My view, as the article mentions, is that a middle road exists. In a pragmatic way, we need to discover for ourselves what experience means for us. Then, we neither get swept up in airy-fairy mystical-schmystical nonsense, nor doomsday pseudo-scientific rhetoric.

Look at guys like Sagan and Dawkins, and then look at guys like Shinzen Young and the Dalai Lama. I think all of these people have said different, yet important things.

FYI, the Science of Enlightenment may be an excellent purchase for anyone who would like to study Eastern Philosophy in a science-friendly, precise way.

WHAT??? Serious, you say? NO, can’t be… Religious? Ah, NOW it begins to make sense

1. Deepak Chopra says: “But people do cross the boundary between life and death only to return…often [These NDEs] appear after the brain ceases all activity.” The medical term for this is “brain death” which according to Wikipedia is “the irreversible end of all brain activity”. Look it up. It is impossible for a brain to cease all activity and return to life. THUS, saying there have been NDEs from people who have been been brain dead is not only wrong it is a physical impossibility. Now this might be nit-picking but one should speak clearly, especially on these matters.

2. On the subject of Ingo Swann and the SQUID, a couple pages of Google only returned websites espousing “remote viewing” and THIS webpage. Without a real study or accredited source, I really can’t put any stock in this argument of Chopra’s. Assuming it was as incredible as he says, I’m fairly certain it would come up somewhat earlier in the Google results.

3. The study of the parrot N’kisi can be found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113161253/http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/abstracts/v17n4a1.php
Not only is this article in “Society for Scientific Exploration” (basically a journal of pseudoscience) but the methodology is inherently flawed (as I’m sure anyone can see from the abstract) AND Chopra states that “Out of 71 trails, N’kisi got 23 hits”, however the study clearly states 147 trials, and “N’kisi said one or more of the key words in 71 trials” and OF THAT got 23 hits which were judged by 3 people. Honestly, I shouldn’t explain anymore, just read the abstract.

Finally, much of what Deepak Chopra said was merely words strung together to form sentences but with no coherent, concrete idea or meaning. Or maybe I just don’t know enough to understand, but Chopra did a poor job of helping me understand.

On my uncle’s death, my father said to me, “If there is a heaven, I am sure Bill is up there looking down on us”. Feeling that need for consolation in our shared grief, I replied, “Me too Dad.” Did we get some consolation? Maybe we did, even though I am sure neither of us – neither my Christian father nor my atheist self – would agree on or even understand the first part of the syllogism.

Staring at the hard realities, however uncomfortable, I have, since childhood, never been able to believe in the supernatural. I am afraid that the world is all there is. It’s got its consolations. The non-existence of the bullying, jealous and vengeful gods of all the many religions is a great relief. The idea that one’s eternal soul might be roasted or returned as a newt for disobedience in this world can reasonably safely be put aside.

As for Deepak Chopra’s “consciousness” and its separate existence, the arguments against put alongside the plain realities of life and death are just overwhelming. Sure, we feel like a consciousness floating somewhere behind our eyes, but that doesn’t make us disembodied souls. Maybe sometimes we feel like a rider and our material body is the horse. Maybe we feel that we should transcend our physical existence. Maybe a bunch of people have told us we do transcend it; that would certainly give them a hold over us and advantage them if we were to believe them, or act as if we believed them. Maybe in many ways it works in our own interests to act as though we are not our bodies. We can “drive ourselves”, “break through the pain barrier” and even consume our bodies with drugs, drink or back-breaking work. So many things go well with a belief in transcendence of the physical. It probably underlies whole categories of social control.

The basic reality that we all accept deep down, however, is that we are our physical selves. Our consciousnesses form gradually as we develop in the womb and as children in the interaction of our growing selves and the world. Each of our faculties is linked indissolubly with a part of our brain or body. As our bodies deteriorate with age, our wisdom and experience grown over a lifetime surrender to dementia, stroke, osteoporosis and loss of sex drive. In the end, we flicker out with our bodies’ metabolisms. Who does not really believe this? What believer in the afterlife really gave up his or her life lightly, bolstered by belief? Why are we not overwhelmed by suicide bombers?

The existence of alternative beliefs is evidence of the fear of extinction, not a fearless examination of reality.

I do not know exactly how consciousness springs from the workings of my body. I feel that it is an emergent quality of the complex interaction between my brain and body and the physical world. I think my awareness/attention at any given moment, combined with a sense of time just past and just to come probably do a lot of it. Memory and desire help. The sense of continuity before and after sleep and other losses/changes of consciousness are also part of it. Tangled hierarchies of process and meta-process probably have to be involved as does the possibility that interesting formal systems will need to be able to confront their own contradictions.

Do some honest objective research and find out how much we REALLY know
how much we thought we KNEW through history that had to be revised or totally abandoned

even the speed of light has recently gained a contender for being the speed limit of the universe (Neutrinos seem to be a fraction faster than “the classical S.O.L. particles” like electrons and photons) there is still no absolute certainty as to the accuracy of these measurements, like minor calibration errors, but neutrinos are very dodgy fellas which makes it very difficult to accumulate massive amounts of statistically significant data, but it would not surprise me that this phenomenon will go the same way as cold fusion, zero point energy and other fringe science, the results in these fields are repeatable, and repeated by plenty scientists with results that at the very least show there is an energy gain, the search now is to refine these processes and find out if they can be put to practical use.

Same with ZPE there is a lot of energy in the vacuum, the problem is finding a way to extract usable amounts from it, at this point it might already be useful to feed nano tech units

And last but not least, certainly not least Einsteins “there can be no spooky action at a distance” another example of a scientific FACT we can add to the list of casualties on the scientific facts burial grounds

Couldn’t it even be remotely plausible that all that scientists everywhere and always have been doing is figuring out HOW god made/makes it all work
Like back engineering a very complicated clockwork?
I am using “god” here figuratively speaking, not as the personification of any thing and as far as i’m concerned one can just as well fill in “nature” “the universe” or what ever one sees fit to name that all encompassing thing, without placing that all encompassing thing outside, or apart, of it all

To me it does not sound weird or improbable at all that self awareness is not exclusively a human condition, but i do believe that if consciousness survives bodily death even that “individual self” will eventually fade either by gradually becoming more and more absorbed by that oneness so many nde’ers describe or because the concrete memories of lives lived and lives yet to live are not individual property, seen from that perspective there is only one “I” and that one I experiences everything from every possible angle and all aspects through every thing and everybody
Since it is just one there is no change, no experience of time nor space.
The self awareness of this oneness divides it’s self
Which brings us back to the singularity).

and then there will be light.

But of course i might be wrong in which case, i will never know, so why let that bother me?

I wonder what attitude Michael Shermer would have had toward that one brave individual that made his way out of Plato’s cave, or for instance if he had never witnessed lightning in a time when it was explained as a supernatural thing. I am strongly convinced he would have started of by saying that the observer was either hallucinating or simply making things up, or simply gone bananas

That is not being a skeptic, that is nothing more than having adopted science as your religion and the “proven facts” nothing more than scientific dogma, like: the Earth IS flat AND at the center of the universe, the stars are little holes in the celestial sphere, I mean those were once all BELIEVED to be proven scientific facts).

As long as science can not come up with a better model for the beginning of the universe than “The Big Bang” theory scientists are no further than the priests of ancient times, the only thing being different in their “explanation” is that science today replaced the “creator” of the universe by the “creation” of the universe

aren’t they suspiciously similar?

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The hypothetical “quantum field” perhaps? Or “brane” if you are into string theory and the unified field theory(ies)

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Sounds suspiciously like the first nano second after the “big bang” to me

Just replace the who by the how (funny how you only need to move the 1st letter to the back as if telling us there is no progress in this line of reasoning but rather the opposite)
A singularity resulting in a big bang, without even the slightest hint of why a singularity wouldn’t just stay as it is, a singularity

And then when their observations of the expansion rate of the universe do not confirm their predictions, that the rate of expansion should be decreasing, but in stead is increasing they come up wit vague constructs like “dark matter and dark energy”.
I’m sure the ancient priests would’ve at least given those unexplained phenomena cooler names like Hargoroth the god of expansion and growth the son Azerothero god of all things fast and faster

If you have a MD degree, you’ll see and prove all physical realm (body, chemistry, electrons) will determine all metaphysics (mind, soul, feelings). It cannot be any different since physical is your (careful, here!) area of interest.

The other way around also works: you can see and prove the metaphysical forms the physical.

What if they’re all correlated? What if they’re mutually influencing each other, *both ways*? Can anyone be such an arrogant messiah to claim it all works one-way only -the way they know?

BTW: mr. Chopra’s reaction is obviously harsher than mr. Shermer’s. I use to react the same way when responding to fake, condescending politeness. Not that’s a good thing to do, tho.