Materialism can't explain near-death experiences

Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard writes: "Near-death experiences (NDEs) are vivid, realistic, and often deeply life-changing experiences occurring to individuals who have been psychologically or physiologically close to death. A clear memory of the experience, enhanced mental activity, and a conviction that the experience is more real than ordinary waking consciousness are core features of NDEs (Greyson, 2011).

"NDEs are frequently evoked by cardiac arrest. When the heart stops, breathing stops as well, and blood flow and oxygen uptake in the brain are rapidly interrupted; the EEG becomes isoelectric (flat-line) within 10-20 seconds, and brainstem reflexes vanish (Clute & Levy, 1990); the individual having the cardiac arrest is then considered to be clinically dead. Because the brain structures supporting conscious experience and higher mental functions (e.g. perception, memory, and awareness) are dramatically impaired, cardiac arrest survivors are not expected to have clear and lucid mental experiences during the cardiac arrest period that will be remembered. 

"Nonetheless, studies carried out in the United Kingdom (Parnia et al., 2001), the Netherlands (van Lommel et al., 2001), Belgium (Lallier et al., 2015), and the United States (Schwaninger et al., 2002; Greyson, 2003) have revealed that about 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. In these studies, more than 100 cases of full-blown NDEs were reported. It is noteworthy that while they are clinically dead, NDErs sometimes report perceptions that coincide with reality.

"Advocates of materialist theories of the mind object that even if the EEG is isoelectric, there may be some residual brain activity that goes undetected because of the limitations of scalp-EEG technology. This is possible, given that scalp-EEG technology measures mostly the activity of large populations of cortical neurons. However, the brain activity agreed upon by contemporary neuroscientists as the necessary condition of conscious experience is well detected via current EEG technology, and is clearly abolished by cardiac arrest (Greyson, 2011). 

"Proponents of materialist theories of the mind also argue that NDEs do not occur during the actual episodes of brain insult, but just before or just after the insult, when the brain is more or less functional (Saavedra-Aguilar & Gómez-Jeria, 1989; Blackmore, 1993; Woerlee, 2004). The problem with this interpretation is that unconsciousness generated by cardiac arrest leaves patients amnesic and confused for events occurring immediately before and after such episodes (Aminoff et al., 1988; Parnia & Fenwick, 2002; van Lommel et al., 2001)."

 

Mario Beauregard, “The Next Great Scientific Revolution,” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, Vol. 2, Postmaterialist Sciences Series (pp. 21-23). The Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences (AAPS), 2020. Kindle Edition.

Aminoff, M. J., Scheinman, M. M., Griffin, J. C., & Herre, J. M. (1988). Electrocerebral accompaniments of syncope associated with malignant ventricular arrhythmias. Annals of Internal Medicine, 108, 791–796.

Blackmore, S.J. (1993). Dying to Live: Science and the Near- Death Experience. London: Grafton.

Clute, H. L. & Levy, W. J. (1990). Electroencephalographic changes during brief cardiac arrest in humans. Anesthesiology, 73 (5), 821–825.

Greyson, B. (2003). Incidence and correlates of near-death experiences in a cardiac care unit. General Hospital Psychiatry, 25 (4), 269-276.

Greyson, B. (2011). Implications of near-death experiences for a postmaterialist psychology. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2 (1), 37-45.

Lallier, F., Velly, G., & Leon, A. (2015). Near-death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest: a study about demographic, medical, pharmacological and psychological context. Critical Care, 19 (Suppl 1), P421.

Parnia, S., & Fenwick, P. (2002). Near death experiences in cardiac arrest. Resuscitation, 52, 5–11.

Saavedra-Aguilar, J. C. & Gómez-Jeria, J. S. (1989). A neurobiological model for near-death experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 7 (4), 205-222.

van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V. & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in the Netherlands. Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039–2045.

Woerlee, G. M. (2004). Cardiac arrest and near-death experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 22, 235-249.

"The universe is alive through our lives . . ."

Physician Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos write in You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters: “We have seen that mind-like behavior isn’t a property of matter. Quite the reverse. When it wants to, the cosmic mind can take on the properties of matter. At the quantum level it can decide to behave like a wave or a particle. When such a choice is made, it’s a mental choice, which shouldn’t shock us. By definition, choices are mental.”

 

“The conscious universe embraces change, nonchange, and the state of potential change. This is another reason, and one of the most important, why the cosmos feels completely humanized once, you open up to the possibility.” We can live in a human universe, if we can see “beyond our current abilities, where we feel trapped by the physical world and hemmed in by its rules.” 

 

In short, “Cosmic mind isn’t done with us. A powerful evolutionary force has propelled the human cortex to unparalleled heights at unbelievable speed.” Isn’t our mind personal? Yes, our “mind feels personal” but at the same time it is cosmic. Imagine that you are a single electron flickering in and out of the quantum vacuum. As a single particle you feel like ‘me,’ an individual.” In reality, however, “you are an activity of the quantum field, and in your guise as a wave instead of a particle, you exist everywhere.”

 

Consciousness is the one reality, continuous and present in all that is. The universe is alive through our lives and all life. This is its meaning. Our purpose is to align ourselves with the creative consciousness of the universe.

 

Robert Traer, Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home (2021), 247-248. Quotes from Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (2017), 207, 217, 218, 221-222.

The cosmic mind gives every event a purpose.

Physician Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos write in You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters: “It’s an axiom in science that the relevant questions are about ‘how,’ not ‘why’.” Yet, “the evolution of life keeps bringing up issues of why. Why did moles abandon the light to live underground? Why do pandas eat only bamboo leaves? Why do people want children? Some kind of purpose and meaning had to enter the picture. Or did a conscious universe contain the seeds of purpose and meaning since the beginning? As matters stand, such speculation is met with considerable resistance by the scientific community. The standard view holds that the universe has no purpose or meaning. So before offering a new model for how life began, we must dismantle conventional thinking first.” 

 

If consciousness is fundamental, as Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger and others have argued, then the universe is conscious. Therefore, our consciousness is derived from a cosmic consciousness. In a conscious universe, everything is alive already. The observation that life comes from life turns out to be a cosmic truth. And we can see this in quantum physics, for quantum particles “behave in a totally lifelike way (i.e., making choices, balancing stability and spontaneity, efficiently harvesting energy, and so on).” Quantum effects in organisms “introduce behavior that isn’t predetermined the way oxygen atoms are when reacting with other atoms.”

 

Chopra and Kafatos assert: “A universe is defined by the creatures who inhabit it.” This is not only true for humans, but for all the creatures we share the earth with and any creatures elsewhere in the universe. Furthermore, it is true because the purpose of the universe is creating creatures that share in the creativity of cosmic consciousness. 

 

In a stunning short paragraph Chopra and Kafatos answer several significant “why” questions: “Why is the human mind creative? Because the cosmos is creative. Why did the human mind evolve? Because evolution is built into the fabric of reality itself. Why do our lives have meaning? Because nature proceeds with a drive toward purpose and truth.” In our universe, “the cosmic mind drives every event and gives it a purpose.”

 

Robert Traer, Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home (2021), 247-248. Quotes from Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (2017), 215, 178-179, 183, 198, 229, 248.

The creative nature of the universe

As with our physical death, the end of life on earth is certain. But the creativity of the universe will continue. For as with the origin of the universe, at the virtual level particles will continue to pop in and out of our known universe. This creative process does not depend on the energy from any star. It is the resonance of the universe from the Other Side of space and time, the virtual state that is timeless as well as “invisible and intangible but nevertheless real.” This virtual state cannot be observed and so cannot be measured from the side of our known universe.

Yet, its virtual activity involves something coming from “nothing” as virtual particles pop into the time and space reality we know. Physician Deepak Chopra and Physicist Menas Kafatos in their book You are the Universe suggest the best way to interpret this “virtual state” of possibilities is to consider our human waking state, when a word or idea simply pops into our mind. “Before you think or say the word,” they ask, “where is it? Words aren’t stored in a physical state in brain cells; instead, they exist invisibly but ready at hand—in a virtual state.”

How are we to understand this parallel between the way the universe is and how we are? Do human acts of consciousness confirm the fundamental creative nature of the universe? Perhaps our answers depend on how and why we find purpose and meaning in the universe.

From Robert Traer, Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home (2021), 246. Quotes from Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (2017), 116.

Unique quantum state in photosynthesis

As animal life was humming along creating hemoglobin, natural processes on the vegetable side of the operation created chlorophyll, which sustains plant life along a different route, photosynthesis. We won’t conduct a tour of the chlorophyll molecule except to say that it consists of 137 atoms, whose sole purpose is to encase one atom of magnesium rather than the iron in hemoglobin. This ionized magnesium atom, when it comes into contact with sunlight, allows carbon and water to form a very simple carbohydrate. How photons of light from the sun can create this new product opens up new mysteries, but once the simplest carbohydrate molecule was generated by plant leaves, an evolutionary breakthrough was made. The machinery that manufactures chlorophyll took a separate track from the machinery that manufactures hemoglobin, which is why cows eat grass instead of being grass.

(Note: In photosynthesis, chlorophyll only needs the carbon atom in carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen atom into the air. You may say, aha, that’s where the free oxygen comes from that isn’t stolen by other atoms. But unfortunately, chlorophyll needs a cell to live inside, and that cell required free oxygen for its construction before chlorophyll could start to operate.)

Now we have a context for asking the right question. The mystery of how life first began comes down to the transition from ‘lifeless’ chemical reactions to ‘living’ ones. Is life simply a sideline of universal chemical behavior throughout creation? Any answer will also have to include why only some atoms and molecules engage in this sideline while the rest continue on their merry way.

Almost all the free energy available for life on our planet comes from photosynthesis. Besides needing their own supply of energy to grow, plants are at the bottom of the food chain for all animal life on land. When sunlight hits cells that contain chlorophyll, the energy in the sunlight is ‘harvested,’ almost instantaneously being passed along for chemical processing into proteins and other organic products. This energy transfer occurs with 100 percent efficiency. No energy is wasted as heat.

Researchers “discovered something quite unique: in photosynthesis sunlight retains its wave-like state long enough to sample the whole range of possible targets while simultaneously ‘choosing’ which one is the most efficient to connect with. By looking down all the possible energy pathways on offer, the light won’t waste energy picking any but the most efficient ones.

The mechanism involves matching the resonance of both the light and the molecules receiving its energy. This is like two tuning forks vibrating exactly alike and known as harmonic resonance.

An entire new theory posits that living things are embedded in a ‘biofield’ that originates at the electromagnetic level or perhaps at an even subtler quantum level, yet to be explored. The breakthrough with photosynthesis was a turning point.

Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (Harmony Books, 2017), 222-229.

Hemoglobin is a miracle of construction

Hemoglobin sits inside a red blood cell, constituting 96 percent of the cells’ dry weight; its function is to pick up oxygen and transport it through the bloodstream to every cell in the body. Blood gains its red color from the iron in hemoglobin, which turns reddish when it rusts (and for the same reason). When the oxygen atoms reach their destination and are released. The red color fades, which is why blood in your veins is bluish. Venous blood is on the return journey to the lungs, where it will start the process of oxygen transport all over again. The ability of hemoglobin to carry oxygen is seventy times greater than if the oxygen were simply dissolved in the blood. 

As a molecule, hemoglobin is a miracle of construction. The hemoglobin molecule is built from 10,000 atoms, creating a vast space that exist so that exactly four iron atoms can pick up four oxygen atoms for transport.

The task that faced inorganic matter billions of years ago on planet Earth was as follows:

- Oxygen had to be set free into the atmosphere without getting gobbled up by greedy atoms and molecules around it.

- At the same time, some of the oxygen had to be gobbled up to form complex organic chemicals.

- Those organic chemicals had to be structured into proteins, of which hemoglobin is one of the most complex.

- Hemoglobin had to be arranged internally so that it encased four iron atoms, which are absent from hundreds of other proteins, including those that resemble hemoglobin in their working parts.

- The iron atoms couldn’t be inertly encased, like locking diamonds up in a safety deposit box. The iron had to be charged (as a positive ion) so that it could pick up oxygen atoms. But it wasn’t permitted to steal any of the oxygen already being used to build proteins.

Finally, the machinery necessary for constructing all of the above organic chemicals had to remember how to do it the next time and the next and the next, while other nanomachines sitting nearby in the cell had to remember hundreds of different chemical processes without interfering with the machine that makes hemoglobin. Meanwhile, time matters. The nucleus of the cell, DNA has to remember—and put into motion with precise time—the whole enterprise.

Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (Harmony Books, 2017), 218-221.

Our experiences of the soul

In each state of consciousness the soul looks different. In the physical world the soul is centered around emotions and idealism. It connotes warmth of heart, love, devotion to God. We look to our souls to remind ourselves that we have a divine spark inside, and yet we don’t base our lives on it. The soul flickers in and out.

 

In the subtle world the soul is spirit, denoting holiness, closeness to God, and freedom from the burdens of physical existence. The soul no longer offers mere comfort; it is the bliss that pain was disguising. The soul is constant now; its guidance can be clearly followed without confusion. The primary feeling is magnetic: one is being drawn inexorably toward the divine.

 

In the domain of pure consciousness, merging is complete. One sees that self and soul are one. Since there is no here and there, the soul has no location. It exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. One no longer seeks the soul’s goodness, holiness, or purity. It simply is. 

 

The divine plan is life itself. It includes all creatures in their proper place. The proper place for humans is, first, in eternity and second, here on earth. Death, like the pause between two breaths, is how you cross from one home to the other.

 

Chopra, Deepak. Life After Death (p. 126-127, 157). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.