Eben Alexander's NDE - 2

“Below me there was a countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. It was earth . . . but at the same time it wasn’t. It was like when your parents take you back to a place where you spent some years as a very young child. You don’t know the place. Or at least you think you don’t. But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself—a part way, deep down—does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again.

“I was flying, passing over trees and fields, streams and waterfalls, and here and there, people. They wore simple yet beautiful clothes, and it seemed to me that the colors of these clothes had the same kind of living warmth as the trees and the flowers that bloomed and blossomed in the countryside around them. A beautiful, incredible dream world . . . except it wasn’t a dream. Though I didn’t know where I was or even what I was, I was absolutely sure of one thing: this place I’d suddenly found myself in was completely real.

“But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t alone up there. Someone was next to me: a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes. She was wearing the same kind of peasant-like clothes that the people in the village down below wore. Golden-brown tresses framed her lovely face. We were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, alive with indescribable and vivid colors—the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the greenery and coming back up around us again.

“Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

“The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.

We will show you many things here, the girl said—again without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. But eventually, you will go back.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander's NDE

Eben Alexander was an experienced neurosurgeon at the time of his near-death and his astonishing experience and recovery. At age fifty-four, he was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a coma for seven days. “During that time,” he writes, “my entire neocortex—the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down.”

“When your brain is absent, you are absent, too. As a neurosurgeon, I’d heard many stories over the years of people who had strange experiences, usually after suffering cardiac arrest: stories of traveling to mysterious, wonderful landscapes; of talking to dead relatives—even to meeting God Himself. Wonderful stuff, no question. But all of it, in my opinion, was pure fantasy.”

In the coma, he first was aware of: “Darkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.

“Consciousness, but consciousness without memory of identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what, you are.

“Language, emotion, logic: these were all gone, as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down.

“Something had appeared in the darkness. Turning slowly, it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart.

“Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Growing in volume as a pure white light descended, it obliterated the monotonous mechanical pounding that, seemingly for eons, had been my only company up until then.

“The light got closer and closer, spinning around and around and generating those filaments of pure white light that I now saw were tinged, here and there, with hints of gold. Then, at the very center of the light, something else appeared. I focused my awareness, hard, trying to figure out what it was. An opening. I was no longer looking at the slowly spinning light at all, but through it.

“The moment I understood this, I began to move up. Fast. There was a whooshing sound, and in a flash I went through the opening and found myself in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen."

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Process philosophers: Life after death?

Philosopher Robert McDermott asserts that process thought regards life after death and other paranormal experiencing as completely natural phenomena: “Besides expanding William James’s radical empiricism, with its acceptance of nonsensory perception, Whitehead also developed an ontology that explains the possibility of not only extrasensory perception, but also psychokinesis and evidence for life after death.”

McDermott clarifies that Whitehead “did not believe life after death to be actual.” Nonetheless, Whitehead “acknowledged its possibility because psyche is potentially free to exist and perceive apart from its physical body.”

Robert McDermott, “David Ray Griffin on Steiner and Whitehead, Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).

David Ray Griffin argues that Whitehead’s panentheism offers two reasons for concluding the universe is meaningful. “On the one hand,” given the primordial nature of God, “our world reflects a divine purpose. On the other hand, every value that is achieved is then preserved everlastingly in God’s receptive side, called the ‘consequent nature of God.’” This means, Griffin explains, that: “Whitehead’s rejection of the materialist identification of the mind with the brain allows life after death to be affirmed, if it is supported by trustworthy evidence.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 345-51, in Griffin, “Whitehead’s Naturalism and a Non-Darwinian View of Evolution,” in John B. Cobb, J., Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 389-390.

Jung on the psyche, mythology, and death

Philosopher Michael Grosso in his 1985 book The Final Choice summarizes C. G. Jung’s psychology: “what is real, effective and fateful is the psyche. We are immersed in a sea of psychisms, deep collective images, linked somehow to vital and cosmic forces. These exist as the living forms of internal existence; what is more, as Jung believed, they are both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’” Jung affirmed that transcendental subjectivity is transcendent objectivity. Grosso, quoting Jung: “What is deeply within leads to what is deeply without.”

Michael Grosso, The Final Choice: Playing the Survival Game (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1985), 125-26.

Jung, writing of the archetypal collective unconscious, after discovering in the dreams of his patients “mythological motifs from cultures of which they had no intellectual knowledge.” He realized, “the human psyche has access not only to the Freudian individual unconscious,” but also to “a repository of the entire cultural heritage of humanity.” And he found comparative mythology useful “for individuals involved in experiential therapy and self-exploration, and an indispensable tool for those who support and accompany them on their journeys.”

Stanislav Grof, “Revision and Re-Enchantment of Psychology,” Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).

Jung had dinner with Einstein several times and wrote in a 1953 letter that Einstein started him thinking about how the relativity of time and space is likely affecting the psyche. In “The Soul and Death” Jung asserts that: “We are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is no form of existence without space and time.” For the psyche in its depth “participates in a form of existence beyond space and time” and “partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’.”

C. G. Jung, On Death and Immortality (Princeton University Press, 1999), 4-5.

In 1944 during surgery Jung suffered cardiac arrest, had his own near-death experience, and later described it as “a glimpse behind the veil” . . .

The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. When you can give up the crazy will to live and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist, then the truly real life begins with everything which you were meant to be and never reached. It is something ineffably grand. I was completely free and whole, as I never felt before.

I found myself 15,000 km from the earth and I saw it as an immense globe resplendent in an inexpressibly beautiful blue light. I was on a point exactly above the southern end of India, which shone in a bluish silvery light with Ceylon like a shimmering opal in the deep blue sea. I was in the universe, where there was a big solitary rock containing a temple. I saw its entrance illuminated by a thousand small fames of coconut oil. I knew I was to enter the temple and I would reach full knowledge. But at this moment a messenger from the world (which by then was a very insignificant corner of the universe) arrived and said that I was not allowed to depart and at this moment the whole vision collapsed completely.

Jung wrote he “was wakeful each night in the universe,” experiencing “the complete vision,” but not as an I.  Instead, he was “united with somebody or something.” As if in “a silent invisible festival permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience.” He learned from his NDE that: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”

Grosso Final Choice, 127-28.

Dr. Tony Cicoria's NDE piano music

In 1994 orthopedic surgeon Tony Cicoria, while at a lakeside family gathering, was making a call at a pay phone to his mother when a bolt of lighting passed through the phone line and struck him in the face. Remembering: I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, “Oh shit, I’m dead.” I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman — she’d been waiting to use the phone right behind me . . . over my body, giving it CPR.

I floated up the stairs — my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be O.K. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of wellbeing and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up. . . . There was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had ’— slam! I was back.

Experiencing pain from his body burning, but otherwise seeming all right. Then, after a few weeks, Cicoria feeling an insatiable desire to listen to piano music. After buying recordings and finding he especially enjoyed a Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recording of Chopin favorites, he felt a craving to be able to play this music. When a babysitter asked to store her piano in his house, he readily agreed, and began teaching himself how to play. Also, he also began hearing music in his head. The first time, it was in a dream, he recalls. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written.

Upon waking, and realizing the music was still playing in his mind, he got up and began writing down what he remembered. Then, whenever practicing Chopin, this music that he had heard in a dream, he says, would come and take me over.

Getting up at 4 in the morning, practicing piano, writing down his music, and at home after work at the piano again, practicing and playing. My wife was not really pleased, he admits. I was possessed.

Three months after surviving his lightning strike, Cicoria feeling the only reason I had been allowed to survive was the music. Beginning to think he’d been given a mission, to tune in to the music that he called, a bit whimsically, the music from Heaven. Coming to him, usually in an absolute torrent of notes, without spacing between the notes.

Oliver Sacks, “A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Yorker, July 16, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-the-blue.

Psychologist Oliver Sacks, interviewing Cicoria for The New Yorker magazine —saying to him, after looking into my eyes as if looking through me — that the music went through an awful lot of trouble to get here, so the least you can do is write it.

Cicoria recalling, I was so shaken by what he said, I went home and bought a Sibelius music writing program. Then, Cicoria, spending the next seven months writing and intensely practicing the piano, performing a year later the piece at the Goodyear Performing Arts Theater at the State University College in Oneonta, New York. And making a CD, Fantasia The Lightning Sonata.

 

Tony Cicoria, “The Electrifying Story of the Accidental Pianist & Composer,” Missouri Medicine, 2014 Jul-Aug; 111(4): 308, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179476/.

Experiencing dead loved ones as apparitions

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody, knowing many bereaved family members long to see deceased loved ones, making an unexpected discovery. In a bookstore, browsing in the psychology section, and knocking a book off the shelf entitled Crystal Gazing. The author, Northcote Thomas, describing in 1900 the practice in ancient cultures of communicating with the dead, by gazing into pools of water or crystals or mirrors. Known in history as scrying. Moody, building a dimly lit booth with a mirror tilted so subjects wouldn’t see their own image but might see an apparition of a deceased loved one. Then inviting students and colleagues to join in this experiment. 

His first participant, a forty-four-year old nurse, hoping to see her husband who had died two years earlier, but instead seeing her father, who “actually emerged from the mirror to talk with her.” A man, reporting somehow “entering” the mirror and meeting with two deceased cousins. Concluding, “It seemed as though they were waiting for me.” A stunned woman, exclaiming her grandmother came out of the mirror into the booth and hugged her. Moody, reporting in his 2012 book Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife, that 80 percent of those using the apparition booth reported seeing “departed loved ones.”

Recalling his response to an interviewer’s question: What do you think happens when we die? Moody writes: “My mind flashed back to the thousands of people I have listened to over the years as they told their story of near-death and the miraculous journey they took at the moment they almost died.” Moody, also remembering his journey to the brink of death,” recognizing, “I was very experienced in both objective and subjective research into life after death.” Then answering: “I think we enter into another state of existence or another state of consciousness that is so extraordinarily different from the reality we have here in the physical world that the language we have is not yet adequate to describe this other state of existence or consciousness. Based on what I have heard from thousands of people, we enter into a realm of joy, light, peace, and love in which we discover that the process of knowledge does not stop when we die. Instead, the process of learning and development goes on for eternity.”

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife (HarperCollins, 2012), 180, 197, 226, 245.

The Light&Love Prayer

 I’ve written this prayer following the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer, but also using:

o   Paul’s greeting of “grace and peace” in many of his letters,

o   Way as in the Acts of the Apostles,

o   Love as central for Paul (1 Cor. 13) as well as the gospel and letters of John,

o   Light as in John’s gospel and as in many near-death-experiences (NDEs),

o   Truth from John 4:24 (“worship in spirit and in truth”).

 

As well as replacing the phrases:

o   “Our father in heaven” with “O God of Love.”

o   “Thy kingdom come” with “May your grace and peace come.”

o   “Give us this day our daily bread” with “Keep us humble ‘til our time has come.”

o   “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” with “And as we forgive those who’ve done us harm, forgive us for the harm we’ve done.”

o   “And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” with “And keep us safe from temptation and evil.”

o   “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever” with “For you are the Way, the truth, and the Light, now and forever.”

 

O God of Love. May your grace and peace come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Keep us humble 'til our time has come. And as we forgive those who've done us harm, forgive us for the harm we've done. And keep us safe from temptation and evil. For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light, now and forever. Amen.

 

Robert Traer