Michael Prescott's Blog

New book: Life & Afterlife (pinned post)

Though this blog is kaput, its content — appropriately enough — lives on after death! 

Recently I published a nonfiction book culled from years of blog posts and also containing a great deal of original work. I call it LIFE & AFTERLIFE, and it's available in a variety of editions, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and trade paperback. The ebook edition is priced at $2.99, the paperback at $9.99 (about as low as I could go, given the publisher's costs).

This is an entirely different book from my earlier effort THE FAR HORIZON, which tackles the same subject but from a more philosophical perspective. With LIFE & AFTERLIFE, my focus is on empirical evidence rather than "what it all means."

This link takes you to the Amazon sales page, where you can find LIFE & AFTERLIFE in paperback and Kindle editions:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQKBVVR7/

You can also visit my newly revamped author site: http://michaelprescott.net.

 

Bleed-throughs

Matt Rouge's thought-provoking guest post has stimulated a lot of discussion, and it got me thinking, as well. Lying in bed last night around 2 AM, I couldn't help noodling on the whole question of UFOs and some related matters. The idea I kept coming back to was "bleed-throughs."

According to Wiktionary,  the three main definitions of "bleed-through" are:

1. The seepage of ink from one side of a printed page to the other
2. The discolouration of a wood veneer due to seepage of glue
3. A weak imprint of magnetic information transferred to adjacent layers of audiotape, resulting in an unwanted echo.

I remember reading a passage in the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts in which Seth tells us that reality consists of many parallel dimensions or timelines, only one of which we occupy. There can be intrusions from other dimensions or timelines, resulting in anomalous phenomena. This is essentially what I mean by "bleed-through."

The third definition quoted above is the one closest to my meaning. "An imprint of information transferred to an adjacent layer of the information storage medium" could be a valid explanation – or at least the beginning of an explanation – for UFOs and a variety of other seemingly inexplicable phenomena.

As readers of this blog know, I'm partial to the idea that information is fundamental to our reality. In other words, the physical reality that we perceive with our senses can be likened to the virtual reality rendered in a headset by a computer program. In both cases, the seemingly real world of three-dimensional objects reduces to an unseen realm of data and data-processing algorithms.

If each stream of reality in Seth's multi-dimensional scenario is ultimately a stream of information, then perhaps some of this information can be transferred from one stream to another, either intentionally or by chance. The resulting bleed-through would yield artifacts in our reality that seemingly don't belong here – weird intrusions from other timelines. 

UFOs seem to have much in common with apparitions, which may be another form of bleed-through. Apparitions vary in their degree of corporeality; some seem wispy and insubstantial, while others are reported to be quite tangible and solid. In cases where an apparition has been observed by several people at once, it appears that it is seen from various perspectives, like any other physical thing; the person facing the apparition will see it head on, while the person standing to the side will see it in profile. Apparitions also have been seen reflected in mirrors, and they can match the light-and-shadow conditions of their environment. In some cases, apparitions seem to have been caught on film, videotape, or other recording media, while the field of electronic voice phenomena offers many examples (admittedly often disputed) of voices captured from the ether.

In short, apparitions can, in some cases, seemingly have the physical characteristics we associate with ordinary physical objects. And yet they are certainly not ordinary physical objects, because they walk through walls, appear and vanish unpredictably, and sometimes are seen by only certain observers while remaining invisible to others in the vicinity.

All of these characteristics can be ascribed to UFOs, as well. Do they sometimes show up on radar? Yes. Are they sometimes captured on film or video? Yes. Do they appear and vanish unpredictably? Yes. Are they sometimes seen by certain observers but not others who are equally well situated? Yes.

We can extend the argument by looking at other paranormal or anomalous phenomena such as poltergeists, deathbed visions, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, after-death communications, and episodes of cosmic consciousness. Any of these could be seen as a bleed-through, sometimes accidental, sometimes intentional. This presumes, of course, that one (or more) of the parallel timelines can be characterized as "the afterlife," and that the "spirits" occupying this zone can cross "through the veil" from one timeline to another.

In many of these phenomena, an altered state of consciousness is involved, so we may be talking about a combination of the bleed-through of information and an adjustment of the "frequency" of consciousness to perceive it. As a rough analogy, imagine listening to the radio and hearing a faint signal from another radio station; if you adjust the dial, you can tune in the other station more clearly. The bleed-through itself may be only half the equation, with the fine-tuning of consciousness as the other half. Either factor, alone, can result in some degree of perception of an anomalous phenomenon, but when both factors are in play, the perception will be more vivid.

This notion might go some way toward explaining why both UFOs and apparitions vary in their degree of physical reality. Some UFOs do not show up on radar. Some do not appear on film or video even when the camera operator is certain he got the image in frame. Perhaps the correct combination of informational bleed-through and perceptual fine-tuning is needed to get fully "real" results.

The same line of thinking may also explain why UFO sightings sometimes come in waves. An initial sighting may trigger a subconscious adjustment of perception in other people's minds, making them more likely to perceive UFOs. It is said that when Uri Geller performed his spoon-bending act on television, many people – especially children – started bending spoons spontaneously, something they had never done before. Seeing Geller do it was enough to alter their consciousness so they could do it too, at least temporarily. The same thing  has been known to happen in the "PK parties" hosted by Jack Houck; it can take a while for anyone to start bending spoons, but once one or two people have done it, the rest of the crowd will find it much easier to follow suit. A small adjustment of consciousness, perhaps merely a lowering of inhibitions, seems to help bring the phenomena into being.

Consider also the recurrent waves of excitement about spiritualism from the mid-19th century through the early 20th  century, which can be compared to a social mania. The positive results obtained by some amateur experimenters – hearing raps or getting messages via planchette – would stimulate other people to obtain similar results. Simply seeing or hearing about the phenomena may be enough to alter consciousness just a bit and make it more susceptible to picking up bleed-throughs. 

Returning to our list of anomalous phenomena, we can consider how each one might relate to bleed-throughs.

• Poltergeists — a persistent bleed-through of a particular spiritual entity, often associated with the consciousness of a particular person (typically an adolescent or young adult who is emotionally disturbed or high-strung, perhaps exhibiting traits of altered consciousness).
• Deathbed visions — the bleed-through of the afterlife timeline into our own, as perceived by the altered consciousness of the dying person and sometimes by people nearby.
• Out-of-body experiences — possibly a way of projecting our own awareness into another timeline; in effect, a reverse bleed-through. Are poltergeists in our world simply entities that are having out-of-body experiences in their world?
• Near-death experiences — essentially a combination of deathbed visions and out-of-body experiences, with the altered consciousness that attends the dying process tuning in to information from a nearby dimension and then projecting itself into that timeline.
• After-death communications — intentional bleed-throughs on the part of people who are no longer alive in our timeline, but who have a strong emotional connection to somebody here. These are most common, I think, when the living person is dealing with the emotional shock and disorientation of grief and loss – in other words, when the percipient is experiencing an altered state of consciousness.
• Episodes of cosmic consciousness — "cosmic consciousness," a term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in his book of the same name, is an epiphany in which a person has a sudden, profound sense of the meaning of life and the ultimate nature of reality. Again, this could be understood as a combination of a shift in consciousness and a bleed-through of information that is normally masked from our perception.

Other phenomena, such as the Mothman, Bigfoot, visions of the Virgin Mary or other iconic figures, alien abductions, and even levitation and miraculous healing may also be connected with the idea of information transfer and consciousness fine-tuning. 

Sally forth

Doing research for a novel, I read up recently on salvia divinorum, a psychoactive plant that is usually smoked or chewed. Known more commonly as salvia or just Sally, the plant is legal in some jurisdictions and has a long history of use in traditional societies. It can be quite dangerous, though. While I don't think it's been directly linked to any deaths, it can bring on terrifying hallucinations with lasting psychological consequences.

Salvia operates on different neural pathways than other hallucinogens and tends to produce chaotic thoughts, visual and tactile synesthesia (you "see" things with your skin), and a profoundly depressing or deeply frightening sense of dissociation.

The nature of these hallucinatory experiences is interesting. What follows are quotes from some people who had bad trips on salvia (as well as a few who found the experience more enlightening than scary).

Many users report out-of-body experiences, often combined with the sense of the body flattening out into a two-dimensional geometrical shape like a plank of wood or a Lego block. (I realize Legos and planks are not really two-dimensional objects, but this is how people describe it.) The sense of ego-identity, of personal existence, can be profoundly undermined. 

My buddy did 40x and said he floated in his chair out of an apartment building, looked back and was floating 20 stories up watching everyone in the building through the walls.

The tv began to flash solid colours and I could feel the sound waves hitting me and bouncing around the room. My head and arms stretched about 7 feet underneath my coffee table and then slowly slid back onto my head. At this point my standing fan and heater were talking to me in a really high pitched voice saying "You're so fucked up" over and over. I started to lift of the couch and fly out the window ... I saw planets and colours I've never seen before. As I came down from it, the feeling was like when you retract a cord back into an appliance it just kinda flys back into its place. Well that was me but to my body. Colours returned back to normal and my body returned. My friend said I sat on that couch for 40 mins not moving an inch besides my jaw and eyes being wide open.

Your soul gets vacuumed out of your body and you find yourself turning into a 2D object that's infinitely huge and twisting into itself and you will feel stuck here for eternity and will leave you doubting your existence for years afterwards. I'm still getting over it 6 years later.

I took a big hit of Salvia and exhaled and instantly went into a "Gold Hue Flipbook". It was basically my life being flipped through rapidly and when my conscious became normal, I slipped out of the 2d plane and was hovering over my body for a brief moment.

I even got to meet Lady Salvia herself, not before I was torn into a million pieces and all that remained was a ball of light. 

External reality can flatten out, twist in on itself, or become cartoonish and unstable. Comparisons are often made to computer programs - glitches, video lags and loops, graphical effects, and pixels. 

My friend's experience with it was his world was "peeling" away ...

Next thing I know my vision is getting saturated, literally like Photoshop effects, and then when I move my head even slightly it's like everything is warping and stretching, like a graphical bug, with pixels not loading, stuff like that. My field of view becomes increasingly chaotic until the vibrating turns into something more like spiraling and then it kind of whirlpools into a point and shatters.

Everything gets depth and becomes pixels, the ground gets depth and becomes pixels and starts moving and carrying [me] around on the pixels, while moving [I try] to look inbetween the pixels into nothing, and [try] to feel in between them ...

I couldn't see anything at all. It was a kaleidoscope so intricate that the pieces were not visible to the naked eye. It was as if a computer took all of its pixels and scrambled them into some random configuration.

My vision seemed to be consistent of pixels like a computer, and all I had to do was turn away ... Turn away and look at the real reality, but I just couldn't.

From the bottom right corner of my vision an invisible hand grabbed this "layer" of reality and ripped it away. It was as if I had no chance to say goodbye, I disappeared into some sort of machine that is responsible for perception. I was part of a segment of reality and it felt as if my life had literally "come to the end of the roll" and I did not exist anymore. It was quite harrowing, yet it retained a very childlike quality.

The last friend I smoked it with had no idea what he was in for, as I don't think I'd informed him enough ... Straight away he seemed distressed and started saying "Whaaat... okay... take it off now dude. I've seen enough. What is this?" Apparently he thought himself an icon in a video game, and he was trapped between planes of reality. He had to make a jump between a clockwork mechanism at the right moment or something 'bad' would happen, and everything seemed fake (classic salvia). He wasn't quite right for about 30 minutes after that. 

The takeaway from the experience is often in line with Roger Ebert's words on the day of his death, "This is all an elaborate hoax." 

It's like nothing exists and all is just ... like fake or something.

This is when I realize that all of reality and everything that I knew to be true was false. I realized that there was someone or something out there that can fuck with everything however they wanted ...  I mean that there was something out there that can do anything it wanted to and it was basically god ... Humans are basically nothing and it can totally fuck with our lives however the hell it wanted to. The "god" can make shit repeat over and over again or maybe put a black hole in the middle of America, etc.

Salvia unzipped myself in half and everyone around me morphed into laughing jokers, causing me to believe that the world had played a giant trick on me and that everything I knew was totally fake. Helpless and terrified.

Breathed out and suddenly, it was as if God pressed stop on my reality. This cruel, heartless, all surrounding, unimaginably powerful God just stopped everything. Suddenly everyone I'd ever known, all the places I'd been, my whole life, had been a lie. It had been just a game, a silly puppet show, and it meant nothing in comparison to the depths of existence beyond my life, way into the infinity of the universe ... I realised I wasn't tripping, this was real. All along my life has been this insane charade which God has now chosen to break down. As I am engulfed in terror at this new reality, the deeper, endless layers of the true reality began folding into my view like the bag of an accordion. A dark, powerful stream of places and perceptions I can't begin to describe, and didn't understand at the time. I shouted out for my partner, who I realised must be part of this fake reality too. My sitter pulled me out of it, and I was back here. Everything seemed fake for a long time after that. The scariest part of this experience was that the Salvia made me believe 100% that I was experiencing the destruction of everything I had ever known.

I was nothing. I was just part of whatever it is that makes up the universe, looking at all the rest of it. I squinted and inspected what I was seeing. Distance didn't matter, everything was too close for it too. I came to the conclusion that all of what I was seeing was a thin layer on my eyeballs, like a TV screen painted onto them ... Everything I was seeing was made of individual, single color pixels, like a TV screen, but the colors weren't limited at all! And they didn't have a definite shape, either. They were all roughly oval. Sort of pill-shaped, but i got more of the impression that they were like plant cells , with thin layers of membrane around each one that kept it binded to the others on the proper sequence. That fascinated me, so I looked harder at it, unable to discern if my eyes were open or closed now, it was as if I was looking at everything on a microscopic level and it was all very alive. When I began trying to concentrate on the cell membranes, the cells would always come unglued, and fall to pieces from each other. All of the cells that had formed together to make something just fell apart like a lot of sand falling to the floor. I didn't know what I was doing to the things that I disintegrated, so I tried to stop, but by then everything was corrupted by my stare, and it started to break apart on a cellular level. Everything was just coming unglued. I recall then that I heard a voice, I suppose it was female, but it really transcended language. it was just really really soothing. She told me in words that aren't words that what I was seeing was the way of things, how the past left to make way for the present.

And what seems like multiple other people's experiences, the only way I can explain it is that it's almost like there are entities that are part of our subconcious mind and the collective unconscious. They are "behind the scenes" in making our objective reality. They are always shifting things to make them seem real and authentic, almost like this reality is just a sinister joke, or some sort of game we all play. 

When the illusory layers of reality are peeled away like pixels dropping off a screen, what remains is the reality "behind the curtain." This can be perceived as a sudden access of universal knowledge, a "cosmic consciousness" experience.   

I closed my eyes that last time I was transported into another dimension where I FINALLY understood life and all of its concepts and a multicolored being came to me and presented himself and explained to me that all we are as humans are tiny pixels working our hardest to play out life for beings above us. He explained to me that his people all understood through psychedelic drugs that they need to work together as pixels to play out our lives and that we needed to do the same for the beings above us. We are all tiny pieces to an indescribably large puzzle, his whole society was a peaceful and enlightened culture and we need to be the same way here in our lives working together to play out peaceful life. 

The whole universe made sense to me at the time then I looked around and I realized I was on top of a pyramid like structure and I looked at my body to see I was made out of a red windowpane LSD type structure, I then spiraled around for a while then I opened my eyes to see my room I felt that I understood every meaning and aspect of life and I sat there for a long time just thinking to myself and trying to remember all of my experiences into salvia land and I was surprised how easily I let go to the experience and didn’t try to hold on to what I thought reality was.

There can be lasting effects, both negative and positive. 

Salvia is the only thing I've done that has so completely shattered my reality and forced me to reassess my entire life and the way I live it.

My old vision of death as simple oblivion has been wiped away, and it's very difficult for me to imagine death as anything other than a new transformation into the conscious energy we were before birth and will return to again. There is a new fear in my mind because of this - fear that there's no way out, fear that I will have to endure all the cosmos ever has in it. Sometimes we crave oblivion, we want rest, we want peace, we want off this spinning sphere for a while. And in those moments of fear I remember the void, the pregnant peace, the infinite expanse of nothing, the utter lack of anything and somehow the foundation of everything. If we can know the void, then we can know peace.

These stories are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is a filter and transceiver that narrows down and reconstructs a vastly larger reality within manageable, familiar constraints, and that when this function is compromised, our perception of reality will radically (and perhaps disorientingly and terrifyingly) expand, with familiar objects dropping away or being peeled off in layers. The stories are also broadly consistent with the idea that physical reality is analogous to a virtual-reality simulation generated by an information-processing program, and that the subjective experience of each of us is akin to the rendered imagery on the screen of our own personal computer terminal - imagery that can glitch up, get caught in an endless loop, or disappear altogether if the render engine fails. 

Finally, it suggests that there is an overall plan behind the scenes, carried out by higher-level entities who apparently have a certain compassion for us, even though they seem bewilderingly remote.

None of which proves anything, but it does provide more grist for the speculation mill. 

Lost in the bardo

Let’s consider a series of items, and then look at where they may take us. 

 

Item: During a near-death experience, a man found himself being tormented by demons. Terrified, he reached back into his childhood to the only faith he had ever been taught and prayed to Jesus for salvation. Instantly he found himself lifted out of the experience into a higher plane.

 

Item: A deeply religious Christian, undergoing a near-death experience, found himself in a stereotypical Christian heaven, complete with "pearlescent gates," streets of gold, and choirs of angels. He came back convinced that he had been to heaven, though he remained skeptical of other NDEs that encompassed different, nonbiblical experiences. 

 

Item: A survey of Hindus in India who underwent NDEs found that many of them reported being taken to the afterlife by angelic messengers known as yamdoots, whose role is to escort the deceased to the next life. In many Hindu NDEs, the experiencer's death was attributable to a bureaucratic error, which was promptly corrected by returning them to life.

 

Item: Spiritualist literature abounds in descriptions of Summerland, a paradisal environment enjoyed by most people after death, which bears a striking resemblance to earthly life. Gardens, cottages, and other homely delights are recounted in detail. People are sometimes said to engage in sex, create artworks, plant flowers, or hold regular jobs.

 

Item: Accounts of postmortem existence often feature puzzling omissions and elements of vagueness that cannot be resolved even after repeated follow-up questions. Exactly how the spirits spend their time, whether there are alterations of day and night, whether people need to sleep, and other details either vary unpredictably or are never satisfactorily addressed.

 

Item: Oliver Lodge's book Raymond recounts purportedly postmortem communications with his son. Among other details, Raymond says that some people in the afterlife smoke cigars and drink liquor. Lodge was ridiculed for believing such far-fetched claims. And yet his book contains much veridical material produced by mediums – statements they had no way of knowing, which were later verified, and at least one startlingly accurate prediction.

 

Item: In some channeled literature and séances, communicators claim that Shakespeare and other great poets are continuing to write. Yet no convincing snippet of original Shakespearean poetry ever comes through. On the rare occasions when original poetry is proffered, it is no better than doggerel.

 

Item: Communicators disagree with each other on such fundamental questions as whether or not reincarnation is real, and whether or not there is a God. 

 

Item: In The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, the alleged spirit of F.W.H. Myers, as transcribed by Geraldine Cummins, warns that Summerland is a plane of illusion which he compares to the land of the Lotus Eaters in Greek mythology. The Lotus Eaters kept themselves perpetually intoxicated and existed in a hallucinatory state. Myers insists that however attractive Summerland may be to its inhabitants, it is not ultimately real, and when an individual spirit recognizes this fact, he will immediately be elevated to a higher plane.

 

Item: Longtime OBE researcher Robert Monroe reported bizarre experiences on other planes of existence that often had an illogical dreamlike or nightmarish quality.Still, his experiences are hard to dismiss as nothing more than dreams, because of their occasional veridical content. 

 

Item: So-called alien abductions have much in common with out-of-body experiences. In both cases, the experiencer typically reports being drowsy or asleep, then feeling his body start to vibrate before he rises horizontally from bed and floats through the air, often passing through a wall or window. Other than the science-fiction aspects (little green men, flying saucers, lab experiments), the only significant difference between abductions and OBEs is that the OBEs are understood to be nonphysical; the person looks down and sees his physical body lying prostrate and temporarily abandoned. By contrast, abduction experiences are assumed to be physical, probably because the person is simply unfamiliar with being out of the body.

 

Item: Hypnotic regression to an alleged between-lives experience, in which the patient remembers an intermediate experience after one earthly incarnation and prior to the next, typically discloses an afterlife environment markedly different from that described in NDEs and mediumship. In between-lives accounts, the spirits typically do not take human form but exist as blobs of light in an abstract landscape. Unlike the residents of Summerland, they remember all their past lives and the other members of their soul group. And they participate in planning their next incarnation, during which they will necessarily sublimate their higher consciousness and all knowledge of their life-plan.

 

Item: Sometime between the 8th and 14th centuries, Tibetan monks authored a document known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It delineates various stages of postmortem existence, stages known as bardos. As is often the case with religious writings, the book is highly formalized, with successive stages neatly ordered in groups of seven and said to last for a specific number of days. Leaving aside these elaborations, the essence of the narrative is that dying persons experience “luminosity" or "the clear light of being." If they recognize this light as their own higher self, they will merge with it and avoid subsequent incarnations. Most people, insufficiently spiritually advanced to do this, proceed to a series of visions, both positive and negative, which are generated by their own minds but perceived as objectively real. They find themselves fully immersed in these thought-forms, which reflect their deepest expectations, fears, and hopes, all the while cut off from the higher self. If plagued by frightening images, they are advised to appeal to a personal deity in order to rid themselves of troubling thoughts. At a late stage in the process, they are brought before the Lord of Death and subjected to judgment by looking into the mirror of karma. As before, they are advised to realize that the scene is nothing more than a mental projection; most people, however, cannot manage it. Eventually they are shuttled back to earth in a new incarnation, still caught in the wheel of rebirth. 

 

Okay. Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all of the above items are factually correct as far as they go. Can they be reconciled? I think so ... and it's not really even that hard.

 

Upon death, a person sees "the clear light,” which near-death experiencers know as "the being of light," sometimes perceived as literally the light at the end of a tunnel. As some near-death researchers, notably Kenneth Ring, have speculated, this being of light is, in reality, one's higher self. Most people, however, will misinterpret it as God, i.e. something outside of and distinct from themselves, a basic error which prevents them from uniting with the light. Then, just as the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests, they move into a realm of illusions produced by their subconscious minds. People with a background in Christianity or Hinduism will see environments consistent with Christian or Hindu imagery. People who are subconsciously troubled may find themselves in a hellish environment, which they can escape by focusing on a personal deity - just as one NDEr escaped from the "demons" tormenting him by appealing to Jesus. 

 

Most people in our secular age find themselves immersed in a virtual-reality environment similar to the earthly world they have left – an environment conjured up by the collective unconscious of many like-minded souls. This is what spiritualists call Summerland, the Lotus Flower paradise discussed by Myers. As a plane of illusion, Summerland can incorporate any ideas in the inventory of the subconscious, including cigars, whiskey, sex, gardening, meeting William Shakespeare, and whatever else may seem pleasurable or interesting. But since Summerland residents are not actually meeting William Shakespeare, they are unable to produce any satisfactory examples of his new work. And because they are Lotus Eaters, they will be hard-pressed to explain exactly how they spend their time or even what time is. They are in a hallucinatory state which they mistake for a higher reality.

 

The "life review" common to many NDEs and some channeled accounts, and described in Buddist terms as peering into the mirror of karma, is another illusory, self-generated experience - which may account for the fact that a person typically sees what he needs to see and feels that he is being judged only by himself. 

 

At this stage of consciousness, the individual is not aware of his higher self, his soulmates, or his previous and upcoming incarnations. He may or may not believe in reincarnation or in God. His knowledge is partial and conjectural. He still sees as through a glass darkly. The higher self, temporarily cut off from the ego-persona, enjoys a different experience, as remembered by hypnotically regressed patients who report between-lives memories.

 

Even without having a near-death experience, people can encounter other planes of existence generated by their own thoughts and possessing a kind of quasi-reality. This is the case with many out-of-body experiences, and it accounts for their dreamlike qualities. It is also the case with so-called alien abductions - nonphysical experiences generated (presumably) by imagery gleaned from popular science fiction. In previous eras, the same types of "abductions" were interpreted as the work of demons, angels, faerie folk;- the popular mythology of the time.

 

Skeptics of near-death experiences, mediumship, and channeled literature are right to point out the discrepancies, illogicalities, lacunae, and cultural biases that crop up in these cases. But they are wrong in assuming that the cases can thereby be explained away in materialistic terms. The best accounts contain too much veridical material. The actual explanation is that the experiences are real but hallucinatory - actual adventures in nonphysical realms, but adventures realized in terms of thought-forms and cultural constructs dictated by the experiencer's own mind. 

 

These sojourns in what the Tibetans call the chonyid bardo and sidpa bardo take place below the evolutionary level of the higher self, on a lower plane where postmortem existence is largely dictated by the biases, assumptions, and limitations of the subconscious mind. Such existence is a virtual-reality simulation, real enough to be fully immersive and widely shared, but not real enough to withstand the direct apprehension that yields liberation. Most NDErs who report visiting the afterlife remember this kind of experience. Most mediumistic communicators exist at this level also. Communications from higher-level entities are rarer and more difficult to evaluate or verify, since they typically lack evidential content.

 

This way of looking at things may help bring some order to the disparate collection of case histories reported as NDEs, mediumship, OBES, hypnotic regressions, and transcendental experiences, which have many commonalities but also many discrepancies. 

NDEs in the ICU

I've been reading Near Death in the ICU, by Laurin Bellg, MD, and finding a lot of fascinating material in it. But before I present some examples, I need to offer a caveat. At the beginning, the author says she has done her best to conceal the identities of the patients and family members in the stories told here. That's understandable, but she goes on to say that in some cases she has even created composite stories based on two or more episodes blended together.

I'm not entirely happy about that approach, since it necessarily means blurring the details of individual accounts and suggesting a more elaborate experience than any one person may have reported. Personally, I think that when it comes to NDE accounts, composites should be avoided and the details should be changed as little as possible.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good stuff here, and I have no reason to doubt the general accuracy of what's being reported. Much of it is consistent with other NDE accounts, but told from a fresh perspective.

One common thread involves seeing a spiritual being (or more than one) in the form of a glowing point of light or a luminous orb. Another feature in common in several accounts is the patient's relocation to an ethereal space of perfect peace.

Here is an excerpt from the account of someone identified only as Dr. John, which includes both details:

His next awareness found him completely and peacefully enveloped in what he could only describe as a soft shroud of mist with tiny points of light blinking in and out, as they darted quickly back and forth all around him. He felt completely weightless and peaceful, void of any fear. The feeling of love was immense, almost unbearable, and recalling it now, Dr. John’s voice became fragile as he paused to fight back tears.

Regaining his composure, after a few moments he continued. He described floating in such a beautiful and bright place of total peace that he lost all thoughts and concerns related to anything connected to his physical existence. He was aware of nothing except how good it felt to be there where he was – wherever that was. How long he lingered in this space he could not say because time had immediately lost meaning for him.

Out-of-body experiences feature in many of the accounts, and in some cases veridical observations are reported. I've already mentioned the next NDE in a book review of another book, The Self Does Not Die. Here is part of the story:

Howard started from the beginning and gave us a play-by-play of his experience. He recounted that at some point, he didn’t know when, he felt more than heard an intense, escalating buzzing. Not long afterward he experienced the sensation of shooting out of the top of his head with incredible speed ...

“Next thing I know,” he said, “I’m looking down on my body and it feels like I’m bobbing and bouncing against the ceiling. I was too shocked to be scared! It occurred to me that I might be dead, so I started to panic and, as crazy as it sounds, I tried swimming through the air to get back to my body. It didn’t work. That convinced me I must be dead, so I just watched and listened ...”

After this, he found himself rising up through the ceiling, where he saw the plumbing pipes and other fixtures between floors. Then he entered a strange environment in which mannequins were laid out in hospital beds. The nurses were flabbergasted when he described this detail to them, because there was no way he could have known about this room, which was used for training purposes. This part of the story is excerpted in my earlier post.

Two features of the above excerpt are interesting to me. First, the buzzing sensation is commonly reported by people who have OBEs, including people who have learned to induce these experiences at will. Exiting via the top of the head is also a pretty familiar observation. (The buzzing sensation is also reported in many cases of so-called alien abduction, a fact that lends credence to the idea that these episodes are OBEs misinterpreted as events in physical space.) Second, the business about bobbing against the ceiling reminded me of a time, some years ago, when I used to have exceptionally vivid dreams in which I would "bob and bounce" weightlessly against the ceiling of my home, sometimes exploring corners of the ceiling or treading water in midair. Was I dreaming? Or was my astral body exploring my environment while I slept?

A woman who suffered a series of heart attacks reported several NDEs that included the orb, veridical observations, and a sort of impromptu scientific experiment that she herself performed in her out-of-body state:

“What happened next was a big surprise, and that’s when I knew I must have died. I became distracted by a growing, bright light to my left, and when I turned my attention to it, it became bigger and brighter. It seemed like it should have been a blinding light, that’s how bright it was, but it wasn’t hard to look at, even though it was so intense. The more attention I gave to it, the closer it came and then, suddenly, I wasn’t concerned at all about what was going on with my body in the ER. Not one bit. In fact, in an instant, I forgot all about it. In just a blink, it was all about that incredible light for me.

“It was coming closer and I wanted it to, because the closer it came, the more intense love I felt ...

“It’s so hard to explain that kind of love. It was very intense and so real. More real than this,” [she said, indicating the room around her].

Later in the experience, she was reunited with her mother, who told her she had to go back. She didn’t want to return, and she put up quite a fight about it.

“I even tried pleading with her to let me stay. I told her, ‘It’s my life, I should get to choose. I should have a say-so.’ Then she told me, ‘It’s not that you don’t get to choose. Part of you, in fact, is choosing and participating in this decision. It would be easy for you to choose to stay here, but you understand on a level you can’t quite comprehend just now that there is more from your family relationships you need to experience and learn. And more they need to learn from you. When choosing is not an act of escape but an act of completion, then you will stay.’"

She did go back but suffered a second heart attack.

She knew it was coming. She felt a subtle buzzing sensation, then perceived a voice saying, “Get ready for it. Here it comes. It’s going to happen again.” Strangely, she said it sounded like her voice, as if she could hear aloud the thought she had spoken internally ...

Having the notion that the voice she heard was actually her own thoughts audibly manifesting so she could perceive them, she decided, in her disembodied state, to test her hypothesis and found her suspicions were correct. True to her self-professed, smarty-pants nature, she tossed out random words – butter, ping pong, tacos – and heard these very words echo aloud, although she was looking at her physical body that was unconscious, mouth unmoving, and clearly in distress. But she wasn’t in distress, not in the least. Rather, it fascinated her ...

Note that her OBE was also precipitated by a buzzing sensation.

Later, she had a third cardiac arrest. Afterward she reported a veridical observation.

She described it to me, and astonishingly, even reminded me of something I had forgotten. She was watching us from a position in middle space – not exactly floating above and not entirely standing; rather, she was somewhere in between. After having the thought, “Your heart is going to stop again,” and feeling the soft buzzing sensation tingle through her once more, she then saw the [sterile] blue drape being lifted up and the nurse reaching under it to start chest compressions.

Then she mentioned something I had forgotten entirely. She saw members of the resuscitation team try to tilt her whole body sideways to put a long, flat board under her and me saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, my stuff,” as I grabbed the things I had set on top of the sterile field to prevent them from falling onto the floor ...

The board is used to make the chest compressions more effective. The patient made this observation when she was totally unconscious and in need of CPR to restart her heart.

One of the book's more elaborate NDEs involves many of the above elements – and more. It is so lengthy and detailed that I have to wonder if it is one of the composite accounts. In any event, here are some excerpts from a much more extensive account:

[Marlene] soon became distracted by the presence of a soft blue orb of light that came into view on the opposite side of the room. She watched as it began to move slowly toward her the moment she had noticed it. How long it had been there hovering, watching before she had actually seen it, she could not say, but it seemed that the mere engagement of her attention drew it forward. While the orb was slowly approaching, she noticed that the voices below [in the hospital] became thinner and more distant while the visual scene grew ever smaller and more remote, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

As the orb, about the size of a beach ball, came to rest in front of her, she felt overwhelmed with emotion and intense feelings of peace, love and complete safety. While nothing in particular was said, the thought came to her that she was going to be okay but that something was going to happen first. This was confusing to her, but she did not feel afraid or threatened ...

She passed between the floors, seeing the pipes and wiring, and then emerged into a hospital room where a patient was eating a meal in bed.

She noted a couple of vases of flowers on the window sill and perceived, more than actually smelled, their intoxicating fragrance. The flowers were the most vivid colors she had ever seen and the petals, stems and leaves all seemed to be made up of tiny particles that vibrated very fast. Remarkably, there was a palpable, humming energy emanating from the flowers that vibrated across the atmosphere, entered into her body, if she could call it that, and presented itself in such a way that she could feel the flowers ...

[After more such experiences, she concluded that] whatever she visually locked in on – from the hospital room where she had seen the flowers, to the roof and then the parking lot below – she gained an instant awareness of the sounds, smells and colors in hyper-sensory detail from a great distance. Her guide, if that is what it was, seemed in no hurry to move her along, allowing Marlene to marvel and observe with this phenomenal skill ...

Moving into lighter space, she was aware that the orb was less dense as well. Looking to her right as they moved along, she realized that her companion was actually no longer an orb but seemed to have stretched out to a filmier smudge of an elongated, cloud-like substance. She wondered why the orb had changed like that – dense and round in physical space but lighter and less formed in a more ethereal atmosphere ...

Her movement became literally as rapid as thought itself, as she whirled over the ocean and the field of rippling wheat, still accompanied by the cloudlike "guide."

Suddenly, she reported, they came to an instant stop with absolutely no sense of deceleration into a vast void that was incredibly silent. But even the silence seem to have texture. After a brief pause of floating in this splendid quiet, the environment took on more density, with subtle shifts in color and hue. At this point, Marlene really struggled to explain this to me, saying that it was like a cloud, but not really – like a mist, but not exactly. She described the feeling of silk or soft fog settling around her while, at the same time, muted colors of blues, grays, and faint pinks and greens fluctuated in and out. With the color there was a faint sound that had a somewhat musical quality, but there were no specific tones that she could identify. It was more vibrational than anything, she recounted, much like the connection she had felt from the vase of flowers ...

In this more rarefied environment, Marlene encountered deceased loved ones, as well as a barely remembered neighbor to whom she had been helpful. Though the small acts of kindness she showed him had meant little to her, they had been more important than she realized.

To her dismay, she was told she could not stay in the afterlife. A child of four or five years old was brought before her; the child, she was told, was "special" and would need her. The child would be named Crystal, and would struggle with a mental issue; the struggle would be helpful to the personal growth of the people around her. The child herself seemed to be looking forward to the assignment. Marlene "was informed, again through a thought that seemed to be deposited in her mind, that this was a preordained task agreed upon by the young child and her guides.”

After this, she retreated to physical reality and was back in her body feeling pain and exhaustion.

For years, Marlene never told her daughter or anyone else about the deepest parts of her experience; she made no mention of Crystal, the girl who was waiting to be born. Nevertheless, twenty-one years after Marlene's NDE, her daughter gave birth to a child who was named Crystal, and the child did struggle with autism and other issues. Bellg writes, “Crystal required a lot of work and attention but her ready smile, infectious humor and unqualified affection more than compensated for it." She goes on:

Marlene and Crystal had a particularly special connection, a bond that was instant and strong. They spent hours together and, living close by, Crystal often stayed the night with Marlene ... Once when Crystal was about four years old, as Marlene was tucking her into bed for the evening, she looked peacefully up at her grandmother and, lost in a soft gaze that connected her to something far away, said, “I saw you before, Grammy, remember?”

“What do you mean, Sweetheart?” Marlene did not immediately understand.

“When you died before, and came to Heaven. I saw you there. Remember?”

With a shiver of excitement, Marlene leaned in toward her granddaughter and replied softly through instant tears, “Yes, Crystal, I remember.” Marlene’s death and return to life so long ago was now a distant memory. It was something she rarely talked about, and certainly not with Crystal. There was no way that this child could have known what she seemed to know about what had happened over twenty years earlier.

“You were sad that you had to go back in your body,” Crystal became pensive as tears poured down Marlene’s cheeks. “Are you still sad?”

“No, Crystal, I’m not sad. I’m very happy to be here with you."

Again, I would prefer it if none of the stories had been conflated to create somewhat fictionalized composite accounts, and I would also prefer to have as few details altered as possible. Still, Dr. Bellg's sincerity is obvious throughout the book, and I don't doubt that she was told of these experiences, though maybe not exactly in the form in which they appear in print.

Near Death in the ICU contains several other fascinating cases. I'll provide excerpts from those in an upcoming post.

The curious case of Miss Z

Recently a commenter named Bill left some interesting remarks on the thread of my brief post announcing a book by Cyrus Kirkpatrick, who sometimes comments on this blog. Bill took issue with a particular detail in Cyrus's book involving a famous experiment performed by parapsychologist Charles Tart. Bill wrote:

I have had a small read of Cyrus Kirkpatrick's book regarding the preview on amazon. Here is a fundamental error.

He says regarding the famous "Miss Z" OBE study that:

"Tart concluded that there was a remote chance of Miss Z cheating if she were to somehow use an apparatus of hidden mirrors that she snuck into the laboratory, but Tart believed it was very unlikely given the protocols, and he concluded a parapsychological explanation was the best fit."

This is wrong. In the paper Tart admits in his own words "Therefore, Miss Z's reading of the target number cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect."

Here is the full quote:

"The second alternative is that she might have seen the number reflected in the surface of the case of the clock which was mounted on the wall above it. This was the only reflecting surface in the room placed in such a way that this might have been possible. Both Dr. Hastings and I spent some time in the dimly lit room to dark-adapt our eyes, and tried to read a number from the subject's position on the bed, as reflected on the surface of the clock. As the room was dimly lit and the surface of the clock was black plastic, we could not see anything of the number. However, when we shone a flashlight directly on the number (increasing its brightness by a factor somewhere between several hundred and several thousand) we could just make out what the number was in the much brighter reflection. Thus, although it seems unlikely, one could argue that the number constituted a 'subliminal' stimulus in its reflection off the clock surface. Therefore, Miss Z's reading of the target number cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect."

So basically there was an entirely naturalistic explanation. Light could have been reflected from the surface of a clock located on the wall above the shelf, and Miss Z could have seen the number this way.

Cyrus Kirkpatrick deliberately "filters" this out of his book (something funny enough he accuses skeptics of doing earlier in his book) ignoring evidence they don't want to acknowledge; instead he only mentions the first alternative of mirrors which Tart does disregard. He does not mention the other simplistic natural explanation.

The statement "a parapsychological explanation was the best fit" is therefore deliberately misleading because Tart admitted no conclusive evidence could be given for a parapsychological effect.

Cyrus Kirkpatrick also seems to indicate the protocols of the experiment were good. They were not very good. Tart admits he fell asleep during the experiment (!), there were no video cameras and the subject had not been searched prior to the experiment (that is just a few issues, we could go on).

I don't buy into the silly mirror idea anyway, what most likely happened was the number was reflected by the glass face of the wall clock above the shelf. This gets me thinking. Should we ignore an entirely simple explanation for an unlikely paranormal one?

Cyrus Kirkpatrick in the beginning of his book admits he doesn't have time to examine all the skeptic rebuttals. Thing is with this study, skeptics are not even involved (they came later). Tart himself first admitted no conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect.

It is basically a poorly controlled experiment with a dozing observer that has not been replicated in nearly 50 years. Yet this is considered to be genuine evidence for a paranormal OBE or life after death?

In my reply, I noted that Tart actually does think that a paranormal explanation is “the best fit" (as Cyrus put it) for the experimental results. In his 2012 book The End of Materialism, Tart writes:

I was cautious in my original write-up of these results: "… Miss Z's reading of the target number cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect" (Tart 1968, 18). I thought I was just making a standard statement of caution, because no one experiment is ever absolutely conclusive about anything, but overzealous pseudoskeptics have pounced on this statement as saying that I didn't think there were any parapsychological effects in this study. I've always thought that it's highly likely that some form of ESP, perhaps because Miss Z was really "out" in some real sense, is the best explanation of the results.

So Tart did, in fact, conclude (and still maintains) that ESP was probably demonstrated by the experiment.

Bill complains that the sleep sessions were not videotaped. I don't think there is much force in this objection. Tart published his first paper on the subject in 1968, and he says that it was considerably delayed. The actual experiments must have taken place sometime earlier. In the 1960s, video recording and playback equipment was neither cheap nor easy to come by. Very few people were using it, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect a poorly funded parapsychological researcher to have access to it.

Beyond that, Bill doesn't mention that there was continuous monitoring of Miss Z throughout the experiment. Tart explains that she was connected via electrodes to an EEG monitor; a strain gauge taped over one eye measured REM sleep; and the electrical resistance of her skin was measured by electrodes taped to her palm and forearm. So while there was no videotape, there was a complete record of her brain activity, eyelid twitches, and skin resistance. Moreover, she could not have gotten out of bed or even sat up more than a few inches without pulling loose some of the electrodes, which would have left unmistakable signs in the record. Tart writes in a footnote on pp. 204-5:

Standard sleep-laboratory procedures leave enough slack in the wires running to the electrodes on the person's head so that he can turn over with ease, but if he tries to sit up more than a little, he'll pull electrodes off, making the electrode susceptible to picking up power-line interference, which will vibrate the recording pens so hard that they throw ink all over the recording room, as well as leave a distinctive trace on the polygraph record.

Bill says that "what most likely happened” was that the target number was reflected on the glass face of the clock. But what Tart and his colleague, Arthur Hastings, determined was that a very faint reflection was visible, not on the glass face of the clock but on the black plastic casing below the clock face. It was this lower portion of the clock that would have caught the reflection, if any. They are quite clear in saying that this reflection was completely invisible unless a flashlight was directed onto the target paper. Even then, it was almost impossible to make out the five-digit target.

Although they included this caveat for the sake of completeness, it is obvious that they did not consider it to be a realistic possibility, especially given the anomalous EEG readings that seemed to accompany the out-of-body experience. Tart writes:

Floating and full OBEs occurred in a relatively discrete EEG stage of what I would technically call poorly developed stage-1 dreaming EEG, mixed with transitory periods of brief wakefulness.… Stage-1 EEG normally accompanies the descent into sleep, the hypnagogic period, and later dreaming during the night, but these shown by Miss Z weren't like those ordinary stage-1 periods, because they were often dominated by alphoid activity, a distinctly slower version of the ordinary waking alpha rhythm, and there were no REM's accompanying the stage-1 periods, as almost always happens in normal dreaming. I had studied many sleep EEG records by then and can say with confidence that this was unusual.…

I eventually showed the recordings to one of the world’s leading authorities on sleep research, psychiatrist William Dement, and he agreed with me that it was a distinctive pattern, but we had no idea what it meant.

Bill summed up his view of the experiment this way:

There is a simple naturalistic explanation for the "Miss Z" parapsychological experiment. So we do not resort to a magical explanation that doesn't have a shred of evidence to support it.

I think, however, that if we look at the case in its entirety – the continuous monitoring of the subject via EEG, REM sleep monitor, and skin-resistance measurement; the anomalous EEG pattern that seemingly accompanied the OBEs; the correct identification of the target number, with odds against chance of 100,000 to 1; the subject's relative immobility as a result of the multiple electrodes attached to her body, which could not be removed surreptitiously; the impossibility of seeing any reflection on the clock without using a smuggled flashlight; and the extreme unlikelihood of being able to the read the faint reflection of the target number even in the glow of a flashlight – that it is not correct to say that Tart's parapsychological explanation is "magical" and "doesn't have a shred of evidence to support it," nor is it quite right to suggest that the reflection hypothesis is "a simple naturalistic explanation."

In short, while it's incontestable that the experiment is not conclusive proof of OBEs, it is hardly "discredited" (as Bill calls it), and the facile "reflection" explanation is not very persuasive.

Incidentally, Bill's further point that the results of the Miss Z experiment have never been replicated is debatable. Tart, pp. 205-6:

Stanley Krippner (1996) had a similar experience with a young man who reported occasional OBEs. He was tested for four nights in the laboratory with an art-print target in a box near the ceiling of the room. On the occasion when he reported having had an OBE, he gave a suggestively accurate description of the target, and had shown an unusual EEG pattern of slow waves (unlike Miss Z) about the time the reported OBE occurred.

Again, this is certainly not conclusive, but it does count as at least a partial replication of Tart's results. There have also been many tests (both formal and informal) of remote viewing, which measure the same kind of talent purportedly demonstrated by Miss Z — the ability to accurately describe a hidden or distant target. Some of the remote-viewing experiments have proved startlingly successful. 

Guest post: Visiting the astral plane

Matt Rouge's guest post inspired another longtime reader to offer his thoughts. Cyrus Kirkpatrick, who's already put out an impressive number of books (see his Amazon author page) offers an excerpt from a forthcoming book with the working title Life After Death For Skeptics. He calls this story "my personal validation of the topics commonly discussed here on MP’s blog."

===

Despite my years of interest in astral exploration, there had always been a disconnection between personal experience and research. Trying to understand something without experiencing it first-hand only takes a person so far. Astronomers can at least observe through an instrument the effects of a phenomenon as theoretical as a black hole to confirm their research. But for the idea of other planes of reality, how can theory be confirmed personally, short of having cardiac arrest and being sucked out of one’s body?

In early 2014 I began to experiment with sleep states and lucid dreaming. This led to my discovery of peculiar moments shortly before entering sleep when I would feel an unusual electrical sensation that could spread from the bottom of my spine upwards. It’s not a comfortable sensation, as it’s like being mildly shocked. Over the years I’d learn to resist the feeling, or ignore it, before falling asleep.

From reading other reports, I identified the sensation as a precursor to the out-of-body experience (OBE). One theory about these “tingles” is that it’s a vibrational shift. The physical effects of your “other” body disconnecting from what we call the physical version. Regardless, I began learning to maintain the feeling for longer periods of time. This led to sensations of being disconnected from my body, and looking around my bedroom despite the fact that my eyelids were closed.

One morning I had fallen back to sleep around 11 AM. I immediately entered a lucid dream state. I have no memory of the initial dream, except I returned to a normal “waking” level of consciousness during it. As I enjoyed the dream, I began to feel the familiar electrical sensations in my body. Suddenly, the dream “melted” away, and I was back in my bedroom spinning.

At this point, my consciousness was only slightly better than the normal lucid dream state. However, I could sense a gradual increase in my consciousness levels. I glanced to my left and looked in the mirror, and noticed I was a few feet above my body, flailing my arms around as I awkwardly floated in the air. In this form, I was wearing cotton pants and a red T-shirt. In bed, I was in just my underwear, but on the head of the bed were the same two pieces of clothing that I was planning to wear after I awoke. Somehow, my “astral” body had duplicated them, which I found odd (why not just go OBE in my underwear?).

Regardless, I then sensed I was traveling “upward.” I thought I was in the attic of the house I rent. But it seemed “different,” like someone else’s home. My consciousness came in and out of focus, switching between what felt like a regular lucid dream, and something more vivid. It was a scrambled sensation, and my environment seemed to fluctuate, until finally I was in a place that felt very “solid.”

I was on a stone walkway, and there were trees lining a kind of veranda that was attached to a bigger stone structure like a temple. My first instinct was that I was having one HELL of a lucid dream. And so, I wanted to experience as much detail as I could before I woke up. I went to a tree and inspected it. It was then I discovered the tree was a really amazing specimen. Every single leaf on it would fluctuate in color, and the colors seemed to respond to my touch or my thoughts. The leaves flashed between blue, magenta, purple, green, etc.

At this point, I began to wonder if I was dreaming, or in some type of literal other realm. So, I began performing tests on my environment. I held my arm out and focused hard, attempting to create an object (in this case, an apple). From my experience with lucid dreaming, such mental states are extremely fickle, and you can shape and alter the environment through your willpower alone.

No such luck making the apple appear; nothing could be manifested or changed in my environment. The place was solid and felt “real,” but at the same time it’s like I could sense my body lying comfortably on the bed, asleep. It was like I was in two places at once, similar to lucid dreams, but there was something far more striking about this realm than typical dreams.

At this point, I decided to just start trying to explore as much as I could. So I headed in a random direction away from the temple, and found myself in the foliage. I was pushing through brush, sticks, and twigs as I left the path behind. At some point, the foliage cleared away and there was a well maintained dirt road. The road was actually the path to the temple I had just visited. So, I started marching the opposite direction.

As I walked down this road, I saw two people coming my way. A man and a woman. When they saw me, they both stopped their conversation together and stared straight ahead at me, almost shocked to see me. I stared back at them. Suddenly, the man started waving his arm in the air. What he said I still find amusing. “Hello over there! You’re in the afterlife now, what do you think of it?”

At a loss for words, I approached closer. I immediately identified them as Eastern Indian. The man wore a brown and gold colored outfit common among Hindu men, with what I identified as a very fancy looking turban. He appeared maybe 30 years old and he reminded me of a very well-groomed Bollywood star. The woman was wearing a white and blue sari dress, and her arm was hooked around the man’s arm.

At this point, something hit me. It was the weight of the experience. I tend to be a very calm and non-reactive person by nature. When I had a very bad injury in 2012, and I lay on the ground with a useless broken leg, I asked to borrow an onlooker’s phone for an “I’m critically injured selfie” as a way to make light of the tragedy. In other words, I like maintaining calm even in drastic circumstances.

However, this particular experience was too much for even me to bear. I started to have a panic attack. I landed on my knees and I was hyperventilating and, to an extent, crying. I’m not entirely proud of this fact, but it was an emotional overload. The couple rushed over and they both put their arms around me and tried to talk to me. Finally, I mustered up what was wrong, and why I was so distraught.

“This is my problem,” I explained. “I’ve spent much of my life studying these alleged other planes. Now that I think I’m in one, it’s like I can’t tell if you’re real, or if this is some type of illusion created by my brain. In fact, that’s the big question I’ve spent so long trying to answer, and now I’m just even more confused. You see part of this is still very dreamlike, I can still feel my other body lying on my bed sleeping. But all of this also seems completely real, at the same time. I hate to imagine that when I someday die, I’m going to be in a confused state like this, stuck in-between a dream and reality.”

“Look,” he answered. “I actually know what you’re saying. You have to understand that the borders between the dream world, and our world, are extremely confusing. It might not feel like you’re entirely physically here right now. But let me assure you of something.” He stood up and started stomping his feet on the ground, kicking up dirt with his shoes. “See that? I’m here, I’m really here, and it’s completely physical and real to me. When you actually cross over to my side, you’ll discover it’s the greatest feeling you can imagine to wake up and really be here.”

I started to wipe the tears off my face. “OK, well I’ll take your word for it that you’re not in my brain.”

He knelt next to me again. “You have to remember something, the key to going between these worlds lies in what you’re doing right now, which is called astral projection. That’s how you can come here at will.”

“OK, but how do I do that?”

“You have to learn to embrace the fear. When you feel frightened as you are going out of body, you have to push past it. OK? When you are ready you’ll be able to come back here.”

“OK.”

Then, suddenly, a shift occurred. Everything turned hazy, and in a flash I was awake again in my bedroom, saying out loud “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” It was now 11:30 AM. The whole experience did feel to be about half an hour, so there was no time discrepancy.

The first thing I did was grab my laptop and began dictating, word for word, as much of the experience and my dialogue as I could remember. This was not hard because the memory did not feel dreamlike, but it was more like something I had physically done, like I had just been to the grocery store.

What this man told me is the only way I’ve been able to make any sense in my mind of these discrepancies between dreams and supposed other planes of reality. That unless we are completely disconnected, as in the case of certain near-death experiences, our minds must process these worlds through a mental state that is often sub-par in terms of true physical awareness.

As our awareness increases, the dreamlike elements subside, and we are brought closer and closer to a “vibration” that matches what residents on these astral planes experience.

The way the Hindu couple looked at me with shock when they first saw me gave me the impression that I was a phantom in their world. Maybe I was partially translucent, or some abnormality gave away the fact that I was not supposed to be on their side. Their response of “Welcome to the afterlife” could be because they believed I was a recently deceased person, who had just landed on their side. Perhaps this is how the newly departed commonly arrive on this particular patch of astral real estate—lost, confused, coming out of the bushes and questioning reality.

Since this experience, I have slowly improved my OBE skills. At times, however, I am still held back by the same fear I was warned about. It’s such an overwhelming experience, that I need to slowly adjust to these concepts before I can return to such a particular realm and be able to keep my head on straight during it.

In the end, the most convincing part of this was my interaction with the couple. When I communicate in dreams, it’s like some part of me understands that the people I interact with are figments of my own consciousness, which is distinct from talking to people in real life. Communicating with this man, however, felt like a real conversation, with a real person, complete with all the tiny details when really talking to somebody—from body language, awkwardness, to identifying social cues.

Further, I found his exotic outfit to be unusual, as I had never seen it before. Later, after browsing Google image search for traditional Indian clothing, I identified the exact style of dress he wore.

For me, this trip was like the astronomer peering through a telescope and confirming research through observation. The only problem is that the telescope isn’t available for just anybody to look through.

***

You can keep up to date with Cyrus at his very non-esoteric related blogs, www.cyruskirkpatrick.com and www.unchainedlifestyle.com. Life After Death For Skeptics will be released in mid-2015.

Out of body

In connection with my recent posts on NDEs, Andrew Paquette sent me a PDF of an article he published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol. 26, No, 4). The article is also available online. Titled "NDE Implications from a Group of Spontaneous Long-Distance Veridical OBEs," it recounts Andrew's experiments in dream journaling, in which he recorded numerous OBEs (or at least OBE-like dreams) with verifiable content. Though initially skeptical of psi, he soon became convinced that he was obtaining accurate information non-locally. He even wrote a book about it.

In his article, Andrew notes that the veridical OBEs in some near-death experiences are often used to show that NDEs are not mere hallucinations. Skeptics counter that the verifiable elements might have been perceived normally (usually via the sense of hearing, with visual content supplied by the mind to match the auditory input). They also complain that many of these cases suffer from a lack of contemporaneous documentation. Andrew argues that his dream journal experiments can help counter these objections, since the dreams were written down immediately upon waking and (in veridical cases) were usually verified within a few hours or, at most, a day. Moreover, the more evidential OBEs involved events that took place miles from his home and therefore well outside the range of his normal senses.

Andrew found three characteristics that distinguished an OBE from his other dreams:

1. It featured a person who ignored my presence,
2. I could identify at least one person in the dream, and
3. The dream contained unusual details that could be used for verification.

He adds:

The first criterion may seem unusual, but it was my way of knowing that I was not a literal participant in the activity. In a typical OBE, I try to interact by talking to people, but they ignore me. Not infrequently, I assume they can hear me, but are purposely ignoring me. This causes me to become increasingly agitated as I make successively more aggressive attempts to force the people in the dream to acknowledge my presence. I learned over time that my observations from dreams like this could usually be confirmed by the subject of the dream.

It is interesting to note that this same detail - trying to make contact with the people around oneself, and failing - has been reported in some NDEs. It's also interesting that in a smaller number of cases, Andrew reports making telepathic contact with the person he's observing, even though that person does not consciously notice him.

An example of this is provided by a veridical OBE where I saw a person I knew, Dr. David Ryback of Atlanta, Georgia, talking to a tenant in the building they both worked in. Dr. Ryback’s acquaintance was telling him how two cars he owned had been severely damaged on two separate occasions in the same week in the same way, by having tree branches fall on and crush their roofs. While continuing his conversation with this man, Dr. Ryback had a brief telepathic conversation with me on a different topic, the gist of which was that he provided a quick answer to a question I had and then told me he was occupied and could not communicate any further.

Some NDErs likewise say that in their out-of-body state, they were privy to the thoughts of the medical personnel attending them, though these reports are uncommon.

It could, of course, be objected that even if there were verifiable details, Andrew's dream OBEs might not have involved "leaving the body," but instead were instances of telepathy or clairvoyance. Certain cases, however, argue against that interpretation. In these cases, the person whom Andrew was observing in his OBE became aware of his presence, or at least aware of a presence of some sort. Here are two examples.

In the first case, a friend in California named Lisa Moore called Andrew and asked if he had dreamed of her recently. He checked his journal and found a dream from two weeks earlier that did seem to involve Moore.

Moore said it was a fair description of recent events in her life connected with the death of her cat during veterinary surgery after it was run over by a car. Impressively, the unusual detail of decapitation was included in my notes. As I learned after I had read the dream to Lisa, this is the first of three cases I know of where the person I dreamed about during an OBE actually saw me at their location. Because of this, Lisa had expected me to call and tell her of the dream.

When Andrew didn't call, Moore eventually called him. She had waited two weeks, meaning that the time frame in which the OBE/dream took place matched the event she remembered.

Here's another case in which Andrew's presence seems to have been detected by the person he was observing.

I will at some point within the OBE begin to feel exceedingly tired. This leads to a gradual collapse into “unconsciousness” within the dream followed by waking in my bed. In one veridical example from April 22, 1990, I observed my mother in her apartment, which was about 2,800 miles from where I was sleeping. I saw that she was on a date with someone and that they were listening to Schubert while she cooked something in her kitchen. While watching this, I suddenly became very tired and leaned into a wall opposite my mother’s position in the kitchen. I then sank to the floor along it, making a kind of scraping noise against the wall. My mother suddenly turned to look directly at me as if alarmed, and then I woke. I called my mother later in the day and verified various elements of the dream. To my surprise, she said that she had been surprised while cooking that night by a strange sound coming from the wall opposite her. She said it sounded like a paper bag being scraped against the wall as it fell to the floor, followed by a thud, but she saw no source for the noise.

Other cases do not include this element, but are notable for their unusual content.

In a dream from August 12, 2003, the spirit of a recently deceased young woman gave me an urgent and disturbing warning for a relative of hers named James. James was a clerk who worked at an art supply store I shopped at occasionally. I had spoken to James on a handful of occasions while purchasing art supplies, but did not know him well. Though hesitant to pass on the warning to James, I did do it. James confirmed that his sister-in-law, with whom he was close, died within the last two weeks when her car was rammed by a police car during a high-speed car chase. He stated that she had appeared to him earlier that week in a dream and given him the same warning she had given me in my dream ...

One dramatic OBE involved a friend and colleague of my wife’s, named Joseph Fazecas, who lived in Manhattan. At the time, we lived in Weehawken [New Jersey]. I dreamed that I visited Fazecas at the hospital. During the OBE, I was sure he had died. After describing this to my wife, she became alarmed and called her office, where they both worked, to check on him. He wasn’t at work because a little earlier he’d had a serious heart attack and had been taken to the hospital for coronary bypass surgery. He survived the crisis, but—as an aside—I wonder if he had an NDE and if that is why I thought he was dead.

Some of Andrew's OBEs involved much greater distances. In two cases, he saw events in the life of a friend named Richard Breedon, a physicist working in Japan. In the first such episode, he observed Breedon "doing something to these little wafers, or tiles. They have letters written on them and are a little bigger than scrabble pieces. He tosses them into the box when he is done with them."

Breedon, who is skeptical of psi, confirmed that he had been labeling small pre-amplifier cards with lettering that resembled the letters on Scrabble game pieces, and that he had placed them into a box when finished.

The second episode is more ambiguous, since it includes misses as well as hits. Still, it appears that Andrew did observe a Japanese woman assisting Breedon in carrying a large electronic keyboard from his car to his office. Andrew did not identify it as a keyboard, but he described its general size and appearance accurately. Some other details of the OBE were wrong (Andrew placed Breedon's office on the wrong floor, depicted extra doorways in the floor plan, and incorrectly said the woman was wearing an unusual hat), but the hits are still specific enough to be of interest.

In another case involving Breedon (who had moved to California by then), Andrew

dreamed that I visited Breedon and his wife Pat as she gave birth to twins in California. At the time I lived about 3,000 miles away, in Maine. I immediately sent an email to congratulate him. He responded with the following message:

Right you are! Born just hours before the time your message arrived here. How do you do it? I showed your message to two professors I work with. One said you had had to get it off the Internet (although I made absolutely no postings), the other simply said, “very good!”

It should be noted that Pat gave birth six weeks prematurely and that I was not tracking her pregnancy ... Breedon read the message at his office on his way home from the hospital at about 5:00 a.m., prior to his having notified anyone that his children had been born.

Finally, Andrew offers a particularly detailed example in which he saw his uncle and aunt discussing a painting his uncle had just done. Andrew's sketch of the painting, made in his journal, matches the size, dimensions, and general appearance of the actual painting quite closely, and his description of the color scheme is correct. This is especially impressive given that the shape of the painting was unusual, and the subject, a landscape, is depicted in a stylized manner. Moreover, the uncle had never before shown an interest in painting, and Andrew was unaware that he had recently taken it up. (This was, in fact, his very first painting.) The distance again was considerable - Andrew was in New Jersey, and his relatives were in Minnesota.

These examples were culled from 92 veridical OBEs recorded in Andrew's journals. Even one such case, if it is genuine, is sufficient to cast doubt on physicalist theories of the mind's unbreakable dependency on the brain. More to the point, they pose a problem for the skeptical view that veridical NDEs can be explained by normal sensory perception or mistaken memories. In these OBEs, memory problems are not an issue, since the episodes were recorded and verified immediately. And sensory leakage cannot be a factor in observing events that took place a thousand miles away (or more). Even "ordinary" psi does not seem to explain those cases in which the discarnate Andrew was seen or heard by the people he was observing.

What, then, do skeptics have to say? Richard Breedon wrote to James Randi for his input. Randi reportedly replied:

When I was a kid, I successfully predicted the outcomes of hockey games by having some 30 different letters notarized, each different from the others, and merely produced the correct one after the game.

Andrew writes:

By this he meant to insinuate that I could have intentionally hoaxed Breedon. By extension, Randi’s suggestion implied that even if I had notarized every page of the journal, a very expensive proposition for my limited means at the time, a critic could simply make the false claim that alternate notarized pages existed to demonstrate that notarization or any other form of proof can be manipulated into meaninglessness by a determined individual. The very same criticism can be leveled at any document created by any person for any purpose. In other words, at this level, the criticism is worthless because it can be suggested of anything.

Of mice and men

My last two posts covered the discovery of an electrical surge in the brains of lab rats subjected to cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. The study has been touted as a possible explanation for near-death experiences.

Arguments about the study quickly become technical, as people debate whether the spikes in certain brainwave frequencies (in the context of greatly reduced overall brain activity) could account for the elaborate structure and intense imagery of a full-blown NDE. I'm certainly not competent to weigh in on this question. The argument made by the study's authors is found here; an opposing argument made by an NDE researcher is here.

Another possible weakness of the hypothesis is perhaps more easily tested. In the study, the rats' brains were monitored (using intracranial electrodes) throughout the waking state, anesthesia, and cardiac arrest (or asphyxiation). No surge was recorded during anesthesia. This has led some to argue that the surge cannot be responsible for an NDE, since NDEs do sometimes occur under anesthesia.

In thinking about this, I wondered if we might be mixing apples and oranges. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of NDEs (though there can be considerable overlap). The first kind are what might be called veridical or autoscopic NDEs, and are basically out-of-body experiences in which the person hovers over his physical body and observes what's happening around him. The second kind are transcendent NDEs, in which the person experiences a trip toward (or into) a bright light, reunion with deceased loved ones, a life review, and a decision (made by himself or others) to return to earthly life. Not all of these components are found in the typical transcendent NDE, but normally at least one of them is.

It seems clear that the veridical NDEs (or OBEs) cannot be associated with the electrical surge. Not only do such NDEs and OBEs occur under anesthesia, when there is no surge, but they also occur in other situations where the brain is not in any distress. It is even possible to learn to bring on such OBEs at will.

That leaves the transcendent experience. Could this be tied to the surge? Could the "hyperarousal" of the brain at certain frequencies be enough to produce a vivid, extended hallucination of going into the light, meeting the dead, judging one's life, and returning?

The fairest way to address this question is to see if transcendent experiences have been documented under conditions where the surge would not be a factor – such as anesthesia. After all, we already know from the rat study that anesthetized rats do not exhibit an electrical surge. So, do anesthetized patients report transcendent NDEs, or only autoscopic NDEs/OBEs?

In search of an answer, I looked at three books from my shelf – admittedly only a small fraction of the vast NDE literature.

In Intimations of Immortality, Robert Crookall recounts several cases of anesthetized patients who had what we would now call autoscopic NDEs (though the term "near-death experience" had not been coined when Crookall was writing). None of them recounted a transcendent NDE.

In Crookall's More Astral Projections, in the section titled "Enforced Out-of-the-Body Experiences," Crookall includes more cases of NDEs under anesthesia. Nearly all are autoscopic. In one case, a patient reported, "I found myself proceeding along a straight black tube with hardly room to move," but there was no mention of a bright light or heavenly realm. Another patient found himself  "in a dark, windy, cold tunnel [and] could see distant lights," but again the experience went no further.

One transcendent case involved the patient's visit to a brightly glowing room, where he was surrounded by smiling people, including his deceased wife. But this patient's heart stopped on the operating table, so the transcendent NDE could have been associated with cardiac arrest, not anesthesia.

Crookall does, however, list one transcendent NDE under anesthesia that apparently did not involve cardiac arrest. A Mr. Roberts encountered "a phalanx of stalwart figures" who escorted his astral body back into his physical body. These figures told him, "Time's up – go back now." Unfortunately no details of the surgery (or any complications) are reported.

Finally, I looked at Michael B. Sabom’s Recollections of Death. Sabom includes the case of a patient who had an autoscopic NDE/OBE while under anesthesia, and who previously had another autoscopic NDE during cardiac arrest. Neither experience was of the transcendent type, but the patient still reported a clear contrast between the two:

But this [anesthesia NDE] is distinctly different from the time I had a cardiac arrest … In the first experience [cardiac arrest] I died … That's a different feeling. This is more earthly, just like I had two feet planted on the ground … I don't think I died like I did before.

Sabom also includes a section titled "The Transcendental Surgical Experience," which covers nine patients. One of them had a full-blown transcendent NDE, in which he visited a beautiful world and met a spiritual figure (interpreted as Christ) before being told to return. But this man "had required resuscitation from a cardiac arrest at the end of his surgery." So again, the transcendent NDE could be linked to heart failure. Similarly, another patient who had a transcendent NDE during surgery (in this case, an encounter with a bright light) was told by his doctor, "We lost all life signs while you were on the operating table."

I realize not much can be concluded from three books. But it would be interesting to know if transcendent (as opposed to autoscopic) NDEs are largely absent from anesthesia cases. If so, it might suggest that the autoscopic NDE/OBE is a manifestation of latent psi powers (perhaps activated by the shutdown of ordinary consciousness) while the transcendent NDE is linked to the end-of-life electrical surge recorded in rats and in some human subjects.

What's needed is more info. If someone can point me to a case(s) of a transcendental NDE occurring during anesthesia, in the absence of a life-threatening surgical complication, I'd be much obliged. Please note that I'm mainly concerned with well-documented, independently investigated cases; self-reported cases on sites like NDERF, while interesting, are inevitably more open to doubt.

OBEs on demand

Here's a brief Popular Science piece on a woman who apparently can have out-of-body experiences at will. Excerpt:

The most exciting thing about this case, to me, is "the possibility that this phenomenon may have a significant incidence but [is] unreported because people do not think this is exceptional," as the authors wrote. "Alternatively," they continued, "the ability might be present in infancy but is lost without regular practice. This would be reminiscent of the discovery and eventual study of synesthesia that some researchers now hypothesize is more prevalent in young people or can be developed."

The piece drew a retort from another PopSci writer who wants us to know that the woman only thinks she is having OBEs, and there is no proof that she's actually observing her environment from outside her body. Which is fair enough, though I would think it's pretty obvious. The original article even notes that an fMRI scan of the woman during one of her OBEs showed activation of parts of the brain associated with "mental representations of bodily movement," which could suggest that her OBEs are imaginary.

As always, more study is neeeded ...