All of Robert McLuhan's new book Randi's Prize is well worth reading, but I was particularly struck by his thoughts on pages 262 through 266, in which he talks about the importance of actually listening to the subjective impressions of near-death experiencers.
Here are some excerpts.
[A] reluctance to listen continues to be characteristic of professional sceptics. Their defensive posture leads them to talk about claims as opposed to experiences, too preoccupied by the challenge to their imaginations to think at all closely about what is actually being said. From their perspective, people who report paranormal-seeming incidents are creating problems, if not actually setting out to cause mischief, and this point of view is bound to create a distortion in their readers' minds. Their insistence that these are mere anecdotes — and for that reason unscientific, undeserving of serious attention — means they lack exposure to first-hand testimony. Blackmore's Dying to Live, rather tellingly, is sparsely illustrated with direct speech: a comparatively bland extract from an individual's reported experience at the beginning is followed here and there by a few short quotes, none of which begin to convey the intensity of the experience as it appears elsewhere.
By contrast near-death experience researchers' studies are laced with copious quotations from individuals who are only too happy to describe something they may have kept locked up for years. This brings the phenomenon alive for the reader; it's more than just a concept, an idea. There's a palpable sense of awe in the first-hand accounts, of euphoria, exultation and mystery….
McLuhan then presents a few random excerpts from Kenneth Ring's book Heading Toward Omega.
… if you took the one thousand best things that ever happened to you in your life and multiplied by a million, maybe you could get close to this feeling…
… this wonderful, wonderful feeling of this light…
There was the warmest, most wonderful love. Love all around me… I felt light-good-happy-joy-at-ease.
I can't begin to describe in human terms the feeling I had at what I saw. It was a giant infinite world of calm, and love, and energy and beauty.
As I absorbed the energy, I sensed what I can only describe as bliss. That is such a little word, but the feeling was dynamic, rolling, magnificent, expanding, ecstatic — Bliss.
McLuhan continues:
How many people can say that anything — anything — they have experienced in this world matches up to these descriptions? My point is that, without such live comments, readers may be left with the impression that what people experience can be described as 'euphoria' or 'a tremendous sense of well-being', a linguistic down-sizing which makes it comparable to the effects of a stiff whiskey or a good workout at the gym. It's then all the easier for a sceptic to argue that it's explicable in neuroscientific terms, a release of endorphins perhaps….
It's remarkable enough that a person's inner consciousness seems to persist when all life functions have apparently ceased, but there's more: the individual also experiences a mega-powerful attack of conscience [in the life review]….
Describing the stage when they are interacting with the 'light', they don't say they gained a sudden insight into how other people felt; they say they experienced the other person's feelings — as if they were their own. A woman sees the younger sister she bullied when she was young, and for the first time feels what the little girl felt, understanding the full extent of her anguish. A hit-man becomes aware of families of the people he murdered and is swamped by their feelings of devastation. The feedback is physical as well: a truck driver who once beat up a pedestrian in a fit of road rage feels his own fist crashing into his own face.
[quoting the truck driver:] And I felt the indignation, the rage, the embarrassment, the frustration, the physical pain. I felt my teeth going through my lower lip — in other words, I was in that man's eyes. I was in that man's body. I experienced everything of that into relationship between [myself] and that man that day.
These are powerful images, and they are too widely reported in the research material to be dismissed as spurious; they form a clear pattern. Here too, I found it hard to resist the idea that the process is in some way intended to impact on attitudes and behaviour: people who experience it are often profoundly changed and they go through personal and professional upheavals as a result. How do we account for such a thing? I'd love to hear a scientific theory that could explain how one shares other people's feelings, not in the conventional way of being able to sense them, or name or describe them, but to experience them exactly as if they were their own, and moreover at a time when all life functions appear to have ceased. I don't mean some formula couldn't be worked out, but it's yet one more feature to load onto a framework already tottering under the burden of sceptical speculation.
In reading this, I was reminded of Dr. Gerald Woerlee's recent review of Pim Van Lommel's book Consciousness Beyond Life. As a firm skeptic, Woerlee was unimpressed with Lommel's evidence for life after death. He was particularly unenthusiastic about Chapter 10, writing:
What a strange interlude is all that can be said about this chapter. Sandwiched, seemingly at random between other heavy and difficult "scientifically" oriented chapters, we have a chapter which is no more than the very personal and emotionally laden extensive account of the NDE undergone by Mrs Monique Hennequin. Pim van Lommel gives no analysis. The account is placed there as is – nothing else. It is an emotional interlude between difficult chapters which many of the less well educated readers might find boring or too difficult.
This arrangement puzzled me, until I related it to the format of the public lectures given by Pim van Lommel, as well as his television appearances. These public and television appearance nearly always include a person who tells of their NDE. Usually it is a well-spoken woman, who is able to express the content of her NDE in terms everyone can understand, as well as fully convey the emotional impact this NDE had on her life. This is something to which most of the audience can relate. Most people ignore much of the scientific talk, but the public testimony really is an effective instrument binding the audience to the speaker regardless of what is said. Jeffrey Long used the same technique during his television appearances to promote his book "Evidence for the Afterlife". Oprah Winfrey and "Dr. Phil" also use this same presentation technique to very good effect in their popular television shows.
He concludes:
"Consciousness Beyond Life" is no more than a book written in the form of the popular "Oprah Winfrey style" television shows!
This is a pretty good illustration of the difference between the skeptical approach and the approach taken by more sympathetic researchers. To the latter, the profound emotional meaning of the NDE is key to understanding and appreciating the phenomenon. To the former, on the other hand, the patient's emotional response is merely an annoying, unscientific distraction.