{"id":98581,"date":"2022-11-01T20:16:47","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T20:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=98581"},"modified":"2022-11-01T20:16:47","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T20:16:47","slug":"a-look-at-the-afterlife-through-different-ndes-and-scientific-considerations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/a-look-at-the-afterlife-through-different-ndes-and-scientific-considerations\/","title":{"rendered":"A look at the afterlife through different NDEs and scientific considerations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat occurs when we die?<\/em>\u201d Human beings have asked this question probably more than any other, with \u201cDoes God exist?<\/em>\u201d and \u201cWhat is the meaning of life?<\/em>\u201d coming in as close seconds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

All three, of course, are intertwined, but while the reality of God and the solution to life\u2019s riddle may be grasped in the here and now, many think that the only way we can know for certain what occurs after death only after we die.<\/p>\n

But is it really the case that the answer to what occurs after death lies beyond a threshold which, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed? While messages from the dead fill folklore, myth, and religions around the world and through the ages have in different ways assured their devotees of the reality of an afterlife, many people are nevertheless not entirely certain that anything awaits them beyond the grave \u2013 except perhaps annihilation, which is, of course, the standard modern view.<\/p>\n

In recent times, however, assurances of a continuity of consciousness beyond the brain have come, interestingly enough, from science.<\/p>\n

Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2001 a paper appeared in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet<\/em> purporting to show evidence supporting the reality of Near-Death Experiences, or NDEs. In \u201cNear-death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands<\/em>,\u201d the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel and his research team presented the results of a twenty-year long study of the experiences reported by patients who survived heart failure.<\/p>\n

That these patients reported being aware of anything during cardiac arrest was amazing enough. The standard view is that when the heart and lungs stop so do the brain and consciousness. What should have occurred was that they experienced nothing at all. Nevertheless, they did.<\/p>\n

The patients Lommel studied reported that during the period of unconsciousness brought on by their seizure, they experienced some very remarkable events indeed. Many recounted feelings of bliss and intense happiness; many spoke of a bright white light, of a tunnel, of seeing deceased relatives and of going through a kind of \u201clife review<\/em>,\u201d in which their entire lives, as the clich\u00e9 goes, \u201cpassed before their eyes<\/em>.\u201d Many spoke of having an \u201cout-of-the-body experience<\/em>,\u201d of seeing themselves and their nurses and doctors from some vantage point near the ceiling. Many spoke of guides, angels and spirits, coming to comfort them. Many also assured Lommel that the experience was entirely beneficial, that it relieved them of their fear of death, that it had transformed them in some way, and that it gave them the certainty that the life we know here on earth is not the only one.<\/p>\n

Lommel\u2019s Lancet <\/em>paper understandably caused an uproar, yet the research was impressive. The statistics Lommel and his team provided seem to show that the usual explanations given to account for NDEs \u2013 from the mainstream scientific view \u2013 did not, at least in these cases, work. Lommel studied some 562 survivors of cardiac arrest and he discovered that up to 18% of them reported having had a NDE. Of these, none could be chalked up to oxygen deficiency to the brain, the effects of drugs, or the other physiological or psychological reasons usually offered as a way of explaining the phenomenon. Lommel and his team concluded the NDE was an actual, objective event and that it argued in favour of some kind of \u2018post-death<\/em>\u2019 survival.<\/p>\n

Perhaps even more controversial, the findings also seemed to offer proof that consciousness can exist outside or even without the brain. While most mainstream scientists will merely snort at the idea of an afterlife, they will positively bellow at the suggestion consciousness is anything more than a by-product of that three-pound mass of grey matter. According to a number of prestigious neuroscientists and philosophers of conscience, \u2013 some of them are discussed in the book \u201cA Secret History of Consciousness<\/em>\u201d \u2013 consciousness is absolutely, positively, 100% produced by the brain.<\/p>\n

Lommel was unrepentant and in 2007 he produced a book, \u201cConsciousness Beyond Life<\/em>\u201d, based on his paper, presenting his case studies in greater depth and bringing his research to a wider public. The results were encouraging. The book was a bestseller in the Netherlands, then repeated its success in Germany, the UK and the US. Lommel has presented his ideas in interviews and videos and on television.<\/p>\n

Lommel\u2019s work has, of course, attracted criticism. Yet his findings seem to stand and for the open-conscience provide the kind of \u2018hard\u2019 evidence that scientists dismissive of any non-materialist accounts of consciousness demand, in order for them to consider changing their minds in any way about the matter.<\/p>\n

A neurosurgeon visits \u201cheaven\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lommel was not the only medical practitioner to take NDEs seriously and to subject them to study. Even more controversial than Lommel\u2019s findings was the account by the American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander of his own NDE. Alexander had twenty-five years\u2019 experience studying the brain and teaching others how to study it, at institutions such as the Harvard Medical School. Like most of his colleagues, he accepted the dogma that the brain produces consciousness.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then, in 2008, a bacterial infection \u2013 a rare form of meningitis \u2013 had him in a coma for a week and taught him otherwise. His chances of recovery were slim at best, and his family was advised that if he did survive, he would be little more than a vegetable: the infection had caused irreparable brain damage. Yet on the seventh day under a ventilator Alexander opened his eyes and came to life. This was a miracle. But the story Alexander had to tell was even more remarkable.<\/p>\n

The white light was there, and also beautiful melodies, angelic choirs, fantastic landscapes with amazing plant life, waterfalls, crystal pools, and thousands of beings, dancing, and a girl who came to him on a butterfly wing. During the week of his coma, when his brain shouldn\u2019t have produced the slightest hallucination \u2013 should have produced no consciousness at all \u2013 Alexander went on a journey to \u201chigher realms<\/em>\u201d and eventually to what he calls the \u201cCore<\/em>,\u201d a centre of reality \u201cfilled with the infinite healing power of the all-loving Creator,<\/em>\u201d the source of everything. He was privy to fundamental realities, for which \u201cGod seemed too puny a little human word.<\/em>\u201d He speaks of experiencing a \u201chigher dimensional multiverse<\/em>\u201d and an \u201coversphere<\/em>\u201d and that his notions of time, space, and everything else were radically transformed. During his coma he underwent a kind of spiritual evolution, from what he calls the \u201cEarthworm\u2019s Eye View<\/em>\u201d to the Core, many times, learning truths about the nature of existence and our part in it. One truth was about the reality of the afterlife, knowledge of which Alexander has pursued to pass on to his many readers in his bestselling books \u201cProof of Heaven and Maps of Heaven<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Like Pim van Lommel, Alexander came to believe that human beings are much more than their physical bodies and consciousness is something more than a by-product of the brain. They disagree with the philosopher John Searle who argues that the brain produces consciousness as the liver does bile. Consciousness, they argue, is not localised in or produced by the brain because consciousness itself is the ultimate reality, not the physical world \u2013 an insight echoed down the ages by mystics and visionaries, but which in recent times it seems some scientists are cottoning on to as well. They see it as a way out of the cul-de-sac<\/em> reached by aiming to solve the \u2018hard problem\u2019 in mainstream neuroscience: how does a neuron, a physical phenomenon, become a thought? The answer is: it doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s the other way around.<\/p>\n

Filtering reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whatever we might think of Alexander\u2019s account of the afterlife and his ideas about mankind\u2019s spiritual evolution \u2013 he has since become a popular advocate of the union of science and spirituality with appearances on \u2018Oprah Winfrey<\/em>\u2019 and other talk shows \u2013 the notion of a non-local consciousness has a history. What was remarkable about the cases Lommel studied and Alexander\u2019s own, was that they reported vivid inner, transformative experience during a time when the brains involved should have been incapable of \u2018producing<\/em>\u2019 anything. If brain \u2018produces<\/em>\u2019 consciousness, this should have been impossible, rather like a flashlight shining without the battery. Some studies done in the 1960s suggest consciousness may not need much brains at all.<\/p>\n

In 1965 John Lorber, a specialist in hydrocephalus \u2013 \u201cwater on the brain<\/em>\u201d \u2013 published a paper as remarkable as Lommel\u2019s. In \u201cHydranencephaly with Normal Development<\/em>,\u201d published in Developmental Medicine and Child Psychology<\/em> for December 1965, Lorber presented several case studies in which people with little or no cerebral cortex functioned normally. In one case the subject had an IQ of 126 and an honors degree in mathematics. Two girls born in the 1960s had fluid where their cerebrums should have been, with no evidence of a cerebral cortex, yet both had perfectly normal intelligence. Unlike \u2018The Wizard of Oz<\/em>\u2019s Scarecrow, they, and the other cases Lorber studied seemed to get on perfectly well without a brain.<\/p>\n

Such cases, though well documented, may push the believability barrier, but we need not resort to these extremes to argue the brain does not \u2018produce<\/em>\u2019 consciousness. In the late nineteenth century the philosopher Henri Bergson argued eloquently that, rather than produce consciousness, the brain served an eliminatory function, acting as a reducing valve, filtering reality and allowing only what was necessary for survival to reach conscious awareness. Rather than produce consciousness, the brain edits it down to something manageable, otherwise we would be overwhelmed by reality\u2019s complexity, a condition common to many mystics.<\/p>\n

The fact that in the cases Lommel studied and in Alexander\u2019s own, the brain was out of commission, seems to support the Bergson thesis. With the filters off, much more of Reality \u2013 called by some \u201cConscience at Large<\/em>\u201d \u2013 became available. If the brain \u201cmutes\u201d reality, allowing only a \u201cthin trickle<\/em>\u201d to enter consciousness, in the NDE the taps seem to be on full blast. The analogy is apt as our kitchen taps do not \u2018produce<\/em>\u2019 the water in our sinks, but quite the opposite, they stop it from running. It\u2019s already there in the pipes.<\/p>\n

Some variant of Bergson\u2019s idea is popular among \u2018alternative\u2019 scientists, such as the biologist Rupert Sheldrake who speaks of the brain acting as a kind of \u201ctuner<\/em>,\u201d \u201cselecting<\/em>\u201d different \u201cwavelengths<\/em>\u201d of reality, rather as a radio works by cutting out all transmissions except the one you wish to hear, or as a television that picks up a broadcast but is not responsible for it. Neither my radio nor my television \u2018produces\u2019 the programs they play. They \u2018receive\u2019 them from the broadcaster, and Sheldrake and other scientists and philosophers like him, see the brain as a kind of inner TV, picking out different \u2018channels<\/em>\u2019, broadcast by \u2013 well, we\u2019re not quite sure. The general idea is that consciousness is the fundamental reality; rather than being stuffed into the cramp confines of our skulls, it pervades the universe. This is the \u201cpanpsychism<\/em>\u201d that philosopher David Chalmers advocates, following in the philosophical footsteps of Bergson and his contemporary Alfred North Whitehead, who, in different ways, envisioned some version of \u201cConsicence at Large<\/em>\u201d. Needless to say \u2013 or perhaps not \u2013 such an idea as an all-pervasive consciousness is, of course, a staple part of many pre-modern worldviews.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another who accepted the idea of Conscience at Large was an early investigator into NDEs, although in his aptly posthumous \u201cHuman Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death<\/em>\u201d (1903), the first \u201cscientific<\/em>\u201d study of the afterlife, F.W.H. Myers did not call them that. Myers spoke of the \u201csubliminal conscience<\/em>,\u201d by which he meant something different than Freud\u2019s \u201cunconscious<\/em>,\u201d which Myers\u2019 coinage preceded by some years. In the foreword to Myers\u2019 classic, Aldous Huxley compares the \u201csubliminal conscience<\/em>\u201d to an \u201cupstairs<\/em>\u201d in the \u201chouse of the soul<\/em>,\u201d rather than Freud\u2019s \u201cgarbage-littered basement.<\/em>\u201d This upstairs had some unusual characteristics and in the late nineteenth century Myers and his fellows in the Society for Psychical Research devoted their lives to studying them.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the remarkable experience of Dr. A. S. Wiltse who in 1889 \u201cdied<\/em>\u201d from typhoid fever. Wiltse was pronounced dead but found himself \u201cwaking up<\/em>\u201d inside his body, and gradually being \u201creleased<\/em>\u201d from it. He felt himself emerge from his body and found that he could walk away from it. No one noticed him and he found that he could walk through people. Wiltse then found himself confronting huge rocks standing beneath storm clouds. A voice told him that if he continued past them he would enter eternity but if desired he could return to life, a common choice in many modern NDEs. He then \u201cwoke up<\/em>,\u201d four hours after being pronounced dead, and told of what he saw.<\/p>\n

Myers\u2019 account of Dr. Wiltse\u2019s experience was preceded by an even earlier one. In 1871 Albert Heim, a professor of geology, fell some seventy metres while climbing in the Alps. During the few seconds of his fall, Heim experienced a panoramic \u201clife review<\/em>,\u201d seeing his whole past \u201ctake place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me.<\/em>\u201d Like many who have experienced an NDE, he saw a \u201cheavenly light<\/em>\u201d and was free from fear and anxiety. Conflict was \u201ctransmuted into love<\/em>\u201d and he found himself moving \u201cpainlessly and softly<\/em>\u201d into a \u201csplendid blue heaven<\/em>.\u201d Heim survived his fall but the experience so moved him that he began to collect accounts of similar experiences by other climbers.<\/p>\n

Forgotten for years, Heim\u2019s work was re-discovered when what we might call the \u201cNDE and afterlife boom<\/em>\u201d of the 1970s and 80s, in the work of Elizabeth K\u00fcbler-Ross, Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and others, brought it back to light. Another fairly well-known account of a NDE is that of C. G. Jung, who, in 1944, following a heart attack, found himself orbiting the earth and confronting a strange temple and Hindu floating in space. Jung was about to cross the threshold like Dr. Wiltse when he found himself whisked back to earth, disappointed at the prospect of coming back to life.<\/p>\n

Do Lommel and Alexander bring anything new to this study? Their scientific and medical credentials certainly bring new attention to it, although to be sure, not all of it is positive, and the claims and expertise of both have come under heavy scrutiny and criticism. But part of what makes their and other studies convincing \u2013 at least to the open-conscience persons \u2013 is the similarity between the accounts they study and older reports on what occurs when we die. As Ptolemy Tompkins in \u201cThe Modern Book of the Dead<\/em>\u201d makes clear, there is much overlap between accounts of the afterlife found in the \u201cEgyptian Book of the Dead<\/em>\u201d and the \u201cTibetan Book of the Dead<\/em>\u201d, to speak of only the two most famous earlier reports on the beyond. And these two share much with recent investigations, such as the insights about the \u201clife between death and rebirth<\/em>\u201d gleaned by the \u201cspiritual scientist<\/em>\u201d Rudolf Steiner through his access to the \u201cAkashic Record<\/em>.\u201d For instance, Steiner too makes the \u201clife review<\/em>\u201d a central part of the process of dying, in preparation for reincarnation.<\/p>\n

But, as Tompkins makes clear, there are also differences. The Swedish scientist and religious philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote much about the brain, journeyed to heaven, hell, and also to an intermediary realm he called the \u201cspirit world<\/em>,\u201d not through a NDE but through inducing visionary states. He gave his own \u201cproof<\/em>\u201d of the higher spheres in his book \u201cHeaven and Hell<\/em>\u201d, yet his account is somewhat different from Eben Alexander\u2019s, while both Swedenborg\u2019s and Alexander\u2019s differ considerably from Steiner\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Enough similarities exist among these accounts to suggest that in some way they and other voyagers were encountering different parts of the same inner landscape. And if the \u2018proofs\u2019 of heaven we have glanced at here are at all reliable, it is one that, at some point, we all will have an opportunity to journey through, in this life and the next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nNovember 1, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat occurs when we die?\u201d Human beings have asked this question probably more than any other, with \u201cDoes God exist?\u201d and \u201cWhat is the meaning of life?\u201d coming in as close seconds. All three, of course, are intertwined, but while the reality of God and the solution to life\u2019s riddle may be grasped in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[358],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-confirms-spiritual-traditions-1603-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98599,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98581\/revisions\/98599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}