Dr. Pim van Lommel's consciousness research

“By studying everything that has been thought and written about death throughout history—in all times, cultures, and religions—we may be able to form a different, better picture of death. But the same can be achieved by studying recent scientific research into near-death experience. Evidence has shown that most people lose all fear of death after an NDE. Their experience tells them that death is not the end of everything and that life goes on in one way or another. One patient wrote to me after his NDE: I’m not qualified to discuss something that can only be proven by death. However, for me personally this experience was decisive in convincing me that consciousness endures beyond the grave. Dead turned out to be not dead, but another form of life.

“Current science usually starts from perceptible phenomena. Yet at the same time we can (intuitively) sense that besides objective, sensory perception there is a role for subjective aspects such as feelings, inspiration, and intuition. Current scientific techniques cannot measure or demonstrate the content of consciousness. It is impossible to produce scientific evidence that somebody is in love or that somebody appreciates a certain piece of music or a particular painting. The things that can be measured are the chemical, electric, or magnetic changes in brain activity; the content of thoughts, feelings, and emotions cannot be measured. If we had no direct experience of our consciousness through our feelings, emotions, and thoughts, we would not be able to perceive it.

“Moreover, people must appreciate that their picture of the material world is derived from and constructed solely on the basis of their own perception. There is simply no other way.

“All of us create our reality on the basis of our consciousness. When we are in love the world is beautiful, and when we are depressed that very same world is a torment. The material, ‘objective’ world is merely the picture constructed in our consciousness. People thus preserve their own worldview. This is precisely the kind of idea that a large part of the scientific community has difficulty accepting.

“On the basis of prospective studies of near-death experience, recent results from neurophysiological research, and concepts from quantum physics, I strongly believe that consciousness cannot be located in a particular time and place. This is known [in quantum physics] as nonlocality. Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time. This endless consciousness is always in and around us. We have no theories to prove or measure nonlocal space and nonlocal consciousness in the material world. The brain and the body merely function as an interface or relay station to receive part of our total consciousness and part of our memories into our waking consciousness.

“Near-death experience prompted the concept of a nonlocal and endless consciousness, which allows us to understand a wide range of special states of consciousness, such as mystical and religious experiences, deathbed visions (end-of-life experiences), perimortem and postmortem experiences (nonlocal communication), heightened intuitive feelings (nonlocal information exchange), prognostic dreams, remote viewing (nonlocal perception), and the mind’s influence on matter (nonlocal perturbation). Ultimately, we cannot avoid the conclusion that endless consciousness has always been and always will be, independently of the body. There is no beginning and there will never be an end to our consciousness. For this reason we ought to seriously consider the possibility that death, like birth, may be a mere passing from one state of consciousness into another and that during life the body functions as an interface or place of resonance.

 

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2010), v-xviii.

Consciousness and our brains

Dr. Pim van Lommel writes: “For me it all started with curiosity—with asking questions, with seeking to explain certain objective findings and subjective experiences. Learning about near-death experience raised a number of fundamental questions for me. An NDE is a special state of consciousness that occurs during an imminent or actual period of physical, psychological, or emotional death. How and why does an NDE occur? How does the content of an NDE come about? Why does an NDE bring about such profound changes in someone’s life? I was unable to accept some of the answers to these questions because they seemed incomplete, incorrect, or unsubstantiated. I grew up in an academic environment where I was taught that there is a reductionist and materialist explanation for everything. And up until that point, I had always accepted this as indisputably true.

“Some scientists do not believe in questions that cannot be answered, but they do believe in wrongly formulated questions. In 2005 the journal Science published a special anniversary issue featuring 125 questions that scientists have so far failed to answer. The most important unanswered question, What is the universe made of? Was followed by, What is the biological basis of consciousness? I would like to reformulate this second question as follows: Does consciousness have a biological basis at all? We can also distinguish between temporary and timeless aspects of our consciousness. This prompts the following question: Is it possible to speak of a beginning of our consciousness, and will our consciousness ever end?

“To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the relationship between brain function and consciousness. We have to find out if there is any indication that consciousness can be experienced during sleep, general anesthesia, coma, brain death, clinical death, the process of dying and, finally, after confirmed death. If the answer to any of these questions is yes, we must try to find scientific explanations and analyze the relationship between brain function and consciousness in these situations.

“What is death, what is life, and what happens when I am dead? Why are most people so afraid of death? Surely death can be a release after a difficult illness? Why do doctors often perceive the death of a patient as a failure on their part? Because the patient lost his or her life? Why are people no longer allowed to ‘just’ die of a serious, terminal illness but instead are put on a ventilator and given artificial feeding through tubes and drips? Why do some people in the final stages of a malignant disease opt for chemotherapy, which may prolong life for a short while but does not always improve the quality of their remaining life? Why is our first impulse to prolong life and delay death at all costs? Is fear of death the reason why? And does this fear stem from ignorance of what death might be? Are our ideas about death accurate at all? Is death really the end of everything?

“Even medical training pays scant attention to what death might be. By the time they graduate, most doctors have not given death much thought. Throughout life 500,000 cells in the body die every second, 30 million every minute, and 50 billion every day. These cells are all replaced again on a daily basis, giving a person an almost entirely new body every couple of years. Cell death is therefore not the same as physical death. In life, our bodies change constantly from one second to the next. Yet we neither feel nor realize it. How do we explain the continuity of this constantly changing body? Cells are building blocks comparable to the building blocks of a house, but who designs, plans, and coordinates the construction of a house: Not the building blocks themselves. So the obvious question is: What explains the construction and coordination of the ever-changing body from one second to the next?

“All bodies function the same on a biochemical and physiological level, yet all people are different. The cause of this difference is not just physical. People have different characters, feelings, moods, levels of intelligence, interests, ideas, and needs. Consciousness plays a major role in this difference. This raises the question: do we human beings equal our bodies, or do we have bodies?

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2010).

Dr. George Richie's impact on NDE research

Dr. Pim van Lommel writes: “Although I had never forgotten the successfully resuscitated patient in 1969, with his memories of the period of his cardiac arrest, I had not done anything with the experience. This changed in 1976 when I read a book about near-death experiences by Dr. George Ritchie with the title Return from Tomorrow. When Richie had double pneumonia as a medical student in 1943, he experienced a period of clinical death. At the time antibiotics such as penicillin were not yet widely used. Following an episode of very high fever and extreme tightness of the chest, he passed away: he ceased breathing and his pulse also stopped. He was pronounced dead by a doctor and covered with a sheet.

“But a male nurse was so upset by the death of this medical student that he managed to persuade the attendant doctor to administer an adrenalin injection in the chest near the heart—a most unusual procedure in those days. Having been ‘dead’ for more than nine minutes, George Ritchie regained consciousness, to the immense surprise of the doctor and nurse.

“It emerged that during his spell of unconsciousness, the period in which he had been pronounced dead, he had had an extremely powerful experience of which he could recollect many details. At first he was unable and afraid to talk about it. Later he wrote a book about what happened to him in those nine minutes. And after becoming a psychiatrist, he began to share his experiences in lectures to medical students.

“One of the students attending these lectures was Raymond Moody, who was so intrigued by this story that he began to look into experiences that may occur during life-threatening situations. In 1975 he wrote the book Life After Life, which became a global best seller. In this book Moody first coined the term near-death experience (NDE).

“After reading Ritchie’s book, I kept wondering how somebody can possibly experience consciousness during cardiac arrest and whether this is a common occurrence. So in 1986 I began to systematically ask all the patients at my outpatient clinic who had undergone resuscitation whether they had any recollection of the period of their cardiac arrest. I was surprised to hear, within the space of two years, twelve reports of such a near-death experience among just over fifty cardiac arrest survivors.”

 

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2010).

Dr. van Lommel’s first “near-death experience”

On his web site Dr. Pim van Lommel says he “worked as a cardiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital, an 800-bed teaching hospital in Arnhem in the Netherlands, from 1977 to 2003.” After more than twenty years of research, in 2001 van Lommel and his colleagues published in the medical journal The Lancet their Dutch study of near-death experiences. “Over the past several years Pim van Lommel has been lecturing all over the world on near-death experiences and the relationship between consciousness and brain function.”

I suggest from my research that van Lommel’s Consciousness Beyond Life provides the most thorough discussion of NDEs in a scientific book. Chapter titles include: What Happens in the Brain When the Heart Suddenly Stops? What Do We Know About Brain Function? Quantum Physics and Consciousness, The Brain and Consciousness, and Endless Consciousness. In 320 pages van Lommel offers a comprehensive narrative supported by more than 30 pages of endnotes. I refer extensively to this book in my writing about NDEs, but in my blog include a few of the arguments presented in this comprehensive study.

Van Lommel begins Consciousness Beyond Life with a quote written early in the 20th-century by Frederick van Eeden, a Dutch psychiatrist: “All science is empirical science, all theory is subordinate to perception; a single fact can overturn an entire system.” Then van Lommel relates his personal experience as a young cardiologist.

“It is 1969. At the coronary care unit the alarm goes off. The monitor shows that the electrocardiogram of a patient with a myocardial infarction (heart attack) has flat lined. The man has suffered a cardiac arrest. Two nurses hurry over to the patient, who is no longer responsive, and quickly draw the curtains around his bed. One of the nurses starts CPR while the other places a mask over his mouth and administers oxygen. A third nurse rushes over with the resuscitation trolley that contains the defibrillator. The defibrillator is charged, the paddles are covered in gel, the patient’s chest is bared, the medical staff let go of the patient and the bed, and the patient is defibrillated. He receives an electric shock to the chest. It has no effect. Heart massage and artificial respiration are resumed, and, in consultation with the doctor, extra medication is injected into the IV drip. Then the patient is defibrillated for the second time. This time his cardiac rhythm is reestablished, and after a spell of unconsciousness that lasted about four minutes, the patient regains consciousness, to the great relief of the nursing staff and the attendant doctor.

“I was the attending doctor. I had started my cardiology training that year. Following the successful resuscitation, everybody was pleased—everybody except the patient. He had been successfully revived, yet to everybody’s surprise he was extremely disappointed. He spoke of a tunnel, colors, a light, a beautiful landscape, and music. He was extremely emotional. The term near-death experience (NDE) did not yet exist, and I had never heard of people remembering the period of their cardiac arrest.

“While studying for my degree, I had learned that such a thing is in fact impossible: being unconscious means being unaware—and the same applies to people suffering a cardiac arrest or patients in a coma. At such a moment it is simply impossible to be conscious or to have memories because all brain function has ceased. In the event of a cardiac arrest, a patient is unconscious, is no longer breathing, and has no palpable pulse or blood pressure.”

Pim van Lommel, www.pimvanlommel.nl/Pim_van_lommel_eng.

A New Testament Prayer

O God of love,

may your grace and peace come,

may your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Keep us healthy and 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, and the Truth, and the Light,

now and forever. Amen.

Dr. Parti's NDE affects his wife and children

Dr. Rajiv Parti's wife, Arpana, admitted: I both like and fear the new Rajiv and all the changes. The same was true, Dr. Parti writes, "of our (then) teenage daughter, Ambika. We had not talked to her in detail about my NDE. But one day she happened by the kitchen when Arpana and I were talking about the experience, and rather than stopping the conversation, we decided to include her. Before long, she was deeply engrossed in the story and very understanding of the transformational experience that had taken place.

“When we told her that we had agreed to swap our house for a smaller one, however, Ambika responded, This is going to affect my whole life! Mom, this is really going to change your whole life. 

"My sons had a similar reaction. When I came back from the hospital, neither wanted to hear about my experience. Our eldest child, Raghav, had a response of almost total indifference, not only to my near-death experience but also to me in general. I had not treated my son admirably. In fact I had not treated anyone in my family admirably.

“But I knew: It was not following the guidance from my near-death experience that might ruin my family. It would be to continue as I had, with very little true spiritual guidance at all!

On his website, Parti describes his wife’s decision to end their marriage. “As the days passed and our anger and vengeance ebbed, I finally heard the heartbreak in my wife’s voice in a new way. And I realized that I had broken her heart as well, even if unconsciously. And perhaps I started us down the road that brought us to impending divorce.

“Thank goodness I saw the opportunity to apply the lessons I learned from my NDE. I knew that the only way to change my relationship and thrive in love again was to change myself. And so I embarked upon a journey to heal my broken heart and grow in compassion, forgiveness, and love.

"It was not easy—it was painful like childbirth. But now my wife and I have a new marriage, a better relationship than we ever had. The abundance of love and joy is staggering! My old relationship had to die before we could experience this new love.

"And so I set out to become the best healer and coach I could be. I studied and learned new ways to apply the timeless wisdom shared with me during my near death experience. I took a vow of bodhisattva service, seva—as a heartbreak healer and love coach—helping the brokenhearted heal, and become empowered to thrive in love again.”

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Learn more about his practice at https://www.rajivparti.com.

In this video interview Dr. Parti describes his NDE and explains how it transformed his life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l-nbk_8EII

Guided by the twelve-step program and angels

Dr. Rajiv Parti was encouraged when he learned the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, had been inspired by a near-death experience in 1934. While being treated at a clinic for his addiction, the clinic’s director asked Wilson “if he would like to dedicate himself to Jesus to see if such an act would rid him of his alcoholism. “Depressed and filled with despair, Wilson began to weep. I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let him show himself! He shouted.

The effect was instant, electric, Wilson says. Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white Light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the Light and the ecstasy subsided. As I became quieter a great peace stole over me, and I became acutely conscious of a presence, which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’

“Wilson never drank again. He told Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic in Akron, Ohio, about his experience, and the doctor also quit drinking and began to pursue a ‘spiritual remedy’ for his own alcoholism. The two men, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, became the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Their twelve-step program, Parti notes, was originally based on these affirmations:

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

“When I look at the twelve steps, I can’t help but think that Wilson’s encounter with the Light was similar to my own with the Being of Light. I also couldn’t help but think that he too was asked to devise a means of spiritual healing much like the one I was being asked to devise. Following my surgery, I realized my addiction to painkillers was abating. Soon I took less than what was prescribed and only as needed for my pelvic pain.

“I felt compelled to meditate after returning home from the hospital, and now I was doing it daily, sometime several times a day. One day when I was meditating, a deep sadness came over me, caused by some of the same concerns that had driven me into depression. I began to think about the money I had lost in the stock market in 1999 and wondered why I had put all of my capital at risk just to try to make more when what I had already made was more than I ever expected. I began to wonder why I had gotten prostate cancer. Had God given it to me? Was this karmic payback for something I had done? Would I ever feel good about myself again?

“Then both Michael and Raphael appeared. In their pleasant way, they calmed me down; telling me that ‘going off the track’ during meditation was common. When you meditate, you are supposed to let thoughts arise, but detach from them, let them float downstream in the river of life, said Raphael.

Yes, that’s what’s supposed to happen, agreed Michael. But that doesn’t happen to most people, at least not in the beginning.

Thoughts have thorns, just like cactus, said Raphael. They stick to you and they hurt. Sometimes they don’t detach as quickly as you would like, and they hurt even when they do.

“There were easy ways to conquer these depressing thoughts, said Michael. It was all a matter of changing perspective. To do that, he suggested I develop two opposing personalities, Poor Rajiv and Lucky Rajiv. Poor Rajiv is the man who is stressed out because he lost money in the stock market and can’t accept that the losses were caused by his greed. Then he got cancer, and with it came multiple surgeries with complications. Now he blames God for his problems instead of considering his own karma. Lucky Rajiv is that guy who has a chance to follow his dharma, his purpose, and doesn’t have a huge mortgage. His life is easier, and he can explore a new meaning of life, maybe even change the world.

The angels told me to ponder the question during meditation: Which one do I want to be today? Lucky Rajiv or Poor Rajiv? I realized I could change the story around the circumstances of my life. As Raphael said: You cannot prevent pain, but suffering is an option. All I had to do was change the perspective, and I didn’t have to suffer.

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).