The fruit of the tree of life.

Does consciousness depend on the brain?

I watched a video of Dr Margaret Ashford, an American neurosurgeon, speaking about when she “flatlined”; her heart stopped for 6 minutes during open-heart surgery and they fought for 5 minutes to restart it. During that time, she experienced immense consciousness.

For 40 years she had strictly adhered to the belief that consciousness was a product of certain electronic stimulations of nerves and physical elements in the brain. She had been able to stimulate reactions by triggering them and had worked to repair brain functions. She was totally convinced that we are machines who produce consciousness, and this ceases when the machine inevitably wears out. She had dismissed talk of spiritual things as “soul language”, which she explained as a reaction of people who were too scared to face their own inevitable extinction, something she said she had been reconciled to quite peacefully for a long time.

All that changed when she experienced amazing consciousness while her brain was without oxygen and non-functioning. She described it as not being limited by ideas and reasoning processes, but as a sort of universal knowing, being within and connected to something which was the ultimate cause of her being, while being conscious of every other conscious being. Now she knows that her previous materialistic view is entirely inadequate.

What struck me was her sense that this was what knowing is really like. But when you compare it to the knowing experienced by the many others who have had near-death experiences, they are hugely varied. Some speak of it as a journey. I believe that her experience was a momentary glimpse of something, which was only a beginning, and that she could easily jump to some very strange conclusions, based only on that brief experience. For example, I did not hear her talk of using her will, which is fundamental to personal activity.

There are religions which speak of being lifted into universal consciousness as the goal of all spiritual searching. Some of these add a belief in reincarnation as the path each individual must take in order to attain it. That seems very odd to members of the three religions which believe in one God, Jews, Muslims and Christians.

While the Jews and Muslims speak of God as an infinite, ultimately un-comprehensible being who is the first cause of all reality, and who will always be separate from humanity, we Christians believe that God has entered our material world in order to lift us into the godhead itself.

What is the material world for?

This raises the radical question: what is this material world for? Is it to end up as a sort of paradise where all that is good and pleasant in our earthly existence is emptied of evil and lifted into intense permanent joy? That is what we tell children, and suicide bombers believe it. Is it us human beings freed from material existence and becoming pure consciousness like Gnostics believe? Or is it a marriage of the spiritual and the material, where all is new and complete? That is what we Christians believe.

Yes, we are on a journey. Fundamentally, it is a mystery that we are journeying into, a mystery too vast for us to know comprehensively, but a mystery to be explored with all the faculties we have, a mystery which we need to envisage by piecing together as well as we can the information given to us in revelation.

What God has told us?

The gradual revelation of God’s self to humanity became complete when the Son of God became human. The information about this process is available in the Sacred Scriptures, and the Spirit-led communal reflections on them over centuries by faithful seekers of truth.

At the beginning of Scripture we are given the tale of Eden, a story not of historical accuracy, but one that God selected as the best vehicle for us to understand the creation and our own beginnings.

It talks of there being two trees at the centre of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. These bore fruit which the first human being were forbidden to eat. Against God’s will, they chose to taste the knowledge of good and evil, and set off on a course away from God, strewn with disasters.

They were expelled from Eden and an angel with a sword of fire stood at the threshold to prevent them entering, particularly to prevent them accessing the Tree of Life. One of the deepest longings of our hearts is to access that tree of everlasting life and eat its fruit. We dread death and dream of achieving long life, even permanent life - cryogenics offers body-freezing for about $100,000; they will wake you up when they discover a cure for the sickness that caused your death.

The Scriptures go on to explain that God did not desert us and that he set in process the course whereby he would lead us to a turning point where we would eventually be able to eat of the Tree of Life.

That tree was planted on the hill of Calvary two thousand years ago, and its fruit is God-become-man, Jesus Christ.

I thought I heard him say today – he was speaking as a carpenter- “I never loved wood more than this wood of the cross”. And I glimpsed for a moment that he is still there glorified, though still suffering in his mystical body the Church until all is complete.

I saw that the blood and water flowing from his pierced heart was not only physical but really and mystically the baptismal fountain gradually engulfing and cleansing the whole human race and all of material creation, and that the body and blood is really and mystically the food for humanity during the long process of ascent into glory.

I saw that the mystical is real. It is the spiritual, centred in and emanating from divinity, which is pressing down upon the earth in order to penetrate all humanity and all creation with love, and to bring us away from subjection to a mixture of good and evil to being totally enveloped by good.