Blog Chapter 8

In his book, “Consciousness Beyond Life” Pim van Lommel, M.D. a Dutch Cardiologist and physics researcher, explores the relationship between spirituality and quantum mechanics.  He posits that reported experiences of many of the hundred thousand survivors of near-death experience worldwide include thought-induced instantaneous visits to remote locales, for example and other aspects of NDE’s that I’ll go into a little later.

First, I’d like to discuss spirituality from a personal viewpoint.  My studies of many books on this subject, some of which are included in the accompanying list to this and preceding blogs, have convinced me that individual consciousness continues after our bodies cease functioning.

I’m not straying from this subject matter, but I want to introduce my relationship with two of my favorite nephews to illustrate the wide disagreement prevalent today on the subject of life after death.  One of my favorite nephews is a tenured PhD professor at a prestigious Eastern university.  He teaches courses on the history of religion.  The practice at his college is to open all of the curricula as electives after a few required courses in the freshman year.  His student body for his courses, as I write this, numbers in the high seventies.  I am very proud of the positive influence my nephew is having on young minds.

Another of my favorite nephews lives in retirement in a nearby state.  I used to baby-sit him when my sister and her husband needed a break from childcare.  He is extremely bright.  After college he worked as a project manager for a large aerospace company.  He is an astute investor and this ability enabled him to leave work at 49 years of age to focus on his passion for aviation.  He owns two aircraft, has a multi-engine pilot’s license and also pilots his aging friend’s helicopter.  His electrical knowledge makes him the go-to person when any of his pilot friends has an issue with an electrical device.  He also is a confirmed atheist.  I have sent him numerous books that, to me, prove the existence of life after death.  He reads the books because of our relationship but steadfastly believes I am on the wrong path. When I try to convince him that NDE’s are proof positive of the existence of postmortem consciousness, for example, he counters with the opinion that oxygen deprivation or temporary insanity are the root causes of the NDE anomaly.  He helps keep me grounded about the doubtful potential for meaningful change in today’s materialistic world.

Back to Dr. van Lommel:  He likens human consciousness to the functioning of a television set, specifically, of a camera that records the images coming from the electromagnetic waves being beamed to us from the universe and a receiver that translates those images into pictures and/or words for our reception, comprehension and retention.  I would like to suggest an additional similarity that was not widely available at the time (2010) when Dr. Lommel’s book was published: “The Cloud”, that electronic repository of encoded internet intelligence available to us today.  The Cloud is eerily similar to the Akashic record reportedly containing all knowledge from the beginning of time and available as a library for residents of the spirit world.  In other words, Dr. van Lommel is suggesting that the human brain is not the source of the experiential portion of human consciousness, (which also includes awareness and thoughts and feelings).  His belief is that the reported experiences of survivors of NDE’s shows that things like foreknowledge and enhanced memory can only come from elsewhere.  His bow to the sensitivity of materialistic convictions of his peers in the scientific community limits his use of the terms “spirituality or spirit world”.  He substitutes the term “nonlocal or non-locally” in most of his book but he comes clean in a few places about what that really means in expressing his understanding of spiritual reality.

I haven’t touched on quantum mechanics or quantum theory yet in the context of spirituality, and in this regard I have to rely heavily on Dr. van Lommel’s writing on this concept because much of quantum theory still is a mystery to me.

He refers to life reviews experienced by many NDErs and says that during these reviews every single event of one’s past life can be relived in exact detail. Everything is connected to everything else, a connection similar to what is called entanglement in quantum physics.  He adds that NDErs report that during their experiences they can be any place in their past as soon as that thought enters their mind.  In quantum physics this timeless and placeless interconnectedness is called nonlocality.  Complementarity, another quantum term, refers to the close relationship existing between waves and particles.

According to van Lommel, “quantum physics turned the scientific conception of our natural manifest world upside down”. The basic problem is that sub-atomic particles can appear as either waves or particles depending on how they are observed. Thus, the quantum observation requirement means that the objectivity of Newtonian physics becomes subjectivity (to observation) according to some quantum researchers. This view is not universal among quantum researchers and wider acceptance awaits additional research.

The above stated possibility brings up the issue of human consciousness. Does it mean we are creating our own reality?  Does the proverbial tree fall in the forest when no one is watching?  Albert Einstein backed away from this interpretation of “observation”, saying, “God does not play dice”.  He also observed that he hoped the moon retained its position in the sky even when he looked away.  In fact, Einstein searched for another explanation for quantum functions almost to the end of his life.  Since Einstein’s time, even if quantum theory is not fully agreed upon, its applicability has resulted in the development of MRI’s in medicine, lasers, miniaturized computer chips and GPS, just to mention a few.

Dr. van Lommel proposed that the experience of an NDE, when  all parts of the brain are essentially dead from lack of oxygen due to cardiac arrest, the brain therefore cannot be the source of our consciousness.   It then follows the source could be transcendent.  Might it even be what we call Divinity?

Taking a great leap forward in our imagination, when we combine the widespread anecdotal reports of NDErs with our beginning assumptions about the genuine source of human consciousness are we able to continue to deny the pervasive influence of Divinity in our daily lives and even in the eternal duration of that consciousness?