Men fear Death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
—Francis Bacon, “Of Death”
According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is no way I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.
—Dr. Eben Alexander, Newsweek, Oct. 9, 2012
If the Grid is real, then could death simply be traveling to another level?
Have you heard the remarkable story of James Leininger? James was a two-year-old boy living a normal life in Lafayette, Louisiana. James was like most kids his age—carefree and playful. Except that over the course of the next four years, he recalled detailed memories of a past lifetime as an American fighter pilot who died in combat over Iwo Jima during World War II. Incredibly, James had innate and intimate knowledge of World War II-specific airplanes, as well as recall of historical details and facts far beyond what any six-year-old could possibly have.
Thousands of such stories exist, many documented in books and on TV shows, of children who are able to remember events, people, and places that existed in a time before they were ever born. Are these children time travelers, or are they actually recalling, perhaps on a cellular level, memories of their past?
Reincarnation research is considered a branch of parapsychology and is generally shunned by mainstream science. But serious researchers such as psychiatrists Ian Stevenson and Jim B. Tucker have examined more than 2,500 case studies of children who claim to remember a past life. Stevenson, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, worked over forty years to document such cases and wrote a number of books about his findings, including Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Stevenson's work was then taken up by psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker, who wrote Life before Life when Stevenson retired. They also published many peer-reviewed papers about their findings with children between the ages of three and seven all over the world who seemed to be able to recall stunning details about past lives in terms of locations, deceased people, and specific events. Often the children would even remember how they died, usually violently or traumatically. Stevenson also examined birthmarks and birth defects that he claimed, in approximately 35 percent of the cases, matched the manner of injuries or illnesses that led to the death of the person each child claimed to have been in the past.
After the age of seven, such memories seem to dissipate, which interestingly corresponds to a shift from the delta brain waves of infancy to the more sophisticated theta and alpha brain waves children operate in up until age twelve. Between the ages of two and six, theta brain waves develop and increase. These brain waves are associated with imagination and creativity. At this time alpha waves are also becoming more prominent, which are receptive, passive, and relaxed yet alert, also conducive to daydreams and a light hypnotic state. Then, around age twelve, children begin to operate primarily in the “wake state” of beta waves, and perhaps once the child's brain matures to this more functional state, the connective links to the past begin to vanish as new memories and experiences are imprinted upon the gray matter. Now one could say that this early stage is proof of the power of a good imagination, but we all know that even a good imagination cannot create factual, provable details that a child would have no access to. Maybe the brain wave differences over age discern who can better walk which levels of the Grid . . . and who cannot (see chapter 5!).
Other scientific researchers have studied the same phenomena, refusing to just pass off these childhood memories as overactive imaginations and anomalies of memory areas of the brain. No, these children were recalling things they could never have seen or experienced, and at a time in their lives when even fantasy and attention seeking and suggestibility could not cause such amazing detail.
We know that the brain does not survive death, so how could a child recall memories of a time before he was born? Perhaps the early brain has access to the field of all information that we call the Grid. And perhaps the concept of death as finality is not at all what death really is. We believe that death is more of a transition, not an ending, like turning the pages of a book from one page to the next.
In 2008, Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander contracted an extremely rare form of bacterial meningitis that quickly spread to his neocortex, the area of the brain that primarily handles sensory perception and conscious thought. For seven days, Alexander lay in a deep coma. For all intents and purposes, Alexander remained “brain dead” throughout this period. But that is only how it appeared on the surface. During the course of the coma, Alexander describes how he “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension I'd never dreamed existed.” There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep, black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings . . . quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet.”
Alexander has extremely vivid recall of the entire experience and remembers meeting a young woman with high cheekbones, deep-blue eyes, and “golden brown tresses” who, along with “millions” of butterflies, spoke to him telepathically . . . seemingly “without using any words.”
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” she told the doctor. “You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” Alexander recounts his story in graphic and vivid detail, despite the fact that the portions of his brain responsible for visual imagery, cognitive thought, and memory were effectively shut down.
Did Eban Alexander visit heaven, or was he walking another part of the Grid, as real and alive as he was on the level he left behind, even if only temporarily?
Near-death experiences are often passed off as neurological anomalies, but more and more neurologists and scientists are wondering why they are so hard to explain and brush away as simply existing within the confines of normal brain activity. Take the case of Atlanta singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds, whose story has been documented by the BCC and Mario Beauregard in his book Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives. An associate research professor at the Departments of Psychology and Radiology and the Neuroscience Research Center at the University of Montreal, Beauregard examines Reynolds's experience after she suffered from a dangerous aneurysm close to her brain stem. It was deemed too dangerous to do even standard surgery, but if the aneurysm burst, she would die. So she opted for a daring surgical procedure called Operation Standstill offered by neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Spetzler in Phoenix, Arizona.
The procedure would bring Reynolds's body temperature down to a point where she was essentially dead so that her brain would not function, but would survive. The extremely low temperature would allow the swollen blood vessels to soften up and then be operated on with less risk of them bursting. Once complete, the surgical team would return her body to a normal temperature, hopefully before any damage could be done.
During the process, she had what is now considered one of the most famous out-of-body experiences ever to be corroborated by other witnesses. As a team of about twenty doctors, nurses, and technicians conducted the operation on Reynolds, even taping her eyes shut and securing her ears with gauze and tape, Speltzer began to cut through her brain with a surgical saw. As things progressed, despite having no sense of sight or hearing, Reynolds was later able to describe her observations, including how they had shaved her head and the Midas Rex bone saw, which she could not have actually “seen.” She was even later able to repeat actual sentences spoken by the team when things went wrong, as when it was determined her arteries were too small on one side of her groin.
At one point, Reynolds's EEG brain waves completely flattened and her heart stopped. Her brain stem became unresponsive, and eventually the team drained her body of blood, pronouncing her clinically dead. That's when Reynolds's OBE turned into a classic NDE and she began having the widely reported visions of the light at the end of the tunnel and seeing dead relatives and friends, including her grandmother, waiting for her. She entered a brilliant and loving light and then was suddenly plunged back into her body when the operating team snipped the aneurysm, turned the bypass machine back on, and began pumping warm blood back into her body, thus bringing her out of death and back into life.
Two hours later, Reynolds was in the recovery room.
She had experienced both the sensation of leaving her physical sense and seeing and hearing things she in no way could have, and then, when she was clinically dead, entering the realm of the near-death experiencer until she was once again fully restored to the living. She walked the Grid, proving to her medical team that these life-changing experiences are absolutely real and defy all logic. How could she, with her eyes and ears sealed, know what was happening and recite later word for word what was spoken? Why did she, like millions of others’ experiences documented all over the world, enter into an amazing experience with common themes upon her death and then come back to tell about it, thus corroborating the work of people like American psychiatrist Raymond Moody in his book Life after Life, and hundreds of books and studies to follow?
So, what happens after we die? The only clues we have come from those who have died and lived to tell about it.
James and Eben and even Pam Reynolds aren't alone. Every year, thousands of other unique experiences are reported throughout the world by people who all seem to share the same uncanny ability to recall locations, languages, and memories—in vivid detail—of experiences they have never experienced (at least in their current lifetimes). These details often include the same exact process: Seeing a dark tunnel and traveling through it to be met by loved ones, as a bright and loving light envelops you in total goodness or safety. There is a sense of being told to go back and finish what you started; you cannot “die”; then you are sent back through the tunnel, often in a more violent and brusque manner than the way you came in.
Could our brains simply be imagining these images and themes, all a series of simple neural actions designed to make death easier, or is it just a total coincidence? Or are these glimpses into other levels of a multiverse that tells us we will never die or lose our loved ones and that we have a purpose?
In the October 14, 2012, edition of Psychology Today, Alex Lickerman writes about the work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who has conducted more than 2,500 case studies over forty years on children who allegedly recall past-life memories. Lickerman reports:
He [Stevenson] methodically documented each child's statements and then identified the deceased person the child identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person's life that matched the child's memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs. While skeptics have argued his reports provide only anecdotal evidence, his data does seem to demand explanation.
Over the last few decades, more and more of these experiences have involved corroboration, as did Pam Reynolds's time in the operating room.
In Brain Wars, Mario Beauregard offers another tantalizing story of a woman named Maria who suffered cardiac arrest and was able to look down on herself and the medical team as she lay on the examining table. She even traveled outside the hospital somehow and saw a tennis shoe on the third floor ledge of the north side of the building. Once she was revived, Maria described the shoe and its location in detail to her critical-care social worker, Kimberly Clark, who found it exactly as Maria had described it. Clark stated that there was no possible way Maria could have ever discerned the shoe without the ability to literally float outside at very close range.
These OBEs and NDEs even happen to blind people, thus proving that the brain does not within its limited constructs hold all of the ability to “see” something. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper worked with the blind and found that their NDEs were classic and that they transcended the ability of physical sight. They called this mode of perception “mindsight.” Perhaps mindsight allows us to experience the visual aspects of the other levels of the Grid that normally remain outside the abilities of our eyes and brains alone.
Skeptics often claim that these experiences are caused when parts of the brain are compromised, like in the case of the “dying brain” theory, where a lack of oxygen during the dying process may fire off the neurons responsible for visions. But those involved intensely in NDE research counter that if this were the case, every patient who experienced a loss of oxygen would have an NDE, which is not the case. Also, this does not explain the fact that many of the near-death experiencers did not have low oxygen levels at the time of their experience. Normal levels of oxygen were present in the brain at the time, so another factor had to have been present.
Are these just wishful hallucinations? Are they collective visions that are passed on via the media, movies, and books? When we die, or come close to it, do we just automatically expect to see a tunnel and our dead relatives? It is possible, but highly improbable.
What is fascinating, though, is how the patients who come out of an NDE feel afterward—enlightened, empowered, and with a new lease on life. Many have reported having the stark realization that everything is connected and everything matters. They got a vision of the totality of reality and brought it back home to transform their lives with a new understanding of life, death, and what it means to be human.
Indeed, the phenomena of NDEs and OBEs demand an explanation. Experiences such as these also raise the interesting (and quite controversial) question that probably haunts us more than any other: Is death truly the end of our time with our loved ones? Or is it merely the beginning, a rebirth of sorts? Will our souls reconnect along the Grid with other souls we've come to know and love on this level of the Grid?
Regardless of your religious ideology, the question of “what happens next?” is a universal one. Even the most devoutly religious feel the doubt and fear that perhaps their beliefs were wrong, or misinterpreted, upon the moment of death. Yet many cultures celebrate death not so much as an ending, but as a passing over from one world to another, one level to another.
What if we were to look beyond the religious views and dogma of heaven and hell and apply real, testable, scientific principles to help answer this essential question?
The concept of rebirth, or reincarnation, has scientific underpinnings that could make it a legitimate possibility. Surprisingly, science (and not simply religious belief) may be used to help ease our apprehension and fear of death.
First, let's have a quick science lesson. From our knowledge of classical Newtonian science, we know that energy exists in many different forms (heat, light, electrical, chemical, etc.). Electrochemical processes govern our primary biological processes.
When we eat, the chewing process utilizes mechanical energy. Swallowing then utilizes gravitational and muscular energy. As the body then begins to digest our food, it does so using chemical and mechanical energy. Our bodies utilize sugar for energy and generate energy from the digested proteins and fats. Our nerves carry electrical impulses to the brain. Our brains mediate motor (muscular) control via electrical impulses that travel to the muscles, exciting them and causing a reaction.
Scientists have identified four distinct “laws” of thermodynamics that define fundamental physical quantities (temperature, energy, and entropy) that can be used to describe all thermodynamic systems. These laws are used to describe how these quantities behave in different circumstances. For the purposes of this discussion, we are only concerned with the first two laws.
The first law of thermodynamics (conservation) states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed; however, it can change form and move from one area to another. According to this law of nature, the total amount of energy and matter in the universe remains constant. In other words, all of the energy that ever was, is, or will ever be already exists—it merely changes form from one type to another.
The second law of thermodynamics states that in all energy exchanges, the potential energy of the state will always be less than the initial state unless energy enters or leaves the system. This concept is commonly referred to as “entropy.” Think of the last time you ran out of gas in your car. Unless you called roadside assistance, the car would not run again until you walked to a gas station and refueled your ride. Once the potential energy from the gasoline is converted to kinetic energy (energy in motion), the mechanism (or organism) will get no more energy until it is input again. That would be a classic example of entropy in action.
Let's go back to entropy for a second. Entropy is actually a measure of disorder. When applied to the human organism, entropy wins when the cells cease to take in energy and subsequently die. But “die” is merely a subjective term, as the energy that comprises the human system would actually transfer to another type of energy upon death of the physical structure. Just because the physical body seems to perish in one form does not mean it is vanishing entirely from the system itself; it may in fact be transferring form to another system, just as physical law dictates.
The concept of “recycling” comes to mind. Perhaps nature's “recycling” of energy might help to explain the thousands of reports similar to James Leininger's, the little boy at the beginning of this chapter who recounted his past lives from a very young age. What if our energy simply recycles upon physical death of the human organism? This introduces a whole different set of logistical issues—mainly “who” we are, and what part of “us” might get recycled. We know that the body returns to the earth, but what of the soul, the spirit, consciousness, and essence?
Dr. Alex Lickerman from Psychology Today reflects:
Given what we now know about the enormous size and power of the unconscious—about just how much of “us” lies beneath the surface of our conscious minds—we have to admit that the defining core of who we are may in fact be located mostly, if not entirely, beneath our awareness (our conscious minds being mostly spectators and interpreters of our unconscious selves).
For many, this might be a difficult pill to swallow. While Buddhists believe that the concept of self is actually an illusion created and perpetuated by many variables and factors (both internal and external), most other religious seem to be a bit more ambiguous. Western traditions focus more on the body as well as the spirit, often giving the body characteristics of being less important and more primal and mundane, even “sinful” and capable of sin, while the spirit has the ability to transcend the limitations of the body and move away from primal urges. But we know that the self is more than the body, or the spirit, or the mind; it is a combination of all three, and perhaps then some, as in the idea that we are a piece of a larger puzzle, one with it, yet separate from it enough to have what we deem our own experience of it.
If we aren't even sure what actually defines us as an individual (the “who”), then how would one's “self”—one's memories, beliefs, and experiences—even factor into the equation? Is the concept of “self” a measurable form of energy? What makes each of us an individual? According to ancient Egyptians, the “soul” was found in the heart, and tomb pictures from around the year 2000 BCE show the god Anubis weighing the soul-laden heart against the feather of truth. This iconic imagery certainly makes one ponder the knowledge that this supposedly “primitive” civilization may have had.
Fast-forward to 1515, and Leonardo da Vinci had a slightly different idea. Da Vinci believed that the soul was contained within the brain, and when he attempted to find the soul by dissecting the brain he was soon after denounced by many as a sorcerer.
In the modern era, many believe that the soul is distinct from the cognitive areas of the brain. Interestingly, in 1907 an American doctor by the name of Duncan MacDougall conducted experiments where he measured the change in weight of patients who were dying of tuberculosis. MacDougall's research (which to this day remains highly controversial) determined that the body lost twenty-one grams immediately upon physical death. MacDougall hypothesized that this weight loss was the result of the soul leaving the body.
A more intriguing, and modern, look at the soul and how it may relate to near-death experiences comes to us from the world of quantum physics. Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Emeritus Professor in the Psychology and Anesthesiology Departments and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, proposed a theory with British physicist Sir Roger Penrose based on a “quantum theory of consciousness.” By looking at the effects of quantum gravity in microtubules in brain cells, they posited in October 2012 that consciousness may be a program for a quantum computer in the brain that can persist as a part of the universe long after death. This idea mirrors the concept of the field or the Grid as a repository for all energy, form, thought, and action and that what comes from the Grid returns to it upon death. It also mirrors Buddhist and Hindu concepts of consciousness as a part of the universe itself, not separate from it.
Hameroff and Penrose go on to state in their theory, which they call orchestrated objective reduction, or Orch-OR, that we have a soul that is more than just brain activity or the interaction of specific neurons. The soul is a part of the greater fabric of the universe itself, and may even have been around since the beginning of time. This is a stunning admission from two quantum physicists, and more proof that the behavior of reality at the subatomic level is quite different from its behavior on the more visible, grander scale. Yet it gives us amazing insight and clues into the hidden infrastructure that all of reality is a part of.
Hameroff told the Science Channel's Through the Wormhole that even if the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing in the body, these microtubules, which are a component of our cellular infrastructure in the brain, lose their quantum state, but “the quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed; it can't be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.” Remember those laws of thermodynamics that describe the inability to destroy energy?
Once a person is resuscitated, Hameroff continues, the quantum information simply goes back into the microtubules and can even give the patient a near-death experience, because, in fact, a part of the person did indeed go beyond the confines of physical death. If the patient is not revived, and thus really “dies,” that information will exist outside of the person's body as their “soul.”
This amazing and controversial concept is not without its skeptics and detractors, but the scientific community is being forced each and every day to move beyond its limited and empirical views of reality and death and examine the possibility that there really is no such thing as finality to consciousness, to the soul, even though the body itself may not live forever.
Information as energy is the key, as per the holographic view of the brain, where memory and consciousness may be stored outside of the brain and projected upon it from another dimension or source, perhaps the Grid itself. In terms of life beyond death and the survival of consciousness, information, then, might act upon the brain and can exist with or without it, before and after life, simply as a transfer of energy within the system to a different type of energy, or a transfer out of the system into another completely different system.
Death, then, becomes something akin to being in a theater multiplex, where one movie comes to an end and the crowd either goes home or sneaks into another theater to see another movie being projected onto the screen. Different movie, but same multiplex. Different energy, but same system. Or, if you choose to go home and watch TV, different energy, different system. Yes, this is an extreme simplification, but the imagery provides an easy-to-understand illustration of the fact that just because something comes to an end does not mean the whole show is over.
Remember our discussion of Karl Pribram, PhD, champion of the holographic brain theory? He posited that the brain implements holonomic transformations that distribute episodic information over regions of the brain, and later “refocuses” them into a form in which we remember. This process occurs on an implicate order (recall David Bohm) in which information is spread out and distributed in a holographic sense. There is, then, a distinct relationship between our perception of “reality” and this process that occurs in the hidden order of reality. This, he points out, is different from the mental processes of thinking, seeing, hearing, and giving our attention to something. Mind may or may not exist, then, depending on exactly how we define mind.
The age-old battle to determine whether the brain and the mind are one and the same, and whether mind/consciousness can outlive physical death, continues, but the more we understand about the brain, the stranger it seems. We know even less about how our consciousness relates to the brain. So to say that we have any kind of proof at all that one exists without the other is impossible, except for subjective, personal experiences of life beyond brain death, and those are getting harder and harder to sweep under the rug—especially when they happen to the very scientists who were once skeptical themselves.
Knowing that we all come from the same thing we return to, and that we are connected, always, via the hidden levels of reality, should make us realize just how precious we are to one another, and how everything we do influences the world around us, like a ripple in a pond, traveling ever outward and changing the pond itself. Yet how often do we treat life as if it's a throwaway, and each other as if we are expendable? It's easy to lose sight of the importance of that deeper connectivity while we are making sure our egos are intact and that we look out for number one.
More than any other experience, death changes us. It removes the physicality we have been bound to in this life and releases a part of us that no sage has yet been able to prove and no scientist has been able to disprove. No matter how complex our brains and bodies are, they do not survive this transition of our core energy, the “information” that is you and me and him and her. That information reenters the field, the sea of quantum possibility and pure potentiality. Nothingness. Until it's time to become something altogether new and different and travel to another level of perceptions and sensations and experiences again.
Death, and what comes before and after it, is simply another floor in the skyscraper, another level of experience and reality, or perhaps even more accurately, the doorway to another level of the Grid.