Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (2 page)

Even medical training pays scant attention to what death might be. By the time they graduate, most doctors have not given death much thought. Throughout life 500,000 cells in the body die every second, 30 million every minute, and 50 billion every day. These cells are all replaced again on a daily basis, giving a person an almost entirely new body every couple of years. Cell death is therefore not the same as physical death. In life, our bodies change constantly from one second to the next. Yet we neither feel nor realize it. How do we explain the continuity of this constantly changing body? Cells are building blocks comparable to the building blocks of a house, but who designs, plans, and coordinates the construction of a house? Not the building blocks themselves. So the obvious question is: What explains the construction and coordination of the ever-changing body from one second to the next?

All bodies function the same on a biochemical and physiological level, yet all people are different. The cause of this difference is not just physical. People have different characters, feelings, moods, levels of intelligence, interests, ideas, and needs. Consciousness plays a major role in this difference. This raises the question: do we human beings
equal
our bodies, or do we
have
bodies?

Just over 50 percent of the population of the Netherlands is relatively confident that death is the end of everything. These people believe that the death of our bodies marks the end of our identities, our thoughts, and our memories, and that death is the end of our consciousness. In contrast, approximately 40 to 50 percent of Dutch people believe in some form of afterlife. In the United States between 72 percent (male 67 percent and female 76 percent) and 74 percent of people believe in life after death. In the United Kingdom about 58 percent believe in an afterlife.
⁷
Yet many people never ask themselves whether their ideas about death are actually correct—until they are confronted with their own mortality after a death, serious accident, or life-threatening illness in their family or close circle of friends.

By studying everything that has been thought and written about death throughout history—in all times, cultures, and religions—we may be able to form a different, better picture of death. But the same can be achieved by studying recent scientific research into near-death experience. Evidence has shown that most people lose all fear of death after an NDE. Their experience tells them that death is not the end of everything and that life goes on in one way or another. One patient wrote to me after his NDE,

According to people who have had an NDE, death is nothing other than a different way of being with an enhanced and broadened consciousness, which is everywhere at once because it is no longer tied to a body.

The Role of Science in the Study of Consciousness

According to the philosopher of science Ilja Maso, most scientists employ the scientific method based on materialist, mechanistic, and reductionist assumptions. It attracts most of the funding, achieves the most striking results, and is thought to employ the brightest minds. The more a vision deviates from this materialist paradigm, the lower its status and the less money it receives. Indeed, experience shows us that the upper echelons of the research hierarchy receive a disproportionate percentage of funding, whereas the lower echelons actually address the condition, needs, and problems of people. True science does not restrict itself to materialist and therefore restrictive hypotheses but is open to new and initially inexplicable findings and welcomes the challenge of finding explanatory theories. Maso speaks of an
inclusive science,
which can accommodate ideas that are more compatible with our attempts to learn about subjective aspects of the world and ourselves than the materialist demarcation currently allows.
⁸

The psychologist Abraham H. Maslow offered a fine definition of what such an inclusive science should entail:

The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn claimed that most scientists are still trying to reconcile theory and facts within the routinely accepted (materialist) paradigm, which he describes as essentially a collection of articles of faith shared by scientists.
¹⁰
All research results that cannot be accounted for by the prevailing worldview are labeled “anomalies” because they threaten the existing paradigm and challenge the expectations raised by this paradigm. Needless to say, such anomalies are initially overlooked, ignored, rejected as aberrations, or even ridiculed. Near-death experiences are such anomalies. Anomalies offer the chance of modifying existing scientific theories or replacing them with new concepts that do offer an explanation. But it is rare for new concepts to be received and accepted with enthusiasm when they do not fit the prevailing materialist paradigm. The words of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson still ring true: “It’s been said that there’s nothing so troublesome as a new idea, and I think that’s particularly true in science.”

Most of the people who specialize in consciousness research, including neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, are still of the opinion that there is a materialist and reductionist explanation for consciousness. The well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett believes, and many with him, that consciousness is nothing other than matter and that our subjective experience of our consciousness as something purely personal and different from somebody else’s consciousness is merely an illusion.
¹¹
According to these scientists, consciousness arises entirely from the matter that constitutes our brain. If this were true, then everything we experience in our consciousness would be nothing other than the expression of a machine controlled by classical physics and chemistry, and our behavior would be the inexorable outcome of nerve-cell activity in our brain. Of course the notion that all subjective thoughts and feelings are produced by nothing other than the brain’s activity also means that free will is an illusion. This viewpoint has enormous implications for concepts such as moral responsibility and personal freedom.

The Need for a New Approach

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black…it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

—W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

When empirical scientific studies discover phenomena or facts that are
not
consistent with current scientific theories, these new facts must not be denied, suppressed, or even ridiculed, as is still quite common. In the event of new findings, the existing theories ought to be elaborated or modified and if necessary rejected and replaced. We need new ways of thinking and new forms of science to study consciousness and acquire a better understanding of the effects of consciousness. Some scientists, such as the philosopher David Chalmers, are more receptive and take consciousness seriously: “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.” Chalmers specializes in the problem of consciousness and has written an excellent overview of the various theories on the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
¹²
I will look at this overview in more detail in a later chapter.

In the past new forms of science emerged when prevailing scientific ideas could no longer explain certain phenomena. At the start of the twentieth century, for instance, quantum physics emerged because certain findings could not be accounted for with classical physics. Quantum physics overturned the established view of our material world. The fact that the new insights provided by quantum physics are being accepted only slowly can be attributed to the materialist worldview with which most of us grew up. According to some quantum physicists, quantum physics accords our consciousness a decisive role in creating and experiencing perceptible reality. This not-yet-commonly-accepted interpretation posits that our picture of reality is based on the information received by our consciousness. This transforms modern science into a subjective science in which consciousness plays a fundamental role. The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated it as follows:

The experience of certain aspects of consciousness during an NDE is comparable, or analogous, to concepts from quantum physics. Of course quantum theory cannot explain consciousness, but in conjunction with the results and conclusions from NDE research it can contribute to a better understanding of the transition or interface between consciousness and the brain.

Science Equals Asking Questions with an Open Mind

In my opinion, current science must reconsider its assumptions about the nature of perceptible reality because these ideas have led to the neglect or denial of important areas of consciousness. Current science usually starts from a reality that is based solely on perceptible phenomena. Yet at the same time we can (intuitively) sense that besides objective, sensory perception there is a role for subjective aspects such as feelings, inspiration, and intuition. Current scientific techniques cannot measure or demonstrate the content of consciousness. It is impossible to produce scientific evidence that somebody is in love or that somebody appreciates a certain piece of music or a particular painting. The things that can be measured are the chemical, electric, or magnetic changes in brain activity; the content of thoughts, feelings, and emotions cannot be measured. If we had no direct experience of our consciousness through our feelings, emotions, and thoughts, we would not be able to perceive it.

Moreover, people must appreciate that their picture of the material world is derived from and constructed solely on the basis of their own perception. There is simply no other way. All of us create our own reality on the basis of our consciousness. When we are in love the world is beautiful, and when we are depressed that very same world is a torment. In other words, the material, “objective” world is merely the picture constructed in our consciousness. People thus preserve their own worldview. This is precisely the kind of idea that a large part of the scientific community has difficulty accepting.

Endless Consciousness

On the basis of prospective studies of near-death experience, recent results from neurophysiological research, and concepts from quantum physics, I strongly believe that consciousness cannot be located in a particular time and place. This is known as nonlocality. Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension that is not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time. This endless consciousness is always in and around us. We have no theories to prove or measure nonlocal space and nonlocal consciousness in the material world. The brain and the body merely function as an interface or relay station to receive part of our total consciousness and part of our memories into our waking consciousness. Nonlocal consciousness encompasses much more than our waking consciousness. Our brain may be compared both to a television set, receiving information from electromagnetic fields and decoding this into sound and vision, and to a television camera, converting or encoding sound and vision into electromagnetic waves. Our consciousness transmits information to the brain and via the brain receives information from the body and senses. The function of the brain can be compared to a transceiver; our brain has a facilitating rather than a producing role: it enables the experience of consciousness. There is also increasing evidence that consciousness has a direct effect on the function and anatomy of the brain and the body, with DNA likely to play an important role.

Near-death experience prompted the concept of a nonlocal and endless consciousness, which allows us to understand a wide range of special states of consciousness, such as mystical and religious experiences, deathbed visions (end-of-life experiences), perimortem and postmortem experiences (nonlocal communication), heightened intuitive feelings (nonlocal information exchange), prognostic dreams, remote viewing (nonlocal perception), and the mind’s influence on matter (nonlocal perturbation). Ultimately, we cannot avoid the conclusion that endless consciousness has always been and always will be, independently of the body. There is no beginning and there will never be an end to our consciousness. For this reason we ought to seriously consider the possibility that death, like birth, may be a mere passing from one state of consciousness into another and that during life the body functions as an interface or place of resonance.