Is there any other experimental avenue for proving that a mind (soul, personality, consciousness, whatever) can travel independent of its body? There is, though it’s not an avenue along which mainstream researchers would be willing to stroll. It involves people who claim to be able to will themselves to have out-of-body experiences—simply pull their consciousness out of the garage and take it for a ride.*
If you wanted to prove that it’s possible for some version or vestige of the self to exist independent of body and brain, you could try to set up some sort of detector in a room far away from one of these purported free-floaters, and instruct him or her to head on over. It’s a jump to further conclude that this is what we do when we die, but it would make it easier—for me, anyway—to accept that NDEs are something other than a neurological/psychological phenomenon.
In 1977, a group of parapsychologists undertook just such a project, on the campus of Duke University. I was pleased to see that the main author on this study was the late Robert Morris, of the University of Edinburgh. I’d written an article on Morris’s telepathy work years ago; I liked the fact that he had cooperated with the skeptics group CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in designing the experimental protocol.
Morris and his colleagues worked with a single subject named Stuart Harary, who had participated in previous out-of-body experience projects at Duke. Harary was instructed to leave his body and travel to one of two detection rooms, either fifty feet or a quarter mile away. To determine whether he could actually do this, Morris stationed people in the detection room and had them try to sense Harary while he “visited.” The results were no better than chance. There were about as many reports of detection during control periods as when Harary believed he was out of his body.
Surmising that animals might be more keenly attuned to extrasensory presences, Morris next did a series of trials using snakes, gerbils, and kittens as detectors. The cages were set up on top of an activity platform that registered movements on a polygraph, whose readout could then be compared to the timing of Harary’s “visits.” As anyone who’s been to a herpetarium could have predicted, the snakes did not work out. They didn’t move around when Harary was visiting the room, and they didn’t move around when he wasn’t. The gerbils proved similarly apathetic. “The rodents spent most of their time either chewing on the cage bars or resting quietly,” wrote Morris.
Morris eventually settled on a kitten that had seemed to show an affinity for Harary. The kitten was not caged but let loose in a corralled area with a grid taped out on the floor; in this case the behavioral measure was the number of squares entered per one hundred seconds and the animal’s vocalization rate. Disappointingly, the kitten seemed to be reliably less active when Harary indicated he was “there,” leading some of the researchers to wonder whether they’d gotten the protocol backward. Perhaps Harary’s presence wasn’t stimulating the animal but calming it. Morris and his colleagues went through a half dozen methodological variations, including one in which the kitten was sequestered under an inverted box until Harary “arrived,” whereupon the box, which was hooked to a pulley, would slowly and dramatically rise like a stage curtain. It is around this point that I like to insert the image of a group of white-haired Duke alumni wandering into the building on a homecoming tour.
The experiment dragged on so long that around page 11, Morris begins referring to the kitten as a cat, noting that it had by then grown to maturity. He reported a number of anecdotal occurrences—frustratingly, a couple of casual bystanders proved better at sensing Harary than the official “human detectors”—that would seem to indicate something was up, but overall there was little to suggest that Harary had been anywhere but inside Harary’s head. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time, and scientific literature is the richer for the introduction of the measurement unit “meows per second.”
A few years later, a team of non-university-affiliated paranormal researchers tried a similar experiment, with strain gauges in place of kittens and gerbils. Here our out-of-body traveler was an amateur parapsychologist from Maine named Alex Tanous. For clarity, Mr. Tanous referred to his out-of-body self as Alex 2, and his stay-at-home self as Alex 1, and so I will, too. Alex 2’s mission was to travel six rooms distant, enter a suspended (to keep floor vibrations from setting off the strain gauges) eighteen-inch cube, and view one of five randomly generated images, which would appear in one of four colors and four quadrants. Meanwhile, Alex 1 would tell the researchers what he sees. A tape was kept running, so that the researchers could see if the strain gauges were registering force specifically when Alex 2 was correctly reporting what he “saw,” as this would suggest that he had actually been inside the cube—rather than knowing the target remotely, via some more ordinary, garden-variety ESP.
Head researcher Karlis Osis, who died in 1997, reported that Tanous had 144 hits and 83 misses. Does this mean that Tanous got all three aspects (color, quadrant, image) of the target correct sixty-three percent of the time? When chance would dictate a correct guess only once in eighty tries? Why hasn’t this guy been on the news? Why hasn’t he turned the world upside down? Osis further claimed that when Alex 2 was seeing the targets correctly, the mean activation level of the gauges inside the chamber was significantly greater than when he wasn’t seeing the target correctly. “Therefore,” concludes the paper, “it is our opinion that the [strain gauge] results can most likely be attributed to the subject’s out-of-body presence in the shielded chamber.”
Though I suspected that a conversation with Tanous would leave me chewing on my cage bars, I decided to try to call him. I did not succeed, because in 1990, Alex 2 had, like Osis, made the big one-way trip out of his body. So we are left to conclude that either Tanous was some sort of bizarre on-call living ghost, or Osis was a deluded or sloppy researcher.
SO LET’S SAY, just for a moment, that people who have near-death experiences are actually leaving their bodies. That they are making some sort of transcendent journey into a different dimension. And that one of the off-ramps in this dimension leads to the afterlife. This means that near-death experiences could—just possibly—provide us with a sneak preview of our own impending eternity. If only someone had kept a list of near-death experiencers’ descriptions of this place.
Someone did. Michael Sabom’s book includes an appendix of all twenty-eight “transcendental environments” glimpsed or “visited” during subjects’ near-death experiences. There seem to be two basic versions: the weather report and the farm report. Fully half the environments consisted of nothing but sky. Heaven appears to have a similar weather system as earth; there were approximately the same number of reports of blue sky and sunshine as there were of clouds and mist. One or two meteorologically inclined individuals included both in their report (e.g., “blue sky with an occasional cloud”).
The other half of the twenty-eight descriptions consisted of gardens or pastures, often with a gate thrown in. The heavenly farmland was more or less deserted, the exceptions being one pasture with cattle grazing and one landscape of people “of all different nationalities, all working on their arts and crafts.”
It seems pretty clear what’s going on here. People are experiencing something dazzling and euphoric and totally foreign, and interpreting it according to their image of heaven. Greyson agrees. “I think the experience is so ineffable that we just put whatever framework, whatever models and analogies we have, onto it.” Greyson says these cultural overlays also apply to the experience of rushing down a tunnel. “I had one truck driver I interviewed call it a tailpipe.” Likewise the experience of being sent back to return to one’s body. In one journal article I read, a man who lived in India experienced this as being told there’d “been a clerical error.”
The alternate explanation, of course, is that the people who had these NDEs actually saw heaven, and that heaven looks just like it looks in the holy books. This is, of course, tricky to prove. Someone who’s bee
n there would have to bring back photographs. Preferably someone scientific, someone trustworthy and pedigreed.
On December 26, 1993, the Hubble Telescope made visual contact with Heaven and took hundreds of pictures and sent these pictures of Heaven to Goddard Space Center in Maryland…. In the pictures of Heaven, you can see bright light and what looks like the Holy City…. Heaven is located at the end of the Universe.
This dispatch comes to us courtesy of the Internet Religious News service. One fine day I called Goddard Space Flight Center to see what they had to say about this. “Well,” said a good-natured NASA spokesperson named Ed Campion, “it is true that Hubble focuses on faint lights at the most distant parts of the universe.” That’s why NASA sent a telescope way out into space—to get it closer to the oldest, most distant parts of the universe, the stuff that dates to the Big Bang. But Campion hadn’t heard about the heaven photos. Or the secret NASA space probe that recorded millions of voices singing “Glory, Glory, Glory to the Lord on high” over and over—as reported, here again, by our imaginative friends at the Internet Religious News service. Or the NASA photos of the “two Giant Human-Looking Eyes in deep space that are billions of light years around and billions of light years apart looking at Earth.”
“That last one,” said Campion, “kind of gives me the willies.”
Realistically speaking, if the place experienced by people who almost die exists as something other than a neurological phenomenon, it’s no more likely to be located by astronomers than the soul was likely to be located by the early anatomists. It exists (if it exists) in a dimension other than that of time and space, a dimension we typically can’t access (if indeed we do access it) until we die. Greyson’s thinking is that cessation of the brain’s everyday activities, as happens during clinical death, might enable the consciousness to tune in to a channel normally blocked or obscured by the chatter. “It’s almost as if the brain in its normal functioning stops you from going there,” he told me. “And when you knock those parts of the brain out, then you’re able to.”
Other than a brush with death, are there other ways to deflect that bothersome everyday sensory input and experience the transcendent reality that may or may not be out there all the time? You bet. The following is a passage from a chapter on the drug ketamine in the book Anesthesiology: “I would suddenly find myself going down tunnels at high speed…. One time I came out into a golden light. I rose into the light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the light, which I believed to be God.” London psychiatrist and ketamine authority Karl Jansen quotes the passage in his own book Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Ketamine is today rarely used as an anesthetic and fairly commonly used as a recreational drug. Jansen used to be of the opinion that since ketamine—or LSD or pot, for that matter—can produce ersatz near-death experiences, this meant that surgical or cardiac arrest patients’ near-death experiences were similarly hallucinogenic.
He has of late changed his tune: “The fact that near-death experiences can be artificially induced does not imply that the spontaneously occurring NDE is ‘unreal’ in some way,” writes Jansen in Ketamine. “It has been suggested that both may involve a ‘retuning’ of the brain to allow the experience of a different reality from the everyday world.” If this is true, it suggests it may be possible to preview death by taking ketamine—which is precisely what self-described psychonauts Timothy Leary and John Lilly did, in what they called “experiments in voluntary death.”
If you want to have a K-induced near-death experience, I read in Jansen’s book, you should take a fairly ambitious dose, and you should take it by injection. You should also be prepared for all manner of physical side effects ranging from the dangerous to the embarrassing. Your eyes may wander off in different directions. Your body may jerk uncontrollably. In his book, Jansen passes along the advice of The Essential Psychedelic Guide author D. M. Turner, which is to have a friend or “sitter” present when you take ketamine. (Turner, Jansen wryly points out, died alone in the bath with a bottle of K beside the tub.)
Before I traveled to England for my mediumship course, I scheduled an interview with Jansen in London. I wanted him to be my sitter, but I didn’t, at this point, tell him. I was hoping he’d offer. I imagined we’d sit in his office and chat for a while, and then he’d open a drawer. I happen to have some ketamine right here. I’ll gladly provide you with a safe, clinical environment in which to have a near-death experience with absolutely no unsightly side effects.
Jansen made no such offer. He was in the process of relocating to New Zealand and was staying at a hotel while in London. He had no office, so we met in his hotel bar. He was tall and suave and accompanied by a similarly tall and suave Russian woman. We talked for half an hour, shouting over the din while the Russian woman looked on intently. I imagined her looking on intently while my eyes rolled around in my head and my extremities spazzed. I no longer wanted to take drugs with Dr. Jansen.
The clean-and-sober voluntary-death alternative takes the form of a Buddhist meditation. Pure Land Buddhists, who date back to A.D. 400, believe that by practicing certain rather extreme forms of meditation, it’s possible to experience the same heavenlike locale that people report having experienced during brushes with death. These guys were the original near-death experience researchers. One of the junior monks’ duties was to sit at the bedside of moribund elders and jot down their deathbed visions of the Pure Land. By the eleventh century, more than a hundred accounts of the Pure Land had been transcribed, including many from people who had been thought dead and then revived. The monk Shantao was one of the most ardent devotees; his sermons contained long, vivid descriptions of the Pure Land. Possibly too vivid: Osaka University professor Carl Becker writes in an article in Anabiosis: The Journal for Near-Death Studies that at least one listener was compelled to take the express route to the Pure Land, committing suicide in the days following the sermon.
Should you, too, wish to preview the afterlife, here are instructions for the “constantly walking meditation practice”: “For a single period of 90 days, only circumambulate exclusively…. Until three months have elapsed, do not lie down even for the snap of a finger. Until the three months have elapsed, constantly walk without stopping (except for natural functions).”
Before you begin, I should warn you that both Pure Land Buddhists and ketamine users occasionally experience something closer to hell than heaven. As do near-death experiencers. Researcher P. M. H. Atwater, who interviewed more than 700 people about their near-death experiences, reported that 105 of these individuals described their experience as unpleasant. But only one researcher ever claimed to be hearing tales of literally hellish goings-on. Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings recounted dozens of stories of people hearing screams and moans and witnessing violent scenes of gruesome torture at the hands of grotesque animal-human forms. Rawlings raised eyebrows in the NDE community with his second book, which advocated a commitment to Christianity as a way of ensuring one doesn’t end up in the sorts of hellish scenarios he claimed his non-Christian near-death experiencers were describing.
If you take Rawlings out of the picture, reports of hell-like sights and sounds are rare.* You will be pleased to know that Atwater never once heard a description of a fiery or even unseasonably hot locale. Both Atwater and Greyson concluded that the difference between an unpleasant near-death experience and a pleasant one is largely one of attitude. A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world “all working on their arts and crafts” can seem like heaven or, if you’re me, hell. The same vast expanse of empty sky that looks beautiful to one person may seem lonely and barren to another. I once interviewed a geologist who searches for meteorites on empty, wind-battered ice fields in Antarctica, where the snow is whipped into knee-high white swirls. He sometimes gives talks and slide shows of his travels to the public. Most people tell him they can’t imagine spending months at a time in such a cold,
barren locale. One night a quiet older woman came up to him as he was putting away his slides and said, “You’ve been to heaven.”
Bruce Greyson has also written papers on what he calls the distressing near-death experience. I asked him whether researchers had ever looked for a correlation between having a hellish near-death experience and being a mean, rotten person. Just, you know, wondering. His answer was reassuring: “We have very blissful accounts from horrible people.” He told me the story of a Mafia bagman who was shot in the chest and left to die. While lying there bleeding, he had “a beautiful experience, in which he felt the presence of God and unconditional love.” One of the focuses of Greyson’s near-death work has been the effects—often profoundly positive—that near-death experiences have on people’s lives. The bagman, for example, quit the Mafia and now counsels delinquent boys. “He walked away from his lifestyle,” says Greyson. “I talked to his former girlfriend, who used to complain to me: ‘Rocky just doesn’t care about money, about things of substance anymore.’”
I DON’T KNOW if Wes can hear anything, but he surely can’t see. His face, like the rest of his body, is draped in blue surgical cloths. If he could see, he’d surely be entertained. Everyone in the room is dressed in bulky lead kilts and matching lead dickeys to protect their thyroids and reproductive organs from the real-time X-rays that are helping the surgeons thread a sensor wire through Wes’s* heart. The wire will be connected to the body of the defibrillator, soon to be sewn into a pocket in the pectoral muscle just below the spot where a more conventional shirt pocket would be.
And now it’s time to almost kill Wes. A technician from the defibrillator company fiddles with a small computer that remotely manipulates the implanted device. In the corner of the screen is the company’s disquieting logo, a heart with a jagged lightning bolt through it. “We’re preparing to shock,” announces the technician. Depending on the voltage and on what the heart is doing when you shock it, the charge can either induce or stop fibrillation. “So it can kill him, or save him,” she says brightly.