Consciousness questions: Cook excerpt #8

In 2016, I was asked by the family of Ingo Swann, who had died in 2013, whether I would write a retrospective of his life. After a great deal of research, we agreed that there wasn’t much more that could usefully be added that Ingo, a prolific writer, plus others, hadn’t already written. But, meantime, we had discovered amongst his papers two ‘lost manuscripts’ and it was agreed that I would work on these with a view to publishing them as one volume – a work that appeared in August 2019¹⁸.

The two manuscripts contained breakdowns, as Ingo saw them, of the ‘psychic systems’ at work in the human mind and body, as well as a ‘map’ of the ‘Matrix’, as he referred to it, with which these psychic systems interfaced.

It also went into many of the anomalous phenomena – phenomena Ingo had studied in depth throughout his life - that characterised consciousness’s paranormal realms.

This was invaluable, because the standard questions on consciousness – such as you would find in a reputable science book on the subject, only went so far. To wit:

• What is consciousness?

• Does consciousness create reality?

• Is the universe conscious?

• What is consciousness like in other animals?

• Can physics explain consciousness?

• How many kinds of consciousness do we have?

• Can we know if a machine is conscious?

• Can you see consciousness in the brain?

• What is consciousness for?

• When did consciousness evolve¹⁹?

Critical to a new narrative emerging from my Phase 2 exploration of these questions, via my interviews with many expert scientific witnesses, were the following themes:

*Reality: By the middle of the 20th Century, physicists thought they had cracked the fundamentals of existence, but the Standard Model governing the quantum realm at its microscopic end is woefully incomplete, as is space- time/general relativity theory – how the game plays out at vast, cosmological scales. To quote the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: “If you want a theory of everything where it all fits, I see no hint we’re even close – zero.”²⁰ 

*Consciousness: Of its many sub-fields, consciousness research can be divided into two broad categories: the ‘easy problems’ and ‘the hard problem’ as defined by philosopher David Chalmers of New York University in 1994. The easy categories are associated with brain-functioning, the integration of sensory information and different states of consciousness, such as waking, sleeping, dreaming and ‘altered’. The hard problem relates to how and why we have subjective experiences (such as the feelings that accompany an aesthetic moment) at all. While the physics of the easy problems can be probed with relative ease, there is no consensus at all on the hard problem. What’s more, the argument as to whether consciousness originates in the brain or outside of it morphs into an even deeper issue concerning the primary ‘state’ of the universe. The ‘accepted narrative’ – promulgated with great gusto by the hegemony of the science mainstream – is that it is ‘matter’, although this is not backed up by definitive scientific evidence, a disconnect epitomised by the ongoing search for the seat, or seats, of consciousness in the brain, and the mechanisms responsible for it/them. This leaves open, however counter-intuitive it may seem, the possibility that consciousness is the primal pre-existent state and that all else, including matter, emerges from it.

*The origins of awareness: Why did awareness first manifest in humans? What happened in the 150,000-year gap between the first ‘anatomically modern humans’ 200,000 years ago and the first tangible evidence of awareness in the human species 50,000 years ago, as portrayed, for example, in cave art? While science has many theories, definitive answers are lacking. This has left scope for new theories to emerge – as, for example, that posited by Prof. David Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art Research Institute at South Africa’s Witwatersrand University. He says that our awareness developed out of a shamanic culture in which hunter-gatherer societies around the world ingested natural psychedelics such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and DMT held in ayahuasca. Bestselling author Graham Hancock takes this further, telling us it may well have been shamanic explorations of hallucinatory realms during the Upper Palaeolithic that played the catalytic role in extracting our ancestors from the five-million-year torpor of the hominid line.²¹

*‘Quantum consciousness’: One of the pillars of quantum mechanics is ‘superposition’, the recognition that particles don’t exist except as a kind of ‘probabilistic entity’ (known as a ‘wave-function’), until an act of observation – by us or in an experiment - causes them to ‘collapse’ into physical reality. This and many other aspects of the quantum realm defies logic, but it is verifiably real. If the land of the very small lies outside our logic system, says Robert Lanza MD, author and specialist in stem cells and regenerative medicine, why must the meta-universe, the cosmos as a whole, be ‘any more obliging’ as far as our thought-systems operate? “Rather, we should face up to something that’s rarely if ever voiced in modern cosmology: the possibility that the true nature of the universe as a whole has nothing (his emphasis) to do with the way its parts work.”²² Since ‘quantum weirdness’ is an accepted facet of physics, why should aspects of physics at scale (my emphasis) be any different?

*Biological unknowns: It isn’t just the dark energy/dark matter conundrum that confounds our relationship to/with reality and our environment. Holes of ignorance, too, for example, dog our understanding of DNA. The ‘molecule of life’, and ‘epigenetics’ (its relationship to/with the environment). Breakthroughs in epigenetics portend better mental health, deeper knowledge of the mechanisms that make us ‘us’, disease control and perhaps, even, why humans have psi abilities such as ESP. There may be mechanisms within DNA that permit depth-level communication with realms of reality beyond the reach of our five senses. These and other putative roles of DNA include its capacity to store vast amounts of data, its capacity to act as a distributed processor – and as a distributed antenna (akin to a phased array) with transmit/receive modes to/from a universe that is beginning to be seen as far more dynamic than the cosmos as it is portrayed by Newtonian physics and general relativity.

*New physics: What used to be seen as empty space isn’t empty at all, even in a vacuum chilled to absolute zero (-237.15 degrees Celsius). Instead, science shows²³, it is teeming with ‘vacuum fluctuations’ composed of particles that blink in and out of existence around their ‘zero-point baselines’. This view of the universe, considered heretical as recently as half a century ago, is increasingly accepted as fact. Instead of the ‘many worlds’ hypothesis within quantum theory which imagines that a new universe splits off with every collapse of the wavefunction, the emergence and disappearance of these ‘virtual particles’ points to a dimension of the cosmos that is beyond the reach of observation and measurement. This version of the ‘quantum vacuum’ creates space-time and ‘in-forms’ the physical universe (including, at its most basic level, the four fundamental forces of nature²⁴). Is ‘organised matter’ (versus the energy created in the ‘Big Bang’) ‘extruded’ from this non-physical realm via the zero-point energy field into our physical universe as ‘reality’?

*Objective paranormality: It is false for science to hold that ‘the paranormal’ exists purely in the realm of subjectively experienced events – or that it doesn’t ‘imprint’ on our three-/four-dimensional reality. ‘Psychokinetics’ – whether in the form of poltergeist-type activity (of the ‘lamp kind’ witnessed by my father and grandfather) or as phenomena manifested by psychics – has an incontrovertible energy signature. ‘Hotspots’ of paranormal activity exist (for example, at numerous ranches across the US Southwest), where a multiplicity of highly unusual phenomena observed (and, in many cases, filmed) by multiple witnesses may be counted as veridical, and therefore objective evidence that ‘our world’ is not defined purely by the science that comes to us from our text-books. Not only are these phenomena seen, they leave real, physical traces.

In one of Ingo’s two manuscripts there is a chapter about a fictional account of a gigantic ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg mid-Atlantic with the loss of many lives²⁵.

The story, published in 1898, presages the sinking of the Titanic fourteen years later. Ingo points us to the story – and to a list of verified premonitions by many people leading up to the Titanic event – as evidence of linkage to a realm in which the events that manifested as the physical Titanic disaster were already forming ahead of their appearance in the material realm.

Ingo never took his ‘psychicness’ for granted – one of his mantras was that his abilities were latent in us all. In pursuit of the facts he felt supported this, he spent a great deal of his life looking for the links and nodes that bind us to each other – and to the ‘Matrix’ his research and experience told him existed beyond our five senses.

This view, as we have seen, has been endorsed on many levels by the military- intelligence community, which has, for several decades, as we have also seen, been far less reticent about studying the paranormal than its physics academia counterpart.

The passage about the Titan and the Titanic held profound clues for Ingo to the true nature of reality – clues he bound into a hypothesis that speaks of a ‘virtual realm’ that disobeys our concepts of linear time and defies our present psychological logic – very much as, for me, the ‘new narrative’ emerging from my Phase 2 study had.

A short section of the book that crystallises Ingo’s theory is worth quoting in full26:

‘If our hypothesis be true, then there is ‘another’ non-immediate existing realm congruent to our material, physical realm. It is ‘governed’ by laws that are different, as far as time is concerned at least, than time as we experience it on a moment-to- moment basis.

‘In our immediate, physical realm, only the now is here and real: the past has ‘vanished’ and the future doesn’t exist as a tangible entity. In the other realm, however, either the ‘present’ is longer, extending deeply into the past and future, or time doesn’t exist at all as we know it. The laws that govern both realms are not mutually exclusive, but both realms interpenetrate and interact with each other.

‘Advance information ‘leaks’ from the other realm into the material realm through dreams, visions, artistic renderings and direct prophecy from ‘gifted’ psychics. Rather, we might say that there is some sort of information exchange between the two.

‘But the clearest point is that the two are interconnected, and because of this we should no longer consider them to be two, but rather, since they are interconnected, as one.’

18 Resurrecting The Mysterious by Ingo Swann, published by Swann-Ryder Productions LLC.
19 The standard questions on consciousness are well known. I have taken these from a recent issue of New Scientist: Special Issue: ‘What is Consciousness? The 10 Biggest Questions About the Greatest Mystery in the Universe’, 10th July 2021.
20 New Scientist, 1st February 2020, Special Issue: What Is Reality?
21 See Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock, Century Books, 2005.
22 Beyond Biocentrism, p.164, Robert Lanza, MD (with Bob Berman), Benbella Books, 2017.
23 As demonstrated by the Casimir Effect, when two plates are pressed together by the fluctuations arising from the ZPE field.
24 Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak nuclear forces.
25 The chapter is ‘Fate & Destiny: Being with the Future’ from Resurrecting The Mysterious by Ingo Swann, Swann-Ryder Productions, 2020. The fictional account Ingo refers to is a novella, The Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan Robertson.
26 Op.cit, p. 207.

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.

The consciousness function: Cook excerpt #7

Nick Cook writes: As part of my own efforts to create language that bridged the world of science with terms that described the paranormal, therefore, ‘Gateway’ could serve a purpose by establishing precedence and authority: this was the military endorsing as science – a science pooh-poohed by virtually all mainstream science communities – techniques, per the report, that might confer intelligence advantage over the US’s military rivals.

Early on, the paper promised to explain ‘the mechanics by which the mind exercises the consciousness function’. This, of course, in the context of something as elusive as ‘mind’ versus ‘brain’, is an assertion that cannot confidently be sustained, but what Gateway does do is alert the neophyte consciousness researcher to terms and concepts that will dog his/her efforts to get to grips with the ‘consciousness function’.

Amongst these, I extracted the following:

Frequency and resonance: Frequencies that bring the brain’s left and right hemispheres into coherence set up a resonance that turns the body into a ‘tuning fork’ of sorts that allows for a transfer of energy, the report states, in a range between 6.8 and 7.8 Hertz into the Earth’s ionosphere, which resonates at about 7.5 Hertz¹¹. Its associated wavelength, of around 40,000 km, ‘knows no obstacles’, and hardly attenuates over large distances, making it the ‘ideal medium for conveying a telepathic signal’¹². This coherence between Earth and human, the report tells us, can produce an out-of-body experience that shifts the seat of consciousness into the surrounding environment, where the mind can ‘communicate with other minds similarly attuned’. ‘Data’ from the universe (what it has, perhaps, become fashionable amongst Millennials to refer to as ‘downloads’) – also become obtainable at appropriate resonances.

Matter and energy: Although enshrined in Einstein’s E=mc2 equivalence formula, the idea for most of us that matter is energy in another form and vice versa is certainly not intuitive. The report prepares us for this by setting up a discussion about these two different states: ‘If the term matter is taken to mean solid substance as opposed to energy which is understood to mean a force of some sort, then the use of the former is entirely misleading’. Solid matter, it says – as represented by the atom, its neutron and electrons – is made up of nothing more than oscillating energy grids – thus, solid matter, strictly speaking, ‘does not exist’¹³. The appearance of solidity, it tells us – and what appears to us as the separation of things - is explained by different vibration rates in the oscillations¹⁴.

The cosmos as a hologram: The universe, being composed of interacting energy fields, some at rest, some in motion, is ‘one gigantic hologram of unbelievable complexity’, the report goes on to tell us¹⁵. The mind is also a hologram that attunes to the ‘cosmic hologram’ to provide us with consciousness. Perception is derived by filtering the holographic information entering the right hemisphere of the brain and processing it via the left, where it compares the imagery with the part of its hologram that constitutes memory. This process, in essence, converts the nonlinear, nonverbal information of the universe into the linear, ‘2-dimensional data’ that provides us with the ‘raw stuff’ of reality¹⁶.

Whilst the science of Gateway could in no way be taken as gospel, it did serve – in part through its blend of science and mysticism - to remind its readers that we lived in a miraculously fine-tuned universe, in which fractional deviations in the values of the fundamental forces post-Big Bang would have created an entirely different universe – or, more likely, one that would have killed it at birth.

Gateway also could be taken as evidence of the military-intelligence community’s ongoing interest - albeit from 1983 and in discrete corners – in the paranormal; an interest that has extended far beyond psychic surveillance.

In Section 18, it enters into a lengthy discussion of ‘unconfined energy’ or energy in a state of ‘inactive infinity’, aka ‘energy in an absolute state’ that it condenses simply as ‘the Absolute’. ‘Between the Absolute and the ‘material’ universe in which we experience our physical existence are various intervening dimensions to which human consciousness in altered states of being may gain access’¹⁷.

The timeless consciousness my wife had experienced at her mother’s death appeared to reside somewhere on this spectrum. If consciousness had the capacity to do this as an out-of-body, shared- or near-death experience, by extension it seemed permissible to look for clues to its existence after our actual, physical death too.

11 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf, p.6.
12 Tests before and since have demonstrated, persuasively, that radio waves (alone) are unlikely to act as a/the carrier-wave for ESP phenomena.
13 Op.cit., p.7.
14 McDonnell quotes Itzhak Bentov on various different vibration rates of matter: The energy grid that composes the nucleus of the atom vibrates at approximately 1022 Hertz; at 70 degrees Farenheit, an atom oscillates at the rate 1015 Hertz; a molecule in the range of 109 Hertz; and a live human cell at 103 Hertz.
15 Op.cit., p.8.
16 Op.cit., p.9.
17 Op.cit., p,11.

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.

Military paranormal research: Cook excerpt #6

Nick COok writes: In laying the foundations of a modest research effort that would include subjective evidence I was able to tap a professional body that had attached great value to subjective data: the military-intelligence community. In particular, through some connections that had arisen out of my earlier writings⁶, I had been put in touch with – and subsequently came to know – Ingo Swann, who had been one of the original founders of the US military-intelligence community’s remote viewing programme. 

 

Ingo Swann

Remote viewing was a methodology that had permitted the US to conduct intelligence-gathering via the use of techniques that might perhaps be described as ‘clairvoyant’. I considered the experience of remote viewers to be timely and relevant, because, knowing the military, a strong case could be made to say that it would not have thrown good money year-on-year at a technique that didn’t work.

Remote viewing, in one guise or another, had been funded since the early 1970s and had patently worked, because it had remained in existence – fully funded by the US government – for the best part of two decades.

And lest an accusation were proffered that RV had been a particular whim or foible of the US intelligence community, it could be demonstrably proven that the Soviet Union had been engaged in remote viewing – and other paranormal activity deemed to have some kind of military purpose – for even longer. As part of anyone’s due diligence on this, a book called ‘ESP Wars: East and West’ ought to be required reading⁷. In it, several of the individuals who had, at one time or other, led these programmes in their respective countries were brought together during a narrow time window in geopolitical history – the 1990s - when thawed relations between the two sides had allowed for discussions on particular aspects of the Cold War standoff.

6 The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook, published by Century, 2001.

7  ESP Wars East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players by Edwin C. May, PhD; Victor Rubel, PhD; Joseph McMoneagle, PhD; and Loyd Auerbach, MS, Panta Rei, an imprint of Crossroad Press, 2015.

On the Russian side, parapsychological military activity culminated in the late 1980s with the formulation of a special unit – Military Unit 10003 led by Lt. Gen. Alexei Savin – tasked with exploiting the capabilities of what Savin described as ‘extraordinarily gifted psychic individuals’ for military purposes.

Under the direction of Army General Mikhail Moiseyev, the Chief of the General Staff (the Soviet equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Savin was ordered to hone Military Unit 10003 into the Soviet military-intelligence community’s ‘centre of excellence’ for the development of ‘extraordinary human potential’, including what is known as ‘psi functioning’, the so-called psychic aspects of our nature. Unit 10003 employed an equivalent number of personnel as the US remote viewing programme had at its height.

A very high level of secrecy was established for Savin’s department from the outset. All of the information was reported only to the Chief of the General Staff and was compartmentalised amidst deep secrecy. “We were so successful at disappearing that almost a decade went by before the first vague rumours about our work filtered through to the press,” Savin told his US counterparts⁸.

Even after the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, this led to remote viewers being forward deployed with Russian military units during the Second Chechen War of 1995. “In Chechnya, I would test the work of my most talented psychics and instructors,” Savin explained. “After the Chechen War, we can now boldly assert that on the whole ESP is a proven and effective tool in the arsenal, not only of strategic military means, but of tactical and operational ones.”⁹

8 Op.cit., p.264.
9 Op.cit., p.288.

As part of my continued due diligence in this area, I was led to a declassified 1983 US Department of the Army study entitled ‘Analysis and Assessment of (the) Gateway Process’¹⁰.

The report was written by US Army Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell in an apparent bid to ‘sell’ the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM, on the ‘Gateway Experience’ developed by the Virginia-based Monroe Institute (along with a technique the institute had developed to bring the brain’s two hemispheres to a state of coherence allegedly permitting altered states of consciousness) – this as a tool to acquaint the service with the mechanics of what it paraphrased as ‘astral projection’.

As McDonnell explained, the 25 pages of the Gateway Report (although one page, to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists, had been missing from the copy held in the CIA’s files until recently) was designed, at a high level of overview, to provide a ‘lucid model’ of how consciousness functions so as to put out-of-body states into the ‘language of physical science’ – this to ‘remove the stigma of its occult connotations.’

10 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf

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.

 

Questions and purposes: Cook excerpt #5

Nick Cook writes: My informal research to this point had furnished me with the following observations and questions: 

 

*Science doesn’t know what consciousness is – nobody knows.

*Science and philosophical enquiry give us two schools of thought: consciousness – our experience of ‘mind’ - is either generated within us, i.e. via electrochemical reactions in our brains and central nervous systems, or is external to us: our brains acting like ‘transmitter/receivers’, exchanging data much as a computer does with ‘the cloud’.

*This gives rise to a further complication: is consciousness the fundamental, underlying ‘substrate of reality’ or is the material world of objects ... things?

*The trouble here is that the ‘science of reality’ is defined, in so far as it can be, by two incompatible strands of physics: the way the universe works ‘at scale’ – as stated by classical physics and Einstein’s general relativity - and quantum mechanics: its workings at the sub-atomic level. There is no ‘theory of everything’ to marry the two, leaving sizeable holes in our scientific knowledge.

*The dark energy/matter conundrum was a case in point – both dark energy and dark matter are, in effect, postulated artificial components – some have gone so far as to refer to them as ‘fudges’ - with properties that permit mainstream science to explain deviations from standard predictions. These properties do not alter the fact: we can account only for five per cent of the stuff of the universe; the rest is an abject mystery.

*With the precedent, to corrupt Wheeler, that the study of anomalies gives rise to breakthroughs in new paradigms of understanding, what would it take, I wanted my research to examine, for mainstream science to be comfortable with the study of the paranormal, whose phenomena might hold clues to breakthroughs in this impasse – as well as in many other areas – that has so successfully impeded much-needed scientific progress in the past several decades?

Here, by corollary, was what I wanted my small research programme to accomplish:

*To present the paranormal as ‘science that is not yet understood’ to facilitate a needed discussion between scientists, parapsychologists and related researchers on the true nature of reality.

*To explore consciousness as it relates to the above – what it is or might be: a, or perhaps the missing link in the formulation of a grand unified theory of physics (and, de facto, reality), linking the macro world of classical science and general relativity with the micro world of quantum mechanics.

*To determine whether there are ‘shortcuts’ to individual experiences of the ‘deeper reality’ gained through ‘experiencer data’ – the kind of subjective evidence that would normally be thrown out ‘pre-trial’, so to speak, before a ‘scientific court of law’.

*To allow silo’d scientists to talk to each other on the subject of consciousness and paranormal/esoteric phenomena using a ‘lingua franca’ understandable to outsiders and acceptable to science.

*To set the framework for a cross-disciplinary approach to our understanding of the above by – in the future - bringing scientists and experiencers together in an ‘intellectually safe’ environment, in which sensible opinions, no matter what, would be respected; this for the purpose of exploring common threads of understanding regarding the true nature of reality.

My lack of formal knowledge would be both a hindrance and a help. On the deficit side, I was entering an unknown field from a near-standing start.

But I was also coming to the subject with few, if any, preconceived notions about what was and wasn’t permitted discussion, which might, conceivably, be an advantage.

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.

Beyond self-serving censorship: Cook excerpt #4

Nick Jones writes about verifying consciousness beyond physical death: But did my wife's 'shared death' experience when her mother died constitute ‘real’ evidence in the sense that my profession knew it? In the course of a career that had required ‘veridical evidence’ – objective evidence that would, in effect, stand up in a court of law – how could I possibly investigate subjective experience? Because, by now, a deep curiosity had kicked in – investigation was what was now required.

The answer, I felt, after some soul-searching, was ‘no’, I could not - and for reasons I would later find instructive.

If I applied the court-of-law principle, whomever I called as a ‘witness’ – a person in a journalistic context I would term a ‘source’ – in the end, whatever that person described would be subjective testimony, no more valid in evidential terms than a thought or a feeling.

Even though I had been in the room when my mother-in-law had died, what had happened to my wife had been a wholly internal experience – she could describe the ‘place’ she had been transported to, but she couldn’t show it to me. And when I revisited the events concerning my grandmother that my father had described – in particular, the levitating lamp – this fared no better. Aside from the fact the witnesses were no longer alive, even if they were, I realised, no evidence they could have presented would appear credible (however credible they were) before that imaginary court of law. A picture of a levitating lamp could easily be faked – and an invigilator would have charged anyway that the witnesses had been in a highly emotional state. And so, I saw, what I was left with would merely come across as incredible, too.

For this and other reasons besides – I wasn’t a psychologist (despite having worked on a book with a psychiatrist), had little knowledge of parapsychology and, above all, wanted to maintain my reputation, such as it was, in my chosen career – I dropped any further thought of investigating my wife’s experience. And this, on one level, is how censorship works – at the very first level, at the level of the profession we work in, most of us censor ourselves.

The impulse, however, would not go away and, in a body-swerve of sorts, I ended up doing the next best thing: turning the research into a work of fiction, a book that was published in 2019⁵.

But when, shortly afterwards, I was offered a small research grant to study the science that I had depicted in the book – science that might have been responsible for the anomalous event that my wife had experienced - I took it. The grant would allow me the time I needed to ‘get granular’ on the whole subject of consciousness.

5 The Grid, Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House.

 

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.

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.