To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
[William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”]
It's been quite a while since I stared death in the eye and saw it blink. It left me breathless, unable to speak for years. The last time I died it was not a textbook experience. No Earth within its cage of silvery light, no angel guides, no glowing fog, no tunnels of light. Until now, every time I tried to stick words to the experience, it moved, so I’ve been giving up. For too long words waited, paused behind my lips.
***
Death was historically believed to be an event marking the permanent cessation of life. Until the 1950s, the medical term for cessation of life was referred to as “clinical death” - the point when any one of the vital functions: blood circulation, electrical brain activity or breathing, ceased. The reasoning was, that once one part of the bio-system failed, the others would quickly follow suit.
The modern definition of “clinical death” requires all three criteria to be met: 1) there is no heartbeat, 2) there is no breathing, and 3) there is no brain function–determined when pupils remain dilated and fixed when a light is shone into the eye, indicating there is no brain stem activity. The brain stems are an area of the brain that controls basic life support functions.
According to Dr James Bernat, a Neurologist at Dartmouth College's Geisel
School of Medicine in New Hampshire, the advent of the mechanical ventilator, which pushes air into and out of the lungs, necessitated a new category, called “brain death.”
Brain death is medically defined as "irreversible unconsciousness with complete loss of brain function", although the heartbeat and respiration may continue. This generally refers to people in a coma during which the two necessary criteria to sustain life and continue to function, but there is no brain activity as the person is not processing their sensory inputs.
However, the determination of permanent death, according to modern medicine, is dependent on other factors beyond simple cessation of breathing, heartbeat and neural firing. And despite its frequent occurrence, the term "clinical death" doesn't actually have a consistent meaning. Dr Bernat told Live Science, “In most hospitals, the doctor in charge of a patient's care makes the death determination, and there aren't universal guidelines for when to make that call”. Adding that, "You're dead when a doctor says you're dead."
A Doctor had said I was dead – on two occasions. The first time was in 1978 at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, for two minutes and 48 seconds. I came back both times.
So what of those events when a person has survived a “clinical death?” Until Dr Raymond Moody coined the term "Near-Death Experience", or NDE for short, in his 1975 book, Life After Life, surviving a clinical death had no word to label the event, even though reports of such experiences have occurred throughout history.
In Plato's Republic, for example, written in 360 BCE, a soldier named Er had an NDE after being killed in battle. Er described his soul leaving his body, being judged along with other souls, and seeing heaven.
Dr Moody's work has simply brought the concept of the Near-Death-Experience to the public's attention, together with a lot of questions.
***
They say there are only two certainties in life—death and taxes. Some beat death. They return from the dead following illness or trauma, which left them breathless, without a pulse or neural activity for minutes at a time, with remarkable stories. Although these stories overlap to a great extent, survivors also describe very different experiences.
Kerry Packer, an influential figure in Australian media, suffered a heart attack while playing polo, which left him clinically dead for a few minutes. In an interview on ABC's 7:30 Report, Packer said of his experience, “Believe me, there is nothing on the other side. I’ve been there.” Stating that “The good news is there’s no devil. The bad news is there’s no heaven. There’s nothing.”
In contrast to Mr Packer's, my own experience was everything but nothing. In one sliver of a moment blackness consumed the world around me. I was skimming almost imperceptible, or maybe just ineffable layers of … something enveloping Earth. I could feel the tension of each as I pushed against it. Kind of like pushing your finger into a balloon-sized soap bubble. Just as you feel the tension of the membrane against your finger, it bursts. Except these layers would self-repair as soon as I was through them, closing behind me like an automatic gate.
I was expanding, reaching out of time. I lifted as if from a moist cocoon, soaring, shining. Opening to the light; the light that was itself reaching for the Sun. Prancing prana sparkles—blue-white incandescence—leaping from world to world.
Wispy, like threads, all around me many hands. I experienced these lives. Not mine. Other people’s, yet somehow familiar. Lives of dead people. Lives of unborn people. I saw probabilities lurking in forgotten moments and histories played out in some other space and time; I saw futures that slumbered in pregnant pauses and dreams pushing out through bubbles of wishful thinking. The link with my physical matter tugged and extinguished the limits of my mortal consciousness.
All emotions possible coagulated around and inside of me, dispersing me everywhere and yet leaving my I subsumed. The doors of perception opened. The shape of truth arrived. Time was no longer an unattainable prospect—it swallowed itself, the days, and the eons. I was in a world outside of yesterday and beyond tomorrow. I was All and I was everywhere. If you know the feeling - this state of heightened consciousness—there is no mistaking it.
I was overwhelmed.
In the illusionary bliss of human ignorance, such a scenario, as wild and strange as it seems, is barely enough to convey the dismantling of my preconceptions. The experience humbled me to an awesome spectacle. Still, the aftertaste ravages painfully through my being.
***
The debate is over whether people who survive clinical death experience what
they perceived.
According to Dean Mobbs, a Neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained."
However, miscommunications and unnecessary disagreements can occur when people are not using the term Near-Death-Experience in the same way. For example, people have perceived similar euphoric sensations while close to death, during traumatic experiences where their heartbeat, respiration and neural activities did not cease. These are often dismissed as hallucinatory, akin to dreams. The neurons kept firing.
Research on the surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, asserts that “high-frequency neurophysiological activity in the near-death state can exceed levels found during the conscious waking state.” These data suggest that “the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near-death.”
What it doesn't explain though, is how visual input, confirmed in detail post-clinical death as factual, can be processed with eyes closed.
“It's long been assumed that once the brain is cut off from its blood supply, it stops functioning”, says Jimo Borjigin, a molecular Neurologist at The University of Michigan, lending credence to a more supernatural explanation for the phenomenon. Interestingly, many patients have described NDEs as being “realer than real”.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, a Neuroanatomist, got a research opportunity of her life when she could observe her mind completely deteriorate in its ability to process all incoming information during a massive stroke:
It was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my
normal perception of reality...to some esoteric space where I'm
witnessing myself having this experience.
I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define
the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and
where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm
blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I
could detect was this energy – energy.
I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful
there.
Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I
felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her
bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding
through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana.
And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to
squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little
body.
Her astonishing story gives rise to a very important question: What is the connection between life, death, consciousness, and the human brain? If the brain is not functioning for minutes' duration, how can it possibly be the source of near-death experiences?
Dr Bolte Taylor explains that:
Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment.
It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it
thinks in pictures and it learns kinaesthetically through the
movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy,
streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems
and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this
present moment looks like, what this present moment smells
like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I
am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me
through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are
energy-beings connected to one another through the
consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.
How strange that such an event that we all face–some more than once–should defy agreement.
Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics & Astronomy at John Hopkins University, in his paper, The Mental Universe, quotes pioneering physicists Sir James Jeans as saying: The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it and accept the inarguable connection. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.
Max Planck, a theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, said that “I regard consciousness as are each the sum parts of a whole, dreaming the illusion that we are somehow separate.
We search for ourselves in others in a quest for healing and integration, in the constant pursuit of the final point of balance: the Zero Point, where our matter meets our Higher Self or Soul, where matter meets anti-matter. The Point or centre of gravity from where we can again be just One. One Note inserted once again into the Symphony of Creation.
For years I abandoned myself, pretending not to see the truth. Lately, though, I have had fearless days. And they seem to be multiplying.
__________________
FOR THE CURIOUS
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for-near-death-experiences-1110395345>
Bolte Taylor, Jill 2008, My Stroke Of Insight, viewed 19 August 2015, <http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insig
ht>
Cho C. Q. 2011, Peace Of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found To Have Scientific Explanations, Scientific American, viewed 19 August 2015 <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peace-of-mind-near-death/>
Conn Henry R. 2005, The Mental Universe, Nature Magazine Vol. 436 7 July 2005
Death, Medical Definition of DEATH, Macquarie Dictionary Ghose, Tia 2014, Clinically Dead? The Blurred Line Between Life & Death, viewed 19 August 2015, <http://www.livescience.com/46418-clinicaldeath-
definitions.html>
Grabianowski, Ed, How Near-Death Experiences Work, viewed 19 August 2015, <http://science.howstuffworks.com/near-death-experience.htm>
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Plato 360BC, The Republic and Other Dialogues, 2013, trans. B. Jowett, Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classic Collection, USA
PNAS 2013, Surge Of Neurophysiological Coherence And Connectivity In The Dying Brain, doi:10.1073/pnas.1308285110 August 27, 2013 vol. 110 no. 35, viewed 18 August 2015 <http://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/14432>
Popova, M. 2012, Alan Watts on Death, viewed 26 August 2015, <http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/31/alan-watts-on-death/>
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Zandt, B-J., ten Haken, B., van Dijk, J.G., van Putten, M.J.A.M. 2011, Neural Dynamics During Anoxia and the “Wave of Death”, PLoS ONE 6(7): e22127. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022127
