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I invite you to think about water. Visualize it for a moment. I bet most of you will have conceived of liquid water, omitting almost by default that it can also be found in solid and gaseous states. Something similar happens with the human mind.
Our culture prioritizes the waking state. The only alternative to caffeinated alertness seems to be deep sleep, often interpreted solely as a mechanism to restore our productive capacity. We live between functionality and rest most of our lives.
But there is more mind ‘in there’. The light beam of consciousness, hitting the prism that is our brain, can be refracted into a range of colors that goes beyond the lean on/off binary. They are called ‘altered states of consciousness’.
The list is longer than one might a priori suppose: lucid dreams, hypnosis, trance, meditative states, psychedelia. Among them we also find the so-called ‘near-death experiences’.
You have probably heard of them (although little is said about them). I had one exactly a year ago. As Bosch painted more than half a millennium ago in ‘The Ascension to the Empyrean’, I was in the famous tunnel with its light at the end. Three figures were lovingly waiting for me. I felt no fear, but I knew that if I kept going there would be no going back. I decided to postpone the trip and return. The surgeon and her team did the rest, along with the prayers of my loved ones.
Scientific studies show that one in five people resuscitated after cardiac arrest report having lived through a similar experience, including the feeling of abandonment of the body, seeing their whole life pass before them, or interacting with deceased relatives. Perhaps it’s all a hallucination caused simply by a lack of oxygen to the brain. Or maybe not. If it is a strictly physiological issue, why didn’t the rest of the patients have a similar experience or, simply, any experience at all? And, in those that did, how could an experience of such intensity occur during the period of clinical death, with a flat encephalogram?
That thoughts are a function of the brain, there is no doubt. The question is, as the psychologist William James put it, whether this function is ‘productive’ or ‘permissive’, that is, whether the brain secretes the mind as the liver does bile or, on the contrary, receives or filters it. like radio to electromagnetic waves. The brain-computer metaphor has become obsolete. The new one science of consciousness it is challenging that hackneyed vision of dull matter, transmuting it into a vital materiality whose matrix houses the ability to know itself.
Meanwhile, science and religion are confused in current neuro-soteriology: promises of technocratic salvation that, without believing in ‘heaven’, propose to upload our ‘I’ to ‘the cloud’. It is the dream (or nightmare) of cheap, high-cost transhumanism that, elevating us to demigods, denies our humanity. His prophecy: immortalize your consciousness as an algorithm on silicon chips. Today you don’t trust, tomorrow yes.
You don’t have to be technically dead to have a near-death experience. In the medical literature, constellations of similar phenomena abound in cases of postpartum shock, traffic accidents, or asphyxiation, among others. Such experiences transform the rest of the lives of those who experience them. Its reality is undeniable. Its impact, indelible.
Similar experiences are also frequently described in palliative care units, when the misguided healing gives way to compassionate care for those who are called terminally ill. The recently called ‘terminal lucidity’ (or ‘improvement of death’, in popular wisdom), sudden improvement shortly before the dying person dies, baffles scientists.
These are not mere anecdotes. There are thousands of stories in people from different cultures that consistently point in the same direction, and that many health professionals also corroborate.
And that’s not all. Traditions like the Buddhist offer detailed descriptions of what happens not only near death, but during, and even after. Like the ‘bardo’, an intermediate state between death and reincarnation. Or the ‘tukdam’, a meditative state in which the corpse does not breathe but does not decompose for weeks. One only has to glance at the Tibetan Book of the Dead to realize the exquisite investigation of the mind that can be done with one’s own mind. Western neuroscientists should take note.
So what happens to the mind when the brain dies? Nothing, the dogmatic materialist will confidently affirm, since, according to his doctrine (more philosophical than scientific), the mind cannot be anything more than brain activity. The true skeptic, however, will confess that we do not know the answer. To doubt is not to deny. Moreover, his obligation is to investigate what is not understood, especially if it challenges his most deeply held beliefs. Let’s not offer hasty explanations, but let’s not denounce the ‘supernatural’ or ‘paranormal’ either, since it only expresses a stubborn prejudice disguised as scientific reason. Great taboos can become a fertile field of investigation.
Whether or not you believe in the ‘beyond’, it is undeniable that something important ends up in the ‘here’. Does any aspect of our consciousness survive after the permanent death of the physical body? The ego is probably extinct. However, the possibility of ‘life after life’ should not distract us from the existential question about the meaning of death. In our thanatophobic society, a kind of orphan wisdom is becoming more and more necessary that allows us to look death in the eye, and love what will not last forever. As the writer and activist Stephen Jenkinson says, when one’s heart breaks, the solution is not less heart. Life remains a miracle and death a mystery.
Alex Gomez-Marin. Institute of Neurosciences of Alicante
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