National Institute for Discovery Science: Revising the Survival Research Paradigm by Michael Grosso

Revising the Survival Research Paradigm

Michael Grosso

The theme of our seminar touches on what may be the most challenging question about consciousness: can it somehow survive the death of the body? This is not only a very difficult question, but one of personal interest to us all.

Scientific interest in the survival of consciousness came to life in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Darwin's theory of evolution inspired a group of Victorian scholars and scientists to invent psychical research. The founders opted to fight fire with fire. The theory of natural selection seemed to undermine the religious viewpoint, which for centuries was the staple of faith in the afterlife. So Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher, and Frederic Myers, a classical scholar decided to use impartial scientific methods to determine whether there were grounds for belief in an afterlife. The result was to launch an investigation into the more remarkable powers of the human mind, and a large mass of provocative data has been accumulated.

In my opinion, anyone who studies this fascinating material, the rich deposit of over a century's work, will agree that progress has been made. A surprising amount of evidence shows that human beings possess some extremely puzzling abilities, even perhaps the ability to retain their conscious personalities after death. Unfortunately, clear and unambiguous answers to basic questions still elude us. Consensus is lacking. So where do we go from here? The purpose of this preliminary seminar is to share our thoughts on this question.

I am presently at work writing a monograph for The Institute of Noetic Sciences titled THE STATUS OF SURVIVAL RESEARCH: EVIDENCE, PROBLEMS, PARADIGMS. The first step is to produce a comprehensive outline of the evidence; next, the problems with the evidence have to be reviewed; and finally, there's the question of the need to tinker with our whole approach to the problem, with the so-called paradigm. The following remarks, then, stem from this larger work underway: they are meant to be suggestive and to promote discussion.

My first remark is about data. In my opinion, we already have more data than we have reduced to conceptual order; we have scarcely begun to assimilate what we know. Of course, new data and more finely honed research continue to be essential. It is exciting, for instance, to study the recent reports from Ken Ring of sight regained in the congenitally blind during out-of-body (OBE) or near-death experience (NDE). Raymond Moody has opened a new vein of research by using scrying techniques to induce apparitions of the dead. Massive efforts of Ian Stevenson show that ostensibly reincarnated people have birthmarks and birth defects that correspond to physical traumas of their previous incarnate personalities.

Important studies need to replicated, such as the out-of-body experiments conducted by Karlis Osis at the American Society of Psychical research. As Bruce Greyson recently reported, there is little in recent near-death research that explicitly addresses the survival question. So one would like to see more research in the near-death arena, especially research that tightens up the investigation of veridical OBEs during NDEs. This will no doubt require the cooperation of medical institutions. One would also like to see further research, as conducted by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Harraldsson, on death-bed visions, which is a form of near-death experience. The research of Osis and Harraldsson did ask whether data confirmed or disconfirmed the survival hypothesis. This work cries out for development, especially the emphasis on theory building and cross-cultural surveys.

The data, however good and suggestive, is inchoate and piecemeal; it faces a variety of difficult problems. For example, superpsi--the idea that all apparent evidence for survival, however compelling, may be explained, as Gustave Flournoy once said, as the "fiendish byplay" of the subliminal mind and its psychic powers. There are other fundamental problems with the evidence; I reserve discussion of these issues for my monograph. In this preliminary statement for the National Institute of Discovery Science, I would like to focus on suggestions about the overall model, approach, or research "paradigm."

Adhere to, expand, and organize the data base. The first step I recommend toward shedding further light on the enigma of death and consciousness is to resolve to adhere to all relevant matters of fact. Or, in the words of Husserl, "Back to the things themselves!" This may seem too obvious to bother stating, but I do so for three reasons.
First, there are some who feel there are no matters of fact relevant to an examination of the afterlife question and still others who seem unfriendly to rational investigation of such matters. For example, people who define persons strictly and solely in bodily terms tend a priori to rule out any evidence for survival.

On the other hand, some religious believers reject the rational approach to items of faith. They might feel that faith is sufficient and that impartial science might upset their preconceptions and cause them undue anxiety. Or, as a Buddhist friend of mine once opined, if there is "no soul" of importance that might survive, why bother doing research on it? Such ideas are poor incentives to research. So let's lay aside our philosophical and religious preconceptions, and try to look at the data with fresh eyes.

Second, we need to stick to all the facts related to the question of survival. Most people, including academics, are unaware that bona fide survival-related data exists, however scattered among dusty research archives and libraries of eccentric learners.

The general public is apt to suppose that near-death experiences (NDEs) and reincarnation fantasies of the hypnotically regressed make the case for an afterlife. In reality, these reflect a small part of the total data. Besides NDEs, there are well-authenticated reports of deathbed visions; besides past life regressions, which have slight evidential value, there are the more bracing efforts of Ian Stevenson on the reincarnation memories of children.

It seems that signals, if such they be, from the other side, come in various shapes and colors. For example, there are numerous accounts of spontaneous, and even some experimental, out-of-body experiences, a prominent aspect of the near-death experience, and one that carries some weight as survival evidence. There is the research done with great mediums such as Leonore Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard. From mediumship evolved subtypes of phenomena such as proxy sittings, book tests, cross-correspondence tests, "drop-in" communicators, and so forth.

Since mid twentieth century reports exist of machine-mediated mediumship. Here, the spirits communicate by means of diodes, tape-recorders, radios, TVs, and computers—counterparts to the pendulums, ouija boards, spirit cabinets, and planchette of the last century.

The early researchers collected and investigated accounts of hauntings and apparitions. These form a huge sprawling mass of data, some of it valuable for the survival hypothesis. Apparitions, sometimes collectively witnessed, may impart correct information, and they may also exhibit purpose and furnish proof of identity.

Discarnate intelligences are a vagrant lot; they may come in dreams or visit us in those states hovering on the edge of dream. The phenomenon of "hagging" or "nightmare," for instance, as described in David Hufford's Terror That Comes In The Night, and poltergeists, as several researchers have argued, may indicate the presence of external intelligence.

A third point on evidence: we should distinguish between evidence directly and indirectly related to survival. The types cited above directly bear on survival. Other types are indirect. For example, the physical phenomena of mysticism, shamanism, and mediumship imply or suggest unknown extraphysical forces and modes of being that seem consistent with the idea of an afterlife.

Reports of UFO contact often have the earmarks of ghostly and paranormal experiences. For example, so-called alien abductors, like ghosts, are said to enter rooms by passing through solid walls. The time is ripe to break down the artificial barriers between these two areas of anomalous research: Jacques Vallee has called attention to the paranormal side of ufology; Ken Ring has studied the psychological profile of near-death visionaries and alien abductees, and found that they were disposed to dissociation. Dissociation may facilitate anomalous encounters.

Mythology, anthropology and transpersonal psychology also contribute indirectly to bolstering a view of the world congenial to the idea of an afterlife. Mythology shows that the idea of transcendent reality was in the mind of the human race since earliest times, a fact that archetypal and imaginal psychologists have documented. Anthropology shows how widespread are shamanic, magical, and totemistic modes of thought; all these share a sense of the presence of other worlds. Transpersonal psychology explores states of consciousness that proclaim a transcendent dimension to human experience. This deserves a place in any paradigm researching the limits of human consciousness.

Another point to note: a fact is a timeless entity. The value of evidence, therefore, is independent of time. I state this explicitly to address an ill-founded suspicion that some of us may harbor that old evidence is bad evidence. It is not.

Survival evidence doesn't seem to be part of any general particular outlook, scientific or religious. To address this problem, we need to build the most comprehensive data base; show how transpersonal and parapsychological data interrelate; and how they relate to "normal" psychology. Some parapsychologists say that psychokinesis and ordinary voluntary motor activity may at bottom be one, thus suggesting a fundamental link between "normal" and "paranormal" psychology. The data, viewed synoptically, may suggest outlines of a greater order or system, in and through which afterlife effects will seem more acceptable. The vague hope or yearning for survival in an afterlife needs to become part of a comprehensive view. So our work is synoptic not just analytic.

We need a system of classification of survival evidence, a taxonomy. However tentative our taxonomy, by means of it we could begin to look for larger patterns of data. Is there, for example, a relationship between spiritual evolution and the ability to produce paranormal effects? (See my Frontiers of the Soul, 1992, for further discussion of this.) How do we connect reincarnation memories, mediumship, and near-death experiences? All these effects, and many others, must be part of some systemically interrelated process. We need to keep looking for the larger pattern that connects, if we hope to gain a foothold on new methods of experimentation.

As for the larger pattern, the literature is rich in possibilities. We have the seminal work of Frederic Myers and, from a different angle, of Michael Murphy today, as examples of how to formulate a new survival paradigm; the work of the process philosopher, David Griffin, (see his Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality, 1997) addresses comprehensive issues in fundamental issues from a stimulating Whiteheadian perspective. Stephen Braude (The Limits of Influence), another philosopher, puts the question of survival in terms of a discussion of the range of human capacities, forcing us synoptically to scrutinize dissociative behavior, savant-syndrome, and survival data.

The question of organizing and classifying all the data brings us to the need for a more useful paradigm. The situation is odd. We have never before had so much data suggestive of postmortem survival, yet at the same time belief in survival is at an all time low among the educated. The reason for this is not hard to see. The data of postmortem survival have no place in the highly restricted niche of scientific materialism. Meanwhile, traditional belief systems seem to be losing credentials through scientific microanalysis. At the moment, cognitive schizophrenia reigns. So we have to try to re-integrate all the data; in other words, develop new models, new paradigms. We need a new story, a new "myth."

Come to grips with the mind-body problem. Survival-related data challenge materialism on the mind-body problem; we need a theory that explains how mind uses the body, can quit it, and carry on elsewhere.

Place the idea of postmortem survival in the context of our general evolutionary cosmology. That a biological creature, fated by genetics as are rattlesnakes and paramecia, should acquire the ability to retain its personal consciousness after going the way of all nature, may strike one as extremely odd. We have to come up with a reasonable story that can embrace such an improbable idea; how does consciousness after death fit into our understanding of evolutionary time? Without dealing with this question, the idea of conscious survival will seem too outlandish to entertain. As Richard Dawkins has brilliantly argued, individual organisms are highly fleeting forms of existence; the only "immortal coils" of nature are genes.
Here again we're not entirely at sea; all is not well in Darwinland; there is far less consensus there than might be supposed. Nevertheless, we need to conceptually install the idea of disembodied survival — a radical break with nature as we know it — in the scheme of evolution. The utterly novel leap into the nonphysical; the time-and-space transcending capacities of the transient individual mind, must be part of some big story whose plot we have yet to fathom.

In one sense, survival — replication and reproduction — are central to the evolutionary process. The postmortem survival of an individual person, on the other hand, would be a thoroughly revolutionary event in nature. Evolution is about species, not individuals; what survives is the genetic code. The species is immortal; the individual comes and goes, dispensible to the program of "selfish genes," to use Dawkins' phrase.

Scale down and refocus epistemic expectations. Part of rethinking the overall approach to this kind of research is to ask: What can we reasonably hope to gain from survival research? Consider a few possibilities.

We may find that the only rational inference from the data is that some human beings survive bodily death. That would be a revolutionary scientific discovery.

Survival-related data, on any reading, compel us to revise our theory of human nature. The mental and physical capacities of the greatest mediums exceed anything we regard as possible in normal human beings. Jung enlarged upon Freud; psychical research, including survival data, enlarges upon Jung. Survival research promises an enlarged map of human potential.

We may find that there is something very peculiar about the evidence for survival, something systematically elusive; we might then be forced to suspend judgement, arriving at a state of classic Greek skepticism. This would at least be an advance over dogmatic materialism.

If it turns out that all the evidence points to super-psi in service to self-deception, we may be forced to conclude that human beings possess undreamed of capacities for self-deception. Again, this would be a provocative finding for science.

Most likely, the evidence will leave us with beliefs that are only probably true. Long ago, Plato called the belief in an afterlife kalos kyndunos, a "noble risk." Well, in this age of the Uncertainty Principle, that may be fitting.

A new basis for personal myth. Speaking of Plato, he often expressed his most important ideas in myths or stories, which, he said, revealed truth that was only probable or approximate. Survival research offers us a scientific basis for forming a personal myth of death and transcendence. Such a myth would be based upon probabilities; but it would have the advantage of being grounded in matters of fact.

This arrangement would differ from the traditional; it would not offer the simple certainties of faith. But it would also differ from scientific materialism, which has little to offer but the dogma of annihilation. Survival research offers positive knowledge, lacking in certainty, but not without hope. Jung once said that we all need to form an idea of death adequate to our needs. With the data base suggestive of survival and transcendence at our disposal, we have a full palette of possibilities for building personal myths.

The practice of death and dying. My last suggestion is about practice. In line with personal mythmaking, one way to get beyond the intellectual stalemate about survival, is to take the shamanic turn, which was anticipated by Plato. Plato's thought, as E.R.Dodds and F.M. Cornford have shown, was rooted in shamanic techniques of ecstasy.

There are several ways we might conceptualize the notion of experimental dying. Plato built his idea of philosophy around the practice of dying, that is, the practice of disengaging the soul from the body. In the Phaedo, Plato defined philosophy as the practice of death and dying. This involved the soul separating from the body, a kind of conscious out-of-body experience. If survival-related data point to the possibility of transcendence, there should be ways to practically explore such a fact here and now.

The idea is not that strange. We are regularly transported to other worlds simply by falling asleep. Transition occurs through a change of consciousness. If there is an afterlife, "getting there" can only be a change of consciousness. Perhaps there are ways we can induce the appropriate changes, and induce transport to the afterdeath world now. Survival may be Like waking up from sleep, survival may be waking up from embodied existence. In that case it might be possible to wake from embodied existence in advance of final disembodiment, a kind of experimental dying. The parapsychologist William Roll thought in these terms, and held that transpersonal states of consciousness could be compared to afterdeath states. In both cases, we radically disidentify from our bodies.

The Chinese Book of the Golden Flower is a text about practical preparation for death. It consists of using controlled breath and imagination to create a "golden flower," a light body, or "imaginal" body, as also described by Neoplatonist and Sufi thinkers. The more we cultivate this imaginal body, the more we become familiar with states of timeless transcendental awareness. As with the shamanic and Platonic way, the aim is to enter the "dead" zone now with conscious mastery.

There are Tibetan Buddhist treatises that describe techniques for inducing consciousness of the Clear Light or the Light of Liberation. The Tibetan Clear Light is reminiscent of the Light that Plato associates with the supreme values of truth and beauty as well as with the Light Experience frequently reported in NDEs. This brings me to my central point about experimental dying. I would operationally define the task of such an experiment to be the experience of the mystic light.

The experience of the mystic light is fundamental to the mystical traditions. In spontaneous near-death experiences people repeatedly report encountering this light. As Mircea Eliade has shown, the encounter with the mystic light is a constant in mystic and shamanic experience. Parapsychology is full of reports of marvels of luminosity. An uncanny light is a frequent feature of ghostly encounters. If the mystic light, then, is a constant in a variety of transcendent experiences, we might be able to induce experiences of it.

I myself have encountered preternatural lights in my dreams for years, and believe it possible to stimulate the experience of the mystic light in the average person. Practicing first on myself, I suggested to several people that by a technique of active imagination they try to awaken the clear light within. In several cases, responses were quite powerful. I am convinced that by techniques of breathing and visualizing, as Stan Grof has proved in his workshops, one may trigger a powerful experience of the mystic light. Melvin Morse has pointed out that the light is the main variable associated with near-death transformation.

In sum, I am suggesting that research take on the cast of shamanism. The shaman is a master of traditional techniques for inducing ecstatic trance; in that state, as in the near-death state, he or she navigates other worlds, descends into "hell" and ascends into "heaven." If these states are kindred to survival-related realities, they are the states we may have to personally explore, if we hope for fresh knowledge of consciousness, and its fate after death. Out of such explorations, science may one day find its way toward a new consensus. With the data we possess, a new model of how it fits into our evolutionary cosmology, and some practical transcendent experience, we can collectively forge a new mythology of death. We will be able to prepare ourselves, as Plato said, "for the journey of a thousand years."