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This is a long one. Sorry.

The apparent question, with respect to my first memory, is what actually happened? But is this question the real question? If the experience is assessed within the cognitive framework that supports “what actually happened”, it constrains the reality of the experience. The rules by which meaning is captured in the net of a sentence and the rules by which meaning is caught by soma are different. Assessing the meaning of Il fait beau in the right context (i.e as a French sentence) works to provoke understanding; in the wrong context it is a bunch of letters and spaces.

Actually. It’s such a strong word. Even if we leave it out—The question is what happened?—“actually” still hovers there under the wing of is. This is an example of the mind storying beginning from the underlying (i.e. usually unconscious) acceptance/belief that there must be an ultimate cause and there must be one correct answer and this is the context that makes of the experience a foreign language. There must be an actually happened—one instance, one meaning, one event that is true.

But, of course, there are many possible truths (stories/fictions) to “explain” what I experienced when I was four years old. 1) It could be literally true. In some manner my child body was materially moved to another time/place where it was summer and where there were two people waiting to speak to me. 2) It could be partially literally true, in that the experience took place in the context of my psych but that the two adults were actual people who were entering my psychic space. 3) It could be metaphorically true, in that the experience was totally occurring in my psyche and that all the events, characters and place were aspects of my developing self. 4) It could be that I had a minor physical anomaly in the brain (such as I will discuss in a moment) that caused the set of sensations that got interpreted in the moment as the above experience. Which one appears to any given mind as “obviously true” is a sign of what particular set of rules govern the interpreters mind but the “obviousness” of the explanation is not a guarantee of any material truth. It’s just an indicator of cultural truth.

Storying begins with what Collingwood calls an absolute proposition. Absolute propositions are ones that are not verifiable. God is an absolute proposition, as is “no god,” as is all actions in the universe have causes. An absolute proposition is the baseline place from which storying begins. In the example of my first memory, if a person starts from the assumption that the body is the sole cause of experience it is very unlikely this person will interpret the experience and arrive at explanations 1 or 2. If the interpreter accepts as an absolute position that there is a non-corporeal world of intent that can cause change in the material world then choices 1 and 2 are now potential stories that could be attributable to the experience. So, depending on what absolute propositions a person has to begin with, any of the above stories could be true or false.

Since absolute propositions are not verifiable by their very nature, no sense can be made of the question “which explanation is true?” What matters is not the truth or falsity of an absolute proposition (Collingwood calls it nonsense to ask this of such a proposition), but its “efficacy.” What matters: What lived universe does an absolute proposition create?

To understand anyone’s reaction (including my own) to my first memory one needs first to understand the absolute propositions that underlie the particular storying mind. “No god” is an absolute proposition and this text (and my life) is the edifice which has been built upon it. No human being lives without a multitude of absolute propositions about the world, the fact that you are a human being, for example. Can your human status be proved? No medical test in the universe—no genetic scan, no battery of comparative anatomy tests—can definitively rule out the possibility that you aren’t some cleverly designed machine or altered alien. Silly, of course, but that’s what happens when you subject an absolute proposition to the test of verifiability.

Perhaps because of their status as unverifiable, absolute propositions are useful things. They are like little platforms from which the world can be perceived and assessed. We jump around (quite unconsciously most of the time) from one platform (absolute) proposition to another depending on what it is we want or need—depending on what context encloses the need to understand an experience. Collingwood, in his Metaphysics, outlines the absolute propositions behind what he terms Newtonian, Kantian and Einsteinian physics. Examining the physical world and its phenomena: Newtonian physics bases its analysis upon the proposition that some events have causes and some events are “due to the operation of laws;” Kantian physics—all events have causes, that is, the concept of law collapses into the concept of causation; and finally in Einsteinian physics there are no causes only laws—there are only laws because the concept of causation has collapsed into the concept of laws. It seems obvious that all of these various physics are “true” by virtue of their applicability. What matters is whether the world of knowledge they build is explanatory and predictive—their efficacy.

Each edifice that has been built from these three absolute propositions is particularly useful in explaining a particular aspect of the world. If you want to know how long a lever you need to move a heavy block, utilizing the theory of relativity will probably result in a backache. By the same token Newton can’t deal with the interesting world of subatomic particulate behaviour. Utility as a guideline is easy to accept in a situation to which very few of us have an emotional attachment. I can think about the movement of planets in their orbits and then think about what string theory could possibly actually mean without a twinge: I can switch systems with no regret, relief or other emotional state. The same cannot be said of other kinds of absolute propositions.

Some propositions are more closely tied to our sense of immediate survival and this is almost always an emotional issue. For example, when faced with the emotions of anxiety and fear the absolute proposition of meaningfulness kicks in to play. We struggle under the weight of answering the question about whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. We struggle because we believe it must be one or the other. We struggle partly because the emotional consequences are so dire with either choice. The question of meaning is not verifiable, nor is the assumption that there is one correct truth or explanation. They are, therefore, absolute propositions. Choosing meaning or meaninglessness is, in other words, an act of faith.

One’s place in history—one’s culture, ethnicity, gender, class, sense of identity—deeply effects which set of absolute propositions is foundational to the storying process. Both one’s place in history and one’s set of absolute propositions are foundational to one’s sense of identity. The particular set of absolute propositions which a person utilizes to assess the world is a key structural element in the conceptual framework which guides what one will perceive as evidence and how one ascribes meaning to the evidence that is accepted. I refer to this overall structure—in its operation—as the “rules of evidence.”

Profound psychological/spiritual change is often about modifying one’s rules of evidence: spiritual disciplines are those practices that when followed accomplish this modification.

Dr. A.I. Reader was a clinical associate professor of ophthalmology in 1995 when he wrote an article called “The Internal Mystery Plays” to explain his “near death experience.” It is a really interesting document on a number of levels. He describes his experience in some detail, focusing on the physical experience as well as the sense he made of it. His experience begins with worry and then a racing heart and pain. He realizes he is dying and then at that moment he “remembered (his) upbringing, which said, ‘When you are facing death, you are to let go and turn everything over to God.” He does, and experiences a “sudden release of the pain and the fear and a complete sense of bliss and understanding.” What he experiences—life memories flashing into awareness, “threads” connecting everything, a bright light, his ancestors and a decision whether he was going to stay or not—are commonalities in many near-death experiences. His status and knowledge as a doctor means that much of what he is describing has a clinical feel to it. The effect is to simultaneously reassure (as to the veracity and reliability of the described experience) and limit (as in the creation of a chasm between the brain made me do it type of explanation and author’s experience of “the Guiding Spirit.”)

He carefully explicates the physical sources of the experience. His headings include: “Neurological Foundations,” “Cortical Contributions,” “Autonomic Contributions,” “Vascular Contributions,” “Psychological Contributions,” and “Theoretical Model for Near-Death and Mystical Imagery.”

Over a period of time this (hyperventilation) can lead to a ‘pseudoangina” syndrome with chest pain, shortness of breath, and other typical myocardial infarction symptoms. This leads to tachycardia and eventual disconnection in the autonomic nervous system with a (usually sudden) decrease in the pulse rate due to the profound reflex vagal stimulation to the heart. Sudden cardiac standstill ensues, which can last up to 20 seconds before profound bradycardia in the rage of 30 to 40 beats per minute occurs. This, I believe, is the physiological basis for my own near-death experience.

After presenting his experience and its physiological causes, Reader then discusses what he calls the “correlates to contemplative practices.” In this section after the paragraph quoted above, he discusses the means by which such states may be induced, talking about empathogens, fasting, meditation, hypothermia, etc. It isn’t until the science is well documented that he moves on to the last two pages of his explanation which begins with the heading “Transformational Psychology.” His first sentence: “However, there are two aspects of the experience that cannot be fully explained physiologically and require delving into physical and spiritual realms.” The first three paragraphs still focus on the physical structures of the experience, β-endorphins, for example and the “dive” reflex, recounting a particularly nasty experiment where researchers let loose a small animal in a tank of water where the animal could not escape. The scientists watched the animal lose hope, “dive” to the bottom of the tank and die. This paragraph immediately precedes “the second aspect of the near-death experience…the transformational aspect of the psyche.”

I find this choice of narrative movement fascinating. It’s almost as if his role as scientist (therefore establishing which rules of evidence should be used to assess the world) required him to focus on the brain made me do it even though, as becomes clear, he has personally applied a completely irrational (from the point of view of the brain made me do it) story to the experience, that which he calls the “Higher Power” or “Guiding Spirit.” He says that

I am constantly asking myself why this experience is accompanied by such a profound feeling of Spirit. The only answer that I can give at present is the one that I have received from the experience itself, and is the same answer given by all known religious masters. The answer comes in a love that is so profound, deep, and unifying that it seems that it can only come from a Universal Presence, and from nowhere else.

This is where he ends up in terms of his thinking about the experience—this is what it feels like but I don’t really know—some deeply honest sentences. What makes this insecurity work in his text is the narrative movement from vicious “dive” experiment to the next paragraph, which ends with “It is this subjugation of will that is the common feature of almost all persons who have had near-death experiences and have then had a transformation in their psyche in the way they live in the physical world.” He cannot explain the subjective experience physically, (“In spite of these discoveries and those yet to come, no one will ever fully know why these reflexes and the sensations associated with them exist, or why they cause such profound psychic, physical, and spiritual changes in the individuals who have them.”) but he can try to mimic the experience for us by shunting us from an imagined death—overwhelmed by the hopelessness and horror of watching a dive-reflex death—to the transformative moment of “consciously releasing the physical body from the personal will through the sudden acceptance of a Higher Authority.”

Amongst other things, what I take from readings like this, and from similar stories recounted to me over the years by people who have had similar transformative experiences is that while absolute presuppositions are themselves unverifiable, the primary criteria for choice concerning which absolute proposition to use is expediency. We need our propositions to work in the world. We want them to do the work of helping us cope with what happens to us and if they don’t then we quickly reach for whatever base-line proposition will allow us to explain our experiences in ways that will allow us to get along in our lives.

Let me hasten to add, this capacity to stand happily on philosophical quicksand has no moral content in my view. Both our inflexibility and flexibility depending on circumstances is just what humans are like. The Stanford experiment shows that this trait can lead to much human misery yet positive therapy (whether secular or religious)—where a person changes the basic story of his or her life enough to effect increased contentment and happiness—is another possible outcome of the human ability to shift absolute propositions and its attendant evidentiary rule. What Reader’s account shows is that while culture and the framework of beliefs that are passed on through socialization are powerful (otherwise why spend so much time assuring the reader of his fundamental scientific orientation, only to tell us of the importance of turning over the will to the “Higher Power”) absolute propositions are not unchangeable. That is, human beings can adapt to this kind of experience in ways that, as Reader puts it, develop strong “altruistic feelings of sibling-like love that are essential to the ethics and morality of any successful culture or race. These moral rules of ‘fair play’ are inherent in the unitive feelings experienced in the near-death state.”