Chapter 17
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REVIEW (origin: French “reveue” (now “revue”), from “revoir,” from “re-“ and “voir”): A general survey or reconsideration of some subject or thing (frequently in “in review,” “under review”); a retrospect, a survey of the past.—Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “review”
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Before moving on, let’s do a quick review of what we’ve covered so far. We began by facing up to what’s probably the most profound problem of life once you’ve adequately handled basic issues of physical survival and social relationships, namely, questions about our real spiritual nature, and we looked at some of the difficulties we moderns face in trying to deal with such questions. Although all ancient traditions see us as basically spiritual creatures, and some current psychological work reveals the great importance of spirituality in life—people who belong to a church tend to live longer, for example—we’re conflicted about it and have a hard time putting consistent energy into spiritual practice, for science apparently tells us that there’s nothing but material reality. Ideas of the spiritual are superstitions and delusions from earlier times, perhaps needed by the dumb and cowardly who can’t face reality, but certainly not by intelligent, educated modern people. Because we like to be considered intelligent, educated, and modern, and since science has been so enormously successful in so many other areas of life, we can’t help but take this objection to spirituality quite seriously. That’s just at a conscious level. Semiconsciously and unconsciously, we’ve all been subjected to great amounts of belittlement of spirituality by scientists and other prestigious thinkers, so there’s unconscious, as well as conscious, resistance to spirituality and the emotional issues around it.
So here we are, spiritual creatures in historical and experiential senses—people do have spiritual experiences, whether they’re considered nonsense or not—who doubt, suppress, ridicule, and “explain away” many of our own deepest experiences.
With deeper inquiry into essential scientific method, we saw that the problem is not a conflict between science per se and spirituality, but between scientism and spirituality. Scientism, attached to the enormous success of the physical sciences, presumes a philosophy of total, materialistic monism. Everything can and will be fully explained by studying space, time, matter, and energy with physical instruments, and we can dismiss the spiritual a priori without wasting our time by looking at it seriously.
Essential, genuine science, radical empiricism, insists, though, that we look at all data, all experience, not just those things that make us happy because they fit the beliefs and theories we’ve already adopted. People have always had and keep right on having experiences that simply do not fit into current materialistic frameworks or reasonable extensions of them. My coup d’état experience, described in chapter 4, exemplified such experiences, as did other accounts in this book, and the interested reader can find literally thousands and thousands of such experiences from intelligent, educated people. My TASTE website, The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences (www.issc-taste.org), for example, describes many such experiences that living scientists have had.
When we apply the methods of essential science to look at these kinds of experiences, which are ignored in materialistic scientism, we discover paraconceptual phenomena, paranormal phenomena as they’re usually called, apparent transcendences of the usual limitations of space and time that happen to so many ordinary people that the “normal” in paranormal is actually misleading. If what happens to a majority of people is “normal,” then those who haven’t personally had some sort of paranormal experience are not up to normal; they’re subnormal or abnormal.
When we look at paraconceptual phenomena in detail, in the science of parapsychology we find, grouped for convenience, two categories. Group one, the big five —telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing—are psi phenomena whose existence is supported by hundreds of rigorous experiments for each phenomenon. Group two, the many maybes, are phenomena that have enough evidence that it would be foolish to simply dismiss them as unreal, but not enough evidence, in my estimate, to make them foundational realities for further research as the big five are. The many maybes that we’ve surveyed (which certainly aren’t all of them) in this book are postcognition, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), after-death communications (ADCs), and postmortem survival in some kind of afterlife as evidenced through mediumship and reincarnation.
The big five paint a picture of humans as beings who are more than just their physical bodies, beings who can sometimes communicate mind to mind, sometimes clairvoyantly know the state of the physical world, sometimes predict an inherently (by physical laws) unpredictable future, sometimes affect physical objects by thought and intention alone, and sometimes affect, for the better, other biological systems, as in psychic healing. Traditional spiritual systems in general tell us that ordinary, physical life is only part of reality; there’s a larger, more encompassing spiritual reality beyond ordinary space, time, and embodiment, and the big five can readily be seen as glimpses of mind operating in this larger reality.
The many maybes bear even more directly on the general spiritual idea that we have some essence or soul that’s the core of the real self. OBEs are almost always interpreted by the people who have them, for example, as a direct experience of existing as a (temporarily) disembodied soul, and we have a little evidence that someone who’s had an OBE can sometimes give us correct information about ordinarily inaccessible aspects of physical reality, suggesting that something is really “out,” rather than that the person is just vividly imagining being out. NDEs add an altered state of consciousness (ASC) dimension to the experience of being out of the body, suggesting that what we consider to be ordinary consciousness is a compound of some more basic mind that’s beyond the body, with the particular amplifying and limiting characteristics of the physical body, brain, and nervous system. Both those who’ve had OBEs and NDEs almost always know afterward that they’ll survive physical death in some form, so these experiences have huge effects on people’s lives.
OBEs and NDEs are, at this time, as “far out” as one can go and still remain a living person. Those having such experiences may know they’ll survive death in some form, but we who haven’t experienced such phenomena do have to consider the fact that they weren’t really dead, since “dead” means permanently dead in ordinary language. It’s nice for them that they have a deep conviction that they’ll survive, but will they, really?
ADCs, which happen to enormous numbers of people, tell us that in spite of the automatic scientistic dismissal of such a possibility, apparent contacts between loved ones and the recently deceased are actually rather frequent. But while the feeling of being contacted is wonderfully reassuring to grieving loved ones, this isn’t much evidence of any reality to the contact when assessed by the scientific parts of our minds. Is there any solid evidence that our being might actually survive physical death in some real form?
This is where mediumistic communications provide the most direct evidence. While many such communications are, like ADCs, emotionally satisfying but not very evidential to the rational mind, some, like the R-101 case we looked at, are quite specific and correct, providing information known to the deceased but not to the living. My own personal assessment of this evidence can be expressed in two statements. First, after I die I won’t be surprised if I regain consciousness in some form. Perhaps there’ll be temporary unconsciousness, as happens ordinarily in sleep, and without a body to continuously shape and support ordinary consciousness, the consciousness I regain may be an altered state compared to my ordinary, embodied consciousness. So second, I’ll be surprised if I regain consciousness. I expect that my sense of “I,” of who I am, will definitely change.
So the better mediumistic phenomena suggest some kind of survival of consciousness after bodily death. Questions about the form of this survival, such as how long it lasts, what it means in terms of how we live this life, and so on, are, to my mind, vastly important but unable to be answered in any satisfactory way with our present data. The descriptions of the afterlife given by ostensible surviving spirits have undoubtedly been distorted by the hopes and fears of both mediums and sitters, and we need a lot more research to learn how to ask these kinds of questions in ways more likely to get useful answers. And, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that we don’t support any research to speak of that deals with the reality or lack of it of postmortem survival and the nature of the afterlife is an incredible lack in modern culture. Probably our fear of death has a lot to do with this total avoidance, but pretending that problems aren’t there has never been a very useful way to solve them.
One possibility is some kind of temporary postmortem survival in a disembodied state and then an incarnation, a reincarnation, to a new body. As with the other many maybes, there’s enough evidence that the possibility must be taken seriously, and it’s just plain crazy that we aren’t devoting enormous efforts to studying this sort of thing.
Interesting creatures, aren’t we?