Mind as essence of a person: Mays excerpt #9

The Mays write: During an NDE, the NDEr’s sense of “self” derives from various aspects of the experience: 

They know they exist with all of their cognitive faculties, without the physical body.

They know they are the same person who lives in or out of the physical body.

They know they are the agent of their actions, feelings, and thoughts. They can choose and their intentions are immediately fulfilled.

NDErs experience that their entire being separates from the physical body and then returns to the body. During their experience, they view their physical body as separate from themselves—like an empty shell, and yet their identity—their mind or self-awareness—continues intact before, during, and after the NDE. Thus, NDErs experience their mind as the essence of their being, independent of the physical body. “That physical body wasn’t me at all!”

Summarizing the evidence that the mind is a separate entity:

NDErs experience that their entire being separates from the physical body. All aspects of their mind act as a cohesive unit and are consciously present to them throughout their NDE—their senses, thoughts, feelings, intentions, and memories.

Throughout the NDEr’s separation of their mind from the body and its return to the body, their mind is continuously self-aware. This continuity of the mind is particularly clear in cases of repeated transitions in and out of the body.

The stark contrast between the “out-of-body mind” in an NDE and the “in-body mind” includes a sense of freedom from physical constraints, the loss of physical pain and disabilities, feelings of weightlessness, sharpness of perceptions, clarity of thought, and instantaneous response to volition. There are enhanced capabilities of perception and memory formation and the view that their physical body is not their real self. During some infant and early childhood NDEs, NDErs later report their out- of-body experience was from an adult perspective. The contrast with the out-of-body mind becomes clearer with the return to the body: the NDEr feels squeezed painfully back into the physical body, with the return of heaviness, fatigue, pain, and disabilities, as well as dulled thinking, perception, and volition.

NDErs experience their mind as the essence of their being, independent of the physical body. They are the same person when out-of-body as within their physical body.

Thus, the experiences of NDErs strongly suggest that a person’s mind is a separate entity that is independent of the physical body.

Nonetheless, skeptics can object that all of this evidence is from the NDErs’ subjective experiences. We can’t see the NDEr’s out-of-body mind and the mind appears to be nonmaterial—it easily passes through solid objects, like ceilings and walls. So, is the subjective experience of the nonmaterial mind objectively real? Is there objective evidence of the existence of the nonmaterial mind entity?

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.