After Effects

                                                                  After Effects

                                                              by Marco M. Pardi

“So irresistible is the transformative power of enlightenment that your life seems to be shifted into a new dimension, opened to new and unsuspected possibilities.” Eugen Herrigel (1885-1955) The Method of Zen.

All comments welcome. 

One of the best methods for studying a culture is identification and analysis of prevalent forms of cognitive dissonance – the holding of two conflicting and contradictory beliefs/values at once.  If America can be described as a culture (doubtful) one such example would be: Land of the Free – and – Society of Law and Order.  The overlap of the two values in the same people is so complete as to be inarguable.  But, which is it?

Another example is: This is a Christian (“Christian” having distinguished itself from others by belief in the resurrection of a dead man and self aware immortality of the soul for everyone) Nation – and – “I don’t believe in spirits, or seeing ghosts, or someone coming back from the dead to tell about it. That’s unscientific”.

The latter example is critical to the understanding of how the various phenomena such as OBE, out of body experience, SDE, sympathetic death experience, PDE, pre-death experience, NDE, near death experience, and/or ADC/E, after death communication/experience affect the lives of the people who experience them.    

Since these phenomena are often interwoven analysis can seem confusing, even daunting unless parameters are delineated clearly.  So, at the outset we can say three of the five, OBE, SDE, and ADC/E can and do occur to people who are not themselves in medical crisis. And, we can delineate by age group or any of several other variables.  However, recent decades have seen a sharp rise in publication of books and other media reporting, especially, NDEs among children.  

Starting with children, much in the media for reasons I’ll explain, we should first establish general developmental states.  As early as the Classical Greeks there was debate on whether a child entered life as a tabula rasa, clean slate, or with preset ideas, values, inclinations. Centuries later the Catholic Church was faced with the question of, When can a child be considered a sinner?  Debate settled on the age of seven, the Age of Reason, after which it was felt the child could distinguish right from wrong and be held accountable; the child had entered the realm of Critical Thinking.

An undercurrent running through the qualitative distinction of very young children from older children and adults is the unspoken feeling that these children are as yet untainted by the morass of conflicting ideas and beliefs awaiting their entry into the realm of thinking; therefore, their reports must be truthful.  This is a somewhat jaded view, although being jaded does not mean being inaccurate.  Of course, this runs contrary to the low degree of confidence placed on the testimony of a child under 7 in a court of law.

However, assuming the 7th year threshold is reasonably accurate, and taking individual variance into account we have a starting point for examining the reports of children less than seven years of age who claim to have had one or more of the phenomena listed above.  Please note that any mention of “God” is not meant to discredit or to support the claim for existence of this God; that issue is irrelevant here.

It may be said no one lives in a vacuum, especially not very young children.  Examination of the claims purportedly made by children in this category must begin with analysis of the significant others in the child’s physical and mental environment.  While we are now far more knowledgeable of the egregious implanting of false memories, either by intent or simple incompetence by self-styled “regression hypnotherapists”, we must seriously examine the nature of the interface between the mind of the young child and its social environment.  When a child is recounting an NDE and says he saw a very bright light and felt loved, does the parent or caregiver respond by saying, “You saw God”?  If so, and the child assents, does that mean the child perceived his experience as having seen God or is he merely accepting the interpretation of others? It is fair to say one should, at the very least, be quite skeptical of this and of the subsequent story line/interpretation which often follows. Yet, putting an objective analyst on site to hear the child’s first report is far less likely to happen than having to re-interview the child after he/she has already been pre-loaded with interpretations now taken by the child as facts.  Further confounding the analysis, there may be intent on the part of the parents to cash in on the child’s experience in the form of book deals and public appearances.  This has been unmasked a few times recently, with the admission that the book in question was almost entirely authored by a parent who significantly manipulated the child for the purpose of supporting the parent’s religious beliefs.    

One interesting current emerges from reports from children: Regardless of their religious or non-religious background, the experience – any of the five listed above – appears to be taken by the child as natural (“Doesn’t everybody know about this?”)  But herein lies the potential for problems, including cognitive dissonance.  If a child is listened to and asked – rather than told – what his experience means he is allowed to process the experience into the ever growing context of his daily experience.  While fostering this the caretaker may also introduce some caution, or at least warning that if and when the child discusses this with others he may encounter resistance, disbelief, and even ridicule. And these can come from religious and secular, pseudo-scientific materialists alike. Still, as with other aspects of helping a child acquire healthy social navigational tools, it can be done without developing reclusiveness in the child. The reader may rightly assume this scenario is unusual to rare.

The more likely development is the child is faced with a choice: Acquiesce to the confabulations of the caregiver and try to incorporate them into the reality of the experience; or, adopt an “I know what I saw” hiding place within the self which is reinforced and broadened with every subsequent experience, of any kind, which is seen by the child one way and interpreted by the caregiver another.  Neither adaptation is healthy. Each can lead to long-term difficulties.  

During the years I facilitated closed groups of adults for discussions of their experiences I encountered a few who claimed after effects including interference with electronic devices, even wrist watches, sleep disturbances, and/or some with “heightened ESP”.  I saw no evidence to support these claims but then the circumstances did not really allow for testing them.  But the sense of alienation was pervasive, requiring constant reminders of confidentiality.  Another constant was the refrain, “I love my minister, but Boy does he have it wrong.”

In those same years I got a first hand look at the lengths to which some religious groups will go. I’ve written elsewhere of the several pre-publication manuscripts sent to me purporting to tell of, especially, the Near Death Experience and the message for Mankind sent back with the returnee.  In some cases the medical information was so miserably incorrect it could not have made script for a television show.  In other cases the returnee clearly had a fragile grip on daily reality, yet the church publishing house insisted (against my advice) on sending the author out on church book tours even in a case where the “NDE” was by any APA standard a psychotic episode.  My challenge to the publisher that they be prepared to underwrite the likely in-patient care for their to-be lionized author, and financial support for their subsistence level family went unanswered. Sell the book, get the “good news” out, and if the author and his family crash and burn they’ll be replaced by another in the pipeline.

Speaking of television, one of the best fictional programs I’ve recently seen stars Jennifer Beals as a skeptical physician hired to investigate life after death.  Titled, PROOF, it has so far provided a firmly balanced, non-theistic approach which could have come from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Given the direction the U.S. has been following recently, I am curious to see if it will be renewed.

In any case, I feel the likelihood of a culture wide approach in a society divided into two faith camps – the theistic religious versus the likewise religious pseudo-science materialists is quite low in my remaining lifetime.  My personal life history has been one of comfortably keeping secrets.  But I do sympathize with the many I’ve met, and the many more I haven’t, as they learn to cope with those who “just don’t understand.”