Deathbed Visions: Ruickbie excerpt #18

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  “The dying person, precisely at the moment of death, and when the power of speech was lost, or nearly lost, seemed to see something; or rather, to speak more exactly, to become conscious of something present (for actual sight is out of question) of a very striking kind, which remained invisible to and unperceived by the assistants.”  

Frances Cobbe likened this experience to that “peak in Darien” (Panama) whereon Cortez and his men, expecting to see a continent, beheld instead the vast Pacific ocean stretching to the horizon. Writing in 1882, Cobbe found that almost every family could recall such a deathbed incident, the vision being of someone known to the dying who had pre-deceased them. 

Almost 150 years later, Dr. Christopher Kerr studied end-of-life experiences involving 1,400 interviews with dying patients. He found that “over 80% reported at least one pre-death dream or vision described as more real than real and distinct from normal dreaming,” and for 72% this was a dream/vision of the deceased (friends, family, and pets). He found a correlation between the frequency of dreaming of the deceased and the nearness of death that had predictive value. Although Kerr did not consider evidential aspects, his study proves that the experience itself is common and widespread.*

The typical case involves the familiar “receptio ad mortem,” to coin a phrase, a welcoming party composed of one or more deceased family members and sometimes friends. This in itself gives heart, that we should see in our final moments those most loved by us and that they are there to welcome us to the other side, even if only a delusion it is a comforting end; however, the delusional explanation is overthrown by the reporting of information that the dying should not ordinarily possess.

The most Scrooge-defying accounts of deathbed visions involve seeing people who are unknown to the dying person to have died. Cobbe recounted one such case, but since then many more have come to light. When A.T. Baird collected a hundred of the best cases, he concluded that deathbed visions of this sort gave “the strongest support to the theory of the survival of human personality after bodily death.”**

* Christopher Kerr, Death is But a Dream: Finding Meaning and Hope at Life's End (Avery, 2020 ) https://www.amazon.com/Death-But-Dream-Finding-Meaning/dp/0525542841. 

** A. T. Baird, One Hundred Cases for Survival After Death, (White Crow, 2018), https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-hundred-cases-for-survival-after-death-alexander-t-baird/1120039023.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Actual-death experiences: Ruickbie excerpt #17

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies about the case of a singer, Pam Reynolds (1956-2010). She writes of her experience during surgery:

 

The next thing I recall was the sound: It was a Natural ‘D.’ As I listened to the sound, I felt it was pulling me out of the top of my head. The further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became. I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on [...] I remember seeing several things in the operating room when I was looking down. It was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life [...] I was metaphorically sitting on [the doctor’s] shoulder. It was not like normal vision. It was brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision [...] There was so much in the operating room that I didn’t recognize, and so many people.

Her surgery is one of the most detailed and best authenticated examples of what is usually called a near-death experience; however, Reynolds was not near death, she was categorically dead.

In order to remove an intracranial aneurysm in the basilar artery – weakness in the arterial wall had caused a huge, life-threatening bubble to develop – that was of a size and position to make other procedures too risky, neurosurgeon Dr. Robert F. Spetzler was called in to use the pioneering method of deep hypothermic cardiac arrest. After being rendered unconscious with anaesthetics, she was cooled to around 20oC (68oF), her heart stopped beating, her lungs stopped breathing, her brain stopped functioning (electro-cerebral silence), the blood was drained from inside her skull. All her vital signs were flatlined. She was clinically dead. There were no signs of life, yet she saw and heard things. There was no brain activity, yet she was conscious.

The sound that seemed to prompt her leaving her body was that of the surgical saw Spetzler was about to use to cut open her skull. She thought the saw looked like an electric toothbrush and noted a dent in it, and its interchangeable blades in a “socket wrench case.” She had expected that the doctors would shave her whole head, but saw instead that only a patch had been shaved. She heard a female voice – she thought it may have been a Dr. Murray – talking about her veins and arteries: they were “very small,” apparently. Most of the tools and instruments she did not recognize, but she saw a heart-lung machine and “didn’t like the respirator.”

Reynolds went on to have a very vivid experience in which she met deceased relatives, but the only testable pieces of information relate to her description of the operating theatre – a description she should not have been able to make under the circumstance. They were all confirmed.

It should only take one case like that of Pam Reynolds for us to rethink the mind–brain problem, if not immediately abandon the current orthodox position that states that the brain produces the mind, but there has been more than one.

Although the term “near-death experience” was only coined in 1975 by Raymond Moody, people had certainly been reporting such experiences for a long time. Moody’s own interest in the subject began in 1965 when he heard a clinical professor of psychiatry (surely a credible witness) relate his own experience. By the time Moody came to write his groundbreaking book, Life After Life, he had about 150 NDE cases, and that was only the start.

The term is not accurate: although some cases do indeed involve experiences when the body is near death, others involve experiences when the body is actually dead; and when we say ‘experiences’ we mean consciousness because only something conscious can have experiences. It is not a near-death experience but post-mortem consciousness. If we more accurately reframe the terms like this, then it becomes immediately apparent that evidence of consciousness after clinical death is evidence of the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body.

What constitutes ‘best’ is precisely that they had actually died, and through the wonders of modern medicine were resuscitated, and then recalled memories from a period when their bodies, including their brains, were not functioning – that is, ordinarily unable to produce memories, the unique ability of consciousness, if consciousness is created by the brain. And then not only that, astonishing as it is, but described events that were independently confirmed – events that they should not have been aware of if consciousness is created by the brain. We have to take these experiences seriously because they are consistent across time and culture: they are not fantasy constructs that somehow get lucky, they are real.

The number of ‘best’ NDE cases is staggering. In addition to Reynolds other cases often cited include that of Al Sullivan. A fifty-five year-old truck driver, Sullivan was undergoing triple-bypass surgery when his consciousness separated from his body. Sullivan saw the surgeon perform an unusual arm flapping motion with his hands tucked into his armpits and encountered his mother and brother-in-law, both deceased, who told him to tell his neighbours that their son, suffering from lymphoma, would recover – all subsequently confirmed.

Kenneth Ring gathered thirty-one cases of blind people reporting seeing things during an NDE that were later verified as true. Current medical science says that this is impossible, yet it happened thirty-one times, at least.

Although NDEs have been reported for centuries, modern medicine is constantly pushing back the irreversibility threshold of death. If Reynolds had lived and been diagnosed some years earlier, there would have been no treatment for her and hence no account of post-mortem consciousness. We are travelling further into death than any civilization has been able to do before. And the information people are bringing back is of a quality and depth never before achievable. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

The subtle body: Ruickbie excerpt #16

Robert Monroe

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Ideas of a second, or ‘subtle’ body can be traced back to Antiquity, and are found in the remote past of other cultures. Much research was done on “travelling clairvoyance,” “doubles” astral bodies, “extracorporeal action,” and “astral projection,” but it was not until 1943 that such phenomena were classified as the now more familiar “out-of-body experience” (OBE) by G.N.M. Tyrrell – a term adopted and popularized by Celia Green and Robert Monroe, among others.

Sylvan Muldoon described passing through physical things and beings during his “astral projections,” and a later study of 1,007 OBErs found that 38% experienced “self-permeability,” i.e., the ability to pass through physical objects. In addition, 40% reported seeing themselves (autoscopy) whilst having an OBE – other studies have reported 56–82% for this experience. An online survey of 16,185 OBErs found that 62% were associated with lucid dreams, and 49% involved “seeing through closed eyelids.” Almost half had some sort of encounter, either “seeing or feeling the presence of an unknown physical being” (22%), or “seeing, hearing or speaking to a deceased loved one” (24%) – Monroe described several encounters with the deceased. One study included cases of OBErs reporting events from past lives (15%), potentially linking the experience with reincarnation.

Over the years many people have attempted to test whether OBEs are really out of the body. H. Durville described holding a piece of paper with large letters printed on it in front of the half-open eyes of a hypnotized subject, Marthe – she claimed she could see nothing, but when the paper was placed before her “double,” specifically at the nape of the neck, she then proceeded to read it without difficulty. Charles Tart conducted experiments with “Miss Z,” placing a random five-digit number on a shelf above her bed whilst she slept and attempted to leave her body. On the final night of the trial she read the number correctly. K. Osis and D. McCormick apparently successfully tested Dr. Alex Tanous’s ability to leave his body.

In his report to the US Army Operational Group in 1983 concerning the “Gateway Experience” (a Monroe Institute programme), Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnel, Commander Det. O, wrote that “human consciousness can, with enough practice, move beyond the dimension of time- space and interface with other energy systems in other dimensions.” McDonnel reported that the technique could also be used to “travel” into the past and future. During his training at the Monroe Institute one of the trainers told him that “numerous experiments have been conducted involving persons moving from one coast [of the USA] to the other in the out-of-body state to read a series of ten computer generated numbers in a university laboratory [...] most have acquired enough of the digits to make clear that their consciousness was present.” Experiments such as these were part of the US government’s long-running research into remote viewing, Project Star Gate.

More recently, Patrizio Tressoldi and colleagues conducted experiments with a group of five OBErs, with the group scoring considerably above chance in correctly identifying the target images at a location approximately 190 km away. They stated that “All participants reported a phenomenological experience of a disembodied personal selfhood able to perceive simply by an act of will without the physical limitation of eyesight, to move in the environment instantaneously and exist in a sort of three dimensional world with no awareness of time.” Tressoldi’s paper was rejected by the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience because, among other things, the findings violated “the basic laws of physics as they are currently understood,” which was surely the point.

In addition to a hundred years’ worth of successful experiments, supporting evidence comes from other avenues. According to Jeffrey Long’s NDERF survey, an out-of-body experience was the most common feature of an NDE, being reported in three-quarters (75.4%) of all cases – Greyson and Stevenson had earlier found 70%. Other studies have shown that as many as a quarter (22– 25%) of people have spontaneous out-of-body experiences, that is, without having to be “near death” at the time.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Out-of-body experiances: Ruickbie excerpt #14

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

As well as self-projectionists, others had discovered that they could send their subjects out of their bodies. In the 1840s, the British physician Joseph Haddock (1800–1861) discovered what he called “distant clairvoyance” during investigations into hypnotism (then generally considered under the heading of Mesmerism). Working with a subject called Emma L., a domestic servant in her twenties, he asked her to describe one of Haddock’s female relatives in London whilst she was mesmerized in Bolton, 174 miles (279 km) away as the crow flies. She was apparently successful in this, but puzzled Haddock by going on to describe a lady in a grand building, which to him sounded like Buckingham Palace (he tested this by asking if she saw any soldiers, to which she replied that she did). He later discovered that his relative – the target of the experiment – had been thinking of the Queen at the time. Emma’s distant clairvoyance had seemingly followed the target’s line of thought. “It appeared,” wrote Haddock, “as if her mind partially left her body, to go to the place sought.” There are many more such accounts in the Mesmerist literature from this period.

I discovered a similar case in the British Library that had escaped being published or discussed in the hundred plus years since being documented in 1915. It involved Francis Gilbert Scott (1868–1933), a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and of the Society for Psychical Research, who had conducted a series of experiments in hypnotism on his maid in an effort to improve her work. He accidentally discovered that, whilst in trance, she could apparently leave her body and visit her sweetheart Edgar, who was serving on the Western Front, approximately 200 miles away. Further experiments included visiting the maid’s cousin Bruce, also at the front. Her observations, always involving incidents that could not have been realistically guessed beforehand, were later confirmed by post.

In both cases, reputable medical men conducted the experiments, which, although informal in character, showed no indication of being deceptive or mercenary. The level of unexpected detail makes sensory cueing or subjective validation unlikely explanations. That these details were independently confirmed also demonstrates that the experiences were not hallucinatory. Emma and Scott’s maid really did seem to be out of their bodies. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Projecting one's "self": Ruickbie excerpt #13

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: 

A surprising finding of the Society for Psychical Research’s Census was that many ‘apparitions’ were not ‘spirits of the dead,’ but actually living people. This realization should open a whole avenue of research: if the living could accidentally be seen as ghosts, could anyone do it intentionally?

In 1890, Joseph Kirk of Plumstead, London, decided to become a ghost, or, as he put it, attempt a “telepathic experiment” upon Miss G., a young lady of his acquaintance. From June 10 to 20 that year, Kirk concentrated each evening on making himself visible to the unsuspecting Miss G. She later complained of disturbed sleep and feeling “uneasy” at night. Disappointed and a little guilty, Kirk decided to leave off, but had another go on June 23. This time Miss G. confessed to having had a very peculiar experience: “seeing Mr. Kirk standing near my chair, dressed in a dark brown coat, which I had frequently seen him wear.”

Mr. Kirk’s coat was a key piece of evidence. He was, he explained, in the habit of wearing a light coat in the office, but as this had been sent to the tailor to be repaired, he was wearing his dark jacket, matching his suit of distinctive “dark reddish-brown check stuff.” Kirk used this fact to test the veracity of Miss G.’s vision. “How was I dressed?” he later asked, noting that this was not a leading question. He was wearing a light suit at the time and Miss G. touched the sleeve of his jacket, saying “Not this coat, but that dark suit you wear sometimes. I even saw clearly the small check pattern of it.” And therein rests the case for the defense, except that Miss G. also added that “I saw your features as plainly as though you had been bodily present. I could not have seen you more distinctly.”

Frank Podmore  

Here is a deliberate attempt to visibly appear before another person, unbeknownst to them, subsequently confirmed with additional evidential details. SPR researcher Frank Podmore collected this and several more such examples, including the Rev. Clarence Godfrey, who projected himself into a lady’s bedroom in 1886, and Mr. H. Percy Sparks who projected his friend Mr. Arthur H.W. Cleave into the dining-room of a young lady in Wandsworth. Cleave’s abilities outshone those of Godfrey: not only did he make himself visible to the target but was conscious of what happened whilst he was there. 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

After-Death Communication: Ruickbie excerpt #12

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

The range reported of apparently intentional contact between living and deceased, covering sound, smell and touch, as well as full-blown apparitions, has led to a new term “after-death communication.” The element of communication is key, but this can be interpreted as any sort of sign that is taken as communication, typically between the deceased and someone who was known to them in life, and is taken as a sign of continued existence after death.

High levels of ADCs have been reported in the research. Before publishing their 1995 book, Hello from Heaven, Bill and Judy Guggenheims had received 3,300 firsthand accounts of ADCs through their website. One meta-analysis of thirty-five studies published from 1894 to 2005 involved 50,682 participants from twenty-four countries, to give an estimate of 30–35% spontaneous incidence of ADCs in the general population, with 70-80% of the bereaved having an ADC within a year of bereavement, concluding that “ADCs are both common and normal.” A study published in 2020 estimated an incidence of 40–50% in the general population. Additionally, a therapeutic approach found that about 75% of people can have an induced ADC.

While many of these experiences are personally convincing, they do not always offer objective evidence of the survival of consciousness beyond death. The SPR’s Census produced eighty first-hand accounts of “death-coincidences” – recognized apparitions occurring within twelve hours of death, typically in such cases the witness is unaware that the person seen has died. The authors of the report concluded that apparitions of the deceased occurring at the time of death could not be due to chance alone, noting that this confirmed Gurney et al.’s earlier conclusion that “apparitions at death, &c., are a result of something beyond chance.”

Ken R. Vincent’s re-analysis of the Guggenheims’ published cases identified 65 out of 353 as “evidential cases” (18.4%). Vincent’s own analysis of 1,667 cases from the After-Death Communication Research Foundation database, identified 336 (20.1%) as evidential: 180 (10.8%) where the apparition was seen before the witness knew that person was dead; 99 (5.9%) in which apparitions conveyed information unknown to the witness that was later verified; and 57 (3.4%) involving multiple witnesses.

A study by Elsaesser et al., [Investigations] identified 20.9% of cases as involving a shared ADC, with the receipt of information previously unknown being a factor in 24.3% of cases. This study also found that 20.7% had had a “crisis ADC” within twenty-four hours of death (before or after), noting that “they are particularly significant, and even evidential, since experiencers claim that they have been informed of the death of a family member or friend by the deceased themselves.” Most of the ADCs in this study occurred to people during the day and whilst they were awake.

Evidentiality was relatively consistent, ranging from 18.4% to 24.3%. These were not laboratory experiments designed to give evidence of the afterlife, but personal experiences probably intended to provide reassurance to loved ones; nevertheless, it is striking how many of them are evidential and are so in a number of different ways. As Prof. Erlendur Haraldsson concluded after his own ADC survey [The Departed Among the Living], “When all the accounts we have collected are considered, it seems impossible to reject all of them as deceptions and mistaken perceptions. Something real is there.” 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Mere chance cannot explain: Ruickbie excerpt #11

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

Æta Highett had lost her fiancé, Eldred Wolferstan Bowyer-Bower, killed in action on the Western Front in March 1917. In December 1917 she had this experience:

I heard a number of raps when I was in bed and I began to talk to Eldred and asked him to rap twice if he was ever going to show himself to me. Almost immediately two raps came; I waited a long time but saw nothing. Then I went to sleep. Afterwards I woke up and looked round and saw Eldred on the bed beside me, he was wearing his blue suit. I sat up and started talking to him, [Miss Highett records what she said, and that “his lips started to move” and made a reply “just above a whisper”]. I then tried to touch him, but my hand went through him, and like a fool I started to cry, and he disappeared.

This single case contains almost everything we need by way of evidence for the afterlife: two apparitions at the approximate time of death before the fact is known, or even guessed at; two apparitions after death has been established; a premonition; and two evidential mediumistic communications. Each experience on its own is vulnerable to being casually dismissed – coincidence, indigestion, etc.—but together, experienced by people separated by continents, but all bearing on the same person, they are nigh unassailable. What reason could anyone have to doubt any of the principal witnesses?

The Bowyer-Bowers were an upper-class family in England at a time when honour and reputation were still important, with a tradition of military service: Eldred, his brother, father and grandfather were, or had been, soldiers. Both Dorothy and Cecily had already decided not to mention what had happened to them: the full details only came to light after Æta talked about her visit to Mrs. Brittain, otherwise they would have remained silent. Æta herself was reticent in mentioning her own apparitional experience. Both Dorothy and Margaret initially sought non-paranormal explanations. There was no attempt to gain publicity or any secondary gain out of their experiences.

It was only the work of Hubert Wales (1870–1943) in gathering the letters and statements together that brought the case to wider notice in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which was only circulated among members and not on general sale, so the publication of the case was anything but sensationalistic. In the report, Wales is described as having been a member of the SPR “for several years.” His interest seems only to have been to gather and make available to the SPR the facts of the case: he was not credited as the author of the report.

This type of phenomenon has come to be called a “crisis apparition” after the work of the early SPR researchers. In the introduction to the SPR’s monumental two-volume work on the subject of Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore, Myers wrote:

Testimony proves that phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing some crisis—especially death—are perceived by their friends and relatives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.

The testimony referred to involved “over two thousand depositions” of which more than half described crisis-type apparitions. According to a study by Hornell Hart, almost everyone who experiences this class of phenomenon—apparitions of people who were dead or close to death at the time of the appearance—recognizes them (85%). Sometimes the apparition was seen more than once (26%), or by two or more people at the same time. Other than signaling their own death, some cases also revealed additional information that was also later found to be true (8%). The crisis apparition occurs close to the time of crisis, but, as in the Bowyer-Bower case, related experiences can occur quite some time after it, and, as we shall see, involve a number of different elements. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.