Science Forums 2

[kkawohl]

My experiences are not unique, many people have had spiritual interactions and near-death-experiences. (NDEs) Dr. Lommel provides an explanation for many of the questions relating to NDEs) at the website of International Association for Near-Death Studies.

Melvin Morse, MD, Pediatrics; Michael Sabom, MD, Cardiology; Peter Fenwick, MD, Neuropsychiatry and Pim van Lommel, MD, Cardiology all have one thing in common. They're in pursuit of verifiable evidence of life after death. Dr Lommel, et al, stirred a bit of controversy back in 2001 when they were published in Lancet, England’s noted medical journal. The publication described near death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest.

I emailed Dr. Lommel about my spiritual experiences with some questions.

Dear Dr. Lommel,

I agree with your thesis about "The Continuity Of Our Consciousness" and also with your statement that religions are mostly “about power, not about spirituality”. I would appreciate clarification on a few points that you wrote about.

You stated: 1. “According to our concept, which is based on the reported aspects of consciousness experienced during cardiac arrest, we can conclude that our consciousness could be based on fields of information, consisting of waves, and that it originates in the phase-space”.

Q: If we assume that consciousness originates in, yet is outside of the brain, can we call this consciousness “spirit” and when is this spirit able to intertwine with another spiritual existence?

2. “During life we can receive aspects of our consciousness into our body as our waking consciousness. During cardiac arrest, the functioning of the brain and of other cells in our body stops because of anoxia. The electromagnetic fields of our neurons and other cells disappear, and the possibility of resonance, the interface between consciousness and our physical body is interrupted, and our heightened consciousness may be experienced outside the body, sometimes in another dimension without our material concept of time and space”.

Q. My first experience was a NDE due to severe pneumonia at age fifteen. The body’s function had been subdued and the brain was in stasis. In November 2001 at age 60, after the World Trade Center Tragedy my mind was preoccupied with how supposedly, Islamists, or religious people could commit such acts. I then attempted and succeeded in executing two similar near-death episodes. I placed myself into a trance by using self-hypnosis. I mentally repeated the words “How is this possible” until mental oblivion set in and then the subconsciousness or spirit seemed to take over and my spiritual adventure began.

After my last two experiences my mind was somewhat trance-like or in a daze for a couple of days and my spirit seemed to pre-occupy my mental faculties for several months afterwards, it endeavored to interpret what had transpired. I have since that time unsuccessfully attempted to repeat these episodes several times. Does your research confirm that deep mental stress could be a contributing factor toward these incidents?

3. “Such understanding 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, the phase-space, in which all past, present and future is enclosed. Research on NDE cannot give us the irrefutable scientific proof of this conclusion, because people with an NDE did not quite die, but they all were very, very close to death, without a functioning brain”.

Q. Is this phase-space possibly the fourth dimension? Science has recently somewhat replicated NDE’s through inductions of electrical currents on the brain and people have experienced bliss and seeing invisible lights, but have you had any patients experience more than one vivid, graphic experience similar to mine?

4. “The conclusion that consciousness can be experienced independently of brain function might well induce a huge change in the scientific paradigm in western medicine, and could have practical implications in actual medical and ethical problems such as the care for 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 a diagnosis of brain death”.

Q. Isn’t a brain dead person diagnosed as completely being incapable of receiving stimuli?

“There are still more questions than answers, but, based on the aforementioned theoretical aspects of the obviously experienced continuity of our consciousness, we finally should consider the possibility that death, like birth, may well be a mere passing from one state of consciousness to another”.

Q. I agree. Will you conduct further research that extends past NDE’s in order to find out if other people have had similar experiences as I have? Is there a possibility that the people who are written about in the Bible had spiritual interactions and that these interactions were then interpreted by preconditioned minds; hence we have various religions?

I look forward to your response.
Kurt

(Dr.Lommel’s response)

Dear Kurt Kawohl

Thank you for mailing to me your near-death experience. The response from your father is what you usually hear from people who have experienced such an experience and try to communicate about it. This is such a hard confrontation. But I also know, that many, many people are open for it, and I also know that this is not a dream, hallucination or a vivid imagination.

Be careful in communicating about your experience, and listen to your intuition in finding people who want to listen. Be patient. I wish you all the best.

Q1. You can call consciousness outside the brain "spirit", if you like, but this can be confusing because not everybody has the same ideas about what exactly "spirit" should be. And there are several "levels" of consciousness, waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, "subconsciousness", collective human consciousness, morphogenetic consciousness, higher consciousness, Cosmic consciousness, Divine consciousness. All these levels of consciousness are interconnected, and available, also during our life in our body.

Q2. I agree with you that also deep mental stress can facilitate the access to other levels or other aspects of our consciousness, See also answer Q1. But also NDE, meditation, regression therapy, isolation, depression, terminal illness and other circumstances can facilitate this effect.

Q3. This phase-space is a higher dimensional space, presumably not just the fourth dimension, according to Quantum Mechanics. Induced experiences are never the same as a NDE, sometimes several elements can be experienced, like flashes of the past, a feeling of not being in the body, or a period of unconsciousness, but aspects like a life-review, or transformation after the experience are hardly mentioned after induced experiences. All ND-experiences are personal experiences, where finding words for it is very difficult, and cultural, demographic and religious factors play a role in this. So I have never heard a similar experience ever.

Q4. Brain-dead is a sometimes very difficult diagnosis. But when the brain has no function any more, without circulation in the brain, there should be no access to stimuli whatsoever according current medical science, which "believes" that consciousness is exclusively produced in and located in the brain.

With kind regards,

Pim van Lommel, cardiologist