Michael Prescott's Blog

Touching heaven

Here's a news story I came upon today in a free newspaper, one of those circulars distributed through the mail. The headline, "Heaven Can Wait," naturally got my attention.

The story concerns Noelle McNeil, a 24-year-old senior at Monmouth University in New Jersey who, in 2005, suffered grievous brain injuries in a horseriding accident. "Unconscious and barely alive," she was helicoptered to a trauma center, where she developed pneumonia and sepsis. She was in a coma -- described by her doctors as a vegetative state -- for 11 days. Physicians saw little chance of recovery. According to the article:

McNeil was diagnosed with diffuse axonal injury in which many of the connections of the brain were severed. She said less than 3 percent of such patients make meaningful recoveries ...

[But] while her family and community and community prayed for a bedside miracle, the comatose McNeil was on an otherworldly journey. McNeil said she remembers leaving her body, gliding over brightly lit clouds into a brightly lit place where she encountered her Uncle Joe, her father's brother, who had died several years before.

"I asked Joe if this was heaven," McNeil explains in her book Heaven Exists. "He said yes. I asked if I could go back because I did not want to leave my life yet. I had so much more left I want to do."

Communicating telepathically, she said, Uncle Joe ultimately told her she could return to her body. He promised she would recover but told her it would take a long time.

"I had been to heaven and now I would have a glimpse of what hell is -- waking up to find myself totally debilitated in a hospital, unable to eat, walk or function in any real sense," she wrote.

An account I found online elaborates on this part of the story:

"I saw my Uncle Joe through the clouds. He told me that my father was upset -- that he didn't want me to be here too soon.

"I asked him if this was heaven and he said yes. Then I asked him if he could find out if I could go back because there was so much I still wanted to do.

"He walked away and when he came back he said, 'Your recovery will take a long time. You can go back, but you might be sorry. It's going to be hard,'" McNeil explained.

In fact, McNeil was sorry. She was stuck in a wheelchair for eight months, for much of that time unable to perform the simplest acts. She became despondent; at times she wanted to commit suicide. However, she persevered through an arduous rehabilitation, and against all odds, was able to make an almost complete recovery, though she still lacks full use of her right arm.

She says now:

"Yes, what happened was emotionally a very painful accident. But I prayed day in and day out for help from above, and I absolutely think I have been granted a second chance at life. No more unrealistic, shallow ideals. I am who I am (my hand may shake) but I am here." And: "I love my life and I would not want to die any time soon, but when it is my time, it is my time. I trust it."

Her mother adds:

"I came so close to losing her that there is very little in life that I now consider important enough to get stressed out over. I am thankful that Noelle is alive, that we get up every day and have coffee. I am thankful that when I watch her walk now, it is much smoother than it used to be. I am thankful that she can now hug me back, even with the ataxic right hand."

Although it is probably unnecessary, I guess I should point out the many features that Noelle McNeil's account has in common with other near-death experiences: leaving the body, flying or floating, bright light, beautiful imagery, reunion with a deceased relative, telepathic communication, the desire to return because there is much left to do, approval granted by (apparently) a higher authority, the warning of a difficult period of readjustment, the painful shock of waking up in a damaged body, and a radically changed outlook on life, which includes the rejection of "shallow" priorities, a more spiritual outlook, and the loss of any fear of death.

Noelle McNeil closes her book this way:

"Tragedy can happen to any one of us at any time. What you do with the tragedy determines who you are."

Something to keep in mind, perhaps, as we greet the New Year, and a new decade.

Beyond materialism

In comments, Coffones called my attention to a Skeptiko interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, the well-known neuroscientist who has said he can reproduce aspects of religious experience, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences by means of transcranial stimulation. In light of this, it is understandable that the interviewer, Alex Tsakiris, begins by describing Persinger this way: "He really is a materialist and very much a mind equals brain guy."

But by the end of the interview, the conversation has gone in a somewhat unexpected direction, and Persinger sounds a lot less like a materialist, or at least any materialist I know.

For one thing, Persinger says he has recently found evidence of telepathy in his laboratory experiments:

What we have found, for example, is that if you place two different brains, two different people at a distance, you put a circular magnetic field around both. There’s a magnetic field going around like a coil, around both brains even at a distance. You make sure both coils are connected to the same computer which means they’re generating the same configuration of two different spaces.

If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement.

This would be very interesting, if the results can be independently replicated. It's worth noting that when a team of scientists attempted to replicate some of Persinger's experiments involving the simulation of NDEs, they met with no success. But the results suggestive of telepathy would seem less subjective -- more amenable to objective measurement -- than some of the earlier results, which relied on test subjects reporting their subjective impressions.

Persinger's apparent acceptance of telepathy -- or something closely akin to it -- also crops up in his discussion of how near-death experiencers can relate details of things that happened while they were unconscious, even describing events in distant locations. Persinger suggests something very much like telepathy or clairvoyance or super-psi:

Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.

The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that - and indeed, altered states in general - is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.

Furthermore, Persinger says that he and his graduate students are investigating the phenomenon of DMILS (direct mental interaction with living systems):

We’re looking at, for example, how various kinds of patterns of electromagnetic fields generated from the brain may influence cell cultures in terms of influencing their outcome in terms of their molecular chemistry, which may someday add to the understanding of how somebody being nearby can influence the physiology and health of a person. We know about individuals with green thumbs. We know that certain physicians are better than others just by touching the patient. And it’s more than just a placebo effect. What’s the mechanism? We’re trying to understand that.

Finally, Tsakiris asks Persinger, "Are you open to the possibility that maybe the physical structure of our brain is more of a transceiver than the agent that creates consciousness, as some people have suggested? Is that on the table for you, or …"

Persinger answers:

Absolutely. The idea [is] that the brain, of course, is a source of all experiences because the brain, obviously if you terminate it you don’t have experiences, but the counter hypothesis - actually it’s not even counter, it’s a parallel hypothesis - [is] that the brain is microstructured. This infinitesimal, complex pattern, is microstructured so that it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns.

And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else. That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.

What I would suggest is that these "electromagnetic patterns" can and do "exist somewhere else" -- namely, in what we might call, for want of a better name, the etheric (or astral) brain, which is part of the etheric (or astral) body. I'm not convinced that these electromagnetic patterns necessarily are consciousness, but they are clearly "associated with consciousness," as Persinger puts it. And I suspect that these electromagnetic patterns and their associated consciousness persist if the necessary "substrate" continues to exist -- which it will, since the etheric body outlasts the earthly body, and may be only one of several closely interwoven bodies that serve as vehicles for consciousness (as many mystical traditions propose).

This suspicion of mine goes far beyond Dr. Persinger's statements, of course, but what's surprising is that his own remarks might be read as leading in this general direction. So is he a materialist? Perhaps such labels are becoming increasingly obsolete in our fast-changing world.

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On an unrelated note, I suggest that readers take a look at the comments thread of my recent post on Ted Serios. A commenter with the screen name Philip A. Centaur pointed me to a YouTube video of Serios in action. Near the end of this clip, right before the closing credits, there is some brief footage that may very well show a slide hidden inside the so-called "gismo" or tube used by Serios to produce his "thoughtographs." I hadn't seen this footage before, and I find it very damning. It is not conclusive, but it is certainly suggestive of fraud.

The Serios case has never struck me as one of the stronger cases for psi (I think I've written only two posts about it), but previously I have been skeptical of the idea that Serios could simply slip a slide into the tube and remove it unobserved in front of many witnesses, especially under controlled conditions. But now I have to wonder.

Serioser and serioser

Recently I received an email from Robert M. Rubel concerning Ted Serios, the Chicago bellhop who purportedly could create photos with his mind -- "thoughtographs," as they were dubbed. Mr. Rubel wrote:

I can be numbered among those who have seen Ted's misdirection in action. I was with the Chicago Sun-Times at the time (end of May, 1967). I would be delighted to share my experience with you.

I told him that I would like to hear his story, and he kindly provided me with the following account:

I met with Ted and his alter ego/manager in a crumby flea bag hotel on Chicago's near north. I and reporter Gabe Favoino  were assigned to track down Serios and do a story on him. I was unofficially the paper's debunker of things metaphysical. Serios insisted that we meet after 2 A.M. and that we bring a bottle of hooch. I must say that both us hard-bitten newsmen were totally taken in by his performance. Later, over a coffee, we discussed what we had seen. I insisted that it had to be a hoax even though I really believed he was the real thing. But then, I had seen many convincing stunts in the past. I told Gabe that I had to disbelieve if I was going to figure our how he had gotten the pictures on the film. I was convinced it was sleight of hand of one form or another. Gabe remained a believer.  Eventually I was able to duplicate the feat to the amazement of those who witnessed me going into a semi-trance. I used my girlfriend's camera and her fresh film. Viola! A picture was on the film.

The paper's lawyers refused to allow us to expose him for fear of law suits. And there it rested. Your mention of the more convincing of his demonstrations does not change my mind. When an illusionist knows something that you do not know, he can build a scenario that has no relationship to the actual facts. That's how they get us to buy their fancy cars and pay to send their kids to college.

There is lots more to the story including how he discovered his amazing talent... but we'll leave that for another time.

In reply, I pointed out that Mr. Rubel evidently had not caught Serios in the act, but had worked out a way that Serios could have faked the photos. Mr. Rubel replied:

There were tale-tell signs that my analysis of his legerdemain was on target. He had not, at that time, started using the glass marble to distort his pictures. That evidently came later to make the illusion more effective. I have, obviously, not told you the full story which, as I said, will remain for another time. We requested another demo which he and his partner refused to grant. You are correct. I did not "catch" him in the act. There are certain indications that occur in most of these scams that reveal the truth. Jane Roberts, who channeled for "Seth" was a textbook example of the signs that shout FRAUD. I wish I could go over with you all the signs that Ted revealed. The last I had heard from him was that he was in England and that someone there had written a book about him. At the time of my contact with him, he was under contract to Borg Warner. They were studying him to see if he actually was the first person to physically demonstrate extra sensory perception.

I obtained Mr. Rubel's permission to pass along his comments. Since I put up a post about Serios back in 2006, and reposted it in 2009, I think it's worthwhile to get another perspective. As I said in my earlier post, it seems to me that some of Serios' feats, if reported accurately, cannot be explained by sleight of hand, since there were times when he was not holding the camera, and in some cases the camera was nowhere near him at all. But I wasn't there, and I can only rely on eyewitness reports. Serios is dead now -- according to Wikipedia, he died on December 30, 2006 -- so he won't be available for any more testing.

I would take gentle exception to two of Mr. Rubel's points. First, I think it is most unlikely that Jane Roberts was a conscious fraud. It's possible that she and her husband were deluded, and that her "channeled" communications came from her unconscious, but the idea that she was deliberately faking the whole thing seems implausible to me. Second, regardless of the reality of Serios' abilities, he would not have been the first person to demonstrate ESP under controlled conditions. Many people have demonstrated ESP abilities in laboratory tests.

Even the noted skeptic Richard Wiseman said recently, "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but [this] begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do." Wiseman later clarified: "It is a slight misquote, because I was using the term in the more general sense of ESP - that is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc as well. I think that they do meet the usual standards for a normal claim, but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim."

So even one of the world's most high-profile skeptics concedes that by the usual criteria of scientific proof, ESP is a reality. This tells us nothing about Ted Serios, of course, but it does call into question the idea that fraud lies behind all paranormal phenomena.

The wheat and the chaff

Recently I received a free copy of a new small-press book about the afterlife, which arrived charmingly gift-wrapped -- sort of an early Christmas present. I don't know the principal author, but he has a blog on this subject which contains a lot of interesting posts. I guess he came across my blog and thought I might be interested.

The book, which is clearly a longtime labor of love, is The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief, and Survival beyond Death, by August Goforth and Timothy Gray (2009), with a foreword by longtime NDE researcher Melvin Morse. August Goforth is the pseudonym of a psychotherapist in New York City. Timothy Gray is the actual name of a New York City writer and photographer who passed away in the early 1990s and whose insights are ostensibly channeled in this book.

The "Risen" of the title is the book's term for people who have passed on -- an expression that provides a nice spin on the more traditional way of referring to the deceased as "the fallen" (as in "a roll call of the fallen" or "our fallen heroes").

One of the major issues addressed by the book is what part of us actually "rises." Do we survive with all our neuroses and fears and likes and dislikes, or are we transformed into something greater? The Risen answers this question in an extended discussion of the "ego-mind" and "Authentic Self," an approach that blends elements of nondualistic mysticism (Eckhart Tolle, e.g.) with the teachings of Spiritualism. It's a combination that intrigues me, because I've found value in both approaches but have not seen how to integrate them. Tolle seems to regard the personality as an illusion that will dissolve when the body dies, while Spiritualism attempts to demonstrate that the personality survives death. Both outlooks, it seems to me, have something worthwhile to offer. On the one hand, the evidence for continuity of personality is, in my opinion, very strong; thousands of mediumistic communications attest to it, and I find many of these communications persuasive. On the other hand, who wants to survive as a bundle of quirks and worries and petty grudges? Wouldn't it be hell to be trapped with your chattering "ego-mind" forever? Sweet oblivion would be preferable.

The Risen

states that the ego-mind and its accompanying personas do not survive, or at least don't survive for long, but that the true self -- what the book calls Authentic Self -- does continue, and that it makes use of the memories and experiences of the ego-mind as needed.

It is, of course, always difficult to evaluate channeled material, especially when it consists of philosophical insights rather than verifiable factual claims. I don't know of any objective way to assess this kind of thing, so my personal approach is to see if it subjectively rings true to me.

Though I don't pretend to understand all of what The Risen has to say on this topic, enough of it feels right to me that I want to present it here, in highly condensed form. What follows are selected excerpts from a much longer presentation spread over two chapters of the book.

If you find these ideas interesting, I suggest ordering the book so you can follow the whole presentation in unabridged form. Sadly, your copy, unlike mine, will be neither free nor gift-wrapped. Who says blogging has no perks?

From Chapter 10, "Ego-Mind & the Simulate Selves"

The ego-mind is an obsessively opinionated, decision-making psychological component of the earthly mind-body. All thought arises from its mentality, generated to manifest physical forms and experiences on the physical plane. Simultaneously, it outwardly projects judgments about our mind-body's perceptions and its environment into our inner space, and onto the bodies and environments of others. This projection is the simulate self. When the feeling of Authentic Self has awakened, all thoughts can be observed, accepted, shelved, or dissolved from a consciously aware stance. But until then, the ego-mind is in complete control of any rising thoughts.

The language of a malfunctioning ego-mind is tribal and therefore fear-based. It subscribes to judgmental concepts that use words and phrases such as "exclusive," "special," "restricted," "fashionable," [etc.] ... Gossip, complaint, and criticism are its food and drink. It is motivated by fame and recognition, and fueled by envy and competition. Insatiably seeking entertainment, "gleeful" and "gloating" best describe its sense of humor, which is delivered with jealousy, sarcasm, and resentment. The ego-mind loves competitive contests. It enjoys attracting and manifesting disasters.

The ego-mind is future-oriented -- it cannot wait, and it worries. It worries about worry. Its language, couched in suggestions, generates anxiety attacks. The ego-mind will seize upon the body's minor aches and escalate them into mental terrors and fantasies about disease and death....

Few earth-embodied Authentic Selves are consciously aware of the psychological component of their mind-body-spirit, also called the psyche or soul. The vast majority of people are moving about in the world with the ego-mind in the driving seat while they sleep in the back, occasionally and briefly waking to look at the scenery passing them by, but then quickly falling back into hibernation....

Because of the unlimited energy permitted to the ego-mind, the simulate self is able to present and maintain the semblance of a self-aware consciousness. In effect, this simulacrum or imitation manifests its own kind of form, and simultaneously, a projected, perceived environment for this form. This environment arises from the multitude of anxious thoughts we allow the ego-mind to generate and amplify, drawing from the vast expanses of energy circumscribed by our fear and trembling....

The simulate self fabricates, presents, and maintains a "personality" or "character" in order to appear real and to appeal to others. It assigns the greatest importance to itself regarding the affairs of the world. It is extremely valuable to keep in mind that our personality is an illusion and not who we are at the core of our immortal existence....

The simulate self resides in our material body's mental areas. The core, true self, or Authentic Self, dwells within the non-mental areas of our interpenetrating material, etheric, and astral bodies....

Authentic Self does not think or have thoughts. It observes them as they arise from the ego-mind, which is contained within the infinite space of Mind....

Connecting with true Reality, or even the beginning awareness of a projected edge against Reality [i.e., the awareness of a perimeter beyond which there is a greater reality - MP], would initiate a weakening of the simulate self's structure, contributing to its possible dissolution and reintegration into something larger, even while Authentic Self is still earth-embodied. The dissolution of the ego-mind and its simulate selves is inevitable, which the ego-mind correctly understands and greatly dreads as its own kind of death....

While survival is the ego-mind's prime directive for the simulate self, it is really meant for the physical cells of our temporary mortal bodies, and on a limited basis. It is not intended for the ego-mind's dreams of immortality for the personality of the simulate self. The ego-mind's true function is to serve us while Authentic Self is spiritually embodied....

The experiences of unawakened human beings are multi-layered, consisting of complex and dynamic sets of simulate selves, interacting with one another and with Authentic Self....

This complexity of selves, of many personalities, means there is not just one simulate self, but that the ego-mind has fractured into many simulate selves -- into many "-I'-s". If we closely watch our thoughts and speech, especially when responding to another person's thoughts or speech -- whether or not they are inside or outside our head -- it becomes clear that we carry within us many "-I'-s" of an indeterminate number, each with its own traits and opinions.... There is the -I- of one's career role, the -I- of one's parenting role, the -I- of one's role as lover, friend, enemy, expert, and so on. These could be typed as major -I's-.

There are also countless minor -I's-. These include the sarcastic, the reactive, the self-entitled ones; the opinionated, the resentful, the gossiping and worrying ones. Some are stronger and are leaders which others follow. Some prefer to remain undetected, while others compete for dominance. There are also the "nice" -I's-. We all know the over-cheerful, the do-gooder, the ever-apologetic, the chronic volunteer, the self-denigrater. Seemingly benign, these -I's- are just slipcovers hiding the shabbiness of the ego-mind's own agenda....

If you've ever "come to" and realized you've been mumbling under your breath, or arguing with yourself, or smiling about a delicious put-down you made earlier, or replaying the boss's congratulations, the next step is to consciously realize that a simulate self was using your brain and body while you, as Authentic Self, slept....

From Chapter 12, "Authentic Self"

Authentic Self is beyond language and increasingly revealed as it is "uncovered." This self-revelation happens as we regain control of the ego-mind and its simulate selves....

One can learn to observe an experience beyond an experience. This observation leads to the empowering question: "Who is it that observes?" Some refer to this who as the "Hidden Observer."

Stilling the incessant criticism of the ego-mind will eventually result in an awakening to the Hidden Observer, who is already very awake but just seems hidden, simply because it is much quieter than the ego-mind.

When no longer hidden from us, it becomes clear that this Observer is Authentic Self. It is a direct channel to Original Creator Source, from which all individualities are rise. While remaining individual and unique, all Authentic Selves -- or Higher Individualities -- are interconnected and collectively joined as our One Source. Individually and collectively, we expand our Source while being our Source....

What are the qualities of Authentic Self? If such labels could be found and described here, the ego-mind would attempt to simulate them into personality traits, which the unaware reader would then pretend to have.

Personality is not individuality, yet most modern people seem to equate them. "Personality" comes from the Latin persona, meaning "mask," referring to the masks that Ancient Greek actors once used onstage to personalize a character. The actors used masks to portray something previously unseen, rendering it visible to others. When they left the stage the masks came off, and they knew that the persona did not continue on as their individuality -- "impersonal" means "unmasked."

Like any good actor, a simulate self needs memories to draw on for its character. These memories are supplied by the ego-mind. Actors also know that the success of their persona depends largely on their own belief in it. The basic nature of belief is that it is temporary. But modern humans actually try to maintain a permanent belief that our persona is some kind of externalized result of the bridging between our inner and outer selves. This is yet another misconception of the ego-mind, because there is but one real self, Authentic Self, which only seems to be hidden....

Individuality, not image, is you. The word "individual" comes from the Latin individuos, "not divided." Contrasted with the image of the personality, our individuality is invisible and indivisible, and therefore indestructible. Individuality survives death when we transition to a Risen stage. It has no dimensions, so it cannot be measured, contained, nor defined. Any effort to do so is to try to personalize Authentic Self. One can cover up Authentic Self with masks, but sooner or later all the disguises come off, and then what remains? The Individualized Authentic Self that is you, which not only exists now, but always will exist, without end. When we leave the theatrical stage of earth, the temporary personality will eventually dissolve and be reabsorbed as informative energy into a Risen Authentic Self -- this usually occurs after we leave the material body, but there are exceptions. Any work that remains to be done in dealing with personality issues will be accomplished after Rising.

Psychologists analyze externalized thought forms as they are expressed and presented through our personalities. But they can't measure the quantity or quality of the dimensionless individual. Earthly science tends to see its presumed authority as reliable knowledge, but such authority is largely a competitive matter of fight-or-flight posturing, to ensure the survival of separate ego-minded personalities.

Most people identify with their personality to the extent that it crystallizes. It retains some semi-substantial but still earthly materiality, so the crystallized form can be quite problematic to dissolve, even on the astral planes. Although it is not intelligent, the free-floating, discarnate personality can display a kind of clever mimicry of the memories with which still resonates. The resultant form will linger on in a kind of quasi-existence on the lowest astral levels that are closest to the earth plane. Recall that the ego-mind eventually ceases to exist when we discard the body, an inevitable ending or death which it fears and does all it can to avoid, while allowed to run out of control with that fear. The disembodied, crystallized form of the simulate self no longer has an earthly ego-mind regulated by what we call a "conscience," or inner critic or judge....

These forms present themselves as apparent semi-intelligences, and are often responsible for the nonsensical, crude, and even cruel communications to sensitives during a mediumistic reading.... They are most successful at making their presences known through an Ouija board, and sometimes through automatic handwriting, table tipping, and rappings. People with traumatized psyches, whose brains are disabled by organic disease, by various substances, or by conditions labeled as mental illness may also be susceptible to the invasive efforts of these discarded constructs, for short- and long-term periods....

To communicate with someone on a higher plane, we must raise our vibrations from that of the earth plane. To do this we make a conscious connection with Authentic Self. In turn, those on the higher plane, who are very likely more familiar with and identified as their Authentic Selves, often must lower their own vibrations. This experience has been reported by them as very uncomfortable, like "sinking into thick, muddy water"...

When the earthly material body falls away, Authentic Self then stands revealed. This Self is the bridge. When I say that I am the bridge or the door to other states of consciousness, I mean to where other individuals exist in similar states of consciousness. I am the door to Tim. In the early stages of communication with the Risen, the door is experienced intuitively.

[Excerpts from The Risen, pp. 70-95 and 112-117]

P.S. It occurs to me that the distinction between the ego-mind and Authentic Self might be what the Gnostics were thinking of when they developed the myth of the demiurge.

Gnosticism claimed that the true God is mostly unknown to people, who mistakenly worship a sort of middleman, the demiurge. The demiurge is a lesser deity that thinks of itself as the one and only God. This fanciful story could be seen as a metaphor for the tendency to see the ego-mind as our one and only self, when in fact it is sort of an imposter, and our true self is something higher and more mysterious.

Avatar of the ego

With the upcoming release of the megabudget sci-fi saga Avatar, superstar director-producer James Cameron is getting a lot of attention. He seems to be the sort of person who inspires very strong feelings. A British tabloid, The Daily Mail, just posted a muckraking article about Cameron, detailing his sometimes bizarre on-set behavior and his four failed marriages (he's now on marriage number five). The article makes amusing reading, but also suggests a serious question: To what extent does Cameron's outrageous ego-driven behavior make his outsized accomplishments possible?

This is, after all, a man who has produced, directed, and written some of the most commercially successful movies in recent history. Titanic was a worldwide phenomenon. Aliens is one of the most highly regarded science-fiction movies ever made. The first two Terminator movies helped to define not only modern Hollywood sci-fi, but action-packed, effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters in general. Even Cameron's lesser films, like True Lies and The Abyss, are pretty darn good. (The director's cut of The Abyss, available on DVD, features an entirely new ending, and is far superior to the original theatrical release.)

Cameron, then, is a man who has scaled the heights of commercial filmmaking, consistently taking enormous chances and somehow making them pay off. All of this is very admirable. But then there's the dark side. As The Daily Mail gleefully reports, Cameron is known as the boss from hell, a maniacal taskmaster who works his casts and crews to exhaustion, savagely abuses his coworkers, and has brought more than one underling to a state of emotional collapse. Moreover, rather than acknowledge any possible shortcomings, Cameron seems to revel in his reputation as a high-pressure, take-no-prisoners workaholic who sleeps only four hours a night and expects his colleagues to do the same. This is a guy who, according to The Daily Mail, actually forbade crew members from using the bathroom during marathon shoots.

To call him a control freak, as The Daily Mail does, seems to be a considerable understatement. He comes across, at least from what I've read in this article and others like it, as borderline crazy, and some people are said to be actually afraid of him.

And yet ...

You can't argue with success. Or, rather, you can, but it won't get you very far. Cameron's bad behavior seems to be part and parcel of the obsessive perfectionism that makes his movies a cut above the rest. Other filmmakers may be easier to get along with, but they don't have Cameron's track record. It's quite possible that you have to take the whole package -- the outsized ego and the outsized talent. Indeed, the monstrous ego may provide the drive that powers the talent and the sparks that illuminate it.

It's kind of a disturbing thought. I'd like to believe that a world without egocentrism and egomania would be a better world. But would a world free of excessive ego also be deprived of "excessive" talent? Would it be a world of mediocrity, of pleasant but uninspired entertainment, of genial but unexciting personalities?

The Daily Mail quotes Cameron as saying, "I think what is misunderstood about my particular film-making process is that I get people to go that extra mile that they've never done before and they go into new territory. They go beyond what they previously thought were their limits, and then afterwards they talk about it like it was a big adventure: 'Oh, man, we worked around the clock and you know, we all almost died.'

'The more I can lead other people into these situations where they all think they're going to die, the more fun I'm having. We have a few people that don't like my version of day camp, but I would say that 80 or 90 percent of them feel like they've been through something. They've done the best that they've done in their professional careers."

This could be seen as a mere rationalization for his controlling, obsessive personality.

On the other hand, it just might be true.

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P.S. Though I've enjoyed Cameron's other work, I have no interest in seeing Avatar, which looks like a big noisy mess of a movie, the kind of thing that would give me a headache. In fact, The Daily Mail reports that some people who sat through the "immersive" 3-D version became nauseated from motion sickness.

The movie looks like it's aimed squarely at 13-year-old boys. Nothing wrong with that, but I'd have to reverse the aging process by 36 years to get back into that demographic.

Also, one of my pet peeves is big-budget Hollywood productions that rip off relatively little-known literary works. Avatar looks to have been inspired by Poul Anderson's 1957 novella Call Me Joe, but as far as I know, Anderson is uncredited, and Cameron is claiming that the story is his own original idea. There's that outsized ego again ...

Tigerwoodsias

Has any celebrity of the worldwide stature of Tiger Woods ever seen his reputation collapse so quickly and so completely?

Lo, how the mighty have fallen. It's enough to put one in a poetic mood.

"Tigerwoodsias"

I met a golfer from a foreign port
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of tin
Stand in a sand trap. Near them in the dirt,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose grin
And twinkly eye and boyish air of sport
Tell that its sculptor well those passions cut
Which yet survive, stamped on that frozen face,
The heart that drove the ball and sank the putt.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Tigerwoodsias, I set the pace:
Look on my scores, ye duffers, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Around the bole
Of that colossal wreck, unswept and bare,
The sand trap stretches toward the eighteenth hole".

This, too, is neat

Longtime readers know that among my numerous other eccentricities, I think Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the true author of the plays and poems attributed to "William Shakespeare."

The overwhelming majority of Shakespeare scholars reject this idea, though I have not been very impressed with their arguments.

Now comes word that one of the foremost "orthodox" Shakespeare scholars in the world has made a rather interesting public statement on this question.

The blog of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reports on a recent "orthodox" gathering in which the various biographies of William Shakespeare were discussed. In the midst of much learned talk about the many bios that have followed Nicholas Rowe's pioneering 1709 effort, the editor of the peer-viewed journal Critical Survey slipped in a few intriguing words.

Quoth the SOS blog:

From an Oxfordian point of view, most startling of all was the declaration made by Professor Graham Holderness, University of Herefordshire.  In the middle of a discussion re the questionable facticity of tales of deer-poaching, calf-killing and horse-holding, he stated baldly – without further comment:

If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes – if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it – it wouldn’t be Rowe’s, it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s.

Hmm. The devil you say.

 

The statement is, of course, quite true, as any reader of Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare" By Another Name can affirm. To give one example, the parallels between Oxford's life and the storyline of All's Well That Ends Well are ridiculously obvious. Like the fictional Bertram, Oxford was pressured into marrying a lower-born woman he despised, after which he fled abroad (apparently without consummating the marriage), only to be eventually reconciled with his wife by means of a "bed trick."

 

Or consider Henry IV, Part 1, which includes an ahistorical episode in which the riotous Prince Hal and some friends, wearing disguises, engage in an act of banditry at Gad's Hill. In May of 1573, de Vere and his friends robbed two servants of Lord Burghley (de Vere's father-in-law), as a merry prank. Where did the incident take place? Gad's Hill.*

 

Multiply such "coincidences"  by a factor of 100 or more, and it's abundantly clear that Oxford's biography fits the Shakespearean canon like a cheveril glove. It's kind of an open secret, actually.

 

What's startling is to have someone as distinguished as Professor Holderness blurt it out -- and to an audience of Shakespearean academics, no less.

 

-----

 

*Oxfordians believe that The Famous Victories of Henry V (registered in 1594), which introduces the Gad's Hill incident, was itself written by de Vere as an early attempt at telling the story of Prince Hal. See this essay for details.

This is neat

I'm not saying it's anything paranormal, extraterrestrial, etc. Hypotheses I've read so far include ball lightning, a missile test, and a laser light show.

Whatever it is, it sure looks cool.

A life in review

Carol Zaleski's 1996 book The Life of the World to Come discusses near-death experiences in the light of Catholic traditions and doctrine. Originally delivered as three lectures, the book is a brief but interesting meditation, though I felt Zaleski was too quick to discount other types of evidence for life after death, such as mediumship (perhaps because mediumistic accounts are less easily reconciled with standard Christian teachings).

In the third and last part of the book, Zaleski spends a few pages on the "life review" reported by many NDErs. As in her earlier book Otherworld Journeys, she is interested in tracing reports of NDEs through history.

First she gives an anecdote from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1822 by Thomas De Quincey:

I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultaneously; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.

Next she includes a passage from Euthanasia or Medical Treatment in the Aid of Easy Dying (1887), by Dr. William Munk. The passage involves a certain Admiral Beaufort of the British Navy, who nearly drowned when he was a young boy. Zaleski writes, "As soon as Beaufort stopped struggling, a feeling of contentment swept over him; his mind became calm but at the same time alert and invigorated, and he found himself reviewing his life in reverse chronological order."

Then she quotes Beaufort's account as given in Munk's book:

... the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.

She also includes a report given by Albert Heim, a mountain climber who survived a fall and later went on to interview other climbers who'd had the same experience. He found that they, like him, had "felt calm, lucid, even joyful as they rushed headlong toward [apparent] death," in Zaleski's words.

Part of Heim's 1892 account is given:

I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain.

... I acted out my life, as though I were an actor on a stage upon which I looked down from practically the highest gallery in the theatre. Both hero and onlooker, I was as though doubled.

Zaleski notes:

Among the common features are the sense of the self as a spectator, the attitude of serene detachment, the comprehensiveness and simultaneity of the visual replay of memories, and the implication that the life review constitutes a final summation and judgment of one's character and history.

I would also note the apparent vividness of the experience, in which "forgotten incidents" are not only recalled but seen distinctly "as in a mirror" and "with the character of recent familiarity," and may be bathed in "a heavenly light."

From here, Zaleski takes a look at older accounts. She writes:

The third-century apocalypse known to the West as the Visio Pauli depicts the soul's exit from the body as a critical moment in which the entire history of one's actions and intentions is displayed in visible form: first, as a written record of deeds and then as a confrontation with the souls whom one has injured in life....

Similarly, in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, those who die and return report seeing their good and evil works made manifest in the form of symbolic buildings, personifications, and dramatic encounters. Gregory interprets the other world entirely as a symbolic landscape, in which the visionary confronts his own soul and thus brings judgment upon himself.

To wrap up this section, Zaleski quotes from a contemporary account of an NDE, specifically P.M.H. Atwater's narrative in her book I Died Three Times in 1977:

And into this great peace that I had become in there came the life of Phyllis parading past my view... The reliving it included not only the deeds committed by Phyllis since her birth in 1937 in Twin Falls, Idaho, but also a reliving of every thought ever thought and every word ever spoken PLUS the effect of every thought, word and deed upon everyone and anyone who had ever come within her sphere of influence whether she actually knew them or not PLUS the effect of her every thought, word and deed upon the weather, the soil, plants and animals, the water, everything else... I never before realized that we were responsible and accountable for EVERY SINGLE THING WE DID. That was overwhelming!

It was me judging me, not some heavenly St. Peter. And my judgment was critical and stern. I was not satisfied with many, many things Phyllis had done, said or thought. There was a feeling of sadness and failure, yet a growing feeling of joy when the realization came that Phyllis had always done SOMETHING.... She tried. Much of what she did was constructive and positive. She learned and grew in her learning. This was satisfying. Phyllis was okay.

Personally, I don't think I want to be held responsible for the weather!

Zaleski feels that a change has taken place from the more ancient NDEs to contemporary ones. The modern life review, she thinks, is "from start to finish a therapeutic exercise" in which "there is no sense of being judged by an external author; the emphasis is on self-evaluation, learning, and growth." She seems a bit uncomfortable with this development, possibly because Christian doctrine emphasizes that it is God who will judge.

I'm not sure I see much of progression in the accounts she cites, however. For instance, her description of the NDE in Gregory's Dialogues indicates that "the visionary confronts his own soul and thus brings judgment on himself." This sounds almost exactly like P.M.H. Atwater's supposedly more "therapeutic" experience. Conversely, some contemporary NDEs indicate that the judging is done by a "being of light" who oversees the life review. It seems to me that the accounts, past and present, are generally consistent in saying that the review is initiated by a higher power but that the experiencer must ultimately accept responsibility for his life. As to who exactly does the judging, Kenneth Ring has suggested that the "being of light" may be an externalization of the person's higher self; if this is true, then one is actually judging oneself, whether directly or indirectly.

From my perspective, the most intriguing aspect of these accounts is the interconnectedness of people and things. Beaufort reflected on his every act -- "its cause or its consequences" -- thus placing each act into a wider perspective, a chain of causality. The Visio Pauli suggests that one must confront "the souls whom one has injured in life." Atwater relived "the effect of every thought, word, and deed upon everyone and anyone who had ever come within her sphere of influence whether she actually knew them or not."

The life review seems to teach us that we are strands in a vast tapestry, or ripples in a wide pond, and that everything is connected to everything else. Our isolation, our separateness, is thus an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Albert Einstein thought so:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Homily for the holidays

I was surprised to discover recently that I'm closing in on the 1,000th post of this blog. (This one is post number 977 on the present site; if you count the 24 posts on my old blog site, I've actually just passed the 1,000 mark.) Probably the majority of those posts have concerned the evidence for life after death. It's clear that I think the evidence is very good; otherwise, I wouldn't have spent so much time -- too much time, I sometimes think -- writing about it.

Yet while I'm pretty comfortable with my assessment of the evidence, I don't want to be dogmatic about it. There is, after all, a great danger in groupthink, when people become convinced that they have truth, goodness, and purity on their side, and that their critics are driven by base and ignoble motives. This is one of the lessons of the ongoing Climategate scandal, in which the CRU scientists simply stopped respecting their opponents. The problem is easy to see in that case, but harder to see when we look at issues that hit closer to home.

Despite my personal belief in an afterlife, based on my evaluation of the evidence, I think there are a number of perfectly understandable reasons why someone might choose not to believe in life after death.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following possibilities:

1. You just can't imagine an afterlife or take the idea seriously. We all have limits to what we are willing to consider possible. We all have areas where our minds are made up. There's nothing wrong with this. It's human nature. There are theoretical possibilities that I refuse to consider because I find them too outlandish to be worth thinking about. For instance, the Many Worlds Theory, which holds that new universes are constantly branching off from our existing universe, strikes me as patently ridiculous. I know there is some kind of mathematical support for the idea, but I just don't believe it. And many people feel this way about life after death, or about the paranormal in general. Take the physicist Helmholtz, who once said: "I cannot believe it. Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible." If you can't believe it, you can't believe it. There is no use trying to persuade yourself of something that cuts so deeply against the grain.

2. You don't find the evidence convincing, or convincing enough. The rules of deductive logic were originally formulated by Aristotle and refined over the centuries, and are now clear-cut. Using deductive logic, it's possible to prove a conclusion beyond any possible doubt. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. QED. But inductive logic, which is what we use when drawing inferences from empirical observations, is a lot murkier. That's why one person can draw what seems like a perfectly reasonable inference from a body of data, while another person, looking at the exact same data, will not draw that inference. It is no use insisting that everyone should draw the same inferences from the same facts. Inductive logic, as presently understood and applied, simply doesn't work that way.

3. You've had a bad experience with religion or "spirituality." Some people have been pretty badly damaged by religious or spiritual authority figures, often in childhood, when they were most vulnerable. They have enduring psychological scars. The last thing they want to do is to embrace any idea that seems to give credence to a belief system that they have -- for perfectly sound reasons of psychological self-defense -- rejected. And it would be senselessly cruel to try to impose such a belief on them. It might simply reopen old wounds.

4. You find the idea of an afterlife repellent or scary. I can relate to this myself. In some ways I think personal extinction would be preferable to plunging into an unknown and largely unknowable future. C.D. Broad, a philosopher who was interested in paranormal investigations, explicitly said he did not want to survive death because he found the prospect undesirable. (Even so, he eventually became convinced that survival was more likely than not.) If even people who are sympathetic to psi research can be turned off by the idea of life after death, isn't it likely that people unsympathetic to psi would be even more turned off? And why should you believe something for which the evidence is not absolutely conclusive if you find it disturbing or frightening?

5. You find the idea of an afterlife distasteful on philosophical grounds. Somewhere in his writings Isaac Asimov said he had no qualms about the prospect of his personal extinction at death. He thought it was (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "the only appropriate destiny for a rational being." The idea of continuing to exist in some "spiritual" realm evidently struck him as disagreeable on an intellectual level. He wasn't necessarily frightened by the possibility -- I doubt he considered it even to be a possibility. It's just that, after a lifetime devoted to an outlook grounded in scientific materialism, he was philosophically averse to anything that smacked of mysticism. This is a perfectly understandable point of view.

6. You think general acceptance of life after death would lead to undesirable social consequences. Some people worry that if everyone became convinced of life after death, the value of earthly life would be diminished. Others fear that such a sea change in public attitudes would derail the scientific revolution and take us back to the dark ages. Still others note that people who are absolutely certain they will gain a reward in heaven sometimes become fanatics, inquisitors, and terrorists.

7. You think life after death is simply too good to be true. We all know that when a product or service is promised to deliver fabulous results at little or no cost, it's likely to be a scam. Life drills this lesson into us over and over again -- and for good reason. It's all too easy to be misled by wishful thinking. Somewhere in the world, there must still be people who respond enthusiastically to e-mails claiming that $2 million is waiting for them in a Nigerian bank account. We don't want to be one of those people. As the CSI: Miami theme song says, "We won't be fooled again." So when we hear stories about our departed loved ones living in a celestial paradise, we may very well think that anything that sounds this good is probably a ripoff. If our life experiences have taught us to react this way, it would be unreasonable to respond otherwise. After all, we've learned these reactions precisely in order to protect ourselves from harm.

This is, of course, only a partial list. Undoubtedly there are other sound reasons why someone either would not want to look at the evidence for life after death or would be unpersuaded by that evidence even after looking at it. When I say they are sound reasons, I mean that any of them is a good and sufficient justification for a person to reject the idea of an afterlife -- not because any of these reasons necessarily has logical merit, but because all of them speak to a person's subjective priorities, predispositions, and needs. And subjective considerations are every bit as valid as any "objective" or logical considerations. We are not obligated to inflict psychological damage on ourselves, or to compromise our deepest convictions, or to subject ourselves to fear and anxiety, or to turn our worldview upside-down and inside-out, merely because a set of data exists that may point to a particular conclusion. We are not here on earth to serve as data-processing machines, but rather to live our lives as best we can and to find happiness and contentment how we may.

I personally know people who have no belief in an afterlife or in any paranormal phenomena whatsoever, and are happy, serene, and joyful. Their worldview works for them, and there is no reason for them to change it. In fact, it would be unreasonable to ask that they change it, and even more unreasonable to demand that they do so.

If you think about it, there is really nothing more unreasonable than insisting that other people, who look at the world from their own unique perspective, should see things the way we ourselves do. First, it would be impossible for them to see the world through our eyes. Second, even if they could manage such a feat, nothing would be gained and everything would be lost; their distinctive qualities as individuals would be surrendered, and they would become mere carbon copies of us. If everyone in the world thought the same way and held the same set of beliefs, we would be like a race of ants, lacking individuality, personality, creativity, originality, and everything else that makes human life interesting.

There's nothing wrong in sharing our views with those who are open to them and interested in them. But proselytizing -- aggressively pushing a point of view on people who've made it clear they aren't interested -- is a violation of their personal space and a denigration of their personal dignity. And browbeating those who disagree with us, or treating them with anything less than respect, is not just an attack on a particular person (which would be bad enough); it's an attack on the uniqueness of every human being. It's really the ego's way of saying, "Everybody should be just like me." And what a sad world it would be if the ego should ever get its wish.

In this holiday season, we are sure to be reminded of the words of Luke 2:14 -- "peace on earth, good will toward men." One way to live that sentiment is to remember that we are each of us unique, and we shouldn't want it any other way.