1
Where Are You?
When I stand before you, talking to you, am I talking to
the skin covering your face? Humans shed and re-grow outer skin cells about
every 27 days, making almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime. Your skin is just
a disposable covering and by the time I finish saying a sentence to you, some
of it is gone.
Each day about 50 billion cells in the body are
replaced, resulting in a new body each year. The body is just temporary. It
can't be who you are. Every second, 500,000 of your body
cells die and are replaced, so we'll have to keep this conversation short—much
of you will be gone before we finish!
Who am I talking to when I speak to you? It's
certainly not your brain. That's just a collection of fat and protein made of
85% water squeezed into the dark enclosure of your skull. Around 50,000 to
100,000 brain cells die each day, so if some of them had today's messages, no
wonder you keep losing track of what your spouse tells you.
You are not your body. The body changes constantly.
The body you had at age 10 when you could run like a rabbit was a different
body than you have at age 70 when you shuffle like a turtle, and the molecules
in it have been replaced 60 times! Last year's body is different from this
year's body. The body is just flesh and bone, made of the same atoms as a bowl
of warm Irish stew. That's not you.
So, when you talk to me, you'll insist you're not
talking to any part of my body, or even the tofu-like mush inside my skull.
You're talking to me. You know
implicitly that you and I are above and aside from the skin and the brain.
You aren’t the body. You’re the mind that is greater
than the body, and that means you’re greater than the brain. So if your mind
is greater than the brain, where are you? This chapter explains where.
We’ll start by correcting a common misconception. You
likely have the belief that science knows your mind is in the three to five pounds
of fat and protein compressed inside your skull. That’s what you were taught
in school.
But the fact is that neuroscience can’t explain how
people have a conscious experience, where the mind is, what memories are, or
where memories are stored. That's pretty remarkable considering that the brain
has been carefully mapped using CTs, MRIs, PETs, and EEGs to find out which
parts of the brain are active when a person is performing activities. In spite
of all the brain mapping that’s been done, they can’t locate the mind and they
can’t find memories.
Many neuroscientists are also saying that even if
someone could locate mind and memories in the brain, that still wouldn't
explain who has the conscious thought. In other words, yes there's a thought,
but who is thinking? Who requested the thought? Yes, the brain shows activity
when there's a thought, but what caused the brain to show activity? How does a
human being have a conscious experience?
That’s known as the "problem of consciousness"
or the "hard problem," and all neuroscientists acknowledge it. They
can’t find a mind or memories in the brain and they don't know how the brain
creates the mind. Statements by a sampling of neuroscientists illustrating this
problem follow. Here and elsewhere in this book, cited writers sometimes use
"consciousness" to refer to the mind. I usually use "mind"
because that is the common term we all use to refer to the inner part of us
that thinks, feels, and decides to act.
Stephan Patt of the Institute of Pathology at Friedrich
Schiller University in Germany summarized the research on the mind and the
brain:
Nevertheless all these experiments and descriptions of brain
activation processes do not explain how neural activity is the cause for
consciousness. Likewise, all attempts which have been undertaken to specify the
neurological mechanisms of consciousness in terms of neurobiological,
information processing and even social theories of consciousness have failed to
prove this causal relationship.1
Sir John Maddox, former editor-in-chief of the
renowned journal Nature, summed up our knowledge of consciousness in the
December 1999 issue of Scientific American:
Nobody understands how decisions are made or how imagination
is set free. What consciousness consists of, or how it should be defined, is
equally puzzling. Despite the marvelous success of neuroscience in the past
century, we seem as far from understanding cognitive processes as we were a
century ago.2
Stuart Hameroff, MD, a renowned researcher in
neuroscience in the Department of Anesthesiology, Arizona Health Sciences Center,
wrote,
Consciousness defines our existence and reality. But how
does the brain generate thoughts and feelings? Most explanations portray the
brain as a computer, with nerve cells ("neurons") and their synaptic
connections acting as simple switches, or "bits" which interact in
complex ways. In this view consciousness is said to "emerge" as a
novel property of complex interactions among neurons, as hurricanes and candle
flames emerge from complex interactions among gas and dust molecules. However
this approach fails to explain why we have feelings and awareness, an "inner
life." So we don't know how the brain produces consciousness.3
David Presti, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology, University
of California-Berkeley, wrote that
Despite the awesome achievements of 20th-century
neuroscience in increasing our knowledge about the workings of the human brain,
little progress has been made in the scientific understanding of mental
phenomena.4
David J. Chalmers, Ph.D., Director of
the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, wrote in Scientific
American,
Consciousness, the subjective experience of an inner self,
could be a phenomenon forever beyond the reach of neuroscience. Even a detailed
knowledge of the brain's workings and the neural correlates of consciousness
may fail to explain how or why human beings have self-aware minds.5
Other researchers report that efforts to find the
locations of memories in the brain have proven to be unsuccessful. Karl Lashley,
a renowned psychologist and researcher in the field of learning and memory,
failed during his entire career to find the location of memory in the brain.
It prompted him to write, "Memory ought to be impossible, yet it
happens." 6
Brian Boycott, a biologist specializing in the study
of memory, summarized the inability to find memory in any specific location in
the brain: "Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular
in the brain."7
Wilder Penfield was able to
stimulate the brain to produce small segments of memories,8 and
neurosurgeons at the Toronto Western Hospital using electrodes have stimulated the brain to recall a
scene from decades before in the patient's memory.9 However,
where the memories are stored, how the mind can intend to recall a memory, and
how memories are archived are not known.
Science simply doesn’t know how
the mind is produced or where it’s located, even though the brain has been carefully
studied and mapped. That has led to science starting to look elsewhere for the
mind.
Many Scientists Are Suggesting Your Mind Is Not in Your
Brain
Because scientists can’t find the mind in the brain,
many are beginning to suggest that the mind isn’t in the brain at all.
Dr. Sam Parnia, a physician from Southampton General Hospital
in England, has been studying near-death experiences among his patients. The
results were published in the February 2001 issue of the journal Resuscitation
and presented to a gathering of scientists at the California Institute of
Technology in June 2001. Following is a segment of an interview he gave to the
Reuters news service:
"The brain function these [near-death]
patients were found to have while unconscious is commonly believed to be
incapable of sustaining lucid thought processes or allowing lasting memories to
form," Parnia said—pointing to the fact that nobody fully grasps how the
brain generates thoughts.
"The brain itself is made up
of cells, like all the body's organs, and is not really capable of producing
the subjective phenomenon of thought that people have," he said."10
Simon Berkovich, Professor of Engineering and Applied
Science in the Department of Computer Science of the George Washington wrote,
The brain is merely a transmitter and receiver of
information, but not the main place for storage or processing of information
(i.e., memories)."11
Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., Freudian psychoanalyst, assistant
professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Chief
of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, summarized
his conclusion after his lifelong study of the mind and the brain:
My first idea was that it [consciousness] has to be
hard-wired in the brain. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how
something like that is possible. Today, I came to the conclusion that it is not
coming from the brain. In that sense, it supports what Aldous
Huxley believed after he had some powerful psychedelic experiences
and was trying to link them to the brain. He came to the conclusion that maybe
the brain acts as a kind of reducing valve that actually protects us from too
much cosmic input. . . . I don't think you can locate the source
of consciousness. I am quite sure it is not in the brain―not inside of
the skull. . . . It actually, according to my experience, would
lie beyond time and space, so it is not localizable. You actually come to the
source of consciousness when you dissolve any categories that imply separation,
individuality, time, space and so on. You just experience it as a presence.12
The same conclusion was reached independently by other
brain specialists. Sir John Eccles, internationally recognized brain
researcher whose work has had a major influence on brain research, concluded
. . . that the mind is a separate entity from the brain, and
that mental processes cannot be reduced to neurochemical brain processes, but
on the contrary direct them. And . . . a mind may conceivably exist without a
brain.13
Sir Cyril Burt, educational psychologist renowned for
his studies on the effects of heredity on intelligence, wrote in his book, The
Gifted Child,
The brain is not an organ that generates consciousness, but
rather an instrument evolved to transmit and limit the processes of consciousness
and of conscious attention so as to restrict them to those aspects of the
material environment which at any moment are crucial for the terrestrial
success of the individual. In that case such phenomena as telepathy and
clairvoyance would be merely instances in which some of the limitations were
removed. 14
Another brain specialist,
Wilder Penfield, was a ground-breaking neuroscientist and physician. While
performing surgery on patients, he noticed that stimulating a part of the brain
cortex could cause the patient to recall a memory. However, while recalling
the memory, the person’s conscious awareness was still active, aside from the
memory, and no stimulation of any part of the brain could cause any of the
actions we associate with the mind: beliefs, problem solving, decisions, or any
of the other activities that happen when a person is "thinking." The
mind activities went on even when he was stimulating the brain cortex, and were
completely unaffected by any stimulation he applied to the brain.
He could stimulate small segments of memories, but he
couldn’t locate the mind inside the brain.
He summed up the conclusions he formed on the basis
of these experiments:
. . . none of the actions that we
attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic
discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind
does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a
convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activation.
The mind, he writes, "makes its impact on the
brain" but isn’t in the brain.15
Neuroscientists can’t tell us how we have a conscious
experience, where the mind is. Some scientists have come to the conclusion
that perhaps the mind isn't in the brain at all.
That’s why we know we’re not speaking to the body
when we speak to one another, and why we know the mind is greater than and
aside from the body. The remainder of this chapter contains evidence
demonstrating that the scientists coming to that conclusion are correct: your
mind is not inside your brain.
Pim van Lommel is a cardiologist and author of an
article in the medical journal, The Lancet (December 2001). His
conclusions were summarized by Tim Touber:
Van Lommel contends that the brain does not produce
consciousness or store memories. He points out that American computer science
expert Simon Berkovich and Dutch brain researcher Herms Romijn, working
independently of one another, came to the same conclusion: that it is
impossible for the brain to store everything you think and experience in your
life. This would require a processing speed of 1024 bits per second. Simply
watching an hour of television would already be too much for our brains. "If
you want to store that amount of information—along with the associative
thoughts produced—your brain would be pretty much full," Van Lommel says. "Anatomically
and functionally, it is simply impossible for the brain to have this level of
speed."16
While small segments or
individual scenes of memories can be re-experienced when the brain is
stimulated,17,18 where those memories
are stored is not known, and it seems apparent that the brain doesn't have the
capacity to hold them. The stimulation brings segments of memories and scenes
to mind, but their source is a mystery to neuroscientists.
Not only does the brain not have the capacity to hold
the memories, but many brain cells die and are replaced every second of our
lives. For the memories to remain over 50 or 60 years, the brain cells would
have to remain the same ones that were there when the memories were created, but
that doesn’t happen since they’re replaced by new brain cells regularly. Dean
Radin, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, professor at Sonoma
State University, and Distinguished Consulting Faculty member at Saybrook Graduate
School and Research Center, explains this further indication that memories
couldn’t remain stored in the brain:
Consider a profound mystery in biology that is not accounted
for by classical assumptions: The average neuron consists of about 80 percent
water and about 100,000 molecules. The brain contains about 10 billion cells,
hence about 1015 molecules. Each nerve cell in the brain receives
an average of 10,000 connections from other brain cells, and the molecules
within each cell are renewed about 10,000 times in a lifetime. We lose about
1,000 cells a day, so the total brain cell population is decimated by about 10
million cells, losing in the process some 100 billion cross-linkages. 19
Some sources today estimate that from 50,00020
to 100,00021
brain cells die each day. In spite of the loss of brain cells and the fact
that the molecules within each brain cell are renewed about 10,000 times in a
lifetime, memories from our childhood of many places we’ve visited can be
recalled in great detail. People in old age report flashbacks of memories
having remarkable clarity that they haven’t recalled for decades.
Dean Radin quotes Paul A. Weiss, of Vienna’s Institute
of Experimental Biology, a pioneer in biology research, about the fact that
memories remain intact in spite of the loss of brain cells and replacement of
molecules in brain cells:
And yet, despite that ceaseless change of detail in
that vast population of elements, our basic patterns of behavior, our memories,
our sense of integral existence as an individual, have retained their unitary
continuity of pattern.22
That fact is another indication that memories aren’t
stored in brain cells.
People missing half their brain after a surgery function
almost perfectly normally, suggesting that the mind must be functioning outside
of the brain. The procedure, called a hemispherectomy, removes half of the
brain from the patient’s head. The operation has been performed hundreds of
times for disorders that can’t be controlled using any other treatments. After
half of the brain has been removed, the patients retain their personalities and
memories. 23 In fact, a study of children
who had half of their brains removed found they often were able to perform even
better in their school work.24
A number of instances have been recorded in which a
normally functioning person was found as an adult to have virtually no brain.
The brain wasn’t necessary to normal functioning or memory. This account is
from a July 19, 2007, story on Reuters:
A man with an unusually tiny brain
managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition caused by a fluid
buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday.
Scans of the 44-year-old man’s
brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most
of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain
tissue.
"He was a married father of
two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and
colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter
to the Lancet medical journal. . . . "What I find amazing to this
day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be
compatible with life," commented Dr. Max Muenke, a pediatric brain defect
specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute.25
That provides evidence for the suggestion that the
mind isn’t in the brain. Mind and memory function perfectly well when half the
brain is removed or the brain doesn't develop fully.
There is a community of the
spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight….
Close both eyes
To see with the other eye.
-
Jelaluddin Rumi (Muslim Sufi mystic)
If we are aside from and
greater than the body, then you'd think we could learn some things about the
world without using the body. In other words, if someone could prove that we can
see without using our eyes, then that would mean the eyes, retina, optic nerve,
and optical cortex in our brains aren't necessary for us to be able to see;
they're just options the mind uses in the physical realm.
But seeing without using the eyes is very common
today. Thousands of people are able to see without using their eyes using a
very common ability called "remote viewing." The remote viewer sits
quietly with his or her eyes closed and focuses on something hundreds or
thousands of miles away. The remote viewer is able to see it. Not only that,
but the person is often able to hear it, smell it, feel the texture, sense
movement, and sense emotions involved with it. In other words, the person is
doing things outside of the body while the body is sitting quietly with its
eyes closed.
For several decades at
the end of the twentieth century, the CIA had a remote viewing program named
Operation Stargate that attempted to use remote viewers to spy on the
Russians. The program had remarkable results. In 1974, a remote viewer named
Pat Price was to view a mysterious, unidentified research center at Semipalatinsk,
USSR, to see what was there. He sat with his eyes closed and focused on the
area. Below is his sketch of what he saw in his mind. It had all the
distinguishing marks of a gantry crane.26
Later, the CIA obtained
satellite photos of the site. A CIA artist created the following sketch of
part of the site based on photos of the actual Semipalatinsk site. It was a
gantry crane:
The government wanted to be sure that their
investment in remote viewing was going into a valid enterprise, so to find out
whether people can really view things from a distance using remote viewing, the
government agencies commissioned the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to
perform 154 experiments with 26,000 separate trials over 16 years. At the end
of that testing period, Edwin May, Ph.D., a researcher in low energy experimental
nuclear physics, headed a team of researchers that analyzed the experiments and
reported to the government.
They concluded that the odds against someone merely guessing
what remote viewers had described when focusing on a target at a distant
location, was more than a billion billion to one. His only explanation was
that they genuinely were seeing without using their eyes and without regard for
how many miles away the target was.27
Now satisfied that remote viewing existed, the
government sponsors of the remote viewing activity requested a second
evaluation to find out how it works. Congress and the CIA commissioned a study
by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The result of
the study was that Jessica Utts, professor in the Division of Statistics at the
University of California at Davis, prepared a report assessing the
statistical evidence for remote viewing in U.S. government-sponsored research.
She uses the term "anomalous cognition" to refer to remote viewing. This
is her conclusion:
It is clear to this author that
anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated. This conclusion is
not based on belief, but rather on commonly accepted scientific criteria. The
phenomenon has been replicated in a number of forms across laboratories and
cultures. The various experiments in which it has been observed have been
different enough that if some subtle methodological problems can explain the
results, then there would have to be a different explanation for each type of
experiment, yet the impact would have to be similar across experiments and
laboratories. If fraud were responsible, similarly, it would require an
equivalent amount of fraud on the part of a large number of experimenters or an
even larger number of subjects. . . .
I believe that it would be wasteful of
valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of
the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to
suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing
and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent
questions about how this ability works. I am confident that the questions are
no more elusive than any other questions in science dealing with small to
medium sized effects, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to
appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade.28
Victor Zammit29
summarized statements from some government sources who had been involved in the
Operation Stargate remote viewing project from Jim Schnabel’s30
book:
"I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics,
because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn't done
your homework." — Major General Edmund R Thompson, U.S. Army Assistant
Chief of Staff for Intelligence, 1977-81, Deputy Director for Management and
Operations, DIA, 1982-84
"You can't be involved in this for any length of time
and not be convinced there's something here." — Norm J., former senior CIA
official who tasked remote viewers
"There were times when they wanted to push buttons and
drop bombs on the basis of our information." — Dr. Hal Puthoff, a
former manager of the CIA
remote-viewing program
"She went into a trance. And while she was in the
trance, she gave us some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our
satellite cameras on that point, and the lost plane was there." — Former
President Jimmy Carter, recalling a 1978 remote-viewing operation
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)
Laboratory at Princeton University began conducting its own, independent
studies of remote viewing in 1978. They tested remote viewers by having a
person travel to some distant location undisclosed to the remote viewer and
having the remote viewer attempt to identify details about the location. The
remote viewers in 334 trials were able to describe details about where the
person was with odds against guessing the details of the location of 100
billion to 1.31
In another study, Robert Jahn, former director of the
PEAR Lab, and psychologist Brenda Dunne conducted 336 rigorous trials with 48
ordinary people who were asked to do remote viewing at distances ranging from
five to 6,000 miles. Almost two-thirds of the results exceeded chance levels,
with odds against chance being one billion to one.32
Russell Targ, a physicist who pioneered development
of the laser, and Harold Puthoff, another physicist who wrote the widely read Fundamentals
of Quantum Electronics, conducted experiments on remote viewing to
determine whether the phenomenon was real. In their tests, they had a person
whom they called a "beacon" travel to a distant site to see whether a
remote viewer could receive mental impressions about the site. The beacon and remote
viewer were separated by distances of several miles so there could be no
communication between them, and the beacon was instructed to go to a site
randomly chosen by Targ and Puthoff without the remote viewer’s knowledge. The
remote viewer was to then focus on the beacon trying to get impressions about
where the beacon was and writing or sketching the scenes. This is a summary of
their findings:
Independent judges found that the descriptions of the
sketches matched on the average 66 percent of the time the characteristics of
the site that was actually seen by the beacon.33
These findings were far beyond chance, demonstrating
that the receiver was looking at the scene where the sender was while many
miles away.
Dr. Chris Roe, a
parapsychologist at the University of Northampton in the UK also verified remote viewing's validity through his
studies. When the results were reviewed by Dr. Brian Josephson, a Nobel
Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, he concluded, "The experiments have been designed to
rule out luck and chance. I consider the evidence for remote viewing to be
pretty clear-cut.34
I'm especially able to
see objects someone puts on a table or desk anywhere in the world. I can sit
in my office, close my eyes, and focus on the place where the object is. In
the blackness of my mind, I can begin to get images of the object and
impressions about it. I then write a description of the object and sketch it
(although I'm not much of an artist).
In 2005, I corresponded with a computer systems
analyst in New Jersey named Bill Walker about remote viewing. He asked me to
do some sessions for him to show him what it is like. I sat in my office in Illinois,
closed my eyes, and focused on objects he had set up in New Jersey. I e-mailed
my impressions and sketches to him. Some accurately described the objects he
had in his office and house, so he decided to put my remote viewing sessions on
his Web site. I've reproduced them on the pages that follow to illustrate that
we don't need a body to see things hundreds of miles away. You can see his Web
site by going to the link at http://youreternalself.com/chapter1.htm.
This is his
description from the Web site of how the sessions occurred:
Craig Hogan and I communicated only
via email. He lives about 700 miles away from me. All he knew about me was my
name, email address, and that I lived in New Jersey. I would place an object on
my table and Craig would email me his impressions. He said that he often got
impressions of other objects in the room. His only input was an object on
Bill Walker’s table. The impressions included sketches and sometimes
written descriptions. In between sessions, the only feedback I gave to him were
the photos of matched items that I show below [on his Web site]. For each
session, he gave anywhere from 5 to 20 impressions.
In the first session, Bill Walker told me he would
put an object on the table in his office. When I was ready to view the object
that was the "target" on his table, I sat in my office in Illinois
and closed my eyes. I focused on seeing things "on Bill Walker's
table." In a few seconds, I did see a green light shining down on gold
brassy parts and sent my notes to him, along with my sketches of what I saw. He
responded to my notes telling me that the green light was his banker’s lamp
with a green shade and gold bottom about six feet from the table in his
office. The other sketches didn't match things in the office.
However, when he arrived home, he found that I had
been sketching things on the tables in his home, not his office. The sketches,
my descriptions, and the photographs he sent me after I sent him my sketches are
on the pages that follow.
Below is the sketch of an orb I sent to him attached
to an e-mail. The text I sent in the e-mail follows the sketch.
My sketch perfectly
matched an orb on a table in his home. He made a photograph of the orb and put
it on his Web site. The photograph is below the sketch. The object is made of
metal, and he described the color in this way: "in natural light, the orbs
do have both silver and gold colors."
My sketch of what I saw in my mind
Photograph of the actual object
A Second Session–A Plant with Round Balls on It
We
did other sessions focusing on things on tables in his home, since it appeared
my mind wanted to look at tables there. I knew nothing about the objects
except that they were on tables in Bill Walker’s home. I sat in my office in Illinois
focusing on "a table in Bill Walker’s home," and saw in my mind a
plant with large leaves and odd little balls at the ends of the stems. I e-mailed
the sketch below. In the e-mail, I wrote "like stems, organic" and "looked
like two leaves, with some stems that had small circles on the end of them."
Below the sketch I sent is a photograph he then sent to me of the plant on a
table in his house.
My sketch of what I saw in my mind
Photograph of the actual object
A Third Session–A Peach-Colored Flower in a Pot
I closed my eyes again to look
for "things on a table in Bill Walker’s house" and saw another plant
that had a light peach flower on it. I sketched the pot, two leaves on the
sides, and a flower in the middle that I saw as "light peach." The
sketch is below. I sent the description and sketch to him. He returned the
photograph of a plant on a table in his house that appears at the bottom of this
page. The flower is light peach.
My sketch of what I saw in my mind
Photograph of the actual object
A Session for Rick Stewart in Maryland
I did another remote
viewing session for Rick Stewart, a man I had never met before, who lived in Maryland.
I viewed the object from my office in Illinois by closing my eyes and focusing
on the object. This is the description I wrote in my e-mail to him and the
sketch I sent:
First drawing round thing, two feet-like things out front
and round thing on top, like a toy, yellow/green color. I know there was
something white somewhere on it but I forgot where by the time I sketched what
I could get.
Another view after writing my
notes and closing my eyes again] Got another round thing. This is rather
like a doll, but it doesn't seem like a doll. It's more like a rolly-polly
thing with a body and feet.
I sent it to Rick Stewart in Maryland. He returned
the photograph of the target object that is at the top of the next page. Its
color is yellow green and the pinwheel on the front is white.
Photograph of the actual object
I can do this at any time,
with accurate descriptions like these examples around 60% of the time. It
isn’t just a one-time happening.
No photons came through my corneas to strike my
retinas and create electrical pulses that would travel along the optic nerve to
my brain. There are no sensory input devices on my body that would receive
photons from 800 or 900 miles away, and without photons, an image of the object
organized into a pattern with billions of pieces to match the photons would
have to all travel together to where I was sitting. Something would have to
encode the image (like a camera or retina), then transmit the image. There was
nothing like that involved. Electromagnetic energy could not travel that far
over the horizon, and studies of remote viewing with the viewers in rooms
shielded by lead to block out energy (Faraday cages) show that the remote
viewing is just as clear when no energy could possibly come to the viewer.35
The blob of fat and protein trapped inside the
darkness of my skull couldn’t possibly have seen a rolly-polly doll or plants
on tables hundreds of miles away; but I saw them. Or rather, my mind, which is
outside of my brain, saw them.
The ability to remote view is very common among
people. There are clubs that do remote viewing, such as the very active,
proficient group in Hawaii named the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild that does
remarkable, consistently accurate remote viewing for entertainment. The links
to some of these remote viewing groups, including the Hawaii group, are at http://youreternalself.com/chapter1.htm.
One estimate is that one out of a hundred people can
do remote viewing successfully, meaning that among the 260 million people of
all ages in the United States, 2.6 million can or will be able to do remote
viewing. I am able to do it. I, and all of the many other people now doing
remote viewing easily, at will, are able to close our eyes and intend to see
something hundreds or thousands of miles away with nothing more to guide us
than a location or a number assigned to the object or picture. Images come to
our minds, but they aren't coming through our eyes.
You can try remote viewing by taking the test I have
online at http://youreternalself.com/chapter1.htm.
The data showing that remote viewing is a common
phenomenon are overwhelming. It shows without question that people can sit
quietly with their eyes closed and "see" things hundreds or thousands
of miles away, in places they’ve never been.
That means that the mind isn’t in the brain. It
isn’t trapped inside the bony encasing of a skull. When people see using eyes,
photons (light particles) come through the eye and travel along the optic nerve
to the brain. In remote viewing, there is no opening in the skull for images
to come in. There is no light energy coming from thousands of miles away. We
can remote view objects inside dark boxes and envelopes. Studies of remote
viewers in lead-lined rooms show that they still get images, so no
electromagnetic signals (light, radio waves, infrared waves, microwaves) are
involved. There is no energy that carries the image. The remote viewer sees
instantly, regardless of distance.
What all that means is that the mind that does the
seeing is outside of the brain and is linked with the object that is far away.
The spirit doesn’t travel to the object. There is no geographical distance
where the mind is. We are one with everything in the universe, including other
people's minds.
You aren’t in a brain. Your mind is outside of the
brain.
Evidence
We Know Information
Without Using the Brain
A large number of studies have demonstrated that
people can know information without having any contact with what they have learned
about. From the 1880s to the 1940s, there were 142 published articles
describing 3.6 million individual trials with 4,600 people attempting to
identify the number and suit of a playing card face down in front of them. In
addition, ESP tests performed on the radio added 70,000 participants to the
database. The studies were performed at over two dozen universities around the
world by hundreds of respected professors.36
The result was that participants were, on average,
able to identify the cards at rates higher than chance. They knew information
they could not have received unless their minds were able to obtain it without
using the body. The results prompted Professor H. J. Eysenck, chairman of the
Psychology Department at the University of London, to write in 1957,
Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty
University departments all around the world, and several hundred highly
respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally hostile to the
claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion the unbiased observer
can come to must be that there does exist a small number of people who obtain
knowledge existing either in other people’s minds, or in the outer world, by means
as yet unknown to science.37
The fact that we can see without using the eyes
indicates that no signals come to the brain, and yet the mind sees. That means
the brain may not be involved in the process at all. That is predicted from
other research. Studies of the brain fail to show how the light waves entering
the eye can come together in the brain to form a complete image.
John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner in the study of the
physiology of the nervous system, wrote Facing Reality: philosophical
adventures of a brain scientist. In it, he explains that when we see using
the eyes, the light enters the eye and turns into nerve impulses in the retina
that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. However, when they arrive
there, they are fragmented and sent to different areas of the brain. Science
can find nothing in the brain that is able to bring the visual experience
together. Eccles writes that the only explanation is that there must be a
conscious mind outside of the brain that influences the brain and makes
patterns using it.
The mind outside the brain apparently sends a willed
action to the brain and the brain transmits to the mind a conscious experience,
whole.38
Blind people, including those blind from birth, can
actually see during near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-the-body experiences
(OBEs), suggesting that their minds must be independent of their bodies, which are
unable see. Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at the University
of Connecticut, and Sharon Cooper interviewed 31 blind and sight-impaired
persons who had NDEs and OBEs, and found that 80 percent of them reported correctly
"visual" experiences, some in detail. For example, they reported correctly
actual colors and their surroundings. One patient who had become totally blind
after having been sighted for at least 40 years "saw" the pattern and
colors on a new tie during an out of body experience, even though everyone
denied having ever described it to him. The results of the two-year research
study were published in the book Mindsight.39
Dr. Larry Dossey, former chief of staff of Medical City
Dallas Hospital, describes this case of a woman who had been blind from birth
being able to see clearly during her near-death experience:
The surgery had gone smoothly until the late stages of the
operation. Then something happened. As her physician was closing the
incision, Sarah’s heart stopped beating. . . . [When she awoke,
Sarah had] a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons
and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the [operating room] layout; the
scribbles on the surgery schedule board in the hall outside; the color of the
sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the
names of the surgeons in the doctors’ lounge down the corridor who were waiting
for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that her
anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though
she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the
cardiac arrest.
But what made Sarah’s vision even more momentous was the
fact that, since birth, she had been blind.40
It appears that Sarah’s mind was seeing when her body
was unable to see, both because she was unconscious and blind since birth.
Blindsight is the ability to see without normal use
of the eyes. In studies when people were made blind temporarily, they were
still able to locate things on a computer screen. The author of the study,
Tony Ro, a psychology professor at Rice University in Houston, has no
explanation for the remarkable finding, but accepts that some alternative way
of "seeing" is available to the brain. "These findings
demonstrate that while certain brain areas are necessary for awareness, there
is extensive processing of information that takes place unconsciously."
He said these are results "suggesting the existence of alternate visual
processing routes that function unconsciously . . ."41
The findings seem to fit with the others presented
here demonstrating that seeing doesn’t require eyes or the use of our brain.
David Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns
Hopkins University, found that if the visual cortex is damaged, people will
assert that they cannot see anything, but when asked to pick up an object in an
unknown location within reach, many can do so on the first try. They also can
judge an emotional expression on a face, especially anger, more often than chance
would predict they would. He suggests that signals from the eyes could go to a
mid-brain area where they’re processed even though the primary visual area is
not operating. However, there is no agreement about it and no convincing
evidence of it.42
Lawrence Weiskrantz, Emeritus Professor of Psychology
at Oxford University and recipient of the William James Fellow Award 1992 by
the Association for Psychological Science, summarized the research showing that
patients with lesions in their primary visual cortex, rendering them blind, are
able to perceive colors and motion:
Previous research has reported that blindsight patients can
retain the ability to detect monochromatic light and grating stimuli, and to
discriminate orientation and direction of movement in their "blind" fields.
These findings have been joined by reports that these patients also are
sensitive to, and are able to discriminate, wavelength in the absence of any
experience of "colour". This reveals that retinal pathways other than
those to the striate cortex are crucially involved in vision.43
In all of these instances, the researchers suggest
that some form of vision is left to bring signals from the eyes to the brain,
although no such alternatives have been discovered. However, these findings
fit with the suggestion that the eyes are not necessary to seeing.
Another phenomenon, called "echolocation," also
seems to show that blind people can "see" objects in their
environment even when they can’t use their optical organs. In echolocation,
the blind person makes sounds by tapping, clicking, or speaking, and while
doing so, is able to walk or even ride a bicycle through an environment filled
with obstacles. The assumption has been that the blind person hears the echoes
of the sounds reflected back from objects in the environment and can interpret
the sounds to identify the objects.
Ben Underwood, who lost his sight to cancer as a
toddler, has two artificial eyes made of plastic. However, he walks without a
cane or seeing-eye dog, plays video games, and identifies objects he passes by
name: "That’s a fire hydrant" or "That’s a trash can." In a
pillow fight, he can throw a pillow to hit a target person even when the person
is moving and silent.44
Researchers know that the brain is active when a
blind person is "seeing" using echolocation:
Scientists have discovered that in the brains of the blind,
the visual cortex has not become useless, as they once believed. When blind
people use another sense—touch or hearing, for example—to substitute for sight,
the brain's visual cortex becomes active, even though no images reach it from
the optic nerve. Echolocation creates its own images.45
The fact that the brain is active when the optical
organs are not functioning fits with the suggestion made by some researchers
that the brain may act rather like a television set that becomes active when a
signal comes to it, but does not produce the signal. Larry King isn't in the
television.
Researchers have studied echolocation to try to
determine how the blind can see to navigate and have concluded that it must be
due to a sonar effect (hearing sounds bounce off of objects and judging their
shape and distance from the sounds). However, the actions of blind people
using echolocation defy the possibility that it could be due simply to a sonar
effect. Ben Underwood, who has two plastic eyes, can perform feats such as
hitting a target with a pillow at distances too far for hearing to be echoed
back when the target is silent. He can identify objects too far away for him
to receive echoes when he is simply making clicking sounds. He rides a bike without
hitting obstacles, at speeds that preclude receiving sonar-type messages to
avoid them, and he plays video games adeptly when the game is producing a
cacophony of noises, and echolocation using sounds could not identify figures
on a computer screen.
The fact that more than sound echoes must be involved
in navigating through an environment filled with obstacles, as in the example
of Ben Underwood, is another indication that the mind seems to see without
using the brain.
Accounts from physicians and nurses abound about
people brought back from near death who had experiences of entering a warm,
loving environment where they speak with their deceased loved ones. The phenomenon
was named a near-death experience (NDE) by Raymond Moody.46
During NDEs, many people see and hear what was going on as physicians and
nurses worked feverishly to revive them and they were unconscious. They
recount statements made by those in the room, describe people and instruments,
and even accurately restate conversations that went on in other rooms.
An organization of people who have had the experience,
called the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS), now has
tens of thousands of members. Dozens of books have been written, filled with
cases of people who have had near-death experiences. A Gallup and Proctor poll
in 1982 estimated that 5 percent of the adult population of the United States
have had near-death experiences. Other surveys put the number at 7.5 percent.47
Near-death experiences, in other words, are
commonplace. One of the most remarkable things about NDEs is that while brain
dead, without a trace of brain function, these people see and hear what is
going on in the scene where their body lies unconscious, and at times in other
rooms of the same building. They then remember all of the details and recount
them to the astonishment of physicians, nurses, and family members.
During the near-death experience, no sensory
experiences and no memory production would be possible if the mind were located
in the brain. During these times, people whose brain activity is being
monitored are showing absolutely no life in the brain. Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist
and one of the leading authorities in Britain on near-death experiences,
describes the state of the brain during a near-death experience:
The brain isn't functioning. It's not there. It's destroyed.
It's abnormal. But, yet, it can produce these very clear experiences. . . .
An unconscious state is when the brain ceases to function. For example, if you
faint, you fall to the floor, you don't know what's happening and the brain
isn't working. The memory systems are particularly sensitive to
unconsciousness. So, you won't remember anything. But, yet, after one of these
experiences [an NDE], you come out with clear, lucid memories. . . .
This is a real puzzle for science. I have not yet seen any good scientific
explanation which can explain that fact.48
Michael Sabom, MD, a cardiologist in Atlanta, Georgia,
studied near-death experiences to see whether people really were seeing and
hearing while their brains were completely non-functioning. He identified a
sample of 32 patients who had had an out-of-body experience during cardiac
arrests while their brains were unable to function so their senses couldn’t be
receiving stimuli. He asked the patients to describe in as much detail as they
could what went on during their resuscitations. To see whether someone could
simply guess the details of what was happening in the trauma scene or recall
the procedure from some chance reading about it in the past, he asked 25 other
patients who had cardiac arrest but no out-of-body experiences to describe the
events involving their resuscitation during their cardiac arrests.
Virtually all of the patients who said they did not
have an out-of-body experience (20 out of 23) made at least one major error in
their account. All of the 32 patients who had near-death out-of-body
experiences described the resuscitation successfully in specific facts or in
the general procedure. When he checked patient descriptions against the
records available about their traumas, he found that six of those who had NDEs accurately
described in great detail specific facts they could not have learned while
lying unconscious that were peculiar to the situation, not just general information
about resuscitation:
The recollected details in each
case were quite accurate and not interchangeable with details from other
near-death crisis descriptions. These specific details included things like
which family members were waiting where in the hospital and their emotional
reactions, the type of gurneys the patients themselves were riding, the type
and description of equipment used to treat them, etc. In one thought-provoking
instance, an NDE survivor made an apparent error in describing the work of a
defibrillation meter—until Sabom found out that the older model the patient
described was exactly the kind used back in 1973 when the patient had his
cardiac arrest. Based on his research, Sabom ruled out a common explanation
skeptics give for dismissing the reality of these details seen during an OBE:
that the accurate portrayal of the near death crisis event is due to prior
general knowledge the patient has of how a resuscitation works, and thus his
description is merely an educated guess.49
Another study, published in the medical publication
Journal of Resuscitation, concluded that people with no brain function who
describe a near-death experience in fact have lucid thought processes,
reasoning, and memory during the period of time when their brains are not
functioning. In the study, doctors at Southampton General Hospital in England interviewed
63 heart attack patients who had been evaluated to be clinically dead, but were
subsequently resuscitated. To ensure that their recollections were fresh, the
people were interviewed within a week of the experience. They described
details and events in which they were thinking, reasoning, and consciously moving
around during the period when they were unconscious, their bodies were
motionless, and doctors working on them had determined their brains were not
functioning. 50
The researchers went on to collect over 3,500 similar
cases of people who had been evaluated to be clinically dead, but could recall
remarkable details about events during the time when they should not have been
able to sense anything or remember even if they had experienced something
because they were clinically dead.
Dr. Sam Parnia, one of the physicians, described a
child 2½ years old whose heart had stopped beating. He was unconscious and
clinically dead, but was revived. Afterward, the child’s parents contacted Parnia
to tell him that the boy had drawn a picture of himself portraying what it was
like during the trauma, but in the picture he was outside of his unconscious
body looking down at himself. In the drawing, there was a balloon-like area.
When the boy was asked what that was, he said matter of factly that when you
die, you see a bright light and you are connected to a cord. Six months later,
he was still drawing the same scene with the same details."51
A study of near-death experiences in the English
medical journal, The Lancet, concluded "that the NDE might be a
changing state of consciousness (transcendence) in which identity, cognition
and emotion function independently from the unconscious body . . ."52
This is the study:
A team of doctors in the Netherlands studied 344
patients who were resuscitated after cardiac arrest, including 62 patients (18%
of those revived) who reported NDEs. They found that the NDE experiences weren’t
explainable as reactions to medication; by a fear of death on the part of the
patient (a hypothesis offered by some psychologists to explain NDEs); or by
physiological changes in the brain caused by a lack of oxygen which can cause
sensory distortions and hallucinations. Concluded the researchers, "The NDE pushes at the limits
of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain
relation."53
A number of verified near-death experiences on record
provide unusually convincing evidence that the brain is not involved in the
near-death experience. A small sample of these cases documented by physicians
and nurses follows.
Maria, a migrant worker brought to Harborview Medical
Center’s cardiac care unit in cardiac arrest, near death, felt herself floating
upward out of the hospital. As she rose, she saw, on a third-story window
ledge of the hospital, "a man’s dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed
on the left side where the little toe would go. The shoelace was caught under
the heel." Health care workers investigated and found the tennis shoe
precisely where Maria had described it. The shoe was dark blue, had a
well-worn scuff on the left side where the little toe would go, and the
shoelace was caught under the heel.54
In another, similar incident, after an unconscious
patient was revived, she described floating above the hospital where she saw a
red tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital. A janitor investigated and found
a red tennis shoe, just as the patient described.55
Bruce Greyson, MD, professor in the Department of
Psychiatric Medicine, University of Virginia, describes a patient named Al
Sullivan, who underwent an emergency quadruple bypass operation. While
unconscious, he had an NDE:
Al Sullivan was a 55 year old truck driver who was
undergoing triple by-pass surgery when he had a powerful NDE that included an
encounter with his deceased mother and brother-in-law, who told Al to go back
to his to tell one of his neighbors that their son with lymphoma will be OK.
Furthermore, during the NDE, Al accurately noticed that the surgeon operating
on him was flapping his arms in an unusual fashion, with his hands in his
armpits. When he came back to his body after the surgery was over, the surgeon
was startled that Al could describe his own arm flapping, which was his
idiosyncratic method of keeping his hands sterile by holding his arms at his
chest and gesturing with his elbows as he instructed staff about preparation
for the operation.56
In another documented case, a nurse had removed the
dentures of an unconscious heart attack victim and put them into the drawer on the
table in the operating room called a "crash cart." A week after the
incident, as the nurse was distributing medications, she came to the heart-attack
victim’s room and he exclaimed excitedly, "'Oh, that nurse knows where my
dentures are. . . . Yes, you were there when I was brought into
hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart;
it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and
there you put my teeth." At the point when the nurse did that, the
patient was in a deep coma with his eyes closed, but he was perfectly accurate
about what had happened.57
The nurse explained
more about what the man then reported:
When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen
himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors
had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail
the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of
those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had
been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is
true that we had been very negative about the patient's prognosis due to his
very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he
desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still
alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience
and says he is no longer afraid of death. 4 weeks later he left hospital as a
healthy man."58
A famous NDE suggesting people are having sensory
experiences when the body's senses were blocked or not functioning was the
subject of a television documentary, "The Day I Died," and reported
in Light and Death, a book by cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom.59
To remove a deadly large aneurysm from beneath her brain, Pam Reynolds was put
into a state of hypothermic cardiac arrest. Her body temperature was lowered
to 60 degrees, her heartbeat and breathing were stopped, and the blood was
drained from her head; her brain waves flattened, showing no brain activity.
After her successful operation, she was warmed and
her own blood was returned to her body. When she could communicate, she
reported a startling near-death experience. She gave remarkably accurate,
detailed descriptions of the surgical procedure. She reported that
someone in the operating room said something about her arteries being small,
and she described the Midas Rex bone saw as looking like an electric
toothbrush, having interchangeable blades, and a high-pitched whirring sound.
These things she saw and heard occurred during the
time when she was deeply unconscious, but before the blood was actually drained
from her. During the time she described hearing and seeing details, her eyes
were taped shut and her ears were plugged with devices that monitored her brain
stem activity. These devices produced loud clicks measuring 95 decibels at a
rate of 11.3 clicks per second, drowning out all outside noise.60
Pam went on to describe a remarkable NDE experience
that could have happened either when she was unconscious and sensory deprived
or while she was brain dead. During the near-death experience, she
reported floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel to a
light at the end where her deceased relatives and friends were waiting.
Her long-dead grandmother was there. Eventually, her deceased uncle took
her back and she re-entered her body.
She said that during the experience, she saw with
vision that was "brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision."
When she heard her deceased grandmother calling, the sound was clearer hearing
than she had with her ears, but her auditory functions were shut down by noise
and unconsciousness.
Five eminent cardiac and medical specialists (Dr. Sam
Parnia, Dr. Van Lommel, Dr. Robert Spetzler, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and Dr. Michael
Sabom) all supported the accuracy of Pam’s stated experience during her
clinical death, reporting that "What she saw corresponded to what actually
happened." 61
She saw and heard details while either sensory deprived and unconscious, with
her eyes taped shut and hearing blocked by loud clicks, or while she was brain
dead.
In out-of-body experiences (OBEs), people describe
being conscious outside of their bodies and having normal sensory experiences
such as traveling to locations, listening to conversations, and seeing distant
people while the body is motionless. OBEs are surprisingly common. Five
surveys done in the United Sates, dating back to at least 1954, show that as
high as 25 percent of those polled responded that they had experienced an OBE.
A 1975 survey of a randomly selected group of 1,000 students and townspeople in
a small town in Virginia found that 25 percent of the students and 14 percent
of the townspeople reported having an OBE.62
Reports of OBEs have been
well-documented for hundreds of years. Fredrick Myers' book, Human Personality and Its Survival
After Death, documents hundreds of carefully
recorded and verified accounts of out-of-body experiences. 63
In May 1980, Dr. Glen Gabbard of the Menninger
Foundation, Dr. Stewart Twemlow of the Topeka V.A. Medical Center, and Dr.
Fowler Jones of the University of Kansas Medical Center, presented the findings
of studies of OBEs to the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in San
Francisco. The researchers reported that those who experience OBEs describe them
as being distinctly different from dreams or hallucinations. They describe
feeling a real sense of separation of the mind from the body. The experiencers
in the study tested normal in all psychological and physical senses. 64
D. Scott Rogo examined over 60 studies of out-of-body
experiences and found these common conclusions:
· The
OBE experience was a common human experience, with roughly 10-20 percent of the
adult population undergoing an OBE sometime in their lives.
· OBE
experiencers weren’t special types of persons (e.g. persons with pathological
states of mind, or over-anxious about death, prone to fantasy, etc.).
· At
least some OBE experiencers can be "detected" at distant locations
during their OBE travels by the use of animal, human and sometimes physical
detectors.
· At
least some gifted OBE experiencers can sometimes make surprisingly correct
observations at distant locations while traveling out of the body.
· At
least some OBEs are certainly not dreams or hallucinations.65
An anecdotal example of
evidence that a person's mind leaves and returns to their body during an NDE
comes from the research of Dr. Melvin Morse,
Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington:
Olga Gearhardt was a 63 year old
woman who underwent a heart transplant because of a severe virus that attacked
her heart tissue. Her entire family waited at the hospital during the surgery,
except for her son-in-law, who stayed home. The transplant was a success, but
at exactly 2:15 am, her new heart stopped beating. It took the frantic
transplant team three more hours to revive her. Her family was only told in the
morning that her operation was a success, without other details. When they
called her son-in-law with the good news, he had his own news to tell. He had
already learned about the successful surgery. At exactly 2:15 am, while he was sleeping,
he awoke to see his Olga, his mother-in-law, at the foot of his bed. She told
him not to worry, that she was going to be alright. She asked him to tell her
daughter (his wife). He wrote down the message, and the time of day and then
fell asleep. Later on at the hospital, Olga regained consciousness. Her first
words were "did you get the message?" She was able to confirm that
she left her body during her near-death experience and was able to travel to
her son-in-law to communicate to him the message. This anecdotal evidence
demonstrates that the near-death experience is a return to consciousness at the
point of death, when the brain is dying. Dr. Melvin Morse thoroughly researched
Olga's testimony and every detail had objective verification including the scribbled
note by the son-in-law.66
Charles Tart, MD, instructor in psychiatry in the School
of Medicine of the University of Virginia and professor of psychology at the University
of California at Davis, documented an event that happened with one of his research
subjects. The subject had had previous out-of-body experiences, so h