Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home

I begin my book by relating life-transforming experiences of scientists. After struck by lightning, surgeon Tony Cicoria heard music “from Heaven” and became a pianist to play it. Biophysicist Joyce Hawkes, after her near-death experience, heard a voice calling her to be a healer, studied with indigenous teachers, and became a cell-level healer. No longer agnostic, Cicoria and Hawkes now trust in the Source of life many call God. Some scientists, such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, acknowledge extraordinary intuitive experiences revealing the secrets of nature. Other scientists report life-transforming healings, visions, and dreams. 
 
Stars, water, and life are natural phenomena but remain fundamental mysteries that may generate extraordinary human experiences. I explain why in chapters on Consciousness and Subjectivity, the Origin and Evolution of Life, a Creative Universe, Purpose and Meaning, Ethics and Ecology, and Nature and God.
 
These wondrous experiences offer evidence that we have come from and will return to an eternal dimension of reality, as unbounded by time and space as quantum reality. Some call it Heaven, the Other Side, or Cosmic Consciousness. Knowing this truth makes everyday life on earth extraordinary. And whether we know it or not, we are on our way home.
 
This is why I end the book by recognizing that the first line of the Lord’s Prayer is as compelling now as it was two millennia ago. Abba, may your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Abba is the Aramaic word for father that Jesus used, and Paul in his New Testament letters also refers to Abba. Source of all life and forgiving love, may we open our hearts to You during our extraordinary lives on earth. Amen.

 

Available in paperback ($8) and Kindle ($1) editions at https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Experiences-Our-Way-Home/dp/B09JDX8ZLV/.

Experiences verify that consciousness is primary

"Every single scientific fact has its source in the emergence of matter and energy, space and time, from a hidden state in the quantum domain. This is where reality comes from." 

“If the mind is primary and matter is secondary, then we live in an intelligent universe. All the aspects of human intelligence are invisibly wrapped up in every atom. We are creative because the universe is creative. Our lives have purpose and meaning because the universe is creative."

"Matter arises, then, because cosmic intelligence needed a way to express itself. Nothing about the unfolding universe from the instant of the Big Bang has been random, then. Randomness is a mere appearance, like the stirring of water and flour when a baker kneads his dough. Flour and water molecules whirl around with no discernible order as the kneading proceeds, yet we know that a completely purposeful outcome.

"On the other hand, if matter is primary in creation, then mind arrived much later, after billions of years of random interactions between atoms and molecules. There is no underlying purpose or meaning to the emergence of mind. It just happened."

"No matter when you look, the visible universe is fundamentally a set of signals. Yet these signals all hold together, turning totally meaningless vibrations into full-blown experiences that have human meaning."

"The truth is that your body exists in you, inside your consciousness. Nothing about our hand—movement, touch, pain, dexterity, et cetera—exists anywhere except in consciousness."

"You are like a light radiating not photons but consciousness."

Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, revised and updated (Bantam Books, 1989 and 2015), 130, 145-146, 153, 251.

"Life is intelligence riding on chemicals."

Deepak Chopra in Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine asserts as facts verified by current scientific research that:

“Mind comes before matter. Mental choices originate the messages that change organs, tissues, and cells.”

“The body is fluid and dynamic, not fixed and determined. Genes express whatever a person desires. They operate through switches that the mind can access."

“The mind/body system is a feedback loop where input and output have many determinants, including lifestyle, environment, behavior, beliefs, and past conditioning. Through self-care, a higher state of wellbeing is attainable. Self-care makes daily use of the mind/body feedback loop.”

Chopra reminds us that the materials that make up our body are constantly changing.

“Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago.”

“The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days, with the actual surface cells that contact food being renewed every five minutes.”

“Even within the brain, whose cells are not replaced once they die, the content of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on is totally different today from a year ago.”

Chopra also reminds us that our eyes are not cameras. What we see is actually the result of our mind-brain activity. Photons that transmit light are colorless and invisible. We create the color and intensity of our world.

“Light’s brightness and color, along with everything else we perceive, come from ‘conscious agents,’ a term coined by the farseeing cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffmann of the University of California, Irvine. He proposes that the only reality we can know is the reality created by consciousness. If there is anything that is real but beyond the human mind, then it won’t be accessible.”

Life, Chopra says, “is intelligence riding everywhere on chemicals.” And despite appearing to be different, “mind and body are both soaked through with intelligence. The material body is a river of atoms, the mind is a river of thought, and what holds them together is a river of intelligence.”

“With thousands of chemicals on its shelf, a cell has not only to choose some, mix them together, and analyze the results. It has to make the chemicals in the first place, finding thousands of ways to create new molecules out of basically a handful of elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. To do that requires a mind.”

Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, revised and updated (Bantam Books, 1989 and 2015), 47-48, 77-79, 100, 121-123.

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.