Too much information?

In the comments thread of the last post, Bruce Siegel made an interesting point. Saying he trusts direct experience over intellectual theorizing, he wrote, "I've yet to hear someone emerge from a deep mystical experience and say: 'Wow. Now I understand! It's all about information!'"

This got me wondering if anyone actually has emerged from a mystical experience talking about information as the essence of reality. Google searches for "pure information" (bracketed by quotes) in conjunction with terms like "mystical insight" and "near-death experience" supplied a few possible examples, though none of them is a slam-dunk case. 

First, an account found on NDERF, a database of NDEs: 

White light is what I remember and the simplest way I can explain the moment is to say, "I saw God." This is what I ultimately came to understand as a mystical experience but at the time, I had never heard of such a thing. This is what Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus Christ, Meher Baba and many others were talking about. This is what Meister Eckhart wrote about only I didn’t know about Eckhart at the time. It is what I have referred to as a non-experiential experience and there is nothing to be remembered. The moment is eternally now and memory serves no function. I am, however, left with impressions. I sense that in some way I was exposed to pure information at a rate that far overloads the capacity of any physical entity. It was all that is all at once and it is Love.

Here the reference to "pure information" is a bit ambiguous. Does he mean that he felt immersed in a sea of information, or does he simply mean that a lot of ideas were conveyed to him very rapidly or even instantaneously? 

In an interview, Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven, discusses the ideas that he was led to by his NDE: 

At the core, it’s all One and at the deepest Core it’s all divine — all One with God. Even the materialists — the scientists, cosmologists, those who do string theory and quantum gravity; they’re all basically converging to say that pure information is the core of all that exists. Everything we see as space, time, mass, energy … can be essentialized into vibrating strings of energy and higher dimensional space-time. And at the very deepest level, everything is entangled into one. Sir James Jeans said long ago, “The Universe begins to look much more like a great thought than a great machine.” That’s a crucial understanding of what this all really is. And if you’re able to go far enough, it all is around that Consciousness — that One is divine, that this whole material world is a very cleverly wrought illusion, that time and space are all illusion. You have to know that Consciousness is not this epiphenomenon of the brain, but is, in fact, a far richer thing that completely precedes and is outside of (and supporting) all of the material realm and this apparent reality.

This is a more explicit statement about pure information as "the core of all that exists." Of course, it could be objected that Alexander came to this viewpoint as a result of intellectual study after having his NDE, rather than from the NDE directly. 

Next, we have a passage from an unlikely source - a book by Mark Singer called Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. It's about a comic book artist with a unique vision. Singer writes,  

His comics dramatize his beliefs in magic and occultism, share his stories of divine revelations and near-death experiences, and articulate a quasi-Gnostic cosmology that maintains the physical universe is a construct suspended in a higher-dimensional space of living information ...

The incident that reshaped his world-view and inspired many of his comics transpired in 1994 on a hotel roof garden in Kathmandu, Nepal. As he tells it, he was visited by silvery blobs who took him outside of spacetime and into a medium of pure information, where they explained the structure of the universe to him ...  He not only insists that the encounter happened, he rejects the possibility that it was a hallucination caused by the hashish pellets he had eaten ... Morrison argues that the contact had much more in common with shamanic  initiations and alien abduction experiences than with any drug trip, a subject in which he claims some expertise. 

Whatever we may think of Morrison's silvery blobs, we do have here an intense subjective experience that apparently left the experiencer convinced that pure information is the matrix out of which the space-time universe arises. The idea was so powerful to him that it became the basis of much of his creative work. 

Finally, we have a discussion of experiences reported by people who've used the powerful psychoactive drug ketamine. One person, who took 100 mg of ketamine via intramuscular injection, said he encountered something like ...

a cosmic assembly line that was constantly churning out the alternate universes that some physicists theorise about in which every conceivable possibility becomes an actual reality. I even had brief flashes in which I experienced some of these alternate realities as they sprouted forth out of this cosmic womb ... quick glimpses into what felt like other incarnations, other lives I could have led, darting journeys through seas of pure information. 

Naturally, it's always possible to question whether a ketamine-induced experience is anything more than a vivid hallucination. (The same is true of NDEs, but at least in that case, there are sometimes veridical observations to lend weight to the testimony.) But if we take this story seriously, it sounds as if the experiencer was exposed to a realm of "pure information," in which all potentialities were explored simultaneously, much as a quantum entity (photon, electron, etc.) exists as a cloud of potentia plotting all possible trajectories and positions, until interaction with other quantum entities or with an observer causes the wave function to collapse to a single discrete point.  

I would bet that more extensive searches, using a wider variety of search terms, would turn up more stories of this kind. But I'd also say that we ought to be careful about taking such accounts at face value. By their nature, these experiences are ineffable; any translation into language is automatically going to limit, redefine, and reshape them. Presumably the expectations and beliefs of the experiencer have a considerable effect on the words chosen to express the inexpressible.

There's also the problem of knowing which revelations to believe. If two experiencers have dramatically different stories to tell, whom do we trust? There's no objective standard by which to discriminate, so we're left to our own judgment, which often means preferring the story that just happens to match our own preconceived assumptions.

Still, I think there is at least some basis for saying that the information-matrix idea receives support from people who've "been there" - people who have had powerful NDEs or vision quests.

Comments

[Bruce Siegel]

Michael said:

"I was talking about the animal kingdom in general, not just humans. Carnivores evolved to eat meat; if this was part of the cosmic plan, it seems inconsistent with love."

We know from the experiences of NDErs that violent deaths can look painful from the outside, but feel wonderful to the consciousness within the dying body.

Is it possible that an animal caught in the jaws of a predator and dying what seems to be a horrible death is actually, at some level, surrendering himself lovingly to his killer? Maybe we're seeing the dying throes of the body, but have no sense of the inward experience.

I was startled once to read the NDE of someone who was nearly killed in a murder attempt. I'll never forget his description of the ecstasy he experienced as the knife entered his body and he passed into another realm.

[SPatel (sciborg)]

While I'm doubtful of "Love is All" I don't know if our eating meat or plants is an argument against it.

Who we are "in the game" and who we are outside may differ wildly, and what we deign to participate in could be very different. Heck I had a dream where I hated Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and when I awoke the animosity made no sense to me.

That said, one only has to look at the caste system in India to see where taking this kind of thinking that "we choose all that happens to us" as gospel can be detrimental.

[Leo MacDonald]

Just wondering what does everyone think about people who have died more than once or at least once and say their is no afterlife just complete darkness no thoughts either ?. I think they are exploring the void experience.

[Bruce Siegel]

"Isn't the willingness to be eaten a loving gesture? ;)"

Julie, I don't know how serious you are about this (because of your wink), but check out my comment at 5:44PM for a similar thought.

[Juan]

"Just wondering what does everyone think about people who have died more than once or at least once and say their is no afterlife just complete darkness no thoughts either ?."

They can only say they do not remember anything, not that they remember that there is nothing after death... are two different things.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Perhaps there is a tendency to take all of this transitioning from physical reality to spiritual realities far too seriously. If consciousness is prime and survives the dissolution of the form in which it manifests then dying is not loss but gain. If we grant survival of consciousness not only to human forms but to animal and other forms and reincarnation and transmigration of consciousness to higher forms is a fact then the mechanism of that transition is unimportant. Whether it is being mangled in a car crash, eaten by a lion or a human or dying in bed in a coma, transition occurs and according to some who have reported their experience during such events, they did not experience the pain and horror of their death. If consciousness is not highly developed as may be the case in lower animals or not firmly embedded in flesh as in some humans then transition to the spirit world may be easy and of little consequence. Now perhaps this is all rationalization but then again, maybe not. - AOD

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Leo,
If people experience complete darkness they have experienced something; their consciousness has survived. I think that perhaps their experience was too short and they just hadn't moved on. However, in the telling maybe they meant that they just didn't remember anything rather than complete darkness. That's a different story. - AOD

[David R]

Has this been covered on your blog, Michael?

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

[Julie Baxter]

""Isn't the willingness to be eaten a loving gesture? ;)"

Julie, I don't know how serious you are about this (because of your wink), but check out my comment at 5:44PM for a similar thought."

I was only half joking, Bruce. Anything is possible.

[no one]

We frequently discuss (and most of us defend) the transmitter/receiver model of consciousness.

I thought I'd do a back to basics and examine how a radio - a basic transmitter/receiver - actually works.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/radio.htm

Read the entire article. It's radio 101. I came away feeling even more convinced that the transmitter/receiver model is the one that best fits the evidence. I am pretty well convinced that the brain and nervous system are organic radios.

And yes, the universe is full of energy and information organized into waves or bandwidths. What you perceive depends on where your radio is set.