Is the Mind More than the Brain (Again): NDEs and Scientists

Is the Mind More than the Brain (Again): NDEs and Scientists

I wonder how many people know about the University of Virginia’s Division for Perceptual Studies? Watch this video on Youtube for scientists discussing research they believe strongly indicates that the mind is more than the brain and that there is some kind of conscious life after physical death:

“Is There Life after Death? Fifty Years of Research at UVA.”

A panel of four highly credentialed scientists who work in the Division discuss their lengthy and in-depth research into consciousness after physical (brain) death.

Returning to an issue I discussed here earlier, they indicate that belief that the mind is NOT more than the brain is what “most scientists believe,” “the basic scientific outlook,” and the “standard materialistic perspective.” To me that means it’s a dogma of modern science. These scientists know that what they are reporting flies in the face of most scientific belief in the modern, Western world.

I found the most interesting of the four scientist Ed Kelly who is (or was) Research Professor of Psychiatric Neurobiological Sciences in the Division. According to him, based on many years of research, mind, consciousness are more than bring and mind is not driven by matter.

The scientists of the Division, all tenured faculty of the University of Virginia, have studied so-called “Near Death Experiences” (NDEs) all over the world, in many cultures. They believe there are basic similarities among them in spite of variations of details. In every case, the person studied had been pronounced dead but “recovered” with clear memories of what they experienced while physically dead.

The scientists also studied numerous cases of children who remember past lives. They said none of them remembered being anyone famous such as Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. But many of them clearly remembered dying a traumatic and even violent death. The researchers followed up on many of their memories and discovered that the events and persons they described, even the person they claimed to have been, were historically real and that the children had no normal way of knowing about them.

Now, these people are not clairvoyants, intuitionists, people into esoteric religions, etc. They are members of the modern scientific community. You can’t just brush their conclusions off as biased or belief-based.On the other hand, they know they are in the minority among the modern scientific community. They are not materialists and, according to them, materialism is the “standard perspective” among modern, Western scientists. But what they believe about the mind and the brain and conscious existence after physical death is not religiously motivated or driven; it is based solely on their own research over fifty years.

I once talked to a psychiatrist about dreams. He told me that dreaming has only one purpose—to irrigate the eyes. (Most dreaming happens during REM sleep.) I told him that some of my dreams have real meaning and purpose and that I have even been directed by God to do something by means of a dream. He pooh-poohed that as nonsense.

I simply don’t know how to account for many children’s memories of previous lives and deaths. Some of the stories seem convincing. That is, the children do not seem always to be inventing the stories. How else to explain such memories if not reincarnation?  Well, reincarnation would seem to be impossible given that there are more people alive on earth right now than the totality of people who have ever lived before now. My own very tentative explanation is something like Carl Jung’s well of human consciousness. Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, who knew Carl Jung, believed in Jung’s theory.