Aside from various faith traditions, is there any useful
information about this subject available? The answer is “yes!” but you’d never know it. It’s not commonly known that science has
important things to say about life after death. The problem is that in our materialist
culture, the question is a non-starter.
Why? Because,
we are told, there is no such thing as a soul, no consciousness without a brain. We are
our brains, neurons, neurotransmitters; it follows that after brain death,
the curtain is down forever.
That is the popular scientific view. But human experience reveals a
different picture. For one thing,
there’s a history of research on the afterlife enigma, beginning in 1882 with
the founding of the English Society for Psychical Research. The founders, renown in their
fields -- philosophers, physicists, classical scholars – studied and assessed fact-based
narratives that point to survival.
A minority of heroic academics
carry on this research today, probing the fate of consciousness after
death. (A lonely lot, to be sure.)
But what have they found?
It’s a tricky space to navigate but the effect of all the
evidence is impressive. Nowadays, we
hear about the near-death experience (NDE), a remarkable phenomenon. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist,
studied near-death experiences of patients who suffered cardiac arrest.
He made a curious discovery. During cardiac arrest the heart stops pumping oxygen
to the brain, which should, according to the mainline view, instantly terminate
consciousness. But that’s not what
happens all the time. In spite of a functionally dead brain, some
reports prove that consciousness not only continues but expands in
life-transforming ways.
Near-death experiences, according to official theory, should
not occur, should not exist. But
they do. It begins to look like our
minds can unhinge from our bodies, wander off in space, and observe our clinically
dead bodies from a distance. These
experiences typically convince people of postmortem survival.
This is by no means the only type of evidence for survival. Research from the University of
Virginia has shown that people may survive death by migrating into the body of
a newborn. There are thousands of
documented cases of reincarnation.
The research suggests that the hidden depths of our
subconscious selves may be very deep indeed, stretching back through many
lives. Each of us then harbors a
vast unknown self – a stunning idea. Perhaps one day we will learn to
communicate with the memory layers of our previous lives. Afterlife research opens ways to
understand our living selves in new ways.
Besides near-death and reincarnation phenomena, other forms
of evidence exist. Scattered throughout history are reports of ghosts,
hauntings, and apparitions of the dead.
Now and then the revenant comes with proof of identity and information
unknown to any living person.
There are famous cases of this type in the literature of psychical
research. In one of my favorites,
an apparition reveals the hidden whereabouts of a last will and testament that
no living person knew of. So the
ghost of a man made finding the document possible, which seems like an argument
that he survived death.
There is another source of afterlife evidence – mediumship. Great modern mediums like Leonora Piper
or Gladys Osborne Leonard have produced strong evidence for survival. Good
mediums place their minds in abeyance and become receptive to messages from apparently
discarnate minds. The message of
mediumship is that each of us, at least in principle, could be an instrument for communicating with the otherworld. Who knows? Mediumship may evolve into an art form of the future.
New forms of survival evidence keep cropping up. For example, there are cases of
so-called “terminal lucidity,” people with brain diseases who spontaneously regain
their mental faculties just before dying.
How strange! At death,
persons with damaged brains recover their faculties: the exact opposite of what
materialism would predict.
One thing may surprise us. Science today has no idea how our brain machinery produces
our consciousness. The two things
are wildly diverse. Even the most committed materialists
admit this obvious mystery. But,
if science cannot explain how consciousness emerges from the brain, we are free
to assume that it pre-exists the
brain. This leads to a new way to
view the problem. Now we can say
that the mind (or soul) uses the
brain; it is not produced by the brain. If our brain doesn’t create our
consciousness, it would not follow that our consciousness dies when our brain
dies.
So the issue of what may come after death remains open. It is closed only to people who accept the
dogmatic assumptions of scientific materialism.*
*The literature on life after death is vast, so I’ll mention
just a few books to launch the reader.
Pim van Lommel, Consciousness
Beyond Life; Ian Stevenson, Children
Who Remember Past Lives; Stephen Braude, Immortal Remains; Kelly, Crabtree, and Marshall, Eds; Beyond Physicalism; M. Grosso, Experiencing the Next World Now.