People Born Blind
Can See During a Near-Death Experience
by
Kenneth Ring, Ph.D. and Sharon Cooper, M.A. |
 Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.,
(www.kenring.org) is
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the
University of Connecticut, where Sharon Cooper,
M.A., was Research Assistant at the time of this
study. This study was funded in part by the
Institute of Noetic Sciences, to which the
authors express their deep thanks for its
support. They also acknowledge their deep thanks
to Lucienne Levy for her invaluable help in
connection with this research. The authors are
also indebted to the following organizations for
their collaboration in this study:
the
American
Council of the Blind;
the
American Foundation
for the Blind;
Blindskills, Incorporated;
the
Massachusetts Association for the Blind;
the
Massachusetts Commission for the Blind;
the
National Braille Press;
the
National Federation
for the Blind;
the
National Federation for the
Blind in Connecticut;
Newsreel Incorporated;
the
Theosophical Book Association for the Blind; and
the
Ziegler Magazine for the Blind. Reprint
requests should be addressed to Dr. Ring at 19A
Stadium Way, Kentfield, CA 94904. This paper was
originally published as "Near-Death and
Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of
Apparent Eyeless Vision" in the
Journal of
Near-Death Studies, 16(2) Winter 1997, and is
reprinted her by permission.
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Table of Contents |
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1.
Abstract |
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This article reports the
results of an investigation into near-death and
out-of-body experiences in 31 blind respondents.
The study sought to address three main
questions:
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(1) |
whether blind individuals have
near-death experiences (NDEs) and, if
so, whether they are the same as or
different from those of sighted persons; |
(2) |
whether blind persons ever claim to see
during NDEs and out-of-body experiences
(OBEs); and |
(3) |
if such claims are made, whether they
can ever be corroborated by reference to
in dependent evidence. |
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Our findings revealed that blind
persons, including those blind from birth, do
report classic NDEs of the kind common to
sighted persons; that the great preponderance of
blind persons claim to see during NDEs and OBEs;
and that occasionally claims of visually-based
knowledge that could not have been obtained by
normal means can be independently corroborated.
We present and evaluate various explanations of
these findings before arriving at an
interpretation based on the concept of
transcendental awareness.
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2.
Introduction |
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This life's
dim windows of the soul
Distorts the
heavens from pole to pole
And leads you
to believe a lie
When you see
with, not thro', the eye.
William
Blake, "The Everlasting Gospel" (circa
1818)
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The question of
whether blind individuals can actually see
during out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while
close to death has long in trigued researchers
in the field of near-death studies. In part, the
idea that this seemingly impossible event could
really occur has been fueled by occasional
anecdotal reports by prominent researchers
(e.g., Kubler-Ross, 1983;
Moody and Perry, 1988)
that they have come across such cases in the
course of their investigations. Lesser known
physicians interested in near-death experiences
(NDEs), such as
Fred Schoonmaker of Denver's St.
Luke's Hospital, have also mentioned that they
have heard such claims from their blind patients
(Schoonmaker, personal communication, 1981).
Similarly, another physician,
Larry Dossey,
opened his book
Recovering the Soul (1989) with
the dramatic case of a woman named Sarah, blind
from birth, who had detailed visual perception
during surgery when her heart had stopped.
As a result of these
accounts in the literature, other researchers
and writers who have taken an interest in NDEs
have used such cases to make a powerful argument
on behalf of the authenticity of near-death
phenomena (Anderson, 1980;
Habermas and
Moreland, 1992; Iverson, 1992;
Wilson, 1987;
Woodward, 1976). Representative of this view is
a passage in a recent book by a leading figure
in transpersonal psychology, the psychiatrist
Stanislav Grof:
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There are ...
reported cases where individuals who
were blind be cause of a medically
confirmed organic damage to their
optical system could at the time of
clinical death see the environment. ...
Occurrences of this kind, unlike most of
the other aspects of near-death
phenomena, can be subjected to objective
verification. They thus represent the
most convincing proof that what happens
in near-death experiences is more than
the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of
physiologically impaired brains. (1994,
p. 31)
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Yet there is reason,
we think, not to leap too quickly to the
conclusion that the evidence supporting visual
perception in the blind is as solid as Grof's
statement would imply. In fact, when one begins
to look into the basis for these claims, they
appear to dissolve into the mists of hearsay,
unsubstantiated anecdote and other dead ends -
and even, in one case, outright fabrication. For
example, Kubler-Ross and Schoonmaker have never
documented the cases they have mentioned or
published any details concerning them.
Similarly, when one of us (K. R.) pressed
Raymond Moody for further particulars about the
blind person he described in one of his books,
he could only remember that he had heard that
account on an audio cassette provided to him by
an elderly physician, but he no longer had the
tape and could not recall the physician's name
(R. Moody, personal communication, 1992). And
the compelling case of Sarah, so vividly
portrayed by Dossey, turned out, as he confessed
in a letter to K. R., to be a complete fiction,
though Dossey justified it on the grounds that
such cases seemed to be implied by the
literature on NDEs (L. Dossey, personal
communication, 1990). Indeed,
Susan Blackmore
(1993) has recently reviewed all this evidence
and concluded that none of it holds up to
scrutiny. In short, according to her, there is
no convincing evidence of visual perception in
the blind during NDEs, much less documented
support for veridical perception (Blackmore,
1993).
Nevertheless, while
there may be reason to concur with Blackmore's
assessment, there was at least one study that
did attempt to inquire whether any evidence for
this proposition could be gathered by
systematically interviewing a sample of blind
respondents. In that investigation,
Harvey Irwin
(1987) had field workers survey a sample of 21
blind persons in Australia. The focus of Irwin's
project was to see whether any such persons had
had an OBE and, if so, to get an account of it.
Among his 21 respondents, three persons did
indeed report having had an OBE. Unfortunately,
as Irwin ruefully had to admit, all of these
persons had either some residual or peripheral
vision, so they did not in the end constitute
anything like a stringent cohort in terms of
which to evaluate the hypothesis that the blind
can see. Irwin's own conclusion at the time was
that neither his own survey nor the work of
anyone else had demonstrated that persons blind
from birth even have OBEs, and therefore no
evidence existed that such individuals could see
under such circumstances. "It now remains," he
wrote, "for further surveys to locate an OBE in
a congenitally totally blind person" (Irwin,
1987, p. 57).
This is precisely
what we have attempted to do in this study. In
what follows we describe the results of a
research project in which an effort was made to
locate and interview blind persons, including
those blind from birth, who believed they had
undergone either an NDE or an OBE not related to
any near-death incident. The principal
underlying aim of this study, however, will
already be apparent: we were concerned to
determine whether in fact any reliable evidence
could be educed from such a sample that the
blind really do see under such conditions.
The significance of
such findings, should they be established, has
largely been implicit in our discussion thus
far, but obviously the validation of such
claims, or alternatively, the confirmation of
all these rumors over the years, would have
far-reaching and possibly baleful consequences
for a conventional materialist view of science.
By the same reasoning, empirical support for
sight in the blind would be consistent with
various "New Paradigm" visions of science that
are rooted in nonlocal, nondual or holonomic
perspectives in which consciousness is the
primary reality. Furthermore, such findings
would raise profound questions, from any
scientific perspective, about mind/body
relationships, the role of the brain in vision,
and indeed the very mechanisms of sight.
Even within the more
limited confines of parapsychological thought,
such data would have a critical bearing on
hypotheses having to do with the nature of OBEs
and NDEs themselves. For example,
V. Krishnan
(1983) has argued that the perceptions reported
during OBEs may have a physical basis. As a test
of this hypothesis, Krishnan has proposed that
the OBEs of congenitally blind persons should be
distinct from those with sight. Irwin, in his
discussion of this issue, framed the
implications neatly:
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Specifically,
because people who surgically regain
their sight take some time to learn
visual identification of objects, the
initial OBEs in the congenitally blind
should exhibit the same property if the
experience depends upon the visual
pathways of the nervous system. The
content of a congenitally blind
subject's OBE therefore may speak to
Krishnan's notion of the physical basis
of out-of-body visual impressions.
(Irwin, 1987, p. 54)
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Our data will thus
provide a crucial test of Krishnan's hypothesis,
as well as speak to the long-standing
controversy in parapsychology over whether the
OBE represents some kind of true extrasomatic
state or only a retrospective reconstruction
based on sensory cues and imaginal processes. In
any case, the possible epistemological and
metaphysical implications of our findings
potentially touch on deep conundrums and
perennial concerns in the history of both normal
and anti-establishment science.
Insofar as the
specific and limited objectives of this study
are concerned, however, there were three that
formed the basis of this inquiry. Each can be
phrased as a question. First, because we were
chiefly interested in NDEs in this research,
there is a necessary preliminary question we
need to answer to which no previous systematic
investigation has even been addressed: do blind
persons in fact have NDEs and, if they do, are
they the same as or different from those of
sighted persons? Second, do blind persons, if
they do report either NDEs or OBEs, claim to
have visual perceptions during these
experiences? And, finally, if such claims are
made, is it ever possible to corroborate them
through independent evidence or the testimony of
other witnesses? In other words, can one
establish that these claims are something other
than mere fantasies or hallucinations?
These were the
issues, then, this study was designed to probe.
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3.
Method |
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A.
Procedure |
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In order to recruit
qualified participants for this study, that is,
blind persons who believed they had had either
an NDE or an OBE, we first made contact with 11
national, regional, and state organizations for
the blind, to solicit their help in locating
potential respondents among their membership.
Toward this end, we provided a notice to these
organizations about our research that was then
in cluded in their respective publications, most
of which were distributed in Braille or in the
form of an audio cassette, providing our phone
number and address and inviting interested
individuals who believed they qualified to take
part in this study to call or write us. A
similar announcement was also published in
Vital
Signs, the newsletter of the
International
Association for Near-Death Studies. Finally, we
alerted a few of our colleagues in the field of
near-death studies about our project and asked
them to refer any potentially eligible
candidates to us.
After an individual
made contact with us, we conducted a screening
interview over the telephone to make sure that
he or she had the appropriate qualifications for
our study. Specifically, we determined the sight
status of the person and made sure that he or
she had undergone either an NDE or one or more
OBEs, not necessarily as sociated with a
near-death crisis. Once the person's eligibility
for the study was established, we either then
continued with the formal in terview or
scheduled a second call for that purpose. In a
few cases, one or more follow-up calls were
necessary to clarify some aspects of the
respondent's account. In the interview, we took
a detailed sight history from the individual and
then conducted an in-depth probe about his or
her relevant experiences. This portion of the
interview was modeled on the format originally
devised by Kenneth Ring (1980), but was tailored
to the specific interests of this study and the
special characteristics of our respondents. In
the course of this interview, particular
attention was given to obtaining information
about events or perceptions that in principle
could be corroborated by external witnesses or
medical records. Where those witnesses could be
specifically identified or relevant records
secured, we made efforts to gain access to them
and, when possible, to interview the witnesses
about their own recollections of the events or
perceptions
described by the
respondent.
All conversations
were tape recorded with the permission of the
respondent, and transcripts based on these
conversations were later prepared, to permit
detailed analysis of our findings. Finally, each
participant who expressed an interest to receive
information about the findings of this study was
sent a summary at its conclusion.
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4. Subjects |
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Of
the 46 persons who were screened for this study,
31 qualified for inclusion and were interviewed.
All but three of this final sample had heard
about our study through the notices we had
distributed. The exceptions were two persons
referred to us by professional colleagues and
one individual who came fortuitously to the
attention of one of us as a result of meeting
her husband while traveling to a professional
conference.
Demographically, our
sample consisted of 20 females and 11 males
whose ages ranged from 22 to 70 years. They were
all Caucasian, overwhelmingly Christian with
respect to their original religious tradition,
but varied greatly regarding their educational
attainment and occupation.
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A. Experiential Status |
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Sixteen of our
respondents had survived an NDE, while an
additional five persons had undergone both an
NDE and one or more OBEs on other occasions not
associated with their near-death incident. Thus,
the total number of near-death experiencers
(NDErs) in this sample was 21. The remaining 10
were per sons who had one or more OBEs only.
Of our NDErs, 13 had
their experience in connection with an illness
or a surgical procedure; six as a result of an
accident, usually involving an automobile; two
were mugged; one was nearly killed by being
raped; one almost perished in combat; and one
survived a suicide attempt. (The totals here are
24 experiences since three persons had two
separate NDEs each and were therefore counted
twice in these tabulations.)
Most of the OBEs
reported occurred during states of bodily
quiescence or relaxation, though some were
occasioned by traumas, such as falls or rapes.
The great majority of these episodes were not
deliberately induced, though a few persons in
our sample did try on occasion to bring them
about through an act of will.
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B. Sight Status |
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Not quite half of our
total sample, 14, was comprised of persons blind
from birth. A few of our respondents classified
as blind from birth either had some limited
light perception as children or have retained
some as adults, but a distinct majority of
persons in this category were without even any
light perception at the time of their NDE or
OBE. An additional 11 persons fell into the
category of adventitiously blind, which means
they lost their sight sometime after 5 years of
age. The remaining six persons in our study were
individuals who were severely visually impaired,
most of them having at best only minimal
non-delineated vision.
With respect to our
two main experiential categories, NDEs and OBEs,
the breakdown on sight status is as follows:
among the 21 NDErs, 10 were blind from birth,
nine adventitiously blind, and two severely
visually impaired; among the remaining 10
out-of-body experiencers (OBErs), four were
blind from birth, two adventitiously blind, and
four severely visually impaired.
Of the 14 respondents
blind from birth, two were congenitally blind
and one had both his eyes removed by the time he
was 41/2 years old. The remaining 11 were born
prematurely between 1946 and 1958 and all were
placed in incubators where they received
excessive concentrations of oxygen resulting in
blindness. These individuals developed
retrolental fibroplasia (RLF), now commonly
referred to as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).
Of our 11
adventitiously blind respondents, seven lost
their vision between the ages of 16 and 41 as a
result of illness or accident. In some cases, it
was their near-death event itself that caused
their blindness. The other four lost their
vision between the ages of 13 and 52 due to slow
degenerative eye diseases including retinitis
pigmentosa (RP), glaucoma, and aging.
Three of our six
visually impaired respondents developed RLF; two
had RP, both of whom had limited peripheral
vison (14 and 20 degree field, respectively);
and one was born with cataracts and developed
glaucoma as a teenager. All six have been
legally blind from birth and only three of these
individuals have been able to read any print at
all.
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5.
Results |
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A.
NDEs in the Blind |
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To examine the nature
of NDEs in the blind, we must of course restrict
ourselves to the 21 respondents in our sample,
12 women and nine men, who reported NDEs. Our
findings with respect to this issue are
unequivocal: blind persons, even those blind
from birth, recount experiences that clearly
conform to the familiar prototype of the
beatific NDE first popularized in Moody's book,
Life After Life (1975). Their narratives, in
fact, tend to be indistinguishable from those of
sighted persons with respect to the elements
that serve to define the classic NDE pattern,
such as the feelings of great peace and
well-being that attend the experience, the sense
of separation from the physical body, the
experience of traveling through a tunnel or dark
space, the encounter with the light, the life
review, and so forth.
Before we turn to a
statistical summary of our findings, however, it
will be helpful to present a couple of
illustrative cases in order to provide a sense
of the actual narrative texture of these
experiences. In doing so, we will unavoidably
discover some unmistakable evidence pertaining
to our second, but primary, question, having to
do with whether the blind see during their NDEs.
Nevertheless, we must defer a detailed
consideration of this issue for the time being
since our purpose here is chiefly to report what
some of our respondents told us they remembered
when they found themselves hovering between life
and death. Because of space limitations, we will
be able to present only one case in depth, but
we will follow it up with a synopsis of a second
comparable instance. Cases that we recount below
with complete names are used with the
respondent's permission; if only a first name is
given to identify a case for purposes of
reference, it is a pseudonym.
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B.
Vicki Umipeg |
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Vicki Umipeg is a
married 43-year-old woman who has had two
near-death experiences. The first, when she was
12 years old, occurred as a result of
appendicitis and peritonitis. Her second NDE
took place almost exactly a decade later, when
she was seriously injured in an automobile
accident.
Vicki was born very
prematurely, having been in the womb only 22
weeks at delivery, and weighed just three pounds
at birth. Afterward, her weight dropped
precariously to one pound, 14 ounces. As was
common for premature babies in the 1950s, she
was placed in an airlock incubator through which
oxygen was administered. Unfortunately, because
of a failure to regulate the concentration of
oxygen properly, Vicki was given too much and,
along with about 50,000 other premature babies
born in the United States about the same time,
suffered such optic nerve damage as to leave her
completely blind. As she made clear in an
initial interview with another researcher, Greg
Wilson, who kindly provided his tapes and
transcripts to us, she has never had any visual
experience whatever, nor does she even
understand the nature of light:
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INTERVIEWER: Could you
see anything?
VICKI:
Nothing, never. No light,
no shadows, no nothing, ever.
INTERVIEWER: So
the optic nerve was destroyed to both
eyes?
VICKI: Yes,
and so I've never been able to
understand even the concept of light.
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Interestingly, the
overall form of Vicki's two experiences, which
were separated by a period of 10 years, was
extremely similar, almost as though they were
replays of one another, albeit with some
variations owing to the particularities of
Vicki's life circumstances on each occasion. To
minimize redundancy, we will present a fairly
full exposition here only of Vicki's second NDE,
since according to her own testimony, it was the
more detailed and vivid of the two.
In early 1973, Vicki,
then 22, was working as an occasional singer in
a nightclub in Seattle. One night, at closing
time, she was unable to call for a taxi to drive
her home and circumstances forced her to take
the only other option: a ride with a couple of
inebriated patrons. Not surprisingly, a serious
accident ensued during which Vicki was thrown
out of their van. Her injuries were extensive
and life-threat ening, and included a skull
fracture and concussion, and damage to her neck,
back, and one leg. In fact, it took her a full
year after being released from the hospital
before she could stand upright with out the risk
of fainting.
Vicki clearly
remembers the frightening prelude to the crash
itself, but she has only a hazy recall of
finding herself alternately out of her body and
then back inside of it at the accident scene.
Her only definite recollection of anything
external to herself while out-of-body is a very
brief glimpse of the crumpled vehicle. Although
this aspect of her experience was confusing, she
does claim that while in her out-of-body state
she was aware of being in a nonphysical body
that had a distinct form and that was, as she
put it, "like it was made of light."
She has no memory of
the her trip to Harborview Hospital in the
ambulance, but after she arrived at the
emergency room, she came again to awareness when
she found herself up on the ceiling watching a
male doctor and a woman - she is not sure
whether the woman was another physician or a
nurse - working on her body. She could overhear
their conversation, too, which had to do with
their fear that because of possible damage to
Vicki's eardrum, she could become deaf as well
as blind. Vicki tried desperately to communicate
to them that she was fine, but naturally drew no
response. She was also aware of seeing her body
below her, which she recognized by certain
identifying features, such as a distinctive
wedding ring she was wearing.
According to her
testimony, Vicki first had a very fleeting image
of herself lying on the metal table and she was
sure, she said, that "it was me," although it
took her a moment to register that fact with
certainty. As she later told us:
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I knew it was
me. ... was pretty thin then. I was
quite tall and thin at that point. And I
recognized at first that it was a body,
but I didn't even know that it was mine
initially. Then I perceived that I was
up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well,
that's kind of weird. What am I doing up
here?" I thought, "Well, this must be
me. Am I dead?... " I just briefly saw
this body, and ... I knew that it was
mine because I wasn't in mine. Then I
was just away from it. It was that
quick.
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Almost immediately
after that, as she recalls, she found herself
going up through the ceilings of the hospital
until she was above the roof of the building
itself, during which time she had a brief
panoramic view of her surroundings. She felt
very exhilarated during this ascension and
enjoyed tremendously the freedom of movement she
was experiencing. She also began to hear
sublimely beautiful and exquisitely harmonious
music akin to the sound of wind chimes.
With scarcely a
noticeable transition, she then discovered she
had been sucked head-first into a tube and felt
that she was being pulled up into it. The
enclosure itself was dark, Vicki said, yet she
was aware that she was moving toward light. As
she reached the opening of the tube, the music
that she had heard earlier seemed to be
transformed into hymns, similar to those she
heard during her previous NDE, and she then
"rolled out" to find herself lying on grass.
She was surrounded by
trees and flowers and a vast number of people.
She was in a place of tremendous light, and the
light, Vicki said, was something you could feel
as well as see. What the light conveyed was
love. Even the people she saw were bright and
reflected the light of this love. "Everybody
there was made of light. And I was made of
light. There was love everywhere. It was like
love came from the grass, love came from the
birds, love came from the trees."
Vicki then became
aware of five specific persons she knew in life
who were welcoming her to this place. Debby and
Diane were Vicki's blind schoolmates, who had
died years before, at ages 11 and 6,
respectively. In life, they had both been
profoundly retarded as well as blind, but here
they appeared bright and beautiful, healthy and
vitally alive, and no longer children, but, as
Vicki phrased it, "in their prime." In addition,
Vicki reports seeing two of her childhood care
takers, a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Zilk, both
of whom had also previously died. Finally, there
was Vicki's grandmother, who had essentially
raised Vicki and who had died just two years
before this incident. Her grandmother, who was
further back than the others, was reaching out
to hug Vicki. In these encounters, no actual
words were exchanged, Vicki says, but only
feelings of love and welcome.
In the midst of this
rapture, Vicki was suddenly overcome with a
sense of total knowledge
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I had a feeling
like I knew everything ... and like
everything made sense. I just knew that
this was where ... this place was where
I would find the answers to all the
questions about life, and about the
planets, and about God, and about
everything. ... It's like the place was
the knowing.
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And then she was indeed
flooded with information of a religious nature
as well as scientific and mathematical
knowledge. She came to understand languages she
didn't know. All this overwhelmed and astonished
her:
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I don't know
beans about math and science. ... all of
a sudden understood intuitively almost
things about calculus, and about the way
planets were made. And I don't know
anything about that. ... I felt there
was nothing I didn't know.
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As these revelations
were unfolding, Vicki noticed that now next to
her was a figure whose radiance was far greater
than the illumination of any of the persons she
had so far encountered. Immediately, she
recognized this being to be Jesus, for she had
seen him once before, during her previous NDE.
He greeted her tenderly, while she conveyed her
excitement to him about her newfound omniscience
and her joy at being there and with him again.
Telepathically, he
communicated to her: "Isn't it wonderful?
Everything is beautiful here, and it fits
together. And you'll find that. But you can't
stay here now. It's not your time to be here yet
and you have to go back."
Vicki reacted,
understandably enough, with extreme
disappointment and protested vehemently, "No, I
want to stay with you." But the being reassured
her that she would come back, but for now, she
had to "go back and learn and teach more about
loving and forgiving."
Still resistant,
however, Vicki then learned that she also needed
to go back to have her children. With that,
Vicki, who was then childless but who
"desperately wanted" to have children -a nd who
has since given birth to three - became almost
eager to return and finally consented.
However, before Vicki
could leave, the being said to her, in these
exact words, "But first, watch this."
And what Vicki then
saw was "everything from my birth" in a complete
panoramic review of her life, and as she
watched, the being gently commented to help her
understand the significance of her actions and
their repercussions.
The last thing Vicki
remembers, once the life review had been
completed, are the words, "You have to leave
now." She then experienced "a sickening thud"
like a roller-coaster going backwards, and found
herself back in her body, feeling heavy and full
of pain.
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C.
Brad Barrows |
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A second case is that
of Brad Barrows, a 33-year-old man living in
Connecticut, who had a near-death experience in
the winter of 1968 when he was only 8 years old.
At the time, he was a student at the Boston
Center for Blind Children, and had contracted a
severe case of pneumonia and eventually had
severe breathing difficulties. Afterward, he was
told by nurses that his heart had stopped,
apparently for at least four minutes, and that
cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had been
necessary to bring him back.
Brad remembers that
when he couldn't breathe any longer, he felt
himself lifting up from the bed and floating
through the room toward the ceiling. He saw his
apparently lifeless body on the bed. He also saw
his blind roommate get up from his bed and leave
the room to get help. (His roommate later
confirmed this.) Brad then found himself rapidly
going upward through the ceilings of the
building until he was above the roof. At this
point, he found that he could see clearly.
He estimates that it
was between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning when
this happened. He noticed that the sky was
cloudy and dark. There had been a snowstorm the
day before, and Brad could see snow everywhere
except for the streets, which had been plowed,
though they were still slushy. He was able to
give us a very detailed description of the way
the snow looked. Brad could also see the snow
banks that the plows had created. He saw a
street car go by. Finally, he recognized a
playground used by the children of his school
and a particular hill he used to climb nearby.
When asked if he
"knew" or "saw" these things, he said: "I
clearly visualized them. I could suddenly notice
them and see them. ... I remember ... being able
to see quite clearly."
After this segment of
this experience, which happened very fast, was
over, he found himself in a tunnel and emerged
from it to find himself in an immense field
illuminated by a tremendous, all-encompassing
light. Everything was perfect.
Brad could clearly
see in this domain, too, though he commented
that he was puzzled by the sensation of sight.
He found himself walking on a path surrounded by
tall grass, and also reported seeing tall trees
with immense leaves. No shadows were visible,
however.
While in this field,
Brad became aware of beautiful music, like
nothing he had ever heard on earth. Walking
toward the sound, he came to and climbed a hill,
eventually encountering a glittering stone
structure so brilliant that he thought it might
be burning hot. But it wasn't, and he entered
it. The music continued here as well and, to
Brad, seemed to be praising God. In this
structure, Brad encountered a man whom he didn't
recognize but from whom emanated an overwhelming
love. The man, without a word, gently nudged
Brad backward, initiating a reversal of his
experience, ending with his finding himself in
bed gasping for air, attended by two nurses.
Brad, like Vicki, has been blind from birth.
These two cases,
which took place a continent apart and before
the advent of modern near-death studies, show an
obvious structural similarity and clearly
exemplify the familiar Moody-type pattern of
NDEs. To be sure, not all of the NDEs described
by our blind respondents are as rich in their
narrative line as those of Vicki and Brad, but
there is no question that the great
preponderance of these experiences conform to
the classic form of the NDE.
To examine this point
from a statistical perspective and help to
provide something of an overview of our findings
here, we can list a number of the common
features of NDEs and state how often they are
mentioned in the interviews of our 21
respondents in the NDEr category. Feelings of
peace, well-being, or being loved were reported
in 20 interviews; a sense of separation from the
physical body, or an actual out-of-body
experience (OBE), in 14; seeing one's own
physical body, in 10; going through a tunnel or
dark space, in eight; meeting others, such as
spirits, angels, or religious personages, in 12;
seeing a radiant light, in eight; hearing noise
or music, in seven; a life review, in four;
encountering a border or limit, in six; and a
choice or being told to return to life, in 10.
In general, although
the numbers in the various sight categories
(that is, blind from birth, adventitiously
blind, and severely visually impaired) were too
small to permit statistical tests, inspection
reveals no obvious differences among sight
subgroups with respect to the frequency of NDE
elements. Thus, whether one is blind from birth,
loses one's sight in later life, or suffers from
severe visual impair ment, the type of NDE
reported appears to be much the same and is not
structurally different from those described by
sighted persons.
With these facts
established, we can now turn our attention to
our principal interest in this study, namely,
whether and to what extent blind persons claim
to be able to see during their NDEs and OBEs.
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6.
Visual Aspects of NDEs and OBEs in the Blind |
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We have already had
evidence from the summaries of Vicki's and
Brad's narratives that there appear to be clear
visual representations, both of things of this
world and of an otherworldly nature, during the
NDEs of blind persons. The question we face
here, how ever, is how common such testimony is
among our respondents as a whole.
First, let us look at
how many of our respondents report being able to
see during their NDEs or OBEs. Of our 21 NDErs,
15 claimed to have had some kind of sight, three
were not sure whether they saw or not, and the
remaining three did not appear to see at all.
All but one of those who either denied or were
unsure about being able to see came from those
who were blind from birth, which means that only
half of the NDErs in that category stated
unequivocally that they had distinct visual
impressions during their experience.
Nevertheless, it is not clear by any means
whether those respondents blind from birth who
claimed not to have seen were in fact unable to,
or simply failed to recognize what seeing was.
For instance, one man whom we classified as a
nonvisualizer told us that he could not explain
how he had the perceptions he did because "I
don't know what you mean by 'seeing.'" He was
not the only such person to admit such
perplexity, so that even among those cases we
felt obliged to classify as not involving sight,
the possibility is not entirely foreclosed. As a
whole, however, our data here are quite
consistent in indicating that the preponderance
of our blind NDErs do indeed report vision
during their near-death encounters, while only a
minority are unsure about the matter or, in some
cases, have no clear sense of sight.
Evidence of vision is
even stronger among the OBErs in our sample.
Nine of our 10 OBErs claimed sight, and if we
include the five persons who had both an NDE and
one or more OBEs on other occasions, the figures
are 13 out of 15. In this connection, one of the
NDErs whom we classified as a nonvisualizer
during her NDE did report vision during her
OBEs.
Overall, the number
of persons who indicated they had some kind of
vision, either during an NDE or OBE, was 25,
which was 80 per cent of our entire sample. Even
for those blind from birth, 9 of 14, or 64
percent, likewise reported sight.
Given that some kind
of vision is the rule for the blind, we can go
on to ask, just what do they see?
In general, they
report the same kinds of visual impressions as
sighted persons do in describing NDEs and OBEs.
For example, 10 of our 21 NDErs said they had
some kind of vision of their physical body, and
seven of our 10 OBErs said likewise.
Occasionally, there are other this-worldly
perceptions as well, such as seeing a medical
team at work on one's body or various features
of the room or surroundings where one's physical
body was. Otherworldly perceptions abound, too,
and for NDErs, as we have already seen, they
seem to take the form characteristic for
transcendental NDEs of sighted persons: radiant
light, otherworldly landscapes, angels or
religious figures, deceased relatives, and so
forth. Somewhat similar otherworldly perceptions
are sometimes found for OBErs as well, though
these, when they occur, are usually limited to
seeing light, beautiful colors, and meeting
others. None of our OBErs recounted a life
review.
How well do our
respondents find they can see during these
episodes? We have already noted that the visual
perceptions of Vicki and Brad appeared extremely
clear and detailed, especially when they found
themselves in the otherworldly portions of their
near-death journeys. While not all of our blind
NDErs had clear, articulated visual impressions,
nevertheless enough of them did so that we can
conclude that the NDE cases like Vicki's and
Brad's are fairly typical in this regard. For
instance, one of our interviewees whose sight
perished completely as a result of a stroke at
age 22, and was near-sighted before that, told
us in connection with seeing her body, her
doctor, and the operating room during her NDE:
"I know I could see and I was supposed to be
blind. ... And I know I could see everything.
... It was very clear when I was out. I could
see details and everything."
Another man, who lost
his vision in a car accident at the age of 19,
had a comforting vision of his deceased
grandmother across a valley during his NDE. In
commenting on his clarity, he said: "Of course I
had no sight because I had total destruction of
my eyes in the accident, but [my vision] was
very clear and distinct. ... I had perfect
vision in that experience."
Still another man,
this one blind from birth, found himself in an
enormous library during the transcendental phase
of his NDE and saw "thousands and millions and
billions of books, as far as you could see."
Asked if he saw them visually he said, "Oh,
yes!" Did he see them clearly? "No problem." Was
he surprised at being able to see thus? "Not in
the least. I said, 'Hey, you can't see,' and I
said, 'Well, of course I can see. Look at those
books. That's ample proof that I can see.'"
Typically, vision is
reported as clear, even acutely so, by our
respondents in the otherworldly domain, where
seeing is often described as "perfectly natural"
or "the way it's supposed to be." However,
sometimes the initial onset of visual perception
of the physical world is disorienting and even
disturbing to the blind. This was true for
Vicki, for example, who said:
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I had a hard
time relating to it [i.e., seeing]. I
had a real difficult time relating to it
because I've never experienced it. And
it was something very foreign to me. ...
Let's see, how can I put it into words?
It was like hearing words and not being
able to understand them, but knowing
that they were words. And before you'd
never heard anything. But it was
something new, something you'd not been
able to previously attach any meaning to
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Later, in commenting
on the shock of these initial visual
impressions, she even used the word
"frightening" to characterize them. She also
told us that she was never able to discriminate
colors as such, but only "different shades of
brightness," about which impressions she could
only wonder afterward whether they represented
what sighted people meant by color.
However, after this
brief and confusing period of adjustment, the
experiencer's perception quickly seems to become
self-organizing and coherent; then it is as if
the individual has been seeing his or her whole
life. As Brad commented on the naturalness of
his own perception in the otherworldly domain:
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It was like it
was always there. ... It was so natural
it was almost as if I should have always
been able to see like that. ... I could
never understand why I never could do
that back in my own body, yet it was so
unbelievably natural. ... I thought to
myself I should be able to carry this
right back with me. It's just something
I've always had. ... I was very
comfortable with it.
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To conclude this
section, we would like to bring all of these
visual threads together in one specific
illustrative case of still another of our blind
respondents, a woman we'll call Marsha. Marsha
is a 40 year-old married woman living in
Connecticut who had an NDE on January 16, 1986,
when she was 32, as a result of complications in
her pregnancy.
Like Vicki, Marsha
was a premature baby, having been born after
only a six month pregnancy, and, as a result,
had developed a condition of retinopathy of
prematurity. Unlike Vicki, however, she has
always had some limited vision. In this respect,
Marsha told us: "I have some vision in my left
eye, not a whole lot. I don't have any reading
vision-I can't read print at all, but I can see,
like, people and stuff, but they look. ...
blurry." We classified Marsha in the severely
visually impaired category, as her actual vision
was extremely poor and she uses a guide dog.
Marsha's case is
mainly of interest here in showing how the
visual perception of a severely visually
impaired individual during an NDE is not only
enhanced, but can become virtually perfect. In
her interview with us, she made it plain that
her heightened acuity pertained both to her
out-of-body perception as well as to that which
she experienced in the otherworldly portion of
her experience. As to the former, Marsha told us
that when she was coming back, she was aware of
seeing her body:
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INTERVIEWER: Could you describe
it? Could you see it in detail?
MARSHA: Yeah, it
just looked like me. I was, like,
asleep.
INTERVIEWER:
And how was your vision, if I could put
it that way, when you were looking down
on yourself?
MARSHA:
It was fine.... It was normal.
INTERVIEWER: When
you say normal, you mean clear?
MARSHA: Yeah,
everything. There was no problem with
it.
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Concerning the quality
of her otherworldly perception, she commented:
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INTERVIEWER: Were you
able to see better than you could in the
physical world?
MARSHA:
Oh, yeah.
INTERVIEWER:
What was your visual perception
like in this room [in the otherworldly
portion of her NDE]?
MARSHA: Everything, I
could see everything. ... All the
people, all the way back. Everything.
INTERVIEWER:
In what way? Could you be a little more
specific?
MARSHA:
It was perfect. It would not be
like that here. There was no problem. It
was, like, you know - everything, you
could see everything. It was not like
your eyes. I don't know what normal
vision would feel like. It was not like
your eyes see. It couldn't be my eyes
because my eyes were back over here. I
could see gold in the room. Gold on the
walls. There [were] white birds and
angels and all these people.
INTERVIEWER: When
you saw birds and the people and the
room, were you seeing it in detail or
just like you see now?
MARSHA: No, no. It was
detail. It was white light. Everything
was white light in there. And there was
gold on the walls.
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Later on, in elaborating
on her perception of colors during this part of
her experience, Marsha was similarly definite
about what she was aware of:
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INTERVIEWER: And could
you see it [color] clearly in the
experience?
MARSHA:
Yes. Everything was the way it
was supposed to be.
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Finally, when the
interviewer probed to get Marsha's further
thoughts on her visual experience during her
NDE, this exchange occurred:
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INTERVIEWER: If you had
to say how much sight you actually had
at the time of your experience, is there
a way for you to describe it?
MARSHA: It was,
like, perfect. I don't see how it could
not be perfect. I can't say I could see
like I see now. ... I could see
everything [then].
INTERVIEWER: Do you have
any thoughts on the fact that you had
vision during this experience?
MARSHA: Well,
see, it was vision, but I don't think it
was my eyes. I don't know how it works
because my eyes were back here, and
since they are not right and I could see
everything right, there had to be more
special vision somehow.
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Although Marsha still
has some residual physical vision, it is clear
that her comments echo both those of Vicki and
Brad concerning the quality of her visual
perception, especially in the otherworldly
realm. There, she saw perfectly and in detail
that was astonishing to her and for which she
had no explanation. And like Vicki and Brad, who
had also noted the naturalness of their
otherworldly vision, Marsha used a phrase we
have encountered before, namely, "everything was
the way it was supposed to be." Likewise, her
visual impression of her physical body seemed
clear and distinct, in contrast to her everyday
vision. Overall, her testimony was as striking
as it was consistent and showed that severely
visually impaired persons, too, may find that
coming close to death appears to restore their
sight to nor mal, and perhaps even superior,
acuity.
In summary, as a
whole our interviews with both NDErs and OBErs
offered abundant testimony that reports of
visual perception among the blind are common,
that their impressions concern both things of
this world and otherworldly domains, and that
they are often clear and detailed, even in
narratives furnished by those who have been
blind from birth.
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7.
Corroborative Evidence for OBE and NDE Visions |
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Obviously, in order
to demonstrate that the perceptions described by
our blind experiencers are something other than
mere fantasies or even complex hallucinations,
it will be necessary to provide some kind of
confirming evidence for them, preferably from
other independent witnesses or from reliable
documentation. But just here, not surprisingly,
is where it proves difficult to gather the type
of indispensable corroboration that would help
to cinch the argument that what they report
seeing is indeed authentic. In many cases, such
as those of Vicki and Brad, the reported NDEs or
OBEs took place so long ago that it is no longer
possible to know precisely who the witnesses
were or where to locate them. In other
instances, potential informants have died or
were not accessible to us for interviews. As a
result, much of the testimony of our respondents
is dependent on their own truthfulness and the
reliability of their memories. As a rule, we did
not have cause to question the sincerity of our
respondents, but sincerity is not evidence and
one's own word is hardly the last word when it
comes to evaluating the validity of these
accounts.
Nevertheless, in at
least some instances, we are able to offer some
evidence, and in one case some very strong
evidence, that these claims are in fact rooted
in a direct and accurate, if baffling,
perception of the situation. In this section, we
will present two of our cases in which we could
document some measure of evidentiality for the
visual perceptions of the blind.
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A.
Frank |
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Our first example is
one of apparently veridical perception during an
OBE in which a respondent claimed to have seen
himself. What makes this case of special
interest, however, is that he also saw something
he couldn't have known about by normal means.
Furthermore, he told us that a friend of his was
in a position to confirm his testimony. Frank is
66 years old, but lost his sight completely in
1982. He cannot see anything now, including
light or shadows. He has had several OBEs,
however, since becoming totally blind. What
follows is his recall of one of them.
Around 1992, a friend
of Frank's was going to be driving him to the
wake of a mutual friend. As Frank remembered the
incident:
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And so I said to
her that morning, I said: "Gee, I
haven't got a good tie to wear. Why
don't you pick me up one?" She said,
"Yeah, I'll pick you up one when I get
down to Mel's [a clothing store]." So
she picked it up and dropped it off and
said, "I can't stay. I've got to get
home and get ready to pick you up to go
to the wake." So I got dressed and put
the tie on. She didn't tell me the color
of the tie or anything else. I was
laying down on the couch and I could see
myself coming out of my body. And I
could see my tie. The tie that was on.
And it had a circle on it - it was a red
- and it had a gray circle, two gray
circles on it. And I remember that.
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The interviewer then
probes for further details and clarification:
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INTERVIEWER: Now just for
the chronology of it, you were lying
down with this tie on, you saw yourself
going out of the body, and then you saw
the tie?
FRANK:
I saw the tie 'cause I told her
the color.
INTERVIEWER:
You told your friend who was
driving you?
FRANK:
Yeah, when she came back to
pick me up. ... And when she came down
to pick me up, I said to her, "Are the
circles gray in this tie?" And she says,
"Yes."
INTERVIEWER:
Was she surprised that you
knew?
FRANK:
Yes. She said, "How did you
know?" She said, "Did anyone come here?"
I said, "No, nobody came here." You
know, you can't tell 'em [laughs],
'cause they just don't accept, they
don't believe in it.
INTERVIEWER: And do you
remember what the tie looked like even
now?
FRANK:
Yeah. It's a rose-colored tie
with circles on it and dots in the
middle of the circle. Whitish/grayish
circle around there. And it's a
beautiful tie, 'cause every place I go
they remark on it. So she said to me,
"Who told you?" And I said, "Nobody." I
said, "I just guessed." I didn't want to
tell because, like I said before ... you
can't say things to certain people.
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Naturally, after hearing
this story, we were eager to see if we could
track down the woman involved in this incident.
That proved difficult, since Frank had lost
contact with her, but eventually he was able to
locate her and, without telling her exactly why
we were interested to talk with her, put us in
touch with her. One of us (S.C.) did conduct an
open-ended interview with this woman shortly
afterward and summarized it as follows in her
notes:
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I independently
called his friend who said she did
purchase a tie for Frank that day and
did pick him up for the wake. However,
she didn't have a clear recollection of
the sequence of events that day to
confirm the accuracy of Frank's story
and didn't remember the exact design and
colors of the tie. She added that Frank
is a down-to-earth guy who in her
experience does not embellish stories.
And even though she couldn't
independently corroborate his account,
she tended to think he was probably
accurate in recounting the details.
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So here, although we
lack the crucial confirming facts we need from
the witness involved, we nevertheless have a
highly suggestive instance that this man's
recall of his experience is essentially
accurate. However, the obvious weaknesses in and
ultimate inconclusiveness of this case were
overcome in our second example, in which a
direct and independent corroboration of the
respondent's own testimony was obtained.
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B.
Nancy |
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The next respondent
was a 41-year-old woman we will call Nancy who
underwent a biopsy in 1991 in connection with a
possible cancerous chest tumor. During the
procedure, the surgeon inadvertently cut her
superior vena cava, then compounded his error by
sewing it closed, causing a variety of medical
catastrophes including blindness, a condition
that was discovered only shortly after surgery
when Nancy was examined in the recovery room.
She remembers waking up at that time and
screaming, "I'm blind, I'm blind!"
Shortly afterward,
she was rushed on a gurney down the corridor in
order to have an angiogram. However, the
attendants, in their haste, slammed her gurney
into a closed elevator door, at which point the
woman had an out-of-body experience.
Nancy told us she
floated above the gurney and could see her body
below. However, she also said she could see down
the hall where two men, the father of her son
and her current lover, were both standing,
looking shocked. She remembers being puzzled by
the fact that they simply stood there agape and
made no movement to approach her. Her memory of
the scene stopped at that point.
In trying to
corroborate her claims, we interviewed the two
men. The father of her son could not recall the
precise details of that particular incident,
though his general account corroborated Nancy's,
but her lover, Leon, did recall it and
independently confirmed all the essential facts
of this event. Here is an excerpt from our
interview with him, which bears on this crucial
episode.
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LEON:
I was in the hallway by the
surgery and she was coming out and I
could tell it was her. They were kind of
rushing her out.
INTERVIEWER: Rushing her
out of where?
LEON:
Of the surgery suite where she
had been in the recovery area, I think.
And I saw these people coming out. I saw
people wheeling a gurney. I saw about
four or five people with her, and I
looked and I said, "God, it looks like
Nancy," but her face and her upper torso
were really swollen about twice the size
it should have been. At that point I
looked and I said, "Nancy, Nancy," and
they just - she didn't know, I mean. She
was out of it. And they told me they
were taking her down for an angiogram.
INTERVIEWER:
Who told you that?
LEON:
I believe a nurse did. I'm not
quite sure. I think I was still in a
state of shock. I mean, it had been a
long day for me. You're expecting an
hour procedure and here it is,
approximately 10 hours later and you
don't have very many answers. I believe
a nurse did. I know I asked. And I think
Dick [the father of Nancy's child] was
there at the same time. I think he and I
were talking in the hallway.
INTERVIEWER: Do
you know how far you were from Nancy?
LEON: When I
first saw her she was probably, maybe
about 100 feet and then she went right
by us. I was probably no more than 3 to
5 feet away from her. And I believe Dick
was right next to me as well.
INTERVIEWER: And
do you know how they took her out? She
was on the gurney?
LEON:
She was on the gurney. There
were IVs. ... I'm not sure - I think she
had some sort of a breathing apparatus.
I'm not sure if it was an Ambu bag or
what it was.
INTERVIEWER:
And then where did they take
her?
LEON:
They took her downstairs to do an
angiogram.
INTERVIEWER:
How?
LEON:
They took her down in the
gurney in the service elevator. They
didn't take her in a regular elevator.
They took her around the corner to the
service elevator.
INTERVIEWER: And did you
see that whole process?
LEON: Yes, I did.
INTERVIEWER: Did
you see her go into the elevator?
LEON: Yes, I
did because I walked around to watch her
enter the elevator.
INTERVIEWER: Was there
any disturbance that you remember in
getting her into the elevator?
LEON: I think
there was a real sense of urgency on the
staff. I've worked in hospital emergency
rooms as well and I can really relate to
that. I think somebody was, like, trying
to get into the elevator at the same
time and there was some sort of a "Oh, I
can't get in, let's move this over a
little bit," kind of adjusting before
they could get her into the elevator.
But it was very swift.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have
a good look at her face?
LEON: Yeah, it really
kind of shocked me. She was just really
swollen. She was totally unrecognizable.
I mean, I knew it was her but - you
know, I was a medic in Vietnam and it
was just like seeing a body after a day
after they get bloated. It was the same
kind of look.
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Leon's account
accorded with Nancy's in virtually every
significant respect, despite the fact that he
was very worried about her condition, and could
scarcely recognize her because of her edema when
he did see her. Yet, despite his evident state
of shock at the time, his interview appeared to
corroborate her story, as much as any external
witness could be expected to. It should be noted
that this witness has been separated from our
participant for several years and they had not
even communicated for at least a year before we
interviewed him. Furthermore, even if Nancy had
not been totally blind at the time, the
respirator on her face during this accident
would have partially occluded her visual field
and certainly would have prevented the kind of
lateral vision necessary for her to view these
men down the hall. But the fact is, according to
indications in her medical records and other
evidence we have garnered, she appeared already
to have been completely blind when this event
occurred.
After a detailed
investigation of this case and a review of all
pertinent documentation, we have concluded that
in all probability there was no possibility for
Nancy to see what she did with her physical eyes
which, in any event, were almost surely
sightless at that time. Yet the evidence
suggests that she did see, and, as the
corroborative testimony we have quoted shows,
she apparently saw truly.
The question, of
course, is how she was able to do that, and not
only how Nancy saw, but how any of the blind
persons in our study saw what they certainly
could not possibly have seen physically. Our
findings in this section only establish a
putative case that these visions are factually
accurate, and not just some kind of fabrication,
reconstruction, lucky guess, or fantasy; but
they leave unexplained the paradox of our
discovery that the rumors some of us have been
hearing all these years, that the blind can
actually see during their NDEs, appear to be
true. Whether and how this can be so is the
mystery we must next be prepared to probe.
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8.
Discussion |
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A.
An Overview of Our Findings |
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Before tackling the
perplexing and difficult questions we have just
posed, it will be helpful to summarize our
principal findings. To do so, we will return to
the three issues this study was designed to
address. The first of these was whether blind
persons do report NDEs and, if they do, whether
those NDEs are the same or different from those
of sighted persons. Our findings here were
unequivocal in the affirmative. There is no
question that NDEs in the blind do occur and,
furthermore, that they take the same general
form and are comprised of the very same elements
that define the NDEs of sighted individuals.
Moreover, this generalization appears to hold
across all three categories of blindness that
were represented in this study: those blind from
birth, those adventitiously blind, and those
severely visually impaired.
The second issue, and
the one that was the driving force of this
study, was whether the blind claim to have
visual impressions during their NDEs or OBEs. On
this point, too, our data were conclusive.
Overall, 80 percent of our respondents reported
these claims, most of them in the language of
unhesitating declaration, even when they had
been surprised, or even stunned, by the
unexpected discovery that they could in fact
see. Like sighted experiencers, our blind
respondents described to us both perceptions of
this world and other worldly scenes, often in
fulsome, fine-grained detail, and sometimes with
a sense of extremely sharp, even subjectively
perfect, acuity.
The last issue hinged
on the second, and that had to do with at
tempting to corroborate these claims of sight in
an effort to show that they represented
something other than fantasies or
hallucinations. This was the weakest part of our
study since, for a variety of methodological
reasons, it was often not possible to locate
relevant witnesses or gain access to potentially
helpful documentation. Nevertheless, we did
offer two illustrative and highly suggestive
cases that seemed to indicate these claims are
indeed authentic and not explicable by
conventional means.
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B.
Some Possible Explanations for Apparent Sight in
the Blind |
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With this summary of
our findings we are now ready to explore the
questions of central interest to us. The
simplest way to frame the issue might be to ask:
"How is it that the blind can see during these
experiences?" But, however natural it might be
to put the question in this form, doing so
implies that we have already concluded that we
can reasonably infer from our data that the
blind do in fact see. That is certainly
possible, perhaps even plausible, but not all
readers would be prepared to concede the point.
Indeed, we have already implied that from an
epistemological point of view, it might be
better to rephrase our basic question as: "If it
can legitimately be said that the blind in some
sense do see, in precisely what sense would that
be?" Putting the question in this way, then,
leaves open the issue of the nature of apparent
sight in the blind. However, even before we can
properly address this question, there is plainly
still another one that must exert a prior claim
on our attention, and that is: "Might there be
some non-retinal-based mechanisms that could in
principle account for the results of this study
and thus demonstrate that vision in the blind is
indeed only apparent and not actual?"
Thus, by a series of
interrogative declensions, we find ourselves
facing first the possibility of various
alternative explanations that would avoid having
to posit some kind of eyeless vision to subsume
our findings. Before resorting to possible
unconventional theories such as those rooted in
New Paradigm science or even esoteric thought to
interpret our findings, we must first make sure
that no already recognized natural or prosaic
mechanism cannot provide a superior or more
parsimonious explanation.
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C.
The Dream Hypothesis |
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One fairly obvious
possibility that has often been advanced in
connection with the NDEs and OBEs of sighted
persons is that this experience is some kind of
a dream, perhaps a lucid or exceptionally vivid
dream, which has such realistic properties that
it is easily misinterpreted and thus given an
ontological status it does not deserve. To
evaluate this hypothesis, we first need to
inquire into what is known about normal oneiric
processes in the blind. Fortunately, there has
been a great deal of research devoted to the
dreams of the blind, some of it going back more
than a hundred years. As a result of these
investigations, certain generalizations about
the presence of visual imagery in dreams appear
to stand up quite well. Among these "empirical
cornerstones" (Kirtley, 1975) are that
(1) there
are no visual images in the dreams of the
congenitally blind; (2) individuals blinded
before the age of 5 also tend not to have visual
imagery; (3) those who become sightless between
the age of 5 to 7 may or may not retain visual
imagery; and (4) most persons who lose their
sight after age 7 do retain visual imagery,
although its clarity tends to fade with time. In
addition, various researchers have found that
audition tends to be the primary sense involved
in dreams of the blind, with tactile and
kinesthetic elements next (Kirtley, 1975).
In our interviews, we
routinely asked our respondents about the nature
of their dreams, and what we found in our sample
accords with the generalizations just described.
In addition, however, and particularly pertinent
to the hypothesis under consideration, our
respondents usually went on to say that not only
were their NDEs unlike their usual dreams, but
in the case of those blind from birth, they
stood out as radically different precisely
because they contained visual imagery, whereas
their dreams had always lacked this element.
Vicki, one of our NDErs blind from birth,
provides a good case in point:
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INTERVIEWER: How would
you compare your dreams to your NDEs?
VICKI: No
similarity, no similarity at all.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you have any kind of visual
perception in your dreams?
VICKI: Nothing.
No color, no sight of any sort, no
shadows, no light, no nothing.
INTERVIEWER: What
kinds of perceptions are you aware of in
your typical dreams?
VICKI: Taste - I have a
lot of eating dreams [laughs]. And I
have dreams when I'm playing the piano
and singing, which I do for a living,
anyway. I have dreams in which I touch
things. ... I taste things, touch
things, hear things, and smell things -
that's it.
INTERVIEWER:
And no visual perceptions?
VICKI: No.
INTERVIEWER:
So that what you experienced during your
NDE was quite different from your
dreams?
VICKI:
Yeah, because there's no visual
impression at all in any dream that I
have.
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These remarks, along
with similar asseverations from other
participants in our study, make it abundantly
clear that from our respondents' point of view,
the NDE, especially its visual aspect, has
nothing in common with their usual dreams. It is
instead something in a class by itself and not
to be conflated with dreams. Since there is no
support whatever from our interviews for the
dream hypothesis of NDEs, we may confidently
reject it as a potential explanation for our
findings.
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D.
Retrospective Reconstruction |
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Another possibility,
at least for the kind of visual perceptions
respondents report during the out-of-body phase
of NDEs, is that in dividuals are not really
seeing at that time, but talking afterward as if
they did. Instead, according to this hypothesis,
they have actually reconstructed a plausible
account after the fact of what might be expected
to have happened while they were close to death,
although they may sincerely but erroneously
believe that they witnessed it at the time. From
a combination of prior expectations, familiarity
with hospital routines, overheard conversations
or other sensory cues at the time, information
gleaned afterward, or even simply by lucky
guesses, it might be possible for an NDEr to
construct imaginatively a pictorial
representation of events during an NDE. Thus,
this hypothesis would contend that what appears
to be vision is in reality a product of the
mind's inventiveness.
The chief proponent
of this hypothesis is
Susan Blackmore (1993),
who used it chiefly to discount some of the
pioneering work by Michael Sabom (1982), in his
study of apparently veridical, though seemingly
impossible, visual perception in a sample of
NDErs. In discussing, for example, how a patient
could unconsciously use auditory information
available during an operation, Blackmore
indicated how naturally such a false
representation could be generated:
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It does not take
much information from such sounds for a
person to piece together a very
convincing and realistic visual
impression of what is going on. This
will provide the best model they have
and seem perfectly real. They may have
no idea that the model was constructed
primarily from things that they have
heard. ... It is very hard to assess
just how much information any patient
would have available. We can only
remember the general point that people
who appear unconscious may still be
aware of some of the things going on
around them and they can easily build
these up into a good visual picture of
what was happening (1993, pp. 124-125).
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Blackmore's reasoning
is logical and her hypothesis has a certain
plausibility, but we have not been able to find
any significant support for it among our
interviewees. In fact only one of our 31
respondents even alluded to it, and at that
merely as one theoretical possibility among
several. Furthermore, a review of our
transcripts affords no basis for arguing that
retrospective reconstruction was likely to have
played a role in most or even some of our cases.
This same conclusion was reached by Sabom and
independently by
Scott Rogo (1989), in an
evaluation of the former's work in regard to the
possible relevance of this hypothesis.
And there are
additional reasons for finding it inadequate
here. For one, when one considers that it is an
after-the-fact hypothesis that virtually cannot
be disproved, the almost complete lack of direct
evidence from our study in its behalf is
particularly telling. Second, this hypothesis
clearly founders when it comes to accounting for
instances where unusual objects, ones that could
not easily have been predicted or otherwise
anticipated, such as the design and color of
Frank's tie, are described by the blind. Third,
it is completely impotent when it comes to
accounting for the otherworldly segments of
NDEs, which is especially clear in visual form
for many of our respondents.
On the basis of these
considerations, we find scant evidence in favor
of this hypothesis, and a number of cogent
reasons not only to reject it, but to be tempted
to regard it almost as a kind of all-purpose
refuge for the skeptically-minded, rather like
the "super-ESP" hypothesis in parapsychology,
which, in principle, is always capable of
explaining away in a pseudoscientific fashion
findings that threaten to disturb prevailing
ideas of the possible.
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E.
Blindsight |
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In the early 1970s,
Lawrence Weiskrantz began to study a curious
phenomenon he was later to call "blindsight"
(Weiskrantz, 1986), in which patients suffering
from extensive cortical blindness appeared to be
able to "see." In his experiments, for example,
Weiskrantz was able to show that in the absence
of any visual sensation, patients, if asked to
reach for a nearby object about whose exact
location they were ignorant, tended to move in
the right direction. Furthermore, when asked to
grasp objects the nature of which was not
disclosed to them beforehand, their hands tended
spontaneously to assume the appropriate form
necessary to hold the object. Weiskrantz's work
has since been replicated by others (Humphrey,
1993) and the phenomenon has even been found in
monkeys after extirpation of the visual cortex.
Is it possible, then,
that what our respondents report is actually a
form of blindsight?
Further scrutiny of
the results of research into blindsight shows
very quickly that although it seems to be a
legitimate form of perception, it can by no
means account for our findings. First of all,
patients manifesting the effect typically cannot
verbally describe the object they are alleged to
see, unlike our respondents who, as we have
noted, were usually certain about what they saw
and could describe it often without hesitation.
In fact, a cortically blind patient, even when
his or her object identification exceeds chance
levels, believes that it is largely the result
of pure guesswork. Such uncertainties were not
characteristic of our respondents. Second, even
when performance is better than chance would
allow, even the best of these patients still
make many errors (Humphrey, 1993). While we
cannot of course provide an overall figure of
accuracy of object identification in our study,
it is not obvious from our findings that errors
were made in regard to reports of visual
perception in those portions of the
environmental visual field where attention was
focused. Finally, and perhaps most crucially of
all, blindsight patients, unlike our
respondents, do not claim that they can "see" in
any sense. As Humphrey wrote: "Certainly the
patient says he does not have visual sensation.
... Rather he says, 'I don't know anything at
all but if you tell me I'm getting it right I
have to take your word for it'" (1993, p. 90).
This kind of statement is simply not found in
the testimony of our respondents who, on the
contrary, are often convinced that they have
somehow seen what they report.
Thus, the blindsight
phenomenon, however fascinating it may be in its
own right, cannot explain our findings. Indeed,
the term itself seems to be a bit of an
unintentional misnomer, since in such patients
there does not seem to be any conscious sense of
visual perception at all.
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F.
Skin-Based Vision |
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The idea that we may
have a kind of eyeless visual back-up system
based on dermal sensitivity is an old one,
although at first blush the notion may seem
preposterous. Yet the retina itself is just a
specialized piece of skin, which through
evolution has come to be the "vision specialist"
for the body. Therefore, it is certainly
conceivable that in our skin itself there might
be a residual basis for visual detection, which
has simply atrophied and become nonfunctional
through disuse, like a vestigial organ.
In fact, when one
begins to explore the empirical basis for this
hypothesis, one finds considerable evidence for
it. The earliest work along these lines seems to
have been done three-quarters of a century ago
by Jules Romains. In 1920, he published a now
nearly forgotten book called La Vision
Extra-Retinienne et la Sens Paroptique, which
described his experiments in skin-based
perception and became available in 1924 in an
American translation under the title of
Eyeless
Sight: A Study of Extra-Retinal Vision and the
Paroptic Sense. Romains' general purpose was to
determine if individuals could "see" without the
use of their eyes. To investigate this
possibility, he first blindfolded his subjects
in such a way as to ensure that no light could
penetrate their eyes. He then ran them through a
series of experiments to assess their visual
capabilities under these conditions. In some, he
would present them with a newspaper and ask them
to read the headlines. In others, he would ask
his subjects to "read" a set of numbers. In
still others, as in modern blindsight
experiments, he would invite them to describe an
object he placed in front of or behind them, or
ask his subjects to identify the colors of
objects or to distinguish the colors of papers
under glass.
In general, and quite
astonishingly, Romains reported that his
subjects performed remarkably well, far
exceeding what would have been possible by
chance. Furthermore, these experiments were
witnessed by many observers, some of them quite
eminent, and therefore do not depend solely on
his own word. Romains found, however, that
several conditions affected the probability of
correct identification. First, even though the
subjects were blindfolded, light had to be
present in the room for them to be able to
"see." Second, his subjects could not perceive
the object or "read" the number or letters on a
paper when an opaque screen or door was placed
between them and the object. Finally, the
greater the area of the skin actually exposed,
the more accurate subjects tended to be in their
descriptions.
Romains developed
some elaborate theories to explain his findings,
but however intriguing his discoveries were, for
several distinct reasons they do not seem to
have much bearing on what we found in our study.
To begin with, in Romains' experiments,
shielding the object from view prevented it from
being "seen." Yet, in our study, even the
presence of walls or ceilings proved to be no
impediment to our respondents' apparent vision,
as cases such as Vicki's and Brad's, among
others, attest. In addition, whereas Romains
found that the degree of skin exposure was
directly related to accuracy of perception,
there was no evidence of that in our study, and
in fact some evidence that would contravene it.
Remember, for instance, that in some of our
cases the respondent's body was covered with
bedsheets or was clothed at the time of an NDE
or OBE, yet vision seemed to occur without
difficulty. Most telling of all, however, is
that Romains' subjects generally took a long
time to achieve whatever degree of visual
accuracy they did demonstrate. Indeed throughout
his book, Romains frequently commented that the
kind of eyeless vision he obtained from his
subjects was piecemeal, gradual, with the
elements of perception coming together slowly,
as a result of laborious effort, at least at the
beginning. Eyeless vision, he wrote, is
successive, a matter of trial-and-error, and
tends at first to discern only objects near at
hand. In our study, visual perception seemed to
be immediate, unlearned, and was not restricted
to objects close to the individual. Therefore we
conclude, as we did with the later experiments
in blindsight, that Romains' findings, even if
valid, have no relevance for ours and must
depend on entirely different mechanisms.
Incidentally, the
insight underlying Romains' work, that there may
be non-retinal mechanisms that afford a kind of
vision, has been followed up by a succession of
modern researchers (Bach-y-Rita, 1972;
Duplessis, 1975;
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, 1983), but
their findings, although generally consistent
with Romains', fail to explain ours. In general,
this more modern research parallels Romains'
observation that it takes a considerable amount
of time and training for subjects to show even a
modest proficiency of object recognition. That
fact alone disqualifies the hypothesis of
skin-based vision as a possible explanatory
vehicle for our results.
The rejection of this
hypothesis also implies that similar views, such
as V. Krishnan's (1983), which contend that the
vision reported in NDEs and OBEs may be a
function of some kind of obscure physical
mechanism are without support. For instance,
Krishnan's position requires that congenitally
blind persons, on seeing for the first time,
have inchoate perception, as do those whose
sight is restored through an operation (Gregory,
1966; Sacks, 1993;
Valvo, 1970;
von Senden,
1960). But, clearly, that is not the case. The
brief surprise or disorientation a blind NDEr
may experience when confronted with visual
impressions before adjusting to them does not
begin to compare with the hours of training that
a newly sighted individual needs to undergo in
order to transform visual information into
meaningful patterns. Relatively speaking, then,
sight is virtually immediate in our blind NDErs,
and although there may be some confusion over
the fact of sight and uncertainty about color,
object perception seems stable from the outset.
Moreover, when never-before-seeing NDErs find
themselves in the transcendental portions of
their experience, some of them remark that
seeing was perfectly natural in that state; it
was if they could always see. Any mechanism that
could explain that baffling fact is, to us,
truly obscure. In any event, the hypothesis that
it might be rooted in some kind of skin-based
vision, as Krishnan has also suggested, is
without a shred of evidence.
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G.
An Assessment of the Evidence for Alternative
Explanations |
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Our search for a
non-retinal-based mechanism that could in
principle account for the results of this study
and thus demonstrate that vision in the blind is
indeed only apparent and not actual has
considered theories and data relating to dreams,
retrospective reconstruction, blindsight, and
skin-based vision, and has come up empty. Of
course, it would be absurd to claim that we have
exhausted the list of naturalistic or
conventional possibilities or eliminated all
conceivable artifacts, but we believe we have
ruled out some of the most obvious candidates
for explanatory honors. At the very least, we
have perhaps managed to cast some doubt on the
tenability of this type of explanation for our
findings, and consequently increased the like
lihood that however they might be accounted for,
we would do best to seek elsewhere for our
answers.
In any case, having
addressed this basic issue, we can now revert to
the question we posed earlier about whether or
in what sense it can be said that the blind do
see. Clearly, before any explanation for vision
in the blind can be accepted, it must first be
established that their reports reflect the
operation of something that can legitimately be
called "true sight." That assumption has of
course been implicit throughout this article and
may perhaps appear to some to be self-evident by
now. But it is not, and our next task is to
demonstrate just why it is not.
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H.
Apparent Vision in the Blind: Is It Really
Seeing? |
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We as researchers can
never have access to the NDE or OBE in itself.
Rather, every such experience is coded in a
certain way as it occurs and afterward, and
comes to us only later as a report in a
linguistic form. Therefore, by the time we
interview our respondents, the original
experience has already been processed through
several distinct filters and necessarily
undergone a series of virtually unconscious
transformations until it reaches us as a
distinct and coherent narrative. Therefore, it
will prove helpful to discern how this narrative
comes to be shaped, and how the experience may
be coded in the first place. Doing so will in
turn shed light on the pivotal question of this
section, namely: is what we discovered in our
blind respondents truly a form of seeing? That
is, is it in any sense something that might be
conceived of as analogous to physical sight?
To answer these
questions, we reviewed our transcripts as
sedulously as possible for insights into the
formative processes that ultimately gave rise to
the verbal report of the NDE or OBE. And what we
discovered in a finer reading of these documents
were a brace of factors that together sounded a
tocsin against an overly literal interpretation
of these reports as indicative of "seeing" as
such. For one thing, our scrutiny of these
transcripts frequently revealed a multifaceted
synesthetic aspect to the experiencer's
perception that seemed to transcend simple
sight. A number of our interviewees, for
example, were hesitant to assert that what they
were able to describe was incontestably visual,
either because they were blind from birth and
did not know what vision was like or because
they knew they could not possibly be seeing with
their physical eyes. The following comments were
typical of this vein:
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It wasn't
visual. It's really hard to describe
because it wasn't visual. It was almost
like a tactile thing, except that there
was no way I could have touched from up
there. But it really wasn't visual
because I just don't have vision any
more. ... It [was] sort of a tactile
memory or something. It's not really
like vision is. Vision is more clear,
but it's also more tied down.
I
think what it was that was happening
here was a bunch of synesthesia, where
all these perceptions were being blended
into some image in my mind, you know,
the visual, the tactile, all the input
that I had. I can't literally say I
really saw anything, but yet I was aware
of what was going on, and perceiving all
that in my.mind. ... But I don't
remember detail. That's why I say I'm
loath to describe it as a visual.
What I'm saying is I was more aware.
I don't know if it's through sight that
I was aware. ... I'm not sure. All I
know is ... somehow I was aware of
information or things that were going on
that I wouldn't normally be able to pick
up through seeing. ... That's why I'm
being very careful how I'm wording it,
'cause I'm not sure where it came from.
I would say to you I have a feeling it
didn't come from seeing, and yet I'm not
sure.
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Even Brad, whose initial
testimony seemed so clear on this point, in a
subsequent interview eventually qualified and
clarified his earlier remarks about his memory
of seeing snow on the streets outside his
school:
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I was quite
aware of all the things that were
physically mentioned in there [i.e., his
earlier description]. However, whether
it was seen visually through the eyes, I
could not say. ... I mean, you have to
remember, being born blind, I had no
idea whether those images were visual.
... It was something like a tactual
sense, like I could literally feel with
the fingers of my mind. But I did not
remember actually touching the snow. ...
The only thing I can really state about
those images was that they came to me in
an awareness and that I was aware of
those images in a way I did not really
understand. I could not really say that
they were visual per se because I had
never known anything like that before.
But I could say that all my senses
seemed to be very active and very much
aware. I was aware.
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Brad, too, seemed to
be telling us now that he could not be certain
his representation of the snow was in any
definitive sense "visual" as such, especially
since he had no real understanding of what a
visual image was. Instead, as with others in our
study, a complex multisensory awareness seems to
have been involved, and, in a remarkable
similarity with one of the respondents quoted
above, Brad made an almost identical statement
to hers about the tactile quality of his
impression, again suggesting that this modality
may be a key feature in the coding of these
experiences by the blind, as it certainly is in
their daily life.
Vicki as well, in
recent exchanges with us, eventually clarified
her previous statements concerning whether her
experiences could be properly thought of as
examples of pure seeing. In our interview with
her on May 27, 1994, she allowed, "It was scary
at first. ... I had trouble relating things to
one another, what I was seeing and perceiving
versus what I had touched and known the way I
had known things all my life." And in a
telephone conversation the following year, on
July 18, 1995, when one of us (K. R.) asked her
whether in her opinion it was a matter of seeing
or knowing in her experience, she unhesitatingly
replied, "It's both, Ken, it's both seeing and
knowing."
As this kind of
testimony builds, it seems more and more
difficult to claim that the blind simply see
what they report. Rather, it is beginning to
appear it is more a matter of their knowing,
through a still poorly understood mode of
generalized awareness based on a variety of
sensory impressions, especially tactile ones,
what is happening around them. The question that
immediately confronts us now, however, is as
unavoidable as it is crucial: Why is it that
these reports, when casually perused,
nevertheless often seem to imply that the blind
do see in a way akin to physical sight?
As we have already
observed, however these experiences may have
been coded originally, by the time we encounter
them they have long come to be expressed in a
particular linguistic form. And that form is a
language of vision, since our ordinary language
is rooted in the experiences of sighted persons
and is therefore biased in favor of visual
imagery. Because the blind are members of the
same linguistic community as sighted persons, we
can certainly expect that they will tend, and
indeed will be virtually compelled, to phrase
their experiences in a language of vision,
regardless of its appropriateness to the
qualities of their own personal experience.
And there is another
clue from our transcripts that mitigates against
an overly literal interpretation of our data on
apparent vision in the blind. Examination of
language usage by our respondents reveals that
they tend to use vision verbs far more casually
and loosely than do sighted persons, a finding
that other researchers who have studied language
in the blind (Cook, 1970;
Rathna, 1962) have
confirmed. Vicki, for example, said that she
loves to "watch" television and uses phrases,
such as "look at this," that clearly cannot be
taken literally. Although this observation does
not necessarily invalidate the testimony in our
reports, it does send up another amber flag of
caution when it comes to the interpretation of
the narratives of our blind respondents.
In summary, what we
have learned from our respondents is that
although their experiences may sometimes be
expressed in a language of vision, a close
reading of their transcripts suggests some thing
closer to a multifaceted synesthetic perception
that seems to involve much more than an analog
of physical sight. This is not to say that as
part of this awareness there cannot be some sort
of pictorial imagery as well; it is only to
assert that this must not be taken in any
simplistic way as constituting vision as we
normally under stand it.
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I.
Eyeless Vision and Transcendental Awareness |
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Even if we cannot
assert that the blind see in these experiences
in any straightforward way, we still have to
reckon with the fact that they nevertheless have
access to a kind of expanded supersensory
awareness that may in itself not be explicable
by normal means. Furthermore, notwithstanding
the cases of indistinct and nebulous "sight" we
have just reviewed, we must not overlook the
ineluctable and very unequivocal claims on the
part of most of our respondents that they did
seem to possess a type of vision that was very
keen, detailed, and even "crystal clear" at
times. Even if these reports may not be
analogous to retinal vision as such, they
clearly represent something that must be
directly addressed. Thus, it remains for us to
grapple with the question of what these reports
represent, if not vision.
To pursue this line
of inquiry, the first point we must note is that
the blind simply represent a kind of limit case
in research dealing with alleged perceptions
while in a near-death or out-of-body state. If
blind persons report what they cannot possibly
see, since they have no physically-mediated
sight, or what they cannot know by other nor mal
means, as seems to be so in at least some
instances in our study, then we have clearly
identified a phenomenon that threatens to cast a
dark shadow on the house of conventional
science. But it is equally plain that whenever
we can show that such perceptions are physically
impossible, whether with blind persons or not,
the same kind of shadow appears, as indeed it
already has, many times, in other research
dealing with NDEs and OBEs. So to begin to focus
more clearly on precisely what it is we need to
explain here, let us look for a moment at a few
illustrative cases one step removed from those
we have considered in this report where
"impossible perceptions" of great acuity are
described by the poorly sighted.
One type of case that
has long intrigued us is when such individuals
are seemingly able to report such fine and
improbably noticed features as, for example,
"dust on the light fixtures" in an operating
room when, from the location of their physical
body at the time as well as their eyesight, such
perceptions would manifestly be impossible.
Here, then, are a couple of such instances from
our previous research.
One of them came from
a woman interviewed in the early 1980s who was
48 years old at the time (Ring, 1984). She had
had her NDE in connection with a surgical
procedure in 1974. What was especially
noteworthy about her account at the outset,
however, was her mention of her unusually garbed
anesthesiologist. As she explained, he was a
physician who often worked with children. And
because he had found that his young patients
often were confused by a team of similarly clad
green-garmented doctors, he had taken to wearing
a yellow surgical hat with magenta butterflies
on it so he, at least, could easily be
recognized. All this will, of course, be highly
relevant to this woman's account of her
experience which will now be described in her
own words. She had gone into shock when she
heard her physician exclaim, "This woman's
dying!" At that point:
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Bang, I left!
The next thing I was aware of was
floating on the ceiling. And seeing down
there, with his hat on his head, I knew
who he was because of the hat on his
head [i.e., the anesthesiologist with
the magenta butterfly cap].. . it was so
vivid. I'm very near-sighted, too, by
the way, which was another one of the
startling things that happened to me
when I left my body. I see at fifteen
feet what most people see at four
hundred. ... They were hooking me up to
a machine that was behind my head. And
my very first thought was, "Jesus, I can
see! I can't believe it, I can see!" I
could read the numbers on the machine
behind my head and I was just so
thrilled. And I thought, "They gave me
back my glasses. . ." (Ring, 1984, p.
42)
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She went on to describe further details of
her operation, including how her body looked,
the shaving of her belly, and various medical
procedures that her surgical team were
performing upon her, and then found herself
looking at another object from a position high
above her physical body:
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From where I was
looking, I could look down on this
enormous fluorescent light. ... and it
was so dirty on top of the light. [Could
you see the top of the light fixture?]
Yes, and it was filthy. And I remember
thinking, "Got to tell the nurses about
that." (Ring, 1984, p. 43)
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One of the striking
features of this case is this woman's
observation that she was able to see so clearly
during her NDE despite the fact that, as she
averred, she was very nearsighted. In this
respect, too, this woman's testimony is far from
unique in our records. Another very similar
story was told, for example, in a letter from an
audiologist who likewise reported seeing dust on
the light fixtures of the operating room where
his NDE took place. This incident occurred in a
Japanese hospital during the Korean war. In
addition, this same man, who became interested
in NDEs as a result of his own experience, also
learned of another case, involving a nurse at
the same hospital, which had a remarkable
correspondence to his. On this point, as he
wrote in his letter:
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The odd thing
about both of our experiences is that we
are both extremely myopic, i.e., thick
glasses and blind as bats 6" from our
noses. And yet we were both able to
describe accurately events, dials,
details, expressions in our OBEs,
without our glasses.
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Such highly acute visual
perceptions on the part of the poorly sighted
are hardly limited to those who are apparently
hovering above their bodies during NDEs. Other
nonordinary states of consciousness, such as
meditation, can also sometimes evoke them. Here
is a particularly compelling example from a book
by an optometrist whose uncorrected eyesight was
20/200:
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[At this time] I
was meditating every day. ... During one
of these deep meditative states, I had a
very profound and startling experience.
Although my eyes were closed, I could
suddenly see everything - the whole room
and myself in it - and I couldn't tell
where I saw seeing from! I wasn't seeing
from my eyes or from any single point of
view. I seemed to be seeing everything
from everywhere. There seemed to be eyes
in every cell of my body and in every
particle surrounding me. I could
simultaneously see from straight on,
from above, from below, from behind, and
so on. ... There seemed to be no
observer separate from what was seen.
There was simply awareness. (Liberman,
1995, p. 47)
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Here we have an
important clue about the nature of this kind of
"seeing." It may not be limited to the kind of
concentrated focus we sometimes encounter in
cases of NDEs, where one's perceptual attention
sometimes seems restricted to the physical body.
Instead, as this account shows, one's awareness
can be omnidirectional. In fact, this type of
perception is sometimes reported by those having
NDEs or OBEs, and it is precisely this feature
that suggests that "awareness" is a more
appropriate term for this experience than is
"seeing," as the writer just quoted also
implied. In this new context, then, consider
this account from an NDEr whose experience
occurred as a result of pneumonia during her
second pregnancy. During this crisis, the woman
was rushed to the hospital by her husband and,
upon arrival, lost consciousness. Still, she was
able to hear the nurses talking about her,
saying that she was "dead meat." Nevertheless,
she herself was elsewhere at the time. As she
related her experience:
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I was hovering
over a stretcher in one of the emergency
rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at
the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in
blankets was mine, and really didn't
care. The room was much more interesting
than my body. And what a neat
perspective. I could see everything. And
I do mean everything! I could see the
top of the light on the ceiling, and the
underside of the stretcher. I could see
the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles
on the floor, simultaneously. Three
hundred sixty degree spherical vision.
And not just spherical. Detailed! I
could see every single hair and the
follicle out of which it grew on the
head of the nurse standing beside the
stretcher. At the time I knew exactly
how many hairs there were to look at.
But I shifted focus. She was wearing
glittery white nylons. Every single
shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing
detail, and once again I knew exactly
how many sparkles there were.
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In this narrative, we
notice again not only this astonishing feature
of omnidirectional awareness, but also a type of
knowledge that stretches our concept of ordinary
"vision" beyond the breaking point.
Clearly, this is not
simple "vision" at all as we are wont to
understand it, but almost a kind of seeming
omniscience that completely transcends what mere
seeing could ever afford. Indeed, what we appear
to have here is a distinctive state of
consciousness, which we would like to call
transcendental awareness. In this type of
awareness, it is not of course that the eyes see
anything; it is rather that the mind itself
sees, but more in the sense of "understanding"
or "taking in" than of visual perception as
such. Or alternatively, we might say that it is
not the eye that sees, but the "I."
Celia Green, in an
important survey of OBEs (Green, 1968), found
evidence for much the same concept as we are
calling transcendental awareness among her
respondents, too. To cite one brief relevant
instance, she quoted one of her subjects as
saying, "having no eyes, I 'saw' with whole
consciousness" (Green, 1968, p. 70). Indeed, her
survey is full of cases showing many of the
features we have found in our study of the
blind, including instances of keenly detailed
perceptions, which some of her subjects, like
ours, characterized as "crystal clear," saying
things like, "I could see the room in great
detail, even the specks of dust" (Green, 1968,
p. 72). Green also reported examples of apparent
sight through physical obstacles and
multisensory or synesthetic experiences.
Therefore, what students of OBEs tend to call
extrasomatic vision seems to be identical to
what we have labeled here transcendental
awareness.
Still another domain
of research that appears to involve this type of
awareness is that of pre- and perinatal
psychology. In some investigations of early
childhood memories, for example, there are
reports by adults of events they appeared to
have witnessed prior to birth (Chamberlain,
1977; Cheek, 1986). In a popular book
David
Chamberlain (1988) wrote on apparent
birth-related memories, he recounted a story
that came from a 3 1/2-year-old boy named Jason.
Riding home one night, Jason spontaneously said
that he remembered being born. He told his
mother that he had heard her crying and was
doing everything he could to get out. He said
that it was "tight," he felt "wet," and he felt
something around his neck and throat. In
addition, something hurt his head and he
remembered his face had been "scratched up."
Jason's mother said she had "never talked to him
about the birth, never," but the facts were
correct. The umbilical cord had been wrapped
around his neck, he had been monitored by an
electrode in his scalp, and he had been pulled
out by forceps. The photograph taken by the
hospital showed scratches on his face
(Chamberlain, 1988).
Another girl, not
quite 4, in speaking of her own birth, knew a
"family secret" that had never been divulged to
her. In this case, a friend of the mother and
later an occasional babysitter named Cathy had
been present at the birth, assisting the
midwife. After the birth, the midwife had been
busy and the mother had by then been helped into
a bath, leaving Cathy temporarily alone with the
baby. As the baby began to whimper, Cathy
reflexively let the baby suck from her own
breast. By the time the mother had returned, the
baby was already asleep, and Cathy, feeling
somewhat guilty about being the first person to
nurse the child, elected to say nothing to the
mother about it.
Nearly four years
later, Cathy was babysitting this same child,
and, just out of curiosity, happened to ask the
child if she remembered being born. As
Chamberlain related what Cathy later told him,
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She answered,
"Yes!," and proceeded to give an
accurate account of who was present and
their roles during labor and delivery.
She described the dim light of the womb
and the pressures felt during birth.
Then the child leaned up close and
whispered in a confidential tone, "You
held me and gave me titty when I cried
and Mommy wasn't there." At that, she
hopped up and went off to play. Says
Cathy, "Nobody can tell me babies don't
remember their birth!" (Chamberlain,
1988, pp. 103-104)
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Hearing such
suggestive anecdotes as these, Chamberlain felt
obliged to see whether he could confirm such
reports through systematic research into the
question. For this purpose, he eventually
studied a paired set of 10 mothers and children
and independently hypnotized them, asking them
for details about the birth from their separate
perspectives. Only mothers who could assure
Chamberlain that they never shared details about
the birth with their child were eligible for the
study. For the purposes of evaluation,
Chamberlain assumed that the report given by the
mother would be at least an approximately
accurate description of the circumstances of the
birth against which the child's testimony could
then be measured.
When comparing these
independent accounts, Chamberlain found that in
general the respective stories of mother and
child agreed impressively, corresponding on
specific points of detail in an almost uncanny
fashion:
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Mother and child
reports were coherent with each other,
contained many facts that were
consistent and connected, and were
appropriately similar in setting,
characters, and sequences. The
independent narratives dovetailed at
many points like one story told from two
points of view. ... Generally, reports
validated each other in many details
like time of day, locale, persons
present, instruments used (suction,
forceps, incubator) and type of delivery
(feet or head first). Sequences of
receiving bottled water, formula, or
breast milk, appearance and
disappearance of fathers, and moving in
and out of different rooms were often
consistent. ... Considering all the
facts, objectively gathered birth
memories appear to be genuine
recollections of experience.
(Chamberlain, 1988, pp. 106 and 120)
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In all the areas we
have mentioned-studies of NDEs, OBEs,
meditation, and pre- and perinatal psychology -
a single unified concept such as transcendental
awareness can provide the basis for a
parsimonious explanation for the entire and
seemingly diverse array of "impossible
perceptions" that research into these phenomena
has disclosed. Furthermore this term seems more
faithful to the nature of these experiences than
one that emphasizes only the visual component.
Returning now to its
specific application to our research, the reason
we prefer to invoke the concept of
transcendental awareness hinges on our previous
discussion about the ubiquity of the language of
vision. In effect, we argue that the blind, like
other persons reporting OBEs and NDEs, have
entered into a state of transcendental
awareness, which confers access to a realm of
knowledge not available in one's normal waking
state, but then are forced, again just like
others, to translate their experiences into
visual metaphors. Thus, the supersensory kind of
knowing that the experience provides becomes
seeing when it undergoes the necessity of
linguistic transformation. That is why NDErs and
OBErs, including some of our blind respondents,
speak as if they have seen, even though, we
conclude, it is an almost unavoidable distortion
required by common language us age.
Thus, in answer to
our earlier question as to what these
individuals experience, if not seeing, we submit
that it is transcendental awareness, a
distinctive state of consciousness and mode of
knowing in its own right, which is operative in
blind and sighted persons alike during their
experiences and which now stands in need of
explanation. But at least we have, we believe,
finally identified the phenomenon itself that
seems to underlie and make possible the claims
that the blind can "see" during their NDEs and
OBEs, and why it is that their apparent "vision"
can sometimes be so extraordinarily detailed and
fine as to be, in their mind, "perfect." Since
transcendental awareness by definition must
transcend the limitations of the senses, it is
possible, at least at times, for one to have
access to a state of consciousness in which,
with "the doors of perception cleansed," things
present themselves in true Blakean fashion, "as
they are, infinite."
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J.
Theories of Transcendental Awareness |
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When confronted with
the evidence for transcendental awareness we
have presented in this paper, both from our own
study and from the research of others, it is
obvious that the generally accepted theories of
human perception and cognition that derive from
mainstream science will not, without some
extraordinary extrapolations, be able to account
for such findings. If, however, we turn instead
to some recent theoretical developments in New
Paradigm Science we can quickly discern the
shape of the explanation we need to seek.
In recent years, a
number of thinkers, influenced by developments
in modern physics, have elaborated a variety of
theories of consciousness which, despite their
somewhat different basic postulates, all either
predict or imply that blind persons should be
able to have something like visual perception
during NDEs and OBEs. In addition, all of these
theories explicitly address the phenomenon of
the NDE in general and also posit the existence
of a state of consciousness that corresponds to
what we have called here transcendental
awareness. Among such formulations are Kenneth
Arnette's "Theory of Essence" (Arnette, 1992,
1995a,
1995b), Larry's Dossey's "Nonlocality
Theory of Consciousness" (Dossey, 1989), Amit
Goswami's "Quantum Theory of Consciousness"
(Goswami, 1993,
1994), Michael Talbot's
"Holographic Theory of Consciousness" (Talbot,
1991), and Jenny Wade's "Holonomic Theory of
Consciousness" (Wade, 1996).
As indicated, the
ground philosophic assumptions of these theories
vary. For instance, Arnette's position is one of
explicit dualistic in teractionism, Goswami's, a
monistic idealism that nevertheless is able to
incorporate some of the insights of dualistic
theories without having to resort to dualism per
se, while Wade's approach represents an
uncompromising nondualism. Nevertheless, these
theorists all agree about certain properties of
consciousness itself, and on this basis they can
serve as a kind of collective expression of the
point of view we believe best articulates our
own theoretical convictions. Let us examine
next, then, this list of the common postulates
of these theories having to do with the nature
of consciousness.
The first postulate
on the nature of consciousness that these
diverse theories share is that consciousness
itself is primary and is the ground of all
being. Goswami's statements are indicative of
this position and sum it up succinctly:
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All events are
phenomena in consciousness. Beyond what
we see as immanent reality, there is a
transcendent reality; ultimately all
reality is comprised of consciousness.
The division of reality into
transcendental and immanent is an
epiphenomenon of experience. (Goswami,
1994, p. 1)
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The second common
postulate is that consciousness is nonlocal.
What this assertion implies is that the mind,
rather than being located in the individual and
bounded by time (that is, birth and death) is
fixed neither in time nor in space. In fact, in
this view, it is not really appropriate, except
as a shorthand convenience, to speak of the
mind; instead there is, as our first proposition
implies, only Mind. This insight, though
derivative from a nonlocality position, may be
stated as a separate assumption, namely, the
third common postulate: that consciousness is
unitive. That is, there is only one
consciousness, which we call Mind, and the
notion of individual minds is at bottom nothing
more than a useful fiction that Dossey pointedly
called "the illusion of a separate self and the
sensation of an ego that possesses a separate
mind" (Dossey, 1989, p. 98).
The fourth common
postulate is that consciousness may and indeed
must sometimes function independently of the
brain. This is a key assumption, especially for
understanding how the blind may become aware of
something that seems like visual perception.
Dossey again stated the matter concisely:
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If the mind is
nonlocal, it must in some sense be
independent of the strictly local brain
and body. ... And if the mind is
nonlocal, unconfined to brains and
bodies and thus not entirely dependent
on the physical organism, the
possibility of survival of bodily death
is opened. (Dossey, 1989, p. 7)
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Of course, as Dossey
elsewhere pointed out and as all of the other
theorists under consideration would agree,
although Mind is neither confined to the brain
nor a product of it, it may of course work
through the brain to give us our representation
of the phenomenal world. According to Goswami,
our ordinary perception of time and space comes
about as a result of a quantum-mechanical
process whereby consciousness self-referentially
"collapses" what are called "possibility waves"
so as to give rise to actuality: "In the process
of collapse, one undivided consciousness sees
itself as apparently divided into dualities such
as life and environment, subject and object" (A.
Goswami, personal communication, 1995).
Thus, what we have
here is an adumbration of a process that begins
with Mind fully independent of brain becoming
self-referential, that is, becoming identified
with consciousness itself, and then converting
this noumenal consciousness into a dualistic
modality that generates the familiar phenomenal
world. What we have called transcendental
awareness is at least the beginning of the
reversal of that process by which, even though
the traces of an everyday dualism remain, the
individual is enabled, however temporarily, to
experience the world from a perspective
independent of brain functioning and the
operation of the senses. Each of these theories
formally entails such a state of awareness, and
specifically in blind persons, during NDEs or
OBEs; we direct the interested reader to the
citations we have provided in order to confirm
our assertion that these New Paradigm theories
are perfectly capable of elegantly subsuming our
find ings as derivations from their stated
premises.
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9.
Conclusion |
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In the introduction
to this paper, we alluded to an account of an
NDE of a blind woman who afterward reported that
she could see during her experience. At first
blush, because this case was recounted by a
well-known physician, we were probably inclined
to take it at face value, perhaps also
influenced by our desire to believe in the
miraculous. Almost immediately, however, we
learned that the story that had so beguiled us
into entertaining such an appealing possibility
was fictitious. But by the end of our inquiry,
we came to understand that in this tale there
resided still another paradox besides the one it
seemed initially to represent: namely, that this
was a story that was simultaneously true and
false. Or perhaps we might better say it was a
fictitious story that turned out to be true
after all, just as the author all along had felt
it just had to be. In this sense, at least,
perhaps this author has received a measure of
justification after the fact for his
convictions, even if we cannot embrace, in this
one instance, his penchant for prematurely
converting belief into apparent fact.
Nevertheless, as we
have seen, there is still another level of
subtlety in this story, because although in a
sense it is true, it is not entirely true. The
story of Sarah implied that she really could see
during her NDE, in the way that a sighted person
might. We have shown this is an unwarranted
inference. What seemed like an analog to
physical sight really was not when examined
closely. It is a different type of awareness
altogether, which we have called transcendental
awareness, that functions independently of the
brain but that must necessarily be filtered
through it and through the medium of language as
well. Thus, by the time these episodes come to
our attention, they tend to speak in the
language of vision, but the actual experiences
themselves seem to be something rather different
altogether and are not easily captured in any
language of ordinary discourse. Indeed, our work
has shown the need to exercise critical
discernment before taking these reports at face
value. To be sure, they make good stories, in
books or in tabloid headlines, as the case may
be, but they are not always necessarily what
they seem. They are more remarkable still.
What the blind
experience is more astonishing than the claim
that they have seen. Instead, they, like sighted
persons who have had similar episodes, have
transcended brain-based consciousness altogether
and, because of that, their experiences beggar
all description or convenient labels. For these
we need a new language altogether, as we need
new theories from a new kind of science even to
begin to comprehend them. Toward this end, the
study of paradoxical and utterly anomalous
experiences plays a vital role in furnishing the
theorists of today the data they need to fashion
the science of the 21st century. And that
science of consciousness, like the new
millennium itself, is surely already on the
horizon.
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10.
References |
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