“Old wives” traditionally tell us that everything comes in threes, especially bad luck.

The BBC had a distinctly old wifeian series of disasters this week, the consequences of which are still unclear, but which conceivably could spell the end of its monolithic structure and alleged metropolitan bias — surely not!

Let’s be kind, the Beeb does some things very well. One of them is occasionally to report on moments when the assumed infallability of science — a demigod at Broadcasting House — is rent apart.

A great deal of science is based on theory and supposition, and yet chunks of it are reported as if they were true in an absolute sense.

One of those moments is at hand. It began with the report by neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander that, while the human part of his brain was effectively “dead”, he was given a tour of Heaven, or at least a higher stage of reality.

This week BBC medical correspondent, Fergus Walsh, broke a story of doctors discovering ways to communicate with people categorised as being in a “vegetative state”, and hence as good as dead. One wonders if they know that traditionally the “vegetable body” (situated around the solar plexus) is the gateway to the spiritual world?

In the new case, a man who had lost all sense of himself, his essential attributes, and presumably, most of his cortical brain function, could answer questions put to him by activating parts of his brain visible to the scientists in an MRI scanner.

He “said” he was happy and not in pain, much to the relief of his family. This is a fascinating breakthrough. The doctors would do well to look at the views of genuine mystics who have studied the subtle interfaces between body, mind and spirit for literally millennia.

Let’s start with some definitions, almost always the infernal flies in the ointment:

Spirit is the ancient word for consciousness and thus equivalent to it. I often use “Spirit/Consciousness” to convey that this is not what science calls consciousness — many neuroscientists believe (and it is a belief) that there is no consciousness outside the brain. I hope the current batch of new developments will nail this frankly illiterate notion once and for all.

Consciousness is both personal and impersonal. The latter is what we call God, the personal is “soul”. Consciousness (with upper-case “c”) is soaked into the Universe and, indeed, is indistinguishable from it, seen spiritually. Some Zen masters make this distinction as Big Mind/Little Mind, although I prefer to use “mind” — originally “heart” in old texts — for something else.

Mind is the contents of consciousness — our everyday thoughts and impressions. It’s what dies with our body, leaving consciousness (soul) to carry on to the next stage. I should point out that all these stages exist simultaneously, only our level of understanding determines where we are at any one time.

Once you look at the events of the recent “discoveries” by neurosurgeons and scientists in these terms, everything becomes simple and explicable. Anyone who studies their own consciousness, through meditation — methods of quieting thoughts and seeking stillness — will eventually arrive at this hierarchy of understanding.

It’s not rocket science, but with a little humility, it could be Science.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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It’s Hallowe’en, All Hallows Eve, the most mystical time of year when barriers between worlds become thin enough for anyone to pass through.

Despite its “pagan” origins — the ancient Celts to be precise — it has taken on Christian meaning as the prelude to All Saints Day.

The mystical connotation of Hallowe’en has in modern times descended into a festival of spookiness and “fun” for children. A typical tale told on this Trick or Treat night goes something like this: “The last man on Earth sat alone in his house. Suddenly the doorbell rang.”

Aside from all that Hollywood jazz, what exactly is a mystic, and would you qualify as one?

Aldous Huxley in his book Grey Eminence wrote, “The Mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion.” Moreover, “A totally unmystical world would be a world completely blind and insane.”

Clifton Wolters, an eminent Anglican priest, writer and editor, defined a mystic as one who has achieved a “deep union with God”. The Spanish founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, thought that a mystic is “a contemplative in action”, which is a neat way of putting it.

Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism and related titles, adds a characteristic flourish to her definition: “… a human being who has become a pure capacity for God and therefore a tool of divine action.”

So Kahlil Gibran’s luminous words in his magnificent book The Prophet: “Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the world.”

I would add: someone who has a spiritual life-purpose and who has tasted the fruits of mystical experience. There are as many versions of the practising mystic as there are individuals on the path.

Take Thomas Merton, for example. A Catholic priest, irresistible writer — his book The Seven Storey Mountain is a must-read — poet, hermit, and all-round bundle of energy, characteristically had his epiphany in Sri Lanka looking at a statue of the Buddha:

“…I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner cleanness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident, obvious…The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no ‘mystery’. All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with Dharmakaya [the Buddhist word for Godhead] … I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.”

What is notable about this passage is the emphasis Merton places on seeing. It is a direct seeing into the nature of existence, not felt, imagined, or experienced in dream, but visually made aware.

The last Pope, John Paul II, was taught in his youth by a Rosicrucian master. Following a car accident which nearly killed him, he had a spiritual experience which mirrored exactly what the teacher had taught him.

Such was its overwhelming power, the young mystical Pole signed up for a seminary that led all the way to his becoming Pope in Rome. He was a mystic with a big job, not such a rarity as many might think.

Last word to philosopher Rudolph Eucken: “Man is the meeting point of various stages of reality.” Very Hallowe’en!

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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The heavenly neuroscientist piece last week — scroll down — elicited more feedback than is good for this site or its writer.

To those of you who offered to send me review copies of your latest books, thank you, but I am already inundated with books to read and review. They now constitute a year’s work waiting in the wings, which is my absolute cut-off point.

Most of the comments were from folk who had actual knowledge of the subject — mysticism and out-of-body experiences — so were enjoyable and instructive to go through. A few were less than entranced. In particular, Toby Young’s baffled piece in The Spectator magazine.

I’m aware a writer has to have a strong point of view to pen 1000 words for a major cultural magazine, but virtually to dismiss an honest account of a mystical experience by parading an atheist philosopher, a Lib Dem and Giles Fraser is somewhat disappointing.

Poor Toby wails, “But it wouldn’t be life as we know it.” Be careful what you wish for. Does he really want to continue opening free schools and writing for the Speccie for all eternity?

He goes on, “Indeed, there would be no ‘we’ to experience life. Our personal identities would perish along with our bodies and, while it wouldn’t be the lights-out death that atheists generally believe in, it wouldn’t be much better.”

Actually, it would. The transition that Dr Alexander experienced was to an expanded, greater state of being. Although he had to come back to his reviving body — or we wouldn’t know about it — the sense of an exalted self remained with him.

His remembered experience was also clouded by the pull of his still vital body back on Earth. It was what is called a “showing” not the totality that is to come.

When Toby Young left school as a boy and went up to Oxford as a man, he left his old life behind, including his parents and his childhood. Would he now wish to go back, or is he glad he followed the Old Testament advice and “threw off childish things”?

All spiritual experiences represent a growth of the soul, which may or may not be immediately apparent to the subject. As for the other people in one’s life, they age and die too, so a long Earthbound life leaves the elderly bereft of contemporaries, close relatives and friends. The world also changes radically and becomes almost alien. Ask any pensioner.

We are temporary forms in a life-filled universe whose reach is far beyond anything we can imagine. Better to be a spiritual adventurer than a stick-in-the-mud atheist, terrified of any existential growth and exploration of the outer limits of existence. The “self” doesn’t get swallowed up, it becomes larger and more able in every way.

As someone who has experienced the foothills of this path (described on this site), I can reassure Toby that it is an infusion of life, not a diminishment, and a welcome indication of glories to come.

You, me, we’re cardboard cut-outs compared with the life of the Spirit.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

The Mystic in the 21st Century is coming soon.

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Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, has written a compelling article in Newsweek magazine, Heaven is Real, on his experiences when he was effectively brain dead.

He writes: “In the fall of 2008 … after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.” Note the wording: a scientific reason.

That consciousness continues after death, and also out-of-body-but-alive states — which is experientially the same thing — is well attested here on this site, including many of my own experiences. It’s good though to have one of the “enemy”, a neuroscientist, on board. Follow the link above to read the four-page article.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain. … For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

He continues, “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. … my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe.”

It’s interesting that Dr Alexander continually refers to this dimension as “the afterlife”, so certain is he that this will be his experience following his actual bodily death. Many mystics, and others who have had similar episodes, will confirm his diagnosis. It is as “real” as the world around us right now.

Actually, there’s no reason to suppose that this life is not a spiritual experience too, a sort of Out of Bounds course to make us ready for higher states of being.

But back to Alexander’s account: what he experienced was a full-blown tour of “heaven”, beyond intermediate states, which often occurs very close to death. Remember, his brain was being eaten alive by bacteria and the thinking/emotional part was completely closed down. This was the big bazooka.

In this life many people get introductions to higher-level states. The first serious one is being bathed in “divine light”. Beyond that lies an initial tentative out-of-body excursion which includes the powerful moment of an address by a superior being. For both experiences, one remains in touch with this world and can see it.

Alexander had temporarily lost his brain-led ability to be in this world. His spirit/consciousness simply floated up into levels above where others were aware of his plight and greeted and guided him, as described in the article.

As he so eloquently puts it: “My near-death experience … took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. … According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

There are many such testimonies around describing in minute detail the glories of an afterlife. Science, as always, crowds them out, either from a belief (and it is a belief) that they are plain wrong, or from a deep prejudice that they cannot be right.

If we — the human race — are fully to come to terms with this life as it truly is, we must stop listening to the wilder fringes of scientific opinion, such as Richard Dawkins, and accept that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [their] philosophy”.

FACT!

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

The Mystic in the 21st Century is coming soon.

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Most mystics are not household names. They fade into the background by choice, occasionally writing about their experiences, often for a small circle of associates. Here is a typical example.

Simone Weil was a teacher in pre-war France, who only became known when a priest with whom she corresponded published her letters and manuscripts.

At first, she was attracted to the Catholic Church, but resisted its blandishments because of an innate mistrust of institutional religion.

She died in England in 1943 at the tragically early age of 34 when, it was rumoured, she starved herself to death. She did not produce a tidy corpus of work but her “philosophic genius” and increasingly contemplative cast of mind, could well have resulted in major work later in life.

Simone was typically French. A powerful intellect, developed young by the influence of an elder brother, guided her down the well-trodden Gallic route of revolutionary politics and a Rousseauvian romanticism about “the workers”.

She was by all accounts something of a rebel at her first posting as a school mistress when she organised the disaffected workmen of the village in their dispute with the authorities. Later, she was involved with a group called the Révolution Prolétarienne, and went to Spain on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Perhaps the turning point in her life came when she settled in Marseilles, presumably as a result of the persistent ill health which was to dog her until the end of her life. There she met the Dominican, Father Perrin, who was to become her unofficial spiritual director for the few years she had left.

In the south, she worked on the soil, almost as a kind of romantic necessity. Her mysticism became more pronounced and she took to the study of Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy.

As the fall of France became a reality, Simone left for New York, only to be recalled and sent to England to work for the French provisional Government in exile. Her health worsened to the extent that she was transferred to a sanatorium in Ashford in Kent, where she died in August 1943.

As it is with most mystics, the bare outlines of her life fail to do justice to what went on interiorly. The outward stubborn rebellions against human authority sit uneasily alongside her consistent longing for contact with the spiritual reality.

Yet she takes a cool, attentive view of the art of contemplation. Listen to her voice here, which always has confident authority: “… prayer consists of attention. It is the turning of the soul’s total attention towards God. The quality of the prayer is determined by the quality of the attention. Warmth of heart is not enough. Only the peak of attention makes contact with God, and only when it is intense and pure enough to make contact …”

This is not the message of her English contemporary, Evelyn Underhill, but of a much sharper, colder intellect; one detects a rather damaged personality here, perhaps.

But her instincts remain true — and very French: “It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is God’s business to think about me.” And again: “I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception.”

Simone sounds like a true contemplative in her views on spiritual experiences: “The word of God is the secret word. He who has not heard this word, even if he adheres to all the dogmas taught by the Church, has no contact with truth.”

She is firm on the view that personal mysticism is at the core of religion, rather than the corporatism of many in the Church: “When genuine friends of God — such as Eckhart to my way of thinking — repeat words they have heard in secret amidst the silence of the union of love, and these words are in disagreement with the teaching of the Church, it is simply that the language of the marketplace is not that of the nuptial chamber.

“Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words ‘Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ Christ did not say 200, or 50, or ten. He said precisely that he always forms the third in the intimacy of the tête-à-tête.”

Her own spiritual experiences are written up in the letters to Father Perrin. She was much taken by George Herbert’s poem, Love, which she took to reciting, especially when she had the blinding headaches to which she was prone: “I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

She then tries to explain what is happening to her: “In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God, I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God … In this sudden possession of me by Christ neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile of a beloved face.”

The absence of her senses and imagination here points to an advanced stage of spiritual realisation: a showing of the nature of reality; the unity of Being, in a Christian context.

Simone continues: “I had never read any mystical works … God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.”

Later, she begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer with the same close attention: “Sometimes also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, clearer than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.”

From these direct mystical experiences, Simone Weil’s contemplative creed is formed, and still in conflict with the institutional Church: “The image of the Mystical Body of Christ is very attractive. But I consider the importance given to this image today as one of the most serious signs of degeneration. For our true dignity is not to be parts of a body, even though it is a mystical one, even though it be that of Christ. It consists of this, that in the state of perfection, which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us; so that through our perfection, Christ in his integrity and in his indivisible unity, becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host.”

Simone Weil died in England, a country she loved for its “kindness”. It was a life highly concentrated and hidden, so typical of many mystics.

First published here November 2011.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Spiritual Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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