The Satori and the NDE

I keep trying to put into words my long-standing view that dramatic experiences like satori (and their equals under other names) stand in sharp contrast to experiences reported by people who’ve experienced death but then were eventually revived.

In the one case the experiencer produces a sort of closure. He feels that all questions have been answered, perfect liberty achieved. At the same time his experience itself lacks content and hence, not surprisingly, is sometimes called the Void. It doesn’t matter what this end result is called—Buddha Mind, union with God, union with Plotinus’ One; these are all functionally equivalent. But we never learn anything at all about the structure or meaning of reality. What we view as the world or cosmos is said to be the consequence of ignorance—or an illusion produced by it. The blood-clotting cycle is an illusion? Produced by ignorance? The hibernating butterfly’s ability to produce a kind of anti-freeze to keep itself alive during months of frost? Whose illusion is that?

In the second case a person experiences separation from his/her dying body, observes events in the hospital, and eventually enters another world where he/she meets other already departed relatives and, often, a luminous person who seems to be in charge of this “reception.” A decision-process takes place. The person then learns that she or he is not yet ready to depart and is sent back—often quite unwillingly. The minimum content of this near-terminal experience is that there is another realm beyond this one; that it has visible and very pleasant aspects; and that some who have died are still there; they are “alive,” capable of communication, capable of being perceived by the discarnate visitor.

In both cases the experiencer, be it of satori or of near-death experience (NDE), is changed for the better in this life. The change usually persists but may fade with time. In both cases, occasionally, the person may have acquired what we call psychic powers; this sort of change is not pronounced or universal; and such abilities may also fade.

The chief differences here are that those seeking enlightenment work very hard and with a will to achieve the end result. Those experiencing NDEs do so passively, often with great surprise. Satori-seekers, you might say, are specialists; near-death experiencers are ordinary people, the usual proportion of men and women, whereas in D.T. Suzuki’s famed essays on Zen no woman ever appears to have been struck by the bold of Enlightenment. The satori is produced by major concentrated labor. The NDE seems to be nature’s way of signaling that there is something beyond the border and, moreover, it has real content.

There is hope, in other words, that humanity’s masses can get there too—and without grinding nonsensical koans for decades counted on two hands.

Of Tunnels and Barriers

My library added a recent book on the near-death experience (NDE), Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long, Harper One, 2010. I checked it out. After a while I realized that I was already aware of Dr. Long. He is behind a rather extensive web site on which hundreds of NDE reports appear; these are contributed voluntarily by the public and hence are something of a mixed bag. The book is intended for the public at large, not for students of the phenomenon. No bibliography; no index. Despite this leaning toward the popular, valuable insights, data, cases, and commentaries make the book valuable.

The book, in turn, led me to consult two already on my shelf. The first of these launched the whole category, Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (1975), the other is At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Harakisson (1986). Moody’s book is also an introduction of the subject to the public, but its structure, style, tone and cases on which it reports produce a sense of clarity. Moody built up his cases in extensive interviews with people who’d undergone the experience. These he then studied systematically. Osis and Harakisson studied the deathbed experiences of people who died; not NDEs these. The data they used came from interviewing doctors and nurses. There are some interesting differences between NDEs and deathbed visions; in the first people are brought back and report experiences; in the second they soon die. One difference is that in death-bed cases people experience neither a tunnel nor a barrier that separates this world from that one—but they are visited by apparitions of relatives, friends, or religious figures shortly before they die.

Concerning the tunnel, a subset of NDE subjects (33.8% in Long’s book) report passing through a tunnel, narrow passage, valley, or some such delimited structure; sometimes, not always, they also report sound effects; these that range from highly unpleasant to vibratory to musical.  The barrier comes later. It is reported as a stretch of water, a wall, a fence, a door, and so on: pass the barrier and you cannot return; some 31 percent reported a barrier in Long’s NDE database.

I went back to re-read Moody because, in his careful presentation, the tunnel phenomenon is closely associated with the actual near-death event; the heart stops, breathing stops, a vast pain is felt. When reported, it is the first experience of the NDE and appears to mark the point when the mind/soul leaves the body. The person doesn’t travel any actual distance; in most cases, after passage, he or she is still in the same room where the body is. The tunnel, therefore, must be taken as a passage from the body, not as a trip to a heavenly realm.

The barrier appears later in cases where the subject also reports visions of another realm; the barrier is located there. Interestingly, in many cases, this other-worldly setting overlays the actual room where the subject’s bed or operating table is located and where, even as the heavenly scenes progress, the doctors/nurses labor on the physical body; and the subject is aware of both simultaneously. As a consequence of profound feelings of serenity, the subject wishes to proceed “onward”—and then meets the barrier, only to be prevented from making that move because “the time is not yet.”

In Osis and Harakisson’s work, neither phenomenon is reported, most likely because it doesn’t take place. By contrast, however, the figures that appear convey to the subject their intention of taking the subject away.

This got me thinking. The NDE phenomenon, however evidentiary for the reality of soul-survival, may be something exceptional, not the usual situation at death—because it isn’t actually death yet. When the final hour arrives, there is no need to tunnel out of the body or to worry about barriers. The transition will happen quite naturally.

To this I might add two notes. The first: Multiple excellent, disciplined, and careful studies of the NDE exist, usually carried out by doctors, nurses, or a combination of these two professions. The best are published in scientific journals accessible only by paying rather steep fees or membership dues. I’ve seen a few but have no hard copy to consult. The second: If it all happens anyway, why waste time on this arcane nonsense? Well, if you are on a tall ship sailing, slowly, to China—and you’ve never seen that realm—you might be tempted to read the few sorry books on board your ship that say something about China, your destination. That they are few and sorry is a given if you are under sail rather than traveling by diesel-steam; but whatever their number or quality, you will study those pages with some curiosity.

Why Not Something Meaningful?

Over years now, time and time again, I’ve noted reading the mediumistic literature that the departed, communicating through a medium, never have anything really meaningful to say. We hear greetings and very short answers—never what, written down, might spell a complex sentence with clauses, never mind anything of paragraph length. Those who seek out mediums, of course, are people who want contact with those they’ve loved and lost, and they appear satisfied. They recognize voices or intonations. But if I were attending a séance (never have), I’d want to know what is over there, and I’d be wanting to hear something novel, anything novel at all.

Now this recurred to me because fellow-blogger, The Zennist, put up a pointer the other day to a film concerning the Scole Experiment (link), a 1990s account of various experiences of contact with the beyond. I watched a bit of that film and, doing so, and the thought came once again. One-word answers to questions. The séances are well-enough recorded so that one almost hears the strain and the effort in the voices from beyond that answer the questions. After I stopped the film, an association sprang up in my mind. These conversations sounded a lot like dialogs between two people one of whom does not speak the language very well. I’ve had that experience three times in my life—learning German, French, and English. You understand the question—because understanding comes before speech—but you struggle mightily to answer, because you lack the words.

Now it occurred to me that in spiritualistic encounters some analog to language might be at work. The spirit is striving to articulate speech either by using the medium’s vocal apparatus or trying to cause air to vibrate in imitation of spoken sound. This may be extraordinarily difficult for a person no longer directly linked to a physical body. Thus what does come out is the absolute minimum. Quite a few near-death experience (NDE) reports contain descriptions of attempts by those having NDEs to communicate—by touch or voice—with those they see around them, usually in a hospital setting. They absolutely fail. Not surprisingly, therefore, those who try to contact the dead reduce physical stimuli to a minimum—dark rooms, silence, concentration, etc. The skeptics interpret this as deliberate attempts to set up deceptions; indeed such conditions favor magicians and tricksters too; but they may be the minimum conditions for making any effective contact—not least the presence of a person who is already sensitive.

The difficulties involved, and the fact that the best that spirits can do is convey a small emotion and an indication that they are still there, convinced me long ago that the mediumistic enterprise is a fringe activity—and probably on both sides. As proof of the beyond these arcane sessions will never be persuasive for unbelievers. Systematic thought about our human condition will produce the right answer; and data on NDEs, if more data are needed, provide much better ancillary proof.

Theory, Technology, Experience

Take two broad categories of human activity, religion and science. In the latter we divide the activity into the theoretical (as in theoretical physics, which largely runs on math) and the experiential (observation, as in astronomy, geology and experiments as in chemistry, particle colliders, etc.). There is also a kind of middle ground where knowledge is turned to use: technology.

I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.

Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.

The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.

The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.

The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.

Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.

Science, Materialism, and Beyond

In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.

In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.

Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.

For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.

The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.

One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.

NDEs: Speculating on the Data

The impetus today is still Pin Van Lommel’s book on near-death experiences (see last post). Van Lommel comes from a scientific background; not surprisingly he spends a great deal of time on examining the interaction between the brain and consciousness; he concludes that the brain does not produce consciousness. He doesn’t go beyond that—and that’s fine. Here the saying applies: “Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof” [Matthew 6:34]. His aim is to make a credible case for the survival of consciousness. But I’ve been certain of that for a long time myself, and my interests range beyond that issue.

The three facts I want to examine are these. First, that people in states of coma, with flat EEGs and no sign of brain function, experience themselves alive, alert, able to see, hear, and to move—to think, feel, remember, and, indeed, with sharply intensified powers. Second, that such people, despite these powers, cannot touch anything material. Third, that the brain certainly mediates between physical and mental levels.

That the brain has such a function is one of the data points; another is that the brain—indeed our bodies taken as a whole—behave like machines, like tools. They represent technology—although not technology we have made. Tooling always has the essential quality of “in order to…” Now here is the puzzle. If a spirit sees and hears, has a functioning consciousness, and greater freedom of movement outside than in a body—if it functions well, even better, without tooling than while in possession of it, what parallels does that suggest?

The first that comes to mind is a diving suit—thus something that enables its wearer to function in an environment in which he or she couldn’t function at all or for very long without tooling. But what is this function we can’t engage in without bodies? What the disembodied spirit cannot do is interact with matter. It can’t vibrate the air and thus cannot be heard by the embodied. It cannot touch matter; it passes through it. This suggests…

This suggests that bodies are a tool by means of which we can experience the material dimension. Doing so we give up certain powers. We can’t reliably communicate mind to mind, although sporadic telepathic powers are known; we cannot move at will and instantaneously from one point to another. Our intellectual powers are also seemingly dimmed. This in turn suggests that some kind of linkage or binding takes place to hold us inside bodies; this link, once it is established, seems effectively to blind us to the other or wider dimension but, by means of the body’s tooling, enables us to act on matter—using matter. Indeed it seems to prevent us from acting in any other way.

But why should the spirit want to be bound in this way? What purpose does that serve—seeing that in disembodied form the spirit can indeed communicate very effectively with other disembodied spirits?

Here the technological, machine-like structure of bodies comes into full focus. That bodies are machines of sorts cannot be denied. The very existence of defects in this machinery—even early on at the genetic level—suggests an agency behind the body which is, like us, limited in its powers and doing a terrific engineering job in a hostile environment. Chance cannot have created living bodies; they are far too complex and exhibit purpose. I find it impossible to imagine life without an agency in the background—also impossible to imagine this agency to be God. Only limited agencies are, well, limited—and therefore obliged to reach for tooling.

These are the issues of interest. They rise to that level only if you accept as fact that consciousness is able to survives death and is therefore independent of its vehicle—the brain, the body. Van Lommel does a superb job proving that case. But it would be far more enlightening to understand why, in a sense, we are imprisoned in these tools of ours, why we can escape them, briefly, only under extraordinary circumstances—and at death more certainly. But even after that, can we remain in that other dimension? Or is there in us, or independent of us, something pulling us down here? Or did we come here out of curiosity—by the billions and billions—as some people are drawn to descend into deep dark caves, equipped with diving gear, to spelunk in the depths at the risk of their lives?

This is a very interesting frontier, I submit. None more fascinating. None with greater potential for good or ill.

Kneeling Before Physics

I’ve argued elsewhere more than once (i.e., on Ghulf Genes) that we are “heading back,” thus that we are—culturally—on our way back from the summit of Mount Matter to climb again Mount Spirit. On the way there, thus at present, we’re in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I find it fascinating that these days those who newly discover that the transcendental order must be real after all—and wish to persuade others of this fact—almost reflexively reach for their proofs in physics. The chosen methodology has little to do with the facts of the matter but everything to do with human nature. To persuade others you need Authority; and these days physics has authority. Einstein is the word that equals wise today—and the atomic bomb made the biggest thunder ever over Japan just a few decades back. If physics is the orthodox religion of modernity, quantum physics is its mysticism, hence the best pool of proof of all.

I was reminded of this forcefully reading a book by Pim Van Lommel on the near-death experience. Lommel is a cardiologist and, these days, a leading figure in NDE studies. The book is Consciousness Beyond Life. It’s a mixed sort of product, stunningly excellent in parts. But it fails as a “work.” It is a kind of together-binding of magazine or journal articles padded out into chapters. The book’s early chapters cover the same ground Raymond Moody did in Life After Life; in many areas Lommel’s book is more complete and thorough, in others interestingly selective. Moody gave very strong emphasis to the spirit’s reception in the beyond by a “being of light.” In Lommel’s presentation the testimonials he chose to illustrate this aspect support a much more pantheistic feeling. But it is Lommel’s main thematic I found interesting as an indicator of our times; but Lommel’s case, I hasten to add, is just one of many. He reaches out to physics for his theme and latches on to the concept of non-locality, a discovery of quantum mechanics.

In the crudest form, locality means that if someone punches me hard on the chin, the lady waiting for the bus a block away won’t fall down. She cannot be affected by what happens to me. In more sophisticated form, this means that for B to be affected by A in some way, communication must be possible between A and B; and this communication cannot take place more rapidly than the speed of light. Non-locality means that in some way, anyway, the pain I feel when punched does affect the lady waiting for the bus; my negative experience is communicated to everyone; others don’t have to feel it consciously, but it is so. It also means that instantaneous communications between A and B are possible, even if these two are moving away from each other at the speed of light.

Now it so happens that non-locality has been proved to exist in quantum physics. Two elementary particles can be caused to come into being by producing particle decay. These particles will be “entangled” with each another; thus if A has an upward then B will have a downward spin. If you change the spin of A, the spin of B will necessarily change as well; that’s what entanglement means. And this can happen even when they’re far apart. Experiments have been conducted so that A and B are caused to fly apart at the speed of light. Then the spin of one is forced to change—while the spin of the other is detected. Sure enough, as A changes, so does B. B seems to know that A has changed and thus conforms to be in harmony—but the “signal” between the two, if there is a signal, must have travelled faster than the speed of light. As physicist understand the matter—and they are clearly concerned not to violate Einstein’s iron law on the speed of light—no signal actually passes. Far separated although in space they are, A and B remain linked in a mysterious field relationship.

Now, you might ask, what does any of this have to do the ability of a human consciousness to survive the death of its body? The commonality here is relatively limited. Communications at a distance without a signal are difficult for modern man to grasp. Indeed, Einstein hated the notion of non-locality and tried to defeat it to the best of his ability. Similarly, for the modern mind—but not for those of us who grew up still embedded in hoary old traditions—the notion of human survival of death is a similar scandal. That’s the real linkage. What is interesting here is that appeal to physics, rather than to human reason and intuition, strikes Lommel as appeal to a Higher Authority. Lommel might have used Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home as his proof; Sheldrake’s findings also show “action at a distance” without discernible signaling, especially when the owner is downtown and the dog in the suburbs thirty miles away. Alas the truth is that the highest authority available to us is our own mind.

Re-Reading Life After Life

Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.

Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:

All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”

Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.

Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.

Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.

I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.

Held Incognito Inside Bodies

While we are inside bodies, we cannot see anything except by means of our sensory machinery—and the interpretation of sensory data by our brains. We can’t hear, feel, or smell anything either. By contrast, we seem to be able to see and hear just fine if we are outside of our bodies. Let’s take a look at these two cases.

Inside and Outside

The first assertion is obvious and amply documented. Special cases merely underline known facts. One such is the case of Helen Keller, which I’ve discussed here on this blog. Another are the experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor mentioned in a recent post here. The second assertion is less obvious. It depends on what I call experiential evidence—based on what people experience. The first can be established by scientific means, thus by physical measurements of physical phenomena. Subjective experiences cannot be replicated or checked independently nor yet measured. They cannot be reached by physical means. It is for this reason that scientists shy away from the paranormal; the blind also refrain from visiting picture galleries: what’s the point if you can’t see things?

Experiential evidence, however, does exist for seeing and hearing ordinary reality without the help of the sensory apparatus and the brain. The clearest cases come from near-death experiences (NDEs)—especially in those situations where a patient is declared clinically dead but, nonetheless, reports his or her observations of accident scenes or hospital surroundings—not least the actions and words of doctors or of the police—during that span of time. The patient is unconscious and comatose. The heart may have stopped beating. The eyes are closed. The EEG reading is flat.

For my own purposes I classify NDEs as this-worldly and other-worldly. In the first case people report about what they see in this world—the accident, the operating room. In the other they talk of seeing other-worldly environments, people, luminous beings, and so on. I’ve written multiple posts on this subject on Borderzone. A striking case, reported by C.G. Jung, is here. A discussion of the worldly phases is presented here. Now my presumption is that people who report seeing real events in this word, while cut off from their senses, also see real events in some other world. Why do we assume that the first instance is real and the is second illusory?

Let me restate the issue again to sharpen it. Why it is that in ordinary life—and also when medical conditions prevail, as during a stroke—our view of reality is restricted to matters that come to us only through the biological machinery we call our body? And yet, under the extraordinary circumstance of being on the brink of death, we’re suddenly enabled to examine, usually from a certain height, the scenes of accidents, operating theaters, hospital beds—and our own body, lying there. If we have the power to see and hear outside of the body, doesn’t that strongly suggest that inside the body something inhibits a power we have as souls? Does this inhibition arise because we are fused to matter in some way while we are what we call alive?

This isn’t merely idle musing or philosophical speculation. We do have evidence for both cases—if, that is, we’re willing to accept experiential evidence. And such evidence often comes from highly credible sources—including pilots reporting on dangerous mishaps, mountain climbers who’ve experienced falls, educated people, young people, mothers, technicians—not merely the feeble and the addled old.

Additional Aspects

The cases of greatest interest—especially for documenting body-soul duality—come from accidents and near accidents. In some of these the person involved may not even be hurt. These are sometimes out-of-body experiences (OBEs) rather then near-death experiences. Death was threatened by the circumstances, but nothing harmful actually took place—seen from the future. In these cases the soul literally jumps out of the body almost as if trying to escape the calamity—but the calamity does not develop. The pilot is suddenly outside the airplane, about to crash, and views himself from outside the cockpit inside of which he sees his body still fighting the controls. Or the subject is a mountain climber who loses his hold and is falling—but is, moments later, saved by a rope snagging on a rock. Yet other such cases involve motor cycle accidents in which the rider, about to be crushed, is thrown free and lands safely without harm—beyond having been knocked out. What we get here is an odd feeling that the soul—but surely not the person’s conscious self—takes an action it is able to take under extraordinary stimulus. I say, not the conscious self, because there is neither time to think in such circumstances, nor a knowledge of what to do, and invariably the conscious person is very surprised by that which suddenly happens, namely the body’s release. And once we contemplate that the soul may be able to release the body—yes, conditions have to be extraordinary—it occurs to me, anyway, that the soul may also be able to attach to a body in the same way.

Speculation

In these ranges of experience, we’ve barely begun to explore what we have learned in the twentieth century. Most of those who study NDEs are motivated to establish that indeed the soul does journey on. And once that fact is satisfactorily established, the job is done. These studies are costly and difficult and don’t have much practical value. They are and remain in the category of experiential evidence, hence won’t ever lead to a Nobel Prize in any category of science. Nevertheless, it seems to me, study of this phenomenon is potentially very valuable in orienting ourselves. Hence I’ll indulge in speculation.

Perhaps a start might be made by looking at some assumptions. It seems that disembodied souls are capable to seeing the physical world but unable to interact with it except in unusual or narrowly defined circumstances. If so, it appears that when they do—do interact in some way—they may link up to a living organism. They may be the very cause of life. To put this in other words, it may be that all living things represent a suitable organic structure which is enlivened by fusion with a soul from a vast disembodied pool of souls. Does all this make you feel, reading this, that you’ve wandered into the mind of a madman? Sorry about that. Discovery sometimes produces that kind of rearing back at the seemingly preposterous. But the idea is not at all weird, actually. What we do know, certainly in the case of humans, is that when the soul departs, life departs as well. It’s not that big a leap to imagine that life may be a spiritual fact—and that some spirits may be conscious while vastly many are not.

Let me make one more wild assumption. For the soul to leave the body—even when the body is still a working machine—requires extraordinary circumstances, namely a life-threatening set of events. It would seem to me logical, therefore, to assume that an equally unusual event, certainly an event of enormous emotional intensity, would also be required to cause a soul to fuse with matter. This would require that the soul could do so—therefore that, at some level of matter—a bridge between two kinds of reality should exist. I can’t help but remember the Tibetan Book of the Dead in this context. There we encounter the suggestion that a soul, unwilling to follow the light into the higher regions, finds itself attracted to men and women as they copulate. The soul then, as it were, plunges in. Don’t laugh. A huge intensity of emotion—some ranges of which may draw the soul almost irresistibly—are often involved when bodies meet in love.

But then, once the fusion has been accomplished—willingly or unwillingly—it may take something equally extraordinary, after that fusion, once more to loosen the soul from its newly minted prison in the lower dimension.

Communications with the Beyond

Although the title will immediately suggest contacting the departed by the mediation of a medium, I would suggest at least two other modes whereby communications from the soul-order beyond reach people. One mode is fairly routinely experienced and not viewed as unusual, transcendental, or weird in any way. The other one depends upon the extraordinary powers some few people develop or carry from early years. But let me first address the obvious, talking to the dead.

Spiritualistic Phenomena. Let me start here by explicitly expressing my own opinion on such communications so that those seeking positive reinforcement can avoid irritation and just click away to somewhere else. True: the rather extensive literature persuades me that such communications do indeed take place, but I’ve come to think of them as almost useless means of learning anything useful beyond knowledge much more easily obtained by other means—namely that another world (or worlds) beyond exist. The analogy I would suggests is learning something about China by means of interviewing derelicts and unfortunates on the margins of Chinese society in great cities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong. Real mediums exist, I think, but the field is ripe with temptations to exploit gullible people. In the paranormal domain, spiritualism is almost impossible, therefore, to study in structured and rational ways.

I come to these conclusions for a number of reasons. What reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) suggest is that disembodied souls have a devil of a time communicating with the living—and the reason for this that I’ve suggested is that they lack access to the instruments by which to reach people in bodies. Those people are equally “blind,” as it were, to the other reality because the functioning of their bodies interferes with seeing the soul dimension. This suggests that unusual circumstances are required for any kind of communication. The central figure here becomes the medium. Virtually all mediums go into trances while they “channel” the other world. That word is suggestive. It suggests that the medium is a tool rather than an agency. The medium absents herself (most mediums are women). She gets out of the way. The spirit on the other side appears to take over the medium’s “instruments,” principally her vocal chords and, presumably, certain functions of her brain. Hence mediums often speak in strange voices. And there are rare cases where the other party in fact comments on the difficulties of using the medium’s body. Many mediums also make use (or are made use of by) a guide or a “control,” thus another spirit on the other side, who is well matched to the medium and in turns transmits information from a third party—the departed.

This suggests to me that some minimal form of at least partial possession is a necessary aspect of the spiritualistic phenomenon. A spirit must gain access to a living person; that person has to get out of the way, accomplished by the trance; then communications of a sort commence. The maintenance of this strange duality—two agencies using the same body—is difficult, chancy, and tiring to the medium. I for one see the medium’s gifts as ill-used in such communications for reasons that have to do with the other aspect of this phenomenon: its fundamentally banal content.

In years of looking at this phenomenon from time to time, I have yet to discover anywhere any information regarding the “beyond” which cannot be found with much less hocus-pocus in the writings of speculators, moralists, and other authors on values or cosmologies. There is nothing much there. What a person can discover is proof that life continues after this stint on earth, but for that we do not need to talk to some departed grandpa who still remembers the pet dog’s name. If the reader is interested in confirming this, I would suggest the excellent web site of SurvivalAfterDeath.org.uk accessible here. This site reproduces many original papers and extracts from the psychical literature reaching well into the nineteenth century; there is much else there as well on psychical research beyond spiritualism.

I will defer discussion of the other two categories of communications to future posts because this entry, as I observe, has already reached its appointed length.

Views on "Life"

If a self continues to exist after the body fails, what do we call the surviving state? Is it “life”? Common usage seems to think so. We speak of life everlasting, life in the hereafter, and survival of death. But we seem to have two things in mind. We also have a down-home definition; it involves breathing, warmth, movement, and the ability to pick up signals. When the body stirs and we cry out, “Oh, thank God! He’s still alive,” we’re not talking about souls. We’re talking about bodies. Can definitions help us sort out this seeming dualism in our own conceptions?

Merriam-Webster produces a number of key words; they have one thing in common; they’re intangible in character. Life is a quality, per Webster; it is a principle or force; and it is a capacity. The definition using that last word comes closest to identifying life with bodies: “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” If we try to determine what the word capacity itself means, we get “facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” And if we seek out the definition of a principle, the most suitable definition the dictionary gives is “an underlying faculty or endowment.” A faculty is a capacity; an endowment is a form of energy or, ahem, capacity.

Life thus seems to be force; power has the same meaning; capacity carries the sense of potential awaiting actualization. Next question: What originates this force? Humanity provides two answers.

One is that life manifests as matter and is therefore one aspect of the material world. Its force is different only in degree and application from (say) the force exerted by the sun in holding planets in their orbits or of the earth in throwing magma up into the air.

The other answer is dualistic. The life-force isn’t physical but something transcending the material order. It is spirit. This view develops into various alternative formulations: one spirit manifests in countless entities; many individual spirits exist and have always done so; their “descent” into matter is what we call life; one God made and continues to create many individual entities; they are endowed with spiritual powers but these ultimately come from and are maintained in force by one agency, God.

But, it seems, bodies get their energy from food and oxygen; life-force is a burning process; no invisible spirit need be invoked in producing that, surely. The dualist answers: Yes, true. The life-force is not the ordinary energy of bodies; bodies are material in composition and must be moved by energies appropriate to them. But the life-force is the constituting and maintaining force; it causes bodies to cohere in highly organized wholes. This may be understood if we think of the soul as giving life to bodies and the soul’s departure as depriving bodies of life. We normally think of this relationship in reverse. Souls exist because bodies do. When bodies die the soul disappears (materialism) or the soul becomes homeless, so-to-speak (transcendentalism).

The soul as a “constituting/maintaining” agency corresponds to the dictionary definition of life as a principle—in the sense defined above. It is the enabling overlord. An analogy. Let’s take a very small woman (to emphasize her relative physical weakness); she decides to build a mansion on a distant, hilly, rocky stretch of land. She has the means to do this, the money and the will. Money is a good analogy; it is an invisible force in that confidence alone gives those dirty dollar bills or that printed check its real value. Machines do the heavy work of land-clearing and digging out the basement; the heavy work of lifting stone and timber; other, able, brawny men do the rest. All of these “tools” operate off a plan drawn up by the architect, but the tiny lady approved images of the structure and of the layout within it. At last, roads having been built to the place, everything connected, she walks into her house. She lacked the capacity to accomplish most of the actual labor involved, yet here she is, the real owner. No, I couldn’t tell you how my liver really works…

It is of course legitimate enough to label this as a fanciful metaphor with no necessary relationship to actuality. But the metaphor gains plausibility when we contemplate the evidence provided by near-death experiences. They suggest that, indeed, we go somewhere; they suggests that, without some kind of material machinery, we are unable to affect matter. They suggest further that, on the other side, in another order, something more naturally accessible to us—without the very coarse space-suit that we are obliged to wear in this dimension—actually exists. Alas, we don’t have equivalent accounts of people recounting their births. If we did, we could be even more certain.

"Other-Worldly" NDEs

Most but not all people who have near-death experiences either “travel” or “find themselves” in another world. Even those who only report an out-of-body experience in ordinary space and don’t enter the new dimension may be aware of it; they may see the world or, at least, an entrance to it. Here is a sample from a report from C.G. Jung’s Synchronicity (Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 92), about a woman who never “entered” the other world:

All this time [thus while observing the doctor and the nurse after a difficult delivery] she knew that behind her was a glorious, park-like landscape shining in the brightest colors, and in particular an emerald green meadow with short grass, which sloped gently upwards beyond a wrought-iron gate leading into the park. It was spring, and little gay flowers such as she had never seen before were scattered about in the grass. The whole demesne [domain] sparkled in the sunlight, and all the colors were of an indescribable splendor. The sloping meadow was flanked on both sides by dark green trees. It gave her the impression of a clearing in the forest, never yet trodden by the foot of man. “I knew that this was the entrance to another world, and that if I turned round to gaze at the picture directly, I should feel tempted to go in at the gate, and thus step out of life.” She did not actually see this landscape, as her back was turned to it, but she knew it was there. She felt there was nothing to stop her from entering in through the gate. She only knew that she would turn back to her body and would not die.

To this I would add by way of observation that some people report ability to see in all directions, thus all around the circle of which they form the center—even when their attention is focused in one direction only—forward, whatever that means in this context.

Those who “travel” report passing through what many call a tunnel at the end of which appears the proverbial light; the light signals the destination; when it is reached it unfolds as a scene often quite similar to the one described above. Here people become visible and receive Mary (our stand-in) as she arrives. Among them often, but not always, is someone often described as a “luminous being” from whom benevolence radiates. Mary finds it easy to communicate with those who thus receive her; if she is average, she will report that the communication is something other than what we call speech in ordinary life—but that it functions in the same way; it is a kind of thought-exchange.

The experiences reported are varied, but a process of decision soon becomes the center of focus. Should the self continue into this new reality or should it, instead, return to ordinary life? The choice is sometimes made by the self. The self, if left to choose, decides to return; if it doesn’t we obviously wouldn’t hear about the experience at all. Interestingly enough, the lady who is the subject of C.G. Jung’s report also ends on a decision—but the decision is already made. In contrast to such situations, sometimes the luminous figure or another figure of authority (a relative) tells the self that its time to go hasn’t arrived yet. Mary must go back. In many cases the person resists this judgment and wishes to stay—but cannot. The NDE rapidly ends after the decision is made or communicated. Mary next reports awakening at the hospital, at the scene of the mishap, or in some other setting linked to the event of trauma that triggered the NDE.

Today I want to focus narrowly at two aspects of this second phase, those I’ve highlighted already: (1) the self sees another world and there is able to communicate with entities whereas, in the worldly phase, it is not; and (2) the chief content of this phase is a decision which evidently has two possible outcomes.

The world that Mary sees is evidently a border area of another region. All reporters think that they are in another world. The images in which this is expressed vary but have the essential meaning, as Raymond Moody puts it in his book, of a “border or limit.” The scene will include a fence, a door, a body of water, a mist—or a gate, as in the case that Jung relates. The qualitative difference between our dimension and that one is signaled by emphasizing its beauty, its strangeness (“flowers … she had never seen before”), unusual architecture, and intensity of light or color. The presence of departed relatives, whom Mary recognizes, suggests that they have certainly not disappeared forever, for here they are; the ability to communicate with them suggests that, in her present disembodied form, Mary is better adapted to that world than the one she left behind.

The vision of that world is limited. And the chief reason for that seems to be precisely that the person reporting the experience did not penetrate deeply into that world but remained, throughout, in the, well, border zone. Why there? We discover the reason for that in the “content” of this encounter. Its aim is to decide which way Mary should proceed. A decision must be reached. And, evidently—at least in many cases—the decision could go either way. Return is the outcome--otherwise we'd know nothing about it.

I will leave commentary on this phase for another posting and conclude here simply by saying that in the aggregate, these accounts are coherent. They appear to depict a natural process of transition; it begins when the body seems to fail. The self is already “competent” to continue in that world; it can certainly communicate with the dead, if not the living; it meets a sample of the “population” that is at home “over there.” In NDE cases, self-evidently (because the people later are revived) the bodily functions are only temporarily damaged; therefore a choice remains.

Traditions on the Soul

As briefly sketched in the last post, we have at minimum indicators that souls can persist without a bodily substrate; the same reports also indicate that while the disembodied self is able to perceive the world through some analog of sight and hearing, it seems unable to affect the material dimension that it can see and hear. Today I want to glance briefly at humanity’s traditions concerning the soul—and how those views resonate with near-death reports.

The picture out there is the usual wondrous confusion. Within Christianity, for instance, we have conflicting view. The Apostle’s Creed specifically singles out “the resurrection of the body” just before it concludes with the final article of belief in “life everlasting.” Within Catholicism—but not exclusively in Catholicism—the focus is on the soul, not on the body-soul composite. Here we encounter the concept of purgatory, for example. At the same time the Church also asserts the resurrection of the body as a dogmatic article of faith. Souls are immortal and hence cannot be said to return to life—therefore resurrection of the body. What we encounter here is a mixing of scriptural and philosophical conceptions not satisfactorily sorted—in my opinion, anyway. The sorting, in effect, is accomplished by dividing time into two great sections; the first is the reality in which we now find ourselves; the second is another one that, curiously, begins “at the end of time,” thus at the beginning of another dispensation.

The popular Greek and the Hindu views of soul present an interesting contrast. The Greeks conceived of embodied life as the proper and, as it were, the full expression of the self. Souls survive the death of bodies but, thereafter, live as ghosts or shades; they lack something they ought to have; hence they continue to exist but in a diminished form. This view is nicely put by Homer in the Odyssey. Ulysses visits Hades and there encounters the great hero, Achilles. In conversation with the hero, Ulysses lauds him as a great prince among the dead.

“Say not a word,” [Achilles] answered, “in death’s favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.” Odyssey 11.488.

In the Hindu conceptualization the soul is something permanent and eternal, indeed uncreated, a particle of divinity. Thus it pre-exists any and all of its incarnations. But its incarnations are, in effect, a form of inferior existence that selves suffer rather than enjoy; the suffering comes from ignorance. Ultimate bliss comes from successful detachment from the material realm, thus from bodies. If any karmic weight clings to the soul on its departure, it will be drawn into yet another undesirable incarnation. Where the ancient Greeks deplored the shades, the Hindus still grieve over the living.

In the Christian tradition, incidentally, Origen (185-254) also held that souls pre-existed their appearance in bodies. Not surprisingly he also denied the body’s resurrection. His views were later anathamized by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (545).

Plato’s view of soul is functionally similar to the Hindus’—but with none of the pessimistic coloration that darkens Indian cosmology. The soul is immaterial and therefore immortal (“incorruptible” in the sense that it’s indivisible); it continues after death. Aristotle—whose enormous powers of rationality, I think, caused him to lean in the direction of materialism—conceived of the genuinely real, or actual, as formed matter. Thus people are substances composed of bodies and souls, but the soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul—and if you separate these two, you don’t have anything real. This is known as the doctrine of matter-form or substance dualism. Only substances are real. Unformed matter or immaterial soul have no ontological status. They’re merely potentials—reminiscent of ghosts or shades. Aristotle, therefore, did not believe that souls survive the passing of the bodies. He did, however, indicate a vague sort of belief in the permanence of intellect. But it's best, in this context, not to confuse “intellect” with “person.”

Ancient materialists—the only two I’m able to name are Democritus (c.460-370 BC) and Lucretius (c.99-55 BC)—both held the doctrine that souls were formed of very subtle atoms. These, much like the coarser atoms that make up the body, disperse into the flux of the world on death. Hence souls do not “survive,” meaning that the clusters of fine atoms do not continue to cohere.

* * *

In looking at these traditions in light of what we can discern of souls in the early stage (I call it the “worldly” phase) of near-death experiences, what seems evident is that the Aristotelian matter-form doctrine may not be right; the “form” seems to survive—if indeed the soul is the body’s form or constituting agency.

The conventional Greek view of “ghost” or “shade” seems mildly confirmed in that the disembodied self is incapable to acting on the world—isn’t heard when Mary or John attempt to speak to doctors, nurses, or their relatives. Experiencers report frustration when they can’t communicate. But that the “life in Hades” is indeed wretched is denied in the later phase of this experience, what I’ve called the “other-worldly” phase of NDEs—as we shall see.

The early phase certainly doesn’t contradict the Hindu view of things; the soul is still there even though the body is in its last stages of cohesion; it might go on and be reborn again. Contrarian indications are present in that, upon departure from the body, no person undergoing such an experience appears to regain memories of previous lives—while still fully possessing memories of this one. But nothing here suggests that later on such memories might not return.

That form of the Christian view which emphasizes the importance of the soul is certainly confirmed. As for the unique importance of one particular body, such that its resurrection becomes important, on that subject the near-death experience is largely silent.

The "Worldly" Phase of NDEs

From within an ideational culture (see last post) the testimony of those with near-death experiences is not at all astonishing but, on the contrary, supports the general belief that we are going somewhere after life’s travails. Let’s examine the experience now without the interfering business of having continuously to make the case for an independent soul. The first aspect of NDEs I find worth noting is that these states usually have two phases, each with interesting implications. One is a “this-worldly” and the second an “other-worldly” aspect. I want to look at the first phase today.

The subject, let’s call her Mary, first experiences her own awareness outside of her body. She sees the hospital bed, the operating room, or the scene of an accident—the situation, in other words, where something decides that she is now on her own. Her perceptions are sharp and clear. Not only does she see, she also hears, and her mind is working quite normally. Mary may very well, if she is average, later relate that her thinking was sharper than ever in ordinary life. What she hears is the noises in the environment and the talk of the doctors, nurses, or attending relatives.

This consciousness of the ordinary world becomes an important aspect of the evidentiary character of NDEs. What she sees and hears can be pinned down in time and then examined in light of the medical observations recorded at the same time. If Mary was comatose at the moment of a particular observation—when the doctor, for example, called for electric shock to restart the heart—if Mary’s brain was no longer functioning at the moment—and if, of course, all the while her eyes were shut—how then could she see, hear, understand, and also form very accurate memories? One logical explanation of such data is that consciousness can operate without our sensory apparatus and the information gained (however it is gained) can be understood and also remembered outside of a bodily frame of reference.

Some subjects also report that they made attempts to communicate with doctors, nurses, or family members in attendance—usually to assure them that all was well. Mary, after all, was still there and feeling no pain. Notably, these attempts invariably fail. Others present at the scene are keenly aware of Mary’s presence as a body in distress; but they are entirely unconscious of Mary as a communicating self. She is neither seen nor heard—although she sees and hears.

Let’s give this a clear conceptual formulation. Those in bodies can see and manipulate the physical dimension but cannot perceive anything beyond it. Those outside of bodies can perceive the physical dimension but cannot act on it without a body. The physical, therefore, is accessible in a limited way from a spiritual order (to give it a name), an order where Mary now temporarily finds herself. The very character of her current situation—comatose, etc.—seems to enable her to perceive the physical in a new way but also prevents her from acting upon it. She is communicating, or trying to do so, but she cannot induce her brain to move her vocal chords in order to set up air vibrations that doctors and nurses can pick up with ears and then decode. They, in turn, encased in bodies and tuned in to sensory inputs entirely, cannot perceive Mary and understand her communication in what appears to be a much more subtle medium. It may be, indeed, that they do hear her at some level; that, at least, seems sensible to me. But it must be that the sensory “noise” is so greatly distracting that the more subtle message, from Mary, does not register sufficiently to reach the agent at the center of that bodily structure. It would seem that the subtle message should be more easily heard: it is closer to the true nature of the agent doing the understanding. This, however, is not what happens—and that fact, alone, may be an interesting indicator either of the “problem” or of the “purpose” of embodiment: separation from something higher.

What the NDE appears to show is that the soul is independent of the body. It throws off the body when it appears to be beyond repair. Outside the body the self appears to be in a different environment but one which seems to permeate the physical without directly influencing it. In the body, however, the self appears to be captured. Other paranormal evidence—and instances from the lives of saints and highly accomplished seers and such—would seem to indicate that this state of “capture” is by no means absolute, that it can be mitigated. But I’ll get to that some other time, God willing and the crick don’t rise. Here I will finish with the notation that all manner of interesting philosophical questions and metaphysical speculations arise from the mere observation Mary and her brothers, sisters report from near-encounters with death. Are we meant to be in bodies? Does an Aristotelian-Thomistic hierarchical arrangement of reality make sense? Are we here voluntarily? Is the sojourn in bodies a kind of training? Much to ponder.

Is Evidence Subject to Debate?

That would depend, it seems to be, on who is engaging in the debate. The line of thought that I began pursuing in the last posting strongly suggests that thought takes place within environments. Indeed, until we’ve produced or selected a broad framework in which to think, we are engaged in something else: we are attempting to find an orientation, we’re clearing land, surveying, and otherwise preparing the ground for thought. This conclusion is almost self-evident. We don’t start thinking suddenly. We’re raised in cultural settings; we learn to think while using mental tooling formed and perfected over many generations by others. We in turn make our contribution and pass on.

In one sense there are as many cultures as individuals. Families have cultures, small communities ditto, and so on up the line to very large collectives. At the same time cultures can be divided into two fundamental kinds: those spiritually and those materially oriented. The Russian sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, renders these as ideational (spiritual) and as sensate (materialistic). He also thinks that in periods of transition, the Renaissance being an example, the two forms mix. I will content myself with the two basic forms because I somewhat doubt that a real mixing is possible.

The ultimate problem for thought—or for the evaluation of evidence—is that these two position are incompatible. I’m tempted to pile on the adjectives: radically, totally, absolutely, and so on. But a naked “incompatible” will do. Here different a priori premises define all that follows; one cannot reconcile this difference at later stages of the argument. The ideational position begins with the acceptance, a priori, of an immaterial reality; its evidence is the sheer fact that we are, know it, and therefore we are conscious. Consciousness cannot be logically reduced to matter; therefore the soul is immaterial. The sensate position denies precisely this basic starting premise of the other side; it asserts the priority of inorganic matter. In effect it never reaches consciousness because it views it as a negligible by-product of brain functioning (mind is an epiphenomenon).

These two sides can’t debate. What are usually labeled debates are efforts to attract a following. To rally a following is, in essence, a form of politics, certainly not philosophy. Or metaphysics. Or theology. There are countless examples of such debates not least, on one side, the rash of books promoting atheism and, on the other, the intelligent design (ID) argument contra Darwin. Such squabbles may have a secondary benefit in helping people orient themselves—thus choosing a framework of thought in which to abide. The best way to identify this sort of ideological activity is to look at the tooling being used. If the argument makes use of physics, biology, or some other natural science to argue—whether it is for or against spirituality—you can be certain that the argument is ideological. So far as I’m concerned, basing a spiritual interpretation on quantum mechanics is still materialism. And so is an argument based on very spiritual-sounding entities like memes, complexity theory, or the Collective Unconscious.

What is interesting is the popular manifestation of this mixed-up situation. The sharp difference in fundamental premises is obscured. The ideational position appears to be grounded on God or, in a more philosophical contexts, where God is assigned to theology, on Being. God’s existence is held to be a matter of debate because in a mixed culture such as ours the best evidence is thought to be something physical out there. There is no physical out there that is evidence for God. Thus a population that is vaguely spiritual in orientation—because, it seems, it comes as a natural endowment—nevertheless gives standing to another ideology. The nihilistic conclusions of the sensate viewpoint, to be sure, are not loudly proclaimed; where they are touted at all, it is as emblems of superior status.

From a point of view like my own—let us say someone who likes to do his own thinking—the real grounding of the ideational position has the strongest possible evidence: it is our internal experience of the self. God becomes a necessary inference if we take this evidence seriously, if we assume, in other words, that we have meaning and that our personally felt meaning has a real foundation, isn’t merely an illusion, has ontological reality. To be sure, we operate at all times as if this were true—ignoring troubled, suicidal states. If it is—especially in light of our personal impermanence on this plane—then it requires a grounding in a transcending Meaning, call it what we may.

Now to the question posed in the title. Debates take place within a framework—else they don’t deserve the name. All sides must share the same grounding premises. Concepts, similarly, must hold their definitions and not undergo strange morphings along the way. If the evidence for anything, let us say for NDEs, takes place within a framework, why not debate it? Something of value may emerge. Across frameworks, however, discussions lose all relevance.

NDEs as Evidence

No sooner had I finished the last posting than I had second thoughts. These arose because the experience of life somewhat contradicts formal distinctions such as those that I presented, thus between philosophy and metaphysics. Thought and knowledge live in the real world, as it were, and in personal experience, we’re interested in how things feel. We live our knowledge and only occasionally reflect back upon it in formal ways. An illustration of what I have in mind is the near death experience (NDE) and the literature, pro and con, that has developed around it.

The NDE is a genuinely modern phenomenon, but its modern character is not, when you reflect upon it, all that surprising. The medical arts are ultimately responsible that we have such reports in sufficient numbers to form the basis of investigation and debunking. Most of those who are today resuscitated almost routinely from severe injuries or illnesses would have died before 1900. In the twentieth century medicine had advanced enough so that Raymond Moody could assemble and publish a sampling of NDEs in his book Life After Life (1950).

The essence of an NDE is that a patient, in what is a critical condition, experiences an out-of-body experience. He or she observes the body lying on the operating table—or, say, at the site of an automotive accident. Afterwards the patient may have the experience of entering another world and meeting relatives and luminous beings. All those who render such reports recover from the trauma—else we wouldn’t have the stories. This is the essence of the NDE.

In Moody’s wake came a series of other medical people who carried on investigations of this sort. Some medical practitioners have also engaged in the systematic debunking of the NDE—not that it happened but suggesting that what NDErs had reported had nothing to do with out-of-body trips much less trips to heaven or hell. No. It could all be explained by physiological events in the brain.

Three ways of looking at this kind of evidence will give me an occasion to look at real life approaches to the evidence. One is my own, one is that of the debunkers, and one is by a hypothetical observer suspended in that vague space that modern life creates: impressed by science but reflexively traditional.

I well remember my own reaction to Moody’s book when I first read it years ago. It was, “Well, there you are!” I didn’t see Moody’s cases as evidence so much as confirmation of something I already knew. I knew it because I’d thought about life after death for many years already. I felt comfortable with the hypothesis because we accept metaphysical postulates if they are formulated comprehensively, if aspects of them don’t violate our broader structures of understanding, and if they add meaning to reality. My quarrels with certain metaphysical structures are not caused by their lack “positive” proof; when I quarrel with them, it is because they carry tenets that don’t seem to me supportable in my own tentative cosmology. Thus, in effect, I treat certain metaphysical theses as matters of fact—although less sharply resolved than matters, say, of chemistry or of consciousness or of will. I don’t draw very sharp lines in day-to-day life.

The debunking responses to Moody (and they swiftly followed Life After Life) illustrate another mindset. It rests on another metaphysical postulate, namely that nothing can be real unless it is materially detectable. For people who hold this position, there can be no evidence ever that might point in a transcendental direction. Books like Moody’s therefore, presented as such evidence—by an author who bears the letters M.D. behind his name, letters that the publishers, of course, never fail to put on the cover for everyone to see—represents a challenge to a world-view. It must be dealt with. But this hurry to defend the meaningless universe has a peculiar character too. It can, at best, convince those who haven’t done their homework.

I read the debunking articles myself, of course, but for me to do so is to engage in anthropology. The same people who wish to explain away the NDE also deny that consciousness or free will exist. Now I haven’t had an NDE and hence have no direct experience, but when it comes to consciousness and will, I happen to own the evidence personally. Thus I’ve learned to discount any debunking argument. Views like that have no standing in my court, as it were.

The third position is that of people who, for whatever reasons, have not delved into these matters directly, personally, and to any depths at all. They reflect the culture, and the culture, brother, he/she is mixed, like that pronoun. The culture rests upon a traditional view. That view rests on religious doctrines. The scientific overlay, particularly science as ideology, dominant in the academy, reflected back in the media, contradicts the tradition. For this person who has studied neither deposit with any energy, Moody’s had the peculiar effect of showing that, finally, science has found evidence for the hereafter. Raymond Moody, M.D. Alas, Moody’s evidence has no more scientific standing that the Gaia hypothesis. But for the person reacting in this way, words like tradition and science have a quite different meaning. They are like brand-names. They carry authority with a certain amount of experiential backing. Mom’s advice is sound. And the way they dealt with that ear infection at the hospital—wow! Science. And just look at that I-Pod of mine.