Black Spirituality Religion : The Great Afterlife Debate

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The Great Afterlife Debate: Michael Shermer vs. Deepak Chopra

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Michael Shermer: Skeptic.

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Deepack Chopra: spiritual science author.

The following debate between Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer came
about after the widely read and referenced debate the two had last
year on the virtues and value of skepticism.

Deepak has a new book out on the subject, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof (Harmony, 2006 ISBN 0307345785), and Michael has written extensively about claims of evidence for the afterlife, so the two of them thought it
would be stimulating to have a debate on the topic.

Michael read Deepak's book and goes first in the debate, offering his assessment of the "proofs" presented in Deepak's book, then Deepak responds.

Shorter blog-length versions are published on www.HuffingtonPost. com,
with the longer versions presented here and on www.intentBlog. com.

www.skeptic. com/reading_ room/debates/ afterlife. html

Taking the Afterlife Seriously

by Deepak Chopra

"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the
sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science."

–Albert Einstein


. Thanks for Coming — or Did You Even Show Up?

I have put Michael Shermer at a disadvantage by writing a book that
bases the afterlife on the survival of consciousness. He has little
interest in consciousness compared to his interest in laboratory-
induced hallucinations and altered states. It's a shame that he
doesn't grasp that the afterlife is about nothing but consciousness.
(I don't offhand know anyone who took their bodies with them.)
Shermer's focus on God is irrelevant to the argument. I give seven
versions of life after death in my book, collected from every
religious and philosophical tradition. He fails to address them or to
realize that certain traditions (Platonism, Buddhism, Taoism,
Vedanta) do not posit a personal God.

Shermer's retelling of the flaws in prayer studies is germane to my
argument but only to a small degree — it by no means forms a sixth of
my book, more like three pages. I must point out, however, that the
2006 Benson-Harvard refutation of prayer is far from being
authoritative. Critics have found methodological flaws in it, and
there are 19 other studies in the field that arrive at differing
results, 11 of them showing that "prayer works." Now to the holes in
Shermer's own approach. It may be curious that stimulating some area
of the brain can induce out-of-body experiences or the feeling of
sinking into a bed, or that Buddhist monks have low activity in their
Orientation Association Area (OAA), as cited by Shermer.
Unfortunately, these experiments have little bearing on the
afterlife. Induced states are quite feeble as science. I can put a
tourniquet on a person's arm, depriving the nerves of blood flow, and
thereby eliminate the sensation of touch. This doesn't prove that
quadriplegics with paralyzed limbs aren't having a real experience. I
can induce happiness by giving someone a glass of wine and having a
pretty girl flirt with him. That doesn't prove that happiness without
alcohol isn't real. The point is that a simulation isn't the real
thing or a credible stand-in for it.

Shermer doesn't adhere to the scientific impartiality he so vocally
espouses. Loading the dice turns out to be fairly standard for him.
For example, he cites the December 2001 issue of Lancet that
published a Dutch study in which, out of 344 cardiac patients
resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-death
experiences. (The actual figure was 18 percent, by the way.)
Immediately he skips on to say that near-death experiences can be
induced in the laboratory. Hold on a minute. Did Shermer miss the
point entirely? The patients in the Dutch study, who suffered massive
heart attacks in the hospital, had their near-death experiences when
there was no measurable activity in the brain, when they were in fact
brain dead. Did he quote the astonishment of Dr. Pin van Lommel, the
Dutch cardiologist who observed this effect? No. Did he go into the
baffling issue of why the vast majority of resuscitated patients
(over 80 percent) don't report near-death experiences? That's pretty
important if you are claiming that all this near-death hokum can be
induced in the lab with a few electrodes.

Leaving out the heart of the matter, as Shermer does, smacks of
unfairness, for I rely on this same Dutch study and give all the
particulars. Skepticism is only credible when it's not being devious.
But Shermer often deliberately misses the point. I cite a University
of Virginia study that to date has found over 2,000 children who
vividly remember their past lives. In many cases they can name places
and dates. The facts they relate have been verified in many cases.
Even more astonishing, over 200 of these children exhibit birthmarks
that resemble the way they remember dying in their most recent
lifetime. (One boy, for example, recalled being killed with a
shotgun, and his chest exhibited a scatter-shot of red birthmarks).
Unable to refute this phenomenon or imagine a counter-study, Shermer
fails to mention it. He snipes at the easy targets to bolster his
blanket skepticism. I wish Shermer realized that true skepticism
suspends both belief and disbelief. Being a debunker of curiosity is
something science doesn't need.

This points to a broader problem with his arguments: the problem of
dueling results. Let's say a skeptic offers in evidence a study that
asks five children to describe a previous incarnation, and let's say
that only those who are coached, either by parents or researchers,
come up with such stories. Has skepticism refuted the original
research? Of course it hasn't. The first study stands on its own, by
sheer force of numbers, demanding explanation. But by Shermer's logic
if some children don't remember a past lifetime, those who do must be
categorically dismissed. By analogy, if I study twenty mothers who
smile when shown their baby's picture, anyone can find twenty others
(suffering from post-partum depression, for example) who don't. But
that doesn't prove that mothers don't love their babies. The second
experiment is an anomaly.

No doubt Shermer will want to lecture me on the need for replication
in science. Yet this is the very thing he conveniently ignores.
Studies on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, memories
of past lifetimes, remote viewing, and so forth — all crucial to the
reality of life after death — have been well replicated. Shermer
finds one study that induces similar states ("similar" being a very
tricky word here) and he walks away satisfied. He already knows a
priori that "paranormal" findings must be false, so why bother to
engage them seriously? Extending our understanding of normal doesn't
interest him.

The focus of science should be on the survival of consciousness after
death, not on the sideshow of fraud, pseudoscience, religious dogma,
and the other straw men Shermer knocks down. For example, I rely a
great deal on the possibility that mind extends outside the body.
This is obviously crucial, since with the death of the brain, our
minds can only survive if they don't depend on the brain.

There are astonishing results in this area. One of the most famous,
performed at the engineering department at Princeton and validated
many times over, asked ordinary people to sit in the room with a
random number generator. As the machine printed out a random series
of 0s and 1s, the subjects were instructed to try to make it produce
more zeroes. They didn't touch the machine but only willed it to
deviate from randomness. Did they succeed? Absolutely. Did other
identical or similar experiments succeed? Over and over. Does Shermer
even touch on this matter, so crucial to my argument? No.

He displays an amazing ability to avoid the important stuff. He
writes, for example, "The ultimate fallacy of all such prayer and
healing research is theological: If God is omniscient and omnipotent,
He should not need to be reminded or inveigled that someone needs
healing." This is simplistic theology at best second-guessing an
omniscient and omnipresent God is a tautology by definition, since
such a God, being everywhere and performing all acts, makes no
choices at all. Such a consciousness encompasses good and bad,
disease and health, equally. (As much as possible I avoid using a
personal pronoun for God, but it's awkward since "It" doesn't work in
English. I am referring to a God that is closer to a universal field
than anything else we can imagine.) Does an omnipotent God even need
a creation to begin with? The question is logically unanswerable.
Fortunately, Shermer's Sunday School God, a patriarch with a white
beard sitting above the clouds, plays no role in my argument — or in
the traditions of Buddhism, Vedanta, etc. mentioned at the outset.
Did my book defend the Judeo-Christian God? Did it argue for a
physical place called heaven (or hell)? Did I praise the joys of the
hereafter in order to denigrate life here on earth? Not for a moment.
I specifically rooted the afterlife in ordinary states of
consciousness that no one doubts, such as dream, imagination,
projection, myth, metaphor, meditation, and other aspects of
awareness that give us clues about the workings of the mind overall.
Shermer doesn't engage those connections, either.

Since he often lumps me in with other authors whom he disdains and
treats cavalierly, I can only assume that he uses the same slipshod
reasoning on them, too. I certainly know for a fact that Shermer
misrepresents and distorts the groundbreaking work of Rupert
Sheldrake, a biologist who graduated with first-class honors from
Cambridge and whose curriculum vitae (not to mention acumen,
curiosity, and intelligence) a gaggle of skeptics can only envy.

But let's concede that Shermer knows he's preaching to the choir and
can afford all this rhetorical by-your-leave. His review hasn't
actually offered anything beyond a self-indulgent expansion on his
first sentence, borrowed from a bumper sticker: I DON'T KNOW AND YOU
DON'T EITHER. He takes this to be humorous; in fact it is
distressingly dogmatic. Is he so proud of his skepticism that
literally he can tell what someone else doesn't know? Without
dragging him into philosophical deep waters, I must point out that
dismissing opposing views even before they are stated seems like
fairly spooky solipsism.

In the end, debating tactics offer entertainment value but are a
dubious way to get at truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the true
test of any scientific or philosophical system is how much it can
explain. I believe that Shermer sincerely agrees with this, despite
his often unfair tactics and his condescension to spirituality in
general. The old-fashioned materialism that underlies his opinions
stands in stark contrast to quantum physics, which long ago opened up
an unseen world where linear cause-and-effect no longer operates,
where intuition has made more breakthroughs than logic. Virtual
reality, populated with virtual photons and subatomic interactions
that operate beyond the speed of light — a realm where events are
instantaneously coordinated across billions of light years — is the
foundation of our physical world. Pace Shermer, the possibility of
intelligence and consciousness in the universe is completely viable;
we must arrive at new theories to account for life after death (among
many other mysteries) by opening ourselves to the origins of our own
consciousness. It's all very well to watch various parts of the brain
light up on an MRI, but to claim that this is true knowledge of the
mind is like putting a stethoscope to the roof of the Astrodome and
claiming that you understand the rules of football.

If Shermer wants to have a serious debate about the persistence of
consciousness after physical death, I eagerly invite it. But I must
in all candor ask him to look at consciousness first. He hasn't made
the slightest effort so far, and yet that was the entire subject of
my book.
II. Science and the Afterlife

To catalog how much Shermer gets wrong isn't the same as proving that
the afterlife is real. But the proofs that it isn't are not very
sound. Hamlet refers to death as "the undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveler returns." For all intents and purposes, this
argument has sufficed for materialists ever since. But people do
cross the boundary between life and death only to return — the number
of near-death experiences is many thousands by now. (For anyone who
wants an in-depth exposure to the phenomenon, see www.near-death. com.
Contrary to what Shermer claims, these aren't artifacts of an oxygen-
deprived brain; they are meaningful experiences full of detail and
coherence, and often they appear after the brain ceases all activity.
The existence of studies in which people do not have such experiences
seems irrelevant. I can offer experiments where people can't identify
the notes of the musical scale, but that doesn't mean perfect pitch
is an illusion.

I was particularly interested in the resemblance between modern near-
death experiences and those reported for hundreds of years in Tibet.
People who return from the dead in that culture are known as delogs,
and what they experience isn't a Christian heaven or hell — in this
country 90 percent of near-death experiences, by the way, are
positive — but the complex layers of the Buddhist Bardo. In our
society heaven is generally reported by those who have near-death
experiences as being like green pastures or blue skies; children tend
to report a child's heaven populated by scampering lambs and other
baby animals.

This made me realize that Hamlet was right to call death an
undiscovered country, not because the living cannot reach it but
because heaven's geography keeps shifting. If we look at how various
cultures perceive the afterlife, there are roughly seven categories:

1. Paradise: Your soul finds itself in a perfected world
surrounding God. You go to Paradise as a reward and never leave. (If
you are bad, you go to Satan's home and never leave it.)
2. The Godhead: Your soul returns to God, but not in any
particular place. You discover the location of God as a timeless
state infused with his presence
3. The Spirit World: Your soul rests in a realm of departed
spirits. You are drawn back to those you loved in this life. Or you
rejoin your ancestors, who are gathered with the great Spirit.
4. Transcendence: Your soul performs a vanishing act in which a
person dissolves, either quickly or gradually. The pure soul rejoins
the sea of consciousness from which it was born.
5. Transmigration (or Metempsychosis) : Your soul is caught in the
cycle of rebirth. Depending on one's karma, each soul rises or falls
from lower to higher life forms — and even may be reborn in objects.
The cycle continues eternally until your soul escapes through higher
realization.
6. Awakening: Your soul arrives in the light. You see with
complete clarity for the first time, realizing the truth of existence
that was masked by being in a physical body.
7. Dissolution: Eternity is nothingness. As the chemical
components of your body return to basic atoms and molecules, the
consciousness created by the brain disappears completely. You are no
more.

There is no common denominator here except one: consciousness itself.
We have to shift our notion of the afterlife from being a place to
being a state of awareness. Once we do that, life after death becomes
much more plausible. Instead of arguing over religious beliefs, we
can ask rational questions:

* Can consciousness survive the body's death?
* Is there mind outside the brain?
* Can we know the states of consciousness that belong to the
afterlife without dying?
* Does consciousness have a basis outside time and space?

To me these are rational questions, and we can devise experiments to
answer them. But before going into that, the issue most people want
to settle is "What happens after we die?" Since this remains such a
pressing question, let me offer the evidence that surfaced when I
looked at cultures East and West. Leaving aside the place a person
might go to (my position is that there is no "where" after death;
everything is projected in consciousness, including heaven and hell),
the afterlife appears to unfold in the following stages:

1. The physical body stops functioning. The dying person may not
be aware of this but eventually knows that it has occurred.
2. The physical world vanishes. This can happen by degrees; there
can be a sense of floating upward or of looking down on familiar
places as they recede.
3. The dying person feels lighter, suddenly freed of limitation.
4. The mind and sometimes the senses continue to operate.
Gradually, however, what is perceived is non-physical.
5. A presence grows that is felt to be divine. This presence can
be clothed in a light or in the body of angels or gods. The presence
can communicate to the dying person.
6. Personality and memory begin to fade, but the sense of "I"
remains.
7. This "I" has an overwhelming sense of moving on to another
phase of existence.

As much as possible I have eliminated religious wording here because
the persistence of consciousness has to be universal. It can't depend
on specific beliefs, which change over time and from place to place.
(When he dies, Michael Shermer will be relieved to survive, but
perhaps he will be disappointed that his long service to fundamental
Christianity in youth, followed by long service to skepticism, won't
give him a special place in heaven. Nor will it lock the gates
against him.)

Right now there are many reasons why science is reluctant to test any
of these propositions about the survival of consciousness. First and
foremost is the ideology of materialism. Shermer stands in for
thousands of actual scientists who see the world entirely in material
terms. For them, consciousness is as alien as the soul. Both are
invisible, immaterial, and unmeasurable and therefore ipso facto
unreal. By these standards virtual photons should also be unreal, but
they aren't (not that Shermer has bothered to become conversant with
quantum physics). Other reasons include peer pressure — i.e.,
ridicule — even when a researcher is brilliant and scrupulous to the
nth degree. Lack of funding is a problem, naturally, and above all
there is the time-honored antithesis between science and religion. In
an either/or world, it's hard to convince the religionists that
rationality has a spiritual place or the scientists that your
research isn't just a stalking horse for the Bible — see the recent
social debate over Intelligent Design where neither side was willing
to see the slightest merit in the other.

None of these obstacles, however, has proven insurmountable. Let me
offer some highlights in the research devoted to answering the most
crucial questions about the possibility of life after death:
Mind Over Matter

My core argument is based on consciousness being a field, like matter
and energy fields, that we are all imbedded in, whether here and now
or after death. It would help us greatly if our minds could alter the
field. Then we would have a link between the two models of mind and
matter. Such a link was provided by Helmut Schmidt, a researcher
working for Boeing's aerospace laboratory in Seattle. Beginning in
the mid-Sixties, Schmidt set out to construct a series of "quantum
machines" that could emit random signals, with the aim of seeing if
ordinary people could alter those signals using nothing more than
their minds. The first machine detected radioactive decay from
Strontium-90; each electron that was given off lit up either a red,
blue, yellow, or green light. Schmidt asked ordinary people to
predict, with the press of a button, which light would be illuminated
next.

At first no one performed better than random, or 25 percent, in
picking one of the four lights. Then Schmidt it on the idea of using
psychics instead, and his first results were encouraging: they
guessed the correct light 27 percent of the time. But he didn't know
if this was a matter of clairvoyance — seeing the result before it
happened — or something more active, actually changing the random
pattern of electrons being emitted.

So he built a second machine that generated only two signals, call
them plus and minus. A circle of lights was set up, and if the
machine generated a plus, a light would come on in the clockwise
direction while a minus would make one light up in the counter-
clockwise direction. Left to itself, the machine would light up an
equal number of pluses and minuses; what Schmidt wanted his subjects
to do was to will the lights to move clockwise only. He found two
subjects who had remarkable success. One could get the lights to move
clockwise 52.5 percent of the time. An increase of 2.5 percent over
randomness doesn't sound dramatic, but Schmidt calculated that the
odds were 10 million to one against the same thing occurring by
chance. The other subject was just as successful, but oddly enough,
he couldn't make the lights move clockwise. Hard as he tried, they
moved counter-clockwise, yet with the same deviation from randomness.
Later experiments with new subjects raised the success rate to 54
percent, although the strange anomaly that the machine would go in
the wrong direction, often persisted. (No explanation was ever found
for this.) In effect, Schmidt was proving that an observer can change
activity in the quantum field using the mind alone.

In an earlier part of this article I refer to replications of these
experiments at Princeton and other laboratories. After 12 years of
study, it was found that about two-thirds of ordinary people could
influence the outcome of the machine, unlike in Schmidt's study,
where only talented psychics were used. After examining the results
in detail in her excellent book, The Field, writer Lynne McTaggart
sees a complete revolution in consciousness: "On the most profound
level, the [Princeton] studies also suggest that reality is created
by each of us only by our attention. At the lowest level of mind and
matter, each of us creates the world."
Remote Viewing

If someone could alter the field simply by looking at it, that would
come even closer to the premise that each of us is imbedded in the
field. An intriguing proof of this was provided by a machine built by
physicists at Stanford called a SQUID, or superconducting quantum
interference device. It's enough for us to know that this device,
which measures the possible activity of subatomic particles,
specifically quarks, is very well shielded from all outside magnetic
forces. This shielding begins with layers of copper and aluminum, but
to insure that no outside force can affect the mechanism, exotic
metals like niobium and "mu metal" wrap the inner core.

In 1972 a SQUID was installed in the basement of a laboratory at
Stanford, apparently doing nothing except tracing out the same hill-
and-valley S-curve on a length of graph paper. This curve represented
the constant magnetic field of the earth; if a quark passed through
the field the machine would register it by changes in the pattern
being drawn. A young laser physicist named Hal Puthoff (later to
become a noted quantum theorist) decided that aside from its main
use, the SQUID would make a perfect test of psychic powers. Very few
people, including the scientists at Sanford, knew the exact inner
construction of the machine.

A letter Puthoff wrote in search of a psychic who would take up the
challenge was responded to by Ingo Swann, a New York artist with
psychic abilities. Swann was flown to California without being told
in advance about either the test or the SQUID. When he first saw it,
he seemed a bit distracted and baffled. But he agree to "look" inside
the machine, and as he did, the S-curve on the graph paper changed
pattern — something it almost never did — only to go back to its
normal functioning as soon as Swann stopped paying attention to it.

A startled Puthoff asked him to repeat this, so for 45 seconds Swann
concentrated upon seeing the inside of the machine, and for exactly
that interval the recoding device drew a new pattern, a long plateau
on the paper instead of hills and valleys. Swann then drew a sketch
of what he saw as the inner workings of the SQUID, and when these
were checked with an expert, they perfectly matched the actual
construction. Swann was vague about whether he had changed the
magnetic input that the machine was built to measure; he offered that
he thought he was affecting its niobium core. But it also turned out
that if he merely thought about the SQUID, not trying to change it at
all, the recording device showed alterations in the surrounding
magnetic field. In the years since 1972, many other experiments in
remote viewing have successfully taken place.
Intelligence in Nature

If we survive death in our consciousness, we'd like to take human
qualities with us, such as intelligence. Is there proof that
intelligence is innate in nature? I will skip over the argument by
design since it isn't logically irrefutable and give an amusing
practical example. Many dog owners will attest to the ability of a
dog or cat to know what the owner is thinking. A few minutes before
going on a walk, a dog gets excited and restless; on the day when a
cat is going to be taken to the vet, it disappears and is nowhere to
be found. These casual observations led the ingenious British
researcher Rupert Sheldrake, a trained biologist now turned
speculative thinker, to conduct a few controlled studies. He wanted
to know if dogs and cats can actually read their owners' minds. One
study was very simple: Sheldrake phoned up 65 vets in the London area
and asked them if it was common for cat owners to cancel appointments
because their cats had disappeared that day. Sixty-four vets
responded that it was very common, and the sixty-fifth had given up
making appointments for cats because too many couldn't be located
when they were supposed to come in.

Sheldrake decided to perform an experiment using dogs. The fact that
a dog gets excited when the time comes for going on a walk means
little if the walk is routinely scheduled for the same time very day,
or if the dog gets visual cues from its owner that he is preparing to
go out. Therefore Sheldrake placed dogs in outbuildings completely
isolated from their owners; he then asked the owner, at randomly
selected times, to think about walking the dog five minutes before
going to fetch them. In the meantime the dog was constantly
videotaped in its isolated location. Sheldrake found that more than
half the dogs ran to the door, waging their tails, circling
restlessly, or otherwise showing anticipation of going for a walk,
and they kept up this behavior until their owners appeared. No dog
showed anticipatory behavior, however, when their owners were not
thinking about taking them for a walk.

So far, this suggests something intriguing, that the bond between a
pet and its owner could result in a subtle connection at the level of
thought. Polls show that about 60 percent of Americans believe they
have had a telepathic experience, so this result is not completely
startling. The next leap is quite startling, however. After writing
up his results with telepathic pets, Sheldrake received an email from
a woman in New York City who said that her African grey parrot not
only read her thoughts but responded to them with speech. The woman
and her husband might be sitting in another room, out of sight from
the bird, whose name is N'kisi, and if they were feeling hungry,
N'kisi would suddenly say, "You want some yummy." If the owner and
her husband were thinking about going out, N'kisi might say, "You
gotta go out, see ya later."

Greatly intrigued, Sheldrake contacted the owner, an artist named
Aimee Morgana. The situation he found was remarkable even without
telepathy. African gray parrots are among the most linguistically
talented of all birds, and N'kisi had a huge vocabulary of over 700
words. More remarkable still, he used them like human speech,
not "parroting" a word mindlessly but applying it where appropriate;
if he saw something that was red, he said "red," and if the object
was another color, he said that color. A decade ago this talent would
have been unbelievable, until a researcher named Dr. Irene
Pepperberg, after twenty years of work with her own African gray, had
proved beyond a doubt that it could use language meaningfully. Now
associated with MIT, Pepperberg made a breakthrough, not just in our
understanding of animal intelligence, but in the possibility that
mind exists outside the brain.

It was this possibility, which Sheldrake and others call "extended
mind," that N'kisi seemed to prove. Aimee had some astonishing
anecdotes to relate. When she was watching a Jackie Chan movie on
television, one shot showed Chan perilously perched on a girder. When
the shot came on, N'kisi said, "Don't fall down," even though his
cage was behind the television with no line of sight to the picture.
When an automobile commercial came on next, N'kisi said, "That's my
car." Another time Aimee was reading a book that had the lines, "The
blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice," and simultaneously from
another room the bird said, "The color is black."

Sheldrake wanted to confirm all of this for himself. On his first
visit, Aimee gave him a taste of N'kisi's telepathy: she looked at a
picture of a girl from a magazine, and with remarkable clarity from
the adjoining room the parrot said, "That's a girl." The next step
was a formal experiment. If N'kisi could understand words and also
had telepathic abilities, could the two be tested together? The
experiment Sheldrake devised was quite strange if he hadn't already
seen what N'kisi could do — he proposed that Aimee would look at
pictures that corresponded to words her parrot already knew. Aimee
would sit in one room while N'kisi remained isolated in another. The
bird would have two minutes to utter a "key word" that matched the
picture. If he said the word in that time, it would count as a hit.
If he didn't say the word, or if he said it after the two minutes
were up, it counted as a miss.

To insure neutrality, someone besides Aimee chose both the pictures
and the key words that matched each one. (This proved unfair to the
bird, actually, since the neutral chooser picked a word like "TV"
that N'kisi had only said once or twice before; it didn't utter these
words at the right time during the experiment, nor did he say them at
all.) After all the trials were over, the tapes of what N'kisi had
said were played for three judges, who wrote down what they heard;
unless N'kisi distinctly said the right word, as transcribed by all
three judges, a hit wouldn't count. The results were beyond ordinary
comprehension. For example, when Aimee looked at a picture showing
scantily clad bathers on a beach, N'kisi mumbled for a bit, then all
three judges heard him say, "Look at my pretty naked body." He didn't
say other, irrelevant key words; in between saying the right words
twice, the bird only whistled and made vocal tones. When Aimee looked
at a picture of someone talking on the telephone, N'kisi
said, "What'cha doin' on the phone?" Perhaps the most intriguing
response was when Aimee concentrated on a picture of flowers. Instead
of simply uttering the key word "flower," N'kisi said, "That's a pic
of flowers."

How did he do overall? Out of 71 trails, N'kisi got 23 hits, as
compared to the 7.4 hits that would have been expected if the results
were random. Sheldrake points out that this is quite a significant
outcome, all the more because N'kisi wasn't aware that he was being
tested and often said the right key word after the allotted time was
up. In a small Manhattan apartment another bit of proof added to
mounting evidence that the mind isn't solely human property and in
fact might exist outside the brain. Communication between the animal
kingdom and us has an eerie ring, but pets can't cheat and they have
no ulterior motive for proving that they are special in their
abilities. India's Vedic rishis long ago asserted that the entire
universe is intelligent, because it is permeated by consciousness.
The Mind Field

If consciousness is an aspect of the field, then our brains should
operate along the lines of a field. This seems to be true. For one
thing, it's impossible to explain how the brain coordinates millions
of separate events simultaneously unless something like a mind field
is present. Take a compass out of your pocket anywhere on earth,
shake it, and a few seconds later the wobbly needle will always
settle pointing north. If every person on the planet did this at
exactly twelve midnight, billions of compasses would be doing the
same thing simultaneously, a fact that doesn't surprise us because we
know that the Earth's magnetic field is responsible. It would be
absurd to claim that each compass decided randomly to pick north.

Yet we say that about the brain. For you to think the
word "rhinoceros" and see a mental image of that animal, millions of
brain cells have to act simultaneously. (We will leave aside the more
difficult question of why you picked "rhinoceros" out of all the
words you could have chosen, since that choice can be based on
reason, emotion, nonsense, or private associations in memory. A
computer can be taught to select any given word using an pre-set
algorithm, but it has no ability to decide on what personal,
emotional, or imaginative basis to pick words — you do.) The neurons
involved in word choice don't jumble through the alphabet to find one
letter at a time; they don't sound out an array of words one syllable
at a time; nor do they leaf through a photo archive to match the
right word to the right animal. Instead, the correct brain activity
arises simultaneously.

Neurologists can watch various portions of the brain light up at the
same time, but this is one area where subjective experience is
stronger, since we all know first hand that we can utter words in any
order and call up any image in our imagination. The brain is acting
holistically like a field, coordinating different events at the same
time, except that we know the brain isn't literally a field. It's an
object. Fields are invisible, and their basic components are energy
and information. Which sounds much more like a mind than a physical
organ, however complex.

You would think that since the brain depends on electrical signals,
it would be affected by the soup of radio, television, microwave, and
many other electromagnetic emissions that surround us. Apparently
this isn't so, and psychic researchers have gone so far as to isolate
subjects in Faraday cages that block all electromagnetic energy
without altering their abilities to see at a distance or exhibit
other psychic phenomena. It will be fascinating to explore the field
phenomena that are subtler than electromagnetism — the afterlife
could well be one of them.

Can it be that the universe is organic, holistic, and aware? I am
perfectly willing to accept Shermer's declaration that the burden of
proof lies with those who claim this rather than with skeptics. But
logically that's not actually true. We cannot prove that the universe
doesn't have a mind, because we aren't mindless. Even when we declare
that atoms and molecules act mindlessly, that is a mental statement.
Nobody has ever experienced mindlessness; therefore we have nothing
to base it on, just as a fish has nothing but wetness to base its
reality on — dryness is a theological fancy under the sea.

In the end, I realize that Shermer and I are speaking two different
languages. He makes no reference to consciousness, the field, quantum
mechanics, advanced neurology, or philosophy. I'd like to hear
arguments from someone more up to date in these fields. It's a
strange feeling when somebody in a Model A Ford challenges you to a
race when you are in a Lexus, but even stranger when he thinks he's
going to win.

Finally, Shermer adopts a word like "soul" in order to refute it when
he doesn't even understand or clarify what the soul is. Does the soul
contain the total information stored in our brains? Is it a personal
localization in the quantum field? Is it our connection to the realm
of archetypes and myths? Information does persist, and so do
archetypes. Without a doubt the electrical activity in the brain is a
localization of quantum probabilities. How, then, can these phenomena
be objects of serious scientific study while Shermer feels nothing
but disdain for the soul? He simply assumes a Sunday School
definition, and like his assumptions about God on his throne and
other childish notions, it's no wonder his arguments against life
after death are scientific non-starters.
 

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