Posted on 16 July 2013, 14:32

A friend, who has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for many years, accepts that there is an afterlife, and worries that he will take his disorder with him into the next world. What am I to say to him?

It is an important question indeed for the perhaps 6% of a population who suffer from a serious mental disorder, and for a much greater number who are less afflicted, or less permanently so.  Even so, there is little in the literature of psychic research to help us. Some helpful work has been done, however.

Before thinking about such work, we can remind ourselves of what is commonly said: that in the afterlife we do carry our personalities, our memories, our opinions and beliefs with us, that in the afterlife we tend to be with those of similar spiritual development to ourselves, that in the lowest levels of spiritual development there is much attachment to the earthly realm, and the various kinds of addicts on the earthly plane are often the victims of obsession by such spirits, and that such obsession is the explanation for some mental disorder.

In this physical world, mental disorder is also often the product of disordered families, and disordered, unjust and uncaring societies. We are very much the products of our cultures, our language, our beliefs, our moral standards, our knowledge, and the intricate pattern of human relationships in which we participate. Furthermore, “mental disorder” besides often being the product of society is often defined as such by that same society. What is considered disordered in one society is not so in another.

So, it might not seem easy for me to give my friend a straightforward answer.  But if we can agree with modern psychiatry that major psychoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, paranoia are as much based on malfunctions of the brain as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, then the question becomes clearer.  If readers can accept the reality of the afterlife, then they will accept that the true personality with its memories does not reside in the brain, but is an aspect of another dimension of reality. So whether the brain is disordered, damaged, or destroyed, it will make no difference.

With those thoughts in mind, I could confidently answer my friend’s question, “Will I take my schizophrenia into the next world?” with, “No, you won’t.”  That would be the good news I could give to my friend. And as schizophrenia originates in a brain malfunction as is the case with dementia, I feel I can say this on the basis of an experience, reported to me, and which I see no reason to disbelieve:

We had a friend who was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 47 after a long period of increasingly strange behaviour, and by the time he died at the age of 63, he could neither feed himself, nor move around, recognise anyone, or even talk. But his daughter reports that as death approached, her father seemed suddenly to regain his faculties, sat up in bed and gazed with a look of glad recognition at the open door, as if a welcoming spirit stood there. 

Such welcoming spirits are often reported in Near Death Experiences: and we may presume (although he didn’t speak) that he was having such an experience.

The phenomenon of Lucidity at Death is referred to in the landmark work Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century –  [Edward F Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly et al, 2007, 800 pp.] :

“Benjamin Rush, author of the first American treatise on mental illness (1812), observed that “most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives” (page 257).… In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, one of severe schizophrenia and the other of senility (in which) the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death” (page 24). Osis and Haraldsson (1977/1997) reported a case of a meningitis patient who had been “severely disorientated almost to the end,” but who “cleared up, answered questions, smiled, was slightly alienated and just a few minutes before death, came to herself” (page 133). Turetskaya and Romanenki (1975) reported three cases involving remission of symptoms in dying schizophrenic patients. Grosso (2004, pages 42 – 43) describes three dementia cases that had been reported to him, one by a colleague and by a nurse. In all three cases, the patient had not recognised family members for several years, but shortly before death they were all said to have become more coherent and to have recognised family members. Such cases are few in number and not adequately documented, but the persistence of such reports suggests that they may represent a real phenomenon that could potentially be substantiated by further investigation.” [page 411.]

I found an article on Lucidity at Death in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, [28(2), Winter 2009] by a German researcher called Dr Michael Nahm, who agrees about the paucity of the reported experiences, and the lack of adequate documentation, but plainly accepts that the experiences are real.  His article is the best that I have found, and if readers wish to read the whole article, they can find it by clicking the link at the end of this blog.

He begins, “Hippocrates, Plutarch, Cicero, Galen, Avicenna, and other scholars of classical times noted that symptoms of mental disorders decrease as death approaches … All of them held the view that the soul remains basically intact when the brain is affected by physical malfunction and disturbance of the mind. Therefore, they believed that during and after death, the soul was freed from material constraints, regaining its full potential.” [p.90]

He gives describes research in this area done by Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) and several others, and gives a number of case histories.  Here are two of them:

“G. W. Surya (1921) recounted an account handed to him by a friend of his. This friend had a brother living in an asylum for many years because of serious mental derangement.

One day, Surya’s friend received a telegram from the director of the asylum saying that his brother wanted to speak to him. He immediately visited his brother and was astonished to find him in a perfectly normal mental state. On leaving again, the director of the asylum decently informed the visitor that his brother’s mental clarity is an almost certain sign of his approaching death. Indeed, the patient died within a short time. Subsequently, an autopsy of the brain was performed, to which Surya’s friend was allowed to attend. It revealed that the brain was entirely suppurated and that this condition must have been present for a long time. Surya asks: ‘‘With what, then, did this brainsick person think intelligibly again during the last days of his life?’’ (p. 14)  [Page 95]

“Martensen-Larsen (ca. 1926) reported the case of a farmer’s wife who was seemingly imbecile for eight years. Similar to Marshal’s 1815) previously mentioned case, this account gives an example of a mental illness that, during Terminal Lucidity, the affected person remembered as a ‘‘bad dream’’ and that is reminiscent of the possession by an alien will that quit the scene at the approach of its host’s death.

Usually, the woman just stared in front of her; and – if at all –  uttered only detestable swear words. When visited by the doctor or the priest, she displayed an odd virtuosity in successfully spitting on their shoes. One day, she began to converse rationally with her caretaker and apologized from deep within her heart for her bad behaviour. Broken and remorseful, she affirmed she was not able to behave in any other way since she had been forced to act like this. It was her utmost concern whether she would be forgiven for these and other sins. When the priest arrived, he handed her the requested Lord’s Supper. The next morning, she died in peace. (Martensen-Larsen, ca. 1926, p. 128)”

Let this suffice in our discussion of Lucidity at Death for psychotic patients.  But the question arises, What about deathbed visions in general?  Why should psychotic patients be different in their experiencing? Is there much difference in kind between a deathbed vision and a Near Death Experience? Are not all such events irruptions of experience of the wider world of Spirit?

On pages 408-411 in Irreducible Mind there is a discussion of Deathbed Visions. Readers may well have seen a number of descriptions in Victor Zammit’s or Michael Tymn’s Blogs. The similarity of NDEs to Deathbed Visions is noted. “Deathbed visions our experiences in which dying people seem to converse with people not physically present – usually deceased persons – or to perceive some environment is not physically evident to bystanders.  Occasionally, a bystander will also perceive what a day that seems to be seeing (see. E.g., Howarth and Kellehear, 2001; Stevenson, 1995). Like NDE experiencers, dying persons who see people not physically present almost invariably see deceased persons, not living ones. Deathbed visions rarely seem to involve other features prominently associated with NDEs, such as OBEs or tunnels, but these differences may be more apparent than real because an even more fundamental difference between NDEs and deathbed visions is that in the latter the experiencer usually dies shortly after the experience. We therefore rarely get direct accounts from dying persons themselves; reports of what they experienced come rather from people at their bedside who heard what the dying persons said about the experience or who witnessed behaviour suggesting the dying person was experiencing.… In modern times only Osis (1961) and Osis and Haraldsson (1977/1997) have attempted a systematic survey of such experiences. Because these surveys were based entirely on the retrospective recollections of doctors and nurses often from many years earlier, the findings must be considered preliminary only, and they tell us little about the real incidence and character of such experiences… Our own informal enquiries, particularly with hospice doctors and nurses, have strongly suggested that such experiences are in fact quite frequent. Moreover, in a recent study conducted by one of us (EWK) the single most common experience reported was being with the dying person who seem to see or hear deceased loved ones; 218/525 respondents reported such an experience, including 36 nurses or other hospital workers who reported witnessing such experiences, some of them on multiple occasions…. Sufficient evidence is already available, however, to counter any facile blanket dismissal of deathbed visions as mere hallucinations of the dying brain…. Osis and Haraldsson (1977/1997) reported that patients were actually less likely, not more likely, to have deathbed visions if they were on medications or had illnesses affecting consciousness… The dying person apparently sees, and often expresses surprise at seeing, a person who he or she thought was living but who had in fact recently died…”

A lot here, to reassure my friend suffering from schizophrenia. The thought of a life time of mental torment being prolonged into the world of spirit! That would be terrible to contemplate.

Read Michael Nahm’s article:  http://thegroundoffaith.net/BLOGS/Nahm.doc
Read this experience:
“I didn’t know dying was such hard work”

Michael Cocks edits the journal, Ground of Faith.

Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

Paperback               Kindle

Posted on 02 July 2013, 17:16

Even if we were to agree that some theology of some Christian churches is questionable, we do need to try to push back against the tide of unsubstantiated invective directed against them. Unsatisfactory theology should not be attacked with unsubstantiated so-called “facts” such as, “scholars are perfectly aware there is no evidence that either the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, or the other writings, as we have them, existed within a hundred and twenty years after the Crucifixion,” {Link 1} or, “when it comes to Jesuah [It should be “Yeshua”] (the Greeks translated his name as Jesus [the Greek was Iesous, Latin Iesus]), there is no direct historic record at the time of his existence.” [On the contrary, there are several non-Christian writers from the 1st century CE who mention Jesus. {Link 2}]

Amongst other popular beliefs we also have the constant assertions, inspired by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.  {Link 3: These links are found at the end of the blog, for possible further reading}

Under the aegis of materialist philosophy, similar disregard for evidence can be shown in the academic world. Controversial theologian and philosopher Don Cupitt for instance presents Jesus as a radical secular humanist.  In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross J.M. Allegro argued that Jesus in the Gospels was in fact a code for a type of hallucinogen, the Amanita muscaria, and that Christianity was the product of an ancient “sex-and-mushroom” cult. The way to international renown seems to involve coming up with such startling theories on suspect evidence.

People who make such claims take care not to mention St Paul. Nobody in this wide world doubts that he was a real person. Nobody in this wide world doubts that he wrote his letter to the Galatians that we find in the New Testament of our present Bible, and that he wrote it about the year 50 CE, sixteen or so years after the death of Jesus. In his letter he mentions that great event, the appearance to him of the risen Jesus, which changed him from being the chief persecutor of Christians to being a follower of Jesus himself, and how after three years from this life-changing event he went to Jerusalem to “get information from” Jesus’ disciple Peter and James the brother of Jesus, for the first time. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8,  Paul writes, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to [Peter] and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”  Now, all agree that this letter is genuinely Paul’s. For him life after death is the same for us as for Jesus:  “When [our body] is buried, it is mortal, when raised, it will be immortal.” [1 C0r 15:14] 

Our survival of the death of the body, and Jesus’ survival of the death of the body, our communion with the spirit of the risen Jesus: that is central for St Paul. It was also central for early Christianity.

But we do need to remind ourselves what both “Christianity” and “Judaism” would look like in the years after Jesus died. According to many historians, most of Jesus’ teachings were intelligible and acceptable in terms of the contemporary Judaism; and that Judaism had no absolute orthodoxy except the Torah and the commentaries on it. There were Pharisees, Scribes, Essenes and other groups. The followers of Jesus worshipped at the Temple, attended the synagogues. St Paul in his missionary journeys apparently was welcome to preach in synagogues in Asia Minor, Greece, and in Rome. He was still a Jew although wanting to reform Judaism.  What set Christians apart from Jews was their faith in Christ as the resurrected messiah. The belief in a resurrected Messiah is unacceptable to Jews today and to Rabbinic Judaism, and Jewish authorities have long used this fact to explain the break between Judaism and Christianity.

The Oral Tradition

Oral tradition was the normal mode for communicating the teachings of a spiritual master in the ancient world. For one thing, before the use of papyrus was widespread, writing was both clumsy and expensive. Using a stylus on a clay tablet worked, but once the clay dried no “corrections” or “edits” could be made. Writing on a scroll made of an animal skin was certainly an improvement, but was still limited. The widespread use of papyrus for the ancient world was like the coming of the internet in the modern world - a virtual explosion of written communication began.

Once great teachings began to circulate in written form ancient writers continued to be sceptical of using the written word. There was a sense that it fell far short for the communication of treasured knowledge. Church historian Eusebius relates this thinking from the fragments of Papias, “But I will not hesitate also to set down for your benefit, along with the interpretations, all that ever I carefully learnt and carefully recalled from the elders, guaranteeing its truth….For I supposed that things out of books did not profit me so much as the utterances of a voice which lives and abides.” -  H.E. III.39,3-4   For the above reasons in the early years after the death of Jesus his teaching would have been mainly preserved in the oral traditions. There were no printed books for followers of Jesus to carry around with them, and of course only a small minority could read. Memorisation was central, as was certainly the case in preliterate societies of Greece or the New Zealand Maori, where a complex culture about the gods, genealogies, legends, histories, and skills necessary for survival were passed on by word of mouth and memorising. Before the development of the Greek alphabet “Homer, whoever he was, composed the works orally, committed them to memory, and recited them on demand, perhaps with a certain amount of improvisation to take into account the particular preferences of his audience.” 

The written tradition

With regard to the life and teachings of Jesus, in the first place there will surely have been the oral tradition. Paul however does write down what he learned from Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, about the Last Supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection appearances. And what he learned then was to dominate the rest of his life. At the very least, Paul refutes the nonsense that Jesus never existed.  That spiritual genius, Paul, with his letters and constant travels, ensured that it was his interpretation of the teaching, life, death and resurrection of Jesus that shaped the origins of a Christianity that was apart from Judaism. Paul does refer to other missionaries, such as Apollos, who presented the teaching of Jesus somewhat differently, and who would have had their following as well.

Gospel of Thomas

But the letters of Paul were not the only early writings about Jesus and his teaching.  In 1945 the manuscript of the Coptic text (CG II), was found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. It is now called “The Gospel of Thomas”  and the original Aramaic or Greek was possibly written earlier than Paul’s first letter. It contains some of the sayings of Jesus quoted in our present gospels.  But how and where were these gospels compiled?

There is some agreement that they were compiled after the Fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE   where the Temple was destroyed and most of the inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. This also destroyed Christianity in Jerusalem, leaving followers of Jesus in other countries needing to supplement the oral tradition with written material that could be read at assemblies for worship.

There is some agreement that the Gospel of Mark was the first to be written, that in compiling their gospels, the writers of Matthew and Luke each copied most of Mark, word for word, and quoted from a document that scholars call “Q” which is a collection of Jesus’ sayings that may have been written down while Jesus was alive, and then added material peculiar to the writer. These three Gospels were called “Synoptic” “seen from the same point of view”.  John was probably written later.
Other gospels were also written, and there are numerous early writings, letters, homilies, that were circulating amongst Christians in the early days, and it took a long time before there was a consensus that the best of them all consisted of most of the books we now call The New Testament.  After the fall of Jerusalem amongst the Christians outside Judaea there were many Christian and Gnostic sects with differing beliefs, differing holy books. Space does not permit to describe the complicated processes by which something like our present 27 books was accepted by many as the definitive canonic selection after the year 200 and there was some kind of a consensus about basic Christian belief.  “Nonetheless, full dogmatic articulations of the canon were not made until the Canon of Trent of 1546 for Roman Catholicism, the Gallic Confession of Faith of 1559 for Calvinism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox.”

For much of the history of Christianity, prior to the invention of the printing press, the Bible (with its varying make-up) was the Church’s book, and the Church decided which parts of the Bible were suitable to be read in public worship. Although   Genesis 1 and 2 were regarded as a true account of the creation, there was no doctrine that the Bible contained the infallible truth.  The Bible was to be interpreted and taught as seemed right to church leaders.

Then the printing press was invented. Gradually texts of the Bible became available to individuals, who drew their own conclusions about its message, and these conclusions were not necessarily sound, or not necessarily better than those presented by church scholars. The formation of small sects was made easier.

The printing press played a role in producing the Reformation, and then the Enlightenment which led to the development of science perceived by many as hostile to religion. In the established churches many members became less certain about the reality of the spiritual dimension. It was in the late 1800s that many, feeling threatened by Materialist science, retreated into asserting that the recently established canons of the Bible were infallibly correct, and that every word of the Bible was literally true: and that is the definition of Fundamentalism.  This modern retreat into Fundamentalism has sometimes led to strongly held beliefs contrary to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching. It involves failure to see the Bible as a library of books written over a period of 1200 years, of unequal value in inspiring to a life in Spirit. It has produced the very stultifying legalism that Jesus was protesting against with the Pharisees. And continuing uncertainty about spiritual realities in mainline churches, not only fails to provide a counter to Fundamentalism, but fuels a retreat into it by people seeking a milieu friendly to deep faith. There is a desperate need for the light thrown on mind and Spirit by quantum physicists and open-minded studies of consciousness.

If we are not to be Fundamentalists, we may see the Bible as containing the testimony of spiritual forebears living palpably close to a beneficent spiritual reality. Their testimony invites us to go deeper into our own personal spiritual journeys and explore what will enable us to grow in spirit. We will evade the call of Spirit if we allow ourselves to get bogged down with disputes about the historicity of this or that event recorded in the New Testament, if we get annoyed by St Paul sometimes departing from his words, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile, male nor female, bond nor free,” and reverting to the patriarchal ways of his culture.  We let our spiritual forebears inspire us as much as they may, and in humility and openness also seek the Christ that is in all, through all, and above all.

J.K.Baxter

I am fond of the words of the New Zealand mystic, James K. Baxter, incorporated into the Anglican A New Zealand Prayer Book.

James K Baxter: ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’
Lord, Holy Spirit,
You blow like the wind in a thousand paddocks,
Inside and outside the fences,
You blow where you wish to blow.
Lord, Holy Spirit,
You are the sun who shines on the little plant,
You warm him gently, you give him life,
You raise him up to become a tree with many leaves.
Lord, Holy Spirit,
You are the mother eagle with her young,
Holding them in peace under your feathers.
On the highest mountain you have built your nest,
Above the valley, above the storms of the world,
Where no hunter ever comes.
Lord, Holy Spirit,
You are the bright cloud in whom we hide,
In whom we know already that the battle has been won.
You bring us to our Brother Jesus
To rest our heads upon his shoulder.
Lord, Holy Spirit,
You are the kind fire who does not cease to burn,
Consuming us with flames of love and peace,
Driving us out like sparks to set the world on fire.
Lord, Holy Spirit,
In the love of friends you are building a new house,
Heaven is with us when you are with us.
You are singing your songs in the hearts of the poor
Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father.
– James K. Baxter, ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’, in
Collected Poems
(ed. John Edward Weir;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 572 pp.

{Where I got the series of mis-statements from} http://freetruth.50webs.org/B2b.htm

{Non-Christian references to Jesus} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#Non-Christian_sources

{Why it was not the case that Jesus married Mary Magdalene} http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/series/was-jesus-married-a-careful-look-at-the-real-evidence/

(More about Don Cupitt} http://philosophybites.com/2009/12/don-cupitt-on-jesus-as-philosopher.html

{Why we are sure St Paul wrote the first letter to the people of Corinth}
http://bible.org/seriespage/1-corinthians-introduction-argument-and-outline

{The stuff about Eusebius} http://www.churchhistory101.com/century1.php

{About Homer composing the Iliad before the invention of writing} https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/homer.htm

{Gospel of Thomas}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas

{Siege of Jerualem}
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70) 

{How it was finally decided on which books should be in the New Tesstament}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

{Detail on the origin of Fundamentalism} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

Michael Cocks edits the journal, Ground of Faith.

Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

Paperback               Kindle