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The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife

Shushan, Gregory

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INTRODUCTION

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Whatever their source (biological, psychological, or metaphysical), there’s no question that NDEs are part of human experience. And while they share similar themes wherever they occur, as with any other experience, NDEs are filtered through our layers of culture, language, and individuality. One person reports meeting Jesus in the form of a centaur riding a chariot, another encounters a Hopi sky-god, and another an identity-less being that radiates light, love, and acceptance. Descriptions of afterlife realms and other details of the experience also vary widely, according to culture and individual. Nevertheless, the experience is virtually always understood as “this is what happens when we die.”

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Materialist scientists and “true believers” alike are determined to believe that NDEs are “the same” across cultures. Overstating the case for similarities and universalism is essential to claims that NDEs are “all in the brain,” as well as to claims that they are a true glimpse into a single human afterlife.

1. NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: PEELING THE UNIVERSAL, CULTURAL, AND INDIVIDUAL LAYERS

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These include out-of-body experience (OBE) in which consciousness seems to temporarily leave the body, rising upwards and seeing one’s own “corpse” below, existence in quasi-physical form, entering darkness or a tunnel, emerging into bright light, meeting deceased friends or relatives, encountering a being of light or other spirit or deity, telepathic communication with other spirits, seeing or entering other worlds (usually idealized mirror-images of earth) which are often seen as one’s true “home,” a sense of moral evaluation or self-judgment, panoramic life review, exceptionally vivid senses and clarity, distortions of time, universal understanding or transcendence, peace and pleasant feelings, love and acceptance, having visions of the future or obtaining precognitive or other information or instructions, loud noises, music, vivid colors, reaching a border or limit, being instructed or choosing to return to the body, and lasting positive transformations following the return (Greyson 1983; Fox 2002: 100f).

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If the NDE is not the same for everyone, this requires explanation regardless of whether we believe the experience is simply the special effects of a compromised brain, or that it is an actual indication of what happens to human beings when we die.

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Our implicit beliefs, psychological states clearly mould and shape the NDE. This doesn't really tell us if the experiences have an external component though. Our beliefs and psychological states mould and shape what we see in this normal material reality as demonstrated by perceptual "illusions" -- it's the way vision works. When people perceive a necker cube (a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional wire frame cube), in a sense the cube is not there, there's merely a series of lines on a 2D plane arranged in a certain way. Tribal peoples who don't see cubes in their environment won't see the necker cube. But, first of all, this doesn't mean there's nothing there at all. There has to be at least the series of lines in order to see the cube in the first place. Secondly, is it true there's no cube there? Consider if there were a three dimensional wire frame cube in front of you. On your retina would be the same pattern as a drawing of that object. But in this case the cube definitely does exist. But tribal peoples still wouldn't be able to see it, until shifting their perspective that is. Different people from differing cultures are attuned to seeing different things in their environment. That needn't imply any of what is seen is unreal. Same for the experiences under NDEs.

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There is some evidence that the manner in which a person almost dies impacts the experience. Those who attempt suicide tend not to have a life review, for example (Ring 1980: 194) – though neither do people in indigenous societies. The duration of an NDE may also help account for differences (Stevenson & Greyson 1996). The life review may come at a later stage in the dying process. This is supported by the findings of some researchers (Sartori 2008), though it conflicts with those of others (Grey 1985; van Lommel et. al. 2001). There is also a human tendency to elaborate events into sequential narratives, so it is difficult to determine whether or not the order of the various NDE elements is consistent (Grey 1985).

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Some NDEs are distressing, though they otherwise often correspond thematically to the more typical positive examples, in an apparently inverted way. Thus, the individual feels fear and panic during the out-of-body-experience, is filled with despair, enters darkness and a void,

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encounters an evil presence, and sees hellish places. It is unclear if there are, in fact, fundamentally different negative and positive NDEs, or if it is simply a matter of individual perception and interpretation of the same kind of experience (Greyson & Bush 1992; Serdahely 1995). The theologian Paul Badham (1997) – one of the first to look at the relationships between NDEs and religious beliefs – notes that in contrast to positive NDEs, however, negative examples are more dreamlike, they do not normally hold the same significance for the NDEr, and are not remembered with the same vivid clarity over time.

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it is estimated that they occur in roughly “10% of people who come close to death, or who survive actual clinical death” (Fenwick 2005: 2). Among cardiac arrest survivors, the percentage is somewhat higher, 12– 18% (van Lommel et. al. 2001).

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they leave up to 90% who do not report having had NDEs. It is not clear whether the experience simply does not happen to everyone who nears death or who is clinically dead for a time, or whether some do not remember the experience or do not report it for other reasons, such as fear of being ridiculed or doubted. Conversely, NDEs (or at least very similar experiences) can occur in individuals who are not actually near death at all but believe themselves to be, such as when falling from a height or nearly drowning, though without being in any real imminent mortal peril (Stevenson et. al. 1990).

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The reason for returning to the body is one example. In contemporary Western NDEs, the return is generally a matter of unfinished business: either the NDEr does not feel ready to leave family or friends, or has some important unfulfilled goal to pursue. In Chinese and Medieval European NDEs, however, the return is often due to mistaken identity: the otherworld entities got the wrong “Jane Doe” and she was sent back to her body when the error was discovered. This suggests socially and culturally constructed interpretations of a thematic universal “return” element. In other words, the rationale for the NDEr’s return to the body is culture-specific, though being instructed to return (for whatever reason) and returning is cross-cultural.

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So the reason for returning is unlikely to be for the reasons they think. Mistaken identity just seems silly.

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while NDEs are culturally and individually experienced and expressed (or “mediated”), they appear not be entirely culturally constructed. If they were, accounts from around the world and throughout history would not share such core elements as leaving the body, seeing the body below, darkness, other realms, encountering deceased relatives, a divinity or other supernatural being often radiating light, conduct evaluation or life review, barriers and obstacles, the attainment of divine or universal knowledge or wisdom, and positive after-effects upon return.

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It is a symbiotic relationship in which culture-specific beliefs and individual expectations influence universal experiences and vice versa

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expressed. NDEs and OBEs clearly reflect established local beliefs and also share apparently universal structural similarities. Cross-cultural differences are attributed to the experiences being mediated, interpreted, and elaborated upon within individual and cultural contexts.

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While pro-survival perspectives are often criticized for conflicting with known laws of science and for drawing conclusions from unverifiable accounts of personal experiences, scientific-materialist perspectives are criticized for a priori reductionism, and for dismissing or ignoring the challenging evidence instead of adequately addressing it.

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An afterlife doesn't conflict with known laws of science. The known laws of science do not, and indeed cannot, account for consciousness at all regardless of whether it is embodied or disembodied.

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a leading expert on ketamine, psychiatrist Karl Jansen (2001), pointed out that a similarity between NDEs and ketamine experiences does not indicate that NDEs are not genuinely “spiritual.” Rather, the drug may simply enable access to the same spiritual “reality” as the NDE.

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Despite decades of theorizing, the most comprehensive attempt to explain the NDE in reductionist terms remains that of psychologist Susan Blackmore (1993), who argues that the NDE is the hallucinatory result of a combination of neurophysiological and psychological events occurring in the dying brain. Some of her key claims are that the feelings of joy and peace are the result of natural opiates being released in the brain as it shuts down; the tunnel, light, and sound are a result of anoxia; the life review is due to “seizures in the temporal lobe and limbic system where memories are organized”; and the OBE is the brain’s attempt to “model reality.” All this is combined with “prior knowledge, fantasy, lucky guesses and the remaining operating senses of hearing and touch.” The intense reality of the NDE is allegedly caused by the brain’s attempt to retain the disintegrating construct that is the personality and consciousness.

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Furthermore, in keeping with her commitments both to Western materialism and Zen Buddhism, she takes for granted that the self is illusory.

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The denial of a self is a necessary consequence of materialism. Having an actual self might, arguably, only make sense if the brain *doesn't* produce consciousness. But, in any case, it's not clear to me how it affects her argument?

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Blackmore has also been criticized for “massaging” her data into an erroneous claim that the tunnel is in fact experienced in India, in order to bolster her dying brain hypothesis (Stevenson et al. 1994; Kellehear 1996).

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The main problem with Blackmore's hypotheses regarding NDE's is that they are not predictive. Predicting a phenomenon is one thing. Having some unpredicted phenomenon occur, then cobbling together a possible explanation to explain that phenomenon, is a different matter altogether. The latter is unlikely to be a true explanation. It's a bit like gathering lots of data, then subsequently revealing many correlations. But such correlations will likely be spurious.

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Actually being near death is clearly not a prerequisite for such experiences, a fact that makes any “dying brain” hypothesis untenable.

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There is also a higher incidence of encounters with animals, and even cases in which children report having met living friends, relatives, or teachers (Serdahely 1990), challenging the notion that the deceased individuals and other beings commonly reported in NDEs are “real.” On the other hand, some children report encounters with deceased relatives they never knew, and are able to either accurately describe them or identify them from photographs.

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Bruce Greyson in his recent book on near-death experiences called After, says: //"It turns out that there are a few NDEs in which experiencers report meeting people who are still alive. In our collection that now includes more than a thousand NDEs, 7 percent involved seeing someone in the realm of the NDE who was still living. But in every one of those rare cases, the experiencer described that person as still living, in most of those cases pleading with the experiencer to come back. None of the NDEs in our collection involved an experiencer mistakenly thinking a person still alive had died."// So this then suggests that those apparitions of people still alive that are encountered during NDEs are phenomenologically dissimilar to those apparitions of people who are deceased.

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Scholars such as Zaleski (1987), however, believe that there is no objective status to the phenomenon at all, writing that because experience cannot be divorced from culture,

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Unclear what this means. Does she mean that the experience is entirely a fabrication by the brain? And obviously experience can be divorced from culture. Someone living entirely by himself on a desert island would clearly have experiences. What we percieve is shaped and moulded by our culture if that's what is meant. But what we perceive still has an external origin that our perceptions attempt to model through one's cultural lens.

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When Zaleski (1987) compared modern Western NDEs with medieval European “otherworld journey” visionary texts, she found that the latter focused on punishment and the process of judgment, whereas the former were more concerned with education and rehabilitation.

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So clearly our background culture, beliefs, psychological states and so on very much influence the experience. I wonder if this might be compared to going to school as a kid. Many kids viewed school positively as a process of becoming educated -- they enjoyed the experience, others -- like myself -- considered it more akin to a place of punishment, something very unpleasant to be endured.

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the Bardo Thödol which states that a “Clear Light” will appear in whatever form is most beneficial to the individual: as the Buddha to a Buddhist, as Vishnu to a Vaishnava Hindu, as Jesus to a Christian, or as Muhammad to a Muslim (Badham 1997).

2. REVELATIONS IN NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

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Ring (1982: 54, 6) found that the prophecies in the thirteen cases he analyzed bore remarkable consistencies, including that Earth will suffer devastation on a global scale due to a nuclear event and/ or widespread natural disasters, and that this will occur sometime in the late 1980s, with 1988 being the most frequently specified year. A few years later, British psychologist Margot Grey (1985) independently replicated these findings, collecting a number of prophetic NDE visions that were astonishingly consistent with Ring’s. Obviously, the prophesied events did not come to pass,

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In other words, prophecies about the future obtained during NDEs might be nothing more than human symbolic manifestations of anxieties about survival on Earth and a desire for a Golden Age.

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On a wider level, cross-cultural variations between revelatory content in NDEs raises some difficult philosophical and metaphysical questions. If we are to accept that NDEs are genuine experiences of an afterlife, what are we to make of their diversity? Are all manifestations of deities and beings of light, for example, genuine divine figures with identities that correspond the experiencer’s claims? Or are they perhaps the same divine figure, which manifests according to local cultural and individual preconceptions? These questions – which will be returned to in Chapter 7 – are further complicated by the fact that NDEs often conflict with the expectations of the experiencer. Furthermore, NDEs that do not feature an encounter with a divinity are also interpreted in spiritual or religions terms by those who have them.

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A few months after the experience he wrote in a letter, “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”

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He refers to Jung.

3. NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES IN EARLY CIVILIZATIONS

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In summary, the Sumerian texts describe a multiplicity of possible fates determined by one’s earthly status, conduct, or mode of death. The numerous underworld deity-judges, and a bureaucratic infrastructure of accountants, sheriffs, gatekeepers, porters, scribes, and ferrymen indicate that individuals were judged and processed upon arrival after death. The netherworld darkness is illuminated by a succession of beings of light: Utu, the dream-god Sissig, and Enki, god of wisdom and water who radiates light, beauty and joy.

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Despite innumerable differences, on a thematic level all traditions reviewed here include descriptions of leaving the body and existing in non-physical or quasi-physical form, journeys to other realms seen as a return to the origin-point or “home,” experiences of both darkness and light, meeting deceased relatives, judgement or evaluation of one’s earthly conduct, an afterlife fate determined by the outcome, encounters with deities and other beings associated with light, obstacles or barriers, divinization or the association/ union of the self with the divine or Ultimate Reality, and a preoccupation with the reconciliation of opposites suggesting transcendence. The notion of an encounter with one’s own corpse leading to the realization of survival after death was also common.

4. SHAMANISM AND NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES IN THE INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS OF OCEANIA

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Despite cultural and ethnic variation across the Pacific regions, there are some pan-regional similarities of afterlife beliefs, including that the soul could temporarily leave the body during illness or through shamanic practices. It was also understood that apparently dead individuals might be in a trance from which they could awaken. It was commonly accepted that at death souls left the body, remained for a time near the corpse, then traveled to another place via the rising or setting sun or through caves, holes, or volcanoes. They encountered various guardians, gatekeepers, interrogators, and judges on the journey, and underwent ordeals or tests. The next world was situated on a distant island or mountain, in the sky, or under a lake or the ocean. Admission was determined by rank, wealth, virtue, mode of death, or proper funerary rites. Social status was maintained in the otherworld, though in some cases the unworthy went to less favorable realms or were annihilated (Moss 1925: 9, 112, 118-31).

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Spirits could continue to influence the living in both helpful and harmful ways, either from the other world or as ghosts on Earth. The notion of ultimately merging “into an undifferentiated company of ‘ancestors’ or some even more inclusive category of spirit beings” (Oliver 1989: 771) was also widely attested. Less common were beliefs in reincarnation and that the soul died with the body, and in many cases there was simply little interest in afterlife speculations

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American missionaries noted that “various accounts have appeared in print … of the adventures of spirits, who after a protracted stay among the spirits of the dead, have been forced back into their bodies to resume active life among the living” (Emerson 1902: 13-14). Missionaries also cited beliefs that souls could be “driven back into the body by other ghosts, or persuaded to come back through offerings or incantations given by living friends, so that a dead person could become alive again”

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According to beliefs on Oahu, when a body grows cold during a near-death state, “it becomes difficult to force the reluctant spirit to reenter,” and a shaman would coax it under the nail of the big toe

5. NEXT WORLDS IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN MEDIUMSHIP

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The merits and otherwise of such cases have been analyzed in depth elsewhere, and therefore only brief contextual summaries of each will be provided in the sections below. Interested readers may find that the most lucid and balanced summary of the earlier cases is Gauld (1982), though also see Becker (1993) and Braude (2003). All three summarize the detailed and complex arguments for and against a survival hypothesis in relation to the evidence from mediumship,

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The afterlife descriptions in Leonard’s scripts are far more extensive and detailed than those in Piper’s, and correspondingly more problematic. It is difficult to accept the descriptions at face value when so much of the content seems calculated to reassure a hopeful, middle-class Edwardian reverend that the afterlife preserves the earthly status quo.

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The afterlife state is compared to the dream-state, but more real and apparently solid. “The spirit world has been created in such a fashion [through a dream-like process] through all time” (Thomas 1936: 5). The realm is thus mind-dependent according to Thomas’s own father in the spirit world, though only in part for “material” exists with which to work (Thomas 1928: 152). However, according to the spirit of “Raymond” – ostensibly Lodge’s son – although it appears to be a “thought-world,” it is not. Souls have the ability to create matter “from certain unstable atoms” with a large wheel beneath which sparks accumulate. Souls also gravitate to other like-minded souls.

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The spiritual body seems “real” and at the prime of life. In children, it corresponds to mental and spiritual age rather than physical earthly age. What the earthly body did affects the spiritual body and results in various “limitations.” Some are “entirely ugly.” There is no sleep because there is no unconsciousness, though some have a long rest or even a deep sleep when they first arrive (Thomas 1928: 27-8, 107-8, 109, 110).

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Spirits live on one of seven spiritual spheres but can visit others. To reach the lower spheres, they travel over a “dark-coloured carpet … neither grass nor flowers… passing into greater density” as they progress (Thomas 1936: 115). On the lower spheres are slums, though buildings there are less permanent and easier to dissolve than on the third sphere. The lowest is for the “definitely evil,” while the next is for the merely “weak and selfish.” They dwell in a grey, drab, depressed state, visited on occasion by higher beings – “like sending missions to the heathen.” Below the lowest sphere (sic) is yet another, for animals that survive not as individuals but as “soul-force.” Pets are an exception, and they are allowed to remain with their owners while they adjust. Only “natural pets” are eligible, however, which includes not only dogs and cats, but horses, “a few monkeys,” and birds.

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Those who are worthy proceed to the third sphere, described as “a picture of fairyland” despite being a replica of one’s home, including identical furniture and grounds (Thomas 1936: 8, 12, 15). This sphere is also known as Summerland, or Homeland. People normally have homes out of habit, but some have outgrown such needs and instead live outdoors in trees, on hillsides, or in valleys. Anyone can go anywhere freely. Nothing is dirty or muddy, there are no clouds, no overcrowding, or large cities. There are small cities, however, which are heavenly reproductions of earthly counterparts, even retaining their original names.

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The notion of the afterlife being an idealized mirror-image of Earth is taken to its logical extreme: the counterparts are literally layered one on top of the other, so that the earthly England is just below that of the lowest spiritual sphere, and the higher spiritual Englands are stacked above (Lodge 1916: 26, 128-32, 229-30). It is unclear why the most spiritually enlightened individuals in the highest spheres would still require the familiar material comforts of these rarefied Englands.

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Only the lower spheres have government, though all individuals are responsible to the levels above them (Thomas 1928: 167, 171; Thomas 1936: 80, 102). There is no “judge and jury,” but there is a “reformatory.” Ancient cities are also reproduced, and ancient peoples are “available to students” (Lodge 1916: 205, 229-30). There are also colleges and classes on afterlife “rules and regulations.” One young boy studies chemistry and goes ice-skating in the summer. Any earthly career might be followed, including going to sea. Music, which is listened to with the mind as well as the “etheric ears” is the highest art, followed by painting. Some individuals work by helping the newly deceased to adjust, or by helping people on Earth

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Races self-segregate, “choosing to live among their own people.” Some spirits retain the servants they had on Earth, “but they are old servants who are attached to them, and who are not spiritually and mentally ready to emancipate themselves for other work.” Buddhists, Muslims, “and others” do not immediately accept Christ upon passing into the spirit realm, though they eventually do. Such individuals “are unlikely to qualify for such high place as those who sincerely follow Christ; because their lives are generally influenced by practices which are neither good nor moral.” Such statements are presumably a reflection of the claim that one can carry earthly difficulties with them, such as disliking certain people – and indeed ignorance, racism, classism, and religious intolerance. This is despite the fact that one supposedly gains a passion for intellectual and spiritual development in the afterlife (Thomas 1936: 4, 17, 154).

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In 1922, “Helen” communicated through Leonard that the purpose of idealized duplicates of earthly places was to make newly arrived spirits feel more comfortable. As with England, there is also a spiritual Japan, for example, so that Japanese people will be more at ease when surrounded by a familiar environment. The soul will later “mingle with other races and so progress,” as spirit-Helen explained. “When one reaches a certain stage the racial differences are less noticed, because the highest in each becomes paramount. We have no hatred and no jealousy between different races, but tolerance and sympathetic understanding.”

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There are also significant differences between the Leonard and Cummins afterlives. For example, while “Myers” also speaks of seven levels of existence, the first is the Plane of Matter which includes earth and celestial regions. Following physical death, spirits hover above the body, then enter an intermediate realm which “Myers” called Hades. Here one undergoes a life review (an element missing from Leonard’s scripts) and self-judgement, assisted by the “Light from Above.” The nature of Hades depends on the individual. For “Myers” it was “a place of half-lights and drowsy peace.” Some wander there aimlessly, meeting “strange beings” who cause sorrow. The realm is returned to each time one considers progressing to a higher level, and additional life reviews assisted by the being of light help in the decision-making process. Some choose to return to Earth or go to another planet (Cummins 1932: 38-9, 81-83).

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As with Leonard’s scripts, the third level is Summerland, here also called The Plane of Illusion, where souls unconsciously create an illusory mirror-image of Earth as a source of comfort to aid adjustment. Contradictorily, Summerland is also said to be created by advanced spirits from the deceased’s memories. New arrivals are often greeted by these spirits and by deceased loved ones.

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Punishment can occur in this realm, though “Myers” seemed to be concerned only with what he regarded as sexual transgressions. Sexual sadists will be miserable at their inability to cause pain, though eventually they will realize the suffering they have caused and will be purified. Sexual masochists are not mentioned. Others who have a “sex history of a reprehensible kind” will be drawn to similar spirits and create an illusory sex paradise which leads to a “horrible satiety.” They will come to loathe sex, but “find it extraordinarily difficult to escape” from the clutches of their fellow orgiasts (ibid. 36-7, 40, 44, 46-7).

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Summerland fades with increased “spiritual knowledge” and spirits decide when to move on to the next level, usually because of boredom. It is not explained why or how one would come to feel ennui in a mind-dependent world, in which boredom itself might be banished with a thought, and spiritual enlightenment created with another.

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The fourth level is the Plane of Colour (Cummins 1932: 77). One must journey from there to Hades or Summerland to contact the living through mediums, but all memory of the higher realms vanishes. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that “Myers” himself was communicating from the fourth level. Like the third level, it is a mind-dependent world, so it can be ugly, beautiful, or bizarre, depending upon the individual. In contradiction to this, it is also the “luminiferous … original of earth,” the present Earth being but “an ugly smudged copy.” There are radiant flowers, colors, and lights beyond the earthly spectrum, and memory of Earth is temporarily lost.

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Communication is telepathic and one learns how to control matter, as well as to “send out protective rays” in case a former earthly enemy is encountered. Sensations, emotions, and intelligence are heightened. Like-minded souls are drawn together to form “group souls” which are “bound together by one spirit” on which they depend for “nourishment.” In yet another contradiction, despite comments regarding the superiority of Christianity, souls must be free of any religious dogma before progressing to the fifth plane (Cummins 1932: 55-8, 60-1, 65-6).

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On the fifth level, the Plane of Pure Flame, “the soul becomes aware of the pattern his spirit is weaving in the tapestry of eternity and realises all the emotional life of the souls fed by the same spirit.” All experiences on all previous planes are perceived, yet there is no form, color, appearance, or feeling. The deceased merges with the group soul, though retains a sense of self, existing in “an outline of emotional thought” shaped by the group. There is further spiritual and intellectual development, but also “severe discipline” and limitations. Spirits glimpse “infinite horizons” and experience “all the passionate existence of [their] comrade souls” while becoming closer with the “unifying spirit.” It is “glorious … despite sinister aspects,” and is like a continual flash of genius. A realization of oneness with all living things occurs (ibid. 34, 67-70).

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The sixth level is the Plane of Pure Light, where the soul gains “an intellectual conception of all the previous existences within the group-soul” and “realises all the emotional life within the body of the world or earth soul.” In contradiction, it is also a realm of pure reason, without emotion or passion. In it is achieved “the assimilation of the many-inone,” and “the spirit which contains this strange individualised life passes out Yonder and enters into the Mystery, thereby fulfilling the final purpose, the evolution of the Supreme Mind” (ibid. 34, 71).

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On the seventh level, “the spirit and its various souls are now fused and pass into the Supreme Mind,” though still one retains individuality, like “a wave in the sea.” Beyond time and space, yet pervading everything like the rays of the sun, the spirit has become “wholly aware of the imagination of God” in which everything is contained. Few reach this state: some go no further than the sixth level, and others reincarnate on Earth. The ultimate goal is to overcome being “individualized” – to achieve unification, first with the group soul, then with the Supreme Mind (ibid. 34, 51-2, 72-3). The influence of the Hindu concepts of atman and brahman are clear, as is reincarnation, likely having been filtered through the Theosophical writings of Helena Blavatsky.

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Yet another inconsistency arises from “Myers’s” statements that there is a male creator god who controls individuals and designs their futures, yet also that “each soul makes its own bed … there is always free will” (ibid. 31, 98). How these competing statements can be reconciled with the above mixture of mind-dependence, self-judgement, life-reviews, and personal choice of spiritual progression is a mystery.

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It depends. The future can exist yet for there still to exist free will. God designing people to be of a particular nature might be problematic, but we don't really know what we're talking about when it comes to "God". The issue is too opaque for anything meaningful to be said.

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In addition to the many contradictions, the Cummins material contains numerous absurdities and obscurities. For example, according to certain “higher beings,” “at one time, there was, or will be” people on Venus composed of vapor and water. Extraterrestrial beings are also included in group-souls for we are all of one spiritual race – we are just incarnated differently. One may choose to be reborn as a “star within the Milky Way” composed of “radiant atoms.” There is more solar life than “so-called human life,” and salamander-flame beings live on the stars (Cummins 1935: 111, 114, 119, 179-80). Nevertheless, in their main points the descriptions are largely consistent with those from other mediums.

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There are “many other realms of existence.” The afterlife is “much more real” than the earthly realm – despite the fact that it is a “mental world.” “Our spirit selves are really travelers and the point at which you are now is the place to which you have decided to travel”; “the overall aim is for every soul to obtain spiritual knowledge and to move towards the light itself.” The only mention of a morally-determined fate is that it is decided by the life led on Earth.

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The afterlife is comparable to a dream-state, and is “the true state … the real home of consciousness.” The realm contains “flowers and fields,” but it is beyond description. “It is a world of beauty in which you can live for many, many earth years.” There are contradictory statements regarding time, however: “time is not a reality, so there is no hurry,” though the spirits don’t “have a great deal of time on [their] hands.” Everyone is engaged in some sort of activity or exploration, often with the assistance of more spiritually evolved guides and teachers. Without practice or “mental turmoil,” souls can instantly express themselves musically with “joy and depth.” There are councils of healing and of “physical phenomena” (ibid. 38, 174-6, 193). The spirits “go on ‘retreats’ sometimes,” and “they live in each other’s consciousness,” as Fontana explained to me.

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This sounds slightly more plausible than the accounts hitherto of the afterlife.

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Interestingly, there is also a video which purports to show images of the other realm. The video experiments were conducted with lawyer and SPR member Dr. Hans Schaer, though they were not part of the main SPR experiments, nor were they subject to the same rigorous conditions. Some were shot in darkness with the camera pointing towards a mirror, and others in full light. One appears to show “grassy plains and crystal mountains in another world.” Others show “beautiful leafy forests,” “pyramids set in a great lake below orange red skies,” and “a world composed of ice.” Since it is a “world without limitations,” according to Manu, and souls are “able to create beauty,” it is unclear if these images depict mind-dependent thought projections or an objective “place” (ibid. 143-44).

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Anderson added that the feeling of heavenly ascent is due to being spiritually uplifted. Individuals have occupations, such as working with spirit-children and animals, and helping the newly deceased to cross over. Those in higher realms can visit lower ones, and many wait for their less spiritually-advanced loved ones to catch up to them before progressing. Souls remain with those they felt close to in their earthly life, or they are reborn in groups. Anderson is unsure if animals “technically” have souls, but their “life force” can join their human loved ones (ibid. 240, 242-3, 249).

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Anderson (1999: 24-5) also stated that for some, the experience of dying and the transition to the afterlife state is more subtle than typical NDE reports. One example is a man who drowned, had a sudden burst of energy, and swam to the surface where he was greeted by deceased relatives and realized he was in another world. Fear or confusion may cause familiar earthly people and places to appear in order to comfort the newly deceased. A child, for example, might be greeted by Santa Claus, or by animals.

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Anderson might have been influenced by NDE reports of children etc.

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Anderson also seemed to claim that the afterlife itself is sentient, for he wrote that it will do “whatever it takes to create an atmosphere of trust and comfort to ease the transition” and to attract the soul. He may have been writing figuratively, for the notion seriously contradicts that of a mind-dependent afterlife. His statement that it is also “a world of constancy, yet always building to suit the reality of the individual who inhabits it…[ and] a fixed place with many levels of consciousness” (ibid. 26, 39, 96) does nothing to clarify matters.

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Anderson defined the Infinite Light as the god of all religions, which are like facets of a diamond – culture-specific manifestations of a One Truth. On one of the happier levels, which is “like a perfect endless summer day … everything is bathed in a beautiful light,” the Infinite Light radiates love and peace, and energizes everything, including inanimate objects. There is no darkness, and no need for sleep. It is an idealized mirror-image of Earth, with communities, work, and relationships. There is no pain or illness, only loving selflessness and “a perfect, carefree, permanent vacation.” Souls can satisfy any material desires and possess anything they wish until they outgrow such needs. Victims of terminal illnesses have a special “house of reflection” surrounded by “fields and meadows, flowers, birds, and small animals, all exuding peace and security” (ibid. 31, 33, 36, 38).

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Souls in the hereafter do not like to discuss reincarnation, and Anderson does not know if it is a possibility or not. He does know that there are no accidents or coincidences – everything is carefully decided and planned (ibid. 45, 47).

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There are five levels, or “astral places” which largely match Anderson’s. The first is Earth, and the second is the equivalent of hell, filled with “negative energy” and “lost souls.” Some of them are unaware they are dead, and could remain there for eternity. There is, however, no devil. Most souls bypass this realm and go straight to the third level, a realm of light, deceased loved ones, and an “awakening.” Some attend “spiritual school” in order to recover and adjust before proceeding to the fourth level: a realm of love, populated by angels, where one’s consciousness is expanded. The spirit is given the option of being reincarnated on earth or proceeding to the fifth level, where there is a final opportunity to return to Earth. The fifth level is the realm of creation, as well as the source of artistic and scientific inspiration on Earth

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Finally, Gordon Smith (2003: 128-9) is one of the few mediums of modern times to give readings for the SPR, and has been endorsed by astronomer Archie Roy among others. His sittings have stood up to the scrutiny of the research group PRISM (Psychical Research Involving Selected Mediums) and the Scottish SPR at Glasgow University. According to the alleged spirits speaking though Smith, the afterlife is mind-dependent and thus subjective: “each mind will gravitate to a level of understanding most suited to its concept of Heaven.”

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Smith also claimed to have journeyed to “the other side” during shamanic-type trance. He described leaving his body, travelling “at high speed toward a light” followed by a lack of any physical sensation, meeting deceased loved ones and other spirits, telepathic communication, feelings of vitality and oneness, and a profound understanding of “life, love, and beauty” – though the overall experience is ineffable. His deceased cousin acted as a guide throughout the experience, and took him on an indescribable “journey through this realm of spiritual beauty” (ibid. 112-114).

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The other possibility is that the information conveyed by spirits was filtered through the mediums’ minds and thus overlaid with the institutionalized bigotry of their times.

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By far the most likely, although I think depictions of the afterlife realm from mediums have to be treat with a pinch of salt.

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Similarly, Eileen Garrett communicated a statement from a spirit – said to have progressed as high as the third sphere – that “the Christian religion is above all others” which are simply “wrong”; and that it is the duty of Christians to enlighten “heathens” and “savages” (Thomas 1928: 131).

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The social history of Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism provides a backdrop to the mediumistic afterlife descriptions. At the same time, despite all their dubious and idiosyncratic claims, the descriptions feature some of the most common elements of NDEs, many decades before Moody. These factors raise two important questions: If, as argued by some psychical researchers, these mediums were relating genuine spirit communications, what are we to make of such obviously culturally situated perceptions of the afterlife? And how can we explain the general but undeniable similarities between the mediumship accounts and contemporary and historical reports of NDEs cross-culturally?

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Due to their lack of evidential value and often dubious content, mediumistic afterlife descriptions were often dismissed as worthless by psychical researchers. Both Hodgson and Lodge actually edited them out of their publications (Sage 1903: 99, Lodge 1916: 230), while their apparently trivial nature contributed to William James’s (1902: 105) doubts about the survival hypothesis. More recently, the psychiatrist and criminologist Donald West stated that some of the material from the Scole experiments was so “implausible if not nonsensical” that it throws doubt on the validity of the entire case (Keen et. al. 1999: 396). Philosopher C.D. Broad characterized mediumistic material as predominantly “twaddle, vagueness, irrelevance, ignorance, pretension, positive error, and occasional prevarication,” and found the parochialism in Cummins’ (1935: lii-liii) afterlife descriptions to be unconvincing. Despite this largely negative assessment, however, Broad (1962: 259) believed that Cummins’s scripts also contained “gems of correct, detailed, and relevant information.”

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the spirits themselves “constantly repeat” that being in the medium’s atmosphere is, for them, a dream-state (Sage 1903: 172, Cummins 1932: 124). However, “Myers” reportedly stated that although Cummins’s descriptions of the afterlife were not always exact, they were “fairly” representative of what he tried to put across, and “the truth as I perceive it” (Lodge 1925: 25). Ellison (2002: 161) suggested that the material was genuinely from Myers, but distorted by the medium’s subconscious activity.

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Alternatively, the philosopher and physicist R. C. Johnson (1957: 238) suggested that the more suspect material came from souls in a lower realm, who not only find it difficult to communicate accurately, but also have a continued attachment to earthly life. This leads them to self-create implausible mirror-images of Earth, which would vary between souls – though would also be similar considering the fact that the “spirits” were mostly English or American. Spiritualist author Paul Beard (1980: 24-5) argued that the afterlife is ineffable and that difficulties arise when spirits try to describe a state of being which does not exist in our world, resulting in the use of earthly similes that appear suspiciously too familiar. According to geologist Robert Crookall (1961: 8, 208), the “poor quality” of communications is due to the fact that most people are of only average intelligence – or even “jokers” or “liars” – and they remain so in the afterlife. Similarly, Thomas (1936: 4, 17) stated that spirits carry earthly difficulties with them, such as disliking certain people. While the offensive and ignorant statements might thus be blamed simply on a particular spirit’s personal views and lack of education, this would again conflict with the claim that one undergoes intellectual and spiritual evolution and enlightenment in the

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Gauld (1982: 219) stressed that even hypothetically genuine spirit communications would be filtered through the medium’s psyche, with a deceased personality’s communications “overshadowing” the medium’s psychological processes, including memories, knowledge, and personality. This was also the conclusion reached in three separate cross-medium comparisons of afterlife descriptions: Hart (1959: 233, 236), Crookall (1961: xxiv), and Beard (1980: 7-8). Rather than seeing the overall consistency of the descriptions in terms of a common socio-cultural background, each favored the notion that the descriptions originated with spirits, though were compromised to some degree by mediumistic interference (see also Hart 1959: 201-2, Johnson 1957: 235, Becker 1993: 9).

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If there is some genuine communication, this to me seems by far the msot plausible solution to the silliness of afterlife reports.

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Mediums themselves stressed the great difficulties involved in spirit communication, characterizing it as a collaborative effort, in which the medium must interpret psychic impressions through his or her own cultural and educational limitations. The result can often be muddled or confused (Gibbes 1932: 23). The “Myers” spirit allegedly asked his medium to read particular books so that she would have the vocabulary to accurately convey his ideas (Cummins 1935: 15, 17).

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Again, this has a certain plausibility.

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In any case, we are left with a somewhat obvious conundrum: communication difficulties cannot explain why statements about the afterlife and its denizens could not be clear, specific, accurate, and consistent while evidential information allegedly could.

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I think I disagree with this. Somethign specific and concrete of this world, could be communicated much more effectively then the nature of the environment in the afterlife realm.

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Gibbes (1932: 159) made much of the fact that the spirit “Myers” (via Cummins, who, it will be recalled, also reported salamander-flame beings living on stars) used neologisms coined by the “real” Myers, such as “metetheric” and “telaesthesia.” However, spirit-“ Myers” also stated that mediums do not receive thoughts from spirits in the form of words, and that their minds “cannot conceive or apprehend what [they] cannot translate.” This would suggest the impossibility of Cummins receiving Myers’s neologisms.

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Commuincation is telepathic and hence words are not conveyed *for communication purposes*. Words might be able to be conveyed, but not in an order that conveys information, or at least it might be very difficult. Anyway, not convinced by the author's reasoning.

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In contrast to those researchers who found the afterlife descriptions problematic or even embarrassing, others had no such issues with them. Johnson (1957: 263) described the Cummins material as “reasonable, attractive, and sublime in its conception.” He suggested that this was because the communicator, “Myers,” was at a more elevated spiritual level than most. Lodge (1932: 10), who was a close friend of Myers, believed the descriptions to be genuine and found them consistent with Myers’s views. Likewise, Thomas (1936: ii) accepted the afterlife descriptions in Leonard’s scripts on the grounds that he accepted the identity of her spirit communicators, who were well known to him in life. He argued that if their identities are accepted, so should their information regarding the afterlife. Sociologist Hornell Hart (1959: 104, 233) found the descriptions to be meaningful and “worthy of serious study and critical examination.”

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Ultimately, however, if we are to accept the claims of evidentiality, we must also either (a) accept the offensive and absurd statements as coming from a mind-dependent context, and reject claims of spiritual progress; (b) understand them as being filtered through the medium’s psyche and thus their culture and beliefs, thereby contaminating and misrepresenting the words of the spirits in the otherworld; (c) accept that the afterlife is genuinely racially and religiously oppressive, as well as a chaotic, nonsensical, yet highly bureaucratic realm; or (d) reject the claims all together as meaningless and confused, even if they do actually originate with spirits.

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Broad (1962: 347-8) suggested that the differences can be accounted for by the communicators being in different stages of development, and to the subjective experiences of the recently deceased in a personal dream-like existence. Broad also compared these reports with the NDE-like visions of the 18th century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and found that they agree with and “supplement [them] in a reasonable way.”

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In a comparison of sixty-three books which contain mediumistic afterlife descriptions together with what he believed to be evidential material, the sociologist and parapsychologist Hornell Hart (1959: 233, 236) found an overall consistency of the descriptions (also Johnson 1957: 235, and Lorimer 1984: chapter 11). It should also be mentioned that both Carl Jung (1935; coll. 1999: 29) and philosopher and theologian John Hick (1976: 407) noted the similarities with the afterlife as described in mediumship narratives and in Tibetan Buddhism (Hick also added the visions of Swedenborg).

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It is important to note that while the issues outlined here make it difficult to accept the descriptions at face value, the recurring similarities between the descriptions are on a broadly thematic level, while most of the main differences occur with more detailed descriptions. These general thematic similarities may in fact be the “gems” of afterlife descriptions we are looking for, to borrow Broad’s term.

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It is especially significant that they correspond to some of the most common elements found continually in other afterlife-related experiential phenomena, namely the NDE and (as will be seen in the next chapter) reincarnation memories of states between lives. Indeed, while widely considered to be “untestable,” the descriptions in these scripts are, in fact, testable by comparison with these other experiential phenomena. What we make of the results of the comparison must remain subjective to some degree, but while similarities don’t necessarily point to the survival hypothesis or to the narratives being true and accurate representations of the afterlife, nor do the differences deem them purely fictitious. Whether or not we accept them as genuine spirit communications, the consistent similarities with the other types of phenomena require explanation.

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Furthermore, even if mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife derive entirely from the workings of the mediums’ subconscious, they are still of potential value as visionary experiences. It is possible that mediums genuinely underwent some shamanic-like experience that bore some similarities to NDEs, or had some kind of intimations of such experiences. Some examples – such as the visions of John Edward and Gordon Smith – are comparable more to shamanic trance-journeys in small-scale societies than to NDEs. Even if none of the phenomena themselves are veridical experiences of an actual afterlife, this would not rule out the possibility that visions emanating from the subconscious reveal what an afterlife state – or indeed simply the dying process – is like.

6. BETWEEN LIVES: REINCARNATION INTERMISSION MEMORIES

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Gauld (1982: 187) argues that because of this, some of Stevenson’s cases can only be explained by reincarnation, or by resorting to the super-psi hypothesis as discussed in the previous chapter. However, children hardly ever display ESP in any context, so an exceptional ability confined largely to past-life memories is highly unlikely (Stevenson 1980: 360-1, 364). Furthermore, the knowledge, behavior, and personality traits the children display are not explained by the super-psi hypothesis – though they are consistent with the alleged past life identity. What super-psi phenomenon could result in a toddler spontaneously manifesting an entirely different behavioral and personality repertoire is obscure. There have been cases in which children have shown an unwavering dislike of a certain food consistent with the past-life personality, a phobia related to the cause of their alleged previous death, and even a penchant for alcohol. Some of these children also show confusion about their surroundings, and their own homes suddenly seem unfamiliar.

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As Badham (1982: 105) points out, however, “what we see and experience is intimately linked with the language we use to report such experiences.” Language is such a central part of an individual that it is unusual that it would not surface in a genuine past personality even as other cultural traits do. The few cases of xenoglossy, in which subjects speak in a language unknown to their current selves, are possible exceptions though very few are compelling (Stevenson 1984).

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I don't agree at all. They'll remember that which emotionally resonates. Language, on the other hand, might be difficult to remember.

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In any case, if super-psi can be ruled out, three possible explanations remain: genuine reincarnation memories, spirit possession (which is arguably less rational, less scientific, and less parsimonious than a reincarnation hypothesis), or what C.D. Broad called the “psychic factor.” According to this idea, after death an individual’s memories become detached fragments of personality – residua no longer associated with the former consciousness – which somehow find their way into the mind of a child (Badham 1982: 108). In a limited way, this recalls the Buddhist conception of skandas, or sets of elements that make up an individual. However, if such a random process does occur, it is difficult to imagine how all those combined elements could survive in a coherent whole, manifest through a living child, and reconstruct an entire past personality within that child. Being merely a set of memories without an associated conscious being, the result would essentially be a “personality” with no associated “person.” A perspective that allows for the survival of personality after death but not of person seems less intelligible that the reincarnation hypothesis. As with super-psi, nor is it clear how this model could explain a child’s recognition of individuals associated with their past life, and the subsequent appropriate emotions involved during “reunions” with the past personality’s family and friends.

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This stance, both extreme and unwarranted, is based mainly upon (a) Edwards’s own self-described “presumptions against reincarnation”; (b) the absurd tautological claim that because reincarnation is impossible it cannot occur; (c) unfounded assumptions of fraud on the part of the subjects or their families; and (d) methodological issues which were mostly beyond Stevenson’s investigative control, such as not enough interview time, interviews taking place long after the fact, and the families of past-life personalities and present “incarnations” having met prior to investigation. Edwards’s first two criticisms are based upon his own culturally situated and scientifically unproven personal philosophy. The third is based upon his unsubstantiated sweeping suspicions rather than particular facts in the cases. The fourth does nothing to disprove a reincarnation hypothesis – it merely stresses research difficulties that were acknowledged by Stevenson himself.

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Edwards (1996: 252) also stated that the notion of intermediate states is intrinsically absurd, and if a subject who reports past-life memories also reports having experienced such a state, “this is sufficient to undermine the trustworthiness” of the entire case.

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Not jsut absurd, but *intrinsically* absurd. But how so. From my reading of Edwards, he never seems to jsutify his assertions. I have criticised him in my blog on the population problem for reincarnation.

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As with many of Edwards’s other beliefs and opinions which he characterized as categorical fact, it lacks reason, logic, and objectivity, while also displaying unfamiliarity with conflicting evidence and competing hypotheses.

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Agree absolutely. I have read part of his book on reincarnation.

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“After they died they said they lived for some time without a body at all, wandering in the air and hiding in the trees. This was for their sins. Then, after some months, they were born again as twin boys.

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Later Burmese cases have been researched by medical student Poonam Sharma & psychiatrist Jim Tucker (2004: 107ff). They unfortunately did not provide full descriptions of any accounts, but instead highlighted the most commonly recurring features from the 35 cases they collected. They found that the children often remembered being out of their previous body and seeing the preparations for their funeral. Some recalled attempting to communicate with living relatives but finding that they were unable to do so. The souls were then “directed by an elder or an old man dressed in white” to some earthly place, such as a tree or a pagoda, though some remained near the body or walked along a path.

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The children also frequently reported encountering the souls of other deceased people, and over half recalled “choosing parents for the next life.” Some followed their new parents home, while others were directed to them by the elder figure. Some recalled entering their new mother, usually being ingested into her body after “transforming into a grain of rice or speck of dust in the water.” Sometimes the water would be discarded before being drunk, or guardian spirits would prevent the new soul from entering, and the soul would have to try again.

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Buddhists in Thailand claim to have experienced intermediate states comparatively frequently, though usually remember nothing about them. Those who do most often recall an OBE in which they witnessed their own funeral, and seeing a “man in white” – a sage who welcomes and guides souls, and helps them to decide upon their next birth. The deceased are often given food, usually fruit, which causes them to forget their previous life. Those who claim to remember the experiences say they did not eat the fruit (Stevenson 1983: 6-7). A Thai man named Bongkuch Promsin, born in 1962, remembered that prior to his reincarnation, his soul lived for seven years in a tree before following his new father home on a bus.

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Additional investigations into Thai spontaneous cases were made by Stevenson’s colleague, Francis Story (1975: 169-70). A soldier recalled an OBE from his previous life, during which he saw his body below before being drawn into the womb of his new mother. Another soldier described similar experiences, adding that he had powers of mental teleportation and passing through solid objects.

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A Buddhist monk, born in 1908, also recalled a past life OBE and seeing his own body being cremated. He claimed that his state of awareness was such that he could “see in all directions” at once. He left the other realm spinning and falling, then lost consciousness before finding himself in his new body. Story also mentioned “many” reports of deceased individuals being met by a guide who assists in the transition to a new birth – in numerous cases an old bearded man dressed in white. There are also “several” cases involving the deceased being offered the “fruit of forgetfulness” (ibid. 184-5, 197, 199).

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“Just before death I felt a profound darkness and after death I saw a dazzling light. Then and there I knew I had come out of my body in a vaporous form and that I was moving upwards.” She was met by four teenage males dressed in bright saffron robes. They had a rectangular vessel about ten inches in diameter into which they placed Shanti Devi’s soul and took her to the third plane. They told her that “those who aspired for a higher life sincerely, but who had committed fleshly wrong in this life, were dipped in the river before moving any higher.” They then proceeded to the forth plane where “all is open space” and “full of light … very mild, and smoothing and enlivening light.” There she saw “still more saints, brighter in appearance than those on the third plane.” With them was the deity Krishna, who “was showing each person a record of his activities on earth, good and bad, and accordingly what would be his condition in the future.” Though Shanti Devi did not recall much of his words, she did hear him read out “House Number 565,” which was her address in her new identity. The four saffron-robed saints then took Shanti Devi “to a place like a staircase where it was very bright.” After sitting there for a long period, she “was taken to a dark room, from all sides of which a very bad smell was coming out. I was made to lie down in a clean place there. … I did not feel any pain. I simply passed into a state of unconsciousness, and at that very moment I saw very brilliant light” (Rawat & Rivas 2005).

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Disna recalled leaving her previous body and flying to a realm reserved for the morally good. There she met a kingly figure in reddish-colored clothes which never became dirty. He wore pointed shoes and lived in a glass palace with “beautiful reed beds.” Disna wore similar clothes, but of gold, and spent her time playing and materializing food which did not need to be consumed to satisfy her hunger. The king figure then decided that she should be reborn.

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At the age of seven, however, he began to refer to himself as the older brother to his now younger brother, and that apparently triggered full past-life recall (Willoughby-Meade 1928: 76; Matlock 2017: 231-32).

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I'm confused. His current life brother is now younger? So the brother was born after he was reincarnated, in which case he won't have been in his previous life at all (unless his brother also died at a young age).

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A well-documented Japanese historical case concerns a boy named Katsugoro, born in 1815 in a village called Nakano, near Tokyo. Though most discussions of the case have used the writer Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of a book called Chinsetsu Shuki (Collection of Strange Stories), Ohkado Masayuki (2021) has recently analyzed the case using earlier and more reliable primary sources. His source for the intermission memories is an 1823 investigation by the famous Japanese scholar of philology and philosophy, Hirata Atsutane.

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Katsugoro began talking about his past life when he was eight years old, and many of the statements he made about it were verified. He recalled that his soul left his previous body just as it was being placed into his coffin. He sat on the shroud covering the body, then went back home. On the way he tried to speak to people but they couldn’t hear him. An old man appeared with long white hair wearing a black kimono, saying, “Come here.” I followed, going up to a place which I didn’t know where it was. Then, I was in a beautiful field and played. Flowers were in full bloom, and when I tried to break off a twig, a small crow appeared and threatened me greatly. When I recall this, I still feel scared. As he played in the other world, he could hear sounds from Earth – his parents talking and monks reciting a sutra. He could also smell their food, though could not eat it. He was even able to visit his previous home. The old man then pointed out his future home and told him he would be reborn there. Katsugoro left the old man “and stayed under a persimmon tree in the yard” for three days, then entered the house through a window and stayed in the stove for three more days. He heard his mother talking about the possibility of leaving to work in the city, and this conversation was later verified. She canceled the trip when she discovered that she was pregnant, and Katsugoro was born 10 months later. The boy only vaguely remembered entering his mother’s womb. He concluded

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that he was “not afraid of my death.” When asked why, he replied, I realized I was dead because other people said so. At the time of my death, I didn’t see my body, and I didn’t think I was dead. The moment of death was not as agonizing as it may have appeared to others. After I died, I didn’t become hungry, didn’t feel hot nor cold. It was not very dark, even at night. No matter how long I walked, I didn’t get tired. When I was with the old man, I was afraid of nothing. People say I was born after six years, but I felt it was just a short time. The deity Mitake-sama also told him, “You don’t have to be afraid of death.” Katsugoro’s statement that he did not see his body is interesting in light of the fact that he knew he was leaving his body as it was being placed in its coffin, and he did see the coffin at his funeral and even sat on his own shroud. Whether this is an inconsistency in his testimony, or if he was just being literal and specific, or somehow didn’t associate the funeral with himself, is not clear.

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More recently, a number of unusual Japanese cases have been identified in which children recall only the intermission prior to the present incarnation, without having memories of a previous life at all. One boy, aged six, remembered “flying in the sky, looking for my mother. Looking down. I could see my mother and chose her.” A nine-year-old girl recalled being in another realm before her current life, with souls of many other children and “a god, an entity with authority.” She described the entity as generous, and said “He was looking after us, like a counselor” (Ohkado & Ikegawa 2014: 477).

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A total of 21 such cases were researched, and it was found that most described the other world as “cloud or sky,” though others said it was a realm of light, “a wide space where you can see the Earth,” “like a star,” “where there are a number of levels,” “up there,” and “in the shape of a long ellipse.” It was a peaceful, joyful realm though “difficult to describe.” Most met a god or god-like figure who helped them decide on their future parents. Many saw their future siblings, and one described other souls as “light balls.” Seeing activities on Earth concerning one’s future family was common, and over half remembered the reason for their rebirth, which varied from helping people on Earth to having a better life than their previous one. “One child said he did not remember why he was born because he forgot the reason when he was born in order to find what it is in the current life.” Over half the children remembered entering their mother’s womb, and three were assisted in the process by a deity, “a shining ball, or an angel-like entity” (ibid. 484).

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A Turkish Druze boy named Nasir Toksöz began speaking of a former life at the age of two-and-a-half. The boy claimed that prior to his rebirth, he first “went to God and gave an account of his conduct to Him.” Stevenson (1980: 9-10, 324, 335) observed that the experience was comparable to the NDE life review. Despite its brevity, the account is important because it conflicts with local beliefs. The Druze believe that the soul transmigrates directly from one body to the next, meaning that any sort of state between lives is impossible, even including OBEs. Indeed, the issue is so religiously sensitive that it is surprising that the case was reported at all. Druze families have been known to falsify birth and death records in order to make a previous life “correctly” correspond to a present one, without any intermediate phase.

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Among the statements of children with past-life memories in Tucker’s (2005: 269, 278) U.S. researches, a boy named Bobby remembered having been in a realm where “people are just happy and never get sick.” Lee “remembered deciding to be reborn. He said that other beings helped him with his decision to come down to Earth.” William recalled “that he floated up after dying, and he talked about being in heaven, where he saw God as well as animals.” A fuller account was given by a boy named Sam Taylor, who remembered being his own grandfather. Sam made several accurate statements about his previous life that he could not have known in his current one, and was able to identify “himself” (his grandfather) from old photos. He described how “his body shot up to heaven when he died.” He met an uncle there, and also met God, who gave him a card that had green arrows on it, which would allow him to be reincarnated (ibid. 232-35, 238).

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With the exception of Goldberg’s idiosyncratic dome and silver cord, Whitton’s cases feature all the elements familiar from the other studies, alongside additional details. Some reported a tunnel, and some were assisted by guides on the journey to the other realm. More often, however, souls were alone before “merging with a multitude of strangers at the end of the journey” (ibid. 11). Souls must make deliberate attempts to think in order to “realize our own individuality.” Increased levels of consciousness bring about spiritual advancement. The other realm is nonmaterial, though a soul’s subconscious creates comprehensible symbols experienced as reality. Subjects reported beaches, palaces, gardens, and all manner of idealized mirror-images of Earth. One man reported being in a cave from which he could see Earth in one direction, and the “interlife” realm in the other – a place of Mediterranean-style whitewashed buildings and luminous hills. Many “found themselves hard at work in vast halls of learning equipped with libraries and seminar rooms.” Doctors, lawyers, and physicists spoke of “studying their respective disciplines,” while others spoke of more metaphysical pursuits. A scientist gained profound knowledge of the workings of the universe and a musician heard rapturous music (ibid. 31, 33-34, 48). It is a world of light and love with colors beyond our spectrum, where souls communicate in an unknown, unpronounceable language. They experience total understanding, which one subject said was “like going into the sun and being absorbed without any sensation of heat.” Cleansed of “fear and negativity,” the “soul is reabsorbed into the undifferentiated oneness of existence.” It is not explained how the soul then re-integrates in order to be reincarnated (ibid. 33, 37). The “animal emotions” – such as anger, desire, jealousy, and sadness – disappear with the loss of the physical body. The “cognitive emotions” – “love, guilt, ecstasy, admiration, remorse, loss, dread” – continue with the astral body (ibid. 38). The “Council” consists of “three wise figures,” and while Whitton claimed that a trinity of judges is consistent in afterlife beliefs cross-culturally, this is not supported by my research. Some of Whitton’s subjects said there were four, and others seven (but not twelve as in Wambach). After a life review and judgement, some enter a sleep-like state before waking up in a new body. Those burdened by guilt and remorse have distressing experiences, feeling all the pain and suffering they caused in their previous life. A man who had murdered his wife appeared before the tribunal “with his own throat slashed.” Most souls, however, describe the judges as benevolent, healing, and encouraging. They do not actually judge, but offer “retrospective counselling,” and help to put the past life into the context of the entire span of the soul’s existence (ibid. 12, 20, 38, 42, 48). The period between lives varies from ten months to eight-hundred years, though “cosmic pressure” ensures that all will reincarnate eventually. Returning to Earth, souls pass through the “etheric barrier” – a sort of cosmic river of forgetfulness. This ensures that lives remain clearly distinct, and that individuals do not become homesick for the interlife state and thus fail to engage fully in the new incarnation (ibid. 52-53).

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Comparing intermission memories in spontaneous cases around the world, Sharma and Tucker (2004: 108) concluded that “While the specific imagery may be culture-specific, preliminary study suggests that the phases seem to be universally applicable.” They also found similarities between the Burmese descriptions in particular and NDEs in both Asia and the West. Common futures include OBEs, meeting other spirits and entities, being in other realms, and “a subjective sense of being dead.” Two Burmese subjects remembered feelings of peace and joy, and most were distressed at seeing their relatives mourning them. Interestingly, none reported entering darkness or encountering bright light, which are two of the most common features of NDEs across cultures. None reported a life review, though one was scolded by the underworld deity for failing in her religious duties. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no subjects described reaching a border or barrier from which they had to return, for their return to Earth was in a new incarnation (ibid. 109-110). In any case, the similarities were enough for Sharma & Tucker (2004: 116) to conclude: While the differences in the reports should not be glossed over, the similarities indicate that the intermission reports by children claiming to remember previous lives may need to be considered as part of the same overall phenomenon – reports of the afterlife – that encompasses NDEs.

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Furthermore, they made a startling discovery: that those who recall intermission states “tend to make more verified statements about the previous life they claim to remember than do other subjects of reincarnation type cases, and they tend to recall more names from that life.” This combination of apparently evidential anomalous information retrieval and memories of NDE-like experience between lives might lend credence to the accounts (ibid. 101). This is an important contrast to the mediumistic reports in which veridical cases rarely accompanied descriptions of the afterlife.

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If true, then this is significant.

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The psychologist Titus Rivas et. al. (2015: 104) also noted “a striking similarity” between intermission memories and NDEs, including “the existence of a ‘heavenly’ realm of light and love, the decision to return to earth, and communication with other discarnate spirit beings.” They argued that combined with the evidence from NDEs, these descriptions alongside the “paranormal” aspects of reincarnation cases – in which children knew information that could not have been known by normal means – indicates that “these memories and NDEs are clearly related and convergent, and they collectively point to the reality of conscious discarnate existence.” The anthropologist James Matlock and lawyer Iris Geisler-Petersen (2016) compared 58 Asian and 27 Western spontaneous cases with intermission memories, confirming that they are markedly similar across cultures, and that “most of the differences may be traced to cultural expectations and interpretations.” The most frequently reported elements were encountering deceased relatives and “nonhuman spirit entities,” with the identity of the latter predictably varying according to cultural background – Asian subjects encountered Yama, while Western subjects met the Christian god or Jesus. The key difference was that the Asian subjects described an earthly or Earth-like environment, while the Western subjects described a heavenly one. This echoes NDE reports in indigenous societies, in which experiencers report walking along a path or road to an Earth-like otherworld (Shushan 2018: 166, 221, 242). Matlock (2019: 462) also found that spontaneous cases “are more similar to NDEs than to regression accounts in their depiction of postmortem consciousness.”

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Comparing the Burmese cases with their Japanese counterparts, Ohkado and Ikegawa (2014: 484-5) noted that a tree, pagoda, and remaining near the body were most common in Burma, while going to the sky, light, or elsewhere were more common in Japan. They concluded that the Burmese examples were influenced by local Buddhist beliefs, in which the soul might be given a duty to perform between lives, such as guarding a temple. Most of the Japanese cases, in contrast, were from non-religious families.

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In the afterlife beliefs of most religious traditions in the world, the soul passes through various intermediate states prior to reincarnation, or to reaching the final spiritual home (Shushan 2009, 2018). Such descriptions are conceptually consistent with the notion of intermission memories. This could support the experiential source hypothesis for the spontaneous cases, and perhaps even the PLR cases as well. As argued earlier, the notion that afterlife beliefs are grounded in extraordinary experiences is not predicated on those experiences being genuinely metaphysical. Even if the experiences proved to have mundane explanations, like dreams they can still result in new beliefs.

7. WHAT KIND OF AFTERLIFE? CULTURE, INDIVIDUAL, AND THE SURVIVAL HYPOTHESIS

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Whether arguing for or against the survival hypothesis, most scholarly and scientific discussions of NDEs treat them either as a universal human experience type, or as an entirely culturally-constructed one. Few see them as both, taking differences as well as similarities into account. Fewer still discuss the implications for the survival hypothesis of historical and cross-cultural NDEs in all their diversity and continuity. This is surprising because the relationship between the apparently universally occurring NDE, and the varying ways in which is it individually experienced and culturally expressed, has serious implications for any theory that attempts to make ontological sense of the phenomenon – whether materialist or metaphysical.

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It seems very strange. Our beliefs, background culture quite literally moulds and shapes what we see in this common physical reality, so seems reasonable to suppose it will do so in any glimpse of an afterlife. Moreover, all the evidence vindicates this!

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It is clear that the similarities between accounts indicate that NDEs cannot be due entirely to cultural expectation. Although afterlife beliefs vary widely around the world, individuals in most if not all cultures not only experience NDEs but also attach the same afterlife-related meanings to them. The default belief cross-culturally is that they are actual experiences of a life after death, rather than simply dreams or hallucinations. This apparent universality – both of occurrence and interpretation – could support arguments that they are indeed genuine afterlife experiences.

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Also, our expectation would be that as we approach death, our consciousness would slowly diminish until it reaches zero. What does seem incongruous is that at the threshold of death one feels more conscious than one has ever been. And what happens then? Just as we think "gosh, so there is an afterlife after all", our consciousness suddenly snaps off, then eterrnal nothingness? Or a rapid? slow? diminishing of consciousness after reaching that maximum feeling of consciousness? And these people *feel* these experiences are real. But, yes, they are sigificantly shaped by one's implicit beliefs. But, I'm not sure this should lead us to conclude they are wholly generated from within. What we perceive is always a combination of implicit expectations and what is actually out there.

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NDEs are a genuine glimpse of an afterlife state, though one that is filtered through cultural and individual idiosyncrasies.

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as Greyson (2007: 142) noted, models of NDEs as either hallucinatory or transcendental create a false dichotomy: “some NDE features may well be linked to physiological events, some to sociopsychological belief, and others to no known materialist cause.”

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“a model is not preferable if it achieves parsimony only by ignoring what it cannot explain.”

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Critics such as Keith Augustine (2007: 116-7) and philosopher Sam Harris (2012) find cross-cultural difference to be fatally problematic for the survival hypothesis, and believe that in order to be philosophically coherent, any actual afterlife must be the same for everyone. Harris, for example, wrote that “unfortunately,” NDEs “vary across cultures …. One would think that if a nonphysical domain were truly being explored, some universal characteristics would stand out. Hindus and Christians would not substantially disagree— and one certainly wouldn’t expect the after-death state of South Indians to diverge from that of North Indians, as has been reported.”

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might instead ask, given the cross-cultural and individual differences between people across the world – religious, linguistic, social, environmental, and so on – why should anyone expect a single afterlife that would be the same for all humanity?

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Augustine (2007: 109, 117) stated that variability between NDEs “certainly undermines a survivalist interpretation of NDEs.” This is because, he claims, “different people would naturally be expected to report similar experiences if they were traveling to the same afterlife environment.”

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Again, not necessarily. Our perceptions are intrincally shaped by our expectations and cultural background, even for this physical reality. And do we go to the same environment? Perhaps we gravitate to those realms most suitable for our psyche. Indeed, perhaps implicit expectations actual create one's environment? I think a big problem with the objections of Augustine et al -- especially the views advanced by the various authors in the "myth of an afterlife" -- is that they assume an afterlife environment will be described by the same regularities and rules as our physical reality. One of the authors, Raymond D. Bradley, asks how fast our souls would go and by what means of propulsion. In a similar vein, Michael Martin also asked how we would manage to travel in Heaven. We obviously need a power source, a battery of some description?! Which, to me, seems ludicrous.

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Arguing against the notion that NDErs in different cultures actually have the same kinds of experiences but simply interpret them differently (for example, a Hindu and a Christian identifying the same being as Yama or Jesus, respectively), Augustine stated that “the most straightforward interpretation of apparent diversity is actual diversity.”

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As the psychologist Harvey J. Irwin (2007: 161) countered, “it entails too great a leap in logic to conclude that, because NDEs show some diversity, all such experiences must be wholly hallucinatory.” In this context, Irwin raised the possibility of “the existence of multiple ‘afterlife realities.’” As Kellehear (2007: 151) similarly wrote, “I do not believe that diversity of NDEs of itself makes the arguments for survival, for whoever wants to make them, less convincing. Perhaps there really are several ‘otherworlds’; there are several ‘worlds’ here, so why not there?”

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From Western philosophy, the model best suited to address the problem remains that of the Welsh philosopher H. H. Price (1953: 5, 11). He posited a world of mental images, a mind-dependent reality that to the disembodied spirit would seem as real as life on Earth. This would include the impression of having a quasi-physical presence complete with “bodily” senses. Indeed, on an experiential, sensory level spiritual existence might be so similar to physical existence that individuals “would have considerable difficulty in realizing they were dead” – a theme reflected in some NDE and intermission memory accounts as well as in afterlife-related myths. Disembodied spirits would appear to each other as “telepathic apparitions,” and also communicate telepathically. Rather than being a solipsistic otherworld in which all is merely personal illusion created by the self, Price (1953: 206-7) postulated that it would be an “intersubjective” shared afterlife: an experience actually created by the deceased individual in conjunction with the minds of other human spirits. Like-minded individuals – with, for example, similar memories, ideas, values, or culture – would collectively create their surroundings, with each soul contributing to the group-afterlife while also bringing personal, idiosyncratic features into being. Rather than a single universal afterlife, Price’s model suggests a plurality of afterlives: numerous different communal worlds formed by the collective consciousness of each like-minded group member. The way these worlds manifest would be determined by the “memories and desires” of the co-creators, meaning that a person’s cultural background and individual psychology would be given form within the experience. This means that while the afterlife exists beyond any single group member, each person can have a different experience.

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The individual, retaining free will and the capacity for subjective observation, both consciously and unconsciously contributes to the creation of the shared elements of the group-afterlife, but also creates individual, personal elements. If the barriers between the conscious and unconscious minds dissolve after death (ibid. 22), repressed fears, wish-fulfilment, and self-perception would all play a role in the formation of these otherworlds. This could lead to experiences characterized by states of mind both positive (love, harmony, unity, wish-fulfillment) and negative (guilt, fear, anger, resentment). Such a scenario corresponds to the NDE theme of evaluation of one’s earthly life (as in the life review), as well as to reports of distressing NDEs. Both also have parallels in afterlife beliefs across cultures, in the form of judgments, heavens, and hells.

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Because souls of the dead – and NDErs – remain conscious with the ability to understand and evaluate the experience in progress, the analogy of lucid dreaming is apt. During lucid dreams, individuals become aware that they are dreaming, though this does not immediately or necessarily alter the dream overall – the landscape, situation, or other individuals involved can all remain stable. Lucid dreamers may, however, achieve a state in which it is possible to change or create their dream content. While such control is rare and normally achieved only through practices such as Tibetan dream yoga (milam) or techniques developed in Western psychology, with out the confines of the physical brain and the five senses, it is conceivable that disembodied consciousness would be comparable to the creatively interactive state of the advanced lucid dreamer (Badham 1982: 120; Shushan 2009: 186-7).

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In Price’s (1953: 7-8) model, individuals become aware that they are dead as a result of discovering the “rather peculiar causal laws” of the postmortem state, such as the ability to appear in a particular place by thought alone.

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Some skeptics think you need a power source as I mentioned in another note!

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Similarly, experiences such as being out of the body, the inability to interact with the living, communicating with other spirits telepathically, and encountering deceased relatives often cause NDErs to realize they are “dead” (Shushan 2009: 144-45). These themes also occur in some of the intermission memory cases, and in the afterlife journey myths across cultures. The psychologist J. Timothy Green (1995: 53-4) also compared the lucid dream state to NDEs, citing common elements such as OBE, darkness, light, feelings of intense clarity, euphoria, and transcendence.

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Jim Tucker (2013: 216) who wrote that the NDE is essentially “a transition dream, involving an awareness of dying and moving on to another kind of existence.” The dream starts “at the point of death, and the nature of the dream can vary from person to person,” and leads to a shared-dream otherworld.

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Nor is the hypothesis by any means exclusive to 20th century Western thought. While Price (1953: 3) was aware that similar beliefs could also be found in Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism scholar Carl Becker (1993: 82-3, 179-80) explored the connection in depth. He saw parallels between Price’s theories, NDEs, and “both scriptural and experiential accounts” in the Mahayana tradition of Pure Land Buddhism. In 16th century Chinese Pure Land Buddhist texts the afterlife is mind-dependent, though “the fact that everyone at death seems to report essentially similar imagery demonstrates that the Pure Land is indeed intersubjective and substantial rather than hallucinatory or illusory” (Becker 1984: 61, 115). Becker concluded that the similarities reflect “common religious experience, pointing to a reality envisioned in the West as well: an idealist life after death.” Finding this notion to be the most reasonable, he summarized, “Since it is the mind or consciousness whose survival we are considering, it need not surprise us that the realms of which it is conscious after the decease of the physical body are also mind dependent.”

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The Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead, c. eighth century CE) describes how souls undergo an expected set of intermediate postmortem experiences, though their character is determined by cultural and individual expectation. These involve leaving the body, an encounter with a bright light, having a “karmic body” formed by one’s “own past and deeds,” encounters with good and evil entities (including beings of light), darkness, fear, judgment, and punishment followed by rebirth. Afterlife images are mind-dependent manifestations of personal hopes, fears, desires and so on (Evans-Wentz 1927: 94; Hick 1976: 414, 400-3).

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I think the Bardo Thodol got it right!

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There are also parallels in the Vedas, which describe the heavenly realm (Svargaloka) as “a projection of the mind” and an intermediate state to be transcended by achieving moksha, or liberation (Panikkar 1977: 633). It is reached by traveling in a “chariot of the mind” according to the Rig Veda, or “by means of the mind” in the Upanishads. Indeed, the Upanishads characterize dreaming and lucid dreaming as analogous to the afterlife state, with the atman described as “that person who, as one sleeps, roams about in dreams.” The afterlife world of the fathers, Pitaraloka, is also analogous to the dream-state. The goal of understanding that atman is brahman (sometimes associated with the sun, a being of light) is essentially the transcendence of illusory separateness – a realization of universal oneness, analogous to the idea of lucidity within a co-creating group-soul. In Egypt, the concept of the ba and ka – microcosms of Osiris and Re – being reconciled as an akh, or divinized spirit, is also relevant here. The akh then becomes one with multiple deities yet personal identity remains.

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The Lacandon Maya believe in an illusory afterlife which tests the readiness of the deceased to transcend it (Bierhorst 2002: 155), reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism. The Aztec notion that souls of the dead are fragments of the sun, and that reunification with the sun is the afterlife goal, is conceptually similar to the group-soul idea. Associations between dreams and the afterlife also occur in Mesopotamia where the dream-god Sissig “lights up” the netherworld; and the dream-goddess Nanshe is the wife of underworld deity Niminur. In China, the conception of Shangdi as “an amalgam of the deceased of the ruling clan” (Paper 2005: 64) recalls the conception of the group soul. The concept of a mind-dependent afterlife can also be found in Zoroastrian, Jewish, Sikh, Christian, and Sufitraditions (Badham 1990: 18; 1995: 119, 121; see also Shushan 2009: 188-90; Shushan 2018: 234).

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In general, the afterlife beliefs found in the ancient texts discussed in Chapter 3 facilitate a mind-dependent or collective lucid dream interpretation when we consider the recurring importance placed upon themes of (a) self-awareness and realization of the reality of the spiritual self; and (b) souls of the dead being continually associated with the divine – notably including creator-deities – while still retaining their discrete identities. Even where it involves becoming one with the divine, “death may represent the end of all personal limits and boundaries, without necessarily being the end of conscious experience” (Becker 1993: 185). This reflects NDE reports in which individuals describe the experience as happening to their own individual conscious self, despite feelings of transcendent oneness. Both concept and experience involve the transformation (or realization) of the self as a microcosmic part of the macrocosmic whole, rather than being totally subsumed into a greater identityless, impersonal whole.

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Yes, we don't get subsumed into a universal soup of consciousness, which is a bit silly. Rather an infinite telepathic identification and empathy with all others, or at least souls similar to oneself.

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The concept of group souls is also found in indigenous societies. The idea of a post-mortem collective merging with the ancestors or other spirit beings was common in Oceania, for example (Oliver 1989: 771), including among Aboriginal Australians. In Hawaii it was believed that souls of the dead were “united in thought and all joined together … in harmony” with relatives, friends, and acquaintances (Kamakau 1866– 71: 49– 51). In the Cook Islands there was a belief in groups of souls ascending together with the sun-god (Gill 1876: 159). In Melanesia, the Kiwai believed that people from the same villages lived together in the spirit world.

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The Wyandot, Ojibwe, and other Algonquian peoples believed in culturally divided afterlife realms for indigenous people and Europeans, while the Wyandot also believed in afterlife divisions based on social groupings. For the Pawnee, each family had their own afterlife village (Shushan 2018: 24, 30, 56).

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In Africa, the idea of transcending individuality into “collective immortality” in the spirit world was common (Mbiti 1990: 160). It is typified by the Lango concept of “Orongo,” which is “the universal spirit from which the individual tipo [soul] derives its separate, though not entirely independent, origin.” Orongo itself is a manifestation of the divinity Jok, though they are associated with one another as two aspects of the same divine principle. Thus, the soul is a part of the universal collective spirit, which itself a part of the divine. The soul is sometimes referred to as Jok Orongo, though after death it is called simply jok, indicating that it becomes one with the universal divine. In shamanic practices, shamans sent their souls to Orongo in order to gain information from Jok (Driberg 1923: 220, 229; Shushan 2018: 234). Beliefs in reincarnation were also common in many African traditional religions. As with the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of moksha and nirvana, when a soul achieved collective immortality the cycle of rebirths ended (Mbiti 1990: 160).

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For people on Maewo island in Vanuatu, a “stone of thought” was encountered on the afterlife journey, causing the deceased’s presence of mind and control of memories to determine whether they would continue to the spirit world or return to Earth.

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A Plains Cree NDEr could not cross the river to the other world when he recalled his bad deeds, and a Tlingit NDEr could only proceed to the other world when he thought about it. A Ho-Chunk Native American shaman recounted the ability to travel anywhere at will by thought alone (Radin 1923: 267). According to Ho-Chunk beliefs, the spirit must be free of fear and doubt when undergoing afterlife trials, indicating that psychological and emotional factors shaped the nature of the experience. As Kalweit (1984: 64, 66-7) explained, the barriers and perils the soul encountered were considered “culturally conditioned visions of an ego which is still caught in the grip of social and cultural models of the imagination and has not yet learned to adapt to the new environment” and “our primordial consciousness confronted by our thoughts.” These experiences of the soul were “an attempt to make the surviving consciousness aware of the fact that it itself constitutes the world of the Beyond” (Shushan 2018: 234).

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I think this might well be correct.

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As acknowledged by Price (1953: 3), there are parallels between his hypothesis and the ideas of the British parapsychologist Whately Carington, and those of the French philosopher C. J. Ducasse (1951: 486-88). The latter suggested that a “dream consciousness” form of survival could account for the differences between the various mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife. On the one hand it would explain the frequent accounts of idealized mirror-images of Earth, for they would simply be products of like-minded souls who desired such realms. On the other it would also account “for the fact that some of the reports deny what some others confirm; for where wish is architect and playwright, diversity of scenery and of drama is naturally to be expected from diversity of persons.” Furthermore, Ducasse argued, the “afterlife-as-dream” hypothesis would also account for the absurdities in the accounts, and for “the lack of firmness and precision” in the descriptions conveyed by mediums. In other words, rather than being due to communication issues or “overshadowing,” inaccuracies and uncertainties about the otherworld would reflect the spirit’s own mind-dependent perceptions, which may sometimes be hazy and imprecise. Individuals might be fully aware of the fact that they are creating the other world, a possibility Ducasse termed “critically controlled creative imagination.” He described this process as “the purposively critical activity characteristic of mental creativity or discovery, whether poetic, pictorial, musical, mathematical, dramatic, philosophical, or other.”

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Price’s model, however, actually makes less philosophical sense when applied to much of the mediumistic descriptions of the otherworld than when applied to cross-cultural afterlife beliefs, NDEs, and intermission memories in spontaneous reincarnation cases. For example, if like-minded souls are drawn together to form groups, there should be different afterlives based upon belief or culture, including Hindu groups, Muslim groups, and so on. These groups would not create or willingly participate in a world in which they are merely converted Christians in-waiting,

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making their own religions and cultures irrelevant while also portraying them as immoral and bad. Other mediumistic descriptions, however, are more in line with Price’s model, such as the claim by “Helen” via Mrs. Leonard that culture-specific realms are temporary familiar comforts until souls are ready to progress beyond their own earthly conditioning (Thomas 1945: 63). The more recent accounts by mediums such as John Edward are also exceptions.

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Mind-dependent, group-soul, and inclusive afterlife concepts are also reflected in the writings of Robert Monroe (1994: 248-50), a pioneer in experimentation with deliberately induced out-of-body experiences. Following his own OBEs in which he claimed to have traveled into afterlife dimensions, he described the various levels and stages that souls pass through. The first is for those who are unaware that they are “dead,” or are unable to let go of their earthly ties. This is followed by the “Belief System Territories,” occupied by souls “from all periods and areas who have accepted and subscribed to various [particular] premises and concepts,” including “religious and philosophical beliefs that postulate some sort of post-physical existence.” Souls then advance to what Monroe called “the Reception Center or the Park”: This is an artificial synthesis created by human minds, a way station designed to ease the trauma and shock of the transition out of physical reality. It takes on the form of various earth environments in order to be acceptable to the enormously wide variety of new comers. Souls may also create their own “personal and special place” within this realm, which results in areas “that are as varied and unique as the participants themselves, ranging for example from log cabins by quiet streams to clumps of trees, South Sea islands, palaces of crystal, and corners of one’s heart.” Souls may also assist those at the previous level who are finding it difficult to accept their physical death. The state of being above the Park level is “beyond not only space-time but human thought,” making it perhaps analogous to nirvana or moksha. Traveling there “limits any return to a physical body.”

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The mind-dependent group soul notion could account for descriptions of rarefied parochial Englands, if we consider that the particular spirit communicators conveying such descriptions belonged to a white middle class Edwardian Spiritualist-Christian group. It does not, however, explain conflicting statements about institutional post-mortem racial segregation, class hierarchies, and ultimate white Christian supremacy. In other words, while the group that these communicators belonged to may have created a whites-only Christian world, the mind-dependence hypothesis itself makes unintelligible their claims about the metaphysical place per se of anyone who is neither Christian nor white. Again we are left with the impression that such mediumship accounts are more culturally immersed than NDEs and intermission memories, if not wholly derived from preexisting ideas found in Theosophical and Spiritualist literature. Mrs. Leonard’s communications with “Helen” are again a notable exception, explaining the system in a

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There are further limitations to Price’s hypothesis. One is that it necessitates an extreme form of relativism which circumvents critical challenge: because the subjective essentially becomes objective in the otherworld – the imaginary becomes “real” – we must regard any description of the afterlife as “true.” This includes the acceptance of all statements about racial, religious, and class superiority, as well as the numerous flatly contradictory statements that are especially typical of the mediumship and PLR accounts. We must accept that there are monkeys in the sun, cats that behave like dogs in the otherworld, a pharaonic Egyptian Muslim Lucifer who has forgotten his native language, and that souls can time-travel to see dinosaurs, meet figures from Arthurian legend, and fight “Ancient Egyptian crocodile-headed monsters” (as per a spirit communication through medium J.S.M. Ward in 1920; Ferguson 2012: 93).

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Some mediumship accounts might well be fabricated.

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A proposed modification to Price’s theory by the British theologian John Hick (1976: 270-1) does little to resolve the problem. He suggested that rather than many shared group-worlds, the minds of souls “are pooled to produce a common environment … by the cancelling out and mutual reinforcements of the multitude of individual desires,” resulting in “a single post-mortem world, formed by the memories and desires of all the human beings who have died since man began.” The realm would develop over time, “as new sets of memories are contributed to the common stock” and “the prevailing pattern of human desires changes.”

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An alternate modification to Price’s hypothesis is that the otherworld is as objective as this one, but that things there are only perceived differently according to the individual. Or, more accurately, the individual actually “projects” specific forms onto a general background structural experience. The generic otherworld features are “clothed” with coherent imagery by the psyche of the person having the experience. The otherworld and a soul’s experiences there are thus not generated by culture and individual, but nor are they separable from culture and individual. A person’s stock of images, memories, creativity, and ideas overlay the mostly featureless background experiences, bringing them to life, making them comprehensible and indeed experienceable.

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Well, yes. This is essentially what happens, to a degree, with our experiences of this reality.

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As outlined earlier, the combination of cross-cultural diversity and similarity of NDEs indicates different perceptions of the same phenomena. In the next world, it might likewise be a case of subjective interpretations being mentally projected onto the structural, thematic environment. For example, everyone may travel to the same spirit village, but the dwellings would be perceived variously as wood-and-straw huts, adobe houses, skyscraper apartments, tipis, stone cottages, and so on. This brings us back to the Bardo Thödol as discussed in Chapter 1, in which the “Clear Light” in the otherworld is experienced by the soul as a culturally relevant identity, whether the Buddha, Vishnu, Jesus, Muhammad, or a generic “being of light.”

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These perceptions – or projections, rather – could also be shared or intermingled. As Becker (1993: 121) described: “While some of the scenery and images perceived in such states will be unique to each individual, other features may be intersubjectively perceived by many conscious nesses.” The afterlife thus “shares certain intersubjective features for all its ‘inhabitants,’ has various regions suited to various types of consciousness, and responds in its minor events to the thoughts and wills of its ‘inhabitants’ or experimenter/ creators.” As in Pure Land Buddhism, deceased relatives and other spirits would be real identities rather than illusory, and only certain details could be altered by individual souls (Becker 1984, 61, 65-6). Only objects, not people, are mind-dependent, and individuals retain consciousness and free-will. For example, if multiple individuals simultaneously desire to see the same person, that person cannot be forced to appear to any of them. The Pure Land tradition even addresses problems regarding conflicting wills and wishes of the co-creators, such as Leonard’s family of gardening enthusiasts: there would be an objective, generic otherworldly garden, but each family member would project their own ideals upon it, and perceive it according to their personal preferences.

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This “projection model” variation of the mind-dependent hypothesis is, in fact, often the conclusion reached by scholars who explore the problem from multiple angles, and who actually engage with both differences and similarities. Osis and Haraldsson (1986: 182), for example, hypothesized that scenes of idealized earthly beauty are “symbolizations” of the feelings of joy, peace, and calm typically reported by NDErs. The diversity of otherworldly landscapes is merely a reflection of the idealized local environment of the NDEr. Likewise, Greyson (2007: 139) pointed out that cross-cultural diversity of NDEs could indicate different perceptions of the same phenomena.

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Something along these lines is probably correct.

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Mind-dependent afterlife models overcome Augustine’s (2007: 117) claim that “the greater the diversity between different NDE accounts, the less credible the NDE consistency argument for survival.” As with Harris (2012), Augustine’s (2007: 120-1) objection is based on his own particular preconception of what an afterlife must or should be like, and the rules that must govern it: that it would be the same for everyone by virtue of our “common humanity” irrespective of cultural diversity. There is, however, simply no reason to believe that disembodied individuals would cease to process their experiences in their own idiosyncratic modes, including the use of personal and cultural memory, imagination, and visual metaphor. A metaphysical interpretation of NDEs is not predicated on the negation of cross-cultural or individual difference (Irwin 2007: 160-1; Kellehear 2007: 151). Put another way, given the nearly infinite diversity of human life experiences on Earth according to individual, environmental, geographic, economic, racial, cultural, biological, historical, social, and familial circumstances, it seems inconceivable that such diversity would simply cease to exist in an afterlife.

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It is also the case that Harris (2012) severely downplayed any similarities between NDEs across cultures, misleadingly giving only generalized and unsourced cursory examples. Augustine (2007: 173-4) similarly characterized them as being far less consonant than they actually are, sharing only “broadly defined elements that we would expect to see among those who feel that they are dying.” This claim inaccurately assumes that end-of-life concerns are universal. Widespread beliefs in Africa about the continued presence of ancestors on Earth, for example, would not prompt an NDE involving going to another realm and meeting deceased relatives, though such accounts have been reported from Africa (Shushan 2017, 2018).

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Furthermore, Augustine asserted that NDE elements such as “feelings of peace, OBEs, passages through a tunnel or darkness toward light, and life reviews … are strikingly absent from most extant nonWestern NDE accounts.” Though life reviews per se are rare cross-culturally, they are at least attested, as are thematic equivalents. The other four elements are some of the most common. Indeed, Augustine’s assertion is so wildly insupportable that one questions his familiarity with the cross-cultural NDE literature. While that literature was not as extensive in 2007 as it is today, there had certainly been a number of relevant works prior to that date, including Abramovitch, Badham, Bailey, Becker, Campany, Counts, Green, Groth-Marnet, Kellehear, McClenon, Pasricha, Schorer, Shiels, Wade, and Zhi-ying & Jian-xun. As with the many scientists who are culturally and historically uninformed, unsubstantiated and incorrect presuppositions can only lead to error and unconvincing conclusions. One cannot construct useful generalizing theories about human beings per se based primarily upon knowledge of a single Western society, with only superficial consideration of the rest of the world.

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In summary, just as we dream in symbols – giving form and apparent “reality” to fears, desires, worries, hopes, and other abstract concepts without conscious intent or deliberation – it is conceivable that we manifest our afterlife experiences in the same way. NDEs are apparently universal on contextual, thematic, and interpretative levels. They also share highly specific cross-cultural similarities on the symbolic and narrative levels. The most common features can therefore give us some idea of what the afterlife experience could be like, including OBE, darkness, light, heightened awareness and emotions, meeting spirits of the dead, personal evaluation, and so on – all given specific form by our individual and cultural particularities. Such features also regularly occur in the mediumistic and PLR accounts, though the reports of intermission states in spontaneous reincarnation memories appear to be more closely aligned with NDEs and without such extensive elaboration and idiosyncrasies.

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In any case, if we grant that NDEs are evidence for survival after death, that evidence tells us about a transitional period rather than about any ultimate fate. In other words, even if consciousness does survive death and leaves the body, it is possible that it would not persist beyond the stages that NDErs have experienced. Survival itself might be temporary or perhaps even extremely brief. Likewise, a mind-dependent afterlife could be merely an intermediate phase prior to some other state of being (Price 1953: 25) or even annihilation, or a nirvana-like impersonal merging beyond consciousness.

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It is also conceivable that different postmortem fates await different people, whether determined by culture, belief, or some unknown factor. Some may enter a mind-dependent state influenced by their state of mind and awareness at the moment of death. Others may find themselves in heavenly or hellish realms according to their actions and thoughts in this life (whether mind-dependent or otherwise). Some may remain on Earth in ghostly form, while others may reincarnate and perhaps eventually achieve a transcendent, transpersonal state. And some may simply die with the body (Becker 1993: 120-1). This kind of wide diversity of post-mortem possibilities could conceivably explain why up to 90% of those who come close to death do not report NDEs – perhaps some other fate awaited them.

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I have a problem wih some people just simply ceasing to exist. Either brains -- all brains, even non-human ones -- somehow produce consciousness, or they don't. So, what would cause someone's annihilation at the moment the brain ceases functioning if it's not the brain per se responsible? Certainly it might be the case that some people reincarnate and others don't. Perhaps some people only have one life on earth. Perhaps some might have no lives at all! Perhaps there are trillions of souls, most of whom have never heard of Earth. We simply don't know. But yes, implicit expectations and so on might determine our fate, what we experience, after death.

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There are grounds to believe in the veridicality of NDEs, reincarnation, and perhaps mediumship, and therefore there are reasonable grounds to believe in an afterlife. There is also a coherent philosophical model that can accommodate individual and cultural diversity, making belief even more reasonable than the evidence alone. Furthermore, there has been no cogent purely biological explanation for NDEs in all their diversity and similarity. Nevertheless, the ultimate nature of NDEs and the possibility of survival after death remain matters of personal belief – and that includes materialist models of NDEs and disbelief in an afterlife.

APPENDIX I: EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCES OR CULTURAL IMAGINATION: “ALL IN THE BRAIN” REVISITED

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Regardless of their “mainstream” credentials, background, and standing in the scientific community, those who reach conclusions in favor of a survival hypothesis (or other non-physicalist theories) are immediately relegated to the “fringe.” In the humanities – specifically in the secular study of religions – regardless of any prestigious academic background, research history, publication record, or other accomplishments, scholars who challenge the dominant paradigms face ostracization, ridicule, and lack of employment opportunities, career advancement, or other meaningful support.

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This dual onslaught has unreasonably and pointlessly stunted the study of important and fascinating pan-human phenomena. In the sciences, it has hindered progress into our understanding of the ultimate nature of NDEs and other extraordinary experiences. In the humanities it has limited our knowledge of the origins and development of religious and ritual systems, and therefore of human cultural development per se.

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In practice, however, the default stance is that the statements of our subjects are considered patently untrue when they conflict with our own philosophical commitments. This serves to keep Western academics in a position of power over the people we study.

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As we have seen, many religious texts relating to life after death show an awareness of the concepts of NDEs and OBEs and involve an individual’s soul temporarily traveling to afterlife realms. Such texts are often intended to prepare the reader for what to expect after death, providing instructions about behaviour types that will ensure a positive fate. This indicates that they were believed to be based on first-hand knowledge and actual experiences.

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This, in fact, does seem to be the case with the continuous strand of otherworld-journey narratives spanning the range of Vedic literature as described in Chapter 3, and is overtly the case with the Tibetan Bardo Thödol. There is an important, perhaps foundational connection between NDEs and Pure Land Buddhism in China and Japan, with many prominent figures in the traditions reporting them (McClenon 1994: 182). Much shamanic poetry and other narratives from ancient China contain descriptions of OBE journeys to other realms. In light of these and many other examples, it is clear that NDEs and OBEs were part of human experience long before they were named by Western researchers, and were seen in religious terms long before Schleiermacher.

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Nor is there is there any psychological, neurophysiological, or anthropological evidence to support the notion that experience is dependent upon language. On the contrary, there is evidence that both emotions and cognition (which are kinds of experience) can precede language (Downey 2010; McClenon 2002: 161). If some experience types can

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How on earth could anyone be so utterly crazy as to believe that experience depends upon language? This would entail all non-human animals are not conscious!

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question: if language is the primary factor in the creation of such experiences,

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I don't understand how language can create experiences. Language communicates experiences, it's nonsenical to suppose it can mysteriously create experiences.

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The idea of a pre-cultural, pre-linguistic origin of NDEs is supported by two further considerations.

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I have no idea why it would be imagined that people only have NDEs due to language.

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Other common NDE elements found in Wren-Lewis’s account include time slowing down, indescribable bliss and joy, universal understanding and feelings of unity, returning to a home or origin state of being, ineffability, being “pure consciousness” beyond space and time, and dramatic impressions of light and darkness – an “almost palpable blackness that was yet somehow radiant.”