Outside of time: Ruickbie excerpt #23

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: “Something catches my attention,” recalled Dr. Bettina Peyton as she talked about her near-death experience. It is “twinkling light, like a tiny jewel,” containing her “entire experience, past, present and future, playing out simultaneously.” Her conscious viewpoint – her consciousness – was external to her own time and able to see all of it. She has not been the only one.

Fifty-five year-old anesthesiologist at the University of Texas Health Center, Dr. Gerard Landry had had a conventional twenty-seven-year career in medicine when he died of a heart attack on March 24, 1979. Surprised to find himself still conscious, he described being in “a dimension beyond sequential time” where “past, present, and future are all merged.”

There are so many more experiences that could be quoted in support of this. According to psychiatrist and near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, 75% described the afterlife as outside of time, and, in an earlier study, 53% of OBErs mentioned “timelessness.”

Many different terms have been used to describe the apparent ability to see into the future, such as clairvoyance, precognition, premonition, second sight, and life preview. Whilst the words differ, the essential elements remain the same. People can experience anything from physical and mental symptoms to actual visions, during dreams or wide awake, even whilst clinically dead, of things yet to come. 

If time is like an arrow, then the future has not yet come into existence, therefore nothing can be known about it. I might predict that tomorrow I will be sitting at my computer writing, because I was sitting at my computer yesterday and today, but this is obviously not the same thing.

The content of premonitions is fundamentally different to what we would normally predict based on past actions, that is usually what makes them stand out in the first place. So, we have to think again about the relationship between consciousness and the future, and the nature of the future, of time, itself. 

 

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.

Proof of precognitions? Ruickbie excerpt #22

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: Before Dr. John Barker, Society of Psychical Research members Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, H. F. Saltmarsh, and Dame Edith Lyttelton, as well as winner of the Nobel Prize Charles Richet, the Director of the Institut Métapsychique International Eugene Osty, and the writer J.B. Priestley had all collected reports of premonitions and attempted to make some sense out of them. Sidgwick, working with the fewest cases, remained the most sceptical, but, working with rather more cases, Myers concluded that “our conception of time loses its accustomed meaning.”

Lyttelton received many accounts of apparent precognition after a BBC radio broadcast in 1934, whilst she was President of the SPR, publishing the best cases in 1937. Although trying to reserve judgement, she conceded “that some predictions are cases of definite precognition I personally have no doubt at all,” and that from this “the world of the senses is then illusory.” Struck by the veracity of evidence and credibility of the witnesses, Saltmarsh concluded that “we are bound to admit that the future does exist in some sense now – at the present moment,” and “we must revise our ordinary ideas about the nature of time.”

   Charles Richet     

Already in 1931, Richet put it nicely when he said: It would be inexcusably rash to affirm, as I have boldly done, that there are premonitions, if abundant and formal proof had not been advanced. This abundant and formal proof has, I think, been given.

Eugene Osty worked for twelve years with a group of psychics and was able to question them closely about their abilities, including the way time was represented to them. M. de Fleuriere saw time symbolically projected “on a semicircular screen,” with the past on the left, the present in the middle and the future on the right. Mme Morel seemed to stand in the stream of time, seeing the past behind her, the present at her side and the future ahead. “Time, as well as Space,” he concluded, “is penetrable by the faculty of super-normal cognition, just as if Time were but an illusory creation of the human mind.”

Saltmarsh also saw that the questions about time arising out of the study of precognition necessarily led to a re-examination of the possibility of life after death, although he did not go further than that. Additionally, he also concluded that the future is both predetermined and what he calls “plastic.”

Experiments continued after the closure of the original Premonitions Bureau. The remote viewing pioneer Ingo Swann (1933–2013) ran the American Prophecy Project from November 1989 to December 1990. The Estate of Ingo Swann relaunched this as the Prophecy Project in 2018. The website UKPsychics.com also ran an online “Premonitions Registry” from 1999 to 2005. 

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove also ran a premonitions registry as a restricted access group on Yahoo from 2001, following the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks. There have been several attempts to recreate Barker’s original experiment, including a growing business in commercial precognition aimed at predicting market trends.

After a year working on what she called “a classified project for the United States government” (i.e., Project Star Gate), the President of the American Statistical Association, and professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis, Jessica Utts, reported:

The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if it pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data!

After studying 35 new cases, Ian Stevenson concluded that “true precognition may occur.” A 1989 meta-analysis of 309 “future-telling” studies by 62 different investigators involving a total of 50,000 subjects between 1935 and 1987 concluded that there was a “highly significant precognition effect.” Stevenson recognized that this “may require some of the more recondite explanations that upset our habitual notions of causation and time.” We can upset that even more when we consider precognition by disembodied consciousness.

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 Premonitions Bureau: Ruickbie excerpt #21

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:

John Barker

In December 1966, psychiatrist John Barker contacted Peter Fairley, science editor of the London Evening Standard, with a plan to establish a clearing house for predictions, the Premonitions Bureau, using the Evening Standard to solicit premonitions from the general public in order to prevent future tragedies like Aberfan. Fairley agreed, giving Barker twelve months. The Premonitions Bureau went live in January 1967, receiving 469 premonitions in its first year. Several were deadly accurate.

The first was from Alan Hencher. He telephoned the Bureau at 6 am on March 21, 1967, telling Barker about an aeroplane crash “over mountains,” with high fatalities: “There are one hundred and twenty-three people, possibly one hundred and twenty-four.” On April 20, a Globe Air Bristol Britannia aeroplane carrying 130 people crashed into a hillside south of Nicosia Airport in Cyprus. The Evening Standard’s frontpage headline was “124 Die in Airliner” – two more subsequently died in hospital. It was Cyprus’s worst aircrash.

On April 23, 1967, Lorna Middleton contacted Barker: she had seen an astronaut looking “petrified, terrified and just frightened.” On April 24, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when parachute failure caused his Soyuz capsule to smash into the ground at full speed. Hencher and Middleton again felt disaster loom towards the end of 1967, with Middleton describing a vision of a crowd and a railway platform, and seeing the words “Charing Cross,” a busy station in London, on November 1. On November 5, the Hastings to London Charing Cross train derailed near the Hither Green rail depot, killing 49 and injuring another 78. “Quite honestly it staggers me,” Barker told the Evening News afterwards, with the newspaper adding, dramatically, “Somehow, while dreaming or awake, they can gate-crash the time barrier.”

In Spring, 1968, messages started coming in to the Bureau of another impending tragedy. Middleton wrote “There may be another assassination. It may be in America shortly,” whilst telling a journalist that “The word assassination continues. I cannot disconnect it from Robert Kennedy.” Joan Hope in Canada wrote “Robert Kennedy to follow in his brother's footsteps.” On June 4, Middleton wrote again to the Bureau: “Another assassination and again in America.” On June 5, Miss C.E. Piddock in Kent wrote in her diary “Janitor will die today” – she later realised that “Senator” must have been meant. In the US, Alan Vaughan wrote to Dr. Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center, with the warning that “This dream may presage the assassination of a third prominent American, one who had connections with John F. Kennedy [...] Could that other martyr be Bobby Kennedy?" Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded in a hail of bullets at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, at around midnight on June 5, 1968, dying in hospital the next day.

The Premonitions Bureau was scoring remarkable hits – its success had inspired Robert Nelson to start a similar operation in the USA, the Central Premonitions Registry – but there were dark clouds on the horizon. At the same time as the Cyprus plane crash, Hencher started to receive premonitions that Barker’s life was in danger. Hencher’s warnings persisted into 1968. Now Middleton was having troubling premonitions about Barker. On February 7, she had a vision of him – just his head and shoulders – with her deceased parents: “my parents were trying to tell me something,” she said. Barker suffered a brain haemorrhage on August 18, 1968, dying later in hospital.

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.

Multiple premonitions: Ruickbie excerpt #20

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:

 On October 14, 1966, Alexander Venn turned to his wife and said, “Something terrible is going to happen, and it won’t be far from here, either.” A sense of foreboding had oppressed him all day. An amateur artist, he turned to his sketchbook to express what he felt. He drew a human head surrounded by black, the impression of coal dust on his mind.

He was not the only one to feel that “something terrible” was imminent. On Tuesday, October 17, a man in Kent became convinced that “On Friday something terrible connected with death is going to happen.” On Thursday morning, October 20, a woman woke in panic after a nightmare of being smothered in what she called “deep blackness.” Later that morning, nine-year-old Eryl Mai Jones said to her mother, “Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night [...] I dreamed I went to school and there was no school. Something black had come down all over it!”

At 9 p.m. that evening, Mrs. C. Milden was attending a Spiritualist meeting in Plymouth: “a vision appeared before her as if on film, showing an old schoolhouse in a valley and an avalanche of coal rushing down a mountainside.” She saw a small boy with a long fringe of hair surrounded by rescue workers, one of whom was wearing a peaked cap that she found odd. At around 4 a.m. on the morning of Friday, October 21, Sybil Brown in Brighton was terrified by a nightmare of a child screaming in a telephone booth, with another child walking towards her followed by a “black, billowing mass.”

At about the same time, another woman in North London, Lorna Middleton, “awoke choking and gasping and with the sense of the walls caving in.” Far to the northwest of England, an elderly man dreamt of a series of brilliantly illuminated letters spelling out “A B E R F A N.” He had no idea what it meant. At 9.14 a.m., Monica McBean, then at work as a secretary at an aircraft factory, had a vision of a “black mountain moving and children buried under it.”

By 9.14, Eryl Mai was already at Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan, Wales, for the last day before the mid-term holidays. At 9.15, far above the coal-mining village, a mass of water-saturated colliery spoil started sliding down tip 7 and it did not stop till 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of black slurry was moving down the mountain. People recalled hearing a sound like thunder or a low- flying jet as an avalanche like a “dark glistening wave” swept away two cottages in its path and engulfed the school and surrounding houses. The result was heart-breaking: 116 children and 28 adults, 144 in all, had been killed. Watching events unfold on the television news on Sunday, Mrs. Milden saw a small boy with a long fringe of hair and nearby a worker wearing an odd-looking peaked cap.

The psychiatrist Dr. John Barker took an interest in the disaster after he heard that a survivor had later died of fright. A member of the Society for Psychical Research, he was writing a book on what he called “psychic death” – when people die from non-physical causes, such as fright. Arriving in Aberfan, he heard stories of the premonitions people had had. Contacting Peter Fairley, science editor of the London Evening Standard, he convinced him to publish an appeal for such premonitions. In the course of the next two week, he received 76 replies.

Another public appeal for premonitions made through The Sun and Thompson’s Weekly newspapers by the Oxford Institute for Psychophysical Research was launched three days after Barker’s appeal, garnering information from another 72 correspondents. The News of the World also investigated the question of premonitions. The three surveys brought in a total of 200 replies.

Barker discarded sixteen of the replies and followed-up the others in more detail. In twenty-two cases the person claiming to have had a premonition told at least one other person, and sometimes as many as four, about it before the event, and in another two cases made a written record of their premonition beforehand. All of these replies came from people with no connection to the area and living some distance from Aberfan, mostly in and around London. Thirty-six took place as dreams, whilst the rest included waking visions and feelings of foreboding, mental distress and even physical sensations of choking or suffocation. The dream premonitions were distinctive by giving literal details of the disaster, of having a vivid quality and by representing the impending disaster as happening in the dreamer’s present. Then it dawned on Dr. Barker:

While analyzing the letters, I realized that the time had surely come to call a halt to attempts to prove or disprove precognition. We should instead set about trying to harness and utilize it with a view to preventing future disasters. 

 

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.

Precognition: Ruickbie excerpt #19

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: 

In December 1925, the journalist Irene Corbally Kuhn (1898–1995) was walking down Michigan Boulevard (now Michigan Avenue) in Chicago. Just weeks before, the twenty-seven-year-old had been in Shanghai working with her husband Bert Kuhn for the China Press, but after Sikh police had fired on a Chinese student protest, killing six, anti-foreign feeling was running high. There were strikes and riots as what became known as the May Thirtieth Movement led to a state of martial law. The Kuhns were in immediate danger. Both hard-nosed journalists, they might have stayed, but, with a two-year-old daughter to look after, it was decided that Irene should return to the USA with their child – Bert would remain (he was also secretly working for US Naval Intelligence).

Chicago in 1925 was mobster Al Capone’s city, but a walk down Michigan Boulevard was still a safer bet than Shanghai. What happened next stopped Kuhn in her tracks:

Suddenly and without warning, sky, boulevard, people, lake, everything vanished, wiping from my vision as completely and quickly as if I had been struck blind. Before me, as on a motion picture screen in a dark theatre, unrolled a strip of green grass within a fence of iron palings. Three young trees, in spring verdure, stood at one side; beyond the trees and the fence, in the far distance, factory smoke-stacks trailed sooty plumes across the sky. Across from the trees stood a small circle of people, men and women, a mere handful, in black clothes. And coming to a halt on a graveled road by the grass was a limousine from which alighted two men who turned to offer their hands to a woman in black, emerging now from the car. The woman was me.

I watched myself being escorted against my will to the group which now parted to receive me. [...] at last I was among the others, and looked at the small hole cut in the grass – a hole not more than two feet square. [...] There was a small box which someone, bending over now, was placing in the earth with infinite tenderness – a box so small and light that I could hold it in my hand and hardly feel it. What was I doing here? Where was I? Why was I letting someone put this box in the ground – this little box which held something very precious to me? I couldn’t speak or move. These people – who were they to me? Then I recognized only the faces of my husband’s family, tear-stained and sad. The silence screamed and tore at me. I looked about. All the clan were there. Only he was missing. Then I knew what was in the box, and I crumpled on the grass without a sound.

The vision lifted as suddenly as it had appeared and Kuhn found herself clutching a lamppost for support. She later brushed off the incident as an over-active imagination triggered by her loneliness in the city.

Things had settled down in Shanghai, so she planned to return, boarding the Empress of Canada at Vancouver in February. Onboard she received a telegram: “Husband dangerously ill, best not sail.” The next telegram brought worse news: her husband had died on February 21, 1926, from “unknown causes.”

The funeral was on May 30th. Kuhn travelled by limousine with her two brothers-in-law to Rosehill Cemetery, “which I had never seen before,” she said. When they arrived:

The men got out first and waited to help me. I put my foot on the ground, and something held me back. For a second I couldn’t raise my eyes because I knew what I would see. At last I looked. There was the spring grass underfoot. There were the three young trees in fresh leaf; there the fence of iron palings, and the smoke-stacks of the city’s industries far beyond in the distance. [...] Bert’s brothers urged me forward gently. I saw the ring of black-clad mourners over to one side, waiting. I stopped.

“You didn’t have to open a full grave, did you?” I asked. “How do you know?” asked Paul with astonishment.

“There’s just a little square hole big enough to take the box with Bert’s ashes, isn’t there?” I pressed on.

Paul’s face was white beneath his natural tan. “Yes, that’s right. They said it would be foolish to open a full grave for a small box of ashes. But how did you know?” he persisted.

I didn’t answer. I was thinking of that December day on Michigan Boulevard when I had seen into the future, over the bridge of time.

As a pioneering female journalist, with an established, if not enviable reputation, Kuhn risked more than she could hope to gain in telling this story, and it is unlikely that she invented it. It also seems to have been her only experience of this kind, so we can rule out any undiagnosed psychopathological condition. Before any court, Kuhn would be seen as a singularly credible and reliable witness.

A remarkable feature of this vision is that, although she was in it, Kuhn did not view the event from her future viewpoint, but stood outside it. One thinks of the viewpoint reported during OBEs (including NDEs) of a conscious observer looking at their own body from an external, independent position. Can we call what she saw ghosts? Surely we must, because, from her physical position in the present, the people she saw were not yet where she saw them, and did not yet do what she saw them do, yet she saw them.

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.

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.