Telepathic star stuff

 

As a commenter on this blog pointed out some time ago, near-death experiences or NDEs strictly speaking don´t tell us what happens after death, since the people having them aren´t...you know...really dead. Still, if the out-of-body "seeing" is taken seriously, then NDEs (and other OBEs) at least strongly suggest that consciousness can in some sense operate outside the physical body and brain, although it doesn´t really prove that it can exist entirely independently of them. Once again: the body and the brain aren´t really dead.

In his book "Glimpses of Eternity", pioneering NDE researcher Raymond Moody retells stories of something he calls Shared Death Experiences. Sometimes, the relatives of a dying person can experience the latter´s near-death experience! This can´t be explained away by skeptics by using the usual excuses: "the dying brain creates dream images", et cetera. The person having the Shared Death Experience isn´t dying, after all. Yet, phenomenologically, these experiences seem identical to NDEs. 

However, there is one other possibility: mental telepathy. Perhaps the dying person is "dreaming" and then the "dream" is telepathically transfered to the relatives around the death bed? Like an OBE, this doesn´t conclusively *prove* that the soul is immortal, but it does strongly suggest that consciousness is more complex than the standard materialist hypothesis would allow for. And, of course, once you embraced this possibility, all kinds of new questions arise. Do we have a soul, is it immortal, where does it go after the death of the body, is reincarnation true, and so on. Maybe humans have more than one "body" (like the Theosophists and occultists claim) with the "astral body" surviving (for some time at least) after the demise of the material body. 

Of course, one problem with the above is that each person has "customized" visions during a NDE (or a Shared Death Experience). Christians see Christ, others encounter Elvis Presley. This could absolutely be interpreted as some form of subjective wish fulfillment rather than an objective event happening IRL. Occultists would explain it by arguing that the astral takes anything projected on it...

A certain kind of reductionist materialists think they are clever when they call consciousness a "process" rather than an "object", but this doesn´t really solve anything. So dead matter can become thinking and willing (and convinced that it´s immaterial) if it´s configured in a certain way by completely blind forces? Oh. Must be the strangest star stuff around.

Telepathic star stuff, perhaps.