research & reviews IN THIS SECTION: From 2009 we have enjoyed the book reviews originally presented in the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter. We now include these reviews in a section devoted also to research. It is active, contemporary research which makes anthroposophy distinct from what are generally called “spiritual paths.” Whether there is any mind or spirit which can be distinguished from the physical organism of a human being is a question of the greatest importance. We inaugurate this section with Walter Alexander’s review of a physician’s book which makes the reality of that distinction inescapable. An advance report of Dr. Peter Selg’s threevolume biography of Rudolf Steiner follows, and then a review of an important new book on “biography work” as such, a field which anthroposophy seeks to strengthen. Finally there is a review of a wide-ranging book of cultural studies by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon— which finds the free and active human spirit at work in all human affairs. 38 •
being human
A View from the Ceiling A review by Walter Alexander Erasing Death by Sam Parnia, MD, (HarperOne, 2013). The patient may hear the medical team pronouncing her/his own demise, may see the doctors and nurses working frantically to restart the stalled heart, reactivate the flatlined brain. The view is from above, looking down onto the tops of heads. The experience may be of being tenuously tethered to the body below, may include encounters with luminous, wise and loving beings, dead relatives, peace, joy, life review, tunnels with lights at the end, a sense of a barrier beyond which return to their body is impossible and a sense that the time to go there is not yet. Among various published studies of such near-death experiences (NDEs), the stories are remarkably similar in their features regardless of the cultures and traditions of those having them, and generally quite independent of their prior religious and philosophical leanings. Generally, as well, they share features consistent with Rudolf Steiner’s descriptions of the period soon after death, with a spatially spread out life review and the presence of a guiding being. Two remarkable books authored by physicians have been published in the last two years (Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, [2012, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks]; Sam Parnia’s Erasing Death, 2013) on this important topic. In the former, Dr. Alexander, a neurosurgeon, survived a week-long meningitisinduced flatline coma. He recounts his out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during that period, calling them “realer than real.” Dr. Parnia, while not reporting his own personal experience, has impressive credentials supporting his authority to go public with his views. Beyond his MD and PhD (in cell biology), his fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of London and the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, he is director of Resuscitation Research at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, New York, and directs international studies focusing on the quality of brain resuscitation and on the cognitive processes that occur during cardiac arrest. Add in a list of publications in leading scientific and medical peer-reviewed journals. Erasing Death clearly and engagingly addresses two “cutting edge” issues: the expanding stretch of time during which it is possible to bring cardiac arrest patients back to life without permanent brain damage and the conventional scientific paradigm-challenging catalogue of NDEs.
The advancing science of resuscitation Dr. Parnia’s job and intent regarding the first of these pertains not to death, but to the history of advances in resuscitation research and know-how. For the first part, the opening story goes like this: A man had the good fortune of suffering a cardiac arrest in a hospital when a specially trained resuscitation team was on duty (thank God not a July weekend when the new interns have just arrived!). CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation), defibrillators (shock-delivering machines for restarting and correcting faulty heart rhythms), bags of ice and injections of chilled saline for reducing body temperature to ranges where destructive cellular breakdown processes are slowed, and injections of adrenaline were all brought to bear. Ten minutes of chest compressions passed without a heartbeat and medical staff hope waned. Conventional wisdom had long been that ten minutes was a dividing line after which oxygen deprivation led