The Women Warriors

[RawMahdiyah]

Near-Death Experiences


The following is information of Western scientific research into near death experience (NDE); experiences "at the edge of death" (*1). Many of the clinically dead who were reanimated describe - to large extent, independently of cultural considerations - encounters with light or creatures of light and the running of a "life film," following experiences of "being magnetically drawn" or sliding through tunnel-like structures. These experiences are depicted as being "more real than everyday reality" and generally have a transforming effect on the rest of that person's life. In a comrehensive study, the Omega Project, Prof. Ken Ring investigated near-death survivors form two perspectives: on one hand, their anamnestic data, to isolate those factors that predispose people to experiences of this kind; on the other hand, the long-term consequences of the experience of clinical death. Here is a brief summay of this fascinating study:

*Structurally, the experiences correspond to the above described "universal schema of initiation into the mystical dimension of being" or that of the "shaman's journey" of "seperation, transformation, reintegration" or "suffering, death, rebirth" (p.92).
*Most near-death surviviors have withstood traumas of the most severe kind at some point in their childhood; they are the "unwitting beneficiaries of a kind of compensatory gift in return for the wounds they have incurred in growing up" (p. 146). (This observation could be an analog to the tribulations that traditional teachers expose their students to).
*Near-death survivors report a number of psycho-physiological changes that take place as residual phenomena of the experience. These include persistent physiological changes, neurological and brain state-specific changes, and unusual psychoenergetic, psychological and parapsychological experiences. These changes generally peak within five years after the experience and are permanent from then on (p. 156, 168 ). The assertion of Eastern spiritual traditions that consciousness expansion is accompanied by a biophysiological transformation is thus supported by the results of Western empirical research.

Many of the depictions of near-death experiences correspond, in my opinion, to Gopi Krishna's "symptomatology of awakening," that is, the Kundalini phenomenon. Ring makes the same deduction:

My candidate for the driving force behind the psychophysical transformations would be kundalini. In this supposition, of course, I am hardly alone, for the most common assumption about the nature of Kundalini is that to quote perhaps the leading authority on Kundalini in modern times, Gopi Krishna, it is "the evolutionary energy in man." That is, according to Kundalini theorists, it is the latent energy that, once released, transforms the nervous system and promotes the psychospiritual evolution of humanity (p. 169).

Ring himself assumes that the NDE "permanently alters the biological system of the individual, probably (in my opinion) by acting upon the autonomic nervous system" (p. 170).
The results of his empirical investigation lead Ring to wide-ranging conclusions:

Our data suggest that this transformation is in fact psychophysical, that NDEers...through their experiences undergo certain changes that affect their physiologicl functioning, nervous system, brain and mental processes so as to permit a higher level of human nature to manifest...I advance the hypothesis that NDEs are a kind of experimental catalyst for human evolution, that potentially, at least, these experiences that we know have occured to many millions of persons across the globe are serving the purpose of jump-starting the human race to a higher level of spiritual awareness and psychophysical functioning." (pp. 11, 169)

Interestingly, Ring's evolutionary hypothesis is also advanced by contemporary Islamic authors: "The more people reach this love (*2)[that is, the form of being that follows the transforming 'dying before you die'] the more evolution will occur and the more tolerance will grow." (Guvenc, The Dervish Path, p. 36). Ring calls the "new person" who is the result of these transformative processes the "omega prototype," drawing on Teilhard de Chardin and B. Greyson, or John White's "Homo noeticus."
Ring refers to this developmnet - and here we come full circle- as the "shamanization of modern humanity":

To make it clear and put it into context for you, consider for a moment the general course of humanity's evolution. What began as physical evolution has obviously and especially with the advent of the neolithic revolution became primarily a cultural evolution. But as cultural evolution has shaped our planet's destiny for the past ten thousand years, has also been evident a third form of evolution - the evolution of consciousness itself. And we have no reason to think that this evolution has ceased, but rather the opposite: It may be that it constitutes the very frontier of humanity's evolution today. If this is so, I would argue that the findings from the Omega Project suggests that we could be in the beginning stages of a major shift in levels of consciousness that will eventually lead to humanity's being able to live in two worlds at once - physical and the imaginal. This is of course precisely what the shaman in traditional cultures is trained to do (pp. 239-240).

"Imaginal" is not to be confused with "imaginary". Ring uses this expression in the sense of Henry Corbin, who writes thus of mystical experiences:

...it must be understood that the world into which these [visionaries] probed is perfectly real. Its reality is more irrefutable and more coherent than that of the emperical world where reality is perceived by the senses. Upon returning, the beholders of the world are perfectly aware of having been "elsewhere"; they are not mere schizophrenics. This world is hidden behind the very act of sense perception and has to be sought underneath its apparent objective certainty. For this reason we definitely connot qualify it as being imaginary in the current sense of the word, i.e., unreal or nonexistent. [The imaginal] world...is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect...We must be careful not to confuse it with the imagination identified by so-called modern man with "fantasy" (*3).

Ring assumes that the "imaginal" element in Corbin's sense is a function of the altered state of consciousness. He characterizes it as a "kind of organ of perception" which the alchemists called imaginatio vera. (It is not hard to recognize in this the Islamic concept of qalb, that is, "heart as organ of perception.") The perception of the imaginal realm:

...is dependent neither on sensory perception nor on normal waking cognition (including fantasy). Because it lies hidden from common view, it can usually be apprehended only in what we now call certain altered states of consciousness that have the effect of undermining ordinary perception and conceptual thinking. When these are sufficiently disturbed, the imaginal realm, like the starry night sky that can be discerned only when sunlight is absent, stands revealed (The Omega Project, p. 220).




*1) Cf. R. Moody Life after Life, K. Ring, Heading towards Omega, and The Omega Project.


2) In Islam, "love" - like "heart" - is a clearly defined technical term having nothing in common with the notions of "romatic" love or indeed sentimental "gushing" that are current in the West. Guvenc, for example, describes "love" as follows:
According to Islamic mystics, "love" is the hal (state) in which one knows the reality directly...In such a state, a person knows what is true and essential and is directed towards every particle of the universal. If love is manifested in the heart [organ of recognition], it directs one toward conscious living, makes life meaningful, and contains a deep knowledge in the real sense. Past feelings, old viewpoints, and understandings formed by things directed towards the person disappear completely...It opens the heart to new forms and brings a great power of intuition for new manifestations...The (material) world loses its influence. Yet - life continues- in another dimension.


3) Henry Corbin, "Mundus imaginalis," in Ring p. 220.



RawMahdiyah
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"Cast down what is in your right hand. It will swallow up what they have wrought. Verily they have wrought only a sorcerer's stratagem; and a sorcerer does not succeed (no matter) from whatsoever (skilled group) he may come." (Quran-20:69)