life, death - Convivium - Roma

THE PHENOMENA WHICH SUGGEST SURVIVAL Experiences Near and After Death
by
Filippo Liverziani
CONTENTS
Introduction 2
1. Discovery of the Soul and its Autonomy
from the Body 6
2. A New Experimental Approach to the Old
Problem of Survival 10
3. Out-of-the-Body Experiences 15
4. Near-Death Experiences 24
5. A Light Beyond the Half-Open Door 37
6. The Crisis of Death 44
7. Passing Through Hades 59
8. A Strangely Terrestrial Paradise 71
9. Other Modalities of Spiritual Existence 79
10. The Ultimate Destination 86
11. The Other World and Our Own 101
12. Final Reflections 107
Notes 114
Bibliography
237 INTRODUCTION This book is dedicated to the question of survival or living-on after
death, and sets out to treat the matter not in the abstract manner of a
certain tradition of Western philosophy but rather in the concrete terms of
lived experience.
Experiencing survival: strictly speaking, only the disincarnate, only the
'dead', could do this, always provided they effectively succeed in
surviving the disintegration of their material shell. This would
undoubtedly succeed. Nevertheless, one can qualify this by pointing out
that there are separation experiences that living men can have even while
fully and perfectly alive, just as they can return to full life after
coming close to death. Here I am referring, respectively, to people who
have had 'out-of-the-body experiences' and others who have had 'near-death'
experiences. Men and women who have passed through such separation
experiences can provide evidence for us. As we shall see, their testimonies
assume additional value because they tend to confirm each other.
We also have at our disposal an extensive literature regarding
mediumistic communi-cations. After many years of studying this entire
phenomenology I deduce that, while there are numerous pseudo-communications
that can be more readily and properly attrib-uted to the unconscious psyche
of the medium, there are also many communications that seem to justify more
or less strong suspicions; yet there still remains a hard core that resists
all attempts at reduction. I am quite convinced that any unprejudiced,
painstaking and thorough examination of the communications in this third
category will only serve to make them seem more and more reliable. Indeed,
these 'serious' mediumistic communications seem not only to be
substantially consistent with each other, but also with the testimonies of
people who have undergone separation experiences.
We thus come face to face with testimony, given by either the living or
the dead, that is truly impressive. The laws obeyed by these phenomena are
obviously different from those of the phenomena of nature. All the same,
the laws underlying the phenomena of nature, and especially those
underlying the phenomena of life, seem to come closer and closer to the
laws of the spiritual world as one gets away from the mechanistic model and
approaches the finalistic one of spontaneity, liberty and creativity, as
one passes from the physical sciences to those of organic and living
matter, to the sciences of man, to the psychology of the profound, to
parapsychology. The spiritual world thus reveals a logic of its own, a
logic that is different from that of the world of life, even though not
radically different at its roots: it is a logic that has to be discovered,
a logic into which one has to feel one's way. We, too, shall try to feel
our way into it little by little, follow-ing a guiding thread that,
starting from out-of-the-body experiences and passing through those of the
near-death type, will eventually lead us resolutely into experience of the
crisis of death and into what seem to be the subsequent experiences of the
new dimen-sion.
No matter what general considerations we may subsequently make, no matter
what conclusions we may subsequently seek to formulate in more general
terms, these will always be based on an analysis of the available
testimony. Since the author is alive, he necessarily has to limit himself
to a comparative analysis of the testimony provided by others. Although he
endeavours to immerse himself in their experiences, as it were, and thus to
relive the spirit of these experiences to the extent to which this may be
possible, he clearly could not do more.
Now, each individual testimony is always wholly personal. One has to
accept it just as the person concerned offers it. But if this person were
to be in bad faith? If he were to tell falsehoods or, more simply,
something that is not exactly 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth'?
If he were to have hallucinations or indulged in judgement errors that had
a distorting effect on his manner of recounting the experiences, thus
making them seem something other than what they really are? Can we be sure
that such accounts are always scrupulously exact? Can memory always be
relied upon? All these doubts, each of which is wholly legitimate, ought to
induce extreme prudence in anyone who presumes to attribute absolute
importance to any individual case.
On the other hand, even though one person could be mistaken, another
could forget or distort, a third could wittingly deceive and a fourth
indulge in over-hasty approximation, can one really believe that all these
witnesses are either deceiving themselves or are bent on deceiving us,
seeing that there are many thousands of subjects all over the world who
offer testimony to the same type of experience and, what is more, do so in
equivalent terms? It is precisely for this reason that, no matter how great
our doubts regarding an individual case, the totality of such a large
number of analogous cases, after all the necessary pruning and weeding,
becomes worthy of attention.
Nor can one protest at this point that the totality is nothing other than
the sum of the individual cases, so that the reasonable doubt attaching to
individual cases is just as relevant as far as the totality is concerned.
We know only too well that whenever an analysis is absolutized, it ends up
by dominating the synthesis and does so with negative and disintegrating
consequences. Once we keep our analysis logic within its proper limits,
however, we cannot fail to note how greatly these individual testimonies
become strengthened by the fact that others agree with them. After all,
common-sense tells us that the testimony of a single person must be taken
with a pinch of salt, and also that, when faced with the concordant
testimony of so many subjects of a certain type, all reporting equivalent
experiences, it becomes extremely improbable that all of them aim to
deceive us or are deceiving themselves.
It is precisely here that lies the basis of the interest these
spontaneous cases have for parapsychology: an individual case, which may be
related by very simple people or by those one may not consider to be
particularly intelligent, can never be fully guaranteed, but such a
phenomenon will be taken into serious consideration when it emerges from a
plurality of cases, especially when these are numerous and distributed all
over the world.
For the same reason, the testimony I here offer - be it given by the
living or the deceased (or supposedly such) - is not intended to be of
value as an individual case, but is related solely and exclusively as an
example: each of these testimonies is but an example of an entire class of
analogous or equivalent phenomena. The individual cases I shall mention,
even when there are two or three of the same type, have no function other
than to give a concrete idea of the type of phenomenon that I affirm to be
real. The example may be one, sometimes two or three, or four at the very
most: a hundred clearly cannot be quoted for lack of space. Right from the
beginning, however, let me emphasise that each of the quoted cases could be
supplemented by many others. The reader must take my word for this, place a
little trust in me.
I quote testimony by the deceased side by side with that of the living,
but not because I want to sow the tares with the wheat. Nobody is more
conscious than I of the fact that, passing from the living to the dead, the
entire matter becomes decidedly more 'phan-tomatic', as one is tempted to
say. The living are closer at hand: they exist and act beside us, we can
readily form a concrete idea about them, not least by listening to what
other living people have to say about them. When it comes to the deceased,
however, anybody familiar with mediumistic experiences will know just how
difficult it is to obtain a true and complete identification in individual
cases. There can be no doubt that testimony by the deceased always contains
something that escapes us, and this even when it is presented en bloc, as a
consistent and organic whole.
The familiar 'animist' objection is also lying in wait: the content of
these mediumistic communications is claimed to be wholly attributable to
motives operating in the uncon-scious of the medium in particular, but also
and more generally of those who participate in the experiment. It is not my
intention here to deal with the animis