Interview
On Life After Death
1-Good
evening, Professor Michael Grosso.
You taught philosophy at the University. What made you interested in the
afterlife and its manifestations?
To begin
with, before I knew what a “crisis apparition” was, my mother told me a story.
She saw an apparition of her brother at the moment he died in a hospital
several miles away. As a young
adult I once saw an apparition of my dead grandmother along with a woman I
never saw before whom I later identified in a photograph as my grandmother’s sister,
a woman long deceased I had never met or known. This, along with my my growing interest in the mind-body
problem, prompted me to investigate the various forms of alleged afterlife
evidence.
2-After
your research experience of many years, what is consciousness and what role
does it play for you?
Consciousness
is what I call the most obvious scientific mystery. Even reductive materialists like Stephen Pinker admit they
are clueless when it comes to explaining the origin of consciousness, without
which there is no awareness of the being of anything. Consciousness appears to us as the fundamental, irreducible,
many-layered fact of being. To me consciousness is the premise of my current
existence and a beacon pointing to unknown regions and dimensions of possible
exploration.
3-You
wrote a book "Experiencing the Next World Now". Many experiences such
as those of the NDE show how beyond the veil of perception of the senses and
social and religious superstructures one can experience an altered state of
consciousness that can show us the life of consciousness beyond matter. What do
you imagine the life of consciousness in the non-physical dimension will be
like?
I think
the closest analogy to our possible afterlife mode of being is the dream. The
world of our dreams is purely mental and infinitely plastic in its
phenomenology, ranging from hellish nightmares to heavenly epiphanies. The dream is often a vehicle of
paranormal cognition and creative breakthrough, the intermediate zone between
our embodied and our possible disembodied postmortem existence. The world of the arts seems to me our
best source of clues to the nature of an afterlife.
4-The
experiences of NDE and OBE or the ASC seem in many cases to produce a change of
personality in those who live these experiences and a compassionate openness
towards others. Without mentioning the many studies on the symptomatology of
these experiences, I ask you what is your opinion on the matter.
This is a
complex question. “Compassionate
openness towards others,” that is the question, the central issue, indeed, the
global challenge. At last count, about 23 or 24 wars are raging on earth now,
and governments everywhere are spending their wealth on beefing up more
diabolical weaponry. My impression
is that radically powerful ASCs (like OBEs, NDEs, and psychedelics) can sometimes
decisively alter the personality toward openness and compassion. The most dramatic is the life review of
the NDE, in which the subject relives the injuries imposed on others, but from
the point of view of the injured party.
In short, if we somehow for a moment attain to a godlike perspective on
the world, we would see and feel far more than we usually do. To reach that
point of view you have to break out of your personal perspective. But most of us suffer from a certain
sclerosis of the imagination. To
combat this, in my opinion, is a renaissance of the humanities.
5-Your
blog Consciousness Unbound is very interesting and deals with many topics
concerning consciousness, spirituality and peak experiences. You are also
interested in psychic research. Recent scientific studies (Korotkov, 2013)
demonstrate that human consciousness possesses measurable magnetic energy. How
do you think this magnetism relates or not to life in matter and life
experiences in the after-death dimension?
Bravo! I
want to read that paper. I see
this finding as supporting a general claim about the reality of psychokinesis
(PK), which is very general. The bare claim: mental states--volitions,
emotions, fantasies, frustrations, etc.—can have direct influence on physical
states. This should be obvious to
any introspective person. An angry thought will raise my blood pressure. Fear
will make my hands cold and my gut writhe. Etc. But there is also evidence that
mental states can influence external physical states, experimental and
spontaneous. There are distinct
categories of PK phenomena, and
not the least is a vast literature on paranormal healing, and growing; there is
the world of the poltergeist, all sorts of unaccountable physical hijinx; the
experimental data on materialization; the world of apports and hauntings,where
all sorts of physical events are reported. Not only is the idea of PK induced magnetism plausible, but
in fact the PK phenomena take us beyond the laws of physics today. The roles of hyperspace and quantum
mechanics have been discussed in efforts to make sense of the physical
phenomena, all of which must have bearing on our thoughts of post-biological
survival.
6-The
ecstatic path in mysticism as an experience of contact with the divine. Is this
path predestined in some men or is it for everyone?
In moods
of evolutionary optimism, I like to imagine a time when human common sense will
have absorbed something of a mystical tincture, so there might be a
developmental trend toward a higher mode of consciousness. Another optimistic fantasy I entertain
would be something like reinventing the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mystery practices,
in which people would undergo a ritual transformation, a long fast crowned by
drinking a psychedelic brew that induced a vision of Persephone, goddess of the
underworld. This was a psychic and
a social form of human transformation we might reconstruct for today’s world. Not about a Greek goddess but suited to
each person’s spiritual symbols and metaphors.
7-Materialistic
science does not share the existence of the soul in metaphysical terms since it
believes that, despite several studies, it is not measurable. How can post-materialism
tell us about the soul and its functions?
Measure
has to do with mathematized physical space, not applicable to the way the
concept of soul is used. Soul is
less a thing than a process of mental life. The post-materialist is already
engaged with soul life through his feelings, memories, dreams, desires,
reasonings, passions, the whole of one’s mental life, conscious and subliminal.
Soul, as Keats wrote in a famous letter, is what we are forever making in the
face of a daunting but equally wondrous stream of complex experience. The soul-deprived and soul-hungry need
but turn the mysterious beam of their consciousness on themselves.
8-A
science of states of consciousness. There are many studies now analyzing alleged
ASC experiences. But there is still no science and perhaps there is no need. It
seems more useful to understand the mechanisms of the activation of these
states and their usefulness for human evolution. What is your point of view?
I
couldn’t agree more. We need to
understand that there are mechanisms, practices we can pursue that promise to
open us to altered modes of perception and
altered modes of action. The science, or knowledge, that we need is
personal and indeed existential. An ironical twist here: objective science is
telling us we have ten years before climate catastrophe overtakes us and
destroys world civilization. All we have to fight back is the soul and its
elusive science.
9-What
does soulmaking mean to you today?
For me,
soulmaking means two great things conducive to saving the world from human
greed, malice and suicidal stupidity. Two items, mutually supportive: empathy
for all sentient beings, including those we righteously loathe and despise and radically rethinking and transforming
our relationship to the natural world, shifting from the murderously
exploitative to a life-affirming partnersnhip.
10-You
have written a book "Frontiers of the Soul". Chapters on the
parapsychology of religion. God, the myth, the spiritual experience. The new
forms of contemporary spirituality seem to slowly detach from religion and be
"spiritual but not religious". Do you think this was an element that
already belonged to the mystics of the past and is only now being revealed?
Yes, I
do. The part of religion many
people crave is the part that touches and frees their soul and spirit, expands
their sense of life, extends it perhaps into a fuller mode of afterlife
existence. The part of religion that is detestable is the cruelty and
fanaticism, and the unholy lust for power that drives the dialectic of
damnable religionism.
11
-Beyond physicalism and the irreducible mind. The challenge to reductive and
monist scientific materialism is not really a challenge since it is expressed
as the result of a limited paradigm for minds that do not have access to the
transpersonal dimension. The question is: In your opinion is scientific
materialism to be limited or the type of men who propose it to be unsuitable
for a broader science that includes the non-material dimension?
Scientific
materialism is not a crime but it leaves out the inner dimension of the human
adventure and has become the servant of two trends that singly and combined are
driving the entire planet toward climate/nuclear Armageddon: consumerism and militarism. The details for the latter proposition
are before us in the news every hour of every day.
12- We
were delighted with Julian Jaynes's theories on the collapse of the bicameral
mind and the birth of consciousness to find a theory that defines the mind that
speaks to the divine. Can you tell us about your opinion on the relationship of
mind and soul and their relationship to human consciousness?
Thanks for
this concluding question that has baffled and inspired the humblest and the
greatest of minds. When I was
about 18 years old I walked into the Vedanta Society somewere on New York’s
East Side. The first thing I saw
on the wall was a quote from the Rig Veda: “Truth is one; people call it
variously.” That confirmed my own intuition, and it’s what I believe
today. From the Upanishads I
further refined the intuition of a single source of divine power and
illumination, the root of all the insights, visions, and inspirations that gave
rise to the great historical religions; the magical and shamanic traditions;
the isolated flowerings of genius in all walks of life—a process that never
stops.
The
situation today is unique, however. It now appears as the result of encroaching
climate catastrophe that we can speak of a global near-death experience. I’ll end with a question: will these
mega challenges serve in the long run to awaken the latent consciousness we
associate with near-death transformation?