Beyond self-serving censorship: Cook excerpt #4

Nick Jones writes about verifying consciousness beyond physical death: But did my wife's 'shared death' experience when her mother died constitute ‘real’ evidence in the sense that my profession knew it? In the course of a career that had required ‘veridical evidence’ – objective evidence that would, in effect, stand up in a court of law – how could I possibly investigate subjective experience? Because, by now, a deep curiosity had kicked in – investigation was what was now required.

The answer, I felt, after some soul-searching, was ‘no’, I could not - and for reasons I would later find instructive.

If I applied the court-of-law principle, whomever I called as a ‘witness’ – a person in a journalistic context I would term a ‘source’ – in the end, whatever that person described would be subjective testimony, no more valid in evidential terms than a thought or a feeling.

Even though I had been in the room when my mother-in-law had died, what had happened to my wife had been a wholly internal experience – she could describe the ‘place’ she had been transported to, but she couldn’t show it to me. And when I revisited the events concerning my grandmother that my father had described – in particular, the levitating lamp – this fared no better. Aside from the fact the witnesses were no longer alive, even if they were, I realised, no evidence they could have presented would appear credible (however credible they were) before that imaginary court of law. A picture of a levitating lamp could easily be faked – and an invigilator would have charged anyway that the witnesses had been in a highly emotional state. And so, I saw, what I was left with would merely come across as incredible, too.

For this and other reasons besides – I wasn’t a psychologist (despite having worked on a book with a psychiatrist), had little knowledge of parapsychology and, above all, wanted to maintain my reputation, such as it was, in my chosen career – I dropped any further thought of investigating my wife’s experience. And this, on one level, is how censorship works – at the very first level, at the level of the profession we work in, most of us censor ourselves.

The impulse, however, would not go away and, in a body-swerve of sorts, I ended up doing the next best thing: turning the research into a work of fiction, a book that was published in 2019⁵.

But when, shortly afterwards, I was offered a small research grant to study the science that I had depicted in the book – science that might have been responsible for the anomalous event that my wife had experienced - I took it. The grant would allow me the time I needed to ‘get granular’ on the whole subject of consciousness.

5 The Grid, Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House.

 

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.