It's Good To Be Back

And What The Guardian Had to Say in my Absence About NDEs

After seven weeks of BICS essay posts, I’m back with ‘live copy’. Thank you for bearing with me while I’ve been gone.

In my absence, I’ve had a chance to review The Light Beyond The Mountains as it’s been posted thus far. I wanted to see how it stitches together narratively – whether, across the ‘long read’, it holds together as the book I’d first held in mind; and, I’m delighted to say, from my point of view, it does.

For paid subscribers, The Light will revert to ‘live’ next week with all-new chapters – well, almost new.

As you’ll know from my previous posts, the thought of writing a book at the outset ‘on the hoof’, with no prospect of retro-active editing, was one that seemed beyond daunting.

Nine months on, it’s one of the aspects of the project that I relish.

God knows how Dickens did it longhand (he posted his chapters in weekly, sometimes monthly instalments) – the serialisation aspect of his work is but one factor in his rightful reputation as one of the greatest storytellers in the English language. But I’m blessed with one asset Dickens didn’t have: interactive readers.

What I’d not bargained on at the beginning was the level of interaction I’d get, which has been extraordinary – and, to a degree, has helped to shape aspects of the narrative that follow.

Back to what I mean by ‘almost new’.

In reviewing the book during the summer, the one thing I could see I’d need to do was redraft the seven BICS chapters I’ve posted into an edit that would match the narrative flow of The Light’s previous 14 chapters.

The style of an essay is very different from that of a book – and those seven BICS instalments were nagging at me until around a month ago when I decided to rewrite them.

These aren’t just edits, however. In recrafting them, I’ve added new information – information I either didn’t have at the time I wrote the essay, or which wasn’t appropriate to the essay format. If we view the essay as the book’s mid-point (which it is approximately), in a very real sense, the new material within the two chapters that follow (next week and a fortnight later) links its two halves.

I’ll be interested to know what you think.

From hereon in, there will be a noticeably different pace to the book. Pacing is a very deliberate thing across all my storytelling. Please bear in mind (as I know paid subscribers do) that this isn’t a book just for the initiated – it’s also designed to be read by people who come to the consciousness subject cold.

And there’s a great deal to absorb – I know, because I had to when I was confronted in the most direct way by my wife’s shared death experience a decade ago – an event I discuss in both the essay and Chapter 9.

There is evidence as the world becomes more uncertain that a popular shift is underway in the way in which we examine (or are forced to examine) aspects of our, quotes, ‘everyday reality’ – a perspective that challenges the reigning materialist/reductionist paradigm and mainstream science’s largely self-appointed role as sole arbiter of the truth.

But there is, clearly, a way to go before the phenomenon of consciousness – and its outlying anomalies – is accorded the same privilege.

I came across a really good example of this a few weeks back in The Guardian, which had posted a very interesting perspective on near-death experience studies. The article details the work of Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, who has conducted serious research into NDEs.

The piece, for the most part, is balanced and well-written. It even talks about the difficulty Borjigin has had in gaining funding because of the paranormal stigma associated with NDEs in academic research circles.

And then, right at the end, it reverts to language that undoes all that impartiality by denigrating ‘sundry kooks and grifters’ who ‘busily peddle their tales of the afterlife’.

I’m not saying there aren’t kooks and grifters who do this – there are kooks and grifters in all walks of life (and death. even) – but it gives the impression that anything to do with the NDE phenomenon outside of academia – including the experiences of NDE’ers themselves – is worthless. Beyond worthless, actually. The implicit accusation is that, unless the data has been gathered in a lab (or a hospital or a clinic), it is all just a big con tied into what the writer describes as a ‘pipeline of money’ from the ‘gullible armchairs of daytime talk shows.’

My mantra, as readers of The Light Beyond The Mountains know, is that consciousness and its anomalies are underpinned by data – it’s just data mainstream science doesn’t wholly (or even partially) accept yet.

In my BICS essay, as those of you who’ve read it will also know, I talk about a court of law principle in which evidence is allowed to speak for itself and to be judged, in effect, by a jury. If it is allowed to be treated in this way, what people will find is that there is a signal in the data that can be heard through the noise. Listen to the signal and what you find is what I call ‘intersubjective evidence’ that speaks to something rather extraordinary: the strong suggestion, at the very least, that what we accept as our 3D/4D reality is merely a convenient interface that has allowed us to navigate the world up to this point.

But if the world is changing, as it appears to be, then maybe it’s because the interface of our perception is changing too. For more on this, read Chapter 12 of The Light …

In short, it’s good to be back and to have picked up a large number of paid and free subscribers in the interim.

Thank you and welcome.

I look forward to seeing paid subscribers in my next regular webinar at the end of this week.