Sight and sound

Skeptics often argue that out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences are caused by purely physiological factors -- usually some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain. Various hypotheses have been offered over the years, with the current favorite involving ketamine or more precisely a ketamine-like substance. Ketamine, when injected, can indeed produce some of the symptoms of an NDE, though there is some dispute about how closely the ketamine symptoms parallel those of an authentic NDE. Ketamine is not produced by the body, but another chemical, which does occur naturally, is said to have similar binding properties and is hypothesized to be released under stress. For a detailed review of this viewpoint, see Karl Jansen's article here. (Hat tip to the reader who linked to this article on a comments thread.)

Personally I think it is entirely possible that a chemical imbalance can bring on at least a partial OBE or NDE - but not necessarily for the reason that materialists assume. My guess is that the brain acts as a kind of filter, straining out perceptions of a larger reality than we can ordinarily observe. When the brain is impaired in certain ways, the filter is shut off and more of this larger reality gets through, overwhelming us with transcendent experiences. Planes or dimensions of reality that we are unaware of in our everyday life suddenly impinge on our perception, often with life-altering results. Incidentally, the above-mentioned Karl Jansen seems to have come around to this perspective himself, after beginning with a more reductionist attitude. He notes this change of mind in the introduction to his article.

Regardless of the mechanism(s) by which an OBE or NDE takes place, the big question that remains to be answered is how a person who is deeply asleep, unconscious, sedated, comatose, or clinically dead can perceive his environment well enough to give accurate and verifiable descriptions of events that occurred around him. The usual answer offered by skeptics is that a seemingly unconscious person can sometimes hear what's happening in his vicinity, and that his mind creates visualizations that match the auditory content it is receiving. In other words, the person is not actually seeing anything; he is only hearing things -- snatches of conversation, noises made by electrical equipment, and so on -- and then imagining the appropriate images.

This explanation obviously does not cover cases in which the person remembers witnessing events that occurred well outside of his immediate vicinity, and such cases do exist. Skeptics chalk them up to coincidence, exaggeration, urban legend, etc.

But how about the far more common cases in which the person apparently observed what was being done in his presence while he was, to all appearances, completely out of it? Does the auditory-input theory really cover what the patients themselves have reported?

What follows are some excerpts from a report given by a 52-year-old night watchman interviewed by Dr. Michael Sabom for his book Recollections of Death (pp. 64-69). During open-heart surgery, the patient believed he was witnessing the operation. His recollections, to the extent that they could be checked against the operative report, proved accurate. (Sabom notes that the operative report had never been shown to the patient.) Unfortunately, Sabom does not seem to have attempted to confirm the non-medical details offered by the patient, even though some of these were quite vivid.

But what I would like you to focus on is the extremely visual quality of the patient's narrative. He certainly does not talk like someone who heard a few scattered sounds and tried to match them to a mental inventory of images. He sounds like somebody who was actually watching -- visually observing -- the events. (In these excerpts, all emphases are added by me.)

When I left that room [prior to surgery], I was totally unconscious and don't have any awareness whatsoever as I was transported from there down to where they do the operation until all of a sudden the room is lit up, not as bright as I thought it ought to be. Then I became aware but, in fact, they had already done some stuff to me. They had finished draping me, the anesthesiologist had started his stuff, and all of a sudden I became aware of it... like I was in the room a couple of feet or so above my head, like I was another person in the room... It was like I would think of something and I would see, in color and in a frame, what I wanted. I recall consciously... seeing two doctors stitch me up after the operation; Dr. C., I think it was because the hands were so large, injecting a syringe of something into my heart on two occasions, one on one side and another on the other side of the heart; the apparatus that they used to keep the ribs apart to make the aperture; some apparatus they put in this vein up here, some kind of readings that they were taking, an instrument up there; something shiny in his hand -- that was the anesthesiologist, I'm sure of that. I couldn't see it all. And the fact that my head was covered and the rest of my body was draped with more than one sheet, separate sheets laid in layers. I knew it was my body. I always imagined that the lights would be brighter, but it didn't seem that bright. More like banks of fluorescent lights rather than a big high-powered beam... I was amazed that I had thought there would be blood all over the place, but there really wasn't that much blood. Not what I expected it to be... A lot of it was draped. I couldn't see my head too much but I could see from about my nipples down better.... [Sewing him up] they took some stitches inside me first before they did the outside. And then it was just like they sew you up. The shorter doctor started down here and worked this way. The other doctor could have started in the middle and worked up. They had a lot of trouble right here, but the rest of it was pretty fast... And the heart doesn't look like I thought it did. It's big. And this is after the doctor had taken little pieces of it off. It's not shaped like I thought it would be. My heart was shaped something like the continent of Africa, with it being larger up here and tapered down. Bean-shaped is another way you could describe it. Maybe mine is odd shaped... [The surface was] pinkish and yellow. I thought the yellow part was fat tissue or something. Yucky, kind of. One general area to the right or left was darker than the rest instead of all being the same color... I could draw you a picture of the saw they used and the thing they used to separate the ribs with. It was always there and I can remember the details of that probably better than the other things. It was draped all around, but you could see the metal part of it. I think all they used that for was to keep it constantly open. They had instruments hanging around it that obscured it and they undid the clamps sometimes and stuck in sponges stuck on the clamps and there were hands so I couldn't see it constantly because it was obscured sometimes... It seems Dr. C. did most everything from my left side. He cut pieces of my heart off. He raised it and twisted it this way and that way and took quite a bit of time examining it and looking at different things ... That thing they held my chest open with, that's real good steel with no rust, I mean, no discoloration. Real good, hard, shiny metal... [Stopping his heart] I sensed they did it with the needle when they injected something into my heart. That's scary when you see that thing go right into your heart... All but one doctor had scuffs tied around his shoes and this joker had on white shoes which had blood all over them. I was wondering why this one doctor was in a pair of patent-leather white shoes in the operating room when the nurses and everybody had green covers that they put their shoes into and it was tied... I thought it was unsanitary. I don't know where he had been walking in those things, but it upset me. I thought he ought to be covered like everybody else... And there was a doctor who had a bad little finger and it looked like he was going to lose his nail. There was a blood clot under his fingernail on his right hand. I could see it through his gloves, which were more or less transparent. It was real dark and I recognized it for what it was. He was the one who did the stitching and was on the opposite side of the table from Dr. C.

This experience, by the way, was not technically an NDE, but rather an OBE, as Sabom notes. The patient himself said, "I didn't feel like I was going to die," and, "But this is distinctly different from that time I had a cardiac arrest [and an NDE].... In the first experience I died -- I mean, what there was left of me, whether it was my brain, my soul, my spirit. That's a different feeling. This is more earthly, just like I had two feet planted on the ground. I could sense things like I was consciously aware of them... I don't think I died like I died before."

As I said, Sabom was able to verify the medical details, though not the non-medical details like the white patent-leather shoe and the bloody fingernail. The patient did make one mistake, but it was simply an error of interpretation -- he assumed that when the syringe entered his heart, he was receiving an injection, when in fact the surgeon was evacuating air from the left ventricle. His description of his own heart was accurate; the "general area to the right or left [that] was darker than the rest" was the ventricular aneurysm, described in the operative report as being "very large." The patient reported that the surgeon "cut pieces of my heart off. He raised it and twisted it this way and that way..." The operative report says, "An incision was made over the most prominent portion of the aneurysm after the heart had been turned upside down in the pericardial wall... The entire aneurysm was resected." Sabom adds that "the patient's description of the shape and consistency of his heart after his chest had been opened is a classic."

Now, this patient, a night watchman in rural Florida, was not an educated man. There is no reason to think that he had any prior knowledge of surgical procedures or anatomy. Indeed, his observations contradicted his own expectations, as he pointed out more than once. And many of his observations were visual. He accurately reported the size, color, and texture, of his heart. He accurately reported the way his body was draped. He was so certain he had seen the saw and the retractor that he felt he could draw a picture of them. He complained that sometimes he couldn't see certain details because hands or draping or instruments got in the way. He noted the degree of brightness in the room, the shiny quality of the retractor that held his rib cage open, the relative lack of blood, even a doctor's uncovered, blood-spattered, white patent-leather shoes and another doctor's blood-clotted fingernail under his semitransparent glove.

I'm not suggesting that a determined skeptic, like any self-respecting member of the dream team, could not attempt to shoot down this report. Maybe the accurate visual details were only lucky guesses. Maybe the patent-leather shoes and the fingernail were purely imaginary; those details were not confirmed. Maybe -- even though he was anesthetized -- the patient could feel the injections and incisions and even the pressure of the sheets laid over his body. Maybe he constructed the entire event in his mind out of the overheard conversation of the surgical team.

Maybe.

But I doubt it.

Comments

[Leo MacDonald]

And the people who have a flat EEG where brain waves were flat Just like Peter Fenwick said we have shown that cardiac arrest is total you can't argue that bits of the brain are working they are not.

[joki]

Are OBE a hard evidence for a dualistic view of the mind-brain-problem and a reliable evidence for life after death? I think this is hard to discuss. As Blanke et al. have shown recently there is a neural correlate for such experiences. These experiences have shown that the brain is able to have extraordinary senses, nonlocal ones, in order to percieve information when other senses a re shut down. This is important is life threatinig situations. But only to discuss these esperiences as illusions, which is done by some neuroscientists, is hardly not durable.

[Judy]

I find all this endless discussion about OBE's rather interesting, and basically useless. When you have had the experience (which I have had, numberous times), you are no longer interested in whether they are real or not. There are common threads which run through all OBE experiences when they occur frequently. Waking in the early morning hours, noticing a feeling of being paralyzed, a lifting feeling after what only can be described as vibrations running through your being....and then...sometimes you go places...through doors, windows, etc. I have never been able to "control" where I go after I leave the house...usually the experience is one of traveling at a great speed, and then I end up "somewhere", have an interesting time, and eventually return. All other accounts I have read parallel this. Read Robert Monroe.

[joki]

Look at Dr. Murphy s website: Spirituality and the brain.(http://www.shaktitechnology.com/index.htm).
He is a neuroscientist and there some excellent scientific papers, which discuss the spiritual meaning of OBE/NDEs.

[Troy]

"I think this is hard to discuss. As Blanke et al. have shown recently there is a neural correlate for such experiences."

I loaned out my copy of Irreducible Mind, but I’m pretty sure it mentions this study in the NDE chapter. Anyone have the book handy and care to comment on this?

[Art]

Wow Michael! Did you copy all that out of the book Recollections of Death or did you find it somewhere on the internet and were able to copy and paste it? Whoever typed all that in - that was a LOT of work! I've got that book in my "Life After Death" collection. I've got about fifty LAD books that are in my collection. I buy about one or two books a month. Right now I'm working on reading Diane Archangel's book Afterlife Encounters. I try to read at least one chapter a day. I recently bought Science and the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo and Entangled Minds by Dean Radin, but I've yet to read them. My favorite LAD author is Melvin Morse. His books are incredibly interesting. I'm sorry that I'm not too much into reading fiction. It's just not where I'm at right now. Michael maybe you could write a life after death book and then I could buy and read it?

[Michael Prescott]

>Did you copy all that out of the book Recollections of Death or did you find it somewhere on the internet and were able to copy and paste it?

Here's my secret: I use Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. That way I can simply read the passage aloud, and Dragon will type it for me. Of course I have to pronounce all the punctuation marks, and I have to proof-read carefully, since Dragon does make mistakes.

[joki]

"I loaned out my copy of Irreducible Mind, but I’m pretty sure it mentions this study in the NDE chapter. Anyone have the book handy and care to comment on this?"
Blanke et al have recently shown (2006/2007) that these areas of the brain are important for the self awareness, which are disturbed in mental illness like schizophrenia. They conclude these experience as illusions, even in healthy subjects, which does not fit to nonlocal memories as shown by Michael.

[Markus Hesse]

>>As Blanke et al. have shown recently there is a neural correlate for such experiences. These experiences have shown that the brain is able to have extraordinary senses, nonlocal ones, in order to percieve information when other senses a re shut down. This is important is life threatinig situations.<<

That is a valid possibility but then you'd have to explain why the overwhelming majority of people (82% in Lommel's 13 year-long clinical study) brought back from the brink of death do not experience an NDE, they typically don't experience or recall much of anything while unconscious, which is consistent with the neurobiology of a brain gradually recovering from a sudden reboot, it's too busy getting vital neural functions back online to spend precious resources on non-essential luxuries like ethereal wet-dreams and short-term memory retention.

It's almost as if the rare few that do experience an NDE have been for lack of a better word "chosen".......

Then there are documented cases where the NDE/OBE actually starts while the person is ECG/EEG flat-lined i.e. clinically dead and is still being resucitated and there is no measureable brain activity to speak of. We know this happens because they will later report rising up and "seeing" themselves being resucitated and will be able to accurately describe the reanimation and recovery process, what was said, who was there, body language, ect. This is known as a "veridical NDE" because it can be verified in an objective manner, an impressive one is included in Lommel's Lancet paper.

And if NDEs are just a hallucination, why do a great many people report being "welcomed" by dead relatives (sometimes older brothers/sisters they didn't even know they once had), being party to a comprehensive "life review" and being told, "Your mission has not been completed," or, "The time for your death is not yet," during their NDE? If NDEs are just ad hoc hallucinations, why are so many people being shown and told the exact same things in their supposedly unique and subjective hallucinations?

And why the hell would soulless and uncaring natural selection even bother to "program" our brains to experience such an incredibly beautiful and soothing thing at the onset of physical death, who cares at that final stage, it's utterly pointless and obviously offers no adaptational/survivalistic advantage.

And you will find that most NDE'ers will firmly insist that what they experienced wasn't just a dream or neural acid-trip, they will describe their NDE as being quitecoherent and clearly-structured and, most strikingly, incredibly lifelike, as if they were fully awake and lucid like usual, totally unlike any dream or hallucination they've ever had.

"No one physiological or psychological model by itself explains all the common features of NDE. The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a period of impaired cerebral perfusion raises particular perplexing questions for our current understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function. A clear sensorium and complex perceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain."

- Dr B. Greyson, The American Psychiatric Association

Markus, I am sorry for my general view. As you mentioned with the note from Bruce Greyson, these experiences are so complex, that it is scientifically false to reduce them to a neural corralate as well to find a common pathophysical conclusion in general. My discussion refers to some OBEs, which are experienced in life threatining situations. Why these memories are so low, no one really knows until now. But I think it is important to see these experiences not only from the spiritual side. I think they are an evidence for nonlocal awareness in order to percieve information under some circumstances. This can be similar, allthough the mechanism are different, to remote viewing.

[Tim]

I've read Irreducible Mind, and the authors talk about NDEs primarily from the perspective of brain function: during unconsciousness, the gamma-band bioelectrical energies that are the signature of normal, everyday consciousness are shut down. They do not and cannot function. So the operative question is, how can someone having an NDE have such a clear, profound and "real" sensory experience when the higher cognition areas of the brain are non-functional?

There are some theories out there, as you would imagine. Some suspect there may be hidden brain function going on that EEG cannot detect. I've seen some skeptics argue that because the EEG cannot read brain activity in the hypothalamus very well, and since that is the seat of much of memory functioning, that must explain NDEs. But high cognition does not occur in the hypothalamus, so that's out. Others argue that the idea that the NDE occurs while the brain is "waking up" and the time distortion effect of dreaming makes it seem longer. But we know that brain activity coming out of unconsciousness is spotty and sluggish, so that is a weak explanation. One of the latest I've read is REM intrusion, which suggests that the stimulation of the vagus nerve brings on sudden REM sleep and intense dreaming. But NDEs are not like disjointed dreaming. So far, little explains their clarity or sense of reality.

The authors seem to concur with Steven Braude, who I also agree with: NDEs are not great evidence for survival, because they are technically not involving the dead. We're not sure what they are. But they are very intriguing phenomena related to the study of mind/brain duality. What's needed is MRI imaging of the brains of people in a possible NDE state. That would tell us definitively if brain activity was responsible.

[Art]

And why the hell would soulless and uncaring natural selection even bother to "program" our brains to experience such an incredibly beautiful and soothing thing at the onset of physical death, who cares at that final stage, it's utterly pointless and obviously offers no adaptational/survivalistic advantage. - markus hesse
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The term they use for that in evolutionary biology is "fitness." Near death experiences, death bed visions, and out-of-body experiences do nothing to increase the fitness of an individual. Evolution works at the individual level.

"Fitness (often denoted w in population genetics models) is a central concept in evolutionary theory. It describes the capability of an individual of certain genotype to reproduce, and usually is equal to the proportion of the individual's genes in all the genes of the next generation.."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_%28biology%29

[Art]

This is known as a "veridical NDE" because it can be verified in an objective manner, an impressive one is included in Lommel's Lancet paper. - markus Hesse
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Why doesn't anybody ever refer to the amazing and mind boggling parallels between near death experiences and the holographic universe and quantum physics? Am I the only one who sees it and thinks it's obvious? Both Ring and Morse have commented on it some of their books. How is that non-technical people come back from their experiences and make comments that sound like they are straight out of Michael Talbot's book? Feelings of connectedness and onenss, 360 degree vision, being everywhere in the universe at once, during the life review feeling others emotions and thoughts, 3-D holographic life reviews, telepathy, putting their hands through objects, whatever you focus on is what you experience, even the all pervasive love can be explained as a holographic feeling. Everything being made out of light? A large percentage of NDE's that I read have things in them that are mind boggling "quantum" type experiences. Buildings made out of knowledge, time and space not existing, all time and space existing at once? How does one account for these descriptions if not through quantum physics and the holographic nature of the Universe? Isn't that evidential? Why am I the only one who talks about it?

[Troy]

"Blanke et al have recently shown (2006/2007) that these areas of the brain are important for the self awareness, which are disturbed in mental illness like schizophrenia. They conclude these experience as illusions, even in healthy subjects, which does not fit to nonlocal memories as shown by Michael."

Again, I don't have IM in front of me, but if this is the same study, it produced hallucinations only vaguely similar to OBE’s. If that's the case, the claim that “the neural correlates of OBE’s have been located” is, at best, extremely premature.

[william]

As I spent years doing research on NDE's in the early 90’s the stories that got my attention where the person had "died" and left the room and came back with information that they “only” could have attained if their consciousness had left the room. These stories are too numerous to tell here but defy explanation unless of course indeed our consciousness survives outside the brain.

For Judy she is convinced that what she experienced is real and wonders why we are such skeptics. But we who have not had an NDE or have any memory of a OBE we must look at the information and analyze it to the best of our ability.

Most of us have become skeptical and some even ultra skeptics by learning the hard way by trusting another person’s story and later finding out that their story was based more on beliefs than reality.

Try to convince my wife and her sister that someone was not in that hospital room when he appeared to be staring at something then she asked her brother "is our dad here" and twice something fell over in the room at the exact instant she asked that question. And of course as with most visitations her brother died shortly thereafter in a very peaceful state, whereas prior to what he saw/experienced he had been for several days in a very agitated state of mind.

The more one studies NDE's the more one begins to realize the profound implications of these experiences.

The "problem” with NDE's is that beliefs can have a profound impact on the experience. An NDE is usually a short-term experience and I suspect is not always the reality we find when we actually cross over. “Spirits” that come through mediums appears to support the reality that right after death our experiences can be different than the reality we find later in our new “astral” environment.

[Leo MacDonald]

I agree there with Stepthen I mean they would only bring on the possibility of post-mortem surival it would tell us anything really if they are still around a 100 years later or more like a lot of mediumship evidence seems to tell that are loved loves are still around after being dead for 100 years and more.

[Michael Prescott]

>Again, I don't have IM in front of me, but if this is the same study, it produced hallucinations only vaguely similar to OBE’s. If that's the case, the claim that “the neural correlates of OBE’s have been located” is, at best, extremely premature.

This is the conclusion IM reaches. The passage is too long to quote, but they seem to feel that no one has yet identified any specific neural substrates that are correlated with NDEs.

>How does one account for these descriptions if not through quantum physics and the holographic nature of the Universe? Isn't that evidential? Why am I the only one who talks about it?

I see what you're saying, Art, but I think there are two reasons that people don't point to this as evidential:

1. Some drugs can produce the same "holographic" state of mind as an NDE, allowing reductionists to argue that it's all brain chemistry.

2. Bohm's holographic universe theory developed has not really caught on among physicists. It is very much a minority position. So the fact that some NDEs are consistent with the holographic universe idea is not necessarily persuasive to people who don't buy into the holographic universe in the first place.

[Leo MacDonald]

I see it through the old concept of the background medium the ether- everything physical body has a ethereal body[soul] to me the aether concept seems to explain nde phenomena and other sorts of the paranormal more better than the holographic universe one does. If holographic universe prinicple is right that does not mean there is a soul it may only mean information survives. If there is a ether substance inside all living organisms that that would be the soul. I was reading up on Dayton Miller and he actually proved the eixstence of the background medium the ether of over 20 years of experiments.
http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm

[drew hempel]

Michael if you're using voice recognition software how can you be sure the computer doesn't think you're a disembodied spirit that it's channeling? haha

[Art]

Some drugs can produce the same "holographic" state of mind as an NDE, allowing reductionists to argue that it's all brain chemistry. - Michael Prescott
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I haven't read about these. It seems I would of stumbled upon them in my 7 year search for stuff related to NDE's and the holographic paradigm. I'd be interested in reading about them if you ever care to post where they can be found.
____________________________________________
Bohm's holographic universe theory developed has not really caught on among physicists. It is very much a minority position. So the fact that some NDEs are consistent with the holographic universe idea is not necessarily persuasive to people who don't buy into the holographic universe in the first place. - MP
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If I went to a murder trial and there were two witnesses, who had never seen or met each other and they both gave exactly the same testimony I would be very favorably impressed with their information. Now multiply that by about a million for people who have had near death experiences and have made comments that exactly parallel what Michael Talbot wrote about in his book, The Holographic Universe. Not to mention that some death bed visions also collaborate the holographic universe paradigm. It says to me that something very peculiar is going on around here.
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from Daisy Dryden's (age 11) DBV: "Two days before she left us, the Sunday School Superintendent came to see her. She talked very freely about going, and sent a message by him to the Sunday School. When he was about to leave, he said, "Well, Daisy, you will soon be over the 'dark river.` After he had gone, she asked her father what he meant by the "dark river." He tried to explain it, but she said, "It is all a mistake; there is no river; there is no curtain; there is not even a line that separates this life from the other life." And she stretched out her little hands from the bed, and with a gesture said, "It is here and it is there; I know it is so, for I can see you all, and I see them there at the same time." http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/books/barrett/dbv/chapter3.htm

That sounds pretty durn holographic to me!

[Marcel Cairo]

Art...

If it makes you feel any better, I too believe that there is some validity to the holographic universe concept (even though I don't totally understand it). I have had numerous experiences and communications which points to some holographic reality.

Someday we'll know.

[Michael Prescott]

>I'd be interested in reading about them if you ever care to post where they can be found.

Here's an excerpt from a review of The Discovery of Love, by M. G. Bishop (1963):

---

The technical details of Bishop's experience provide a fascinating look at how clinical experiments with LSD were conducted at Menlo Park. In the company of professionally trained staff, with whom he already had a degree of trust, Malden Bishop ingested 200 micrograms of LSD-25 and spent the next 10-12 hours on the most fascinating journey of his life. Although these experiments were conducted in a clinical setting, much care was taken to have comfortable, tasteful furnishings and beautiful works of art available. Good music was also an integral component of the experience. Overall, Bishop's descriptions of the setting in which the experiment was conducted is a far cry from scenes shown on recent television documentaries about other clinical evaluations of LSD. I can recall a recent piece on MTV that contained scenes of test subjects under obvious distress in stark clinical surroundings. Conducted properly, clinical experiments with psychedelic substances can produce moments such as the one Bishop describes taking place within the first few hours of his experience:

[After describing a pastoral vision he was having] I was a young man and wandered in and out of many of the old houses. Old houses have always interested me. I have often likened them to old women. As with old women, they were once filled with youthful vigor, with loving, with life, with being. But after a while they have served their purpose and they seem to slowly disintegrate, slowly erode back into the earth from which they came. They are a sort of symbol to me of the temporariness of form, and the eternalness of substance. . . . I went through all the experiences of my youth, and more too. . . . The important thing about this phase of the experience, I think, is that I was learning that all things are one, and all things are a part, an essential part, of my being. The blossom and the piece of excrement are one, and equally important. The storm and the sunshine, the rock and the sand, everything and all things are one with me, and I am one with them. I had heard these ideas stated before but now I knew it.

His statement, "now I knew it" is the core of the psychedelic experience. Direct contact with the divine, without the filters of everyday human life, is the central teaching of Bishop's book. [end of excerpt]

---

A Google search for "LSD + oneness" will bring up other examples. Of course, LSD is not the only drug that creates a sense of oneness with the universe. William James exerimented with nitrous oxide. He wrote:

"The centre and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the meum and the tuum, are one. Now this, only a thousand-fold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea of representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanished in a higher unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are literally in the midst of an infinite, to perceive the existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the same as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to be striven about; and in this common topic, the same of both parties, the differences merge. From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; yes and no agree at least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same thing --- all opinions are thus synonyms, and synonymous, are the same. But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again difference and no-difference merge in one."

[Art]

"and its first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong."
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Yep, there it is. No arguing with that. And now after reading those qoutes I remembered that Michael Talbot wrote about Stanislov Grof also doing experiments with drugs that had a very holographic flavor. Something about a girl who took LSD who had memories of being some kind of prehistoric reptile. She became "one" with the lizzard. But for me at least, that doesn't diminish the power or belief in the holographic universe paradigm, but only strengthens is. From all the information I've gleaned over the past 7 years, the Implicate Spiritual Universe seems to have a very "holographic" flavor about it; and that it also seems to be the world of the "quantum", in that thoughts seem to be things and consciousness creates reality. A place where consciousness is primary and matter is secondary. A place where matter is an epiphenomena of consciousness. (words which I plagerized right out of Dr. Fred Alan Wolf's book "The Spiritual Universe").

MP,

you are not skeptical enough at times.. this happens with lots of us.. we are not skeptical enough of skeptical explanations which are mainly only speculation and have no scientific experiments as their basis..

for ex:

"The usual answer offered by skeptics is that a seemingly unconscious person can sometimes hear what's happening in his vicinity, and that his mind creates visualizations that match the auditory content it is receiving. In other words, the person is not actually seeing anything; he is only hearing things -- snatches of conversation, noises made by electrical equipment, and so on -- and then imagining the appropriate images."

You should have added..

"The Skeptics have not pointed to studies where by blindfolded people have been able to vividly imagine the visual settings based on auditory signals and such studies are not known to exist. Hence the skeptics speculation can be summarily dismissed"

Art,
On fitness, I find the whole definitions and assumption surrounding it bogus...

Unless the scientists can mark X number of ants in a colony as FIT and Y number of other ants as UNFIT and then study who passed on their genes better, we have no way of proving fitness...

current definition means..

"Those who are FIT, survive and those who survive are assumed to be FIT"

methinks the resoning is circular

[Kevin]

I recall avidly absorbing Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe" when it appeared in the early 80's, which led me in a direct line to David Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". The experiments of Aspect (and,later,others) confirming quantum non-locality gave credence to the concept of reality as being something of a "superhologram" in which what we conceive of as "past, present and future" could be in existence simultaneously gave me the comforting feeling that my precognitive dreams were not the result of some strange mental aberration. At the same time, Dr. Karl Pribram's application of the idea of holographic function as an explanation for the brain's method and capacity of memory storage proffered a new direction of inquiry into the nature of "mind". From our present vantage point, these parallels seem like a given, but they still give materialist science pause.

Since NDEs and OBEs are mental phenomena, and the (holographic) brain is the conduit for the transmission of the mental into the physical, we can reasonably imply that the holographic paradigm is crucial to our further understanding of conscious existence. As Dr. Richard Conn Henry so succinctly pointed out in his one-page article printed in the (obviously conservative) journal Nature in the July 2005 issue (available at http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf, Adobe needed), "The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."

If we accept that the concept of holography is central to furthering our understanding of existence, we need to note that holograms are resistant to reductionism, that every part of a hologram, if separated by fragmenting its transmissive medium, contains all of the information possessed by the whole. Thus, if the Universe and brain (and, thereby, the mind) are holographic in some manner, the reductional materialism of science, the science of the (non-existent) "objective", is unusable in the attempt to gain ultimate understanding of these matters. Science must be modified in order to progress.

Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne of the now-discontinued Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory suggested in their paper "Science of the Subjective" (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol.11, No.2)that the modification of science into "neo-subjective" science "while retaining the logical rigor, empirical/theoretical dialogue,and cultural purpose of its rigidly objective predecessor, would have the following requirements: acknowledgement of a proactive role for human consciousness; more explicit and profound use of interdisciplinary metaphors; more generous interpretations of measurability, replicability, and resonance; a reduction of ontological aspirations; and an overarching teleological causality. Most importantly, the subjective and objective aspects of this holistic science would have to stand in mutually respectful and constructive complementarity to one another if the composite discipline were to fulfill itself and its role in society." Given the consistant content of NDEs/OBEs, we may even find that the true nature of these experiences is metalogical, beyond the scope of or indeterminable by logic.

Yet NDEs/OBEs are still reported (relatedly, does anyone know of a verifiable example of NDE which predates Plato's mention in The Republic?), and we may in the end discover that, for all the useful power of the scientific method, however modified, we need to use our emotions to gain real "understanding" (whatever that might mean), we need to FEEL our way through life AND death AND whatever lies beyond. The closing quote comes from an interview response by a question to Dr. Raymond Moody: "They (NDE experiencers) say they become aware of what's described as a tunnel...they come out into a very brilliant, warm, loving and accepting light...this being asks them a question, and they all say words can't convey it--that communication in this position does not take place through words...but rather in the form of an immediate awareness. The way they summarize this question...is they say he asks, in effect, 'What have you done with your life? How have you learned to love?'"

[Leo MacDonald]

Hey, Michael and everyone else just to let everyone know a got a new blog http://paranormalandlifeafterdeath.blogspot.com/

[Art]

I recall avidly absorbing Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe" when it appeared in the early 80's, which led me in a direct line to David Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". - Kevin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wow Kevin, great post! Finally someone who sees the world similar to the way I do. All I know is that when I read NDE's it's not unusual at all for me to see things in them which closely parallel what Michael Talbot wrote about in The Holographic Universe. The truth is the Universe may be more bizarre and strange than we can even begin to comprehend or imagine.
____________________________________________
from Mark H's NDE:
"There is no distance here. So time does not exist." http://www.nderf.org/mark_h's_nde.htm
--------------------------------------------
and from The Holographic Universe:
"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html#zine

[JoeMB]

"The Skeptics have not pointed to studies where by blindfolded people have been able to vividly imagine the visual settings based on auditory signals and such studies are not known to exist. Hence the skeptics speculation can be summarily dismissed"

* * * * *

Great point.

By the way, you really need to read all of Karl Jansen's book to get a better feel for the Ketamine info. The article is good but not the complete story.

Here's a video that many of us will find interesting. I haven't watched it yet but
I think it's about one case of alleged reincarnation.

The Boy Who Lived Before

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5cGSUBU8-w

[Bill W.]

"This explanation obviously does not cover cases in which the person remembers witnessing events that occurred well outside of his immediate vicinity, and such cases do exist."

I know a psychic who has frequent OBEs that are precognitive, and the events witnessed take place at a later time. Obviously, the "explanation" does not cover that case either. ;-)

[drew hempel]

I just posted a bunch of academic database excerpts on how LSD is carcinogenic, causes SIDS, muscle degenerative disease, and gene damage. See the "LSD and Me" thread at the forum for http://breakingopenthehead.com

Drugs are only electrochemical while alchemy -- Taoist Yoga -- creates electromagnetic spirit travel. Big difference.

[JoeMB]

I guess all those native cultures should have been doing Yoga instead of peyote and ayahuasca.

[drew hempel]

Hey I just watched the Boy who lived before -- amazing! http://dailygrail.com

Also the Bushman culture is the only culture going back to 80,000 BCE!! They only used trance dance for healing. Drugs were just an exception to help some of the women but 90% of the men became healers and 10% of the women -- all without drugs. The process used was the same as Taoist Yoga or qigong alchemy.

[Wake up]

Yeah and thats why Albert Hoffman is living, healthy and mentally spritely at the tender age of 102 !! "Because LSD causes carcinogenic, causes SIDS, muscle degenerative disease, and gene damage" hahaha . That is preposterous hahaha, Hoffman used it for decades and outlived his critics and the propaganda spewers of his generation.

Try our endogenous neurotransmitter DMT and you'll know all about trancendence and holographic universe and OBE/NDE/ ego death.

[Wake up]

For that matter try a high enough dose of Pcilocybin, LSD, mescaline, NICOTINE, nitrous oxide, ketamine and a few other thousand chemicals and you'll know all about it too in different ways. Yoga and tantra etc. come from shiva and soma, it was taught to us by them.

The bushman use the barks of many DMT containing acacias and mimosas, as do the aborigines with certain DMT containing eucaluptus (leaves and barks). The bushman use many psychoactive plants. I even grow a few of their active succulents like Sceletium. Some of their cacti contain mescaline like chemicals. they smoke cannabis (and have many substitutes). Western outsiders are not shown the sacred because we might usurp it (like what happened with sceletium). Most southern african tribes' "sangomas" use many tripped out plants for healing or "consulting the ancestors", for healing, or for initiation or "strong head medicine". I've my own witness or been told first hand accounts of pcilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, DMT acacias and datura species.

Why have shamanic cultures in every corner come to the same conclusions about life, the universe and everything in it. Its doesn't matter whether U use teacher plants, meditation, fasting, yoga, drumming, dancing etc. to reach the trance state. What is important is that we reach the trance state. The failure of the west is to see the oneness and interconnectedness of everything, all symptoms of a severe lack of entrancement and
ignorance to the ethereal truths encountered within.

[Quote]

"Somebody said—not Tim Leary, "LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it." Now a lot of drugs are like that, and we have a lot of psychotic people running around who have been driven mad by drugs they never took. But what they did take was your civil rights, your freedom to guide your own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of thing is intolerable. If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness - and remember, they used to be called "consciousness expanding" drugs (just a straight phenomenological description) - if there's an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to loot our children's future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough and there's going to have to come a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and take it, and take it. You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese philosopher named Mao Tse Tung, who once said, "The Revolution is not a dinner party!" Of course, he went on to say it's an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I don't think we're ready to call for armed struggle, but I think it is time to call for "Hands Off The American Mind. GIVE US BACK OUR MIND." The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who can't think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth." Terence McKenna