Ptolemy Tompkins: the imaginal state of mind

Ptolemy Tompkins in his 2012 book, The Modern Book of the Dead, writes that the nineteenth century poet and near-death researcher, Frederick Myers, proposed the word “imaginal” to describe a state of mind that could be understood as both real and imaginary. Tompkins suggests we might conceive of this state of consciousness as “a plane of experience that is every bit as real as the physical world we experience" while in our physical bodies, "but that is also much more elastic; a world that blooms and buzzes a hundredfold more vividly and intensely—and personally—than the one we are in right now.” 

If we add to this imaginal dimension Myers assertion that the mind is not simply a product of the brain—which now has been scientifically verified—we have “an entirely new perspective on the fate not just of consciousness, but of our particular, individual, personal consciousness after the body has been left behind. A perspective that allows us to continue to believe in the existence of the spirit in the age of science, and that allows us also to appreciate different spiritual perspectives without insisting that one be right and all the others wrong.”

This perspective enables us “to take the afterlife descriptions of, say, a Brazilian Indian and an Inuit Eskimo seriously and respectfully, without having to literally envision the afterworld as a thick tropical jungle or a snow-covered stretch of northern tundra.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 112-113.

Near-death experiences under general anesthesia

Radiation oncologist Jeremy Long writes: "If near-death experiences were solely due to physical brain function, NDEs under general anesthesia should have less consciousness and alertness than other NDEs. But that is not what the NDERF studies found. The NDERF studies found that typical NDEs happen under anesthesia, usually with greater consciousness and alertness as commonly described in all NDEs. 

Either general anesthesia alone or cardiac arrest alone results in unconsciousness without any possibility of a lucid memory. Thus, typical near-death experiences occurring while under general anesthesia are doubly medically inexplicable. This is powerful evidence that consciousness can function apart from the physical body and separate from biological brain function.

"Bruce Greyson, MD also reported near-death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia:

In our collection of NDEs, 127 out of 578 NDE cases (22%) occurred under general anesthesia, and they included such features as OBEs that involved experiencers’ watching medical personnel working on their bodies, an unusually bright or vivid light, meeting deceased persons, and thoughts, memories, and sensations that were clearer than usual.

"Unlike NDEs, anesthesia awareness experiences are often unpleasant, painful, and frightening experiences. Anesthesia awareness more often involves brief and fragmentary memories with hearing described more than vision.

"Near-death experiences under general anesthesia show that full consciousness can exist separately from the physical body. NDEs arising while under general anesthesia are robust evidence that consciousness survives bodily death."

Jeffrey Long, MD, "Evidence for Survival of Consciousness in Near-Death Experiences: Decades of Science and New Insights." In the next several posts I will share excerpts from Long's 2021 article. Footnotes have been deleted. The complete text is available as a pdf at https://www.nderf.org.

 

The mystery of Christ: a book written in our heart

Scholar Elaine Pagels writes in Why Religion? “When the author of the Gospel of Truth sets out to reveal Paul’s secret teaching, he begins by asking, What happened before the beginning of time? In answer, the author offers a primordial drama of creation, telling how, when ‘all beings’ began to search for the One from whom they came forth, they couldn’t find him. Feeling abandoned, not knowing where they came from, they suffered anguish and terror, like children wandering in the dark, searching in vain for their lost parents. 

"As this gospel tells it, what separates all beings, including ourselves, from God is not sin. Instead, what frustrates our longing to know our source is its transcendence, and our own limited capacity for understanding. Yet when these beings—or when we—realize that we can’t find our way home, don’t know where we came from, or how we got here, we feel utterly lost. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, we may rush into paths that lead nowhere, more lost than ever, imagining that there’s nothing beyond the confusion we see in the world around us.

“At this point, the Gospel of Truth turns toward a drama of cosmic redemption. When the Father sees his children terrified and suffering, ensnared by negative energies, he sends his Son, ‘the hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ,’ to show them a path and bring them back ‘into the Father, into the Mother, Jesus of the infinite sweetness.’ And although, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, ignorant and violent ‘rulers of this world’ tortured and crucified Jesus, the Father overturned their conspiracy, transforming even their hideous crime into a means of grace.

“To show this, the Gospel of Truth reframes the vision of the cross from an instrument of torture into a new tree of knowledge. Here Jesus’s battered body, ‘nailed to a tree,’ is seen as fruit on a tree of ‘knowing the Father,’ which unlike that tree in Paradise, doesn’t bring death, but life, to those who eat from it. Thus, the author suggests that those who participate in the Eucharist, eating the bread and drinking the wine that, symbolically speaking, are Jesus’s flesh and blood, ‘discover him in themselves’ while he ‘discovers themselves in him.’

“After years of contending with familiar Jewish and Christian sources, I found here a vision that goes beyond what Paul calls ‘the message of the cross.’ Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, this gospel suggests that, seen through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we’re connected with each other, and with God; what Paul’s letter to the Colossians calls ‘the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. No wonder, then, that Christians called their sacred meal a mystery (mysterion), a Greek term later translated as ‘sacrament’ (from Latin sacramentum).”

“The author of the Gospel of Truth rejects images of God as a harsh, divine judge who sent Jesus into the world ‘to die for our sins.’ Instead, he suggests, the loving and compassionate Rather sent Jesus to find those who were lost, and to bring them back home. So rather than see the writing on the cross as any death sentence—whether Pilate’s or God’s—this author suggests instead that Jesus published there ‘the living book of the living,’ a book ‘written in our heart’ that teaches us who we really are, since it includes the names of everyone who belongs to God’s family.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (pp. 200-201). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 

The transcendent realm of experience

Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern write: "The accounts we have of the mental processes of the dying can only give us a partial view, taking us up to the moment of death. The accounts given by those who return from an A/NDE [After Death Experience or Near Death Experience] have a higher definition and paradoxically seems to give a much clearer insight into the mental state of the dying as they start the journey. But despite these differences, the amazing similarity of accounts of the transcendent realm strongly supports the idea that there is one transcendent reality which, although accessed differently, is where the dying go.

"It is surely illogical to think of end of life visions and actual death experiences as isolated, entirely unrelated events. It makes more sense to regard them as part of a continuum, or as different views of the same event – the dying process. It is easy to spot the similarities between them. Both give a glimpse of a transcendent realm suffused with love and light, and both seem to eliminate any fear of death. The presence of dead relatives who seem to be there for a purpose is common to both experiences - to take you on your journey, in the case of an end of life experience, or in an ADE, to send you back, with the message that it was not your time to go. The relatives are all healed of any injury like lost limbs and they never age.

"There are obvious differences too. First, the feeling of being out of one’s body has not been reported in any of the end of life visions we have been told about, though it probably occurs in about a third of ADEs. Neither has anyone described a tunnel experience as part of an end of life vision. Instead, although the dying person sometimes describes being able to move into and out of another transcendent realm, only a movement towards rather than a real journey seems to be involved, just a feeling of going to and from with great ease. Perhaps it is the mental set of the dying which makes the tunnel experience less likely to occur. 

"The dying often spend some time on the edge of consciousness, and at some level at least may know that death is approaching; they are embedded in a psychological matrix of ongoing, a journey to elsewhere, in which the process of leaving may be prolonged. In the A/NDE the movement into the experience – sometimes through a tunnel – and the return, usually described as a ‘snapping back into the body’ are very precise and abrupt events. There is a clear beginning and a clear end. But the end of life experience is a one way journey only, guided and supported by those you have loved.

"How does this help with our understanding of life after death? The evidence we have would suggest that the domain after death has no location in physical space; subjective time is quite different, almost as if there is no time. But the domain is full of light and love. This would fulfill the concept of an entry into no time and no space but the memory of this area is always love and light.

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.

 

Shared experience of dying loved one

Writer and researcher Nick Cook relates this story: "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 categorized herself for a moment as ‘religious’ in any recognized 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’.

 

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.

End of life experience that was reassuring

Dr. Christopher Kerr, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer for Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, writes of dying patients having dreams of renewing friendships with deceased friends and relatives:

"Frank had been admitted to the Hospice Inpatient Unit with severe congestive heart failure. At 95, he was still completely aware of his surroundings and loved a good conversation. He had collected encyclopedic bits of baseball lore the way others do treasured objects and could talk the game like no one else. Yet, despite his recall and engagement, when Frank closed his eyes to rest, his room became crowded with dead relatives. One of them was Uncle Harry who had been dead for 46 years and who 'wouldn’t shut up'. This was a recurring phenomenon I now knew better than to mistake for the manifestation of a broken mind.

"Like for so many of our dying patients, time was now inconsequential and what was before was now in the present while realities, whether current or past, living or dead, merged. His body was shutting down, but his mind had not lost its foothold in consciousness. In truth, he had a foot in two worlds, only one of which we shared.

"Over time, Frank’s inner-world experiences returned him to what he treasured most in life, his wife’s love. The more he dreamt of her, the more he felt her presence and the more peaceful he became. He finally requested that we discontinue treatment. His decision to decline care was medically appropriate. As is so often the case, patients recognize medical futility before their physician and, in a sense, release the doctor from an obligation that can no longer be honored. Frank wanted to join 'Ruthie in heaven'. 

"We helped him reach comfort for this much-awaited reunion, and he died with the beauty and grace he had lived and created. As his organs failed, his senses, perceptions and awareness did not. In fact, they were telling Frank that his soul was in fact very much alive. In contrast to the notion of 'raging against the dying of the light', Frank, like most of our patients, was fighting towards not against. The 'towards’ he was drawn to was within his end of life vision providing a renewed consciousness warmed in familiar love. This was where he was now experiencing 'life', beyond his physical boundaries."

Christopher Kerr, “Experiences of the Dying: Evidence of Survival of Human Consciousness,” an essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in response to the question: “What is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after bodily death?” Dr. Kerr, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer for Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo.

After death experiences: Consciousness Survives

Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern write: "There can be no evidence clearer than the personal testament of someone who has died. Thanks to the success of medical interventions following cardiac arrest, many people do return from something that would have been classified as dead 50 years ago – a state in which the brain has ceased to function, the heart has stopped and the person is to all intents and purposes actually dead. And some report experiences which suggest the existence of another state of consciousness, unavailable in our normal everyday world.

"The international definition of death is: no respiration, no cardiac output and absent brain stem reflexes. This is the exact clinical state after a cardiac arrest. Simultaneous recording of heart rate and brain electrical activity show that within 11 seconds of the heart stopping, the brainwaves go flat. You are clinically dead.

"Consciousness is lost in a matter of seconds when the heart stops and may not be regained until hours to days after it restarts.

"Even if cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) begins straight away, blood pressure will not rise high enough to establish an adequate blood flow through the brain. Doine Stub and Graham Nichol found that only 7% of cardiac arrest patients survived and most had some evidence of brain damage; and the mental state during recovery is confusional.

"The flat EEG indicating no brain activity during cardiac arrest and the high incidence of brain damage afterwards both indicate that unconsciousness is total. The brain can’t create images, so it should be impossible to have clearly structured and lucid narrative experiences and because memory is not functioning, if experiences did occur they should not be remembered. The brain does not begin to function again until the heart restarts. So in theory it is impossible for anyone in this state to a) experience or b) remember anything that occurred during it. And if an experience occurred during the gradual return to consciousness it would be confusional, and not the clear, lucid story which is characteristic of actual death experiences.

"However, to muddy the waters some studies have found that in patients who are being monitored and have begun the actual death process, there is a sudden recurrence of brain activity, containing faster frequencies which may last up to five minutes. Materialists have jumped on this as the explanation for the ADE. But this is random cortical activity which does not integrate different areas of the brain, and certainly could not restore consciousness.

"Conventional science cannot explain how an ADE could occur at any point during the death process, and there are special difficulties in accepting that it happens when the ADErs say it happens — during unconsciousness. However, about 10% of those who survive a cardiac arrest report an ADE .

"It is very difficult to judge the exact timing of an ADE during a cardiac arrest. But two prospective studies were of people who had had cardiac arrests and were resuscitated in coronary care units, where their medical records show exactly what had happened; the patients had the same medication and resuscitation procedures and could be questioned as soon as they were well enough.

"Of the 63 cardiac arrest survivors interviewed, 89% had no memories and about 10% reported ADEs, which they said had occurred while they were unconscious. These ADEs were, as was expected, very similar to those NDEs already reported in the literature. The authors also found that the ADEs were not due to medication, electrolytes, blood gases, religious belief or any other cultural factors.

"Other research groups have found similar results. In a Dutch study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, 41 (about 12%) reported ADEs (van Lommel, 2011). Their occurrence was not influenced by the duration of unconsciousness or cardiac arrest, or by medication but more ADEs were reported in the group of survivors who died shortly after their experience. In another study a higher rate of 23% was reported (Schwaninger et al., 2002) about 10% were found by Greyson, (2003) , while others (Sartori et al., 2006) report about 25%. What is clear is that actual death experiences do occur in association with cardiac arrest, and their contents are similar to those reported in the NDE literature.

"No studies have so far been able to provide definitive scientific proof of when an ADE occurs. Parnia, with Fenwick and others (Parnia et al., 2001) found that the patients themselves felt that the experiences occurred during unconsciousness - important because, as discussed above, we have no idea how clear consciousness can be experienced during a period of clinical death with a flat EEG. This question is absolutely crucial to one of the biggest problems facing neuroscience: is consciousness entirely a product of brain function and is it confined to the brain? ADE research is perhaps the most promising way of filling the ‘consciousness gap’ in neuroscience. From the point of view of science, the ADE cannot occur during unconsciousness, and yet there is tantalizing evidence that that is just when they do occur.

"About a third of ADEs are preceded by an out of body experience in which the experiencer says they leave the body and rise to the ceiling and can see the resuscitation taking place. Anecdotal evidence points to the OBE and therefore the ADE occurring during unconsciousness. Certain subjects even described their own resuscitation procedures accurately, suggesting that their ADE had occurred when the brain was ‘down’ (Sabom, 1982).

"Dr. Penny Sartori studied a group of cardiac arrest survivors in a coronary care unit, several of whom said they had left their bodies and witnessed the resuscitation process. She compared their accounts of their resuscitation with those of another group of patients who had had no ADE during their resuscitation but were asked to describe what they thought had happened. It is usually argued that everyone sees so much resuscitation on TV that they know the procedure. Dr. Sartori was able to show convincingly that the patients who claimed to have seen their resuscitation, described it much more accurately than those who could only guess what had happened and who made significant errors (Sartori et al., 2006).

"The case of Pamela Reynolds, described in the BBC’s documentary film The Day I Died, (Broome, 2002) is worth quoting at length because it seems so clear that even the most ardent debunkers have been unable to produce a satisfactory explanation for it.

"Pamela had to undergo surgery to remove a cerebral aneurysm situated deep in the central structures of her brain. The operation was carried out in a specialized neurosurgery center under close medical monitoring during the entire operation. Her brain was cooled and EEG electrodes measured her brain activity. When the anesthesia had reached sufficient depth, the brain was known to be non-functioning. Pamela was clinically dead. Her circulation was taken over by a heart lung machine, the blood was emptied from her brain and the neurosurgeons removed the aneurysm. Then the heart was restarted, and the wound was closed.

"After the operation Pamela made several observations about what she had ‘seen’ during it which were acknowledged by the medical team to be correct. The best skeptics have been able to come up with to rebut this was that it was a case of ‘anesthesia awareness’, which does indeed occur under some circumstances, but is impossible in cases such as this when the brain is emptied of blood and clinically dead. Far more significant is the following comment on the case, from the British Medical Journal.

“There is still much scientific work to be done before we can confidently suggest mind-body separation during the NDE. Dr Spritzer, the neurosurgeon who operated on Pam Reynolds, stated that he could not explain her NDE in the physiological state she was in, commenting 'I don’t want to be so arrogant to be able to say that there is no way it can happen'. Let us hope that all those engaged in NDE research can adopt a similar attitude.” (BMJ-editorial, 2003).

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.