Eben Alexander: A Neurosurgeon's Journey through the Afterlife

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander talks about his NDE while he had bacterial meningitis. Dr. Alexander has written about his experience in the remarkable book Proof of Heaven (for other similar books check out the Recommended Books page). The incredible rarity and severity of his illness, which wiped out not only his neocortex but brainstem as well, makes Dr. Alexander's experience a very strong case for the independence of consciousness from the physical structure and functioning of the brain. He explains more in this marvelous talk at the Theosophical Society.



Runs 98 minutes.

Stuart Hameroff and Deepak Chopra

Did Stuart Hameroff just explain what is vibrating when spiritualists have spoken of spirits existing on different vibrations? At 18 minutes he discusses the different resonance frequencies of the microtubules of the brain. I've watched this four times now and I don't fully understand it, but the the different frequencies of the microtubules corresponds to something that has to do with quantum gravity, and that makes it possible to have different worlds (physical, etheric, astral, etc.) all superimposed in the same physical space. A mind vibrating at 80 hz would be aware of one world (ours), while a mind vibrating at 8000 hz would be aware of a different world, and a mind at 80,000 hz would be aware of a different world, but they would all be in the same place, just at different frequencies, and an observer in one would not be aware of any others. The smaller the scale, from our scale to the Planck scale, the lower the energy but the greater the information processing capacity. That means the higher planes described in channeled messages are actually microscopic in size!



Also in this dialogue is a discussion of zombies, near death experiences, reincarnation, and quantum holography. Runs 33 minutes.

Science and the Survival of Consciousness after Death

Dr. Bruce Greyson in a 2010 talk about survival of consciousness. Runs 42 minutes. Some of it seems familiar. Maybe there is overlap with the last presentation, maybe from another interview.

Stuart Hameroff on Quantum Consciousness

Dr. Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist and philosopher, is the co-creator, along with Dr. Roger Penrose, of the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of consciousness. Orch-OR postulates consciousness as a quantum phenomenon located mainly in the microtubules of the brain. As coherent quantum information, consciousness can exist outside the brain, possibly indefinitely, retaining its unique identity, and might even be able to enter a new brain, accounting for reincarnation. Orch-OR may be unique in that it may be the only materialistic explanation for consciousness that can account for survival after death and the effects of psychedelic drugs and intense states of meditation. Dr. Hameroff also proposes an experiment for testing the hypothesis, involving different regimens of anesthetic drugs.



Dr. Hameroff explains the Orch-OR model in greater detail in this one hour interview.

Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?

Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, gives a one hour talk on evidence that consciousness can exist independent of the brain, including deathbed lucidity, patients with little brain tissue, children remembering past lives, and the near death experience.  Followed by questions.



From the Cosmology and Consciousness Conference - Mind and Matter in 2011.

A Tale of Two Rebirths

There are two main versions of the mechanics of reincarnation that I will call "old" and "new" for sake of simplicity.

The old system has been around for thousands of years. While the details differ slightly, it is the system of reincarnation taught primarily by Hindus and Buddhists, but also by some ancient Christian sects and in Judaism until about the fifteenth century. A good outline is provided in an essay by Ken Wilber called "Death, Rebirth, and Meditation". There exists some disagreement as to what survives and how long the whole process takes, but in general rebirth takes between 49 days and 200 years; some say personality and memories do not transmigrate and others do. All the differences are really pretty minor when viewed against the similarities regarding how the mechanism itself works. Human psychology is basically the same as what modern science has shown us. Our fears and addictions carry on with us where we have to deal with them in very real terms. Psychological traumas we suffer in this life must be dealt with in this life or the next, and if we cannot overcome our problems than we will be carried aloft by them into a new rebirth. Some say we meet up with people we've known in this life (or even other past lives) in the between life stage, and that certain souls transmigrate together, and others say we do this all alone, but every action in this life always has an equal reaction in the next. There is no escaping causality, the books must be balanced, full stop. We work through our troubles, gradually perfecting ourselves lifetime after lifetime until we finally break free from suffering all together and abide as Spirit forever.

In the new system, promulgated by certain spiritualist circles and "new age" movements, the whole old system is turned on its head. Rather than beginning in ignorance and spending lifetimes trying to end suffering, in the new system we all begin enlightened and we come to this life to experience suffering. Every soul is enlightened, we come to this world with a sort of willful amnesia, and when we die we are automatically restored to perfect knowledge. The lives we live are games we play with one another, and they don't really mean anything on the other side. When we die there is no balancing of good and bad deeds, because there is no good or bad, as we plan our lives out in minute details from the beginning. People who get raped or murdered make agreements with other souls who will be doing the raping and murdering, so there are no villains and victims, and not because the world is ultimately illusory, but because the world is a game we play for life experience. In the new system souls are basically masochists. You can't really know what something is like until you experience it first hand, so a soul living in perfection might have an idea what suffering is, but it doesn't really know until it experiences it for itself.

Why anyone would want to partake of such experiences I cannot understand. If I were Superman and I knew with absolute certainty I could never get hurt I still wouldn't care to know what it felt like to drive a car into a tree or get shot in the face. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to drown or get exploded. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to live in poverty on the streets, or for that matter what it would be like to live in a mansion eating lobster every day.

The new system is very distasteful and reeks of wish fulfillment. Imagine a group of souls floating around planning their next life together. One soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!" The idea infuriates me, to be honest. I think that's much worse than the materialist idea that when you're dead you're dead and there's no justice. I would much rather live in a universe where life is ultimately meaningless and there is no afterlife than have a universe where the Nazis made an agreement with the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust that the whole thing would be staged just to see what it would be like to gas eleven million people. Admittedly the grotesquery of such a scenario is not evidence that it is not true in itself, but it does not help the case either.

It is also not helped by the types of evidence that are available to support either system. The old system, which recapitulates everything we know from earthly psychology, is attested to through near death experiences that reveal our mental state and personalities are pretty much the same after death as before, and through spontaneously remembered past lives of children that often turn out to be phenomenally accurate when later investigated. Enlightened sages also attest to the veracity of the old system through the remembrance of their past lives.

The primary evidence for the new system is through hypnosis of adults, that sometimes does produce highly accurate results (which could be more akin to a form of remote viewing), but a lot of times these memories are false, crafted by the imagination of the subject and the leading of the hypnotist. The new system is also, sometimes, attested to by channeled material, but by no means all. Some channeled material flatly denies the existence of reincarnation, other spirits admit they don't know, and some affirm the old system. The spirits that talk about group souls, of instant enlightenment following death, of coming to Earth to experience things no sane person would ever want to experience such as disease, disasters, and war, and flat out deny the existence of good and evil, seem to me to be lower spirits. Whether malicious or simply tricksters (like Internet trolls of the spirit world), they will say whatever gets them the most attention, and earthly interlocutors receiving confirmation of their desires pass it along in books that say you can literally create your reality and that morality is for squares. As John admonishes in his first epistle, we are to test the spirits to see if they are of God. Anyone from the other side can say they are advanced spirits with brilliant insight into the workings of the universe, and that is why we must use our reason and intelligence to see if what they say makes sense.

In the light of the evidence and the moral implications I would have to say that if reincarnation does exist it seems far more likely that the old system with a gradual progression from ignorance to perfection is correct.

Richard Rose: Zen and Death

Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind the will bring people around to the "right" direction.
- Richard Rose

Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.

Dr Peter Fenwick on Near Death Experience

Dr Peter Fenwick, renowned neuro-psychiatrist, will discuss his research
on the near-death experience.Dr Peter Fenwick is an internationally
renowned neuropsychiatrist and a Fellow of the Royal College of
Psychiatrists. He is Britain's leading clinical authority on near-death
experiences and is president of the British branch of The International
Association for Near-Death Studies.

Runs 17 Minutes

Exploring the Near Death Experience

Someone called TheSurvivalIndex has put out a 15 minute video detailing the cultural phenomena associated with the NDE. He says three main groups of people form the bulk of the popular presentation on the NDE:
1. Fundamentalist Christians,
2. New Age Haberdashers, and
3. Fundamaterialist Skep-Dicks.
Group 1 latches on to the pro-Fundamentalist Christian NDEs as proof of their beliefs and ignores or even denigrates NDEs that are favourable to other religions or to no religions at all (like atheists who have NDEs that tell them part of their life's mission is to be an atheist). Group 2 extrapolates from the NDE to believe all sorts of stuff that most likely is untrue (Loch Ness Monster, Fairies, Vampires, etc.*) and often tries to profit large offering spurious services to unknowledgable people. Group 3 likes to come up with bullshit just-so stories to explain away the NDE because they are committed to materialism, even when those stories blatantly ignore real facts, are based on illogic, and other fundamaterialists disagree and tear apart opposing stories. All three groups are able to thrive because the general populous doesn't actually read the primary material - actual NDE accounts and the reports of NDE investigators. Even though all three groups are contradicted by the evidence that doesn't bother them because as long as the vast majority of people are ignorant of that evidence they can still come off looking like authority figures.










*I'm not necessarily saying things like the Loch Ness Monster and fairies are not real - they may be - but I have looked into the topics and can't really find any good evidence for them. Loch Ness almost certainly can't support a single large creature, let alone a breeding population. There were biosonar signals detected in Lake Champlain though, indicating that, while not a "monster" there has to be a freshwater equivalent of a cetacean, something that has never before been seen. Things like fairies, gnomes, and other little people stretch my credulity a might, but they may have something to do with some spiritual force, I don't know and am open to the possibility. Vampires, either corpses reanimated by evil spirits (as the original vampires were), people infected with a virus that compells them to drink blood, or these psychic vampires who are real people who claim to drain people's energy in some way they never quite explain, are probably one of the least likely of these "paranormal" phenomena. If vampires reproduce like zombies there should have been a "vampire" apocalypse by now. The vampires in the Blade movies kept changing to suit the story and the Underworld vampires were never really explained very well, so I don't know how they stayed in hiding all these centuries. Psychic vampirism appears to be a lifestyle choice, like hippies or bikers other such groups, and probably aren't vampires at all, although they get happiness from playing a role. There are people who are difficult or depressed or assaholic and drain your energy that way, but there's nothing "paranormal" about that.

Surgeons and the Soul

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander talks about his NDE while he had bacterial meningitis (2 videos, 9 minutes total).





Cardiac surgeon Lloyd Rudy tells two stories about his patients NDEs and what they brought back (12 1/2 minutes). One man comes back after twenty minutes with no heart beat with veridical perceptions of the operation.

Two Happy Stories

These two stories have been in the stack for months. What with the world going mad and all I've dug deep into the stack to find two stories that are not depressing (I was originally going to do something on income tax).



The first story comes from The Seattle Times, October 2010. A man from Ballard (which I assume is a neighborhood in Seattle), Kenny Johnson, was pulling out of his driveway when he witnessed a car accident. No one went to help the people trapped inside the burning car, a man and his daughter. Kenny went in the car and pulled the two to safety because he's a real hero (not an anti-hero or a tv hero or someone out for revenge). The girl, three year old Anna Kotowicz, survived with relatively unharmed. Her father, 37 year old Andy Kotowicz, died in the hospital three days later.



Several days later Kenny was sleeping beside his wife when, in the hours known as wee, a man appeared in the room standing over him. It was Andy, and he had a message for Kenny to deliver to his wife and daughter, and another message to give to his co-workers. He would go on to deliver the messages, which were well recieved.



The second story comes from HotAir.com, 19 November 2010. The story recounts events from three years ago, when then four year old Colton Burpo was in surgery for a burst appendix. During the operation he had a perfect example of a Near Death Experience, seeing what his parents were doing while outside his body. These veridical perceptions were accurate and represent knowledge Colton could not have gained had he not really witnessed his parents from outside his body.



Colton later visited Heaven where he met his grandfather, whom he had never known, as a young man. He was later able to identify his grandfather in a photograph that his father had to go searching for. Colton also met with his sister, who had died before she was born. His parents had not told him of the miscariage, and were quite surprised by their son's knowledge.



The author of the second story needs to take a few more lessons in journalism (a lot more), but otherwise, another wonderful and uplifting story for us during these very troubling times.

Near Death Conference

You, my valued couple of readers have probably seen this before. It has been sitting in my pit of perpetual ignorance (TM) for two and a half years, waiting for me to find the time to edit another page of The L (page S05, which will be a day late), while listening to the wonderful presentation. Dr Bruce Greyson gives a presentation on NDEs at the IANDS Near Death Experience Durham NC Conference in October 2008. The presentation mentions the difference between prospective and retrospective studies, briefly mentions the AWARE study (that had just begun at the time), and mentioned in passing mediumship, OBEs, apparitions, why temporal lobe seisures can't account for NDEs, and a whole bunch of other things. The video is pocked-sized, so you will gain nothing extra by watching instead of just listening, except a cute cartoon of snow people. Listening is highly recommended, even if you have listened to it before. Run time just over one hour.

Beyond and Back

Sunday Night I watched a show on the Biography Channel called I Survived... Beyond and Back. The official website describes it as follows:



"I Survived... Beyond and Back reveals one of life's greatest mysteries by profiling the extraordinary stories of people who have literally passed on to the other side. The series combines the compelling and emotionally gripping stories of I Survived... with the unexplainable experiences some people... "



I read about it from comments on Michael Prescott's Blog. After two hours I have a really mixed reaction. The parts that I like I really like, and the parts that I dislike I really dislike.



To start off, the show opens with a juvenile, ghoulish, really cheesy neon green slime covering the original I Survived... opening screen, and from this slime drips the words "Beyond and Back" like ooh, it's spooky or something. Already I'm wondering if I'm supposed to take this program seriously or not with an opening straight out of a second grade class' Halloween special.



The program features three different people telling stories of the day they died, what killed them, what they saw on the other side, how they came back, and how their life has changed afterward. This is wonderful. The world needs at least nine more programs like this where people tell of their death experiences. It is uplifting and magnificent and the people are treated with great respect and no one tries to debunk anything. Their first hand accounts are presented of their experiences along with the experiences of the people who helped revive them, and that's it. There is no armchair commentator, just people telling their own stories. This is raw data, and I love data, completely unsullied by intellectualism of any kind.



The bad part is that all three stories are told simultaneously. Each person will tell a little bit of their story, then the program cuts to the next person and the next, then there's a commercial. After the commercial the people resume their stories in the same order. When the stories resume there's a brief recap of what was said, something that would be completely unnecessary if each person could tell their story in its entirety without being cut off. There are four commercial breaks per hour show, so there's a whole lot of repetition, just like in Buddhist stories, only not to drill the point home but to remind the viewer what just happened because the format sucks. The show is made very confusing and roughly half an hour of material is padded into a full hour show It is difficult to really get into any one story when in ADD fashion they're presented in little bites.



When each person dies theire's a neon green EKG thing that beeps a couple of times then goes flat. Periodically throughout each person's story there's a little thing that reads:



♥Heart Stopped

0:00



It ticks for three or four seconds, making a very annoying and strange tolling sound every second. This sound is probably the worst part of the show. They couldn't have used any of the many more obvious sounds to mark the passage of each second, a tick, a beep, no, they use the most bizarre and annoying sound possible. All the while the story does not progress until the timer disappears.



The people tell their stories of what they saw on the other side, some accounts are very short (the shortest I recall was just over 3 minutes) and some are almost an hour (57 minutes was the longest). Meanwhile the people who are with their physical body tells the story of how they try to revive them.



When the people are revived the EKG thing reappears, their heart beating again. They then tell how their life has changed, and boy howdy has it ever. They are more loving, jovial, compassionate people who appreciate life more. They also have to readapt to life on earth. This part too is wonderful.



What Beyond and Back is is not a typical NDE program, it is a NDE program with Hollywood flair added and cheap special effects to capture an audience with a three second attention span. However, it is not a debunking program but is instead sympathetic to these people's experiences and for that I am greatful. Overall I will continue to watch Beyond and Back, at least for awhile. I recommend the program to you, my valued couple of readers and invite you to make up your own minds.



-Dee