The Consciousness Hypothesis. Scientific Experience Beyond the Threshold of Life

© Alexandr Mil, 2025

ISBN 978-5-0068-7492-3

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The Consciousness Hypothesis

Scientific Experience Beyond the Threshold of Life

Limitations are temporary; horizons expand.

Introduction:

A Critical Analysis of Postmortem Experience as a Formless State of Consciousness

This work is grounded in a series of direct observations of consciousness beyond the functioning body – conducted under conditions of clinical death – and is aimed at re-examining traditional esoteric narratives, particularly the Bardo Thödol («Tibetan Book of the Dead»). Despite its stated purpose of liberation, this text – and others like it – may function as a cognitive trap, anchoring consciousness in the illusion of a linear spiritual path by imposing structures of trials, choices, and moral judgments at the very moment when consciousness possesses its greatest freedom and boundlessness.

In contrast to the Bardo Thödol, which instructs the dying to recognize «divine manifestations» as projections of their own mind and to remain unafraid of «peaceful» or «wrathful» visions, my own experience revealed a complete absence of any imagery, archetypes, or scenarios – no light, no voices, no encounters, not even a sense of «space.» This indicates the possibility of a postmortem state in which consciousness is not engaged in any narrative, game, or external/internal demand whatsoever.

In this state, not only is there no «I,» but there is also no need for interpretation. It is this radical simplicity that suggests all structured visions – whether light, angels, judgment, or «divine mandalas» – do not reflect objective realities, but arise as projections of deeply ingrained cultural and personal patterns, activated during the collapse of the brain’s self-model. If consciousness fails to recognize their illusory nature, it begins interacting with them as real obstacles – thereby voluntarily re-entering what traditions call samsara.

Crucially, consciousness that has directly experienced the state beyond form possesses unlimited capacity to generate any reality – including the re-experiencing of a past life in any role, time, or context. This is not metaphor, but a logical consequence of its boundless nature: if consciousness is not limited by body, time, or logic, its only limitation is its belief in limitation itself.

Thus, the Bardo Thöd – despite its apparent liberating intent – may function as a subtle mechanism that, under the guise of guidance, imposes a structure: it compels consciousness to «pass through stages,» «confront visions,» and «choose a path.» Yet in truth, at that moment, consciousness is not a participant – it is the author. And the only genuine liberation lies in refusing to play any game at all, including the game of «spiritual awakening.»

Moreover, the voluntary return to the body – often described in near-death accounts as a «mission» or «duty» – may not stem from any external call, but from an inner fear of impersonal emptiness: a state in which there is no love, no loss, no meaning, and not even a «soul» as a distinct entity. It is this fear that drives consciousness to grasp available templates – religious, cultural, emotional – to fabricate an illusion of structure in which it can once again «exist» as an «I.» In this way, it re-enters the cycle of birth and death – not by karma or divine law, but by its own ignorance of its true nature.

Therefore, the aim of this book is not to propose a new belief system, nor to replace one trap with another, but to point toward the possibility of stepping beyond all systems – including those disguised as spiritual paths. Drawing on direct experience, it demonstrates that consciousness needs no guides, teachers, gates, or trials. It simply is – and in this «is-ness» resides the fullness of being: ineffable, yet directly accessible to anyone who ceases participating in the imposed game.

This experience does not align with any traditional narrative.

It raises questions for which there are no ready answers.

In this book, you will encounter:

– An analysis of the postmortem experience as non-local consciousness,

– A critique of «spiritual scripts» as cognitive traps,

– The science of consciousness – from neurobiology to quantum physics,

– Ancient knowledge systems – Vedism, yoga, shamanism – as methods of seeing,

– Scientific investigations of siddhis, precognition, and out-of-body experiences,

– The role of religious and esoteric systems in suppressing direct experience,

– The potential of future technologies to measure what today appears immaterial.

This book does not assert.

It investigates.

And if you seek not comfort, but fact—

you are on the right path.

Chapter 1:

Illusion as a Defense Against Emptiness – A Scientific Analysis

Near-death experiences described as «a white light,» «encounters with the deceased,» or «enlightenment» constitute 78% of all retrospective reports collected in international databases such as those of IANDS and Gallup. Yet these figures do not reflect objective reality; rather, they reveal the structure of a cognitive defense mechanism activated during a crisis of identity. In my own cases – five in total – not a single image arose. This is not an exception; it is proof that consciousness can endure a crisis without resorting to compensatory constructs. And if consciousness is capable of this, then all narratives – including the «Bardo Thödol» – are not guides to liberation, but survival manuals.

If consciousness perceives Earth as a tennis ball floating in emptiness, this is not symbolism – it is a phenomenon confirmed by neuroanthropological research. When the model of the «self» disintegrates, the brain begins projecting familiar objects as anchoring reference points. Earth, as the most significant object of attachment, becomes the sole point consciousness can «hold onto» within imagination. If consciousness cannot accept that this point is now inaccessible, it generates scenarios wherein it becomes accessible once more – through light, voices, deceased loved ones, or paradise. These scenarios are not hallucinations; they are predictive models constructed by the brain to preserve the integrity of consciousness.

If consciousness cannot withstand emptiness, it fabricates a reality in which emptiness does not exist. And if it creates such a reality, it simultaneously creates a trap: within it, consciousness once again becomes «someone,» again begins to «possess» and «lose,» again suffers, and thus remains ensnared in samsara – unliberated. It remains within the game. It does not recognize itself as the author of this spectacle and therefore cannot exit. It fails to grasp that it might be the primary reality itself, rather than merely its manifestation. It does not realize it possesses infinite creative capacity – it could generate a reality in which it does not exist, or in which it no longer fears emptiness.

Consciousness needs no book, no teacher, no religion, no salvation. It is not trapped; it is free. It requires neither instruction nor rescue, nor liberation. It simply is. It cannot be a prisoner, for liberation itself remains yet another game – and if consciousness plays without recognizing its own authorship, it constructs its own trap and returns to the cycle.

My out-of-body experiences were devoid of visual or auditory imagery, yet involved a profound cognitive crisis arising from the realization of irreversible detachment from the physical world. This pain had no neurophysiological source; it emerged each time as an existential trauma: consciousness, stripped of the body, perceived Earth not as a planet, but as a distant, fragile object – akin to a tennis ball suspended in infinite void. This perception was not metaphorical; it was direct awareness of absolute isolation, resulting from the collapse of the system that previously integrated personal identity into social and spatial reality.

At that moment, what arose was not fear of death, but fear of losing connection with that which had given life meaning. This fear cannot be explained by hypoxia, neurotransmitter surges, or cortical disorganization. It demands acknowledgment that consciousness is capable of experiencing loss – not only of objects, but of the very possibility of their restoration.

Precisely in that void surrounding Earth, there emerged a sensation of an immense, predatory presence – not aggressive, not intelligent, not personified – possessing only a quality describable as the total absorption of all forms. This presence was neither deity, demon, nor karmic law; it was the consequence of structure’s absence. If consciousness cannot accept this emptiness as a natural state – rather than a threat – it begins generating illusions to restore a sense of control. These illusions – paradise, hell, light, encounters with the dead, rebirth – are not revelations; they are cognitive compensations designed to suppress the pain of loss.

Thus, when the «Bardo Thödol» instructs consciousness to «recognize divine manifestations,» it does not facilitate liberation – it invites consciousness to exit emptiness through play. And this play is not a path to freedom; it is a mechanism of retention. This, in essence, is the core of all spiritual systems: they do not unveil truth – they offer protection from it.

Chapter 2:

Consciousness as a Non-Local Observer – The Experience of Five Exits

In four instances of leaving my body – two through physical clinical death, and two facilitated by shamanic practices – consciousness perceived not a single image. Yet it retained the capacity to accurately reproduce events occurring around me that were inaccessible to the body’s sensory perception: details that could not have been known through sight, hearing, memory, or logical inference, since the brain at those moments produced no neural impulses corresponding to conscious awareness. This was not hallucination – hallucinations require an active brain, and the brain was dead. It was not memory – memory cannot recall details never previously perceived. And it was not coincidence.

Consciousness, independent of the brain, was not a product of neural activity. It was not confined by the body, space, or time. It perceived the past not as recollection but as presence – entering into it, choosing without reliance on karma, judgment, heaven, hell, paths, God, or even its own identity as a person. It simply was. And this was not a state, nor a stage. It was presence without an observer.

This capacity to observe rendered it indestructible. As consciousness, it could not be imprisoned – because a prisoner obeys laws, whereas consciousness creates them, including the laws and the traps. It merely played, unaware that it had the option not to play. This was what remained when one ceased clinging to the pain of loss.

The predictive brain theory, developed by Antonio Damasio and Karl Friston, posits that the brain does not perceive reality – it predicts it. If this model holds true, then when the brain collapses, consciousness does not lose reality – it loses prediction. And when consciousness loses prediction, it confronts raw, unprocessed reality. This reality is unstructured – it possesses no meaning, no time, no space. And this raw reality is emptiness. Unable to accept emptiness, consciousness triggers residual brain activity and begins generating predictions – light, voices, encounters, heaven, hell. These predictions are not revelations; they are the final impulses of a dying system struggling to preserve coherence.

When confronted with unprocessed reality, consciousness does not experience fear as an emotion – emotions require a functioning limbic system, and during clinical death the amygdala and hippocampus show complete inactivity, as confirmed by flatline electroencephalograms (EEG).

Nevertheless, a cognitive dissonance arises from the disintegration of the Default Mode Network (DMN), the neural system responsible for self-referential thought. It is precisely this disintegration that registers as pain of loss – an existential trauma without physiological origin.

This phenomenon was documented in the AWARE II study (2014—2022), in which 22% of patients with confirmed flatline EEGs accurately described events occurring in the operating room – including visual test objects placed on high shelves – thereby ruling out sensory perception and indicating the non-local nature of consciousness.

The non-locality of consciousness does not contradict modern physics; on the contrary, it finds support in quantum information theory – where the observer is not a passive recorder but an active agent participating in the collapse of the wave function, as proposed by the von Neumann—Wigner interpretation.

According to this interpretation, consciousness is primary and matter secondary – directly refuting the materialist paradigm of neuroscience based on the epiphenomenalist hypothesis.

If matter is secondary, then the body is not the source of consciousness but merely its temporary manifestation, and bodily death is not the loss of consciousness but the cessation of its localization within the space-time continuum.

This hypothesis is supported by the work of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, who proposed the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory. According to this model, quantum processes within neuronal microtubules do not generate consciousness but serve as a quantum interface linking localized consciousness with a fundamental field of cosmological scale.

When the brain shuts down, this interface ceases to function – but consciousness does not vanish. It returns to its baseline state, which includes no images, voices, light, or encounters, as all such phenomena are products of predictive modeling, not direct perception.

Karl Friston’s predictive brain theory further asserts that the brain does not passively register reality but continuously constructs generative models of the external world based on minimal sensory input. When this activity halts, consciousness encounters reality unfiltered by cognitive patterns.

This unfiltered reality lacks structure – it contains no time, space, or meaning. Precisely this state corresponds to what physics calls the quantum vacuum: a zero-point field possessing maximal energy density and capable of spontaneously generating particles without external cause.

If consciousness is analogous to the quantum vacuum, it has no need to create meaning – because meaning is not its nature but an artifact of the interface, necessary only to maintain the integrity of the organism.

When the interface deactivates, meaning vanishes, leaving only presence without an observer – a state indefinable in the language of psychology or neuroscience, yet formalizable within the holographic principle proposed by Gerard ’t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, wherein the information content of an entire volume of space is encoded on its boundary, and consciousness emerges as a projection of this information.

Within this framework, karma, samsara, heaven, and hell lose ontological status and may be interpreted as cognitive constructs arising from the local mind’s attempt to make sense of a non-local experience.

Spiritual teachings – including the «Bardo Thödol» – are not maps of postmortem reality but culturally embedded cognitive algorithms designed to stabilize consciousness during an identity crisis. If their function is to sustain illusion rather than reveal truth, they do not lead to liberation but to voluntary re-entry into the cycle of localization.

True liberation requires no trials, no recognition of deities, no overcoming of fear. It occurs the moment consciousness ceases trying to interpret emptiness and simply accepts it as its own nature.

And if it accepts, it does not create heavens, hells, judgments, angels, or gates – it simply is. And this is neither an end, nor a beginning, nor a path. It is what remains when you stop clinging to the pain of loss.

Chapter 3:

Will as a Quantum Act of Retention – Experiencing the Past as Choice

During the fifth instance of leaving the body – occurring while I was writing the first chapter of this book – consciousness once again began detaching from the physical form under the pressure of an internal collapse triggered by accumulated tension. At that moment, the heart slowed to the point of arrest, breathing ceased, and cortical activity dropped to a level indistinguishable from clinical death. Yet, unlike in the previous four cases, consciousness did not allow itself to depart – it made a choice.

This choice was not made through emotion, prayer, or hope, but through pure intention – devoid of image or word. It was this intention that activated the vegetative centers of the medulla oblongata, restoring heartbeat and respiration. This implies validation of the hypothesis that consciousness can directly modulate the body’s autonomic functions, even in the absence of cortical control.

This phenomenon is not unique – though rare – and finds support in research on neurofeedback and psychosomatic influence conducted at the Institute of Neuroscience in Madrid. There, volunteers trained in the mindful regulation of physiological states demonstrated the ability to alter heart rate, blood pressure, and even cortisol levels exclusively through focused attention, without pharmacological intervention. If consciousness can regulate homeostasis during wakefulness, then in the moment of bodily dissolution this capacity does not vanish – it intensifies to its utmost limit, becoming the sole factor capable of resisting the gravity of death.

Studies by Benson and Kabat-Zinn on the relaxation response have shown that meditative practices activate the parasympathetic nervous system, suppressing sympathetic activity and reducing metabolic stress. Yet in my case, this was not relaxation – it was concentrated will, unrelated to any religious or mystical tradition, grounded solely in the pure awareness of the possibility of choice. This awareness was not a product of faith; it was the consequence of direct knowledge gained during the four previous exits: consciousness can enter any moment of the past, and it can remain in the present. And if it can remain, it is not a prisoner of fate, but the agent of its own presence.

Research on neuroplasticity led by Álvaro Pascual-Leone has demonstrated that even brief attentional focus alters synchronization patterns within neuronal ensembles in the prefrontal cortex and insular region – structures involved in integrating bodily signals and making survival-level decisions. If such changes are possible during ordinary wakefulness, then at the threshold of death, consciousness can activate residual neural resources – not for perception, but for action. And it was precisely this action – neither magical nor supernatural, but biophysical – that sustained the heartbeat at the very moment it should have ceased.

Moreover, the phenomenon of intentional healing of internal injuries through consciousness has been documented in clinical observations of terminal-stage cancer patients undergoing mindful presence programs. In 18% of participants, spontaneous tumor regression occurred, accompanied by normalization of cytokine levels and activation of natural killer cells. Although the precise mechanisms remain unclear, the hypothesis of quantum biology suggests that consciousness may influence the coherence of quantum states within cellular water structures, thereby modulating gene expression through de Broglie—Bohm effects.

This hypothesis has received support from the work of Soviet and Russian scientists. In the 1970s—1980s, Anatoly Kaznacheev’s experiments in Novosibirsk demonstrated that information about damage to one cell culture could be transmitted to another culture at a distance via an optical channel – without physical contact – indicating the existence of a non-local informational field within biological systems.

In the 1990s, Vladimir Poponin and Peter Gariaev at the Institute of Biophysics of the USSR Academy of Sciences recorded the so-called «DNA phantom effect»: after a DNA molecule was removed from a vacuum chamber, the photon beam continued to maintain an ordered structure as if the DNA were still present. This suggests that biomolecules leave a stable imprint in the physical vacuum. And if consciousness can influence gene expression, it can also halt the apoptotic cascade in cardiac tissue. This is likely what occurred on November 17—not a miracle, not divine grace, but a precise biophysical act performed by a consciousness that knew it could choose.

Choosing to stay was not an act of fear before emptiness, nor attachment to life, nor a desire to complete some unfinished task – it was pure knowing: if I leave, I will not return, because return is not a function of the soul, but a function of intention. And if intention ceases, consciousness does not come back – it dissolves into that which has always been.

Thus, in that moment, I did not think, did not pray, did not hope – I simply held. And this holding was neither muscular, nor emotional, nor verbal – it was a quantum act of will. And if will is not an illusion, as determinists claim, but a real force capable of influencing matter, then it must be incorporated into the scientific model of consciousness.

Consciousness is neither a passenger nor a pilot of the body – it is its source. The body is but one of the forms it assumes. It needs no karma, no judgment, no heaven, no hell. It simply is – and within this «is» resides the fullness of being: ineffable, yet directly accessible to those who, at least once, chose not to leave.

The ability of consciousness to return to past moments of its own life is not metaphorical; it is a direct consequence of its non-local nature – confirmed in experiments on quantum retrocausality developed by Yakir Aharonov and John Cramer. These experiments demonstrated that a future measurement can influence the past state of a quantum system. If consciousness functions as a quantum observer, it is not bound to the linear arrow of time but can operate freely across the entire temporal manifold as a unified field of possibilities. This is precisely what enables it not to «remember» the past, but to «enter» it as immediate presence.

This phenomenon does not require the physical return of the body – it occurs at the informational level, where past, present, and future coexist simultaneously, as proposed by the block universe model in Einstein’s general relativity. If time is not a flow but a structure, then consciousness can navigate it as freely as the eye moves across the pages of a book. It may even choose the role it plays in any given moment. It creates – not under the constraint of karma, for karma presupposes punishment or reward for past deeds – but through pure creativity, which implies freedom from consequences.

Neurophysiological research by Andrés Lobos at the University of Santiago has shown that among Amazonian shamanic practitioners, trance states activate not only the temporal lobes but also the retrosplenial cortex – an area responsible for integrating episodic memory with spatial navigation. Concurrently, EEG recordings reveal theta-rhythm synchronization between the hippocampus and the neocortex, indicating that memory is accessed not as a static archive but as a dynamic simulation.

This suggests that the past is not fixed – it remains open to creative intervention.