Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (44 page)
Read Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience Online
Authors: Pim van Lommel
People share these experiences only when they feel a great deal of trust and know that they will not be at the receiving end of prejudices or negative comments (“It’s just wishful thinking” “It’s your grief talking”). When they do share them, they tend to do so warily for fear of being misunderstood or declared insane. Most encounters with the deceased loved one occur during sleep in a lucid dream and sometimes even involve communication. But this is no dream. Like its perimortem equivalent, this experience feels much more intense and real than any ordinary dream. Sleep seems to enhance the potential for receiving nonlocal consciousness because waking consciousness normally blocks the reception of the interface. A postmortem experience, that is, contact with the consciousness of a deceased loved one, is often extremely comforting, and the inner awareness that all is well with the deceased person aids the mourning process. Contact with (the consciousness of) the deceased person also tends to alter one’s perception of death and brings an inner conviction that there is a form of life after physical death. In many cases fear of death disappears. This effect is comparable to the consequences of an NDE or a deathbed vision, which can also involve contact with the consciousness of deceased loved ones.
One of the best-known examples of a postmortem experience is found in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,
where Hamlet sees the ghost of his dead father in his mind’s eye and is told by this ghost that his brother Claudius murdered him to marry his widow, Hamlet’s mother, and become king of Denmark. The ghost also shares details of his death by poisoning. I was reminded of Hamlet when a woman from the United States, both of whose parents had been murdered, e-mailed me an unmistakable example of a double postmortem experience (although the first is more like an empathetic NDE):
I have not had a near-death experience, but I have had a “dream” that was as though I had one.
My mom was murdered in 1992. After suffering in intensive care for fifty days she passed away. I was very distraught and upset because my mother always had a fear of dying. This preyed on my mind. One night, about a month after her death, I went to bed and said a prayer and asked in that prayer to please let me know my mother was all right. That night I had a dream. I had the same experience that so many people have described in their near-death experience. I went through a darkness towards the light. And the light was an overwhelming feeling of Love. It was a blinding, brilliant light that is indescribable. It was so inviting, it felt so good, and I didn’t want to leave. I was told my mother was fine, but I had to go back. I awoke knowing my mom was in a better place, and I had such a sense of peace. I know in my heart that there is something beyond this life.
I have never been an overly religious person. I am reluctant to tell many people this incident but was compelled to write to you after reading this article. Three years ago also my father was murdered. After three weeks the police came to a standstill and put out a call for help in the newspaper. I dreamed of my dad three nights in a row. Each night he told me to look in the files and gave me specific instructions. After the third night I called the head of the ATF who was working on our case. He must have thought I was a real crackpot. But I had looked in my dad’s files. In my dream he had given me a date and a name. Sure enough, the name was there. The ATF agents contacted that person, and he gave the police the names of the people who were involved in my father’s murder. I really can’t give you any more details on this—we haven’t gone to trial yet and there is a gag order issued. I don’t claim to be psychic. I don’t have any idea why these things have happened to me. But it makes me wonder and curious.
Another example, this one of a shared or collective postmortem experience, was sent to me by a young man from Hungary:
I would like to tell you about my mother, who had a massive brain hemorrhage three years ago. It left her paralyzed and unable to speak, and she died about six months later. Three days after her funeral, the following happened: I was sleeping when suddenly a strange cold feeling woke me. I was sleeping on my right side, and when I woke up I rolled onto my left, sensing something there. And to my big surprise, I saw my mother! She was dressed in white, surrounded by a radiant white light, and smiling; she was beautiful. She touched me on the shoulder and told me, though not with words: “Everything is all right now, and there is nothing for you to worry about.” I wanted to respond, but somehow or other I fell back asleep.
I didn’t wake up again until the following morning, and it wouldn’t have been anything other than a strange dream had it not been for the following incident: From the moment I woke up, I kept thinking about what had happened that night, and in the afternoon I went to my father’s room to talk to him about it. But to my big surprise, my father said, “You’ll never guess what happened last night!” And my father told me, “In the middle of the night, a cold feeling woke me, and when I turned around and sat up I saw your mother at the other end of the bed. She was radiating light, she was dressed in white, she looked happy, and she touched me and said that I shouldn’t be worried about her and that she would take good care of us.” And after that my father had fallen asleep again!
Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it; neither of us had ever heard anything about contact with the dead. My father is a rational doctor and never mentioned it again. I never dreamed about my mother again. But I’m convinced that it wasn’t a dream. I’m convinced of this, because my father and I had the same experience, during the same night, without realizing it.
Belief in a Form of Personal Afterlife
A recent, major European survey on social trends in European countries, conducted by researchers at Tilburg University, not only featured questions about work, leisure, politics, religion, and social issues, but also questioned respondents about belief in a personal afterlife. It emerged that, on average, between 48 and 59 percent of Europeans believe in a life after death, with people in the former East Germany forming the exception at a worldwide low of 15 percent. The same survey found that 22 percent of people in Western Europe believe in an existence before this life, that is, in reincarnation. The European study put the figure of belief in a personal afterlife in the Netherlands at 50 percent of the population (approximately 8 million people). In the United States between 72 percent and 74 percent of the population believes in life after death, and in the United Kingdom about 58 percent believe in an afterlife. In the Netherlands 21 percent (nearly 3.5 million people), in the United States 24 to 27 percent, and in the United Kingdom 29 percent believe in reincarnation. As we know, official Christian doctrine denies reincarnation.
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These figures are interesting given that two articles in
Nature
suggest that the majority of today’s scientists in the Western world reject these ideas. They generally struggle to accept the possibility of a personal afterlife. But how else can we explain these experiences, which have been reported the world over by different people under different circumstances, other than by assuming that consciousness can be experienced independently of the body in a dimension where time and space play no role and everything is connected nonlocally? Mainstream scientific opinion is in sharp contrast with the findings of the social survey, which suggests that more than 250 million people in Europe believe in some form of continuity after physical death and more than 100 million Europeans believe in the possibility of reincarnation.
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The Continuity of Consciousness After Physical Death
The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness which overflows the organ we call the brain, then the more natural and probable we find the hypothesis that the soul survives the body.
—H
ENRI
B
ERGSON
The findings of NDE research suggest the possibility that (nonlocal) consciousness is present at all times and will therefore last forever. The content of a near-death experience suggests a continuity of consciousness that can be experienced independently of the body. But as I outlined above, identical experiences of an enhanced and nonlocal consciousness (sometimes coupled with contact with the consciousness of deceased persons) are reported during episodes of mortal fear, despair, isolation, meditation, on a deathbed, and during perimortem and postmortem experiences.
The questions still outnumber the answers, but in view of all the reported experiences of consciousness, we ought to seriously consider the possibility that death, like birth, may be a mere passing from one state of consciousness into another. Our vision of death is completely transformed by the near-inevitable conclusion that after physical death nonlocal consciousness can continue in another dimension in an invisible, immaterial world that encompasses past, present, and future.
Consciousness is not confined to the brain because consciousness is nonlocal, and our brain facilitates rather than produces our experience of consciousness. Whereas our waking consciousness has a biological basis, because our body functions as an interface, there is no biological basis for our endless and nonlocal consciousness, which has its roots in nonlocal space. Waking consciousness is experienced via the body, but endless consciousness does not reside in our brain.
A death notice I came across recently featured the following words: “What you have perishes; what you are survives beyond time and space.” Death merely marks the end of our physical aspect. In other words: we
have
a body, but we
are
consciousness. Free from our body, we are still capable of having conscious experiences, we are still sentient beings. Recently somebody with an NDE wrote to me: “I can live without my body, but apparently my body cannot live without me.” Once the body has died, following a terminal phase that can last anywhere between hours and days, we are in contact with or, rather, we become a conscious part of this endless and nonlocal consciousness.
Research into NDEs does not provide us irrefutable scientific evidence for this conclusion because NDErs never actually died. They regained consciousness. But they all had a very close brush with death, with temporary total loss of all brain function during a (reversible) process of dying. Besides, scientific research has shown that consciousness can indeed be experienced independently of the body without brain function. This conclusion alters our view of humankind and has consequences for current medical and ethical issues. Knowledge of near-death experiences can be of great practical significance to both health care practitioners and dying patients and their families. They would all benefit from knowing about the extraordinary experiences that may occur during a period of clinical death or coma, on a deathbed, or after death. I will write in more detail about these medical issues in the appendix.
Other Forms of Nonlocal Information Exchange
After an NDE, most people are affected by an enhanced intuitive sensitivity or nonlocal information exchange. They become more sensitive to parts of the nonlocal consciousness of which they were previously unaware. By the same token, they have an increased sensitivity to aspects of other people’s consciousness. The concept of nonlocal consciousness appears to explain not just the NDE, but also enhanced intuitive sensitivity, remote viewing or nonlocal perception, geniality, and the mind’s influence on matter (nonlocal perturbation). All of these phenomena can also be reported during and after an NDE, as we have seen.
Enhanced Intuitive Sensitivity
I take enhanced intuitive sensitivity to mean the experience of verifiably correct information about people or events, including future events, that could not have been obtained via the senses or from memory. It refers to (often involuntary) contact with aspects of one’s own consciousness, with that of other people and deceased loved ones, and perhaps even with animals and nature. We are mostly unaware of this continuous relationship with our surroundings. Much to their surprise and confusion, NDErs often experience enhanced intuitive sensitivity, such as clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, or prognostic dreams about events that have yet to take place, as we have seen. The NDE seems to permanently enhance their reception capacity. We could compare this with a TV set, which normally only shows us channel 1, the broadcast of our own personal consciousness, but after an NDE also gives us channels 2, 3, and 4 with aspects of other people’s consciousness. As I wrote earlier, there is scientific proof for this nonlocal “entanglement” of consciousness.
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An unconscious experience near death and dying is an ineffable premonition, an inner sense that somebody is about to die, in most cases a sudden death caused by an accident or a cardiac arrest. A sudden death is never entirely unforeseen. During the final few hours, days, or weeks before the sudden parting, people often ask general questions about death, express their funeral wishes “for no apparent reason,” or make a will.
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I know of a six-year-old girl who asked her mother what death really meant, whether you disappear completely or live on in some way. Two hours later she died when she crossed the street and was hit by a car. People with enhanced intuitive sensitivity often know or dream that somebody is about to die.
Enhanced intuitive sensitivity is common across Europe and the United States. Both the European values survey and the Gallup Poll in the United States have asked people (anonymously) whether they ever experienced telepathy (contact with somebody at a great distance) or clairvoyance (the sensation of knowing what is happening at a great distance). The question elicited positive responses from 46 percent (230 million people) in Europe and 60 percent (180 million people) in the United States. In May 2006
Reader’s Digest
published a survey with questions about aspects of heightened intuition among more than a thousand adults in the United Kingdom. The sense that others were secretly staring at them was reported by 68 percent of people while 62 percent of respondents reported that they knew who was calling before they answered the phone. Premonitions were reported by 52 percent while 26 percent sensed when a loved one was ill or in trouble, and 19 percent reported an encounter with a deceased relative.
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