Apologies to you all for Dancing’s disappearance this month. A family member’s hospitalization has had me shuttling back and forth just enough distance to eat up most of a day. We’re about to get back to something like normal–and so, back to posting! Thanks for your patience.
Here’s a question to go with the matter of what’s real: What about monsters?
In my household, the past several weeks have been taken up with a knee replacement (not mine) gone not-quite-as-desired. While I try to catch up with posts, here is an article that doesn’t mention NDEs but has a bearing on the way we think about things that go bump in the night and in our darker selves.
Two sentences practically jumped off the page at me from Robert Perry’s interesting article (see previous post):
“We clearly need to look to hard evidence, and not just trust the subjective impression of the experiencers themselves… They are overwhelmingly convinced that their experience was real. If we can gain some genuine understanding of why, then perhaps that will help us decide how much we can believe them.”
I’ll be interested in hearing your responses.
As I read these sentences, they suggest that the question is whether we are to understand the essence of what experiencers say about their own experiences or to believe that they are returning from those experiences with ‘hard evidence,’ something like lab data. And yet, these are the types of events Joseph Campbell described as being “metaphysically grounded in a…realm beyond space and time, which, since it is physically invisible, can be known only to the mind.” It’s important to science that we work with the right set of inputs.
If a perception is unverifiable, does that mean it is false? Is it possible that the hard evidence about them is that NDEs and similar experiences give people a clear perception that __x__ is happening? If, as you die, your last flicker of cognition is that you are being greeted by the person you most love in all the world, how much does it matter that a research observer would agree? Within the experience, it is real.
But that is pure speculation. How much can we know about these odd events? Andrew Newberg says of his brain scans of monks and nuns during peak instances of meditation and prayer that the altered states of mind which the meditators “described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the results of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”
Those “observable neurological events”—the hard evidence—demonstrate that something measurable (i.e., “real”) is happening in our familiar time/space universe; they give satisfyingly concrete data about when and where the activity occurs. However, just as a map is not the territory, the scans are incomplete: they are not the experience, any more than a book of photos is a trip to Niagara Falls.
In that same way, a near-death experience is a real experiential event–but only in the life of the individual who has it. This is the problem with subjective events: that only one person is the “subject”; there can be no witnesses. At the very instant in which an experiencer begins to describe it, the experience vanishes; for everyone else in the world what remains will be a conceptually ordered and interpreted story, a narrative that cannot be “known” in all its dimensionality. Of course the narrative is coherent; that is the business of language and reason; yet to force an experience down through the restrictiveness of language and concept is like trying to draw an accurate picture of sunrise with only primary color crayons; it may be suggested but can’t be captured, and the interpretive result cannot be precise. For instance, “I saw Jesus” from a child may mean that, in truth, he saw Jesus; or it may mean, “I was with a presence that felt the way the stories of Jesus talk about him, and I don’t know what else to call that, so I guess it’s ok to say it was Jesus.” One is as experientially real as the other.
We must learn to live with NDEs as we do with subatomic particles, which disappear when observed, their portraits showing not the particles themselves but only where they have been. There may be no known physical, geographical locality that matches what is described in an NDE. On the other hand, NDEs have demonstrable consequences that are often real enough to disrupt and reshape human lives—the “footprints” of experiential reality. Can we accept those as convincing data?
To make matters worse, Campbell’s “realm beyond space and time, which, since it is physically invisible, can be known only to the mind” is a realm that lives not by denotation but by connotation, not by the sharp lines of photography but by the soft edges of watercolor. This is where the archetypes live, not in the sense of neatly lined up definitions but as limitless cascades of suggestion and possibility. When we say, “It’s only in your mind,” we mean something isn’t real; but here, only the mind can know what is true. It may be experientially true yet factually wrong. (Example: Genesis 1 & 2)
We will continue to drive ourselves crazy if we do not recognize that the reality of the “real world” of material, physical objects does not always accurately describe the “real world” of invisible, interior personal experience that happens somewhere (and somehow) in our mind. The materialist view of the past 300-plus years, which has been ferociously defended during the past century, has been to insist that only the physical reality is “real” reality; the rest is too often derisively dismissed as illusion, when in fact the problem may be with our understanding of how to listen. When our culture says, “It’s all in your mind,” what if that’s where this particular reality is?
A sophisticated young blogger makes some useful observations:
For the Pentecostal Christian communities in the bush in Africa, the spiritualist aboriginal cultures in the Pacific islands, and the Shamanistic nature religions in the remote mountains of South America, humans and spirits walk the same ground and live life side by side in a way a westerner cannot fully grasp. Seemingly miraculous healings/exorcisms/ demon sightings can and do occur—any cultural anthropologist will tell you this. But you will find alongside the “spiritual” explanation a “scientific” one that accounts for the same phenomena through psychology, deceit, or nature. Acknowledging these other explanations should not force us to choose either side. It should simply make us wary when determining what can and cannot exist based solely off of what we can and cannot observe in the material realm. (http://theophiliacs.com/2008/09/14/demons/)
Can we believe what experiencers say about their NDEs? Are they real? Well, do you mean, in a Western sense, are they materially verifiable, or are they true? To mistake the difference is to create a great distortion.
Remember–you’re invited to talk back!
Over at the Paranormalia blog, a couple of days ago (October 10, 2011) Robert McLuhan linked to a question from Robert Perry about the grounds on which we can believe the testimony of near-death experiencers.
Two sentences in Perry’s article jumped out at me:
“We clearly need to look to hard evidence, and not just trust the subjective impression of the experiencers themselves… They are overwhelmingly convinced that their experience was real. If we can gain some genuine understanding of why, then perhaps that will help us decide how much we can believe them.”
Read more here…
From Italy (hi, Valentino!) comes a question that is interesting on a couple of levels:
Have you ever read the book of Rick Strassman about the endogenous DMT’s role in producing NDEs? I think that a “bad trip” induced by DMT could be a possible explanation of negative NDEs. What do you think ?
Let’s start with what is “endogenous DMT”? DMT—full name dimethyltryptamine–is a naturally-occurring (endogenous) psychedelic compound, like the neurotransmitter serotonin, secreted in minute amounts by the brain. A Journal of Near-Death Studies review of Strassman’s book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, describes DMT: “One of the constituents of snuffs and brews used by South American shamans for thousands of years (it is especially prevalent in South American plants), DMT was first isolated in 1946, and then briefly tested by Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara in the 1950s. DMT gained a reputation as being a rather frightening substance, and lay scientifically fallow for several decades.”
In the early 1990s, however, psychiatrist Rick Strassman, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine was intrigued by the possibility that endogenous DMT plays a role in triggering mystical experience, and obtained permission from the U.S. government and University review boards to study the range of psychological experiences that result from ingesting DMT. Over the next five years, Strassman administered roughly 400 doses of DMT to sixty volunteer subjects.
The experiences they reported ranged from brief episodes that were like full-fledged psychotic episodes with paranoid fantasies to sessions that seemed to be mystical experiences—bliss, ineffability, timelessness. However, it was also evident that for individuals unprepared for the possible effects of DMT, the effects could be terrifying. Almost half of Strassman’s sample encountered otherworldly beings, described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or “entities” that defied description. They were not always friendly. One of Strassman’s subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about this negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.
As the Journal article concluded, “Moreover, as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Dr. Strassman himself had come to the “undeniable realization that DMT was not inherently therapeutic,” and that ‘Risks were real, and long-term benefits vague,” and that despite the number of near-death and mystical sessions, there was an “ineffectiveness in effecting any real change.”
In partial response to Valentino’s question, notice how similar the images are, and note also how vastly different these effects are, compared to the effects of near-death experiences. (Cue background music.)
A few years back, I came upon a quote that throws a curious and remarkable light on Strassman’s findings.
Shinzen Young is an American Buddhist teacher of mindfulness meditation, whose monthly day-long retreats I had been attending in Vermont. Before moving to North Carolina, I ordered his six-disk series of teaching sessions, The Science of Enlightenment. In one of them, he talks about the terrifying images that may appear in advanced meditation —insectoid, grotesquely otherworldly, demonic. (My italics.) Here is what Shinzen says about the images:
[T]hey are best interpreted as part of a natural process of release from the deep archetypal levels of the mind. Such upwelling visionary material is a natural function of human consciousness and should not be cause for the slightest concern: You are not going crazy. You are not going to get weird. You are not going to be possessed by devils, assailed by Satanists, or devoured by monsters. You are not going to be sucked into another world. However, if you have a history of prior mental illness, you should discuss these phenomena both with your meditation teacher and a therapist.
From a naturalistic perspective, those are the images reported by Strassman’s volunteers. Unfortunately, Strassman had not heard Shinzen Young’s analysis, for it might have saved a worthwhile research project.
Over decades the work of Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof has demonstrated that something about the human psyche functions as a gigantic warehouse with the “deep archetypal levels” Shinzen mentions. The deepest levels are what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” the repository of humanity’s symbols and icons and most moving images (and sometimes the most horrifying). But why? How? What do they mean? This blog exists because of questions like those. I hope we find answers as time goes on.
Does this mean that NDEs are only drug responses? No! The point is that DMT, like being close to death, and LSD, and deep prayer and meditation, and hyperventilation, and…and…and…can in some instances give access to those deep, shared archetypal levels of consciousness. A DMT experience is not exactly an NDE, as indicated by their effects; but they share images.
For starters, it seems quite enough that we all join hands and circle ’round—near-death experiencers, pray-ers and meditators, DMT and LSD experiencers, holotropic breathers—and see that we’re on a common dance floor, sharing the same basement storage, and hauling mutually-held images up to the light of ordinary day. It’s quite enough for today to take in the possibility that the images in distressing visionary experiences can be understood as more than punishments from some external source, whether divine or malevolent. Some may be like potholes in the universe (a metaphor, you literalists; see my post last month); others like code, trying to tell us something. But first we have to learn the language of do-si-do. Grab your partner.
Take a second look at the scatter chart in post #3 in this series. Notice how many red dots (studies with distressing near-death experiences) there are. Only three years after Moody and two years before Ken Ring’s Life at Death hit the bookstores, Maurice Rawlings had a book out about hellish NDEs. How can it be that for over two decades almost everyone has said that only 1% of NDEs are “negative”?
In 1982, pollster George Gallup, Jr. and his co-investigator William Proctor reported, “[O]ur major national poll of those who had a close brush with death showed that only one percent said that they ‘had a sense of hell or torment.’” That same paragraph continued, “But … the picture is more complex than that …[I]t does seem clear that many of these people…were reluctant to interpret their experience in positive terms.” (p. 76)
In fact, as Gallup and Proctor make clear, the figure of those reluctant to call their NDE positive may have been as high as 28%. But the figure that stuck in the minds of those who reported on it was the more agreeable 1%.
Why? I’ve done that myself, knowing that I didn’t believe the figure but not wanting to turn an audience away with nothing but their fears. Having nothing more authoritative to say, I would use the 1%, thinking, “One of these days we’ll know more.” That being the case, I think the primary reason for the sliding around was that saying 1% was more comfortable; it was less disturbing to hearers. Another, in my view, is that although speculation ran freely, no one knew quite what to say other than that the distressing events weren’t “real near-death experiences.”
In fact, we do know a bit more nowadays. According to a careful review of the book and journal literature from 1975-2005—the one that produced these nifty tables—in a total of 20 studies large and small, with a total of 1,910 NDEs of which 332 were distressing, the average percentage was something over the midpoint of Gallup’s 1%-28%: 17% distressing.
You will not be surprised that I keep thinking of those 332 people out there all on their own for all those years. I hope they’re online.
“Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible.”
~ Carl Jung
