Nassir H. Sabah
Despite having been extensively studied by many scholarly investigators, no single neurophysiological or psychological explanation has been able to account for all features of the near-death experience (NDE).
It has been shown that NDEs:
- are not dreams; they occur under deep anesthesia, known to suppress dream activity;
- nor are they hallucinations, for they remain vivid for decades and often lead to profound and permanent transformations in personality, attitudes, beliefs and values;
- nor are they caused by abnormal states of the brain, such as some brain malfunctions;
- nor are they caused by the release of chemicals in the brain to help cope with the stress of death;
- nor are they caused by the effects on the brain of various physiological factors that come into play when death is imminent, such as oxygen deficiency or increased levels of carbon dioxide;
- nor are they explained as a psychological defense mechanism in reaction to trauma.
Nevertheless, NDEs remain essentially anecdotal recounts that cannot be objectively verified. Although most scientists are of the opinion that NDEs should be explainable within the framework of present-day science, many renowned scientists believe that NDEs are beyond conventional scientific explanation.
The spiritual or transcendental explanation of NDEs is that they are very real and provide evidence of a nonmaterial mind or soul departing upon death from the physical body to an afterlife that also exists. Those who experience NDEs describe them as “more real than real”.
If real, NDEs raise some intriguing and thought-provoking questions about memory, consciousness, and the mind-brain problem. First, NDEs seemingly involve a higher state of consciousness, as evidenced by:
- experiencing colors and sounds that are not perceived in the normal state of living;
- extraordinary visual acuity and field of vision; in the words of a near-death experiencer: “…I watched the mowing of the lawn from straight above, anywhere from several hundred to a couple of thousand feet, as though I were a camera…I could have counted the mosquitoes…”;
- the life review is conducted in minute detail and at an incredibly high speed;
- extreme clarity of thought and a sense of all-knowledge and oneness with the universe.
And all this whilst the physical brain is clinically dead or at least severely impaired. How can that be?
Second, in the out-of-body experience, NDE experiencers view their physical bodies from above, without feeling any attachment to them. In this out-of-body state they can still see, hear, and feel while seemingly unconscious, with their eyes taped shut and their ears plugged. How can that be?
Third, relatives and friends encountered during an NDE have their own memories, feelings and thoughts, despite having been dead for a long time and their bodies decomposed; yet their consciousness and memory are preserved. How can that be?
It is seen that the implications of NDEs, if real, is that memory and consciousness have an existence of their own, outside the physical body.
It is interesting in this regard that an English researcher, Rupert Sheldrake, postulated in the early 1980s the concept of what he calls morphic fields, as an extension and development of the idea of morphogenetic fields first proposed in the 1920s by embryologists as a hypothesis to explain some still unexplained aspects of morphogenesis, that is, the development of form and structure during embryonic growth.
Sheldrake attempts to explain many phenomena associated with living organisms, including instinctive animal behavior, in terms of morphic fields and their interactions. According to Sheldrake, memory is not in the brain at all, but in the morphic field, whose influence is not diminished by distance or time from the past to the present. This explains the fact that, although neural correlates of various memory operations have been identified, definitive memory storage locations in the brain have eluded detection so far.
It is noteworthy that the Quran distinguishes between three entities: the physical body, the self (Arabic, nafs), and the spirit (Arabic, ruḥ). The body-self-spirit has been compared to a car. The material parts of the car are analogous to the physical body. The ignited fuel (or the electric charge in the batteries in the case of an electric car) that “brings the car to life” and makes it move is analogous to the spirit. To be useful, the car must be acted on in a purposeful manner – moved forward or backward, turned right or left, accelerated or decelerated, or driven to some destination. The driving agency, which may be a human driver or some form of autonomous or remote control, is analogous to the conscious self. Thus, the spirit is the essence of life, whereas the self is the essence of our conscious being.
