Thoughts on my last post and some of the comments it elicited.
Matt Rouge pointed out that deceased communicators can show agency, greet the dying, or announce their recent departure by means of a "crisis apparition." He argues that this is not behavior we would expect from those who are lost. Good point, so instead of saying "lost," I’ll say they are at rest in the bardo. That is, they are experiencing a world that is relatively familiar and expected, so as to ease their transition. It would be greatly disorienting for most people to pass instantly from corporeal life to some amorphous nonphysical state. Perhaps yogic masters are ready for such a transition, having devoted themselves to shedding the multiple illusions of bodily form and egoic identity. But few of us are yogic masters. For the vast majority, a more incremental approach is required. As a venerable saying has it, "nature does not make jumps." Change, in other words, is normally gradual.
In the Gospel of John, the most mystical of the canonical gospels, Jesus is made to say, "My Father's house has many mansions." The word "mansions" has long been recognized as a mistranslation. "Way stations" would be closer to the mark. The afterlife, then, offers many way stations or resting places.
I would say, however, that some spirits really are lost, inasmuch as they haven’t yet found their resting place. Spiritualists have been known to "rescue" these lost souls by guiding them into the light. The 1924 book Thirty Years Among the Dead, by Dr. Carl Wickland, provides many seemingly persuasive case histories of such spirits, who were found to be obsessing on psychiatric patients and causing or aggravating their mental problems.
Amos Oliver Doyle says that postmortem environments never feature mythical creatures like unicorns. Kathleen agrees that if these environments were hallucinatory, "someone would have met a hobbit." Matt says the absence of mythical creatures shows that NDEs are not "random dreams."
I agree that we are not talking about random dreams. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there is no dreamlike component to NDEs and ADCs. If we assume that these environments are consensus realities generated by the subconscious memories, beliefs, and expectations of a large number of people, then we would expect them to have a certain plausibility and predictability. We aren’t positing a private, solipsistic hallucination or dream in which anything goes. We’re imagining a shared reality distilled from overlapping elements of many different minds, and quite possibly dependent on some other informational substructure as well.
The question then would be: Should we expect to see unicorns and hobbits in such a consensus reality? Do very many people believe in such things (deeply, on a gut level) or expect to encounter them? Would a plane of existence coalesce around such imagery, or are these creatures too idiosyncratic and marginal to be objectified by a wide range of minds acting together?
Kevin Williams says that Howard Storm described his tormentors as malicious human souls, not demons, and adds that any NDE that reports demons must be false. He may be right about Storm, although the description sounds more like "analytic overlay" (post hoc theorizing) than direct experience. But I wouldn’t rule out the legitimacy of NDEs and ADCs that report demons. Unlike unicorns and hobbits, demons are still widely accepted at a gut level by millions of people, making it entirely possible that thought-forms of demons could be objectified. After all, our hypothesis is that what a large number of people believe deep down is what will manifest in their little corner of the afterlife.
A commenter identified as N/A says that even if the bardo is unreal, it doesn’t follow that the self is unreal. Here I think everything depends on the meaning of "self." If we mean the ego structure tied to particular memories and beliefs, I would say this structure is artificial and, to a degree, unreal. It is a construct formed of perceptions and interpretations grounded in the space-time universe. If the universe is not what it appears to be – if it is reducible to information and consciousness – then the ego-self is not an irreducible primary, but a secondary, derivative, and ultimately artificial phenomenon.
On the other hand, if by self we mean the higher self, pure awareness, the I-thought … then it is almost certainly true that this Self is real. But it is not the ego or the personality. It is something more like unfiltered, wordless, all-illuminating perception, a rarefied state of mind attained in experiences of "cosmic consciousness" or Buddhist enlightenment or a kundalini awakening. Perhaps the closest most of us will get to it in this life is the occasional sense of a "witness" who observes our behavior in a nonjudgmental, entirely objective manner. The witness is known to appear in moments of extreme stress, when we observe ourselves from an outsider's perspective (either literally or metaphorically).
My guess is that the witness, the transcendent luminosity of enlightenment, the NDEr's Being of Light, and the Higher Self are all one and the same, and that this pure objectivity is loosely analogous to the focused beam of light that projects through a holographic plate, creating an image in space, or the laser beam that reads the information encoded in a compact disk and renders microscopic indentations into graphics and text.
Whether the Higher Self is ultimately indistinguishable from God (if there is a God), and whether the informational substrate is part of the Mind of God (meaning that everything that exists is Mind observing itself), are questions I can’t even begin to address.
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