from John Drury’s ‘Music at Midnight‘

After the recent post on dreams and hinting at the transpersonal, it seemed a good idea to republish this story triggered by the death of a friend some years ago now.

She woke in tears, her heart beating fast. The light was off nowadays but her practised hand went straight to the switch, then the pen and she was soon scribbling fast to catch every detail of the dream.

Only three months in and she had had her first dream. She couldn’t believe how excited she was. How long would it be before the next one?

Why had he had to phone? Why didn’t she see him face-to-face? Why was he cut off? Why did he say he wasn’t supposed to be ringing yet?

Never mind. At least she’d heard from him. It was definitely his voice. She’d know it anywhere. Maybe it was really him and not just a construct from her memories. She would know soon enough when the second dream came and she could check out what was said against the contents of the packet.

At first she began to enjoy the routines of her life more because of the lift the dream had given her. Her yoga began to raise her spirits again. The children at her school, where she worked in the reception class, almost made her feel hopeful, though she never lost a background sense of sadness that she and Alistair had never been able to create a child of their own. She still steered clear of his family and friends most of the time: the elephant of his absence always stood between her and them, though he was never mentioned.

Only in her evenings alone and most of all just before she went to bed, did the grief hit her hard once more. She couldn’t listen to her favourite songs. They were mostly his as well. The first chords turned the sadness of six foot breakers into tsunamis of distress.

Still, she slept in hope each day, and every morning woke in disappointment.

As the weeks crept by at snail’s pace hope faded and her spirits began to sink. She went out less, except to work. Her thoughts darkened. She wondered how long she could endure this uncertainty. Surely, anything would be better than this – even the sure knowledge that her first dream had been wrong.

. . . . . . . . .

It was six months later. There’d been no other dream containing Alistair bearing a message of any kind – just fleeting moments of wish fulfilment when she saw him apparently alive again and with her in their home, cooking at the stove surrounded by more pans than they had ever owned, rinsing pots over the sink under the sunlight running from the taps, and sitting contentedly in the garden with his coffee and his book with yellow swallows darting overhead.

Then the pain of loss when each dream was over.

As she emptied the dishwasher after breakfast, she came to a decision. She wouldn’t wait any longer. She didn’t want all this focus on her dreams anymore.

She’d had a dream and got a message about the contents of the package. If it was right it would confirm that his mind lived on. If not, she was no worse off, and the uncertainty of waiting for the second dream wasn’t helping. Perhaps he wasn’t going to be allowed to come again. That’s what his message implied, or at least it might be so long in the future she couldn’t bear it. No, she’d go to see John, today if possible, and find out what was in the packet.

She picked up the phone. The dialling tone buzzed on for quite some time and she was just about resigned to hearing the answer phone when John’s voice cut across: ‘Hi, Dorothy.’

“Hi, can I come over. I want to open the packet.’

‘Have you had the second dream?’

‘No, but I can’t wait any longer.’

There was a silence. What was he thinking?

‘Are you sure about this? You know me. I don’t believe in this whole mad idea anyway, but you probably do and Alistair certainly did. If you come now you’re going against what he asked you to do. You could feel bad about this later.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I’ve had the one dream with a clear message. That should be enough. It’ll either be right or wrong. Either way, that will be the same whether we open the package now or next year.’

‘Well, if you’re really sure . . . ,’ John tailed off.

. . . . . . . . .

She drove round to John’s after lunch.

He made a cup of coffee for them both before sitting down at the dining room table with the packet in front of them. It was quite small, about book size. This was encouraging. Any larger or smaller and she would have begun to regret her decision and might have changed her mind. But no, this looked good. She should carry on.

‘Right,’ she said as she sipped her coffee. ‘As I remember, Alistair said I must tell you what is in the packet before we open it. So, I’ve brought my transcript of the dream for you to read, so you can get the full context.’

She passed him a typewritten sheet of A4.

He quickly glanced through it.

‘The Everyman George Herbert then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there any way you could’ve have thought of this yourself and built it into a dream?’

‘Well, I bought the Everyman edition as a birthday present some years back, but it’s one present among many. I could have picked loads of others. I was always buying him books. This was one of his favourites but not the only one and I hadn’t thought about it for years till the dream itself. And there’s no way I could’ve noticed it was missing from his shelves. He had thousands of books and I haven’t begun to sort them yet. Too difficult.’

‘Is that the only copy of Herbert’s poetry he owned?’

‘No, he had two or three others, but none with all the poems in, which is why he specially wanted this one.’

‘ That could prove interesting. So, d’you want to go ahead?’

‘Definitely.’

John popped into the kitchen for a sharp knife to cut open the sellotape. He peeled back the brown paper. There was definitely a book inside. And a handwritten note. And something else – a CD.

This wasn’t quite what she expected. Should she have waited? Why was there a CD in there?

They picked up the note to read.

‘Dear both, if you are reading this you will have opened the packet. I hope you waited, Dorothy, till you’d had both dreams because I misled you. There are two things in here not one. And I planned to tell you about them one at a time. You know there is no sense of time in the next world. The second dream could be a long time after the first in your world but immediately after in mine. I wanted you to be able to tell John about both items, not just one. He’ll be a hard man to convince and I really want to convince him. Anyway, if you didn’t wait for the second dream it’s too late to go back now, because if you’ve seen this you’ll have caught sight of the second item. . . . . .’

Dorthy’s head was swimming. She was so angry with herself for going against what he’d said, but even more angry with him. He was a trickster. She had thought this was all for her but he had set her up to convince John. And now it was all a mess. Still, she had to know whether she was right about the book.

‘What’s the book, John? Am I right about that at least?’

‘Yes. It’s the Everyman George Herbert all right.’

He passed it to her. She opened the fly leaf. Sure enough – her writing. ‘Just your kind of stuff – the poems of a priest. Enjoy! Just don’t expect me to read it.’

Her words sounded a bit sour now, though she had meant them as an affectionate joke at the time. She wondered whether she had hurt his feelings with her more sceptical attitude. Had he picked this book to make that kind of point even after death?

John read her words over her shoulder.

‘Do you think you might have felt guilty about that? The mind holds onto things out of awareness you know. That would be enough to slide it into a dream.’

‘But I wrote that kind of thing all the time in the books I gave him. Why would I feel badly about this one in particular?’

He shrugged.

‘And it’s good that it’s the correct edition of the two or three he had.’

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Shall we look at the other item?’ he asked.

She nodded.

Handel’s Messiah. She couldn’t remember how many times, through his study door, she’d heard the rousing Hallelujah Chorus or the plangent strains of ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.’

‘I could just as easily have dreamt that one by guesswork – more easily in fact. He played it all the time, for heaven’s sake. Why did I dream of the George Herbert instead?’

‘Well, that would depend upon which affected you most strongly at the deeper levels of your mind,’ John explained patiently, ‘outside your conscious . . .’

‘You know, John,’ she cut in, ‘in your different ways you both drove me nuts. He banged on about the soul and you hit me over the head with the mind all the time. And you know what? None of it makes any sense to me. It never did and it never will. You just can’t prove any of it. God, Freud, the after life, the unconscious. They’re all crap. Just fantasies to try and make sense of the mad mystery of life. I don’t know what I really thought when I dreamt of him, anymore than I know whether I’m going to live on or black out when I die. None of it helps. I just want Alistair back. I just want my old life again.’

She burst into tears once more, wracked by deeper sobs than John had ever heard from anyone in his entire life so far.

. . . . . . . . .

She drove home through winter twilight uncomforted and in a dark and desperate mood. She had no interest in food. She somehow managed to make herself a drink of hot chocolate and crept very early into bed.

It took a long time for sleep to come and with it came disturbing dreams of witches and beheadings. As the sky began to lighten just after dawn her sleep deepened.

She finds herself walking across a stretch of water she half-recognises. It reminds her of the bay in Cyprus where she and Alistair once stayed in the early days of their marriage. The air is warm and though there are waves on the surface of the water she does not trip. In fact, she feels lighter and lighter with every step almost as though she could fly.

Then she is on a hill high above the sea looking down at a sunset, with its darkening reds and golds. There is a boat on the water with purple sails moving fast towards her. The closer it gets the more peaceful she feels. When the boat is half-way across the water, it begins to glide into the air, rising higher and higher as it gets closer to where she stands.

She could swear, as it approaches overhead, that she can see Alistair at the prow gazing down at her and waving. He is too far away to speak but she knows he is not angry with her. She can almost believe that they will meet again.

When she wakes just after a cloudless sunrise, the brightness of the light through the crack in the curtains touches her heart and she knows that she will manage to rebuild her life without forgetting him but healed enough for happiness of some kind to return.

Tomorrow she will apologise to John.

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Dreamproof (1/2)

After the recent post on dreams and hinting at the transpersonal, it seemed a good idea to republish this story triggered by the death of a friend some years ago now.

Dorothy[1] stared at the piles of paper on his desk. The magnolia just beginning to blossom outside the window proved that it was spring, but this was not the spring clean she had planned. It wasn’t his fault that the desk was covered in notebooks, newspaper cuttings, envelopes, scribbled sheets of A4, and bits of card in various colours. That was her doing.

She had known since the funeral that she would have to clear out his study at some point, but had put it off all winter. The short dark days had made it seem too difficult to tackle such a painful task.

She’d shipped his clothes to the Oxfam shop. He’d never been attached to them and nor was she, but this was different. His study held the heartbeat of his life’s work. She couldn’t face the bookshelves yet, nor the filing cabinet with all his journals in, so she’d attacked his desk with all the venom of her grief. Every heavy drawer was heaved out of its slot and dumped onto the rust-red leather surface until there was no more room.

The mounds reached almost to her chest. Scribbled scraps had fallen onto the carpet. No longer able to stand she sank into his chair just as the tears began once more to slide their customary path down along her cheeks.

Surely this would have to wait until another day. She was just about to get up and leave when her eyes fell on an envelope, originally at the bottom of a drawer but now at the top of the last hoard she had thrown onto the heap.

It had her name on it.

Hesitantly she pulled it towards her. The envelope felt thick and stiff, as though it held a card for her to read. Memories of anniversaries flooded back, of other cards in better days, in Paris in the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa, beneath the Orloj in Prague’s Old Town Square, in Amsterdam with Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum.

With misty eyes, she groped into the top left hand drawer – not one she’d emptied yet as she knew that all it contained were such things as staplers, pens, rulers, scissors and sellotape. And the brass letter opener she needed was there somewhere. Her hand finally detected it.

She slit open the envelope.

Sure enough, a card, with van Gogh’s sunflowers on the front.

“My dearest Dorothy,” it read, “I should have put this somewhere more obvious but I thought it was best to make this task as difficult as I could for obvious reasons. I have given a packet for John to keep until you ask him for it. I am requesting you not to do so until I enter your dreams twice, on two separate nights, and tell you what the packet contains. There is one thing inside that I only want you to find after you have seen me twice in a dream and I have told you what the envelope contains. You must tell John what is inside the envelope before you open it in his presence. In that way we will make it as certain as possible that, if you are right, my continuing life after death is confirmed at least for the two of you, the most important people in my life. Of course, if you are wrong, while it will not prove that my mind is still alive, as I sincerely hope it is at the time that you read this, it does not prove the opposite either. Whichever way this goes, please remember that in this life at least I have loved you more than any other person, place or thing.

“With deepest love, Alistair.”

She could hold back the sobs no longer as her mind carried her back to the late winter morning just over a year ago, after the surgeon had confirmed there was nothing more they could do. Alistair had sat where she sat now, as she stood in the doorway watching him, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. They had just got up and the heating was only just beginning to loosen the grip of a frosty night.

He had explained to her, with a wide grin on his face, his latest plan.

‘Jesus!’ she spluttered in her drink, ‘You’ve got to be bloody joking.’

‘Why? It’d be a great experiment. If I did come back you’d be so comforted.’

‘But what if you didn’t?’

‘Well, you’d be no worse off than if we didn’t work this plan.’

. . . . . . . . .

John was just biting into a wholemeal biscuit when his mobile rang. It was Dorothy. For a moment he was tempted to ignore it but relented. She didn’t ring often after all.

‘’Hi, Dorothy. How goes?’

‘D’you know what I’ve found,’ she burst out loudly at high speed.

‘Tell me,’ he responded wearily.

‘The card,’ she shouted. ‘The one telling me about the packet Alistair left with you.’

He paused. He’d been dreading this moment.

Not only did he feel guilty that he hadn’t given Dorothy more time and support in these difficult days, but he regarded the whole ‘experiment’ Alistair had set up as a complete waste of time. He’d always known of his dead friend’s obsession with the possibility of the afterlife. They’d had many a conversation in which he’d tried to bring him back to his senses. Nothing had worked. And now he resented the way his friend had dragged him into this pointless charade. It was not only embarrassing but would probably leave Dorothy feeling even more hurt and let down than ever. And he would have to deal with all this.

‘I know the one you mean. Do you really feel we need to go through with this? It’ll drag on for ages and slow down any chance you have of grieving properly and moving on.’

‘Of course we have to go through with it,’ she snapped. ‘He wanted it and it’s what I want as well.’

‘But it’ll only lead to disappointment . . . . ,’ he began.

‘You don’t know that. You believe whatever you want. Believe in nothing for all I care. But I believe something else is possible and this may be the only chance I ever get of proving it to myself at least.’ She stopped. ‘Maybe it’ll change your mind as well.’

‘Fat chance,’ he thought but said nothing.

‘What is it that you want me to do?’

. . . . . . . . .

Dorothy sat at the garden table in the late afternoon sun. Its light scattered off the dimpled glass in snaking patterns. She knew John wasn’t happy to continue with this plan but she was grateful that, out of loyalty to Alistair probably, he was on board with it at least for the time being.

The next big problem was her dreams. She never remembered any. Alistair had banged on endlessly about how everyone dreams, and about how important they were as messengers from ‘the subliminal mind.’ How irritating all that psychobabble was while he was still alive and how much she missed it now.

On the table was a book about dreaming. It was one he had recommended to her many times over the years. She’d always refused to go near it. Well, he’d won the battle in the end. She picked it up and began to read, skimming past the early chapters trying to find where this wonderful advice was about capturing the dreams she felt she never had. Ah, got it. She read more carefully. She had to prime her mind before sleep and ask to be given dreams. Then, if she woke and remembered even the faintest fragment of a dream, she must catch it and write it down even in the middle of the night.

It all seemed a bit mad to her. Was this his way of getting her to do now he was dead, what he could never persuade her to consider while he was alive? Perhaps it wasn’t about proving his mind lived on at all. Perhaps he believed that tuning into her dreams would help her with her grief and the rest of her life without him. Should she ring John and tell him to call it off?

She remembered that Alistair was not a trickster. He didn’t play those kinds of mind games. He was obsessed with near-death experiences and bored you almost to death endlessly explaining them. He almost certainly did want to test this theory out. Maybe he wanted her to value her dreams as well but definitely not instead.

She read on.

That night she placed a pad and pencil next to the bed. She decided to leave the light on as well. Her sleep would be more broken, which might help, and she wouldn’t have to grope for the pencil and risk losing the dream.

This became her nightly ritual for weeks. She faithfully recorded what she could remember of her dreams.

At first mere wisps of smoke with no sign of the fire.

She was on a green train going somewhere. She was trying to make a phone call but the screen of her mobile didn’t work. She was in a meeting with a report to make but she had left her draft at home. She is at the window of a house on fire, helping people to escape.

Slowly, over time the dreams became more detailed and more weird.

She was in what seemed to be a church, sitting on the kind of shiny reddish-brown wooden bench that usually constitutes a pew. There were quite a few people around. Across an aisle there was a bench or barrier with some kind of platform in front of it. It didn’t look like those tombstones found in a church but it was about the same height. There were several people in front of it watching some kind of mythical creature pacing up-and-down, perhaps even dancing. It was of medium height and possibly had wings. A girl, with a bow and arrow in her hands, clearly felt the creature was dangerous and she had to kill it before it harmed someone. She loved the creature dearly and really didn’t want to kill it. She went close to the platform and shot it with an arrow. She had to go so close so as to be sure to kill the creature and not hurt someone else. Dorothy burst out sobbing. She was so intensely sad. She felt embarrassed and, looking round, was relieved to see a skinny girl to her left also holding back her tears on the same bench.

After this dream she woke up feeling something really significant had happened. She didn’t know quite how to go about decoding it. There were tinges of the Cupid legend and ideas of love. There was grief there, and death. Also there was religion with all that implied about faith and the afterlife. She wondered if it meant that she was getting closer to a meeting with Alistair in a dream. She didn’t know who the other girl was – her younger self perhaps?

The following week there was a longer dream.

Dorothy is wandering around a vast campus. The experience is like a fusion of starting university and being at a conference. One moment she is stepping between people sitting on the central steps of a massive auditorium, as she strides down towards the stage to give a talk. Next she is opening doors off corridors into what should be laboratories, lecture halls or seminar rooms, to find people asleep in them in the daytime. She feels they must have travelled vast distances to get here and are jet lagged. Then she is striding long pathways in flat blank spaces outside completely alone and talking to herself. She is feeling really strange and tense. She seems to know no one.

It’s coming up to 5 p.m. She decides to ring home and gets her mobile out. It’s useless. It’s all in Greek. There is a pretty scene of some ancient building depicted on the screen. There is no address book and no way to ring numbers. She is desperate to make the phone call. Her battery is going flat – it’s showing 19% and she doesn’t have her portable charger with her. She finds a group of red phone boxes near something like a factory and goes into one with her change in her hand but can’t understand the slots for the coins. They seem to be specialised for factory-made discs to go into. Then the phone in her booth rings. She hesitates, then picks it up.

‘Hallo,’ she whispers.

‘Hi, love, it’s Alistair.’

Her heart leaps. She can hardly speak.

‘You’ve done it. You’ve come into my dream.’

‘Listen, love. I haven’t got much time. I’m not meant to ring you yet. In the packet is a book – the Everyman edition of George Herbert’s . . . . .’

The phone went dead.

(Part 2: Tomorrow)

Footnote:

[1] This was begun after we attended the funeral of a close friend. She was a complete sceptic so in a way this is written partly from her point of view.

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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)

Given that tomorrow’s post makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish it now. 

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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Review: ‘Dancing Past the Dark (3/3)

‘Newton’ by William Blake

A recent death triggered a poem on the subject on Monday. So, it seemed useful to flag up this brilliant book again by reposting the full sequence.

Clash of Paradigms

With Bush’s help in her valuable treatment of these experiences, we have looked at the various problems people in our modern Western society will have making sense of a near-death experience (NDE) especially if it is distressing. Where does all this leave the person who has experienced an NDE, distressing or otherwise? Bush puts it well (2133-37):

The Catch-22 for many individuals after an NDE is that they know what they experienced but they can’t believe what they experienced; . . . . In the mainstream of Western thought, the physical world is the only possible real world, and therefore the only sane one.

Interpreting the experience as spiritual is not an easily available option for most of us. She quotes Grof again (2145:

The mystical nature of many experiences . . . . puts them automatically into the category of pathology, since spirituality is not seen as a legitimate dimension in the exclusively material universe of traditional science.

Our culture has a very different model (2184):

Especially in modern times there have developed ‘explanations of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly’ which are not based on a notion of the transcendent, for example atheistic Marxism and secular humanism. Although in every respect these “explanations” function as religions traditionally have in human life, because they omit the idea of the transcendent it is best to give these a separate name. The name often used is ideology.

Bush doesn’t buy this model. She quotes Edinger as saying (2206): ‘There is in the unconscious a transpersonal center of latent consciousness and obscure intentionality.’

In grappling with both the limitations of Kahneman’s two system model of decision–making and what Bahá’u’lláh meant by the phrase ‘understanding heart’ I have been seeking to explore this issue from various angles including dreams. Bush feels that (2208) ‘Dreams, fantasies, illness, accident and coincidence become potential messages from the unseen Partner with whom we share our life.’ She feels that distressing NDEs are approaching the same territory from a different and more disturbing angle (2213-15):

Individuals who find themselves in distressing NDEs that involve a sense of transcendence with feelings of awe and terror may be encountering what the German scholar Rudolf Otto (1958, 12) termed the “numinosum,” the Holy. . . . . . .  This is not the tame ‘walking in the garden with God’ kind of holy but the original holy terror, ‘the fear of God’ so expertly captured by Old Testament writers as a sense of overpowering awe.

She sees the terror as at least in part derived from the threat to our ego (2290):

Life lived within the myth of the self comes up against the spiritual demand for surrender. We are aghast. What’s worse, we are unprepared.

She attacks the simplistic notion (2309), though, ‘the view that some experiences are terrifying because the individual “should have” given in to it, should have surrendered.’ She explains why (ibid.):

This assumes not only that the person knows this beforehand but that the response can be somehow both imagined and volitional from within the experience. This is a cultural dilemma. It also ignores the real possibility that sometimes one may be well advised not to be taken in by the terrifying vision, not to go with it but to find a different way around.

She argues, rather as McGilchrist might in the same territory, that we need to keep the left hemisphere of the brain on the case here (2335):

Without discernment and common sense (left hemisphere), we become easy marks for spiritual charlatans and crooks. Two halves make a whole brain and a whole person.

A Point of Transition

Our world is deeply conflicted. She reminds us again of the difference between East and West on this particular subject. She quotes Richard J. Foster (2344):

‘Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to empty the mind in order to fill it. The two ideas are radically different.’

She argues (2386-2403) that we are in another ‘Axial Age:’

. . . . . in roughly the years between 800 and 200 BCE, something fundamental happened in the thinking and even in the very nature, of people around the world. Humanity discovered morality. . . . . . That same kind of turmoil is with us today, on a larger scale but with the same elements: stunningly new ideas, radical shifts in religion, globalism and a jostling of cultures, and economic upheavals. . . . . . Today we are amid a second Axial Age and are undergoing a period of transition similar to that of the first Axial Age.

I will resist going off into an explanation of the similarity of that view to the Bahá’í understanding of our current predicament, and refrain from recapitulating my reactions to Robert Wright’s Evolution of God and Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson’s brilliant analysis of this period of ‘parenthesis.’ However, the reference she quotes to our moving towards a ‘Global Civilisation’ should be a big enough hint (2409):

Leonard Swidler (2008), has said of the 20th century’s wars, ‘In fact, however, those vast world conflagrations were manifestations of the dark side of the unique breakthrough in the history of humankind [of] the modern development of Christendom-become-Western Civilization, now becoming Global Civilization. Never before had there been world wars; likewise, never before had there been world political organizations (League of Nations, United Nations).’

She is therefore very aware, as she writes, that she must write in a way that is accessible to a wide variety of perspectives and world views. The multitude of terms that have been applied to the NDE experience scarcely touch never mind overlap. These terms are the filter through which people understand the experience (2450):

Historian of religion Ann Taves (2009, 162) has observed that when people use the adjectives ‘religious,’ ‘mystical,’ ‘magical,’ ‘superstitious,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘ideological,’ or ‘secular’ to apply to such an experience, it is the preexisting belief of the speaker rather than the experience itself that determines which word will be chosen.

Whatever the terms used (2456) ‘whether religious, mystical, magical, superstitious, spiritual, ideological, or secular, it is the same individual experience.’

The ultimate effect of this has been disastrous for anyone trying to make sense of an NDE, especially a distressing one (2502-05):

Experiencers have told many sad stories of going to a professional for help in understanding their NDE, only to find themselves caught up in the medical model, pathologized by a diagnostic label and the NDE dismissed as meaningless. . . . . . . People have also told of being dismissed by their rabbi or pastor as well, for in a secular society much awareness of deep spiritual process is lost or distorted, even within religious institutions themselves.

It seems likely that the insecurities of religious institutions are being triggered, at least in part, by the openness of these experiences (2512):

A great many experiencers have observed, often with dismay at their religious institution, that the message of their NDE was far more open, more universalizing and inclusive than what their tradition teaches.

It used to be well-known and widely accepted that (2542) ‘many dramatic and difficult episodes can occur during spiritual practice and that the road to enlightenment can be rough and stormy.’ Sadly that level of awareness has long been lost in the West at least. Jung’s view was that (2563) ‘After almost four centuries of deepening materialism and the dimming or outright loss of the West’s major religious and philosophical symbols. . . .  the energies of the psyche had begun saying, “enough.”’

Moreover, in Bush’s view, (2605):

. . . . in the belief systems that were converging in the new broth, there was—not pantheism, “nature worship”—but panentheism, the conviction that God permeates all of creation, that God is in all and all are in God—which means that in some measure each individual person is directly connected not only to every other individual person and the universe itself but is connected to that One, that All… and is in some measure divine.

She contrasts that with the West’s prevailing orthodoxy which is spreading ever more widely (2624):

As opposed to the dominant culture, which has been outward, rational, reductionistic, dominated by the senses, and driven by the letter of the law, this alternative reality tradition has been inner, contemplative, ascetic, and mystical, believing itself to be the true aristocracy of the spirit from which the letter of the law was derived.

Paths Forward?

Which brings us to the last section of her book, which, as I indicated at the start of the series of posts, I would deal with briefly and come back to at more length later. To begin with she visits some ground previously traveled: attempts to define the NDE, understanding its purpose, the importance of the shock it administers to our world view.

In the end though she feels (2710-12) ‘Whether the events are literally, physically, materially real or not is irrelevant; they are real experiences, profoundly real in the imaginal sense, a sudden, shocking revelation of truths previously unrecognized about the world we thought we knew.’

She examines some of the ancient imagery that is possibly helpful to consider in this context, for example, ‘daimons’ (2791):

Daimons were understood to be potentially both good and evil; but eventually the good gods and their destructive qualities were divided from the evil demons and their potential for good, shifting constructive qualities to the gods and destructive qualities onto the demons. It was one of the prices of monotheism, that loss of complexity.

In the end we lost something important. According to James Greer (2801): ‘In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth.’

Something like them can certainly feature in advanced spiritual practice (2807):

Shinzen Young (2005), an American Buddhist teacher of mindfulness meditation, has noted that terrifying images—insectoid, grotesquely otherworldly, demonic—may appear in advanced meditation. He teaches that they are ‘best interpreted as part of a natural process of release from the deep archetypal levels of the mind.’

She discusses in some detail the nature of distressing experiences and concludes along with Grof that (2878):

‘The experience of extraordinary perception can be associated with deep metaphysical fear, since it challenges and undermines the world view that the Western culture typically subscribes to and associates with sanity.’

More than that even, they may be saying, as do positive ones as well, something about our essential being at the deepest levels (2886):

The bottom line about distressing NDEs in general and the hellish ones in particular seems to be that hell, like heaven, is very real—as a product of the imaginal system that produces experience. It is not a place, not a destination, but a built-in range of ideas that are part of us, and that we must deal with.

They are symbols representing a reality that cannot be accessed except through symbols. There is a catch, however. Bahá’u’lláh is very clear that what He is expressing, as He attempts to communicate to us about spiritual reality, is according to our understanding, not according to the reality He perceives (Hidden Words: 67):

All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.

He also explains that we cannot understand such symbols if we are not sufficiently detached (Kitáb-i-Íqán: pages 68-69):

Wert thou to cleanse the mirror of thy heart from the dust of malice, thou wouldst apprehend the meaning of the symbolic terms revealed by the all-embracing Word of God made manifest in every Dispensation, and wouldst discover the mysteries of divine knowledge.

There is much to explore here.

Bush explains that (2919) ‘NDEs cannot be the territory they represent: they are signposts, arrows; maps written in symbol.’

We have to be careful though to distinguish two different categories of thought when we are talking about symbols (2923):

What is imaginary does not really exist but is made up, pretend, fantasy. What is imaginal, on the other hand, as . . . . . Joseph Campbell . . . . noted, “is metaphysically grounded in a dreamlike mythological realm beyond space and time, which, since it is physically invisible, can be known only to the mind.”

What the logical mind interprets as destructive may not be so at this level of understanding. I will need to return to this again but one example she gives is fire (2935): ‘Fire signifies divine revelation—the burning bush, the ancient sacrifice, the burning lamp, the all-enveloping presence of God. It is a classic symbol of transformation.’ And (2940), ‘As in dreams, a suggestion of death or end times may point simply to change—to the end of a life phase or a major change in one’s awareness, the death of a particular time.’

These symbols have deep roots and should not be dismissed (2963):

Stanislav Grof has observed . . . . , “These mythologies and concepts of… heaven and hell… are an intrinsic part of the human personality that cannot be repressed and denied without serious damage.”

Also, it is worth bearing in mind the possibility adduced by Christopher Bache (2990) ‘that a distressing NDE represents a painful fragment of a potentially transcendent experience that either has insufficient impetus to blast through to the transcendent level or that gets “stuck” in the tunnel so many near-death experiencers describe.’

Basically Bush feels we should avoid simplistic one-dimensional interpretations (3018): ‘The more one knows about symbolic language, the wider the possible understanding of what an experience is about.’

What follows in her book is a deeper exploration of how someone might go about accessing more positive interpretations of what at first sight seem such dark and damaging experiences. She covers a remarkable amount of ground and draws on a wide range of thinkers and practitioners. There is no way I can do justice to it in this review. There is also no way I can resist bringing in more of my own ideas than is appropriate.

What I have tried to do in this review is demonstrate how rigorous and valuable her examination is of a hitherto virtually neglected body of experiences. It is well worth reading and brings this whole area out into the light where more of us can share it.

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