A serious investigation of the reality of life after death brings us face to face with perhaps the most challenging of all issues regarding what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness. But what is consciousness?
The Wikipedia discussion of consciousness makes these points.
“Consciousness at its simplest refers to “sentience or awareness of internal or external existence.” Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.” Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists.”
In their remarkable book, Irreducible Mind, Kelly and Kelly discuss the nature of consciousness in terms of the very old and still debated issue known as the mind-body problem. We humans appear to have both physical properties, housed in a body, that can be readily explained by the physical sciences including size, weight, shape, and motion through space and time and also mental properties, centered in a mind, not possessed by physical objects including consciousness and intentionality that are aspects of a subject or a self. Physical properties in principle are equally observable by anyone either directly or with the help of scientific equipment and techniques. They are public. This isn’t true of mental properties. You just know how something looks to you, but I can only guess. I may be able to tell by your behavior that you seem to be in pain, but only you can feel it directly. Conscious mental events are private to the person experiencing them, a privileged access we don’t have to physical events.
Within the fields of psychology and cognitive science the brain is held to be the key to consciousness. Over the past 30 or so years researchers have employed a “formidable” array of increasingly sophisticated clinical, pharmacological, biochemical, genetic, neurosurgical, electrophysiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging techniques to investigate the functioning of the brain. The resulting highly sophisticated findings appear to most observers to be establishing an ever tighter connection between the mind and brain suggesting that properties of minds will ultimately be fully explained by those of brains.
Out of this work contemporary mainstream psychologists, scientists, and neuroscientists appear to roughly agree to a conception of the human mind and personality along the following lines.
“We human beings are nothing but extremely complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle causally explainable from the bottom up in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics—ultimately, that is, in terms of local contact interactions among bits of matter moving in strict accordance with mechanical laws under the influence of fields of force.’ Some of what we know, and the substrate of our general capacities to learn additional things, are built-in genetically as complex resultants of biological evolution. Everything else comes to us directly or indirectly by way of our sensory systems, through energetic exchanges with the environment of types already largely understood. Mind and consciousness are entirely generated by—or perhaps in some mysterious way identical with—neurophysiological events and processes in the brain. Mental causation, volition, and the “self” do not really exist; they are mere illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And, of course, because one’s mind and personality are entirely products of the bodily machinery, they will necessarily be extinguished, totally and finally, by the demise and dissolution of that body”. (Kelly)
Not only the vast majority of contemporary scientists hold views like this, but they have been widely picked up by the public at large.
Although apparently supported by mountains of evidence Kelly states emphatically that such views are seriously lacking. Despite its many significant accomplishments, a century of mainstream scientific psychology has not provided a satisfactory theory of mind or solved the mind-body problem.
The belief that the brain produces consciousness seems so obvious that common sense tells us that any other notion is ludicrous. Yet, there are a few serious thinkers who aren’t so sure. The issue for them isn’t that there is a fundamental relationship or correlation between normal waking consciousness and the functioning of the brain; virtually everyone recognizes this. What is questioned is the nature of the relationship, particularly when non-ordinary aspects of consciousness are considered.
They hold an alternative view of the brain – mind relationship asserting that rather than producing consciousness the brain filters or shapes consciousness. If this is the case, then consciousness may be only partly dependent on the brain and might, at least conceivably, survive the death of the body.
Philosopher Erwin Laszlo asserts that there is no evidence that the human brain has specific features by virtue of which it produces consciousness. Clinical and experimental evidence only shows that brain function and state of consciousness are correlated. Functional MRI techniques show that when particular thought processes occur, they are associated with metabolic changes in specific areas of the brain. However, they do not show that brain cells producing proteins and electrical signals also produce the thoughts, emotions, images, and other elements of the conscious mind. Neurophysiological research cannot explain how the brain’s network of neurons would produce the qualitative sensations that make up our consciousness.
Looked at objectively, the view that consciousness is produced in and by the brain, accepted as a fundamental reality among most scientists, is in actuality more of a philosophical position than a scientific fact. In addition to the ‘brain produces consciousness (mind) materialist view, a number of philosophers and a few scientists hold a dualist position view with matter and mmd both fundamental but entirely different realities and not reducible one to the other. A third idealist conception, no longer held by many contemporary thinkers, views consciousness as the first and only reality and matter only an illusion created by the mind. (Laszlo)
William James, one of the founders of the discipline of modern psychology, as well as a researcher into mediumship, offered this well- known passage in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
James made the point that there is no logical way of distinguishing by observation whether consciousness is generated by the brain or is a transmitter of it.
Sigmund Freud popularized the view that consciousness as we experience it involves two realms or dimensions of mind that he called the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious includes those parts of mental life which the individual is readily aware of at any given moment and the unconscious aspects of mental experience that are totally outside of awareness. The contents of the unconscious may remain permanently unknown or under certain circumstances may emerge into the conscious.
One time associate of Freud, Carl Jung, conceived of the unconscious as having two aspects, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is a storehouse for personal experiences, feelings, and memories that are not directly knowable, but may become conscious at times. This corresponds roughly with Freud’s view.
The collective unconscious lies at a still deeper level and contains material common to all human beings. This material did not come from personal experience of the individual. The collective unconscious is a psychological heritage that we all have. It is inherited. The collective unconscious, Jung stated, contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof arguably has the most penetrating and comprehensive understanding of consciousness and the unconscious available. Through guiding thousands of people in explorations of nonordinary (altered) states of consciousness he developed what he calls a “cartography of the human psyche” which extends our understanding of the unconscious considerably beyond Freudian and even Jungian insights.
This cartography or map reveals an unconscious comprised of three major realms, the psychodynamic, the perinatal, and the transpersonal. Simply put the psychodynamic realm of the unconscious includes material involving significant events from a person’s life experiences, particularly childhood. It corresponds closely to Freud’s concept of the unconscious and Jung’s concept of the personal unconscious. The perinatal realm of the unconsciousness includes a rich variety of material relating to a person’s actual birth as well as themes of death, rebirth, and spiritual awakening.
The transpersonal realm includes material and phenomena which transcend the normal bounds of time and space and involve psychic and spiritual themes. These relate directly to our discussion of life after death and require further discussion. Grof grouped transpersonal experiences into several categories.
Transcendence of Spatial Boundaries. Under special circumstances it is possible to identify experientially with anything in the universe including experiences of merging with another person into a state of dual unity, assuming another person’s identity, tuning into the consciousness of a group, identifying with the consciousness of animals, plants, and even inorganic objects and processes, and, in the extremes, experiencing the consciousness of the entire planet.
Transcending the Boundaries of Linear Time. This group of phenomena involves the reliving of concrete and realistic memories of fetal and embryonic experiences, memories from the lives of one’s ancestors, past incarnations, and even the formation of the galaxies, our solar system and early geophysical processes on this planet. One can also experience clear anticipation and precognitive flashes of future events that show far-reaching correspondence with the actual events to come.
Experiential Extension Beyond Consensus Reality and Space-Time. This group of experiences includes subtle energetic manifestations of auras, meridians, and chakras, certain astral-psychic phenomena such as apparitions of and communication with deceased people, spirit guides in animal and human form, various superhuman entities, mythological and legendary beings, fairy tale scenes, blissful and wrathful deities from different cultures, adventures that seem to be happening in universies other than our own, identification with the Creator and sources of cosmic creativity, and the merging with the Absolute.
Transpersonal Experiences of a Psychoid Nature. These experiences have a peculiar characteristics. On the one hand they are clearly subjective intrapsychic events. Yet on the other, they are meaningfully connected with specific changes in the world of consensus reality which can be observed, shared, and even measured by others. Psychoid phenomena thus are strange hybrids that lie in the twilight zone between consciousness and matter.
One group involve spontaneous events such as stigmata appearing during ecstatic raptures, sightings of and encounters with UFO’s, spiritistic occurrences such as activities associated with poltergeists and haunted buildings, and activities such as raps, bangs, and touches experienced during seances of physical mediums.
Another group involve intentional psychokinesis which is the ability to influence the material environment without the physical intervention of the body by simply wishing events to happen or by performing acts that have no ordinary cause-and-effect relatiobnship to the outcome. These phenomena include laboratory psychokinesis, ceremonial magic, healing and hezing, and firewalking.
From his over three decades of systematic studies of human consciousness, Grof has come to firmly believe that “consciousness is more than an accidental by-product of the neurophysiological and biochemical processes taking place in the human brain.” Rather, consciousness and the human psyche are “expressions and reflections of a cosmic intelligence that permeates the entire universe and all of existence.” We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers in our heads. We are also “fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.” (The Holotropic Mind)
When we think about ourselves or some aspect of ourselves surviving after our body dies, we view whatever that may be as conscious. It is often said by those critical of the possibility of survival that, although the body and mind cease at death, in fact we do live on because we remain in the memories of those who knew and loved us. While true, this is not what we mean by the concept of survival.
Medium and academic Julia Assante makes the point that in understanding the experience of dying and the afterlife consciousness is key and should replace the traditional terms of soul and spirit. Those terms set up unnecessary divisions within the self and between this world and the next. A person while living is not called a spirit, only after his or her death. A person can have a soul while alive but becomes a soul after dying. Consciousness, she says, transcends these divisions and supports the notion of the self that is independent of physical identity. You do not have consciousness; you are consciousness whether alive or dead.
This view of consciousness corresponds with that of Grof. We are conscious entities or beings within limitless fields of consciousness. Like cups of water dipped from the sea we contain the same essence but in limited contained forms. Our minds filter the consciousness sea into manageable amounts for our survival and growth. Physical death loosens or changes that filter to allow an expanded experience of consciousness.