Consciousness, Mind & Brain: After the Near Death Experience

Usually the ego of the dying person – whether there has been a near-death experience or not – faints for a while because it is not prepared to handle all the processes of transition consciously. But after a while it reawakens and the passed away person finds him or herself in a realm of consciousness without physical pains and hindrances, and where he of she can pass through walls and instantly move from one place to another wherever his mind wishes him to go. The person takes on a form built of a type of subtle or astral matter and this form usually looks much like the form and appearance he had during physical life. This form is called kāmarūpa, desire form, as mentioned earlier. It corresponds to one's ordinary desires and thoughts which accompany one's daily desires, but not the higher mind. These entities can be knowledgeable and even, during séances, have 'scientific' talks with the physical people in the séance room, and they may know things that they can impossibly have learned before they died. But they have no higher mind. They can not think out abstract new philosophies nor novel and pioneering ideas. Sometimes they know facts unknown to all participants, because all that ever happened has left an impression in their sphere, the lower 'astral light'. Therefore they may manifest a decades old newspaper or even describe instruments once invented or projected about which everyone nowadays has forgotten. But the real inventor of the instrument is beyond where spiritualistic mediums can go, and what is shown during a séance is only a shadow. As said, they can not think out and bring in ideas that further the future development of humankind. These entities – they could be you and me after our death – are the entities that can materialize at séances, speak through a medium, in rarer cases can make themselves visible and hearable under proper circumstances, leave readable script on films or recognizable information on recording tapes, etc. They can, with apparent considerable effort, and usually only partly, materialize their astral bodies into a visible and tangible form. Many participants of séances have seen and actually felt densified astral hands and other body parts of the ghosts. They can also manifest all types of phenomena which belong to the possibilities of their astral realm – which seem astounding to us, but belong to the normal properties of that astral realm. On the same level as they themselves do, they can work with so-called elementals. Elementals have never been human beings. Indeed they are lower in evolution than even minerals. But they posses by nature particular specific powers according to their earthly, fluidic, airy or fiery nature. The minds of the deceased people, though these are only the more earthly aspects of their original mind and can be right-away evil, not caring for any truth or morality, are a tremendous distance ahead of these elementals in evolution and can compel the last by concentration and will power to do all kinds of things, like producing lights or sounds, or lifting and transporting physical objects.

During manifestations under the proper circumstances in séance rooms, the passed away humans seem to be very consciously present with what they are doing. They mention their names and tell details about the afterlife, they show knowledge about our as well as their own world. Most 'entities' only say things like 'I love you' or 'I am alive on this side'. All this does not prove that they themselves are consciously involved in what they are doing. Just as my computer is 'personally' unconscious of what is on its hard disk and what it brings to the screen, the involved entities may act (at least partly) automatically. As said above, all that happened in the past is recorded in the astral light, even after many centuries. But when there is a possibility of question and answer between the living and the dead, there must at least be some conscious awareness from both sides, it seems to me. Sometimes particular 'spooks' take the lead in organizing the séances. They call the other entities which are expert in certain fields of knowledge and are respected by the others. Such 'ghosts' or entities also organize the whole séance and tell the participants on our side of the session what they should do, and what is forbidden, for example filming. They also can, sometimes, to a certain extent, explain why certain things are forbidden. This all has to do with the inherent laws and workings of their astral realm, which are in many respects different from the laws and workings of the physical realm.

Often answers by the entities are picked up from the brain of the questioner or they 'read' from the knowledge of one or more participants of the séance. So how conscious the deceased themselves are is difficult to know.

How intense their consciousness is may depend on their own passion regarding these things. Also we don't know whether they maintain their state of awareness after the séance is over. Personally I think that in most cases their daily awareness during their stay in that astral realm is rather vague and incoherent.

What however is the importance of all this together, is that it proves a continuity of consciousness after physical death and complete deterioration or cremation of the physical body. As said above, death is, from a Theosophic point of view, but a phase of eternal, cyclic life. Death and life are not alternating phenomena, they are only phases of one phenomenon: life-consciousness.

As long as physical, materialistic scientists do not accept the possibility of other laws than the few physical laws they usually work with, their skeptic belief system will find it difficult to accept these otherworldly phenomena.

Spooks also do not live forever though. Ultimately they fade away, and die as well. But consciousness and life themselves do not die. As we experience daily during our life, our consciousness knows many levels. Our consciousness can be focused on physical joys and sufferings. We can have physical addictions to our well-known environments and habits. We can also center our consciousness in our psychological well-being or frustration, in our emotional life. Much of our consciousness is residing in our daily thinking life, either in combination with emotions, or as mind in its own world: we may think in an effort to understand our daily experiences, and this includes scientific and practical philosophical thinking. All this is called, in Theosophical terms, the lower manas or mind. It eagerly associates with personal desires and prejudices, because the lower mind alone is unable to transcend the realm of phenomenal thinking, and unable to distinguish between what is really true and false. Therefore it tends to cling to dogmas and the things we have learned in our worldly education. It is this mind, in combination with desires and acquired mundane knowledge which – after taken upon itself a 'body' or form of astral matter – becomes the spook as described above.

It is funny that these elemental beings, whose own state of evolution is even lower than that of a stone, are able to defy gravity and other 'laws' of the physical world. Still, common science, which limits itself to the strictly physical, does the craziest things to 'find' gravity. For that purpose we spend billions to build a Large Hadron Collider to find the hypothetical Higgs' boson that could explain why physical things have weight. We speculate how ancient Egyptians and prehistoric cultures may have transported stones of immense size and weight over longer distances. Physics regards gravity as one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, next to electromagnetic and weak and strong nuclear forces. With all our sophisticated instruments piercing into space over distances up to events that took place almost fourteen billion ago, and other instruments which we build in mines deep underground to detect one or two possible detections of 'dark matter' particles in a year or not even that, we have not even solved the most obvious power in daily life: gravity – yet, ghosts have! Dark matter is the hypothetical type of matter which has never been reliably perceived and which is supposed to account for much more of the gravity in the universe than 'normal' physical matter. Still, in a séance room, not only today, but throughout the ages, the lowest of low creatures that automatically make use of the laws of the astral realm, can lift or push down very heavy objects and play with them like objects in a space ship. As long as science is not prepared to really investigate gravity in all its aspects, including its presence and working in the astral world, it will never understand this force, nor any of the other of nature's forces. Is it not a clear sign of science's failure that no telescope, microscope or collider has ever seen or recognized an astral being in the whole cosmos it studied? This type of science obstructs the great mass of humanity to gain access to understanding life, love, consciousness and all beautiful, transcendental and spiritual aspects of the Being in which we are living and are a part. Holistically, each of us contains everything in the universe: "So above, so below" goes the Hermetic axiom^[1]

If a simpleminded medium can do things that a thousand scientists together can not do, does it not become a good question to ask whether science is really studying Nature or only the thinnest material crust of it? The matter-only skeptics have brought top scientists to a lower level than many an illiterate farmer or housewife, who intuit what will take science still ages to believe, let alone proof.