Shared joyful death experience: Cook excerpt #3

Nick Cook writes: In 2014, I gathered with my wife’s family at her family home to be with my much- loved mother-in-law as she slipped into unconsciousness after a long illness. Besides my mother-in-law, there were six other family members in the house.

After a day in which we’d taken turns to be with her, her breathing changed suddenly, and we all assembled by her bed for what her nurse told us would be her last moments. My wife, who had been exceptionally close to her mother, took her hand. At the precise moment of her mother’s passing, still holding Sylvia’s hand, she turned unexpectedly to the rest of us and, in a joy-filled voice that belied the pain everyone knew she was feeling, announced to the room that ‘all was well’. When, some hours later, I asked her what had happened in the midst of her turmoil to make her say this, she looked at me, perplexed. “Didn’t you experience it, too? Didn’t everyone?”

She told me that what she had experienced had been so vivid – so real – she was convinced everyone in the room had been ‘there’ too: a place where time didn’t exist, but where it also seemed to stretch endlessly. In this realm, she told me, everything had felt so primally ‘connected’ that she had been presented with every piece of information that had ever existed across all time - and every bit of it ‘made sense’. Fear, anxiety, and pain had all disappeared to be replaced by a different state of being - a realm, my wife described it as - that felt infinitely ‘more real’ than our own; the world that for a second or two (as we had experienced it) she had left behind.

She felt in this moment overwhelmingly that her mother had gone ‘home’; and that for some reason she had been allowed to experience that place too. These were words that had come from someone who wouldn’t have categorised herself for a moment as ‘religious’ in any recognised sense.

The other word my wife used was ‘love’ – love of the purest and most joyous kind had permeated this place at every level of its being and of hers; and, in this sense, she said, there was no distinction, no separation, between ‘it’ and her; they were, in effect, one.

Here is her personal experience in her own words: I felt like I’d been taken part of the way with her. I felt, as I was holding her hand, something else was holding her, and that I was a part of that moment. I just felt loved. I knew everything. I didn’t need to know what I knew. I just understood it. I felt a part of everything, connected with everything. It was like: ‘Ah, I get it’, but I can’t tell you what it is that I got. There was no division. I was it and it was me. All I remember (on returning to the room) is turning around and going: ‘All is well. It’s all OK. She’s fine.’ I had never felt more loved, more safe. I was just one with everything. I had perfect understanding of everything and knowing that where she was was real.

Over the next several months, this event had a profound effect on me. I had been given testimony of an anomalous event from someone whom I trusted intimately – and there was no question that, for the person to whom the event had happened, it had been real. When I Googled it, I found it was something others had experienced – a phenomenon allied to the OBE and the NDE known as a ‘shared death experience’. There were books even on the subject.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Overcoming scientific taboos: Cook excerpt #2

 John Archibald Wheeler            

Nick Cook writes: For many people, the pain of ridicule – and, worse, ostracism – whether they are media, academics, or any other career-professional, outweighs the pleasure that can come from the pursuit of knowledge. “In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it,” said John Archibald Wheeler, the theoretical physicist (a man, ironically, ill-disposed to parapsychology). Long before I had heard this aphorism, I realised I had been unwittingly applying it in my journalism – not always to my long-term career advantage.

And I learned, second-hand, about its effect on material science. Parallel to my journalism, I had embarked on a career as a writer, initially of fiction, later of non- fiction. In between times, I ‘ghost-wrote’ – that is, I would occasionally write the autobiographical books of people who were either too busy, too famous or perhaps unqualified to write their stories themselves.

One such (he was too busy) was an eminent psychiatrist, from whom I learned a great deal about the physical workings of the human mind.

Something that came to interest him greatly was the out-of-body experience (OBE), which had begun to crop up increasingly in his clinical work. This, for him, was an anomaly that needed to be explored. He was led to the work of Susan Blackmore, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England, who had written extensively about near-death experiences (NDEs) as a formidably rigorous sceptic – her belief being that the NDE was an essentially physiological event brought on by lack of oxygen, the structure of the brain’s visual cortex and other factors.

Her explanation sat comfortably with my psychiatrist’s own training. Informally amongst his trauma patients - especially a small group of them who had made little to no progress towards a cure - he began asking them one-by-one if ‘anything odd’ had happened when they had been exposed to their trauma – anything ‘beyond their understanding’. Not altogether to his surprise - but very much to theirs (that they were even being asked the question) – all of them revealed that they had gone ‘out- of-body’ during the life-threatening event that had triggered their PTSD. When the psychiatrist decided to share this statistical eureka moment with a group of psychotherapists at a professional seminar soon afterwards, he was greeted with silence, accompanied by numerous strange looks. Nobody wanted to know, he said, because, in his world, he had just brought up a taboo – even though he subscribed heavily to the Blackmore view that what his patients had experienced had been nothing spookier than a hallucination. And this was as recently as the late 1990s.

By coincidence, at the time that he told me this, the world of science was beginning to come to terms with what may turn out to be the biggest scientific anomaly of our times: the riddle posed by observations that the universe isn’t expanding at the constant rate predicted by the ‘Big Bang’ and general relativity – that, instead, its expansion is accelerating. This led science to introduce us to a form of energy – ‘dark energy’ – that explains how an accelerating, expanding universe might be accounted for.

Ninety-five per cent of the total mass-energy content of the cosmos is composed of dark energy and an analogue hypothetical form of matter known as ‘dark matter’. As is clear from the millions of words that have been written about these subjects in scientific papers and journals ever since their ‘discovery’, science has exhibited no awkwardness at all during its discussion of these terms – this, despite the corollary to the whole conundrum: that it – we - can account only for five per cent of existence.

What this tells us about science’s attitude to the so-called paranormal – for this, of course, is what we are really referring to in our discussion of the anomalous phenomena associated with the permanent survival of consciousness post-death – is that we’re not just talking about a science problem here, but one of communication. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Witnesses speak for themselves: Cook excerpt #1

Nick Cook* writes in his 2021 essay entitled "What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?"

 

In the 1946 Powell and Pressburger film ‘A Matter Of Life And Death’¹, Squadron Leader Peter Carter of the Royal Air Force, almost home from a harrowing mission over Nazi Germany in the final days of the war, is forced to bail out of his burning bomber without a parachute. Before he jumps, Carter, played by that quintessential Englishman, David Niven, holds a poignant conversation with June, an American radio operator at a USAAF base on the English coast below. Although they have never met, the connection they forge is palpable; and when, finally, he jumps, we know there is no chance of survival. But this being fiction, the next we see is Carter washed up on a beach, injured but alive. On his way to hospital, he meets June, played by Kim Hunter, and their love, kindled in what they both believe to have been his final moments, becomes powerfully real.

This, however, being the movies, there’s a catch. Carter is supposed to be dead – an angelic messenger sent to transport him to the ‘Other World’ at the moment he jumped had been unable to locate him in the thick English fog. Carter’s reprieve, though, is temporary – the matter of his survival, we are told, needs to be corrected. He is given three days to prepare his appeal to a heavenly court that will decide his fate: whether or not he can remain on Earth with June. The case against him is that the law of the universe is immutable – that to maintain its order, he has to die. In his defence, Carter maintains that the Other World’s clerical error has changed the rules of the game – he and June have fallen in love; his future, he says, now lies with her.

1 A Matter of Life and Death was released in the USA as Stairway to Heaven. It was directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starred David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter and Marius Goring.

Why choose this fictional story to open an essay on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death? The answer, as I hope will become clear, is manyfold. In the film, Carter’s friend and doctor, Frank Reeves, who has been helping to treat his increasingly debilitating visions as he approaches his heavenly trial, becomes his counsel in the Other World – this after Frank’s death in a motorbike accident on the night of the operation to stem bleeding from the lesions in Carter’s brain - lesions his surgeons believe to be killing him. Reeves, unlike the towering figures from history who are offered to Carter as his defence counsel – all of whom Carter rejects - is untrained in the ways of the courts. How, then, will Reeves defeat the infallible logic of the Other World’s petition, which is to see universal order restored?

In the pages to come, we will meet an extensive dramatis personae of witnesses and expert witnesses who will present proof beyond a reasonable doubt that our consciousness persists after bodily death. It is my intention for these witnesses to speak for themselves – and for the evidence to do likewise. If I have a role in the proceedings, it is to tap the spirit of Dr Reeves, because the question in the title – the question of our consciousness’s survival when we die - couldn’t be more timely.

Like Carter, we are, I will argue, approaching a moment of crisis - a fork in the evolutionary road. One direction leads toward a ‘transhumanist’ future, in which advances in computing, nanotech and medicine will permit the fulfilment of a materialist desire to extend our bodily survival to its absolute limit. In the other, lies what might be termed an ‘exoconscious² future’ in which we learn to explore – and, ultimately, to unlock – capabilities within us increasingly ignored in the hallways of science since the 17th century - that speak to the potential of humans to be so much more than they – we - currently are. This latter journey is one that we can make only by travelling inward – a direction that is presently anathema to science. Yet, throughout this essay, the subjective experience will be called frequently to the witness stand as being not just relevant to the case for ‘survival’, but critical to it.

2 A term coined by Rebecca Hardcastle Wright, PhD, to denote the study of extraterrestrial dimensions of human consciousness.

I am a rationalist by nature – trained professionally in both the arts and the sciences. As a young journalist working for a trade publication³ that served a professional readership interested in technology and technology development, I was fortunate to have been mentored by other trade journalists who thought and analysed critically – there was no room in the business I had entered for sentiment or woolly-minded thinking: we were, I was told, all about the hard facts of science and engineering.

But there is one facet of journalism (of whatever stripe) that no mentor can ever teach: to pursue ‘the story’ you have to have curiosity. Everyone, to some degree, is curious, but in journalism, especially investigative journalism, you have to have good, liberal doses of it. I acquired mine, I am certain, from my father, an engineer and inventor. Long before I understood anything about the workings of the brain, my neural pathways were likely encoded by our discussions about the natural world and, as my father saw it, its inherent orderliness.

Which is why one particular story he used to tell troubled me – because it troubled him: the events he described surrounding the death of his mother, my grandmother, when my sister and I were very young.

My grandmother, Pamela, was an American who survived the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The only child of divorcees, she journeyed with her mother to England, where she eventually married my grandfather, an old school Englishman. My father and his brothers grew up in a large country house in the south-east of England, where my passionate, hot-blooded, highly literate, and curious grandmother, found herself encircled by the buttoned-down, stiff upper lip insouciance of the English class system. This was especially pronounced, post- World War 1, in the so-called Home Counties that surround London.

3 Jane’s Defence Weekly, for which I was Aerospace Editor from 1987 to 2005.

When she died, at the (even then) comparatively young age of 67 during what should have been a routine operation, my father spent the next several days in the family home with my grandfather, who had been especially affected by her sudden death.

To begin with, the signs of Pam’s presence were barely noticeable – during the small hours, clacks of a broom against pieces of furniture were audible in the attic above my father’s bedroom. Sweeping the attic was what she had done during persistent bouts of insomnia, but my father was able to put down what he thought he’d heard to grief and imagination. Lights turning off and on elicited a similar response. What neither he nor my grandfather could ignore, however, was the moment when, as they were discussing a part of her will whose interpretation they differed upon, a heavy lamp on the table beside them lifted six inches into the air and rocked from side-to- side, before settling back on to the table with a thump.

This being a household imbued with a requirement to display indifference to anything out of the ordinary, my father and grandfather looked at each other, but never said a word – indeed, they never spoke about it at all (although they did move on from the contentious clause of the will). But my father did speak to my sister, my brother and me about it – frequently – and we knew that he was not a man to make things up.

As an engineer, he wanted to know how energy had been transferred to that lamp apparently from nowhere. The bigger question – the matter of the energy’s connection to a surviving consciousness – was placed to one side. For me, too, the story remained little more than a tale to tell friends on dark nights, until, some years into my journalistic career, when I found myself researching material for what eventually turned into a book about anomalous science.

That experience was salutary – what I saw as a trail of evidence, my colleagues saw as a fool’s errand. This exposed me to a pleasure/pain principle that has permeated both, I am ashamed to say, my former profession, and, to an equal, if not even greater extent, the conservative hallways of science.

*Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Recognizing the evidence: Taylor excerpt #25

Greg Taylor writes: A number of dedicated researchers continue collecting evidence for the survival of consciousness, with new approaches and more refined experiments. For example, veridical NDEs are now being investigated in studies involving various hospitals around the world, in which patients who survive a cardiac arrest are being asked if they saw hidden ‘targets’ placed in the room that are only visible from near the ceiling.

However, while researchers continue to search for more evidence, it should now be clear that there is currently more than enough to rationally believe that consciousness does survive death. We have barely skimmed the surface of the literature in this essay – I suggest readers seek out the source materials and explore them at length – and yet we have seen the quantity and quality of the evidence is abundant and strong.

Professor Bruce Greyson, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on NDEs, says that while he is always open to alternative explanations, at this point in his opinion “some form of continued consciousness after death seems to be the most plausible working model” to explain the evidence. 

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, after years researching end-of-life experiences (ELEs), note that “the hypothesis of extended mind manifesting at the time of death is a much more persuasive explanation for most of these experiences than coincidence or expectation.” Past-life memory researcher Jim Tucker says “I do think that these cases contribute, along with near-death experiences and the other things, to a good body of evidence that there are times where consciousness does survive after the body dies.”

Professor Stephen E. Braude, in his comprehensive review of the evidence for survival of consciousness – and related skeptical explanations, including super-psi – concluded that in his opinion we can say “with some justification, that the evidence provides a reasonable basis for believing in personal postmortem survival.” Alan Gauld in his authoritative examination of the evidence for mediumship says that in each area that we have reviewed there are “cases which rather forcefully suggest some form of survival,” and that “the super-ESP hypothesis will not suffice to explain the quantity of correct and appropriate information.”

And yet, orthodox science continues to largely ignore this evidence, with minimal funding and support for continued research – despite the fact that it provides answers to the greatest question facing us as humans, and a balm to the anxiety and suffering of those facing their own death or the loss of loved ones. Surely it is past time for honest appraisal of the substantial quality and quantity of evidence that has been collected by dedicated scientists, putting aside illogical fears of disrupting the scientific paradigm.

As Thomas Henry Huxley once said, scientists should be prepared to “sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads,” or else they “shall learn nothing.” A huge pool of evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death has been collected across multiple fields, by honest scientists with critical minds using careful methods, often over the course of decades with little funding and chance of reward (in fact, often in the face of scorn or hostility from skeptics and fellow scientists):

10-20% of people who have a brush with death report undergoing an experience in which their consciousness separates from their body – confirmed by a substantial number of ‘veridical NDEs’ in which they provide details which they could not have known via any normal means – and meet deceased individuals and travel to another realm.

A majority of carers surveyed report that people, in the days and weeks before their death, undergo experiences in which they are greeted by deceased individuals and transit to and from another realm.

These experiences are not caused by drugs or a malfunctioning brain, and ‘Peak-in-Darien’ experiences provide evidence substantiating the reality of these visitations. Additionally, carers and family of the dying also often report experiencing anomalous events, including lights, ‘crisis apparitions’, and other strange phenomena at the time of death that have in a number of cases been corroborated by multiple witnesses.

Mediums who claim to be in communication with deceased individuals have been found by scientists to be able to provide accurate information that cannot be explained through normal, everyday means.

A collection of thousands of reports of ‘past-life memories’ reported by children across the globe provides numerous evidential cases where details were known about deceased individuals that the child had no means of knowing. Furthermore, in a substantial number of cases birthmarks and birth defects correspond to wounds on the body of the previous identity.

If we are seeking proof beyond reasonable doubt, we have it. A huge number of credentialed witnesses, providing details that have been found by honest, skeptical researchers to be backed by evidence, and pointing at the one conclusion. The only way not to accept the evidence is by being unreasonable; it requires multiple convoluted and unlikely explanations that reject all of the testimony of an impressive number of witnesses, motivated by an illogical desire to protect a worldview from being overturned.

The evidence is freely available, vast, of high-quality, and is all explained by one simple, parsimonious solution – if we are just willing to take the next step, move beyond the current paradigm, and accept that it clearly shows that human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references.

Elevating Consciousness: Taylor excerpt #24

Greg Taylor writes: When quantum physics changed the scientific landscape at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the pioneers of the field, Max Planck noted that he believed it also changed our entire view of reality. “I regard consciousness as fundamental,” Planck revealed. “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."

Planck was hardly alone in his thinking. The famed cosmologist Sir James Jeans said that he inclined “to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe.” Influential physicist Freeman Dyson said that it appeared to him that “the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature.” And cosmologist Paul Davies has made clear that consciousness seems to him to be much more than some simple, accidental by-product of firing neurons:

Somehow, the universe has engineered not only its own self-awareness, but its own self-comprehension. It is hard to see this astonishing property of (at least some) living organisms as an accidental and incidental by- product of physics...the fact that mind is linked into the deep workings of the cosmos in this manner suggests that there is something truly fundamental and literally cosmic in the emergence of sentience.

The idea that consciousness may be a fundamental, stand-alone element of reality is obviously, therefore, not an inherently ‘anti-science’ idea.

Is it too much to believe that, in the early 21st century, we are laboring under the same illusion that our science is complete, and that it should not be questioned even when there is abundant evidence to the contrary? As Buckminster Fuller once warned, what we think of as ‘reality’ is always up for redefining. “Up to the twentieth century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear,” Fuller pointed out. “Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.”

Numerous alternatives to our current materialist-centered paradigm have been suggested. For example, the French polymath Jacques Vallée has pondered whether our cosmos might be more informational than physical in its fundamental construction, a model which would more easily explain a number of the paranormal events that people regularly experience.

Alternatively, William James, in questioning the scientific ‘truth’ that consciousness is just a by-product of brain processes, asked if “we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function.” In this ‘transmission theory’, our consciousness exists independently of the brain, which acts only as a receiver. Consider, for example, one of the Mars rovers – which to a 19th century human observer might seem like a creature with its own brain that, if damaged, stops the creature from functioning correctly. But its ‘thoughts’ are actually being transmitted to it from another world (and entity) entirely.

And perhaps we don’t even require ‘new’ ways of explaining the cosmos. The distinguished physicist Henry Stapp has stated that in his view, even quantum mechanics allows for “aspects of a personality” to survive physical death:

I do not see any compelling theoretical reason why this idea could not be reconciled with the precepts of quantum mechanics. Such an elaboration of quantum mechanics would both allow our conscious efforts to influence our own bodily actions, and also allow certain purported phenomena such as “possession,” mediumship” and “reincarnation” to be reconciled with the basic precepts of contemporary physics.

These considerations are, I think, sufficient to show that any claim that postmortem personality survival is impossible that is based solely on the belief that it is incompatible with the contemporary laws of physics is not rationally supportable. Rational science-based opinion on this question must be based on the content and quality of the empirical data, not on the presumption that such a phenomenon would be strictly incompatible with our current scientific knowledge of how nature works.

Stapp’s summation gets to the heart of the matter. As we have seen in this essay, we have copious amounts of data from a number of fields that point quite clearly toward survival of consciousness. We have not even considered a mass of data from other fields supporting the primacy of consciousness, such as can be found detailed in well-researched academic books like Irreducible Mind. But due to the materialist paradigm we live within, when we are confronted with the anomalous experiences reviewed in this essay, we are still conditioned to try and impose ‘mundane’ explanations upon them – even when those explanations are overly contrived and ignore the obvious answer (that they are exactly what they seem to be).

As Tom Shroder asked in his book Old Souls, when he found himself reaching for ways to explain the vast number of convincing cases of past-life memories collected by Dr. Ian Stevenson: “Why was I so unwilling to accept the most obvious explanation, that these cases were genuine?” Stevenson asserted that: “Everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed.”

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Paradigms and skeptics: Taylor exerpt #23

Greg Taylor writes: On their own, each of the four areas we have discussed [Near-death experiences, end-of-life experiences, communication from the dead, and memories of past lives] offer compelling evidence for the survival of consciousness. Cumulatively, the evidence is overwhelming. People have NDEs, during which they often perceive themselves as leaving their physical body and being taken to another realm; the large number of veridical NDEs provide proof that their consciousness does indeed leave their body. People at their death-bed see deceased loved ones come to greet them and escort them to another realm; Peak-in-Darien experiences and other anomalous phenomena provide proof that their experience is real. Mediums communicate with deceased individuals and are able to produce verifiable personal information as a result. Children tell of memories of past lives (and often have birthmarks or defects related to injuries in that life), the details of which researchers have been able to verify.

Furthermore, the fact that all these evidential areas are pointing at the one, unified conclusion, the survival of consciousness beyond death – without having to rely on or necessarily reference each other at all – is evidence itself and makes the case all the more compelling. And yet still, while each does not need the others, these areas do support each other: NDEs and ELEs share common elements; deceased individuals communicating through mediums tell of experiencing facets of the NDE after death; and children’s past-life memories also reference similar elements. If this were a court of law relying on corroborated, multiple witness testimony, the jury would be convinced.

On the other hand, skeptical arguments must rely on individual, convoluted and often unconnected explanations for each facet; even NDEs on their own require a long list of suggestions of separate physiological and psychological causes that, as we have seen, researchers have dismissed. If we were to employ that favorite tool of skeptics, Occam’s Razor, to the arguments for and against survival of consciousness, the simplest and most parsimonious solution to the evidence is that our consciousness survives the death of our body.

So why isn’t it a generally accepted conclusion?

In modern society, the phenomena mentioned in this essay are considered mysteries and anomalies, despite decades of investigation and analysis. But they remain mysteries only when viewed from within the framework of materialism: the dominant scientific worldview that physical matter is all that there is. When viewed from a framework that allows consciousness to exist independently of the body, they actually make perfect sense, and the evidence from NDEs, ELEs, mediumship and past-life memories fit perfectly – similar to the simplicity that Copernicus’s heliocentric theory brought to the strange movements of the cosmos once it was accepted. On the other side, skeptical explanations for this range of phenomena introduce a complex list of individual explanations to suit each, like Ptolemaic cycles within cycles explaining the anomalous movements of the planets within an Earth- centered cosmology.

The reality of the matter is that modern skepticism is, for the most part, a defense of the materialist paradigm, rather than an unbiased system being used to seek after the truth. That is not to say that we should disregard skeptical commentary – it is absolutely necessary in the areas explored in this essay, and when employed correctly is one of the most valuable tools we have in analyzing evidence, testing our theories and ultimately understanding the world better. But we should be very careful in understanding the difference between good skepticism and bad, as many of the ‘authoritative’ skeptical sources that comment on areas related to the survival of consciousness are often ‘believers’ in the current paradigm, motivated to defend it by any means necessary.

When, instead of critically analyzing the evidence in total, skeptics instead pull out one case – such as pointing out a fake medium, or a hoaxed NDE story – to dismiss the entire topic, we should understand that this is bad skepticism. If they ‘cherry-pick’ data or misrepresent it to make a point, we should understand that this is bad skepticism. If they present convoluted arguments that make little sense, just to explain away anomalous data, we should understand that this is bad skepticism. And this is exactly what has happened in skeptical arguments that have marginalized the abundant evidence for the survival of consciousness.

Doubt can be ‘weaponized’. Across the corporate world, sowing seeds of doubt is now an established method of disrupting scientific evidence. When cigarette companies faced the existential crisis brought on by medical evidence that smoking caused cancer, an industry report noted that their marketing strategy needed to change. Instead of actual cigarettes, the report decided, “doubt is our product [emphasis added], since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” Sowing the seeds of doubt, it continued, would provide “the means of establishing a controversy,” rather than allowing the facts to be accepted.

Our world is now awash in ‘controversies’, where reasonably established ideas – such as the overwhelming safety of vaccines, and results of carefully monitored elections – are now viewed with uncertainty, and sometimes even outright distrust, by significant portions of the population due to campaigns to sow doubts and disinformation – a strategy that author David Michaels calls “manufacturing uncertainty.” He cites the case of the aspirin industry delaying FDA regulation of their product – to warn that consumption by children with viral illnesses greatly increased their risk of developing a serious illness – simply by arguing that the science establishing the link “was incomplete, uncertain and unclear,” even though the medical community was virtually certain of the danger. Compare this to skeptics’ framing of the evidence for survival of consciousness as being incomplete and unproved, despite the fact that nearly every researcher who has spent substantial time investigating these topics thinks otherwise.

An analysis of the tactics used in such campaigns feels like it could just as easily apply to the large body of evidence for the survival of consciousness, and the tactics used by many skeptics:

The principles of scientific inquiry involve testing a hypothesis by exploring uncertainty around it until there is a sufficient weight of evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion [emphasis added]. Proof can be much longer in coming, and consensus still longer. The product-defense industry subverts these principles, weaponizing the uncertainty inherent in the process. Its tricks include stressing dissent where little remains, cherry-picking data, reanalyzing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired results.

That is not to say that skeptics of the survival of consciousness are involved in knowing deception or organized campaigns against the idea; just that many of their strategies do mimic those of “product defense consultants.” In this case though, the defense of the ‘product’ (the materialist paradigm) is often motivated mainly by a staunch belief in it.

There are numerous examples of skeptics, and well-known skeptical organizations, presenting ‘authoritative’ cases against the evidence for survival of consciousness beyond death which do not hold up to critical examination. For example, the ‘authoritative’ debunking of Leonora Piper’s mediumship was written by the famous skeptic Martin Gardner, and having his name attached to the piece alone allowed it to be cited for decades as trumping decades of research done by multiple well-credentialed investigators of the S.P.R. And yet a close examination of Gardner’s essay, when compared to the original case notes, shows that he either disregarded nearly all the original research and testimony, or didn’t even bother to read it in the first place.

When looking at the large body of evidence accumulated over many decades supporting the survival of consciousness – and the quality of those investigations – we can only conclude that skeptics of the hypothesis aren’t so much at odds with the evidence, as they are with the conclusion it is pointing to.

As we will see though, it’s a strange stance, given that a change of scientific worldview – to one that includes consciousness as being a fundamental part of it – really isn’t that controversial, as some of the finest minds of recent times believe that is the case.

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Past-life Interval memories: Taylor excerpt #22

Greg Taylor writes: Another study that made use of the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) database involved an analysis of ‘interval memories’ in past-life cases – that is, recollections by the children of events said to have occurred during the interval between the death of the previous personality and the birth of the child. It was found that interval memories were present in approximately 20% of the cases, and that children who reported interval memories, compared to those who did not, “made a greater number of statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate, recalled more names from the previous life, had higher scores on the strength-of-case scale, and were more likely to state the names of the previous personalities and to give accurate details about their deaths.”

DOPS researchers: Bruce Greyson, Ed Kelly, Marieta Pehlivanova, Kim Penberthy, Jim B. Tucker

Furthermore, a comparison of interval memories reported in Burmese cases were compared to reports of near-death experiences (NDEs). The study found features similar to the transcendental component of Western NDEs, and significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs (e.g. they saw themselves from outside their body, encountered a mystical being or presence, and met deceased spirits). According to Dr. Tucker, based on this it is possible that “interval memories and NDEs could be considered parts of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife.”

Furthermore, a comparison of interval memories reported in Burmese cases were compared to reports of near-death experiences (NDEs). The study found features similar to the transcendental component of Western NDEs, and significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs (e.g. they saw themselves from outside their body, encountered a mystical being or presence, and met deceased spirits). According to Dr. Tucker, based on this it is possible that “interval memories and NDEs could be considered parts of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife.”

One case recorded by Dr. Stevenson also provides an account of a veridical out-of-body experience during the interval period. The subject of the case complained of ‘seeing’ her ashes being scattered, rather than buried as requested. Upon checking, it was found that the previous personality had requested that her ashes be buried under a tree at her temple, but her daughter had found the tree’s root system made it impossible to dig there, so she scattered them instead.

Based on the number of strong cases of past-life memories collected over the past 60 years by researchers, Dr. Tucker says he is “now ready to say we have good evidence that some young children have memories of a life from the past.”

Currently, the best explanation for the strongest cases appears to be that memories, emotions, and even physical traumas can, at least under certain circumstances, carry over from one life to a subsequent one... [T]he cases contribute to the evidence for survival of consciousness after death.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.