Michael Prescott's Blog

Book review: The Self Does Not Die

I'm currently reading The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences, by Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf H. Smit. As the title indicates, it's an in-depth study of NDEs with veridical content. The book was originally published, in a slightly different form, in a Dutch edition.

When I started it, I wasn't too excited about the prospect of reading yet another book about NDE's. I felt a little burned out on the subject. But The Self Does Not Die proved to be different from most other books of this type. It is never sensationalistic or overheated; the authors carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of the various cases, ranking each according to how well documented and authenticated it is. The collection of professionally researched cases is the most comprehensive I've seen. Cases that don't meet the authors' strict criteria are omitted. The overall tone is serious, even a little dry, an approach I like much better than the carnival barker style of some popular accounts.

Though right now I'm in the middle of the book, I did skip ahead to read the authors' conclusions and their coverage of skeptical objections. In the latter section they concentrate on the debunking efforts of anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee, who has written extensively on the subject and devotes a website to it. 

There are far too many cases to summarize, but the one I read just this morning – case 3.33, "Howard," on pages 112-113 – was particularly intriguing. It is drawn from Laurin Bellg's 2015 book Near Death in the ICU, and involves a man who suffered cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated. After he had recovered sufficiently to talk, he described an NDE that took place while he was unconscious:

I felt myself rising up through the ceiling and it was like I was going through the structure of the building. I could feel the different densities of passing through insulation. I saw wiring, some pipes and then I was in this other room.

It looked like a hospital but it was different.… It was very quiet and it seemed like no one was there. There were individual rooms all around the edge and on some of the beds were these people, except they were not people, exactly. They looked like mannequins and they had IVs hooked up to them but they didn't look real. In the center was an open area that looked like a collection of work stations with computers.

Dr Bellg, a critical care physician, says her jaw dropped when she heard this. She writes:

I stole a look at the nurse who looked equally surprised. What we knew that Howard didn't, is that right above the ICU is a nurse-training center where new hires spend a few days rotating through different scenarios. There are simulated hospital rooms around the perimeter with medical mannequins on some of the beds. In the center there is indeed a collection of workspaces with computers. 

The patient also repeated statements made by Bellg during the resuscitation effort, when he was being defibrillated, and accurately reported who was present during the event. 

Though not all the cases are this dramatic, the sheer number of them and the obvious efforts that have been made to substantiate the patients' accounts add up to a powerful argument for the significance of NDEs – not as the hallucinations of a traumatized brain, but as ontologically real events. Readers who are serious about the scientific study, analysis, and interpretation of near-death experiences can't go wrong by reading this important book. My only complaint is that there's no ebook edition. Soon, I hope! 

Blood simple

Materialism is a badly flawed philosophy, at least when taken as a comprehensive explanation of reality. As a partial explanation, it fares much better. I've sometimes used an analogy with the history of physics: Newtonian physics was once seen as offering a complete picture of reality, but then was superseded by quantum physics, which subsumes classical physics while going beyond it. Newton wasn't wrong — he was right in a certain (very large) context — but his description of the world was incomplete and therefore unhelpful in certain areas. Materialism, too, is right in a certain context — it has immense explanatory and descriptive power in dealing with large areas of reality — but it is incomplete and leads its proponents into error when they go too far afield. It, too, needs to be subsumed within a larger system of thought that can address those parts of reality that materialism is unequipped to face.

Materialists often tout the track record of scientific and technological success in recent centuries as proof that materialism works. But this argument misses the point. No serious person denies that materialism works. Classical physics also works; using nothing but Newton's laws, it is possible to chart a course for the moon and land a spacecraft there. But just as classical physics breaks down when dealing with black box radiation or the double slit experiment, so materialism breaks down when dealing with psi phenomena, after-death communications and experiences, and consciousness itself — not to mention spirituality, love, art, and morality, among other things that materialism is at a loss to explain (and prefers to ignore, debunk, belittle, or dismiss). It is not that materialism doesn't work, but that it works only in certain limited (albeit large and important) areas. Outside those areas, it fails. Materialism is like the proverbial drunk looking for a lost item under a lamppost; even though he didn't lose it there, it's the only place where there's enough light to see.

Old Mutt 'n' Jeff cartoon strip illustrating the "streetlight effect" 

All of which brings us, naturally, to Silicon Valley billionaires who want to become vampires.

Say what? No, really. There are such people. Peter Thiel, who recently made news as the first openly gay person to address a Republican convention, is one of them. Well, he doesn't actually say he wants to be a vampire. But he does want to extend his life indefinitely, and he hopes to do it with chronic infusions of younger people's blood.

Now, let's just stop and take a look at this little notion. And let's assume it could really work (doubtful). What are the practical implications?

This planet's human population is already growing out of control. The only thing holding it in check is mortality. If everyone became immortal, the population would surge to hopelessly unsustainable levels. Unless, of course, people stopped having children altogether, in which case the present generation would be the last generation. Neither alternative sounds appealing.

But of course the would-be vampire billionaires already know this. They are blissfully unconcerned, because they have no intention of making everybody immortal. Immortality is for the special people, the movers and shakers — you know, them. It's not for the hoi polloi. They can continue dying off as usual. Who will miss them? One hamburger flipper or landscaper is the same as another.

No, the gift of immortality will be enjoyed only by a select few, who already enjoy massively concentrated wealth. But what of the morality of using young people's blood to keep septuagenarians and octogenarians and nonagenarians forever youthful? Pish posh — morality is a fable told to keep the masses in line; it doesn't apply to the superman. What, then, of the sheer creepiness of it? Well, perhaps it is creepy. Perhaps it is even a bit insane. But anything is justified, if the goal is to stave off death.

Because death is the end, utter extinction, eternal oblivion, and it must be postponed as long as possible, no matter the means or the cost.

And here we circle back to materialism. The hopeful vampires think their project makes sense because they can imagine no reality beyond physical reality. They're unconcerned with morality because materialism has taught them that morality is an arbitrary construct. They're willing to go to insane lengths, even to risk social strife and political upheaval, because their number one priority is the perpetuation of the ego — the ego being the facet of the self that is most directly focused on and connected to the tangible physical world.

Now, I'm not saying we should sit back and accept whatever nature wants to do to us. This was the position of doctors who opposed anesthesia because, they thought, God intended man to suffer. It's the position of today's "deep ecologists," who want to undo most or all of the advancements of the scientific era and revert to a pre-technological lifestyle. 

But it's one thing to make life better for oneself and others. It's another thing to make the perpetuation of one's own life the be-all and end-all, trumping all other considerations. This impulse, I think, displays both a spiritual poverty and an embarrassing immaturity. Coming to terms with the inevitability of one's earthly demise is a big part of growing up. Adolescents, who typically think of themselves as immortal, are notorious for their self-involved thoughtlessness. The realization of mortality deals a blow to the ego which allows for the development of empathy and concerns larger than self. 

Adults who haven't accepted this reality are not really adults in the full sense. They cannot see past the boundaries of the ego. They're blind to a larger and more interesting world.

Could they see farther, they would regard the inevitability of death not as shocking, cruel, and unfair, but as normal and even comforting — a chance to rest after a long earthly struggle and to prepare for further growth and personal evolution. They would prepare themselves mentally and spiritually so as to make their transition as gracefully as possible. And they wouldn't be tempted to batten, leechlike, on the next generation in order to keep their physical bodies going on ... and on ... and on.

If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that this plan rarely works out well.