Near-Death Experiences

Exploring the Mind-Body Connection

Ornella Corazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134050291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Near death experiences fascinate everyone, from theologians to sociologists and neuroscientists. This groundbreaking book introduces the phenomenon of NDEs, their personal impact and the dominant scientific explanations. Taking a strikingly original cross-cultural approach and incorporating new medical research, it combines new theories of mind and body with contemporary research into how the brain functions.

Ornella Corazza analyses dualist models of mind and body, discussing the main features of NDEs as reported by many people who have experienced them. She studies the use of ketamine to reveal how characteristics of NDEs can be chemically induced without being close to death. This evidence challenges the conventional 'survivalist hypothesis', according to which the near death experience is a proof of the existence of an afterlife.

This remarkable book concludes that we need to move towards a more integrated view of embodiment, in order to understand what human life is and also what it can be.

Ornella Corazza is a NDE researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2004-5 she was a Member of the 21st Century Centre of Excellence (COE) 'Program on the Construction of Death and Life Studies' at the University of Tokyo.

1
The mind–body connection¹

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

(William Blake)

Life is a fascinating journey and at some stage or another each one of us will ask questions such as ‘Who are we?’, ‘Is there life after death?’, ‘Does God exist?’ To address these questions in all their complexity, we would need to consider the relationship between humans and the universe, their more immediate natural and inanimate environment, between individual persons and other individuals, and groups, and whole societies; between individuals living now and in past times; the cultural traditions of their own societies and other societies. And this of course is an enormous topic of enquiry. However, what I propose to discuss in this chapter is more limited: what we are in relation to our own minds and bodies—or, seeing that there is no single word, let us use it in a hyphenated form—our own mind–bodies? So what are we in relation to our mind–body? What are we in relation to this total organism in which we live? (Huxley 1992). From a common-sense point of view, there is no problem at all. Most of the time, as we go about our everyday activities, we experience such transparency between the mental and the somatic aspects of our being that we are not led to reflect on their differences. For us, it is just natural and immediate to be who we are, without feeling the necessity to reduce ourselves either to mind (or soul) or body. Let me give you an example. Right now my mind wants to write this sentence and my fingers move across the keyboard and make the words appear on the computer screen. This action may seem natural and unproblematic to most of us; however, the moment we start thinking about it in greater detail, the problems start. If I wish to write this sentence, I simply type it. But who is the ‘I’ who does the typing?

It is obvious to me that it is not exclusively the ‘I’ who is sitting here thinking about it, the ‘I’ who writes it, because I do not have the faintest idea how my fingers can type! All I know is that I expressed the wish to write this sentence, whereupon something within me set to work a number of little muscles in perfect harmony so as to produce this movement in my right arm and fingers.

Similarly, we can ask ourselves, how did we form in the womb of our mothers? How did we grow up? How did we learn to walk, or to talk? Or more ‘simply’, how does our heart beat? How do we breathe? How do we digest our food? Just to mention some of the few imponderables—we don’t have the faintest idea. All these actions are left to an ineffable deeper intelligence, which is far greater than our thinking self. The question then arises: ‘How are we connected to it?’ This enquiry requires some historical analysis.

What are we made of?

Since the seventeenth century, especially with the influential philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650), we have been taught to conceive of ourselves as composed of two classes of substances: an immaterial mind and a physical body. Descartes, a devout Catholic, prepared the way for his conception of the mind–body relationship with his famous Latin dictum cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’).² With this, he identified the thinking ‘I’ as the soul, and confined it within a physical body, as made explicit in the following statement:

I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me’, that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.³

The tendency to separate the mind from the body can be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus (ca 400 BC). Hippocrates and his students were primarily concerned with the introduction of the first elements of clinical practice such as observation, palpation, diagnosis and prognosis. But at the same time they attempted to disregard all the ‘irrational’ and ‘magical’ methods used by traditional folk-healers along with their ancient knowledge of the human body. In Hippocrates’ treatise on epilepsy, ironically entitled On the Sacred Disease, we read:

I do not believe that the so-called Sacred Disease is any more divine or sacred than any other disease, but that on the contrary, just as other diseases have a nature and a definite cause, so does this one, too, have a nature and a cause … It is my opinion that those who first called this disease sacred were that sort of people that we now call ‘magi’. These magicians are vagabonds and charlatans, pretending to be holy and wise, and pretending to more knowledge than they have.

(Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987:9)

The distinction between body and mind is even more explicit in the German language, where two different words are used to describe the body (Leib and Körper). Der Leib refers to the animated body, while der Körper refers to the objective, exterior and institutionalized body (Turner 1992:9). Gilbert Ryle mockingly called the idea of the physical body inhabited by the non-physical mind ‘the ghost in the machine’, a phrase which has nowadays entered into common use (see, for instance, Blackmore 2003).

Descartes’ separation of body and mind has to be put into the context where it belongs. As Mary Midgley has pointed out:

In Descartes’ time, their separation was intended as quarantine to separate the new, burgeoning science of physics from views on the other, more general attempt to separate Reason from Feelings and establish Reason as the dominant partner, Feeling being essentially part of the body.

(Midgley, in Lorimer 2004:173)

The argument that we need to attempt a reconciliation between reason and emotion has largely been supported by Antonio Damasio, who has drawn on his experience with neurological patients affected by brain damage to present a new theory of emotion that emphasizes its inseparable dependence on reason (Damasio 1994). According to Damasio, Descartes’ error was

the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensional, mechanically operated, indefinitely divisible body stuff, on the other hand, the unsizable, undimensional, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgement, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations from the structure and operation of a biological organism.

(ibid.: 249–50)

As we have just seen, Descartes’ idea of a disembodied mind also goes against our ordinary experience, which seems to present us with a transparency, not an opposition, between body and mind. Metaphorically speaking, if we think of the ocean, the seventeenth-century idea of the mind and body relationship is like the one between the water and the sand: they never become one. On the contrary, from a common-sense point of view, the relationship between mind and body is like that between the water and the salt. As Kasulis has pointed out: ‘Unlike the sand, the salt surrenders its crystalline structure to dissolve completely into the water’ (2004:15).

The spirituality of the material body

In order to find a link between mind and body, Descartes was able to identify a physical point in the body through which the immaterial mind could actually operate to effect changes in the physical world. He believed the pineal gland,⁴ located between the left and the right brain, made this function even more likely. He understood the process as follows:

Although the soul is joined with the entire body, there is one part of the body [the pineal] in which it exercises its function more than elsewhere … [the pineal] is so suspended between the passages containing animal spirits (guiding reason and carrying sensation and movement) that it can be moved by them; and it carries this motion on to the soul. Then conversely, the bodily machine is so constituted that whenever the gland is moved in one way or another by the soul, or for that matter by any other cause, it pushes the animal spirits, which surround it to the pores of the brain.

(Descartes 1954:357)

It is important to point out that the recognition of mind–body unity was also the departure point for Descartes’ philosophy, as emerges clearly in The Passions of the Soul. For instance, he wrote:

I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel … I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt.

(Descartes 1937:135)

With this statement he explicitly recognized that the soul could not simply be reduced to that abstract ‘something’ confined within a physical body. As I will argue in greater detail in the following section, this more integrated conception of mind-in-the-body has been increasingly recognized today in the so-called ‘new science of consciousness’ (see, for instance, Damasio 1994). As Yuasa observed, ‘it has taken three hundred years … to return to the bon sens behind Descartes’ theory’ (1987:193).

The absent body

Far from being a mere philosophical speculation, the seventeenth-century separation of body and mind had an enormous influence not only on the new developments of mechanistic paradigms of science, but also in generating a gradual process of desacralization, objectification and exploitation of all nonhuman nature (Metzner 1999). The phenomenon has been well described by Rupert Sheldrake in his Natural Grace:

The soul, the animate principle, was withdrawn from the whole universe and also from the body. The world was deanimated and was effectively regarded as an automatic machine with no soul, no spontaneous life, and no purpose of its own, animals and plants became inanimate machines, and so did the human body. The only part of the material world that was not entirely mechanical was a small region of the human brain, the pineal gland, where the rational conscious mind of man somehow interacted with the machinery of the nerves. The old view was not that the soul was in the body, but that the body was in the soul. Now the soul survived only inside our heads.

(Sheldrake, in Sheldrake and Fox 1996:15)

Although this is not the topic of this book, it will be informative to remember that the idea that nature is alive is not only part of the world-view of many other cultures, such as shamanistic societies (Eliade 1964; Metzner 1999), but it was an ‘old view’ of our own ancestors in pre-industrial societies. Aristotle, for instance, postulated that animals, plants as well as the Earth (or ‘Gaia’, its ancient Greek name) and the entire universe were believed to have a soul.

This strange course of events has also resulted in a disembodied and desacralized vision of our everyday life. Caught up in the frenetic rhythms of our daily activities, rapid communication and transportation, we feel very much dissociated from our spiritual nature and that of the world around us. As a result, mind and body have become two different forms of consciousness, two different lives that we live. I believe we need very sincerely to keep a connection. We not only have, but we are our bodies. According to Drew Leder, dualism allowed us to develop a kind of mechanistic conception of the body and its functions, according to which there is no interaction or at least no significant interaction between mind and body (Leder 1998:117). Consequently, we tend to perceive the body as a sort of machine, as ‘something’ that is different from ourselves. This phenomenon is also known as that of the ‘absent body’ (ibid.). Never before have we spent so much money on beauty treatments and products, rejuvenation remedies, and so on, pretending to be younger and smarter. I was a model in Milan and London for some years, and I am convinced more than ever that real beauty comes from the spirituality of the material body. As Yasuo Yuasa has observed:

It seems that the more affluent the world has become materially, the poorer it has become spiritually: contemporary civilization is on the verge of losing its spiritual wealth. But, isn’t the most truly important thing for human beings the act of enhancing one’s own mind and heart, while nurturing the soul which harmonizes with others?

(Yuasa 1993:36)

Healing the split

This ‘unholy’ way of life is now coming to an end. The twenty-first century has already shown the symptoms of a new revolutionary change, in which science, spirituality and the sense of the sacred are coming together in the so-called ‘new science of consciousness’. We rapidly are developing a certain consensus philosophy, which strongly moves away from the mind and body dichotomy. This new tendency is partially influenced by an Eastern view of conceiving the mind–body, which rejects any kind of dualism (see, for instance, Yuasa 1993; Nagatomo 1992). According to Yuasa, the mind–body relationship today has become a ‘new problem’:

the problem has changed from the disjunctive mind-body dualism (‘Cartesian dualism’) to a dualism of mind-body correlativity. Following this model of mind-body correlativity it is possible to study the body in its physiological functions and its various organs by dividing the whole into numerous parts in light of anatomical classification.

(Yuasa 1993:41)

Yuasa warns that this classification is not possible for the mind:

Although the mind is usually believed to be in the brain, the function of the mind is not only related to the brain but also influences the functions of all the organs in the whole body. Consequently, when we take mind-body correlativity as our standpoint, the reductionist attitude, which first divides the whole into parts and then understands it as the sum of its parts, is clearly insufficient. For this reason, a holistic standpoint is advocated today which takes note of the holistic function of the mind/body.

(ibid.: 41–2)

According to this approach, although mind and body may be conceptually distinguishable from some perspectives, they are not assumed to be ontologically distinct (ibid.). A useful metaphor to explain this concept is that of the Japanese shimenawa. The shimenawa is a sacred robe, which indicates the presence of a certain kami,⁵ or divinity. Usually it is hung on a tree. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe how, for the Japanese, this does not mean that a certain kami (‘divinity’) inhabits the tree, but rather that the tree itself is a kami. The same thing could be said about the mind–body relationship. This does not mean that an immaterial soul (mind) inhabits a physical body, or/and that it can be placed in some part of the brain, but rather the physical body is the soul.

Toward an Eastern theory of the mind–body

The originality of this Eastern view consists in the fact that mind–body unity (‘oneness’) is conceived as an achievement rather than an essential relation, which can be reached through physical practice (Yuasa 1993). This implies a form of knowing which is strictly corporeal and that can be developed through ‘self-cultivation’ (in Japanese, shugy-o). Pragmatically speaking, the process of self-cultivation is fundamental at any stage of our existence. We cultivate a plant in order to let it grow; we educate our children in order to let them be good adults, so we ‘cultivate’ our minds in order to let them be in harmony with our bodies. According to Yasuo Yuasa, one of the greatest theorists of the body in the contemporary period, personal ‘cultivation’ is the philosophical foundation of Eastern theories, where the mind–body relations represent not only a way of ‘thinking’ about the world, but also a mode of ‘being’ in the world. In other words, we could say that self-cultivation is a valid method of overcoming dualism through praxis. For instance, a famous renga poet, Shinkei conceived the ‘training’ and the ‘di...