A Fictional Thought Exercise
What Would Need to be True About the World for us to Renounce Violence?
The attack on concertgoers in Moscow has left me – as it has millions the world over - not just appalled at the toll of dead, wounded and traumatised but wondering how, as a species – in the third decade of the Third Millennium – we can inflict such suffering on one another … and the depths to which leaders of multiple stripes will sink to exploit acts like this.
Because with an inevitability you could hang your hat on, President Vladimir Putin linked Ukraine to this appalling event - even though the claim stretched credulity to the max.
In a piece of plotting that would test the mind of any thriller-writer (it certainly did this one’s), Putin announced on television (24 hours after the attack – time enough, presumably, to work through the suspend-your-disbelief plot mechanics) that Ukraine had granted safe passage across its border to the gunmen suspected of carrying out the attack - sanctuary that was denied to them thanks to the swift action of the Russian security services.
The attack, and Putin’s response, coming on the back of a period of seeming war-without-end that has been with us for decades, has led me to wonder what it would take – in consciousness terms – for us to abandon this aspect of our nature – the side that says it’s OK to maim and murder for what a state or non-state actor seeks to persuade its people is a ‘justifiable cause’, whether it’s killing innocents at a concert or invading another country.
Five years ago, I wrote a thriller called The Grid that posed this same question – and, in that plot, which was utterly fictional, Putin figured eminence grise-like in its background as well.
The Grid emerged out of years of research I had been doing into consciousness – the theme that underwrites my new non-fiction book, The Light Beyond The Mountains, which I’m serialising here on Substack.
The Grid postulates that a state actor – I won’t reveal who – has developed technology that can hack into the substrate of reality.
The Grid (the eponymous system of the book’s title) sees and knows everything – think of the Ultra decrypts that allowed British intelligence to read all Germany’s most secret codes during World War 2, then add steroids and you have the gist of the system’s capabilities.
Outlandish? Maybe. But the underlying theme of The Grid, I hope, is more nuanced: might science one day be able to unravel the physics (if that’s right word) of consciousness and reality? And, if it can, how might knowing about the science of them change our behaviour?
I mean, if I know that my consciousness persists after I die, because it has been proven scientifically – how might such knowledge change my actions in life? Would it at all? Particularly, if it were revealed that the substrate – being a field (of information, or consciousness, or whatever) – turned out to be non-judgmental, meaning your actions would carry consequences, but wouldn’t necessarily send you to Heaven or Hell? Of course, these questions are fundamental to religious belief, but religion is an article of faith. In my thought exercise triggered by The Grid’s research, God becomes a proven scientific fact.
I raise all this and pose the questions here because they’re not entirely academic - in the testimony of near-death experiencers the issue and the questions crop up again and again.
I’m going to quote extensively here from the essay of Elizabeth Krohn, a runner-up prize-winner in Robert Bigelow’s $1.8 million essay contest that launched his Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies endeavour in 2021 (full disclosure: I got an ‘honourable mention’ in the contest and Elizabeth and I were, for a while, colleagues on the BICS board of directors).
In a section of the essay (on p.49) headed ‘What We Do Here Matters … A Lot’, Elizabeth, who had her NDE in 1988 after she was struck by lightning, writes: ‘One of the clear messages I received in the afterlife was that our actions and thoughts in life will play a role in our afterlife. I learned that we personally have a hand in determining what type of afterlife experience we will have.
‘I learned in the Garden (ed: so-called because it was a particularly beautiful part of her NDE, even though it was ‘unlike any garden on Earth’) that the core of a person – the soul – survives. A handicapped person, a sick person, or a person suffering from a mental illness in life becomes a soul without limitations in the afterlife since they have shed their physical body. We are all equally whole there.’
‘However, what we do here matters greatly in determining what our afterlife will look like. It has to do with an individual’s expectations, actions, and thoughts. It was surprising to me to learn that my thoughts here played a role in my afterlife. If a person has led a good, loving, clean life in which they helped others, then that person knows at a soul level that they are good.’
And a sentence or two further on, she says: ‘A person who knows they have led a good life will expect Heaven to be beautiful.’ And her final word: ‘Fortunately, since in this dimension we are all flawed humans, God is benevolent and forgiving. It is through a combination of God’s love, our own thoughts and actions in life, and our own expectations, that our afterlife is shaped and becomes a uniquely personalized experience for each of us.’
To paraphrase, then, that great line in Gladiator, ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity’, is repeated here - and by other NDE’ers: our actions and thoughts in life, they tell us, matter.
Whilst this may not be seen yet (or ever) as science, it does in my book (metaphorically speaking) constitute data that deserves our attention, because it is a recurring theme amongst those who bring their near-death experiences back.
Science presently excludes subjective data from evidence that counts in the laboratory – but for how long?
And why does science have to be the arbiter of what counts?
NDE testimony appears to be remarkably veridical – in that, NDE’ers, by most yardsticks of an evidential test, know things from their experiences they couldn’t possibly have derived from their five senses, but which match the facts as they exist in our three-slash-four-dimensional world.
A view of a part of an operating theatre that couldn’t possibly be seen from an operating table, for example, or maybe an inaccessible, unviewable exterior part of the hospital in which they have had their experience (for which read the ‘case of Maria and the shoe’ on p.49 of my own BICS essay).
So, to bring this back to the tragic events of this week – or, for that matter, the self-serving actions and decisions taken by any leader – political, terrorist or otherwise – that inflict suffering on others in the name of a ‘cause’, would it make a difference? Would it deter them if they knew – because it could be shown by data – that what we do here matters?
As a thought exercise, it makes me wonder … a lot.
I’d be interested to know what you think too.
Hello Nick, what comes to mind is the fact our culture has no framework to hang these horrific episodes on that allows for such a conversation. Except, perhaps, in places like this. The closest I can think of are the karmic reincarnation traditions, eg the Hindu faith.
Hi Nick, I suspect that many of these so-called leaders have such a deeply rooted, narcissistic, god-like complex that it wouldn’t occur to them to…
Extends to some business leaders too.
Darwinian, possibly…? In which case we’ve only got ourselves to blame ;-)
As we both like a spot of pop culture, how about this:
“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”