Demystifying Reincarnation 10 – Near Death Experiences – Conscious when unconscious?

 

Hare Krishna.

Welcome back to our demystifying reincarnation series. We are discussing near-death experiences. And could it be possible that somebody whose heart is not beating, whose brainwaves are flat, for whom they have been given an artificial heart attack, the body temperature has been brought down to 60 degrees Celsius Fahrenheit, whose head has been drained of all blood, can such a person see what is happening to them, hear what the medical staff is talking, and describe events accurately, when their ears are covered with plugs that are emitting sounds which are louder than a train whistle and the sounds are coming at the frequency of 10 to 20 such whistles per minute.

Such is an extraordinary case that is the case of Pam Reynolds, described by Michael Sabom, a pioneering researcher, in his book Light and Death. So near-death experiences are often thought of as explainable through the idea of partial consciousness. Maybe the subjects were partially conscious and that's how they were able to describe accurately whatever was happening.

Before we go to Sabom's case, let's discuss another case which is described by Pim Van Lommel in an article published in Lancet. So he described the case of a person who was in a park and suddenly got a heart attack. The heart attack was so devastating that he went into a coma at that time.

He was rushed to a hospital and when he came to the hospital he was already in deep coma and the medical staff rushed around him. He had dentures, so in order to give the shock, to revive the person, they had the dentures removed and a nurse removed the dentures and put them aside on a cart and they started giving vigorously the attempt to resuscitate him and they kept trying for 30 to 45 minutes and finally they saved his life. His heart started functioning again.

After this, for 7 full days, he remained in coma. After 7 days, when he came back to consciousness, at that time he asked the medical staff for his dentures and nobody could locate the dentures. And then the same nurse who had actually removed the dentures and kept, she came to attend to him and as soon as he saw her, Hey, you know you kept my dentures, please get them.

She was surprised and he told her, he described the cart on which she had kept. Now she had kept the dentures but in the heat of the moment, so much had been happening that she had forgotten that she had kept the dentures there and he told her, he described the cart, he described the kind of bottles that were on the cart and he also described the kind of drawers that were there in the lower part of the cart. Not only that, he also described that when he was brought into the hospital, at that time, what were the, what were the kind of people who were there and what were the, what were the, how were they attired, what were the looks on their faces, how they were talking with each other, all this he described.

And he said, he saw all this from an out-of-body perspective, above. And he said that he had been mortally scared because he feared that the medical staff was on the verge of abandoning their efforts to resuscitate him. And that nurse as well as the other medical staff, they confirmed that this was true because they had tried for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes to try to resuscitate him and they had not succeeded.

So he had looked in such a terrible condition when he had brought in, in deep coma, they had thought there was no chance of resuscitating him. So he had been desperate, trying to somehow communicate to them, please don't stop, I am here, I am alive. So he said he had been in great anxiety.

So, now this, this incident begs the question, how could a person who was already in coma when brought into a hospital and who had a heart attack already, which had put him into coma and who did not come out of the coma for 7 days after that, how could such a person have been conscious? And I described things which people who had been conscious had forgotten, such as the location of the dentures. Even if he had been conscious, it's just not possible at that time, in that situation, for a person to be biologically conscious. So the fact that he described this means that his consciousness was actually coming from a source above his body.

Another, even more fascinating case is of Pam Reynolds, as I mentioned in the start. You know, Reynolds, she was, she was in North America and she, during a medical checkup came to know that she had a giant bacillus aneurysm. That means there was a swelling at the bottom of her brain and that swelling was like a time bomb.

It could explode any moment and if it exploded, it would kill her. And it was at such a deep location in the brain that reaching it and removing it was almost impossible. So most doctors told her that the case was hopeless, that there was no chance of her living.

And she had almost given up on hope till she heard of Dr. Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Research, Barrow Neurological Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. And there Dr. Spetzler had pioneered a daring operation for saving patients like her who had maladies like her and this operation was called Operation Standstill. Operation Standstill means, the idea is, standstill means there is no motion.

So during this operation, all motion in the body is artificially brought to a stop, brought to a standstill. And what does this operation involve? Now, first, the patient is given an artificial humanly induced, mechanically induced heart attack. It involves a hypothermic cardiac arrest.

Hypothermic means the temperature is taken below the normal body temperature. The normal body temperature is 98.6. The body is cooled down to 6, around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. 98.6 Fahrenheit to 60 degree Fahrenheit and then the heart attack is given so that when the heart attack comes, then at that time there is no pulse, there is no heartbeat, there is no, there is no breathing and then after that then the person's head is drained of all blood.

Why? Because the doctors need to reach, need to actually open the cranium and reach down to the, they have to actually literally lift up the brain out of the cranial cavity and then they have to reach down to the bottom of the brain, find the aneurysm and then pluck it out and remove it from the body and then place the brain back inside the cranial cavity, seal the brain and then after that revive the person. It's an extremely daring operation and when this is to be performed at that time what are the medical implications? Dr. Spezler describes that at that stage in the operation nobody can observe or hear in that state and I find it inconceivable that your normal sense such as hearing let alone the fact that she had clicking modules in each ear that there was any way to hear what she heard through normal auditory pathways. Now what does this mean? Actually when she had been completely made unconscious like this at that time Reynolds had a near-death experience and what was that? She saw herself from above her body and she saw herself she first saw the peculiar way in which her hair had been shaved.

The doctors had to open the cranial cavity and for that they had to cut off her hair. So she was allowed to see the way her hair had been shaved off and then she saw that somebody was operating in her groin area and she said she thought something what is going on over here that actually supposed to be a brain surgery what are they doing at the groin area and she heard a female voice saying oh the veins here are too small then a male voice responded try the other leg and then they started doing something on the other side on the other side of her groin and actually what had happened was for when they give a artificial heart attack they have to have a support system by which in case a bypass has to be done they have to have a means to access the heart and that's why they have a incision and a pathway from the thighs to the groin and that's the way have to the surgery and that's the way they do the surgery and that's the surgery and And in that loud sounds of around 90 to 100 decibels, there are clicks, they come out at almost 11 to 13 clicks per second. So these clicks are as loud as a whistling tea kettle or as a train whistle as it is rushing by.

So the idea is normally if a person is sleeping, then if a loud noise comes and loud noise comes near their ear, they'll wake up immediately. That's how that's the principle of alarm clocks. That's how people wake up in alarm clock.

So here the alarm clock, we normally keep it near the bed or near the ear. But here these modules which produce these clicks, they were fixed to the ears. And if there's even the slightest remnant of consciousness in the person, then this loud clicking modules will immediately cause the person to wake up.

And as soon as the doctors see, even in the brain, there is some response that this loud noise is coming through the ears and if it's going to the brain, if the brain itself is conscious of this, the brainwaves will show a response. And when despite such loud noises, 11 to 13 clicks per second at 90 to 100 decibels, when they are coming and when there is no response in the brain in spite of this, even when the brainwaves stay flat, that means that the person is not conscious at all. And at such a time when such loud noises are coming through apparatus affixed to the brain for a person to hear some conversation that happened at a normal conversational level, probably 60 decibels, it is impossible.

And Reynolds, she was not in the least distracted by that conversing, by that clicking sound. In fact, what to speak of being distracted, when she was asked about it, she said, I didn't even hear that sound. So then she was asked, how did you hear them? She said, I heard by some auditory channel that had nothing to do with the body.

Just as she was seeing without the body, she was seeing from above her body below, like that she was also hearing from above without the body being involved in it. What does this mean? This means again that the soul or whatever is the source of consciousness that had separated from the body and was observing and hearing from above the body. So what does Spetzler say about this? I don't have an explanation for it.

I don't know how it's possible for it to happen considering the physiological state she was in. At the same time, I have seen so many things that I can't explain, that I don't want to be so arrogant as to be able to say that there's no way it can happen. So how it could happen? We will discuss this elaborately when we discuss the spiritual philosophical perspective about where consciousness comes from.

But at this stage, suffice it to say that that partial consciousness is not an adequate explanation for explaining near-death experiences because there are documented cases of people who were totally unconscious from the bodily perspective and then they are fully conscious during their near-death experiences. So now what explanation remains? If it is not partial consciousness, we have discussed earlier, could they be just hallucinations? No. Could they just be guesses? No.

Then what remains? Could they just be all frauds? Now, who could conduct the frauds? It could be either the subjects or it could be the researchers. Now, as far as the subjects are concerned, what do they gain? What would they gain by it? They actually, most of the time, the subjects, when they tell about their experiences, they are greeted with skepticism and they often have to bear the skepticism of their relatives and especially the medical staff who are, who have a lot of faith in medical science, mainstream materialistic medical science, mainstream materialist science, and therefore they don't believe that consciousness can be possible in a person who is unconscious. So they have to endure this all, cynicism.

And still, they are speaking. Most of the times, it is not that these near-death experiencers, they go on the public media and they speak to the whole world that I had this case. It is only when near-death experiencers solicit, want to do some case study and they solicit information, then they tell the information.

So fraud does not lead to gain anything, any gain for them. Now, it could be that some of them may feel that their religious belief in an afterlife is vindicated by the near-death experiences. That's possible.

But just vindication of one's belief does not explain the content of the experience. And that content is not just, oh, you believed in Jesus, so you saw Jesus. That's not what we're talking about.

Whatever you believed in, whatever somebody might believe in, we're not talking about beliefs, we're talking about facts. How could somebody who is conscious be able to describe information which they could not have known by any other means? Any other means. What is the scope for a fraud over here? There is no scope itself.

Now, what about the researchers? Could they have colluded with the subjects or could the medical staff have colluded and acted as if the subjects have given the information? When actually the subjects have been fed the information, that's also a possibility. But we see that the near-death experiencers have similar patterns throughout hundreds of cases reported by researchers, research by researchers and reported by subjects all over the world. And these involve even children.

So how would children who are not even in their teens, how could they have been persuaded to join an international collusion with strangers whom they had never met and whom they never meet? It is not that subjects from one part of the world and other parts of the world regularly have meetings and they decide what stories they are going to tell. No, there is no chance of collusion over there. Along with that, near-death experiences are no longer a fringe, loony area of study.

There are many, many research bodies which adhere to standards of mainstream scientific research. That is IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies, which involves researchers with impeccable credentials in science from mainstream scientific institutes who have been intrigued by this field and have used their best faculties to evaluate that field with the required level of scientific criticality. So the level of criticality and scrutiny that the subject to, the subject of near-death cases to is seen in their quarterly magazine, The Vital Science and the peer-reviewed journal of near-death studies.

So therefore, to dismiss away all these explanations as frauds is actually blatantly biased. Emily Keller, Emily Kelly is a part of a team of authors who has come, who has brought together, who has written a book called Irreducible Mind Towards the Psychology for the 21st Century. It's a classic exhaustive anthology of the research in various fields that points to the irreducibility of the mind.

And there she writes, she addresses the deception, the fraud hypothesis. She says that that deception is certainly always a possibility to be guarded against in individual cases. But when this suggestion is used repeatedly and without supporting evidence as a blanket defense against the entire body of evidence, it should be recognized for what it is.

It is simply an unwillingness to examine that evidence in a truly scientific spirit. So the true scientific spirit is what? That we let the evidence speak for itself. We don't let the evidence be silenced to support our own pet beliefs.

So the pet belief that is there in mainstream science today is that matter and brain are the source of consciousness. And because of this pet belief, evidence to the contrary is often sidelined, denigrated and silenced. But this is not the spirit of science.

Science has advanced throughout its history by examining the fringes. Newton's Newtonian classical physics had more or less explained much of the motion of physical objects by the start of the 20th century. But it was on the fringes there were some problems.

The motion of cosmic bodies was not explainable as well. And black body radiation was not explainable by classical physics. And if scientists had just sidelined these two fields, then Newtonian classical physics would just have continued on.

But the focus on these two branches of study led to the development of firstly relativity physics for explaining the motion of cosmic objects, nearing the speed of light and to quantum physics. And both of them revolutionized physics. So science progresses by examining that knowledge, that evidence which is at the fringes.

What is already explainable by current theories, just focusing on that will not expand our knowledge. What is not explainable by current theories, when you examine that, that is when our knowledge will expand. So we have discussed till now about, first we started in the series discussing about our past life memories, which suggests that consciousness or conscious being can leave one body and go into another body.

And in this session, we discussed about how the conscious being can live, can leave the body and still be conscious from an out of body perspective. These are, you could say, empirical evidences for the idea that consciousness can exist outside the brain. Now, science has these two aspects.

There is experiment observation, there is the empirical aspect and there is the conceptual or theoretical aspect. So in our next session, we will discuss from a theoretical perspective, does it make sense to conceive that consciousness exists outside the body? How would it be possible and what would it mean? That we'll discuss in our next session. Right now, to summarize, in this session, we discussed about the explanations of consciousness as, of near-death experiences as coming from partial consciousness and how that does not work.

And therefore, we also discussed the fraud hypothesis. So to go over quickly the near-death experiences analysis, what are the possible explanations and why those explanations don't work? Could they be hallucinations? No, because hallucinations are disorderly and leave subjects feeling confused and they often have biological causes. Near-death experiences are very orderly.

They help the subjects feel illumined and they occur even when none of the causes of hallucination are present. Then could the near-death experiences just be guesses, educated guesses? No, because the near-death experiencers describe specific details that require methodical observation, which cannot be known by laypeople who cannot have specific knowledge. Then could the near-death experiencers are having partial consciousness? No, because when we are partially conscious, we are more likely capable of hearing than of seeing.

Whereas near-death experiencers see, they actually see. It's not that they are manufacturing their sights based on the touches or sounds. And not only are they able to see themselves, but they are able to see things beyond their vicinity also.

Paranormal perceptions are there. Not only that, they are also able to, even when they are blind, they are able to see. And not only that, even when they are completely unconscious, medically documented, we discussed the cases of Pam Reynolds and the case reported by Wim Van Lommel in Lancet about how in complete unconsciousness also, there were people who were conscious and had vivid perceptions, which they described and which were verified later.

And then could this all be fraud? It's because the subjects have nothing to gain by doing a fraud and they have no means to do a fraud also because when they are unconscious, how can they know any information? And the medical staff, could they be colluding or could the researchers be colluding? In one or two cases, it might be possible. And in individual cases, we have to be cautious. But when case after case after case and hundreds of cases report the same finding, then we need to not shut down the evidence, but rather we need to open our minds and open our conceptions to understand what the evidence implies and what theoretical perspective can explain this evidence.

We will consider in our next session.