Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (37 page)

New Scientific Concepts

As mentioned, current medical and scientific knowledge cannot account for all aspects of the subjective experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors with an NDE. However, I believe that science means asking questions with an open mind. And science is also about searching for possible explanations for new, initially perplexing problems instead of clinging to old facts and concepts. The problem lies less in accepting the content of new ideas than in rejecting old and familiar conceptions. The history of science tells us that sooner or later—and sometimes very soon—new empirical findings will force us to abandon our acquired knowledge. Quantum physicist David Bohm believed that “fixed ideas which underlie scientific hypotheses are not aids but obstructions to clarity, and that a methodology which combines discipline with openness would be better equipped to keep pace with the truth that is revealed as scientific investigation progresses and deepens.”
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I do not expect new ideas to find immediate acceptance, but they should at least be examined more closely. As Frederik van Eeden put it back in 1890: “I am more convinced than ever that the a-priori rejection of and refusal to examine unfamiliar and unusual phenomena is the greatest foe of scientific progress.”
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In the introduction I cited the well-known American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who claimed that contrary to popular belief, most typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. This is a generalization, of course, but he believed that scientists tend to be rather “conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate.” Most scientists try to reconcile theory and fact within the accepted paradigm, which Kuhn describes as essentially a collection of “articles of faith shared by scientists.” All research results that cannot be explained by current scientific theories are labeled “anomalies” because they threaten the existing paradigm and challenge the expectations raised by such paradigms. Needless to say, these findings are initially overlooked, ignored, rejected as aberrations, or even ridiculed.
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Near-death experiences are such anomalies because their cause and content cannot be accounted for with current medical and scientific ideas about the various aspects of human consciousness and the mind-brain relationship. I believe that anomalies can make a vital contribution to the critical reassessment and, where necessary, rejection of old concepts in favor of new and better theories that do explain these anomalies. In the past anomalies have always been the key to scientific paradigm shifts, just as the initially inexplicable behavior of heated metal prompted the development of quantum physics.

A New Perspective on Consciousness and the Brain

I developed the following views in response to the commonly reported experiences of an enhanced consciousness during a cardiac arrest. This enhanced consciousness features nonlocal aspects of interconnectedness, such as memories from earliest childhood up until the crisis that caused the NDE and sometimes even visions of the future. It offers the chance of communication with the thoughts and feelings of people who were involved in past events or with the consciousness of deceased friends and relatives. This experience of consciousness can be coupled with a sense of unconditional love and acceptance while people can also have contact with a form of ultimate and universal knowledge and wisdom.

In this new approach, complete and endless consciousness with retrievable memories has its origins in a nonlocal space in the form of indestructible and not directly observable wave functions. These wave functions, which store all aspects of consciousness in the form of information, are always present in and around the body (nonlocally). The brain and the body merely function as a relay station receiving part of the overall consciousness and part of our memories in our waking consciousness in the form of measurable and constantly changing electromagnetic fields. In this view, these electromagnetic fields of the brain are not the cause but rather the effect or consequence of endless consciousness.

According to this concept, our brain can be compared to a television set that receives information from electromagnetic fields and decodes it into sound and vision. Our brain can also be compared to a television camera, which converts sound and vision into electromagnetic waves, or encodes it. These electromagnetic waves contain the essence of all information for a TV program but are available to our senses only through a television camera and set. In this view, brain function can be seen as a transceiver; the brain does not produce but rather facilitates consciousness. And DMT or dimethyltryptamine, which is produced in the pineal gland, could play an important role in disturbing this process, as we saw earlier. Consciousness contains the seeds of all the information that is stored as wave functions in nonlocal space. It transmits information to the brain and via the brain receives information from the body and the senses. That consciousness affects both form and function of the brain and the body has been described in the discussion of neuroplasticity (“The mind can change the brain”). This view corresponds with what David Bohm has written: “Consciousness informs and in-forms.”
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Nonlocal Consciousness in Nonlocal Space

My term for the wave functions in nonlocal space, which possess both personal and universal information, is
nonlocal consciousness.
According to this approach, consciousness has no material basis. I already outlined this vision in 2004 and 2006, but the terminology I now use is slightly different. In this model nonlocal space is more than a mathematical description; it is a metaphysical space in which consciousness can exert influence because nonlocal space possesses subjective properties of consciousness. In this view consciousness is nonlocal and functions as the origin or basis of everything, including the material world.
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As I explained in the previous chapter, observation is, by definition, impossible in nonlocal space because everything is based on probability fields (wave functions); time and distance play no role either. In other words, the physical aspect of our consciousness in the material world, which we experience as waking consciousness and which can be compared to the particle aspect of light, stems from the wave aspect of the “complete” and “endless” consciousness created by collapse of the wave function in nonlocal space. This particle aspect, the physical effect of our waking consciousness, is observable and demonstrable in the brain through EEG, MEG, fMRI, and PET-scan technology whereas consciousness in nonlocal space is not directly demonstrable on (quantum) theoretical grounds: everything that is visible emanates from the invisible. To better understand this immeasurable and invisible nonlocal consciousness, one could think of gravity. While gravity itself is not directly demonstrable or provable, its physical effects certainly are.

Theory of Complementarity

Aspects of consciousness must resonate in different parts of the brain in order to be experienced as waking consciousness. Resonance involves oscillation with the same frequency. As we saw earlier, neurological imaging techniques such as fMRI and PET show that different states of consciousness activate various brain centers. Depression, joy, fear, pain, meditation, decision making, cognitive functions, mindfulness, sleeping, or perception all activate different centers of the brain. But while the imaging techniques can establish the neurological correlations, they do so without accounting for the content of the different aspects of consciousness. They merely point out the place of resonance of the different aspects of consciousness. Our waking consciousness has a biological basis because our body functions as an interface. But there is no biological basis for endless or enhanced consciousness, which is rooted in a multidimensional nonlocal space. So enhanced consciousness is not limited to our brain because it is nonlocal, and under normal circumstances our brain only allows us to experience waking consciousness. Like the particle and wave aspects of light, this perspective on the relationship between nonlocal and waking consciousness constitutes a complementary theory rather than a dualistic one.
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Conscious subjective experiences and their corresponding objective and visible brain activities, the physical effects of waking consciousness, which can be established with the help of an fMRI or EEG, are two different manifestations of one and the same underlying reality; they cannot be reduced to one another.

A Comparison with Global Communication

How can this theoretical approach help us understand the possibility of experiencing consciousness, complete with memories and occasional glimpses of the future, during an NDE when the brain has stopped functioning? It may be helpful to compare this continuous, invisible, and instantaneous interaction between the mind and body to modern worldwide communication. Time and distance appear to play no role in the nonstop global exchange of information because of all the electromagnetic information waves for the ubiquitous cell phone, television, radio, and computer technologies that surround and penetrate us at all times. These information waves propagate at the speed of light. We are not aware of the hundreds of thousands of telephone calls, hundreds of television and radio broadcasts, and the billions of Internet connections around us day and night, passing through us and through the walls, including those of the room in which you are reading this book. We are not aware of these electromagnetic information waves until we switch on our cell phone, TV, radio, or laptop. But what we receive is not actually in the appliance. The voice we hear through the receiver is not inside the telephone. The images and music of the TV broadcast are not inside the TV set, and the concert is not inside the radio. We only see and hear the program when we switch on a TV set, and when we switch it off again we stop seeing and hearing it even though the broadcast continues. When we switch on another TV set, we receive the same program again. The connection appears to be nonlocal, and in actual fact all electromagnetic information is disseminated at the speed of light.

We can also compare endless and nonlocal consciousness with the Internet, which does not originate in the computer but is received and made visible to the senses by the computer. Akin to the brain’s role in consciousness, a computer has a facilitating function: with the right access codes, a computer allows us to access more than a billion different Web sites. The computer does not produce the Internet any more than the brain produces consciousness. The computer allows us to add information to the Internet just like the brain is capable of adding information from our body and senses to our consciousness. Like a computer, the brain functions as a transceiver. As soon as you switch your computer off, you lose access to all those Web sites. Yet the sites themselves remain available worldwide, in Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, as well as North and South America. And so it is with consciousness. It is always present. During life, we can experience aspects of consciousness in our body as our waking consciousness. Life allows us to make the transition from nonlocal space to our physical world, space-time. The oxygen deficiency brought on by the stopping of the heart temporarily suspends brain function, causing the electromagnetic fields of our neurons and other cells to disappear and the interface between consciousness and our physical body to be disrupted. This creates the conditions for experiencing the endless and enhanced consciousness outside the body (the wave aspect of consciousness) known as an NDE: the experience of a continuity of consciousness independent of the body. This concept of an enhanced and nonlocal consciousness can account for all elements of an NDE. When the body dies, consciousness can no longer have a particle aspect because all brain function is permanently lost. Endless (nonlocal) consciousness, however, will exist forever as wave functions in nonlocal space.

Scientific Proof of the Nonlocal Entanglement of Consciousness

Experiments appear to provide scientific proof of the nonlocal entanglement or connectedness of consciousness. Pairs of people were placed in two separate Faraday cages, which are rooms shielded from electromagnetic radiation to block out any electromagnetic information transfer. If these two people were strongly connected to each other, such as parent and child or two people who practiced many years of joint meditation, simultaneous changes in their EEG could be registered. In one isolated Faraday chamber, sensory stimulation through random computer-generated flashes of light caused visual evoked potentials in the EEG registration of the stimulated person, and this activity was instantaneously received by the other, unstimulated person in the second Faraday cage.
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As a result, the registered patterns in the EEG of the unstimulated person changed the moment the lights flashed in the other Faraday cage. This transferred electrical activity, the so-called transferred potentials, the coherence or correlation between the two EEGs, can be ascribed only to nonlocal influence. Because the experiment design excluded electromagnetic information transfer, this correlation cannot be explained with classic scientific models.

Physicist Fred H. Thaheld has outlined a potential scientific basis for this macroscopic and biological nonlocal entanglement. The first studies of this nonlocal entanglement of consciousness were carried out at the University of Mexico by the neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. The research initially met with criticism because of its poor design, but scientists at three different laboratories later replicated identical EEG correlations. Two fMRI studies found evidence of nonlocal entanglement between the brains of two isolated individuals while nonlocal influence has also been identified in subjects whose fMRI registration changed significantly when a healer at some distance focused attention on these subjects. And a recent study using laser stimulation and local EEG registration has shown nonlocal biological and macroscopic entanglement between two cultivated specimens of fully isolated human neural networks.
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