Our exploration so far is of things and contexts that are in many ways analogous to how things are in the ordinary world; it looks as though the soul is a kind a of body with means of perception and action analogous to physical ones, that exists in a kind of place and environment that is unusual but not radically strange. Overall, this looks like an enlarged perspective but not a transformative one. Or so it seems.
We know that we are vulnerable to an array of perceptual traps and hazards that lead us to experience things in ways that are conditioned by our expectations and prior mental models. We can also miss important details in a scene because we focus our attention closely on aspects that particularly interest us. We should suspect that such effects may have hidden from us key aspects of the NDE experience and its meaning. Perhaps it all looks rather familiar because that is all we able or likely to notice, rather than that there was not much more to see. It is very likely that key aspects of the meaning of the evidence remain to be uncovered.
This being the case, we should look for ways in which we can shift our perspective to where we can see more clearly. Can we find ways to look for evidence of phenomena that have no familiar analogue in ordinary experience?
There are techniques for doing this. One way is to try to look beyond the immediately apparent content of the experiences and reflect on what the attributes of the experiences might reveal. Perhaps we might find interesting insights ‘hiding in plain sight’. We will offer one example of this.
A central theme of the NDE narrative is a meeting with a ‘being of light’, often identified by the experiencers as the central deity of their religion. Of course, there are expectation effects at work here, so the real nature of the ‘being of light’ is mysterious to us. However, that identification issue is only about the immediately apparent content of the experience. Something else is going on here that is equally interesting, something remarkable that lies at the heart of the transformative power of the NDE experience. Here are some typical examples:
“...I floated...up into this pure crystal light...it was beautiful, and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love”.
“I recall thinking to myself ‘This is it – Death.’ And ‘looked around’ to see straight ahead a bright light, sending warmth and benevolence...”
“All the time I was up there I never felt afraid, or alone. There was someone or something up there. A presence that radiated love, joy, warmth and deep awesome spiritual feeling... It was the most beautiful experience I have ever had, and I will always cherish it.”
“Around me, as the tunnel began to lighten, there were presences. They were not people, and I didn’t see anything, but I was aware of their minds...There was total wisdom and goodness in them”, (emphasis in original).
These experiences are remarkable, not just for what was encountered but for how it was perceived, which is even more astonishing. We see here that souls have the ability to directly perceive qualities that we normally only experience subjectively, such as love, benevolence, goodness and wisdom. Besides the fact that these qualities are directly observable, they were perceived in a context with which the experiencer had no prior experience. There would have been no cues about how to interpret the beings’ nature or intent. As this perception is direct, it has objective qualities like the redness of a rose.
Any suggestion that people are simply jumping to positive conclusions fails due to reports of encounters with beings and presences that are observed in a negative way. Here are examples:
“I seemed to arrive in a huge, broad place like a void of pitch-black darkness....in the darkness, I sensed the most incredible coldness and fear coming over me.... I began to sense evil in the darkness. The darkness seemed not just physical but spiritual. I felt like I was being watched. A cold encroaching evil seemed to pervade the air around me. I knew there was something around me”.
“I was going down, deep down into the earth. There was anger and I felt this horrible fear. Everything was grey... There was this terrible feeling of being lost. ...there were two beings of some kind near me. I believe one was evil, maybe the Devil. He was the force that was tugging me down into that awful place. I felt enveloped by dark, black evil”.
Contrary to these, we have many cases of people reporting being ‘embraced’ or ‘enveloped’ by love or goodness. These accounts are mirrored in the broader literature on spontaneous religious experiences, where love, beauty, joy or sacredness is often experienced as a power and/or an influence.
The objectivity of these impressions appears to be confirmed by the fact that exposure to them appears to generate lasting and commensurate effects. For example, an encounter with the ‘being of light’ during NDEs appears to have a lasting positive effect on a person; more than 80% of NDErs report a strong positive change in their attitudes and Morse has found that “the deeper the experience of light, the greater the transformation”.
David Rousseau & Julie Billingham, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness survival.” Footnotes have been deleted for these excerpts, but a full paper is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. David Rousseau is a British systems philosopher, Director of the Centre for Systems Philosophy, chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a Past President of the ISSS, and the Company Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. Julie Billingham is Strategy Director for the Centre for Systems Philosophy.
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