Opening the Conversation About NDE: Dr. Eben Alexander & the Question of Consciousness
The following originally appeared on The Eyeless
Owl.
There is a slow shift in our cultural worldview surrounding the nature of consciousness. It's a shift that is occurring in incremental stages, its main bulk still writhing below the surface of frothing rhetoric and opinionated debate, but a Newsweek's cover story marks an important change in the public discussion. Dr. Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon, with 25 years of experience, including teaching at Harvard Medical School, has had an NDE.
In his upcoming book, Proof of Heaven: A Neuroscientist's Journey into the Afterlife, Alexander describes in detail his Near Death Experience, which is detailed in brief through the Newsweek article, "Heaven Is Real: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife." His experience, as he understands it, radically altered the static assumptions that he had developed throughout his career in academic science.
Such an integral moment becomes very hard to explain on the cold grounds of academic dispassion. This is not to say that objectivity is in need of being abandoned, however it points to a central problem that has plagued contemporary science, which, when applied under the wrong assumptions, has been unable to relate to our lives in any kind of holistic way.
Having been hammered by the politicized, back and forth rhetoric of the Neo-Atheist and Creationist movements, it may come as a surprise that the leading edge of our current scientific investigations are pointing to a reality that is more complex than stock answers that make for good soundbites. While Alexander's book is an anecdotal account, it represents a drastic shift in our understanding of the world, a shift which began when NDE's were first moved out of the psychological category of ‘delusion' in the mid-1990′s.
At the heart of this are advances in neuroscience, physics and biology showing that some of the unqualified materialistic assumptions that have undergirded popular science are difficult to fit with the evidence. Many of these questions are arising from explorations of non-local field effects, and the question of just how relevant they are to physical phenomena.
Stephan A. Schwartz, a former Research Director at the Rhine Research Center, recently pointed out, in a presentation preceding the first, global, online Remote Viewing experiment, that peer reviewed independent studies, across a wide range of disciplines, are more and more indicative of the fact that there is more to be studied regarding non-local fields, including the underlying nature of consciousness. The scientific worldview is at a tipping point where a synthesis of the data is going to cause a drastic change in the current model.
I'm working on an ongoing feature series for Reality Sandwich focusing on consciousness studies, and anomalous human experiences, and I've been shocked by my overview of the field. The current reporting by the media is far behind what 130 years of data indicates is going on. In fact, experimental models in the area of Dynamical systems theory, such as those being developed by mathematicians like UC Santa Cruz' Ralph Abraham, are coalescing insights that draw on even deeper sources. Recent studies and experiments applying these insights have been very provocative.
The cultural shift we're seeing expressed in this Newsweek piece is beginning to make these areas of speculation more open to the public conversation. While the conclusions regarding the ultimate meaning of his NDE are subjective, Alexander's account points to the fact that there is still much to explore in our understanding of consciousness, and ultimately the universe itself.
Alexander, himself, admits:
"The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn't mean they had journeyed anywhere real."
However, he continues, regarding his own experience:
"When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.
Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind -- my conscious, inner self -- was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I'd never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
But that dimension -- in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states -- is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey."
Alexander's experience is not proof of anything beyond the fact that we don't know quite as much about the workings of the universe as the proselytizing pundits would have us believe. However, this does nothing to negate the importance of what he is expressing. His background allows him insights into the experience that others who have had NDE's do not have.
It is also an important moment when a neuroscientist comes forward with something that goes against the publicly accepted worldview that his discipline espouses. Each step taken to bring these questions forward into a more open discourse is an important step in opening up our ability as a society to explore areas that remain closed if they are locked by a tired game being played by fundamentalist factions of faith or scientism.
No doubt the game will continue for some time, as evinced by LiveScience publishing yet another inaccurate, random, but rhetorically compelling article on the in-existence of ESP & Psychic Abilities just as Alexander's story begins to gain ground in the media: ESP & Psychic Powers: Claims Inconclusive.
Photo by kiwanja, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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Science meets spirituality
Rough way to find the truth
“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”
I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it. Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.
“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”
That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.
- Dr. Eben Alexander
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-docto...
***
It's very, very rare that we simply look and are aware that we are looking. And that involves being aware of what we're looking at, and being aware of ourselves looking at the same time. So right now, I can be aware that I'm moving my hand, and that I'm talking, and that you there are in front of me. But it's actually not a very, very common state at all, to be aware like that.
And Empedocles gave very, very specific directions for how to start to become conscious through your senses. How to look and be aware that you're looking. How to feel your tongue inside your mouth, and be aware of it. Not just rub your tongue on the top of your mouth, but actually be aware that it's happening. And how to do this with all of the senses at the same time. And this last stage, about how to do it with all the senses at the same time, this is very, very powerful, it's very, very esoteric, it is an extraordinarily elegant way of realizing God. Not by leaving the senses behind, but by consciously using all of your senses at the same time. If you do that, if you actually do that, you start to become aware there is your sense of sight, there is your sense of hearing, there is the sense of feeling what you feel, your backside on the chair, or you feel your shoes on the floor. The hearing, the seeing, the feeling, the tasting, the touching.
And it's difficult enough even to do one of those consciously, but if you do them all consciously, you become aware of this infinite blackness between them. There is a void that connects the seeing to the hearing, to the tasting, to the touching. And that's eternity. And that eternity is totally unchanging, but that eternity is also what gives rise to the physical world. And it's out of that experience of eternity that people like Empedocles or Parmenides, these ancient Greeks, were actually able to bring the germs of a new civilization. Because that eternity, it never changes, but it contains the seeds of all change.
- Peter Kingsley(interview)
***
DAZZLING DIVINE DARKNESS
The mysteriously radiant blackness of Kali arrests my mind every time I recall Her divine form. In an extraordinary book, "Mother of the Universe", the ecstatic hymns to Maha Kali by the 18th century Bengali saint Ramprasad Sen, the translator,Dr. Lex Hixon, writes:
The mystery of Kali, impenetrable to conventional, dualistic thining, is her blackness, her beautiful midnight blackness. The Goddess tradition, along with many other authentic spiritual transmissions during planetary history, fundamentally emphasizes divine inconceivability, the indefinability of Reality. The rich darkness within what Christian mystics call the Cloud od Unknowing is the radiant blackness of Mother's womb.
Ramprasad is a consummate poet of this dazzling divine darkness:
Why is Mother Kali so radiantly black?
Because she is so powerful, that even mentioning her name destroys delusion.
Because she is so beautiful, Lord Shiva, Conqueror of Death, lies blissfully vanquished beneath her red-soled feet.
There are subtle hues of blackness, but her bright complexion is the mystery that is utterly black, overwhelmingly black, wonderfully black.
When she awakens in the lotus shrine within the heart's cave, her blackness becomes the mystic ilumination that causes the twelve-petal blossom there to glow more intensely that golden embers.
Whoever gazes upon this radiant blackness falls eternally in love.
This black light expresses the highest teaching of the Goddess. It is the radiance beyond whatever we know as light, yet at the same time it constitutes all physical, intellectual, and spiritual light.
- Lawrence Edwards, Ph D, "Kundalini:Her symbols of Transformation and Freedom"
Our Black Lady (Montserrat)Black Artemis of Ephesus
Love is contrary to conscious common sense because love involves the total systemic mind.
- Gregory Bateson
From the perspective of the Bardo Thodol
Jim Cross
http://www.broadspeculations.com
At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light.(Ap.)
"As we are leisurely walking and talking, the sense is that I am walking, but I am also watching myself walking. I am a personal presence, a fullness that is an extension of the black absolute mystery, walking on the road with Karen. At the same time, I am the absolute vastness, as the background of all appearance, witnessing my personal presence walking. Karen is experiencing herself the same way. We are personal presences, both coemergent with, and inseparable extensions from, the mysterious vastness of the absolute. At the same time, we are each this black vastness witnessing the two of us walking.
There is the perception of appearance as surface. But this surface, which is all that perception beholds, is three dimensional and dynamic. The darkness of the night and the luminous blackness of the absolute are almost indistinguishable. This mysterious blackness projects itself dynamically as the various forms, hills and trees, buildings and cars, stars and lights. My personal presence, inseparable from the body, and that of Karen, are parts of this dynamic appearance, but inseparable from it. We are both in oneness with all of existence. At the same time, our personal presences are clearly inseparable extensions of the black absolute into this oneness of appearance. We recognize that each of us is a projection of the absolute mystery as a personal presence walking into the appearance, an appearance that the absolute is also projecting. As we talk it is really the absolute talking to himself, while he walks as two people.
I am both a dynamic embodied presence and a transcendent witnessing background, simultaneously. These manifestations are completely coemergent. The experience is very mysterious, and totally confounding to the mind.
The insight arises that this condition is the resolution of the issue I have been working on for several years, the issue of the dichotomy between life and death, soul and absolute. I am both the soul as an embodied dynamic presence, and the vastness of the witnessing absolute. I am the soul as an expression and extension of the absolute, while remaining the transcendent absolute. I am fully the personal soul, and I am completely the absolute vastness. Fullness, absence and mystery are all present.
Karen bids me good night as we reach my room. Entering, I am aware of bringing the luminous darkness into the room, along with my personal presence. The whole room, the furniture, the lights, all constitute a graceful, exquisite manifestation of my vastness, as my personal presence inhabits and moves within it."
- A. H. Almaas
http://www.ahalmaas.com/Extracts/lnj14_life_deathless.html
Love is contrary to conscious common sense because love involves the total systemic mind.
- Gregory Bateson
attention psychonauts
Sam Harris
""As you can see, the article by Eben Alexander has provoked a considerable amount of commentary, and a number of readers have written me personally as well. Several cite neuro-scientist Sam Harris' writings, and have asked me what I think of them, or challenged me to accept them. I do not kn ow Sam very well, we have only met a few times. I was always impressed by his intelligence, and his passion. However, in this case, I am afraid science is not on his side. Parapsychologist Chris Carter shreds Sam Harris' arguments, one by one, in his book Science and the Near-Death Experience. Senior cardiologist Pim van Lommel, in his book Consciousness After Life, does so as well. Both also provide, from different perspectives, a comprehensive assessment of this entire field of research.
As to Eben Alexander: I do not know him at all, and have not yet read his book, so I cannot say anything about it. I published his article because it was a dramatic example of the Near Death Experience, written by a man whose brain was certifiably "offline" as he puts it for several days. I know people who know him and, through their estimations, I have no doubt about his integrity. His scientific credentials are a matter of public record.
The details of his experience I cannot speak to, but as to the reality of the Near Death Experience, I think the evidence, from several sources, is clear and overwhelming that an aspect of consciousness exists outside of space time, and survives corporeal death.
There are now six protocols in parapsychology with one in a billion odds that it is not chance producing the results -- the Higgs Boson was assessed to be real on the basis of 1 in 300 million odds -- and over 13 million Americans have reported NDEs. It is an act of willful ignorance to deny this. The materialist paradigm is crumbling. It isn't going to happen overnight; it isn't going to go without a fight; but it is failing; and it will be gone for most of science within 30 years. That's my prediction of where the trend is heading."
Also this post by Bernardo Kastrup goes further: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/10/sam-harris-critique-of-eben-alexa...
And Greg Taylor at The Daily Grail mentions that: "There are elements to the case that weren't mentioned in the Newsweek article
which will obviously be in the book, and which no doubt led Alexander to his conclusion that his 'NDE' was proof of an afterlife. Perhaps the most prominent of which was that the woman he interacted with during the experience was his birth sister whom he had never seen an image of before (Alexander was adopted out), and who had died just a few years previous to his illness."
http://www.dailygrail.com/Spirit-World/2012/10/Near-Death-Experience-Com...
Robert McLuhan also has some interesting insights over at Paranormalia: http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2012/10/proof-of-heaven.html