SCIENCE: THE NEW RELIGION

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."

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 LeCat 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."

"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."

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. "

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."

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."

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."

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?"