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’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.