CHILDREN'S UNEXPLAINED EXPERIENCES IN A POST MATERIALIST WORLD

Donna has been researching with children and young people since 2004, and has more recently focused on nature of self and ‘unexplained’ experiences in children. Her analysis makes it very clear that the use of the word ‘unexplained’ is contingent on subscribing to the dominant materialist worldview that has no room to such experiences. Already in the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace pointed out that there were no impossible facts, and more recently Lawrence LeShan has highlighted that it is the theory that needs to be revised when such facts cannot be explained within existing frameworks. Donna points out that First Nation cultures have no difficulty in integrating spiritual and psychic experiences as value is placed in the unseen worlds. Instead of approaching her research through adult organisational agendas, she begins with children’s own agendas and takes their experiences at face value. She also relates her own NDE at the age of 15 as an important starting point.

This leads her to develop an interesting model (p. 106) with three senses of self. In the middle is the most limited conceptual self, then the next circle is the transpersonal self, and finally the most expanded is the ‘Knowing I.’ In quite a number of cases (and this applies to adults as well), ‘the individual self is dissolved and replaced with an expanded sense of being one with the universe.’ Such a participatory, non-dual self is described by Rupert Spira, among others, as Consciousness (with a capital C). Definitions used by clinicians and psychologists in mental health are characterised by the ego with its sense of separation, while ‘children’s experiences of self and unexplained phenomena point to a reality whose features are deeply intra-connected, relational yet deep and metaphysical.’ (p. 111) Many types of experiences are illustrated, including telepathy, out of body experiences, contact with the deceased, remembering previous lives, lucid dreams, clairvoyance and clairaudience. Until they are told otherwise by adults and experts, they regard such occurrences as normal.

Donna uses Bernard Carr’s model of three mental spaces to categorise the experiences, first with respect to normal space (and the conceptual self – phenomenological), memory, visualisation and dream spaces. Then the paranormal space of the transpersonal self, involving psi, apparition and threshold spaces. And finally transpersonal space with OBE, NDE, survival and mystical space – noting, though, that experiences can cut across the porous boundaries. It becomes self-evident that post-materialist approaches to these phenomena are both more fruitful and plausible, and they do not involve wholesale dismissal or the use of such derogatory terms as illusion, hallucination and fantasy. Rather than the brain being responsible for producing consciousness, approaches involving a field of consciousness where the brain is a reducing valve or filter make more sense in this context.

The foreword to the book is written by Bernardo Kastrup, whose analytical idealism provides one possible framework. In this respect, Donna is critical of panpsychism as simply advancing materialism by spreading mind through the body. Instead, she supports cosmopsychism as a model of reality that proposes ‘that the experiences of ordinary subjects are ultimately grounded in an all-pervading cosmic consciousness.’ Shani and Keppler conceive the ordinary self as a dynamic vortex within an oceanic field (I myself developed a similar model of the self as a condensation within a Bohmian implicate order in the early 1980s). Kastrup is rightly critical of mainstream science presenting assumptions as facts, himself hypothesising that consciousness divides itself into multiple centres of awareness, where we are ‘alters’ of a universal mind at large. Within such a framework, the children’s experiences discussed become logical within the context of larger qualitative fields with porous boundaries.

Donna concludes that turning reality on its head to start from consciousness rather than matter also has implications for social transformation. For a start, respecting and understanding such experiences indicates an expanded and participatory reality where children’s natural ways of being can be nurtured and we can begin to develop a new narrative, relating to each other and to Nature with a sense of connection, wholeness and even oneness. The book marks a significant advance that has important implications for science, philosophy, psychology and psychotherapy by normalising children’s experiences within a wider post-materialist framework.