Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  But the good news is that we, as a society, are already beyond both Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins. Or, at least, a world beyond these partisan yelling matches is available to us. Whether it is Eagleman, philosophers like Jean Gebser or Ken Wilber, or for that matter the Dalai Lama, more and more serious thinkers are recognizing that the most enlightened view allows for a rich dialogue between science and religion—not the dominance of one at the expense of the other.

  Bringing more people into this kind of collaborative worldview won’t be easy. And the media is one of the obstacles we need to overcome. Journalists often portray the fight between mysticism and materialism in stark terms—and through the lens of some dramatically phrased question, like, Can science and spirituality coexist? In the following pages, this book is essentially making one argument: That in the fullness of time, it’s not only apparent that science and spirituality can coexist, as they have coexisted for centuries. The lesson is even more dramatic than that. The lesson is that they can serve one another.

  We are about to embark on a tour through a series of fundamental questions about the nature of human existence. In a sense, we will all be like the man, Paul, we saw at the beginning of this introduction. You may hear the foot-falls and bangings of various ghosts—or the workings of human imagination.

  You will definitely encounter a UFO.

  Mind reading, a trip to the moon, and spiritual ecstasy are also all on the agenda—and we’ll get a few glimpses of potential afterlives, besides.

  The answers, when they are available, sometimes sacrifice the specificity of a false certainty for the accuracy of the unknown, as they did during my time with Lou Gentile. Paul and his family reported a wide range of phenomena—including doors that rattled in the middle of the night and drawers that inexplicably shook in their dressers, all in the wake of a death in the family. But the most interesting thing was that series of photos Paul showed us.

  I’d seen lots of photos like these over the years, and Gentile had probably seen thousands of them. Paul seemed certain that each comprised evidence that a ghost—maybe the ghost of his father—was floating around his house. But light reflecting from nearby, out-of-focus dust particles, can create a halo that turns a dust mote into what some take to be evidence of spirits. So Gentile, slowly, gently, and deliberately, explained to Paul how dust floating in the room might have caused the vast majority of his strange images.

  When we left, I took this as an occasion to talk to Gentile about how easily people delude themselves into thinking every photographic anomaly is a ghost. Lou agreed. But he always tried to counter my skepticism with examples of phenomena that couldn’t be so easily explained away. And so, on one of my visits with him, he set up a projector screen in his home and told me a story about what he considered perhaps the best photo he ever took in all his years investigating haunted houses. “I want you to see a photo,” he said, “that isn’t just dust.”

  He was looking into a reported haunting in Connecticut, he explained, and he was standing in an upstairs hallway, just waiting for something to happen, when a sudden movement flickered in his peripheral vision. Turning quickly, he saw it—a long shaft of light, slowly undulating toward him, like a snake floating in the air. Gentile had a camera hanging around his neck and recovered his senses just in time to snap a single photo as it passed him by.

  Gentile told me this story many years after the event in question occurred. The projector screen behind him was still blank. Then he clicked a button on the projector and the photo he took appeared before me. The light he claimed to see was in the image, maybe six feet long, its form clear and consistent, its leading edge caught in the middle of a dip. I stayed focused on the light itself, but then Lou showed me why he thought this light was so intriguing. And there it was, in the lower corner of the photo, a shadow, seemingly cast by this odd shaft of light—suggesting that something, however unlikely, was actually there.

  “What do you think that was?” Gentile asked, to which I could only reply, “I don’t know.”

  In the coming pages, these interrelated tales will force us to use that same dirty, three-word phrase—“I don’t know”—on a regular basis, heating up our emotions in the process. But I think a tour through our own fractured universe, in a sense our own fractured selves, is exactly what we need right now.

  Chapter 1

  On Death and Not Dying

  The Provocative Beginning of Near-Death-Experience Research

  Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.

  —Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

  I can hear my mother wailing, and a whole lot of scraping of chairs. I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely something going on upstairs.

  —Nick Cave, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!”

  She sipped tea with the rhythm of an addict and ate chocolates the same way. Swiss chocolates, from her homeland, her fingers steadily working, her face going momentarily serene whenever cocoa met tastebud. These small pleasures were essentially all that was left her. The great lady’s world had shrunk along with her tiny frame. She was one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century, shaking hands with dignitaries the world over, accepting not their congratulations but their thanks.

  All that was over now. The great lady had diminished with age, like a paper going yellow in the tick of time. She was seventy-eight years old but seemed even older, her skin wrinkled in deep folds, her voice and body weak from a series of strokes that did her in over a period of years.

  She knew.

  She had seen all this before.

  Up close.

  But this time, the looming presence in the corner of the room was there for her. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was dying, in an Arizona nursing home, and still, complete strangers came to her. They had been coming for years, people who had been touched by her work in some way and wanted, sometimes with feverish intensity, to meet her. Once, as her friend Fern Welch made her way inside her tiny private room, she found Kübler-Ross beset by two young women, who she remembers literally kneeling on the floor and bowing before Kübler-Ross. Welch made her way around the two prostrate girls to give Kübler-Ross a customary hello kiss. But when she leaned in, the old woman whispered to her, “Please, get them out of here!”

  Welch had seen all manner of Kübler-Ross’s fans show up over the years, and shooed the girls away. But this particular episode stayed with her. The irony was so great. Two young girls, venerating an old woman and stealing a portion of the little time and energy she had left. Kübler-Ross died not so long after this in August 2004, culminating a long, public descent.

  Most people know Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as the writer and psychologist who wrote On Death and Dying, which remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Published in 1969, her tome’s message was brutally simple: We, as a society, treat our sick and dying loved ones as something less than human. Hospitals relegate terminally ill patients to back rooms, where the specter of illness can be kept out of sight. They enforce short, strict visiting hours, as if to make sure the dying suffer alone. And they strip the sick of their dignity, failing in most cases even to acknowledge the patient’s terminal diagnosis. This description, written in the present tense, appears jarring and somewhat inaccurate today, some forty years later. But at that time Kübler-Ross merely described the world as it stood. She had gone into a hospital to help the sick and found that everyone was ill—that seemingly healthy family members, doctors, and nurses were all victims of the human condition.

  Doctors saw the death of their patients as a professional failure, so the terminal diagnosis went unspoken; the nurses felt trapped by this, darting in and out of the room and avoiding eye contact, the better not to give away the truth; and loved ones struggled with what to say. Our symptoms may differ, but the underlying distress is universal. Because, Kübler-Ross wrote, every last person coming into contact with the terminally ill patient is reminded of his or her own mortality. What this me
ans is that we love the dying, pity them, mourn for them, wish to heal them—and hate them, too, for reminding us that one day we also will lie there helpless, flat on our backs till the end. This cocktail of emotions is so potent that Westernized societies, deceived by the seeming omnipotence of modern medicine, tucked the dying out of sight, hiding them behind closed doors, beeping machines, and IV stands—a veil of technology that soothed everyone but the terminally ill.

  Kübler-Ross became most famous for outlining five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—stages that subsequent academics have since criticized and amended in various ways. But her real accomplishment was in getting cultures all over the world to openly discuss death—the reality we’d all been busy hiding from. She accomplished this feat in a slim 276 pages. And in so doing, she became the public face of a then-new hospice movement.

  It is impossible to quantify the impact Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying had on the world at large, but by any account it was massive. The emotional maelstrom unleashed in the wake of her book literally remade end-of-life care. And today, laypeople still turn the pages of On Death and Dying when there seems nowhere left to go. Medical programs still list her as required reading. And in brief newspaper and magazine summations of Kübler-Ross’s life, her story often seems to end there, in about 1974, on the heels of her greatest professional achievement. But she lived for roughly thirty more years. And for our purposes, the real entry point into her life story is the subsequent turn she took into the paranormal. In 1975, in fact, she put her then impeccable reputation on the line by penning the forward to Raymond Moody’s Life After Life—literally the first book ever written about near-death experiences (NDEs).

  By now, the lore of the near-death experience is well known: The tunnel, the light, the life review, the reunion with loved ones. But in 1975 the term NDE had never previously been used, so the press and academia both were shocked at Kübler-Ross’s involvement. The story was clear enough for every reporter to see: the brave lady who asked us not to shrink from the reality of death suddenly suggesting death may not exist at all. There is much to be learned from this twist in the life story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Perhaps most important, venturing into these realms is dangerous—to our reputations and relationships, to our filter for what’s real and what’s fiction.

  By 1980, in fact, the same woman who cried “Bullshit” about Western medicine had succumbed to bullshit of another flavor: she was consulting mediums who claimed to channel spirits of deceased loved ones and “higher entities.” She hosted New Age–themed spiritual retreats for widows. Her husband left her and became the main caretaker to their children. Her most prized medium proved fraudulent. Kübler-Ross’s fall from grace became a running gag in the media, her life story ballooning into something too vast and complicated to be captured by any single narrative. Her son, Ken Ross, minds her legacy now—the foundation formed in her name. And he knows, up close, how hard it is to pull together a coherent story about his mother. He says HBO has spent years trying to develop a movie based on his mother’s life. Numerous screenwriters have come and gone, none delivering a workable biography. “My mother’s life was complicated,” says Ross. “They told me they couldn’t figure out which story to write.”

  But the Kübler-Ross story isn’t only hard for screenwriters to encapsulate. It’s hard for all human beings—or at least those of us with normal, functioning brains. We are, as a species, neurologically uncomfortable with ambiguity. Imaging studies of the human brain in action demonstrate that the fussy little onboard computers in our skulls send out anxiety messages when confronted by conflicting or confusing information. As a consequence, we have a natural, internal impetus to settle on an interpretation that removes any perceived conflict.

  If we’re not cognizant of our own biases, this probably means choosing an interpretation that preserves our current worldview and disregards contrary evidence, replacing the accuracy of I don’t know with the false certainty that we do. So, how do we reconcile the brave, passionate, hardnosed pragmatist who taught us about death with the New Age queen who lost so much over her commitment to a psychic? Well, according to the people closest to Kübler-Ross, and just as modern neuroscience would predict, we don’t. We see her as the great lady. Or we see her as a crank. We bow to her memory. Or we smirk at the mention of her name.

  “People tend to see Elisabeth as they want to see her,” says Rose Winters, a friend of Kübler-Ross. “It’s hard for those of us who knew her. Because people don’t acknowledge all of her. They don’t see her as she really was.”

  We see her, it appears, in much the same way we see the paranormal (or the political), as if we only have two choices: to passionately embrace or hotly reject. But there is a messier, truer view, one we need to draw closer to if we are to understand her, or even ourselves, let alone the paranormal.

  ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS WAS BORN in Zurich, Switzerland, on July 8, 1926, the first to emerge among triplets. She weighed just two pounds and was not expected to survive. As a child, perhaps mindful of her own early frailty, the young Elisabeth Kübler nursed any injured animal she found, including a crow she fed and protected till it was strong enough to fly away. She defended weaker kids from schoolyard bullies. And she even bounced a book of psalms off the head of a preacher who had unfairly punished one of her sisters. Though she was later typified as a New Age faerie queen, the truth is she was a bit more like Keith Richards—a rebel by any accounting.

  She first rebelled against her father, an assistant director of Zurich’s biggest office supply company. “He had dark brown eyes that saw only two possibilities in life,” his daughter would later write. “His way and the wrong way.”

  In the chauvinistic Switzerland of the early 1940s, her dream of being a doctor was considered just that. And one night her father sat her down to talk about her future. She was so responsible, he said, so capable, he thought she would make a fine … secretary.

  “You will work in my office,” he told her. But the thought of being stuck in his boring office, following his boring orders, and furthering the aims of the boring office supply industry, rather than doctoring, made Elisabeth Kübler half-nuts. “No, thank you!” she told him.

  His counteroffer? “Then find work,” he said, “as a maid.”

  Having no other means to support herself, she did just that. And in the ensuing years, she made her own way in the world. She left home, attended medical school, and met her husband—an American med student named Manny Ross. Her gender shaped her path. After she moved with Manny to America and became pregnant, the only residency program that would have her was the one she didn’t want: psychiatry.

  Still, they needed the money. So she took a position at the Manhattan State Mental Hospital, working in a small unit with schizophrenic women. The head nurse allowed her cats to freely roam the ward, pissing and defecating among the patients. The entire asylum carried the ammonia stink of cat urine. And patients were punished for showing signs of their mental illness—beaten with sticks, subjected to electroshock treatments, and experimented upon with drugs like LSD and mescaline. “What did I know about psychiatry?” Kübler-Ross later wrote. “Nothing. But I knew about life and I opened myself up to the misery, loneliness and fear these patients felt. If they talked to me, I talked back. If they shared their feelings, I listened and replied.”

  She was already opening herself up to the role she would play to the dying: the woman who shared their burdens and received their woes. But psychiatry never felt right to her until she and Manny moved to Denver for hospital positions. There, a colleague asked her to fill in and deliver a two-hour lecture he couldn’t make. She cast around for a subject. She hunkered down in the library. She walked the hospital halls, wondering what topic would be suitable for a general audience of medical students and residents in various specialties. The answer came to her at home, as she stared into a pile of dying leaves, rake in hand. At the time, in 1964, death was not really a
hot topic in medicine. In fact, when Kübler-Ross went back to the library to see what was available on the psychology of dying she found precious little: a single, dense, academic psychoanalytic treatise; some sociological studies on death rituals across cultures. She realized she would need to do her own research. But for her talk, she spoke only for the first hour. Then, during the break, she retrieved a patient she met in the hospital’s wards: a sixteen-year-old girl who was dying of leukemia. When the students returned, Kübler-Ross explained the girl’s terminal condition and opened the floor to questions. No one raised a hand. So she called on students, requiring them to come to the stage and think of a question.

  These were med students. They asked about the girl’s blood count, the size of her liver, her chemotherapy trials. The girl grew furious and began talking, unbidden, about what it was like to be sixteen and given only a few weeks to live; what it was like to never go on a date or have a husband; and how she was coping with it all. When she was finally wheeled from the room, the audience sat in heavy, dumbfounded silence. And gently, in her soft, Swiss accent, Kübler-Ross diagnosed what troubled them. Your reaction is a product of your own mortality, she told them, which the girl forced you to confront.

  In this sense, they had not been looking at a sixteen-year-old girl at all. They had been looking into a mirror. The experience was so powerful that Kübler-Ross stopped questioning her own commitment to psychiatry. And when she and Manny subsequently moved to Chicago, she took a position at Billings Hospital, which was affiliated with the University of Chicago, and began her mission: to reconcile the world of the dying with that of the living. She grew famous for her efforts. But what is less well known is that during her years in Chicago many strange things happened to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And she also found an unlikely professional companion.