Her surgery is one of the most detailed and best authenticated examples of what is usually called a near-death experience; however, Reynolds was not near death, she was categorically dead.
In order to remove an intracranial aneurysm in the basilar artery – weakness in the arterial wall had caused a huge, life-threatening bubble to develop – that was of a size and position to make other procedures too risky, neurosurgeon Dr. Robert F. Spetzler was called in to use the pioneering method of deep hypothermic cardiac arrest. After being rendered unconscious with anaesthetics, she was cooled to around 20oC (68oF), her heart stopped beating, her lungs stopped breathing, her brain stopped functioning (electro-cerebral silence), the blood was drained from inside her skull. All her vital signs were flatlined. She was clinically dead. There were no signs of life, yet she saw and heard things. There was no brain activity, yet she was conscious.
The sound that seemed to prompt her leaving her body was that of the surgical saw Spetzler was about to use to cut open her skull. She thought the saw looked like an electric toothbrush and noted a dent in it, and its interchangeable blades in a “socket wrench case.” She had expected that the doctors would shave her whole head, but saw instead that only a patch had been shaved. She heard a female voice – she thought it may have been a Dr. Murray – talking about her veins and arteries: they were “very small,” apparently. Most of the tools and instruments she did not recognize, but she saw a heart-lung machine and “didn’t like the respirator.”
Reynolds went on to have a very vivid experience in which she met deceased relatives, but the only testable pieces of information relate to her description of the operating theatre – a description she should not have been able to make under the circumstance. They were all confirmed.
It should only take one case like that of Pam Reynolds for us to rethink the mind–brain problem, if not immediately abandon the current orthodox position that states that the brain produces the mind, but there has been more than one.
Although the term “near-death experience” was only coined in 1975 by Raymond Moody, people had certainly been reporting such experiences for a long time. Moody’s own interest in the subject began in 1965 when he heard a clinical professor of psychiatry (surely a credible witness) relate his own experience. By the time Moody came to write his groundbreaking book, Life After Life, he had about 150 NDE cases, and that was only the start.
The term is not accurate: although some cases do indeed involve experiences when the body is near death, others involve experiences when the body is actually dead; and when we say ‘experiences’ we mean consciousness because only something conscious can have experiences. It is not a near-death experience but post-mortem consciousness. If we more accurately reframe the terms like this, then it becomes immediately apparent that evidence of consciousness after clinical death is evidence of the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body.
What constitutes ‘best’ is precisely that they had actually died, and through the wonders of modern medicine were resuscitated, and then recalled memories from a period when their bodies, including their brains, were not functioning – that is, ordinarily unable to produce memories, the unique ability of consciousness, if consciousness is created by the brain. And then not only that, astonishing as it is, but described events that were independently confirmed – events that they should not have been aware of if consciousness is created by the brain. We have to take these experiences seriously because they are consistent across time and culture: they are not fantasy constructs that somehow get lucky, they are real.
The number of ‘best’ NDE cases is staggering. In addition to Reynolds other cases often cited include that of Al Sullivan. A fifty-five year-old truck driver, Sullivan was undergoing triple-bypass surgery when his consciousness separated from his body. Sullivan saw the surgeon perform an unusual arm flapping motion with his hands tucked into his armpits and encountered his mother and brother-in-law, both deceased, who told him to tell his neighbours that their son, suffering from lymphoma, would recover – all subsequently confirmed.
Kenneth Ring gathered thirty-one cases of blind people reporting seeing things during an NDE that were later verified as true. Current medical science says that this is impossible, yet it happened thirty-one times, at least.
Although NDEs have been reported for centuries, modern medicine is constantly pushing back the irreversibility threshold of death. If Reynolds had lived and been diagnosed some years earlier, there would have been no treatment for her and hence no account of post-mortem consciousness. We are travelling further into death than any civilization has been able to do before. And the information people are bringing back is of a quality and depth never before achievable.
Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
No comments:
Post a Comment