85% of People Don't Have Souls?

Notes from a Reluctant Deist Part IV

I don’t understand faith. I really don’t. Maybe I lack the “trust” gene. Maybe I’m too much of a rationalist. Maybe I’ve just been burned too many times by placing my faith in the wrong ideas, people, and Yelp reviews. People will say, “You just have to have faith,” or “Take a leap of faith,” ignoring the fact that blind leaps often lead to terrible outcomes - breaking your neck, for example.

I can’t ignore the crevice that separates the world as I know it from the ephemeral world I do not. Many people can’t. That’s why Londoners are told to “mind the gap” when riding the tube. You ignore the gap at your own peril.

When it comes to metaphysical matters, how does somebody cross the empty space? One way would be read a book. There’s a lot of them out there, some of them quite popular. Like The Bible. The Bible is a literary anthology of God’s words and deeds, rules and regulations, a bunch of stories, some neat resurrection stuff, a few letters to some Romans, a ton of boring genealogical stuff, and a nutso Doomsday ending involving four horsemen, seven angels blowing seven trumpets, a star called Wormwood crashing to the Earth, and a partridge in a pear tree.

I’m not making fun of The Bible (gentle teasing at worst) but it’s tough to use it as a bridge across the faith divide because Christians (and the Jews who use the first bit, but not the second) cite it as the source material for their faith, a faith which is based on the source material itself. So there’s a kind of circular reasoning there. When somebody asks how they know Jesus is the Son of God, for example, they’ll say, “It’s in the Bible.” Right, but why do you believe the Bible? “Because it’s The Bible.” All religious texts have the same problem. We follow them because we believe them but we believe them because we follow them. That’s just not good enough for me. There’s just not enough there there.

Believers supplement their readings with personal, anecdotal experiences which bolster their faith. Perfectly reasonable but not particularly convincing to those of us who haven’t had those experiences. It helps when somebody like my mom hears a Voice. I trusted her enough to know she didn’t make it up, but I can’t say what that Voice was. People like me want to have faith but need more than somebody else’s say-so to get there. So it’s a conundrum. And it’s why I’ve never found a satisfactory religious explanation for the sense of spiritual mystery I feel.

I recently watched a talk by Rupert Spira, who explained the difference between perception and sense thusly: he said that perception is the way we experience the world from the outside in, using sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This is how we perceive the world, but we sense the world from the inside. Love, for example, cannot be perceived through the traditional manner. We can’t measure it using our five senses, but we have no trouble experiencing, or sensing its presence. The “sense of spiritual mystery” I feel is similar. Another way of putting it would be to say, “The sense of soul” I have. I have no way of objectively measuring my soul, or even of proving that it exists. But I sense it.

So what does somebody like me do when confronted with the problem of soul? We look for evidence. But what kind of evidence? One of the great promises most religions make is to answer life’s ineffable questions, the most pressing of which is: what happens to us when we die? This question seems directly related to the concept of soul, no? We’ve got this maybe-thing within us that doesn’t feel tied to the material world. If it exists, might it belong to some other consciousness or realm? And what better way to get at that question than to examine what happens to it when that thing, whatever it is, becomes divorced from the physical body? It’s the Great Question, Charlie Brown.

And, call me crazy, but I think we at least have a partial answer.

(Me asking the Great Question)

Most people are, at this point, familiar with the Near Death Experience. Millions of people around the globe have experienced them after dying and being resuscitated. Sometimes they occur when people only believe they are about to die. Oftentimes, in about eighty-five percent of these cases, they don’t happen at all.

You probably know the classic hallmarks of a typical NDE: floating above the body, tunnel, light, life review, overwhelming feeling of love and acceptance, meeting loved ones or some sort of celestial entity, and finally being sent back because the person has more to do back at Home Base. There are other elements, such as an unconscious patient able to describe in great detail medical procedures being performed on them that they would have no way of knowing, or of being able to describe events occurring in other rooms of the hospital in which they were not present. Sometimes, they leave their bodies and are able to see loved ones in distant places. There’s more to it, but you get the idea. If the NDE experience is more than just a combinatory function of the dying brain attempting to self-soothe and/or a series of lucky guesses, then it would seem we have compelling evidence of some kind of life-after-death, which would blow the fully materialistic view of the world out of the water and get us a great deal closer to a new understanding of humanity.

The problem is, that’s’ a big If. Maybe the biggest If in the history of Ifs. Because these experiences can’t fully, independently verified, we have no way of knowing if they are “real” in the sense that they are actually happening outside the mind. Yes, we can validate aspects of them: did the surgeon really flap his arms like a duck while in the operating room? He did? Well, I’ll be damned. But knowing the seemingly unknowable may be some kind of heretofore undiscovered extrasensory perception we have, which doesn’t necessarily correlate to the existence of a soul.

Some people think NDEs are caused by hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain, despite the fact that experiencers often have more oxygen in their brains when having an NDE. Some people think, as I said, that the NDE is merely an evolutionary trick the brain uses to keep us comfy when the end is upon us. I don’t know if there’s any way to prove or disprove this theory.

What seems certain, though, is that NDEs are real. They happen to every kind of person in every corner of the globe. The stories people tell differ in details but overlap in their essential message: you are loved. Experiencers come back profoundly changed. They often describe their NDEs are being “more real than real.” They see colors that don’t exist on Earth, feel emotions more profoundly, people blind since birth experience sight. When they return, they no longer fear death. They often change professions to pursue jobs of service. They lose interest in material goods. Oftentimes, they end up divorcing their partners because, they return as, in a very real way, different people. In short, they’re changed.

So why don’t all people who have died and come back report NDEs? I don’t know. Perhaps they don’t remember them. Or, perhaps, they simply didn’t have them. If they didn’t have them, does that mean they’re not real? Or does it mean that eighty-five percent of people don’t have souls? Because that would suck. Regardless, we’d be idiots not to look at the minority of people who do experience these events and take what they have to say seriously.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that I’m discounting the religious person’s “personal, anecdotal experiences” which shore up their beliefs without any real proof but I’m choosing to believe the personal, anecdotal experiences of the NDE experiencer. And that’s true. The difference between the two is the sheer volume of NDEs. There’s just so many of them that I find it nor credible to dismiss them all as imaginings. Taken together, the magnitude of the experience outweighs their unbelievability. Does that mean I think the NDE proves the existence of a soul?

Death is the ultimate leap, and I would love to mind that particular gap with some assurance about what follows. Is the NDE enough ? Not quite, no, but it certainly gets me closer. What I need is something that connects my humanity to something more, something that removes my atheistic belief that we are random accidents in a random universe, a tiny bit of sturm und drang, but ultimately just a haphazard collection of molecules thrown together for a minute or two, then scattered into some new form. What I need is some explanation that would make sense of this – all of this – some narrative that fits both my perceptions and my senses. But that’s for another post.

What do you guys think? Have any of you had an NDE? If so, I’d love to hear about it.