- The Aeneid (published 19 B.C.), Book Six, vv. 434-439
by Publius Vergilius Maro

The assumptions I make in what follows are presented here so that readers may decide at the outset whether they wish to continue reading. The assumptions are:

1. Paranormal phenomena do occur. They include telepathy, bodily incorruption, and ghosts. By no means are all claims of such phenomena true.
2. There is no direct link between physics and psychic phenomena. That is, psychic events cannot (at least thus far) be reduced to electromagnetism, electroweak forces, quantum mechanics or any other energy, force, state or field treated by modern physics, even though they may have physical effects.
3. Underlying and supporting the consciousness of the human mind is a subconscious or unconscious complex of mental activity which I here call the soul or psyche. It consists largely of an integrated ensemble of memories of different types: personal, transpersonal, racial, phyletic (belonging to the species) and biological. It is coordinate - but not identical - with the body and its nervous systems, especially the brain, although the means of its coordination is at present unknown.
4. Underlying and supporting the soul and its individual unconscious is a much more general, transpersonal unconscious, which exists beyond space and time and transcends the entire universe. I call this transpersonal unconscious the inframind. It is the basis of paranormal phenomena and of the universe itself. That aspect of it which relates to the earth as a whole I refer to as the planetary inframind, while in its widest aspect I call it the cosmic inframind. It is characterized by memory in the sense proposed by Rupert Sheldrake (see below), although Sheldrake's idea of "fields" is unnecessary, since these would involve space, while the inframind is non-spatial.
5. Memory and the physical world are co-generative and mutually supportive.

Unfortunately, the NDE phenomenon has been used by many charlatans, magicians, religious ideologues and others to gain power, money and fame. Such individuals take advantage of the credulity of large numbers of people to delude and exploit them. Luckily, there are others, such as members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), who have done much to debunk the misunderstandings, delusions and outright lies and deception so often found among false proponents of the paranormal. The card-guessing games of many parapsychologists as well as the fortune-telling activities of many "psychics" and the trickery of professional magicians have been shown to be often little more than deception of oneself or others, due to the efforts of people such as those who belong to CSICOP. These people have demonstrated irrefutably that true psychic phenomena are not founded in any way on electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, or anything else in the world of physics.(4) The truly psychic (or "supernatural") and the physical, while somehow communicating with one another, are completely separate in nature and function. The view espoused here, however, is that of Rupert Sheldrake: that the "laws" of physics are in fact of the nature of habit (i.e., deeply engrained memories). This means that these habits can, under certain highly unusual conditions, be changed. In many cases, however, the sceptical members of CSICOP and their associates are correct and to be commended for their work in separating truth from falsehood.

At the same time, there is a pronounced tendency on the part of the sceptics (or "skeptics," as they often term themselves) to discredit more than the facts would allow them to discredit. Cases which prompt them to do this are those involving life and death, cases where they produce marvelously simple rationalizations of such things as the nature of genetic transmission, or of the NDE mentioned above. Almost invariably, for instance, the "supersceptics" claim that the forms of living beings are "programmed" into their DNA. How this could be so, when the only thing known for sure about DNA is that it codes for amino acids and proteins, not forms, is not explained by them. But when a philosopher-scientist such as Rupert Sheldrake suggests that a memory-complex (which Sheldrake calls a "morphic field") might be responsible for this, and also suggests experiments by which to test his theory, they offer little more than ridicule to counter his ideas. For it is easy to expose quacks or unscientific and credulous people, but not so easy to do the same to individuals such as Sheldrake.

In recent decades the fundamental principle of evolution has been determined. That principle is called evolutionary epistemology, from the Greek word epistêmê, "knowledge, intelligence, insight" and -logía, "collection (of information); lore." In other words, the whole of biological evolution, from the beginning of life on earth to the present, is a learning process. Many biologists are of the opinion that this process is purely mechanical, based upon "selfish genes" and nothing more than survival of the fittest. The countless evolutionary jumps - abrupt emergences of higher species from lower ones - are explained away as pure accident or as only apparent and due to gaps in the historical record.

In contrast, Sheldrake views life as a form of matter which accumulates and coordinates memories, that is, learns. He suggests that the jumps are psychosomatic and caused by the same reconfigurative, "unconscious" problem-solving that is seen is lesser scope in ourselves when, after struggling with some knotty problem, the answer suddenly pops fully armed into our heads from our unconscious. The transition takes place virtually instantaneously and from the collective mind of the affected group, and is not due to some random genetic fluctuation. To oversimplify: a small (perhaps feathered) dinosaur subspecies living amongst the trees suddenly, overnight and without any intermediate steps, becomes a flying animal with feathers. The subspecies "reformulates" itself.

Something analogous may occur in the cases of the mysterious "spontaneous healings" and sudden, startling remissions which are found from time to time in medicine: an individual on a deathbed, afflicted with some disease lethal in 99.999% of all cases, suddenly and without any visible external aid, becomes wholly cured and restored to normal life. All in a matter of a few hours or less. Diehard sceptics will assure themselves that there was a misdiagnosis of some sort to begin with, or chalk it up to the "insufficient data" category. The idea that the cure might be mental in nature is inacceptable to them. My own view is that such healings are due to a "recapitulation" or "rethinking" of the bodily state by the unconscious - perhaps sometimes with paranormal help. And, as will become clear, I suggest that this same kind of "mental reorganization" is involved in the NDE.

The most difficult phenomenon of all for sceptics to explain is the NDE. It is often explained away as merely a hallucination resulting from, e.g., the deprivation of oxygen, etc., in the brain. It is pointed out repeatedly that the person did not really die. This, of course, is true, and is why the NDE is called a Near-Death Experience.(5) But there are additional elements which the supersceptics prefer to ignore or dismiss with facile rationalizations, and the supercredulous often try to twist to their own preconceptions.

To begin with, the symbolic experiences of the NDE are utterly unlike any true hallucination. In the latter, the perceived happenings are obviously self-contradictory, even insane, often involving great confusion, and are frequently followed by the mental or even bodily deterioration of the afflicted individual. The hallucinations caused by drugs are the best-known examples. Here, the experience can be shown to be anything but uplifting.

In contrast, the visions of the NDE are coherent and the subject is in a state of high awareness, as evidenced by his or her testimony afterward. They are neither chaotic nor disintegrative. Quite the opposite is true: its parts are logically related, exquisitely structured and life-enhancing for the experiencer, as is clear from the didactic "lessons" which the subject later relates. Even when horrifying, they are in no way "crazy." In fact, as will become increasingly clear, the juxtamortal experience belongs to the category of the lucid dream rather than of the hallucination - a very powerful dream in which one often perceives the biological and psychological structure of one's own self and much else besides. It is often also salutary and psychologically integrative. Only a diehard or perhaps neurotic debunker would consider a dreamer crazy.

Dreaming of any type depends on an intact brain, however quiescent. Thus, if the brain is either damaged or so affected by the trauma of disease or injury that it is seriously impaired, it is less likely that a juxtamortal dream will occur. As clinical psychologist Robert Kastenbaum relates in his Is There Life After Death? The latest evidence analyzed,(6) those who are objectively closest of all to actual death are less likely to report NDEs than those who are "merely close" to it.

The hypothesis offered here is that the juxtamortal dream consists essentially in an interchange of information between the inframind (the "transpersonal" psychic realm) and the constitutive memories of the deep brain. Inflowing information can be apprehended only through these memory structures - through memories as "windows." Naïve people who do not understand this - both religious believer and agnostic brain researchers - will mistake the near-death psychodrama in some literal way. The naïve believer may take it to be only supernatural, the naïve researcher as only psycho-biochemical, whereas in reality it is both.

Most instructive is the fact that the Near-Death Experiencer often sees his or her own life, from infancy (or even before) to the present. The method of this "seeing" varies considerably: sometimes it is seen like a movie, sometimes as a sequence of still shots; sometimes in color, other times in monochrome; sometimes in the sequence in which things actually happened, sometimes in reverse; sometimes wholly or as a montage, sometimes only the highlights. But in any case, the dying person frequently sees his or her self in toto, as a complete "self-constructed" entity consisting of the memories laid down during life: the self as memory-complex - as "morphic field," in Sheldrake's terms. One fact about the "life review" is clear: that the function of memory is highly activated and very powerful in the NDE.

It would be most presumptuous of anyone to say that the NDEer is in such a case hallucinating, since the evoked memories are those of true events - that is, they are remembered by the subject and others as having actually transpired during his or her life. If these were "hallucinations," then all memories of whatever type would have to be hallucinations. As in an ordinary dream, envisioned memory elements may indeed be mingled with other factors, but they are organically integrated with them, not disjointed as cocaine addicts often report about their "trips."

It thus appears that the typical NDEer's memory is working fine - in fact, much better than it normally does, since we cannot normally recall events from long ago, and we all repress many things from normal consciousness to the point where they cannot be recalled at all. In this respect, the NDE - the juxtamortal dream - can be considered a point of total recall.

The confirmed sceptic will normally gloss over this matter of the life review, and hurry on to what he really wants to oppose: the seemingly "supernatural" or "netherworldly" aspects of the experience. These include the often described vision of the "Light" (there is a strong Gnostic component in all of these reports), the encounters with the dead and with religious figures (Christ, an angel, a Hindu god, etc.), and seemingly preliminary but often life-changing glimpses of heaven, purgatory, hell, or other otherworldly "places." Since it is impossible to subject these dream-like experiences to an antagonistic scientist's laboratory, and because they are symbolic in nature rather than directly observable in a clinical sense, the sceptic usually dismisses them as the pathological products of a brain in extreme stress: products which have no objective validity whatsoever. Why the juxtamortal dream should be regarded as pathological while ordinary dreams are not, has yet to find an answer.

Many brain researchers seem to be obsessed with the various visual and affective elements of the NDE such as the "Light," the feelings of peace and so forth. Most of these components are individually replicable through drugs that release a monoamine neurotransmitter (serotonin), various endorphins, or techniques of direct electrical brain stimulation or the like. In their defense, it may be said that the juxtamortal dreamers themselves often overemphasize these visual and affective elements. However, what gets lost in the shuffle is the meaning of these elements taken as a whole and, above all, the clearly paranormal aspects of such experiences when these also appear. So the NDE is basically dismissed as nothing more than the results of intense brain stress.

Such dismissal amounts to jumping to conclusions. To begin with, we know from clinical psychology that normal nocturnal dreams often have symbolic aspects or components which refer to real psychological or physical facts about the dreamer's life or body. The appropriate approach, as with other dreams, is to ask about the meaning of the symbols, not just their literal form. A "divine figure," for instance, is the symbol of the self as harmoniously integrated both within itself and with the totality of existence. The oft-reported "light" is a symbol of knowledge - the learning process inherent in evolution and in one's own body structure, while "darkness" is just the reverse: a symbol of the active refusal to learn and evolve, or of the frustration of the evolutionary process in some way.

The core of the paranormal is meaning. But the import or significance of a particular happening cannot be shown until the event (say, a poltergeist outbreak) is first evaluated by the human mind. This takes time, sometimes much time. If one is predisposed to misinterpret the paranormal deliberately or to subject it in advance to conditions of meaninglessness under the guise of strict laboratory controls, one will never see it. In this way it is much like humor. Moreover, a particular "message" or revelation may be received in many different ways and modes. To expect uniform, "scientifically replicable" manifestations of such a message is to underestimate grossly how fundamental the paranormal is. In the juxtamortal dream, all of the most profound elements of the human mind are used to transmit, and hence to interpret, the awesome ordinations of this pre-linguistic, "pre-geometrical," pre-experiential foundation of being. The error many neurological researchers make is to mistake these mental elements - such as the experience of brain-generated "light," drug-produced "mystical euphoria," or physically caused "out-of-body" sensation - for the core of the NDE. They are not. They are means of expression only, much as distant falling rain is a means to turning white sunlight into a rainbow of different colors. And what these means express in the NDE is the all-sustaining Mind of the Life Source: the cosmic inframind. The unexpected, uncanny things associated with, or resulting from, the NDE show this.

Often the NDEer claims to have met people who had died. This is the most difficult item of all for sceptics to accept. Even one of the best researchers of the topic, Carol Zaleski, almost totally ignores this element in her otherwise excellent Otherworld Journeys.(7) The prevailing view among the cultural elites is that the subject does not learn anything at all which was not previously in his or her mind in some way. Thus when the "shade" of a deceased person is reported to have told the subject something which could not possibly have been known by that subject beforehand, the report is simply dismissed out of hand and the subject ridiculed for having imagined it in the first place.

In addition, it is demonstrably true that many apparitions of the dead, and much associated therewith, arise from within the visionary's own unconscious, not from the depths beyond it. So NDEers, seeking to avoid ridicule, usually keep their experiences to themselves.

Dr. Raymond Moody, a psychologist who is both a Ph.D. and an M.D., has long worked with people who have had NDEs. In the last decade he has constructed what the ancient Greeks used to employ to consult the dead: a psychomanteum (accent on the "e").(8) He has recently described this place and his work with it in a new book, Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones.(9) The psychomanteum proper consists of a small room with a low, comfortable easy chair facing a wall with a large, 31/2' x 4' mirror on it. The mirror is placed just a little above the head of a person seated in the chair, so that the viewer's image is not reflected. Around the sides and back of the chair hangs a dark blue curtain which is the only thing reflected in the mirror when seen from the chair. In fact, the mirror really reflects only darkness. Directly behind the chair on the floor is a small lamp with a fifteen-watt bulb which provides the room's only light, once the windows are shuttered. When seated in the chair, the sitter sees only what appears to be a transparent void, a clear depth, in the mirror.

The room is in a grist mill over a century old in rural Alabama. Forests, meadows and a brook provide a lovely natural environment for the old mill. Dr. Moody has refinished the building with pleasant and most interesting decor and furnishings. Everything is calculated to make clients feel relaxed, stimulated and pleased.

Dr. Moody takes no more than one client a day, a person who usually brings photographs or mementos of a deceased one. They spend several hours talking about the client's relationship with the deceased, or as long as the client wishes. The atmosphere is convivial and friendly, and the client is encouraged to make himself or herself at home, to explore the building and its surroundings, and generally to become acclimated to a pressure-free environment. Usually around twilight the client is introduced to the psychomanteum, sinks into the easy chair, and awaits whatever may appear in the mirror. He or she is told, of course, that there is no guarantee that anything whatsoever will be seen, and in fact only about 40% of the clients experience anything at that time, although many have encounters with the dead hours or days later. The remarkable success rate of healing of grief and resolution of psychological problems through this means, however, together with the suddenness of the effects, has led to the spread of Dr. Moody's techniques to other parts of the nation and Europe.

Now, with regards to the strange experiences encountered in the NDE (rather than in a psychomanteum), sceptics often say that "lack of oxygen in the brain" (hypoxia) causes the visions of the dead and the interviews with them. This lack of oxygen is frequently to be expected as a result of the physical trauma suffered by the subject in an accident or perhaps on a hospital operating table.

In Dr. Moody's psychomanteum, people frequently interview dead loved ones in encounters similar in many respects to the encounters of the NDE. Yet these people are under no stress or trauma whatsoever - in fact, they are in the opposite state of relaxation. So the hypoxia explanation is at best incomplete; lack of oxygen is only one of several possible conditions which may trigger these extraordinary perceptions.

Dr. Moody, incidentally, sat in his own psychomanteum one day attempting to envision his maternal grandmother. After about an hour with no success he gave up, gathering he was impervious to visions. However, some while later as he was sitting in another room, his paternal grandmother walked in. (Dr. Moody says it is his impression that subjects see those whom they have a need to see, not necessarily those they seek.) She appeared to be much younger than she was at the time of her death. The two of them talked for a long while, and she let him know some personal family matters which had been previously unknown to him. Dr. Moody stresses the natural and almost "ordinary" nature of his encounter with the apparition. When they finished talking, he simply walked out of the room and she was gone when he returned. He writes of the experience (Reunions, p. 22), "It also left me with an abiding certainty that what we call death is not the end of life."

Sceptics (and many overly credulous people as well) seem to have trouble accepting, not just the extrasensory abilities of the soul,(10) but the symbolic nature of the visions. Yet if we think about it, we will realize that virtually all of our perceptions are symbolic, in the sense that we by no means perceive external objects as they are in themselves. We know from physics, for instance, that bowling balls consist mainly of empty space; if they did not, then subatomic particles such as neutrinos could not pass through them as easily as they do. Yet we perceive bowling balls as "solid." Similar transformations are performed by all of our senses all of the time. Even most of our modern computer programs are written in such a way as to present data graphically and symbolically rather than as raw numbers, to take advantage of the brain's preferred way of dealing with complex information. For the same reasons, modern clinical psychiatry uses all kinds of mental imagery and visualization in its therapy.

With mental phenomena the problem is complicated because thoughts are invisible, and yet can truly give rise to "mental pictures." Memories are only one example, dreams another. Moreover, the devices thus far devised by human scientists for detecting subtle phenomena such as electromagnetic waves, neutrinos or gravity waves, even though they may be quite sensitive, are still very crude compared to the sensory sophistication of even primitive life forms.(11) We know that the human brain (and the brains of the other higher animals) forms internal pictures due to stimuli acting appropriately on it. In the case of our sight of external objects, the stimulus is a stream of light entering our eyes - a marvel in itself. In the case of visions of the dead during low-amplitude, non-beta brainwave states, however, the stimulus is not coming through our eyes. In at least some of these visions (or feelings, or even smells), the stimulus may in fact be coming through some other, more general sense: a "psychic" sense. This sense provides input to the visual cortex in the case of visions, and to the other sensory centers in the case of feelings or smells, etc., and must therefore itself be more fundamental to the brain and life than any of the other senses. We note in passing that some neuroscientists seem to want to explain all extrasensory experiences by recourse to events in the visual cortex. This ignores the non-visual sensations which are frequently correlated with the visual ones.

A word on the pervasive atheism found among many scientific researchers: Few modernist proponents of an atheistic approach to science seem to realize that science itself was born in the Christian monasteries of thirteenth century Europe. The monastic schoolmen of that time had inherited the Greek idea that divine Reason - the "Logos" (literally "word," but also used philosophically to mean the divine "Logic" of the cosmos) or "Verbum" (Word) - ruled the universe and believed that it had become incarnate in a man - Jesus - they worshipped as God, as stated in the opening hymn of the gnosticizing Gospel of John. They therefore undertook to understand the world in terms of Greek logic and the new mathematics imported from India and Iran through Islam (cf. our "Arabic" - really Sanskrit - numerals, and the words algebra, alchemy, chemistry). This "logico-theistic" understanding led, despite some temporary, political resistance by the Italian hierarchy, to the Renaissance and the development of ever more intellectual tools with which to understand the divinely rational Universe. Copernicus, for instance, was a Polish Roman Catholic priest. It is thus incorrect to allege that scientific progress and understanding depend upon an atheistic or agnostic ("blind watchmaker") worldview. Science would not even exist had it not been for intellectuals who first believed that the world was the outward expression of a divine, mathematically rational mind, and then investigated nature for evidence of that belief. A religious approach, hence, does not necessarily disqualify a theory from being scientific.(12)

But to return: A good review of most of the objections or "explanations" offered by sceptics and debunkers is given in Carol Zaleski's aforementioned Otherworld Journeys.(13) Here it will suffice to discuss only three of the most common objections.

As reported above, many sceptics often claim that NDE visions are due to oxygen deprivation ("hypoxia" or "anoxia"), too much carbon dioxide ("hypercarbnia"), various endorphins (brain chemicals), etc., in the brain. This idea by no means "explains" any but a small percentage of NDEs. Au contraire, I propose that internally generated visions, whether experienced in an NDE, in a religious epiphany of some sort, in most "spontaneous" apparitions, or in near-sleep or in nocturnal dreams, require, at a minimum, a dominant brainwave frequency slower than the fast beta-wave (ca. 14-30 cycles per second) of standard, attentive, waking consciousness, and a correspondingly lower wave amplitude. Also, for us humans, the main locus of reception seems to be the innermost, "reptilian" brain.(14) That is, the subject must be in alpha (8-13 c/s), theta (4-7 c/s) or even delta (1/2-3 c/s) wave mode in order to experience powerful apparitional or depth-psychological phenomena. Brainwave amplitude must also be much reduced. (This, of course, is another reason to view the NDE as a species of dream.)

The reason that accident victims and operating-table patients have so many NDEs, therefore, is not directly because of hypoxia or hypercarbnia (although these conditions may indeed obtain in some cases), but because their brainwave frequencies and amplitude are very low. The less their inner minds are harnessed by the physics of brain electromagnetism, the more they become engaged by a totally different, psychic reality. Drastically lowered oxygen or elevated CO₂ levels can logically be expected to reduce brainwave frequencies from beta to almost nil and to greatly weaken brainwave amplitude, thus making the brain and mind much more receptive to subtle communications normally drowned out by intense beta-wave activity. But there are also other states, such as childhood, sleep or hypnagogic states, in which such slow brainwave activity occurs naturally. These are states whch have nothing to do with hypoxia, hypercarbnia or other chemical imbalances.

Take childhood. The brains of children are not yet large enough to produce the intense, sustained beta-wave frequencies and brainwave strength typical of adulthood. And we indeed find that young children often have "imaginary" playmates who disappear as the children grow older. For example, in religious Catholic countries apparitions have appeared much more often to children than to adults. Two recent, famous examples are the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal (ancient Lusitania) in 1917 and at Medjugorje, Croatia (ancient Illyricum) from 1981 (June 24) to the present.

There are also cases where people are about to have a deadly accident (in a fall or car accident, for instance), but for some reason escape bodily harm. During the "near-miss" event, the individual may suddenly find himself or herself out of body, reviewing his life, etc. What appears to be happening here is a state in which the subject is "frozen with fear," and the brain virtually shuts down instantaneously to very slow, quiet brainwave activity. This enables the person briefly to become aware of the inframental context and experience NDE-like phenomena.

Moreover, in comparing the sexes, we can see that the larger average body size of men results in a larger average male brain size; hence it is probable that on average there is more intense, stronger beta-wave in men than in women. In any case, spontaneous apparitions and "psychic" experiences are found much more frequently among women than among men. In this connection it may be mentioned that the greater separation of the visuo-spatial and linguistic functions to different brain sides ("lateralization") in men than in women may also be a factor in the lesser psychic sensitivity of men.

It may be countered that this insensitivity is only because men repress such experiences (or their "feminine side") more than women do. But precisely that is my point: the physically larger, more highly lateralized brains of men are more likely to drown out ("repress") the incoming data - whether sensory or extra-sensory, than are the brains of women.

In general, women are everywhere on earth more "religious" than men, since women often "feel" the effect of psychic events - such as the instant of a baby's spirit's entry into the womb - which men simply do not feel at all. (Modern industrial societies draw large numbers of women into the work force and thus cause them to speed up their brainwaves, so that feminine psychic abilities may be declining on average nowadays.(15))

Finally, psychologist Michael Murphy, writing (in The Future of the Body, p. 312) on the different levels of trance in hypnosis, discusses the work of one researcher, Spencer Sherman, who measured the EEG of the subjects he hypnotized. Murphy reports, "the profoundest hypnotic states produced in Sherman's study were correlated with drastic reductions in EEG amplitude." In other words, as the brain approximates background electromagnetism (or electroweak) conditions, the soul (or consciousness) becomes more "detached" from (i.e., less influenced by) the body.

Intense research on the subject has shown that many individual elements of the NDE (such as the light, the euphoria, etc.) can be replicated by various drugs or electrical stimulations. Therefore, some researchers conclude, the NDE is nothing but the brain's own "opiates" which produce a pleasant delusion to help us die peacefully. (We will not spend any time discussing the insurmountable problems this idea would present to traditional evolution theory, which would find no evolutionary survival value to speak of in such a stratagem.)

Without question, brain biochemistry is intimately involved in the NDE. However, the NDE is anything but uniform, and biochemistry is limited in its ability to explain very much here. For one thing, biochemistry certainly does not explain the powerful conveyance of meaning that attends juxtamortal impressions. The biochemical explanation is also unable to account for the negative experiences (of no evolutionary value) - which some may have even under hypnosis - in which, for instance, an utter void and black nothingness may be sensed as an expression of bottomless despair.

Moreover, many truly telepathic messages manifest themselves in the form of images. In such cases, activation of the relevant neurotransmitters, etc. is generated by some factor more fundamental than brain physiology. It is the meaning of the images in such cases which enables us to recognize them as derived and not primary. The same is true of the images of the NDE. At most, psychotropic electrochemical stimulation can explain drug-induced hallucinations, which are meaningless, no matter how euphoric, "mystical," or even nightmarish. (No one ever changed his behavior as the result of a drug trip.)

The frequent manifestations of paranormal phenomena (ESP, healings verging on the miraculous, etc.) in the vicinity of death and in the wake of juxtamortal dreams verify that something else is involved here besides (but not excluding) physiology.

From these considerations it would seem to follow that we are all in fact constantly receiving input of a numinous ("paranormal") type from our deep brains all of the time. It is just that, without a "quiet" brain, we cannot perceive it consciously, since modern consciousness is composed largely of strong, neocortical beta-wave frequencies and strong amplitude, which perforce block out the weaker, lower frequencies as the daytime sun does the stars. A normal minimum (but not sufficient) prerequisite for perceiving these subtle sensations is, accordingly, to lower one's brainwave intensity by some means.

It also happens that in a few cases of brain injury, the victims later discover that they have parapsychological sensations or powers. (These are often developed by NDEers also.) The most famous such victim was Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), whose psychic medical diagnoses were world famous. But there are others, perhaps many others. It may reasonably be assumed in such cases that the imperfectly healed brains are impaired in their ability to maintain strong beta-wave activity in the normal way, or that they somehow magnify the weak signals from less noticeable sources, and hence are more receptive to extrasensory input. Something like this may also be responsible for the similar psychic aftereffects of the NDE. And, finally, it might even be true that those of low intelligence, and the insane, have more extrasensory experience than normal people do, for the same reason.

One extraordinary NDEer who has had two NDEs is Dannion Brinkley. He reports in two books(16) on his experiences that he had been instructed by faceless "beings of light" to build retreat centers designed especially for assisting those approaching death and others laboring under difficult, stressful problems. These centers afford an environment in which eight steps in a spiritual retreat may take place. The steps in order are: (1) group therapy sessions; (2) physical massage, meant to induce physical relaxation and allow deeply hidden memories to rise into awareness; (3) sensory deprivation on a comfortable lounge in darkness (or other gentle environment), assisted by audio-visual techniques and measured breathing to induce a very quiet state of consciousness; (4) biofeedback techniques, with appropriate equipment, to demonstrate to the participants how much control they have over their own physiology; (5) using intuitive gifts or psychoanalytical means to provide participants with personal insight; (6) the klini - a specially constructed, narrow but very comfortable, inclined bed, which uses electronics to convert pleasant musical tones into vibrations which deeply relax the participant reclining on the klini; (7) a psychomanteum; (8) a final session on the klini.

It will be noted that the natural, cumulative result of this eightfold process is a calming of the brain so that the slower brainwave frequencies of reduced amplitude may predominate. Defensiveness, guilt-suppression, and anxiety, which cause beta-wave activity, are dissolved and the brain is placed into a receptive mode, a semi-hypnotic state, in which it can listen to itself. This mode or state is precisely the condition which makes it possible for parapsychological communication and psychological healing to occur. And it is similar to the brain state expected to obtain in the NDE.

A noteworthy element in Brinkley's Centers is number 2: physical massage. Massage causes deeply submerged memories of long ago to rise into awareness. A similar evocation of long-forgotten memories, and of apparitional figures as well, occurs when a patient is kept conscious during brain surgery, and weak electrical currents are applied with electrodes directly to various parts of the brain through the opened skull. It may be that the (involuntary) manipulation of muscles and body parts in massage likewise causes electrochemical currents to activate memories associated with the various parts of the brain to which the muscles and body parts are neuronally connected. Similarly in the NDE, the partial shutdown of the electrical state of the brain during near-death also activates the memories associated with its various levels. The fact that the "life review" is often sequential (beginning to end or end to beginning) in temporal order is consistent with the fact that the brain grows from the stem outwards during life. In most cases, the electrical weakening, too, might start from the center of the brain and pass outwardly from there, or vice versa, and hence produce a sequence (as opposed to a simultaneous montage). Completion of the review would be synchronous with the onset of the minimum brainwave frequency (usually delta) necessary for keeping the body alive. This is also the state in which the individual is most receptive to extrasensory input. As mentioned above, the truly extraordinary thing about the NDE is the fact that consciousness is greatly heightened, not diminished, by the brain's partial shutdown (and often perceives itself as outside of the body). This is exactly the opposite of what one would expect if consciousness were a matter of brain physiology alone.

In their refusal to accept the reality of paranormal and parapsychological happenings, extreme sceptics often point out that all reports thereof are "anecdotal" and therefore not "scientific" according to their definition of the term. If, however, "anecdotal" testimony is viewed as inadmissible evidence, then we might as well consider all legal systems of all countries on earth as invalid, since "anecdotal" evidence is their daily bread.

The unpredictable, uncontrollable and constantly varying nature of paranormal events derives from the fact that we are here dealing with life, not with Newtonian mechanics of some sort, as some early parapsychologists seem to have thought. It is inappropriate to reject reports of the paranormal on the basis that they are oral or written testimony. The universal human experience is that paranormal events do in fact occur. They occur all the time, and they occur spontaneously among every conceivable age, sex, race, intelligence level, and culture everywhere on earth. (They even occur to sceptics, who have a pronounced tendency to explain them away with any handy rationalization.) The mere numbers involved overwhelm the "anecdotal" objection. Paranormal events even occur among animals. We are not talking here about circus shows of calculating dogs or ponies, but of evidence of precognition (e.g., warnings of unpredictable catastrophes, such as the bombings of towns, etc.) by animals. These things indicate a phylogenetically ancient quality of the paranormal in biology: it has always been around; it was around long before man came to be. It is why and how he came to be.

Finally, while the manifestations of the paranormal are as varied as life itself, some types of phenomena are much more frequently reported than others. Indeed, precognition and clairvoyance are so common as to be almost "ordinary." And there are some people - mystics, seers, clairvoyants, for example - whose whole lives are pervaded by such occurrences on a daily basis. The categorical consistency in the reports of these spontaneous events in the living experience of all mankind since time immemorial is itself a strong argument for their veracity. This is so regardless of the fact that the phenomena are "anecdotal," that is, known to most "beta-wave" thinkers only through the testimony of others. In fact, it is the beta-wave condition which ought to be investigated more thoroughly than it is, since it tends willy-nilly to drown out the reception of virtually every communication from the deep unconscious, not just the inframental ones.(17)

Another popular pseudo-explanation is that the oft-reported "tunnel" experience is but a recall of the passage through the birth canal. In her book After the Light,(18) Seattle International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS) president Kimberly Clark Sharp reports that she presented this idea to a group of obstetric/gynecological specialists for their reactions to it. They responded with "a certain amount of skepticism." They noted that, in contrast to the reported ample size of the NDE tunnel, the birth canal is very tight and pressing. Virtually no light is visible from inside or while squeezing through this narrow way. Also, many babies are born with eyes closed; and newborns can barely distinguish between light and dark anyway; not only that, but many "NDE tunnelers" have been born by Caesarean section, and thus could not be "remembering" any birth canal passage in any way.

The "remembering the birth canal" hypothesis belongs to a class of pseudo-explanations derived from overheated Freudian psychology. Like the Bible, psychological ideologies can often be used as hats from which to draw any rabbit one wishes. It is impossible to prove them wrong. But they are worthless as explanations.

In short, it often appears that sceptics will prefer any explanation, no matter how far-fetched, to a parapsychological one. For many of them it is not rational explanations of the facts which are of interest, but their own materialistic preconceptions. On the other extreme, of course, are various fundamentalist clergy who, without studying the field, arrogate to themselves the right to impose their "official" interpretations of the NDE on the members of their congregations. Neither of these extremes aids dispassionate inquiry into the juxtamortal dream.

major stumbling-block in grasping the world philosophically is the "realist" belief that we perceive the world "as it is." This is a mistake. Rather, our senses select only a small portion of our environment. They then translate that portion into a form usable by our minds. The translation itself is quite complicated and sometimes subject to many errors and illusions. Our "minds" themselves consist of the current comprehension and past memories of whatever is provided by our inner and outer senses.

But we have no direct way of knowing what the outside world is, or even whether it exists. Our physical beings make the working assumption that it does in fact exist and is structured. (Why should we have senses at all if there is nothing to sense?) We live, in other words, on the basis of hypothetical realism.

But such a working hypothesis will carry us only so far. When, in science, we begin to leave the ordinary world of the senses, we find that we must revise this hypothesis or even replace it with others. A main characteristic of modern science is the constant competition among varying theories, not just, e.g., in brain research and evolutionary biology, but in cosmology (the attempt to understand the universe as a whole) and in quantum physics. This competition shows clearly that modern analytic philosophy is correct in maintaining that we are unable directly to access "reality in itself" - whatever that is. Instead, we must first construct languages (including mathematics) out of whose sentences we then construct the world. These linguistic world-constructs are subsequently tested using purely pragmatic criteria: we try to discover whether a given "language" can describe, explain and predict better than competing language models. As we devise ever better models with which to push out the frontiers of science, the next step of such discovery and confirmation becomes harder and harder to achieve. We find ourselves enveloped in mystery, limited by our own language - that is, our conceptual framework.

Thus, to deny, solely on the basis of a currently regnant theory, that any truly paranormal phenomena whatsoever occur is to claim (incorrectly) that one's model of the universe (evolution, brain, etc.) is now complete. This, however, is an impossibility, since we can fashion only better and better theories, but never the all-encompassing, final one.

The constant mutation of allegedly "definitive" theories of evolution, of cosmogony, and of mind demonstrates clearly that the state of science (scientia, "knowledge") about the origin of the cosmos, life or mind is actually quite murky. As just mentioned, such uncertainty is and will always be inherent above all in cosmogonic (universe-creation) theories which try to explain everything, because they are constructs of logic and cannot access their subject matter directly. Every such theory will have its own limits and will therefore have to be explained by a yet more comprehensive theory ad infinitum.(19) Nonetheless, the currently dominant spokesmen in science are sure only of their conviction that they must be solidly against introducing any non-materialist factor into the discussion of these most important questions. They often claim their approach is based on the famous dictum (falsely) ascribed to William of Ockham (1280-1349), Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ("entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary"), otherwise known as "Occam's razor."

Of course, these spokesmen assume they have the right to determine precisely what necessitas actually means. To push their case, some also use every logical fallacy in the book. A particular favorite is the argumentum ad verecundiam ("appeal to prestige"), e.g., "Scientists have produced some great stuff, therefore you had better listen to us when we tell you that the universe is just one big meaningless accident."

There are glaring gaps in the naturalist theories of evolution which make it impossible even in principle for the origin and history of the universe, of life and of consciousness to be understood through current hyper-materialist theories. Nevertheless, virtually all of the biggest (and most heavily tax-supported) names in science believe (or have been intimidated into pretending) that these gross inadequacies will somehow be finessed away without recourse to any more inclusive, non-mechanistic conceptual structures. This belief (or fear) frequently leads them to suppress the impossibly large gulf between the facts and their theories or to invoke weird "explanations" (e.g., "hopeful monsters," viruses from comets) to evade it.

This mechanistic ideological system forever promises to explain everything, but never does. The system's response to critics is always "the check is in the mail." That is, just wait a few years, or a lifetime or so, and "science" will explain it all away. Meanwhile the powerholders in the science game force their system on non-conformists using their positions of power and prestige. They consistently not only ridicule, but muzzle and ruin the career of, any scientist who, however excellent his work, refuses to accept their methodological and metaphysical naturalism. And they excuse such tyranny on the grounde, tt error has no right to exist. (Where have we heard that one before?) This dictatorial intolerance, extended into the non-scientific spheres of education, has also contributed to much of the political correctness now poisoning and calcifying the American university in the name of cultural diversity and racial sensitivity (to non-whites only, of course).(20)

Let us consider that activity of man which has always been most involved with his deep unconscious: religion. Specifically, it is more fruitful if we investigate only the natural, long-lasting religions, not the very recent religious variations which have developed in America over the last two hundred years. We will discover from such religion that it takes all of its major symbols from either the body itself or from the racially ancestral behavioral memories stored deep within the constitutional memory of our species (the phyletic memory).

A primary example is the phenomenon of sacrifice. Originally, sacrifice arose from the attack by lower-ranking males on the alpha male patriarch of the pre-human tribal group, who owned all of the females and drove all of the other males, including his own sons, to the peripheries of the tribe. (An excellent exposition of this very common primate process is to be found in anthropologist Robin Fox's The Red Lamp of Incest.(21)) The common memory of such a traumatic event, cyclically repeated over millions of years, was transmitted through our shared racial unconscious (the phyletic memory) to later generations, where the act of actually killing the king was reenacted, but sublimated or "transsubstantiated" into an act of killing and perhaps also eating lesser, non-royal mortals, then animals, plants or, in traditional Christianity, bread and wine, which were always psychologically identified with the original patriarch, now a god. Thus ancient, inherited memories become hallowed by becoming part of the innermost self. And the central sacrament of Christianity is revealed to be a ritualized, symbolic cannibalism.

In other words, the communications of the deep unconscious come to consciousness not only through our culturally determined attitudes, but also through the filter of our own evolution, which is still within us and is us, encrypted as form and behavior, and perceivable through archetypes in memory. Unless this encryption and these archetypes are recognized, the communications will be either taken too literally or viewed as total nonsense. To some extent it is our own trans-generational evolution - our own self - which is speaking to us, in part, through religious (i.e., deep-unconscious) symbolism. We are dealing here with the self as lens.

This is quite remarkable, for it shows us that memory transcends the limits of the individual body's time and space, and that each of us carries memories which are those of his own racial lineage, even if he cannot normally access those memories.(22) Like neuroses, which are also deeply embedded memories, they compel us to act in certain ways and not in others. And they also determine the shapes of our very bodies, as well as how our bodies function, as the above-mentioned Rupert Sheldrake has shown.

Sceptics will maintain that racial memories are somehow "coded" or "hard-wired" into the DNA. But there is no known mechanism in DNA by which such memories might be retained and transmitted. Moreover, it appears that we humans share about 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and yet the chimps clearly have racial memories which differ greatly from ours. Following the sceptics' logic, we would have to expect that the 2% of human genes which are not found in the chimps, alone contain the entire memory of the specifically human race.

Many sceptics also seem to be very put off by the fact that the dead, or honored psychics of the past such as the Buddha or Jesus, have not divulged anything about the physical structure or origin of the universe. They point out that all of the religious cosmologies (unless understood symbolically) are only fantasies having nothing to do with science, and yet are taken to be literally true by countless millions of credulous believers.

But if any of those same sceptics has a visitation from one of his dead relatives, I doubt very much whether he will spend any time at all talking to him or her about the nature of subatomic particles or about the first second or so of the Big Bang. No, the conversation will revolve around issues of personal meaning and life - the things which are most important even to sceptics who, after all, are humans too. Perhaps, as the numbers of sceptics grow, we will find that some of them will in fact ask the dead scientific questions. My own impression is that most of the dead do not know very much more about scientific subjects than we ourselves do, even though they may have a better grasp on where things are headed.

It is important to understand the rapid changes the human brain has been undergoing due to the rise of civilizations over the last few thousand years. In the last millennium, the dominant trend in the West has been for people to become less and less religious and more and more secular, reflecting, on average, a general rise in the amplitude and frequency of brainwaves and, hence, consciousness. To a certain extent this seems to be associated with a general rise in IQ among the upper classes. It is a general tendency of civilized life to generate this kind of trend, and is seen in its arts. In both Classical and Western civilizations, in literature, the "hero" or literary centerpiece, who mirrors the self (and thus the Zeitgeist), descends over the course of the civilization's lifespan from the plane of the gods down to the level of the neurotic and the criminal.(23) As seen from this literary viewpoint, Western civilization is now at the end of its tether, and the self has become an object of suicidal contempt. (As an exception to this trend, some science fiction represents a return to myth and the gods.) All of this is driven by the evolution of consciousness on a civilization-wide scale.

There is yet another item to be investigated in connection with the dead: miracles. Specifically, there are some cases where striking events have transpired in connection with the utterly unexpected apparition of, or communication from, the dead, particularly those dead thought of as holy.(24) Three such cases - two Catholic and one Tibetan Buddhist - associated with death are presented in Appendix A. From these extraordinary exceptions to the normal pattern of events surrounding death, we can decrypt part of the mystery surrounding it.

In the Catholic cases discussed in Appendix A, only two of a great number recorded in the Catholic Church's Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Records of the Apostolic See), several things stand out: to begin with, it was a dead priest, Fr. Andreas Bobola, who made known the whereabouts of his own tortured corpse, which was subsequently found undecomposed by the members of the seminary college in Pinsk. The priest's apparition promised to watch over the seminary and keep it safe in a period of great troubles; and indeed, it went unscathed thenceforth. These events, plus the fact that the saint's body is one of the few on earth which have mysteriously remained incorrupt long after death,(25) indicate the existence of a vast power beyond the grave: a power which can hold in abeyance the natural processes of bodily decay.(26) In Christianity this mysterious power is called God, in pre-Christian Germanic religion it was called Weird ("Fate"; from earlier *wrt- "the twisted" [i.e., woven thread of life]), in the Orient, the Tao, and so forth.

Another clue found in Fr. Bobola's case was that the apparition appeared both to the College rector and to sacristan Procopius Lukaszewicz (or undersacristan Sezerbicki) when they were in bed and either on the verge of sleep or already asleep. In other words, when their conscious minds were relaxed and their brains were presumably no longer in a high-amplitude beta brainwave state characteristic of active consciousness. This concords with the mirror-apparition events in Dr. Moody's psychomanteum and similar places.

All this also suggests that the receptivity of the individual has much to do with whether he will experience an apparition. The intense, beta-wave-producing brain of, say, a scientist will be much less likely to have such an experience than will a child being reared on a farm in a religious environment. But receptivity is not the whole of the story, any more than the perfect condition of a TV fully explains the appearance of a picture with sound on the set. In at least some cases, there must also be an outside source which the receptor receives, because the information imparted to the receptor is utterly new. How that information is interpreted is another matter. The ancient scholastic rule is "omne quod percipitur, per modum recipientis percipitur" ("everything received is received according to the characteristics of the recipient"). In other words, symbolically.

In the second case, that of Don Bosco, the fact that the prayers of the saint could have awakened a dead boy will be rejected out of hand by sceptics. This is similar to the third case, that of the Buddhist master, Lama Tseten who, after having just died, came back to life when his confrere, Jamyang Khyentse, called on him to do so. However, in order to reject the Don Bosco case honestly, sceptics will have to claim that the whole thing was a delusion: that the boy's parents mistook coma for death. But then there is the question of why the boy awoke only when Don Bosco told him to awaken, and why he died after their conversation was over. Why did he not remain alive? Why his complete mental alertness while his body remained cold? Ultimately, a thoroughgoing sceptic will be forced to claim that the entire narrative was invented or grossly exaggerated by overheated imaginations. But this is not characteristic of priests.

Also in the Don Bosco case, we encounter an element which is perhaps experienced quite often in NDEs, but rarely talked about and almost as often surpressed: hell. Carl's deathbed experience of hell also occurred while he was so deeply comatose (and presumably not breathing) that everyone considered him dead. In such a case, again, the brainwave frequency, if any, must have been delta - i.e., extremely slow, and amplitude virtually nil.

We live in an environment in which the concept of an afterlife is considered mainly a purely personal subject unsuited to serious discussions of any sort. But the concept of hell is banned almost totally even from the pulpits of modern teachers of morality.

Yet hell, or purgatory, or something equivalent to them, appears again and again not only in the world's religions, but in reports of those who have come back from the brink of death, or even of those who are approaching it. Considered as part of a juxtamortal dream, it is the ultimate nightmare. (For one report of a typical vision of hell, see Appendix B.) We must therefore accept this unpleasant (not to say horrifying) element as just as integral to the realm beyond the grave as the experience of heaven.

The "eternity" of heaven and hell is pictured by us living people as unending time. But modern physics teaches us that both time and space are constructed by our senses out of a more fundamental "spacetime," and that spacetime itself came into existence only with the Big Bang 15 billion years ago. While the temporal aspect of spacetime is real (and carries a negative sign in the equations), it is not as separate from space as our senses make it appear. In the NDE it seems that we come closer to perceiving this more fundamental spacetime as it is in itself. We see the whole geodesic ("world path") of everything, from beginning to end.(27) In such a state, the soul appears as a totality rather than as an ongoing process. If it is closed off from its environment and utterly self-absorbed, then that is both its nature and its hell. And we would view it as "eternal" because that is the way we living humans describe spacetime when we perceive it mystically.

The idea of hell remains theologically and empirically obscure and mystifying. Nonetheless, it is clear that not all of those who have "returned from the dead" after a Near-Death Experience have reported only sweetness and light in their NDE. Some tell of horrifying and soul-shaking experiences while in the abyss of morphic memories. See the (rather fundamentalist Christian, but nonetheless informative) book by Maurice S. Rawlings, M.D., To Hell and Back: Life after Death--Startling New Evidence,(28) which argues that hellish NDEs are repressed into the deep unconscious unless recorded immediately after resuscitation, yet in fact represent about half of all NDEs. On the other hand, Seattle IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies) president Kimberly Clark-Sharp says comprehensive research indicates that only about 10% of all NDEs are hellish.(29)

Atheists and agnostics, of course, do not believe in anything supernatural. But in recent decades, there has been a tendency even among Christian theologians to downplay or even eliminate the traditional concepts of hell. Various reasons are given, but the motivating, often hidden rationalization seems to be the currently popular idea that a "loving God" would never permit such a thing as hideous, eternal punishment of humans, no matter how evil they have been.

This rationalization presumes that modern Christianity (or Judaeo-Christianity, if one prefers) has an accurate understanding of the vast mystery behind the sensory world, the mystery it terms "God." Moreover, the general Western tendency to euphemize anything considered unpleasant is a recent development. So any considerations about the existence or non-existence of hell cannot start with such emotion-laden or presumptive ideas.

In contrast to modern Christian theologies, the views of shamanic traditions are much less humanistic and universalizing, and far more ethnocentric, concentrating on the maintenance of the shaman's own folk as a "chosen people." They are therefore less suited to the sociopolitics of empires, such as Rome or America, than are universal ("catholic") religions. Shamanism is thought by today's anthropologists to be the earliest religious practice of mankind.(30) Although remaining today among only a few small and comparatively isolated peoples, the classical definition of a shaman (the word is from the Siberian Tungusic language) is a religious specialist who, usually through mortification of the flesh, undergoes a deliberate "Near-Death Experience," resulting in an otherworldly voyage to the realm of the dead and the supernatural powers, or in possession by them. In a fascinating book on the Tibetan pseudo-Buddhist, shamanistic institution of the "Death-Returnees" (Tibetan dé lok), the French researcher Françoise Pommaret provisionally defines a shaman as a person who can enter at will into an altered state of consciousness which allows that person to travel to the realm of the spirits, or the spirits to come and take possession of the person's body, in order to establish a communications link with the spirit world for the sake of the members of the community.(31) From such specialists all over the planet come reports of fantastic monsters, some of them evil, in the other world. The journeys themselves can be quite dangerous, and weak or insufficiently prepared shamans may go mad or die during the process. In any case, the supernatural context, which Christianity would call God and ancient Northern shamanism called Weird, is unforgiving to the unprepared. From shamanism ancient and recent, and from many other religions as well, we get a picture of the afterlife similar in many respects to what Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) portrayed symbolically in his Divine Comedy: a multitude of heavens, purgatories, limbos and hells, all suitably repaying their inhabitants with just desserts for earthly merits or demerits. Also frequently encountered is the concept of ritual purity (e.g., prayer, fasting, abstinence from certain foods, etc.) by which one may increase one's spiritual potency and invulnerability, and without which one may be ill prepared indeed to cope with the netherworld. Thus shamanic cultures (such as that of the pre-Christian Germanic peoples) would offer no arguments against the idea of hell.