ABSTRACT
In the concluding chapter of Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience (2003), Mark Fox observes that ‘twenty-five years after the coining of the actual phrase “near-death experience”, it remains to be established beyond doubt that during such an experience anything leaves the body’ (ibid.: 340). One of the reasons for the continuing uncertainty could be that the research directions taken so far have been epistemologically insufficient to handle the complex nature of the experience. We may wonder: ‘Has something important been left out of the discussion?’ As a contribution to this field of enquiry, I would now like to put forward a set of observations to support a theory of embodiment. I shall attempt to open the door to a new perspective on the NDE, one designed to bring out the non-dualistic, non-reductionist nature of the experience. For you to fully appreciate this new view, I invite you to suspend for a moment any knowledge or beliefs you may have about the near-death experience. The discussion will be strongly influenced by an Asian, more specifically, a Japanese, theory of mind-body, which rejects any kind of dualism. As we have seen, essential to this approach is the view that bodily activities are primarily considered in terms of space (basho) rather than time. In some ways, this viewpoint contradicts a common Western notion of embodiment in which ‘time’ (mind) is primary and ‘space’ (body) is secondary (Yuasa 1993). Watsuji (1978) called the characteristic of spatial or environmental relatedness a state of ‘between-ness’ (aidagara), which he considered to be the foundation of our being. The relevance of this approach is validated by recent developments, especially in neuroscience, in which consciousness, far from being considered a neural correlate (NCC), has been recognized as dependent on the dynamic interrelations between self, others and the surrounding environment (Varela et al. 1991; Panksepp 1998; Damasio 1999; Zahavi 1999; Thompson 2001). This realization is a fundamental prerequisite for removing those barriers that separate mental from physical phenomena.
