Wouldn't You Really Like to Know?
Wouldn’t you like to know, wouldn’t you really like to know if death as we think we know it is an illusion?
I would.
I went to another meeting of Seattle IANDS last Saturday and got another dose of verbal input from another near-death experiencer who’s seen another reality beyond the physical one science says is the real and only deal. She sincerely believes that we do not die. We morph.
Cut to the War in Iraq. Price tag: around $200 billion. People are getting killed. Bang—gotcha! Bang—gotcha! Bang—gotcha! Maybe you know someone who got killed. Maybe you know someone who knows someone who got killed. Maybe you have a Support Our Troops bumper sticker on your car.
Whether it’s us killing them or them killing us, there’s killing going on. And vast quantities of money is being spent on the gross amount of killing going on.
I think most of us can agree that our US economy tanked big time when terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center and killed a lot of people. And the Bush Administration decided to go to War in Iraq to save us all from the specter of more killing.
In my mind I hear echoes of a song from the Fugs in the late 60s, “Kill, Kill, Kill for Peace!”
Cut back to a meeting room: So every month in IANDS groups around the world people talk about not dying. Oh, yeah, bodies go. Bodies turn to dust. But souls don’t die. Our consciousness goes somewhere else.
And it’s not to eternal rest and relaxation. While every NDE account is individual and unique, I keep hearing agreement that there’s a whole lot going on in the universe that does not get covered by your favorite news channel.
And for the most part, it doesn’t get covered in your favorite church, either. NDErs rather consistently report that organized religions are virtually clueless in how they present spiritual reality. Meanwhile, many “religious right” groups (right does not necessarily mean correct) contend that NDEs are orchestrated by the devil, so there you go.
Earth is a real creativity-on planet, and we don’t know diddly about it because we’re too busy fighting wars and tanking our economy with fear, greed, and heartache. We’re too busy hiding behind our cable TV shows and our materialistic empire-building—pursuits that numb us from exploring the unseen universe that, ironically, becomes seen during a near-death experience.
So why isn’t there more research being done on near-death experiences? If all these people are coming out of the NDE closet all over the world to share the accounts of their journeys out of the body, why aren’t we paying attention in a more serious way?
The answer: lack of research funding. Ain’t no money in the kitty to solve cosmic mysteries. We spend too much of it killing people to research what we might be doing by killing people.
I must admit that I am pretty naïve about funding and research procedures. I don’t have a clue about the intricacies and the obstacles involved in obtaining grants. So in this I probably qualify as a backseat driver.
However, it seems ludicrous to me that with anecdotal evidence about NDEs piling up like snow drifts in the Rockies, we are not applying even an itsy-bitsy, teen-weeny yellow polkadot bikini’s worth of funding to this paradigm-flipping research. As a rich and powerful nation we’re pleased as punch to spend hundreds of billions to impose our karmic will on Iraq (no, that’s not how the Bushies describe it), but we aren’t going to spend squat on exploring the nature of death.
In an email I asked a prominent NDE researcher about this situation. In response he lamented about the state of funding and that it took support from a powerful Senator to move things along in alternative health care research. Then he added specific to NDEs, “Until someone like Dick Cheney has an NDE, no amount of public interest is likely to make a big difference in funding.”
Does that sound like a challenge or what?
He then added, “There are still (incredibly) many people who are sitting on their NDEs, afraid to mention them in public because they think they're the only ones who've ever had one, and that people will think they're crazy if they mention them. So the more we can put this stuff in the public eye, the better…for the experiencers, for society, and, after a few generations of public acceptance, for research funding.”
So that, in a nutshell, is why I write The Big If Weblog. I think accounts of NDEs are the best show in town. They offer more fuel for spiritual growth and intellectual pleasure than virtually anything else I’ve experienced. That people get shamed, ridiculed, and sometimes even committed to mental institutions for sharing their out-of-body experiences is tragic at best—but is certainly in line with all those historical lessons about people like Galileo who eventually became heroic figures for sharing their truth despite all the shut-up-you-fool voices.
It’s my self-appointed role, because it is such a passion of mine, to be a harmonic voice in what I perceive to be a growing crowd of people who think (left brained) and feel (right brained) that we as a society should investigate this stuff.
Every time I watch the news and see another story about death, my mind goes back to one of a dozen IANDS meetings where I heard someone else share another story about non-dying. It makes me wonder from the depths of my heart when are we going to wake up and do something important, paradigm-flipping, and life-changing.
How about now?
posted by Creativity On! at 2:16 PM
6 Comments:
Whether it's research about NDEs and other soul-related phenomena, or sending people to Mars, I couldn't agree with you more that less money should be spent on killing, and more on exploring our universe. I'm not so sure that any amount of funding could yet offer much useful information about near-death experiences, if for no other reason that it is unethical to cause one to happen merely for the purpose of a laboratory observation. Add to this that no one really knows what to look for, as most of the people with personal experience in this matter are not scientists, nor even if they were could they have information about any physical aspects of the experience that could be analyzed.
I suppose it comes down a very old question: Does something have to have a physical component in order to interact with the physical world?
Surely our souls interact with our physical bodies, yet surely they are infinite and do not die as the body does. I think that a soul must in this case be physical at least in part, or else it would find the body intangible, and vice versa. And, if a soul is partly physical, then it ought to be measurable.
Perhaps, a few centuries down the road, we'll have a wonderful grand unified field theory and the experimental data to back it up, showing that all things are indeed part of everything else. We'll know this because out instruments will be of sufficient sensitivity to measure all forces and all their varied mediating particles in nature (inconcievable in our current time) - and perhaps then, we'll finally be able to...
wiegh a soul
As medical technology improves and more and more people are brought back from the brink of death, more and more NDE accounts emerge for scientists to look at. As I have become more familiar with IANDS, the International Association for near-death studies, I have become impressed with the quality of many of the reports of NDEs as well as the integrity of some of the researchers looking into the phenomenon. When you look at the body of research conducted by people like Kenneth Ring, Bruce Greyson, Melvin Morse, and Raymond Moody, you see trained medical and psychiatric professionals and academics doing the work.
Probably the leading contender of what's being looked at to validate the OBE portion of an NDE comes when people who believe they've had an NDE report some bit of information they could not possibly have known which is then later verified. One famous example is told by Kimberly Clark Sharp in her book After the Light of the woman who talked of leaving her body and seeing a red tennis shoe in a very unlikely spot on a ledge on the exterior of the hospital. The shoe was found where she said it would be.
For me personally, listening to people talk about their NDE is quite moving. It's much better than reading about them. In person you get body language and emotion and an unedited flow of words. Even though NDEs vary widely and are very subjective for the experiencer, it's clear that something very profound happens during these events, and they deserve being investigated.
While I admit that I have not read any works by the authors you mention, I do have some thoughts about Moody. Is this the same fellow who would astound people by using a giant Tesla Coil to throw seemingly life-threatening bolts of electricity in to the air from his fingertips? I have built several of these devices and have performed this stunt myself, though I would consider anyone using it as part of a spiritual-oriented presentation as being unethical.
That aside, I do not otherwise doubt the integrity of any researcher who has collected or interpreted data from people who have had NDE's. Your previous post spoke of the need for more funding to be given to research the world of the hereafter. Do you agree that, short of triggering NDEs under close observation, or increasing the observation of patients undergoing life-threatening (or life-saving, perhaps more accurately) surgery, then the only source of information will come from stories told by the people who experience this phenomena?
While my readings into metaphysical research are most likely quite small in comparrison to yours, nearly everything I have read comes down to one thing: that paranormal effects always dissapear below the margin of error possible thorugh pure chace once proper double-blind standards are put in place for the experiments. I'm going to have to side with the likes of Susan Blackmore for now, until something truly profound happens to me. Unfortunatly, I can't think of any way to get enough people with special information from NDEs together in a double-blind study about the validity of their extrasensory perceptions to form any kind of conclusive YES or NO about the reality of what they experience. So, this will remain in the realm of things that can neither be proven nor disproven: ...faith.
I think that being able to happily ignore the metaphysical side of the world is a good thing - since it leaves me all the more free to improve things in the physical world around me.
I am no atheist, and I don't intend to say that just because I don't have any personal proof of there being more to the world that can be found through our typically aknowledged senses that no one else's personal proof in invalid for themself. Does this make a contradiction for me? Can I maintain that consideration of ghosts, souls, and the afterlife is a waste of time, while simultaneously telling other people that it is fine with me if they want to devote their lives to it? I get the feeling that I more or less end up telling them that they are either crazy or lying.
You've referred previously to huge amount of anecdotal evidence that exists in support of the value and reality of experience when it comes to NDEs giving people special insight or clairvoyant information. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence for quite a lot of things, including alien abductions, psychokenesis, and just about any variety of psychic or woo-woo phenomenon.
The problem is that any person, no matter how well-intentioned or full of integrity or truthful or intelligent, will give innacurate information through anecdotes. Our perception and memory simply does not record events accurately enough to be used as a basis for scientific study. And, comparisons between what people percieve at any given moment, and what they recall percieving, and what actually was happening, can be done, have been done, and do support what I just said about the fallibility of anecdotal information.
This all being said, I want to assure you that I IMMENSELY enjoy reading a lot of things throughout the archives of this blog. Thanks for being really, really interesting. Oh, and I'll be moving to the Seattle area this summer. Maybe I'll come to an IANDS meeting, to hear the witnessing of people first-hand.
And if you aren't turned off by my energy, then *HUGS*
I plan to give a more complete answer to you in other blog entries, but I think the short answer is that our discussion would turn into something very much like the one outlined in the film Contact. NDErs have highly subjective experiences that usually cannot be validated nor replicated by the rigors of science. So you have millions of NDErs for whom this experiences is "real," and many more millions of non-experiencers for whom it is not provable.
For the most part, it's the non-NDErs who need or want proof that death is a transition, not a termination. Non-NDErs are the ones who have a stake in the science. I am one of them. I would be more comforted, I suppose, if science validated the NDE, and my stake in that is that it might radically change some social institutions that I think we both agree really need fixing.
When you talk to NDErs who are willing to talk, you get an assurance or confidence that goes beyond someone who dreamt or hallucinated something. The vast majority of NDErs do not have a book to sell or anything financial to gain from sharing their stories, which is very unlike many metaphysical enterprises like psychics, channelers, etc.
Personally, I like the composite picture in my mind that I get from all the NDE accounts that I have read and heard in person. It is a much more interesting and creative picture of reality than what hard science gives us.
I cannot give you any precise information about the research being done with respect to how to prove NDEs. I am not coming at this topic from a hard sciences' approach. I am more interested in answering the question, "Assuming the NDE is ever proven real, what would that mean to society?"
When you do land in Seattle, I would encourage you to see what IANDS is all about. Just don't expect it to be a forum about scientific proof; that's not the scope of that organization. It's mostly a support group atmosphere for people who have been through the experience.
I think I'll wrap this us with a difference of opinion. I tend to look at life through a very science-oriented view, yet I am often confused when non-scientists claim or insist that science squashes all the beauty, mystery, awe, or simple lovliness out of the universe. You say that you find the collective image of the world expressed by NDE'rs to be "a much more interesting and creative picture of reality than what hard science gives us. "
Now, I think that science is far more interesting in its views, if for no other reason than it can and must self-test all of its ideas, and the incredible creativity of the creators of those ideas can be seen in many instances throughout history.
For me, science seems to create even more questions than answers. It allows the great unknowable portions of our reality to be put into a realistic perspective with what we can directly observe.
Is it so odd to think that looking at a flower, and seeing not only its outer beauty, but also the incredible system of energy that exists within it, embodying counter-intuitive physical laws, without which matter as we know it could not exist.. ..inspires me more than all the visions the mind can create?
Modern science doesn't rule out quite a few things that seem woo-woo to me. If you take a closer look at quantum physics, or the current research being done on possible means of testing string theory.. ..then the universe can very well be just as interconnected and metaphysical seeming through the eye of science as it is by any person with a more direct personal knowledge, such as NDE'rs.
I could give you specific examples if you want... ...but I am sure you could find even better sources of inspiration at any graduate-level university with a good reputation for science. A lot of very intelligent folks still find science to be dry or incomprehensible.. ..to me, it is the language of the universe.. ..or at least the best approximation we poor, pathetic, 3-dimensionally bound creatures can concieve of.
This is drifting away from what you want to discuss - the effect proof of the "supernormal" (though if you proved it, would it still be more-than-normal?) would have on society.
I guess our difference of opinion could be boiled down to one thing: I don't think proof exists to be found, and you do, or else why would you want to discuss it's possible effects? It seems to be such an awful waste of time and energy. Though, if you enjoy it, then you are recieving an intrinsic reward, and that it all the justification you need. So I'm glad you're looking in to this.
I don't have enough of a scientific mind or background to know about how to go about proving the existence of a soul or of an afterlife. Fortunately, there are people with better minds than mine in that arena who are coming up with ideas on proof.
Sometimes words fail miserably. Yes, maybe it sounds as if I don't respect science. What I was thinking is more along the lines of someone waking up in a hospital recovery room having had an awesome experience. Then as soon as s/he tries to share it, the physician, or scientist by my way of thinking, says, "Oh, you were just hallucinating. It was just the meds."
Perhaps my quarrel with science is more aptly expressed as the politics of scientific research, of what gets studied.I have always admired the scientific effort that got humans to the moon. I would also be impressed with someone who could somehow prove that he visited the moon without his body and without a long flight.
Anyway, I do appreciate your communicating. For me this is all a work in progress, and different opinions help me shape mine.
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