What happens when we die? How can we explain that when the brain shuts down, some people are able to leave their body and give detailed descriptions of scenes they did not witness? Stéphane Allix, former war reporter, published on October 4 the results of fifteen years of investigation in Death does not exist (Harper Collins). It attempts to scientifically understand the unexplained phenomena that accompany death (near-death experience, extrasensory perceptions, etc.).
He comes back for 20 minutes on these fifteen years of research which led him to the Amazon where he experienced ayahuasca (a hallucinogenic drug), accompanied by a shaman, to try to approach his brother, who died years earlier . According to him, consciousness is not limited to the brain.
You title “Death does not exist”. If this is true, what happens when we die?
Death in our society equals the end. We die, it is understood, consciousness is finished. When you look at the different experiences that are reported by millions of people like near-death experiences or all the ones that I list in the book, they show, if I summarize to the extreme, that consciousness does not die with extinction of brain activity. People in cardiac arrest as part of a near-death experience continue to be conscious. They even describe more intense conscious experiences than those that you and I can have at this moment. And this, at times when the brain is either at a standstill, during a cardiac arrest, or in serious dysfunction, during a coma, for example.
Isn’t it just a chemical reaction of the brain when it’s close to shutting down?
Faced with these testimonies, my first reflex is to go see scientists, neuropsychologists and ask them: could these phenomena be produced by mechanisms that we do not know in the brain, a posteriori reconstructions of an experience? ? I went to question all the researchers like the neuroscientist Steven Laureys who directs the Coma Science Group. He searches in this direction without being able to demonstrate that this or that mechanism is at the origin of these experiences.
In your book, the researchers explain that the field of near-death experiences has not been sufficiently explored by science. Are we not facing a limit of knowledge?
We have a limit on tools for observing activity in the brain. Even MRI is extremely crude compared to the colossal wealth of brain activity. This does not prevent us from seeing that these experiences occur at times when they should not be able to occur. Medical studies have monitored brain activity during cardiac arrest. We know that after 20 seconds of cardiac arrest, the brain is completely shut down, there is no longer any activity.
Our consciousness has a fundamental dimension that appears to be unaffected by brain death.
If science does not have enough observation tools, perhaps we do not see what happens when we believe the brain has stopped…
The question you highlight is: “could a residual, non-detectable activity be at the origin of these experiences? » This hypothesis is invalidated by the fact that people are capable of accounting for perceptions that cannot even be explained with a properly functioning brain. For example, out-of-body experiences during a near-death experience. Let’s say a person has a near-death experience on Place de la République. She is able to describe an accident scene involving a yellow car on the Place de la Bastille, several kilometers away. When we check, there was indeed an accident involving a yellow car at the same time on the Place de la Bastille. We can explore the idea that it is a reaction of the brain, but this explanation ignores exits outside the body. The only alternative is to say: the witnesses were wrong or their information is not accurate. I met the witnesses and the medical teams involved. The testimonies are very precise. It would be quite a coincidence that I described an accident with a yellow car and that such an accident actually happened at the same time. Yet this is what we find in accounts of near-death experiences. This remains inexplicable even with a brain that functions normally, unless we consider that part of our consciousness is capable of perceiving things independent of time and space. This is what I develop in other types of experiences such as remote viewing [la vision à distance].
Can you explain the remote viewing ?
It is an extrasensory perception technique that allows us to collect information. With the remote viewing, you are able to see what is happening at Place de la Bastille, as in the example of the accident. These procedures were used by American intelligence to capture information that traditional intelligence was not capable of obtaining. Here again, we are not in a fantasy or a delusion, this technique has been the subject of evaluations by the CIA. We act as if belief had a say in this area. These themes can go beyond the field of belief. We can analyze these testimonies with discernment and rationality. We take the stories of 100 witnesses, we cross-reference the information, we see if they are detailed, precise. This is investigative work.
After fifteen years of investigation, what is your conviction about death?
We now have enough evidence to prove that consciousness is not limited to the activity of our brain. Something is going on. Our consciousness has a fundamental dimension that appears to be unaffected by brain death. This is an observation. What happens next? Once we approach this question, it is much more difficult to have truly objective information.
The bond that exists between my father and me today is paradoxically more intense and more nourishing than the relationship we could have had during our lifetime”
You also seem to want to prove that consciousness exists, does that reassure you?
I started investigating the subject after the death of my brother, which made me a thousand times more demanding than if I had worked on this subject dispassionately. As a journalist, I try to detach myself from my subjectivity. My desire that my brother was still alive somewhere was more of a feeling that I constantly fought against, so as not to let myself get caught up in a belief. I am not going to provide definitive proof that there is life after death. In this book, I simply echo a community of scientists for whom the hypothesis is sufficiently supported to be accepted. Steven Laureys, whom I quote in the book, is one of the people who refute this hypothesis. For him, we don’t yet have enough elements.
Can you tell me how you would describe consciousness?
Consciousness is a mystery. Whether it’s philosophers or neuroscientists, we don’t know what we’re talking about. For me, it is our ability to perceive our environment. It characterizes our inner experience but it has many different depths and levels. We realize that, in certain particular states, it is capable of perceptions that our brain would not make possible. It has a dimension that escapes time and space. It is not circumscribed and restricted by our body. Something in us can perceive beyond our eyes, beyond our memory, beyond our brain activity. Is it a soul? “Soul” has a strong spiritual and religious connotation but I use it because I think it is also a phenomenological reality that can be demonstrated.
Before carrying out your investigation, were you afraid of death?
I was indifferent to it. The fear came when my daughter was born, linked to the pain that my death could cause in those close to me. Maybe in my shamanic experiences, at first, I struggle because I’m terrified. I begin to experience the dissolution of my ego which I believe to be the entirety of my being and when it begins to die, it’s completely scary. Research shows that we are not cut off from the rest of the world, we are not cut off from others. This world of the dead is perhaps much more invasive than we imagine. It is an illusion to believe that we are entities enclosed by armor. The bond that exists between my father and me or between my brother and me today is paradoxically more intense and more nourishing than the relationship we could have had during our lifetime. It was, in a way, constrained by the human nature of our bodies. At key moments, I feel the presence of their love and accept that it is a subjective and improbable experience. I have gained enough discernment to be sure it’s not just in my head.