Tag Archives: Near-Death Experience

Is There Life After Death?

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

A review essay of James and Whitehead on Life after Death by David Ray Griffin

Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don’t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don’t believe in the someone.

The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers.  Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences.  It is arguably also what motivates so much human behavior, from keeping busy to waging war to trying to hit a little white ball with a long stick down a lot of grass into a hole in the ground and doing it again and again.

Death is the mother of distractions.

It is also what we cannot ultimately control, although a lot of violent and crazy rich people try.  The thought of it drives many people mad.

No one is immune from wondering about it.  We are born dying, and from an early age we ask why.  Children often explicitly ask, but as they grow older the explicit usually retreats into implicity and avoidance because of adults’ need to deny death or their lack of answers about it that makes sense.

David Ray Griffin is not a child or an adult in denial.  He has spent his life in an intrepid search for truth in many realms – philosophy, theology, politics, etc.  He is an esteemed author of over forty books, an elderly man in his eighties who has spent his life writing about God, and also in the last twenty years a series of outstanding books on the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the demonic nature of U.S. history.  He fits T.S Eliot’s description in The Four Quartets:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Though the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning

In his latest book, which is another beginning, James and Whitehead on Life after Death, he explores the age-old question of whether there is life after death and concludes that there probably is.  It is a conclusion that is arguably shared in some way still by many people today but is clearly rejected by most intellectuals and highly schooled people, as Griffin writes:

The traditional basis for hope was belief in life after death. Modern culture, however, has so diminished this belief that today, in educated circles, it is largely assumed that life after death is an outmoded belief….The dominant view among science-based modern intellectuals is that the idea of life after death is not one to take seriously. That conclusion, however, is virtually implicit in the presuppositions of these intellectuals, such as Corliss Lamont. According to these modern intellectuals, there is no non-sensory perception; the world is basically mechanistic; and the world contains nothing but physical bodies and forces.

Griffin argues the opposite.  His book is devoted to refuting these presuppositions with the help of William James and Alfred North Whitehead.  It is not an easy read, and is not aimed at regular people who would find it rough going, except for the middle chapters on mediums, extrasensory perception, telepathy, apparitions, near-death out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation – the stuff of tabloid nonsense but which in Griffin’s scholarly hands is treated very intelligently. Moreover, these chapters are crucial to his overall argument.  However, the book will mainly appeal to the intellectuals whom Griffin wishes to convince of their errors, or to those who agree with him.  It is scholarly.

Without entering into all the nuances of his rather complicated thesis, I will try to summarize his key points.

Griffin is what is called a process theologian and his work of philosophical theology is intimately linked with scientific thinking and the idea of evolution, even as it rejects the modern mechanistic worldview for a “postmodern” cosmology based on recent science, in particular, the work of microbiology.  Although he is a Christian, the present book does not presuppose any Christian beliefs such as revelation, nor, for that matter, specific beliefs of any religion, although he does presuppose (and partially explains in chapter eleven) the existence of a “divine creator” or “divine reality” who is responsible for the evolutionary process that is the expression of a cosmic purpose with the “fine-tuning” of the universe.  This “Holy Reality” is important to his argument.

The thought of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead underlies everything Griffin writes here.  Whitehead is known as the creator of process philosophy, which, to simplify, is the idea that all reality is not made up of things or bits of inert matter, no matter how small (e.g. atoms, brain molecules) or large (people or trees) interacting in some blind way with other bits of matter, but consists of conscious processes of ongoing experiences.  In other words, reality is constant change, flowing experiences with types of awareness and intention and the free creativity to change.  Humans are, therefore, ongoing experiments, not static entities.

Following Whitehead, Griffin has coined the term “panexperientialism,” meaning that all reality is comprised of experiences.  It is worth noting that the etymology of the words experience and experiment are the same – Latin, experiri, to try.  Life is therefore a trying.  As some might say, it is trying to be born and to know you will die.

Griffin begins by noting the importance of life after death and why many argue against it.  He states how he will avoid many of their objections and how he will show how the valid ones dissolve under his analysis.  He promptly writes that “Microbiology has dissolved the mind-body problem.” He bases this on the work of acclaimed evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis,, among others, and her theory of symbiogenesis:

Her theory of symbiogenesis was based on the idea that all living organisms are sentient. Saying that her world view ‘recognizes the perceptive capacity of all live beings,’ she held that ‘consciousness is a property of all living cells,’ even the most elementary ones: ‘Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life.’

Margulis’s point is consonant with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, meaning that all physical reality possesses a degree of perceptive experience, although Griffin says “some of us may prefer to save the term ‘consciousness’ for higher types of experience.”  The fundamental point is that all of physical reality experiences, or, as he quotes William James, “is a piece of full experience.”  In layman’s language as applied to people, the mind and body are one.

Having laid down this scientific/philosophical foundation in the first four chapters (and in two more detailed appendices), Griffin turns to psychical research and how Whitehead and James believed in the need for such research and how James’s radical empiricism supported the reality of parapsychological events as did Whitehead, who accepted telepathy.  Griffin writes:

Like James, Whitehead affirmed the reality of non-sensory perception. Moreover, besides affirming its reality,Whitehead argued that non-sensory perception is fundamental, so that sensory perception is secondary. Far from being primary, sensory perception is derivative from non-sensory perception….Accordingly, there is nothing supernatural about telepathy; one becomes aware of the content of other minds through the same non-sensory mode of perception that tells us about causation, the real existence of physical objects, memory, and time.

(Let me interject the simple but important point that it follows that in order to have any perceptions one must exist in physical form.)

Turning to actual psychical research that was promoted by the establishment of The Society For Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882, Griffin, as previously mentioned, devotes four key chapters to mediums, telepathy, extrasensory perception, near-death out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation. This research and its findings, while rejected by the modern scientific worldview, is widespread and quite believable, in various degrees.  Griffin shows why this is so.  The truth of such psychic experiences is hard to refute since there are so many examples, which Griffin gives.  He would agree with James who said:

The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomenon under discussion is good enough to hang a man twenty times over.

And James, of course, the longtime professor at Harvard University, is revered as one of the United States’ most brilliant thinkers, not a fringe nut-case.  This is also true for many of the others Griffin calls on to show how solid is the evidence for much psychic phenomena.  Most readers will find these chapters very engaging and the most accessible.

Finally, Griffin explains why the idea of a fine-tuned universe makes the most sense and how it dovetails with the belief in God, even as it runs counter to the mechanistic, materialistic, and atheistic view of many intellectuals. He writes:

The new worldview advocated in this book requires a new understanding of the divine reality. Whitehead and [Charles] Hartshorne [an American process philosopher and theologian who developed Whitehead’s work] advocated a view of the universe known as ‘panentheism.’ The term means ‘all-in-God.’  Panentheism [the world is in God] is thus distinguished from pantheism, on the one hand, and traditional theism, on the other.

Based on these factors – microbiology, Whitehead and James’s philosophy, psychic research, etc. – Griffin concludes that there is ample evidence for life after death, not in the physical sense but in that of psyche or soul or spirit.  He says that he has “long believed in life after death,” but that in offering this book with his argument for life after death as our “only empirical ground for hope” since we all die, he does so reluctantly.  “I suggest this answer with fear and trembling, knowing that most of my friends and other people whose opinions I respect will hate this answer.”

That they would be surprised by his conclusion is a bit perplexing since he has long believed in life after death.  I surely do not hate his answer and believe that he has made a strong case for his long-held belief.  I share it, but differently.  And I think that many of his scientifically-oriented friends and others may indeed agree with him more than he thinks, for his argument is rooted, not just in philosophy and theology, but in science.  It is based on the idea of the non-duality between mind and matter, with the difference being that for him matter is conscious and for them it is not. They may come to accept the recent findings of microbiology and reject the “assumption of materialists and dualists alike” that “neurons are insentient.”  They may reject some of their own presuppositions.  For these debates take place at the highest level of abstraction where intellectuals dwell, and accepting one new scientific paradigm does not necessarily lead to belief in life after death.  Far from it.  That is when God enters the picture.

Griffin wisely uses hardcore commonsense beliefs to refute dualism and materialism.  But I propose that there is another hardcore, commonsense belief that he ignores: that people know and feel that they are flesh and bones.  Out of this feeling comes our conceptions about life, not the other way around.  The Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life,  put it this way:

Our philosophy – that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life – springs from our feeling toward life itself …. Man is said to be a reasoning animal.  I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal …. And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.

David Griffin, relying on John Cobb’s term, says the “resurrection of the soul” is a better term for life after death than the more traditional ones of “immortality of the soul” and the “resurrection of the body,” since it splits the difference, thereby taking a bit of truth from both terms.

But as I understand his argument in this book, he is doing what he cautions against via Whitehead: “… he [Whitehead] said that one must avoid ‘negations of what in practice is presupposed.’”  Griffin’s presupposition is that both dualism and materialism are both wrong and panexperientialism is correct.  He writes:

Panexperientialism is based upon the supposition that we can and should think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our ‘mind,’ and the entities comprising our bodies is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways. We know our minds from within, by identity and memory, whereas in sensory perception of our bodies, as in looking in a mirror, we know them from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind. [my emphasis]

So if that is true, I ask this question: why, if body and soul/mind are inseparable and are what people are, why is it necessary to argue for their divorce in death?  If God created them as one at birth, could not God recreate them as one in death?  Why Griffin concludes that this is impossible or would require a miracle escapes me.  Maybe contemplating it is a bit too pedestrian and non-philosophical.

Despite my point above, James and Whitehead on Life after Death is another quintessentially brilliant volume from Griffin’s pen.  It forces you to think about difficult but essential matters.  It may not be easy reading, but it may force you to imaginatively ask yourself, what, if anything were possible and life continued after death, you would want such a life to be like.  Maybe the man David Ray Griffin wants it to be non-bodily.  Maybe many do and can’t imagine an alternative.  But I can, and I hope for bodily resurrection.  It’s just what I am.

Philosophy and theology can get very abstract and leave regular people in the dust.  Another poet comes to mind, a counterpoint to T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yates, who wrote in “An Acre of Green Grass”:

Grant me an old man’s frenzy,

Myself I must remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call;

 

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind,

An old man’s eagle mind.

 

I would love to read what a frenzied David Ray Griffin has to say, now that I have read his philosophical logic. I can’t help agreeing with Unamuno:

And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man

The man of flesh, blood, and bones.

A New Concept of Consciousness

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By Ervin Laszlo

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from The Intelligence of the Cosmos by Ervin Laszlo, published by Inner Traditions.

What about mind? If the world is vibration, is also mind and consciousness a form of vibration? Or on the contrary, are all vibrations, the observed world, a manifestation of mind?

Although it is true that when all is said and done all we know is our consciousness, it is also true that we do not know our own consciousness, not to mention the consciousness of anyone else. We do not know what consciousness really is or how it is related to the brain. Since our consciousness is the basis of our identity, we do not know who we really are. Are we a body that generates the stream of sensations we call consciousness, or are we a consciousness associated with a body that displays it? Do we have consciousness, or are we consciousness? Consciousness could be a kind of illusion, a set of sensations produced by the workings of our brain. But it could also be that our body is a vehicle, a transmitter of a consciousness that is the basic reality of the world. The world could be material, and mind could be an illusion. Or the world could be consciousness, and the materiality of the world could be the illusion.

Both of these possibilities have been explored in the history of philosophy, and today we are a step closer than before to understanding which of them is true. There are important insights emerging at the expanding frontiers where physical science joins consciousness research.

On the basis of a growing series of observations and experiments, a new consensus is emerging. It is that “my” consciousness is not just my consciousness, meaning the consciousness produced by my brain, any more than a program transmitted over the air would be a program produced by my TV set. Just like a program broadcast over the air continues to exist when my TV set is turned off, my consciousness continues to exist when my brain is turned off.

Consciousness is a real element in the real world. The brain and body do not produce it; they display it. And it does not cease when life in the body does. Consciousness is a reflection, a projection, a manifestation of the intelligence that “in-forms” the world.

Mystics and shamans have known that this is true for millennia, and artists and spiritual people know it to this day. Its rediscovery at the leading edge of science augurs a profound shift in our view of the world. It overcomes the answer the now outdated materialist science gives to the question regarding the nature of mind: the answer according to which consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a product or by-product of the workings of the brain. In that case, the brain would be like an electricity-generating turbine. The turbine is material, while the current it generates is not (or not strictly) material. In the same way, the brain could be material, even if the consciousness it generates proves to be something that is not quite material.

On first sight, this makes good sense. On a second look, however, the materialist concept encounters major problems. First, a conceptual problem. How could a material brain give rise to a truly immaterial stream of sensations? How could anything that is material produce anything immaterial? In modern consciousness research this is known as the “hard problem.” It has no reasonable answer. As researchers point out, we do not have the slightest idea how “matter” could produce “mind.” One is a measurable entity with properties such as hardness, extension, force, and the like, and the other is an ineffable series of sensations with no definite location in space and an ephemeral presence in time.

Fortunately, the hard problem does not need to be solved: it is not a real problem. There is another possibility: mind is a real element in the real world and is not produced by the brain; it is manifested and displayed by the brain.

 

Mind beyond Brain: Evidence for a New Concept of Consciousness

If mind is a real element in the real world only manifested rather than produced by the brain, it can also exist without the brain. There is evidence that mind does exist on occasion beyond the brain: surprisingly, conscious experience seems possible in the absence of a functioning brain. There are cases—the near-death experience (NDE) is the paradigm case—where consciousness persists when brain function is impaired, or even halted.

Thousands of observations and experiments show that people whose brain stopped working but then regained normal functioning can experience consciousness during the time they are without a functioning brain. This cannot be accounted for on the premises of the production theory: if there is no working brain, there cannot be consciousness. Yet there are cases of consciousness appearing beyond the living and working brain, and some of these cases are not easy to dismiss as mere imagination.

A striking NDE was recounted by a young woman named Pamela. Hers has been just one among scores of NDEs;* it is cited here to illustrate that such experiences exist, and can be documented.

*For a more extensive sampling see Ervin Laszlo with Anthony Peake from The ­Immortal Mind (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2014).

Pamela died on May 29, 2010, at the age of fifty-three. But for hours she was effectively dead on the operating table nineteen years earlier. Her near-demise was induced by a surgical team attempting to remove an aneurism in her brain stem.

After the operation, when her brain and body returned to normal functioning, Pamela described in detail what had taken place in the operating theater. She recalled among other things the music that was playing (“Hotel California” by the Eagles). She described a whole series of conversations among the medical team. She reported having watched the opening of her skull by the surgeon from a position above him and described in detail the “Midas Rex” ­bone-cutting device and the distinct sound it made.

About ninety minutes into the operation, she saw her body from the outside and felt herself being pulled out of it and into a tunnel of light. And she heard the bone saw activate, even though there were specially designed speakers in each of her ears that shut out all external sounds. The speakers themselves were broadcasting audible clicks in order to confirm that there was no activity in her brain stem. Moreover, she had been given a general anesthetic that should have assured that she was fully unconscious. Pamela should not have been able either to see or to hear anything.

It appears that consciousness is not, or not entirely, tied to the living brain. In addition to NDEs, there are cases in which consciousness is detached from the brain in regard to its location. In these cases consciousness originates above the eyes and the head, or near the ceiling, or above the roof. These are the out-of-body experiences: OBEs.

There are OBEs where congenitally blind people have visual awareness. They describe their surroundings in considerable detail and with remarkable accuracy. What the blind experience is not restored eyesight, because they are aware of things that are shielded from their eyes or are beyond the range of normal eyesight. Consciousness researcher Kenneth Ring called these experiences “transcendental awareness.”

Visual awareness in the blind joins a growing repertory of experiences collected and researched by Stanislav Grof: “transcendental ­experiences.” As Grof found, these beyond-the-brain and ­beyond-here-and-now experiences are widespread—more widespread than anyone would have suspected even a few years ago.

There are also reports of ADEs, after-death experiences. Thousands of psychic mediums claim to have channeled the conscious experience of deceased people, and some of these reports are not easy to dismiss as mere imagination. One of the most robust of these reports has come from Bertrand Russell, the renowned English philosopher. Lord Russell was a skeptic, an outspoken debunker of esoteric phenomena, including the survival of the mind or soul beyond the body. He once wrote, “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” Yet after he died he conveyed the following message to the medium Rosemary Brown.

You may not believe that it is I, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, who am saying these things, and perhaps there is no conclusive proof that I can offer through this somewhat restrictive medium. Those with an ear to hear may catch the echo of my voice in my phrases, the tenor of my tongue in my tautology; those who do not wish to hear will no doubt conjure up a whole table of tricks to disprove my retrospective rhetoric.

. . . After breathing my last breath in my mortal body, I found myself in some sort of extension of existence that held no parallel as far as I could estimate, in the material dimension I had recently experienced. I observed that I was occupying a body predominantly bearing similarities to the physical one I had vacated forever; but this new body in which I now resided seemed virtually weightless and very volatile, and able to move in any direction with the minimum of effort. I began to think I was dreaming and would awaken all too soon in that old world, of which I had become somewhat weary to find myself imprisoned once more in that ageing form which encased a brain that had waxed weary also and did not always want to think when I wanted to think. . . .

Several times in my life [Lord Russell continued] I had thought I was about to die; several times I had resigned myself with the best will that I could muster to ceasing to be. The idea of B.R. no longer inhabiting the world did not trouble me unduly. Befitting, I thought, to give the chap (myself) a decent burial and let him be. Now here I was, still the same I, with the capacities to think and observe sharpened to an incredible degree. I felt earth-life suddenly seemed very unreal almost as it had never happened. It took me quite a long while to understand that feeling until I realized at last that matter is certainly illusory although it does exist in actuality; the material world seemed now nothing more than a seething, changing, restless sea of indeterminable density and volume.

This report “from beyond” appears hardly credible, were it not that it is supported by other ADEs. One of the most striking and difficult to dismiss of these ADEs is the case of a deceased chess grand master who played a game with a living grand master.*

*For details see Laszlo with Peake, The Immortal Mind.

Wolfgang Eisenbeiss, an amateur chess player, engaged the medium Robert Rollans to transmit the moves of a game to be played with Viktor Korchnoi, the world’s third-ranking grand master. His ­opponent was to be a player whom Rollans was to find in his trance state. Eisenbeiss gave Rollans a list of deceased grand masters and asked him to contact them and ask who would be willing to play. Rollans entered his state of trance and did so. On June 15, 1985, the former grand master Geza Maroczy responded and said that he was available. Maroczy was the third-ranking grand master in the year 1900. He was born in 1870 and died in 1951 at the age of eighty-one. Rollans reported that Maroczy responded to his invitation as follows.

I will be at your disposal in this peculiar game of chess for two reasons. First, because I also want to do something to aid mankind ­living on Earth to become convinced that death does not end everything, but instead the mind is separated from the physical body and comes up to us in a new world, where individual life continues to manifest itself in a new unknown dimension. Second, being a Hungarian patriot, I want to guide the eyes of the world into the direction of my beloved Hungary.

Korchnoi and Maroczy began a game that was frequently interrupted due to Korchnoi’s poor health and numerous travels. It lasted seven years and eight months. Speaking through Robert Rollans, Maroczy gave his moves in the standard form: for example, “5. A3 – Bxc3+”; Korchnoi gave his own moves to Rollans in the same form, but by ordinary communication. Every move was analyzed and recorded. It turned out that the game was played at the grand-master level and that it exhibited the style for which Maroczy was famous. It ended on February 11, 1993, when at move forty-eight Maroczy resigned. Subsequent analysis showed that it was a wise decision: five moves later Korchnoi would have achieved checkmate.

In this case the medium Rollans channeled information he did not possess in his ordinary state of consciousness. And this information was so expert and precise that it is extremely unlikely that any person Rollans could have contacted would have possessed it.

There are also firsthand testimonies of consciousness without a functioning brain. The well-known Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was just as insistently skeptical about consciousness beyond the brain as Lord Russell had been, gave a detailed account of his conscious experience during the seven days he spent in deep coma. In the condition in which he found himself, conscious experience, he previously said, is completely excluded. Yet his experience—which he described in detail in several articles and three bestselling books—was so clear and convincing that it has changed his mind. Consciousness, he is now claiming, can exist beyond the brain.

The above-cited cases illustrate that there is remarkable, and on occasion remarkably robust, evidence that consciousness is not confined to the living brain. Although this evidence is widespread, it is not widely known. There are still people, including scientists, who refuse to take cognizance of it. This is not surprising, given that the evidence is anomalous for the dominant world concept. Those who strongly disbelieve that such phenomena exist, not only refuse to consider evidence to the contrary, they often fail to perceive evidence to the contrary.

Nonetheless, the view that consciousness is a fundamental element in the world is gaining recognition. The Manifesto of the Summit on Post-Materialist Science, Spirituality and Society (Tucson, Arizona, 2015) declared: “Mind represents an aspect of reality as primordial as the physical world. Mind is fundamental in the universe, i.e., it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more
basic.”