Is the mind objectively real? Mays excerpt #10

The Mays write: We can take a subjective phenomenon to be objectively real if it can be observed by others. There are several lines of evidence from NDEs that the nonmaterial mind is objectively real.

The NDEr’s out-of-body “body” can evidently be seen by animals. Jerry Casebolt experienced an NDE at age seven. He died during surgery, left his body, and was met by a “Light Being.” Toward the end of his NDE, he floated over a school playground located just north of the hospital. There were lots of children playing outside there. Jerry recounts his NDE in the third person, as a boy named Gary Caldwell:

“A German Shepherd dog was playing with the children. Gary [i.e., Jerry] floated down to investigate. The dog sensed his presence and playfully barked at him. ... Gary floated down and positioned himself just a few inches above where the dog could jump. He teased the animal by staying just out of reach. The dog barked and jumped up at Gary. As the dog became more excited, the children took notice. One small girl began to cry. ... The dog continued to wag his tail excitedly, barking and jumping crazily up at Gary. Gary laughed. He was having a good time like any seven-year-old kid should. The Light Being did not share in the humor of the moment. It stopped this ‘childish’ diversion and hauled Gary back to the top of the hospital roof as it transmitted, ‘You are causing the other children to be frightened’.”

In a personal communication, Jerry told us that he and the dog “looked into each other’s eyes; I was moving up, down and to the sides; we moved together like a dance.”

The NDEr can be seen by other people. An “apparitional” NDE is a particular event in an NDE in which the out-of-body NDEr visits and communicates in some way with a living person, and both accounts of the encounter are subsequently verified to be consistent with one another.

Annie Dirven

Titus Rivas, Annie Dirven, and R. H. Smit report in The Self Does Not Die the following case. In 1989, Olga Gearhardt underwent heart transplant surgery. All of her family came to the hospital to await the outcome, except her son-in-law who could not be at the hospital. The heart transplant was successful, but at 2:15 a.m., her new heart stopped beating, and it took 4 hours to resuscitate her heart and then longer still for her to recover consciousness. The son-in-law, who was sleeping at home, awoke at exactly 2:15 a.m., and Olga was standing at his bedside. Thinking that the surgery had been postponed, he asked her how she was. She replied, “I am fine. I’m going to be all right. There’s nothing for any of you to worry about.” She asked him to tell her daughter (his wife) and then she disappeared. The son-in-law wrote down the time and exactly what was said, and he went back to sleep. When Olga regained consciousness, her first words were, “Did you get the message?” Olga later reported that she had left her body and had tried but was unable to communicate with the family members who were all asleep in the hospital waiting room, so she went to the son-in-law, with whom she succeeded in communicating. NDE researchers Melvin Morse and Paul Perry thoroughly verified these details, including the note the son-in-law had scribbled.

In apparitional NDEs, the in-body person typically perceives the NDEr as physically present. Olga’s son-in-law thought that Olga was physically present in his bedroom; he assumed the surgery had been postponed.

Critical care physician Laurin Bellg related the encounter of a woman dying of cancer with her son during her NDE. She was dying of cancer in the hospital but refused to have her son visit. The son had been estranged from his family for 25 years. He had done some things that had hurt his parents financially and had served prison time for the theft that had destroyed their financial lives. Nonetheless, the son wanted to come visit his mother on her deathbed and she said, “No. I don’t want to see you.” The son is sitting in a bar near the hospital, experiencing deep sorrow, deep regret, deep remorse, wanting to connect with his mom before she crosses over. He’s crying. “He looks up and he sees his mother coming into the bar, and he’s so shocked and so elated. He’s excited, and he can’t understand it because she’s so sick. What is she doing there? And he gets up to go greet her. ... [But] there are people that obscure the view, and when they pass, she’s no longer there. His mother wakes up and says [to her daughter], ‘I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that I was in a bar and I saw my son sitting at a table crying, and he got up to start coming to me. And I got scared and I woke up.’”

Laurin Bellg explained, “I was there the next day to hear it. What we do know is that the afternoon that it happened, the lady woke up and told her daughter and then the son that evening told his sister. She’s the one who was able to put together that this had happened around the same time. She’s told me because she was just so amazed that had happened. ... The thing that’s so mysterious to me is for her to explain that she started walking toward her son, saw him crying, he got up and for him to say he saw his mom, got up, and started to go to her. That’s pretty astonishing.”

Bellg continued, “It looked like she was physically there. It never occurred to him that this would be an apparition or a projection of some kind.”

Robert G. Mays, BSc and Suzanne B. Mays, AA,  “There is no death: Near-death experience evidence for survival after permanent bodily death.” An essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies addressing the question: “What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?” Footnotes are omitted from these excerpts but are in the full text available from the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.