“If our conscious experience totally depends on the brain, then there can’t be an afterlife—when the brain is gone, the mind is gone. But it’s not that simple. Even when the brain seems to be virtually disabled, people are still having these experiences.” Emily Williams Kelly, University of Virginia’s Department of Perceptual Studies
I’m fascinated by the situation we find ourselves in every time we open our eyes after sleeping. We seem to emerge from a vast ocean of unconsciousness, gasping, and suddenly this world seems real, but when we were asleep, we had no awareness of this place at all. That is what many of the world’s creation myths tell us is true – we emerge from the ocean of thought (the Milky Sea), or a sleeping god is dreaming us.
For years now, I have been part of a dream group that meets four times a year. Everyone brings a dream and one by one, we open the images and discuss them. The group is led by Lionel Corbett (a medical doctor and psychiatrist among many other things), and I’m one of the few members who isn’t a psychologist, or clinician. It is always amazing when a strange (and stubborn) dream image is presented and we can’t make heads or tails of it. Then with one piercing question, insight, or suggestion, the dreamer is moved by a huge, visceral emotion and the key components of the dream open like a flower. The metaphoric and symbolic depth of the dream become apparent. I’ve never seen it fail. Dreams are profound, and they do a lot more than process the day. But where do they come from? Who or what is the dream weaver?
Additionally, I wonder about the near-death experiences some people have, potent image-experiences so similar to dreams. Mostly (but not always) these are positive and reassuring sequences. Yet they should be medically impossible. No matter what you believe about where they come from, NDEs often change the way a person lives for the rest of their lives. While there are many positives people take away, the most consistent is that the experiencer no longer fears death. As a result, they become more interested in living a meaningful life. Love and relationships take on greater importance. When I look through the 30 years of NDE collected on the NDERF website, I’m blown away by how prevalent this is.
I once attended a lecture at USC by Dr. Jeffrey Long, the founder of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and that website. Needless to say, there were plenty of academic skeptics in the room, yet, he handled every objection as though he’d heard them all thousands of times before (because he had). People shouldn’t have consciousness when the brain and heart are non-functional, yet they do. Dr. Long said that he now calls them death experiences, and drops the “near” because the person is clinically dead – so that, by definition, is an experience on being dead.
The experience of psychedelic drugs is similar too. What wisdom generates the healing images of a psilocin or ayahuasca experience? These image sequences (like dream images) can heal. Nightmares and difficult psychedelic experiences, and even the negative NDE are no less valuable for being frightening. In fact, I could make the case that the difficult experiences are the most transformative. Such wisdom is behind these images!
So, I ask myself these questions: If consciousness doesn’t depend on having a functioning body, what does it depend on? What if the powerful images of dreams, drug induced visions and NDEs all come from the same place? And what if that place is some kind of afterlife? Or what if it’s the ocean of consciousness underneath everything – the Underworld of mythology - is a metaphor for that?