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I ONCE
SAW A BUMPER STICKER THAT READ: MILITANT AGNOSTIC: I DON’T KNOW AND
YOU DON’T EITHER. This is my position on the afterlife. If we knew
for certain that there is an afterlife, we would not fear death as we
do, we would not mourn ouite so agonizingly the death of loved ones,
and there would be no need to engage in debates on the subject. |
In Deepak
Chopra’s 2006 book, Life After Death: Burden of Proof,
he presents six lines of evidence that convince him that the soul is
real and eternal: 1. Near-Death Experiences.
2. ESP. 3. Ouantum Consciousness.
4. Talking to the Dead. 5. Prayer and Healing Studies.
6. Information Fields and the Universal Life Force.
For Chopra, the universe is one giant conscious information field of
timeless energy of which all of us are a part. Life is simply a temporary
incarnation of this eternal field of consciousness. Let’s review these
one by one.
Near
Death Experiences
Five centuries
ago demons haunted our world, with incubi and succubi tormenting their
victims as they lay asleep in their beds. Two centuries ago spirits
haunted our world, with ghosts and ghouls harassing their sufferers
all hours of the night. In the last century, aliens haunted our world,
with grays and greens abducting captives out of their beds and whisking
them away for probing and prodding. Today people are experiencing near-death
and out-of-body experiences, floating above their bodies, out of their
bedrooms, and even off the planet into space.
What is
going on here? Are these elusive creatures and mysterious phenomena
in our world or in our minds? New evidence indicates that they are,
in fact, a product of the brain. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger, in
his laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, for example,
can induce all of these experiences in subjects by subjecting their
temporal lobes to patterns of magnetic fields. I tried it and had a
mild out-of-body experience.
Similarly,
the September 19, 2002 issue of Nature,
reported that the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues
discovered that they could bring about out-of-body experiences (OBEs)
through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal
lobe of a 43-year old woman suffering from severe epileptic seizures.
In initial mild stimulations she reported “sinking into the bed”
or “falling from a height.” More intense stimulation led her to
“see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower
trunk.” Another stimulation induced “an instantaneous feeling of
‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close
to the ceiling.”
In a related
study reported in the 2001 book Why God Won‘t Go Away,
researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili found that when Buddhist
monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray their brain scans indicate strikingly
low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region of the
brain the authors have dubbed the Orientation Association Area (OAA),
whose job it is to orient the body in physical space. (People with damage
to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house).
When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction
between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation
and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the
lines between reality and fantasy, between feeling in body and out of
body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who experience a sense of
oneness with the universe, or to nuns who feel the presence of God,
or to alien abductees floating out of their beds up to the mother ship.
Sometimes
trauma can trigger such experiences. The December 2001 issue of Lancet
published a Dutch study in which of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated
from clinical death, 12% reported near-death experiences (NDEs), where
they floated above their bodies and saw a light at the end of a tunnel.
Some even described speaking to dead relatives.
These
studies show that mind and spirit are not separate from brain and body,
and that all experience is mediated by the brain. Since our normal experience
is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when a part of
the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the
brain interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is thought
to be the paranormal. In reality, it is just brain chemistry.
ESP
For the
past century ESP research has suffered from two fatal flaws: replicable
data and a viable theory. There are not many significant fmdings of
ESP under controlled conditions, but when there are other scientists
always fail to replicate them. In science, if we cannot replicate a
finding, skepticism is the appropriate response. A still deeper reason
that scientists are skeptical of ESP is that there is no explanatory
theory for how it works. Until ESP proponents can explain how thoughts
generated by neurons in the sender’s brain can pass through the skull
and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response.
Quantum
Consciousness.
Deepak
Chopra and others will counter that there is, in fact, a perfectly cogent
theory of ESP, and that is quantum consciousness, which was recently
featured in the wildly popular and improbably-named film, What the
#@*! Do We Know?! University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit
Goswami, for example, says: “The material world around us is nothing
but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment
my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.”
Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously
choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies.
According
to the physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff, inside
our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding.
The conjecture is that something inside the microtubules may initiate
a wave function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atorns,
causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons
and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating
thought and consciousness. Since a wave function collapse can only come
about when an atom is “observed” (i.e., affected in any way by something
else), neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea,
even suggested that “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop
from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind
to atoms. . ..
In reality,
the gap between sub-atomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems
is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum,
the University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates
that for a system to be described quantum mechanically the system’s
typical mass m, velocity v,
and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant
b. “If mvd is much greater than b,
then the system probably can be treated classically.” Stenger computes
that the mass of neural transmitter molecules, and their velocity across
the distance of the synapse, are about three orders of magnitude too
large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro
connection.
Subatomic
particles may be altered when they are observed, but the Moon is there
even if no one looks at it.
Talking
to the Dead
Chopra
recounts his experience of participating in a university study of three
psychics who claimed that they could communicate with those who had
already “passed over” to the other side. Even though none of the
psychics were told that Chopra was present, two of them identified him
by name, two of them told him that he wanted to contact his recently
deceased father, and one knew his Hindi childhood nickname. He declared
it a genuine experience, even while admitting that he had his doubts,
especially since “My ‘father’ knew things I knew, but nothing
more.”
That is
more skepticism than most people muster, especially in emotion-laden
readings that promise people a connection to a lost loved one. How do
psychics appear to talk to the dead? In short, it’s a trick called
Cold Reading, where you literally “read” someone “cold,”
knowing nothing about them. You ask lots of ouestions and make numerous
statements and see what sticks. Most statements are wrong, but you only
need a few hits to convince people. In an expose I did on psychic medium
John Edward for WABC New York, for example, we counted about one statement
per second in the opening minute, as he riffled through names, dates,
colors, diseases, conditions, situations, relatives, keepsakes, and
the like. His hit rate was below 10%, but those handful of hits were
all his subjects needed to feel that they had made contact with a loved
one.
I played
a psychic for a day for a television special and found it remarkably
easy to convince my subjects that I was really talking to the dead.
Of course, anyone can talk to the dead. The hard part is getting the
dead to talk back. Psychic mediums use trickery to give the illusion
that the dead are communicating with us.
Prayer
and Healing Studies
In April,
2006, The American Heart journal
published the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the effects
of intercessory prayer on the health and recovery of patients. Directed
by Harvard University Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson, a
long-time proponent of the salubrious effects of prayer, the findings
were eagerly awaited by members of both communities. There were a total
of 1,802 patients from six U.S. hospitals that were randomly assigned
to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer and were told that
they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory
prayer and were also told that they may or may not receive prayer; and
601 received intercessory prayer and were told they would receive prayer.
Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued daily for two
weeks after. The prayers were allowed to pray in the manner of their
choice, but they were instructed to ask “for a successful surgery
with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”
The results
were unequivocal: there were no statistically significant differences
between any of the groups. Prayer did not work. Case closed.
Information
Fields and the Universal Life Force
Have you
ever noticed how much easier it is to do a newspaper crossword puzzle
later in the day? Me neither. But according to Rupert Sheldrake it is
because the collective wisdom of the morning successes resonates throughout
the cultural morphic field. In Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance,”
similar forms (morphs, or “fields of information”) reverberate and
exchange information within a universal life force. Morphic resonance,
says Sheldrake, is “the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections
between organisms and of collective memories within species,” and
explains phantom limbs, homing pigeons, how dogs know when their owners
are coming home, and such psychic phenomena as how people know when
someone is staring at them. Thousands of trials conducted by anyone
who downloaded the experimental protocol from Sheldrake’s Web page
“have given positive, repeatable, and highly significant results,
implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being stared
at from behind.”
Let’s
examine this claim more closely. First, science is not normally conducted
by strangers who happen upon a Web page protocol, so we have no way
of knowing if these amateurs controlled for intervening variables and
experimenter biases. Second, psychologists dismiss anecdotal accounts
of this sense to a reverse self-fulfilling effect: a person suspects
being stared at and turns to check; such head movement catches the eyes
of would-be starers, who then turn to look at the staree, who thereby
confirms the feeling of being stared at. Third, there is an experimenter
bias problem. Institute of Noetic Sciences’ researcher Marilyn Schlitz
(a believer in ESP) collaborated with University of Hertfordshire psychologist
Richard Wiseman (a skeptic of ESP) in replicating Sheldrake’s research,
and discovered that when they
did the staring Schlitz found statistically significant results, whereas
Wiseman found chance results.
Sheldrake
responds that skeptics dampen the morphic field’s subtle power, whereas
believers enhance it. Maybe, but as it is said, the invisible and the
nonexistent look the same.
So where
does this leave us? I am, by temperament, a sanguine person, so I really
hate to douse the flame of that doubtful future date with the cold water
of skepticism in this present state. But I care what is actually true
even more than what I hope is true, and these are the facts as I understand
them to be. Shall we then abandon all hope of a paradisiacal state?
No. Paradise is here. It is now. It is within us and without us. It
is in our thoughts and in our actions. It is in our lives and in our
loves. It is in our families and in our friends. It is in our communities
and in our world. It is in the courage of our convictions and in the
character of our souls.
Hope springs
eternal, even if life is not.
Taking
the Afterlife Seriously - Deepak Chopra
Courtesy: Skeptic
Volume 13 Number 4 2008
The most beautiful
and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mysterious.
It is the power of all true science.”
–Albert Einstein
I have
put Michael Shermer at a disadvantage by writing a book that bases the
afterlife on the survival of consciousness. He has little interest in
consciousness compared to his interest in laboratory-induced hallucinations
and altered states. It’s a shame that he doesn’t grasp that the
afterlife is about nothing but consciousness. (I don’t offhand know
anyone who took their bodies with them.) Shermer’s focus on God is
irrelevant to the argument. I give seven versions of life after death
in my book, collected from every religious and philosophical tradition.
He fails to address them or to realize that certain traditions (Platonism,
Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta) do not posit a personal God.
Shermer’s
retelling of the flaws in prayer studies is germane to my argument but
only to a small degree — it by no means forms a sixth of my book,
more like three pages. I must point out, however, that the 2006 Benson-Harvard
refutation of prayer is far from being authoritative. Critics have found
methodological flaws in it, and there are 19 other studies in the field
that arrive at differing results, 11 of them showing that “prayer
works.”
Now to
the holes in Shermer’s own approach. It may be curious that stimulating
some area of the brain can induce out-of-body experiences or the feeling
of sinking into a bed, or that Buddhist monks have low activity in their
Orientation Association Area (OAA), as cited by Shermer. Unfortunately,
these experiments have little bearing on the afterlife. Induced states
are quite feeble as science. I can put a tourniquet on a person’s
arm, depriving the nerves of blood flow, and thereby eliminate the sensation
of touch. This doesn’t prove that quadriplegics with paralyzed limbs
aren’t having a real experience. I can induce happiness by giving
someone a glass of wine and having a pretty girl flirt with him. That
doesn’t prove that happiness without alcohol isn’t real. The point
is that a simulation isn’t the real thing or a credible stand-in for
it.
Shermer
doesn’t adhere to the scientific impartiality he so vocally espouses.
Loading the dice turns out to be fairly standard for him. For example,
he cites the December 2001 issue of Lancet that published a Dutch
study in which, out of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical
death, 12 % reported near-death experiences. (The actual figure was
18 %, by the way.) Immediately he skips on to say that near-death experiences
can be induced in the laboratory. Hold on a minute. Did Shermer miss
the point entirely? The patients in the Dutch study, who suffered massive
heart attacks in the hospital, had their near-death experiences when
there was no measurable activity in the brain, when they were in
fact brain dead. Did he quote the astonishment of Dr. Pin van Lommel,
the Dutch cardiologist who observed this effect? No. Did he go into
the baffling issue of why the vast majority of resuscitated patients
(over 80 %) don’t report near-death experiences? That’s pretty
important if you are claiming that all this near-death hokum can be
induced in the lab with a few electrodes.
Leaving
out the heart of the matter, as Shermer does, smacks of unfairness,
for I rely on this same Dutch study and give all the particulars. Skepticism
is only credible when it’s not being devious. But Shermer often deliberately
misses the point. I cite a University of Virginia study that to date
has found over 2,000 children who vividly remember their past lives.
In many cases they can name places and dates. The facts they relate
have been verified in many cases. Even more astonishing, over 200 of
these children exhibit birthmarks that resemble the way they remember
dying in their most recent lifetime. (One boy, for example, recalled
being killed with a shotgun, and his chest exhibited a scatter-shot
of red birthmarks). Unable to refute this phenomenon or imagine a counter-study,
Shermer fails to mention it. He snipes at the easy targets to bolster
his blanket skepticism. I wish Shermer realized that true skepticism
suspends both belief and disbelief. Being a debunker of curiosity
is something science doesn’t need.
This points
to a broader problem with his arguments: the problem of dueling results.
Let’s say a skeptic offers in evidence a study that asks five children
to describe a previous incarnation, and let’s say that only those
who are coached, either by parents or researchers, come up with such
stories. Has skepticism refuted the original research? Of course it
hasn’t. The first study stands on its own, by sheer force of numbers,
demanding explanation. But by Shermer’s logic if some children don’t
remember a past lifetime, those who do must be categorically dismissed.
By analogy, if I study twenty mothers who smile when shown their baby’s
picture, anyone can find twenty others (suffering from post-partum depression,
for example) who don’t. But that doesn’t prove that mothers don’t
love their babies. The second experiment is an anomaly.
No doubt
Shermer will want to lecture me on the need for replication in science.
Yet this is the very thing he conveniently ignores. Studies on near-death
experiences, out-of-body experiences, memories of past lifetimes, remote
viewing, and so forth — all crucial to the reality of life after death
— have been well replicated. Shermer finds one study that induces
similar states (“similar” being a very tricky word here) and he
walks away satisfied. He already knows a priori that “paranormal”
findings must be false, so why bother to engage them seriously? Extending
our understanding of normal doesn’t interest him.
The focus
of science should be on the survival of consciousness after death, not
on the sideshow of fraud, pseudoscience, religious dogma, and the other
straw men Shermer knocks down. For example, I rely a great deal on the
possibility that mind extends outside the body. This is obviously crucial,
since with the death of the brain, our minds can only survive if they
don’t depend on the brain.
There
are astonishing results in this area. One of the most famous, performed
at the engineering department at Princeton and validated many times
over, asked ordinary people to sit in the room with a random number
generator. As the machine printed out a random series of 0s and 1s,
the subjects were instructed to try to make it produce more zeroes.
They didn’t touch the machine but only willed it to deviate from randomness.
Did they succeed? Absolutely. Did other identical or similar experiments
succeed? Over and over. Does Shermer even touch on this matter, so crucial
to my argument? No.
He displays
an amazing ability to avoid the important stuff. He writes, for example,
“The ultimate fallacy of all such prayer and healing research is theological:
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, He should not need to be reminded
or inveigled that someone needs healing.” This is simplistic theology
at best second-guessing an omniscient and omnipresent God is a tautology
by definition, since such a God, being everywhere and performing all
acts, makes no choices at all. Such a consciousness encompasses good
and bad, disease and health, eoually. (As much as possible I avoid using
a personal pronoun for God, but it’s awkward since “It” doesn’t
work in English. I am referring to a God that is closer to a universal
field than anything else we can imagine.) Does an omnipotent God even
need a creation to begin with? The question is logically unanswerable.
Fortunately, Shermer’s Sunday School God, a patriarch with a white
beard sitting above the clouds, plays no role in my argument — or
in the traditions of Buddhism, Vedanta, etc. mentioned at the outset.
Did my book defend the Judeo-Christian God? Did it argue for a physical
place called heaven (or hell)? Did I praise the joys of the hereafter
in order to denigrate life here on earth? Not for a moment. I specifically
rooted the afterlife in ordinary states of consciousness that no one
doubts, such as dream, imagination, projection, myth, metaphor, meditation,
and other aspects of awareness that give us clues about the workings
of the mind overall. Shermer doesn’t engage those connections, either.
Since
he often lumps me in with other authors whom he disdains and treats
cavalierly, I can only assume that he uses the same slipshod reasoning
on them, too. I certainly know for a fact that Shermer misrepresents
and distorts the groundbreaking work of Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist
who graduated with first-class honors from Cambridge and whose curriculum
vitae (not to mention acumen, curiosity, and intelligence) a gaggle
of skeptics can only envy.
But let’s
concede that Shermer knows he’s preaching to the choir and can afford
all this rhetorical by-your-leave. His review hasn’t actually offered
anything beyond a self-indulgent expansion on his first sentence, borrowed
from a bumper sticker: I DON’T KNOW AND YOU DON’T EITHER. He takes
this to be humorous; in fact it is distressingly dogmatic. Is he so
proud of his skepticism that literally he can tell what someone else
doesn’t know? Without dragging him into philosophical deep waters,
I must point out that dismissing opposing views even before they are
stated seems like fairly spooky solipsism.
In the
end, debating tactics offer entertainment value but are a dubious way
to get at truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the true test of any
scientific or philosophical system is how much it can explain. I believe
that Shermer sincerely agrees with this, despite his often unfair tactics
and his condescension to spirituality in general. The old-fashioned
materialism that underlies his opinions stands in stark contrast to
quantum physics, which long ago opened up an unseen world where linear
cause-and-effect no longer operates, where intuition has made more breakthroughs
than logic. Virtual reality, populated with virtual photons and subatomic
interactions that operate beyond the speed of light — a realm where
events are instantaneously coordinated across billions of light years
— is the foundation of our physical world. Pace Shermer, the
possibility of intelligence and consciousness in the universe is completely
viable; we must arrive at new theories to account for life after death
(among many other mysteries) by opening ourselves to the origins of
our own consciousness. It’s all very well to watch various parts of
the brain light up on an MRI, but to claim that this is true knowledge
of the mind is like putting a stethoscope to the roof of the Astrodome
and claiming that you understand the rules of football.
If Shermer
wants to have a serious debate about the persistence of consciousness
after physical death, I eagerly invite it. But I must in all candor
ask him to look at consciousness first. He hasn’t made the slightest
effort so far, and yet that was the entire subject of my book.
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