‘Van Lommel doesn’t say, “This is the Truth”. What he says is “Let’s keep an open mind”, which is what good scientists should do anyway.’ Photo: Book cover of Consciousness Beyond Life: The science of the near-death experience, by Pim van Lommel
Consciousness Beyond Life: The science of the near-death experience, by Pim van Lommel
Author: Pim van Lommel. Review by Daniel Clarke Flynn
This book is much more than its subtitle. When I wrote a simple thank-you to its author, he sent me an article that ends with this extraordinary statement: ‘Consciousness seems to be our essence, and once we leave our body, leave our physical world, we exist as pure consciousness, beyond time and space, and we are enfolded in pure, unconditional love. Obviously, this new insight helps us to better understand the inevitable conclusion about the continuity of human consciousness after the death of our body.’
From a materialistic, non-religious medical training, how did he get to such a spiritual belief? An interview with him (viewable at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44&t=121s) gives some clues. In 1969, while he was in his first year of cardiologist internship, one of the patients he resuscitated from ‘clinical death’ surprised him by recounting afterwards an ‘out of body’ experience. Pim van Lommel ignored the patient’s story because there was nothing in his medical education that addressed such occurrences. As his career developed, however, more and more patients talked about similar experiences. He began documenting such testimony. He then undertook a study with the cooperation of ten hospitals in the Netherlands. Its analysis was rigorous enough to be reported in The Lancet.
Van Lommel’s approach is to let people tell their stories, as did William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. I am attracted to such stories because, when I was ten years old, in 1949, I had a ‘pre-cognitive’ experience. As I was saying my prayers one night, I had a thought that I had never had before: ‘Gee, I have seen a lot of dead people in cowboy films, but never a real dead person.’ The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next morning was the blue face of my beloved father, who had died that night from a heart attack. It was an experience that changed my life and made me more open to the part of us we call ‘intuition’. Synchronicity, some say, and I have had other such non-sensorial experiences throughout my life.
As a young person, I was impressed when someone said ‘I’ll believe it when I see it with my own two eyes’. That person is wise, I thought. Today, I think just the opposite. I now know that we see very little with our eyes, and that having vision is far more than physically seeing. Van Lommel reminds us that most of what we see comprises ever-changing forms, emerging from, and disappearing into, empty space, through which energy and information travels. What we think is solid is not so, but is instead in constant change, which is not detected by our unaided physical senses. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (a physicist and a bio-chemist) came to the same conclusion in The Systems View of Life: A unifying vision (2014). But William Penn also knew this three and a half centuries earlier: ‘This world is a form; our bodies are forms; and no visible acts of devotion can be without forms. But yet the less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit’.
The near-death experience stories in this book are just the start of Van Lommel’s research. He reviews what modern medical brain science, cellular biology, and quantum mechanics have discovered in the past 125 years, as well as what all world religions and philosophies have to say about the possibility of consciousness beyond life. He doesn’t say, ‘This is the Truth’. What he says is ‘Let’s keep an open mind’, which is what good scientists should do anyway.
Knowledge can be the biggest barrier to learning. I have come to believe that practising curiosity, intuition and imagination are the first steps in learning.
Sprinkled throughout this book are pearls of wisdom from diverse sources that illustrate this attitude. Here is a selection: ‘All science is empirical science, all theory is subordinate to perception; a single fact can overturn an entire system’ (Fredrik van Eeden); ‘If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black… it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white’ (William James); ‘Our ideas about death define how we live our lives’ (Dag Hammarskjöld); ‘It is worth dying to find out what life is’ (TS Eliot); ‘The brain is the messenger to consciousness’ (John C Eccles); ‘The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine’ (James Jeans); ‘The search for truth is more precious than its possession’ (Albert Einstein); ‘The important thing in science is not so much as to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them’ (William Lawrence Bragg); ‘I do not know what I am; I am not what I know’ (Angelus Silesius); ‘The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness which overflows the organ we call the brain, then the more natural and probable we find the hypothesis that the soul survives the body’ (Henri Bergson); ‘He who has never changed his mind has never learnt anything’ (from an advertising campaign run by the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad).
I compare Van Lommel with another modern writer who inspires me, Willigis Jäger (1925–2020), the German Benedictine monk, Zen Buddhist teacher and scientist. He came to a similar conclusion, from a totally opposite direction, to say that all religions point beyond themselves to the divine which he labelled ‘love’. Both Pim van Lommel’s and Willigis Jäger’s visions offer me new perspective on what I encounter in unprogrammed Quaker Meeting for Worship – connection with what Van Lommel calls non-local universal consciousness.
Both authors suggest, each in their own way, that we are called to experience more beyond what we see and hear, and then come back to daily life with new vision, putting it into practical use. Our Friend Jennifer Kavanagh suggests as much in Practical Mystics, as do many inspirational others, such as Thich Nhat Hanh and another Friend, Roswitha Jarman, in Breakthrough to Unity.
Van Lommel mentions the disdain that some practitioners of traditional medical science have displayed towards research into near-death experiences. For me, that is not new: it recalls how the church of my beginnings threatened with torture and death those such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei who offered a new scientific vision. Based on what they observed through a simple device that was created in Van Lommel’s native land, the Netherlands, just over 400 years ago – the telescope – they hastened the Copernican revolution, challenging the church’s pre-modern-science view that the earth was the centre of the universe upon which the three major western religions were founded.
Certainly, if George Fox had been born two or three centuries earlier, he would have been put to death for saying ‘that of God’ could be seen in everyone, as would have William Penn, who believed that we ‘are everywhere of one religion’.
Today, I admire most the writings of contemporary open-minded multidisciplinary authors who gain vision from diverse perspectives. I first realised this when I was asked to write a review of our Friend Stephen Sayers’ book, All is One Love (see 8 April, 2022). Sayers began life with dreams of becoming a rock star, and wound up as a transpersonal psychology professor at Leeds Beckett University. His multidisciplinary life experience led him to his belief that ‘all is one love’.
When I practise lifelong learning from all perspectives, as Quaker faith & practice 1.01 encourages me to do, I see and hear more, and am ever more grateful for the life that I have been given as a human animal with choice. It is a unique, temporary, and necessary manifestation of consciousness, and with choice.
Our Friend Harvey Gillman said it well in 1988: ‘I do believe that there is a power which is divine, creative and loving, though we can often only describe it with the images and symbols that rise from our particular experiences and those of our communities. This power is part and parcel of all things, human, animal, indeed of all that lives. Its story is greater than any one cultural version of it and yet it is embodied in all stories, in all traditions. It is a power that paradoxically needs the human response. Like us it is energised by the reciprocity of love.
‘It wills our redemption, longs for us to turn to it. It does not create heaven and hell for us, but allows us to do that for ourselves. Such is the terrible vulnerability of love’ (Quaker faith & practice 26.31).
Comments
When one is deeply connected to the permanent and unchanging, then there is less fear of impermanence and change.
By MartinCoyle on 16th March 2024 - 9:04
Whilst I like your article and examples Daniel, I think it’s worth pointing out that van Lommel’s book is somewhat critically reviewed in a wikipedia entry about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_van_Lommel
By trevorb on 16th May 2024 - 19:27
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