Okay, I said, not convinced but ready to hear more.“How could she hear conversations with those ear speakers in?”
“Have you seen a lot of these kids wandering around with ear-plugs?” he asked. I had noticed by now he favored the Socratic method.
“You mean iPods?”
“Yep. And the volume turned up to maximum? And nattering to each other?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Precisely,” he said, as if that nailed the coffin shut.
“But they say these ear molds emit sound at ninety decibels, which is like a jet plane taking off,” I observed.
“Yeah, it’s all very well, but if you’ve got an iPod playing at maximum volume and you can hear your mate talking to you, then you’re not going to tell me they can’t hear each other. And that’s basically the situation here. They make a lot of talk about these [ear molds] being totally sound occlusive, et cetera. But it’s rubbish. She
heard
this cardiac surgeon.”
The evidence suggests Woerlee is demonstrably wrong. The electrodes in Pam’s brain stem had stopped showing any response to the ninety-decibel clicks, meaning she was not hearing anything, period. But Woerlee’s insistence is revealing: no amount of evidence would budge him from his assumptions.
Next I asked about the oxygen-deprivation argument. Wouldn’t her brain be too starved for oxygen for her to see or hear or form memories?
“No,” Woerlee replied. There had to be enough blood in her brain to sustain consciousness “because this is proven by this event.”
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re saying, if she had been unconscious, she couldn’t form memories. Therefore she had to be conscious—because she formed memories. Isn’t that circular reasoning?”
“Consciousness is a product of brain function. Period.”
I couldn’t resist baiting him one more time. “Some people believe that reductionist science is too narrow, that it has to come up with a new paradigm.”
“
Everything
I say can be proven,”Woerlee retorted.“
Nothing
they say can be proven. And that’s the difference.”
I relate this dialogue not because of its “ ’Tis not,” “ ’Tis so” quality, but because this is the paradigm that near-death researchers must shatter in order to make their case. Woerlee and other mainstream scientists may be correct, and physiology as we understand it today may explain all. But when they hear Pam’s accurate descriptions of the operating room, I wonder, aren’t they just a little bit curious?
Sitting in her touring bus, I asked Pam if she felt like William James’s white crow, living proof that consciousness is independent of the brain.
“I’m convinced it is,” she said. “But it happened to me, so I sort of have no choice but to believe. I’m not a brain surgeon, so I can’t speak to you on a scientific level of how it works. But in my mind, there’s no way that consciousness is kept and recorded only in the brain.”
She reflected a moment.“Every once and a while I wonder if it’s just some kind of big farce.”
Or, perhaps, evidence of another reality.
Before I left Pam’s bus, one question nagged at me. I wondered if she had returned from the edge of death with a physiological marker in her brain, similar to the monks in Richard Davidson’s research, or the nuns and Pentecostals in Andrew Newberg’s studies. I asked Pam if her neurologist had found anything unusual about her brain.
She looked surprised at the question.
“Yes, my EEGs—my brain waves—are extremely slow,” she replied. “Even when I’m asked to do difficult mental functions, my brain waves act as if I’m at rest. But I can do the function and do it accurately.”
“How do your doctors explain that?” I asked.
“They don’t.”
I got up to leave. I asked if I could take her picture outside. She laughed.
“I don’t do stairs well, baby.”
As I looked back, I snapped an image of Pam Reynolds’s life: trapped in a broken body, yet savoring her husband, her children, her grandchildren. Walking with a cane but freer than most people I know. A 100-watt woman living in a dimly lit bus.
And the Blind Shall See
Pam Reynolds’s story compelled me to seriously reconsider the assumption that the mind cannot function without the material brain. Vicky Bright’s story took me one step further. Could it be that we possess
spiritual senses
that lie dormant until they are called into action?
At one-thirty in the morning on February 2, 1972, Vicky Bright (now Noratuk) had finished her shift as a pianist and singer at a small restaurant in Seattle. She was twenty-three years old and owned no car. With considerable misgiving, she accepted a ride from a couple who had enjoyed a little too much to drink. The wife was chattering away when the husband, who was driving, mentioned he was seeing double. Suddenly, they began to weave across the road. At the bottom of Queen Anne Hill,Vicky heard a sickening squealing of wheels. Their van spun and crashed into a wall, and then, in slow motion,Vicky sensed herself being flung out of the vehicle and dragged along the road.
“I saw the pavement,” Vicky told me in an interview thirty-four years later. “I was up above, looking at my body on the ground.” Her world went blank, until she found herself hovering near the ceiling in an operating room at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Below Vicky lay a woman on a cart—tall and slim, her thick waist-length hair shaved in places like a Mohawk.Vicky thought she knew the woman, but was not quite sure.
“I saw the people working on the body,” she said.“There was a male and a female, and they were doctors. The male doctor was saying, ‘It’s a pity that she could be deaf, because there’s blood on her left eardrum.’ And the female doctor said, ‘Well, she may not even survive. And if she does, she could be in a permanent vegetative state.’That really upset me.
“And I floated down closer to the female, and I tried to communicate with her. Then I saw my wedding ring, and I thought,
Oh my God, that must be me they’re talking about
. And I thought,
Am I dead or what?
”
Vicky can perhaps be forgiven her confusion. This experience marked the first time she had ever seen herself. Or seen, for that matter.Vicky Bright has been blind from birth. Like many other premature babies born in the 1950s, she was placed in an incubator when she was born at twenty-two weeks, and the incubator destroyed her optic nerve.
“Some people say, ‘Don’t you see black?’ No, I don’t see anything, because my eyes are atrophied and the optic nerve is dead. So I’ve never seen light. I’ve never seen shadows. I’ve never seen anything, ever. Ever, ever.”
That night in the operating room would be the exception. After she failed to draw notice from the female doctor—trying to grab the woman’s arm and watching her hand pass through it—Vicky felt herself move “up through the ceiling and I was out up above the buildings and the street.”
“Could you see the buildings and the street?” I asked, curious whether she could distinguish forms.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what you saw? Like, did you see a car?”
“I saw several cars. They were going down the street. It was in the middle of the night. I saw buildings, I saw the street. But I had trouble discerning what things were—because, of course, I’ve never seen. And it was really terrifying.”
She giggled. “But then, it was kind of neat, because I didn’t have to worry about bumping into anything.”
One could argue that all of Vicky’s “observations” could be explained by assuming she was partly conscious during her out-of-body experience, and her hearing painted the images in her mind. She heard a male and female voice. The female doctor confirmed the next day that the doctors had discussed blood on her eardrum—an
auditory
, not visual, detail. Vicky’s ears could have detected them shaving her hair and assumed it had been cut short in places. And her description of her wedding ring—white gold, with tiny orange blossoms around the diamonds—proved nothing since she had no doubt touched it thousands of times.
But if any part of Vicky’s account is true, if she did “see” for the first time, it is the kind of evidence that smashes paradigms. On that operating table,Vicky found herself with a radically different way to perceive, a new “spiritual” sense that leapt into action the moment her brain was disabled.
That new sense is what Kenneth Ring calls “mindsight.”
“The mind sees,” he explained. “It’s not the eyes that see. It’s like a spiritual sight or a spiritual awareness.”
Ken Ring, who is professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Connecticut, began investigating near-death experiences in 1977. Occasionally he stumbled across stories about blind people suddenly seeing objects for the first time.
“I felt if this was actually on the level, this would be a dramatic demonstration of the brain-mind split,” Ring said, referring to the idea that the mind can operate independently of the physical brain. If he could find a case in which a blind person could accurately describe the environment, as verified by other people,“that really would be—I won’t say a clincher—but a very strong argument for the authenticity of these experiences.”
Ring never found his airtight case, but he did come to believe in a sort of spiritual perception. He tracked down thirty-one cases of blind people who had reported near-death experiences and inquired whether they had visually accurate (veridical) memories of those experiences.
10
Eighty percent reported visual perception—and of those respondents, two-thirds were blind from birth. Of his thirty-one subjects, fourteen reported an out-of-body experience, in which they claimed to visualize details in the operating room, their bedrooms, or other physical settings.
None of these stories makes a perfect case that consciousness continues when the brain has shut down. Still, the fact that all these subjects described the same perplexing type of vision does raise a startling possibility: somehow,Vicky Bright and others seem to have been catapulted into a new level of consciousness, where they found new resources to understand reality—in their case, sight that perceives in finer detail than ordinary vision. And the special case (of the blind) might hint at a more general principle: perhaps an encounter with death catapults you and me and anyone with all five senses into a different sort of perception of the universe. Being sighted, we cannot imagine what that is, any more than Vicky Bright could imagine seeing her shorn hair and her wedding ring before she glimpsed them in her out-of-body experience.
On any given day, you may be perfectly content to putter along in “normal waking consciousness,” as William James had it, affixed to this familiar reality by your name, family, job, the opinion of others, your worldview, your bad knee, and your preference for strawberry ice cream.
“These are all things that keep you in this zone of ordinary waking consciousness
,”
Ken Ring explained. “But if you nearly die, if you fall off a bridge, if something happens that shocks you, then [ordinary consciousness] falls away and you are for a moment aware of something else, something greater, something truer.”
You perceive, he asserts, with “a kind of spiritual sense.”
I was jolted by the language, not because it was foreign but because it wrapped around me like a soft, familiar sweater. Raised a Christian Scientist, I had learned to assume we have spiritual senses that perceive the spiritual realm—God’s universe—just as our eyes and ears capture the physical world. Or, as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the religion, put it: “Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost.”
11
I had been taught that there is a close connection between material and spiritual existence, that out bodies and brains are the human counterpart to a spiritual identity—and that a
transcendent
realm can be perceived by spiritual senses. As I listened to these stories, I wondered if spiritual senses could be triggered not just by prayer and meditation but by drugs or seizure, by lucky happenstance, or by a close brush with death, as Vicky Bright and Pam Reynolds claimed.
It is one thing to swallow doctrine as a child, another to find that the very ideas you discarded as an adult might in fact be legitimate. It unnerved me. But I found that these ideas were not so strange after all. Consider, again, Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve.” The author (and connoisseur of LSD) proposed that drugs, spiritual exercises, hypnosis—and, he might have plausibly added, death—can open up the valve to let us perceive at least a sliver of “Mind at Large.” He defined Mind at Large as “something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.”
12
True, the strange idea that an invisible reality penetrates the material world, this bizarre notion that our minds might be able to operate independently of our brains—these are mere hypotheses. At the same time, these hypotheses about mind and brain are more than fantasy or speculation. They spring from life experience. These stories are everywhere, accessible. They are low-hanging fruit, and you need only step into your backyard and pluck them. And while people’s experiences are not as conclusive as a DNA match, they are
something
, and they point toward a reality beyond the horizon of this world.
Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has studied near-death experiences for thirty years, has noticed a rare but extraordinary phenomenon that can occur when people are slipping from life to death. As their brains shut down, they often enjoy brief and clinically inexplicable recoveries in the final moments of life. People suffering from dementia become lucid. Those with Alzheimer’s disease recognize family members after years of confusion. Schizophrenics become clearheaded.
Even though this happens very rarely, he told me, “the fact that this ever happens at all is inexplicable if we equate minds with brains, because dying people’s brains do not correct their structural or chemical derangement” when they are dying.