Perceiving soulful qualities: Rousseau excerpt #6

David Rousseau & Julie Billingham in their Bigelow Institute 2021 prize-winning essay, “On evidence for the Possibility of Consciousness Survival,” address several critical questions. They rely primarily on near-death experience research to formulate their answers.

 

The ability to objectively project and directly perceive such qualities seems unlike anything we normally expect to find in the ordinary world. However, as we know from the models explored earlier, if the soul has a power in the out-of-body state then that power might still be present in the normal embodied state, albeit rather weakened. This is something we can look for beyond the NDE evidence.

Many philosophers have in fact argued that that when we encounter other beings, we are directly aware of more than what is physically present before us or can be inferred from it. Here is Wittgenstein:

"In general, I do not surmise fear in him - I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside; rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I was seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own."

Talents are unevenly distributed in the population, so some people might have this ability to an extraordinary degree, and perhaps be recognized as ‘spiritual’ or having high ‘emotional intelligence’. Others might have less of it than usual and so perhaps be perceived as having a syndrome such as autism. As we explore this topic, we can also look for evidence that these unusual abilities are naturalistic.

Interestingly, we do have data suggestive of the direct emission and perception of value-oriented qualities in ordinary life. A striking example of a deficit is provided by the neuropsychiatrist Oliver Sacks, describing his encounter with the well-known autist Temple Grandin:

“I was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple's immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conduct themselves. One cannot say that she is devoid of feeling or has a fundamental lack of sympathy. On the contrary, her sense of animals' moods and feelings is so strong that these almost take possession of her, overwhelm her at times. She feels she can have sympathy for what is physical or physiological - for an animal's pain or terror - but lacks empathy for people's states of mind and perspectives. When she was younger, she was hardly able to interpret even the simplest expressions of emotion; she learned to 'decode' them later... Temple had longed for friends at school and would have been totally, fiercely loyal to a friend..., but there was something about the way she talked, the way she acted, that seemed to alienate others... Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing - an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly...”.

From this it looks as though people really can be, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘aspect blind’. Grandin has learnt to infer such properties from body language by asking others to explain the correlations to her, so she could memorize them. She clearly has the ability to note non-verbal cues and to associate meanings with them, but this is a poor substitute for the faculty non-autistic people have and not a model of how they do it.

From a naturalistic perspective, we know that perception is mediated by fields that are emitted or reflected by the thing perceived and absorbed by the percipient’s sensor. This means that if this ability is naturalistic, a field must exist capable of carrying such information. There was a suggestion of this in some of the experiences quoted above, where people reported the ‘being of light’ as sending warmth and benevolence, or radiating love, joy, and warmth.

Here are two credible and telling anecdotes. The first comes from the journalist Dominic Lawson, talking about the chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov:

“I first met him as a teenager in 1983 when I helped to organize a world chess championship semi-final in London. He was quite unlike anyone I have met before or since – and it didn't take any understanding of the rules of chess to appreciate his exceptionality. Waves of mental energy and, yes, aggression, emanated from his body in a way that intimidated everyone in his presence”.

Such influences have also been seen in formal research and personally experienced by researchers. For example, people report being affected by encounters with seasoned meditation practitioners or simply by being in the presence of ‘naturally good’ people like the Dalai Lama.

The psychologist and expert researcher into emotions Paul Ekman, in a meeting with the Dalai Lama, experienced a spontaneous remission of his quickness to anger, a problem that he had struggled with for more than forty-five years:

I had a very strong physical sensation for which we do not have an English word – it comes closest to “warmth”, but there was no heat. It certainly felt very good, and like nothing I have felt before or after... As a scientist, I cannot ignore what I experienced... I think the change that occurred within me started with that physical sensation. I think that what I experienced was – a non-scientific term – “goodness”. Every one of the other eight people I interviewed [who reported similar experiences] said they felt goodness; they felt it radiating and felt the same kind of warmth that I did. I have no idea what it is or how it happens, but it is not my imagination. Though we do not have the tools to understand it, that does not mean it does not exist.

These cases strongly suggest that people can both project and perceive such qualities. The implications of this could be far-reaching. If people and other beings can have such qualities objectively, there is an implication that people and beings, and perhaps places and substances, can be good or bad in an objective sense, not just as a matter of culturally conditioned judgement. We know that qualities such as emotional intelligence can be developed, so perhaps there are ways for people to grow into persons that are objectively better or worse. Perhaps such qualities survive across contexts, including the transition from embodied life to an afterlife and whatever lies beyond. If that is the case, our cosmological understanding of the evolutionary journey that we are on is far from complete, and exciting discoveries await us as we further investigate the evidence for survival beyond death. 

 

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.