Consciousness after death: Ruickbie excerpt #31

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Take a shaft of light and pass it through a prism and it reveals that rich rainbow of colors that make up what we see. That is my approach here. I have taken the beam of paranormal experience and passed it through a prism to reveal its different frequencies, but where some researchers specialize, perhaps only studying the red or the blue, I have wanted to study this whole spectrum, because it is the whole spectrum that tells us what light is.

As defined at the beginning, ‘ghost’ means an immaterial identity format (IIF), the conscious ‘I’, and we looked for it specifically in the three categories of experiential time. What we have found is evidence for ghosts of the past in Martindale’s Roman soldiers, and others, and also in the life review that is often a part of the NDE, as well as in the huge amount of evidence for reincarnation. We found ghosts of the present in the form of crisis apparitions and after-death communications, as well as evidence for the ability for consciousness to leave the body as a result of accident, illness or intention in various conditions termed OBEs, NDEs (and actual-death experiences), travelling clairvoyance, etc. Ghosts of the future were apparent in premonitions, memorably when Irene Kuhn saw her own ‘ghost’ in the future, but we also saw disembodied consciousness show itself to be conscious at a point beyond physical death in the past, and how consciousness beyond the body could witness the life preview of what was yet to come.

The argument put forward does not rely on one piece of evidence, or one case, so if one case is found in error it does not derail the overall argument. In fact, for each area of evidence considered, many other cases could be brought forward if needed. As said at the beginning, the amount of evidence is not the problem – the problem is why we do not believe it.

The witness was always the weakest link in the chain of evidence. As far as possible we sought to establish the credibility and reliability of the witness, and to consider possible motives. When a witness is credible, reliable and motiveless, then we must take them at their word. They could still be mistaken, ill, drugged, or another explanation, such as telepathy might be produced. This is where multiple witnesses to the same event are of paramount value. Where otherwise credible, reliable and motiveless witnesses agree, it would be unreasonable to insist on their being wrong.

Even if right in having witnessed something, the explanation of what that something is could still be different. Shared hallucination or group telepathy have been forwarded, but such explanations become more difficult to uphold when information is acquired from the experience that the witnesses would not otherwise have had.

This higher level of evidentiality was also matched by using statistics to achieve a greater degree of representativeness. Even the best witness could still be an exception proving nothing. This is why we also used statistical analyses of sometimes thousands of cases to resolve the quirks, leaving a higher level of probability – a level of evidence beyond reasonable doubt.

It has already been noted that the evidence for life after death would be sufficient to prove the case in a court of law. One of the earliest to do so was author John Vyvyan (1908–1975). Writing in 1966, he said “a jury might well be convinced of a life after death on the basis of these arguments.” Since then, researchers have amassed almost sixty years’ worth of additional evidence in every area concerned with life after death. If it were enough to convince a jury then, how much more so now?

Have I convinced myself? Having now laid out the ‘best’ evidence and connected the dots, as it were, the Scrooge in me may still be thinking of my stomach, but the scientist must acknowledge the evidence even when it contradicts cherished theories. This evidence leads necessarily to the conclusion that our ‘ghost,’ consciousness, can exist independently of space and time, the fundamental co-ordinates of the body. Such a bold claim has been made before, but this time we have also seen that modern physics has revealed a universe in which just such a state could exist where consciousness itself is a quantum process and time is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, timetanglement.

The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the term “ghost in the machine” to sum up the mind–body dualism espoused by René Descartes, and others since, that the mind and body are separate. Ryle thought that Descartes had made a category mistake, but whether philosophically in error or not, we have seen that there are copious examples of the mind acting independently of the body, even existing independently of the body in cases of actual death. And that in those states, consciousness is described as operating not only outside of the body (space), but outside of time as well. We realize that it is the physical body that creates time for the mind, that the ghost is not just in a machine, but in a time machine. 

 

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.