There are few questions more intriguing than whether man survives death — and if so, just what is it that survives?
Traditionally, the answer has been a matter of faith — either you believed in life after death (accompanied, usually, by a belief in God), or you didn’t. Attempts to prove that consciousness survives the body have usually been in philosophical or religious terms — until recently, when the scientifically documented findings of parapsychologists studying out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, poltergeists, hauntings, ESP, and mediumistic communication began giving even disbelievers something to think about.
Durham has long been associated with parapsychology, being the home of Duke University’s now defunct Parapsychology Laboratory, as well as J. B. Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man and, more recently, the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF).
The PRF was set up 15 years ago to study the survival question. W. G. Roll, its director, and author of The Poltergeist, reviewed the most promising survival research in an article in the PRF’s quarterly magazine, Theta. It’s a richly documented and thoughtful piece, and we’re grateful that he’s given us permission to reprint part of it. The entire article has been included in Edgar Mitchell’s anthology, Psychic Exploration, published by G. P. Putnam.
A distinction must be made between the survival of consciousness and the survival of personality or of an image of the body. There is suggestive evidence from mediumistic communications, reincarnation studies, apparitional sightings and so on, that images of the body and more or less full-fledged personalities may persist after death at least for a time.
But such survival does not imply the survival of the consciousness which animated the people in question when they were alive. There is, however, evidence from the findings of parapsychology that human consciousness is not private to any person but can be shared by others. If this is the case, consciousness will continue beyond the death of any one individual.
Since we do not know whether mediumistic communicators, apparitions and so on are conscious but we do know that the consciousness which may continue beyond death exists in the living, it seems that the best place to explore for this consciousness is in living beings.
A survey of persons who have had the experience that their consciousness extended beyond the body suggests that consciousness exists in a spectrum ranging from very constricted to very expanded. Close to the former end of the scale, but probably not at its extreme end, is the kind of consciousness which we identify with the physical body. This type of consciousness may be involved in most out-of-body experiences; after death it may be involved in apparitional sightings. At the other end of the scale, the person experiences an identification with the whole universe so that everything in it is felt as “his” and no distinctions are recognized. Some individuals may be limited to a particular place on the scale while others may be able to move up and down.
It should then be possible for the living to experience the world of the dead. . . . The most interesting stories about any land are told by people who have been there themselves. . . .
The findings also suggest that experiences of extending into the environment are sometimes real in the sense that persons who have such experiences may be able to interact with people and things at the distant locations in question. On the other hand, it is still uncertain whether or not such experiences require a living body.
When we have discovered the characteristics of the consciousness which may survive — whether this be the type experienced during out-of-body travels or the field consciousness type — we may look for these characteristics in apparent survival phenomena. Parapsychology has discovered one such characteristic: The consciousness which may survive is public. It should then be possible for the living to experience the world of the dead.
Charles Tart suggests that scientists who study altered states of consciousness develop the ability to enter such states themselves. In parapsychology we have insisted on a sharp separation between the scientist and the people he studies. But the assumption that there is a real distinction is another of the dubious ideas born of the limited perspective of ordinary consciousness. It is clear from the research findings that the experimenter often affects the results of his subjects.
Perhaps we should encourage the subjects to share in the role of the experimenter and participate in the planning and interpretation of research. And perhaps the experimenter should learn to enter altered states such as out-of-body and field consciousness experiences. Personal familiarity with the states of consciousness in which psi phenomena seem to originate might reduce the number of false assumptions about them. Such familiarity might also lead to better maps of states of consciousness which may exist after death. Until now we have tried to trace the characteristics of these states from afar, mainly on the basis of the stories OOBE subjects, mediums and others bring back. But the most interesting stories about any land are told by people who have been there themselves and the most credible stories are told by those who are trained observers and who bring the necessary tools along for reliable recording.
In the past it has sometimes seemed that the question of survival after death was a minor issue in a field of research which itself was at the fringe of science. If the main focus for survival research is extended states of consciousness, this research becomes relevant to any discipline concerned with the human mind. In turn any science, from physics to transpersonal psychology, which has something important to say about consciousness may contribute to our understanding of a possible next world.
Expanded states of consciousness or field consciousness are of special interest because they may reveal potentials in man for wider interactions than are generally thought to be possible. Field consciousness appears to be an experiential demonstration of the connections parapsychology, physics and other sciences have shown exist between man and his environment. The exploration of field consciousness could be particularly important in today’s society which is based largely on the premise that people are separate. If more persons could actually experience the connections of which all may be part, they might encroach less on each other and on their physical environment. By exploring such states of consciousness we may contribute to man’s survival and well being in this world at the same time as we point to what may come in the next.
It is common in telepathy that thoughts and ideas are transmitted without the “agent” being aware that he is “sending.” To explain telepathy (and also psychokinesis), H. H. Price the Oxford philosopher, suggests that once an idea has been formed in a mind it has
“so to speak, an independent life of its own (and) . . . is no longer wholly under the control of the consciousness which gave it birth. Though it began its career in consciousness, it persists outside of consciousness (‘in the unconscious’ as we say). It may return into consciousness from time to time or it may not. Moreover, we will also suppose that every idea is endowed with causal efficacy; and that it not only exists but also operates independently, apart from the consciousness in which it originates.”
Psychologists have discovered a great deal about the causal efficacy of ideas. For instance, we know that emotionally intense and vivid ideas are more likely to return to consciousness than emotionally neutral ones. The same is true for frequent and recent ideas. These tendencies are described in the laws of association. But what gives strength to ideas in the mind where they originated also seems to work when they appear somewhere else as in ESP.
Another point about ideas which is important to remember is that they do not exist in isolation but are part of large associative clusters. To say that an idea can operate independently of the consciousness in which it was formed is tantamount to saying that the whole associative system of which it is part may have such a life. Hornell Hart suggests something like this in his “persona” theory. A deceased personality provides the impetus for a communication and the expectations of medium and sitter add other pieces to create a communicator. Afterwards this “persona” may go on existing more or less independently. Usually the stimulus comes from a deceased personality, according to Hart, but sometimes from a living one. It is also easy to find cases where the “communicator” does not exist at all. In my work with mediums I have often been presented with a full-fledged personality giving a name, supposed times and places of birth and death, a nonexisting address and other spurious information. Such material does not come as a surprise since persons in dissociated states, such as mediums, are often highly suggestible and will try to accommodate themselves to the wishes of the inquirer. The fact that a person has died and that “he” can supply information about his earthly existence, attitudes and so forth does not enable us to infer that he exists as a conscious, experiencing self. There can be mediumistic “communications” without anyone communicating.
At times a person who has an out-of-body experience is perceived as an apparition in the area in which he finds himself in the OOBE state. But it is only by questioning him afterwards that we can know that this apparition was conscious. The occurrence of an apparition of the living, as of the dead, is not by itself proof of the existence of a conscious entity.
Edmund Gurney reports a case which involved an apparition of an old woman who repeatedly was seen on a bed in a kitchen, fully dressed and with her face to the wall. The description matched a previous occupant as she was found after a beating by her husband from which she did not recover. Gurney thought it unlikely that the spirit of the woman had remained on her bed and suggested instead that the apparition was due to “the survival of a mere image, impressed, we cannot guess how on we cannot guess what.”
The possibility that mental processes may leave residues or traces on physical objects has often come up in connection with so-called psychometry tests. In such tests, the ESP subject seems to obtain information about events by holding an object which has been associated with these events. Many mediums and psychics use this procedure when they try to obtain information about the past lives of people. It is possible that haunting apparitions result from the same process.
I mentioned Price’s theory about ideas. He has a similar theory about images. Mental images, according to Price are “persistent and dynamic entities which, when once formed, may have a kind of independent life of their own, and may escape more or less completely from the control of their author.” Apparitional hauntings are due to the tendency of images to get themselves localized in physical space. “Once localized there, they might continue to be so localized for a considerable period, retaining the telepathic charge which they had at first, though this might gradually diminish in intensity.” In other words, an image of a person may survive his death without being inhabited by his consciousness. This has been called a “thought form” in some occult traditions.
Because the “telepathic charge” of a haunted house or a psychometric object is similar to the magnetic, gravitational and other fields which surround physical objects, I have used the concept of psi field to describe psi phenomena which seem to depend on such objects. For the present purpose we can think of the psi field of an object, whether this be animate or inanimate, as a pattern of associations. In the same way as a magnet may magnetize another piece of metal and then be destroyed without affecting the new magnet, so may the images, ideas and so on of a person continue to exist as part of the psi fields of objects with which he was once in contact long after he has gone. The image of a person seen in an apparition, whether this image was produced by him or someone else, may survive his death without being inhabited by his consciousness.
If the origin of mediumistic communications and apparitions is so uncertain, why have survival researchers placed so much emphasis on them in the search for evidence of survival?
Before we go into this question, let us consider the more basic one, whether the material we are discussing includes genuine psychical phenomena or whether it can be explained away as fraud, sensory cues and chance guessing. I find it difficult to suppose that all the cases admit of such easy explanations in view of the precautions often taken. However, this area of parapsychology is in need of a more systematic approach than it has received so far.
For most of the material reported in the literature, the methods of observation and assessment were not highly developed. The reports, however, show that the investigators were often cautious and aware of the many pitfalls. It is unlikely that the data can all be explained away. Take the cross-correspondences. In these experiments, which were apparently initiated by the deceased communicators themselves, two or more mediums produced disjointed and apparently meaningless statements which, however, turned out to refer to common themes such as a Greek play or a poem known to the deceased. It is not difficult to suppose that there might be chance correspondences as a result of the sheer mass of writings produced by the several mediums. However, some could hardly be due to chance considering the obvious relations between many of the items produced by the mediums.
In the previous section, I pointed out that some apparitions are localized in space. This relation between a surviving entity and physical space or matter also comes up in the mediumistic material. In most of these, there is a physical connection or link between the medium and the ostensible communicator. Sometimes this link is a person who is present at the experiment and who knew the deceased when he was still living. Alternatively, a psychometric object is used. This word is also used in the sense of mental measurement, so parapsychologists prefer other terms. I use the phrase “associated object.” In these types of ESP tests, the medium appears to obtain information about some person or event by holding an object which belonged to that person or with which he had been in physical contact, such as a scarf or a pipe. Such objects are also used in tests where the subject tries to obtain information about the living. Because of the similarity to the mediumistic experiments involving a deceased agent, it is natural to suppose that these experiments too are in fact ordinary object association tests and that the discarnate communicators are only creations by the mind of the medium.
There is a special type of mediumistic communication which apparently does not rely on such connections. These are the drop-ins. A drop-in communicator, as the term suggests, is unknown to either medium or investigator and appears spontaneously at a mediumistic sitting. No psychometric objects are used. However, drop-ins show a geographical clustering effect: They usually come from the same area as the medium or others connected with the experiment or from areas which these persons have visited. In other words, there seems to be the same linkage or association with physical space we find with mediumistic communicators.
Due to the efforts of Stevenson in recent years reincarnation cases have figured prominently in survival research. The cases usually involve young children who spontaneously appear to recall persons and episodes from a previous life. Because of their youth and general circumstances it appears unlikely that the material has been obtained by normal means and since the children do not generally show evidence of other psychical abilities, there is nothing to suggest that they have picked up the information by a more common form of ESP. In addition to memories of the past, the children often show the emotional reactions and interests of their previous incarnations. As with many mediumistic communicators, they are realistic. These cases also show the geographical focusing effect. A person is likely to reincarnate in the same general area in which he spent his previous life.
This “attachment” to familiar objects and locations runs through most of the data suggestive of the survival of personality.
We generally suppose that our memories, thoughts and emotions belong to only one physical object, our own brain. When this brain disappears we suppose that our memories, ideas and so on also disappear. But if we think of these as field phenomena, it is easier to accept the possibility that they may persist in other physical systems than the brain in which they were formed and that they may be available to others, as in ESP. After the disintegration of the brain, our thoughts, images and ideas remain part of the psi fields of the other objects with which they have been associated, retaining their “telepathic charge” and hereby the capacity to reproduce a more or less full picture of the deceased.
One of the laws describing the connections in the psi field is the “law of contiguity,” one of the primary laws of association (the other is the law of similarity). In its psychological form, this law says that two ideas or precepts which have been experienced together by a person hereby become associated. The strength of this association depends on the secondary laws (of vividness, frequency and so on) which I have referred to before. Generally we do not extend these laws to relations between a person and inanimate objects in his environment but this is an exclusion which does not seem to be justified by the facts of parapsychology.
It is premature to state any conclusions with respect to the survival of personality, either in its full-fledged form or in terms of partial systems of memories, emotions, ideas and feelings. The indications are, however, that what we call personality continues to exist after the death of the body as a kind of field or system of associations around the objects with which the person was in physical contact when he was alive. It seems that a living person’s brain functions as the primary source of information about the person available to another through ESP but, when the body and brain have dissolved, the physical objects associated with him become the main source of ESP information about him.
The indications that personality survives as a causally efficient and more or less integrated whole do not, however, allow us to infer that it is animated by a consciousness — and even if it is so animated that this is the consciousness “belonging to” the person when he was living.
The possibility that a replica or image of the physical body and the cluster of memories, emotions, etc., which constitute human personality may survive death is interesting in the same way as it is interesting that a person may “survive” in photographs and tape recordings. This possibility, however, is not nearly as interesting as the possibility that consciousness may survive. For the survival of consciousness provides a continuation of actual experiences while the survival of an image of the body, memories and so forth do not necessarily imply such continuation.
Research on the survival question has been guided by certain implicit assumptions about what it is that may survive death and by certain assumptions about the nature of ESP.
In any discussion of evidence for survival, ESP plays a central role. ESP is presumably used in supposed communications with the dead and people who see apparitions apparently do so by ESP. When we try to explain away the evidence for communicators we often say that they were created by the medium who obtained the necessary facts by ESP from existing sources such as the minds of living people who knew the deceased, obituaries and so on. We use similar explanations for people who see apparitions and for other survival evidence. It is therefore important to have some notion of ESP when we discuss the survival issue.
Most of us believe that ESP information originates in one mind or place and is then transmitted over space (or time) to another mind. Furthermore, we restrict the meaning of ESP to the acquisition of veridical information about the distant mind or place. We generally assume that if the ESP response does not in some way correspond to verifiable mental or physical events, we are not dealing with ESP.
These beliefs about ESP are not the results of empirical observations. They derive from our ordinary state of consciousness in which we experience ourselves as separate from others and from the physical environment. Being separate we suppose that all communication is a stimulus-response process, either sensory or extrasensory. But the stimulus-response model which works reasonably well for sensory perception does not work well for ESP. For instance, the size of the ESP target, its distance from the subject, physical barriers and so on, do not affect results in the manner we should expect if ESP followed this model.
In our ordinary state of awareness we experience an outside world which consists of objects and people separate from ourselves. Obtaining information about that world seems very different from obtaining information about our own mental states. Since we limit ESP to the acquisition of veridical information about the outside world, we suppose that the ESP process is quite different from the process whereby we become aware of our own psychological states. When responses appear in ESP tests which do not correspond to anything in the familiar world, as a rule we dismiss them as ESP failures. But the veridical responses are usually indistinguishable from the responses which originate in the unconscious mind of the subject, except that the former match objective events in other minds or places and the latter do not. The implication is clear: What is called ESP is a process whereby the individual gains awareness of his unconscious. This way of explaining ESP is more satisfactory than the stimulus-response theory. As with other unconscious material, access to ESP information seems to be increased during relaxation, hypnosis, meditation, dreams and other states which encourage material such as forgotten memories and repressed emotions to emerge into awareness. On the other hand such states are impediments, not aids, to known responses by the body to outside stimuli. It seems that the aspects of the physical and social world which lie outside a person’s direct sensory awareness should be regarded as part of his unconscious. In ESP a person apparently becomes aware of those aspects of his unconscious to the extent he can dissociate himself from the narrower world of ordinary sense perception. This collective unconscious, as it is sometimes called, is the same as the psi field mentioned earlier and the same laws apply to both.
When parapsychologists discuss the aspect of man which may survive his death, they make further assumptions. Since we usually conceive of the human self as restricted to a physical body and to the kind of consciousness in which most of us spend our waking hours, we expect survival to be in terms of the same kind of body and consciousness. Since our consciousness is generally tied up with the external and internal stimuli of the physical body, we look for survival evidence in the form of apparitional phenomena, dreams of the deceased and other experiences which provide a replica of this body. Our ordinary state of consciousness is intimately associated with memories of the past, plans for the future, our special skills — in short, with the associative cluster we call human personality. When we seek evidence for survival after death, we look for the continuation of this cluster as in mediumistic experiences, reincarnation phenomena and the like.
This assumption has guided survival research until the present time. As a rule we have taken for granted that if we can demonstrate the independent existence of apparitions, mediumistic communicators, etc., then we shall have demonstrated the continuation of consciousness. Conversely we have supposed that in the absence of apparitions, mediumistic communicators and so forth, there is no continuation of consciousness (or at least there can be no evidence for such continuation). It has therefore been the basic concern of survival researchers to try to determine whether apparitions and mediumistic communicators exist independently or whether they are products of the psychical abilities of the living. In addition to mediumistic, apparitional and reincarnation cases, there is the evidence from dreams in which the dead appear and from cases where the dead seem to make their presence known by some kind of physical action, such as stopping a clock belonging to them or causing their pictures to fall. Whatever the evidence, it generally involves the reproduction of an image of the body of the deceased or of his memories and other personal characteristics. But we cannot infer the survival of consciousness after death from the survival of a body image, as seen in an apparition, or even from the survival of a full-fledged “personality” which may appear in a mediumistic communication. An apparition or a mediumistic communicator may be the sole product of the “telepathic charge,” psi field or whatever name we give the energy which is associated with the thoughts, ideas and images formed by man.
We may define consciousness as awareness of an experiencing “I” or self. The unconscious is non-awareness of the self or non-awareness of parts of it. In the sense in which I use the term, the unconscious can become conscious (and the conscious can become unconscious).
A person’s experience of his “I” or self may be confined to his physical body. But it appears that in ESP others may directly apprehend the contents of his consciousness and may even identify with it to the extent of experiencing it to be part of their own consciousness. This suggests that consciousness is not private to anyone but is public. In the same way as the gravitational field of a material object is part of the gravitational field of the earth, the consciousness of a person seems to be part of wider consciousness of which he may or may not be aware.
If consciousness and the feeling of selfhood are in fact not private to the individual but can be shared by others, it would be illogical to expect consciousness to disappear with the death of the individual. And, of course, myriads have died without diminishing the consciousness of the survivors. Moreover if consciousness is public and continues beyond the death of the person, it is difficult to suppose that his ability to share in this consciousness ceases or even diminishes when he dies.
On the contrary we should expect that the range of consciousness would increase when the body ceases to function. The sense organs and the central nervous system seem to contribute to the impression that the self is restricted to the body; their disintegration should therefore permit easier access to further reaches of consciousness.
Studies of mediumistic communicators, apparitions and other post-mortem residues of the living have not established that they are conscious entities. A different approach is needed to determine if consciousness persists after death.
If there is survival after death, then that which survives must exist beforehand, in the living. In other words, it should be possible to approach the survival question by a study of consciousness in the living.
There are many kinds of consciousness in addition to the waking state most of us experience most of the time. There is dream consciousness of which, in turn, there are several types and there are states of consciousness which result from being hypnotized, taking drugs, engaging in meditation and so on. In other words, a person is potentially able to experience himself and the world in many different ways. In the search for the kinds of consciousness which may survive death, we need something similar to the testing situation explorers of outer space have created in their simulated space laboratories. In these laboratories conditions which are expected in outer space are reproduced as closely as possible on earth. Parapsychologists need simulated survival laboratories where they can explore the nature of a possible life after death by studies of the characteristics of the consciousness in living people which may continue after their death.
Three parapsychological centers are developing laboratory techniques which will meet this purpose. They are the American Society for Psychical Research, the Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, North Carolina.
People occasionally report that their consciousness, what they regard as their self or I, moves or extends beyond the boundaries of the body. The experience ranges from the feeling in out-of-body experiences (OOBE’s) that something like ordinary waking consciousness leaves the physical body and moves to another distinct location in space and time, to the feeling that the self simultaneously occupies or becomes identified with all space and time. The latter has been called the “peak experience” by Abraham Maslow. I shall use the term “field consciousness” (FC) for experiences which seem to take in part or all of the environment outside what is usually considered a person or individual.
At the Psychical Research Foundation we have done most of our OOBE research with Blue Harary, a Duke student and PRF research assistant. He had the following experience before we began work with him. One evening he went to bed at his home in New York City, thinking about an elderly lady friend in Maine with whom he had lost touch. After he fell asleep, he reported,
“I found myself floating out of my body which lay below me on the bed. I had this experience many times in the past and so was not surprised. I now could travel to find my old friend. I decided to bring my close friend George, who was living elsewhere in New York, with me. I concentrated on George and soon was floating above him where he lay asleep on his bed. I awoke George’s out of the body self and grasped his hands and pulled him up out of his body. George readily decided to accompany me. None of this seemed the least bit unusual to either of us. On the way to Maine, George and I walked through wooded areas, and up and down green rolling hills. At one point when we stopped to rest on a hillside George began to wander too close to a pool of pink, hot bubbling liquid. I warned George not to wander too close because it was dangerous, even in an OOBE state.
“We reached an area near where we thought the woman would be, and were surprised to find that the woman had been waiting for us. I recognized her reddish blond hair and high cheekbones. We sat for a long while and discussed many of the things that had been disturbing all of us in our Earth lives. We seemed to find calm and reassurance in existence in that other-worldly level and in each other’s warm company.
“We said our goodbyes and George and I went back, and I helped him into his body which still lay asleep on his bed. I went back and found my own body safe and sound where I had left it. I floated in the air for a moment and then climbed back into my body. The next morning I awoke with complete recollection of the experience.
“I didn’t see George again until later the next day. He said that when he awoke in the morning he had the strangest sensation of having forgotten something.
“Later in the evening when George and I were discussing dreams a sudden strange look came across his face. He held his hands over his eyes and then pointed a finger at me and looking up with a shocked expression, said ‘Last night!’ He then proceeded to ask me if we had been out of our bodies together and if what seemed so real to him at the time actually was a real experience. I told him very little at first and asked him to tell me all of the details that he could remember. ‘A lady,’ he said, ‘there was this fantastic lady.’ ‘Was she an elderly lady?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, but not with grey hair like most old ladies,’ he answered, ‘but with reddish blond hair and with high cheekbones.’ He also remembered that there had been a danger and ‘something about a pool.’ ”
It is sometimes argued that OOBE and FC experiences only involve an imaginary extension into the environment and that ESP information comes to the physical body of the person and is not acquired at the place he experiences himself to be. According to this theory, people and animals who seem to detect the presence of a person in an OOBE or FC state, would only become aware by ESP of his intention or belief that he has extended. Arguments of this type, however, rest on assumptions about ESP which I discussed earlier and which seem to be mistaken. ESP, it seems, is awareness of what already is part of the self. Out-of-body experiences verify what we already know about ESP: The person is not going anywhere or seeing anything other than where and what he already is. It is only from the restricted perspective of ordinary states of consciousness that he may appear to observe the familiar physical world (and that he is not having a “real” OOBE or ESP experience when he reports something different). The relationship between ESP on the one hand and OOBE and FC states on the other is apparently this: In OOBE and FC states, the person is aware of what is going on while ESP as such may or may not be associated with a conscious experience.
As Lawrence LeShan has shown, experiences of field consciousness are often strikingly similar to the descriptions of the universe by modern physicists. But FC experiences are rarely of the type that allow one to determine if consciousness actually occupies known physical space. This is not surprising since field consciousness sometimes seems to be everything and everywhere. There are, however, anecdotal accounts which suggest that on entering or leaving this state, the person’s perspective narrows sufficiently to detect discrete events. It also appears that people who often have FC experiences may have more ESP awareness than others.
Richard Alpert, formerly a professor of psychology at Harvard who is known as Baba Ram Dass since his initiation by an Indian teacher of meditation, says that when he was “being a Holy Man” at Esalen in Big Sur, California, somebody asked if he had any psychic powers. Alpert replied
“ ‘No, I’m happy I don’t, . . . I have a big ego, and I’d misuse them. And then I looked at this man — he had just arrived and . . . I said, ‘Could you imagine . . . if I could look at you, sir, and I could say, ‘You were walking up the hill to get here and you looked down on the ground and you saw what you thought was a jewel and you picked it up and you threw it away.’ . . . He stood up and turned ashen white . . . and he says, ‘I was walking up the hill,’ and he said, ‘I saw this . . . and I picked it up and I thought it was jade and it turned out to be a piece of ginger ale bottle and I threw it away.’ ”
In exploring the relationship between meditation and ESP abilities, it is interesting that persons who have such abilities to a marked degree often use procedures to activate them which are similar to the procedures advocated by many meditation systems. In most forms of meditation, the meditator seeks a deep state of relaxation, yet remains fully awake. Usually, the mind is either kept a blank or is engaged in some simple task, such as repeating a word mentally or visualizing an object, with the hope that this will reduce discursive thinking and allow the meditator to experience the unity between himself and the rest of the world. ESP receptivity seems to be facilitated by similar procedures.
One of the few physiological studies of OOBE states was done by Charles Tart who found considerable alpha activity in the two subjects he tested. In our OOBE work with Harary, he first enters a state of deep relaxation which he calls his “cool down” period. This is characterized by a great deal of alpha in both hemispheres of the brain which persists into the OOBE state. In the OOBE state there is a reduction in eye movements and a decrease in skin potential. The latter suggests a relaxed condition. Surprisingly, there is also an increase in respiration and heart rate which suggest increased activity or arousal. The interpretation of these data must wait for further research. So far the evidence suggests that Harary’s body functions at a near normal rate during his OOBE states while his central nervous system may be less active.
If brain functions are related to OOBE and FC states, we might find different characteristics for the two types of experiences. In OOBE’s there is often the same experience of temporal succession and sequential progression through space as we experience in ordinary states of consciousness and which are characteristic of left hemisphere mentation. Conversely, the global experiences in FC suggest right hemisphere involvement.
On the other hand, if the brain is largely dormant during OOBE and FC experiences, then we may suppose that such experiences are independent of the brain and will continue when the brain has ceased operating altogether. Reports of OOBE and FC during heart stoppage, near drowning, anesthesia or when brain and body functions have been reduced by voluntary control (as reportedly done by yogis and meditators) raise the possibility that the central nervous system is not responsible for these experiences. Karlis Osis has found that people near death sometimes seem to experience another world and other entities, including deceased friends and relatives.
Theta magazine, in which this article first appeared, is published by the Psychical Research Foundation, Duke Station, Durham NC 27706.
Theta is the first letter of the Greek word thanatos, which means death. The magazine is devoted to research on the question of survival after death.
