Transcription
Hello, Marjorie, and thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. You've completed university studies within the materialist reductionist paradigm. So I guess it will be fair to say that you started your career as a scientific materialist, right?
That's right. Right. But at some point, you've extended your research expertise to NDE and the so-called fringe phenomena. In fact, you are the research director of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. But what is your current metaphysical position and how did you come to it?
So first of all, I want to say regarding all of that, I'm going to be wearing two different hats today at various times during this talk together with you. And the first, of course, is the hat of the neuroscientist with the PhD and graduate training in rehabilitation medicine. So I was a professor at the University of Oregon for 35 years, and chair of the Department of Human Physiology for seven years, and also a member of the Institute of Neuroscience. And related to that, I wrote over 200 papers in neuroscience related to brain development, aging and neurological disease. And I received grants from the National Institutes of Health in the United States for 35 years, from 500,000 to $1 million per grant. And I also wrote a textbook for clinicians on assessing and treating patients with movement problems called Motor Control Translating Research into Clinical Practice, with my coauthor Anne Shumway-Cook. And it's now in its sixth edition.
But I also will be wearing a second hat. And that is the hat of a meditator, which I've been practicing for 40 plus years. And as part of that second aspect of my career, I earned a Master's degree in Asian Studies at the University of Oregon and authored the book Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. And that book has received a number of awards, including the Paris Psychological Association Award and the Body Mind, Spirit Award. And as you mentioned, I'm also president or research director of a number of academies, including the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materials Sciences, the AAPS, for which I'm the president, and the research director for the International Association of Near-Death Studies, and co-director with David Lorimer of the Galileo Commission, which does research again on these various end of life and consciousness being fundamental type phenomena. And I’ve also published research exploring, as you said, the nature of consciousness, including the phenomena of near-death experiences, spiritual awakenings and transformation, and end of life experiences, and also transformational effects regarding meditation and, for example, Tai chi. And then finally, I recently published a book with David Lorimer called Spiritual Awakenings. Scientists and academics describe their experiences in which 57 scientists and academics talk about their own spiritual experiences and how they transform their lives, but also the barriers to sharing them with others and especially other scientists.
So I'd say then, that my metaphysical position today with those two hats that I'm going to be wearing in the interview, is similar to that of what I would call the venerable quantum physicist Max Planck, in which he stated, “I regard consciousness as fundamental and I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” I totally agree with him, and I believe this is the same view as Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin, who I'll talk about later on today, and also other scientists today. And this worldview is often described as idealism, but I think that words with an “ism” after them can often be misinterpreted, because everybody may have their own idea of some aspect of that idealistic perspective that I'll be talking about a bit today. And you ask how I came to that particular perspective, and that takes a little explaining.
So I'll tell you that I started out my university training and my career as the materialist neuroscientist, believing that consciousness was solely produced by the activity of neurons in my brain. And then in 1976, as a young professor, I had an experience in meditation that opened up for me an awareness of a dimension of reality that I'd never before experienced. I was invited by my sister to a meditation retreat, and though I was skeptical, I was curious. I think curiosity is a very important aspect of a scientist. And I decided to attend. And in the first meditation, I had an experience of expansive, joyful energy in my heart. And the energy seemed like it was coming from my heart, but radiant, radiating out through my whole being and beyond, and felt like it was filling my entirety and everything around me. And it felt like nectar. It felt like pure love. And it felt like it was the most incredible experience I had ever had in my life. Beyond any feeling of love and joy I'd had before, and words went through my mind that had nothing to do with scientific analysis. They were “I'm home. I'm home. My heart is my home.”
And what's interesting about this is that afterwards, without any effort on my part or even willing it, I made a 180-degree shift in my habits. Beginning the morning after I returned to my university position in Virginia. I got up at 5 a.m. in the morning and I meditated. And I did it day after day. And it's never stopped. And it's because I knew somehow after that experience that just below the surface of my awareness simmered this quiet equanimity, this quiet ecstasy and love. And I tapped it once. So I had the feeling that it was there, waiting for me if I could find it again. And that created a shift in my worldview. And I now had a professional dilemma. I asked myself, “Is my worldview really based on classical Newtonian physics, or could it be more than that?” And I asked, “What is consciousness? Is it tied to neural activity like I always thought it was? As a university professor in neuroscience, or could consciousness exist without neurons?” So that awakening created this longing inside of me to understand the deeper nature of reality that I tasted in those moments. And so that's why I added a Master's degree in Asian studies to my PhD. And I began to explore the concept shared by the writers of medieval texts of Kashmir, which also support the view that consciousness is fundamental and that matter is derivative from consciousness. And I published a paper with Doctor Ben Williams, who's a Sanskrit scholar who got his PhD at Harvard University on similarities between these views and those supporting the primacy of consciousness from neuroscience today. Try to put together those two worlds in my life. And I should say, it drives me every day to explore more deeply the phenomenon of expanded consciousness, whether it's generated through meditation or near-death experiences or other events in our lives.
Marjorie, I'm just listening to you and thinking. So the key thing for that switch to happen was really a personal, first-person experience, the transformational experience that you had. Because you were just a happy scientist. A happy materialist scientist. And then all of a sudden you experienced something which collided with what you were taught and what you were doing. So but that I was wondering, how did it work for you initially? Because clearly there was a road, but initially how did this work for you? So you said, okay, I see it's not the reality or whatever. Reality is a big word, right? It seemed to collide with what I was told at university, and what I'm teaching my students, and the research, what I'm doing and the worldview that I adhere to. How did it work for you initially? I was just curious.
That is a good question. And I think I also want to mention that though I was a successful young neuroscientist just starting out my career, I also should say that just as Federico Faggin, who I'll talk about a little bit later, who's the quantum physicist now doing this sort of research, said about his own life. He had done everything in his life to make himself happy. He had become, in fact, the inventor of the microprocessor. He was in Silicon Valley making a lot of money. He was well known, he was doing everything anybody could want, had a great family, and he was very unhappy. And he didn't know why. That was the same thing that happened to me. I was a young neuroscientist. I got my PhD, I'd gotten a good professorship. Everything should have been fine. And yet I wasn't happy and I didn't know why. So I think that what must be happening is something deep inside of us. There's this yearning for something we were told about in this materialist paradigm. If I just get all the accolades, all the knowledge, all the material possessions I could want, I should be happy. And then wait a minute, what went wrong? Why didn't it work? So I think that opens us up to being aware that we want something more, and we become more curious to looking for alternative perspectives. So that's a start. But then the second part of it is that, yes, after that first experience, I remember going home from that meditation retreat and thinking, “What happened to me?” And, you know, how can I relate this to all that I've studied for the last many, many years in graduate school in neuroscience? And what happened was that I would shift back and forth in different moments of my day, between my gut understanding of this wonderful love and equanimity that existed inside of me, when I simply quieted my mind down, to my intellectual understanding that I was trained in for all those years, in which my colleagues believed in an actual, concrete way. And I would remember I would go to a meeting. For example, I went to a meeting in Sweden one summer, giving a talk at the meeting in Sweden, and all of my friends were absolutely materialists, and I realized I began to question myself. And then I had to remind myself to go back into that place of equanimity inside. And there it is again. Oh, yes, that's what I'm really looking for. So I would say that during my first years, it was this fascinating thing of: “Can I trust my own interiority? Can I trust my own subjective experience and not just believe the intellect, which is telling me something else from my background, my culture, my career?” And I think that gradually, over time, I found that my heart would be running ahead of my mind. As I would say, my heart was running ahead of my intellect wanting to explore these things, and my intellect was sort of trying to keep up afterwards to see how it might put these two worlds together. And of course, when you do it long enough, you find beautiful ways of integrating this as you explore it further.
Interesting. We go back to the Asian studies, and I think one of the particular areas of your interests and knowledge these days is Kashmiri Shaivism, am I correct?
Yes. Okay. And how did you arrive at that? Because most people stay with Advaita Vedanta or some, some a little bit more known systems. And by the way, maybe we should say what Shaivism actually is because not everybody knows. Many people have heard about Vedanta, but not… Advaita Vedanta, but not about Kashmiri Shaivism. Maybe you could help us out.
Definitely. I should say that, first of all, what happened is the reason that I became interested in this Kashmiri Shaivism was because during one of my sabbaticals in the year 2000, I decided to go to Rochester University in the United States, where they had a very strong Asian studies program and professors studying a lot of ancient texts of Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, etc. And so, because I was there, I began taking courses in, for example, Kashmiri Shaivism. And that particular philosophy states that consciousness is fundamental. But first, let me give you a little bit more background, because I think it'll help you understand how I got into this. So I was on that sabbatical year from the University of Oregon. So I spent six months at the University of Rochester, where I began, in fact, an advanced degree in Asian studies. And the professor I was studying with introduced us to sutras from a philosophical work that was called the recognition sutras in Sanskrit. That would be the Pratyabhijna-Hrdayam. And the author was a sage named Kshemaraja. And the means of delivering these teachings in that era, this is like the 10th century now, was the sutra. And a sutra is the shortest possible statement of a teaching on a given question. And Sutra one – and this work is really a definition of supreme consciousness, which is what I'm interested in today and what I think Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin and others are interested in. So the sutra is this. I'm going to say it in Sanskrit, but then say it in English: Chiti svatantra vishva siddhi hetuhu. So the words are consciousness, freedom, totality, power and cause. And I was intrigued by the fact that there's no verb in the sutra. So you can see that consciousness itself here is being defined. It's the first word. Now in neuroscience, consciousness means awareness. But in Kashmiri Shaivism consciousness is also synonymous then with freedom, with everything in the universe, with all power and attainment. And it's also the cause of all that. Now that sounds very much like what we hear from Bernardo Kastrup and Federico Faggin when they're talking about idealism today. So one way to translate that sutra is: “Consciousness out of its own freedom is the source and the power of everything.”
Beautiful. Sorry, gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Sorry. I thought, I love that too. And so the point is, it's seen as the energy and the origin of all that is. And it's a force by which these manifest into form. Now I'm going to give you two more sutras because I think they help even unpack it further. The second sutra says: “Consciousness itself descends from that expanded state to become the mind contracted by the objects of our perception.” Thus, this pure consciousness has the capacity to contract into the separate awareness of each individual, that is, all of us defined as actually all the entities in the universe, taking the form of our sense of material reality around us. And that material reality is whatever we choose to put our attention on, whatever we perceive and understand from that perception. And the sutra is saying that the mind actually takes the form of our perceptions and our thoughts. And I think this is critical. It takes the form of our thoughts. Now the next sutra, as one more level of understanding. It says “the person whose nature is the contracted mind – that's my contracted mind – experiences the illusion of duality.” We feel we are separate from everything else in the universe.
So when I read those sutras, I thought of the papers that Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin and others have written about the nature of consciousness because they sound so similar. Talking about these individual points of consciousness, awareness that come from this expanded awareness, saying, “Let me know myself and therefore the way I can experience myself is to become many points of consciousness learning from the other points of consciousness.” So I want to say just one more thing about this Kashmiri Shaivism and that is that there's one other text by another sage called Utpaladeva, the same 10th-century time period, called the Stanzas on the Recognition of Shiva. Shiva is simply the nature of universal consciousness. That's their word for it. And what I like about this is that what it does is, it adds one more bit of essential knowledge that the reason we become ignorant of our essential nature when we become points of consciousness in space, you and me, etc., is because of our ignorance of who we really are. And the ignorance comes from the fact that now we create thoughts as we're looking at the world, trying to identify different points and objects in the world. And so we carve out from this expansive consciousness a bird or a rabbit or a tree. And in doing that, we basically cognitively separate that from everything else. And we often ignore the other things that we aren't naming. So right then we have created the illusion of duality, and we have actually filtered out much of the universe as we only focus on the things that we have concepts for. And to me, that's very, very similar to the modern understanding of filter theory. In fact, they call it the filter theory there. And that's what I've been studying now for the last 15 years, is understanding in neuroscience how our brain filters out this wider awareness, just like they were saying in Kashmiri Shaivism in the 10th century.
Fascinating. I love the sutras. I must say. But the difference between Advaita Vedanta and Shaivism, Kashmiri Shaivism… Is it only related to the fact that Advaita Vedanta says that the world is maya, the illusion. And Shaivism says: the world is Shiva or the manifestation of Shiva? That's it? Or… more or less.
There are a lot of different complexities because they came from slightly different parts of India, and the same sort of time period. But I would say that, non-dual Advaita Vedanta is very much like Kashmiri Shaivism. There's other Vedanta that is a dualistic form, which says: there is, in effect, consciousness, and then there's the world. And one is separate from the other. But I think the point is that what the Kashmiri Shaivism is saying is that literally, consciousness comes into every aspect of the world as the world is created, as it is basically crystallized out of infinite awareness, infinite consciousness, to become the infinite particles, numbers of particles or entities that we are. It retains all of its original characteristics, its creativity, and also its ability to re-know itself from its ignorance to recognize itself. That's why these sutra texts are called recognition sutras. And I think that's the important point, is that we know who we are at a subtle level, but we have to recognize it. And I think that Bernardo Kastrup and Federico Faggin really say exactly the same thing. And I just want to remind you, I've been reading Federico Faggin’s book, IRREDUCIBLE, meaning consciousness is irreducible, and this is what he says about it in terms of his own understanding of consciousness or idealism. He says basically, it begins with the source of consciousness, which he calls the creative principle. Well, I would think people from Kashmiri Shaivism would also call it the creative principle, which he calls the one consciousness and defines as a unified quantum field. So that's the difference. Now we understand quantum mechanics so Federico Faggin can talk about it in terms of this quantum field, which is a probability cloud of possibilities, which is exactly, again, what we were talking about before, before consciousness becomes crystallized into reality. It was a probability field that was waiting to come into a three-dimensional space-time realm in a certain sense. And the other thing that I think is interesting about Faggin’s version of this, and I think Bernardo talks about it somewhat similarly. He says this one consciousness gives purpose, meaning and direction to the universe, and it wants to know itself, to fulfill itself and thus enjoy and love its existence. So I'm thinking that sounds so similar to these ancient texts. And he also says it's essential. And irreducible properties are consciousness, free will, just like they say in Kashmiri Shaivism. Holism – it's one. Dynamism – it's actually constantly creating. And life itself. And then the other thing that's so similar in the modern view of idealism is the process of knowing itself involves the creation of consciousness units, which Federico Faggin calls parts-whole because they're part of the same whole, of that one. And he says that every new self-knowing in the universe is an entity that represents the whole, but is not separate from the whole. So we are not separate. We represent the whole, but we have our own ability to create and we create further each one of us. So I think to me it's like, wow, these are so similar. And the fact that the consciousness units have free will, is an important part of modern idealism. So the oneness within all these entities and all the entities are within the one. So to me, I'm going, that's amazing. And somehow it gives me confidence that I think people who have had very interesting awakening experiences, like Federico Faggin had, and many other scientists, seem to get in touch with an interiority inside of them that helps them want to explore how our material world and their experience may be related. And they've come up with these beautiful ways of knowing whether it was in the 10th century, perhaps 3000 years ago or today.
The majority of Shaivism, the majority of the texts, are coming as part of revelation, isn't it? It's not something that was analytically or intellectually achieved. While the modern idealism… OK, in case of Federico maybe it was both – intellectual and revelational. But in case of Bernardo… he clearly stated it’s only purely analytical. So it is remarkable that, you know, so many centuries ago, knowledge obtained through revelation versus knowledge obtained through intellectual effort, sort of coincides or there are such strong parallels between them. So, I'm starting saying: there must be something to it. Not a coincidence, is it?
Right. But and I also want to mention that many of the texts, in fact, that were written in the 10th century, whether they were Buddhist texts or these texts from Kashmir, and I want to mention that Kashmir and Tibet are just right across the mountains from each other. And they interacted a lot throughout the last 2000 years. And they also created, after they might have had some sort of an expansive experience, looked very logically at their own perception of the universe, and tried to explain what was going on. Like Utpaladeva is saying, “Wait a minute. It's because of our conceptuality, our thoughts, that we contract into these awarenesses that make us think that we are separate from everything else.” So I appreciate how perhaps, like Bernardo, they're trying to put together these two things to make it very clearly understandable to the intellect, as well as to maybe our own intuition inside.
What conclusions do you think, apart from, you know, my WOW, can we draw from these parallels: the modern idealism and the Kashmiri Shaivism. And how do we position that against materialism? Because it seems to be like, you know, two different, completely different stories and understandings of reality.
Well, they are, and yet, obviously, I think they're complementary. And so one thing that I always talk to people about when I'm giving a presentation is I show them one of those paradoxical figures. And one example again is a vase that you see in the foreground in black. But if you look carefully at the diagram, you see that the white background really shows you two faces that are facing each other. And it depends on whether you're focused on the foreground of the black vase or the white background, whether you see a vase or a face or two faces and to me, that's what's happening with materialism and what I might call consciousness being fundamental. As a materialist, I was focusing only on the face that was in my foreground. It was my five senses, and they certainly seemed like my superficial, absolute reality. But when I had my experience of quieting my mind down and seeing something more expansive, I then saw that something else was there as well. And so it's not that it's ever an either/or. And I keep trying to emphasize that to my students and to my scientific colleagues. All I'm saying is, can you expand your vision to include the vase and the face; the five senses and the object of the universe that I see through my five senses, with my intuition and a vibratory-felt sense that is also there at the same time, that goes beyond what my five senses and my neurons and my brain can actually explain about reality, the phenomena that go beyond what my five senses can do. And this just reminds me, when I look at the fundamental aspects of what I would call consciousness being fundamental. They include things like not only is causal physical reality of course, is its manifestation, but all conscious entities are linked or entangled. And as a neuroscientist, I couldn't accept that. But the more I look at research coming out today, the more evidence there is for that. And I want to give you just one quick example, because I just learned about it. It's research that has been done by Diane Hennacy Powell, a neuropsychiatrist, on children with autism who usually cannot speak. And they are now being given tests to show that they have almost 100% mental telepathy with their mothers, who they are emotionally linked to. And she's done this experiment with many of these children. She will put the child in a room and the mother across from the room, so the child can't see even like, words the mother is looking at or a book. And simply has the mother look at, for example, a picture on a book, and the child will tell you what the picture is. And they can do this if the mother's in another room. There's no way they can be communicating at a verbal, three-senses level. And yet these children again and again are absolutely accurate. And the point is, it was partly probably because they couldn't use their normal senses because they were autistic. And so they developed telepathy, the ability to mentally know what another person is seeing or thinking. So, I mean, we have so much evidence these days from a number of different types of experimental studies. I'm saying, look, the fact that consciousness is entangled, it looks like it's getting more and more obvious. So I think that those are the intriguing things that I'm finding that my curiosity is helping me see. And I didn't have that curiosity when I was a materialist. This is why I believe in expanding our awareness. If we expand our curiosity, we'll see the data that are lying there in front of us, but in a different part of that paradoxical view of vase and faces.
Yeah. One of your areas of expertise is the physiological and transformational effects of mystical experiences, NDEs, meditation and after-death communication experiences. So I'm curious, what are the most interesting research cases and stories that you have come across in your career? And what have been the biggest AHA moments for you as a scientist and possibly as a meditator?
Yeah, I think that that is probably a key part of what I have been learning in the last many years since I began exploring this. And I want to mention, of course, that researchers believe typically, who are materialists, that neuroscience basically says that a near-death experience could not occur because, in fact, if the neurons are not functioning normally, there shouldn't be a way that you should have these amazing experiences people talk about. But the people that have done careful research in the area feel that there are very strong cases giving evidence for the fundamental nature of consciousness, meaning that it doesn't emerge solely from the activity of neurons in our brain. And so I want to mention that there are a number of carefully conducted studies now. First of all, as prospective studies, which means that they bring all the patients into a hospital network that had a near-death experience, if, excuse me, that had cardiac arrest and if they survived their cardiac arrest, they asked them, “Did anything unusual happen during your cardiac arrest in resuscitation?” And if they say yes and they then explain a near-death experience that happened, they then carefully interview them. And the point is that they know that these people who had cardiac arrest, which lasted more than I think it's about 20 seconds, had flat EEG, which means the whole cortex of the brain is silent. And they found that about somewhere between 18 and 20% of those people. In one study by Pim Van Lommel, in the Netherlands, had an NDE and about 12% had what they call a core NDE, meaning that they left their bodies and often experienced things outside of the room they were in, etc. and again, that EEG, cardiac arrest. And what I want to do right now is say that, first of all, we have the evidence from these prospective studies that say yes to success and yes, that people see things that they couldn't see with their five senses. And just before I even go into any of the cases, think about this: in most of these cases, during surgery, your eyes are taped shut. You cannot see through your eyes no matter what. In another case, the ears have loudspeakers in them because they're trying to see if there are reflexes from hearing that are available, and so the ears are, in effect, taped shut. Okay. Then the person actually gives you evidence from a perspective outside their body that they are recognizing people in the room and saying exactly what they were doing. Now, I don't know, as a neuroscientist, how the neurons in my brain and my five senses could do that. So I think that's one of the key issues that I'm thinking about as I'm trying to evaluate the authenticity of these various cases. So the first one I want to tell you about is actually one that is by Pam Reynolds, which was actually looked at very carefully by Doctor Sabom, in Atlanta, Georgia. And the reason why this one is so powerful is that blood was drained completely from her brain during surgery for a brain stem aneurysm, and she had an NDE during that procedure. So I'll just give you a little bit of a background on it to see how powerful I think this particular case is. So she was 35 and she was a suburban mom with classical music training, and
She went to a neurologist because she began to have trouble speaking. And he found she had this aneurysm, which was a ballooning of a blood vessel in the middle of her brain stem, and it was already leaking blood into her brain. And the neurologist told Pam Reynolds that the aneurysm was situated so that its safe removal was pretty much impossible using standard neurosurgical techniques. So you can imagine in the middle of your brain stem, you don't want to be cutting through the brain stem to get to an aneurysm and try to protect it.
But Pam found that Robert Spetzler, who was a neurosurgeon in Phoenix, had developed this new surgical procedure to deal with these risky aneurysms like the one she had. And he agreed to do the procedure for free. Now, at the beginning of the procedure, she was given a sedative intravenously to put her to sleep, and her eyes were taped shut, and she was given a barbiturate to stop her deepest brain functions.
Now, in the next four hours of the surgery, Doctor Spencer, assisted by his team of 20 doctors and nurses, performed that surgical procedure under hypothermic cardiac arrest. Okay, so they cool the body down and they stop the heart and they drain the brain. So basically, this procedure involves the patient's vital signs, the lungs, the heart chilling the body to 60°F (ed. circa 16°C) and draining the blood from the affected body part, in this case, the head. So not only is she given medication to put her into the deepest coma, but then you add on to this hypothermia, which puts her into an even deeper coma. So her brain is as asleep, as comatose, as unresponsive as it can possibly be.
And when he was asked if Reynolds could see or hear anything during this time, Spetzler said: absolutely not. Yet she did. And so her near-death experience began just at the point when the surgeon, using this pneumatically powered cutting tool, began to cut into Reynolds' skull. And this is how she described it. So this is after the fact. She is now aware of what's happening in spite of all of this; she says, the next thing I recall was the sound. It was a natural D. Remember, she's a musician. As I listen to the sound, I felt it was pulling me out of the top of my head and the further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became. She said: I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on. I remember seeing several things in the operating room when I looked down. So again, she's looking down from above. It was the most aware that I think I have ever been in my entire life. She said: I was metaphorically sitting on Doctor Spetzler's shoulder. He's a surgeon. It was not like normal vision. It was brighter and more focused and clearer than my normal vision. And she said there was so much in the operating room that I didn't recognize and so many people. So she saw all those people on the team. She said: I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar. I expected them to take all of the hair, but they didn't. She said: I saw then the thing that I hated the sound of, and it looked like an electric toothbrush, and it had a dent in it, a grove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the handle. I want you to be aware that even if a skeptic might say, maybe this was a hallucination, she was seeing these verified events in the room from outside her physical body with her eyes taped shut.
Pam Reynolds says she also remembers hearing a female voice saying that her veins and arteries were small. And in fact, while Spetzler operated on Pam's head, a female surgeon located the femoral artery and vein in Reynolds' right groin, and they did turn out to be too small. And so the left artery was used. So they then did that hypothermia procedure. So once her heart stopped, Reynolds' brainwaves flattened into their electro-cerebral silence, and her brainstem function weakened. And clicks from that ear device—it was clicking into her ear—produced more and more lower spikes on the monitoring electrogram of her midbrain, or, excuse me, her brainstem function. So she was now in total brain shut down. And that was the time for their jarring surgical maneuver to begin. And in this period, her near-death experience progressed. And now, she said, there was a sensation like being pulled almost out of her body, but not against her will, she said. She said I was going of my own accord because I wanted to go, and the feeling like I was going up this elevator really fast, like almost in a tunnel, but not a tunnel. And there she ended up meeting her grandmother and a number of other her relatives and her family told her, it's not your time. You cannot go any further. You need to go back. And she said, then I saw my body back in the surgical room and she said, I didn't want to get into it. It looked terrible. It looked like a train wreck. It looked like what it was. It was dead. I believe it was covered, she said. It scared me and I didn't want to look at it. When it happened, she said: it was like diving into a pool of ice water. It hurt. And of course, the point is that she survived. She woke up later in the recovery room and survived for many, many years.
But I think the point is that we do know from the surgeons' accounts that it would be unlikely, almost impossible, for Reynolds to have seen or heard the bone saw with her eyes and her ears taped shut and with loud speakers in her ears. And when he was asked how he could explain Reynolds' perceptions of the events of her surgery, Spetzler said: From a scientific perspective, I have absolutely no explanation about how it could have happened. He was then asked whether the drugs or the neurotransmitters could create hallucinations, and Spetzler said: Those are suspect, but not in this setting. You can have patients who become hypoxic who have too little oxygen in the blood, but in that situation, patients may experience hallucinations where you see yourself transported up into a corner of the ceiling and you're looking down on things. But in virtually every one of those settings, you have a warm body, which is missing something. So that you can imagine all sorts of neurons firing in an unorganized fashion. And it would give you an explanation. But here you have the opposite. Here you have the neuron in a depth of a sleepy state of suspended animation. And that makes it very hard to think that is from active neural transmission. So when I heard that case, it was like, really? How could I, as a neuroscientist, find a reason to say that this couldn't have actually been a credible case of her witnessing from a place outside of her body with flat EEG things that were happening and having experiences of other realms at the same time. So to me, that's one of the strongest cases that we have in our near-death experience repertoire of the reason that, in fact, consciousness does not need active neurons to be able to actually perceive events around it.
Fascinating. I mean, I'm always fascinated by these cases. And and also when people start arguing on our YouTube channel, because we've done an interview with Doctor Pim van Lommel. And then people say: yeah, it's only 18% that remember. So, that sort of... that doesn't really count. It must be some, you know, some reason why science still doesn't know it, because it's so few people that actually remember something at all. Yeah. What would you say to that?
Well, I would say to that is I often wondered about that myself. And of course, because I look at the literature very carefully and also cases that might come up, I found about, I think it was a year and a half ago, a case that was actually reported by Stephanie Arnold about her own near-death experience during cardiac arrest during the birth of her second child from amniotic fluid embolism that happened to her. And what was interesting about this case was that she had no memories of a near-death experience right after her resuscitation, but she recovered her memories of the NDE only later, after she was under hypnosis. And then when she shared the recordings of the hypnosis sessions with her hospital staff, her husband and the other caregivers, they verified everything she said. And I think that's important because recent prospective studies, like those of Pim van Lommel, only do see these NDEs, and maybe somewhere between 18 and 20% of cases, depending on the study. But as you say, some people then say, well, wait a minute, how can it be real if people don't have this all the time? And what's interesting is that the well-known MD, Sam Parnia, said, why would it happen and only, say, 18% of the cases? And he proposes that these percentages may be low, not because they don't occur in more individuals, but because patients had retained no memory of the event. And he states that that possibility really raises the issue of experiences in relation to death being much more common than we've previously estimated. With some individuals being aware during cardiac arrest but having forgotten the experiences until later, they try to attempt to recall the events. Most people can't. But now studies are showing that under hypnosis, these memories have this new tool for coming now to the surface. As I like his phrase, he says, basically that these enhanced methods may permit access to a larger iceberg of memories outside the range of those normally attainable through explicit recall.
So to me, it's like, oh, wow. I certainly am aware that that happens because we know in our dreams the dreams are happening in absolute like clear color. And as soon as we wake up, they're gone. And no matter what I do, I can't remember them. So in fact, I think there is research showing that we remember best events that happen in a particular state of consciousness when we go back to that state of consciousness. And that's sort of what you're doing in hypnosis. You're going back to this quiet brain where you were in the NDE, and then that memory can come back. And I just want to mention to you, in this case of Stephanie Arnold, that I published a paper after doing an interview with her. And I know that Robert Mayes and others have also looked at her case carefully. And there are 14 separate events that happened during her cardiac arrest that were later verified by hospital personnel when she actually recovered these memories during this hypnotherapy. And I'll just name a few of them for you so you get a feeling of what she actually had verified. So one of them was that she saw another doctor who was not her own doctor, who was named Doctor Levitt delivering her son Jacob, and she was wondering, why is it Doctor Levitt delivering my son Jacob? Well, when she mentioned this Doctor Park, the resident who delivered her son Jacob, confirmed that she had delivered him. They said that's typical. In a teaching hospital, you allow the residents to go ahead and do some of the parts of a procedure. Another was Arnold saw another doctor. Again, this is Doctor Lim in the operating room standing next to the EKG, though she was not scheduled to be in the operation. And again Doctor Lim confirmed that at the last minute she decided to attend Arnold's delivery. So all of these things were seen with her eyes taped shut, again under cardiac arrest. She says she also saw a brunette nurse push the code button when she had cardiac arrest, and Doctor Higgins verified that it was this brunette nurse that did that. Arnold saw Doctor Higgins put a tube down her throat to get her breathing back, and Higgins confirmed that she was the one that intubated Arnold. And she also saw one of the nurses, who was very big and strong, starting compressions, and she recognized her a year later when she met her for the first time and said, you were the one that broke my ribs during the compressions. And the nurse, Jessica, confirmed that that was the case. So I heard those particular events and the fact that they were all corroborated. When the hospital staff saw the recording of the hypnotherapy session and they said you were explaining everything exactly as it happened. So those are the reasons why I say, look, a lot of these objections that people may have are because they haven't looked carefully at the research literature. And now the reason I published that case study was because I wanted to get it into the Journal Explorer, which would be on the PubMed database, where doctors and other scientists would be able to access it when they were looking up, for example, a key word like near-death experiences, and they would find that and then see the evidence that is there.
Amazing. I mean, just just mind-boggling, really. But so what you're saying, what we are saying basically here is that the reason why people do not remember or very few people remember NDEs is because somehow we don't have access to those memories. The memories are there, the events are there, the memories created is just we don't have access. The same way, we, some of us, do not have access to dreams. There are people who never dream in their entire life, right? They have dreams, certainly have. But they don't remember, so to speak. Right? So the entire life they say: I never dream! Doesn't mean that they don't. So the same with the NDEs. Yeah. Okay. That clarifies somewhat. Please go ahead. You were saying something.
Yeah. But I would say that there are just two more cases that I won't go into detail on, but they're also very strong. One is the case that I actually also published with Doctor Bettina Payton, who had cardiac arrest during a cesarean section for the birth of her third child. And once again, she had her eyes taped shut. And yet at a certain point, she, of course, hears the surgeon say, basically... Well, no, it's the anesthesiologist say: Her blood pressure is too low, how far along are you in the surgery? - to the surgeon. And he basically says: Her blood pressure is plummeting fast. And at that point, she hears a loud explosive because, in fact, her blood pressure has plummeted. And they then go ahead and press that red button to call a code on the wall because her heart has stopped. And she then is watching all of this now from above, her body in the operating room, seeing everything in the operating room. She then leaves for a period of time and goes. She says she realizes it's not another realm, it's another state of consciousness that she is in where she feels one with a sparkling like intelligence, and she feels totally happy there, but then is told you have to go back. She goes back, enters the operating room and sees the code team rushing into the room trying to revive her. And then this white-haired surgeon coming in, weaving his way through the room to her side, taking his hand, reaching into her blood-filled abdomen, locating the aorta, clamping his finger around it, clamping it shut. And that's when her heart starts pumping again. And she knows that she's going to live because she's watching all of this happening. And she then again hears a nurse whisper in her ear that you have a baby. This is a beautiful little girl. She survived. She wakes up in the recovery room later from the anesthesia. And before anybody can talk to her, even though she has a trachea tube in her mouth, still, she motions for them to say nothing and for a napkin, and she writes on the napkin. I know my heart stopped. I know my uterus is out because they did a hysterectomy, and I know I have a baby girl. So that she could tell them before they could tell her exactly what happened. And she said from that moment she knew that consciousness was fundamental, that she was not just this physical body. And she had been an atheist ahead of time. But that experience now told her, I am much more than my five senses and the neurons in my brain. So once again, she was an MD and she then went on to do hospice care in the rest of her life's work. And people said when she walked into a room for hospice care, her lack of fear of death could be felt. That's how it transformed her. So.
Yeah. Yeah. What does it tell us about the nature of reality and about who we really are? I think it links very nicely to the philosophies and, you know, to the ancient and the modern philosophy of idealism as well. But then I started thinking, some people say that consciousness is like the wind. We cannot observe it directly. We can only observe its effects. How can we best study it? Because you explored that topic as well in your career?
Yes. And I think it's a really good question, because I think one of the things that you and I might talk about is whether it helps to be a meditator studying consciousness or to be a purely objective scientist coming from the outside studying consciousness. And I think the first point is that no matter what area you're studying, I believe the important point is that you be an expert in the field to begin with, so that you understand the questions in a very clear and precise way. So when I was doing my work on, for example, balance control in patients with Parkinson's or with a stroke, the fact that I had, you know, 20 years of research as my background, made me, I think, a better researcher in asking the right questions and creating my hypotheses. The key is that I have to be willing to accept alternative hypotheses. So yes, I have my own idea about how an experiment might turn out, but I'm open to other ways that it might turn out. That will tell me even more about the mechanism. So I'm not afraid of what I will discover in my experiment. I think it's the same way with a meditator. I think that meditators are probably very good scientists studying meditation because they have watched the phenomenon in a certain sense from their own interiority; what blocks their ability to have expanded awareness. What helps that happen. And then they simply need to couple it with real curiosity about what is happening in their brain and or beyond so that they can be both very, very intuitively curious that also be able to accept whatever they see and look into it more deeply if things don't really explain themselves so immediately, they can begin to unravel it more and more and go deeper and deeper. So that's the first part of the sentence, the question. But I think the next part really is, if people now are students that are coming to me to say, okay, Marjorie, what do you think is the best thing to do if I want to go and study consciousness? And the first thing I want to say is that I think that the academic environment is slowly changing, and there are more and more professors doing research related to the fundamental nature of consciousness. And there are places in the United States like Harvard University, Brown University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin, University of Virginia. They're all now with professors doing research in these areas. So a student can certainly apply there. And in Europe, it's the same way: the University of Northampton, Oxford University, Imperial College London, the University of Greenwich, University of Nancy in France and the University of Padua in Italy. So it's not as if it's not going on in an academic setting. So that's really great news. And then I would say to students, okay, now what you need to do is to actually develop two parallel lines of research. Once you begin to do this research for a PhD, a postdoc or a professorship, so that you have one that is in your true, heartfelt research area of understanding consciousness and what it really means. And the second is in a more mainstream area where your colleagues are comfortable and they will accept your credibility because you're getting grants in that mainstream area and you're publishing in that mainstream area, and that means you're credible, also at looking at these other areas like - is consciousness fundamental? And I think that that's what's made me successful. Right now, I have all that background in a mainstream area proving to my colleagues I'm credible, credible. And now, when I do this other research, people say: well, maybe I can trust her, that she's carefully looking at these research questions and looking at the data and scrutinizing it very carefully. So to me, those are the two things that are really, really important, as more and more young people begin to move into that area of science.
But then what I'm hearing you say is that actually having your own first-person experiences is not a hindrance towards being a scientist and producing credible work and adhering to a third-person objective approach as well? So actually what you're saying, in fact, it's a strength, right? That's what you're saying.
Absolutely. Well, and Natalia, I want to mention one more thing. When you hear about a number of scientists who have actually been Nobel Prize winners or close to that, talking about how they made a scientific discovery, often it came to them in a dream. So, you know, once again, it's not as if it's only the intellect and its linear, rational portion of our brain that is functioning to create these great insights. It is often this other part of ourselves that comes when the mind is quiet. And then in the dream, the answer comes, and then in the morning we write it down and we do the experiment. And it's true. So I think that that's the point. When we are meditating, we are quieting the mind down and making insights more available to ourselves to really do the best experiment possible. But then the larger question remains, I think, can we really unite spirituality and science? Because right now those are completely separate areas, officially speaking. But I mean, what I'm hearing you're saying is, first of all, you can have your spiritual practice and you can use that to inform your questions and to have your own insights. That's that's clear. Any other way we can unite and marry spirituality and science? Is a part of me that wishes we would take away the word spirituality, because in fact, I think what Bernardo was saying, and in many ways Federico Faggin and others that I've been studying, there's a man named Jeb Barton that has been doing research on consciousness and how we can get access to these more expansive states of awareness. And it's like the word spirituality seems way too woo-woo, supernatural, etc., but all we're doing is quieting down the activity of the default mode network in our mind that is taking up all of our brain space with its analysis of what's going on with me related to my environment and my career and this and that and the other, and allowing the mind to become quiet so that we can have more expansive, creative insights. So we if we could take away the word spirituality and look at it in simply this view that there is a fundamental consciousness, why does that have to be spiritual? That simply could be a fact. And then we, our individual points of consciousness, again, just another fact that we want to get more access to that expansive consciousness, to get more insights into how to do experiments in science. To me, then it becomes a much more neutral platform that we could all work on.
You are the president of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-materialist Sciences. You are a key speaker at conferences and working groups around the world. So this must be your passion. I reckon this must be your passion. You dedicate so much time and effort to it. So why do you think it's important to advance a post-materialist paradigm, especially in sciences?
So first, I think there's considerable research published that shows that persons with a post-materialist worldview, as we discussed earlier, that consciousness is fundamental to the universe and that all beings, our consciousness, have a very different attitude toward other human beings, toward animals, plants, and in fact, for the whole planet. So first, they feel this deep interconnection with others, and so their value shifts toward more compassion toward others. They feel more connection with their fellow human beings, and they want to do whatever they can to take care of the resources of the planet, for others and for future generations. And I have written papers on this, and I know many others have begun to write papers on this in the last 20 or more years, examining changes in attitudes of individuals after they've had an experience that shifts their world view to one of the fundamental nature of consciousness and the data that support that perspective. So I would say that whether your change in worldview comes, like Bernardo Kastrup, from more carefully analyzing the data versus Federico Faggin, from that experience in the middle of the night, it doesn't really matter. The point is that that shift in worldview toward understanding that consciousness looks like it truly is fundamental and everything is interconnected can't help but change your behavior and your attitudes toward life. And in the research paper I've published, it shows that people become, for example, much more wanting to help other people; they're more altruistic. They also get along much better with their family, and they become less materialistically oriented. It's not that they, like, eschew materialism, but they find that they appreciate the materialistic material things they have, but don't feel the necessity to surround them all the time with material possessions. So they have a much more balanced point of view in life toward what really is important to them, and for taking care of others. Feeling that unity with everyone around them, the animals around them, the planet. Their heart opens. It's like now that their heart is really open and they feel that. So my sense is that wouldn't everyone want to have that? Wouldn't we all want to feel that sense that we have enough and we can share what we have with others? That brings me kind of to a quote by Carl Gustav Jung. And it's really good to quote Doctor Jung. So once he said that the future of humanity depends on how many people achieve individuation, or we might say enlightenment.
You have studied the transformative effects of ESP phenomena and mystical experiences that often, not always, but often lead to enlightenment. Would you agree with Jung? And what is the future of humanity in your view?
That's a wonderful question. I think that I totally agree with Jung, and I believe that more and more people are understanding now the truth of what he said. And to me, the key is how do we spread this understanding that our belief system determines how we act in the world and how we preserve this planet and the resources on it, and take care of everything versus how we exploit it and actually may bring it to destruction. And if we can simply understand that that sense of interconnection, of also trusting in the world around us. Again, my friend Jeb Barton, who I now quote with my friends a lot, says that we need to understand that this is a trustworthy universe and that I am really co-creating, as part of an experiment, the expansion of consciousness within this universe. My joy and my passion is expanding consciousness through this creative experiment of being an individual in the universe right now with others, and it is trustworthy, is full of love, and we can begin to focus our attention on those aspects of the universe and then experience those in our day-to-day life. It's partly what we choose to put our attention on that determines how we perceive reality. So to me, that's a key that Jung was also saying over and over again in all of his own works.
And as an experienced meditator, and you've done you've gone through this experience, being unhappy with your kind of routine materialist life towards doing rigorous meditations or rigorous meditation routines, as far as I'm concerned anyway. What can you can you say to people who are at the stage of where you were before your transformative experience? How can they make that step? What people should do to move forward, not to get stuck in life? You know, there's the so-called ‘rat race’, you know; home-work, home-work routine. “And all these people telling me from the screen: consciousness and it's full of love. And, you know, I'm just doing that, you know, daily: in-out-sleep-next day, in-out-sleep-next day.” So here's what I learned myself. So when I... before I had that meditation experience, I believed that my only value in the world was related to how much I actually produced. Becoming a really good graduate student, getting my PhD, writing papers, getting grants. And that determined my value in the world. And now I'm understanding that I have an intrinsic value as a being on this planet of being lovable, just as I am. And everybody has that same value of being lovable as they are. And if we accept that as our true nature, and then we do the research that I'm still doing from the joy of doing the research, but not
From the pressure of proving my value, it changes my whole attitude toward the world. I think the key thing is to understand that we're here on this planet, in this body, to actually fulfill our passion of understanding what the world is about and sharing that with others. It has nothing to do with competition. It's the fact of doing what we enjoy most, doing what we feel will fulfill us. And then having fun with it during the day. And whether we win or lose on that given day with our research or whatever, it doesn't matter because we're having the joy of actually unfolding this beautiful reality and our understanding of it with other people. We're playing a game of unfolding the beautiful creative nature of the expansion of consciousness. So it's not maya. It's not an illusion, is it? No, not at all. Right.
Where our audience can learn more about your work and what publications and books would you recommend? Yes. So certainly my website, which is marjoriewoollacott.com, is a place that they can go for my articles and books to find out about them. I mean, the first book was Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind, where I began to talk about how I made the shift toward curiosity and then began looking at all these things that I talked about today. I think that that was certainly a fun book, and it's an audio version with me recording it. And the other one, I think that I love that a lot of people have loved is the one that is the collection of essays called Spiritual Awakenings: Scientists and academics describe their experiences. And that's because you have 57 scientists and academics telling their story of their awakening, the transformation in their lives, and the barriers to that in academia. And they're like four pages long, but they give you a sense that there are a lot of people out there that are academics, that are highly intellectual, that have had very interesting experiences, that they often keep in the closet because they're afraid to share them with their colleagues. So those are two of them. And then I can send to you certainly, a list of publications, if there's a way that you might be able to either get a link to them for the people that might listen.
Is there something that I haven't asked that you think is important that we say it out to people, a message or something that we should have tackled in some way or another, or something to add to our conversation? You know, I think one of the things that we didn't talk about in terms of my own collaborative research relates to terminal lucidity and end of life experiences. And I say that this is important because so many people in our society are afraid of the dying process and death, and the medical profession is only trained in keeping people alive and not helping them make that transition, which we're all going to have to go through. And so our research is really about learning more about these end of life phenomena and fact, how we can see consciousness itself in some ways appearing to come back into full lucidity when a person, for example, with Alzheimer's or a stroke or Parkinson's disease would be another one where they have lost their normal lucidity, come back to awareness beautifully, lucidly, say goodbye to their family and say, I'm going home now, or I'm going to the other side, often saying I'm going to be accompanied by my mom, and then they die peacefully. And if we had more awareness of that in our hospital settings, our hospice settings, we would have a much better way of helping people and the family that are going through this together. Find a beautiful fulfillment and a sense of equanimity in the dying process, instead of making it a tragedy and the feeling of total loss. So I think that with this other perspective, we have a very different way of approaching all of the challenges in life, as well as the beautiful moments in life.
I just want to follow up on this one. What do you think happens after death? Because... and maybe it's a silly question, but I will ask. You have your background.... You come from a family of Protestants, right? I suppose you have a rather strong Protestant background, right? Yeah. Then you studied eastern philosophies and eastern contemplative traditions. That's what it's called. So you you saw other types of, let's say... set of beliefs, maybe we call it, right... about what happens after we die. So I wonder myself and it’s a childish question, but I will ask it. When you die, what happens? Because we are... so many of us, like Muslims and Christians and, and Hindu and you know... So what happens? You die and then you go: okay, Christian? Good Christian? - the right door. Buddhist? Okay, bardo, second door to the left, you know. Hindu? Good karma? One floor down. Bad karma? - one floor up. Well, what's your personal view about this?
I think... Well, and it's based on, again, reading many, many scientific texts as well as philosophical texts from these traditions, all of those traditions. And I would say, first of all, that because I also wrote a paper with Chris Roe and other colleagues, Evelyn Elsaesser, about after death communication, where about 900 or more people, basically filled out a questionnaire about after death communication from their loved ones, their mother, their child, their husband from the other side after they died. All they say that these people are very happy on the other side, and they usually come back to them to simply say, I'm okay and don't worry about me. Or they might actually say, I'm so sorry that something happened between us where I may have hurt you. Here's a beautiful story. And again, in one paper that I wrote with Chris Roe and others, where a man is awakened early in the morning with a knock on the front door, he's in bed. He gets up, puts on his bathrobe, goes to the front door. There's an older woman facing away from him. She turns toward him and he sees it's his grandmother, and she says to him, I'm so sorry. And she's crying that I basically shunned you after your father died, that I couldn't deal with it. And now I want to say, I am so sorry. And he. Then she gave him a big hug. He gave her a hug, and he said the light was so blinding as he was giving her a hug, he had to close his eyes and then suddenly he realized the light was fading. And when he opened his eyes, nothing there was left. She was as if she was right there with him for him in that moment. So when I hear those stories, I say, wait a minute. It's like there's we could move to a different state of awareness, but we have access if we want to, to be able to energetically come back into this time space, phenomenal realm and interact with some of these people if they are able... open to hearing it. So to me, that's a good sign that we don't go away. Now, whether there's reincarnation or not, every religion philosophy may be different. It makes a lot of sense to me that we would come back to continually learning. I'd like that idea that I'll be back another time to continue expanding my understanding of consciousness, rather than limiting it to just one lifetime. So that's my own preference. And again, Ian Stevenson, University of Virginia Jim Tucker at University of Virginia have done many, many studies looking at cases suggestive of reincarnation. And they look very, very credible. So there you go. So it's not our first life and last life on the Earth. Yes. It would sound like a waste isn't it? So yeah. Such a short moment and so much to learn, so much to do, and so much to explore, and so much to grow actually. Okay. Reincarnation!
And out of Christian beliefs? Have you preserved anything? Well, you know, yes. I mean, in fact, I should mention that you probably know as well reincarnation was a part of Christianity until a particular council. I don't know if there was a Council of Trent, but yeah, so. So in fact, these things were perennial beliefs. And at some point it was voted out. And I think that's so strange that somebody would vote a belief like that out of a particular religion. So I think that I. Yeah. And of course, most of the Christian beliefs that are the core ones are God is love. It's like those things which really are essential. And I would say the mystics of the Christian tradition, like the mystics of Buddhism or any other tradition, all sound similar. They're all about: ‘we are one’. We are connected with this higher consciousness, which is totally love, and that is the essence of who we are, and what we're doing here is to learn more about that. Marjorie, thank you very much for this interview and this enlightening conversation!