A00196 - Book of the Month for the Months of August and September 2023: Surviving Death by Leslie Kean: End of Life Experiences

"Peter Fenwick is a neuropsychiatrist and fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK.  He holds appointments as emeritus consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, the foremost psychiatrist teaching hospital in the UK, and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.  He is also an emeritus senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. With over two hundred published papers on brain function, he has been part of the editorial board for a number of journals, including the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, the Journal of Epilepsy and Behavior.  Dr. Fenwick has a long-standing interest in the mind/brain interface, the problem of consciousness, and has conducted extensive research into end-of-life phenomena.  (Page 133.)

Throughout the centuries mankind has wondered what happens after death.  In virtually every culture throughout recorded history there are indications of rituals associated with the dead and evidence that they might have been buried with some sense of expectation of an afterlife.  Hunter-gatherers believed that the dying would leave their bodies and journey to their ancestors.  The concept of "journeying" at death is still central today to the understanding of death in most parts of the world.   (Page 134.)

A number of studies has suggested that before dying many people will experience deathbed visits from dead relatives, which reassure the dying that the process of death is not as terrifying as they may have believed.  The first attempt at a systematic scientific study of these apparitions was made by Sir William Barrett, a physicist whose interest in the topic was aroused when his wife, an obstetrician, told him about a patient of hers who began to see visions as she lay dying.  She mentioned seeing not only her dead father, but also her sister.  Her sister had indeed died three weeks earlier, but the patient, because of her delicate condition had not been told.  The fact that so far as the patient knew her sister was alive and well, but she had seen her in the company of the father she knew to be dead, so impressed Sir William that he began to collect similar experiences.  His book, Deathbed Visions, published in 1926, concluded that these experiences were not merely a by-product of a dying brain, but could occur when the dying patient was lucid and rational.  He also reported a number of cases in which medical personnel or relatives present shared the dying patient's vision.  (Pages 134-35.)

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Fairfield, California

September 22, 2023 

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>

To: 

Sent: Friday, September 1, 2023 at 04:00:03 AM PDT

Subject: Book of the Month for the Months of August and September 2023: Surviving Death by Leslie Kean: An Intriguing Holy Trinity

I continue to read the remarkable accounts of individuals who have experienced an after-life that are set forth in Leslie Kean's Surviving Death.  I am on page 169 now and I am persuaded that there is something to the notion of an after-life.  Indeed, I have believed in such an after-life for virtually my entire existence on this planet.  After all, what is the story of Bernadette Soubirous but a verifiable encounter of an individual (Bernadette) with a personage with seemingly eternal life (The Lady of Lourdes).  As it just so happens, I am finally reading Franz Werfel's marvelous novel The Song of Bernadette

The Song of Bernadette (novel) - Wikipedia

and I am convinced that Bernadette in her moments of ecstasy was blessedly a receptive medium for the spirit of The Lady of Lourdes.  Thus, I now have two parts to my after-life trinity. As for the third, well, in an odd twist, I find that, by coincidence, this week I am focusing on the remarkable Sufi mystic, Ibn 'Arabi

Ibn Arabi - Wikipedia

I suggest that, if feasible, one should become acquainted with the spiritual practices of Ibn 'Arabi

Ibn 'Arabi Translations-Spiritual Practice (ibnarabisociety.org)

and become familiar with his greatest work, Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya

Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya - Wikipedia

which some translate in English to be The Meccan Revelations

P | A | Morris: Introduction to The Meccan Revelations - Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society

Once one does, if you are like me, you are taken aback by the this third set of stories about the denizens of another world which, over time, appear to achieve confirmation in reality,

This world, and the next, are amazing.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

P.S. Please read this excerpt from the Morris article cited above.

While all of Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings – and most especially the Futuhat – are replete with autobiographical discussions of his extraordinary inner visionary life and spiritual experiences, everything that is known about him from external sources indicates that in his later years he rigorously lived up to his own ideal of the hidden, “solitary” Friends of God (the afrâd or malâmîya) as the highest of the spiritual ranks, “invisible” in their outward conformity to the normative practices of the revelation and the ethical and social obligations common to all – carefully avoiding the public, visible “spiritual gifts” (karamât) popularly associated with many shaykhs and the then-nascent forms of institutionalized Sufism. Although he was accompanied by a small group of friends and close disciples, who became the eventual vehicles for his later wider influence, Ibn ‘Arabî seems to have been best known in his own day as a religious scholar and student of hadith, an impression that could only have been encouraged by his phenomenally prolific literary output of hundreds of works, of which the Futuhat was apparently by far the longest and most comprehensive. [5]

Even Ibn ‘Arabî’s most skeptical biographers have been compelled to note the remarkable way subsequent history has come to confirm his self-conception of his destined role as the “Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood”, [6] whose voluminous writings – and more important, the underlying spiritual “Reality” that they are meant to reveal and convey – were specially intended to open up the inner spiritual meanings at the heart of all preceding prophetic revelations (and especially the Qur’an and hadith). At the time of his death, Ibn ‘Arabî himself was virtually unknown, in any wider public sense, in that Mongol/Crusader period when Islamic public authority almost vanished for some decades from all but a handful of Arab cities (and permanently from most of his native Andalusia).

Moreover, all of his “books” discussed here existed only in a handful of manuscript copies, left behind in the Maghreb or restricted to the assiduous students and future transmitters of his teachings during his final years in Damascus. Yet within a few centuries, through one of those mysterious developments so familiar to the historian of religions, his writings – foremost among them the Bezels of Wisdom (Fusûs al-Hikam) and these Meccan Revelations – had come to constitute the constantly cited source of inspiration, and justification (and, as a result, a frequent polemic target) for that vast movement of religious, cultural, social, and literary creativity that brought into being the institutions and masterworks of the Islamic humanities. It was through those creative developments, in a wide gamut of languages, cultures and new institutions, that Islam became a true world religion, with its new cultural and political centers stretching from Southern and Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa across to Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia. [7] Despite the historically quite recent ideological responses to colonialism, the transformations of modernity and the new demands of the nation-state, most Muslims throughout the world have lived for the past six or seven centuries in cultural, spiritual and religious worlds [8] whose accomplished forms would be unimaginable without the profound impact of ideas rooted in and expressed by Ibn ‘Arabî. Even his later honorific title, “the greatest Master” (al-Shaykh al-Akbar), does not really begin to suggest the full extent of those influences.

A second, equally mysterious stage in Ibn ‘Arabî’s ongoing influence has been the ways his writings and concepts have served, over the past century, to inspire contemporary intellectuals and students of religion and spirituality outside traditionally Islamic cultures. Faced with a cosmopolitan, multireligious world not unlike the great Muslim empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Moguls, these thinkers have increasingly relied on Ibn ‘Arabî’s works and ideas for the task of creating the common language and subtle conceptual structure required to communicate universal spiritual realities in an increasingly global civilization. [9]

On Thursday, August 24, 2023 at 02:22:44 AM PDT, skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com> wrote:

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