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The Hitchens departure for points unknown

December 16, 2011 By Nan Bush 2 Comments

Today’s Baroque in Hackney post (see my blogroll) is a beautiful tribute to Christopher Hitchens, a man who could set my teeth on edge like almost no other. I come away from Katy’s post with two thoughts in particular. First, about his anti-religion tirade of a book, God is not Great, she says :

…polemically, he demonstrated his position by throwing loads and loads of facts at it, and I ruefully noted that there is not a sentence in the book that would lose meaning if you replaced the word ‘religion’ with ‘human nature’. But his convictions were true convictions and went through him like a stick of rock.

That “stick of rock”–or all of them together–is much of what made me grind my teeth. All that certainty, that immovable sense of rightness helped make Hitchens what he was. But is that always admirable?

Secondly, while going all thoughtful over that image of “a stick of rock,” I am admiring Katy’s observation that applies, I think, as well to people dealing with whatever distress, whether of near-death experience or any other of life’s challenges:

Do you remember, recently I mentioned the idea of occupying one’s own space …? Christopher Hitchens occupied himself utterly, and thus became fearsome. And fearless. Even the cancer that killed him he declared ‘banal’, saying, ‘It bores even me’. He is exemplar, and refused to be sentimentalised by illness.

The New York times quotes him on the possible regret he might feel for the unhealthy life that brought him cancer of the oesophogus:

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

The parties, the conversation, the necessity of good talk. Two essays he wrote about his cancer – one, about his diagnosis and admission to the Country of the Sick; and two, the final essay he wrote, about pain, life and dying – demonstrate the power of this remark.

Outside, the rain is turning to snow; the day is cold, drear, forbidding. Seize it. I mean to try. If we learn one thing from the Hitch, it’s that.

Where is the medical evidence that NDEs happen?

December 8, 2011 By Nan Bush 5 Comments

The blog Skeptico recently featured an interview with PMH Atwater, after which a couple of commenters kept asking about the medical evidence that her three NDEs happened. In fact, they wondered whether any NDE can be said to happen in the absence of corroboration. Where are the records? Or, to quote one comment, “An NDE-like experience without any witnesses or medical documentation to support it can be anything, including hallucinations.”

Those questioners are far from alone. The fact that this question keeps being asked is an indication that a great many people don’t get the idea of “experience.” Any experience is a private, personal happening in consciousness. It is not a public activity. By definition, a near-death or similar experience cannot be witnessed, although in rare instances it may be shared.

The best a medical record can do is track physiological events and record circumstances. Although a monitoring device may register a blip in some function being recorded, it cannot indicate the presence of an NDE during that blip. No one watching the monitor will see, or feel, or think what the patient is seeing and feeling and thinking. In short, the biological event may be witnessed, but the NDE itself is not open to observers.

It seems ironic that under the most tightly monitored circumstances, in cardiac arrest with stringent clinical recording, studies find the fewest reports of NDEs. Does this mean that near-death experiences in other circumstances are fraudulent? No, it means simply that the conditions surrounding cardiac arrest and resuscitation either do not promote having an NDE or affect a patient’s being physically and cognitively able to report it afterward. As for mistaking one type of experience for another, the differences between the sensations and effects of NDEs and hallucinations have been well documented for two decades; that is no longer an issue except for people who are unaware of the research.

I wonder, after so many thousands of NDE reports with no corroborating medical records but with objective evidence of life changes to indicate that something happened, what is it that people are looking for in demanding medical evidence?

November disappeared

November 19, 2011 By Nan Bush Leave a Comment

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.

Not only distressing NDEs go bump in the night

November 6, 2011 By Nan Bush 3 Comments

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.

http://www.patheos.com//Resources/Additional-Resources/America-Is-Scared-of-Itself-Greg-Garrett-10-21-2011.html

So…are NDEs real?

October 13, 2011 By Nan Bush 9 Comments

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!

Distressing NDEs: push the book

October 2, 2011 By Nan Bush 4 Comments

Another book proposal packet has just gone off, this time not to an agent but directly to a publisher who is likely to be interested. Manuscript is finished and can be sent to them if they request. Working title: Dancing in the Dark: Distressing near-death experiences, what they are, what they mean, and why they should matter to you.

Yeah, all that. Affirmations, prayers, positive incantations, and general good vibes relative to this project will be appreciated.