In proceeding, the problem needs addressing by first tackling the prevailing assumption among the authors cited herein that the uniformly qualitative phenomenology of ECE is indicative of the existence and reality of a spiritual realm. With that assumption I most strongly disagree: the possibility of a spiritual realm cannot be based on their conclusions since, as I have insisted, each narrative report is idiosyncratic and fails to corroborate the ‘core’ or ‘thanato-mimetic’ sequence. On the contrary, another question arises: that is, why, within what I regard as idiosyncratic individualized experiences, the predominant typologies do result in the perception of some kind of other- worldly realm, or even ‘heaven’, and encounters with known spiritual figures. Moreover, it is in facing an acute crisis even though it may not be inevitably 92 Objective Analyses into ECE Subjectivity
lethal that many subjects grossly overestimate the threat to their continuing mortal existence.46ECE result only from an acute antecedent event. I am not aware that ECE involve subjects who have lain unconscious for months or even years before recovering some measure of conscious-awareness. Neither, as noted above, do these types of other-worldly spiritualized imagery invade the experiences of subjects who know they are not about to die, or who know they are not in a death-threatening circumstance as when awaking from faints or a period of laboratory-induced centrifugation.
It is my contention, therefore, that the impact of sensing themselves to be dying, or of just having died, induces every subject to recall their previous, and somewhat conventionally uniform, cognitively bound models of what it is like to die and ‘to be on the other side’. Such model apprehensions of the hereafter will already have been synthesized from subjects’ imaginations, past experiences, impressions based on vicarious religious and other secular influ- ences, thoughts and constructions arising out of personal and local deaths and attendances at funeral services, and their overarching constructions about the future afterlife. As the ECE gets underway, these model apprehensions will now be subconsciously unfolded, being directly recalled from memories already implanted in the brain.
I give some cogent examples to drive home this important point: pre- existing and prevailing cognitive activities do shape the contours of later subconscious mentation. There are several pertinent case-reports providing exemplary evidence which underpins this viewpoint. The first is of a 29-year-old English woman47 subject to repeated temporal lobe seizures since the age of 8. At the time of clinical presentation, she had recently received from The Netherlands an official photograph of her brother’s tombstone in a British Second World War military cemetery. Following receipt of this photograph, her pre-ictal auras henceforward always com- prised rows of tulips, serried lines of gravestones and linear arrays of lamb carcasses. Clearly, the impact of this highly emotionally charged experience had major repercussions on the character of her later seizural auras. Impor- tantly, a transferral of her cognitive and affective dispositions had now become realized in another part of the brain concerned with the elaboration and spreading of her pre-epileptic auras. Moreover, the witnessing of the lambs was perhaps a metaphorical representation of her innermost feelings although we know neither the circumstances of her brother’s death, nor her
46 Owens et al 1990; Gabbard et al. 1981. 47
depth of grief, nor the duration of her loss and what it meant to her. We might surmise it was fairly significant: recall the disastrous horrors of Arnhem in order to feel the poignant impact of the phrased imagery ‘like lambs to the slaughter’.
The second example48involves a girl who, aged 7, encountered a man who threatened to put her in a sack filled with snakes. This threat was later re- enacted in her subconscious dreams (at age 11), subsequently to become a daytime aura (at age 14), accompanied thereafter with occasional tonic sei- zures. Investigations revealed right-sided temporo-occipital cortical atrophy. A third case centres on an American veteran. His armed service in Vietnam became transferred to his subconscious as very frightening dreams. EEG showed bilateral temporal spikes. He subsequently responded to the anti- epileptic drug, carbamazepine.49It is significant that in all three cases, under- lying temporal lobe damage presumably facilitated the transfer of the original cognitive stimulus to the ensuing pre- and inter-ictal auras.
In like manner it is understandable, as the prospect of death or thoughts of having died are faced, how the ensuing ECE phenomenology would directly reflect the memories, perceptions and apprehensions which all subjects might imagine or believe ensue at the moment of death, and beyond. The variety of retrospective narratives offered, all intensely geomorphic and even anthropomorphic for those supposing themselves to have been in the pres- ence of God or Jesus, or a reviewing committee, are clearly evident from an appraisal of each subject’s personalized account. The imagined descriptive contours of the afterlife are represented in subconscious mentation as vivid, but often somewhat bizarre, quasi-dream-like sequences and encounters, many examples of which have been given in the preceding pages. There are no pearly gates: confronting death during an actual life-threatening crisis certainly concentrates the mind. It is a serious business and not the occasion for recall of music hall jokes or newspaper cartoons. Indeed, these images are representative of the deepest concerns and inarticulate instincts which we all secretly, and to variable degrees, harbour in the recesses of our hearts about the finality of death. This repressed imagery is played out on the neurophysiological matrix of a somewhat confused brain, as each cortical area gradually recovers its functional role towards the re-expression of full conscious-awareness.
48 Epstein A, Biol Psychiatr 17: 1207 1215, 1982 (see pp. 1211 and 1213). 49
Stewart J and Bartucci R, Am J Psychiatr 143: 113 114, 1986.
4 . 5 . A R E - C L A S S I F I C AT I O N O F O B A N D N D E X P E R I E N T I A L P H E N O M E N O LO G Y
To summarize, my argument is that the foundation for much out-of-body and near-death phenomenology is the recovering brain, which provides the neuro- nal basis for whatever bits of those phenomenologies are experienced. How- ever, the experiences undergone are coloured and rendered non-uniform by two critical insights. First, because the stored perceptual model idealizations of what might be entailed in dying and accessing the afterlife are personally and psychologically idiosyncratic. Second, because the circumstances of and re- covery from each ECE depend on several important biological and environ- mental factors50which are personally and clinically idiosyncratic. These, to my mind, are crucial factors which demand careful analysis. They alter consider- ably prevailing concepts and expectations of what ECE are really about.
In introducing and articulating my own interpretations of ECE, I have pursued a critical approach towards the actual testimonies offered by subjects. From these, I have attempted to draw out, at this stage more by logic than by scientific analysis, what clues these accounts yield in expanding our under- standings of the extraordinary events to which the latter bear witness. With that approach, I have already begun to shift perceptions away from overriding ‘mystical’ interpretative constructs to one which, now, inevitably leans to- wards a more straightforward, but neurophysiologically grounded, aetiology. These conclusions, now brought to light, make it difficult to avoid the likely relevance of a biomedically based aetiology. It is with these newer implica- tions, tilting towards a more informed approach to scientific outcome, that my text now engages.
It is on these grounds that I propose an entirely new reclassification of ECE phenomenology. The OBE is envisioned as a perturbation of the complex neurophysiological mechanisms that construct body-image and its relation- ship to peri-personal space, as I shall discuss in further detail below in Chapter 6. Allied perturbations of egocentric body space include autoscopy, heautoscopy and the sensing of invisible presences. The NDE, on the other hand, can more usefully be understood as two entities—early-phase and late- phase components (Figure 3) rather than the proposals already discussed and rejected: I want nothing to do with ‘core’ and ‘depth’ experiences. The early phase component, like OBE, may involve aberrant functioning of the vestib- ular system together with a visual component, due possibly to the incipient
50
These include the subject’s age, degree of atheromatous arterial degeneration, previous ‘stroke’ events, congenital malformations of the cerebral arterial tree, the period of time without a circulation or an effective blood pressure, history of smoking, and so on. . .
revascularization of the visual cortex and relevant association areas which result in the subject’s retrospective perception of ‘moving’ through an illusory tunnel and ‘onwards’ into a light. Early-phase phenomenology is predicated on, and conditioned by, premorbid cognitive constructs in subjects’ minds of what dying and the afterlife would be like. Another most striking feature of this incipient dawning of the return to full conscious-awareness is the absence of pain, the ability to traverse at ease solid objects such as walls or ceilings, and the unconcerned indifference of floating off a bed around which may be sitting weeping relatives.
Thus, early-phase phenomenology contrasts sharply with late-phase characteristics which herald the progressive, and final, reassertion of full conscious-awareness. Here, during the short, ephemeral evolution of ECE, consciously perceived somaesthetic activities, together with other ‘higher’ mental functions, interdigitate with, and progressively overtake, the preceding subconscious dream-like fantasy of early-phase mentation. Furthermore, late phase behaviour is now coloured by ‘moral’ intrusions in respect of earthly people and responsibilities, in parallel with the lack of desire, or ability, to overcome physical barriers.
Already, I have hinted at certain scientific approaches which underpin many of my conclusions, thus providing incisive counter-arguments to the material, and emergent views, expressed in the canonical texts. Much ECE phenomenology can be logically traced to a waking, rather than an agonally dying, brain. From all that, strong evidential claims arise, indicative of neurophysiological, rather than spiritualized, other-worldly explanations for these events. Moreover, neurophysiologically based explanations should, in future, begin to enjoy a far greater role in accounting for the varied facets of these phenomena. Indeed, in making such claims, I am immediately freed from the straitjacket of brokering dead brains, but instead, offered the means of engaging with considerably more fruitful neurophysiological opportunity and possibility. These will be explored in the succeeding chapters.
The reclassification offered here notably avoids the fabulous reconstruction of Moody, and the spurious proposals of Ring of the artificial notions of either ‘core’ or ‘deep’ experiences. The phenomenology is emphatically idio- syncratic, as each testimony clearly demonstrates, comprising preconceived ideas about the afterlife which are replayed in memory as the event unwinds. No event can be forced into an imaginary core or depth sequence: each ECE in its personalized idiosyncracy is, in part, dependent on the manner by which the brain is revascularized. This novel classification has nothing to do with dying or dead brains, Ring’s absurd ‘thanatomimetic’ sequences, nor with the escape of soul or consciousness into another other-worldly realm whose descriptive features are banal, bizarre, illogical and intensely geo-/anthropo- 96 Objective Analyses into ECE Subjectivity
morphic. On the contrary, my theory is firmly based on neuroscience, and thus fully capable of offering explanations which are rationally conditioned and logically constructed. Phenomenologically, at base is a personal, idiosyn- cratic event that is revealed in personal, idiosyncratic language.
In taking recourse to a thoroughly scientifically based account of ECE phe- nomenology, I am not suggesting that one specific aspect of neurophysiology provides a definitive answer to the unravelling of the whole problem. Rather, I think that any solution rests on analogical comparisons, by drawing attention to various brain-states or aspects of cortical function, normal or aberrant, which illustrate how pieces of the entire phenomenological jigsaw could, conceivably, come together. In the following five chapters, we shall be examining several areas which have that direct relevance to ECE phenomenology.
From what has already been written above, it will come as no surprise to the reader that these neurophysiological explorations relate not only to the realm of waking-consciousness, but also to ‘unconsciousness’, and other ‘subcon- scious’ states of existence. While these words of themselves have little precise meaning, and hence are difficult to define from a strict neurophysiological perspective, they nevertheless point to a spectrum of existential states between either being fully consciously aware or being entirely unconscious and there- fore unresponsive to any environmental stimuli.
Consciousness is also important to our theme, however, since a large proportion of ‘everyday’ conscious-awareness is partly subconscious, and partly illusory (see Chapter 5). Since ECE phenomenology is, in my view, an illusory dream-like event engendered by the brain while in the process of awaking, it is important to understand the parameters of ‘normal’ wakeful illusion, in order to effect comparisons with the reduced conscious states during which illusory ECE phenomenologies arise and evolve. In thinking about this illusory world, our attention is immediately drawn to the vast extent to which our brains operate outside the realms of wakeful conscious perception throughout our lives.
In developing the theme of ‘consciousness’ in the next chapter, emphasis will be oriented towards the so-called ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon, not only because it is a reasonably well-known circumstance, but because it draws attention to the ability of the brain to create mental constructs of body parts no longer physically extant. Such explorations provide the grounds for de- monstrating how the body may appear to its owner to be outwith the physical domain, as witnessed during OBE. In the succeeding chapter, I shall then develop my case that OBE can be conceived entirely as brain-based illusory phenomena, as opposed to declarations that mind can exist outwith the brain (and body), thereby providing: first, veridical documentation of events opaque to normal sensory inputs; and second, explanations for so-called psychical competence.