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

I’ve never seen anything, no light, no shadows, no nothing. A lot of people ask me if I see black. No, I don’t see black. I don’t see anything at all. And in my dreams I don’t see any visual impressions. It’s just taste, touch, sound, and smell. But no visual impressions of anything.
The next thing I recall I was in Harborview Medical Center and looking down at everything that was happening. And it was frightening because I’m not accustomed to see things visually, because I never had before! And initially it was pretty scary! And then I finally recognized my wedding ring and my hair. And I thought: is this my body down there? And am I dead or what? They kept saying, “We can’t bring her back, we can’t bring her back!” And they were trying to frantically work on this thing that I discovered was my body and I felt very detached from it and sort of “so what?” And I was thinking, what are these people getting so upset about? Then I thought, I’m out of here, I can’t get these people to listen to me. As soon as I thought that I went up through the ceiling as if it were nothing. And it was wonderful to be out there and be free, not worry about bumping into anything, and I knew where I was going. And I heard this sound of wind chimes that was the most incredible sound that I can describe—it was from the very lowest to the very highest tones. As I was approaching this area, there were trees and there were birds and quite a few people, but they were all, like, made out of light, and I could see them, and it was incredible, really beautiful, and I was overwhelmed by that experience because I couldn’t really imagine what light was like. It’s still…a very emotional thing when I talk about this…because there was a point at which…at which I could bring forth any knowledge I wanted to have.15
Vicki goes on to explain that in this other world she was welcomed by some acquaintances. As Ring and Cooper point out:
There are five of them. Debby and Diane were Vicki’s blind school-mates, who had died years before, at ages eleven and six, respectively. In life, they had both been profoundly retarded as well as blind, but here they appeared bright and beautiful, healthy and vitally alive. They were no longer children, but, as Vicki phrased it, “in their prime.” In addition, Vicki reports seeing two of her childhood caretakers, a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Zilk, both of whom had also previously died. Finally, there was Vicki’s grandmother—who had essentially raised Vicki and who had died just two years before this incident. Her grandmother, however, who was further back than the others, was reaching out to hug Vicki.16
Vicki’s experience concludes with a forced reentry into her body:
And then I was sent back and then I went back into my body and it was excruciatingly painful and very heavy and I remember feeling very sick.17
The fact that somebody who has been blind from birth as a result of an atrophied eyeball and optic nerve and who has an undeveloped visual cerebral

Of these out-of-body perceptions, 92 percent were completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent was completely erroneous. And even among those cases corroborated to the investigaor by an independent informant, 88 percent were completely accurate, 10 percent contained some error, and only 3 percent were completely erroneous.”12 This proves that an out-of-body experience cannot be a hallucination, which is a sensory perception that is perceived as real by the hallucinating person but that does not correspond with reality

During an out-of-body experience people have verifiable perceptions from a position outside and above their lifeless body. Patients feel as if they have taken off their body like an old coat, and they are astounded that despite discarding it they have retained their identity, with the faculty of sight, with emotions, and with an extremely lucid consciousness.
The out-of-body experience begins with a patient’s sensation that his or her consciousness is leaving the physical body but continues to function unchanged. Sometimes this is accompanied by fear, followed by a (futile) attempt to return to the body, but patients often feel liberated and are amazed at the sight of the lifeless or seriously damaged body. The most common vantage point is from the ceiling, and because of this unusual position some people initially fail to recognize their body. People experience their new weightless body as a spiritual or nonphysical body that can penetrate solid structures such as walls and doors. It is impossible to communicate with or touch others who are present. To their utter amazement, people go unnoticed even though they can hear and see everything. The range of vision can extend to three hundred sixty degrees, with simultaneous detailed and bird’s-eye views. Blind people too have the faculty of sight while deaf people know exactly what has been said. While this is happening, people discover that all it takes to be near someone is to think of that person.

It is often confusing to hear bystanders or doctors declare you dead at a moment when you feel extremely alive and whole. If a sound is heard at this point it is usually a buzzing or whistling sound, sometimes a loud click or a soft murmur.
The weird thing is that I wasn’t at all surprised or anything. I simply thought: Hey, I’m dead now. So this is what we call death.

2. A Feeling of Peace and Quiet; the Pain Has Gone
For many people, the overwhelming feelings of peace, joy, and bliss constitute the first and best-remembered element of their experience. The intense pain that usually follows a traffic accident or a heart attack is suddenly completely gone.
And the pain, especially the pressure on my lungs, was gone. The atmosphere made me feel totally relaxed. I’d never felt this happy before.

And an immense, intense pure love compared to which love in our human dimension pales into insignificance, a mere shadow of what it could be. It exposes the lie we live in in our dimension. Our words, which are so limited, can’t describe it. Everything I saw was suffused with an indescribable love. The knowledge and the messages going through me were so clear and pure. And I knew where I was: where there’s no distinction between life and death. The frustration at not being able to put it into human words is immense.

1. Ineffability
What happens in a life-threatening situation is often totally unfamiliar and indescribable and lies outside our normal sphere of experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that people run into difficulties when they try to put their experience into words.
“I was there. I was on the other side.” For a long time that was all I could say. I still get tears in my eyes thinking about the experience. Too much! It’s simply too much for human words. The other dimension, I call it now, where there’s no distinction between good and evil, and time and place don’t exist.