Survival of consciousness: Rawlette excerpt #22

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—"We’ve now looked at a wide variety of evidence for survival of death, both from third-person and first-person perspectives. Each phenomenon we’ve examined—apparitions, dreams, mental mediumship, poltergeist phenomena, phantom phone calls, synchronicity, near-death experiences, memories of previous lives, and intermission memories—provides some evidence for survival when taken alone. But the real strength of the evidence lies in the fact that not only are experiences of postmortem consciousness exceedingly common but, across their many forms, they display consistent evidential qualities and a cohesiveness that’s hard to explain except by appealing to the actual survival of consciousness beyond the death of the body.

"Some people are likely to still reject the idea of survival because it doesn’t fit today’s mainstream scientific views about the physical world and the connection between consciousness and the brain, but it would be a serious mistake to ignore the well-substantiated evidence described in this essay just because it doesn’t match currently popular theory. This evidence has a lot to teach us, and its clearest lesson seems to be that we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.

"Fortunately, there’s an increasing number of researchers and theorists who take the evidence for survival seriously and who are formulating theories about the mind-brain relationship that account for this evidence as well as making new, testable predictions. The most promising kind of theory, in my opinion, regards consciousness as the primary reality and understands physical reality as just one type of experience that consciousness can have. 

"Consciousness is the hardware, if you like, and physical reality is one kind of software it can run. Another analogy I find useful is to think of physical reality as a dream consciousness can experience. This fits well with the observations of NDErs who say dying is like waking up from a dream. It also explains why there seem to be other ways, besides dying, of taking a momentary break from the experience of the physical world: for instance, through the altered states of consciousness facilitated by meditation or psychedelic substances.

"Maybe the most important advantage of a consciousness-based theory of reality is that it dissolves many of the puzzles that arise when one studies the evidence for survival of death. For example, investigators have long been stymied by the fact that apparitions sometimes and in some respects seem like physical objects (for example, by having solidity and opaqueness, appearing appropriately from multiple angles, causing physical effects) while at other times and in other respects seem like projections of the mind (the fact that they wear clothing, often appear younger than the deceased’s age at death, sometimes appear transparent, dissolve, or walk through walls). 

"If all physical objects are fundamentally patterns of conscious experience, then there’s no need to choose between apparitions’ being physical and their being mental. Apparitions are in consciousness just like everything else, and while they sometimes play by the same rules as the phenomena we call “physical,” they can also deviate from them and be more fluid and responsive to intention, more like the experiences we have while, well, dreaming.

"Theories in which consciousness grounds the physical world are not new. In fact, they’ve been around for millennia, even in the Western world. In philosophy, they go by the name “idealism,” to reflect the primacy of ideas over matter. Idealism has had staunch defenders even during the scientific era, in philosophers such as George Berkeley, Brand Blanshard, and most recently Bernardo Kastrup. Consciousness is also understood as playing a central role in the determination of physical properties under some interpretations of quantum mechanics.

"But whether or not idealism proves to be the most productive path to understanding the physical world and the not-so-physical phenomena we’ve seen in this essay, taking seriously the evidence for survival of consciousness will be of vital importance in the development of future theory. And that’s not just because of what it tells us about what awaits us beyond death, but also because of what it reveals about the world we live in right now."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.