Studying consciousness

Communication from those who have died is spotty at best, so one of humanity's great mysteries has always been what happens when we die. The only living people who have direct experience with dying and the afterlife are those who've had near-death experiences (NDEs). In the last twenty years, a whole science has developed around studying NDEs and extrapolating their meaning for consciousness.

You can be clinically dead and recover without having an NDE; I also suspect some who have them simply can't make sense of them and so don't remember them. Every day, we filter what we see, hear, and touch through our experiences and belief system, and those things we can't find a place for, we often just discard.

Those who do recall NDEs describe them differently, filtered individually, but there are remarkable similarities. I am fascinated by the stories, especially by how often people are either instructed to return to life because they're not done yet, or given a choice to continue living or to die. However, what I'm most interested in are the implications for life after death.

I've been reading about NDEs since last fall, but I somehow missed an international conference on the topic held right here in Seattle last month. (Synchronicity fail!) My therapist learned of it after the fact when she heard one of the speakers on the radio. She was very excited about what he'd talked about, thought it would interest me, and as she continued, I realized I've had his book on my bedside table since November. The book is Consciousness Beyond Life, by Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist who wanted to understand more about the experiences his patients described during heart attacks and other life-threatening events. He has systematically studied NDEs for 20 years and published the first scientifically rigorous study on NDEs in The Lancet in 2001. I cracked the book open last night, and wanted to share a bit.

Consciousness is not confined to the brain because consciousness is nonlocal, and our brain facilitates rather than produces our experience of consciousness. Whereas our waking consciousness has a biological basis, because our body functions as an interface, there is no biological basis for our endless and nonlocal consciousness, which has its roots in nonlocal space. Waking consciousness is experienced via the body, but endless consciousness does not reside in our brain.

I particularly like a death notice he quoted: "What you have perishes; what you are survives beyond time and space."

A bunch of us went through the Adobe haunted house together
in 1996, and Sandy convinced us to have the photo taken as
a group. Our culture loves haunted houses, delights in ghost
stories, salivates over otherworldly phenomenon — but
people are hesitant to share touching moments of contact
with the consciousness of people they love! Go figure.

van Lommel says that there are no scientific articles or monographs on the topic of contact with the nonlocal consciousness of people who have died because the taboo is such that these experiences are usually not mentioned, even to next of kin. (Apparently I missed the memo about the taboo, because I do prattle on and on . . .) However, a survey conducted by the Tilburg University in the Netherlands in 1980-83 asked respondents anonymously whether they'd ever had a sense of contact with someone who had died: 25% (125 million) said yes in Europe; 30% (100 million) said yes in the U.S. Research specifically asking widows and widowers has found 50% have had at least some contact with the consciousness of a deceased partner. And among parents who have lost a child, a whopping 75% had had contact.

NDEs have only been researched seriously in the past few decades. Surely it's time for us to take a scientific look at the kind of contact people have with loved ones after they die. The first step, I think, is for people to talk about it more openly, without fear that they'll be thought crazy or delusional. I've really been astonished by the number of people in my life who share stories of contact with fathers, mothers, grandparents, cats or dogs, dear friends, or anyone else they had a strong connection with in life. They'd never shared these stories with me before. I'm not saying it needs to be part of every conversation, but I do think there are some truths worth exploring here. And they can't be explored if we don't own the experiences and come out of the closet about spiritual contact.

I'm not sure whether I'd be alive right now without having had so much contact with Sandy since her death. But I'm certain that I'd be much worse off, much further from a return to my optimistic, active self, if she hadn't been so generous with her presence. If we can learn more about opening those channels of communication, we could reduce suffering among survivors, and as someone who's been devastated by pain many times in the past year, I can attest that that's a worthy goal.