Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Ring used the Greek word omega for his study because it is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and can be taken to mean the end of life, or, more positively, the goal of life. Ring (1984, p. 252) took this goal to be the evolution of consciousness. Ring (1984, p. 255) considered the ndE to be “only one of a family of related transcendental experiences” that were contributing to this evolution, characterized by “unlocking spiritual potentials previously dormant.”

Another prominent researcher into ndEs and OBEs is Michael B. Sabom. When he was in his first year of cardiology practice at the University of florida in Gainesville, he heard psychiatric social worker Sarah Kreutziger give a talk about dr. Raymond Moody’s book life after life. Sabom (1982, p. 3) recalled, “My indoctrinated scientific mind just couldn’t relate seriously to these ‘far-out’ descriptions of afterlife spirits and such.”

nevertheless, Sabom, along with Kreutziger, decided to do a little research into the matter. Sabom chose patients that had been close to physical death, which he defined as “any bodily state resulting from an extreme physiological catastrophe, accidental or otherwise, that would reasonably be expected to result in irreversible biological death in the majority of instances and would demand urgent medical attention, if available” (Sabom 1982, p. 9). These states included severe injury, heart attacks, and deep comas. In interviewing subjects, Sabom and Kreutziger agreed they would at first avoid mentioning any interest in “near death experiences.” They would simply ask subjects to tell their remembrances of what happened before they lost consciousness. Then they would ask if they could recall anything that happened during their unconscious state. Some subjects simply said they could remember nothing, except that they were unconscious. But other subjects would hesitate, and ask, “Why do you want to know?” At that point, Sabom or Kreutziger would explain that some patients had experienced things while they should have been unconscious and that as researchers they were sincerely interested in gathering more information about such experiences. The subjects would then usually share their experiences, first saying things like, “You won’t believe this, but . . .” (Sabom 1982, pp. 9–10).

In his book, Sabom described many aspects of the ndE. I found most interesting the “autoscopic” experiences, in which the subjects found themselves observing their own bodies. for example, a fifty-sevenyear-old construction worker found himself floating four feet above his body during an operation. He could see the doctors and nurses operating. At a certain point, he noticed one of the nurses looking in the direction of his floating face. It was obvious to him that she could not see anything (Sabom 1982, p. 10).

In another case, an American soldier in vietnam was severely wounded in a mine explosion, losing two legs and one arm. While he was being transported away from the battlefield in a helicopter, in an unconscious state, he had an out-of-body experience. He remained close to his body and could see it. His body was taken to a field hospital. There he saw doctors operating on his body, but he wanted them to stop. In his interview he said, “I actually remember grabbing the doctor. . . . I grabbed and he wasn’t there or either I just went through him or whatever” (Sabom 1982, p. 33). The same soldier reported traveling from the operating room back to the battlefield, where he witnessed other soldiers putting the dead into body bags and collecting the wounded. After trying to get one of the soldiers to stop, he found himself suddenly back in the hospital. He recalled, “It was almost like you materialize there and all of a sudden the next instant you were over here. It was just like you blinked your eyes” (Sabom 1982, p. 33). Other subjects also reported such “thought travel” experiences. A night watchman who had an autoscopic ndE during cardiac arrest reported traveling to locations near the operating room where he was being treated. These movements occurred according to his own desires. He recalled: “It was just like I said, ‘Okay, what’s going on in the parking lot?’ and my brain would go over and take a look at what’s going on over there and come back and report to me” (Sabom 1982, p. 34).

Sabom (1982, p. 34) stated, “All the people interviewed remarked that during the autoscopic ndE, they felt as if they had been truly ‘separated’ from their physical body.” The autoscopic ndEs would usually end with the subject reporting reentering the body at the same time as some key event in their treatment. One of Sabom’s subjects, a cardiac arrest patient, reported floating above his body. He could see the medical team putting pads (defibrillators) on his chest. He could not feel the first shock. Just before the second shock, he remembered his family, and thought he should reenter his body. He reported, “It was just as if I went back and got into my body” (Sabom 1982, p. 35).

Many of Sabom’s subjects reported what Sabom (1982, p. 39) called “transcendental near-death experiences.” The autoscopic experiences described above involve perception of the subject’s own body and the surrounding environment, including other people, as they would be perceived by an observer in normal consciousness. The transcendental ndE’s involve perceptions of being transported to realms beyond that of our normal experience, and perhaps also encountering deceased friends or relatives or personalities who seemed angelic or godlike. forty-one of Sabom’s subjects reported transcendental ndEs (Sabom 1982, p. 41). One of Sabom’s heart attack patients recalled how he blacked out while being taken into a hospital for treatment. He saw his life flashing before him, including his acceptance of Jesus christ. Then he entered a black tunnel, seeing at the other end an orange-colored light. Seeing this he entered into a peaceful state of consciousness. He could hear voices. He saw steps, which he took to be the steps leading up to the gates of heaven (Sabom 1982, p. 40). Some of Sabom’s subjects reported experiences with both autoscopic and transcendental elements.

The most interesting of Sabom’s subjects, from the scientific point of view, were those who gave detailed reports of their surgical procedures, observed during out-of-body experiences. In the beginning Sabom was skeptical of such reports. He thought it would be very easy for him to explain them. Sabom, a veteran of over a hundred resuscitations of cardiac arrest patients, said (1982, p. 7): “In essence, I would pit my experience as a trained cardiologist against the professed visual recollections of lay individuals. In so doing, I was convinced that obvious inconsistencies would appear which would reduce these purported visual observations to no more than an ‘educated guess’ on the part of the patient.” But at the end of his study, Sabom came to a different conclusion.

Here is one of the cases that helped change Sabom’s mind. The subject was a night watchman, 52 years old. He had undergone two heart attacks previous to the interview. He told Sabom about an OBE that occurred during his first heart attack, but hesitated to tell him about another experience he had undergone during his second heart attack, suggesting Sabom would probably not believe it. Upon further prompting from Sabom, the man went on to describe things he witnessed during his second heart attack (Sabom 1982, pp. 64–67). In his interview, he jumped back and forth in time, so in the following summary I have sorted out his observations in what appears to me to be the correct order. first he was administered an anesthetic intravenously, which caused him to become unconscious. But then he recalled, “All of a sudden I became aware of it . . . like I was in the room a couple of feet or so above my head, like I was another person in the room.” He saw himself being draped with several layers of cloth. He saw his chest opened, and the chest cavity being held apart by a metal apparatus. He observed his heart, and saw that part of it was colored differently than the rest. He saw the doctors insert an apparatus into a vein. He heard them discussing a bypass procedure. He saw the doctors remove a piece of his heart. during the operation he saw the surgeons “injecting a syringe of something into my heart on two occasions.” After the operation, he saw two doctors stitching him up. They worked first on the inside, and then the outside.