Is There Really a Heaven?

Something touched a nerve about this subject because the forthcoming book on heaven is on the cover of Newsweek (Oct. 15, 2012), (Read the article here) and is a new book.  It is written by a scientist, self proclaimed, because he is a neurosurgeon.  Scientists and neurosurgeons are not necessarily equal.  In the field of psychology he is far from a scientist.  But  let’s look at what he claims; but first in order to establish his bona fides,  his disclaimer:  he never  believed in near-death experience.  He was a “faithful Christian” but not a practicing one.  I think he means he was a believer but not really a “true believer.”

  He  contracted meningitis, fell into  a  coma for a week, and a good part of this thinking/aware  neo-cortex was shut  off.  “Then on the morning of the seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment,  my eyes popped open.  While  the neurons of  my cortex were stunned to  complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another dimension of the universe.”  He went to a place he never dreamed existed; sorry, I mean he went to a place that he dreamed existed.  This placed him in a “new  world.”  And I am sure that world is new to him: but not to me.  And not to me as a scientist who studies the deep unconscious.  I will need to explain.

As soon as our doctor had  his top level surgeon  brain  knocked  out he was like all of the rest of us: non-scientific schlubs  with no critical/judging cortex to help  understand our experience.  He was no longer scientist but someone who went through what our patients go through every day. The  difference is that our patients are able to connect their experience to higher level processes, where the doctor could not because there were no higher levels operating at the time.  I will have to explain better.  Our therapy is based on the three levels of consciousness, not as a theoretical abstraction but as a scientific therapy that has been heavily researched.  We take patients back to their childhood to relive and integrate childhood trauma, and even before to birth trauma and earlier events during womb-life, which  is neurologically possible.  These events operate  on different levels of consciousness where the deepest level is processed in brain structures that lie on the bottom part  the brain in the brainstem which handles our instincts, primitive experiences such as terror and fury, and imprints early events far below our ordinary levels  of  conscious/awareness.  And  that means far below the emotional experience of a surgeon whose whose life  is focused  on the here and now, not on his childhood and emotional trauma.

The top  level cortex is the thinking, comprehending analytic brain that understands experience, but we have experience without all that.  Look at the Alzheimer patient  who has  a pretty full life, albeit unconscious or unaware, who operates on below conscious/aware levels.  She can fall in love, care for  animals, take walks with someone she cares about and carry on minimal conversations, bereft of fancy abstractions.  She can have a life.  Well that is what  all of us have but beyond  that we have a deeper, brainstem life with  a  little bit of an emotional/limbic  system component that signifies a  life before words and even before the full  development  of our emotions.  I reiterate, those brain levels  exist in  all of us and have their  own operating system that dictates how we respond.    Unfortunately, few of us ever have a chance to go back  to visit  and relive  those experiences, except for our patients.  And what happens when they do?  The  imprinted experience on the brainstem sends its nerve shoots (brain pathways) to higher levels that in turn respond in their  own way.  The limbic area offers  emotions to the mix, and then at long  last  the cortex  enters the fray and adds is ideas and fantasies.  The final step  in our work is arriving  at  conscious/awareness; lower levels rising and  gathering up parts of each higher  level, finally recruiting  the neo-cortex to make sense of it  all.  It  unifies the entire experience into a specific meaning…  “They didn’t love me.”

  How do we know? Well we  have years of research behind us,  discussed in peer reviewed journals, but  also  in our therapy when patients descend  to deeper levels  they not only begin to feel deep sadness or pure  terror but  as  the  feelings expands the brainwaves also  mount, as does  the blood pressure  and body  temperature.  More important, when the feeling is unified there is a descent of key vital signs below starting baseline.  That signifies the beginning of  integration; and over months those vital  signs remain changed as the body changes.  We change all levels of consciousness not just the top level neo-cortex, as happens in cognitive therapy.

  We have seen patients approach these deep levels, after months of therapy, never right away, and begin their strange ideas……”I am in a washing machine that won’t stop and I don’t know how to  stop it.”  Or, “I  am  suffocating in a cave. There is no air and I cannot get out.”  These, in my experience, are derivatives of the birth experience (foreshortened here),  that first send up vague  but related ideas, the forerunner of the reliving experience.  It is very possible  in those who approach these experiences too soon  or who have take drugs to get there, that they will get stuck in the fantasy,  the dream sequence, and never arrive at  a connection.  Here is  where our surgeon enters.  Surgeons, and we have treated them, are notorious unfeeling  souls who  left their emotions far behind to be able  to  cut into our brains.  We get them in therapy after a stroke or from some exotic disease.  We get them when they have no other option.  They are the  last to believe  in feelings and the  emotional level.  I am not sure that if we are fully feeling we could take  a knife and cut  into someone’s brain.  But you know what they say, “a shrink is a doctor who cannot stand the sight of blood.”

  So what happens?  Experience on  deep brain levels are like the spokes of a wheel that  radiate upwards and forwards to inform high levels of it  all but without words or verbal  information.  We later put  words and fantasy images thanks to our  emotional levels and then we believe what we have “experienced.”  This only means that the person has stopped short of  connection  and has conflated or grown into a “cosmic consciousness” thanks to LSD, rebirthing and other nonsense.  He gets blocked on the emotional level, in this case, because the meningitis brain is not doing so well and cannot help out much.  And so later he really believes he has “been  to heaven,” which our previous LSDers believe after an acid trip.  We know  from research that the acid takers are flooded  with pain  as the  control mechanisms in the brain shut down with  the  drug.  Their pain of a lifetime surges forward into the top level.  Their  only recourse is to  manufacture another planet with the little cortex they have left.  And  they can construct someplace else where all is wonderful…..pink clouds  and softness,  and especially, where  death  is not only not so bad but a nice place to be—everyone’s dream of heaven.  If our doctor  had written that it was a  horrible experience  it would never be on the front page of Newsweek.    It doesn’t help that he is a scientist; in fact it hurts,  because he has less  expertise on feelings than most of  us have.  He is on another planet; that of surgeons.  He states that although his top level was out of commission his lower brain levels were alive and well. And they are but he never knew what lies on those levels.  It took us forty years to get down to those levels safely and  finally to understand the brain well  enough to know about those three  levels and how they make out our conscious/awareness.  We have been there and have  taken careful notes on our patients” experiences.  They go through pretty much the same thing; first emotional/dreamlike fantasies, (as the limbic system contributes) and later the concoction of elaborate  notions of heaven and new planets of existence thanks to the neo-cortex.  If you want to call that heaven that is fine but don’t give it the imprimature of science.  It is  fantasy pure and simple, even when offered by a “scientist.”  I have  found  that  the minute a scientist gets slightly out of his specialty he tends to talk nonsense.  And he stops being a specialist.  He  leaves off  where we begin.  We don’t dissect the brain  but we dissect what  the brain does with feelings.

  Our doctor  could not do that so he hears beautiful chants  and songs  of angels; by the way, if the top level was  completely shut  down where did  he  get the idea of angels?    He  now sees that we are one, unified beings, part of all the world.  And  then he says it gets  worse: he has  a companion through  it all, someone  young and beautiful,  riding  along  on the wings of  a butterfly.  You need a limbic system to have even an imagined companion, so clearly, higher brain levels were at work.  And  then without  any words a wind thrusts  through  him  and he heard,  “You are loved.  Cherished.  You have nothing to fear.    There is nothing  you can do wrong.”  All three  basic primal feelings that one  gets to in  our therapy over  time.  But it is not an idea; it is a feeling where patients beg, “Love  me just a little.  Say  I  am  good and not wrong,” etc.  Basic needs  that we all have  and need to experience.  It  needs connection which  is  liberating, something  our doctor never had; and needs for a real  experience.  Doctor, it is not the wind speaking; it is your father.

  Years ago there was a  similar book, also  a best seller, who had little men who looked like ET who  bundled off the author to a waiting  starship where they performed all kinds of booga booga on him.  It sounds crazy but no more crazy than riding  on pink clouds with  a beautiful “princess.”  It is all fantasy and does not  make heaven  any more real except for the true  believers.  It is all in the mind.  The doctor believes, “It as if I were being born into a larger  world,  and  the universe was like a giant  cosmic womb.”  Exactly.    A symbolic birth primal.  We have patients who have been on drugs or who are  very disturbed  who have  those feelings;  once they connect, it  all disappears.  But imagine me explain to the doctor that birth imprints stay in the brain  and direct part of our lives. And then tell him that we can  relive it all. He will surely think I am  the  crazy one.  He says that what he went through demands explanation.  Here I am.

  One part of the explanation is that as death nears  the whole system goes into alarm state.  There is secretion of endorphins  and serotonin as the system fights the  danger, and then it  is  over; or not.  If it is not over, the person may have felt the near-death  syndrome but he never went to heaven.  He touched on hell and that drove his brain to  fabulate heaven.  There have many studies on near death.  Usually it is when someone has fallen into a coma, comes out and imagines she died.  She didn’t.  But that doesn’t stop the notion that “I left my body and traveled to another planet.”  Let us not forget  that Wilder Penfield in Canada, decades ago put an electric probe on areas of the temporal lobe (of those undergoing surgery for epilepsy) and got delusions and hallucinations.  It so happened that the closer he got to the  actual memory site the more real the memory became.  All this means that we can get all  of these fantasies in a surgical setting in those not near death.  The minute that  we interfere with neurotransmitters we can get this effect, as well.  LSD affects serotonin turnover.  And this can result  in  disinhibition  which  then results  in delusions as repression  and inhibition falters.  In  short, we cannot believe what the cortex tells us  when lower brain levels is telling us something else.  But when the cortex offers goodies such  as gorgeous girls and heaven instead of death it can’t be beat.

If I were to take this doctor into therapy we would get to the real feelings eventually but then he couldn’t sell a million books.

More on the Critical Window

I have noted for decades now that there are  critical  windows when events have  their  major impact; windows that seem to open and close at specific biologic timeframes.  I have written about love and when it must happen. There is a new study just out that speaks more to the notion of the critical window.  It is found in Scientific American (Oct 1, 2012.  "The Story of a Lonely Brain."Read the Scientific American article here).  They start out the article  noting that we are social  animals, and when we cannot be social early on, we begin to suffer.    They use brain development as key example, demonstrating the difference between the evolution of our grey matter (the  thinking brain), and our white matter which lies below and has to do with connections between cells, and is  largely subcortical.  As white matter  becomes myelinated it develops into a  functioning cell that permits rapid  response where impulses travel at optimim speed. It is the fatty material that  covers  the cell that  allows it to become functional  spreading the message over long  distances  in the brain.  For some white matter the myelinization continues on into adulthood.    And we go on learning and evolving.    The authors point out that children who grew  up in orphanages had deficient myelin sheaths and  less  white  matter, which made learning more  difficult.  If they were soon put into a loving foster home  there was no such damage.  Their conclusion was that placement in foster homes when  early enough  and during a critical period avoided serious brain damage.  In short, they could "catch  up" neurologically.

  Part of what helps produce myelin are the oligodendrocytes.  Isolated,  non-social mice had stunted oligodendrocytes (OLIGOS) which were often  malformed and had fewer branches.  And worse, the nerve  cells connecting the right and left brains were fewer and thinner.  In other words, the ability to transmit emotional information from right to left brain is  diminished.  The  point of this was that mice that were isolated very early on had the greatest damage; those who isolated later on did not have this.  The damage had to be  during the critical  window.  That is when there is the greatest impact on the system.  Rhesus monkeys raised in  isolation had smaller sized corpus callosum.  They also had great learning difficulties.  All this to say what should be clear by now: that there is a critical period when love can have its maximum and  longest  duration; any love outside that period will have much less of an impact.  This is what they found with myelin sheaths that signal the readiness of a cell to fire.  If the mice were isolated outside the critical period, there is minimal impact.

  So to sum up: mice who were deprived of social contact  during a critical window had  lifelong damage  and learning problems.  So why don't they do good at school when they are fifteen? Maybe we should  look at much earlier times.

Childhood Trauma and Adult Behavior

There is a study done by Kaiser Medical on 17,000 subjects (See for example http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/pdf/childhood_stress.pdf). They tested them on childhood trauma, parents in prison, divorce, parental abuse, etc.  They gave them each an ACE* score: no trauma was zero and it went up from there, depending on how much trauma there was in childhood.  Those with an ACE score of four were 6 times more likely to have sex before age 15, twice as likely to develop cancer and emphysema, more likely to be alcoholics (seven times more likely); while those with a score of six were 30 times more likely to have tried suicide.  Those with zero scores had very little learning problems or trouble in school.  When the scores are four or higher school problems begin.  In short, trauma in childhood  does bad things to adult life, something that probably is a given for most of us.

    But wait! That did not include womb-life where  major imprints and dislocation of function occur.  Where the memories are more deeply embedded, where almost irreversible  damage happens and where  the greatest impact on the brain  occurs.  In other words, the study has ignored the most crucial time of our lives where the crucible  for most later behavior and physical symptoms get their start. For example, it is more likely that the seeds for later  cancer are there, in the  early part of our lives while being carried; then later life  trauma, the  obvious kind, (a parent in prison) are observed and are added to the pathological mix.

    As the brain begins its incredibly rapid development while we are being carried, trauma in this time period is of utmost important.  And this means that any proper treatment means going back to address those traumas and undo their impact. We are not simply victims of that abuse we are responders who can  gain control of  the trauma and surmount it.  It means being exposed again to that very same trauma, feeling  its pain and thereby lessening the impact.  It breaks open the repression and  allows for  full  feeling.  It means undoing the damage.  I have written how this can be done in my "Life Before Birth". It can be done.  We do it and measure the results. One  result is the reduction  of the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. As stress comes down, immune function increases.  It also means that as we experience the early traumas fully, we are under far less stress.  These are measurable outcomes.

  The implications of all this are, among other things, difficulty in concentrating  and studying, and the inability  to sustain paying attention. It means later learning  problems.

   I would have thought that economic factors are important here, but evidently not as important as we might imagine. A loving family is what counts most.

   A carrying  mother who takes drugs,  drinks  alcohol, is highly anxious and/or depressed is starting  serious damage for the child.  So  this study just confirms the primal viewpoint which has been made public for over forty years.


*Adverse Childhood Experiences