BK's 'Phantom World' Hypothesis for NDEs

[AshvinP]

I came across BK's recent essay through Discord and am sharing the link here, along with my brief response. It could be interesting to also respond on BK's site, although I think it would need to be much more refined.

***

BK article - https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/02 ... sobes.html

Response:

The 'dissociative boundary' is a completely unwarranted assumption that then leads to postulating a 'phantom world' that is entirely unnecessary. Nevertheless, BK has stumbled upon something true about NDEs. That is the fact that the after-death state is experienced with the same mode of cognition that we normally use and that is completely adapted to sensory-like conditions. This fact by itself explains pretty much all the facts of NDEs, without needing some 'phantom world' instinctively assembled by MAL, which in turn raises many ontological issues by creating a new sphere of reality within MAL. 

When we loosen our consciousness from the sensory organization at death, we are not transported into a different world where we can now magically access inner mental states of others, but simply awakening to what made our sensory experience possible. When we are merged with that sensory experience, we don't have enough cognitive distance to understand how it is that we can interact, communicate, empathize, etc. with other beings. We are like a fish in water. After death, we gradually gain this cognitive distance by loosening the sheaths from the physical body and begin to realize how our 'private' experiences were never private to begin with, but the interference of all other experiential perspectives. We begin to experience the consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and deeds in their distributed interferences with the experiential perspectives of others. This is what BK points to here - "the experiencer expects to perceive the world from his or her own unique and contingent point of view, not the objective perspective of other people."

Again, this is not some special ability we acquire or some 'phantom world' we go into, but simply an awakening to what is always the case.  We start to realize how nonsensical our abstract explanations for our experiences were during life, such as packets of 'information' traveling through 'empty space' to reach the senses and brain. Then the reality of completely interwoven perspectives begins to shine through into our consciousness. Neither our brain nor our biological organism is the image of a 'dissociated alter', but an image of a whole Cosmic interference of the most varied archetypal perspectives. These archetypal influences provide the matrix of support in which we can unfold our localized activity during life. Our physical and biological organism doesn't belong to our localized consciousness but to the whole Cosmos, to which it mostly returns after death (hence the natural decay of the corpse). 

With NDEs, the experiencers are actually expanding into the real spiritual Cosmos, which is the only reality there is. Far from entering into some phantom world of perceptual memories, they begin to experience the true ideal nature of the One World. The familiar sensory world is but a temporally decohered manifestation of this One ideal Cosmos. However, the purely ideal experiences can only be captured in the sense-based concepts developed between birth and death. These would be gradually dismantled as the soul expands from the soul world into more archetypal layers of activity (spiritual worlds), and then the ability to remain lucidly conscious would depend on what sort of inner forces were developed during life. If the soul simply flowed along with sensory experience its entire life, then it would drop into a dream consciousness and then dreamless sleep, like we do each night. But since the experiencers don't make it this far, or they drop into dream and sleep conditions, they only remember the sensory-like manifestations of the spiritual world. 

(borrowed from Cleric) The 'spiritual world' has nothing to do with parallel universes of non-spatial nature. If we don't understand this, we fall into a characteristic duality where we imagine that we're presently entirely in the physical world (including our psyche) and thus the spiritual world is a speculative realm that can only be allegedly accessed by certain gifted individuals. But we live in the non-spatial spiritual world all the time. Imagine that you think about literature. Now you switch to politics. How did you reach that new topic? By turning left, right, up, down? When we try to understand how our states of being metamorphose, we clearly discern that we're following lawful relations that are non-spatial. These are the same lawful relations we experience after death except without meditation through the senses. 

The above may sound like yet another speculative hypothesis for what is going on after death. How could anyone know these details with any concreteness? The answer to that follows completely logically from an ideational and unified structure of reality. There is no hard boundary between our current ideational perspective and those that we inhabit after death, free from the formatting of the sensory organism. The latter can also be systematically grown into during life with the proper inner training. And our current capacity for reasoning through these ideas is but a more constrained form of that direct spiritual perception across the threshold of death. Through our thinking, we are probing the consonances and dissonances of these purely ideal curvatures that modulate our transforming states of being (not just perceptions, but also desires, emotions, ideas, intuitions), which we then call "logical" or "illogical".

It could be an interesting experiment to compare NDE experiences between the average person and a trained mathematician who had learned to think completely independently of the senses. I suspect the latter would return with a much more spiritually oriented understanding of the after-death state, i.e. of how the soul expands into a musical hierarchy of MAL's higher-order intents (not some instinctive MAL that has created a perceptual replica of the physical world based on the memories of alters)

***

After suggesting that crude experiment at the end, I googled "mathematician near death experience" and the first link was this one:

Elsevier, the world's leading provider of science and health information, published an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery discovered in a near-death experience (NDE) that matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems and has applications in general systems theory, universal systems modelling, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrobiology, education and other areas of study. This article is about Lynnclaire Dennis and how she brought back perhaps the greatest scientific discovery ever from a NDE. The Mereon Matrix's sequential process generates a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social.

I then found the website for Mereon, which has some interesting videos.





I'm not clear on what if any spiritual significance any of that may have, but just found it very interesting at a hazy intuitive and imaginative level. As soon as I saw the image in the video above, I was reminded of Steiner's planetary seals.

[Federica]

Thanks for sharing, Ashvin.
I've read the article and I'm undecided whether this speculation constitutes an improvement in BK's overall intuitive direction or not. Maybe yes, in the sense that he's a tiny bit closer to a concrete idea of interconnectedness, even if in a very abstract context in which the substance of interconnectedness is as dry and flat as sensory perceptions again, that MAL dully patches up. But at least he plays with the idea of accessing a shared medium beyond the aliased rigidity of the dissociative boundary.

The interesting part, I believe, is when he says that it's reasonable that the experiencer accesses the perceptions of others, despite these persons' own boundaries being up and functioning, because then there's only one layer of boundary between them, the experiencer having temporality lost their own. So piercing a double boundary is hopeless, as it seems, but "it's reasonable" to think that a single layer boundary can be pierced, especially if there's feeling between the experiencer and the person(s) in question.

I doubt that it would help to reply on BK's site though. He says it himself, these are intellectual speculations. He is clearly problem-solving from constraints, not from open creativity. His constraints are, #1 analytic idealism, and #2 the NDEs reports. With these premises I think it wouldn't be received very well to start off with "the dissociative boundary is entirely unwarranted". He would take this response as off topic: a general critique of his philosophy rather than a specific comment on the phantom world hypothesis.


PS. I haven't tried to understand the scientific basis of the video you have shared, but the first thing coming to mind for me is Moiré patterns.

[AshvinP]

Thanks for sharing, Ashvin.
I've read the article and I'm undecided whether this speculation constitutes an improvement in BK's overall intuitive direction or not. Maybe yes, in the sense that he's a tiny bit closer to a concrete idea of interconnectedness, even if in a very abstract context in which the substance of interconnectedness is as dry and flat as sensory perceptions again, that MAL dully patches up. But at least he plays with the idea of accessing a shared medium beyond the aliased rigidity of the dissociative boundary.

The interesting part, I believe, is when he says that it's reasonable that the experiencer accesses the perceptions of others, despite these persons' own boundaries being up and functioning, because then there's only one layer of boundary between them, the experiencer having temporality lost their own. So piercing a double boundary is hopeless, as it seems, but "it's reasonable" to think that a single layer boundary can be pierced, especially if there's feeling between the experiencer and the person(s) in question.

I doubt that it would help to reply on BK's site though. He says it himself, these are intellectual speculations. He is clearly problem-solving from constraints, not from open creativity. His constraints are, #1 analytic idealism, and #2 the NDEs reports. With these premises I think it wouldn't be received very well to start off with "the dissociative boundary is entirely unwarranted". He would take this response as off topic: a general critique of his philosophy rather than a specific comment on the phantom world hypothesis.


PS. I haven't tried to understand the scientific basis of the video you have shared, but the first thing coming to mind for me is Moiré patterns.

Federica,

Thanks for these thoughts. I agree, the response couldn't be presented in its current form or would be taken off. I think it could be reformulated so the dissociative boundary isn't directly questioned, but by the end of the post, it should become clear why that boundary is completely unnecessary to explain how we normally experience ourselves as isolated bubbles of consciousness through our sensory organization. As long as one sticks to the boundary assumption, none of the further reasoning about the stages after death, which we dimly experience through our Earthly ideal life, can be oriented to properly. It needs to become clear that we cannot make sense of our normal sensory experience without the intuitive movements we are flowing through in those higher spheres. Practically, that may end up requiring a few pages of text.

The thing is, if we trace the whole spirit of this hypothesis, it is essentially finding a new way to justify MAL's instinctive intelligence in the face of NDE reports and reasoned intuition that may seem to suggest otherwise. He is projecting man's intellectual consciousness and its associative intelligence onto MAL and saying the latter cannot help but create this phantom world out of the memories it gathers from the reassociated alters, as if that is the full extent of its purposes. He hasn't even stopped to consider how radically different consciousness would be in the absence of the brain-sensory scratchboard. In that sense, I think it is another major step in his backward intuitive direction. He is finding new ways to solidify MAL's instinctive nature in his thinking and intellectually erode the mystery of experiences across the threshold, which may otherwise lead one to explore them further and more intimately.

At this point, it seems BK is way too invested in his abstract thinking patterns to be open to moving his thinking in a more vertical direction so he can perceive the glaring flaws in his current reasoning. Previously he already had the implicit duality of the physical world and spiritual world via the dissociative boundary, now he has made it a trinity of physical, spiritual, and phantom world. The situation becomes ever-more convoluted and complex simply to justify the subconscious desire that the spiritual should not be concretely known during life and made more transparent within and through the physical. Now even esoteric researchers can be said to simply explore a phantom world of memories which they have mistaken for the 'real' spiritual world, no matter how much sense those 'memories' make of our actual streams of living experience.

[Lou Gold]

I came across BK's recent essay through Discord and am sharing the link here, along with my brief response. It could be interesting to also respond on BK's site, although I think it would need to be much more refined.

***

BK article - https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/02 ... sobes.html

Response:

The 'dissociative boundary' is a completely unwarranted assumption that then leads to postulating a 'phantom world' that is entirely unnecessary. Nevertheless, BK has stumbled upon something true about NDEs. That is the fact that the after-death state is experienced with the same mode of cognition that we normally use and that is completely adapted to sensory-like conditions. This fact by itself explains pretty much all the facts of NDEs, without needing some 'phantom world' instinctively assembled by MAL, which in turn raises many ontological issues by creating a new sphere of reality within MAL. 

When we loosen our consciousness from the sensory organization at death, we are not transported into a different world where we can now magically access inner mental states of others, but simply awakening to what made our sensory experience possible. When we are merged with that sensory experience, we don't have enough cognitive distance to understand how it is that we can interact, communicate, empathize, etc. with other beings. We are like a fish in water. After death, we gradually gain this cognitive distance by loosening the sheaths from the physical body and begin to realize how our 'private' experiences were never private to begin with, but the interference of all other experiential perspectives. We begin to experience the consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and deeds in their distributed interferences with the experiential perspectives of others. This is what BK points to here - "the experiencer expects to perceive the world from his or her own unique and contingent point of view, not the objective perspective of other people."

Again, this is not some special ability we acquire or some 'phantom world' we go into, but simply an awakening to what is always the case.  We start to realize how nonsensical our abstract explanations for our experiences were during life, such as packets of 'information' traveling through 'empty space' to reach the senses and brain. Then the reality of completely interwoven perspectives begins to shine through into our consciousness. Neither our brain nor our biological organism is the image of a 'dissociated alter', but an image of a whole Cosmic interference of the most varied archetypal perspectives. These archetypal influences provide the matrix of support in which we can unfold our localized activity during life. Our physical and biological organism doesn't belong to our localized consciousness but to the whole Cosmos, to which it mostly returns after death (hence the natural decay of the corpse). 

With NDEs, the experiencers are actually expanding into the real spiritual Cosmos, which is the only reality there is. Far from entering into some phantom world of perceptual memories, they begin to experience the true ideal nature of the One World. The familiar sensory world is but a temporally decohered manifestation of this One ideal Cosmos. However, the purely ideal experiences can only be captured in the sense-based concepts developed between birth and death. These would be gradually dismantled as the soul expands from the soul world into more archetypal layers of activity (spiritual worlds), and then the ability to remain lucidly conscious would depend on what sort of inner forces were developed during life. If the soul simply flowed along with sensory experience its entire life, then it would drop into a dream consciousness and then dreamless sleep, like we do each night. But since the experiencers don't make it this far, or they drop into dream and sleep conditions, they only remember the sensory-like manifestations of the spiritual world. 

(borrowed from Cleric) The 'spiritual world' has nothing to do with parallel universes of non-spatial nature. If we don't understand this, we fall into a characteristic duality where we imagine that we're presently entirely in the physical world (including our psyche) and thus the spiritual world is a speculative realm that can only be allegedly accessed by certain gifted individuals. But we live in the non-spatial spiritual world all the time. Imagine that you think about literature. Now you switch to politics. How did you reach that new topic? By turning left, right, up, down? When we try to understand how our states of being metamorphose, we clearly discern that we're following lawful relations that are non-spatial. These are the same lawful relations we experience after death except without meditation through the senses. 

The above may sound like yet another speculative hypothesis for what is going on after death. How could anyone know these details with any concreteness? The answer to that follows completely logically from an ideational and unified structure of reality. There is no hard boundary between our current ideational perspective and those that we inhabit after death, free from the formatting of the sensory organism. The latter can also be systematically grown into during life with the proper inner training. And our current capacity for reasoning through these ideas is but a more constrained form of that direct spiritual perception across the threshold of death. Through our thinking, we are probing the consonances and dissonances of these purely ideal curvatures that modulate our transforming states of being (not just perceptions, but also desires, emotions, ideas, intuitions), which we then call "logical" or "illogical".

It could be an interesting experiment to compare NDE experiences between the average person and a trained mathematician who had learned to think completely independently of the senses. I suspect the latter would return with a much more spiritually oriented understanding of the after-death state, i.e. of how the soul expands into a musical hierarchy of MAL's higher-order intents (not some instinctive MAL that has created a perceptual replica of the physical world based on the memories of alters)

***

After suggesting that crude experiment at the end, I googled "mathematician near death experience" and the first link was this one:

Elsevier, the world's leading provider of science and health information, published an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery discovered in a near-death experience (NDE) that matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems and has applications in general systems theory, universal systems modelling, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrobiology, education and other areas of study. This article is about Lynnclaire Dennis and how she brought back perhaps the greatest scientific discovery ever from a NDE. The Mereon Matrix's sequential process generates a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social.

I then found the website for Mereon, which has some interesting videos.





I'm not clear on what if any spiritual significance any of that may have, but just found it very interesting at a hazy intuitive and imaginative level. As soon as I saw the image in the video above, I was reminded of Steiner's planetary seals.

I dunno much about NDE reports or abstract models. All I can say from my current experiential status, called 'active dying' by the medical folks, is that it's definitely liminal and expansive. I resonate strongly with Joni Mitchell's song "Both Sides Now and am quite impressed that she presented it as a much younger woman 56 years ago.

My current visual explorations are focusing on collaborations with others, where I'm portraying my grok of mixing representation (the photo by an other) and abstraction (my photoshop manipulation). It's a lot of fun to do during my rather invalid time of 'active dying' when I can't get 'out there' to take new photos but enjoy exploring "Both Sides Now."

[Federica]

He is projecting man's intellectual consciousness and its associative intelligence onto MAL and saying the latter cannot help but create this phantom world out of the memories it gathers from the reassociated alters, as if that is the full extent of its purposes.

Yes, he’s anthropomorphizing MAL, but this was already the case before, at least implicitly, which is why the dissociative boundary comes in handy in the model - to partition the flat sea of “mentation”. So I don’t think it’s a new way. It’s only a speculative extension of his old way, specifically to incorporate NDEs.

He hasn't even stopped to consider how radically different consciousness would be in the absence of the brain-sensory scratchboard. In that sense, I think it is another major step in his backward intuitive direction. He is finding new ways to solidify MAL's instinctive nature in his thinking and intellectually erode the mystery of experiences across the threshold, which may otherwise lead one to explore them further and more intimately.

He hasn’t even stopped simply because the dissociative boundary is not the final add to a theory that starts from monistic idealism. I believe his reasoning process starts from human sensory experience, then postulates the boundary, then goes to a vague idea of MAL/nature. It may not be formalized in this way, but I believe this is his intuitive process. So, I believe he hasn’t even stopped to consider the various options for MAL for the simple reason that he hasn’t really arrived there (yet) - to a serious consideration of MAL. That is the frontier.

In this sense, I am a bit less negative than you seem to be. Sure there's dualism, but I’m not sure that the phantom world is a third element, making things worse than what he previously theorized. It’s just a more explicit speculation on the nature of MAL as he had already imagined it. The phantom world is MAL itself.

In any case, I agree that in a way or another, in the background of all this, there is “the subconscious desire that the spiritual should not be concretely known during life and made more transparent within and through the physical.” The desire to cling to the infancy of humanity, in other words to stay some more in the protective womb of Nature. Curiously, I have a distinct such impression when I watch him talking and argumenting.

[Cleric K]

I think we should remember that in a sense the dissociative boundary is real, although not exactly of the nature that BK conceives.

In reality, this dissociation is simply the result of the excess forces of antipathy that still live in the soul. Upon hearing this, many may jump "But this is nonsense, I don't harbor any antipathy toward anyone, yet I'm still dissociated." This only shows, however, how little real self-knowledge man has today. As Ashvin explains in his commentary, our souls interfere. To enter consciously the spiritual world we need to become naked. We should be ready to find the thoughts and feelings of humanity within the same conscious space as ours. If we try to assess how much of our inner life we actually maintain only because we believe that it is secret and unknowable to any other being, we'll quickly realize that we very badly desire to be dissociated.

This reminds me of a story by Gianni Rodari. His works were influenced by his political views but we can nevertheless contemplate the story for its Imaginative content.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2010 ... o-crystal/

Giacomo-of-Crystal

Once in a faraway city there was born a baby who was completely transparent. You could see through his arms and legs just as if they were air or water. He was made of flesh and bone but he looked as if he were made of glass. If by chance he happened to fall he didn’t break into pieces. At most there would be a transparent bump on his forehead.

You could see his heart beating, and his thoughts flickering like colored fish in their tank.

One time by mistake, the boy told a lie. Right away the people could see it like a ball of fire just behind his forehead: then he told the truth and the ball of fire dissolved. All the rest of his life he never told a lie.

Another time a friend told him a secret and right away everyone could see a black ball which rolled without stopping in his breast, and the secret wasn’t secret any more.

The boy grew, became a youth, then a man, and everyone could read his thoughts. When they asked him a question, they could guess his answers before he could even open his mouth.

His name was Giacomo, but people called him “Giacomo-of- Crystal” and loved him for his loyalty. Everyone become kind when they were around him.

Unhappily in that country there came to power a ferocious dictator who began a time of bullying, injustice and poverty for the people. Whoever dared to protest disappeared without a trace. Whoever rebelled was shot. The poor were persecuted, and humiliated in a hundred different ways.

People kept quiet and suffered, afraid of what might happen otherwise.

But Giacomo couldn’t keep quiet. Even if he didn’t open his mouth, his thoughts spoke for him: he was transparent and everyone could read behind his forehead angry thoughts and condemnation for the injustice and outrageousness of the tyrant. In secret, then, people began to repeat the thoughts of Giacomo and they took hope.

The tyrant had Giacomo-of-Crystal arrested and ordered him thrown into the darkest prison.

But then an extraordinary thing happened. The walls of the cell in which Giacomo had been shut became transparent, then the inner walls of the prison and at last the outermost walls. The people who walked near the prison saw Giacomo seated on his stool, as if the prison were made of crystal and they continued to read his thoughts. At night a great light poured out of the prison and the tyrant in his palace had all the curtains drawn so that he wouldn’t see it, but all the same he wasn’t able to sleep. Giacomo-of-Crystal, even in chains, was stronger than he, because the truth is stronger than any other thing, brighter than day and more terrible than a hurricane.

translated Bart Anderson

[Lou Gold]

I think we should remember that in a sense the dissociative boundary is real, although not exactly of the nature that BK conceives.

This reminds me of a story by Gianni Rodari. His works were influenced by his political views but we can nevertheless contemplate the story for its Imaginative content.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2010 ... o-crystal/

Giacomo-of-Crystal

Nice story, Cleric, I posted it.

[Lou Gold]

I came across BK's recent essay through Discord and am sharing the link here, along with my brief response. It could be interesting to also respond on BK's site, although I think it would need to be much more refined.

***

BK article - https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/02 ... sobes.html

Response:

The 'dissociative boundary' is a completely unwarranted assumption that then leads to postulating a 'phantom world' that is entirely unnecessary. Nevertheless, BK has stumbled upon something true about NDEs. That is the fact that the after-death state is experienced with the same mode of cognition that we normally use and that is completely adapted to sensory-like conditions. This fact by itself explains pretty much all the facts of NDEs, without needing some 'phantom world' instinctively assembled by MAL, which in turn raises many ontological issues by creating a new sphere of reality within MAL. 

When we loosen our consciousness from the sensory organization at death, we are not transported into a different world where we can now magically access inner mental states of others, but simply awakening to what made our sensory experience possible. When we are merged with that sensory experience, we don't have enough cognitive distance to understand how it is that we can interact, communicate, empathize, etc. with other beings. We are like a fish in water. After death, we gradually gain this cognitive distance by loosening the sheaths from the physical body and begin to realize how our 'private' experiences were never private to begin with, but the interference of all other experiential perspectives. We begin to experience the consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and deeds in their distributed interferences with the experiential perspectives of others. This is what BK points to here - "the experiencer expects to perceive the world from his or her own unique and contingent point of view, not the objective perspective of other people."

Again, this is not some special ability we acquire or some 'phantom world' we go into, but simply an awakening to what is always the case.  We start to realize how nonsensical our abstract explanations for our experiences were during life, such as packets of 'information' traveling through 'empty space' to reach the senses and brain. Then the reality of completely interwoven perspectives begins to shine through into our consciousness. Neither our brain nor our biological organism is the image of a 'dissociated alter', but an image of a whole Cosmic interference of the most varied archetypal perspectives. These archetypal influences provide the matrix of support in which we can unfold our localized activity during life. Our physical and biological organism doesn't belong to our localized consciousness but to the whole Cosmos, to which it mostly returns after death (hence the natural decay of the corpse). 

With NDEs, the experiencers are actually expanding into the real spiritual Cosmos, which is the only reality there is. Far from entering into some phantom world of perceptual memories, they begin to experience the true ideal nature of the One World. The familiar sensory world is but a temporally decohered manifestation of this One ideal Cosmos. However, the purely ideal experiences can only be captured in the sense-based concepts developed between birth and death. These would be gradually dismantled as the soul expands from the soul world into more archetypal layers of activity (spiritual worlds), and then the ability to remain lucidly conscious would depend on what sort of inner forces were developed during life. If the soul simply flowed along with sensory experience its entire life, then it would drop into a dream consciousness and then dreamless sleep, like we do each night. But since the experiencers don't make it this far, or they drop into dream and sleep conditions, they only remember the sensory-like manifestations of the spiritual world. 

(borrowed from Cleric) The 'spiritual world' has nothing to do with parallel universes of non-spatial nature. If we don't understand this, we fall into a characteristic duality where we imagine that we're presently entirely in the physical world (including our psyche) and thus the spiritual world is a speculative realm that can only be allegedly accessed by certain gifted individuals. But we live in the non-spatial spiritual world all the time. Imagine that you think about literature. Now you switch to politics. How did you reach that new topic? By turning left, right, up, down? When we try to understand how our states of being metamorphose, we clearly discern that we're following lawful relations that are non-spatial. These are the same lawful relations we experience after death except without meditation through the senses. 

The above may sound like yet another speculative hypothesis for what is going on after death. How could anyone know these details with any concreteness? The answer to that follows completely logically from an ideational and unified structure of reality. There is no hard boundary between our current ideational perspective and those that we inhabit after death, free from the formatting of the sensory organism. The latter can also be systematically grown into during life with the proper inner training. And our current capacity for reasoning through these ideas is but a more constrained form of that direct spiritual perception across the threshold of death. Through our thinking, we are probing the consonances and dissonances of these purely ideal curvatures that modulate our transforming states of being (not just perceptions, but also desires, emotions, ideas, intuitions), which we then call "logical" or "illogical".

It could be an interesting experiment to compare NDE experiences between the average person and a trained mathematician who had learned to think completely independently of the senses. I suspect the latter would return with a much more spiritually oriented understanding of the after-death state, i.e. of how the soul expands into a musical hierarchy of MAL's higher-order intents (not some instinctive MAL that has created a perceptual replica of the physical world based on the memories of alters)

***

After suggesting that crude experiment at the end, I googled "mathematician near death experience" and the first link was this one:

Elsevier, the world's leading provider of science and health information, published an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery discovered in a near-death experience (NDE) that matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems and has applications in general systems theory, universal systems modelling, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrobiology, education and other areas of study. This article is about Lynnclaire Dennis and how she brought back perhaps the greatest scientific discovery ever from a NDE. The Mereon Matrix's sequential process generates a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social.

I then found the website for Mereon, which has some interesting videos.





I'm not clear on what if any spiritual significance any of that may have, but just found it very interesting at a hazy intuitive and imaginative level. As soon as I saw the image in the video above, I was reminded of Steiner's planetary seals.

Ashvin,

I do not disagree but once again your comment raises a specific simple concrete question, which can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no' wothout more elaborate explanation.

You ask:

How could anyone know these details [about after death] with any concreteness?

I ask:

In your present here-and-now, do you concretely know this?

I'm asking with respect in order to more deeply accept your reporting and not to trigger debate. I promise to accept your 'yes' or 'no' as purely descriptive.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I do not disagree but once again your comment raises a specific simple concrete question, which can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no' wothout more elaborate explanation.

You ask:

How could anyone know these details [about after death] with any concreteness?

I ask:

In your present here-and-now, do you concretely know this?

I'm asking with respect in order to more deeply accept your reporting and not to trigger debate. I promise to accept your 'yes' or 'no' as purely descriptive.

Ok, Lou, yes. Hope that helps : )

[Lou Gold]

Ashvin,

I do not disagree but once again your comment raises a specific simple concrete question, which can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no' wothout more elaborate explanation.

You ask:

How could anyone know these details [about after death] with any concreteness?

I ask:

In your present here-and-now, do you concretely know this?

I'm asking with respect in order to more deeply accept your reporting and not to trigger debate. I promise to accept your 'yes' or 'no' as purely descriptive.

Ok, Lou, yes. Hope that helps : )

Very good. Thank you and blessings on your works.