The Case for Spiritual Consciousness

A measuring tape is a great way to find the true length of a 2×4 wooden board. But it won’t tell you how many gallons of water are in your bathtub.

No one measurement, or group of measurements, will suffice to find truth in all situations. Lets look at the problem of consciousness, or psyche, or mind, or soul, or spirit, whatever you wish to call it.

Consciousness is who you are, and science says it resides in the brain. OK. If consciousness resides in the brain then it must be biological, and it must die when the brain dies. So we look at the brain, and find that brain cells look pretty much alike. It seems “memory” would take up a lot of brain space, but we can’t find memory anywhere, does it have a color? Do we look for red for memory, green for thoughts, where are the thoughts?. Well we have looked over 100 years at the brain, and can’t find consciousness anywhere in it.

So, we just assume it’s there, but we can’t see it. Maybe brain mapping will tell us where it is, so scientists start mapping the brain. A problem arises, the maps don’t match, and then when a portion of the brain is damaged, another portion takes over to continue the function. How does the brain do that?

Enter the near death experience. Surgeons and medical doctors noticed their patients recalling strange stories after they were revived from cardiac arrest. One doctor Raymond Moody decided to study this strange phenomenon with the permission of the doctors and hospital. When he completed his study and published a book, his peers were outraged, and kept him from working as a Psychiatrist for the rest of his life. Dr. Elisabeth Keubler-Ross spent her whole life studying death and dying. She came to the same conclusion that Dr. Moody did. Consciousness is spiritual, and Spirit does exist without the body.

I think Pam Reynolds will become the benchmark of near death experiences. Here is an event that was experimental surgery. It was monitored and taped with every modern device of medicine.

Stopped heart and no brain waves

A mother of three, 35 year old Pam Reynolds lay on the operating table in the summer of 1991 with a life-threatening bulge in her brain.

Doctor Robert Spetzler, the director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix had arranged for Pam to be hooked up to a brainstem monitoring machine. And other machines tracked Pam’s heartbeat, temperature, breathing and other vital signs. Additionally, Pam’s eyes were taped shut. Pam was also under anesthesia. Doctor Spetzler had to stop Pam’s heart which caused all bodily signs to cease.

Shortly after Doctor Spetzler turned on the surgical saw to begin cutting through Pam’s skull, Pam felt herself “pop” outside her body and hover above the operating table to a position where she could hover over Doctor Spetzler’s shoulders where she could observe the operation on her motionless body below.

From this position she saw Doctor Spetzler working on her with a saw which looked to her like an electric toothbrush. Pam heard and reported later what nurses in the operating room had said and exactly what was happening during the operation.

A little while into the operation, Doctor Spetzler ordered that Pam’s blood begin to drain from her body. Still every monitor attached to Pam’s body registered “no life”.

Pam found herself going from monitoring the operation above the table to traveling down a “tunnel” which had a light at the end. At the end of this tunnel Pam could see her relatives and friends waiting, including her long-dead grandmother. Time and all worries seemed to stop for Pam.

It wasn’t long, however, before a “dead” uncle led her back to her body.

Reentering her body felt to Pam like “plunging into a pool of ice”.

BIBLE PROBE COMMENT:
THE ABOVE STORY was reported in the August 2003 Reader’s Digest.

What is important about this story is that with no brain wave function, no heart function, and blood being drained from her – Pam’s is a case that rules out any “hallucinations” from chemical or psychological reasons. Combine this with the preponderance of evidence from thousands of similar near death experiences – and any thinking person would have to be led to the belief that the “soul” is cognitive, and that it survives death….

Read Near Death Experiences (NDEs) here.

© 2019, Lekatt. All rights reserved.

Near Death Experiences, Real Glimpses of Afterlife

The Jury is in. After more than 35 years of research by top scientists, the studies all point to consciousness living beyond the death of the brain and body. Incredible as it may sound, we now have solid evidence of an afterlife.

A few of the scientists that have been researching near death experiences over the past thirty-five years include:
Dr. Raymond Moody,
Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross,
Dr. Melvin Morse,
Dr. Jeffrey Long,
Dr. Peter Fenwick,
Dr. Bruce Greyson,
Dr. Sam Parnia,
Dr. Michael Sabom,
Dr. Pim Van Lommel,
and many, many others have joined them in researching near death experiences over the years. All of the near-death research points in the direction of an afterlife. The research is being done at dozens of universities here in the states and abroard. The research has been published in scientific journals. Many books have been written by these researchers. They are available from Amazon.com. I highly recommend: “Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience,” by Dr. Pim van Lommel.

There are an estimated 10 million near death experiencers in the U.S. alone. So why is this not front page news in all the newspapers and magazines, and why do main stream scientists continue to teach and hold to the old theories that the brain produces consciousness when all the research shows that consciousness is non-local (a separate entity) and is not produced by the brain?

The clash between the new research, showing consciousness continues to live after the death of the brain and body, and the old theories that assume consciousness is produced by the brain and dies when the brain dies, has been going on for a long time. So it is now time to examine the facts of the debate.

The New Research.

The new research shows that a percentage of the people that die during surgery, and are brought back to life, can accurately describe what happened during the time they were clinically dead. They can accurately describe the surgeon and staff, what they said, and what they did to their clinically dead body while being out of their body in a position above their body near the ceiling. Even if the patient was blind or deaf before the surgery, they can still hear and see all the activity going on around their dead body. Some of them are able to see for the first time in their life. This is called veridical near death experiences. The accuracy of the surgery patient’s account is verified by the surgeon and staff performing the procedure. To date there are thousands of these verified NDEs published in the reseach. They are solid, clear evidence that our consciousness continues to live after the death of our bodies.

Registered nurse has a near death experience.
The Pam Reynolds surgery.
An emergency room nurse tells about an NDE.

The Old Theories.

On the other side of the debate is the theory that the brain produces our consciousness which is dependent upon the brain, and therefor dies when the brain dies. This remains only a theory because no one has found evidence of memory, thoughts, beliefs, and other attributes of consciousness physically present anywhere in the brain.

I understand there are basically three ways scientists can examine the brain, and the only thing they can measure related to consciousness in the brain comes from the brain activity.

1. By stimulating part of the brain with electical or chemical probes. This will usually result in the person who owns the brain seeing, feeling, and/or hearing some kind of an event. From this the assumption is made that the brain contains that event at that location. But this is not evidence, only theory, an assumption. Probing a TV tuner at different locations will show you different channels, but no one believes the channels with pictures and sound are located in the TV. The event triggered by the probes could be just as well non-local, since brain activity has not been shown to be generated by the brain. Scientists can’t show proof brain activity is coming from the brain, it could be a non-local consciousness feeding activity to the brain instead.

2. In this method is seen a reverse of the first one. A subject is asked to do, or the think of something, and brain activity is measured to see which part of the brain “lights up” when this event or activity is performed. Again this is not proof of the event or activity residing in that part of the brain. These procedures, 1, and 2, are sometimes called brain mapping. This so-called “brain mapping” has not been very accurate.

3. Brain damage. What can we learn from brain damage. Many scientists believe the brain to be hard-wired like some machine. If this is true, which it isn’t, then a stroke that causes a leg or arm to be paralyzed due to brain damage could never be used again. But we know through physical therapy many times full use of the arm or leg can be restored. If our consciousness is non-local and uses the brain as an interface to the body, then it can be explained why brain damage can be reversed without restoring the damaged part of the brain. If the part of the brain controlling a function is damaged, then your non-local consciousness can move that function to an undamaged part of the brain. However, a relearning process is necessary for the function to be restored. The Magic Brain.

Science doctrine is full of contradictions. One is assuming everything is material, without knowing everything. Two is assuming that personal experiences are unreliable, when it is obvious that personal experiences are the only kind of experience there is, and our only interface with the physical world. Three is assuming theories are more than educated guesses or they are backed up by facts. If they were factual, they would not be theories, they would be evidence.

So why is the new research not widely accepted.

The usually reasons is that us humans are not quick to change. We like our comfort zones and giving them up is not an easy thing. Then there are vested interests. Government and university funded research that would no longer be needed. There would also be a lot of theories that would need to be upgraded or replaced by the new knowledge. But I think the biggest reason is that spirituality would have to be acknowledged. Along with spirituality comes a huge amount of questions with little or no answers. This may be upsetting to the number of atheists among the scientific community, because while an afterlife doesn’t prove the existence of a higher intelligence, it does strongly suggest one. It would be a hard thing to acknowledge spirituality after years of teaching materialism.

But the advantages are many. There would now be meaning, purpose, and hope in all our lives. The fear of death would be diminished or gone entirely, along with the fear of life. Kindness would be taught again in all schools, including love one another. The world would improve if all knew physical life was not the end. Stress, anxiety, and anger would be reduced. Everyone would understand the law of attraction, and know that however they treat others would be returned to them. They would understand they are responsible for the deeds they do and the thoughts, beliefs they hold would determine the quality of their life in both the physical and spiritual. The world would not be perfect, but certainly improved. I hope it will happen sooner than you think.

© 2010 – 2021, Lekatt. All rights reserved.