2018-02-09, 05:04 PM
“THE SELF DOES NOT DIE”:
INVESTIGATIONS, INTERPRETATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Vortex: Hello, dear Psience Quest members. Today I’m proud to present you our new interview. This time, we have two interviewees at once, and both are well-known to our community; in fact, they are its active members. One of them, some time ago, has already given an interview here – the very first one, to be precise. So, please welcome Rudolf “Smithy” Smit and Titus Rivas.
The main – but not the only – topic of our trialogue would be veridical psychic phenomena manifesting in the connection with NDEs, which were studied by Titus and Rudolf for a long time. The results of these studies are summarised in the book authored by them – “The Self Does Not Die”. As far as I know, this is a first full-length research book published by the IANDS organisation, that before limited its publishing activities to periodicals, such as Journal of Near-Death Studies and the Vital Signs magazine, and short reports and videos.
There are several different forms of veridical near-death phenomena. There are instances of veridical ESP by the person who was near-death in the moments such instances of ESP occurred. There are shared death experiences (SDEs), when the dying person experienced a telepathic connection with someone still alive and well, with this “someone” having the same telepathic experience and thus able to confirm the reality of the connection – or when the living person has experienced an apparition of the NDEr, with the time and place of such manifestation being harmonious with an OBE experienced by this dying person. There are cases of apparent after-death communications, providing veridical information, by the dying people with the people who are already dead. There are cases of anomalously fast and effective recovery from serious diseases after NDE. All of these phenomena we will discuss today.
But we will not limit ourselves to them. We will also examine the impact of such phenomena on experiencers themselves, as well on their social contacts and relations to the other people. We will reflect on the influence such phenomena, if widely accepted, may have on our culture. We will explain why the skeptics’ attempts to explain them away have so far failed utterly, and will talk a bit about skeptics themselves. And we will explore the philosophical and spiritual implications of such phenomena for our selfhood and personhood – can they serve as an additional arguments that our selves are real and not illusive?
But, before we start our trialogue, we must recall that there should be four of us, not three, here. The fourth participant should be Anny Dirven, who co-authored the aforementioned book with Titus and Rudolf. Unfortunately, she deceased some time ago.
So, Rudolf, Titus – can you both tell us something about Anny? Who was she? What can you tell us about her? What were your relations to her? What contribution did she make to the book?
Rudolf Smit: What can I say about Anny? I have met her in person only once or twice, but I remember her as a warm and quite keen personality. She has done a lot of excellent work, especially in collaboration with Titus. She deserved every right to be a co-author of our book The Self Does Not Die.
Titus Rivas: Anny Dirven was one of my best friends from 2001 until her passing in 2016. We met through a written course about parapsychology and psychical research of which I'm the author. She became very active for Athanasia Foundation, a foundation for research into survival, reincarnation and personal evolution, and related subjects. Together we used to go to paranormal fancy fairs, trying to collect personal paranormal experiences from visitors, and we carried out numerous serious investigations into promising cases. We also co-authored many articles and published several other books, apart from The Self Does Not Die.
As I just said, Anny Dirven was much more than a devoted collaborator and colleague for me. She was a close personal friend, despite the age difference and differences in cultural background. In general she was very loving, patient and compassionate toward anyone she met, including animals. She was paranormally gifted and convinced me of the reality of her healing and clairvoyant powers because I experienced rather spectacular examples of both in her presence. She's dearly missed, although there have been several occasions on which she seems to have sought contact with me after her death.
Evaluating the Extraordinary Evidence
Vortex: Thank you, people. Well, now to the book itself.
Veridical observations made by NDErs and people who were always an important part of the evidence base for the immaterialistic interpretation of the NDEs. Unfortunately, the public discussion of them was largely limited to a few high-profile cases, such as the ones that I may call “the Big Trio” – the Pam Reynolds’, the “Maria’s Shoe” and the “Man with the Dentures” cases. Other cases were not as widely known as these three were, and thus not discussed actively enough to be noted by the larger audience. Yet, the situation has changed with the publication of “The Self Does Not Die” – first in Dutch, then in English. It, in its current English edition, has assembled more than a hundred – 104, to be precise – cases of NDEs that contained verifiable, and successfully verified, components.
So, what kind and amount of work you should have performed to compile such an exhaustive collection and analysis of veridical NDE cases? I suppose it included both scholarly inquiry – the thorough examination of the relevant literature – and social investigations, such as interviews and exchanges with the experiencers and witnesses, followed by the reflection on the information gathered by both previous methods.
Titus, as far I know, you were the one who actively sought for the data on these cases, contacted their participants to acquire their testimonies and analysed the information that had been gathered. So, can you tell us more about the process of research that lead to the writing of the book? What had to be done to prepare this large summary of veridical NDEs?
Titus Rivas: Well, this is not entirely correct. All three of us were actively involved in the investigation of important cases and collecting data about them. Rudolf played a major role in the evaluation of famous cases such as the Man with the dentures and Pam Reynolds, and in this he was helped by Stephen Woodhead from the UK. Together with Anny, I did take care of most of the literature study concerning lesser known cases, and this was quite a task, though even in this respect we were helped by a volunteer for Athanasia Foundation, Inge Manussen, and by Jan Holden's earlier collection. We also received a lot of support from other members of Network Near-Death Experiences (formerly known as Merkawah), IANDS' Dutch sister organization. For the English version of the originally Dutch book (Wat een stervend brein niet kan), we were actively helped by the American team in our search for new cases, notably by Robert and Suzanne Mays, Jan Holden and our devoted translator Wanda Boeke.
It has to be mentioned, by the way, how honored we were when we were asked by the Mays couple and Janice Holden, who is the Editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, to prepare an English translation for publication by IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies). Robert and Suzanne Mays also added an excellent foreword, and included in Chapter 11 a large section about the mistreatment of Eben Alexander in Esquire Magazine.
Rudolf also was very actively involved in the study of the new cases described by Laurin Bellg. His role was equally important in many debates with the so-called skeptics or debunkers, as described by him in Chapter 11. In these, he was again assisted by Stephen Woodhead. My own role also includes the theoretical interpretation (and its philosophical foundation) of our findings, and for the English version I was helped in presenting my ideas to a general educated public as clearly as possible, by Jan Holden and Robert Mays.
Although the original idea for the book was Anny's and mine, the end result was just as much Rudolf's. And in the process we were helped by very dedicated Dutch and US teams and invaluable correspondents like Stephen Woodhead (aka “Tim” on this forum) from the UK.
Vortex: A hard work indeed. Now let’s look at the specific categories of these cases. The first ones are the instances of veridical ESP by the NDErs, either in the immediate vicinity of their bodily senses – which, I need to remind, were hardly functioning because of their critically impaired somatic state and the circumstances of resuscitation – or entirely beyond the reach of their bodily sensory capabilities. Such events are valuable for the immaterialistic interpretation of the NDEs since they provide not just the evidence for the psychic perception as such, but crucial “time anchors” that allow us to identify the time of the perception as the time of the clinical death and resuscitation – and thus add weight to the hypothesis of actual disembodiment of experiencer’s consciousness and of post-mortem survival.
Yet the notable – probably the most notable – theoretical conflict of parapsychological research community, the post-mortem survival – living agent psi (LAP) debate, provides some challenges to the survivalist interpretation. In the cases of veridical NDEs, there are some attempts to explain these instances of successful ESP during the period of clinical death as the LAP manifestations. People who support such anti-survival (yet still pro-psi) explanations claim that ESP happens before or after the apparent time of its occurrence – this is, not during the clinical death itself – and acquire the verifiable information about the events during the clinical death via precognition or retrocognition. Let’s call this rejection of survival-supporting “time anchor” interpretation “the temporal shift hypothesis”.
Titus, what can you say about these attempts to reject the survivalist explanation of the veridical NDEs by shifting in time the moment of information acquisition? And can you provide us with some examples from the book?
Titus Rivas: First of all, ironically, there is the temporal, functional argument against both LAP-explanations. Regarding retrocognition, there are cases in which the patient regained consciousness so quickly after the cardiac arrest that the investigators involved concluded that the NDEs must have actually happened during clinical death and not after that, even if they did not include any veridical perception. We see this for this in our case 3.3, derived from Penny Sartori's book The Near-Death Experience of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study. A woman (Sartori's “'Patient 4”) had ventricular fibrillation that caused cardiac arrest during which she experienced an NDE. Once this patient had been resuscitated, she immediately regained consciousness and did not receive any calmatives or sedatives. She was certain that her NDE had occurred between the moment at which her husband had sat at her bed and the moment she came to again. Sartori concluded that, considering the patient regained consciousness immediately after resuscitation, this means that the experiences she had must have occurred during her cardiac arrest.
Regarding precognition, it could in principle occur only in NDEs during which the patient was already unconscious for a long enough period of time to have been capable of having an NDE during that phase. Therefore, such precognition cannot be applied to cases during which the patient was normally conscious before the cardiac arrest, which is typical for cases involving cardiac arrest, as decribed in Chapter 3 of the book.
Now, critics might claim that after NDErs have lost consciousness, undergoing a precognitive or retrocognitive vision of specific events does not nearly take as much time as those events themselves. There could simply be a subjective temporal accerelation within the veridical of the perception of events during the vision, just like a person may experience a long dream while in physical time the brain activity during the dream only lasts for a few minutes. I don't think they have a point, because along with the visions, there should at least be enough time to subconsciously realize that one is dying (in the case of precognition) or was dying (in the case of retrocognition) and, for that realization they would still need sufficient brain activity for this realization, as there is no reason to suppose that it could be accelerated as well.
Such exotic, far-fetched and very counter-intuitive hypotheses are only interesting if we had a solid, independent reason to suppose that survival of consciousness during cardiac arrest is impossible by definition. Within the philosophical framework of dualism there is no such reason – on the contrary, the very existence of consciousness and of ESP themselves point to an ultimate independence of the brain, and therefore support the possibility of the mind's survival after death. Precognition and retrocognition are not a priori hypotheses that are equally or even more plausible than survival, they are ad hoc attempts to avoid facing the reality of sutvival. I mean, in cases of NDEs, in which the events perceived really took place during cardiac arrest and before any CPR was undertaken, such as the cases of the Man with the Dentures, and of the patients of Tom Aufderheide, Richard Mansfield, Lloyd W. Rudy and Maurice Rawlings (all included in Chapter 3), it is much more straightforward to assume that the perception occurred in real time, rather than before or after cardiac arrest (through pre- or retrocognition respectively). In The Self Does Not Die, we say about this. “As far as this point goes, a clear parallel can be drawn with the explanation for indications of paranormal perceptions in general. Materialistic skeptics will always prefer extremely complex normal explanations to, say, true telepathy and clairvoyance because in their worldview there simply is not any room for actual extrasensory perception. These complex, far-fetched, standard explanations are important only if we first share the skeptics’ conviction that it is all but certain that extrasensory perception does not exist. If it does exist, then there is no reason to take these far-fetched, complex, standard explanations seriously, either. […] In fact, scholars who take paranormal phenomena seriously due to the lack of plausible materialistic explanations for the evidence, but who do not accept that there are indications for survival after death, should explain this, too, either by clarifying why an explanation of relevant concrete evidence that does not assume survival, is plausible or by clarifying why the very existence of (particular manifestations of) survival itself should practically be precluded.”
Now, even if we do take such farfetched hypotheses seriously, there are still psychological reasons – based on motivational psychology – to reject them. LAP-supporters often seem to ignore such psychological considerations and instead focus only the technical question if living agent psi could in principle account for the veridical perception as such, which really is not the point. We are not talking about mere possibility here, but about plausibility! Scholars like Michael Sudduth like to point out that the LAP without survival-hypothesis and the survival-hypothesis are (so far) equally plausible or implausible, but this is only because they tend to ignore both the ontological and the empirical knowledge we already possess – as wel as argumentation from serious opponents, but that won't concern us here.
From a rational perspective, any theory favored as the best fitting and most plausible one, needs to make sense within a well-founded ontological framework, and also be compatible with what is known about basic psychological principles. In cases, in which Living agent psi may indeed play a role – for instance in the context of mental mediumship in which relatives or friends of someone who died are getting a reading about their deceased loved ones – we may invariably assume that there is a strong motive, only at a subconscious level or also at a conscious level, which supposedly activates a LAP-process. Without the plausibility of such a motive, for example: a desire to reconnect with dead loved one, psychologically speaking, it does not make sense to postulate that LAP could explain any type of case. As we state in our book, “We have no reason to believe that people, unconsciously, simply go after something without some kind of a comprehensible psychological motive.[…] From a more general perspective, alternative, non-survivalist parapsychological hypotheses such as retrocognition or precognition (instead of consciousness occurring during cardiac arrest itself) need to be taken seriously only if there is a mechanism or psychological motive that could explain why the presumed retrocognition or precognition occurs. A possible hypothetical motive could be that the patient wants to (unconsciously) reassure himself or herself that he or she was still mentally there during clinical death. But a motive such as that is conceivable only if the NDEr is convinced, prior to clinical death, that a cardiac arrest might take place. However, this conviction is not an option for people who completely unexpectedly, without preparation, experience an acute cardiac arrest; likewise for children who are not aware of the gravity of their condition. And it also cannot play a role for infants and toddlers who, prior to their NDEs, do not even have a clear picture of what it means to physically die, as in [...] the Mark Botts case.”
Vortex: Now to the second category of veridical NDEs – SDEs, which involve some kind of psychic connection between the NDEr and some other person. These shared experiences are interesting, since here we see a distant experiential convergence between at least two persons, one dying and one feeling well. Or, in some other cases, other persons can have apparition experiences that are in concurrence with the dying ones’ OBEs.
In such cases, arguments to precognition (or retrocognition) sound much weaker, since the theorist using them bears the burden of explaining the simultaneous and harmonious nature of the experiences of the different people. And, in some not-NDE-related controlled experimental conditions, in experiments of repeatable psychophysical correlations between the brains of mutually distant and separated people, such arguments become entirely inadequate: the brain activities of the subjects are too evidently similar, too precisely concurrent and too persistently recurrent to appeal to time-shifts of any kind. So, this is not a way for a successful explanation of NDE-related veridical telepathy.
Yet here I must mention the second very common counterargument employed by the LAP proponents – an assumption that NDEr’s brain was not as inactive as we might think. They tell that, on the current level of neuroscientific knowledge, we cannot claim with certitude that the brain is totally inactive during clinical death conditions: our best measurements are only useful for the detection of its surface activity, while they are not enough to penetrate the deeper parts of the brain, so we have no reliable knowledge whether these deeper parts are active or inactive. In my opinion, such explanations are lacking in plausibility. It is commonly recognised that the higher mental activities are connected with surface, neo-cortex parts of the brain; it is unlikely that the very same functions would be doubled by the deeper neural structures. And, during cardiac arrest, blood flow to the brain ceases, and it is even more unlikely that sufficient activity would happen anywhere within it.
So, Titus, who were these persons, dying and living, who experienced the telepathic connection and how were their experiences in agreement with each other (some examples would be useful). And how would you respond to the “not so dead brain” argument I described above?
Titus Rivas: One example concerns the patient of a cardiologist from South Dakota, a case investigated by Raymond Moody. The cardiologist’s automobile struck another car as he was on his way to the hospital. He was very upset by the accident and worried that the people involved would demand a lot in damages. Still preoccupied by these concerns, he hurried to the emergency room to resuscitate someone in cardiac arrest. The following day, the patient whom he had saved told the cardiologist that during the resuscitation, he had left his body and had watched the doctor during his work. He told him exactly how the medical instruments had looked and in which order they had been used. But what really convinced the cardiologist was the following statement: “Doctor, I could tell that you were worried about that accident. But there isn’t any reason to be worried about things like that. You give your time to other people. Nobody is going to hurt you.”
Another example, is the case of Tom Aufderheide's patient. The patient kept having cardiac arrests in the midst of frenzied attempts to resuscitate him. After long hours in which he tried to rescue his patient, Aufderheide had become so hungry that when the patient’s lunch arrived, knowing the patient was in no condition to eat it, he decided to eat it himself. The patient later correctly reported that during his NDE, Aufderheide had thought, “How could you do this to me?” By “you,” the novice Aufderheide had meant the more seasoned physicians who had thrown him unassisted into this demanding emergency. Aufderheide told me by e-mail that he had not shared this thought with anyone until the patient brought it up. Moreover, the thought had occurred to him before the patient’s resuscitation had even begun.
A third example concerns a 10-year-old Australian boy named Jed Archdeacon who experienced an NDE during a near fatal asthma attack. That same morning, Jed’s mother was overcome by a strong feeling of love for him, and she also felt particularly drawn to a family photo, especially to his likeness in it. Still completely overwhelmed by these unusually intense feelings for Jed, she went out to work in the garden. Soon she had another strange feeling. She felt drawn to some alyssum flowers. They had planted the alyssum at Jed’s request, because it bore his favorite flower, and Diana also liked it. Jed had selected the alyssum together with his mother and had helped plant it. She picked some of the tiny flowers from the bed, smelled them, and thought of her son. Again she was overcome by a remarkable, inexplicable feeling of peace. She said, “I’m unable to explain why. I was just suddenly thinking of Jed all the time. But I knew whatever it was, was something good.” During his NDE, Jed had almost reached a spiritual realm, but he stopped and was dragged back in the opposite direction, toward his body. As he was lying in the hospital bed, Jed told his mother, “The funny thing was—I don’t get it —I saw you in the garden smelling the flowers.” Diana added, “Found out later that about the time I was smelling the flowers was about the time he was near to death, and he claims that he saw me in the garden smelling the flowers. And I really was there at that time.”
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