Super-Psi & some notes from Braude's Immortal Remains

There are so many elements and characteristics of NDEs that make it preposterous to suggest that these experiences are due to super-psi, that it is hard to see how this hypothesis can be seriously considered (as opposed of course to the exploration of the super-psi concept out of intellectual interest). This is so much the case that I think it would be more interesting to examine what sort of twisted mindset could generate such a belief. This would apparently start with an immovable conviction or compulsion that the mind must be the brain and that a soul and an afterlife are fantasy. How else could such a ridiculous hypothesis be entertained? It's hard to imagine how this could apply to Braude, but there you have it.

It would also be more interesting to consider the implications of there now being no viable alternative explanation for the NDE phenomenon; that is, any viable plausible alternative to the soul/spirit and afterlife hypothesis. If that is the case then there is no point in continuing to try to stretch super-psi to somehow explain all the mediumistic communication evidence, for instance.

On the opposite side, we have Survival linking together disparate kinds of phenomena such as NDEs and Reincarnation by providing a singular reason for the aforementioned commonalities.

Some more on the connection between Intermission Memories and NDEs:

There is an obvious difference between near-death experiences (NDEs) and intermission experiences: NDErs return to the same body in the end, whereas those who remember the intermission claim to have left their old bodies and adopted new ones. Nevertheless, in structure and content, NDEs have much in common with intermission experiences. Intermission experiences seemingly pick up where NDEs leave off.78

Many NDEs begin with an out-of-body experience or OBE stage, during which the experiencer views his or her body, as if from outside it. NDEs then transition into a ‘transcendental stage’ that passes (in Western cases, at least) in an unearthly, nonmaterial realm typically described as heaven. During this transcendental stage, the experiencer may meet both human and nonhuman entities. Some of these entities act as escorts or guides, and often they tell the NDEr he or she can go no further, but must return to the body.79 During all stages, experiencers may perceive and interact with the material world and people in it, and these activities may be veridical.80

The OBE stage of the NDE greatly resembles Stage 1 of the intermission experience, and the transcendental stage is like Stage 2. The return to the body in NDEs, and the selection of parents and move into the womb in intermission experiences, are complementary, and in fact, the same types of entities which tell NDErs it is time to return to their bodies, in intermission experiences draw experiences on and may show them to their new bodies (Katusgoro is an example). Perceptions of the material world and interactions with the living are reported during NDEs, just as during intermission and prebirth experiences.81

Features like passing through a tunnel, seeing a light, and reviewing one’s life—which have become widely associated with NDEs—are also reported in Stage 1 of intermission memories, albeit rarely.82 Interestingly, these features have turned out to be characteristics mainly of Western NDEs and are not part of what is now recognized to be the cross-culturally universal NDE, which in addition to the basic structure, includes no more than apprehending spirit beings and non-material realms on the brink of death.83 In their essential qualities, intermission memories are thus closer to the universal NDE pattern than they are to the Western NDE pattern.

And just as some mediums while in trance claim to meet deceased persons, the same thing happens in NDEs. And as there are drop-in communications with mediums, there are also drop-in type cases with NDEs:

...In a recent systematic review of research published on ADC, Jenny Streit-Horn (2011a) found a total of 35 studies published between 1894 and 2006 that had collectively involved a total of more than 50,000 people who had reportedly experienced ADC—ADCrs—from 24 countries. Thus ADC is a phenomenon well established to have occurred widely across cultures for more than 100 years—actually since early in recorded history. Readers interested in a summary of findings from her review can access it online (Streit-Horn, 2011b)...

...Thanks to the NDE, the patient had paranormal information regarding characteristics of the deceased, such as the dead person’s appearance, personality, and specific experiences during earthly life.

Rivas, Titus. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (p. 135). International Association for Near-Death Studies. Kindle Edition.

Horton then went through a tunnel at the end of which was a colorful meadow, and she was aware of being guided by beings of light as she moved through the experience. One being came forward as a baby, claiming that he was Horton’s brother, when as far as she knew she only had two sisters. He told her to remember how he looked, wearing a tiny cap and dress, socks and booties, and to provide this description to her father, who would recognize the infant immediately. After she regained consciousness, Horton discussed these incidents with her family and found out that they were all true. Her father acknowledged that his first child had been a boy and that the baby had died a couple of days after birth. This boy was never talked about among the family. As embarrassing as it was for him and as amusing as it was for her, her brother-in-law confirmed that he had in fact said what she had heard him say to the neighbor during her OBE. Her observation of her daughter wearing mismatched clothing was also correct.

Rivas, Titus. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (pp. 140-141). International Association for Near-Death Studies. Kindle Edition.

Later that evening, Sherry and her son went home again. They were watching television when the boy suddenly broke down and began to sob so intensely that he could hardly breathe. Sherry thought he would have to go back to the hospital. She told him to calm down so that he could tell her what was wrong. He sobbed, “I just want to go back to heaven with Pop-pop.” Sherry asked him what he meant. Her son told her that when he fell into the pool, he had tried to grab on to the inflatable raft. He had attempted to get back to the side but was unable to swim well enough. At first it had hurt a lot when he drowned, but then it became peaceful. There was white light everywhere around him and also around a man he somehow knew to be his great-grandfather, who had died when the boy had been only 10 months old. The man said the boy had to go back because it was not his time yet. Sherry stressed that among the family they never really talked about this great-grandfather. When she asked her son to describe the man, he did so perfectly. He said that the man was a little bit bald but that he still had some hair on the sides of his head; that he was short; and that although he was not fat, he was kind of stocky. At his great-grandmother’s house, he would pick up all kinds of things and ask her, “This was Pop-pop’s, wasn’t it?”

Sherry’s mother lived close to a cemetery, and her grandson kept going there. At a certain point, he told his mother that he had talked with the Virgin Mary. Mary told him that he would receive a book from his great-grandfather when he was a lot older. Years later, his great-grandmother, who was in a care facility by this time, told both the boy and his mother that his great-grandfather had had a book that he had intended his great-grandson to have, thereby confirming what the boy had said Mary had told him so many years earlier.

Rivas, Titus. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (p. 139). International Association for Near-Death Studies. Kindle Edition.

There are so many elements and characteristics of NDEs that make it preposterous to suggest that these experiences are due to super-psi, that it is hard to see how this hypothesis can be seriously considered (as opposed of course to the exploration of the super-psi concept out of intellectual interest). This is so much the case that I think it would be more interesting to examine what sort of twisted mindset could generate such a belief. This would apparently start with an immovable conviction or compulsion that the mind must be the brain and that a soul and an afterlife are fantasy. How else could such a ridiculous hypothesis be entertained? It's hard to imagine how this could apply to Braude, but there you have it.

It would also be more interesting to consider the implications of there now being no viable alternative explanation for the NDE phenomenon; that is, any viable plausible alternative to the soul/spirit and afterlife hypothesis. If that is the case then there is no point in continuing to try to stretch super-psi to somehow explain all the mediumistic communication evidence, for instance.

I do tend to lean in this direction, especially regarding my last above post about NDEs and "drop-in" communicators.

I agree that some of the explanations Braude offers feel tortuous, but keep in mind that Braude ultimately leans toward Survival over Super-Psi. He might simply be trying to cover his bases in proposing an idea - that we survive our bodily deaths - that apparently many (especially in academia) find hard to accept. Colin Wilson and Alan Gauld also seem to have had trouble accepting Survival, Wilson initially preferring some kind of Information Realism.

Regarding NDEs and the weight they lend to the Survival Hypothesis, I actually think the strongest case for Survival is Replacement Reincarnation, then other cases across the board of a "drop-in" type, and the rest follows from this as a logical singular causal source [Survival of the Personal Self in some kind of Spirit World] providing a causal nexus that aligns not just between accounts of survival but what we've been told about the spirits and spirit world from other sources such as esoteric and shamanic traditions.

That singularity of an explanatory source - along with some issues relating to philosophy of Mind, Causation, & Maths - is what makes me seriously consider what I semi-jokingly refer to as the "Super Spirit Hypothesis" that all Psi [well really all causal relations] is [are] communication between conscious agents. This would include psychometry, PK, and even "retrocognition". (I don't believe that information comes from the future back to the present, but that's a subject for another thread...I'll probably resurrect the Time Loops by Eric Wargo thread I started...)

And just as some mediums while in trance claim to meet deceased persons, the same thing happens in NDEs. And as there are drop-in communications with mediums, there are also drop-in type cases with NDEs

While arguably drop-in type cases are the strongest argument for Survival, the meeting of those persons who are deceased but unknown (a special case of ADC- After Death Communications) to be dead also lends weight. Note these are known in the Western World as Peak in Darien cases:

Among scholars, cases in which people living or people near death encountered unknown deceased persons—as in the cases in Chapter 5—or known deceased persons not known to have died—as in the cases in this chapter—have been termed “Peak in Darien” cases...

...we present a singular case of ADC in which a living person not near death was accurately informed by a deceased person of the impending NDE of another family member...

She [Emine] answered [my phone call], I got surprised. “Did you give birth girl?” she said, and I answered, “It’s your mother, dear, your sister went to hospital, and been gone for hours, but we received no information.” She told me she wasn’t surprised, and that her grandmother came to visit her. I first thought she had a dream, but it wasn’t. That scared me, and I asked her “Did she come to take your sister?” The thought made me cry, but she said “Mom, don’t worry, she told me that my sister would have a hard time but not to worry—three times—she will get better, but it will be hard.”

...Emine’s grandmother had predicted that Huriye’s soul would leave her body. When Huriye was sufficiently recovered, Emine asked her whether she had felt anything when her heart had stopped beating. Huriye told her that she had observed the doctors’ efforts. She had felt totally alone and found herself in a kind of tunnel. She felt the pain of the doctors’ procedures, even though the doctors had told her husband that she would not feel anything. She saw how she had been cut open during the operations and felt the doctors’ panic...

Rivas, Titus. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences

As noted in the NDE Text Resources Thread Bruce Greyson has written a paper about these types of cases:

Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died:“Peak in Darien” Experiences

The ubiquitous belief that, after death, our consciousness might persist in some discarnate form is fueled in part by phenomena like near-death experiences(NDEs) and deathbed visions, mystical experiences reported on the threshold of death.Some NDEs, called “Peak in Darien” experiences, include visions of deceased people who are not known at the time to be dead. Cases of this kind provide some of the most persuasive evidence for the survival of consciousness after bodily death

While in these cases it seems possible the NDEr telepathically scans for information, learns someone is deceased, and then incorporates this into their supposed hallucination...this doesn't feel like a natural explanation. After all, in some cases it isn't clear who's mind is being telepathically read as the status of the previously unknown to be deceased person has to be confirmed by those in the NDEr's vacinity:

...Then Eddie remarked that he had also seen his 19-year-old sister, Teresa, and that she had been the one to tell him he had to go back. This report unsettled his father, because only two nights before, he had spoken with Teresa, who was a student at a college in Vermont. Eddie’s father even asked the doctor to give Eddie a sedative. Later that morning, Eddie’s parents called the college. They learned that just after midnight the previous night, Teresa had been killed in a car accident...

Rivas, Titus. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences

As with all our other examples in this thread, Survival provides a clear reasoning for why these cases have descriptions of events that match what we'd expect if the deceased abide in some kind of spiritual reality.

There's probably more that could be said on NDEs but Braude's Immortal Remains is 17 years old. Most of the short summaries Braude provides on the medical debates is outdated and I'm not sure how relevant that is. Let's say someone's brain is still functional enough - does that change the significance of the drop-in cases? After all the Super-Psi advocates will even grant the idea of an astral body so long as that body dies around the time the physical body dies.

There are a few cases of NDErs coming out of their experience with Psi abilities, but again this can be read as an approach of the soul to higher levels of consciousness by the Survivalist and the turning on of Psi abilities after the "hallucination" (with veridical ESP pieces) by the Super-Psi advocate.

I'd advise people to check out the NDE subforum where Tim and others have provided a great deal of resources for further exploration.

Next up is transplant cases, so here's the Psi Encyclopedia entry which was written by Braude:

Transplant Cases Considered as Evidence for Postmortem Survival

...transplant cases introduce evidence of a new type. They ex­pand the empirical horizon in our search for evidence of survival, and they present us with a distinctive network of needs and interests to which we can apply both the living-agent-psi and survival hypotheses.

Consider: When we think along survivalist lines, it’s easy to imagine why, after their trag­ic and premature deaths, organ donors might cling to their earthly con­nections—in this case, their vital organs, and especially the heart. Of course, advocates of living-agent psi would emphasize a different set of causally relevant motives. Donors would not be the only individu­als with apparently burning needs. Organ recipients and the families of both donor and recipient will also have deep concerns, and they must be addressed as well. For example, in order to interpret the evidence carefully, we need to consider not simply how much the organ-recipient and recipient’s family knew about the donor, but how much they wanted to know. Similarly, we need to consider wheth­er members of the donor’s family urgently seek evidence of the donor’s survival. And of course, organ recipients tend to feel a deep bond with their donor, and that bond may be expressed psychically in a variety of ways, both flagrant and subtle.

Some have tried to explain transplant cases in terms of cellular memory; indeed, that’s the prevailing explanatory strategy,3 and talk of cellular memory is quite fashionable, as is mechanistic thinking generally. However, Stephen Braude has suggested that this approach is deeply flawed (in fact, incoherent), because it faces the same fatal difficulties con­fronting all trace theories of memory.4

Some cases:

The donor was a 34-year-old police officer shot attempting to arrest a drug dealer. The recipient was a 56-year-old college professor diagnosed with atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease.

The donor’s wife reported:

When I met Ben [the recipient] and Casey, I almost collapsed. First, it was a remarkable feeling seeing the man with my husband’s heart in his chest. I think I could almost see Carl [the donor] in Ben’s eyes. When I asked how Ben felt, I think I was really trying to ask Carl how he was. I wouldn’t say that to them, but I wish I could have touched Ben’s chest and talked to my husband’s heart.

What really bothers me, though, is when Casey said offhandedly that the only real side effect of Ben’s surgery was flashes of light in his face. That’s exactly how Carl died. The bastard shot him right in the face. The last thing he must have seen is a terrible flash. They never caught the guy, but they think they know who it is. I’ve seen the drawing of his face. The guy has long hair, deep eyes, a beard, and this real calm look. He looks sort of like some of the pictures of Jesus.

The recipient reported:

If you promise you won’t tell anyone my name, I’ll tell you what I’ve not told any of my doctors. Only my wife [Casey] knows. I only knew that my donor was a 34-year-old very healthy guy. A few weeks after I got my heart, I began to have dreams. I would see a flash of light right in my face and my face gets real, real hot. It actually burns. Just before that time, I would get a glimpse of Jesus. I’ve had these dreams and now daydreams ever since: Jesus and then a flash. That’s the only thing I can say is some­thing different, other than feeling really good for the first time in my life.

=-=-=

The donor’s mother, a physician, said:

When Carter [recipient] first saw me, he ran to me and pushed his nose against me and rubbed it. It was just exactly what we did with Jerry [donor].

I’m a doctor. I’m trained to be a keen observer and have always been a natural born skeptic. But this was real. I know people will say I need to be­lieve my son’s spirit is alive, and perhaps I do. But I felt it. My husband and my father felt it. And I swear to you, and you can ask my mother, Carter said the same baby-talk words that Jerry said. Carter is [now] six, but he was talking Jerry’s baby talk and playing with my nose just like Jerry did.

We stayed with the [recipient family] that night. In the middle of the night, Carter came in and asked to sleep with my husband and me. He cud­dled up between us exactly like Jerry did, and we began to cry. Carter told us not to cry because Jerry said everything was okay. My husband, I, our parents, and those who really knew Jerry have no doubt. Our son’s heart contains much of our son and beats in Carter’s chest. On some level, our son is still alive.

The recipient’s mother reported:

I saw Carter go to her [the donor’s mother]. He never does that. He is very, very shy, but he went to her just like he used to run to me when he was a baby. When he whispered ‘It’s okay mama’, I broke down. He called her mother, or maybe it was Jerry’s heart talking. And one more thing that got to us: we found out talking to Jerry’s mom that Jerry had mild cerebral palsy mostly on his left side. Carter has stiffness and some shaking on that same side. He never did as a baby and it only showed up after the trans­plant. The doctors say it’s probably something to do with his medical condi­tion, but I really think there’s more to it.

One more thing I’d like to know about. When we went to church to­gether, Carter had never met Jerry’s father. We came late and Jerry’s dad was sitting with a group of people in the middle of the congregation. Carter let go of my hand and ran right to that man. He climbed on his lap, hugged him and said ‘Daddy’. We were flabbergasted. How could he have known him? Why did he call him Dad? He never did things like that. He would never let go of my hand in church and never run to a stranger. When I asked him why he did it, he said he didn’t. He said Jerry did and he went with him.10

=-=-=

The donor was a 3-year-old boy who fell from an apartment window. The recipient was a 5-year-old boy.

The recipient reported:

I gave the boy a name. He’s younger than me and I call him Timmy. He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot, I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore, though. I like Tim Allen on ‘Tool Time’, so I called him Tim. I wonder where my old heart went, too. I sort of miss it. It was broken, but it took care of me for a while.

The recipient’s father reported:

Daryl never knew the name of his donor or his age. We didn’t know, either, until recently. We just learned that the boy who died had fallen from a window. We didn’t even know his age until now. Daryl had it about right. Probably just a lucky guess or something, but he got it right. What is spooky, though, is that he not only got the age right and some idea of how he died, he got the name right. The boy’s name was Thomas, but for some reason his immediate family called him ‘Tim’.

The recipient’s mother added:

Are you going to tell him the real Twilight Zone thing? Timmy fell trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen on the ledge of the window. Daryl won’t even touch his Power Rangers any more.14

Next up is transplant cases, so here's the Psi Encyclopedia entry which was written by Braude:

From the same entry, in the Analysis section:

But perhaps the principal issue before us is: How well do transplant cases support what we could call the hover hypothesis: that the donor’s surviving personality (or a fragment thereof) remains close (in a sense needing to be explained) to the organ recipient (or to the transplanted organs)? Some cases suggest this fairly clearly and even look a bit like possession cases. In fact, apparent possession might be a relatively clear exemplar of the sort of hovering at issue. If so, transplant cases would be a subset of possession cases: namely, those possession cases in which trans­planted organs provide a clear motivating link between possessor and possessed. And if that’s the case, then the transplant cases may not be nearly as unprecedented as they seem at first. They would still be cases of a new type, but that type would not differ radically from other forms of possession.

The cases most strongly favoring the hover hypothesis may be those where the organ recipients are children. Survivalists could argue that children will be particularly open to postmortem influence, presumably because they haven’t had their receptivity ‘educated’ out of them. Of course, advocates of living-agent psi could make an analogous claim—namely, that chil­dren are particularly receptive to antemortem ESP because they have not been conditioned into regarding ESP as impossible or as taboo. And in fact there is some evidence that children score more poorly on ESP tests as they age, pass through the educational system, and presumably learn that others consider displays of psi to be unacceptable or impossible.19

It is interesting then, that the young organ-recipient in case 7 refers to his donor in the present tense. However, of the cases presented above, probably number 3 most clearly suggests hover­ing or possession. Young Carter attributed his behavior in church to the donor, Jerry. He said it was not he (that is, Carter) who ran to Jerry’s father (whom he had not met), hugged him, and called him ‘Daddy’. Carter said Jerry did this and he went with him. And Carter told Jerry’s parents not to cry because Jerry said it was OK. On the surface, at least, this sug­gests an interaction between two distinct minds or individuals, Car­ter and Jerry. In fact, it resembles a form of mediumship in which the com­municator interacts with and sometimes controls the body of the me­dium. Thus, there might be some force to the contention that young Carter’s description is less conceptually ‘polluted’ than those of other recipients, whose expectations of what is empirically possible are unfavorably disposed against the option of possession.

Although the hover hypothesis seems to handle transplant cases fair­ly smoothly, one striking feature of the cases may be problem­atic: name­ly, the apparently lasting personality alterations in the organ recipient. For example, in case 1 the recipient acquired what seems to be a new and abiding interest in classical music, and in case 2 the recipient be­gan to manifest a new and apparently permanent interest in art and atti­tude toward sex. If these cases really form a subset of possession cases, then presumably we’d have to regard the possession as permanent, or nearly so.

Now perhaps there is no problem with that. It would be a problem only if we sup­pose, apparently without justification, that possession (assuming it oc­curs) can only be temporary or sporadic. Of course, here (as elsewhere) the evidence is ambiguous. But it is also a fertile source of clues for the­ory construction. So, once we decide to entertain the possibility of pos­session, we must try to let the data guide us, and we must try also not to be con­strained by whatever biases we had at the start. Cases of ostensi­ble possession cover a wide range, including traditional cases of medium­ship, spirit possession in shamanic contexts, cases close­ly re­sembling reincarnation cases, and the transplant cases now under con­sideration. Thus, at this stage, the totality of data seems to suggest that apparent posses­sion—whatever it is—can occur in varying forms, varying degrees of completeness, and for varying periods of time.

We might want to modify this stance later, after hammering out a detailed and empirically adequate theory of postmortem existence. We might then decide to taxonomize possession cases so as to draw a sharp line between transient or temporary possession (as in mediumship or shamanic ritualistic possession) and its apparently more permanent forms. But for now at least, it seems that these cases all share a com­mon crucial feature. The ostensible manifestation of another, postmor­tem, individual occurs well after the subject’s birth, typically following some sort of ritual, or induction, or other event (such as an organ trans­plant) that provides an occasion or motive for apparent possession. That may be enough to distinguish these cases from cases of ostensible rein­carnation.

Gauld discussed a kind of possession - Overshadowing - which we'll look at in the next post as it might shed some light on what is occurring with these transplant cases.

From the same entry, in the Analysis section:

Gauld discussed a kind of possession - Overshadowing - which we'll look at in the next post as it might shed some light on what is occurring with these transplant cases.

From Gauld's public domain work Mediumship & Survival:

Mrs Sidgwick...eventually came to believe that behind Mrs Piper’s dramatic rendering of communication from the dead, overshadowing it and |118| somehow directing its course, there might sometimes lie those same deceased persons who figure as characters in the drama. The medium writes many of the speeches, and ensures continuity in the plot; but some of the lines (perhaps the most important ones) are filled in by outside authors. Let us call this theory the theory of ‘overshadowing’. It seems to be a version of it towards which William James moves at the end of his report on Mrs Piper’s Hodgson-control (74, p. 117):

Extraneous ‘wills to communicate’ may contribute to the results as well as a ‘will to personate’, and the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would be, on the prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson’s surviving spirit, and a natural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against ‘the light’, it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of the trance-talk on this side. The wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that the ‘will to personate’ would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused to activity by the other will.

So not only does Overshadowing seem to explain those transplant "hauntings" where the spirit doesn't communicate (as far as we know) this also seems to match cases of adult reincarnation, like in a Sharada case, wherein a presumed spirit comes into the picture.

In fact in the case of the drowned girl's organ going into the body of a boy, we see that not only does he sometimes communicate with her but also that he ended up with her terror of the water ->

Another case from Pearsall, Schwartz, and Russek’s modest collec­tion suggests a similar type of communication between organ recipient and the surviving personality of the donor. The donor was a 3-year-old girl who drowned in the pool at her mother’s boyfriend’s house. The mother and boyfriend had left the girl in the care of a teenage babysit­ter. Apparently, the girl’s parents had been through an ugly divorce, and thereafter the father never saw his daughter. Jimmy, the recipient, was a 9-year-old boy who claimed not to know who the donor was. He re­ported,

I talk to her sometimes. I can feel her in there. She seems very sad. She is very afraid. I tell her it is okay, but she is very afraid. She says she wishes that parents wouldn’t throw away their children. I don’t know why she would say that.20

Jimmy’s mother added that since the operation, her son was ‘deathly afraid of the water’, although he had loved it before.

So even when the spirit of deceased is seen as a separate entity, it can influence the personality of its "host". Another interesting aspect of this Overshadowing idea is that it fits well into the previously discussed idea of therapies treating sub-personalities as spirits influencing the I-self.

This is something I think speaks well of the Survival Hypothesis, that the threads weave together into a stronger cord and that Survival can even move into the ground of sub-personalities upon which Super-Psi depends .

OTOH consider how to explain transplant "hauntings" with Super-Psi. Braude himself rejects the idea that the memories and personality are stored in the organs, for the same reason that it doesn't make sense to say structure has some inherent meaning. Now one can claim there is some connection to an "ocean of information" or "collective unconsciousness", and that this reservoir is accessed by the recipient, but this just adds to the number of just-so stories that pile on in the Super-Psi Hypothesis. (Not to mention these "watery" "places" suggest a realm in which spirits of the deceased could reside...)

Even Braude, who wrote the transplant section for the Psi Encylcopedia (he largely took it from his own book Immortal Remains) seems much more inclined to transplants inducing a kind of possession. After all what exactly is the motivation [of the recipient supposedly gifted w/ Psi] to absorb aspects of [the donor] personality into one's self? Braude mentions the Psi might be of the donors' loved ones and/or the recipient but even this seems to stretch things. [After all he] mentions a recipient wanting to know things about their donor, not generate a sub-personality or take on characteristics of the deceased. And in the youngest cases where there is communication between deceased donor and recipient, do we assume that the parents unconsciously use the biological connection to create a sub-personality in the recipient? In the cases of reincarnation, it was assumed the beliefs of the parents would result in the seeming manifestation of a reincarnated soul, but in these transplant cases are we to assume the parents' need for the child to "live on" in the recipient is taken literally by their own subconscious and thus creates a subpersonality in the recipient?

Next up is Death Bed Visions [& Terminal Lucidity].

Next up is Death Bed Visions [& Terminal Lucidity].

The Psi Encyclopedia on Death Bed Visions

The phenomenon of dying people experiencing visions of deceased relatives came to public notice in the early twentieth century, with the publication of deathbed observations by obstetrician Florence Elizabeth Barrett. This article describes more recent research by psi investigators Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson.

The majority of visions just before death proved to be of departed relatives, and, less frequently, of religious or celestial beings. The dying patient sensed that these beings had come to take him or her into another world. Often the patient’s well-being drastically impoved when this happened. In many instances the patients had been worried or afraid to die. After the visions they usually felt happy to go.

Some patients reached an emotional high shortly before dying, a great feeling of well-being. Furthermore, the data showed that a great number of these patients were not under the influence of factors that were known to cause hallucinations. Osis and Haraldsson constructed a scale or index number for factors known to cause hallucinations, finding that these visions were not connected to the scale. In fact, if the patients were high on this scale, they were less likely to have visions about someone coming to fetch them, but more likely to have confusing hallucinations – a highly interesting finding.

In the US as well as in India it was common that dying patients saw departed loved ones that invited the patients to follow them to another world. In one aspect there was a cross-cultural difference: in India it was more common that religious beings appeared to the patient than persons. It was also rather common that beings appeared that wanted to take them to another world, but they did not want to go.

The culture expectations of course will be a challenge to the Survivalist, though the degree to which this is an issue will depend on the person's leaning toward Survival, Super Psi, and of course Skeptic/Materialist...though in this thread just want to keep the focus on the Survival vs Super Psi question.



I'd say if there was no other kinds of cases this would be a bigger challenge but given the stronger cases I personally suspect there is some projection of a culturally relevant entity onto these figures. As for why anyone should think these figures - whether psychopomps or dead relatives - are real I'd note two things - deathbed visions sometimes predict death even when the patient seems healthy or at least unlikely to die, and those cases where the dying person was not told the figure they see had died.



From Chris Carter's Science and the NDE:

But one day Su seemed very puzzled. “Why is my sister with my husband?” she asked. “They are both calling me to come.”

“Is your sister dead?” I asked.

“No, she still lives in China,” she said. “I have not seen her for many years.”

When I related this conversation to the daughter, she was astonished and tearful.

“My aunt died two days ago in China,” Lily said. “We decided not to tell Mother—her sister had the same kind of cancer...."

Carter, Chris. Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Kindle Locations 4447-4448). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

More from the Psi Encyclopedia article:

There were a few cases where the patient sensed that somebody had come to fetch her – against expectations, as she was not expecting to die, nor was expected to by doctors or relatives – and died shortly afterwards.  Here is an example:

A seventy-year-old patient had seen her deceased husband several times and then she predicted her own death. She said that her husband had appeared in the window and motioned her to come out of the house. The reason for his visits was to have her join him. Her daughter and other relatives were present when she predicted her death, laid out her burial clothes, laid down in bed for a nap, and died about one hour later. She seemed calm, resigned to death and, in fact, wanted to die. Before she saw her husband she didn't speak about imminent death. Her doctor was so surprised by her sudden death, for which there were no sufficient medical reasons, so that he checked if she had poisoned herself. He found neither signs of poisoning nor any such drugs in the house.

Then back to Carter for a comparison to NDEs:

Osis and Haraldsson noted that they had collected 120 cases in which patients had come back from near-death states and had reported seeing apparitions, with the number of cases split almost evenly between the United States and India. They had expected to find more apparitions of the living in the comeback cases, but the data proved them wrong. Apparitions related to the afterlife were as common in the comeback cases (80 percent) as in the cases of those who died (81 percent).

Carter, Chris. Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Kindle Locations 4471-4475). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

I would say the strongest piece of death bed visions is seeing someone who was not known to them to have died. The sudden deaths when the patient was not expected to die are interesting but I think we'll need to have more advanced medical equipment before we can ascertain why they die.



Of course deathbed visions alone can be seen as a kind of telepathy under a Living Agent Psi Hypothesis (not really Super is it?). But even here there is a potential bone in the craw of that theory. If someone gains telepathy at the moment of their demise, wouldn't that suggest - as it does in NDE and NDE type cases - that in some sense the mind is a limiting filter on a non-locallized consciousness?

As an addendum to the above post, something that comes up in NDE and Death Bed Vision arguments is whether it was just the drugs or the commonality between a psychedelic trip and an NDE vision.

I don't particularly like this argument against Survival, as we already know physical changes to the body can result in an NDE. Why shouldn't drugs be another physical item that can shift consciousness? After all various shamanic traditions have believed just that, and there is some research that certain drugs could enhance Psi abilities. That further suggests the mind is a kind of filter in its usual state but the drugs allow for greater non-local awareness. (I say awareness b/c AFAIK no one has claimed any type of drug enhances PK.)

Chris Carter makes note of this as well, regarding the Ketamine/NDE debate, by quoting Karl Jansen's 1997 article in the Journal of Near Death Studies:

After 12 years of studying ketamine, I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience. It exists when we begin, and may persist when we end. Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist.

Now Jansen may have changed his mind in the intervening years, I don't know, but I think the point still stands.

Next up is Deathbed Visions & Mystic Experiences.

Next up is Deathbed Visions & Mystic Experiences.

One of the modern examples that has gotten some fame is Ebert's It's All a Hoax vision:

The one thing people might be surprised about—Roger said that he didn't know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: "This is all an elaborate hoax." I asked him, "What's a hoax?" And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.

It's hard to put it into words. I just loved him. I loved him so much, I think I thought he was invincible. To tell you the truth, I'm still waiting for things to unfold. I have this feeling that we're not finished. Roger's not finished. To me, Roger was magic. He was just magic. And I still feel that magic. I talk to him, and he talks back.

Made me think of Grant Morrison's comic Flex Mentallo:



Morrison also came to that view due to a mystic vision.

This also matches some of the mystical visions that sometimes correspond with NDEs, and of course some mystic visions happen spontaneously or through following a spiritual path. From Beyond Physicalism:

...The veridicality of psi is open to relatively straightforward investigation, and there is indeed good evidence for psi (Kelly et al., 2007; Radin, 2006), even if it is not widely recognized in the mainstream. It follows that there is indirect support for the objectivity of mystical experience. Second, mystical experiences sometimes appear to furnish insights into the natural world, such as the coexistence of past, present, and future, and the existence of holistic interconnections between things. There is a body of literature, mostly of a popular bent, that sets out parallels between mysticism and physics in order to suggest that the mystics of old anticipated modern scientific discoveries through their special insights into physical reality (e.g., Capra, 1975)...

Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kindle Locations 1224-1229). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Of course mystical visions don't necessarily corroborate personal survival, and have at times been used to argue against such. But I think a lot of that has to do with interpretation of such experiences, such as assuming even visions of Yaweh/Allah fall into descriptions of an Awareness that has no point of view. That latter idea [of Awareness being transpersonal in an Absolute sense] itself is in contention, and not everyone believes that you can have a consciousness without "for-ness". (For example, I lean heavily in that direction.)

And as this post notes, one can have a mystic near-death vision that reconciles the omni-spatial with the I-Self identity.

"Deathbed visions" have occupied a prominent place in popular lore from time immemorial, but during the past decade, reports of strange and apparently religious experiences accompanying close encounters with death have for the first time become the subject of serious scientific study. In prescientific cultures, such reports tended to become so quickly incorporated into the prevailing dogmatic or mythological thought-patterns that the separation of experiential fact from wishful fancy or didactic elaboration was virtually impossible: Who can say, for instance, how much of the story of Nachekita's visit to the kingdom of death in the Katha Upanishad, or of Plato's story of Er, or of Dante's Divine Comedy, sprang from any kind of mystical experience, and how much from intellectual invention designed to make philosophical points? It seems to have been necessary for our culture to pass through a period of total skepticism before the subject could be studied in a fashion that established a solid factual basis for such stories; even though the majority of medical and scientific opinion probably remains skeptical about whether or not these "near-death experiences" have any religious or metaphysical significance, there is now no serious doubt that they occur (Lundahl, 1982).

One of the rare exceptions to the rule in the near-death stories occurs in Raymond Moody's Life after Life, where a man reports a darkness "so deep and impenetrable that I could see absolutely nothing, but this was the most wonderful, worry-free experience you can imagine." I, too, felt utterly secure in my darkness, knowing that all life's struggles were over and I had "come home" to a state beyond all danger, where I no longer needed or wanted anything because everything I could possibly want or need was already mine. That shining darkness seemed to contain everything that ever was or could be, all space and all time, and yet it contained nothing at all, for the very word "thing" implies separate entities, whereas what I experienced was an utterly simple being-ness without any kind of separation-the very essence, it seemed, of aliveness, prior to any individual living beings.

And as I lived, week after week, with this process of drifting away from God-consciousness and clicking back to it again, I came more and more to feel that in some strange way, the God-consciousness wasn't really extraordinary at all. It was like coming home to something I'd always known deep down, which I suppose is what Plotinus meant when he said that the Supreme is not "other"; it is we in our so-called normal consciousness who are "other," estranged from the true ordinariness of reality. As a practical expression of this, I found I had no urge or need to make any drastic changes in my life-style. I have remained recognizably John; I've not lost my taste for meat or wine or good company or humor; and I have found no wish to spend long periods in meditation. I have for some years enjoyed half-hour spells of meditation without finding the process any big thing, and while I certainly enjoy these withdrawn periods more with the new consciousness, this is no different from my increased delight in other experiences, including sleep; I don't find that meditation, diet, or any other kind of discipline makes any difference to the frequency with which I slip out of the con-sciousness, nor my ability to click back into it. I entirely understand now the statement of a modern American mystic that before enlightenment he put himself through all manner of disciplines, but on the day he became fully realized, he simply went home with his wife and watched TV.

At minimum, taking a largely neutral stance on what mystical visions as a whole might mean, I believe one can at least say the commonality of mystic visions and some deathbed & near-death visions seems to suggest the brain is a filter for the non-localized consciousness of the mind. It that sense these cases align with other types of cases that indicate the brain is an interface for identities, rather than producing the Self.

And of course one case type of special importance is Terminal Lucidity, which I'll get into next.