the Beyond, such as heaven and hell, have been relegated to the realm of fairy tales and handbooks of psychiatry. The entire spiritual history of humanity has been pathologized. At the cradle of all the great religions of the world were transpersonal experiences of their founders, prophets, and saints. We can think here, for example, about Buddha’s encounter with Kama Mara and his army or his reliving of various episodes from his past incarnations accompanied by “tearing of the karmic bonds”. The Old Testament describes Moses’ vision of Jehova in the burning bush and the New Testament Jesus’ temptation by the devil during his stay in the desert. Islamic scriptures portray the journey of Muhammad through the seven heavens, paradise, and hell in the company of archangel Gabriel. According to traditional psychiatry, all these experiences are indicative of severe psychopathology, mental disease of the individuals involved. Psychiatric literature abounds in articles and books discussing what would be the best clinical diagnosis for various famous spiritual figures, some of them of the stature of the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Ramakrishna, or Saint Anthony. Visionary experiences of the transpersonal realms are usually attributed to severe psychosis of the schizophrenic type or to epilepsy, as it is in the case of Muhammad. Saint John of the Cross has been labeled “hereditary degenerate” and Saint Teresa of Avila a “hysterical psychotic”. Mainstream anthropologists have argued whether shamans are psychotics, hysterics, or epileptics. There is even a paper applying psychopathological criteria to meditation. It is entitled “Buddhist Training as Artificial Catatonia”, and its author is the famous psychoanalyst and founder of psychosomatic medicine Franz Alexander (Alexander 1931). According to Western neuroscience, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, a product of the physiological processes in the brain, and thus critically dependent on the body. The death of the body, particularly of the brain, is then seen as the absolute end of any form of conscious activity. Belief in the posthumous journey of the soul, afterlife, or reincarnation is usually ridiculed as a product of wishful thinking of people who are unable to accept the obvious biological imperative of death, the absolute nature of which has been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Very few people, including most scientists, realize that we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced by the brain and not even a remote notion how something like that could possibly happen. In spite of it, this basic metaphysical assumption remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science and has profound influence on our entire society. This attitude has effectively inhibited scientific interest in the experiences of dying patients and of individuals in near-death situations until the 1970s. The rare reports on this subject received very little attention, whether they came in the form of books for general public, such as Jess E. Weisse’s The Vestibule (Weisse 1972) and Jean-Baptiste Delacour’s Glimpses of the Beyond (Delacour 1974), or scientific research, such as the study of death-bed observations of physicians and nurses conducted by Karlis Osis (Osis 1961). Since the publication of Raymond Moody’s internationSpirituality Studies 1 (2) Fall 2015 5 (3)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=