Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (42 page)

In summary, DNA seems to be more than just a complex molecule that encodes proteins on the basis of hereditary information. Approximately 95 percent of DNA is called junk DNA and has an as-yet-unknown function. However, there is increasing evidence that this part of our DNA plays a significant role as interface between nonlocal consciousness and the body, thus enabling each individual cell to function as interface. I see heredity as a form of memory. Heredity is the preservation, via DNA, of physical possibilities and conscious and unconscious properties (individuality). In addition, DNA could play a coordinating role in the collaboration of cells, cell systems, organs, and the living organism as a whole through the reciprocal information exchange regulated via DNA (biocommunication).

The fact that the DNA in each cell has an interface function and facilitates the exchange with the hereditary information from nonlocal space and with nonlocal consciousness may explain the continuity of our ever-changing body. Additional analysis of living DNA is needed to elaborate and confirm this hypothesis.

This book is about consciousness: about endless consciousness; about experiences of an exceptionally lucid and enhanced consciousness that may follow the loss of all brain function; about the brain and consciousness; about quantum mechanics and consciousness; about nonlocal consciousness; about being conscious.

But what is consciousness? The term is extremely difficult to define, because it is often used to describe many different forms of consciousness. Someone in a state of deep and dreamless sleep usually experiences no consciousness, whereas somebody who is awake can be said to be conscious. This is known as waking consciousness. Waking consciousness requires an observing subject, a person who is aware. People can be aware of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories, all of which are known as objects of consciousness. A person’s ability to perceive or experience an object in waking consciousness depends on selective intention and attention. People can be so lost in thought that they are barely aware of themselves or their surroundings. The fact that they are not aware of “being aware” does not mean that there is no consciousness at that moment. The awareness that we exist, the experience of a sense of subjectivity (our self-awareness), is another aspect of consciousness. But in my opinion consciousness encompasses more, and this is what I want to look at in this chapter.

As mentioned, consciousness is subjective and not scientifically verifiable. The ability to experience consciousness is different from the nature or intensity of any other subjective experience. Physicist and psychologist Peter Russell compares the ability to experience consciousness with the light of a film projector.
¹
As the projector throws light onto a screen, the projected images change constantly. All of these projected images, such as perceptions, feelings, memories, dreams, thoughts, and emotions, form the content of consciousness. Without the projector’s light there would be no images, which is why the light can be compared to our ability to experience consciousness. But the images do not constitute consciousness itself. When all the images are gone and only the projector’s light remains, we are left with the pure source of consciousness. This pure consciousness without content is called
samadhi
by Indian philosophers and initiates and can be experienced after many years of meditation. It is said to bring enlightenment.

During an NDE, the encounter with “the light” is felt to be the most intense and most essential part of the experience. This encounter is always accompanied by an overwhelming sense of unconditional love and acceptance. At this point NDErs feel completely enveloped by the enlightening and all-encompassing consciousness.

Our Consciousness and Reality

Normally we derive our sense of self from our body, our appearance, our family, our history, our nationality, our roles (father, mother, child, grandfather, grandmother, lover), our jobs, our social and financial status, our possessions, other people’s opinions of us, and so forth. We also derive our identity from our thoughts and feelings, our belief system, our values, our creative and intellectual capacities, our character, and what we call our personality. All this, and much more, determines our sense of who we are.
²

But who are we in essence, independent of our thoughts, feelings, and ideas? What shapes our consciousness, and what determines how we experience this consciousness? Is consciousness a primary property of the universe, which has always had a nonlocal presence, or is consciousness the product or consequence of something else?

Why and where consciousness originated will probably remain a mystery forever because I think the answer to this question is unknowable. Consciousness is not visible, not tangible, not perceptible, not measurable, and not verifiable. And yet consciousness is what each living being draws on to give form and meaning to life. Without consciousness, there is no living body. Down to every last cell, life appears to be an expression of the will of (unconscious aspects of) consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no perception, no thought, no feeling, no knowledge, and no memory. Consciousness is all-encompassing; reality as we experience it exists only in our consciousness. In fact, it is influenced and ultimately determined by our consciousness.
³
Because the body restricts our ability to perceive “true reality,” this true reality is by definition unknowable. We cannot perceive anything without consciousness. During waking consciousness we can perceive the world around us via our senses. This is not an objective, passive registration in our consciousness, but an active creation by our consciousness: it depends on our intention and attention. Everything exists only inside our consciousness, and everything outside it, such as “true objective reality,” is unknowable. Electricity, for example, is not immediately perceptible, as the Dutch physician and author Frederik van Eeden wrote more than a century ago, but its physical manifestations are: light to the eye, pain to the skin, sound to the ear, taste to the tongue. Similarly, forces in themselves are not knowable; only their physical effects, such as the motion of objects or the experience of weight, are visible or measurable. Our consciousness is not visible either. Only the physical aspects of our waking consciousness can be seen and registered. Reality around us is unknowable, unlike the physical and visible aspects of reality that we can experience in our consciousness. This view was shared by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that we can only know reality as it appears to us and not reality as it is in itself. Perception is possible thanks to our power of reason (an aspect of consciousness) because our consciousness shapes reality as it appears to us. But true reality (
Das Ding an Sich
or “the thing-in-itself”), according to Kant, is unknowable.
⁴

Personal and Shared Aspects of Consciousness

All aspects of our consciousness are interconnected. Our waking consciousness, which we experience on a daily basis, is an individual aspect of the all-encompassing consciousness, as is the awareness that we exist (self-awareness), that we perceive, and that we have memories. Our ability to reflect on what we think and our awareness that we dream (in the case of lucid dreams) are other aspects of our individual consciousness. In Latin the word
individual
literally means “indivisible.” But there is also a universal or collective human consciousness that connects each individual with everything that is, was, or ever will be. As mentioned earlier, there is good reason to believe that this shared human consciousness could be compared with the concept of the collective unconscious as defined by psychiatrist and psychologist Carl G. Jung. He writes that the human collective unconscious manifests itself in images that recur in our dreams as well as in fairy tales and myths. These images are also the source of all religions. Individuality, which includes Jung’s concept of the “self,” is thus distinct from the embodied ego or waking consciousness because the “self” is the center of the total personality, including both conscious and unconscious aspects and the ego. The unconscious, individual component of consciousness communicates with other aspects of the collective human unconscious, of which it essentially forms a part. Everything is nonlocally connected to everything else. Under normal circumstances, the ability to receive information from nonlocal space (such as memories, knowledge, and associative thoughts) rests on our free will, our attention, and our (waking) consciousness. Some aspects of the personal unconscious, however, can only be experienced in dreams, meditation, regression therapy, or hypnosis. The collective unconscious is, in principle, unlimited; according to Jung, its top and bottom layers will never be accessible to our waking consciousness.
⁵

Transpersonal Aspects of Consciousness

I do not know what I am, and I am no longer what I know.

—A
NGELUS
S
ILESIUS
(J
OHANNES
S
CHEFFLER)

Because, in Jung’s view, a collective aspect of consciousness is not experienced as personal consciousness, it is also known as the transpersonal aspect of consciousness.
Transpersonal
refers to those aspects of consciousness that transcend the personal or the ego. In his recent book, psychologist Jorge Ferrer takes stock of the many different versions of transpersonal theory.
⁶
He offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of the transpersonal aspects of consciousness, which he describes as the spiritual dimension of humanity. In his view, transpersonal consciousness is a basic principle that enables human spiritual growth.

The term
transpersonal psychology
originated in the work of the clinical psychologist and founder of humanistic psychology Abraham H. Maslow and the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof, who is often described as the founder of transpersonal psychology. In the 1970s Grof stressed that certain aspects of consciousness, which may be experienced during the (therapeutic) use of LSD, cannot be accounted for with current scientific ideas about consciousness and the brain. In doing so, he also referred to other experiences of an altered state of consciousness, including the experience of consciousness during a medical crisis (now known as NDE) or during isolation. He wrote that these experiences must be located in a dimension without time and space because states of mind change as soon as inner attention shifts. To me these are aspects of nonlocal consciousness in nonlocal space. Consciousness can be experienced as the sole reality when the distinction between the ego and its surroundings dissolves; people experience themselves as simultaneously part and whole (experience of unity). Sometimes they even relive, with photographic precision, the first few days or weeks of their life or remember specific details of their birth. At times people report successive experiences of birth and death. Wondering how all information can be encoded in each sperm or egg cell, Grof proposes a form of cellular consciousness, which is compatible with my view of DNA function as described in the previous chapter.
⁷

Holistic philosopher and author Ken Wilber elaborates on the concept of transpersonal consciousness. In his book
No Boundary
Wilber describes endless consciousness, or unitary or eternal consciousness. The transpersonal self, or “the witness,” is experienced as one with everything it witnesses. But I am not identical to my experiences. I have a body, but I am not my body. I have desires, but I am not my desires. I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. All that remains is pure and undivided consciousness.
⁸
This consciousness transcends the individual and connects humans with a world beyond time and space. This unitary consciousness differs from all other levels of consciousness because it encompasses all levels or aspects of consciousness. To Wilber this boundless, endless consciousness is the spiritual aspect of humanity, and this consciousness encompasses the present (“now”) at every moment in time. There is no past and no future here, no beginning and no end, no division between self and nonself. Everything is connected. There is a boundless unity. The “eternal now” or the “timeless moment”
is
consciousness. His ideas bear a striking resemblance to the concept of nonlocal consciousness.

According to Wilber it is extremely difficult to express the ineffable experience of this unitary consciousness because endless consciousness cannot be captured in words and thoughts.
⁹
This echoes the sentiments of people trying to describe their NDE. More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrote that our language is too limited to describe the essence of things: “Words conceal rather than reveal the inner natures of things.”
¹⁰

Psychologist Harald Walach also holds the view that spiritual and religious experiences can be conceptualized as the alignment of the individual with some kind of transpersonal or transcendent reality. According to him this interconnectedness can be explained by the effects of generalized entanglement, predicted by a theoretical model analogous to quantum theory. Generalized entanglement is a formal and scientific way of explaining spirituality as alignment of an individual with a whole, which according to this model inevitably leads to nonlocal correlations.
¹¹

Experiences of an Altered State of Consciousness

Over a century ago psychologists William James and Frederic W. H. Myers studied extraordinary experiences of consciousness. Both called into question the—still-dominant—view that consciousness is a product of the brain. In their recent and well-documented book
Irreducible Mind,
psychologists Edward and Emily Williams Kelly outline Myers’s and James’s major contribution to the study and description of special states of consciousness, such as mystical or religious experiences, unconscious aspects of humans (“subliminal consciousness”), hypnosis, trance, premonitions, and physical changes caused by (self) suggestion. The Kellys’ book reintroduces us to long-lost knowledge that is now regaining currency thanks to recent scientific treatises on extraordinary aspects of human consciousness. More than a century ago James’s and Myers’s research into special forms of consciousness asked the same questions that I raise in this book. In a posthumously published book Myers even wrote about the human personality surviving physical death while James too was convinced that human consciousness lends us an aspect of immortality. In 1898 James wrote that the brain’s role in the experience of consciousness is not a productive but is instead a permissive or transmissive role; that is, it admits or transmits information. In his view consciousness does not originate in this physical world but exists already in another, transcendental sphere; access to aspects of consciousness depends on the personal “threshold of consciousness,” which for some people is lower than for others and which allows them to experience various aspects of enhanced consciousness. James draws on abnormal experiences of consciousness to support his theory. He speaks of the continuity of consciousness, and both his approach and his terminology are remarkably similar to my concept of nonlocal consciousness.
¹²