Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [106]
It’s like saying that if an eight-year-old can pitch in Little League, then he can start for the Red Sox. An oxygen-deprived brain blurts out idiosyncratic hallucinations and leaves the survivor confused. But near-death experiencers tell coherent narratives and describe elaborate conversations with dead relatives, beings of light, or religious figures like Jesus. And even if those “memories” are not real accounts of actually meeting dead relatives in heaven but only a reconstruction from past events, that complex thought could not be formed while a person has only brain-stem activity or partial consciousness. Besides, the oxygen-deprivation argument cannot explain cases in which oxygen levels are normal upon death, as in a car accident.
Still, as I sat back and reflected on all these arguments, it seemed to me that the near-death-experience team has hit a couple of singles but not a home run. It is not that their arguments are unreasonable. It is that they are, at this point, speculation. How to directly test these experiences in, say, a brain scanner, is also problematic. Researchers can’t really say, Mrs. Brown, you don’t have long now, may we just slide you into this MRI tube for the betterment of science? Even if you could capture the experience in a neurological snapshot, what would that tell us? That various parts of the brain light up while Mrs. Brown is subjectively experiencing a near-death experience? We still would not know if the brain is causing the perception of something that is not happening, or leaving a record of something that is.
Bruce Greyson supplied what seemed to me the most honest and ultimately satisfying solution to this conundrum. I asked him if these near-death experiences point to a reality beyond our physical reality.
“There is absolutely no scientific evidence to make a compelling case one way or the other,” he said. But after researching the edges of death for thirty years, he believes the evidence in favor of unseen reality is “impressive.”
“We could be misinterpreting things, overemphasizing certain things. I would not be surprised at all if I’m wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think the evidence strongly points in the direction of there being more than just this material world.”
In thinking about two adjacent, perhaps overlapping worlds, I recalled something Pam Kircher told me at the Houston conference. Kircher is a physician at M. D. Anderson who specializes in helping patients at the end of their lives.Very ill patients train their senses on two different audiences, like an emcee who faces the audience on one side of the curtain, but occasionally pops his head through the curtain to see if the actors are ready. Kircher said when she started visiting dying patients, she noticed that they routinely talked with deceased relatives, the familiar “Aunt Sally,” as it were. At first, she thought they were hallucinating, so she constructed a test.
“I would interrupt the conversation with Aunt Sally,” she said. “I’d ask them their pain measurement on a scale of one to ten, or ask them what they had for breakfast. And they could tell me. They were polite; they would stop the conversation with Aunt Sally and tell me very logical answers to those things, and then go back and talk to Aunt Sally, who of course was much more interesting than I was.”
A person who is hallucinating cannot be pulled back to reality, Kircher explained. “They’re gone. They are not going to tell you what their pain level is. They’re in another stage of reality. But my patients could be pulled back.”
They have glimpsed behind the curtain to the stage she cannot see.
Dying in a Brain Scanner, Sort Of
The Holy Grail for near-death researchers is a physical marker, like a stamp in a passport