Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (31 page)

What next for me? If I wanted to return, I had to go “backward” immediately or I would be received into the light. As an example of how I felt at that moment: imagine you’re on one of those moving walkways that take you to your gate at the airport. You reach the end without doing anything, but you do have to “get off” to avoid taking a tumble. If you don’t want to get off, you have to walk backward at what feels like a very brisk pace. When you do this you will hover at the point of disembarkation so you can delay your decision. You also know that if you stand still for only a second, you will fall off the moving walkway. Constant attention and effort are required. And if you really want to return, you have to walk backward as fast as possible (mind you, without legs), faster than the moving walkway moves forward.

A lot of words for a feeling that lasted a split second. That blasted language of ours! If only I could conscious express my feelings through feelings, then I wouldn’t need all these words. Without the limitations of words and pictures, but with love and a lucid consciousness, everything can be expressed and conveyed as it really is, and not as people think it is. Everything will make perfect sense.

When I was about to get off (by simply letting myself go) I wasn’t ready to decide, but the indecision was too much to sustain. I had no time to weigh up the two options. I felt like I was suffocating; I had to decide. I had reached the hardest part of both of my NDEs, and the decision this time to return to my body on earth was actually the only time that felt like I was “dying.” The decision to walk backward and return as quickly as possible seemed inexplicable to me. It was the more painful of the two options, and I knew I would be suffering a lot of pain. Ahead of me everything was good, full of love, warmth, honesty, knowledge, everything I had always wanted here on earth. Then why return to that hell when I knew for sure that what I saw in front of me I would never have on earth?

Actually, it wasn’t about having but about being. I myself should be full of love, honesty, warmth, and awareness without wanting or having it from someone or something else. Only when I am these things shall I be able to give and receive them; therein lies the greatest wealth.

I realized that I would have to fight not just to reenter my aching and weak body but also to rebuild that body to meet my next challenge. I had no time to rationalize my decision. But I knew that it would have been pointless to stay. What is the point of enlightenment if I can’t reach out to others? Sharing knowledge, love, honesty, and awareness—that’s it! I had to reach out to myself (my ego, my “I”) and others.

The intention behind the earlier choice I made at my level, “my heaven,” came back to me very clearly: “Even if I can only reach one person to feel this, it will be worth all the pain.” As soon as I became aware of this, I felt the connection, the warmth, and the support of where I belonged, and I no longer felt isolated and alone. I had reconnected to the source and knew that I needed my body.

Suddenly I was back in my body, rudderless, and this time with a mask over my mouth and nose. Somebody leaned over me, manually respirating me. I was in pain and longed to be back, but I also knew that I needn’t feel alone as long as I kept the connection with the love and gratitude. Strangely enough, this painful decision was also motivated by conscious love. Love for creation, the nature of everything, and consciousness as well as love for myself, because the decision to give up ran counter to nature and creation; in other words, it ran counter to me. Everything remained dark for days, and during the moments when I was aware of my comatose state, I knew that my first experience was a natural one and that my so-called negative experience was an unnatural one that sprang from lovelessness. However, the latter NDE taught me most about love and conscious choices because I had to feel right down to my toes what free will, faith, and love can achieve and that I’m always only one thought removed from the source, irrespective of the horrible state I’m in.

At no point during my NDE did I feel that somebody other than myself forced me to do anything. I made all the decisions. That’s what made the crucial choice of staying or going back so intensely difficult.

I will never be able to let anyone see or feel what I perceived or where I was during my NDE. I can only describe what I felt, what I pictured, imagined, and what it signified to me. In other words: what I experienced. Everybody is free to make of this what he or she wants. And everybody will have a different interpretation because everybody attaches different meanings, images, and values to words. I use the words
picture
and
image
because that is literally what I do. When I describe something I have witnessed but that can’t be seen or experienced on earth, I paint a picture, an image with words; in fact, unless I refer to earthly properties, none of it makes sense. How can I explain something that doesn’t exist here or that does exist but cannot be seen? When my soul (consciousness or energy) perceived instantaneously everything that can’t be perceived by earthly senses, the “picture” was clear and complete. There was no need for me to “experience” or discover it via the faculties of a body in space and time and to find a rational explanation for it.

Without a body and without time, I wasn’t disturbed by my ego or by the function or dysfunction of my brain and memory. And during my pure perception within the source, I had no opinion either. I didn’t even have an “I.” An opinion is tied to the ego, and the ego to the body. Without any of this, there was only objective consciousness.

During my negative experience I was neither complete nor objective. I still had an “I.” I actually saw that my father was wearing his old raincoat whereas I knew perfectly well that we had got rid of it a long time ago; the very fact that I saw him as a human figure made me doubt my objectivity later. My “I” only disappeared toward the end when I felt the oneness from my positive experience again.

Back inside my body, I found it difficult to put everything into words although this had nothing to do with what I had perceived. I often wonder whether everything remains pure when such an experience is put into words because of being back inside a body and dealing with time, the brain, memory, and an ego.

When I left the hospital after my NDEs, the search began. What I had perceived must surely be known here on earth? I knew that numbers and units have names—obviously! A one and a zero is called ten, the perfect number according to Pythagoras, everything and nothing, both full and empty, but who knew what a googol was? And why couldn’t this be deduced from the Latin word, like the meaning of one and zero? Who knew that this “accidentally” coined number of ten to the power of a hundred takes up 333 bits in binary format and that this number is sometimes used to refer to the trinity or perfection, fullness in emptiness? Or who knew that the “universe” has numerical values too and is not merely a name? Or that even thoughts, letters, and words have vibrations and values, which have an effect on physical matter? And even form matter? Where could I find information on, for example, gematria? Where was I to look, who could I turn to? Where did science and spirituality meet? What is matter and what is reality? I practically lived at the library and in bookstores; I recognized all kinds of things, but none of it felt like real “life.”

The greatest reality for me was there! There where I awoke again and again with a speed far greater than the speed of light. A pure life at spirit level, an energy that surges on and through the earth, through everything! Would I ever be able to feel it here—if only for a split second, so I could feel whole again and no longer isolated from real life? During this brief spell here on earth, I occasionally feel hindered by my body, my physical senses, my thoughts, time in general, and “my” time. Everything that is visible here on earth feels like a feeble reflection of reality. The tiniest piece of matter that is as big as the universe and the universe that permeates the smallest known unit—these I find difficult to grasp.

I feel like I’m retracing my steps in my search for what is known here while moving forward in time. Knowing that the more I encounter on my path, the more questions I will have, and knowing that when I’m briefly without a manufactured thought I know everything, I sometimes find it futile to carry on searching. But I continue down my path, see and feel intuitively where, when, and especially with what intentions I take the next step. I still have no scientific explanation for what I experienced in 1991, but within the exact sciences, the M-theory and the description of antagonist harmonic pairs seem to come closest to my picture of the clusters in the field and their effect.

The feelings are even harder to explain. I can’t give any examples of the love, the acceptance, the awareness, and the source except perhaps something as simple as newborn lambs or ducklings in spring, bright reflections in the water, or the smile of a child with an even brighter sparkle in its eyes.

Reentering a body and staying there was difficult; waking up from earthly life and everyday consciousness happened spontaneously and was as natural as being born. Staying there, in the eternal and endless consciousness, would have been a choice, just like the choice to take the body that I ensouled or inhabited before my death and make it entirely “my” body again and getting it literally and figuratively going again. Every day I’m happy that I chose the difficult route and that I’ve been through this heaven and hell. On a wall in my living room I calligraphied “What you think matters; in fact, it forms matter” as a daily reminder of the opportunities offered by life. Whether the experiences will feel positive or negative depends on the intention of my heart.

The preceding chapters dwelt at length on the various theories seeking to explain all aspects of a near-death experience. We reached the conclusion that the scientific approaches outlined so far fail to offer a satisfactory, irrefutable explanation for either the occurrence or the content of an NDE. We still do not know how it is possible for people to experience an enhanced consciousness during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period when the brain displays no measurable activity and all brain function, such as bodily and brain-stem reflexes and breathing, has ceased. Looking at the interaction between consciousness and the brain, we concluded that consciousness cannot be seen as the product of brain function. In fact, sometimes the opposite seems to apply: the mind influences brain function, both in the short and long term as a result of the empirically proven principle of neuroplasticity. Our current scientific knowledge cannot account for all aspects of the subjective experiences reported by some cardiac arrest patients with complete loss of all brain function.

Some NDE Elements Reconsidered

Let us therefore reexamine the contents of a detailed near-death experience, as described before. Some subjective aspects of this profound experience invite comparison with concepts from quantum physics. Quantum theory emerged at the start of the twentieth century when scientists began measuring the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons and protons and were surprised to learn that these particles did not follow the rules of classical physics. This chapter will feature a comprehensive account of such quantum behavior and the theory behind it and then compare that to aspects of NDEs.

We learned earlier that during a life review every single detail of one’s past life can be relived. Everything appears to be connected to everything else, an interconnection similar to what in quantum physics is called entanglement; everything is one. All past events appear to be stored and available as soon as one’s mind turns to them. Time no longer plays a role; everything exists in an eternal present. This is true for time as well as for place. NDErs report that during their experiences they can be anywhere in the past as soon as they think about or want to be in a particular place, be it as a baby in its crib, at a sporting event in elementary school, as a student on a study abroad program, or during a vacation in Australia. They instantly return to that situation and relive everything that mattered at that moment in time, including the emotional impact on themselves and others. The mind seems to contain everything at once in a timeless and placeless dimension. In quantum theory this timeless and placeless interconnectedness is called nonlocality (see later in this chapter).

Similarly, during a preview or flash forward the concept of time as we know it in everyday life appears to be nonexistent. We also experience this timeless aspect in dreams, in which everything appears to happen outside of time. But the vivid reality experienced during an NDE is quite unlike everyday reality or a dream. As was already described, an NDE seems to generate images from one’s own future and from that of the world. In this timeless dimension everything seems possible and accessible. And years later the perceived events are found to be true when they are recognized as part of the earlier NDE or experienced as a kind of déjà vu.

Reports seem to confirm that a nonlocal experience can also occur during an out-of-body episode when an NDEr’s consciousness, independently of the body, can provide instant access to whichever place he or she is thinking of. When somebody is comatose in a car wreck and thinks of their partner, they instantly join their partner at home; they can even see what the partner is doing or thinking. In retrospect, this observation is found to be true. In other words, it seems to be possible to have a nonlocal connection with other people’s consciousness as well as with the thoughts and feelings of deceased friends and family and to communicate with them by way of thought transfer. To their utter confusion, NDErs often retain this ability for nonlocal connection. Without really wanting to, they can still communicate beyond time and space. This is known as heightened intuitive sensitivity. I already mentioned it in an earlier chapter and will come back to it later.

Additionally, people with a tunnel experience during their NDE seem to be making a conscious transition from our physical world, also known as space-time, to a multidimensional space in which time and distance no longer play a role. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calls the instantaneous transition from space-time to a multidimensional space a wormhole.
¹
Wormhole models look remarkably similar to hourglass-shaped tunnels.

Scientific studies of near-death experience seem to show that various aspects of an NDE correspond with or are analogous to some of the basic principles from quantum physics. Quantum theory might perhaps explain the reported connection between one’s own consciousness and that of other living persons or deceased relatives. The same applies to nonlocal phenomena such as the life review and preview, in which past, present, and future can be experienced simultaneously and which elude our conventional embodied conception of time and space.

Some Concepts from Classical and Quantum Mechanics

Because discussions of quantum mechanics can get very technical, I provide here a synopsis of the concepts that are necessary for understanding this and the next few chapters. This synopsis does not contain any references to scientific literature. Readers who would rather not delve into quantum physics just yet can skip this chapter (for now).

According to
classical
physics, objective reality comes about according to certain fixed principles. Everything in our world occurs within an
unchanging structure of space and time
on the basis of
unchangeable laws
that can be accounted for with unambiguous ideas about
reality, causality, continuity,
and
locality.
Classical physics is based on the premise that perceived reality in the physical world equals objective reality. This chapter will first look at a few “classical” physics concepts such as waves, fields, and information.

We start with electromagnetic fields, which are fields that are produced by electrically charged particles whose patterns travel in waves. An electromagnetic field appears to possess an infinite capacity for storing or encoding information. Think of the more than one billion Web sites to which computers all over the world have wireless access. All this wireless information is encoded as differences in wavelength. In particular, information is coded within interference, which is a phenomenon whereby overlapping coherent waves create a specific pattern. When two waves oscillate regularly in a certain relationship they are said to be coherent, and that coherent relationship enables interference. Information in a coherent field is like a hologram, which is a picture of, for instance, a three-dimensional object encoded in two dimensions. The holographic principle makes it possible to retrieve information about an object as a whole from any location in a coherent field. So far we are still in the realm of classical physics, where particles and waves behave in predictable ways.

Quantum physics turned the classical scientific conception of our material, manifest world upside down. New concepts from quantum physics include s
uperposition, complementarity, the uncertainty principle, the measuring problem,
and
entanglement
or
nonlocality.
All of these concepts relate to the same problem: certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Unless a quantum object is observed, it has neither a definitive location in time and space nor any of the fixed properties that classical physics ascribes to objects. Instead, there is a range of possible observations, each with a different possibility. The different possibilities are called
probability waves.
Light behaves like either a particle or a wave, depending on the experiment design, but never like both at the same time. This phenomenon has been termed
complementarity.
Particles and waves are complementary aspects of light. What had already been proven for light—that it has both a particle and a wave aspect—was found to apply to matter as well. All matter, 99.999 percent of which is emptiness, can ultimately be regarded as a wave function and thus possesses wave–particle complementarity.

Experiments with isolated photons show that a photon sometimes behaves like a wave, which means that it is entangled with itself. Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon whereby spatially separated particles possess properties that are connected beyond time and place. They are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart. This is known as the
superposition
of wave functions, whereby a wave should no longer be seen as a real wave but as a
probability wave,
as this quantum phenomenon is called. It means that we can calculate only the probability that a particle will be found in a given location, not where it will actually end up; the range of probable locations is the probability wave. In other words, we can never know a particle’s exact location at the same time as its momentum, which is an indicator of its proper velocity. This is the
uncertainty principle
of Werner Heisenberg, which posits that observation is impossible without fundamentally altering the observed object. Some quantum physicists champion the radical interpretation that observation itself literally creates physical reality, thereby ascribing consciousness a more fundamental role than matter or energy. I personally support this not-yet-widespread view that consciousness could determine if and how we experience (subjective) reality. I will come back to this later.

One of the most important principles of quantum physics is that two isolated, remote particles can have an
instantaneous
effect on one another because these two remote objects can become entangled. This is known as
nonlocality
and has given rise to the quantum physics concept of
nonlocal space:
a multidimensional space, with nothing but possibilities, also known as probability waves, and without certainties, without matter, and without a role for time and distance. Everything in this space is uncertain, and physicists can carry out neither measurements nor observations. The nonlocal space represents a hidden reality that, at the quantum level, exerts a continuous influence on our physical world, which is the
complement
of nonlocal space.

Another possible name for nonlocal space could be the absolute or true vacuum; it has no structure and is a timeless and empty space, in which quarks (elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter), electrons, gravity, and electricity have all become one and as such no longer exist. This space forms the foundation for an infinite number of possibilities, and at a temperature of absolute zero the true vacuum possesses an infinite amount of energy. On the strength of these and other findings, some scientists like the Nobel Prize winners and physicists Eugene Wigner and Brian Josephson or the mathematician John von Neumann argue that this absolute vacuum, this nonlocal space, could form the basis for consciousness (see later in this chapter). This chapter also considers whether or not quantum physics applies to living systems.

Not everybody will be able to accept the ideas, concepts, and interpretations of quantum physics. We do not know yet if and to what extent quantum physics can help us find answers to all of our unanswered questions. But in my view the foundations of quantum physics, such as wave-particle complementarity, entanglement, and a nonlocal space with probability waves, which have been accepted by most quantum physicists, might be crucial for understanding the mind–brain relationship and the nonlocal aspects of consciousness itself.

Our Classical Worldview

We begin our in-depth look at what quantum physics might tell us about NDEs by looking more closely at our classical worldview. During and after an NDE people experience phenomena that suggest an instantaneous, intuitive connection with the thoughts and feelings of others. NDErs experience an enhanced consciousness in a dimension where time and distance no longer play a role. These phenomena cannot be accounted for with concepts from classical physics.

According to classical physics, it is impossible to be in two or more places at the same time or to move instantaneously to another time or another place.
Instantaneously
means immediately, much faster than the speed of light; it refers to a connection that, independent of distance, is timeless and ubiquitous. According to classical physics, we live in objective reality, which means that everything in our world is supposed to happen within a structure of absolute, fixed space and time. Adherents of classical physics assume that the perceived reality in the physical world equals objective reality. Under this assumption, reality exists independently of observation. The unchangeable laws of classical physics assume that everything in our natural world happens along orderly and predictable lines. As Albert Einstein said, “God does not play dice.”

In classical physics, causality is paramount. This means that time is unidirectional and that the order of cause and effect is always a foregone conclusion. Classical physics assumes that reality is continuous, which refers to the fact that our physical world is free of discontinuity and that everything happens gradually and orderly in time and space.

Classical physics assumes locality, which means that objects are influenced only by direct (local) contact. This law rules out remote influence. That said, several centuries ago classical physicists were already engaged in a fierce debate about local versus nonlocal causality. Isaac Newton proposed a nonlocal model of gravity, which could exert a remote influence in, for example, our solar system, and which was fiercely disputed by contemporaries.