Abstract
There is inherent irony in the conceptual relationship between Near Death Experience (NDE) and the mystical: death is not normally the means by which an individual seeks mystical insights even if, in analogical language, death is a metaphor representing transformation. There is immediate tension in the suggestion that dying is a possible condition for certain types of mystical knowledge, or a necessary circumstance for life-changing perceptions. The major proviso for such knowledge is that the individual not die but return to life animated with a new vision of what-is. This tension between near death and a return to altered life is rarely mediated by choice—who would choose physical death as a means for mystical knowledge? And yet, the literature clearly illustrates that dying persons have NDEs that are highly transformative, even transcendent, so in a very basic sense, death is not prohibitive of mystical knowledge. By death, I am referring to the clinical descriptors of death: no heartbeat, no respiration, no eye-reflex, no measureable brain activity. However, dying is a process, a dynamic series of biological stages and degrees of subtle loss and increasing paralysis, which may, under optimal circumstances, be halted and result in revival and resuscitation. It is this in-between phase of neither fully alive nor fully dead that provides an opening to alternate landscapes whose transphysical contours suggest a much more vast and complex realm of human perceptions than currently recognized by normative physicalist accounts of embodied awareness.
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Notes
My concept of ECP is a modification of ECE (Extra Corporeal Experience) as illustrated in Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier, “Voluntary Out-of-Body Experience: An fMRI Study,” in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014). Accessed April 16, 2014, doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00070.
P. M. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2007), 9.
Raymond Moody, Life after Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon-Survival of Bodily Death (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
Bruce Greyson, “Defining Near Death Experience,” Mortality 41 (1999): 11–12;
for a thorough review of NDE characteristics see: The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, ed. Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2009), 18–27.
Kenneth Ring, “Near Death Experiences: Implications for Human Evolution and Planetary Transformation,” in Human Survival and the Consciousness Evolution, ed. Stanislav Grof (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 262.
Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999),
cited in Robert J. Brumblay, “Hyperdimensional Perspectives in Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 21.4 (2003): 220.
Bruce Greyson, “Near Death Experiences and Spirituality,” Zygon 41.2 (2006): 496.
Bruce Greyson, “The Mystical Impact of Near-Death Experiences,” Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness 17 (2008): 10.
Michael Nahm, “Reflections on the Context of Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 25.3 (2011): 463.
Bruce Greyson, “The Psychology of Near Death Experience and Spirituality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, ed. Lisa J. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 516–517.
Natasha Tassell-Matamua, “Psychology and Near-Death Experiences: Challenges to and Opportunities for Ongoing Debates about Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 20.11–12 (2013): 152–153.
Bruce Greyson and Surbhi Khanna, “Spiritual Transformation after Near-Death Experiences,” Spirituality in Clinical Practice 1.1 (2014): 49–50; see also Sutapas Bhattacharya, “Transcendence of the Time/Space Matrix of Perception in Enlightenment and Near-Death Experiences,” Journal for Spiritual & Consciousness Studies 37.2 (2014).
Mark Fox, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), 5.
Judith Cressy, “Mysticism and the Near Death Experience,” in The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, ed. Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates (New York: Routledge, 1996), 372.
Carol Zaleski, “Evaluating Near Death Testimony,” The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, ed. Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates (New York: Routledge, 1996), 335, 339.
David M. Wulff, “Mystical Experiences,” in Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, ed. Etzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley Krippner, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, [2004]2014), 369.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.2 (2003): 274–279.
Edward F. Kelly and Emily W. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 501–503.
Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Kelly and Kelly, Irreducible Mind, 511–516.
Jess Byron Hollenback, Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 8–16.
Katz, Mysticism, 22–74; Robert K. Forman, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1–8; Kelly and Kelly, Irreducible Mind, 517.
Ninan Smart, “Interpretation and the Mystical Experience,” Religious Studies 1.75 (1965).
Forman, Mysticism, 6; see also W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1960).
See ibid., 17–23, 276–300, for Black Elk’s vision, 326–339; see also Lee Irwin, “Chosen by the Spirits: Visionary Ecology and Indigenous Wisdom” in Teaching Mysticism, ed. William Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 121–137.
Hollenback, Mysticism, 278–280; for more on the visionary imagination, see Lee Irwin, Visionary Worlds: The Making and Unmaking of Reality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).
Nicki Crowley, “Psychosis or Spiritual Emergence? Consideration of the Transpersonal Perspective within Psychiatry,” Royal College of Psychiatrists. http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/Nicki%20Crowley%20%20Psychosis%20or%20Spiritual%20Emergence.pdf. Accessed June 3, 2014.
Pim van Lommel, “Near-Death Experiences: The Experience of the Self as Real and Not as an Illusion,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1234 (2011): 20–21, 24.
Michael A. Thalbourne, “Transliminality: A Fundamental Mechanism in Psychology and Parapsychology,” Australian Journal of Parapsychology 10.1 (2010): 73.
A good example is Robert C. Fuller, Spirituality and the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Jenny Wade, “Mapping the Courses of Heavenly Bodies: The Varieties of Transcendent Sexual Experience,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 32.2 (2000): 107.
Charles T. Tart, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2009), 89–97.
For example, see Waldo Vieira, Projections of the Consciousness: A Diary of Out-of-Body Experiences. (Rio de Janeiro: International Institute of Projectology, 1995);
Robert Bruce, Astral Dynamics: A New Approach to Out-of-Body Experience (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Road Publishing, 1999).
The well-known example of veridical NDE is the Pam Reynolds case, see Michael Sabom, Light and Death (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998), 37–52.
Stephen E. Braude, “Survival or Super-psi?” Journal of Scientific Exploration 6.2 (1992): 127–144;
M. Sudduth, “Super-psi and the Survivalist Interpretation of Mediumship,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 23.2 (2003): 167–193;
David Rousseau, “The Implications of Near-Death Experiences for Research into the Survival of Consciousness,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 26.1 (2012): 43–80.
Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001).
The participatory theory is developed in the following volume: Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, eds., The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 1–78.
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© 2015 Thomas Cattoi and Christopher M. Moreman
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Irwin, L. (2015). Mystical Knowledge and Near-Death Experience. In: Cattoi, T., Moreman, C.M. (eds) Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_10
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