Near-Death Experiences and the hyperactive survival drive

Professor Wren-Lewis's musings along these lines will appear during 1993 along with other 'Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow' from a galaxy of Human Potential names, in a book with this title edited by leading yoga authority Georg Feuerstein, to be published by Quest Books. This article is based on one of Wren-Lewis's regular broadcasts for Radio Australia's programme 'All Things Considered'.

In the 1960s, it wasn't just a selfish urge for 'kicks' that led many people to experiment with psychedelics - I know because I was there and was actually roped into an international research project on the subject. What inspired most of those youngsters was the hope, advanced by serious and sensible writers like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that with the invention of LSD and similar substances, science had opened a way for ordinary people to experience enlightenment, to gain a new peacefulness and love without having to spend a whole lifetime in monasteries practising meditation, which rarely brings enlightenment anyway. Alas, psychedelics didn't bring it either, because even their most profound 'altered states of consciousness' didn't last. Then they began to be abused, governments got panicky, international crime syndicates got into the act and the whole thing went underground. It seemed that hopes for an Aquarian Age had died.

And that of course enabled religious pundits to reassert what I call the aristocratic view of enlightenment, as a high achievement comparable to a Nobel Prize in science or an Olympic championship in sport - so the best ordinary people can hope for is to spend years and years searching for it under the authority of leaders, probably not actually getting it until they've moved onto some higher plane after death, or been reincarnated many times on earth. If I thought this were true I'd be very pessimistic about any hopes for the next milenium. But in the past decade a new reason for Aquarian democratic spiritual hope has emerged, from a most unexpected quarter.

The medieval Zen mystic Bassui described enlightenment as 'feeling like one come back from the dead', and similar statements can be found in basic mystical literature. Pundits and theologians have interpreted this to mean that enlightenment is 'dying to the self', 'sacrifice of the ego', involving long struggle with natural human narcissism and the 'monkey mind'. Some psychologically minded thinkers like the American Ken Wilber have interpreted enlightenment as the highest stage of personal growth, where personality transcends itself after overcoming egoism. Nowadays, however, people from all walks of life are coming back from the dead in a much more literal sense. Thanks to huge improvements in resuscitation technology, great numbers all around the world are being rescued from the very brink in extreme medical emergencies like heart attacks. And afterwards quite a few of us, including many like me with no prior mystical beliefs, have found ourselves living in a state of consciousness where 'egoic' preoccupations no longer dominate life, though we've done nothing to discipline ourselves. We still have the sense of self, but it's now experienced as just part of universal aliveness, not something to be anxious about.

This phenomenon has attracted a lot of public attention over the past decade, under its quasi-official medical name of 'Near Death Experience' or NDE, but its real significance is usually missed because media reports tend to focus on the fact that some whose lives have been changed like this describe visions that seem like glimpses of another world. NDEs have been hailed as powerful new evidence for life after death - and so perhaps they may be. But to see them primarily in that light is to do less than justice to the life-changes that they bring. Most people throughout history have taken survival beyond the grave for granted, yet have been every bit as ego-preoccupied as any modern Westerner. The really revolutionary thing about NDEs, including some like mine that involve no visions at all, is that they produce a lasting change in consciousness itself, which reduces anxiety in a way that not even the most convinced belief can do. Psychologists who've studied the phenomenon internationally have actually stated that in the most profound cases it amounts to a mystical opening, and I'd call it an opening to the eternal dimension which is present in each instant.

After my own rescue from death-by-poisoning in Thailand in 1983 [Ed. see his account in Journal 23], I felt as if something like a cataract had been removed from my brain, and for ten years now it's allowed me to experience a wonder and depth of aliveness in each moment in a way I'd never dreamt possible in my previous sixty years, not even in psychedelic states, which never even lasted for ten days. The satisfaction of merely existing far outshines the transitory and shallow pleasures that come from getting my personal preferences met, so I can't get het up about them; to my amazement, it even transforms the pains that come when life goes against my personal wishes. Yet I actually have more sense of social obligation, because aliveness is now a shared thing, not my possession that I have to hang on to.

The mere fact that such an opening can occur without any spiritual discipline presents a fundamental challenge to the aristocratic or 'growth' model of enlightenment. And perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that I don't feel in the least bit 'high' or special. The state feels so absolutely natural that I continually wonder how on earth I contrived to live for sixty years without noticing that I was just a focus of infinite aliveness, eternity's game of John Wren-Lewising along the line of time. It's as if the NDE jerked me out of a collective nightmarish trance where individuality seemed to mean separateness and struggle to survive, when really it's an arbitrary convention, like the lines on a map.

Now of course we can't start recommending dicing with death as a way to enlightenment; quite apart from the dubious ethics of doing that, it's also a fact that many people rescued from the brink report no special experience or life-change. What NDEs do seem to offer is a clue to the nature of the collective trance that blocks out eternity in so-called ordinary human life. If this trance can on occasion be broken simply by close encounter with death, then it must be something like a malfunction, a hyperactivity, of the natural protective instincts that are meant to maintain the game of individuality by avoiding death as long as possible. Post-NDE lives offer evidence that these instincts actually function more efficiently without the 'anxious thought for the morrow' that blocks out awareness of 'eternity now'. What we need now is to set all ancient traditions about enlightenment aside and do real research into less drastic ways of soothing the hyper-active survival drive, and therein I believe, lies real hope for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Professor John Wren-Lewis, 1/22 Cliffbrook Parade, Clovelly NSW 2031, Australia (tel 02 692 3650 w; fax 02 692 4203 w - mark faxes attention of 'School of Studies in Religion').