| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.– Rupert Brooke
Most of us die only once. But the process of dying, we now realize, is complex, gradual and, in some cases, reversible. Those who have come very near to death offer us a vicarious glimpse of what to expect when our own time comes. And that glimpse is of something quite astonishing.
So much has been said and written about NDE’s in the past few years that their most remarkable aspect is often overlooked. This is not the tunnel, the light, or the out-of-body sensation. It is not the meeting with spirit figures or the vision of Elysian fields. All these may be peripheral details that can be explained well enough without looking beyond what happens inside the brain as the senses fail and hallucinations and memory-held images rush to take their place. No, the big surprise, the central mystery of the NDE is the reported expansion of consciousness as life shades into death.
At just the moment we would expect awareness to close down as the body’s life-support systems collapse and brain function is increasingly impaired, NDEers say that they experienced startlingly heightened cognition. For them, reality seemed more real, perception more vivid than ever before. In the words of one individual who went through this extraordinary, terminal transformation: “I felt as though I was awake for the first time in my life.”
Combined with this sudden growth of consciousness is a feeling of total loss of self and of timeless, all-at-onceness. Subjects struggle to capture in words what happened to them. One NDEer, speaking on Australian television, said: “I can’t exactly describe it to you, but it was just all there. It was just there all at once. I mean, not one thing at one time, blinking on and off, but it was everything, everything at one time.” During the same program, a scientist called John recounted: “It’s as if everything were there and everybody was there; the sense was of absolute, total fulfillment. But the quite amazing thing is that I wasn’t there; John vanished at that moment.”
Clearly, something momentous and unforeseen is going on in these situations. We are brought up in the West today to believe that the brain is a creator of thought, a producer – or at least an agent in the production – of consciousness. We are indoctrinated into the materialist belief that the mental world is merely a superficial, almost superfluous outgrowth of the physical. But now, in the light of NDE’s, we must forcefully challenge that view. From those who have skirted death comes this extraordinary new evidence suggesting that cognition may actually broaden and become more profound at exactly the time the brain stops working. How is that possible?
An increasing number of scientists and philosophers today are trying to “explain” how consciousness comes about. Among them are influential figures such as neurologists Daniel Dennett and Gerald Edelman, philosopher John Searle, mathematician Roger Penrose and molecular biologist Francis Crick. These investigators are struggling hard to explain consciousness purely in terms of what is going on inside the brain. In their efforts they have drawn upon ideas from fields as diverse as computer science, quantum mechanics, and Darwinian evolution. Penrose, for instance, believes consciousness may result from certain unusual properties of subatomic particles. Crick, of DNA fame, has argued that consciousness emerges from the binding effect of electrical oscillations in our neurons. All are ingenious theories. But in the end all fail utterly in what they set out to do – to bridge the gap between brain states and feelings. Which among these supposed explanations can say why a brain shouldn’t behave exactly as it does at a physical level and yet still be entirely unconscious? Why do “we” feel like anything at all?
It is not simply that scientists have failed to explain consciousness, they have failed in the main, to see that such an explanation is not even possible. Today’s prevailing view that subjective experiences arise spontaneously when certain physical systems (such as brains and, perhaps, computers) get complicated enough is fundamentally misguided. It stems from our habit of seeing the world dualistically – as having separate subjective and objective aspects. But in reality there is no separation.
Treating the universe as if it were divided does have one big advantage. It lets us isolate those parts of nature that can be explored with logic. The Renaissance scientists such as Galileo realized this more than three centuries ago. But in making the distinction, a prejudice crept in that gave priority to “primary” (i.e., objective or measurable) qualities over “secondary” (subjective or sensual) ones. From that point on, it became built into our Western outlook that the material aspects of nature were somehow more important, more basic and more “real” than feelings. From this stems today’s materialist belief that the subjective side of reality derives from the objective. More particularly, we have come to believe that as brains evolved they gave rise, at some point, to the “secondary” quality of consciousness. It cannot be stressed hard enough that this belief is based on a misconception.
Science has its place. It has enriched human life and freed many from ill-health, pain, and drudgery. It will go on to reveal more and more about the mathematical and physical relationships that exist in nature. There is no need to decry science as a pursuit. But there is a need today, as never before, to acknowledge its ultimate limitations. If science searches the universe – as it does – for certain kinds of truth, then these are inevitably the only ones it will find. Everything else will slip through the net.
Science starts from the assumption that there is a knowable logic to the universe – which there clearly is. It then strips away all aspects of the world that logic cannot tease apart, calling these subjective. There is nothing wrong with this – science couldn’t progress in any other way. The mistake is to assume that this separation of objective from subjective, which we choose to make, reflects how things really are. It does not. And this misunderstanding is now becoming very clear as scientists go beyond their own remit and try to explain consciousness as a derivative of brain function. Their failure is no surprise.
Consciousness is not some side-effect, or epiphenomenon, of the objective world. It is an integral, irreducible part of reality. Consciousness is the subjective aspect of all things – the ever-present “mind” of the universe.
Mere opinion? Yes – but then so is anything we believe in that stands above the rational world. No one can prove that dualism is wrong, because proof requires logic. And subjective experience, by its very nature, falls outside logic’s domain. Nor is language any help in resolving this most basic of metaphysical problems. Language stems from the illusion that the world can be divided into object and subject and so is not a vehicle by which we can then show that object and subject do not really exist.
No, it cannot be proved that the dualist view of nature is wrong, any more than it can be proved it is right. But let us suspend judgment. Let us accept that it may at least be equally valid to think of the universe as being a true indivisible unity. Where does this radically reappraised view of reality lead?
If we accept that everything in the universe has a subjective aspect to it, then the brain appears in an extraordinary new light. The brain begins to look more like a regulator or an editor of consciousness – a “reducing valve,” as Huxley called it. At first sight, this may seem utterly bizarre, so familiar is the idea of the brain as a maker of thought. And yet most, if not all, the major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don’t manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we think?
Among those who speculated along these lines is William James. He picked up the notion from Oxford philosopher Ferdinand Schiller, who in his book Riddles of the Sphinx wrote:
Matter is an admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting and restraining consciousness, which it encases. Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that which limits it. It is an explanation which no evidence in favor of materialism can possibly affect. For if a man loses consciousness as soon as his brain is injured, it is clearly as good an explanation to say the injury to the brain destroyed the mechanism by which the manifestation of the consciousness was rendered possible, as to say that it destroyed the seat of consciousness.The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson was also drawn to the idea that consciousness is all around us. For him, it was a force that applies intelligence to evolution. In a similar vein, controversial biologist-writer Rupert Sheldrake has argued that consciousness exists in the form of a field spread throughout space. Individual minds, he suggests, can tune in to this field and so “resonate” with one another.
Sheldrake likens the human brain to a TV set. An extraterrestrial who had never seen television before could drive itself slowly mad trying to figure out where the picture on the screen came from solely in terms of the set’s hardware. We, who know how the trick is done, recognize that the TV simply picks up and selects from the complete range of broadcast signals. And we know, too, that even if the set is turned off or destroyed, the signals carry on.
Seen as a reducing valve, the brain is a mixed blessing. Without it, human beings would never have evolved. The brain shields us from an awareness of every little thing, letting through only those experiences that are relevant to our survival. On the other hand, the brain prevents us from being directly in touch with reality. It is the barrier that stands between us and the limitless potential of the universe.
The brain is the very reason we think of ourselves as individuals. “We” are what remains after the brain has finished sifting through and processing all of the experiences available to it–the statue left when most of the marble block has been chipped away. The brain is the creator of self and, therefore, of the illusion that the universe is divided – subject from object, feeling from fact.
It may prove humbling, but perhaps we should begin to think of ourselves as being deprived rather than privileged because of our exceptional power to rationalize. We may be supremely self-conscious, but for this very reason our awareness of reality is surprisingly limited.
As Lynn Margulis, professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, has pointed out:
Because we are acutely conscious of the signs and symbols of other people, we think we are conscious of everything. But we are dimly conscious... The sensory systems of all of the 30 million species with which we share this planet are all vastly greater than the few we enjoy. Microbes respond profoundly to oxygen, methane, acids, sugars, salts, lipids... Phototrophic and other bacteria sense infrared and ultraviolet light we can’t see.Bigger and more powerful brains may be just the thing for conjuring up complex illusions – elaborate, multicolored dreamworlds that convince the brain’s owner of their authenticity. But they do precisely the opposite of making us more conscious than our fellow species. The truth is that our outsized brains serve to block and distort consciousness. All other living creatures are more conscious than us, if by this we mean that they interfere less with the totality of experience available to them. A microbe, for instance, puts up only the most rudimentary obstacles and filtering devices between itself and the outside world. This places it intimately in touch with its environment – almost at one with it. Rocks, atoms, stars and such put up no resistance at all. With inanimate objects, the distinction between the individual – the self – and the unity of everything breaks down completely. So, the bewildering paradox emerges that inert matter can be considered more conscious than anything that lives, while human beings are the least conscious creatures of all!
Such a conclusion seems unreasonable. But that is only because it runs counter to the completely false picture of the world we normally uphold. We are the ones who invent the myth of objects and phenomena, of separation and selfhood. None of this really exists. Everything we experience through our rationalizing minds is an illusion. So what does it mean to say that a rock is more conscious than a person? Simply that what it is like to be a rock is the same as what it is like to be the whole universe, because outside of the human mind there is no differentiation.
We, by contrast, are extremely self-conscious. Our brains manufacture the most comprehensive, convincing selves in the known universe. But that necessarily implies that we are more cut off, more estranged, than the rest of nature from the underlying reality outside ourselves. Our brains, far from being prerequisites for conscious thought, reduce the ever-present torrent of total subjective experience to a carefully moderated trickle. They condense the infinite, unbroken cosmos down to a cozy, extraordinarily parochial world that seems to revolve around the individual.
Seen from a unified perspective, then, life’s evolution centers very much around the evolution of self. As life-forms developed, the tendency was always to build stronger, more selective barriers between the individual and the outside world. Today, this long saga of the emergent self is retold by each of us as we develop from newborn infant to articulate child.
Margaret Donaldson, a developmental psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, sees several distinct stages or “modes” in our mind’s growth. The most primitive is the point mode, occupying the first two or three months of life, when attention is taken up wholly with the here and now. Following this brief period of innocence we move farther and farther away from a state of nonjudgmental awareness. At about eight months comes the line mode, in which attention can be given to remembering selected events in the past and imagined events in the future. Our facility for labeling and for organizing the world around the illusion of passing time starts to take a firm grip on our lives. Then, at about eighteen months, comes the core construct mode–the ability to conceptualize one’s self, to form general beliefs not tied to a particular perception and to build a character for ourselves. Our illusions grow, the separation of self from reality widens. Finally and gradually, we acquire the capacity to reason and to partition the world in our uniquely human way.
In retrospect, the symbolizing ego-self phase of evolution, as it has spectacularly culminated in man today, seems inevitable. How could the penetrating beam of intelligence, that survival ploy most crucial to our species, have come about without eventually leading to an extreme rationalization of the world and a firmly entrenched sense of personal observership and self-awareness?
In all this, the development of language has been central. Yet its effect has been double-edged. On the one hand, language frees our minds to conjecture and speculate – to ask endlessly. “What if?” On the other hand, it traps us, cutting us off from the true, frontierless universe, imprisoning us in a fallacious world of our own devising.
The brain builds models. Then these models are projected outward, creating the appearance of “things” and “happenings” beyond the senses. But these phenomena are not objectively real. We see only our own confabulations – sophisticated falsehoods that include elements of experience as fundamental as our selves, our perceptions of moving time and our anxiety at the prospect of death.
Why does nature play such games? Why have brains and nervous systems come about if they just serve to hold back consciousness and create fantasies? Surely, if the universe is, and always has been, “cosmically conscious,” the last thing it needs is a range of biological filters by which to locally diminish it?
Questions framed like those above, however, imply that the universe somehow thinks and schemes about what to do next. But as far as we know, the universe just happens. Stars happen, planets happen. And on the surface of at least one planet, molecules happen to have stuck together in such a way that what we know as life eventually emerged. Competition began. Life-forms equipped in certain special ways survived, and so had the opportunity to pass on their successful genetic programs. Evolution continued. Brains developed because, as it turned out, they had survival value. But brains were not “invented” as a means of generating consciousness. They were not laid out so that “we” could better enjoy the world and savor its sensual delights. Brains improve the survival chances of the organic structures that encase them. They assist with the four essential F’s – fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. And they do this by restricting consciousness to just that paltry form needed to maximize our chances of staying alive.
Humans have been outstandingly successful in the survival and adaptation stakes not because they are highly conscious but for exactly the opposite reason. We are conscious of virtually nothing outside the illusory world of our self-centered minds. Of all the limitless experiences on offer, of everything the universe “knows,” we are privy to just a single sliver of time and an extraordinarily narrow range of distorted sensory impressions.
All our lives we are hobbled by the brain’s shortsighted self-centeredness. We are hoodwinked by false imagery, obsessed with the importance of our selves at the hub of it all. We try to accumulate and then cling to possessions, loved ones, status, beliefs, life. “We” – our inner feeling of self – is desperate to carry on in its present form. And then what? We die anyway and find, strangely enough, that at last we are truly alive.