Consciousness Beyond Life

In all times and all cultures and during every phase of life—among them the birth of a child or grandchild and confrontations with death and other serious crises—these essential questions are asked again and again. You may have asked them yourself. Yet we seldom receive satisfactory answers. Whatever happens in our lives—whether we meet with success or disappointment, no matter how much fame, power, or wealth we acquire—death is inescapable.

According to the philosopher of science Ilja Maso, most scientists employ the scientific method based on materialist, mechanistic, and reductionist assumptions. It attracts most of the funding, achieves the most striking results, and is thought to employ the brightest minds. The more a vision deviates from this materialist paradigm, the lower its status and the less money it receives. Indeed, experience shows us that the upper echelons of the research hierarchy receive a disproportionate percentage of funding, whereas the lower echelons actually address the condition, needs, and problems of people. True science does not restrict itself to materialist and therefore restrictive hypotheses but is open to new and initially inexplicable findings and welcomes the challenge of finding explanatory theories.

Next up is the account of Vicki, a woman who was born blind. She was born extremely premature in 1951, after a pregnancy of only twenty-two weeks, and immediately placed in a very primitive incubator and administered 100 percent oxygen. Such a high concentration of oxygen damages the development of the eyeball and optic nerve, which doctors were not aware of in the early days of the incubator. Thousands of premature babies who survived such early incubators went completely blind as a result. Vicki suffered complete atrophy (withering) of the eyeball and optic nerve. The visual cortex, the part of the occipital lobe of the brain that processes light stimuli into images, also fails to develop properly when it receives no light stimuli from the nonfunctioning eyes and optic nerves.
Vicki’s near-death experience is described in Kenneth Ring and S. Cooper’s book, and she was also interviewed at length in the BBC documentary The Day I Died. In 1973, when Vicki was twenty-two, she was hurled out of her car in a traffic accident. A basal skull fracture and severe concussion left her in a coma, and she had fractured neck and back vertebrae and a broken leg. She caught a brief glimpse of the car wreck from above (as a blind woman she could see and recognize the smashed Volkswagen van), and later in the emergency room, where she had been taken by ambulance, she was able to see from a position above her body. In the room where she saw a body on a metal gurney, she also spotted two people and could hear them talking and expressing their concern. It was only when she recognized her wedding ring, which of course she knew only by touch, that she realized that it was her own body. And after she had gone up “through the ceiling,” she saw the roof of the hospital and trees