Michael Prescott's Blog

The limits of objectivity

While I was out for a walk today, something occurred to me that is pretty obvious, yet I hadn't thought of it quite this way before -- namely, that there can never be any objective answer to the question, "What is life?"

By "What is life?", I don't mean the strictly biological question of what physical processes are necessary to maintain the existence of an organism. Instead, I mean: "What is the nature, meaning, purpose, or significance of my life, or of the lives of others?"

Life, in this sense, is a set of subjective experiences. Everything we perceive, remember, or imagine is subjective -- a thought, image, sensation, etc. in our field of consciousness. This is not to say that there is no objective component to our experiences. There may well be. But we cannot access this objective component directly. What we know directly is only our personal experience, which is necessarily subjective.

Nor are we entitled to assume that the objective component, if any, is identical to our subjective experience of it. We simply don't know. A case can be made that our method of experiencing reality has developed in such a way as to simplify the world, and that our perceptions may no more resemble the underlying structure of reality than the icons on a computer desktop resemble the underlying applications they represent. This argument has been developed in some detail by Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at UCI, in his paper "The Interface Theory of Perception" (PDF).

In any event, all that we directly know consists of our subjective experience.

Now, suppose someone were to ask whether the formula "E equals mc squared" tastes sweet or sour. The obvious answer is that it has no taste, because mathematical formulas do not belong to the category of things we can taste. The question is a category error.

Well, subjective experiences are not part of the category of things that are objective. Therefore, if life is a set of subjective experiences, then looking for an objective answer to the question "What is life?" is also a category error. Or so it seems to me.

Objective methods of proof are possible only in regard to things that can be measured objectively. For practical purposes, we generally agree on what those things are. We can agree that there are objectively ten laboratory rats in a cage because we all agree on the existence of laboratory rats and the reliability of our sense perceptions. In fact, we are actually agreeing only that we all perceive ten rats, but as a practical matter, we assume that our perceptions accord with some underlying reality. To this extent objectivity is possible.

But when it comes to purely subjective experiences, how can there be any objective validation or proof? Without such validation, these experiences are doomed to be considered scientifically unproven, and some people will reject them for this reason. But in this case, "scientifically unproven" merely means that the particular method of science is not applicable to these experiences. There is no ground for saying that the experiences are unreal or unimportant just because they do not happen to fit the particular methodology that science employs.

Imagine if science were to "prove" that there is no such thing as love -- that love is purely a chemical reaction with no moral or spiritual significance. Would anyone be tempted to give up on love, to divorce his spouse or abandon his children, to deny his own subjective experience of love, merely because some presumed authority had ruled against it? But of course science could not "prove" such a proposition in the first place. The most it could prove is that there is some chemical state that is correlated with the subjective experience of love. Science as such cannot go beyond that point. Some individual scientist might presume to do so, but then he would not be speaking for "science" as such. He would be expounding his own private philosophy.

When I came back from my walk, I looked up an essay by William James called "Is Life Worth Living?", which can be read in full here. I had a vague recollection that there was something in this essay relevant to the subject at hand.

What follows is the final section of the essay, considerably compressed, and with a couple of the longer paragraphs broken up for easier reading. (It is worth reading the whole thing at the link provided.)

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Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science opposes to our act.

There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the idol. Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.' It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues, -- that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head....

[But science is still in its infancy, and therefore] our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, -- that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever.

Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need.

And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.

And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? ... Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind....

It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal, -- this bare assurance is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane.... 

Probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf....

[James analogizes the life of a domestic animal, who cannot conceive of the larger sphere of human relations around him, to the life of a human being, who cannot fathom the possible larger sphere of divine activity around him.]  In the dog's life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.

But "may be! may be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?" Well, I reply, the 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss.

In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, -- both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act....

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? ....

Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments -- the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith -- sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal....

Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there."

Good vibes

The idea of a spectrum of consciousness, only a small part of which is available to us in our ordinary waking (embodied) life, continues to intrigue me.

I was rereading Robert A. Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body and came across this relevant quote:

At this stage, I believe it impossible for human consciousness to comprehend fully the reality of Locale II [Monroe's term for the spirit world and/or parallel dimensions]. It would be like asking a computer to work on an analogue for which it has not been programmed. Consciousness as we have developed it to date is not prepared for this kind of comprehension....

On the other hand, I am quite sure that the subconscious, unconscious, superconscious, superego, soul -- or whatever our non-material consciousness is called -- is generally quite aware of and familiar with Locale II. How much this awareness affects our conscious thought has been contemplated by our most revered philosophers. Many suggest that it dominates our waking actions. The records of the experiments seem to bear this out. We are masters of ourselves, but not at the conscious level. Our actions in Locale II may have forceful bearing on our daily activities, completely unrecognized by the conscious self. [pp 272-273]

Although I have my doubts about some of the experiences recounted by Monroe, I do think he was on to something with his research. Like many of the people who have worked in this field, either as mystical adepts or psi percipients, Monroe seems to have arrived at the conclusion that the spectrum of consciousness covers a much wider range than we ordinarily realize.

Another researcher who reached this conclusion -- who, in fact, pioneered it, at least in the modern Western world -- was F.W.H. Myers. In his essay "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished," William James quotes Myers as writing:

Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows, -- an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.

James adds:

The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red [sic] and ultra-violet rays. In the psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our ordinary consciousness and memory.

James's entire essay is well worth reading, by the way.

The persistence of this idea, which implicitly lies behind the familiar talk of raising one's "vibrations" in order to do psychic work, strongly suggests to me that there is something to it. How it works in detail, what the specific mechanism is, I have no idea. Conceivably the theory proposed by quantum physicist Henry Stapp, and summarized in Irreducible Mind (pp. 611-616), may point us in the right direction. The theory is presented in even briefer form in this post from Robert McLuhan's excellent blog Paranormalia.

Of mice and men

I haven't read very much about experiments in psychic healing, although I know that many such experiments have been carried out, and quite a few have obtained positive results. In his recent book The End of Materialism, veteran parapsychologist Charles T. Tart describes one such experiment, which was performed back in 1965. The experimenter was a biologist named Bernard Grad, a professor at McGill University.

Tart tells us, "Grad was a cancer researcher who got interested in psychic healing, especially when he met an immigrant to Canada, Oskar Estabany, who had a reputation as a healer." Estabany would lay his hands on his patients -- both human and animal -- and apparently accelerate the healing process. Grad's question was whether the healing was accomplished by some psychic mechanism or simply by the emotional benefits of Estabany's soothing touch. To answer this question, he designed experiments intended to isolate the psychic mechanism, if any.

Tart continues:

Grad carried out two classic studies (1965), one in which the "patients" were wounded barley seeds, the other in which the "patients" were wounded laboratory mice. Let's look at the latter.

The laboratory mice were deliberately wounded by having a fold of their inherently loose skin plucked up and then a small chunk cut off with scissors. This produced a skin wound, which was a useful kind of illness to work with experimentally, because the size of the wound could be precisely measured by putting a piece of tracing paper over it and outlining the edges of the wound. Then a device called a planimeter could be used to objectively measure the actual area of the wound. Forty-eight mice were thus wounded and randomly assigned to three groups....

Aside from mental suggestion when people are the patients, we might conventionally hypothesize that the laying-on-of-hands healing might also involve some kind of chemicals emitted through the healer's skin, chemicals that might have a healing effect. This would be useful to discover if it were indeed the case for some healers, but Grad wanted to isolate his mice patients from anything but a psi healing effect. Thus each mouse received an individual treatment, but to prepare for the treatment, a research assistant (who didn't know what group the mice were to be in) would take a mouse from its cage, put it into a paper bag, and staple it shut so that the mouse was no longer handled directly. Few chemicals can readily penetrate a layer of dry paper in a short time.

Maybe just being put in a paper bag has an effect on a mouse? But all three groups of mice were put into paper bags.

For the experimental group, Estabany would then come in and hold the bagged mouse in the palms of his hands for twenty minutes twice a day, while visualizing the flow of healing energy. When done, Estabany would leave the room, and then a research assistant would come it and put the mouse back in its cage, released from its paper bag. In the control group, once the mouse had been bagged, it sat on a shelf for the same amount of time Estabany gave healing treatments to the experimental mice. This controlled for being bagged per se.

The possibility also existed that the warmth of the healer's hands could be responsible for promoting healing, so in the third, "heat control" group, another assistant, not known to have any healing abilities, held the bagged mouse for the same length of time.

Grad had decided in advance that the degree of healing of the wounds, measured by how much they had closed up, would be measured after two weeks. The statistical analysis of areas showed significant differences. It's pretty clear even from a second set of wound tracings that the controls and heat controls showed similar, moderate degrees of wound healing, but the experimental group treated by Estabany showed far more healing. [pp. 170-173]

Tart's book reproduces charts showing the wounds before and after psychic healing. It is obvious even to the naked eye that the healer-treated wounds fared much better. Of these 14 wounds, fully ten have been reduced to the size of a pinprick, while the remaining four are slightly larger but still much improved. By contrast, both the regular control wounds and the heat-control wounds are noticeably larger. Of these 28 wounds, only one is the size of a pinprick, and many of the others are two or even three times larger than the largest of the healer-treated wounds. Naturally, Grad didn't just eyeball the results; he relied on planimeter measurements to determine the exact area of each wound.

Note the care taken by Grad to address possible objections to the experiment. The mice were bagged so that chemicals from human skin would not affect them. Even the control mice were bagged. One set of control mice was exposed to the heat of human hands. It is hard to imagine how the experiment could have been more elegantly designed.

Tart goes on to describe Grad's barley seed experiment, which was equally well designed and equally successful.

More on Grad's work can be found in this Google Books entry and in this one (which includes discussion of a much larger follow-up study with 300 mice, also with positive results).

Up, up, and away

I thought this was funny. It's from the opening paragraph of an article called "Stupid Parents + Reality TV = Kids at Risk," by Kate Ward, in the current (Oct. 30) issue of Entertainment Weekly:

On the 100th episode of Wife Swap, self-described psychic Sheree Silver stood in front of Richard Heene and warned him, "You are leading your family into a science experiment that's going to blow up in your face." Maybe it's time we started believing in clairvoyance.

Actually, if any psychic talent was involved in Sheree Silver's statement, it would be precognition, not clairvoyance.

Heene, as all the world surely must know, is the eccentric dad who allegedly arranged an elaborate hoax involving his six-year-old son, a UFO-shaped helium balloon, and near-global media coverage. The balloon was supposedly built for a "science experiment,"  the affair certainly involved Heene's "family," and it did "blow up in [his] face." He's now looking at possible criminal charges.

So is Silver's statement "evidential"? Well, probably not. Anybody with normal intuition could likely have foreseen  trouble for the chaotic Heene household, and the dad's penchant for oddball experiments had already placed his family in danger. (Reportedly, he took his young children with him on risky storm-chasing adventures.)

Still, the prediction did come true.

The spectrum

My life is very exciting. Take last night, for instance. It was a Saturday night, a time when most people are going out to dinner, taking in a movie, or visiting a nightclub. Me? I was thinking about split-brain patients.

You've heard of them -- people who've had their two cerebral hemispheres surgically severed, and who then exhibit clear signs of independent mental function in each hemisphere. Such cases are sometimes used as an argument that consciousness is produced by the brain, as opposed to the dualistic idea that consciousness operates through the brain. The argument, as I understand it, is that if consciousness did originate outside the brain, it could not be split in two by the splitting of the brain; it would remain unitary regardless of the brain's condition.

As you might expect, I'm unimpressed by this line of reasoning. It seems to me that the split-brain experiments show this much, and nothing more -- that consciousness as it is experienced while we are embodied on earth is dependent on the brain, and can be affected in various ways by changes to the brain.

I'm not sure why this is thought to be a point worth making, as I doubt that very many people have ever questioned it. Anyone who has consumed alcohol or observed the effects of Alzheimer's -- to give just two examples -- knows that changes in brain chemistry or brain structure will affect the way consciousness is experienced.

The particular significance of the split-brain data is held to be that two loci of consciousness are produced -- a left hemisphere locus and a right hemisphere locus. The right hemisphere locus seems to be fairly limited in its capabilities; nevertheless, there is some consciousness operating in (or through) that part of the brain, which is distinct from the consciousness operating in (or through) the left hemisphere. Thus the nonverbal right hemisphere will be aware of things that the verbalizing left hemisphere doesn't perceive.

This phenomenon is certainly interesting, but I fail to see why or how it says anything about whether consciousness is produced by the brain, or merely operates through it. If we assume, for argument's sake, that some form of dualism is true and that consciousness uses the brain as an instrument, then cutting the instrument into two separate pieces is clearly going to affect the way consciousness uses it. As a rough analogy, consider a situation where a gust of wind blows through a pipe, producing a musical sound. If the pipe is cut in two pieces, then the gust of wind will blow through both pieces and produce two sounds. But there is still only one gust of wind.

In order to address this kind of argument in greater detail, we first have to consider the more fundamental question: what is consciousness? Clearly, consciousness cannot be simply what we are aware of at any given moment. Such a narrow definition would leave out the subconscious mind and, for that matter, the nonverbalized right-hemispheric awareness of split-brain patients.

I think the best understanding of consciousness is the one suggested by F.W H. Myers' term "the subliminal self." By subliminal, Myers meant below (or above) the limits of ordinary awareness. Myers' conception was that consciousness was a multilevel affair, comparable to a house with a cellar (the subconscious) and a sunlit attic (what we might call the superconscious).

Or, to change the image, we might think of consciousness as a segment of a frequency spectrum. A narrow band of frequencies in the middle of the spectrum corresponds to our ordinary consciousness, while the much wider bands on either side correspond to our subconscious and superconscious -- our "lower self" and "higher self." How far these may extend in either direction is unknown, but possibly they extend a good deal further than we imagine.

Proponents of dualism sometimes regard the brain as a receiver or a filter. Continuing the spectrum analogy, we might say that the brain can strongly and clearly pick up only the frequencies in the midrange, and can pick up, at best, only weak, ghostly impressions from the higher and lower ranges, roughly similar to the occasional bleed-through from one radio station to another one that is adjacent on the dial.

Now, if there is any truth in this picture (which is purely illustrative and not intended as a formal theory), then what would happen if consciousness were to find itself operating "outside of" the body -- i.e., freed from the brain? I think we would expect to have sudden access to the whole spectrum, including the ends that had previously been cut off by the limitations of the brain as a receiver (or filter). We would still be conscious of "ourselves," because the familiar midrange of the spectrum would not have been lost; but we would abruptly be aware that we are much more than we had realized.

We would have immediate access to the total spectrum of our consciousness, including the "high end" of the spectrum, and from this higher perspective we might see a logic, a pattern, a wholeness, a meaning and significance to everything that had previously seemed random, accidental, and unimportant. This perspective, once glimpsed, could never be completely forgotten -- but if we then returned to our normal brain-based mode of consciousness, with all its narrowness and limitations, we would be hard-pressed to prove our insights or even to put them into words. They would be "ineffable."

Varying the analogy slightly, suppose that a person with normal human vision were briefly gifted with the ability to see beyond the edges of the visible light spectrum. A whole new world would open up for this person, a world of infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths, of X-rays and microwaves, of radio waves and gamma rays. If he were then to return to using only his normal vision, could he adequately describe in words the colors and sights he'd seen? I don't see how he could. The experience could not be translated into the terms familiar to the rest of us, who are restricted to normal vision. Yet in fact what we call normal vision perceives only a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the other frequencies in the spectrum are no less real than the visible light frequencies.

So this is the kind of experience we would logically expect if something like the spectrum idea is true of consciousness. And in many cases, isn't this exactly what we do observe? The literature of transcendent mystical experiences, deathbed visions, and near-death experiences all seems to agree that a person freed from the limitations of ordinary consciousness does experience precisely this feeling of expanded awareness, holistic perception, and union with a higher self.

It seems to me that changes in consciousness brought about by changes in the brain -- whether temporary changes like intoxication or permanent changes like split-brain surgery -- pose a problem for dualism only if we assume that our ordinary embodied consciousness is the only consciousness there could possibly be. On the other hand, if we see our ordinary consciousness as a narrowly filtered slice of the larger spectrum of consciousness, the greater part of which we cannot access during our embodied life except under special circumstances, then the problem simply disappears. (In the postscript below, I look at a related objection, first addressed by William James.)

Is there any way of testing this idea or trying to disprove it? Showing that brain illness, brain damage, and pharmacological alteration of the brain can affect or even split consciousness will not disprove it. What would disprove it, I suppose, is if no "higher" or "expanded" consciousness was reported in conditions where a dualist would expect to find it. For instance, if people undergoing NDEs, whose brains have temporarily stopped functioning or are barely functioning, did not report a state of consciousness different from their ordinary state, then this would be good evidence that the brain does not act as any sort of filter or receiver, or at least that there are no higher or lower frequencies of consciousness that are being cut off by the brain's reception.

But of course, people undergoing NDEs frequently do report a higher, expanded state of consciousness in various respects. For instance, they may report supernormal perception, as in this NDE of a drowning victim:

Suddenly I could see and hear as never before. The sound of a waterfall was so crisp and clear that it just cannot be explained by words. Earlier that year, my right ear had been injured.... But now I could hear perfectly clearly, better than I ever had before. My sight was even more beautiful. Sights that were close in distance were as clear as those far away, and this was at the same moment, which astounded me. There was no blurriness in my vision whatsoever. I felt as if I had been limited by my physical senses all these years, and that I had been looking at a distorted picture of reality. [quoted in Lessons from the Light, by Kenneth Ring, p. 35]

Or they may report supernormal knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, as in Carl Jung's NDE:

I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand - this too was a certainty - what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing.... My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions ..."

Are there other test cases we find, besides NDEs? How about Induced After-Death Communications -- subjective encounters with the deceased that can be brought about by EMDR therapy? I've discussed these elsewhere. For our present purposes it's enough to point out that the deceased figures encountered in these IADCs invariably communicate understanding, forgiveness, and acceptance, and give the impression that they can see life from a higher perspective. They are still recognizably themselves, but they seem to also be more than themselves -- an enhanced, ennobled, elevated version of themselves. Again, this is just what we would expect if there is a wide spectrum of consciousness, much of which is unavailable to us during our embodied existence, but which becomes available after the brain no longer cuts out the high and low ends of the spectrum.

How about mediumistic communications? According to many such messages, the difficulties of "coming through" are considerable; the communicator must "lower his vibrations" and enter a trancelike state in order to speak through the medium. In other words, to use the medium's brain as an instrument, the communicator must reduce his own range of consciousness. Isn't this strikingly consistent with the spectrum idea? Doesn't it help explain lapses in the quality of mediumistic communications, and the frequently expressed frustration of the communicators themselves?

I also can't help thinking of the persistence, across time and cultures, of the idea of guardian angels. Suppose for a moment that the spectrum idea is true, and that the brain ordinarily receives only the midrange of the spectrum, cutting out the highs and lows; but that in certain states of mind, such as meditation or a hypnagogic state, some part of the hidden material can bleed through. Wouldn't the insights -- fragmentary and tantalizing though they might be -- that we glean from these "altered states" of consciousness dovetail neatly with the idea of a guardian angel (or personal deity) with whom we can commune, and from whom we can gain special wisdom? Socrates' daimon, who was said to have guided him throughout his life, could be part of the higher range of the spectrum of his consciousness, intuitively accessible through reverie or meditation.

I don't think anyone would deny that there are at least two levels of consciousness -- the everyday conscious mind, and the subconscious. Myers' "subliminal self" makes room for a third level, a higher self, which is just as mysterious to our ordinary consciousness as the subconscious is, but no less real. And I see no reason why this total range of consciousness, though it no doubt can be influenced by our experiences and conditions while embodied, must be in any way dependent on our embodiment.

In short, I see no problem for dualism in the undeniable fact that our ordinary waking consciousness can be impaired, distorted, or chopped up as a direct result of injuries and insults to the brain which consciousness uses. There is just no reason to think that our ordinary, everyday consciousness is the totality of our consciousness. On the contrary, I think it is likely to be a rather thin slice of a wide spectrum ranging from the subconscious to the superconscious, from the lower self to the higher self. A temporary alteration of brain activity, perhaps during meditation or at the advent of sleep, may put us in touch with a larger portion of this total spectrum, and death (if it entails separation of consciousness from the body) would naturally open up even more of the spectrum of consciousness to our immediate awareness. We would still be ourselves, but we would also be more than what we presently know ourselves to be.

This idea, of course, cannot be proved, but it is consistent with a great deal of mystical teaching, folkloric tradition, and parapsychological research. I think it is more likely to be true than any purely materialistic account, which cannot explain mystical transcendence, paranormal phenomena, or for that matter, consciousness itself.

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P.S. One anti-survivalist argument is that if consciousness is radically divided in two by split-brain surgery, then our personality as such must similarly be the result of the brain's structure, and so upon death (even in a dualistic framework) the individual personality would be extinguished, and all that would be left is some egoless universal consciousness. William James, in his famous essay "Human Immortality," which lays out the transmission theory of consciousness, anticipates this objection and addresses it in endnote 5:

The transmission-theory connects itself very naturally with that whole tendency of thought known as transcendentalism.... But it is not necessary to identify the consciousness postulated in the lecture, as pre-existing behind the scenes, with the Absolute Mind of transcendent Idealism, although, indeed, the notion of it might lead in that direction. The absolute Mind of transcendental Idealism is one integral Unit, one single World-mind. For the purposes of my lecture, however, there might be many minds behind the scenes as well as one. All that the transmission-theory absolutely requires is that they should transcend our minds, -- which thus come from something mental that pre-exists, and is larger than themselves. [endnote 5]

In his preface to the second edition, James elaborates on his point:

So many critics have made one and the same objection to the doorway to immortality which my lecture claims to be left open by the "transmission-theory" of cerebral action, that I feel tempted, as the book is again going to press, to add a word of explanation.

If our finite personality here below, the objectors say, be due to the transmission through the brain of portions of a pre-existing larger consciousness, all that can remain after the brain expires is the larger consciousness itself as such, with which we should thenceforth be perforce reconfounded, the only means of our existence in finite personal form having ceased.

But this, the critics continue, is the pantheistic idea of immortality, survival, namely, in the soul of the world; not the Christian idea of immortality, which means survival in strictly personal form.

In showing the possibility of a mental life after the brain's death, they conclude, the lecture has at the same time shown the impossibility of its identity with the personal life, which is the brain's function....

The plain truth is that one may conceive of the mental world behind the veil in as individualistic a form as one pleases, without any detriment to the general scheme by which the brain is represented as a transmissive organ.

If the extreme individualistic view were taken, one's finite mundane consciousness would be an extract from one's larger, truer personality, the latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes. And in transmitting it -- to keep to our extremely mechanical metaphor, which confessedly throws no light on the actual modus operandi -- one's brain would also leave effects upon the part remaining behind the veil; for when a thing is torn, both fragments feel the operation.

And just as (to use a very coarse figure) the stubs remain in a check-book whenever a check is used, to register the transaction, so these impressions on the transcendent self might constitute so many vouchers of the finite experiences of which the brain had been the mediator; and ultimately they might form that collection within the larger self of memories of our earthly passage, which is all that, since Locke's day, the continuance of our personal identity beyond the grave has by psychology been recognized to mean.

It is true that all this would seem to have affinities rather with preexistence and with possible re-incarnations than with the Christian notion of immortality. But my concern in the lecture was not to discuss immortality in general. It was confined to showing it to be not incompatible with the brain-function theory of our present mundane consciousness. I hold that it is so compatible, and compatible moreover in fully individualized form. [Preface to Second Edition; emphases in original]

I think it is fair to say that a purely logical terms, there can be no objection to the possibility that the personality does dissolve upon death, leaving only an egoless "world mind." However, in considering the problem, we are obliged to use not only logic but also empirical data. And it seems to me that the empirical evidence makes this idea highly unlikely, inasmuch as people who have reported transcendent mystical experiences, near-death experiences, etc., generally do not speak of losing the sense of self altogether. Rather, they speak of an expanded sense of self.

Even mystics who report that they were "united with all existence" seem to retain some sense of personal identity, though its importance may be vastly diminished; they say, "I was one with the universe," which implies that there was still an "I."

On the basis of reports from people who've undergone these altered states of consciousness (and on the basis of ADCs, IADCs, mediumship, past-life memories, etc.), I would say that the individual personality probably does survive death, but in an expanded form. Though the alternative possibility of merging selflessly into a universal mind is logically possible, it does not seem to fit the facts, or what I take to be the facts. (This is not to say that at some later stage of postmortem existence, the personality might not eventually lose itself in the vast ocean of a universal mind. Who knows? But in the earlier stages, this does not seem to happen, if the available evidence can be trusted.)

Incidentally, note that James's formulation above fits the spectrum idea very nicely:

If the extreme individualistic view were taken, one's finite mundane consciousness would be an extract from one's larger, truer personality, the latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes.

This is just the way I look at it, and I think it is precisely this possibility that is overlooked by those on the other side of the question, who seem to assume that consciousness must be limited to our everyday experience of it (our "finite mundane consciousness," as James put it).

====

P.P.S. Here are a few additional examples of the enhanced clarity of thought often reported in NDEs.

In Irreducible Mind, by Kelly and Kelly et al, we read:

A recent analysis of our collection [of NDE cases] showed that 80% of near-death experiencers described their thinking during the NDE as "clearer than usual" (45%) or "as clear as usual" (35%). Additionally, 74% described their thinking as "faster than usual" (37%) or at "the usual speed" (37%); 65% described their thinking as "more logical than usual" (29%) or "as logical as usual" (36%); and 55% described their control over their thoughts as "more control than usual" (19%) or "as much control as usual" (36%). [p. 386, footnote 16]

The authors add:

Furthermore, an analysis of cases in our collection in which we were able to examine contemporaneous medical records showed that, in fact, people reported enhanced mental functioning significantly more often when they were actually physiologically close to death then when they were not. [p. 386, main text, emphasis in original]

The fact that proximity to physical death correlates positively with enhanced, as opposed to merely normal, mentation would count as evidence that the brain does act as a filter of sorts, and that as its filtering activity lessens, consciousness expands.

Irreducible Mind also quotes the famed NDEr Pam Reynolds as saying that during her NDE she was "the most aware that I think I have ever been in my life," and that her vision was "not like normal vision. It was brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision," while her hearing "was a clearer hearing than with my ears." (p. 393, citing Sabom, Light and Death.)

Two other quotes from Irreducible Mind are worth noting. One is a statement by a cardiac arrest patient, who said, "I do not have words to express how vivid the experience was. The main thing that stands out is the clarity of my thoughts during the episode." Another is a statement made by a six-year-old who also suffered cardiac arrest (presumably during surgery), and remarked that "it was realer than real." [pp. 417-418]

"Realer than real" is how we might expect our experience to feel if we abruptly obtained access to a wider range of consciousness and perception.

Also, I looked at Robert Crookall's book More Astral Projections, which compiles numerous accounts of OBEs and NDEs (although the term NDE had not been coined when Crookall's book was published in 1964). Comparing the statements of OBErs and NDErs with those communicated through mediums, Crookall writes:

Both astral projectors and the 'dead' state that the physical body acts on the Soul Body, and therefore on the Soul and on consciousness, after the manner of the "blinkers" on the harness of a horse, or like a damper, a blanket, a sphincter, etc.: it narrows, focuses and retards our thought and emotions. This statement accords with another (made independently) that when the physical body is shed, either temporarily, as in astral projection, or permanently, at death, thought and feeling is much more rapid and more intense.... [Case] No. 20 similarly said,  "You may think that you can think and act with rapidity -- but once you have become conscious in the astral body you will realize at what a snail's pace the conscious mind moves in comparison." ...

The "communicator" of E.C. Randall (The Dead Have Never Died ... 1918, p. 122) said that all the mental actions of mortals are "intensified to a degree you cannot imagine" once the blinkers-like body is cast off . [Three similar examples are given, followed by:] "Julia" told W.T. Stead [After Death ... 1897, p. 33] "Material senses are not so much to help us to see and hear as to bar us off from seeing and hearing. We are on earth, as it were, with blinkers on.... Death is more of a laying-down of the blinkers that limited and confined our vision than almost anything else." [pp. 122-123]

Light lessons

Since NDEs have been on my mind lately, I found myself rereading Kenneth Ring's Lessons from the Light (1998). On pages 97-98, I came across a case that, while not an NDE itself, is obviously relevant to this subject and to some recent speculation of mine.

Ring reports that he "received a letter from a mother who wanted to share with me a baffling conversation she had had with her young son. At the time it occurred, she told me, by way of introduction, that she had had only a passing familiarity with NDEs, but what happened to her that day was to lead her to want to know much more about the subject."

The woman wrote:

The incident concerning Steven occurred when he was two years and two months old. (He is now two years and ten months old.) I was framing a picture of my grandmother and grandfather, who have been dead since before Steven was born. Steven was sitting nearby playing with a toy, and asked me what I was doing. I told him and explained that it was a picture of his grandma and grandpa, who were now dead. No one had ever discussed death with Steven before, and all of a sudden I found myself faced with doing just that, with no prior preparation....

I began by saying that they were no longer here with us and that they had gone to be with God.... Before I could say more, he said in a very matter-of-fact way: "When you die, it's a tunnel."...

I asked if there was anything in the tunnel. He replied that there was light in the tunnel. I asked what color the Light was, and he replied, "White." I asked if, when you die, you go through the tunnel. He answered affirmatively. I asked what you do when you come to the end of the tunnel. He said, "You go to the Light." He also volunteered that grandpa (pointing to the picture) was there with "a light on his head."

In her letter to Ring, the mother added:

I thought it was significant that several of your NDErs mentioned a feeling of homecoming, a familiarity, a feeling that they had always known everything they experienced. Is it possible that very young children retain some memory of having been there? Is it possible that by the time most of them have adequate verbal skills to express it, the memory is gone?

This small incident dovetails rather neatly with the speculations I presented in my last post.

Ring uses this letter as the springboard to a brief examination of NDEs in children. On pages 100-101 he recounts Melvin Morse's investigation of an NDE reported by a seven-year-old girl who nearly drowned. (In what follows, material in square brackets was written by Ring.)

Morse saw her for a follow-up examination. As a physician, he was interested in such matters as brain tumors and childhood leukemia, and had no interest whatever in NDEs....

After Morse introduced himself, but before starting his examination, Kristle turned to her mother and said, "That's the one with the beard. First, there was this tall doctor who didn't have a beard, and then he came in." [Correct, thought Morse.]

She then went on spontaneously to describe several other procedures that were performed on her, including a nasal intubation -- all of which statements were again accurate. Morse, who had been there during all this time, knew that her eyes had been closed and that she had been profoundly comatose during this entire period....

Intrigued, he asked, "What do you remember about being in the swimming pool?"

"You mean when I visited the Heavenly Father," Kristle replied.

Nonplussed, Morse encouraged her to say more, but all Kristle would say that day was "I met Jesus and the Heavenly Father." Then, she got very shy or embarrassed and said no more.

However, when Morse returned the next week, he tried again, and this time he succeeded in prying out Kristle's full story. Here it is.

She remembered nothing of the drowning. However, in her words: "I was dead. Then I was in the tunnel. It was dark and I was scared. I couldn't walk."

She then told Morse that a woman named Elizabeth appeared, and that the tunnel then became bright.... They entered heaven. "Heaven was fun," she said. "It was bright and there were lots of flowers." She said there was a border around heaven that she could not see past.

Kristle reported to Morse that she met many people there, including her dead grandparents, her maternal aunt, and "Heather and Melissa," two souls waiting to be reborn....

Kristle then found herself able to see home and observed her mother cooking and her father, who was sitting on the couch, as well as her brothers and sisters playing. [According to Morse, when Kristle later described this scene to her parents, they were astonished that she accurately described their clothing, their positions in the house, and even the food her mother had been cooking.]

Ring also reports the case of Nina, a nine-year-old girl who had an NDE during a surgical operation. Raymond Moody reported Nina saying:

I heard them say my heart had stopped but I was up at the ceiling watching. I could see everything from up there. I was floating close to the ceiling, so when I saw my body I didn't know it was me. Then I knew because I recognized it. I went out in the hall and I saw my mother crying. I asked her why she was crying but she could not hear me. The doctors thought I was dead.

Then a pretty lady came up and helped me because she knew I was scared. We went through a tunnel and I went into heaven. There are beautiful flowers there. I was with God and Jesus. They said I had to go back to be with my mother because she was upset. They said I had to finish my life. So I went back and woke up.

The tunnel I went through was long and very dark. I went through it real fast. There was light at the end. When we saw the light I was very happy.... The light was very bright. [p. 102]

Then there is the case of a nine-month-old baby boy who suffered a cardiac arrest during an emergency surgical procedure and was without a pulse for 40 minutes. Afterward he was in a coma for three months. Ring reports:

Two years later, when he was five, he was having lunch one day with his father and spontaneously brought up the time "when he had died."

As the mother observed before she related this event to us, neither parent had ever heard this story before. She went on to say, "He had never, ever, been told that he had died. He was never told the things that happened to him."

In any case, as the mother recalled a conversation, it went like this:

He sat down besides his dad, and he said, "Dad, do you know what?" And his dad said "What?" "You know I died." "Oh, you did?" And he said, "Yeah." His dad said, "Well, what happened?" And he said, "It was really, really dark, daddy, and then it was really, really bright. And I ran and ran, and it didn't hurt anymore." And his dad said, "Where were you running, Mark?" And he said, "Oh, Daddy, I was running up there [pointing upward].... And he said he didn't hurt anymore, and a man talked to him. And his dad said, "What kind of words did he say?" And Mark said, "He didn't talk like this [pointing to his mouth], he talked like this [pointing to his head]." Because he couldn't tell you with his little vocabulary that it was through the mind. And he said, "I didn't want to come back, Daddy, but I had to." [Pp. 108-109]

This event occurred before the publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life, which first popularized the idea of NDEs, so there is little chance that the child or his parents had been exposed to this concept.

Finally Ring gives the example of a pediatrician named David B. Herzog who "reported a case in a medical journal [Critical Care Medicine] that involved a little girl who was only six months of age when she may have had an NDE."

The infant suffered renal and circulatory failure and barely survived. Herzog reports:

Some months after her discharge, she had a panic reaction when encouraged by some siblings to crawl through a tunnel at a local store. The cause of this reaction was not obvious but the "tunnel panic" was seen again on a number of occasions. According to her mother, during these episodes the patient would talk very fast, be unduly frightened and overwhelmed, and would seem as if she knew the tunnel quite well. At the age of 3 1/2, when her mother was explaining the impending death of her grandmother, the child replied, "Will Grandma have to go through the tunnel to get to see God?" [p. 112]

One thing I learned from rereading the opening chapters of Lessons from the Light is that I was mistaken in my objection to the AWARE study currently being carried out. I had argued that someone in the grip of an an NDE would probably not focus on extraneous details such as pictures taped to the top of shelves. However, it is clear from the cases Ring reports that at least some NDErs do notice extraneous details, such as dust and cobwebs on top of light fixtures.

This being the case, I would expect that some patients in the AWARE study would observe and remember the pictures. If a significant number of NDEs are reported by this pool of patients -- NDEs that include the OBE component -- and if none of the patients can remember or describe the hidden pictures, then this would constitute significant evidence that the experience is at least partly hallucinatory, though, in itself, it would not explain the veridical perceptions that have already been established in some earlier cases.

Many of the accounts cited by Ring make it clear that the subject's perception is not limited to any one particular object of interest, but is closer to an omniscient perspective. Take the case of Craig, who had an NDE when he nearly drowned. Describing the event, he wrote:

All of a sudden, I noticed a floating sensation, as if I were rising. I was shocked to find that I was floating upwards into the open air above the river. I remember vividly the scene of the water level passing before my eyes. Suddenly I could see and hear as never before. The sound of a waterfall was so crisp and clear that it just cannot be explained by words. Earlier that year, my right ear had been injured when somebody threw an M-80 into a bar where I was listening to a band, and it exploded right next to my head. But now I could hear perfectly clearly, better than I ever had before. My sight was even more beautiful. Sights that were close in distance were as clear as those far away, and this was at the same moment, which astounded me. There was no blurriness in my vision whatsoever. I felt as if I had been limited by my physical senses all these years, and that I had been looking at a distorted picture of reality. [p. 35]

A similar report of enhanced perception was made by an actor who had an out-of-body experience (not an NDE) while dancing on stage.

Suddenly, without a moment's warning, I found myself in steel rafters near the ceiling of the room. I was aware of the gloom of the girders rising up through the shadows, and looking down on the spectacle below, I was startled to see that my vision had changed: I could see everything in the room -- every hair on every head, it seemed -- all at the same time. I took it all in, in a single omnipresent glance: hundreds of heads arranged in wavering rows of portable chairs, a half-dozen babies sleeping in laps, hairs of many different colors, shining from the light on stage. Then my attention shifted to the stage, and there we were in multicolored leotards, whirling about in our dance, and there I was -- there I was -- face-to-face with [his dancing partner]. [p. 57]

Compare this to the case of a woman who lost consciousness after being rushed to the hospital with pneumonia:

I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat perspective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher. At the time, I knew exactly how many hairs there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing detail, and once again, I knew exactly how many sparkles there were. [pp. 62-63]

Very clear visual perceptions are common in NDEs. Ring mentions a questionnaire distributed by Janice Holden, a professor at the University of North Texas, to people who had experienced OBEs near death. She received 63 replies. Ring writes:

79% of her sample reported having clear visual perceptions, and a comparable percentage also stated that it was distortion-free, in color, and involved ... a panoramic field of vision. Furthermore, 61% of her cases claim that they had a complete and accurate memory of the physical environment, and a like percentage even said they could read during their OBE! [p. 58]

Addressing the issue of the veridical NDEs, Ring first recounts the well-known story of Maria's shoe, which I covered in detail in an earlier essay. Then he gives us a couple of other stories involving shoes.

A 1985 case involved a woman who had been resuscitated. The nurse who investigated the case reported:

She told me how she floated up over her body, viewed the resuscitation effort for a short time, and then felt herself being pulled up through several floors of the hospital. She then found herself above the roof and realized she was looking at the skyline of Hartford. She marveled at how interesting this view was, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a red object. It turned out to be a shoe ....

I was relating this to a resident, who, in a mocking manner, left. Apparently, he got a janitor to get him onto the roof. When I saw him later that day, he had a red shoe and became a believer, too. [p. 67]

Ring says he asked the nurse whether she had ever heard of the case of Maria's shoe. She had not.

In 1982, Ring tells us, a nurse named Joyce Harman

returned from work after a vacation. On that vacation, she had purchased a new pair of plaid shoelaces, which she happened to be wearing on her first day back at the hospital. That day, she was involved in resuscitating a patient, a woman she did not know.

The resuscitation was successful, and the next day, Ms. Harmon chanced to see the patient, who volunteered, "Oh, you're the one with the plaid shoelaces! ... I saw them," the woman continued. "I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died. I was up above." [p. 68]

Another case comes from the 1970s. A clinical instructor named Sue Saunders

was helping in the emergency room to resuscitate a sixtyish man who was flatlined. Medics were shocking him repeatedly, with no results. Ms. Saunders was trying to get him oxygen, using a "bag-without-mask" apparatus. In the middle of the resuscitation, someone else took over for her and she left.

A couple of days later, she encountered this patient in the cardiac unit. He spontaneously commented, "You looked so much better in your yellow top."

She, like Joyce Harman, was so shocked at this remark she got goosebumps, for she had been wearing a yellow smock that day (and had not worn it since).

"Yeah," the man continued, "I saw you. You had something over my face, and you were pushing air into me. And I saw your yellow smock." [pp. 68-69]

Perhaps even more intriguing are cases of blind patients who reported visual perceptions in their NDEs. Ring wrote a whole book on this subject, Mindsight. Lessons from the Light summarizes a couple of the better cases, including that of Vicki Umipeg, who was blind from birth. She had two separate NDEs, one at the age of 20 after an attack of appendicitis, and the second at the age of 22, following a car crash.

She says, "Those two experiences were the only time I could ever relate to seeing, and to what light was, because I experienced it. I was able to see."

She described her second NDE to Ring. (Material in square brackets was written by Ring.)

The first thing I was really aware of is that I was up on the ceiling, and I heard this doctor talking -- it was a male doctor -- and I looked down and I saw this body, and at first, I wasn't sure that it was my own. But I recognized my hair... It was a very long ... and it was down to my waist. And part of it had to be shaved off, and I remember being upset about that.... From up there on the ceiling, I could tell they were very concerned, and I could see them working on this body. I could see that my head was cut open. I could see a lot of blood [though she could not tell its color -- she still has no concept of color, she says].

I went up through the roof and then. And that was astounding!... It's like the roof didn't ... it just melted. [last ellipsis in original]

From that vantage point she saw "lights, and the streets down below, and everything." Her experience continued as she entered some other dimension of reality. Ring summarizes:

Now finding herself in an illuminated field, covered with flowers, she sees two children, long deceased, whom she had befriended when they were all in a school for the blind together. Then, they were both profoundly retarded, but in this state, they appear vital, healthy, and without their earthly handicaps. She feels a welcoming love from them and tries to move toward them. She also sees other persons whom she had known in life, but who have since died (such as her caretakers and her grandmother), and is drawn toward them, too.

Ring asked how her NDE compared to her dreams.

VU: No similarity, no similarity at all.

KR: Do you have any kind of visual perception in your dreams?

VU: Nothing. No color, no sight of any sort, no shadows, no light, no nothing.

KR: What kinds of perceptions are you aware of in your typical dreams?

VU: Taste -- I have a lot of eating dreams. And I have dreams when I'm playing the piano and singing, which I do for a living, anyway. I have dreams in which I touch things ... I taste things, touch things, hear things, and smell things -- that's it.

KR: And no visual perceptions?

VU: No.

KR: So that what you experienced during your NDE was quite different from your dreams?

VU: Yeah, there's no visual impression at all in any dream I have. [pp. 75-78]

Notice a few of the common denominators in the above material.

Vicki Umipeg said, "I looked down and I saw this body, and at first, I wasn't sure that it was my own. But I recognized my hair."

Nine-year-old Nina said, "I was floating close to the ceiling, so when I saw my body I didn't know it was me. Then I knew because I recognized it."

Seven-year-old Kristle said, "I was dead. Then I was in the tunnel. It was dark and I was scared." Then a lady appeared and took her to heaven. "It was bright and there were lots of flowers."

Nina said, "The doctors thought I was dead. Then a pretty lady came up and helped me because she knew I was scared. We went through a tunnel and I went into heaven. There are beautiful flowers there."

A three-and-a-half-year-old asked, ""Will Grandma have to go through the tunnel to get to see God?"

There are many other commonalities, of course. Though some details vary, the basic experience seems to be remarkably consistent, whether reported by young children, adults, or people born blind.

It's just me

My last post concerned the scientific investigation of NDEs. Here I want to speak personally. I want to make clear, right up front, that what I'm saying is purely subjective and is not intended to serve as any sort of scientific argument or thesis. It's just a personal observation, which may resonate with some readers.

When I first started looking into paranormal phenomena back in 1997, I was very skeptical and wary of being drawn in too deeply or too fast. One area that I avoided looking at for quite a while was life after death. I couldn't conceive of how such a thing would be possible -- where would the dead people go? -- and I felt the whole subject was likely to be a waste of time.

Sometime around 1999 (I think), I was in a used book shop and saw a paperback copy of Raymond Moody's bestseller Life After Life. I reacted with disdain. Who would want to read that crap? Yes, I had read some of Rupert Sheldrake's books by then, and other books dealing with outré theories and strange phenomena, but this was a bridge too far. I wasn't going to buy it. But then I noticed that because the book was in very poor condition, it had been marked down to 50 cents.

Well, I figured, for 50 cents, why not give it a shot? It'll be good for a laugh anyway. So I bought it.

My point is, I was not predisposed to like this book.

Nor is the book terribly scientific in its approach. Later studies of NDEs -- those by Kenneth Ring and Michael Sabom, for instance -- made an effort to approach the subject in a methodical way. Life After Life, on the other hand, is basically a series of reports Moody elicited from his patients, in no particular order, with few details and no clear method.

Nevertheless, when I read the book, a peculiar and unexpected thing happened. I felt that it made sense to me. More than that, it felt real. It felt ... familiar.

Actually, it felt as if I had known this all along, but somehow had forgotten it. Now Moody had reminded me, and I thought, "Well, of course. I should have remembered."

Sometime after reading the book,  I recalled a rather odd feature of my early childhood, which was that I was chronically dissatisfied with the world. I felt irritated -- exasperated, even -- by things like litter and unkempt lawns and ramshackle buildings and rude people. I thought that everything should be perfect. In fact, I liked to imagine designing a theme park like Disneyland where everything would be immaculately maintained and the staff and visitors would be unfailingly cheerful and kind. I didn't care so much about the rides at this fanciful park of mine; what appealed to me was the idea of a community, a self-contained world, where everything was beautiful and clean and perfect and happy.

Life After Life brought back these childhood memories, and I wondered if maybe -- just maybe --  I had remembered, as a child, a perfect, beautiful environment that I had known before I was even born, and if my desire to recreate it was an attempt to get back to that better, cleaner, shinier, happier world.

Be that as it may, my response to Life After Life was that it was probably true. This response, I freely admit, was not based on any scientific evaluation of the book's contents. It was simply a gut feeling. This is the way it is -- that's how I felt.

Naturally I was not intellectually satisfied with a mere feeling, so I dove into the literature of NDEs and quickly found that there were more rigorous studies available. But I wouldn't have pursued this interest in the first place if the book -- the very idea -- hadn't felt "right" to me.

I suspect that Life After Life became a surprise bestseller in part because other people, consciously or unconsciously, shared my response. It may be that this knowledge -- nonverbal, nonrational -- is part of us all, but is usually buried under the pressures, strains, and distractions of daily life, emerging only when someone reminds us of it. It's like a dream we've forgotten, until something comes along to jog our memory.

Our culture being what it is, we then feel the need to justify, explain, rationalize, defend, and prove our position, rather than simply accepting our feelings as valid indicators of a larger truth. And this is not altogether a bad thing, since a commitment to rational analysis may help us steer clear of chimerical notions and false leads.

Still, an intuitive sense that this is the way it is probably underlies a great deal of the fascination with the paranormal, and especially with life after death. And I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss such intuitions.  Of course, they will never be convincing to other people who don't share them. But should that matter? Where is it written that our purpose in life is to get other people to agree with us? Shouldn't our purpose, instead, be to define our own truth, on our own terms, in a way that at least makes sense to us, even if to no one else?

As I said, this is unscientific, and I am not trying to prove anything here about the validity of NDEs or life after death. I simply want to raise the possibility that we may, perhaps, at times, experience a kind of "deep knowing" that goes deeper than scientific investigation, and which may never persuade anyone else, but can be immensely persuasive to us.

And perhaps we can benefit from honoring this kind of knowing, even if it isn't something that can be written up as a laboratory report, peer reviewed, and footnoted.

The right stuff

Since, in the past, I've been critical of authors who misreported the facts of the famous "Pam Reynolds" NDE case, I thought I should point out an example of someone who gets it right.

In his new book The End of Materialism, parapsychologist Charles Tart describes the Reynolds case in some detail (pages 230-238). Tart correctly observes that Reynolds was not clinically dead for the veridical parts of her NDE. He writes:

But note that while Pam was heavily anesthetized -- certainly deep enough to feel no pain from the cutting and sawing on her scalp and skull -- she was not "dead," as she would be later.

Later, after describing the non-verifiable parts of her experience, he adds:

One can argue about the precise timing in Pam's NDE -- if time in an altered state is experienced more rapidly than in an ordinary state, for example, could her entire NDE have taken place while there was still activity in her living brain, before it was brought to a standstill? -- such that her NDE did not really occur while she was technically dead? But that's an argument that itself pushes against a lot of our ideas about what time is, so it certainly looks, by ordinary standards, as if parts of Pam's NDE happened after she was physically dead.

Kudos to Dr. Tart for presenting the case clearly and accurately.

Incidentally, the account contains two interesting footnotes. In the first, on page 234, Tart addresses a criticism raised by Keith Augustine in his well-known paper, "Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences." Reynolds had monitoring devices placed in her ears; these molded earplugs produced a rapid-fire series of clicks (11.3 clicks per second, according to Irreducible Mind, p. 392, footnote 21) at a volume of approximately one hundred decibels. She was also sedated. Even so, she accurately reported a statement made by a female doctor in in the operating room.

 Tart writes:

One critic (Augustine 2007) has argued that [Reynolds] might have been able to hear the doctor's statement with her normal hearing because she was inadequately anesthetized. As I responded (Tart 2007), I tried listening to hundred-decibel music with ordinary muff-type headphones while my wife spoke loudly in the room beside me, and although I was fully conscious, with no disadvantage of clouding by any sort of drugs, I couldn't make out a word she said. I have normal hearing but a hundred decibels is literally deafening.

The second footnote refers to the book The Scalpel and the Soul, by Allan J. Hamilton. Tart writes, rather -- um -- tartly:

It looked as if a second, comparable case had appeared just at the time of this writing (Hamilton 2008), but rumors in the parapsychological community are that this is a composite case rather than an actual one, and so of no evidential value. My attempts to contact Dr. Hamilton have received no reply.

The case of Gretchen

Here's an interesting example of past life recollection under hypnosis combined with xenoglossy -- the ability to speak a language that one has never learned -- as reported in Chapter 14 of Robert S. Bobrow's worthwhile book, The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine. Bobrow, an M.D., covers a wide variety of paranormal phenomena with an inquiring mind and a puckish sense of humor.

This particular case concerns Dolores Jay of Mt. Orab, Ohio. In 1970 her husband -- a Methodist minister and amateur hypnotist -- hypnotized Delores in the hope of curing her back pain. Bobrow writes:

During this session, when her husband [Carroll Jay] asked her if she still had pain, Dolores replied "nein" -- the German word for "no."

The problem was that neither of them spoke German. Intrigued, Reverend Jay re-hypnotized his wife three days later and tried to expand upon what had happened. Encouraged to speak German, in trance, she did. The minister asked the questions in English; Dolores replied largely in German, and in the voice of a young child. Since he could not understand her, Carroll found some friends who could speak German and had them listen to the sessions, which he had taped.

Dolores spoke German, under hypnosis, responsively, meaning she answered in German whether the query was posed in English or in German (some sessions were attended by German-speakers). Only she wasn't Dolores; she was Gretchen. And the time in which she lived, placed by events of which she spoke, would have been the late 19th century.

Bobrow acknowledges the difficulties in confirming past life regressions: the known tendency of hypnotized subjects to confabulate, and the scarcity of historical records necessary to verify the patients' claims. He goes on:

Suffice it to say that Gretchen's accounts were more or less consistent, including her last name (Gottlieb), the town in which she lived (Eberswalde), and her death -- a murder -- at about the age of sixteen. Not to mention the fact that she could speak German, and even used some archaic and obscure words.

At this point, Ian Stevenson enters the picture. Stevenson was a University of Virginia professor of psychiatry who traveled the world studying cases of children who spontaneously remembered past lives. He collected more than 2500 such cases, many of which included verifiable details.

What mainly interests me about Stevenson's involvement is the extraordinary effort he made to investigate the case. Bobrow tells us:

After a letter from Reverend Jay, about his wife, appeared in a psychic magazine, Stevenson contacted the Jays. His report of "The Case of Gretchen" was published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1976....

Stevenson speaks German, and first ascertained that [Dolores] was, in fact, responding to coherent German in her "Gretchen" mode. He then obtained assurances from the couple that neither had ever had any prior knowledge of the language; they even signed affidavits to this effect. Mrs. Jay would eventually take a lie-detector test in New York City, which showed that she believed she was telling the truth about never having learned German.

The focus of the paper is an investigation into whether to Dolores Jay could have learned to speak German at some juncture in her past, and perhaps had forgotten about it. She was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and at the age of two moved to a neighboring town. Her only German ancestry consisted of two great-great-grandparents on her mother's side, who had died many years before her birth. Stephenson interview [Dolores's] mother, who told him that she had never heard any family members speak German.

Carroll Jay ... was from the same area of West Virginia. He and Dolores were high-school sweethearts and married soon after graduation. Stevenson went back to the Clarksburg area where both Jays had grown up and interviewed nineteen relatives and neighbors of Dolores Jay, including her parents and a younger sister. All denied having any family or acquaintances who spoke German. No German books had ever been in the house. Young Dolores could not have toddled off to learn a foreign language unbeknownst to her parents, who kept a close eye on her (the parents also signed affidavits as to the truth of their reports).

Stevenson even found statistics as to the number of German-speaking persons in Harrison County, West Virginia, where the Jays' hometowns were located, but could find no one conversant in this language anywhere near the wondering range of a young, supervised child. Even the schools of Harrison County did not teach German at the time the Jays were enrolled there.

This certainly sounds persuasive, but before we draw any conclusions, we might consider some contrary information courtesy of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia summarizes the Gretchen case as follows:

Gretchen, an American woman named Dolores Jay who presented the life of a teenage girl in Germany while hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in German. Mrs. Jay did study a German dictionary at one point during the sessions, but Stevenson pointed out that she had already spontaneously produced 206 words before this event. [Sarah] Thomason's reanalysis, while acknowledging that the evidence against fraud was convincing, concluded that Gretchen could not converse in German. Her speech was largely the repetition of German questions with different intonation, or utterances of one or two words. Her "German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty". When asked what she had for breakfast, she answers ‘Bettzimmer’, which is a non-existent word made up of the two words for 'bed' and 'room'. Moreover she had some previous exposure to German in TV programmes and a "look at a German book".

Wiki is not always the most reliable source, so I took a look at the paper cited, "Xenoglossy," by Sarah Grey Thomason (PDF here). Thomason writes,

Mrs. Jay's previous (remembered) acquaintance with German was confined to television programs and a look at a German book.... Mrs. Jay studied a German dictionary at one point during the relevant period, in an effort to learn enough German to please her ailing husband during subsequent hypnotic sessions; but Stevenson points out that Mrs. Jay had already produced 206 words spontaneously before this event.... Stevenson made great efforts to rule out fraud as a possible explanation for the subject's linguistic performance. His conclusion that there was no fraud is convincing ... though [Dolores'] desire to please [her husband] by manifesting the foreign [personality] might have encouraged [her] to pay close attention to any stray ... German phrases that came [her] way....

[Gretchen's] answers are largely confined to utterances of one or two words, and many of them are simply repetitions of the interviewer's question (but with declarative sentence intonation rather than question intonation). Gretchen's German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty....

Some of her pronunciations seem to be influenced by German spelling rather than by German sounds....

Gretchen says that she is illiterate, but at one point she writes about forty words (some of them repetitions) in German, with spelling errors that one might expect from an English speaker who had learned only a little German.... Stevenson is confident about the need for a paranormal explanation for the subject's linguistic performance. In a letter responding to criticisms of the Gretchen case, he says that `[a]lmost anyone might pick up casually a little German, but not the amount (small as it was) that Gretchen knew.'

This is the trouble with xenoglossy cases. Even experts differ as to how fluent in the language the speaker really is. And the possibility that the speaker acquired some of the language from forgotten sources -- such as TV shows or books -- can never be ruled out entirely. In this case, it's unclear to me what sort of television programs Mrs. Jay had watched. Are we talking about German-language TV shows, or (more likely) American movies and shows where some characters speak a smattering of German? I have seen movies with some German dialogue (in fact, I just watched one last night, Patton), yet I could not respond to questions posed to me in German, nor could I fake any knowledge of German.

Then again, maybe under hypnosis I could.

Stevenson's conclusion about the Dolores Jay case was simply "that responsive xenoglossy derives from some paranormal process." Even this relatively cautious statement may be going too far.

Bobrow adds:

As for the reverend, although he had dabbled in hypnotic regression previously, he had made no attempt to accomplish this with his wife. In fact, [he] found the idea reincarnation somewhat incompatible with the teachings of Christianity, nor did he care for the concept of possession, which bespeaks of the devil. The couple also had no involvement with parapsychology or cults. But despite their own bewilderment, the Jays felt that something had transpired that was worthy of scientific study.

On this, at least, all open-minded inquirers can probably agree.

Hidden messages

Currently I'm reading Immortal Longings, by Trevor Hamilton, a biography of pioneering psychical researcher and psychological theorist F.W.H. Myers. Early in the book, the author discloses a fact about Myers that may be relevant to the famous "cross correspondences."

The cross correspondences were a long series of messages received by mediums after Myers' death. These messages were broken up into fragments that appeared in the communications of different mediums, widely scattered around the world. When someone thought of piecing these fragments together, coherent messages emerged.

Of course, people have debated the significance of this for years. Some regard the cross correspondences as among the best evidence for life after death; others think the connections between the fragments are coincidental or the product of "data mining."

What I learned from Immortal Longings is that this method of disguising a message by breaking it into fragments was actually used by Myers when he was alive. As Hamilton reports, some of Myers' diary entries took exactly this form.

Take Myers' cautious approach to recording his love for Annie Marshall, a married woman. Hamilton writes,

Entered in his diary on the next page, broken up into several pieces as was sometimes his way with material that required discretion, was 'Adgnosco Veteris Vestigia Flammae: I recognise traces of the former passion', the anguished cry of Dido in book IV of the Aeneid.

Note that the majority of cross correspondences attributed to the discarnate Myers also involved classical allusions. Myers, a classical scholar, often expressed his ideas in terms of quotations from classical sources.

Later, Myers visited Scarborough with Annie and her husband. Hamilton tells us:

At the foot of the page recording the Scarborough excursion, and of the next three pages, were placed single-line quotes from a poem by William Morris. When these were combined they clearly indicated the way love had been creeping up on him: 'Love is enough;/ while ye deemed he was sleeping/ There were signs of his coming/ and sounds of his feet'."

Referring specfically to this series of entries, Hamilton adds:

For those interested in the puzzle of apparent post-mortem communications from Myers, it may be worth noting that the same device appeared in one of 'his' [postmortem] scripts.

The close similarity between the cross correspondence and Myers' habit, when alive, of concealing his messages by breaking them up is, at the very least, suggestive that Myers' consciousness lay behind some of the messages received after his death.

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(Quotations are from pp. 40-41 of Immortal Longings. The citation given in the last quote is an article by Alice Johnson, "On the automatic writing of Mrs Holland," in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 21:178. As far as I can determine, this article is not freely available online, though apparently members of the Society can access it.)