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.They are oftenclosed, either from relaxation, napping, or blinking.Even if their eyesare open and free of tears, they are often completely devoid of atten-tion, like adults who may be momentarily oblivious to their physicalsurroundings even when their eyes are open.(1993: 113)3And even if the newborn infants were able to perceive their surroundingswith any kind of completeness or uniformity at birth, the birth experienceand the death experiences with which we are concerned are not sufficientlyanalogous to reduce NDEs to memories of birth (ibid.: 115).Transcendental hypothesisThis approach, also known as the  survivalist hypothesis , strongly supportsthe view that a detachable soul leaves the body at the moment of the near-death experience and that this provides evidence of our survival after the deathof the body (see, for, instance, Badham and Badham 1982; Rogo, 1982; Sabom1982).This approach is mainly based on the experience as it appears to thosewho have had an NDE.As Paul Badham put it:The hypothesis appears to be supported by the claims made by manyresuscitated persons that at the moment their hearts stopped beating theyfound themselves outside their bodies looking down with interest onthe attempts made by the medical teams to revive them.What makesthese claims evidential is that their observations seem to be extraordi-narily accurate, and to accord with what would have been seen if theygenuinely were looking down from above.(2003: 192)Implicit in the survivalist hypothesis is a dichotomic way of thinkingaccording to which soul and matter are two separate and incompatibleentities.Before we move on with our discussion, it is relevant to observehow the term  soul , or anima, has intentionally been avoided in contem-porary debates and replaced by  consciousness or  mind.I find it rather a9780415455206_4_006.qxd 6/6/08 4:43 PM Page 123Explaining the mystery 123dismissive attitude because the concept of the human soul is not only fun-damental in various religious traditions, but it also contains all the elementswe need  to define human uniqueness: mind, spirit, essence, immortal being,personhood, identity, selfhood (McPhate, in Deane-Drummond and Scott2006: 100).Even this approach has its own limitations.The most remarkable one isthat by losing sight of mind body wholeness, the mind (or soul) is con-sidered a disembodied entity, which is totally unrelated to the rest of the body.In order to overcome such a limitation, the Church of England DoctrineCommission has recently redefined the concept of the soul as follows:It would not be possible to speak of salvation in terms of destiny of soulsafter death, if the soul were thought of as the detachable spiritual partof ourselves.If the essential human being is an embodied whole, ourultimate destiny must be resurrection and transformation of our entirebeing.to speak thus is not to abandon talk of the soul, but to seekits redefinition.(Church of England 1995)Interestingly, this redefinition of the soul provides a more inclusive conceptof what it means to be a human being as an  embodied whole and refers tothe resurrection of a new form of embodiment, rather than a disembodiedsoul.Similarly, Keith Ward has observed that  the idea of resurrection isthe idea of a new embodiment which is so closely related to this one that itcan be best spoken of as the  same body transformed , rather than as quitea new body (Ward, in Lorimer 2004: 169).In his view, the doctrine of re-surrection is popularly misunderstood because of three Catholic doctrines,namely, (1) that the soul is created by God at a specific point (which makesone think it is a thing); (2) that the soul is naturally immortal (which makesone think that it could just go on for ever without a body); and (3) that thebody is resurrected (which makes one think that the very same body climbsout of the grave).He suggested that  to get the orthodox view, one has tohave some grasp of the idea that the soul is the Form of the body, and yetthat it is a substantial Form, capable of (un-naturally) existing with justconscious contents (ibid.: 169 70).The value and the necessity of recovering a concept of the soul in the con-temporary debate on consciousness has been emphasized by Paul Badham,who argued that:The concept of the soul is a necessary ingredient of any faith, which wishesto affirm that we are more than physically determined creatures, and thatwe have the potentiality for moral and rational growth and for devel-oping a spirituality, which can ultimately transcend our bodily death.(Badham 2005b: 219)9780415455206_4_006.qxd 6/6/08 4:43 PM Page 124124 Explaining the mysteryAlthough, for Badham, the soul is clearly difficult to define, he also en-courages a rational explanation of it, which he thinks possible (ibid.: 220).Although I fully support this view, I would like to suggest that the near-deathexperience is proof of something more immediate than our survival afterdeath, something that is much more concerned with our here and now.Myassumption here is mainly based on the fact that the survivalist hypothesisseems to be inadequate to explain the cases of those who did not experiencea situation of temporary death as we have seen, for instance, in theketamine study.4 Nevertheless, it can be argued that the fact the personsdid not die on these occasions contradicts their accounts of dying and ofleaving their bodies.How is it possible? The argument has been extensivelytreated in the work of Yasuo Yuasa (1925 2005), which will be discussed inlength in the next chapter.As he confirmed during a personal discussion,5as well as in some of his publications (Yuasa 1993), the idea that during anNDE an immaterial soul leaves the body and enters the Divine or Ultimatereality, represents a new contemporary form of dualism, which does not rejectin toto the previously accepted reductionism that the mind is the brain(ibid.: 41).In order to overcome such a limitation, he attempts to inspirereconciliation between body and mind by offering a new reflection based onthe unexplored spiritual potential within the body.Particularly interestingin this respect is his body scheme, which will be discussed in Chapter 7 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]