People come to the subject of near death experiences (NDE) with pre-set attitudes: either for or against. The subject excites people who, for obvious emotional reasons, want to believe, opposed by those who try to defend rationality against the rising tide of New Age religiosity – these are the sceptics who would rather dismiss NDE along with alien abduction, tarot cards, creationism and channeling dead Himalayan gurus.
But near death experience is a real phenomenon. It is not confined to those who have religious or spiritual beliefs, or to the mentally disturbed. It isn’t the result of indoctrination. It occurs cross culturally and is often brought on by heart failure when a person is, for a short time, clinically dead.
Time magazine’s recent article on NDE comments: “Of the thousands of NDEs reported, none has done more to convince some researchers that the phenomenon's explanation must lie outside the square than the case of Pam Reynolds, an American who underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm in 199I. Preparation for Reynolds' operation included taping her eyes shut, blocking her ears and monitoring her EEG to ensure her brain was functioning at only the most basic level. Yet, after coming around, Reynolds described not only a full-blown NDE but the bone saw that had been used to cut her skull.”
Then there was the convincing case, reported by Dr. Bruce Greyson, of an elderly woman in intensive care who had a heart attack followed by a NDE in which she saw some red tennis shoes on the roof of the hospital. A maintenance worker and some medical people later went on to the roof where they found the shoes exactly as described.
Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, published an impressive study in the British medical journal Lancet in which 144 Dutch patients were resuscitated from clinical death, of which 12% reported NDEs. The paper is full of medical and scientific details but his conclusion was that we must consider the possibility that, “consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness.”
Some suggest that NDEs are hallucinations activated by brain activity when the electroencephalogram (EEG) line goes flat. van Lommel likens the brain in this state to a "computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn't hallucinate. It couldn't do anything at all… A flat electroencephalogram recording doesn’t suggest mere impairment. It points to the brain having shut down.” Yet this is when NDEs are most likely to occur.
At last year's first International Medical Conference on Near-Death Experience, held in Martigues, France, eight participants describing themselves as “a group of dedicated physicians and researchers working in different scientific fields” released a statement. They said that while the NDE is mediated by chemical changes in the brain, “its extremely rich and complex content cannot be reduced to a mere illusion.” It is of the "utmost importance,” they argued, “that scientists wishing to understand the nature of human consciousness conduct research without prejudice.”
van Lommel advances one possibility – the same idea as Rupert Sheldrake’s – that the brain is more like a radio or television receiver. There is a continuous flow of electromagnetic waves around us in the form of radio and television transmissions. We are unaware of this until we switch on our radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. “We do not realize”, he says, “ the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us.”
But the TV show is not part of the television set, it does not come from inside the set. What is transmitted is not part of the electronic circuitry of these devises. Could our brain be compared to such receiving sets? It would be the receiver of consciousness, not the originator of it. van Lommel asks us to keep an open mind, entertaining the possibility that: “people can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions.”
“There are, he says, “still a lot of mysteries to solve, but one has not to talk about paranormal, supernatural or pseudoscience to look for scientific answers on the intriguing relation between consciousness and memories with the brain.
However, my feeling is that we are not simply up against a scientific difficulty. I would say the problem is more profound: it is the philosophical problem of consciousness itself, as we discussed in our last TAAP seminar. The brain-correlates of consciousness can be studied objectively, but consciousness itself, by its very nature, cannot be. Right here we may be up against the absolute limits of empirical science. Your consciousness and experience cannot be experienced by anyone else but you. You can tell people about it, and even elicit similar a experience in them, but there is no third agency that can compare them to say how similar or different they are.
You can study people’s brain activities with objective scientific methodology, but you cannot study consciousness in the same way. Consciousness is, as the philosophers say, sui generis, a unique class of its own in the natural world.
So near death and out of the body experiences must be taken as valid for those who describe them. There are no external criteria by which we are permitted to judge otherwise.
If you wish to glance at a few of the hundreds of accounts of NDEs go to http://www.nderf.org/NDERF_NDEs.htm
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
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email: taap@paradise.net.nz
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