We are all part of a collective One Mind

The 2014 Napier Banquet at the Pilgrim Place senior retirement community in Claremont California honored Nancy Mintie for her creative community service as director of Uncommon Good. When she spoke to us and the Napier fellowship university students, however, she did not as many expected issue a resounding call to struggle on for justice, peace and ecology. Instead, after acknowledging how little affect our good works will have on the crises of our time, she shared a new-found hope based on scientific arguments a global consciousness described in Larry Dossey’s book, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters, which ends with this statement of faith: “I believe that the concept of the unitary, collective One Mind, a level of intelligence of which the individual minds of all sentient creatures are a part, is a vision that is powerful enough to make a difference in how we approach all the challenges we face―not as a mere intellectual concept, but as something we feel in the deepest way possible.”1

Based on extensive research into verifiable near-death experiences (NDEs), Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel concludes “the current materialistic view of the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too restricted for a proper understanding of this phenomenon. There are now good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced conscious can sometimes be experienced separate from the body.2

For example, psychiatrist Raymond Moody tells of a seventy-year-old woman who, despite being blind since the age of eighteen, was able to see as she hovered over doctors resuscitating her body after a heart attack. “Not only could she describe what the instruments used looked like, but she could even describe their colors. The most amazing thing about this to me was that most of these instruments weren’t even thought of over fifty years ago when she could last see.”3

One survivor reports: “I don’t know how long it was before the ‘real me’ was floating close to the ceiling, face downward, looking down with great interest at the body lying on the bed. The interest was because the mind in that body was a total blankness, a complete darkness, like a TV screen switched off. ‘Real me’ was ethereal, had no shape, no substance, but had a mind, enjoyed sensation, could see everything in the room in detail, was a power over and above the body that lay inert. The body had no mind, no feeling, no eyes, no life.”4

These out-of-body experiences (OBEs) occurred during cardiac arrest, when according to current scientific knowledge the brain is incapable of observation and memory. Yet, an OBE is very common in NDEs and the many perceptions during these OBEs have been verified.5

Remembering that her “experience of death was wonderful” Hilda Middleton describes moving from above her hospital bed down “a tunnel with a very bright light at the end. Animals, pictures, everything was so beautiful and all the colors were shades of delicate pink, yellow, blue, etc. I was overwhelmed with joy.” Mary Lowther recalls “indefinable shades of pastel-like colors” and “what I can only describe as billions of beautiful shimmering forms, no outlines, and they were all ‘cloaked’ in what looked like a garment of translucent light.” Audrey Organ says, “I was in a tunnel or glorious golden light with my dad, who had died some years earlier. We were strolling side by side but with no physical walking. We were enormously happy, conversing but without the usual verbal speech, all via the mind.”6 On the basis of his study of NDE survivors, van Lommel reports: “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.”7

A NDE may also free a person to embrace the unknown with hope, as it did for Ella Silver. “I have never before or since had such a feeling of ‘knowing’ for sure I would know joy. It was totally different from happiness. I felt my heart would burst with the excitement of expectation.”8

 

1 Larry Dossey, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters (Hay House, 2013), 253.

2 Pim van Lommel, “Pathophysiological Aspects of Near-Death Experiences,” in Mahendra Perera, Karuppiah Jagadheesan and Anthony Peake, editors, Making Sense of Near-Death Experiences (Jessica Kingsley, 2012), 90.

3 Raymond A. Moody, The Light Beyond (Bantam, 1988), 134-135.

4 Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkley Books, 1995), 39.

5 Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, compared the memories of those who had OBEs to the knowledge of patients with considerable hospital experience. “He found that most of the patients in the control group―twenty-three out of the twenty-five people―made mistakes in describing the resuscitation procedures. On the other hand, none of the NDE patients made mistakes in describing what went on in their own resuscitation.” Raymond Moody, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2012), 127-128.

6 Ibid., 84-85, 94.

7 “Many argue that the loss of blood flow and a flat EEG do not exclude some activity somewhere in the brain because an EEG primarily registers the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. In my view this argument misses the point. The issue is not whether there is some immeasurable activity somewhere but whether there is any sign of those specific forms of brain activity that, according to current neuroscience, are considered essential to experiencing consciousness. And there is no sign whatsoever of those specific forms of brain activity in the EEGs of cardiac arrest patients.” Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperCollins, 2010), 165. For a video on this NDE research see “The Mystery of Perception During NDE” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avyUsPgIuQ0.

8 Fenwick, The Truth in the Light, 71.