Second path: sudden, sometimes even momentary, when an entire worldview changes under the influence of a strong external factor. Among those factors, clinical death holds first place. Everyone who has survived it returns to this world a completely different person. We affirm this not only because hundreds of such cases are described in the books of world famous doctor Raymond Moody, but also on the basis of personal experience of one of the authors of this book, who has survived clinical death twice.
The other factors are often heavy trauma as in the case of the Bulgarian clairvoyant Baba Vanga, immersion in regressive hypnosis or a lightning strike. At times a book can serve as such a strike of lightning, when “the roof flies off” and opens up a whole new view of the world and oneself. Admittedly, this is an extremely rare occurrence.
Gradual change of conceptions, without lightning and clinical death, can be traced through a simple example. Consider yourself right now to be not just a reader, but a participant in an experiment on transformation of consciousness.
Let’s imagine you heard that a person can live without his or her brain. Would you immediately agree with this assertion?
If you responded “yes,” the next question is “why?” and then you would need to present arguments supporting this point of view. And if you have such arguments, it means that you received them somewhere at an earlier time: heard them, read them, saw them in a pop-science film, etc.
If you never before encountered this question, you would have two more or less likely variations of answer. The first: “I am not aware of the topic, and as such I can neither confirm nor deny this.” The second, skeptical, would sound like this: “What stupidity! That’s just impossible!”
We now propose to step by step acquaint ourselves with the following information:
• In 1336 in Germany under King Ludwig the Bavarian, at the execution of Ditz von Shaunburg, the following incident took place. Ditz, being condemned for revolt, received the king’s word that he would pardon four rank and file soldiers in the mutiny if he (Shaunburg) could (after execution) run, without his head, past these four warriors, who were placed in a row eight steps away. The king was forced to uphold his word, which he gave to the condemned man before everyone, when Ditz von Shaunburg really did run past all four lance knights who were standing eight steps away.
Please, stop for a minute and think about your attitude towards the story described. Once you’ve formed an opinion, read on:
• In the review of Dr. Robinson at the French Academy of Sciences is described an even more unique incident. An elderly man in his sixties was wounded in the Parietal lobe by the sharp end of a skewer. This led to slight bleeding. For the length of a month the wounded man seemed fine. He then began to complain of poor vision, but felt no pain. A short time later the afflicted man unexpectedly died with signs of epilepsy. Autopsy revealed that the deceased had no brain. There was preserved only a thin shell of brain matter containing a putrid decomposed substance. For almost a month the man lived with practically no brain.
Again, pause and reconsider the question: how do you react to this? If you reach the conclusion that these are merely historical anecdotes and do not convince you of anything, then there are other, more modern stories. For example, this one:
• In 1935 at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York a child was born lacking a brain (absence of a brain at birth is called anencephaly). Nevertheless, in spite of all medical conceptions, the child lived, ate, and cried like all newborns over the course of 27 days. Furthermore, the child’s behavior was completely normal, as affirmed by eyewitnesses, and nobody even suspected that he had no brain until the autopsy.
Getting “warmer”? Or you still don’t believe like before? Then read on:
• In 1940 Doctor Augustine Iturricha made a sensational announcement to the Anthropological Society in Sucre (Bolivia) and presented his colleagues with a dilemma that even today remains unanswered. He and Doctor Nicholas Ortiz had long studied the illness of a fourteen year old boy who was a patient at Doctor Ortiz’s clinic. The adolescent ended up there because of a diagnosis that he had a tumor in his brain. The youth was fully in command of his reason and retained consciousness until the very end, complaining only of a headache. When pathologists performed the autopsy they were amazed. The entire brain mass had been separated from the internal cavity of the braincase. A large abscess had taken hold of the cerebellum and part of the brain. The question arose, what was this child thinking with? But the riddle that Ortiz and Iturricha came across was not as mind-bending as that which the famous German brain specialist Hufeland became acquainted with. He completely reconsidered all his earlier views after the autopsy of the braincase of a man who was stricken by paralysis. The sick man retained all his mental and physical abilities until the last minute. The results of the trephination were stupefying: in place of a brain the braincase of the deceased contained a little over 300 grams of water.
• In 2002 a little girl from Holland survived an intensive operation in response to a neurological infection (the diagnosis was Rasmussen’s encephalitis). They removed the left hemisphere of her brain, where the speech center is to this day thought to be located. Today this child astounds doctors with the fact that she has mastered two languages and is studying a third. The girl talks with her sister in perfect (for her age) Dutch, and communicates with her mother in Turkish. Doctor Johannes Borgstein, observing the little Dutchwoman, says that he has already advised his students to forget all the neurophysiological theories that they are studying and will study.
If these facts are too little for you, take a look into the authoritative scientific journal Nature; issues 415—420 from 2002 contain many similarly interesting materials.
In the preceding chapter we already mentioned Nobel laureate John Carew Eccles’s statement about the mind. We’ll now add to that the opinion of the great scientist and surgeon Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky (1877—1961), who is also known as Luka, Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. In his book Spirit, Soul and Body he asserts that “by its very construction the brain shows that its function is the transformation of outside stimuli into a well chosen reaction… The nervous system and the brain in particular, are not the apparatus of pure conception and cognition, but simply instruments designed for action.”
But even if the brain is absent, outside signals can be received by other organs. We earlier employed the example of how the beheaded Ditz von Shaunburg ran more than 20 meters. In Voyno-Yasenetsky’s book there is another example: “If a beheaded frog’s skin is irritated, it will take appropriate action directed at removing the irritation, and if it is prolonged, the frog will turn to flight and hop just as if it were not beheaded. In the wars of ants, which have no brain, there is clearly revealed premeditation and, accordingly, rationality, which in no way differs from that of a human being”.
Having studied a large collection of materials regarding the brain, we saw that in the last two decades science has definitively admitted the fact that the brain does not think and that mental functions are located beyond its boundaries.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (544—483 B.C.) knew this 2,500 years ago; he said “The power of thinking is outside the body.”
Now tell us honestly, has your conception about the functions of the mind changed after reading these past four pages? We’ll honestly say that when we ourselves first encountered such facts we reacted to them with amazement bordering on aversion. Our belief system didn’t allow for the possibility of existence without a brain, even for a short time. But through the accumulation of information (of which only a small part was presented here) our views underwent a gradual change, which led to full acceptance of the fact, which is now a part of our belief system. And if someone were now to try returning us to our previous beliefs, this would prove to be impossible. We don’t simply believe in the possibility of life without a brain, we now know that this is so. Our