Light seen leaving body: Cook excerpt #14

Nick Cook writes about experiencing light around those who are dying: This light phenomenon has been reported by almost all near-death experience (NDE)  researchers, including psychologist and physician Raymond Moody MD, who coined the term ‘near-death experience’ in his 1975 best-selling book, ‘Life After Life’. In his book on shared death experiences, ‘Glimpses of Eternity’, Moody cites a large number of witnesses to light phenomena amongst relatives and carers of the dying. One, Sharon Nelson, told Moody about her encounter with the light at the death of her sister. ‘About one week prior to my sister’s actual passing, a bright white light engulfed the room. It was a light that we all saw and a light that has stayed with us ever since.’

In another case, Moody was approached by two sisters, Maria and Louisa, at a medical conference in Spain who told him about a ‘brilliant light’ that filled the room at the death of their father. ‘The light stayed for maybe ten minutes after he died,’ said Maria, ‘We saw no forms or figures in the light, but it seemed to be alive and have a personal presence.’

And this from a hospice nurse in North Carolina, who, having had a deep fear of witnessing her first death – that of a Mrs Jones – told how she heard Mrs Jones’s voice in her head calling her into the room: ‘I saw her draw her last breath. Right then, a light that looked like vapour formed over her face. I never had felt such peace. The head nurse on duty was very calm and told me that Mrs Jones was leaving her body and wanted me to see the dying experience. I saw a luminous presence floating near the bed, shaped somewhat like a person.’ The experienced nurse witnessed the light in the room, but not Mrs Jones’s ‘presence’.

Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from This Life to the Next, Raymond Moody Jr., MD, PhD, and Paul Perry, SAKKARA Productions Publishing, 2010.

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.

Peter Fenwick's ELE research: Cook excerpt #13

Nick Cook writes: Dr Kerr makes no judgment on whether ELEs are physically real. Dr Peter Fenwick, on the other hand, insists they are – that they are evidence of the so-called ‘non-dual state’ which we enter as we transition from what we experience as our physical bodies to what Dr Fenwick – a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and renowned expert on near-death experiences – describes as our natural state of consciousness; one that is indivisible from the universal field of consciousness – the ‘substrate’ - to which we revert when we die.

“We need to start thinking about death as a radical change in consciousness,” he told me44. “As we approach death, the data “show unequivocally that the fabric of consciousness is pulled apart in dramatic terms in three broad phases,” as documented by Swiss psychotherapist and palliative care physician, Monika Renz45:

The first, pre-transition, involves the kinds of phenomena documented by Dr Kerr in the weeks and days before death. This happens before an ‘inner transformation of perception occurs’, according to Renz. ELEs, Dr Fenwick says, which often begin during this phase, may indicate the state in which we enter death to be critical – a ‘good death’, one that is eased by the comforting appearance of ‘familiars’, as they are referred to, may be key to our initial experience of what he terms ‘an afterlife’.

The second is death itself, in which the transition is characterised by a loosening of ‘ego consciousness’ – the ‘egoic function’, as Dr Fenwick refers to it, replete with the attachments that bind us to our material existence - and the third is post-transition, when, Dr Fenwick says, we attain a ‘fully non-dual state’ – and the attachments of the egoic function dissolve completely and we become ‘one with consciousness’.

Can any of this be seen? The short answer, according to Dr Fenwick is, yes. ‘The perception of something leaving the body around the time of death is a little discussed phenomenon, reported consistently by professional carers and, most importantly, relatives, but usually only when they are directly asked about it,’ he wrote in the paper ‘End of Life Experiences and their Implications for Palliative Care’46. The accounts are varied, his report explains, but central to the experience is a form or shape that may leave the body – and, often, he reported separately, light witnessed at the precise moment of our passing by friends and relatives in the room.

44 Dr Fenwick’s remarks to me are drawn from two Zoom interviews: on 8.7.20 and 15.7.20.
45 Dr Fenwick credits the data of the phases themselves to Monika Renz. See: ‘Dying Is A Transition’ by Monika Renz PhD et al, American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, 2012. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229153806_Dying_is_a_Transition

 

 

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.

End-of-life experiences (ELEs): Cook excerpt #12

Nick Cook writes: Dr Christopher Kerr, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Hospice and Medical Care Buffalo, NY – a psychologist and physician with a PhD in neurobiology - has pulled together, with the active cooperation of his many patients, a large dataset of so- called end-of-life experiences (ELEs)³⁹. These mostly comprise ‘visitations’ by deceased relatives, friends and even pets. Some appear in dreams, others as manifestations in what we would describe as everyday ‘waking reality’ - but most, if not all, are “qualitatively different from hallucinations”, Dr Kerr explained to me⁴⁰.

Dr Kerr was a hard-boiled, 37-year-old cardiology fellow finishing his specialty training while working weekends at Hospice Buffalo to pay the bills, when he had a transformative experience. In expressing a thought to a veteran charge nurse called Nancy that his patient, Tom, would respond well to IV antibiotics and fluids, she told him it was too late – Tom was dying. When Kerr queried how she could be so sure, she told him that he had been dreaming about his dead mother. Kerr responded: “I don’t remember that class from medical school.” To which, Nancy – with the wisdom and directness that comes from a career spent on the front line – replied that he, Kerr, must have ‘missed a lot of classes.’⁴¹

Dr Kerr’s ELE research is focused on his patients – his first and only concern is on how these experiences can help them and their caregivers as they approach death.

The study he subsequently launched had a two-fold objective: first, to demonstrate that pre-death dreams and visions exist and occur routinely; second, to address their ‘prevalence, content, and significance’ from the patient’s perspective.

To document ELEs as related by the patients themselves, he and his team utilised a standardised questionnaire in conjunction with more open-ended questions. Every participant was asked the same questions about dream or vision content, frequency and degree of realism, many of them having reported, as NDE’ers and SDE’ers (like my wife) so often did, that they seemed ‘more real than real’. A numbered scale was used so that answers could be quantified and compared.

In a fusion of the research carried out to date, what it has shown is that 88.1 per cent of patients report having at least one ELE; 99 per cent report their ELE as seeming or feeling real; and 60.1 per cent that their dreams were comforting (18.8 per cent that they were distressing)⁴². The ELEs they most frequently reported as soothing included the presence of dead friends and relatives (72 per cent), followed, in order, by living friends and relatives, dead pets or other animals, past meaningful experiences, and finally, religious figures. ‘Taken together,’ Dr Kerr concludes, ‘the data suggest that the dying process includes an extraordinary but built-in mechanism that soothes our fears as our inner world becomes ever more populated by those we have loved and lost.’⁴³

Can it be said, then, that ELEs have some kind of purpose? Many dying patients describe having been ‘put back together’ by their experiences; others to have significantly higher ‘post-traumatic growth scores’ than their non-ELE-experiencing counterparts – evidence, Dr Kerr says, that, even as we approach death, we are yet afforded an opportunity to grow. 

39 Since I interviewed Dr Kerr, he and his research team now to refer to ELDVs (end-of-life dreams and visions) as ELEs: end-of-life experiences.
40 Interview with the author, 27.7.20
41 From Introduction, Death Is But A Dream, Dr Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Quercus Editions, London, UK, 2020. 
42 https://www.drchristopherkerr.com/research
43 Percentage and quote, p.49 ‘Death Is But A Dream’. 

 

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.

Van Lommel’s "consciousness": Cook excerpt #11

Nick Cook writes: Alerted by patients who, after massive heart-attacks, came ‘back from the dead’ – almost universally they had attested they had been to, and returned from, a state in which they had left the body, entered a realm of infinite connection and non-existent time, been drawn to a light and imbued with a feeling of connection and pure love – Dr Pim van Lommel has pulled together a lot of data on near-death experiences.

“The point is,” he told me in the early stages of my Phase 2 research, “information and energy are never lost – and that’s what we see in the veridical evidence of what people say they see when they are clinically dead, things it should not be possible to see. And here I’m not just talking about NDEs, but out-of-body experiences, too. What it all amounts to, is clear evidence of what I call a continuity of consciousness.”³⁰

The point he makes that we need to discuss here is ‘veridical’. Of the many definitions found online, the Oxford Dictionary’s - ‘a coinciding with reality’ - comes closest as a scene-setter for the short diversion that follows.

Van Lommel, now retired, forged a career as a renowned cardiologist. In 1969, as an attendant doctor in a coronary care unit in the Netherlands, he had his first experience of a cardiac patient who ‘came back from the dead’ to report all the classic signatures of an NDE. His curiosity awoken, in 1986, he began to ask all the patients at his outpatient clinic who had undergone resuscitation whether they had ‘any recollection of the period of their cardiac arrest’. “I was more than a little surprised to hear, within the space of two years, twelve reports of a near-death experience among just over fifty cardiac arrest survivors,” he wrote later³¹.

He gained international recognition following the publication of an article in the Lancet, a highly respected UK-based, peer-reviewed medical journal, in which he and his colleagues discussed 344 cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest³². One group that reported having had an NDE was analysed against a control group that did not, with the two being compared two and eight years later.

Of those 344 patients, 62 (18 per cent) reported an NDE, of whom 41 per cent described a ‘core experience’ (its meaning unaffected by ‘external variables’ like gender, age the time of the NDE, and latency and intensity of the NDE). Van Lommel went on to write half a dozen or so other papers on the subject of NDEs, as well as a book, ‘Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience’, a best-seller in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The purpose of this diversion is not to seek to verify the survival of consciousness through the myriad NDE studies that have been performed by van Lommel and others – whether you’re a proponent of NDEs or not, they attest to something valid at the centre of the phenomenon – but instead to look at the kind of evidence a ‘court’ would accept as veridical; proof that what happened was ‘coincident with reality’.

Broadly, two criteria get called into question: the first is whether the patient was dead in any clinically acknowledged sense; the second is whether, while ‘dead’, they were afforded an ability to see or know things they couldn’t possibly have known via the senses we employ when we’re fully conscious (or, for our purposes here, ‘alive’).

A case that illustrates the point is related by Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social care worker in the critical care unit of a Seattle hospital, regarding what has come to be known as the ‘case of Maria and shoe’33. In 1977, Maria, a middle-aged Mexican migrant worker visiting Seattle to see friends, suffered a massive heart-attack, followed by a second while in hospital. As Clark Sharp watched efforts to revive her, Maria ‘flatlined’ – she wasn’t breathing, and the monitor indicated no heartbeat. She was, fortunately, resuscitated quickly and stabilised, but soon afterward began to tell Kimberly, in a highly excited manner, what she had experienced while ‘clinically dead’. She had left her body, she said, and had watched the efforts to revive her from a corner of the ceiling in the room. She accurately described everything that had taken place, all of it highly persuasive; although, it has to be said, not impossible to derive by surreptitious means – prior knowledge of hospital procedure being one.

But the part that really got Kimberly’s attention was Maria’s description of what she had perceived during the emergency from other viewpoints around the hospital - in particular, while outside, three or four stories above the ground, staring very closely at a strange object that had grabbed her focus on a window ledge. It turned out to be a tennis shoe, which she described as being dark blue, with a scuffed outer side, near the little toe, and a white shoelace tucked under the heel. Maria was so keen to prove that she had been ‘alive while dead’ she persuaded Kimberly to go and look for the shoe, which she eventually found on a hard-to-see, let-alone-access ledge outside of the building’s third floor. The shoe was exactly as Maria had described it.

Here, then, is what veridical evidence is: if it could be proven Maria was clinically dead and that she had seen things she could not possibly have perceived from her gurney, or any other vantage point using her five senses, then QED something remarkable must have happened; enough, perhaps, to invoke Wheeler’s aphorism.

But instead, it seems, Wheeler’s ‘strangest thing’ conflicts so markedly with some people’s belief systems that their first instinct is to want to kill the anomaly, rather than ‘get curious’ about it.

NDE research is no exception; and, in a sense, this isn’t unreasonable: extraordinary claims rightly demand extraordinary evidence. But, as with other areas of anomalous science, what we see in the ‘case of Maria’s shoe’ is the dismissal of whole bodies of research because of a sceptical tendency to pick apart one or two cases, rather than evaluate the body of data as a whole. Are we really to dismiss the work of van Lommel, Janice Holden, President of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Dr Sam Parnia, associate professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center³⁴, because Clark Sharp failed to prove (to the satisfaction of some) that she received the salient details of the shoe from Maria before she went and located it on the ledge? There is a wealth of research across thousands of cardiac arrest and other near-death survival cases that point toward some form of ‘nonphysical veridical perception’ among a hard core of cases³⁵.

Does this mean that we have to accept all their evidence and analysis? No, it does not.

This capacity of the NDE’er to acquire by psychic means the kinds of veridical knowledge that is often presented as ‘clear evidence’ of post-death survival is rightly called into question here.

We should not tag veridical data emerging out of an OBE as evidence of an NDE – they are clearly not the same.

Per Janice Holden, there are two sides to an NDE: the ‘material aspect’, involving earth-bound evidence of the shoe kind, which shares some characteristics with an OBE; and the ‘trans-material aspect’, in which the experiencer ‘perceives phenomena in transcendent dimensions beyond the physical world’³⁸ – much as my wife had when her mother died.

For NDE’ers to acquire veridical knowledge by psychic means doesn’t make their experience any the less remarkable – an OBE is remarkable.

But it isn’t conclusive proof that our consciousness survives permanent bodily death. For this, we must continue to look elsewhere.

30 Skype interview with the author, 15.6.20
31 Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, p. vii, Pim van Lommel, M.D., Harper Collins, 2010.
32 Van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in Survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039-2045.
33 See Chapter 6, The Shoe on the Ledge, by Kimberly Clark Sharp, MSW, from Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence For An Afterlife by Leslie Kean, Three Rivers Press, 2017.
34 He is also director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton in the UK.
35 For example, whilst at the University of North Texas, Dr Holden – in her paper More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Response to “Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features” – identified 107 cases of apparently nonphysical veridical perception, in which a case would be designated ‘inaccurate’ if even one case were found not to correspond to consensus reality. Thirty-seven per cent of the cases ‘involving apparently completely accurate perception’ were determined to be accurate by independent, objective sources.
36 My emphasis. 
37 Op.cit., p.93.
38 Leslie Kean, quoting Holden, on p.97 of Surviving Death.

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. 

Interface model of consciousness: Cook excerpt #10

Nick Cook writes: Professor of Cognitive Sciences Donald Hoffman likens our experience of reality to the relationship we forge with the ‘graphical user interface’ of a computer, its screen²⁸.

In the classical physics model, everything we perceive involves illusion. What we see is not a direct representation of the objects in our vision; it is a translation formed by our brain’s interpretation of the light reflected off the objects. This is high school physics and well understood. The reality represented by those objects – and the meaning we attach to that reality – will be different depending on who is doing the observing.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine (a laptop, for example) – its hardware and its software – in order to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons (and apps) it displays on- screen. We ourselves create the icons, but the icons themselves, being an on- screen representation, aren’t conscious. At heart, conscious realism states that consciousness is primary and the physical world – our world of matter – emerges from it.

This, Hoffman says, gives rise to the idea of ‘conscious agents’. “The way one agent in a network perceives, depends on the way some other agents act,” he tells us²⁹. In this world, our brains function as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘just the reality we need’ for ‘survival’. To take this a step further, we agree on reality, because we’ve all evolved the same reality interface.

It is this interface that, over eons, has allowed us to play the same game. It is also the process that provides us with our perception of consensus, objective reality.

What Hoffman wants to do is develop maths, an algorithm, to allow him to unpick the ‘source code of the game’ – leading, potentially, to technologies by which we can access the ‘greater reality’ in the parts of the machine we don’t normally experience.

Meantime, ‘crude methods’ – methods we might refer to loosely as ‘technologies’, as well, including meditation and psychedelic drugs (even though it might be hard to think of a psychedelic as a technology) – give us a limited capacity to do the same thing.

So, where – and what - is this ‘interface’?

The light that enters our eyes projects upside-down on to the retina, the sensory membrane at the back of the eyeball. There, millions of cells, each adapted to pick out one of three primary colours, send signals to the occipital lobe in the back of the head, where a trillion synapses help forge them into our world of vision. A similar sensor-fusion process takes place inside the brain with inputs from our other senses.

Matter, as we have already seen, is 99.9 per cent empty space. Dr Robert Lanza, whom we met earlier, wants us to be ‘really clear’ on how and where we forge our construed, consensus picture of ‘objective reality’: with and within our minds; and that the world we perceive to be a world of separation – an ‘out there reality’ of trees, houses, tables, rocks, animals, things; and an ‘in here reality’ of us – doesn’t exist. The icons on our user-interface, then – of which, per Hoffman, there are an infinite number and variety – might be said to arise out of the vibrating energy grids we also encountered earlier, informed, as they are, by the quantum magic that permits an infinite range of sub-atomic probabilities to collapse into the particles that make up the things – the material objects we all agree upon – in a format that contributes to our sense of hard, cold reality. Here, Hoffman says, our brains filter out anything not to do with survival.

Here, too, ‘survival’ isn’t just about the physical things – food, water, shelter, warmth etc. – we agree on for the furtherance of our species, but a more tenuous consensus of colour, taste, aesthetics, our sense or right and wrong ... love, even. But you’ll find little discussion of what makes this, or any other definition of our reality in a textbook, because it relies on something science can’t agree on to begin with: consciousness.

The question at the heart of this essay – whether human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death – hinges on the ability of ‘the mind’ to exist outside of the body.

Consciousness, because we are immersed in it and it in us, is, essentially, non- provable. But anomalous aspects of it that manifest as paranormal phenomena are – which is what makes them so important. They are the clues we must examine from the outside in that alert us to a fundamental feature of existence – the idea that there are depths to our everyday reality that we don’t customarily see; and that existence is based on a set of commonly agreed protocols that give us, for the moment, all the reality we can handle – no more, no less – via a panoply of agreed ‘everyday icons’.

But the evidence, too, says there’s some malware in the machine that’s throwing icons we don’t all agree upon on to the user interface – what we might, perhaps, refer to as ‘rogue icons’.

These manifest as ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, angels and demons, miracle cures and any number of ‘anomalies’ that mainstream science wants to tell us aren’t ‘real’.

Except, since they exist as shared experiences for so many, at some level, they have to be.

28 See The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes, Donald D. Hoffman, Allen Lane, 2019.
29 Op.cit. p.184.

 
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. 

Mapping the cosmos: Cook excerpt #9

Nick Cook writes: Science has a long history of compartmentalisation. The chief architect of the revolution that has marked our science paradigm of the last 250 years was the 17th Century French natural philosopher René Descartes, who pronounced that mind and matter were separate. ‘Cartesian dualism’ has coloured our perception of the world ever since and maintained other divisions besides. Thanks to dualism, science has been left to explore the universe with objective detachment, leaving the business of spirit to religion. In this paradigm, it was tacitly agreed that each would stay out of the other’s way.

The cosmos as mapped by the classical mechanics of Descartes’ contemporary, the English natural philosopher (as he also referred to himself) Sir Isaac Newton, was – and still is – a cold, detached place that operates much as a giant clock. Until the emergence of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20th Century, we, the observer, had no capacity to affect it. Even now, officially, that capacity is limited to the micro-world of particles and atoms. Consciousness, if it had any role at all in this universe, was deemed to have somehow arisen from the matter made up of these atoms and particles, even though matter itself could be seen to occupy a fraction of its endless expanse.

The cold hand of Cartesian dualism still predominates – especially in the laboratory, where its unwritten rules state that objective data are the only data that count and only then if the experiments that derive them are repeatable. If Ingo’s hypothesis is true, however, it would make the alternative landscape emerging out of my science exploration of Phase 2, where next to nothing is straightforward – and science is far more squirrelly, actually, than a lot of scientists would want us to believe – much more understandable. Because in Ingo’s ‘non-immediate realm’, the precise opposite of the Cartesian world held true – everything was a little bit (or, at times, a lot) weird; and next to nothing was repeatable; the paranormal operates on what seems to be its own terms, but its impacts in our 3D/4D space can unquestionably be physical.

If we extend its range to a wider set of phenomena beyond those associated (rightly or wrongly) with the dead - to ESP, the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), the study of cryptozoology (mythological creatures such as werewolves, bigfoot, the yeti, etc that are said to roam parts of the planet as ‘cryptids’) and discarnate entities characterised as angels and demons – then these phenomena, too, can be said to ‘leak’ into our realm, just as the information pertaining to the Titanic tragedy did.

Except, per Ingo’s hypothesis, the interconnection between the two worlds meant we had to stop looking on them as two but as one – no more ‘normal’ and ‘paranormal’. In this model of the universe, we needed to consider an aspect of it in which the reality we customarily experience gets ‘bent out of shape’ in the presence of certain kinds of anomalous phenomena. In this small, but quirky corner of the ‘reality envelope’ – populated as it had become by my Phase 2 research data – reality is both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ (ghosts that come and go), distorted by odd time effects (the missing time reported by UFO abductees), populated by ‘miracle cures’ (examples of spontaneous healing) and benign and malign ‘intelligences’ (good and bad spirits).

As I grappled to come to terms with the features of this bizarre and slippery corner of existence, I wrestled, too, with what to call it. One term I had encountered in my literature trawl was a ‘metaphorical reality’, another was a ‘non-literal reality’. But neither of these seemed to do total justice to what the data indicated were three sets of conditions that appeared both to underpin the phenomena and to influence them: location, environment and culture.

Eric W. Davis

Jacques Vallée

This corner of the reality envelope had been deeply explored by two researchers whose pioneering work I had come across frequently in my research: that of Jacques Vallée and Eric W, Davis, who had charted the hinterland of this place in a paper on the ‘physics of high strangeness’, a model whose core features are found in six layers²⁷:

Layer 1: Physical: the encounter (usually, but not always with a UFO) exhibits physical effects and leaves physical traces in the environment.

Layer 2: Anti-physical: Effects that manifest in our 3D/4D space but conflict with Layer 1, e.g. instantaneous appearance/vanishing and producing missing time.

Layer 3: Psychological: The tendency of witnesses to rationalise an unreal encounter in rational terms – until faced with the inescapable conclusion that the object/phenomenon is unknown.

Layer 4: Physiological: The phenomenon is reported to cause effects perceived or felt by humans as: sounds (e.g. buzzing, rushing), burns, paralysis, extreme heat or cold, metallic taste, loss of volition, severe headache etc.

Layer 5: Psychic: Involves a class of phenomena with the encounter e.g. impressions of communication without a direct sensory channel, poltergeist type, levitation, premonitions, healing etc.

Layer 6: Cultural: Concerns the way society reacts to such encounters, including secondary effects, such as hoaxes, absorption into books/films, scientific theories, leading to a gradual consciousness shift in the way humans perceive ‘fantastical events’.

While this model charted the in/out, on/off, real/non-real weirdness (which is all it had ever intended to do) of what I now referred to as a ‘conditional reality set’, it hadn’t accounted for why it existed. Still needed was a model providing a cogent explanation for the interconnected, ‘as-one’ worldview Ingo had called for – one that would stop the paranormal from being treated as something separate from science.

27 Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena by Jacques F. Vallée and Eric W. Davis. 

 

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. 

 

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.