A00182 - Book of the Month for the Months of August and September 2023: Surviving Death by Leslie Kean

For the months of August and September 2023, I have chosen to read Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife by Leslie Kean.  I have chosen this book because I find that at this stage of life, I seem to be attending all too many memorial services and because I find that the concept of death is not what it once was.  I commend to you the Netflix series which is based on Ms. Kean's book. For me the series segment and the book chapters on the children who had specific and vivid memories of their past lives as adults decades before was chilling and amazing. 

However, for the more scientifically inclined, I commend to you Chapter 9 of the book which is entitled "The NDE and Nonlocal Consciousness" and which was written by Pim van Lommel, MD.  As the text explains:

"Pim van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who worked at a teaching hospital in Arnhem in the Netherlands for many years and published several professional papers on cardiology.  In 1986, he began studying near-death experiences in patients who survived a cardiac arrest.  Dr. van Lommel and colleagues published the results of a breakthrough study in the reputable medical journal The Lancet in 2001.  As the author of the 2007 international bestseller Endless Consciousness: A Scientific Approach to the Near-Death Experience (renamed  Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience in the U.S. edition) he is now recognized as a world authority on near-death experiences.  He has lectured on this topic all over the world. 

"Dr. van Lommel has provided the following exclusive chapter, which places evidence from the veridical OBE [out of body experience] and NDE [near-death experience] in a larger context. The child past-life cases can also be applied to the conclusions he draws about the nature of consciousness and its continuity before and after death."  (page 114).

*****

"In 2005, the journal Science published 125 questions that scientists have so far failed to answer.  The most important unanswered question was "What is the universe made of?"  That was followed by "What is the biological basis of consciousness?"  But I would like to reformulate this second question as follows:  "Does consciousness have a biological basis at all?"

"Based on the universal reported aspects of consciousness experienced during cardiac arrest, we can surmise that the informational fields of our consciousness, likely consisting of waves, are rooted in an invisible realm beyond time and space (nonlocality), and are always present around and through us, permeating our body.  They become accessible, and form our waking consciousness through our functioning brain, in the shape of measurable and changing electromagnetic fields.  Our normal, waking consciousness has a biological basis because our body is an interface for it.  But it is one small part of our larger field of consciousness.

"Could our brain be compared to the television set, which receives electromagnetic waves and transforms them into image and sound? These waves hold the essence of all information, but are only perceivable by our senses through suitable instruments like the camera and TV.  And as soon as the function of the brain has been lost, like turning off the TV, memories and consciousness do still exist, but the reception ability is lost: the connection, or interface, is interrupted. Yet consciousness can be experienced during such a period of a nonfunctioning brain, and this is what we call an NDE.  So in my concept, consciousness is not physically rooted.

"I refer to this consciousness beyond time and space, which has no material or biological basis, as "nonlocal consciousness."  It features an interconnectedness that offers the chance of communication with the thoughts and feelings of others, and with those of deceased friends and relatives.  Its roots lie in another invisible, immaterial realm tha is always in us and around us.

"In trying to understand this concept of the interaction between nonlocal consciousness and the material body, another analogy can be made with modern worldwide communication.  At each moment, day and night, we are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of telephone calls, by hundreds of radio and TV programs, and by a billion websites, but we become aware of these electromagnetic informative fields only at the moment we use our mobile telephone or by switching on our radio, TV, or laptop.  What we receive is neither inside the instrument, nor in the components, but thanks to the receiver, the information from the electromagnetic fields ("the cloud") becomes observable to our senses and our perception.  Internet with more than a billion websites available worldwide is obviously not located inside our laptop nor is it produced by it.  Rather, it is stored in "the cloud."  But we need a functioning instrument to receive information from "the cloud," which can be be compared with nonlocal consciousness.

"Nonlocal consciousness can be experience in many ways, ... , and this concept is not a new one.  Scientists and philosophers over the ages have proposed this idea.  Aspects of quantum mechanics like nonlocality help us to understand how consciousness actually functions.  But the difference is that now we have more data highly suggestive of its reality, such as the NDE, which can be explained in all its elements as an experience of nonlocal consciousness. 

"The inevitable conclusion that consciousness can be experienced independently of brain function, and what that implies, should induce a huge change in the scientific paradigm in Western medicine.  It could have practical implications in actual medical and ethical problems, such as the care of comatose or dying patients, euthanasia, abortion and the removal of organs for transplantation from somebody in the dying process with a beating heart in a warm body but with a diagnosis of brain death.  Such understanding also fundamentally changes one's opinion about death, because of the almost unavoidable conclusion that at the time of physical death consciousness will continue to be experienced in another dimension, in an invisible and immaterial world, in which all past, present, and future is enclosed."  (Pages 124-126)

*****

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Fairfield, California 

August 24, 2023