Modern medicine has developed skills and technologies used to resuscitate people from clinical death. In most cases a clinically dead person stays dead, unless somebody intervenes and resuscitates the victim by pumping blood back in the dead brain; one then becomes conscious and returns to life. The range of time that the period of death lasts is from a few minutes to cases reportedly lasting hours.
But now we come to the shocker. People who are revived from being dead report having the most extraordinary experience of their lives. The materialist would expect nothing! Instead, the trip is to a world, immense, wonderful, beautiful, and occasionally horrific. We’ve known about this other world from 1975 when Raymond Moody published. Life After Life. By now we have a growing population of people who die for a period but are restored to life. These folks uniformly report quite amazing afterworld experiences.
A highly metaphysical and emotionally charged issue is suddenly thrust into the limelight of glaring medical fact. We are told by the revived person exactly how at the time of death his consciousness appeared but outside his body, totally at peace and devoid of interest in the sight of his own corpse. People all over the planet are having near-death experiences, which to some degree, vary, due to culture. For example, unlike America, the Japanese rarely experience the life-review. Even so, overall, the experience is structurally similar, being flung as it were into an unexpected universe, not extinction. So, we now have a technology that can serve as a portal to a new dimension of experience, the very afterlife or next world we’ve all heard about. Of course, getting there by ND is not the same as going on a summer vacation. We need our scientists and artists to experiment and help us devise ways of crossing the psychic boundary without killing ourselves.
All this may sound outrageous and super-silly to our materialist friends. There are efforts to argue that the near-death experience is just a matter of hallucination. End of story. Why then do no living people showing up in these hallucinations? Why then the repeated accounts of the ND experiencer describing the minute details of doctors trying to revive their dead brains, the devices they manipulate, their verbal exchanges. Only lucid consciousness, not hallucination, could account for the accurate observations. Also, the NDE has recurrent structures, themes, motifs, drama that is not at all hallucinatory but intensely focused and meaningful.
And there’s this. The NDE transforms people in extraordinary and lasting ways. Far from hallucination, we have direct evidence that persons physically dead continue to be conscious, happy, and moreover, transformed, in values, in heart, in understanding. The NDE is a global phenomenon. It is possible to see experiencers as a branch of a new type of human being. This new type is distinguished by having direct, experiential entry into the next world that has haunted the soul and imagination of humankind since the dawn of our history. It appears that we have evolved a technology that restores the traumatized brains of dead people. When revived, they describe their disembodied, transformative, experiences.
Medical technology has, inadvertently, opened the door to a new phase of evolutionary psychology. Science is using technologies that bear on phenomena of psychospiritual transcendence. Near-death stories take us out of our body; and reveal a host of other extraordinary phenomena. Fortunately, there are less violent procedures for opening the inner gates and exploring the next world. Science, by evolving the technology of resuscitation, has created a new genre of human narrative, stories of voyages into a world perceived as more real than our familiar world and “real” in a way as ineffable as it is transcendent. The new genre consists of stories about after death experience. This is a breakthrough that opens many doors, experimental and theoretical.
3 comments:
Michael, 3 weeks before my mother passed away from complications of her dementia, she suffered a serious aspiration episode (a common occurrence in these cases) in which her heart and breathing stopped and she had to be given CPR. A few hours after being brought to the ER and stabilized I asked her whether she remembered anything about the ordeal, but she had no memory of the event from the time it occurred until she was resting and started to talk while in the ER.
In recent years I have been wondering about how dementia patients like my mother and others with other types of brain disorders/abnormalities that affect their everyday cognition would deal with a NDE. One can also wonder what their afterlife experiences are like. For instance, consider those with serious intellectual disabilities, one wonders what their mental life is like in the afterword. Anyway, I am aware of cases of paradoxical lucidity, but I don't recall ever reading about NDE reports in these populations of patients. Are you aware of any such cases?
This is a good question. I can't say from any specific cases that I can answer your question. But I can say this. If people do survive death they do so because their consciousness survives the death of their brain. That means no brain disease is there to warp or constrain consciousness. Survival of death must entail freedom from the effects of brain disease.
Ah, good point, Michael. I still wonder though. I seem to recall that during seances, certain spirit entities would behave erratically or child-like, which may have simply represented their personalities while living. But, but as currently understood, our personalities are (at least in part) a function of our brain physiochemistry. Of course, another explanation is that their manifestation is in part driven/affected or interpreted by the living.
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