CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Melvin L. Morse and Paul Perry
1990
SCIENCE: THE NEW RELIGION
Page 84
Virtually all primitive societies-not just
the relatively recent Egyptian and Tibetan-believed in survival after
death.
In fact, it has only been in the last two-hundred years (and then primarily
in Western civilization) that the belief in a hereafter has been abandoned
as "unscientific." Science is our religion now. Genetic engineering
and heart transplants are our hope of eternal life. Life after death
is seen as a subject that is unworthy of scientific investigation. When
science turns its spotlight on life after death, it is usually trying
to debunk it.
How is it that we have forgotten the knowledge of the ancients? What
transpired so that these cosmic truths taken for granted by our ancestors
are now largely forgotten or ridiculed? How is it that many physicians
have stopped ob-serving and listening?
Only twenty years ago, it came as a complete surprise to the medical
profession that dying people actually went through a variety of psychological
stages before passing on.
In her hotly debated "pioneering" work, On Death and,
Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross claimed that there were five stages
of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet
this "hotly debated" information has long been common knowledge
to most nurses, who attend patients and talk to them instead of at them.
The medical establishment has managed to make near-death experiences
a freakish event, not the rule. It has con-vinced patients that they
are having bad dreams, not profound experiences that bond them with
all of humanity.
As a medical doctor and someone who has been privileged to hear hundreds
of childhood NDEs, I became intensely interested in why we no longer
believe in life after death. Why do so many of my colleagues react negatively
to this subject? Why does the medical establishment assume that NDEs
are hallucinations?
What has changed in Western society that has led to this massive denial
of death? By the .time our children reach adulthood, they have seen
over a thousand violent deaths on television, yet they have no concept
of what is involved in the dying process.
How have we gotten ourselves into this situation?
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Some theologians feel that the change in Western spirituality started
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with scientist-philosophers
Isaac Newton, John Locke, and John Ray. These three English Protestants
and amateur theolo-/ Page 85 / gians built the foundations of modern
science by trying to discover the works of God in the design of the
universe. Hence, when the apple bopped Newton on the head, it led to
the theory of gravity, the way in which God worked to keep everything
on the earth.
Their work, which led to the scientific revolution, was initially an
attempt to find the hidden divinity of God within nature. By uncovering
the natural laws that controlled the universe, this trio of geniuses
believed we could better un-derstand God.
These scientists were deeply religious. Newton, for ex-ample, was more
proud of his treatise on the Book of Daniel, than in being the father
of physics. However, studying nature-to find the laws of God proved
to be a slippery enterprise. The Catholic Church, which never really
recovered from its attempt to suppress Galileo's theory that the earth
rotated around the sun, was powerless to stop the development of scientific
thought. Rather than welcome it as an acceptable addendum to religion,
the church fought it. Since that time, religion has found itself squarely
opposite science.
The study of nature was abandoned to the scientists, with religious
leaders focusing on the immortal soul and meta-physics while at the
same time claiming that some scientific discoveries were "the devil's
work." Darwin's theory of evo-lution and the subsequent fossil
evidence supporting his the-ory conflicted with the theologian's account
of creation. Advances in obstetrics, including the use of anesthesia,
were bitterly reviled by the clergy, who claimed that "man should
be born in pain."
A greater schism developed between church and science. Religion basically
yielded nature to science and became mas- ter of the metaphysical world,
which could be entered only by following the word of God-as they read
it.
The triumph of science in interpreting the world weakened / Page
86 / the role of the church. By the late
1800s, many people no
longer believed in heaven and hell. Church attendance dropped dramatically
as the Industrial Revolution rapidly vin-dicated science as the new
God.
This period also marked the birth of medical materialism. Science became
almost numbed with excitement at the dra- matic discoveries. Physicians
discovered that germs caused many diseases, a finding that ultimately
led to antibiotics. The effects of nutrition on disease were discovered.
Surgeons were learning how to control infections.
Where early physicians had always incorporated religion into their healing
practices, they now omitted it. Having been forced to choose between
theology and science, they went with science. What else could they do?
Most religions had rejected the importance of the body in favor of the
healthy soul. The possibility that religion and science could peace-fully
coexist was not an option.
This lopsided view continues to this day. Now surgeons are able to remove
appendices, replace hip joints, and even transplant hearts. As science
progresses, We are able to ma- nipulate nature through genetic engineering.
As quickly as science has advanced toward unlocking na-ture's secrets,
we have moved away from spirituality and the possibility of a life beyond.
After all, it is an intangible subject as far as science is concerned.
Is there a way to conduct an experiment proving the afterlife that yields
reproducable re-sults? No. Is there anything for a scientist other than
anecdotal or scriptural evidence? Not so far.
So what's the point? ask modern scientists. Call near-death experiences
"hallucinations," and let's get on with "legiti-mate"
research.
With the explosion of scientific knowledge, we have seen a brutal revolution
in traditional ideas and feelings. Less than / Page 87 / a hundred years
ago, most people died at home, surrounded by a multi generational family
and loved ones. Today, most people die alone in hospitals. Today, fewer
than half of Amer-ican households are composed of two biological parents
and children. Fewer still include grandparents.
THE INVISIBLE DEATH
The growth of medical technology and the
loss of religious involvement in the healing or dying process have greatly
changed our attitudes about death. The focus is on the living and the
losses they will incur. It is widely assumed that those who are near
death are beyond knowing.
Deathbed rituals have been abandoned. Predeath visions have been forgotten
or discarded as hallucinations. The lov-ing lie shields everyone against
the inevitable. Medical sci-ence-with its ability to use machines in
place of failed organs - has replaced religion as the key to immortality.
The attitude of society toward death, has changed. Today we ignore death.
A portion of an article on California sums up our national attitude
on the subject: "peace is simply not a component of what passes,
out here, for the seasona1 cycle. You cruise along the freeway in sunshine
and shirtsieeves, and then one day it rains, and you realize that for
two weeks it's been February. As a result, people don't really 'get'
death out here, which means they don't get the kind of grown-up seriousness
that mortality inspires. Not that people don't drop dead, of course.
But the deaths of others are seen as aberrations, a violation of the
L.A. ethic. 'Everything's so nice here,' is the unspoken attitude. 'You'd
have to be crazy to die.' " Such is the attitude of many
about death."
3 |
DIE |
18 |
18 |
9 |
4 |
DEAD |
14 |
14 |
5 |
5 |
DEATH |
38 |
20 |
2 |
6 |
BREATH |
54 |
27 |
9 |
6 |
OXYGEN |
90 |
36 |
9 |
4 |
LIFE |
32 |
23 |
5 |
4 |
LIVE |
48 |
21 |
3 |
5 |
ALIVE |
49 |
22 |
4 |
5 |
LIVED |
52 |
25 |
7 |
2 |
VE |
27 |
9 |
9 |
6 |
LIVING |
73 |
37 |
1 |
3 |
OUR |
54 |
18 |
9 |
8 |
MAGNETIC |
72 |
36 |
9 |
5 |
FIELD |
36 |
27 |
9 |
CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Melvin L. Morse and Paul Perry
1990
Page 96
"...Story after story, puzzle after
puzzle, case studies like this one come along.
Do these mysterious tales prove the existence of a higher plane? Do
they prove the existence of the soul, a part of us that leaves the body,
flies up that tunnel, and, well, goes to heaven?
Science has long debunked the spirit because of its intan-gibility.
For the past hundred years, neuroscience has con-centrated on exploring
the intricate connections between brain and body that allow us to walk,
breathe, and use the senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and
smelling. Most neurologists are not interested in studying conscious-ness.
Denying the existence of the soul, scientists define the brain as limited
to neuron and electrochemical reactions that cause observable behavior.
To admit to more would be to confess that there is more to the human
mind than simply the brain.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOUL
The soul has been widely defined throughout
history. Some societies have believed that the soul represents the highest
of human thought, and therefore, it is most abstract and difficult to
define. Others have believed that the soul represents the source of
life itself, while others have considered the soul only to be the source
of afterlife.
Democritus, a fifth-century Greek philosopher, felt that life was sustained
by "psychic atoms" that were spread throughout the body but
were controlled by the brain, which contained "the bonds of the
soul." Plato theorized that the / Page 97 / soul had three parts-intellectual,
irascible, and sexual-but only the first aspect had the virtue of. immortality.
Galen, the first-century Greek physician, agreed with Plato, but went
further. He divided the soul into several functions. All of our motor
and sensory abilities were attrib-uted to the soul as were "rational"
functions such as imag-ination, reason, and memory.
The Catholic Church appropriated and developed Galen's concept of the
soul, even offering opinions as to where the various functions were
located in the brain. There the issue rested for almost fifteen hundred
years, researchers and phi-losophers keeping their opinions to themselves
regarding the soul lest they offend the doctrines of-the church.
French philosopher Rene Descartes offered the viewpoint that is dominant
in the Western world today. He felt that the body was a machine composed
of bones, blood, muscles, nerves, and skin and controlled by the brain.
The soul, ac-cording to Descartes, was something only found in human
beings and not in animals. It couldn't be divided into parts the way
Plato said it could. It was unique, immaterial, and immortal. This theory
was called dualism.
Many accepted the dualism of Descartes then, and many still accept it
today. Many accept only half of the dualistic argument, the half that
says the body is a machine.
Scientists who fit into that category are knowni as behav-iorists, researchers
who believe that all human and animal functions can be explained by
observable behaviors. For the most part, they see man as nothing more
than a complex animal or machine. Indeed, throughout history many have
sought to create an artificial man. About a century after Descartes,
Jacques de Vaucanson, a builder of automatons, and a French physician
named Claude Le Cat even went so far as to make a duck that could flap
its wings and digest seeds. The soul was not discussed by those who
studied the / Page 98 / br-ain
and the body because it could not be observed. French physician Julien
affray de la Mettrie even put forth the notion in the eighteenth century
that the soul could easily be re-moved in most men without losing much
of the man him-self-if they could find the soul, that is.
The invention of the computer seemed further to vindicate the behavioral
approach. Throughout the 1950s. and 1960s, most brain scientists considered
philosophy to be "silly" and unrelated to the real work of
discovering the circuitry of the brain. The self-conscious philosopher,
rather than attempting to understand the soul as philosophers had since
the days of Plato, took up the question of whether computers would ever
be able to think or have-emotions.
To a great extent, this type of thinking persists today. Rich-ard Restak,
the acclaimed neurologist who wrote a book en-titled The Brain,
states that there is no "seat of the mind" and that the entire
concept of mind or soul is a philosophical fallacy, nothing more than
a literary device. Restak even goes so far as to state that he attempted
to find the soul in the brain by using a very sophisticated imaging
machine known as a PET scanner. Since he doubted that he could photograph
the soul with this machine, he concluded that it must not exist. That
was his method of "proving" his hypothesis that man is a soulless
creature, at least according to the PET scanner."
5 |
BRAIN |
44 |
26 |
8 |
4 |
BODY |
46 |
19 |
1 |
9 |
- |
90 |
45 |
9 |
- |
- |
9+0 |
4+5 |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
BRAIN |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
BRITAIN |
73 |
37 |
1 |
- |
BRIT |
49 |
22 |
4 |
- |
TRIB |
49 |
22 |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
TRIBE |
54 |
27 |
9 |
4 |
RACE |
27 |
18 |
9 |
9 |
- |
81 |
45 |
18 |
- |
- |
8+1 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
9 |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
"I must hasten to add that
many researchers in the medical profession feel, deep down in their
heart, that there is a soul. I remember one of my professors
at Johns Hopkins University telling me that "When I say,
'I went for a walk today,' I. know I am simply
describing to you a behavior that my fellow scientists can quantify.
But I know that there was more to my walk than just my legs moving.
I know that some inner force decided to go for a walk and that
that same inner force enjoyed the flowers and birds and the beauty of
nature; /Page 99
"I=9 must hasten to add
that many researchers in the medical profession feel, deep down in their
heart, that there is a soul. I=9 remember one of my professors
at Johns Hopkins University telling me that"When I=9 say,
'I=9 went for a walk today,' I=9. know I=9 am simply
describing to you a behavior that my fellow scientists can quantify.
But I=9 know that there was more to my walk than just my legs
moving. I=9 know that some inner force decided to go for a walk
and that that same inner force enjoyed the flowers and birds and the
beauty of nature;" / Page 99 / thoughts that science will
never be able to measure or quan-tify." That statement came from
a rigid behaviorist with whom I=9 spent hundreds of hours quantifying
the exact fre-quencies of sounds that monkeys can hear".
When I=9 reflect on what he said, I=9 remember the works
of Wilder Penfield"
On page 98 / I=9 occurrs x
8 = 72 7+2 = 9
Page 99 / thoughts that science
will never be able to measure or quan-tify." That statement came
from a rigid behaviorist with whom I spent hundreds of hours
quantifying the exact fre-quencies of sounds that monkeys can hear".
When I reflect on what he said, I remember the works of
Wilder Penfield.
The lines quoted occupy nine
lines of page 98 and occur x 3 within 6 lines of page 99
I=9 occurrs x 11= 99
CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Melvin L. Morse and Paul Perry
1990
THE FATHER OF 'NEUROSCIENCE
Page99
"Wilder Penfield is widely recognized
as the father of neu-rosurgery, Educated at Princeton,-Oxford, and Johns
Hop-kins, he is responsible for much of our current understanding of
brain function.
Among other things, Penfield did extensive "mapping" of the
brain in the 1930s and forties. To do this, he electrically stimulated
various areas of patients' brains during neurosur-gery. He was able
to do this with the patients under local anesthetic because the brain
only perceives pain from the rest of the body and has no ability to
feel pain itself. During the procedures, with the patients fully conscious
and alert, he would prod different areas electrically and carefully
doc-ument what happened.
For example, electrical stimulation of the motor cortex would result
in movement of the arms or legs. Other areas were documented as being
responsible for speech, hearing, vision, and so forth.
Penfield, like many of his medical cohorts, thought for many years that
there was no soul or independent conscious-ness in human beings. He
believed that the neurons of the brain could explain all human behaviour.
Basically, what you see is what you get-three pounds of gelatinous neurons
wrapped in a bony skull, the same "soulless" stuff Restak
saw on his PET scanner.
At his farm in rural Canada, Penfield used a large rock to / Page 100
/ illustrate this belief. On one side of the rock, he painted
the Greek word for "spirit." On the other side, he drew the
outline of a human head with a question mark where the brain should
be. He connected the two figures with a solid line linked to the Aesculapian
torch, representing medical science. To him, this image meant that questions
about the existence of the soul had been answered by science: As far
as Penfield was concerned, brain studies could ultimately explain every-thing
about the mind and body.
Fifty years later and in frail health, Penfield changed his mind. He
put on six sweaters to keep out the bitter Canadian winter and trudged
out to the rock that he had painted with such assurance so many decades
earlier. With fresh paint, he crossed out the solid line between the
brain and the spirit, replacing it with a dotted line and a question
mark. It became a visual reminder that all of his work with the brain
had still left many unanswered questions about the mind and the soul.
As he said in his last work, The Mystery of the Mind,
"I came to take seriously, even to believe, that the consciousness
of man, the mind, is NOT something to be reduced to brain mechanism."
Penfield went on to say that determining the connection between mind
and brain is "the ultimate of ultimate problems. "
After years of observing human brains in conscious pa-tients-which went
beyond the work of his peers who arrived at their conclusions through
psychotherapy or by examining brains of experimental animals-Penfield
believed that some-thing differentiated the mind from the physical
brain. As he wrote:
"Taken either way. the nature of the
mind presents the fundamental problem, perhaps the most difficult and
most important of all prob-lems. For myself, after a professional lifetime
spent in trying to dis- / Page 101 / cover how the brain accounts for
the mind, it comes as a surprise now to discover, during this final
examination of the evidence, that the dualist hypothesis (the mind is
separate from the brain) seems the more reasonable of explanations,
"Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science,
his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private
beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too
can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit!
"Possibly the scientist and the physician could add something by
stepping outside the laboratory and the consulting room to reconsider
these strangely gifted human beings about us. Where did the mind-call
it the spirit if you like-come from? Who can say? It exists. The mind
is attached to the action of a certain mechanism within the brain. A
mind has been thus attached in the case of every human being for many
thousands of generations, and there seems to be significant evidence
of heredity in the mind's character from one generation to the next
and the next. But at present one can only say simply and without explanation,
'the mind is born.' "Pondering the ultimate of ultimate questions,
this physi-cian-philosopher asked himself the question: "What becomes
of the mind after death?"That question brings up the other question
so often asked: 'Can the mind communicate directly with other minds?'
As far as any clearly proven scientific conclusion goes, the answer
to the second question is 'no.' The mind can communicate only through.its
brain-mechanisms. Certainly it does so most often through the 'mechanism
of speech. Nonetheless, since the exact nature of the mind is a mystery
and the source of its energy has yet to be identified, no scientist
is in a position to say that direct communication between one active
mind and an-other cannot occur during life. He may say that unassailable
evidence of it has not yet been brought forward.
"Direct communications between the mind of man and the mind of
God is quite another matter. The argument in favor of this lies in the
claim made by so many men for so long a time that they have received
guidance and revelation from some power beyond them- / Page 102 / selves
through the medium of prayer. I see no reason to doubt this evidence,
nor any means of submitting it to scientific proof.
"Indeed, no scientist, by virtue of his science, has the right
to pass judgement on the faiths by which men live and die. We can only
set out the data about the brain. and present the physiological hypotheses
that are relevant to what the mind does.
"Now we must return, however reluctantly, to the first question:
When death at last blows out the candle that was life, the mind seems
to vanish, as in sleep. I said 'seems.' What can one really conclude?
What is the reasonable hypothesis in regard to this matter. considering
the physiological evidence? Only this: the brain has not explained
the mind fully."
After fifty years of studying the living brain, Wilder Pen-field realized
that the answer to the question, "Is there a soul," was more
elusive than ever.
Perhaps the soul does not appear on the latest machine invented by man
to study the brain. I believe that by looking carefully at the work
of neuroscientists one can conclude that there is within the human brain,
an area that is genetically coded for out-of-body experiences,
tunnel experiences, and much of what we know as the near-death experience."
4 |
HEAD |
18 |
18 |
9 |
5 |
BRAIN |
44 |
26 |
8 |
4 |
BODY |
46 |
19 |
1 |
13 |
- |
108 |
63 |
18 |
1+3 |
- |
1+0+8 |
6+3 |
1+8 |
4 |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
4 |
MIND |
40 |
22 |
4 |
6 |
MATTER |
77 |
23 |
5 |
10 |
- |
117 |
45 |
9 |
1+0 |
- |
1+1+7 |
4+5 |
- |
1 |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
DIVINE |
63 |
36 |
9 |
4 |
LOVE |
54 |
18 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
THOUGHT |
99 |
36 |
9 |
6 |
SOURCE |
81 |
18 |
9 |
FINDING THE SOURCE
"After the Seattle study, in which
we determined that a person must be on the brink of death to have a
near-death experience, we asked ourselves another question: What is
the relationship of NDEs to hallucinations and other psychic phenomena?
We researched the medical literature and found that NDEs are unique.
No other hallucinations, visions, or psychic phe-nomena are identical
to NDEs. I have to say that I was surprised. I assumed that I would
find many drugs that mim-icked the experience. I was mystified to find
that marijuana, / Page 103 / psychedelics, alcohol, narcotics,
anesthetic agents, Valium, lack of oxygen to the body, or severe cpsychological
stress did not cause NDEs.
A form of gas therapy called the Medune mix did cause experiences similar
to NDEs, but I believe that was because patients actually were near
death from being forced to breathe a high concentration of carbon dioxide.
This was done in the name of psychotherapy in the 1940s, as a possible
cure for depression and other mental disorders. Treatment was halted
when the expected results didn't occur.
Our research stumped me. I was not alone in my inability to find drug
or psychological causes for NDEs. A number of
researchers, including Raymond Moody, psychologist Ken-neth Ring, and
even astronomer Carl Sagan; could find no common pathway to explain
the near-death experience- except near death, that is. Moody, the first
medical doctor to study the near-death experience, concluded in a 1988
Psychology Today article that "for years I have been trying
to come up with a physiological explanation for NDEs, and for years
I have come up empty-handed."
My first hint of a solution to this problem came when I was casually
discussing NDEs with Art Ward, former chair-man of neurosurgery at the
University of Washington. Ward is a great thinker, a surgical artist,
and a crusty old man whose shoot-from~the-hip style causes many junior
residents to cower in fear. He is not given to metaphysical thinkin.g;
"hard science" and just the facts are his domain. Yet when
I described NDEs to him, he was already very familial with them. He
had heard them recounted from many of his own patients.
Ward remembered one patient who experienced every trait of the near-death
experience while Wilder Penfield poked an area of his brain with an
electric probe. As part of the patient's / Page 104 / brain was stimulated,
he had the sensation of leaving his body. When, another area close by
was stimulated, he had the sensation of zooming up a tunnel, and so
forth.
Ward thought that the area Penfield was probjng was the right temporal
lobe. He felt that some very interesting ex-periments could have been
conducted had they thought of them at the time. For instance, they might
have devised ways to see if these people were really leaving their bodies.
Un-fortunately, said Ward, nobody thought of it at the time.
This was an intriguing lead. Our team of researchers began to examine
Penfield's work. Buried in a forty-year-old text- book, we found clear
reference to areas of the brain that, when electrically stimulated,
produced out-of-body experi-ences. At times patients on his operating
table would say, "I am leaving my body now," when he touched
this area with an electric probe. Several reported saying, "I'm
half in and half out. "
3 |
ARC |
22 |
13 |
4 |
4 |
ARCH |
30 |
21 |
3 |
9 |
ARCHETYPE |
101 |
47 |
2 |
9 |
ARCHETYPE |
101 |
47 |
2 |
10 |
ARCHETYPAL |
109 |
46 |
1 |
9 |
ARCHANGEL |
69 |
42 |
6 |
9 |
ARCH + ANGLE |
69 |
42 |
6 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
SYLVIAN |
102 |
30 |
3 |
7 |
FISSURE |
97 |
34 |
7 |
14 |
First
Total |
199 |
64 |
10 |
1+4 |
Add
to Reduce |
1+9+9 |
6+4 |
1+0 |
5 |
Second
Total |
19 |
10 |
1 |
- |
Reduce
to Deduce |
1+9 |
1+0 |
- |
- |
Third Total |
10 |
1 |
- |
- |
Add to
Reduce |
1+0 |
- |
- |
5 |
Essence
of Number |
1 |
1 |
1 |
Page 104 continues
The area he "was "mapping" was the Sylvian fissure,
an area in the right temporal lobe located just above the right ear.
When he electrically stimulated the surrounding areas of the fissure,
patients frequently had the experience of "seeing God," hearing
beautiful music seeing dead friends and relatives, and even having a
p-anoramic life review.
This was an exciting find. Up until this point, the existence of
archetypes was only a theory from psychotherapist C. G. Jung, who
described them as being psychological phenomena present in the genetic
makeup of all people, regardless of race, creed, or color.
We were stumped. We had confirmed the specific area of the brain where
NDE's occur, but we didn't know what was actually happening"when
they occurred.
Someone proposed that this experience was a defense mechanism, a way
for the body to fool itself into belieying that it was surviving death.
That theory made sense to a point, / Page 105 / but it didn't explain
the reason that these experiences were so consistent from one NDEer
to the next. After all, why would a person on the brink of death almost
always have an experience that was so similar to what another person
on the brink of death experienced? Why were they leaving their bodies,
zooming up tunnels, seeing beings of light, and all those other things?
Why weren't they having experiences so individual that they couldn't
be categorized? That the distress of near death causes a neurological
response almost explains it. But there is some research that couldn't
be ignored.
The research on out-of-body experiences, which about twenty-five percent
of NDEers have, represented very com-pelling evidence that something
was leaving the body.
We discussed the research of Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist
who has done some fascinating work on out-of-body experiences and people
who almost died of cardiac arrest. In these experiences, a person in
a near-death crisis claims to leave his body and watch his own resuscitation
as the doctor performs it in the emergency room or during surgery. Sabom
had thirty-two such patients in his study.
Sabom asked twenty-five medically savvy patients to make educated guesses
about what happens when a doctor tries to get the heart started again.
He wanted to compare the knowl-edge of "medically smart" patient
with the out-of the body ex-periences of medically unsophisticated patients.
He found that twenty-three of the twenty-five in the control group made
major mistakes in describing the resuscitation procedure. On the other
hand, none of the near-death pa-tients made mistakes in describing what
went on in their own resuscitations. This presented very strong evidence
that these people were actually outside their bodies and looking down
as they said they were.
Sabom's research represented excellent empirical evidence of a life
out-of-body, or at least an extremely sensitive sixth / Page 106 / sense.
So did many of the stories we had heard from patients and other doctors.
Dr. William Serdahely at the University of Montana Med-ical School told
us the remarkable story of an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy.
Jimmy was fishing from a bridge when he slipped from his perch on the
railing and hit his head on a rock in the water below. The doctor's
report says that Jimmy had stopped breathing and was without a pulse
when a police officer pulled him from the deep water in which he had
floated facedown for at least five minutes. The policeman performed
CPR for thirty minutes until the hospital helicopter arrived, but he
reported that the boy was dead on the scene when they started the rush
to the hospital.
The boy lived. Two days later, he was out of his coma.
"I know what happened when I fell off that bridge," he told
his physician, who related this story to us. He proceeded to describe
his entire rescue in vivid detail, including the name of the police
officer who tried to resuscitate him, the length of time it took for
the helicopter to arrive on the scene, and many of the lifesaving procedures
used on him in the helicopter and at the hospital.
He knew all of this, he said, because he had been observing from outside
his body the entire time.
It was not my intent to assess whether or not these children actually
left their physical body during their near-death ex-periences. In every
case in which children could provide details of what was going on outside
their body at a time that they were unconscious, it was astonishing
to me how accurate these details were. If two female physicians attended
the re-suscitation, the child would accurately report that fact. If
they were nasally intubed, they were able to report that. If they were
taken to other rooms for X-rays or procedures, again, they were always
accurate in their descriptions. This does not / Page 107 / mean
that they were actually outside their physical bodies, however, as comatose
patients simply may have better abilities to perceive what is going
on around them than we have previously understood.
Yet there is one case in which a teenager told me a fantastic story
that was so unusual it had to have been an out-of-body
experience. Rhonda was a fifteen year old who went into severe allergic
shock as the result of an X-ray procedure. She was having an intravenous
pyelogram to assess her kidney function. She suffered a cardiac arrest
as a result of an allergic reaction to the radiopaque material used
in the procedure.
When interviewed a year later, she told me that suddenly the room was
dark. She could see herself illuminated by a soft light. She felt that
she was floating above her body, perhaps on the ceiling. She saw her
father pick her up and throw her over his shoulder and run to the emergency
room. She said the radiologist was running after him. She was then resuscitated
in the emergency room.
I interviewed the hospital personnel who were involved with the case,
and all. agreed that her description was accurate. Certainly a reasonable
explanation for the accuracy with which she reported the unique events
of her resuscitation is that she was actually out of her body during
it.
Most NDEs involve leaving the physical body and traveling to the light.
When this teenager told me of being carried by her father to the emergency
room, I thought that this case would certainly be the exception to the
accurate reports of other children. Yet when I investigated it, I found
every detail she described to be true.
In 1986, when it came time to publish our findings about the anatomical
location of near-death experiences, we en-tirely ignored the spiritual
implications. We all agreed that / Page 108 / bridging the gap between
psychology and neurology was a big step in itself. As the head of neurology
said, "Let's leave out any of that metaphysical stuff we were talking
about." It was felt to be too controversial, too "far out."
6 |
SPIRIT |
91 |
37 |
1 |
4 |
SOUL |
67 |
13 |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
SPIRIT |
- |
- |
- |
- |
S |
19 |
10 |
1 |
- |
P |
16 |
7 |
7 |
- |
I+R+I |
36 |
27 |
9 |
- |
T |
20 |
2 |
2 |
- |
SOUL |
- |
- |
- |
- |
S |
19 |
10 |
1 |
- |
O+U |
36 |
9 |
9 |
- |
L |
12 |
3 |
3 |
4 |
SOUL |
- |
- |
- |
THE SOUL HYPOTHESIS
"Our paper was published in 1986
in the American Journal of Diseases of Children without the
words "soul" or "spirit" appearing
anywhere in it. Afterward, some of us continued to discuss this area
of the brain in a different light. We began to ponder several questions:
Does this information demystify the near-death experience? Does the
fact that we know where the experience originates make it more a reflex
than a spiritual experience?
We ultimately answered "no" to this question. Like Wilder
Penfield and others who had done brain research, we now knew where in
the brain a certain action took place; we didn't know why.
There are many other examples of genetic imprinting within the human
brain, and none of those functions is any less valid for being inborn.
For instance, we are all born with the capacity to learn language. This
built-in language ana-lyzer enables us to learn the language of our
society. This ability to analyze language is genetically part of our
brains, although it is'strongly influenced by environment. Which is
why the French speak French and Americans speak English with an American
accent.
Birds are another example of animals that have genetically printed information
in their brains. They are born with a detailed map of the night sky
that is somehow passed to them through genetic tissue. Birds do not
need to learn what the sky looks like; they come equipped with an inner
map of the heavens. Using planetariums that can project a changing /
Page 109 / night sky, scientists have demonstrated that birds raised
in labs and never exposed to the night sky are born with a "memory"
of the stars that enables them to navigate.
Rather than diminish the NDE, we should consider the metaphysical ramifications
of the phenomenon. As Penfield said: "I have no doubt the day will
dawn when the mystery of the mind will no longer be a mystery. But 1
believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion,
in man's study of man, until the nature of the energy re-sponsible for
mind-action is discovered."
CONFIRMING THE THEORY
When my research team published its report
on the anatomy of the near-death experience, we were contacted by a
group of neurologists in Chile who had been studying the same thing.
They had arrived at the same anatomical conclusions that we did, that
near-death experiences were generated by neuron activity within the
Sylvian fissure. By examining
the effects of a wide variety of psychoactive drugs, lack of oxygen,
epileptic seizures, and altered states on the brain, the Chilean researchers
pinpointed the same area in the brain as being the site of NDEs.
But exactly what did that discovery mean? They were as stumped as we
were. They called for research that would study NDEs in the light of
visionary experiences, for example, Paul's ecstatic visions and claims
of astral travel
But for now, they said, "We are on the right path separating
phyical elements from metaphysical ones"
I was excited to learn that two inidependent research teams had arrived
at the same conclusion, Frankly, there were times when I worried that
our anatomical theory was completely incorrect. Learning that other
scientists had reached the same conclusion independently told us that
we had at least dis-/ Page 110 / covered the circuit boards of mysticism.
In our hearts, some of us believed strongly that we had discovered
the seat of the soul."
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
5 |
SATAN |
55 |
10 |
1 |
6 |
HEAVEN |
55 |
28 |
1 |
4 |
HELL |
37 |
19 |
1 |
|
REAL |
36 |
18 |
9 |
7 |
REALITY |
90 |
36 |
9 |
8 |
HEAVENLY |
92 |
38 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
HEAVEN |
- |
- |
- |
- |
H+A |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
EV |
27 |
9 |
9 |
- |
EN |
19 |
10 |
1 |
6 |
HEAVEN |
55 |
28 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
6 |
HEAVEN |
55 |
28 |
1 |
9 |
First
Total |
81 |
45 |
9 |
- |
Add
to Reduce |
8+1 |
4+5 |
- |
9 |
Essence
of Number |
9 |
9 |
9 |
CLOSER TO THE LIGHT
Melvin L. Morse and Paul Perry
1990
THE HEAVENLY MIND
"As so frequently happens, children
can sum up difficult con-cepts with a few innocently spoken words. Such
was the case with one child who spoke to researcher Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
about death and the nature of the soul.
During a visit to Seattle, Kubler-Ross described a seven-year-old boy
who asked his mother to turn off the oxygen so that he could
finally die after a three year battle against leu-kemia. "Turn
off the oxygen; I don't need it anymore," he said. "It
is my time."
He had experienced a predeath vision of what heaven was like. The vision
revealed that his grandfather would be wait-ing for him. Despite his
illness, he was excited about going to heaven.
When he was asked what heaven looked like in his vision, he tried his
best to explain it: "It's sort of like if you went through another
passageway. . . you "walked right through a wall to another galaxy
or something. It's sort of like walking into your brain. And
it's sort of like living on a cloud, and your spirit is there, but not
your body. You've left your body. It is really like walking
into your mind."
This boy's experience represents the soul as being the place where the
material and the spiritual worlds meet, a perfect description really
for a soul that is rooted in the brain. For him, there
was no contradiction between believing that heaven is in his
mind and that he can leave his body and meet his grandfather
in heaven.
There was no contradiction for Dr. Penfield, either. In one of his lectures
on the brain, he tackled the question of / Page 111 / the soul with
a directness frequently used by senior statesmen to attack thorny issues.
He readily admitted that the energy source that powers the mind
is a total mystery. It fills us with the fire of life, and in the end,
the wind of death blows it out like a candle, 'said 'Penfield.Then what
happens?
"It is clear that, in order to survive after death, the mind
must establish a connection with a source of energy other than
that of the brain," said Penfield. "If during life (as some
people claim) direct communication is sometimes established with the
minds of other men or with the mind of God, then it is clear that energy
from without can reach a man's mind. In that case, it is not unreasonable
for him to hope that after death the mind may waken to another source
of energy."
I love this quote, both for what it says and for what it implies. It
says that the mind is one thing, the brain another, and that the brain
cannot do what the mind does. It implies that people may
communicate through the mind's energy with other people and / or
God. And that when the body dies, the mind may be forced
to rely upon another source of energy for its existence.
Is the near-death experience the beginning of
the soul's journey to another source of energy? Maybe. If Penfield
had questions about the nature of the soul, then I feel comfortable
having them too. After all, he spent years mapping the brain and studying
its functions, and yet he was unable to locate the source of the
awesome energy that powers all living things. It left him
somewhat frustrated, but accepting of the mystery of life: "It
is obvious that science can make no statement at present in regard to
the question of man's existence after death, although every thoughtful
man must ask that ques-tion," said Penfield. "Whether the
mind is truly a separate element or whether, in some way not
yet apparent, it is an expression of neuronal action, the decision must
await for further scientific evidence."
4 |
NEAR |
38 |
20 |
2 |
5 |
DEATH |
38 |
20 |
2 |
10 |
EXPERIENCE |
104 |
59 |
5 |
19 |
First
Total |
180 |
99 |
9 |
1+9 |
Add
to Reduce |
1+8+0 |
9+9 |
- |
10 |
Second
Total |
9 |
18 |
9 |
1+0 |
Reduce
to Deduce |
- |
1+8 |
- |
1 |
Essence
of Number |
9 |
9 |
9 |
N |
14 |
5 |
5 |
D |
4 |
4 |
4 |
E |
5 |
5 |
5 |
N+D+E |
23 |
14 |
5 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
N+D |
18 |
9 |
9 |
D+E |
9 |
9 |
9 |
ASTRAL
ASTARATLAST
7 |
REALITY |
90 |
36 |
9 |
4 |
REAL |
36 |
18 |
9 |
3 |
ITY |
54 |
18 |
9 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
9 |
2 |
ME |
18 |
9 |
9 |
3 |
EGO |
27 |
18 |
9 |
3 |
OUR |
54 |
18 |
9 |
10 |
CONSCIENCE |
90 |
45 |
9 |
THE DEATH OF FOREVER
Darryl Reanney 1991
A NEW FUTURE FOR HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Page 247
The pursuit of happiness
I and Mankind
are one
"In looking at this statement, I have to discuss religion directly.
I would like to do so without prejudicing the scientific basis on which
this book is predicated. Let me make it clear that in the section that
follows, I am not judging the material at issue from the standpoint
of faith. Rather, I am looking at religion as a source of psychological
insight, to be examined and interpreted like any other body of valid
human experience.
The thing that strikes one about the psychology of religion is not the
differences of dogma (over which so much blood has been pointlessly
spilled) but the commonality of insight. What insight? At its root,
simply that all men are brothers and that we
should treat others as we treat ourselves.
Christianity: 'All things
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them'
(Matthew 7:12)
Judaism: 'What is hurtful
to yourself do not to your fellow man' (Talmud)
Taoism: 'Regard your neighbour's
gain as your own gain: and regard your neighbour's loss as your own
loss' (T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien)
Hinduism: 'Do nought to others
which if done to thee would cause thee pain' (Mahabaharata
5.15.17)
Buddhism: 'hurt not others
with that which pains yourself (Udanavarga
5.18)
The unity of insight encoded in these sayings is all the more remarkable
because they seem, for the most part, to have evolved independently,
in different parts of the world under the influence of different cultural
traditions at different times during history. The feeling that each
of us is capable of 'loving the world' is a common human intuition.
Most of us, when supremely happy, are able to affirm 'I'm
in love with all mankind'. However, to let it rest there
is to miss the deeper message. What these sayings tell us is
not merely that we should use a common code of conduct in our dealings
with / Page 248 / our fellow creatures. Rather that, at the taproot
level, we are our fellow humans, that the distinctions which divide
us are functions of ego and of differing phases of growth.
I am too young to have any memories of the Second World War but I have
a vividly etched memory of a photo I saw of the campaign in the Western
desert, where my father fought. It showed a soldier, naked from the
waist up, hung over the edge of a gutted tank. He looked so pathetically
young and beautiful that it was hard to realise that what I was looking
at was death. I mention that image because it always brings to mind
the saying of the Greek dramatist Sophocles: 'who
is the slayer and who the victim. Speak', and over
twenty centuries later, the words of the German soldier poet Heinrich
Lersch: 'My eyes,deceive me but my heart cannot;
each corpse has my brother's face'.
What these lines tell us is that, in those moments of compassion
that reach beyond tears, the boundary between self and other breaks
down. We are our victims; each act of degradation
perpetrated on the body or mind of another is an act of violence against
ourselves. Bertrand Russell captured another element of the
same intuition when he said 'he who watches a crime in silence commits
it'.
Is this mere intellectual sophistry? I for one am certain it is not.
In grief therapy, when someone weeps for a recent loss, other members
of the group will automatically reach out and touch the person in pain.
They feel the woundedness of the mourner as their own; for a brief moment
of communion, the individual's sorrow becomes that of the group. In
that dilution, the grief, no longer confined to the one but shared among
the many, becomes bearable; healing begins.
The reality of this losing of oneself in others is unmistakable when
it occurs in ordinary life. In the course of a conversation, you will
often notice that the person you are talking to is only 'half listening'.
Even as you are speaking, they are phrasing their reply. Watch the difference
when someone really listens, totally absorbed and self-forgotten as
they focus on your story. In situations where grief is involved, this
kind of loving listening is the genesis of trust. When it is present,
it can make the plainest face beautiful.
American psychologist W. Scott Peck in his book The Different Drum,
discusses the mechanism by which a sense of community evolves among
a group of initially separate and ego-centered individuals. I can speak
from my own experience here and affirm / Page 249 / that group awareness
can indeed be forged from the reality of shared experience and that
the awareness so created seems, in some hard-to-define way, greater
than the sum of its parts. One of the most hopeful signs of change
in the egoic structure of Western man is the rapid proliferation of
groups dedicated to exploring personal rela-tionships in a communal
setting. As is inevitably the case with any 'new' movement, the structure
of many of these groups is becoming heavily overlaid with, and corrupted
by, a lotof 'New Age' baggage, belief in crystals, tarot, astrology.
However, the original impulse was healthy, oriented as it was to communion,
not self.
Thus the collective reality of pooled human consciousness (not separate
as in ego, but together as in true communion) is one and indivisible.
One cannot cause pain to another without causing pain to oneself. In
John Donne's famous words:
"No man is an island, entire
of itself." every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind,'
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for
thee
The measure of our failure to understand
this is the measure of our immaturity as a species.
I and all creatures
are one
Modem molecular biology has shown that all forms of life on earth
use a common genetic language. In this sense, a truly deep unity underpins
the surface diversity of life. Evolution demonstrates beyond doubt that
all forms of life on earth are related, sharing as they do, a common
ancestry. Thus the growing number of organisa- tions dedicated to animal
welfare and the recognition that other creatures have rights are but
introducing into the Western egoic structure the ancient sense of kinship
that the Sioux Indians knew so well: 'with all beings and all things
we shall be as relatives'.
The idea that the whole complex web of terrestrial life is one coherent
interrelated system has now achieved the status of a respectable scientific
theory in James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was the
Greek Earth Goddess. The Gaia theory points to the fact that the
highly selective conditions which favour most forms of life, e.g. the
concentration of salt in the sea and oxygen in the air etc, have remained
remarkably constant across geological ages in the face of chemical tendencies
which should have brought them to / Page 250 / equilibrium. The Gaia
explanation is that life has collectively created, on a planetary scale,
the sophisticated systems of feedback control that preserve constancy
in the chemistry of its member individuals. The human race is discovering
to its cost that it is impossible to damage anyone element of Gaia without
damaging the whole. Burn coal in Britain and acid rain falls in Norway;
cut down a rainforest in Brazil and the climate of the entire earth
warms. Here is the principle of the preceding section writ plain, in
scientific language.
I and creation are one
In the symbolism of the world's great faiths, the sense ofcommunion
that starts so hesitatingly with sex finds its supreme expression in
a sense of total union with the universe as a whole. 'I and my Father
are one' affirms Christianity. The Atman (the true Self) is the Brahman
(the Supreme Being) says Hinduism. Across the ages, the voices of the
world's mystics have echoed this same deep insight:
I went from God to God,
until they cried from me in me 'O thou I'
Bayazid of Bistun
I=9 went from God=8 to
God=8, until they cried from me=9 in me=9 'O
thou I=9'
The knower and the known are one.
Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood
there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we
are one in-knowledge.Meister Eckhart
When the Ten Thousand things are
viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we
have always been.Sen T'sen
Mahayana Buddhism perhaps makes the most
explicit statement of the 'one in all and all in one' principle
when it says, 'When the one is set against all the others, the one
is seen as pervading them all and at the same time embracing them all
in itself. However, it is Hinduism which captures the essence of
this total sense of unity when it says, simply, 'Thou art that'.
It might seem that ultimate union, such as is encoded in these religious
insights, can have no scientific underpinning. That is fundamentally
false. We have already seen (chapter 10) how quan-tum physics vindicates
the insight of Meister Eckhart, 'the knower and the known are one'.
This principle, at the deepest level, holds / Page 251 / true in all
areas of reality. We can see why by going back to the ill Genesis
event, the Big Bang, and tracing a forward path to now.
Let us start with the just-born expanding seed of spacetime. As it expanded,
it cooled. A few minutes after Genesis, its temperature had dropped
enough to allow the first atoms to be created. Those atoms, by a large
margin, were hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen is the simplest atom in the periodic
table of the elements. It is the raw material of all subsequent evolution,
the groundstuff of creation. Its significance has been beautifully summed
up by the Canadian zoologist N. J. Berrill, who said:
If you listen intently, you can hear the universe singing its song
of hydrogen, the first and sustained note in the melody of creation.
There are trillions of hydrogen atoms in our own bodies. Thus the texture
of our bodies and brains - part of our very being - is still
continuous with an event that took place at the dawn of creation. We
are still part of that 'great silent fire at the beginning of time',
to use Brian Swimme's evocative phrase.
Hydrogen is the start of the evolutionary journey. In a typical star
like the sun, hydrogen is burned to helium, the next highest element.
This is the pattern: as the fires inside stars get hotter, as the furnaces
of creation glow more brightly, ever more complex elements can be created
- carbon, oxygen, iron etc. Our bodies are made of star-ash.
We are children of the stars. When we look at the night sky
with its far-off lights, when we feel an aching longing for we know
not what, we are remembering. The 'now' us is speaking to the
'then' us, each knowing the other in some dim way, below words.
these bones, this hand star-ash
brain molten with Genesis heat -
this quiet thought, that raging fire
This is the message of modem cosmology.
All parts of the cosmos, including ourselves, are deeply interconnected,
flawlessly interwoven, one wholesome unity. Increasingly science
is coming to see that in order to explain anything, you have
to explain everything.
All this seems to have led us a long way from the issue of happiness
to which this chapter is dedicated. In fact, it has not, we have been
/Page 252 / approaching the question 'how can I be happy?' from the
only perspective in which it makes sense, the cosmic perspective.
In the above section, I tried to show how each human individual can
connect to beings and objects around him, starting with another human
being, a sexual partner, and ending with the totality of all, the universe.
Through these successive communions, one rule, one basic premise, has
always held true. Each act of union lessens the boundary between
self and other. This is the absolute, and final criterion by which
all action can be measured and judged.
To give these lessenings of self some human reality, I must bring them
back from the abstract into the realm of 'everyday life' and ordinary
experience. So, let us retrace the sequence which succes-sively links
the individual with a sexual partner, then with humanity as a whole,
then wiith life as a whole, then with the cosmos as a whole, looking
at each link in the chain from the standpoint of the 'happi-ness' it
generates.
Start once again with sex. The happiness that comes from sexual love
needs no elaboration. It is part of the weft and web of all adult human
experience. In the physical and emotional coupling of male and
female the 'I' sense falters; the boundary between self
and other weakens. Sexual union also involves a release from tension,
it engenders a drowsy contentedness, a sense of peace. This is, in part,
the warm inner glow of satisfied appetite-but only in part.
The happiness that comes from non-sexual communion is also a fact of
human life. We all have friends whom we can truly say we 'love' even
though the drive towards physical consummation is absent. If we analyse
our feelings towards these 'special people', we always find that the
source of the attraction is something which fits the self / other rule:
a shared interest, a feeling of trust, i.e. of being able to expose
our vulnerability without being hurt.
The feeling of union between man and nature takes us into what, at first
sight, seems unfamiliar territory. 'Nature and I are one'. Yet,
this urge to 'commune with nature' is precisely what drives people to
picnic in the country, to go on walks through the bush, to climb mountains
and watch sunsets. Each of us can think back to some special moment
when the feeling of peace that comes from being alone in a wilderness
setting gave us a sense of being 'at one' with the environment.
At first sight, the drive to 'commune with nature' seems at odds with
our drive to commune with our fellow humans. Most of us from /
Page 253 / time to time feel the need, not to relate to our fellow humans
but to get away from them, to have our 'forty days in the wilderness'.
We think of this yearning as a desire to be 'alone' and yet, in the
wilderness, we are not alone. We have the companionship of life in all
its richness and variety. We return whence we came, to find silence
in the 'still centre', so that we may renew ourselves at the deep roots
of our life.
Many of us have a particular love of the ocean. The sight of endless
acres of blue, interrupted perhaps by tossing caps of white foam, seems
to capture our longing for transcendence as few other visions can. In
its vastness, the sea is a metaphor for infinity and in the ceaseless
surging of its breakers, ever arising and ever dying, a simile for the
shortness of life. The ocean recalls our origins. Far back in the remote
deeps of time, our prehuman selves slumbered, quickened but not yet
conscious, in the salt waters which are 'remembered' to this day in
the chemical composition of our blood.
Am I lapsing into metaphor here? Yes and no. It is not simply that the
crossopterygian fish that swam in the ancient seas were our lineal ancestors.
Rather, in a perfectly factual sense, we existed then in these creatures
just as the more-than-human consciousness we shall become already exists
in us now. So it goes throughout the whole scale of deep time. The process
of genetic evolution which led from microbe to man is seamless and unbroken.
The process of chemical evolution which led from the simplest element,
hydrogen, to the more complex elements is seamless and unbroken. We
would not be here if they were not. Most of us, if asked our age,
would say 'I am fifteen years old', or 'thirty years old' or 'sixty-four
years old', etc. The truthful answer is I am fifteen thousand million
years old'.
Many intelligent people still cannot make this jump in under- standing.
A man of forty-five, for example, will readily admit that he, in some
sense, existed in the boy he was at thirteen, just as he will still
exist in the person he will be at sixty. He admits this even though
his actual memory of his past forty-five years is unconscious, something
he can summon forth only at intervals, not necessarily in sequence and
usually in highly incomplete form. However, he will baulk at acknowledging
the oneness of his being with any of his ancestors, human or prehuman,
because he cannot remember them at will.
Part of his difficulty here is the feeling of discontinuity that birth
creates. Birth seems like a break in the thread of being-but is it?
Page 254 / Suppose that our forty-five-year-old man is asked to track
the worldline of his life backwards in imagination, successively strip-ping
his brain of its stored layers of memory (remembered or not remembered).
For most of the time, in each year of his relived past, he will be able
to recall something, some image, of what he will insist is him as he
was at that stage of his life. When he gets back to his first year he
will, most likely, not be able to summon forth any memory. He will,
almost certainly not be able to recollect any snapshot of life in the
womb. Yet he will still insist that the foetus he once was, was him
despite his total lack of any consciously recallable memories of that
time.
Think carefully about this. Our forty-five-year-old's foetal self is
a valid part of his four-dimensional being but it is much less information-rich,
relatively less being stored in the memory banks of its brain and relatively
more in the memory banks of its genes. From the standpoint of the branch
of science called information theory, genes, like brains, are both recording
devices, ways of remembering. Our forty-five year old's genes came from
two prior sets of genes by direct copying, the male gene set from his
father and the female gene set from his mother. These prior gene sets
remember the physical characteristics and temperamental dispositions
of his parents. As one winds the clock of evolution backwards, across
hundreds of millions of years, these ancestral genetic recording devices
get less information-rich-they remember less. However, all these prior
genes are still part of our forty-five-year-old's lifeline, they
are still part of him. There is no break at any point. 'But',
our stubborn sceptic will say, 'I did not experience events that took
place before my birth, along the time-track of evolution'.
To this I must give the only truthful answer I know. Which is, 'Of course
you did!' You experienced each and every phase of the long journey that
has led from the Big Bang to now - only you were not human in those
earlier 'moments'. Your consciousness was dimmer and less focused
when it stirred in the ancient reptiles whose brains remain to this
day as the core of your own mind. It was dimmer and less focused still
when it slumbered in the mindless cells of the first seas whose oxygen-less
chemistry remains to this day the base of life. You were there,
at every stage. There never was a time when you were not there. The
vital being that is cosmos, aroused and brightened into consciousness
in you, is one process, unbroken, real and ongoing."
THE HE AS IN
SHE THAT IS THEE
THAT IS ME THAT
ISISIS
Page 255
"Boy and man are one being, separated
only by the stage of their growth. Cosmos and man are one being, separated
only by the stage of their growth. The block in our minds comes from
the separation- the sense of being dismembered into unconnected fragments.
The whole thrust of this book has been to try and show how separateness
is anchored in self which is anchored in time. The message of this book,
now clearly revealed, is that separateness is an illusion and the source
of sorrow. In truth, in reality, nothing is separate, everything is
united in the four-dimensional dance of becoming. The one exists in
the all and the all exists in the one. There is no boundary between
self and other. Thou art that.
At the end of our journey, we now approach the final question. How can
we understand, really understand, the inner sensation that reflects
and communicates a state of near-perfect communion with all creation?
The truthful answer is that we cannot. Happiness is too weak and anaemic
a word to capture the rapture that pure conscious- ness knows and is.
To see into the nature of this bliss, at our present level of evolution
and in the midst of our present human limitation, is virtually impossible.
It is like hearing the sound of strange music, some supreme melody whose
joy is the birth of galaxies and whose sadness is the death of suns-but
far off, barely audible, at the farthest limit of our capacity to hear.
Those who have attained something of this bliss, who have experienced
the 'thou art that' state, have
enormous difficulty putting into words that which is beyond the power
of language to convey; thus Whitman, in a poem written with a sense
of the black depths of sickness and advancing age, says movingly:
One effort more, my alter this
bleak sand
that Thou Oh God my life hast lighted
with ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee
light rare untellable, lighting the very light
beyond all signs, descriptions, languages
To 'get inside' this 'cosmic consciousness',
to capture some faint impression of that yet-to-be rapture in ordinary
English, I can only quote a key paragraph from Somerset Maugham's
The Razor's Edge. In this well-known account of a young man's search
for God, the youth in question, Larry, goes to India to study at an
Ashram. After spending some years in prayer and contemplation, he goes
one / Page 256 / morning to a high place in the Himalayan foothills,
to spend his birthday in solitude. Larry describes what happens in his
own words:
I have no descriptive talent, I don't
know the words to paint a picture: I can't tell you so as to make you
see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the
day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the
mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below
me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone
like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world, I'd
never known such exultation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange
sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and travelled up to my head,
and I felt as though I was suddenly released from my body and as pure
spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense
that a knowledge more than human possessed me so that everything that
had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was
explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release
myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should
die,' and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than
forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt?"
HOW GREAT THOU ART MY GOD HOW GREAT
THOU ART
AUM MANI PADME HUMN