Tucker’s reincarnation research: Cook excerpt #18

Nick Cook writes: Jim B. Tucker, the Bonner-Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, became intrigued by children’s past life memories after reading Stevenson’s work. In a paper published in 2006, he raises an often-overlooked aspect of past-life experiences: the memories reported by children of events occurring during the interval between death and rebirth.

Approximately 20 per cent of children in reincarnation cases, he found, make such reports⁵³.

Here, suddenly, I found myself back at the nub of the near-death issue that had vexed the question of veridical evidence surrounding Maria’s shoe.

It is impossible, critics of the post-death survival thesis say, to separate an NDE from an OBE because the ‘psychic interpretation’ - the difference between a consciousness associated with a body that has not yet lost the potential to live and the consciousness of a body that has forever lost that potential – can never be resolved.

To clarify: since it is impossible to ‘come back from the dead’, whatever the clinical definition of ‘death’ may be, we can never say for sure, based on those aspects of an NDE involving veridical evidence of the earth-bound variety (exemplified by Maria’s shoe), that consciousness survives permanent bodily death. The best we can say is it does temporarily, since, for a while, it operates outside the body, as in an OBE.

Which, potentially, takes us into a very thorny corner of our research envelope – because, technically, the only data under the court-of-law, beyond-reasonable-doubt principle that would be evidence of the ‘trans-material testimony’ kind – would be from someone who has permanently crossed into that other realm. Which by any yardstick is impossible, since this evidence has no means materially of being conveyed.

From Professor Tucker’s research, we learn that past-life subjects who reported ‘interval memories’ tended to make a greater number of statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate, recalled more names from that former life, had higher scores on the strength-of-case scale, and were more likely to state the names of the previous personalities and to give accurate details about their deaths compared to those who hadn’t reported such memories⁵⁴. There is something about this testimony, perhaps then, that may be considered to be inherently reliable.

Close analysis of 35 ‘interval memories’ in Burma indicated that these memories could be broken down into three parts: a ‘transitional stage’; a ‘stable stage’ in a particular location; and a ‘return stage’ involving a choice of parents or conception.

The reports of the Burmese children’s interval memories were compared to the testimony of people who had had NDEs – and were found to contain features that were similar to the transcendental (or trans-material) component of Western NDEs as well as having significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs. ‘It thus appeared,’ Professor Tucker concluded, ‘that interval memories and NDEs could be considered part of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife (my emphasis added).’⁵⁵

The interval memories cast doubt, too, Professor Tucker went on to say, on the materialist reductionist explanation of NDEs as mere fantasies produced by dying brains, since the subjects reporting the interval memories were young and healthy.

53 Raised in a section of Prof. Tucker’s paper – Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present and Future Research, Division of Perceptual Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia - that discusses work beyond individual cases to include examinations of groups of cases, with correlations from across the department’s database.
54 Op.cit.
55 Op.cit.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Ian Stevenson’s research: Cook excerpt #17

Nick Cook writes: The world’s leading authority on reincarnation, Professor Ian Stevenson, was a Canadian by birth who worked at the University of Virginia’s Department of Medicine for 50 years until shortly before his death in 2007. In 1968, eleven years after being named its chair of psychiatry, he was bequeathed a million dollars by Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox copying process, to pursue parapsychological studies at the University of Virginia. Carlson’s funding allowed Stevenson to travel the world in search of the best evidence of reincarnation – research he eventually compiled into ‘Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects’, a 2,268-page, two-volume book published in 1977.51

This phenomenal work detailed accounts of people of all races, creeds and religions who professed to have memories of previous lives.

A typical case was that of an Indian girl, Kumkum Verma, who, aged three and a half, began to relate how she had lived in Darbhanga, a city of 200,000 people approximately 25 miles from her then home. Her aunt wrote down all the things Kumkum remembered about her previous life, which included the name of her son, her grandson’s name, the town where her father had lived and a pet snake that she used to feed milk to. A friend of Kumkum’s father went to the district in Darbhanga she had described and found that a woman who had died five years before Kumkum was born matched all the details the little girl had provided.

Hundreds more cases uncovered by Stevenson in India and elsewhere attested to certain common features, for example a tendency of subjects to talk about their previous life at a very young age - starting at two or three and stopping by six or seven. Most made their statements spontaneously and without the use of hypnotic regression. Some told of being deceased members of their own families; others, like Kumkum, of being part of families they had no knowledge of. Whilst most described ordinary lives, what often distinguished them was the way they had died: 70 per cent, Stevenson’s research showed, had died of unnatural causes, often violently and suddenly. In these cases, 35 per cent showed phobias related to their mode of death.

While some critics saw confirmation bias in this portion of Stevenson’s work, less easy to dismiss were subjects born with birthmarks and/or deformities matching the wounds inflicted upon them in their former incarnation.

In ‘Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect’,52 another seminal work that he published in 1997, Stevenson listed 200 cases, many including autopsy reports and police records, in which the birthmarks or birth defects of those with past life memories matched wounds they had suffered as their former personalities.

The subjects included a boy with birthmarks on the front and back of his head that matched the entry and exit wounds of the bullet he said had killed him in his former life; and a girl with what Stevenson described as the most extraordinary birthmark he had ever seen that corresponded to the skull surgery she said she had undergone in her previous existence.

All these cases, Stevenson said, represented tangible evidence of ‘carryover’ from a deceased individual, with concomitant impacts on a developing foetus.  

 

51 The work is currently unavailable. Published as (1997a), Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Some details are available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reincarnation-Biology-Contribution-Etiology-Birthmarks/dp/0275952835  

52 Published as (1997b), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Westport, CT, Praeger.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Mind and consciousness: Cook excerpt #16

Nick Cook writes: What does shared deathbed experience of the 'phenomenon of the light' say about the nature of ‘mind’ – and about the nature of reality itself?

Shorn of the ‘attachments of the ego’ - that function of the ‘self’, according to Carl Jung which provides us with the armour we cloak ourselves in progressively from birth - the ‘essence of a person’ becomes visible to some but not others. There’s a lot to unpack here, but it suggests that the regulating system of the ‘interface’ is governed as much by the immaterial processes of ‘mind’ as by the physical brain.

If reality is holographic in nature and our brains tune into the ‘depth data’ in the hologram under particular conditions, then, as the Gateway Report told us, what we may be doing is converting the non-linear, non-verbal information of the universe into 2-dimensional data that’s understandable in, and relatable to, our material existence.

What might this non-linear, non-verbal information look like? Carl Jung would tell us that it is ‘symbolic’ in nature and appears in archetypal form through the ‘collective unconscious’.

Archetypes are signs, symbols and patterns of behaviour or thinking that are shared by all of humanity.

‘The experience of light has no known origin in the brain,’ Moody writes in Glimpses Of Eternity. ‘Numerous scientific researchers have documented that every element of the near-death experience – being out-of-body, travelling up (a) tunnel, seeing dead relatives, having a life review, seeing visions of heaven (etc) – can be found to reside in various parts of the brain, yet none of the reductionist researchers has been able to find the anatomical origin of the mystical light.’

Per Dr Peter Fenwick’s research, this is because it manifests and resides in something that isn’t physical.

In the English language, we often use the words ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ interchangeably, but they are very far from the same thing. The brain is an organ, but the mind isn’t. The materialist viewpoint is that the brain is the physical location of ‘mind’ and mind is the manifestation of thought, perception, memory, imagination, emotion and attention and intention – all the things that make us ‘us’ – the things that provide us with our capacity to function as autonomous, independent human beings. The materialist reductionist viewpoint, therefore, would say that the brain is the ‘interface’, but the ‘phenomenon of the light’ says it can’t be.

If the brain (along, quite likely with other parts of the nervous system) is the receiver, mind is the ‘organiser’ that takes the essential information we need for our survival and transposes it as ‘icons’ on to our user-interface. Most of these we agree on by consensus – they are the icons we experience as our everyday reality. But subtler information of the ‘non-physical’ - the universe as experienced by Ingo Swann and countless others – a universe most of us don’t experience directly – is represented on the interface, too; and, as evidenced by the shared phenomenon of the light, this information is occasionally made available to us as a consensus reality – albeit one that transcends what we perceive of as ‘normal’. Mind, then, is the interface – the place where ‘our reality’ plays out. But this reality, as our witnesses have been telling us for a while now, is far subtler than materialist science would like us to believe.

Sharon Nelson, whom we met in Moody’s book about shared death experiences, said of Mrs Jones’s light: ‘Words cannot express what impact this experience had on me. This was certainly not something I had ever thought before. The wisdom and peace of this light have not left me since.’ Maria and Louisa said they felt ‘changed for the better by the light’. And the hospice nurse from North Carolina who had been dreading witnessing a death has since used her experience to teach student nurses.

It is tempting at this point to transpose mind and ‘consciousness’, but they are clearly not the same thing either. Consciousness is the ‘thing’ that allows us to witness what plays out on the screen.

If we survive bodily death, then, logically it is this part of us – whatever this part is - that goes on. It is this part of ‘us’, therefore, we need to focus on as we go forward.

For now, there is something else the phenomenon of the light speaks to: something we may express as ‘the universe’ is communicating to us and the meaning we take is that ‘everything will be OK’ (this, you may remember, was the meaning my wife brought back from her shared death experience with her mother: that all is well). And this, maybe, as its follow-up: that what science tells us is the end may not be the end at all. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

 

Perceiving this light varies: Cook excerpt #15

Nick Cook writes: Dr Fenwick, who has studied the physics of the phenomenon (deathbed light), says the light takes other forms, including a ‘globular’ and ‘stringlike’ appearance. He has compared its deathbed manifestations with light witnessed by students of French spiritual teacher, Alain Forget48, whose methods for ‘dissolving the ego’ have, he says, enabled Forget to ‘manifest light’ during EEG, fMRI and CT monitoring sessions49.

Alain Forget

Fenwick breaks down the characteristics of the (Forget) light in the following way:

*First, not everyone is able to see it, “which, tells us something about its inherent qualities,” he told me.

*Nor did it show up in photographs, “so we know it can’t knock electrons out of the sensitive material in a camera.”

*The light is visible through different kinds of glass but becomes weaker.

*The presence of ‘normal light’ – daylight or electric - serves to increase its intensity; and darkening the room doesn’t cause it to shine beaconlike as might be expected, but instead makes it dimmer.

“This gives us the beginnings of an idea as to what may be happening. What, is augmented by light and doesn’t show up in darkness?” Fenwick asks rhetorically.

The answer, he suggests, has something to do with the visual cortex. Something, clearly, is happening in the brain – but not just in the brain. Something else is at work, too.50

Connecting Forget to an EEG, Fenwick observed clear changes in brain functioning. Using a measure called a phase slope index (PSI), he compared read-outs between Forget and his students, the PSI telling him which ‘channel’ was ‘leading’ and which was ‘following’ and the correlation between the two. What he found was that Forget’s brain led in the 10 Hertz range, while the student’s led at around 1 Hertz – the two brains being intertwined in “quite a marked way”. The areas of the brain that are involved are the parietal region in the back of the head (used for sensory perception and integration), the fusiform region (used mainly for reading facial expression) and the primary visual cortex (used for the conscious processing of visual stimuli).

“When Forget is leading, then you can argue these areas (in the student’s brain) are being stimulated in some way,” Fenwick says. “However, when the student affects Forget’s brain, the student does something different – he stimulates the executive area in Forget’s frontal lobes, as if he is giving him direct feedback as to what is going on.”

The experiment is highly suggestive that the ‘giving and receiving of light’ is some form of ‘entanglement phenomenon’, Fenwick says, and that “there is a real change in brain function that couples the (entangled) people together”, indicating a telepathic mechanism of some kind – a connection, under certain conditions, that becomes supercharged between a person who is dying and a loved one in the moment of ‘transition’.

When the dying person becomes fully ‘non-dual’, this is when we lose all the “filters related to the structures of the world,” Fenwick informs us, providing us with a clue, perhaps, to the true nature of the ‘interface’ that we discussed earlier. Light, which should at all times be objective and measurable, is seen by some but not others – and not always by technology, because, to be clear, in the ‘giving and receiving of light’ between Forget and his students, as discussed above, scanning equipment measured the brain’s reaction to the perception of the light, not the actual light itself.

48 Forget, who became a mentor of Dr Fenwick’s as well, has written a book on the ‘mechanics of the ego’ and methods for its ‘dissolution’ in How To Get Out Of This World Alive, translated from French into English by Antoine Laurent, 2012.
49 Electroencephalogram (EEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computerised tomography (CT).
50 Dr Fenwick’s comments about Forget and the light are drawn from his two interviews with me, see above. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

 

Light seen leaving body: Cook excerpt #14

Nick Cook writes about experiencing light around those who are dying: This light phenomenon has been reported by almost all near-death experience (NDE)  researchers, including psychologist and physician Raymond Moody MD, who coined the term ‘near-death experience’ in his 1975 best-selling book, ‘Life After Life’. In his book on shared death experiences, ‘Glimpses of Eternity’, Moody cites a large number of witnesses to light phenomena amongst relatives and carers of the dying. One, Sharon Nelson, told Moody about her encounter with the light at the death of her sister. ‘About one week prior to my sister’s actual passing, a bright white light engulfed the room. It was a light that we all saw and a light that has stayed with us ever since.’

In another case, Moody was approached by two sisters, Maria and Louisa, at a medical conference in Spain who told him about a ‘brilliant light’ that filled the room at the death of their father. ‘The light stayed for maybe ten minutes after he died,’ said Maria, ‘We saw no forms or figures in the light, but it seemed to be alive and have a personal presence.’

And this from a hospice nurse in North Carolina, who, having had a deep fear of witnessing her first death – that of a Mrs Jones – told how she heard Mrs Jones’s voice in her head calling her into the room: ‘I saw her draw her last breath. Right then, a light that looked like vapour formed over her face. I never had felt such peace. The head nurse on duty was very calm and told me that Mrs Jones was leaving her body and wanted me to see the dying experience. I saw a luminous presence floating near the bed, shaped somewhat like a person.’ The experienced nurse witnessed the light in the room, but not Mrs Jones’s ‘presence’.

Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from This Life to the Next, Raymond Moody Jr., MD, PhD, and Paul Perry, SAKKARA Productions Publishing, 2010.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Peter Fenwick's ELE research: Cook excerpt #13

Nick Cook writes: Dr Kerr makes no judgment on whether ELEs are physically real. Dr Peter Fenwick, on the other hand, insists they are – that they are evidence of the so-called ‘non-dual state’ which we enter as we transition from what we experience as our physical bodies to what Dr Fenwick – a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and renowned expert on near-death experiences – describes as our natural state of consciousness; one that is indivisible from the universal field of consciousness – the ‘substrate’ - to which we revert when we die.

“We need to start thinking about death as a radical change in consciousness,” he told me44. “As we approach death, the data “show unequivocally that the fabric of consciousness is pulled apart in dramatic terms in three broad phases,” as documented by Swiss psychotherapist and palliative care physician, Monika Renz45:

The first, pre-transition, involves the kinds of phenomena documented by Dr Kerr in the weeks and days before death. This happens before an ‘inner transformation of perception occurs’, according to Renz. ELEs, Dr Fenwick says, which often begin during this phase, may indicate the state in which we enter death to be critical – a ‘good death’, one that is eased by the comforting appearance of ‘familiars’, as they are referred to, may be key to our initial experience of what he terms ‘an afterlife’.

The second is death itself, in which the transition is characterised by a loosening of ‘ego consciousness’ – the ‘egoic function’, as Dr Fenwick refers to it, replete with the attachments that bind us to our material existence - and the third is post-transition, when, Dr Fenwick says, we attain a ‘fully non-dual state’ – and the attachments of the egoic function dissolve completely and we become ‘one with consciousness’.

Can any of this be seen? The short answer, according to Dr Fenwick is, yes. ‘The perception of something leaving the body around the time of death is a little discussed phenomenon, reported consistently by professional carers and, most importantly, relatives, but usually only when they are directly asked about it,’ he wrote in the paper ‘End of Life Experiences and their Implications for Palliative Care’46. The accounts are varied, his report explains, but central to the experience is a form or shape that may leave the body – and, often, he reported separately, light witnessed at the precise moment of our passing by friends and relatives in the room.

44 Dr Fenwick’s remarks to me are drawn from two Zoom interviews: on 8.7.20 and 15.7.20.
45 Dr Fenwick credits the data of the phases themselves to Monika Renz. See: ‘Dying Is A Transition’ by Monika Renz PhD et al, American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, 2012. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229153806_Dying_is_a_Transition

 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

End-of-life experiences (ELEs): Cook excerpt #12

Nick Cook writes: Dr Christopher Kerr, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Hospice and Medical Care Buffalo, NY – a psychologist and physician with a PhD in neurobiology - has pulled together, with the active cooperation of his many patients, a large dataset of so- called end-of-life experiences (ELEs)³⁹. These mostly comprise ‘visitations’ by deceased relatives, friends and even pets. Some appear in dreams, others as manifestations in what we would describe as everyday ‘waking reality’ - but most, if not all, are “qualitatively different from hallucinations”, Dr Kerr explained to me⁴⁰.

Dr Kerr was a hard-boiled, 37-year-old cardiology fellow finishing his specialty training while working weekends at Hospice Buffalo to pay the bills, when he had a transformative experience. In expressing a thought to a veteran charge nurse called Nancy that his patient, Tom, would respond well to IV antibiotics and fluids, she told him it was too late – Tom was dying. When Kerr queried how she could be so sure, she told him that he had been dreaming about his dead mother. Kerr responded: “I don’t remember that class from medical school.” To which, Nancy – with the wisdom and directness that comes from a career spent on the front line – replied that he, Kerr, must have ‘missed a lot of classes.’⁴¹

Dr Kerr’s ELE research is focused on his patients – his first and only concern is on how these experiences can help them and their caregivers as they approach death.

The study he subsequently launched had a two-fold objective: first, to demonstrate that pre-death dreams and visions exist and occur routinely; second, to address their ‘prevalence, content, and significance’ from the patient’s perspective.

To document ELEs as related by the patients themselves, he and his team utilised a standardised questionnaire in conjunction with more open-ended questions. Every participant was asked the same questions about dream or vision content, frequency and degree of realism, many of them having reported, as NDE’ers and SDE’ers (like my wife) so often did, that they seemed ‘more real than real’. A numbered scale was used so that answers could be quantified and compared.

In a fusion of the research carried out to date, what it has shown is that 88.1 per cent of patients report having at least one ELE; 99 per cent report their ELE as seeming or feeling real; and 60.1 per cent that their dreams were comforting (18.8 per cent that they were distressing)⁴². The ELEs they most frequently reported as soothing included the presence of dead friends and relatives (72 per cent), followed, in order, by living friends and relatives, dead pets or other animals, past meaningful experiences, and finally, religious figures. ‘Taken together,’ Dr Kerr concludes, ‘the data suggest that the dying process includes an extraordinary but built-in mechanism that soothes our fears as our inner world becomes ever more populated by those we have loved and lost.’⁴³

Can it be said, then, that ELEs have some kind of purpose? Many dying patients describe having been ‘put back together’ by their experiences; others to have significantly higher ‘post-traumatic growth scores’ than their non-ELE-experiencing counterparts – evidence, Dr Kerr says, that, even as we approach death, we are yet afforded an opportunity to grow. 

39 Since I interviewed Dr Kerr, he and his research team now to refer to ELDVs (end-of-life dreams and visions) as ELEs: end-of-life experiences.
40 Interview with the author, 27.7.20
41 From Introduction, Death Is But A Dream, Dr Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Quercus Editions, London, UK, 2020. 
42 https://www.drchristopherkerr.com/research
43 Percentage and quote, p.49 ‘Death Is But A Dream’. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Van Lommel’s "consciousness": Cook excerpt #11

Nick Cook writes: Alerted by patients who, after massive heart-attacks, came ‘back from the dead’ – almost universally they had attested they had been to, and returned from, a state in which they had left the body, entered a realm of infinite connection and non-existent time, been drawn to a light and imbued with a feeling of connection and pure love – Dr Pim van Lommel has pulled together a lot of data on near-death experiences.

“The point is,” he told me in the early stages of my Phase 2 research, “information and energy are never lost – and that’s what we see in the veridical evidence of what people say they see when they are clinically dead, things it should not be possible to see. And here I’m not just talking about NDEs, but out-of-body experiences, too. What it all amounts to, is clear evidence of what I call a continuity of consciousness.”³⁰

The point he makes that we need to discuss here is ‘veridical’. Of the many definitions found online, the Oxford Dictionary’s - ‘a coinciding with reality’ - comes closest as a scene-setter for the short diversion that follows.

Van Lommel, now retired, forged a career as a renowned cardiologist. In 1969, as an attendant doctor in a coronary care unit in the Netherlands, he had his first experience of a cardiac patient who ‘came back from the dead’ to report all the classic signatures of an NDE. His curiosity awoken, in 1986, he began to ask all the patients at his outpatient clinic who had undergone resuscitation whether they had ‘any recollection of the period of their cardiac arrest’. “I was more than a little surprised to hear, within the space of two years, twelve reports of a near-death experience among just over fifty cardiac arrest survivors,” he wrote later³¹.

He gained international recognition following the publication of an article in the Lancet, a highly respected UK-based, peer-reviewed medical journal, in which he and his colleagues discussed 344 cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest³². One group that reported having had an NDE was analysed against a control group that did not, with the two being compared two and eight years later.

Of those 344 patients, 62 (18 per cent) reported an NDE, of whom 41 per cent described a ‘core experience’ (its meaning unaffected by ‘external variables’ like gender, age the time of the NDE, and latency and intensity of the NDE). Van Lommel went on to write half a dozen or so other papers on the subject of NDEs, as well as a book, ‘Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience’, a best-seller in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The purpose of this diversion is not to seek to verify the survival of consciousness through the myriad NDE studies that have been performed by van Lommel and others – whether you’re a proponent of NDEs or not, they attest to something valid at the centre of the phenomenon – but instead to look at the kind of evidence a ‘court’ would accept as veridical; proof that what happened was ‘coincident with reality’.

Broadly, two criteria get called into question: the first is whether the patient was dead in any clinically acknowledged sense; the second is whether, while ‘dead’, they were afforded an ability to see or know things they couldn’t possibly have known via the senses we employ when we’re fully conscious (or, for our purposes here, ‘alive’).

A case that illustrates the point is related by Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social care worker in the critical care unit of a Seattle hospital, regarding what has come to be known as the ‘case of Maria and shoe’33. In 1977, Maria, a middle-aged Mexican migrant worker visiting Seattle to see friends, suffered a massive heart-attack, followed by a second while in hospital. As Clark Sharp watched efforts to revive her, Maria ‘flatlined’ – she wasn’t breathing, and the monitor indicated no heartbeat. She was, fortunately, resuscitated quickly and stabilised, but soon afterward began to tell Kimberly, in a highly excited manner, what she had experienced while ‘clinically dead’. She had left her body, she said, and had watched the efforts to revive her from a corner of the ceiling in the room. She accurately described everything that had taken place, all of it highly persuasive; although, it has to be said, not impossible to derive by surreptitious means – prior knowledge of hospital procedure being one.

But the part that really got Kimberly’s attention was Maria’s description of what she had perceived during the emergency from other viewpoints around the hospital - in particular, while outside, three or four stories above the ground, staring very closely at a strange object that had grabbed her focus on a window ledge. It turned out to be a tennis shoe, which she described as being dark blue, with a scuffed outer side, near the little toe, and a white shoelace tucked under the heel. Maria was so keen to prove that she had been ‘alive while dead’ she persuaded Kimberly to go and look for the shoe, which she eventually found on a hard-to-see, let-alone-access ledge outside of the building’s third floor. The shoe was exactly as Maria had described it.

Here, then, is what veridical evidence is: if it could be proven Maria was clinically dead and that she had seen things she could not possibly have perceived from her gurney, or any other vantage point using her five senses, then QED something remarkable must have happened; enough, perhaps, to invoke Wheeler’s aphorism.

But instead, it seems, Wheeler’s ‘strangest thing’ conflicts so markedly with some people’s belief systems that their first instinct is to want to kill the anomaly, rather than ‘get curious’ about it.

NDE research is no exception; and, in a sense, this isn’t unreasonable: extraordinary claims rightly demand extraordinary evidence. But, as with other areas of anomalous science, what we see in the ‘case of Maria’s shoe’ is the dismissal of whole bodies of research because of a sceptical tendency to pick apart one or two cases, rather than evaluate the body of data as a whole. Are we really to dismiss the work of van Lommel, Janice Holden, President of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Dr Sam Parnia, associate professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center³⁴, because Clark Sharp failed to prove (to the satisfaction of some) that she received the salient details of the shoe from Maria before she went and located it on the ledge? There is a wealth of research across thousands of cardiac arrest and other near-death survival cases that point toward some form of ‘nonphysical veridical perception’ among a hard core of cases³⁵.

Does this mean that we have to accept all their evidence and analysis? No, it does not.

This capacity of the NDE’er to acquire by psychic means the kinds of veridical knowledge that is often presented as ‘clear evidence’ of post-death survival is rightly called into question here.

We should not tag veridical data emerging out of an OBE as evidence of an NDE – they are clearly not the same.

Per Janice Holden, there are two sides to an NDE: the ‘material aspect’, involving earth-bound evidence of the shoe kind, which shares some characteristics with an OBE; and the ‘trans-material aspect’, in which the experiencer ‘perceives phenomena in transcendent dimensions beyond the physical world’³⁸ – much as my wife had when her mother died.

For NDE’ers to acquire veridical knowledge by psychic means doesn’t make their experience any the less remarkable – an OBE is remarkable.

But it isn’t conclusive proof that our consciousness survives permanent bodily death. For this, we must continue to look elsewhere.

30 Skype interview with the author, 15.6.20
31 Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, p. vii, Pim van Lommel, M.D., Harper Collins, 2010.
32 Van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in Survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039-2045.
33 See Chapter 6, The Shoe on the Ledge, by Kimberly Clark Sharp, MSW, from Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence For An Afterlife by Leslie Kean, Three Rivers Press, 2017.
34 He is also director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton in the UK.
35 For example, whilst at the University of North Texas, Dr Holden – in her paper More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Response to “Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features” – identified 107 cases of apparently nonphysical veridical perception, in which a case would be designated ‘inaccurate’ if even one case were found not to correspond to consensus reality. Thirty-seven per cent of the cases ‘involving apparently completely accurate perception’ were determined to be accurate by independent, objective sources.
36 My emphasis. 
37 Op.cit., p.93.
38 Leslie Kean, quoting Holden, on p.97 of Surviving Death.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. 

Interface model of consciousness: Cook excerpt #10

Nick Cook writes: Professor of Cognitive Sciences Donald Hoffman likens our experience of reality to the relationship we forge with the ‘graphical user interface’ of a computer, its screen²⁸.

In the classical physics model, everything we perceive involves illusion. What we see is not a direct representation of the objects in our vision; it is a translation formed by our brain’s interpretation of the light reflected off the objects. This is high school physics and well understood. The reality represented by those objects – and the meaning we attach to that reality – will be different depending on who is doing the observing.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine (a laptop, for example) – its hardware and its software – in order to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons (and apps) it displays on- screen. We ourselves create the icons, but the icons themselves, being an on- screen representation, aren’t conscious. At heart, conscious realism states that consciousness is primary and the physical world – our world of matter – emerges from it.

This, Hoffman says, gives rise to the idea of ‘conscious agents’. “The way one agent in a network perceives, depends on the way some other agents act,” he tells us²⁹. In this world, our brains function as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘just the reality we need’ for ‘survival’. To take this a step further, we agree on reality, because we’ve all evolved the same reality interface.

It is this interface that, over eons, has allowed us to play the same game. It is also the process that provides us with our perception of consensus, objective reality.

What Hoffman wants to do is develop maths, an algorithm, to allow him to unpick the ‘source code of the game’ – leading, potentially, to technologies by which we can access the ‘greater reality’ in the parts of the machine we don’t normally experience.

Meantime, ‘crude methods’ – methods we might refer to loosely as ‘technologies’, as well, including meditation and psychedelic drugs (even though it might be hard to think of a psychedelic as a technology) – give us a limited capacity to do the same thing.

So, where – and what - is this ‘interface’?

The light that enters our eyes projects upside-down on to the retina, the sensory membrane at the back of the eyeball. There, millions of cells, each adapted to pick out one of three primary colours, send signals to the occipital lobe in the back of the head, where a trillion synapses help forge them into our world of vision. A similar sensor-fusion process takes place inside the brain with inputs from our other senses.

Matter, as we have already seen, is 99.9 per cent empty space. Dr Robert Lanza, whom we met earlier, wants us to be ‘really clear’ on how and where we forge our construed, consensus picture of ‘objective reality’: with and within our minds; and that the world we perceive to be a world of separation – an ‘out there reality’ of trees, houses, tables, rocks, animals, things; and an ‘in here reality’ of us – doesn’t exist. The icons on our user-interface, then – of which, per Hoffman, there are an infinite number and variety – might be said to arise out of the vibrating energy grids we also encountered earlier, informed, as they are, by the quantum magic that permits an infinite range of sub-atomic probabilities to collapse into the particles that make up the things – the material objects we all agree upon – in a format that contributes to our sense of hard, cold reality. Here, Hoffman says, our brains filter out anything not to do with survival.

Here, too, ‘survival’ isn’t just about the physical things – food, water, shelter, warmth etc. – we agree on for the furtherance of our species, but a more tenuous consensus of colour, taste, aesthetics, our sense or right and wrong ... love, even. But you’ll find little discussion of what makes this, or any other definition of our reality in a textbook, because it relies on something science can’t agree on to begin with: consciousness.

The question at the heart of this essay – whether human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death – hinges on the ability of ‘the mind’ to exist outside of the body.

Consciousness, because we are immersed in it and it in us, is, essentially, non- provable. But anomalous aspects of it that manifest as paranormal phenomena are – which is what makes them so important. They are the clues we must examine from the outside in that alert us to a fundamental feature of existence – the idea that there are depths to our everyday reality that we don’t customarily see; and that existence is based on a set of commonly agreed protocols that give us, for the moment, all the reality we can handle – no more, no less – via a panoply of agreed ‘everyday icons’.

But the evidence, too, says there’s some malware in the machine that’s throwing icons we don’t all agree upon on to the user interface – what we might, perhaps, refer to as ‘rogue icons’.

These manifest as ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, angels and demons, miracle cures and any number of ‘anomalies’ that mainstream science wants to tell us aren’t ‘real’.

Except, since they exist as shared experiences for so many, at some level, they have to be.

28 See The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes, Donald D. Hoffman, Allen Lane, 2019.
29 Op.cit. p.184.

 
Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.