Secret teachings: Pagels excerpt #3

Pagels notes that Bishop Irenaeus, engaged in missionary work in Gaul in 160-180, “insists  that Jesus and Paul never offered secret teachings.” Yet, she writes, “Mark’s gospel says that Jesus, like other rabbis of his time, spoke a simple message in public, but explained its meaning only to his closest disciples when he was alone with them, saying, ‘the secret of the kingdom of God is given to you—but to those outside, everything is in parables,” so that “they may listen, but not understand’—although Mark tells nearly nothing of what he taught in private.

 

Furthermore, while researching the Gospel of Truth found at Nag Hammadi, Pagels “discovered a different Paul—and a different message. Its anonymous author, most likely Valentinus, the Egyptian poet and visionary, who admires Paul, sees the apostle as teacher of secret wisdom whose vision of grace includes everyone.

And writing to the church in Corinth, Paul adds that while teaching the simple gospel, he also shares with some a secret wisdom: “We do teach wisdom among people who are mature—not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this age. Rather, we speak the wisdom of God hidden in mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory—which none of the rulers of this age knew—for, had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Pagels asserts: “I was intrigued to see that here, in his own words, Paul hints at a different version of the gospel—not that God ‘sent his own son to die’ as a human sacrifice, but that ignorant and violent people, or the spiritual powers that energized them, had killed Jesus.”

“Fascinated,” Pagels continues, “I realized that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Truth writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom—or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words ‘The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!’ Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.

“What happened, then, not just ‘in the beginning,’ but before the beginning, in primordial time—and how would we know? To answer this question, the Gospel of Truth offers a poetic myth. For around the time this author was writing, some devout Jews, and some non-Jews as well, loved to speculate on questions about what God was doing before he created the world. Often they looked for hidden meaning in poetic passages of the Hebrew Bible, like that opening line from Genesis, which tells how ‘a wind (or spirit, ruah) from God moved over chaotic deep waters.’

“What was there, then? Others claimed to find hints of what happened in a famous poem in the biblical Book of Proverbs, in which divine wisdom (hohkmah), identified with God’s spirit (ruah), tells how she worked with God to create the world. Since both ‘spirit’ and ‘wisdom’ are feminine terms in Hebrew, she speaks as the Lord’s feminine companion, or perhaps as his beloved daughter, who participated with him in creating the world, when first she swept over the deep ocean waters:

“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was there beside him, like a little child, delighting him daily, always rejoicing before him, and rejoicing in his world full of people, delighting in the human race.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 197-198). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Children of God: Pagels excerpt #2

Pagels writes in Why Religion? unlike the Gospel of Mark, which pictures Jesus announcing that ‘the kingdom of God is coming soon,’ as a catastrophic event, the end of the world, the Gospel of Thomas suggests that he was speaking in metaphor:

“Jesus says: If those who lead you say to you, ‘The kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will get there first. If they say, ‘It is in the sea, then the fish will get there first. Rather, the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves then . . . you will know that you are the children of God.

“Here, with some irony, Jesus reveals that the kingdom of God is not an actual place in the sky—or anywhere else—or an event expected in human time. Instead, it’s a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being. In Thomas, then, the “good news” is not only about Jesus; it’s also about every one of us. For while we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, background, family name, this saying suggests that recognizing that we are ‘children of God’ requires us to recognize how we are the same—members, so to speak, of the same family.

“These sayings suggest what later becomes a primary theme of Jewish mystical tradition: that the ‘image of God,’ divine light given in creation, is hidden deep within each one of us, linking our fragile, limited selves to their divine source. Although we’re often unaware of that spiritual potential, the Thomas sayings urge us to keep on seeking until we find it: ‘Within a person of light, there is light. If illuminated, it lights up the whole world; if not, everything is dark.’

“Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in my vision of a net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God.”

What we’re looking for may not be anything supernatural, as we usually understand what we call ‘spiritual.’ Instead, as one saying in Thomas suggests, we may find what we’re seeking right where we are: ‘Jesus says: “Recognize what is before your eyes, and the mysteries will be revealed to you.”

Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, such sayings remain opaque as stone to anyone who has not experienced anything like what they describe; but those who have find that they open secret doors within us. And because they do, what each person finds there may be—must be—different. Each time we read them, the words may weave like music into a particular situation, evoking new insight. Some secret texts calm and still us, as when listening in meditation; others abound in metaphor, flights of imagination, soaring and diving.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 176-178). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Sensing a presence after death: Pagels excerpt #1

Elaine Pagels, History of Religion professor at Princeton since 1982, is best known for her research and books about what are generally identified as the Gnostic Gospels. Her book with this title published in 1989 received both the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Her 2018 book, Why Religion? A Personal Story, reveals her struggle for a religious faith, after the deaths of her son Mark, who died in 1987 from pulmonary hypertension at age six, and her husband Heinz, who a year later fell from a cliff while hiking.

Her son’s death devastated both Elaine and Heinz. “We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. I was moved by what another bereaved mother, Maria of Paris, a Russian Christian whom Orthodox Christians revere as a saint, wrote after her six-year-old daughter died; she felt her ‘whole natural life . . . shaken . . . disintegrated; desires have gone . . . meaning has lost its meaning.’

“But instead of sinking into passivity, she risked her life to save the lives of other people’s children during the Nazi occupation. When German soldiers forced Jews into a central square of Paris before shoving them into trains hurtling toward the death camps, Maria slipped into the square to join them. There, whispering hastily, she persuaded several parents to allow her to hide their children in garbage bins, and so to save their lives, which she did, finding families to care for each one of them. Later, when she and her own son were arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to the death camps, she exchanged places with someone targeted for the gas chambers, serene in the conviction that she’d done what her faith required, choosing to enable others to live. Many other parents whose children have been killed by gun violence, war, drunk drivers, or disease also choose to create meaning by working to spare other people unfathomable losses like their own.”

The death of her son and husband led Pagels to seriously consider if she could believe in a life after death. She writes: “Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.

“More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled ‘Superman at Fifty!,’ which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.

“Could this be coincidence? Of course, it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them ‘across the shining river.’ At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.”

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion?  (p. 104, 137-138). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Living light/love stories matters: Cook excerpt #26

Nick Cook writes: To conclude, I need to return to where we began: to ‘A Matter Of Life and Death’.

In my consulting work, I use the power of story to help deliver strategy and reach target markets and, one way or another, usually end up citing the work of Joseph Campbell, an American professor of comparative religion and mythology who came up with the concept of ‘monomyth’: his theory that the great stories of the world are descended from a single ‘origin story’ conceived at humanity’s awakening. In his seminal book, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’⁷⁴, published in 1949, he broke the monomyth down into its constituent parts via a model he called ‘The Hero’s Journey’.

Almost all the stories we love – particularly of the epic kind – follow the journey’s twelve waypoints, which starts with an ordinary person getting a ‘call to adventure’; his or her reluctance being assuaged by a wiser, older mentor; a series of trials that culminate in our hero acquiring a prize, or ‘boon’; the boon’s return to the ‘ordinary world’ and it then acting in such a way that the ordinary world is forever changed.

The Lord Of The Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars are all testaments to the power of monomyth – George Lucas, indeed, consulted Campbell on the original Star Wars script.

We resonate with these stories, because the characters in them – from the hero and the heroine to the fool and the arch-villain – are all archetypes: facets of our own psyches.

Expressed another way, the challenges faced by these heroes are mythic representations of the trials each of us faces and undergoes in life.

On a recent assignment with a ‘top ten’ consulting organization to deliver themes that its senior partners believed would be critical to business success in the coming decade, one of the biggest themes to emerge during our discussions was ‘purpose’. Unless companies developed a culture that engendered purpose, we were informed, 60 per cent of Millennials would walk out the door to seek alternative employment with an employer that more genuinely shared their values. Sixty-eight per cent of employees, we were also told, believed businesses didn’t do enough to instil a sense of ‘meaningful purpose’ in their culture. To develop this culture, they needed to be vulnerable, confessional, own up to past mistakes and show the next generation of talent that they were serious about recruiting and retaining them. Businesses that succeeded going forward, these consulting gurus all agreed, would need to ‘do good’ in addition to ‘doing well’. And if they didn’t – i.e. they merely paid lip-service to that ambition - heaven help them: there were any number of ‘hashtag movements’ out there to ensure that they got their name in lights - and for all the wrong reasons.

Being ‘authentic’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘purposeful’ – and, most importantly, ‘human’ - in the era of artificial intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are terms that are increasingly becoming hardwired into the playbooks of organisations and multinationals seeking to survive and thrive in the 2020s.

Alongside this, however, the world has never been more anxious.

According to the World Health Organization, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem at some point in our lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from a mental health condition, placing mental disorders amongst the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide. In the US, according to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 43.6 million Americans – more than 18 per cent of the population over 18 years of age – suffer from mental illness in any given year; almost ten million – 4.2 per cent of the adult population – will suffer from a seriously debilitating mental illness. Elsewhere, the stats are no better. Phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as general anxiety and depression are the order of the day for large swaths of the population⁷⁵.

And this was before Coronavirus. Emerging from the pandemic, we still have any number of potentially cataclysmic events to look forward to, most of them of our own making.

Thanks to exponential advances in technology and medicine, every day brings news of what we’re able to do to change our physical bodies – either so we can adapt to an increasingly hostile world, or so we can live longer and/or smarter; or merely to make us look better. This is the transhumanist route many see as humanity’s future. What it ignores, however, is the part of us we have discussed in these pages; the part that plugs us into the sea of connection and information that is our real world - integrating the part we’ve ignored for too long; the part we don’t see in the mirror.

As ‘stories in physical form’, to quote Suzanne Giesemann, we have the power at any given moment to decide what our stories are going to be – and, if we want to, in this moment or any other, to change them. We can also look back and see that what we’ve achieved to get to where we are – no matter what those achievements are - harbours all the elements of the mythic stories Joseph Campbell tells us are the interplay of our archetypes as we struggle to understand who we are and why we’re here.

The testimony of our witnesses, along with a growing body of scientific evidence that consciousness is primary, ought to tell us that every life on the planet is part of an interconnected story that matters – and that these stories – our stories – imprint forever in the fabric of existence. This, I believe, is a far better narrative than the transhumanist one and, at a subliminal level, is one that it is hardwired into us all; the proof of it being held in the stories we resonate with that tell us this is so - including those that come to us from the great religions.

At the end of A Matter Of Life And Death, Peter, of course, triumphs before the court, because, whilst the law of the universe is ‘immutable’, nothing, the court is told, is stronger than love.

In amongst all the pieces of remarkable testimony given by our expert witnesses here, we have been confronted with actual, physical evidence that this may indeed be so.

For, in the ‘giving and receiving of light’ – a light that is shared in the moment of physical death via a connection that appears to be based on an unbreakable bond between the essence of two or more people – we are offered clues to a form of entanglement, a foundational pillar of quantum mechanics, that may prove to be the true substrate of existence.

That this light appears only to people who have this bond is not at odds with the view that it is also a symbolic message from the universe – a message that ‘life goes on’.

The screen that we experience as reality is ‘one mind’, Suzanne Giesemann tells us, but it also arises as individual minds. For these two statements to square with one another we and the screen - the ‘one mind’ - have to be that same limitless intelligence.

Why would an intelligent, sentient, self-aware, loving universe put itself through all the trials and tribulations of life as we experience it, with its suffering and its beauty and everything in between?

The answer, perhaps, is that it is the only way it has of experiencing itself.

And, thus, maybe, when you strip away all the science, this is why existence ‘is’: so that it can know itself, learn and evolve.

As well as being a measurable communication from the universe, the light, I believe, is a sign of the hope that is given to us all.

74 The Hero With A thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, Princeton University Press, 1949.
75 https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/mental-health-and-mental-disorders#4

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.

Evidence of conscious energy: Cook excerpt #25

Nick Cook writes: I began this essay with an introduction to the fictional heaven in which Squadron Leader Peter Carter finds himself in ‘A Matter Of Life And Death’. In the film, the court’s verdict will determine whether he can return to Earth and to June, the girl he loves, or remain forever in the Other World. In this, our trial setting, it is the reality of the Other World that is itself being judged.

I explained, too, that in my quasi-role as counsel for the defence of the proposition that our consciousness survives bodily death – a role that emulates the part played by Dr Reeves in the film - I would allow the witnesses to speak for themselves.

This, I believe, they have done powerfully and persuasively - and to have proven the proposition behind the question beyond a reasonable doubt. And, further, that it is the unmitigated weight of the evidence that has allowed them to do this.

But I am aware, too, that this isn’t quite enough, because the data I amassed in the course of my project’s research – thanks almost entirely to the witnesses heretofore assembled – call on me to draw conclusions of my own as to the nature of reality – a reality that happens to incorporate the continuity of consciousness, and therefore its survival following our permanent bodily death, as one of its inherent features.

And so, although now, as it were, ‘the defence rests’, I crave the indulgence of the court for a few moments longer, because what follows – unlike what I consider to be the concreteness of the data presented thus far – are my inferences from the data.

In the 1983 Gateway Report prepared by the US Army – an attempt by its author to map a reality that went far beyond the precepts of materialist, reductionist science - we were introduced to the ideas of vibration, frequency and resonance, matter as something that is far more elusive than our senses tell us, and the substrate of reality as a hologram that we, having resonant properties ourselves, are able to tune into. Per Dr Edgar Mitchell, our brains, acting as quantum computers, download information from this substrate – a realm beyond space and time that acts as a repository for all the information that ever was, is, or will be, including our memories.

Per Prof Hoffman, the only data we need are those that are germane to our survival. In a co-creative dance with the intelligence that is a facet of the universe, we are presented with just that - what we need, and no more - on our ‘reality user-interface’. This interface is what we might refer to as ‘mind’ – a screen on which, broadly, we project our perceptions, which aggregate as consensus ‘icons’ – objective reality, as we know it.

By ‘we’, what we actually mean is ‘consciousness’. But consciousness isn’t us, exactly, and nor is mind, because something – some deep, fundamental aspect of consciousness – plays the part of ‘the witness’ to everything that’s on the screen.

It is this part of us, I believe, that acts as a kind of IP address for ‘our’ consciousness; the part that we usually refer to as a ‘soul’, and this is the part that ‘continues’; the timeless, placeless, non-local part of us that ‘just is’, with no beginning and no end.

Back on Earth, where everything also is vibration and frequency, our resonant frequency accretes in material form, as does everything in our reality – the universe that we see and sense; a universe precisely fine-tuned to the reality we experience within it. The data from the contact modalities speak to this idea of frequency and the ‘Creator/Source’ encountered by all the experiencers - or what Gateway called ‘the Absolute’ – vibrating at highest possible frequency.

Everything, therefore, would appear to reside on a spectrum – and somewhere on it we ‘materialise’ (literally) in the form that we do. Because all matter has its own resonant frequency, this is how the world of things takes form and appears as, and to, us.

But the ‘rogue icons’ that we occasionally encounter on our reality user-interface – the paranormal phenomena that some would say we are increasingly encountering – attest to the fact that there are entities ‘out there’ that do not exist at or on the same frequency as us. Some of these entities will have a lower frequency; some higher.

If Ede Frecska, whom we met in the last section is right, when the ‘conditional reality’ permits it, these entities may form as archetypal ‘projections and reflections’ on the screen of our reality user-interface in endless forms of ‘non-human intelligence’ – from ‘tricksters’, to creatures of mythology, to angels, demons and extra-terrestrials.

This conditional reality, identified in my Phase 2 research as something that could and should be probed and tested, will form the basis of a next-stage ‘Phase 4’. The plan is to co-design experimental protocols with credentialed academics to identify what combinations of conditions – elucidated earlier as ‘location’, ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ – need to be present for this conditional reality-set to take form in our 3D/4D world; all of it in the cross-disciplinary, ‘intellectually safe’ environment to which the project originally aspired, where sensible opinion will be respected no matter what.

The wild card in this ‘conditional laboratory’, as I foresee it, is ‘us’ and the energy, if that’s the right word, that we bring to bear on the other three conditions. Whilst it is entirely possible that Frecska is right and that we ourselves are responsible for the entities that appear to shadow us in particular locations, our intuition tells us that the beings encountered by experiencers across all eight contact modalities possess ‘conscious agency’ in their own right - which is why, in a limited way, we are able to interact with them. This, I am certain, science can prove. When mainstream science takes the same view - that the rogue icons we know as ‘the paranormal’ are a part of a consciousness we can test - then truly we will have entered a new scientific age.

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.

DMT research consensus: Cook excerpt #24

Nick Cook writes: ‘DMT (Dimethyltryptamine ) voyagers’ I spoke to agreed with this assessment – that there is a high degree of consensus amongst voyagers with regard the key aspects of the experience; and that the experiences appear to bear a striking resemblance to NDEs and SDEs.

Some of the common, recurring themes and characteristics of the DMT experience include:

*A subjective feeling of traveling outside or beyond the human body and human identity, which is often described as a process of ego-dissolution;

*An experience that often begins with traveling through a tunnel or portal before ‘breaking through’ to the DMT realm;

*A sense of sacredness pervading the experience;

*A sense of timelessness and a transcendence of time and space;

*Perceiving and interacting with sentient beings ranging from those with dull, almost machine-like attributes to ET-like figures and angelic divine beings;

*A noetic quality, yielding profound intuitive insights and knowledge;

*A sense of oneness, interconnection and unity with all things;

(Entering into a reality that is felt to be ultimate, absolute and infinite – accompanied by a subjective feeling that this reality is objectively ‘real’ and more fundamental than the human experience;

(The paradoxical nature of what is perceived and experienced;

*An ineffable quality to the experience that is fundamentally beyond the capacity of language or human mental concepts to describe.

A DMT voyager I interviewed at length maintained that the high levels of consensus amongst voyagers to the DMT realms crossed over appreciably with experiences reported by NDE’ers. “In my perspective,” he explained, “DMT, NDEs and mystical experiences all seem to represent direct encounters with the same ultimate truth, the same infinite source/ultimate reality out of which all has emerged” – what he called a “cross-cultural consensus”. Indeed, a recent study led by Imperial College, London, revealed ‘an intriguingly strong overlap’ between the phenomenology of NDEs and those associated with DMT⁷².

One of the most intriguing aspects of DMT and other psychedelic experiences are the beings that are routinely encountered. “Whoever these beings are,” the same DMT voyager maintained, “they exist in a way that is in not constrained by our laws of physics; nor, too, by space or time or by any system of logic or rational thought.”

A central characteristic of the DMT realms and the beings therein, he went on to say, is that they are completely paradoxical, non-linear and non-physical - and only when we recognise that this paradoxical, multidimensional aspect of existence, and the forms of ‘life’ within it, play to a different set of rules will mainstream science come to the understanding that there is a bigger, more expansive ‘theory of everything’ within which existing scientific frameworks are embedded: “A more expansive theory of everything may include alternate realms or dimensions of existence beyond the physical universe, where our laws of physics and logic seemingly break down.”

That ‘beings’ – including, potentially, our souls - exist as independent functioning entities in these alternate realms/dimensions of existence is one view. Another, expressed by Ede Frecska PhD, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, is that all entities are ‘quasi-autonomous structures’ whose identity is ‘informed’ – literally – by our conscious belief-systems⁷³.

This offers a persuasive explanation for entities that appear to cross into our 3D/4D world with what Frecska describes as ‘veridical potencies’ – the energy to impact it physically. These range from poltergeists and angels to cryptids and mythical beasts. “Our expectations have a morphing-plastering effect on them,” Frecska says, “and not only ours – for people from the past and future who had or will get into contact with them, their expectation shapes them because they are in a non-local realm.”

In short, any ‘thing’ that can exist in this version of the universe can, does and very likely will – and, as is attested to by paranormal hotspots where ‘high strangeness’ witnessed by many people occurs frequently, it has energy to perform ‘work’ here.

72 DMT Models the Near-Death Experience, Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Luke Williams, David Erritzoe, Charlotte Martial, Helena Cassol, Steven Laureys, David Nutt and Robert Carhart-Harris. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30174629/

73 From Chapter 6, ‘Why May DMT Occasion Veridical Hallucinations and Informative Experiences’, by Ede Frecska, from DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Edited by David Luke and Rory Spowers, Park Street Press, Vermont, USA, 2018.

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.

Eben Alexander's NDE: Cook excerpt #23

Nick Cook writes: The neuroscientist whose NDE resulted in his best-selling book ‘Proof of Heaven’⁶⁹, Dr Eben Alexander, said that cross-over data gathered from the modalities may be key to our understanding of the interconnectedness of consciousness.

Dr Alexander became ill with acute bacterial meningoencephalitis in November 2008 and quickly fell into coma. For the next seven days he remained on a ventilator – scans of his brain showed massive damage. This, however, was his portal into an extraordinarily rich NDE, in which his conscious awareness was transported through levels of experience to arrive finally at what he described as ‘the Core’, a void ‘filled to overflowing with the infinite healing power of the all-loving deity at the source’.

Hoffman’s ideas are interesting, Dr Alexander told me, but they don’t go far enough⁷⁰. “The literature is there, the data is there – it’s not as if we need to ask what we have to do next to prove this.” This doesn’t mean, he went on to say, that we don’t have a lot more work to do to uncover what he calls the ‘mechanisms of consciousness’ – as a neuroscientist he remains intrigued by the way in which we communicate with the ‘deeper realms’ – psychedelic drugs, or entheogens, as he refers to them, being a case in point.

In his second book, ‘Living In A Mindful Universe’⁷¹, Dr Alexander quotes a 2012 report from Imperial College London, in which fMRI was used to evaluate various brain regions under the influence of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms.

The most remarkable finding, he wrote, was that it demonstrated a reduction in activity of the major connection regions of the brain in those who were having the most profound psychedelic experiences – the opposite of what was expected.

This may be evidence, he told me, that DMT*, LSD, psilocybin and other entheogenic plant medicines are affecting the brain’s ‘main calculator’, the neocortex, and in so doing “revealing the vast reality that exists that we’re not normally aware of – the reality that comes into view in near-death and shared-death experiences. It’s by going into that ancient circuit that you can actually separate your conscious awareness from the here and now of the physical brain and the sense of self.”

*Dimethyltryptamine

 

69 Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2012.
70 From my interview with him on 15.12.20.

71 Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2017.

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.