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.