Paranormalia

Distressing Near-Death Experiences

It's easy to forget, amid the hype: not all near-death experiences are about light and bliss. I've been reading a new ebook, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences by Nancy Evans Bush.

Bush herself had an experience of this kind when she was 28, in labour with her second child. She left her body and saw the hospital and town receding swiftly below her, then had the feeling of hurtling into space. The darkness was immense.

Then this happened:

A group of circles appeared ahead and slightly to my left, perhaps a half-dozen of them, moving toward me. Half black and half white, they clicked as they flew, snapping white-to-black, black-to-white, sending an authoritative message without words. Somehow its meaning was clear: "This is all there is. This is all there ever was. This is It. Anything else you remember is a joke. You are not real. You never were real. You never existed. Your life never existed. The world never existed. It was a game you were allowed to invent. There was never anything, or anyone. That's the joke - that it was all a joke."

The circles felt heckling but not evil, mocking, mechanistic, clicking without feeling. They seemed like messengers, certain of what they were saying, not ultimate authority themselves but with an authoritative message.

Bush argued passionately to prove them wrong, bringing up details of her family and her relationships, historical facts, the fact of other people's existence. But the circles kept up their mocking.

And then I was entirely alone. The circles had moved out of sight, and there was nothing left - the world unreal and gone, and with it my first baby, and this baby who would never be born, and all other babies. Everyone I knew and loved - (but how had I known them, if they were never real?) - gone, and hills, and robins. There was no world, no home, no babies, not even a self to go home to. I thought that no one could bear so much grief, but there seemed no end to it and no way out. Everyone, everything, gone, even God, and I was alone forever in the swimming twilight dark.

Coming to in a hospital bed, her first thought was: Calvin was right about predestination. She was one of the lost. That is what it would be like when she died. She struggled for the next few years, bringing up her two infant children and wondering 'how so much tiredness can exist in someone who does not exist'.

Twenty years later Bush answered an advertisement for a job as office manager at a non-profit start-up in the nearby University of Connecticut. By chance, this turned out to be the International Association for Near-Death Studies, and she has been closely involved with it ever since.

Where positive experiences are concerned it's challenging enough to come up with an explanation. But at least they are satisfying and life-affirming. What are we to think about something like this? And why would someone like Bush - a preacher's daughter with an active life in the church - be burdened in this way?

Within the spirituality movement a popular explanation is based on psychology. If you have a bad spiritual experience it's because there's something wrong with your personality: you're cold, rigid, unloving, fearful, mean. Bush is in a strong position to understand the absolute falsity of this equation, as there's no data to support it. (Curiously, researchers who resort to it never wonder whether a person who had a blissful NDE actually deserved it.)

The conventional wisdom is that one is rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad. For fundamentalist Christians, it has as much to do with belief. But these ideas were already suspect in the positive experiences, and are further refuted by the negative ones. Even Christian saints had hellish experiences, as a description by Teresa of Avila makes clear. There's no correlation between beliefs and/or behaviour on the one hand and what one may experience in a near-death situation.

When Maurice Rawlings's book Beyond Death's Door about hellish experiences was first published it seemed obvious that he was biased by his fundamentalist Christian convictions. That weakened his credibility in the research community, and meant that the phenomenon was downplayed.

In the 1990s Bush collaborated with researcher Bruce Greyson on a survey. It took them nine years to gather information on fifty cases; that's not necessarily because they are more rare than the positive kind, more likely because people are deeply reluctant to open up about them. The impact on the experiencers had been appalling: several of were still in psychotherapy as long as twenty years later, Bush says.

The survey showed there was no universal 'distressing' experience; in fact, there was more variety than with the positive kind. Three types emerged. The most common was where the elements of the pleasurable kind were experienced as terrifying. Then there was Bush's type - of existing in a limitless, featureless void that creates feelings of emptiness and fatalistic despair A more rare category corresponds to some extent with the hell of the popular imagination - demons and hellfire, and so on.

Bush frankly admits that no one knows why some people have these experiences. But the effort of coming terms with her own has led her into a full and profound reflection on the issue, exploring a spirituality in which the experience of suffering has full expression.

Her thought ranges widely, but in essence it's about integration. She sees the meaningful outcome of suffering in transformation, what Jung calls 'individuation' - the ultimate stage of psychological or moral development (a moralistic view of suffering as punishment seemed to him too to be inadequate and misleading). Interestingly, Bush also recalls the psychic dismemberment of a shamanic initiate, a painful and apparently destructive process which again is conceived not a punishment but as a means of leading the apprentice towards his/her destiny (similar, she also suggests, to the religious significance of the crucifixion of Jesus).

I have to confess, I found the description of her experience so shocking that I too found myself searching for quick rational explanations - a process she rightly considers suspect. I thought for instance there might be some karmic element: the experiencer is being punished for something, if not in this life then in a previous one.

I wondered too about the mocking derision in the 'message' she was given, so similar to the kind of thing directed at believers by atheists and sceptics. By chance blogger Michael Prescott addressed this in a recent post, in which he summarised their point of view rather effectively as follows (I hope he won't mind me quoting it):

None of the key developments in your life was somehow meant for you. No one is looking out for you. No events in your past happened for a reason, and they aren't building up to any future purpose. The story of your life has no continuity and no destination - heck, it's not even a story - and there is nothing to strive for. You were not put here for a reason, you don't matter, and you're deluded if you think you have a "mission" in life. Face facts! You have no calling! The universe couldn't care less about you! Just give up!!!

It's easy to construct some narrative along the lines of a destructive atheist being made to experience, in a future existence, the effects of his/her corrosive mockery on other people. But such facile approaches won't do. However much we want a rational explanation for human suffering and evil - and however much we doubt the materialist explanation - we have eventually to face up to the fact of it, and deal with it in an interior way, not look for reasons to push it to the side. And to ask why a nice young Sunday school teacher would suddenly have her life blighted by an appalling 'truth' is perhaps not so different from asking why innocent people are brutalised by the powerful, why many suffer from poverty and unemployment, why little children are born with painful diseases and disfigurements, and so on.

I agree with Bush when she points out that we have a very skewed perspective on this. As she says, we live in a 'culture of unparalleled privilege at a time of almost obsessive flight from even minor inconvenience and discomfort. Even in a decade of unaccustomed economic hardship, technology and material progress are shielding us from the magnitude of deprivation and sheer physical pain that the majority of others, including our ancestors, have taken for granted.'

It sometimes seems as if contemporary spirituality, too, sees suffering as an irrelevance and an inconvenience. Over the years I've noticed that some of its most enthusiastic advocates are horribly shocked when bad things happen to them, and find that their enlightened attitudes and behaviour offer no protection. But they may gradually discover that dealing with the pain becomes itself a path to deeper understanding.

It's perhaps not well understood that a positive near-death experience itself is free of challenges of this kind. As a veteran official of IANDS, Bush has long experience of dealing with NDEers, and dispenses with some popular misconceptions. The stereotype of the experiencer returning 'garlanded with saintliness and brimming with answers to life's questions' was always a myth, she points out. Audiences want to hear them talking about the spiritually uplifting stuff, but when they get together among themselves all they want to talk about are the life-problems - depression, domestic bust-ups, etc - that they too suffered as a result.

All this said, I'm personally left with a sense about the NDE phenomenon which the distressing variety does nothing to weaken: its apparently didactic nature. These aren't just random experiences that happen to individuals. They're shared with the rest of us. We don't feel the full impact, but they can draw us to ponder and investigate. It's as though there's a deliberate educational process going on.

In Bush's case, there's an intriguing clue embedded in the experience itself: the white and black circles.

Some six years afterwards, visiting a friend, she chanced to look into a book about Jungian symbols and was horrified to see the circles represented in an illustration - exactly as she remembered them. They were the classic yin and yang circles, each containing an element of the other. The message is inescapable: the light and the dark are part of each other.

Added to the curious synchronicity of her getting a job at a research organisation dedicated to investigating the near-death phenomenon - at a time when she did not even know there was such a thing - and the eventual production of a thoughtful exploration that can help others towards a deeper understanding, one is left with the reassuring feeling that this apparently random horror may have some positive purpose after all.

Jonny Wilkinson's Search for Truth

I don't much associate rugby players with spirituality, so it's interesting to see what is being said about Jonny Wilkinson on his retirement from the game. Wilko was no common or garden sporting star. There was something oddly religious about his quest for perfection on the pitch, especially the obsessive practising at drop-kicks and conversions, that paid off so spectacularly in the 2003 World Cup. He seemed always, as Donald McRae says in his send-off piece, to "delve within himself in an apparent search for purity and truth."

That unflinching mentality was complicated by a puritanical streak that meant Wilkinson imagined every minute of his day was recorded by a hidden video camera. At night, he pretended that the instance of which he was least proud would be screened back to himself and the people he loved most. "I follow this ethos because, when I go to bed, I want to feel I've done absolutely all I can to move forward in my life. I need that intense self-scrutiny."

Was this determination to excel behind the perpetual injuries that eventually blighted his career? In another life Wilkinson might have been an ascetic hermit or a Jesuit, pushing himself to the limits. He seems to have a philosophical bent: he read up on quantum physics and took to Buddhism and meditation to help him moderate his obsessive perfectionism. People "scratched their heads in confusion" about it, McRae says.

Sports interviewers did maybe, but many other people will understand where Wilkinson is coming from. The remark about the hidden video camera recording his life is particularly interesting, being suggestive of the near-death experience. It got me thinking, because it's pretty much what I feel also, although without focusing on it particularly. I've become so convinced by the logic of psychic phenomena in general, and the near-death experience in particular - the materialist dismissal of the phenomenon as a hallucination seems to me to be scientifically incoherent - that I'm bound to pay attention to the implications. That means I take it for granted that everything I do and think is being recorded in some sense, and that one day I'll have to review the whole thing from start to finish. And quite possibly to have to keep on doing so. My past life will be my 'project'.

So the image has become part of the framework that governs my mind and in a certain sense acts as a restraint or as an incentive, as the circumstances require. In my case this has little to do with concepts of 'religion' or 'faith' or 'belief'; it's simply a logical step to take. If I'm going to be stuck with my life, as a product, so to speak, I'd ideally like it to be a class product, not trash.

Now since the near-death experience is so well known, it seems likely to me that a great many people allow themselves to be guided by it in the same way. In which case, the idea of a judgement at the end of life, powerfully present throughout the Christian era, remains equally present now, in a modified form.

I'm not sure how well this is understood by those people who long for the "death of religion". Richard Dawkins is on typically crowing form today in the New Statesman, pointing out that the latest Social Attitudes study published last week paints an increasingly grim picture for religion in Britain. In 1983 one in three did not have a religion, but by 2010 this has become one in two.

[The study] clearly demonstrates that religious affiliation, religious observance and religious attitudes to social issues have all continued their long-term decline and are now irrelevant to all but a minority of the population. When it comes to life choices, social attitudes, moral dilemmas and sense of identity, religion is on its deathbed, even for many of those who still nominally identify with a religion.

One could argue that if 50% of the population said 'yes' when asked if they had a religion this is quite a high figure, in a society that is usually described as secular. The concept of 'having a religion' is a rather vague one anyway: it doesn't imply actual belief. I'd also query what we are actually measuring here. The real decline is in traditional church-going, especially in the Anglican Church, which has apparently halved since 1983 to 20%. But church-going really only correlates with religiosity, not with inner beliefs.

What surveys like this seem to ignore is the growing interest in spirituality. According to Penny Sartori's Hereafter Report last January, in a poll of 3000 Brits, 66% said they believed in some form of afterlife and almost all believed their actions in this life would affect their circumstances in the next. I'd say this is a pretty high number, and not particularly indicative of increasing secularity.

So what Jonny Wilkinson talks about - and what sounds outlandish in the context of a sports interview - is quite likely what a large proportion of the population actually thinks. We may no longer require religion in the traditional Dawkinsian sense of the term to help us make life choices and sort out moral dilemmas. But things have moved on, and there are other models that we can use, that are not exactly secular.

The Realness of NDEs

Robert Perry has been thinking deep thoughts about near-death experiences: Why do they seem so real?

He quotes a conversation he had with psychologist and NDE researcher Bruce Greyson, who told him he once interviewed

a schizophrenic man who had jumped off the roof of a building because he heard the devil’s voice telling him he deserved to die and should kill himself by jumping. He said that, while falling through the air, he heard the voice of God telling him that he would be all right and did not need to die. Obviously, he did survive, though with some broken bones.

When I interviewed him a couple of days after his jump, he regarded the devil’s voice as a schizophrenic hallucination, but he insisted that God’s voice was real. I pointed out to him that, from the perspective of a third party like myself, both the devil’s voice and God’s were voices only he heard, and therefore I had no way to tell they weren’t both hallucinations; and I asked him how he made the distinction.

More here.

Why Only Now? (by Robert Perry)

[Thanks to Robert Perry for posing this question - RM]

Recently, I've been watching some videos on YouTube on children's apparent memories of past lives. I like this one, on the work of Jim Tucker, author of Life Before Life (an excellent book), who has carried on the groundbreaking work of Ian Stevenson on children's past life memories at the University of Virginia. Also this one, a 1992 documentary on Stevenson's work. And finally, this one, about an American boy who has memories of being a World War II fighter pilot.

As I watch these, the question that comes up for me is: Why hasn't this phenomenon been known in the West for centuries? It's clear that children in the West have these memories. They aren't that uncommon. One of the videos offers an estimate of one in every 500 children. Indeed, the daughter of a friend of mine had apparent past-life memories. Presumably, these things have been happening forever. So why did it take one man, Ian Stevenson, to bring this phenomenon to light in 1960?

The same question arises about near-death experiences. Why didn't they come into public and professional awareness before the 1970s? Presumably, they have also been happening forever. I asked Dr. Jeffrey Long, author of Evidence of the Afterlife, what percentage of NDEs would have happened in the past, without benefit of medical intervention. His "wild guess" is that "around half of all NDEs happened as a result of modern medical intervention." Given that a 1992 Gallup poll estimated that 5% of Americans have had an NDE, this would give us a rough figure of one in 40 people in pre-modern times, which is still quite an impressive frequency. So why wasn't anyone talking about them?

And if you think that we've run out of such discoveries, there is the case of Raymond Moody's shared death experiences, which he has just written about in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity. These are where people in the room with a dying person seem to experientially share in that person's transition. This can include apparently passing through the stages of that person's death process-leaving the body, having a life review, passing through a tunnel, entering a celestial landscape-with the dying person. While it's easy to see these as a sub-category of near-death experiences-shared near-death experiences-they don't actually fit, since no one is near-death. One person is healthy and the other person actually dies. It's a new phenomenon, one that is quite impressive, and according to Moody, also quite prevalent. Yet it too has managed to fly under the radar until very recently.

I would also include in this the phenomenon I documented in my 2009 book Signs: A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life Purpose, and God's Plan. This is what I call CMPEs (Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events) - extreme synchronicities in which two events happen to occur close together in time and share a long list of parallels, with the story told by these parallels providing commentary on a relevant situation in the person's life. We've just finished a pilot study which will soon be published in Psychiatric Annals, which documents the occurrence of CMPEs in the lives of the study's participants. This bolsters what I have seen evidence of for a long time, that CMPEs do happen to people all over, even if not to everyone. Yet you will be hard-pressed to find examples of this phenomenon in the literature on coincidence and synchronicity.

Why, you have to wonder, did these phenomena - and I'm sure we could cite many others - go undocumented for so long? In the case of NDEs at least, I don't think the answer is terribly mysterious. It is common to hear NDErs say that they were afraid to tell anyone what they experienced, or that they tried and soon clammed up due to harsh or dismissive reactions. Steve Volk's Fringe-ology tells of how Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came very close to breaking the story of near-death experiences several years before Raymond Moody did, in a planned (and already written) final chapter to her now-classic book On Death and Dying. Yet she chose not to, afraid that it would kill the chances of her book getting published. Volk puts it more strongly: "Her entire life's work would have been dismissed" (p. 32).

The fact is that our culture is uncomfortable with the paranormal. In centuries past, that discomfort, I am sure, came mostly from the religious establishment. Now, I think it comes largely from the scientific establishment.

It makes you wonder what would happen without that stigma there. How many more such phenomena would come to light? And what might be the benefits of widespread and well-funded research on all such phenomena? Analogous to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests, we might find that we have been sitting on something of far larger proportions than anyone has suspected, driven underground by our collective unwillingness to face it. We might have to revise our terminology to reflect the fact that the paranormal is, in fact, normal. And more than that, we might have to revise our whole picture of reality.

Carter vs Woerlee on Near-death Experiences

Anesthesiologist and sceptic Gerald Woerlee has had a go at Chris Carter's book on near-death experiences at Subversive Thinking, and Carter has made an extensive reply. It makes interesting reading.

Woerlee stoops from a great height to put poor Carter in his place. 'Imprecise and sloppy' statements; 'same tired old and discredited arguments'; 'disturbing points ... totally destroy the pretence of any scientific credibility'. Carter's discussion of quantum mechanics provokes in him a 'weary sigh'. Other knowledgeable physicists struggle to suppress 'impolite hysterical laughter' at such ideas. Etcetera and so on.

Why do sceptics talk like this? What makes them so superior?

On QM, Carter responds:

In my chapter I discuss the famous interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Eugene Wigner. Von Neumann was one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and his friend Eugene Wigner was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in physics. In my book I argue that this theory is by far the most rigorous and logical interpretation of the quantum facts. The von Neumann/Wigner interpretation makes quantum mechanics an inherently dualistic theory - that is, it requires the existence and action of a non-physical mind - and the several respected academic physicists that I quote in support of this interpretation do not seem to be "suppressing hysterical laughter."

Returning to the Pam Reynolds case, which he has persistently tried to debunk, Woerlee continues to insist that a patient showing no responses to 100 decibel clicks in her ears could nevertheless hear sufficiently in order to fabricate the content of a suppose out-of-body experience. Carter is surely right to call this 'desperate'. Woerlee's next observation is quite remarkable:

...the report of Pam Reynolds clearly tells us she could hear. She awoke to the sound of a "natural D". Pam was a musician, and many such persons have natural pitch. So by saying it was a "natural D", she meant a sound with a frequency of 293.6, or 587.3 Hertz. This fact together with the stimulus parameters reveals how she could hear the sounds of speech etc (I will write an article on this for the JNDS if they are interested).

If I understand this correctly - and someone please tell me he's not being this obtuse - Woerlee is using a paranormal element of Pam's paranormal out-of-body experience - a paranormal sensibility, in other words - to support his contention that no paranormal event occurred.

Another remark caught my eye:

Chris Carter ends the description of another seemingly remarkable case study with the words: "The skeptic must say that the dying person telepathically or clairvoyantly gains true information about a recently deceased friend or relative, ..." I find this a remarkable statement. A skeptic with even a basic knowledge of body structure and function also rejects belief in telepathy and clairvoyance. These are paranormal sensory abilities which the experiences of the blind, the deaf, and gambling casinos teach us simply do not exist.

I'll let Carter do the honours on that one. In my view his response is an excellent job.

Shared Death Experiences

I've been doing some reading and re-charging batteries. One book I looked at is Glimpses of Eternity, Raymond Moody's latest collection of NDE anecdotes. This describes what he calls 'shared death experiences', where family and friends of a sick person themselves experience some kind of event at the moment of the patient's passing. Most probably fall into the category of 'deathbed visions'. However there are also a few near-death experiences in which the living get to see what the dying are experiencing.

This addressed a question I've been asking about the life panorama, which appears both in NDE reports and in communications through mediums. It's said that you can access your entire life, and that it's spread out in front of you like a diorama, so you can enter into each memory and relive it. But I wondered, does that mean anyone can access the same memories? Are you an open book for anyone you associate with to read? And if so, how would you feel about that?

The concept of privacy does seem to exist in afterlife accounts, where people describe being able to withdraw from company if they feel the need. On the other hand, when they are with others they can't conceal anything they are thinking, which is as obvious as if they were jabbering out loud.

Here's a an account given to Moody by a woman whose shared life review with her husband was vivid and contained images and events that she had previously been unaware of. It occurred when her husband died of cancer.

I was beside him the whole time in the hospital and was holding onto him when he died. When he did, he went right through my body. It felt like an electric sensation, like when you get your finger in the electrical socket, only much more gentle.

Anyway, when that happened our whole life sprang up around us and just kind of swallowed up the hospital room and everything in it in an instant. There was light all around: a bright, white light that I immediately knew - and Johnny knew - was Christ.

Everything we ever did was there in that light. Plus I saw things about Johnny... I saw him doing things before we were married. You might think that some of it might be embarrassing or personal, and it was. But there was no need for privacy, as strange as that might seem. These were things that Johnny did before we were married. Still, I saw him with girls when he was very young. Later I searched for them in his high school yearbook and was able to find them, just based on what I saw during the life review during his death.

In the middle of this life review, I saw myself there holding onto his dead body, which didn't make me feel bad because he was also completely alive, right beside me, viewing our life together.

By the way, the life review was like a 'wraparound'. I don't know how else to describe it. It was a wraparound scene of everything Johnny and I experienced together or apart. There is no way I could even put it into words other than to say that all of this was in a flash, right there at the bedside where my husband died.

Then, right in the middle of this review, the child that we lost to a miscarriage when I was still a teenager stepped forth and embraced us. She was not a figure of a person exactly as you would see a human being, but more the outline or sweet, loving presence of a little girl. The upshot of her being there any issues we ever had regarding her loss were made whole and resolved. I was reminded of the verse from the Bible about ' the peace that passeth all understanding'. That's how I felt when she was there.

One of the funny things about this wraparound view of our life was that we had gone to Atlanta in the seventh grade, to the state capital, where there was a diorama. So at one point we were watching this wraparound and watching ourselves in another wraparound - a diorama - where we stood side-by-side as kids. I burst out laughing and Johnny laughed too, right there beside me.

Another thing that was strange about this wraparound was that in certain parts of it were panels or dividers that kept us from seeing all of it I don't have the words to this, but the screens or panels kept particular parts of both of our lives invisible. I don't know what was behind them but I do know that these were thoughts from Christ, who said that someday we would be able to see behind those panels too.

Quite a striking account. I'm struck by the statement that yes, some of it was 'embarrassing and personal' but at the same time there was no need for privacy. I tend to assume that when the time comes we won't be judgmental about our private goings on, or those of other people - and that we'll see all that in a different light.

Here's another, by a woman in her seventies describing her experience of tending to her dying mother. As her mother died the light in the room suddenly became much brighter and more intense and she felt a rocking motion through her whole body. She then found herself seeing the room from a diferent angle, from above and to the left side of the bed instead of from the right side.

This rocking forward motion was very comfortable, and not at all like a shudder and especially not like when a car you are riding in lurches to the side and you get nauseous. I did not feel uncomfortable but in fact the opposite; I felt far more comfortable and peaceful than I ever felt in my life.

I don't know whether I was out of my body or not because all the other things that were going on held my attention. I was just glued to scenes from my mother's life that were flashing throughout the room or around the bed. I cannot even tell whether the room was there any more or if it was, there was a whole section of it I hadn't noticed before. I would compare it to the surprise you would have if you had lived in the same house for many years, but one day you opened up at it and found a big secret compartment you didn't know about. This thing seemed so strange and yet perfectly natural at the same time.

The scenes that were flashing around in midair contained things that had happened to my mother, some of which I remembered and others that I didn't. I could see her looking at the scenes to, and she sure recognised all of them, as I could tell by her expression as she watched. This all happened at once so there is no way of telling it that matches the situation.

The scenes of my mother's life reminded me of old-fashioned flashbulbs going off. When they did, I saw scenes of her life like in one of the 3-D movies of the 1950s.

By the time the flashes of her life were going on, she was out of her body. I saw my father, who passed seven years before, standing there where the head of the bed would have been. By this point the bed was kind of irrelevant and my father was coaching my mother out of the body. I looked right into his face and a recognition of love passed between us, but he went right back to focusing on my mother. He looked like a young man, although he was 79 when he died. There was a glow about or all through him - very vibrant. He was full of life.

One of his favourite expressions was 'Look alive!' and he sure did look alive when he was coaching my mother out of her body. A part of her that was transparent just stood right up, going through her body, and she and my father glided off into the light and disappeared.

The room sort of rocked again, or my body did, but this time backward in the opposite direction and then everything went back to normal.

I felt great tenderness from my mother and father. This entire event overflowed with love and kindness. Since that day I wonder: Is the world we live in just a figment of our imagination?

Glimpses of Eternity is quite a slim volume, and much of the later part is taken up with old research into deathbed-visions. So it seems there's not a lot of material to make an identifiable category of shared NDEs. I certainly haven't come across anything like it before and I suspect it's quite rare. But I'd be interested to hear of any other experiences like these.

Book Review: Science and the Near-Death Experience - How Consciousness Survives Death

I started Chris Carter's new book on near-death experiences some months ago, and got half-way through before events forced me to stop. Frustrating not to be able to write about it then, and I'm guessing that most Paranormalia readers will by now be well familiar with it from reviews elsewhere. But here are my thoughts, for what they're worth. 

Carter's previous book Parapsychology and the Skeptics was a welcome attempt to redress the balance against the decidedly uncritical criticisms made by some high-profile sceptics. (My review is here).  It was deservedly well-received, not least by parapsychologists who are at the receiving end of their assaults. Having an interest in this area myself I've long felt that parapsychology needed to speak up for itself a bit more firmly.  Of course psi-researchers and their supporters complain about the way their work is trivialised and misrepresented. But there's a need for people outside the field to assess the arguments and clarify the issues for a wider public. In that regard I'd say the expectations raised by Carter's earlier book have been exceeded here.

Carter first clear away some conceptual difficulties with survival of consciousness, specifically the proposition - accepted by the great majority of scientists and intellectuals today - that the mind is a product solely of brain functions. 

I've often wondered at the insistence on this. Experiences with mescaline in my student days - including trips that turned out a lot more intense than I'd anticipated - brought home to me just how very particular our every-day consciousness actually is. As I later discovered, this was the insight that William James arrived at after experimenting with nitrous oxide: consciousness comes in different guises, and what we humans experience could well be just one of them. His conclusion - shared by thinkers like Ferdinand Schiller, Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley - was that the brain does not create consciousness from scratch but filters and regulates that great Consciousness out there - Mind at Large, Huxley called it - to a form that works for human needs.  

To me this seemed to fit with evidence that impairments to the brain - epilepsy and schizophrenia, just to take two examples - are often the source of mystical or religious feelings, not to mention the effects of hallucinogens themselves.   Of course the materialist view of the mind-brain problem is dominant for all sorts of reasons, but I was puzzled how little consideration this alternative 'transmission' view of consciousness receives. It's hardly discussed anywhere; the publication of the Kellys' Irreducible Mind recently was the first time I had seen it given serious consideration. So it's good to see Carter focusing on it so fully, and exposing the theoretical difficulties with the 'production' model.

Carter is good at exposing the logical fallacy of materialist philosophers assuming a functional dependence of consciousness on the brain that in fact has never and nowhere been demonstrated. I especially appreciated his dismantling of Paul Edwards's argument relating to Alzheimer's.  Edwards insists, on the basis of observing a friend with the disease, that the implications of the survivalist position is that inside she remained her normal self, but was simply unable to express it. As Carter firmly points out this is a 'crude caricature', and when Edwards suggests it is 'perfectly natural' to argue that a person's mind has deteriorated with age, the correct response is that all sorts of observations that once seemed 'perfectly natural' in fact turned out to be wildly mistaken (for instance the proposition that the sun goes round the earth).

'It is testimony to the desperation of the materialists and the weakness of their case,' Carter suggests, 'that one of the strongest arguments Edwards can invoke for his cause is that "the annihilation theory is completely consistent" with what he feels it is "perfectly natural to say."

I was also glad to see Carter's exposition of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's work, again tackling the objections of Edwards along the way. In operations aimed at curing epilepsy Penfield discovered that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the cortex would produce in the patient very lively and detailed memories.  Sceptics have sometimes produced this as evidence that the panoramic flashbacks reported by near-death experiencers are the effect of the dying brain - the memories being lodged in the brain tissue.  But Penfield himself eventually decided that these sorts of investigative methods provided no good evidence that the brain alone can carry out the work of the mind, and he became personally convinced that it does not. 

Carter then dives into the history of science, describing the development of classical physics, to which he sees the scientific establishment still firmly wedded while it largely ignores the implications of modern quantum mechanics.

The point here is to demonstrate that quantum theory provides a potential gateway to viewing the brain as interacting with an external source of mind. Again, it's good to see this subject grasped in a philosophical analysis so firmly and authoritatively, as it's one that few parapsychologists - Dean Radin is a notable exception - have much concerned themselves with. (In conversation with the late Bob Morris, head of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, I once mentioned that I intended to get to grips with the arguments of Evan Harris Walker. 'Good luck with that!' was Bob's curt response.)

Walker makes an appearance here, as does the quantum physicist Henry Stapp, who has remarked:

The only objections I know to applying the basic principles of orthodox contemporary physics to brain dynamics are, first, the forcefully expressed opinions of some non-physicists that the classical approximation provides an entirely adequate foundation for understanding mind-brain dynamics, in spite of quantum calculations that indicate just the opposite; and second, the opinions of some conservative physicists, who, apparently for philosophical reasons, contend that the successful orthodox quantum theory, which is intrinsically dualistic, should be replaced by a theory that re-converts human consciousness into a causally inert witness to the mindless dance of atoms, as it was in 1900. Neither of these opinions has any rational basis in contemporary science.

It was good, too, to see Carter tackling Daniel Dennett, whose book Consciousness Explained has been hugely influential in reinforcing the materialist conception of mind and brain recently, as Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind was back in the 1950s. Dennett, it appears, offered a hostage to fortune in basing his rejection on dualism firmly on the apparent violation of the principle of conservation of energy.  Henry Stapp brushes this aside, pointing out that the Dennett is basing his argument on classical physics, and that the objection disappears in contemporary physics. 'Contemporary physical theory allows, and its orthodox von Neumann form entails, an interactive dualism that is fully in accord with all the laws of physics,' Stapp insists - a message that Carter's quite full analysis drives home.

The second part of the book gets down to the NDE research. It capably describes the phenomenon with full reference to specific cases, identifies the challenges to orthodox scientific thinking and picks off the sceptical objections. I particularly appreciated Carter's skewering of research by Michael Persinger that purports to show most of the NDE features being artificially created by means of electromagnetic stimulation. I have long wondered at the ability of sceptics to see in these rather weak phenomena a significant and illuminating parallel to the far more dramatic reports made by near-death experiencers, showing as they do little or nothing of the latters' clarity, intensity and transformative effect.

Carter reproduces Persinger's own table of effects, which - with sensations of dizziness, tingling and vibrations, all more or less absent from NDE research, topping the list - shows how unwarranted the comparison actually is. Yet more interesting is the failure of a Swedish team to replicate his findings. Even using his own equipment it found no effect whatsoever; suggestible subjects reported strange experiences whether or not they were actually receiving a current.  The study surely deserves to be quoted by sceptics in their discussions of 'pathological science' along with landmark examples such as Blondlot's mythical N-Rays, although I somehow doubt that it will be.

I wondered whether Carter would respond to the recent cavils of NDE sceptics who creatively come up with loopholes that subvert the conclusions of dedicated researchers without really explaining anything (for a typically tetchy discussion see this comments thread on Paranormalia.) I think he is wise to pay them no particular attention. Instead he provides very full descriptions of key arguments and cases and addresses the key objections, leaving it up to us as readers and observers to judge the validity or otherwise of sceptical nit-picking.

Personally, I'd find it hard - after reading his very full account of the celebrated Pam Reynolds's case, for instance - to sympathise with the argument that a woman in surgery, anesthetized and unconscious, her eyes taped shut, micro-speakers in her ears emitting a stream of clicks at 100 decibels, could accurately have described the instrument with which her skull was being sawed open (apparently from an out-of-body perspective), by means of 'hearing and background knowledge, perhaps coupled with the reconstruction of memory'. This sort of thing leaves one thinking that the determined sceptic can believe absolutely anything.

Two qualities stand out in this treatment: clarity and confidence. The clarity with which some quite difficult philosophical and scientific concepts are elucidated, and their relevance demonstrated, and the confidence with which the challenges of sceptics are confronted and answered. As I think has been said by other people, I wish Carter's books had been around when I first started trying to figure out this stuff.  It's not that there aren't some great books around, but to the beginner especially, the dismissals of sceptics and the absolute certainty with which they are expressed - NDEs are obviously "hallucinatory wishful-thinking experiences" and so on - can create a great deal of confusion.  It needs a strong logical mind with a good grasp of the totality of the research to provide proper guidance.

As to whether the phenomenon provides proof of survival of death, this is more implied than actually stated. In the absence of alternative candidates - the sceptics' counter-explanations having been examined and rejected - survival does seem all-but-certain. However more detail specific to this subject will doubtless be provided in Carter's third and final book of the series, which will deal with children's memories of a previous life, apparitions and channelled communications. These offer all sorts of challenges, and it will be fascinating to see Carter's take on them.

Science 'solves' mysteries

A couple of scientific studies caught my eye recently. One claims to have found the cause of the near-death experience - all in the mind, and nothing to do with angels and afterlife, apparently - while the other finds a partial confirmation of the claims for acupuncture, and again, this has a purely physical explanation, nothing to do with yin and yang.

Pretty strong stuff, then. I'm always fascinated by newspaper headlines that science has 'solved' this or that paranormal mystery, especially when it's something as complex and extraordinary as the near-death experience. I approach these articles with a feeling of intense anticipation, as if, in the next few seconds, the mystery that has had researchers scratching their heads for decades, will finally all be cleared up, and I'll be left gasping - so that's what all that was about! A sort of Darwin-Wallace moment. I know the claim is going to be exaggerated, if not actual nonsense, but I still feel a bit cheated when that turns out to be the case.

This was research carried out by Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical centre in Washington. Chawla had terminally ill patients rigged up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) to measure brain activity, as a means to regulate their pain killers. He noticed that at the moment of their expiration, their brain showed full conscious activity for a period of between thirty seconds to three minutes. He surmised that this surge of electrical energy, released as the brain runs out of oxygen, could be the cause of near-death experiences:  "As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse," he says. "It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations."

It's a fascinating finding, and has interesting implications. For instance, it correlates with the claim of some hospice nurses that dementia patients sometimes show full lucidity at the moment of death. But it doesn't really explain anything. Why those particular sensations?

For me, the inferences that Chawla makes underline the rough-and-ready nature of much scientific thinking about the relationship between mind and brain. Scanning technology has uncovered all kinds of correlations between mental states and brain areas, and this tends to give heart to sceptics and atheists. It proves that psychic and religious experiences are 'all in the mind'. But where else are they going to be? In the leg? The small intestine?

The acupuncture study, by contrast, is potentially quite significant. Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, tested her theory that the painkilling effect of having needles inserted close to the source of pain is caused by the stimulation of adenosine, a natural pain killer which works like a local anaesthetic and is released whenever a small injury occurs (like a needle being inserted).

Nedergaard used mice with a sore paw, comparing the effect on normal ones with those who lacked the gene to produce adenosine. The normal ones showed significantly lower pain after the treatment.  The mice had no expectations, so the result can't be dismissed as a placebo effect, the currently fashionable explanation. 

Simple and elegant, so why did no one think of it before? It's interesting that Nedergaard's colleagues bitched about her investigating acupuncture.  I'd have thought that they would have welcomed a purely physical explanation - or was that not what they were expecting from a scientific experiment?

NDEs In the Press

Precious few mainstream British journalists can write sensibly about any aspect of the paranormal. One is Bryan Appleyard, who had a piece in yesterday's Sunday Times magazine about near-death experiences. The article discussed Dr Sam Parnia's new three-year study of 25 UK and US hospitals which aims to interview 1500 survivors of cardiac arrests and find out if any of them report anything.  The idea is similar to Penny Sartori's at Swansea (Just Coincidence, June 13): place pictures on high shelves that would be visible only to a patient experiencing an out-of-body experience, and look for patients who can identify them as a means to rule out naturalistic explanations.

Sartori's study was negative, but Parnia's is bigger, and Appleyard is upbeat about its prospects. He speculates that positive results could finally persuade even hardline sceptics to accept the NDE's dualist implications. Against the complaint that a mind independent of the brain is inconceivable, he evokes the non-locality principle in quantum mechanics, which Henry Stapp, a physicist at the University of California, is convinced applies to large as well as small things.

'The observer,' Stapp tells me, 'is brought into quantum dynamics in an essential way not only as a passive observer but as an active part of the dynamics. He make certain choices not specified by the physical dynamics which seem to come from the psychological described realm rather than the physically described realm...'

Quantum non-locality, Appleyard goes on, could mean the mind is capable of being non-local to the brain, of floating to the ceiling of the room.

It can become, as Stapp puts it, 'unglued'. His words 'certain choices not specified by the physical dynamics' are world-changing. This idea would, if widely accepted, end the reign of scientific materialism, replacing it with a new dualism. It would mean the universe is not a 'causally closed' system, locked down since the big bang, as mainstream science has always insisted it is, but open to freedom of choice by the autonomous, floating, matter-altering mind. We would have regained our souls.

Appleyard thinks that positive results from Parnia's survey would be 'seismic'.

First, you'd have to accustom yourself to the idea that your mind is not just the little man inside your skull - he really is out there in the world. Second, you'd have to accept that a lot of the things that now seem like products of charlatans and grifters - telepathy, spiritualism, even psychokinesis - will suddenly seem much more credible. Thirdly, you need not anticipate instant oblivion on death but a series of very weird and very illuminating experiences.

This would be a revolution, Appleyard goes on, but it would also be  return to the past, to a world when people lived with a lively sense of the presence of the dead.

Strong stuff, but now Appleyard produces the required 'bucket of iced water'. Scientists who believe in dualism are still a small minority; the evidence remains anecdotal; and the most impressive stories tend to look less convincing on closer examination. Cue Susan Blackmore. 'There are many claims of this kind but in my long decades of research into NDEs I never met any convincing evidence that they are true.'  Appleyard also mentions Jason Braithwaite's piece on Van Lommel''s study which I critiqued a couple of months ago ; this refers to evidence that even a brain that is flatlining may still be active. He doesn't try to rebut any of this, but nevertheless concludes that in the present state of our knowledge to assume that what goes on in the NDE is just another delusion is 'crude and premature'.

I first came across Appleyard's name in diatribes by scientists and sceptics complaining about a recent book, which naturally I rushed off and read.  Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man is an outspoken but intelligent polemic against hard-core reductionism. There's nothing at all New Agey about it: Appleyard is interested in all aspects of modern culture, and his pieces for the Sunday Times are commentary on the contemporary British middle-class zeitgeist as seen through the prism of new books, art and films. His stance on other paranormal aspects is interested but aloof - a recent book about alien encounter experiences views it purely as a cultural phenomenon, worth exploring for what it tells us about ourselves -  and writing about the Scole séance phenomena a few years back he was unconvinced. 

Expressing a positive view of near-death experiences holds fewer hazards. This particular article is an elegantly written and accurate snapshot of the debate, and coming from someone with a platform to influence opinion is very welcome.  It does of course suffer from the inevitable journalistic shortcomings. The heading - 'The afterlife has long been an article of religious faith. And now scientists are finally putting the idea to the test' - could have been written any time in the past hundred years.  It's probably the sub-editor's doing, not his, but it does reflect journalists' obsession with the present, a sort of Memento world in which anything that happened longer than ten minutes ago never happened.

More seriously, I don't at all share Appleyard's optimism. Far from hardline sceptics being forced to throw in the towel I'm sceptical that positive results from this study would change anything at all. He quotes Chris French, who regards this as 'definitely a legitimate scientific inquiry' and offers his full support to refereed proposals of this kind, which considering French's status as a leading sceptic Appleyard thinks is important. But French might have said exactly the same about Van Lommel's hospital study, which nevertheless was the subject of a ruthless put-down in his magazine recently.

It's understandable that there should be such a focus on the veridical element of out-of-body seeing, as it's the kind of thing that ought to settle things once and for all. But by now it's becoming clear that it never does. There is always wiggle room, some objection that the creative sceptical mind can come up with. In the last resort sceptics can simply imply deceit or collusion.  As long ago as 1982, Michael Sabom produced some striking evidence that what NDEers observed while out of the body could not remotely be explained by chance, overheard conversations or lucky guesses, but Susan Blackmore swatted it away as if it meant nothing, and she's the one sceptics listen to. Similarly at one time there was speculation that a blind person having an NDE would be truly convincing, but Kenneth Ring came up with some examples, and guess what - it made no impression at all.

I don't mean that Parnia's study isn't important, but any positive evidence will just be another brick in what by now is becoming a very large edifice. The real work that needs to be done, I believe, is in helping to change public perceptions and make paranormal research a legitimate subject for discussion. In that sense,  informed journalists like Appleyard with a large audience among the educated elite are just as much players as the scientists they write about.

'Dying Brain Hypothesis' Not Dead

Interested to see The Skeptic magazine taking a pop at Pim van Lommel's hospital study of near-death experiences in its recent issue. This study, originally published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2001 has been hugely influential, so its not surprising the mag wants to cut it down to size.

Van Lommel and his team spent 13 years interviewing patients in ten different Dutch hospitals who had been resuscitated following a cardiac arrest. The aim was to see whether they had experienced an NDE. Eighteen per cent reported some memory from their period of unconsciousness, and 12% - one in eight - experienced several of the classic features: out-of-body perception, the tunnel, the light, blissful feelings, panoramic life review, and so on. Van Lommel concluded that medical factors could not account for the phenomenon. If purely physiological factors resulting from cerebral anoxia were the cause, he reasoned, most of the patients should have had an NDE.

This piece is by Jason J. Braithwaite, a researcher in visual cognitive neuroscience. He argues that survivalists like van Lommel have 'repeatedly misunderstood and misrepresented the dying-brain hypothesis when trying to argue against it'.  According to this theory, as formulated by Susan Blackmore and others, it's not the mere presence of anoxia that causes vivid seeming hallucinations, but the rate of its onset. If it comes on too rapidly, the patient will lose consciousness and black out, so no conscious experience or memory could occur.

However van Lommel made no attempt to measure the level of anoxia, so is in no position to make claims regarding its effects or the lack of them. He also, Braithwaite claims, ignores the way that anoxia impacts on different parts of the brain, and how some areas will be more susceptible than others. In any case, he goes on, it's not anoxia itself that is said to cause the NDE, but neural disinhibition, which can also be caused by drugs, epilepsy and so on.

Braithwaite also takes issue with the idea that a flat cortical EEG is an indication of total brain inactivity. Recent research with epileptics shows that large scale seizure activity can occur in deep sub-cortical regions that does not register at all on scalp-based EEG traces - an indication that an EEG is an unreliable measure of neural activity. In other words, there still lacks any reliable evidence that a person who reports an NDE was literally brain-dead at the time. He cites evidence that inter-ictal discharges in the hippocampus or amygdala alone are more than sufficient to produce complex meaningful hallucinations - no involvement from the cortex is necessary.

In short, he concludes that the dying brain hypothesis lives on - van Lommel's data notwithstanding. That should be pretty cheering to the Skeptic's readers. The article is forcefully argued and will leave them with the impression that all the fuss about van Lommel's study has been overdone, that it provides zero support it provides for the claims of survival, and so there's nothing to worry about.

Will it impact on the wider debate? Braithwaite knows his stuff, and his points about anoxia and EEG read-outs are probably quite relevant. It confirmed my feeling that the whole business of trying to prove that an individual could not possibly have had the experience since nothing was going on in his/her brain at the time - and certainly nothing that could have accounted for it - is fraught with difficulty. To that extent he's done a good job, and he's certainly a forceful advocate for the sceptic position.

But those of us who get our information from other sources besides sceptic magazines will not be left much further on. It's all very well to beat off attacks on the so-called dying brain hypothesis, but I've never been very certain what this ever actually amounted to. It's a rather grand term that implies to the uninitiated that the entire pantheon of effects in the near-death experience - any one of which is pretty surprising on its own, but which in combination many people justly find to be hugely meaningful and impactful - can somehow be explained away on the basis of neurological activity, whose effects we can only describe in very general terms. What the patient saw wasn't there, so it must have been a hallucination, and anoxia is implicated in neural disinhibition which causes hallucinations. There's your explanation. What more do you want?

I often wonder whether sceptics understand the enormity of what they are trying to explain away. (I remember coming across Michael Shermer somewhere referring to the near-death experience as 'obviously a wishful hallucination' - what magisterial certainty!) At one point Braithwaite raises the subject of the 'vivid and meaningful experiences' that are reported by patients undergoing brain stimulation, and which van Lommel argues are quite unlike the near-death experience. Van Lommel says:

These recollections ... consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE. Further, transformational processes with changing life-insight and disappearance of fear of death are rarely reported after induced experiences. ... Thus, induced experiences are not identical to NDE...

That seems the very least one can say, but Braithwaite thinks 'this claim is not entirely accurate'. He suggests that the context of the two events - one when the patient is relaxed and enjoying a constant controlled interaction with the surgeon and receiving constant feedback, the other where the patient is possibly undergoing some form of trauma, confusion, disorientation, etc - may play a part.

It is certainly not unreasonable to assume that the small experiential differences between NDE and brain stimulation studies can be explained, to some degree, by these large differences in context. This is certainly a far more probably conclusion than that of mind-brain dualism.

It's a nice try, but...  small experiential differences? Braithwaite quotes several sources, among which I recognised Wilder Penfield, the neurosurgeon whose book on this subject I read some years ago, and whose work poking around in the brains of conscious epileptics I'm certain produced nothing remotely comparable to the panoramic life review or the ineffable feelings commonly described in the NDE, to name only two.   But that's the nub of all this - for some people, absolutely anything is more probable than mind-brain dualism. Like all paranormal debunkers, the author radiates indignation at the idea, and the irresponsibility of those who dare to suggest it.

The fact is, for those who can recognise the challenge here, the dying brain hypothesis is not really a hypothesis at all - it's a set of defensive stratagems based on inaccurate comparisons and speculative generalisations.   Some of it sort of hangs together if you don't look too closely at what experiencers actually say - Blackmore's idea of the dying cells in the visual cortex causing the tunnel effects has certainly gained traction in this regard. But in other respects it just relies on bluff and misinformation - Blackmore's chapter on out-of-body perception in Dying to Live being a prime example.

What I find so interesting is that in the sceptical analysis the transcendental and transormative element hardly gets any mention at all. OK, there may be something going on at some deep level of the brain, beyond the ability of instruments to detect. But is that really the point? Patients aren't just continuing to have experiences, something happens to them so powerful that when they return to existence they think and behave differently. What possible, meaningful neurological explanation could there be for that?

My feeling is that no materialist account of the NDE will be complete until we address this. We should surely all by now be able to recognise that it's a coherent and relatively common human experience, and one that has relevance to the human condition, on a personal and on a cultural level. So let's stop pretending that it's simply some weird nonsense that happens when the brain winds down, and nothing really to worry about. Let's instead ask ourselves why, if we are the creatures formed by natural selection that believe ourselves to be, something as odd and yet as meaningful as the near-death experience could ever have evolved. What's the purpose of it?