Becker on Buddhism

Recently I managed to discover another book by Carl B. Becker, this one titled Breaking the Circle: Death and the Afterlife in Buddhism (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). I’d mentioned earlier here (link), Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993). Becker is a professor of comparative philosophy and religion at Kyoto University in Japan.

Both of these books are of the highest excellence. The second is, for me, the best ever summation of its subject, human survival of death. The second, it turns out, turns out to be one of the very few coherent accounts of the evolution of Buddhism over time. That development has to be sketched in order to present the development of Buddhist views on the afterlife. The presentation is brief but—Becker is a very clear thinker and a talented writer—wonderfully clear.

Even approaching this pair of subjects—Buddhism and the afterlife—seems harshly daunting. The seeming object of Buddhism is nirvana, a kind of absolute enlightenment. The Buddha himself (he lived 560-477 BC) maintained that nothing whatever could be asserted of it pro or con. The earliest Buddhist school (the Theravada, later renamed by its opponents as the Hinayana*) asserted that nirvana meant annihilation; the Sanskrit meaning of the word is “blown out.” Buddhism itself came to be powerfully linked to the concept of anātman, meaning “no soul” or “no self”—although the Buddha actually denied that. In practice, however, anātman came to mean that, on death, what remain are packets of karma—read residuals of action—not tied to an “owner” or “a carrier”; therefore rebirth is not the reincarnation of a person but that of karmic packets. So how are we to understand an afterlife? But hold for a moment. With the rise of the now dominant form of Buddhism, the Mahayana, coinciding with the first century of our era, the religion came to be transformed into a faith complete with heavens and hells—and beyond them the Realm of Nirvana, a realm that a Catholic, anyway, might be forgiven for thinking of as union with God.

How we get from no-self to saved-self is a major part of Becker’s story told here. I’d been exposed to the transformations within Buddhism earlier through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. particularly his Essays in Zen Buddhism. These volumes, however, concentrate on the history of Zen, and Zen, hews close to the Hinayana throughout time. And while the surprises of history are there in Suzuki as well, much greater light falls on the subject in Becker’s work. I recommend The Closing Circle highly to other amateur scholars—a work written by a gifted professional.

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*Theravada means the “teaching of the elders.” Hinayana means “the lesser vehicle,” so labeled by those who thought they were riding in the Mahayana, “the greater vehicle.”

Behind the Veil

The following is an extract from Alfred Tennyson’s 1849 poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., cantos 55 and 56. The initials stand for Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet and a young man who died at 22; he was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emily. The work was originally titled “The Way of the Soul,” and the quoted portions in a way summarize the “problem” we all face here.

LV
The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI

'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, `A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law—

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal'd within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match'd with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Although context provides the explanation, the word “type” used first in the second stanza of 55 means “species,” but that word would jar poetic nerves. Another as it were poetic work-around is in the last line of the first stanza, “the likest God within the soul,” where saying “the likeness of God within the soul” would much trouble the meter. Those fanes in the third stanza of 55? Banners.

The segments illustrate the problem faced by the sincere and active soul attempting to grapple with traditional understanding of the divine arrangements and actual observation. As Tennyson himself remarks in this work (Canto 96): “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” There is discernible here also the path by which portions of humanity reach a gnostic vision of the fallen world.

Two Roots of Morality

Conviction, Observation. This post is the consequence of ricochets from two different blog posts I read in succession this morning. One is the fascinating story of the origins of the U.S. civil service on Siris (link), another is a comment on death on Maverick Philosopher (link). The first deals with corruption, the second with the strongly held beliefs of some that this life is all there is; on death we just go poof. It struck me reading these, in turn, that both morality and faith may have deep or shallow roots. Deep here means “inner” and shallow “outer.” I abbreviate these two roots further by using conviction for the first and observation for the second.

Conviction is a peculiar sort of—what? Feeling, state? I know it when I have it. A syllogism may have a compelling quality, but that compulsion or agreement falls short of conviction. I’ve met irresistible syllogisms I did not agree with—because at least one premise lacked something. A conviction, by contrast, is powerful even if the person who holds it cannot unpack it. Conviction, therefore, seems to arise from some inner intuition reaching us from a source that cannot be denied. A morality rooted in conviction is merciless—you violate it knowing full well what you are doing; you’re going against your own, firm judgement; and you know it.

Observation produces raw data. It’s what we see out there. A morality based on it produces an ambiguous picture. Lots and lots of people confirm a certain behavior; but others, and very often those who appear to be most successful, violate it. An outwardly-oriented person, essentially a stranger to him- or herself, in effect lacks morality: the observations have not sunk deep enough; the self has not engaged them effectively enough; the intellect has not examined them; they have not become internalized enough to evoke the intuitive judgement. Such people behave in response to stimuli; that something like “morality” is out there is, of course, also a social observation, but if their behavior violates it, there is justification for it. Others are doing the same.

Observation also shows that people die and don’t come back. The heavens do not cleave routinely to reveal a beatific vision. What purpose may be visible in reality is not exactly on the surface. It takes heavy digging. And living on the surface, what we see is what we get. Not so if we look deeper; and then conviction rises.

The Contemplative Life: Another Look

As I plow deeper into my seventies, it’s becoming ever more obvious that physical activities and preoccupations are at best utilitarian…that a triumph here and there is also meaningless, thus activities in time seem to be empty too. But here a paradox arises. I feel this viscerally—and that word refers to the physical, doesn’t it?

The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.

We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.

Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.

Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”

To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.

Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.

Mind-Produced Reality?

There is a mystical line of speculation suggesting that beyond the border, that side of life, what we see is the creation of our own minds. Suppose you, an elderly lady, die, and, having been brought up in the Christian tradition—and your conscience reasonably clear—you expect to be in heaven. Heaven is all things good and beautiful—hence you behold beauty, harmony, see lovely lights, hear splendid music. Or suppose that you’ve just been shot dead in a store that you were holding up, but you didn’t see the owner in the hallway, holding a rifle, and just as you try to pistol-whip the clerk, by way of saying “I mean business,” you’re shot, fall to the ground, crawl to the door of the store, and die on the sidewalk. Got it? Good. Now you, a hoodlum, old enough to know that hold-ups are a no-no, a vague conception of Christianity alive in your noodle too, over there, beyond the border, you don’t anticipate the best. Rather the opposite. This mystical speculation therefore suggests that you’ll see devils advancing on you, a sea of flame behind them silhouetting horns and three-pronged spears. You would say “Woe is me!” but, alas, you haven’t read enough to know that phrase. Instead you say, “Oh, shit.”

Now what about this notion that the mind creates reality?

I’m fairly convinced that the idea arose because we do seem to create reality in dreams. I’ve had the experience countless times, usually in quite banal dream situations. Here is one that I recall. In this dream I had to cut something out, a picture from a printed piece of paper. I was standing at a table then and, in dream memory, there was nothing on that table except a cup, pencils, and the sheet. But now I just reached to the left, over there, and sure enough a pair of scissors in my hand, but, I swear, it materialized, manner of speaking. It wasn’t there before. I noted this fact in the dream itself. Indeed that thought caused me to awaken. And I lay there thinking about it—and that’s why I even remember this snippet. But I’ve noted this phenomenon many times before. I think of people, and there they are. But other things far more outrageous also happen, not least—and everybody has experienced this—the scene suddenly changing, without any transitional state. People will say: I was gardening, and the next thing you know I’m in this, like bazaar…

Dream reality, in the dream, a little less so when remembered, precisely for the reasons just outlined, seems very real. But the progression of events convinces me that what we experience as concrete reality is thoughts expressed in three-dimensional picture form. Thus when I think of scissors, I hold them because I thought of them. The gardener is in a bazaar because an association, perhaps a memory, brought a bazaar to mind, a place where once she’d seen some tool she needed at that moment. The reason why scenes change abruptly is because they do. They do so in our head. I just thought of Kroger, a big fruit display. If I were asleep, I might be in that Kroger.

The thinking behind this theory—based on the dream although it is—is that outside of bodies our mind becomes our only home and that, in consequence, we are subject to its spontaneous productions whether we will it or not. The good will enjoy heavenly pleasures, the evil will be tortured forever. End of story.

Something in me dislikes this notion. Let me look and see what it is. The notion has no anchorage in anything except dream experience, and that I’ve managed to explain that to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, why would that be so? What, if anything, would that have to do with galaxies, say, or shells on sandy shores? For any real life beyond this frontier, the other side would have to have some kind of immovable, resistant reality by means of which we should be able to orient ourselves. Without an objective over-against, our own minds would have no meaning whatsoever. Do I think that the elderly lady and the hoodlum will have identical experiences over there? No, I don’t. But the notion that this whole fantastic universe exists merely so that, having spent a lifetime doing—whatever, you fill in the blanks—so that, thereafter, I can spend it reliving my brief jaunt at Woodstock in 1969—Naw. I find that preposterous.

Oh, by the way, just a figure of speech. Too old for Woodstock. And had I been the right age, I’d have been too busy doing something really fun…

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.

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.

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.

Super-Psi?

The notion that souls depart and live on in another world comes to every child sooner or later as a cultural transmission. It may be negatively slanted (“Ignorant people believe…”) or positively; the fact remains that people don’t discover this point of view; they inherit it. Any kind of investigation thereafter is thus a second-order activity. Some people in every generation get engaged in the debate; they seriously ask themselves if the tales they’ve heard are true or false; if individuals go much beyond that, they’re part of a kind of enterprise.

Assuming my own experience is average, most people learn about these things from figures of authority (grandmothers, impressive aunts, etc.). Outer circles of adults confirm what they have heard. There is broad consensus on the matter. It’s part of the culture. Thus it is disbelief in the cultural transmission that requires initiative, not acceptance. But that initiative is also aided by processes of enlightenment. In our day “achieving” disbelief is a part of growing up; we discover that it’s not the storks that bring the babies—and that the dead stay in the grave. Human personalities, however, are interestingly layered. The cynical, bright, adult layer floats on top of an archaic world of childhood feeling, and in certain circumstances people can descend again and, from within a deeper layer, they can actually believe what they deny on their brittle surface— namely that mother, dad, or the child is still alive up there, somewhere, in heaven. We are more complex than we seem.

Two Approaches. But let’s look at the more conscious processes of resolving the debate. Two alternatives are open; they are both used in a mixed form. One is a process of reasoning from patterns of reality; that’s the philosophical approach. The other is based on experiencing or evaluating empirical evidence. In the West that evidence is usually associated with communications with the dead, with apparitions and, since the 1970s anyway, with near death experience reports. Reincarnation studies, although pioneered by Ian Stevenson from the West, are predominantly based on reports of experiences provided by people in the eastern world.

I will explore the philosophical approach some other time, but note here that that approach produces as strong an argument as any; indeed, in my opinion, it is the most persuasive. Those who think this way, however, can point to the best empirical evidence as confirmation.

What Constitutes Evidence? How do we know that NDE reports are true, that mediums are really communication with someone dead, or that apparitions are the dead? Interestingly enough, mere reports of having been to heaven, claims by mediums that Grandpa sends his love, or statements, however amazed, that Joe appeared to me and held out his arms as if to embrace me—none of this is hard evidence. Hallucination, self-deception, or fraud may be the explanation. The only thing that constitutes real evidence is some kind of information from the dead (or near-dead) to the living of a certain kind. But of what kind? The information must contain something only the personality on the other side could possibly know or could only obtain over there.

I stress the centrality of information on purpose. The very fact that such information is necessary to establish the evidentiary value of the seeming contact has led to a positivistic interpretation of such phenomena. Before we get to that, some examples now to make these matters more concrete.

• A person, a teenager, say, reports an NDE. As part of that account, she claims to have seen Aunt Elizabeth in heaven. Aunt Lizzy was part of a group, including grandma and grandpa, receiving the teenager up there. Now it so happens that the teenager’s family had just recently heard of Aunt Lizzy’s death in California. The death took place some time after the teenager was hospitalized in a severe accident. The teenager didn’t and couldn’t have known that Aunt Lizzy had passed on. The teenager’s knowledge, therefore, is taken as hard evidence of another world.
• In a séance a woman, Jean, learns, listening to a medium, that her late husband is very much upset that Jean sold what the medium calls the “leather bindings” which had been Jean’s husband’s pride and joy. Jean had met the medium for the first time this very evening. Jean is bowled over by this information. Her husband had owned a very valuable set of old leather-bound books, antiques that he had purchased as a young man. And, indeed, Jean had recently sold them to an antiquarian at a very decent price with lots of second thoughts.
• A woman, Margaret, awakens at night. In a dim light, but unmistakably visible, she sees the figure of her husband standing there in combat uniform. His left hand is extended toward her in a gesture of greeting. The whole of her husbands left side is covered in blood; he appears to be standing on one leg. Weeks later she learns that her husband died after emergency amputation of his left arm and leg necessitated by the explosion of an improvised explosive device. The date of his death coincides with the date of her vision.

In each of these illustrative cases—they are not actual cases although just such cases are common—an element of information is present apparently proving that only a paranormal or spiritual faculty could have conveyed the information from sender to recipient.

Super-Psi. Indeed such cases, and such evidence, are powerfully indicative of the truth of survival claims. It strikes me as rather interesting that one element of humanity simply can’t accept such evidence. Thus from within the very center of paranormal studies has arisen a new explanation to discount the evidence; that’s super-psi. This doctrine emerged in the twentieth century as a counter to the survival hypothesis; in effect it materializes the spiritual.

To put the matter as simply as possible, the advocates of super-psi explain all paranormal phenomena, not least cases indicative of survival, by means of telepathy and other similar so-called psychic powers. These are considered to be universally present in humanity but overlaid by sensory information. Super-psi would explain each of the three cases above. The teenager did not see Aunt Lizzy in heaven but, instead, picked up the fact that she had died telepathically from other members of her family and had then woven that fact into a fantasy while in a semi-conscious state; the entire near-death experience was nothing but a fantasy. In the second case, the medium managed to pick up information about the leather-bound antiques Jean had sold, her misgivings about the sale, and the value of those books to her husband, by telepathic means from Jean herself. No communication with the dead needs to be assumed here. In the third case, Margaret’s vision of her husband was simply her own telepathic reception of his final agonies. Super-psi, therefore, is able to explain it all using what its proponents envision as ordinary but usually hidden human power. No heaven, no beyond—and death retains its sting.

Super-psi proponents can and do make claims for psi far more fantastical than any survival hypothesis. The very fact that such an explanation could emerge and get some traction at all, especially in a field traditionally comprehensive in its approach, suggests that in the case of survival, as in every other, the empirical approach must be judiciously combined with a philosophical inquiry to produce the total picture.