Peter Fenwick and his wife make the case for old fashioned Rene Descartes dualism.  I scoff at them.  Then Dr. Fenwick reminds me of my own words in that we have to look at the data first! I recently reviewed over 100 hours of my original videos of children's near death experiences and Dr. Fenwick is right!  The evidence from the children clearly supports the "gaseous vapor" theory of a soul.  CLICK HERE for full report.

"Yes Dr. Morse can be so so wrong.  In fact, sometimes the more he insists he is right, the more likely it is that he will be wrong.

Let's talk about directions to go anywhere.  If he says he knows exactly how to get somewhere, I get out my Iphone and GPS it, and then wait patiently until he gets totally lost. ( I have a 3GS with 8 pages of Aps, my Twitter and my Blog are on it so I can just work on my Blog until he figures out he is wrong, or course find the closest Starbucks. Or work on my shopping list or reminder to drink my 8 glasses of water a day. Of course it is a fart machine too, which keeps Melody happy until he realizes he is wrong.)

Wrong? Well there was that time in France when we were having a big meeting with his French Publisher  and some of the news media were there as well.  Suddenly he didn't like what he was hearing, he particularly gets upset when people call him metaphysical or New Age.  He jumped up and said that no one at the table understood him, that he was saying we have to find spirituality in this world, that there are angels among us, and some of them aren't even angels, but are humans. 

Well I understood what he was saying, but no one else did.  He was just saying that the children talk about finding pieces of light in this life, wherever they look.  For Dr. Morse, an angel can be a "real angel" or what other people might call a coincidence of good fortune, or even an actual human being who does a wonderful thing.  Dr. Morse sees all of these various categories of "angelic events" as the same, because he believes that this life is filled with the light of god.  But he won't admit he believes in God.

It reminds me of that joke about the man who was in a flood and wouldn't accept help from a police boat, or rescue teams.  Then he got to heaven and asked God why God wouldn't save him.  And God told him, "I did try to save you, I even sent rescue teams out to save you".

Well anyway, Dr. Morse got so upset that no one understood his point that he even knocked over a little table behind him, and then he went outside. Well I knew he was really embarrassed.  So I just explained to everyone what Dr. Morse's point really was, and he probably just wanted to go for a walk to think some really new idea that they probably gave him.  Then I went and got him and he was still mad and wanted to walk home, but I told him everyone wanted to hear his new ideas, so he came back in.  And we signed for two more book contracts by the time the evening was over. So I guess I was pretty right about it all.

So he was pretty wrong to just storm out that way, but sometimes when he is wrong things still turn out all right.  Also he seems to learn the most when he is wrong. 

Yah! That is a very low blow gang, bad form! I will tell you everything they said was wrong, but first, I want to comment that if the so called "skeptics" of the world had half the intellectual rigor of Merkawah, we would have already solved the whole science-religion debate long ago.  I did win a few arguments with Pim when we met, but it took a skeptical physician from Germany and me working on him together to even come close to his intellect.

A.  The Brain experiences consciousness.: This is the fundamental insight I learned from Pim. When we understand this, thousands of loose ends suddenly vanish. For example, we all know that the brain seems to localize functions, such as "the god spot", the move your arm spot, etc. There are functions localized to the right and left sides of the brain. Yet there are many exceptions and contradictions to this as well.  For example, some people have very very little brain and yet high IQs (published in an article entitled "Do You Need a Brain) in Science. When I was a medical student, I cared for the great Dr. Mountcastle's patients who had half a brain removed, and yet they seemed to do fine, perhaps limping a bit.

Furthermore, in the original studies when they assigned brain function, it was sort of a final "brain map" by committee, there were many contradictory studies, and many studies in which they stimulated the exact same areas many times with many different results.

 As Dr. van Lommel points out in his new book Forever Consciousness, if we see the mind as existing in non-local consciousness, and the brain being the "biological expression" of the mind, many many of these contradictions in neuroscience melt away.

B. Controlled Remote Viewing is simply a structured means of having Non Local Perceptions.

  This is a key insight.  Non local perceptions include spiritual visions, communicating with a "god", near death experiences, premonitions of death, end of life experiences, communication with the dead, among other experiences.  Controlled remote viewing, when understood as a subset of non local perceptions, then becomes important as the "targets" they perceive have an objective reality that we all agree upon, so we can learn from their protocols.

C.  Vocabulary is important! 

Being with Merkawah and Pim was like taking seventh grade English again.  They are correct. We have to pay close attention to our vocabulary and what words we use to express things. We also need to pay close attention to the words others use, and try to make an extra effort to understand words and phrases that are unfamiliar to us. For example, all you neuroscientists out there, when you speak of "neural networks" and "superneural networks", have some understanding that you are not far from describing the spiritist concept of "vital energies", and "Peribrain", and you are touching on concepts thousands of years old described by Yoga Practionners and mystics

The Greatest Lesson Dr. van Lommel Taught Me!

Life is Internconnected and There Are No Co-incidences

In the early 1990s, I traveled to Amsterdam to meet with Dr. van Lommel and to lecture to Merkawah.  I wanted to co-ordinate the scientific protocol of my prospective study of children who survived cardiac arrest with his study of adults who survived cardiac arrest, so our results would be meaningful to the world.

We had dinner and I expressed to Dr. van Lommel that I was having a hard time with his philosophy, that everything is interconnected, there are no co-incidences, etc.  I emphatically told him "of course there are co-incidences, they happen all the time".  (In the back of my mind, I heard the voice of one of my professors orating "Gentlemen, to rely on co-incidence is the refuge of the lazy mind!)

I grandly told Dr. van Lommel: I will prove to you that there are in fact co-incidences.  When I return to the States, I will buy you a present.  You say you like old books. I will go to a bookstore I know in Seattle and buy you the first old medical book I see.  Then you will believe me when I say that of course there are co-incidences.  You are just ignoring them, and then telling all these wonderful stories which really is an example of recall bias to support your theory.

And I returned to Seattle and went to the book store.  There were in fact no medical books that day.  Then the owner said, "oh yes, this book just came in! It is a very old text from Amsterdam".  I purchased it and mailed it to Dr. van Lommel.  The book was written by one of his ancestors! Co-incidence?

My Descriptions of Right Brain/Left Brain Functions Are Too Simplistic

Adam Crabtree, among others, has pointed out that my separation of consciousness into left brain function and right brain function is too simplistic.

The left hemisphere is our analytic conscious self, our internal narrator. It is a filter of the enormous amount of information our brain receives, using perhaps 1-5% of that total information to create our shared reality.

However right brain functions, although accessed through specialized left-right brain separation of consciousness techniques, in fact are distributed throughout the entire brain.  As Mario Beauregard points out, we have primarily a spiritual brain (which is one of the right brain functions)

So the left brain is the left brain, but the right brain is the whole brain!

EVERYONE IS TELLING ME JUST HOW WR0NG I AM!

IN THE PROCESS WE ARE LEARNING WHAT IS "RIGHT"

1.  Peter Fenwick MD argues that the brain is truly dead during the NDE, not near death or the final moments of life, as I have always seemed to argue:

Oddly enough, I have always agreed with Dr. Fenwick on this issue.  The problem is one of terminology and communication.  I have preferred to use the term "clinical death", to avoid the issues of precisely defining death.

Defining death precisely is both an extremely controversial and ultimately distracting issue with regards to the New Paradigm of quantum consciousness.  All that really matters is the point at which the probability of experience remains with cell function and life, as opposed to the probability of cell decomposition.

 Click here for more on this issue and a case report from Dale Hall MD. 

2.  Peter Fenwick and Amit Goswami point out that the quantum connection of non local consciousness with the right temporal lobe is a rough first approximation, but is not possible.

Instead, they process a quantum connection at the level of the super neural network, which in turns facilitates memory and spiritual experiences being expressed by right temporal lobe function.

ALL I CAN SAY TO PETER FENWICK AND AMIT GOSWAMI IS:  "I AM NOT WORTHY!".

3.  I WASN'T WRONG ABOUT THE GOD SPOT!  WE HAVE A GOD SPOT IN OUR BRAIN.

In Mario Beauregard's book,  "THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN", he states there is no "god spot". He is wrong. His book is really no different from Mathew Alpert's  "THE GOD AREA OF THE BRAIN" and both of them need remedial work with Pim van Lommel.  I comment further in the FAQ Page since this is not something I am wrong about.

Dr. Beauregard is saying that we have a "spiritual brain" instead of a "god spot".  I am not sure this is correct. Daniel Amen, for example, wrote The Hardware to the Soul, and his SPECT scan studies showed precisely what I stated in "Where God Lives" that the right temporal lobe seems to be the god spot.

Please note: Dr. Beauregard and Mathew Alpert do not reach the same conclusions, only agree on the neurophysiological findings. Dr. Beauregard is a deeply spiritual man and extremely cool. Mathew  Alpert is an atheist who has to deny and trivialize the spirit of man to reach his conclusions.

4.  Yes, the Near Death Experience is still a mystery!

 Child's Drawing of the entire sequence of the near death experience starting top left

Merkawah used my own words, quoting segments from my own books, against me in getting me to concede this point.  It will always be a mystery as it has to do with the highly individual and personal relationship between man and "god", or as I prefer to see it, man and "the light with the happy face for me", or man and "the god that Pauline believes in".

I am sure they touched on many other things I am wrong about, and I am completely sure they will soon let me know, and frankly, I probably got most of the above wrong!  Anyone interested in consciousness research should take in a Merkawah Meeting.

Vicious Criticisms are actually compiments!

Occasionally I get petty personal attacks on my character, not my ideas. My mentor Vernon Neppe MD always told me that such attacks are compliments, it means the attackers cannot find anything wrong with my ideas. 

I am pretty thick skinned about vicious personal criticism. Far too often, the person making the criticism is truly struggling within themselves.  More than once I have been viciously attacked by a fellow scientist, only to see that same scientist describe an extraordinary spiritual experience that they are trying to process.