Mea Maxima Culpa

by Marco M. Pardi

In analyzing the many hundreds of Near Death Experience reports, particularly those with no veridical evidence such as verifiable knowledge gained which could not have been gained otherwise, one quickly recognizes a problem: Beyond the currently acknowledged possibility that a priori exposure to the commonly accepted sequence of NDE events may have set the stage for the individual’s drama, there is the deeper problem of discovering and analyzing intrusive cultural themes, mores, and folkways. Included in these culturally transmitted elements would be themes interpreted by some as identifiably religious in nature; there is a given here that, particularly among “People of the Book” (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) there are themes which exist apart from the holder. That is, they may be referenced in a preserved body such as a book or an art form even in the absence of any believers of these themes. To the extent that Hinduism and Buddhism may be classed as moralistic philosophies (by scholars) and religions (by some common believers), the literature and art forms of these may also be included.

If one accepts a Near Death Experience report, whatever its manifest form, as something other than or beyond the mere electro-chemical degeneration of the organic brain then one is, de facto, accepting the presumption that the mind has, independent of the brain, moved to a different domain, changed to a different dimension, or in the vernacular of the “New Age”, changed to a different frequency (frequency and dimension are entangled in quantum mechanics).

Yet, the person returning from this experience usually has a narrative which is inherently troubling, no matter how glorious the content might be. First, the individual is typically able to say “I” when describing the person to whom the experience occurred. That is, self concept, albeit with the frequently reported enhanced sensory and conceptual awareness, remained intact and, in cases of claimed self history examination (“life review”), actually became broader and deeper while even more intensely focused on “I”.

The problem of “I”, in this context, may be approached in several ways. The Mystic, especially a Buddhist mystic, would say I is a habit, perhaps even an addiction. It is a return to, or a clinging to a sense of predictable internal stability and continuous identity through external changes over time; a “stable and predictable personality”, which, according to mystics and to information theorists is utterly illusionary. The defender of the I, however, would counter with the assertion that someone must be doing the returning or the clinging, someone must “have” the addiction. And, they must have it in a continuously stable form over time or there would be no chronic coherence to what others would perceive as a recognizable person. Mental health practitioners would classify this person as suffering from Korsakov’s psychosis (syndrome); immediate and cyclic amnesia unaccompanied by dementia.

Interestingly, this last point raises the question of the degree to which the ongoing I is a social contract. Perhaps I remain stable over time because my social surroundings are stable and I conform myself to them. They, in turn, remain stable because I, as part of their affective social environment, remain stable to them. Researchers in various fields have long noted that the I is the first casualty of solitary confinement, sometimes permanently so as even the internal constructions we have made of “other people”, those people with whom we converse “in our head” fade undeniably into the mirror which reflects only us. Remove the external, social matrix and the construction called I disintegrates.

No matter how dramatic the death, with the possible exception of being vaporized in a nuclear explosion, death is a process; it is not an on – off proposition. The common narrative of the Near Death Experience suggests that, as this dying process unfolds, the social/personal matrix continues, albeit in modified form. Here then is the crux of the problem. If the mind has separated from the functions of the brain, as would be suggested by those cases wherein monitored brain function is demonstrably terminated, what carries the social/personal matrix into the reported other state – the domain, dimension, or frequency in which the NDE is being experienced? How can a “person” be a self coherent and self knowing entity while existing in the proposed other form? Even more troubling, to what extent does the particular enculturation of the person remain intact, and for how long?

Perhaps a clue may be found in one of the most common claims by people who report near death experiences: “It was simply beyond any words I could use to describe it.” It was ineffable. Unfazed, however, by their own pronouncements, many people have gone on to attempt a descriptive narrative anyway.

It is probably fair to say that most people have had little exposure to the fields of psycho-linguistics and information theory. Nonetheless, they are enculturated into a matrix of Self and Other definition and distinction; in order to be any-thing, one must be some-thing. Being some-thing is exclusionary of being other-things. Included in this process is the enrollment into a social contract we call language. And, watching for responsive cues from our social environments, we learn over time to fine tune and adjust our usage of this contract device in order to communicate. As Noam Chomsky can show us, whether we did actually communicate is highly debatable. But, it generally seems so to us on an everyday basis.

The acquisition of language is, subtly, the acquisition of culturally agreed upon meaning domains; we learn to circumscribe the Gestalt of experience into discreetly manageable packets provided by our cultural lexicon, our cultural vocabulary. Whether I actually know what something is is generally unimportant so long as I can get by with just calling it a “thing”. The same general convenience often applies when quantifying and/or qualifying other packets, such as “good”, “evil”, “love”, “beautiful”, “shameful”, ad infinitum. People traffic in this contract on a “You know” basis. Know what I mean?

But while this process of culturally guided circumscription allows us to exchange information packets on a superficial level, it also leads us into the temptation of thinking that the packets are inherently real; it seduces us into the illusory “real world” of this versus that, now versus then, and here versus there. Examples of the actually delusional level of this phenomenon appear in the usage of such terms as “afterlife”, particularly when coupled in a linear juncture with an “eternal soul” which presumably takes the baton toward the ever receding horizon. Eternity, most would agree, is endless. Since a beginning is an end seen backwards, there must have been no beginning to something which is endless. Since a linear construct has length, albeit out of sight at both “ends”, it must have width in order to distinguish its length. Yet, width – as is so with depth, has limits; it has ends. Eternity being endless, can have no length, width, or depth. Nor, obviously, can our fourth dimension – Time, be applied to eternity. Time, too, is an illusion. As Albert Einstein said, “Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

How is it, then, that the “I” in the NDE narrative stands distinctly before the “them” – deceased relatives, or “wise” figures in culturally appropriate robes, or the Being of Light, and on and on?  If being immortal is being unconstrained by dimensionality, then how is the experiencer standing over here while the others are standing over there, albeit without a sense of time passing?

Another problem inherent in many, but not all near death experience narratives is the claim that one realized the effects of one’s actions on others during life, felt the joys and pains of those others (including non-human animals and, presumably plants), and felt guilt and remorse while being brought to a realization that was too late in coming.

If there is still a coherently organized entity recognizable as Isaac Newton, this entity must be flapping its robes and pitching apples high into the ethereal trees (pay back time). The concept of cause and effect is manifestly the heart of Newton’s “Clockwork Universe”.  Shades of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Peter Pan’s chronometrically challenged crocodile, and Sesame Street’s The Count.

For the past 90 years the world of quantum mechanics has shown us that Newtonian mechanics are appropriate only on a gross, macro level. We now know, on an academic level, that the solid chair we sit in while reading this is not really solid at all; the sub-atomic particles of which it is composed are further apart, relative to their size, than the stars in the visible universe. But wait, there’s more.

We now understand, if understanding is the appropriate concept, that what we have thought of as ultimately irreducible particles are not really small “things”. If anything, they appear to be states. Furthermore, exhaustive experimentation continues to show that certain “particles”, separated from one another at variously extreme distances (the width of your finger would be staggeringly far in the world of these particles) instantaneously match their states to each other at speeds faster than the speed of light when the charge of one is changed. Einstein referred to this, rather morosely, as “spooky action at a distance.”

The salient point here is that we, on our macro level, see “cause and effect” as separated in being, separated in place, and separated in time because we are living in a communal, macro dream; we are dreaming that the dimensions we are physically constructing as we inhabit them are actually and exclusively real. We are indeed “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps”, or building our prison from within, unmindful of the Every Dimensional Oneness of which each of us is part and each of us is all. Localizing the cause for anything into the macro-globule that can be identified as me is an act of stupendous arrogance. It is, in fact, exactly what could be expected from the entrapment/development we call enculturation. Being raised from a shitting, slobbering bundle of cells on the floor to a cooperating participant in the social contract means buying into the collective dream. The success of that collective dream depends on me buying into the rules for that collective dream. And it is the rules of that dream that are somehow being carried forward into the new or different form of existence described in the near death narratives.

Another identifiably cultural element which is being carried forward is the desire for the retention of ego, the desire to keep on being singularly and identifiably me. Throughout the recorded history of many cultures, particularly in the West, there has been a plethora of hero figures who, through the nature of their lives and deaths, have archetypically provided Mankind – or the selected people, with the assurance of eternal life. Jesus was among the latest and best known.

In fact, misunderstanding of the nature of “Nirvana” (Sanskrit: nir – beyond, vana -wind) as a state of complete ego loss is the most cited Western objection to Eastern philosophies. Western “cherry pickers”, like “cafeteria Catholics”, pick out those Eastern elements that they mistakenly find most appealing. Among these is the idea of personal reincarnation. While the Bardo Thodol, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” is a sequenced guide to the rejection of transitional stages in which entrapment could mean reincarnation, Westerners are often thrilled at the prospect, flocking to “therapists” who claim to be able to uncover their “past lives” with the implication that there are more to come.

What is being totally missed by these self lovers is the message that the personal ego is a restrictive shell; once having seen through the shell the individual ego becomes EGO, the Allness. No loss of ego is involved. Instead, the personal ego is seen in its natural state; a manifestation but still a part of EGO. It is greater, not lost.

Thus, we could say that the overwhelming Western interest in near death experiences is largely a culturally driven desire for reassurance that the ego remains distinctly intact among other distinctly intact egos. The suggestion, as Mystics the world over have said – often at their peril, that the experiences reported by “returnees” were only preliminary, culturally burdened orientations to a much more expansive reality does not sit well with people who love themselves too much.