Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (41 page)

According to developmental biologist Brian Goodwin, the differentiation of cell functions during the embryonic phase cannot be accounted for solely by the genetic code contained in DNA structure. Goodwin too proposes self-organizing fields in and among cells to explain the differentiation and coordination of cells and cell systems.
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What else could explain the hundreds of thousands of well-coordinated chemical reactions in each cell every second, coupled with a reciprocal feedback mechanism in cells, organs, and entire organisms (systems biology)? Besides, chemical processes sometimes happen a million times faster in living organisms than under the most auspicious laboratory conditions. How can the living cell, governed by DNA, achieve this? It is highly likely that nonlocal information exchange between cells and cell systems plays a role. Another possible explanation is the fact that all cells are interconnected because they originate from a single source, namely the fertilized egg cell with the person-specific DNA. As we saw, Alain Aspect’s experiment, which provided definitive proof of nonlocal information exchange, also made use of two particles originating from one and the same source.

The electrocardiogram (ECG), which shows the heart’s electrical activity, can be registered on the skin of people’s arms, legs, and chest because this electrical activity can be found in each of the body’s cells. Presumably all of the body’s quintillion cells are interconnected via the heart’s rhythmically changing electromagnetic field. Also the registration of the brain’s electrical activity, the EEG, reveals the heart’s electrical activity. It is possible that self-organization enables the heart, with its intensive electromagnetic fields with coherent patterns, to create reception potential (an interface) for certain aspects of our consciousness and to transmit this information via its electromagnetic fields to the body as a whole. However, this supposition requires a great deal of additional research.

To understand correctly the evident effect of nonlocal information I would like to mention the effective functioning of groups of thousands and sometimes millions of living organisms, such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites. These colonies are examples of living and self-organizing systems composed of animals with different tasks but with a collective consciousness coordinated by the queen. If the queen is isolated from her colony but alive, everything continues as normal, but if the queen is killed away from her colony, chaos ensues and all work stops. The queen coordinates at a distance (nonlocally)—and probably on the basis of her DNA function—all of the colony’s activities by creating and maintaining a collective consciousness.
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A flock of starlings reacting to a falcon attack.
Photo by Manuel Presti, Italy

A flock of starlings reacting to a falcon attack. Photo by Manuel Presti, Italy.

Photo by Manuel Presti, Italy Collective consciousness also appears to play a role in the extremely rapid coordination displayed by schools of fish or by migrating birds (see picture). A flock of birds recorded on film was found to have a reaction speed of 38 milliseconds, which is far too quick for normal communication between hundreds and thousands of birds that are often dozens of yards apart.
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The birds behave no longer like separate beings but like a cohesive and coherent entity. Because the collective coordination of these species is innate, it makes sense to assume that their DNA plays an important part in this kind of remote communication.

DNA, Heredity, and Consciousness

According to the theory set out in this chapter, DNA does not contain hereditary material itself but is capable of receiving hereditary, morphogenetic (formative), and person-specific information from nonlocal consciousness. As mentioned earlier, morphogenetic fields involve a nonenergetic form of information transfer, which makes them comparable to probability fields in quantum physics. The reciprocal information transfer between the field and the living cell structures takes place via resonance with specific frequencies, even at the smallest subcellular level of electron spin resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance (quantum spin correlation). As mentioned before, the concept of morphogenetic fields was conceived independently by the biologists Weiss and Gurwitsch and brilliantly developed by the English biologist Rupert Sheldrake. These morphogenetic fields store information about the development and design of the body with all its different cell systems with specialized functions. This information is also essential for the continuity of all bodily functions, because of the constant breakdown and regeneration of molecules and cells.
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Each cell must therefore be in contact with the morphogenetic consciousness via the DNA in the cell nucleus. The process is best illustrated by the stem cell, which has been much written about in recent times. These stem cells are called omnipotent because they have the potential to grow into any cell type, such as a neuron, heart cell, or muscle cell, depending on the environment in which stem cells originate or are cultivated. This environment appears to contain the information (the morphogenetic consciousness) that the cells need to develop and specialize. When stem cells are cultivated among neurons, they will be able to grow only into neurons and never into heart or muscle cells. All cells in the body communicate with each other and with consciousness fields via resonance, electromagnetic fields, hormones, and messenger proteins. The cell collaboration that enables the continuity of function of the various cell systems must occur within nanoseconds given the aforementioned replacement of 500,000 cells per second. Because of the distance between the various cell systems in the body, the speed of this information exchange must approach the speed of light, which is obviously much faster than signal proteins alone could manage.

What is heredity other than the capacity to remember what was and what may be? Heredity is the preservation of physical possibilities and unconscious properties. But heredity is also the preservation of conscious properties, “being conscious,” which results in our capacity for conscious recollection, conscious expression of will, and conscious decision making guided by our conscious (and unconscious) experiences, which in turn leads to knowledge and insight. Heredity is therefore another word for memory. Whether we call memory a property of consciousness or a biological principle is irrelevant, because these words indicate the different levels at which the same kind of information functions and manifests itself nonlocally. Both heredity and consciousness with memories form, via our DNA, the connecting link between past and future.

Consciousness is the nonlocal repository of all past experience. The reception of information from nonlocal space rests on our free will (intention), attention, and the state of our (waking) consciousness. In all probability, our person-specific DNA has given the different manifestations of our consciousness, such as waking consciousness and the individual subconscious, their different places of resonance, both in the brain and in other cell systems, each with an individual access code comparable to a private phone number. There is also a universal or collective human consciousness that links each individual human being with everything in existence or everything that ever was or will be, and this happens via the universal-human DNA with a shared access code. This is comparable to an international access code. This universal-human access code (DNA) differs from that of animals and plants. According to psychologist C. G. Jung, who himself experienced an NDE during a cardiac arrest in 1944, the shared human consciousness is similar to the collective unconscious.
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Alongside the ego, as waking consciousness, Jung recognizes the self: a higher or broader aspect around the ego, which encompasses both the conscious and unconscious components of personality. Individuality, therefore, is distinct from the embodied ego. The unconscious individual component of consciousness is in contact with other aspects of the collective human unconscious, of which the individual unconscious essentially forms a part. Each part is linked nonlocally with the whole. The next chapter will elaborate on the various aspects of consciousness.

Communication with Remote Cells

There is evidence that remote cells are capable of communicating and responding to the thoughts and feelings of the owner of these cells. The inventor of the lie detector, Cleve Backster, not only tested his equipment on people but also conducted experiments with plants and white blood cells. A lie detector registers minute changes in skin conductivity via hypersensitive electrodes. Backster also registered changes in the conductivity of the leaf surface of plants responding to emotional or negative thoughts, even after those leaves had been ground and their remains distributed across the electrodes. Finally, he measured white blood cells, leukocytes, taken from an oral swab and kept alive in a culture medium. This technique is sometimes applied in dental surgery. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, activated white blood cells exhibit an oscillatory activity while the distribution of waves in and between cells is nonlinear, that is, a quantum process. Even when the white blood cells in Backster’s experiments were transported twelve to twenty kilometers from their owner, or when the cells were placed in an environment shielded from electromagnetic radiation (in a Faraday cage), the cells were found to react when the subject was shown horrific or sexually arousing images (see figure). At the same time, he registered anomalies in the subject’s skin conductivity and found proof of instantaneous and nonlocal communication between the subject’s consciousness and his white blood cells. In other words, each cell is capable of responding, via its person-specific DNA, to the state of mind of its owner. This communication between separate cells at a great distance ties in with the possibility of nonlocal information exchange via individual DNA.
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The response of the white blood cells of a Pearl Harbor veteran who, twelve kilometers from his cells, is shown a filmed close-up of the face of a gunner shooting a Japanese aircraft that subsequently crashes into the ocean.
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The response of the white blood cells of a Pearl Harbor veteran who, twelve kilometers from his cells, is shown a filmed close-up of the face of a gunner shooting a Japanese aircraft that subsequently crashes into the ocean.

Transplanted Memory

The donor organ in a heart transplant contains the donor’s person-specific DNA. Because this material is foreign to the recipient, it will in principle trigger a rejection response, which requires suppression with strong medication. But sometimes the DNA in the transplanted organ continues to function as a place of resonance or interface of the donor’s consciousness, allowing the organ recipient to sense snippets of feelings and ideas that turn out to match the personality and consciousness of the deceased donor. This phenomenon was the subject of a 2003 Discovery Channel documentary called
Transplanting Memories.
It is an appropriate label for the experiences described by Claire Sylvia in her book
Change of Heart
and by physician Paul Pearsall in his book
The Heart’s Code.
A recent article features ten well-documented cases of heart transplant patients, some of them still extremely young, who underwent striking emotional and behavioral changes that relatives of the deceased donor later identified as matching the donor’s personality.
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A possible explanation for this cellular memory is provided by the hypothesis that DNA functions as the place of resonance for our person-specific, nonlocal consciousness and continues to do so for the deceased donor’s individual, nonlocal consciousness, which the donor recipient can experience through the donor organ’s DNA. Unfortunately, the reservations of transplant centers and transplant organizations have so far prevented any systematic scientific research into this now-and-then-reported phenomenon.