Compass of Compassion

As the current sequence is dealing with the massive challenge of the world’s current state, it seemed appropriate to publish this poem once more.

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Earning our Chance

As the next sequence will be dealing with the massive challenge of the world’s current state, it seemed appropriate to publish this poem once more.

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Summer Break

We’ve reached that time of year again when the decrease in footfall triggers a few weeks break. I’ll be picking up the threads again at the beginning of September and bombarding you all with poems, I suspect. Hope all goes well. Below is just something to be going on with.

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Book Review (3/3): ‘My Stroke of Insight’ revisited: Transcending our Limitations

Illuminating Silence

I ended the previous post by emphasising, not for the first time on this blog, the importance of silence. I quoted ‘Abdu’l-Bahá when he explains:

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign (from God) in every phenomenon: the sign of the intellect is contemplation and the sign of contemplation is silence, because it is impossible for a man to do two things at one time—he cannot both speak and meditate. It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.

What I neglected to do was also include Piero Ferrucci into the mix. In Chapter 20 of his book What We May Be[1] he writes about the ‘state of intense and at the same time relaxed alertness,’ which comes with silence. He speaks of how ‘insights flow into this receptive space we have created.’ He goes onto explain what might be going on here:[2]

While the mind [in my terms intellect] grasps knowledge in a mediated way . . . and analytically, intuition seizes truth in a more immediate and global manner. For this to happen, the mind becomes at least temporarily silent. As the intuition is activated, the mind is gradually transformed . . . .

He unpacks the kinds of intuition to which we may come to have access: about people and about problems, but beyond that also at ‘the superconscious level’ we can have ‘a direct intuitive realisation of a psychological quality, of a universal law, of the interconnectedness of everything with everything else, of the oneness of all reality, of eternity, and so on.’

There is one more priceless potential outcome of this kind of process:[3]

There is, however, one higher goal – higher even then the flower of intuition – to which the cultivation of silence can bring us. While it is rarely reached, it is of such importance that no discussion of silence can be complete without it. I refer to illumination. While intuition can be thought of as giving us a glimpse of the world in which the Self lives, illumination can best be conceived as a complete view of that world. In fact, illumination is the act of reaching the Self and contacting it fully.

Connectedness & Unity

What follows at this point are some of the hints as to the form taken by Jill Bolte Taylor’s ‘illumination.’

One of the strongest elements, and one that also resonates to the insights of the Bahá’í Faith, is this:[4] ‘How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe?’ There are strong echoes here of the poem quoted by Bahá-u-lláh in The Seven Valleys which I also referred to in the first post of this sequence: ‘Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’  She adds, ‘There was both freedom and challenge for me in recognising that our perception of the external world, and our relationship to it, is a product of a neurological circuitry. For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my own imagination!’

This insight maps onto another recent book I came across which has an interesting take on this that I haven’t quite digested yet. Anil Seth, in his book Being You: a new science of consciousness, argues that all any of us have is a controlled hallucination, which in the case of some people breaks down into an uncontrolled hallucination. To put it as simply as I can, he is singing from the same hymn sheet as David Robson in his book The Expectation Effect whose basic case is that the brain is a prediction machine.

Robson’s first simple piece of evidence in that direction came as a surprise to me:[5] ‘If you look at the wiring of the visual cortex at back of the head, you find that the nerves bringing electrical signals from the retina are vastly outnumbered by the neuron connections feeding in predictions from other regions of the brain.’ Seth contends that[6] ‘we never experience the world as it is.’ We create, at best, a simulation that is usually good enough to help us survive physically but no more than that. What we experience[7] is a ‘construction of the brain.’ He summarises his position at one point as:[8] ‘you could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.’ I feel that this perspective supports the sense I have always had that hallucinations are not a categoric symptom of a clearly definable disorder most of us don’t share, but points along a continuum from acceptably normal to unacceptably bizarre. We are all at some point on that spectrum and sometimes hallucinations can be shared.

Once we break through to the right hemisphere experience, everything changes:[9] ‘To my right mind, we are all equal members of the human family. My right mind does not perceive or give heed to territories or artificial boundaries like race or religion.’ This demolition of prejudice is again resonant of the Bahá’í perspective.

She even strays explicitly into the theological:[10] ‘My right mind character… is the seat of my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer. It is my intuition and higher consciousness.’

I hope I’m not reading too much more into what she means by that when I am reminded of what Bahá-u-lláh explains to us as he quotes from an earlier passage of His in Gleanings XCIII:

“Earth and heaven cannot contain Me; what can alone contain Me is the heart of him that believeth in Me, and is faithful to My Cause.” How often hath the human heart, which is the recipient of the light of God and the seat of the revelation of the All-Merciful, erred from Him Who is the Source of that light and the Well Spring of that revelation. It is the waywardness of the heart that removeth it far from God, and condemneth it to remoteness from Him. Those hearts, however, that are aware of His Presence, are close to Him, and are to be regarded as having drawn nigh unto His throne.

She is aware of this block against insight:

. . . Many of us make judgements with the left hemisphere, and then are not willing to step to the right… for a final update. For many of us, once we have made a decision, then we are attached to that decision forever.

In shifting to the ‘right’[11] she felt something else that echoes the Bahá’í perspective:

I am a part of it all. We are brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place.

The left mind has a role though:

My left mind is responsible for taking all of that energy, all of that information about the present moment, and all of those magnificent possibilities perceived by the right mind, and shaping them into something manageable.

Which again maps onto the Bahá’í emphasis on doing as well as being.

She describes the immense value of transcending the left hemisphere’s limitations:[12]

 . . This stroke of insight has given me the priceless gift of knowing that deep inner peace is just a thought/feeling away… I realise that for many of us, the distance between our thinking mind and our compassionate heart sometimes feels miles apart… Others of us are so committed to hopelessness, anger, and misery that the mere concept of a peaceful heart feels foreign and unsafe.

. . . The feeling of deep inner peace is neurological circuitry located in our right brain. This circuitry is constantly running and always available for us to hook into.

Once, some time back, when I was sitting quietly in our back garden I looked up at the pure blue cloudless sky overhead. It was a reminder for me of our pure consciousness all too often hidden from us behind the brain clouds we mistake for reality and for who we are.

She adds to her list of reminders of this newly discovered reality:[13]

The first thing I do to experience my inner peace is to remember that I am part of a greater structure… Knowing that I am part of the cosmic flow, makes me feel in innately safe and experience my life as heaven on Earth… My left mind thinks of me as a fragile individual capable of losing my life. My right mind realises that the essence of my being has eternal life.

Compassion

What she goes on to explain next reminded me of my earlier attempts to remind myself of the importance of compassion by seeing it as my compass. She is in no doubt of its importance:[14] ‘If I had to pick one output (action) word for my right mind, I would choose compassion.’

She unpacks some of the word’s implications:[15]

When we are being compassionate, we consider another’s circumstance with love rather than judgement. We see a homeless person or a psychotic person and approach them with an open heart, rather than fear, disgust, or aggression.

This triggered me to go back to my attempts to create a mnemonic to remind me of all the elements I need to hold on to if I am to be more consistently compassionate.

C: Consciousness & Connectedness (and four other Cs I won’t bore you with here)

O: Openness

M: Meditation, Music & Metaphor

P: Poetry & Psychology

A: Art & Altruism

S: Slowing down (as well as Silence, Spirituality & Synergy)

S: My 4Ss (Spot It, Stop It, Swap It etc.)

I: Intuition, Interdependence & Illumination

O: Om

N: Nature

I began working hard to slow down. I noticed that a tightness in my breathing was a warning that I was tensing up and going too fast. My breath is, in fact, the barometer with which I test the climate of my mind. If my chest feels tight, for example, the inscape’s weather is bad. Keeping myself focused on my breath (what spirit meant originally, of course) physically helps me to remember to reconnect with my heart metaphysically. Strange that it’s taken me 49 years of conscious effort to get to this point – more than half my life!

I also at intervals stepped back from my to-do list and worked at silencing my mind’s chatter.

It all began to make a significant difference.

For example, as I walked to town the other day slowly and calmly I saw, perhaps for the first time, the beauty of the shadows the lime colonnade painted on the path I was treading down College Road.

When I reached the town centre I noticed a man limping slowly along with a short version of the stick used by blind people. He was heading straight for an advertising board set up on the pavement. When he was about a yard away I was close to him. I could see his stick was not detecting the sign but sliding between the gap between the sign and the shop front. I warned him to slow down. Because he didn’t understand why, I tapped the metal sign. He got the message and I held his arm to help him move out far enough to avoid harm. He thanked me at least three times.

Would I have noticed his danger if I had been dashing along as I usually did when I was not so closely tuned into my right brain?

I am wondering why it had taken me so long to pull all these pieces together into one peace. I resolved that from now on, as far as humanly possible what I wear, use or carry must remind me of who I really am, of this need to connect with my understanding heart. I was kinder to more people that day and more moved by music than I have ever felt before that I can remember. I hope I’m on the right track in a sustainable way at last. A red admiral butterfly fluttered by as I wrote those words at the table in the back garden.

There are also reminders that have helped my left hemisphere stay on piste. Listen and Silent are anagrams that help it realise that if it doesn’t shut up it will never hear what matters. Hear is a partial anagram of the understanding Heart which needs to be listened to and which, in turn, is an anagram of the Earth which we must take care of rather than ruthlessly exploit. The implications of that last mnemonic have been explored at length on this blog in the aftermath of my Hearth Dream.

The connection between the left hemisphere and the ego resurfaces again:[16]

Most important, however, our desire for peace must be stronger than our attachment to our misery, ego, or our need to be right. I love that old saying, ‘Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?’

The ego is like a stupid dog that follows me everywhere. I have to keep it on a tight lead if I cannot kennel it completely. I have to learn to treat its barks and growls as stupid jokes. I’ve had two strong dream warnings that my scale was seriously out of balance at times, that my head was far too heavy and my heart too light, and compassion not sufficiently present. These were the Dancing Flames and Hearth dreams.

Superfluous Suffering

On a perhaps less important point she shared an insight that links back to something I discovered elsewhere:[17] ‘It’s important to realise that we are capable of feeling physical pain without hooking into the emotional loop of suffering.… To experience pain may not be a choice, but to suffer is a cognitive decision.’

Goleman and Davidson’s excellent book The Science of Meditation[18] marshals the evidence that indicates that meditation enables the skilled practitioner to avoid our self-induced suffering and experience only the inescapable physical pain.

Gardening Again

It is obviously only a coincidence that in English heart is an anagram of earth and vice versa. It makes it so much easier for my left brain to hold onto the idea, found so often in the Bahá’í Writings, of gardening the heart, for example by planting only the rose of love or the hyacinths of wisdom.

Not surprisingly Jill Bolte Taylor’s use of the metaphor resonates strongly with me, not least because of my Hearth dream where both heart and earth are joined together in the one word. She writes:[19]

I view the garden in my mind as a secret patch of cosmic real estate, that the universe has entrusted me to tend over the years of my lifetime.

Regardless of the garden I have inherited, once I consciously take over the responsibility of tending my mind, I choose to nurture those circuits that I want to grow, and consciously prune back the circuits I prefer to live without. Although it is easier for me to nip a weed when it is just a sprouting buds, with determination and perseverance, even the gnarliest of vines, when deprived of fuel, will eventually lose its strength and fall to the side.

This resonates also with the advice that Schwartz gives in his book The Mind & the Brain about the need to catch lapses into bad brain habits as soon as possible as the longer you leave it the harder it is to change them.

Coda

After a snooze and dinner, it seemed clear to me that I may have finally arrived at a perspective that blends my kind of psychology with my kind of Buddhist/Bahá’í spirituality. It will be hard to stop me promulgating that at every opportunity. My left hemisphere egotistic self is clearly the animal self that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá condemns, and its vices and weaknesses map onto so many of the traits and behaviours that the Bahá’í Writings warn us against, for example backbiting, criticism, prejudice etc. Right hemisphere peaceful oneness needs no further explanation of its parallels to Bahá’í spirituality: unity, and the peace that follows, is the core concept. In terms of her model, psychology and spirituality are really on the same page despite what the materialists argue.

At a pragmatic level this approach is also so powerful. When I want to understand something deeply I need to be in the being mode of the right hemisphere. When I feel I know what the problem really is I need to draw on my left hemisphere to work out what to do about it. And always when in action both hemispheres need to constantly check out with each other.

Have these insights at last got my left psychology brain on the same page as my spiritual right brain? It feels as if something like that is happening more consistently than before.

Her account may be slightly simplistic hemisphere-wise but is nonetheless inspiring. The left language circuits that originally interfered with her access to right hemisphere holism had gone but the left hemisphere positivity might have remained and integrated with the new experience. (This possibility was perilously close to setting my inner sceptic off again and undermining my one day of peaceful credulity. The worse is avoided though, I think.)

My self-work over the years has been helped by subliminal processing between one reading of a book and the re-reading later such as with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and/or by resonances between two different books such as applies here with Eben Alexander and Karen Newell’s Living in a Mindful Universe and My Stroke of Insight.

In addition, it’s perhaps worth sharing that I use certain songs to test at the present moment the depth of the well of pain I discovered during that Encounter Group weekend many years ago. This time there were no tears when I played Kate Rusby’s rendering of Annan Waters and only proportional ones to My Young Man given the correspondences to mum when dad was dying — my well of tears was not there tonight for the first time ever on testing alone. I have little doubt now that the well of tears is more to do with my all-too frequent-alienation from my true/deepest self rather than with the death of my sister before I was born, though there is a degree of resonance between those two deeply felt triggers.

It may also be that my introversion gave me a huge advantage on my journey inwards, further empowered by several years of intense Buddhist meditation – I’ve always need to pull back, slow down and be quiet to recharge my batteries and that has helped re-establish a degree of connection to my right hemisphere/understanding heart .

I think it’s only fair to acknowledge that Jill Bolte Taylor has been a key influence to help me pull together the disparate elements of the inscape model I have been slowly assembling over many years.

So, I’ll let her choose the last words from her brilliant book to end this sequence:[20]

I think Gandhi was right when he said, ‘We must be the change we want to see in the world.’

References:

[1]. What We May Be – pages 217-26.
[2]. Op. cit –page 221.
[3]. Fer-(Page 225..
[4]. Op. cit – page 70.
[5]. The Expectation Effect – page 11.
[6]. Being You – page 92.
[7]. Op. cit – page 93.
[8]. Op. cit – page 87.
[9]. My Stroke of Insight – page 139.
[10]. Op. cit – page 140.
[11]. Op. cit – page 141.
[12]. Op. cit – page 159.
[13]. Op. cit – page 160-62.
[14]. Op. cit – page 170.
[15]. Op. cit –page 171.
[16]. Op. cit – page 171.
[17]. Op. cit – page 173.
[18]. The Science of Meditation – page 240.
[19]. My Stroke of Insight – page 176.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 177.

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Gleams of Hope

Given that this post  from April 2011 contains a reference to Jill Bolte Taylor it seemed worth republishing at this point.

Occasionally you are given the heads up about something that confirms almost all your wildest suppositions about the world. This happened to me recently. Some time ago a good friend, who knows my weakness for this kind of thing, posted me a link to an article by David Brooks which I finally got round to reading last week. It said:

[A] growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

Every single one of those insights resonates powerfully with me.

I have already explored the way in which the comparison of the human heart to a garden, which you find in the Bahá’í Writings, is an image which conveys very effectively the idea that invisible processes in the ‘soil’ of our being produce remarkable results that can take long periods of time to emerge into the light of consciousness, rather in the manner of flowers and fruit. McGilchrist is a writer who pulls together a wide range of data to explain very clearly how functioning in a fully human way depends upon our recognising and fully integrating the emotional and intuitive aspect of our being with the logical and verbal one, rather than pretending it does not exist or is fundamentally undesirable. And this blog is littered with posts referring to the fundamental centrality of empathy and compassion in the complex pattern of human life.

What he goes on to say takes me further along this road. While the labels he uses may seem slightly abstract, even strange or dubious, what he goes on to describe integrates in one place those core human qualities upon which the future of our civilisation probably depends.

. . . . this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

The spiritual path I follow has at its heart the idea that all human beings share a core of being that is essentially the same regardless of differences of colour, gender, class, race or politics. When we encounter differences with this perspective in mind the idea of Attunement becomes not only faintly possible but completely natural. There is a quotation from the Bahá’í Writings that not only reinforces this but shows how it might link to the other talents that he refers to:

O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

(Arabic Hidden Words: 68)

Equipoise would seem to depend upon detachment which is in its turn linked to the capacity to reflect, which is a good word to use to describe the process behind Equipoise. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá unpacks some aspects of this relationship in Paris Talks, for example when He says (pages 175-176):

Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries. In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves. To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.

This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God.

Meditation, contemplation and reflection are closely related terms and depend upon high levels of detachment for their most effective operation. Detachment seems also to be necessary if we are to tune into the feeling states of others in a way that is conducive to high levels of empathy. It is not too difficult then to see how an ability to be in synchrony with others, which he describes as sympathy, is linked to the interaction of all these skills or qualities. This is partly at least what ‘being as one soul’ surely means.

The explanation in Paris Talks also suggests that both Metis and Limerence are rooted in this same combination of detachment, oneness and meditative reflection. ‘[T]he ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations’ at the very least overlaps, perhaps even maps completely onto, discerning ‘the reality of things’ just as being ‘in touch with God’ must be close in nature to those ‘moments of transcendence’ at the centre of what Limerence is according to Brooks.

McGilchrist’s comprehensive overview suggests that this is not ‘pie in the sky by and by’ but rooted in our evolved physical nature which has the capacity to bring these meta-realities down to earth. The holistic intuitive right-brain sees patterns in complex experiences that the analytical left brain is blind to. Silencing the chatter of the left brain, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá recommends in His discussion of meditation and Jill Bolte Taylor experienced as a consequence of her stroke, allows these fruits of a deeper processing to float into consciousness.

Whether you see them as coming ultimately from a spiritual realm, as I do, or from a wiser part of our physical being, is immaterial (no pun intended!). What counts is that both secular and spiritual insights, experience and systematic evidence suggest more and  more of us have to learn how to tune into our deepest levels in this way if we are not, as a society, to sink more deeply into chaos and a social entropy that will destroy all that we have created that is positive in our civilisation.

It is extremely encouraging to see how so many people of good will across the spectrum of beliefs are of one mind on this at least. This is why there is hope. The word ‘gleams’ in the title of this post is a rather feeble acronym to act as a mnemonic for the Great ‘Limerence Equipoise Attunement Metis Sympathy’ combination of ideas.

 

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Book Review – ‘After’ by Bruce Greyson (3/3): NDEs – A life changer?

Thou art but one step away from the glorious heights above and from the celestial tree of love.

(Bahá’u’lláh – Persian Hidden Words, Number 7)

A recent death triggered a poem on the subject on Monday. Republishing this sequence reminding me of why my belief in an afterlife is confirmed by good evidence therefore seemed a good idea.

We ended the previous post on a somewhat mystical note. Now for a consideration of the impact of NDEs upon the lives of the experiencers and their sympathisers.

How Important is this Impact?

Greyson makes it very clear that he feels that the life-changing impact of NDEs upon those who experience them is possibly the most significant factor in the whole challenging conundrum. He states unequivocally towards the end of his book: [1]

. . . . there is one thing about which I am certain, about which the evidence is overwhelming – and that is the effect of NDEs on people’s attitudes, beliefs and values. If you take only one thing from this book, I would want to you to appreciate the transformative power of these experiences to change people’s lives.

For him, after decades of careful study, these life changes are in no way in doubt, the evidence in support of them is so strong, and the impact is startlingly powerful as well.

He asserts[2] that NDEs were ‘changing people’s lives as surely as our psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy. What’s more, they seemed to do this much faster, more profoundly, and more permanently.’

It is perhaps also important to mention that in his view NDEs are not some kind of symptom of an underlying mental disorder:[3]

… the evidence suggests that people with mental illness have NDEs no more or less often than do people in the general population.

In fact they seem to mitigate such problems:

. . . But what I did find surprising was that, among those who had come close to death, those who’d had NDEs described less psychological distress than those who hadn’t had NDEs.

They clearly do not originate from a mental health problem:[4]

[The memory of an NDE] doesn’t fade over time, but retains its vividness and richness of detail. In contrast, people with mental illness usually realise, after the acute episode is over, that their visions were unreal. And memories of an episode of mental illness fade over time…

Moreover, ‘[p]eople who have had NDEs often examine their experience again and again, in order to seek and develop insight into the meaning of the experience,’ and they are usually life-enhancing:

NDEs usually lead to an enhanced sense of meaning and purpose in life, increased joy in everyday things, decreased fear of death, and a greater sense of the interconnectedness among all people. As a result, people who have NDEs often become less absorbed in their own personal needs and concerns and more altruistic and compassionate towards others.

A surprising piece of evidence pointing in this direction comes from Joel, a sufferer from chronic pain, who had attempted suicide. He responded to Greyson’s probing around, if what awaited us after death was so beautiful and he was in so much pain, why was he still alive. Joel’s response is worth quoting at some length:[5]

“It’s true that I am no longer afraid of death,“ he said, “but I’m also no longer afraid of life. Yes, I am still in a lot of pain, and I don’t see a way out of that for now. But I also see that my pain and suffering are given to me for a reason. I see now that there is a meaning to everything that happens, and a purpose for all our problems.“

. . . “ The pain is something I need to learn to deal with, not something I need to escape from.“

And as Greyson points out,[6] ‘[Joel’s] pain never went away, but he never tried to kill himself again.’ Moreover, ‘[t]hose who do have NDEs are less suicidal after the event than suicide attempters who don’t have NDEs. . . . They most often report that the experience made them feel they are a part of something greater than themselves.’

The Nature of the Impact

A mountain of evidence from the reports of those who have experienced an NDE highlights how important it was in giving their lives meaning. He reports that[7] ‘[m]any link their heightened personal value and more meaningful life to their belief that death is not the end, and their sense of being interconnected with other people.’ They refer to[8]  ‘increased compassion and concern for others and a sense of connection to – and desire to serve – other people, which often leads to more altruistic behaviour.’

Some form of spirituality comes into the mix as well, which means[9] ‘the aspect of their personal lives that includes something beyond the usual senses, and a personal search for inspiration, meaning, and purpose, a quest to connect with something greater than themselves.’

It is again worth quoting another person’s story at some length:[10]

“An almost insatiable thirst for knowledge in the subject of science, philosophy, theology, and what is called metaphysics has dominated my life since the NDE.… I feel the most important things are seeking and sharing knowledge, and receiving and returning love. I feel strongly it is the spiritual that is important, and that the dogma and doctrine of organised religions are a man-made, and for that reason, subject to flaw, and as history has shown, not too effective.”

Greyson comments on that, saying ‘NDEs often lead to a paradoxical decrease in devotion to any one religious tradition, despite a greater awareness of guidance by and connection to a higher power.’

Bizarrely there is a strong echo of one of my favourite poems here:[11]

Many experiencers describe adopting a form of nondenominational spirituality since there NDEs, in which all religious traditions are valued but no one religion is given precedence. [Katherine Glenn] told me she saw in her experience that the core of all religions is essentially the same.

. . . ‘ there are many paths of the mountain to reach God and it really doesn’t matter which one you take, because when you get there to that mountaintop it is all the same love, light, peace, harmony, gratitude, wisdom, truth, and victory for everybody.’

As I explained on the back of a quote from this poem in a talk I gave at a methodist church in Ludlow on the Bahá’í concept of unity, the essential oneness of religion is not a new idea. John Donne, an Elizabethan poet-priest in Tudor England, wrote:

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

The most obvious implication of what he says here is that we have to work hard to find Truth.

However, there are other equally important implications, and one of them in particular makes a core aspect of the Bahá’í path, the essential oneness of all religion, particularly relevant for us in our relations both between ourselves and with the wider community.

Within our different faiths, we are all, in a sense, approaching Truth from different sides of this same mountain. Just because your path looks somewhat different from mine in some respects, it does not mean that, as long as you are moving upwards, yours is any less viable than mine as a way to arrive at the truth. Only when someone’s idea of God takes them downhill, perhaps killing others in His name, or at least hating them as misguided deviants, should we realize their God is not ‘worthy of worship,’ to use Eric Reitan’s phrase, and is not God at all. Theirs is not a true religion. All the great world religions are in essence one. It is only when we mistake the cultural trappings and rituals for the core that we think this is not true.

Donne clearly felt so at the time he wrote Satire III:

As women do in divers countries go
In divers habits, yet are still one kind,
So doth, so is Religion.’

As part of this realisation NDE experiencers, referring to something many feel all religions share in one form or another,[12]‘often describe the Golden Rule not as a moral guideline we should try to follow, but as a description of how the world works, a law of nature as inescapable as gravity.’

The power of these insights in Greyson’s view has to go beyond words:[13]

Of course, the true test of spiritual growth is not what people feel or say but whether it translates into everyday life.

He feels that it does.

There are many other insights in this book that I have not shared, relating to the negative reactions of others when these experiences are shared,[14] brain activity during recall matches that for the recall of real events[15] and many more.

The Indirect Impact

I want to close with a consideration of the impact of NDEs on those who learn about them without having experienced any such thing themselves.

For example, one study at Miami University of Ohio[16] ‘found that more than 80% of undergraduate students in a sociology class that studied NDEs felt more compassionate concern for others and greater feelings of self-worth both at the end of the semester and in a follow-up a year later.’

And it is not just people with no serious problems who benefit:[17]

Studies have shown that introducing information about NDEs into the treatment of suicidal clients who did not respond to traditional therapy can lead to a dramatic decrease or elimination of suicidal thoughts. Other research has shown that information about NDEs can reduce the suffering of grieving individuals, leading to less anxiety, anger, and blame, and help them feel engaged in life again.

As a result he concludes that ‘near-death experiences appear to be having a rippling effect throughout society in helping people address their concerns about death and their ability to enjoy life and feel compassion for one another.’

That is one reason why he feels the impact of the experiences is perhaps their most important aspect, and not just on the NDE experiencer.

The Last Judgement

This is an accessible, but definitely not a superficial, exploration of the importance and validity of these phenomena, embedded in an account of his own joureny to deeper understanding as a result of his research. I recommend it to all those who have recognised the importance of this subject, whether at this point they believe in it or not. Any sceptic who decides to walk away from this exploration of the evidence without giving it a second glance cannot in my view rightly describe themselves as a true scientist.

For myself, after I’d finished this sequence, a thought drifted across my mind which I felt might be worth sharing. I don’t want to pass over until I’ve made better sense of this life and what it means, but I probably won’t be able to do so until I pass over. I think that’s quite  enough for now.

References

[1]. After: a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond  – page 164. Unless specified otherwise, all quotes are from After.

[2]. Page 60.

[3]. Pages 81-82.

[4]. Page 88.

[5]. Page 167.

[6]. Page 168.

[7]. Page 169.

[8]. Page 172.

[9]. Page 177.

[10]. Page 178.

[11]. Page 179.

[12]. Page 182.

[13]. Page 184.

[14]. Page 198.

[15]. Page 97.

[16]. Page 213.

[17]. Page 214.

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