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.