As for philosophy, I’ve been on the trail of the mind-body problem. What could be more crucial? Our own minds—in effect, ourselves—what we consciously are and experience from moment to moment. It turns out that our minds are a stubborn scientific mystery. The materialist is unable to physically explain how consciousness evolved from matter. It appears that our mental life is irreducibly real. A feeling of love or hatred is totally unlike anything you can imagine going on in a brain. Consider this. If our minds are radically distinct from our bodies, life after death might be possible; our bodies will die, but our mental life may survive. The two are intimately linked in life, but in death they are divorced.
To prove that the afterlife isn’t just possible but real, I dove into a sea of fascinating reportage from careful researchers of mediumship, apparitions, hauntings, possession, and all sorts of ghost stories. Even I have a little ghost tale from a night in a haunted house I spent that resulted in my being physically attacked by a ghost. I watched the light form come at me across the room right at my face and body, paralyzing me briefly, and then it was gone. My experience of a ghost was in a house where nine other people interacted with said ghost. Anyway, it’s hard for me to deny that once I was pounced on by a real ghost.
Since 1975, a different category of afterlife evidence has emerged, and spread around the planet, the near-death experience (NDE). There are interesting features of this new set of afterlife data. It’s a compelling afterlife argument for the person who has the NDE. Moreover, and this second point we owe to YouTube: you can watch and listen to people who have been though the NDE process, with no story like another but all loosely sharing a set of recurrent variables: the out of body experience, wondrous music, meeting deceased family members, meeting and dialoguing with spiritual beings like angels or, often, the presence of Jesus, a figure of universal outreach, a human deity of transcendent love. The NDE is a kind of initiation into a new dimension of reality, a new afterlife space. What is also brand new is having a technology for rapidly disseminating experience and information about this extraordinary phenomenon.
Now to the main point of this post. I’m interested in the so-called survival question, not just because I and most normal people prefer more life than extinction. There is a special category of people I hope wake up to the loving world of the classic NDE when they die. My hope for a loving afterlife is especially directed toward children willfully murdered, tortured, starved to death, bombed, shot in the head on purpose, and otherwise trampled to death by homicidal maniacs. The horrible idea of children thus systematically slaughtered has come to my attention from certain current events. The films and photographs of their emaciated faces, hacked, burnt bodies, decapitated heads with frozen eyes peeping out of rubble. All this moral horror show I find stamped on my psyche. I hope the manosphere is not offended by my squeamish harping on the annihilation of children. The spectacular evil of the perpetrators is evident to people everywhere on earth. My immediate attention is on the uncountable thousands of dead children, whose numbers increase daily. The will to exterminate an entire people and culture is also demonstrated daily; it’s all there, a public performance. And as we know, a good part of the U.S. government, being complicit, applauds. Enough of that.
I want to think about the thousands of dead little guys and girls. I remember the sight of one boy fleeing from a soldier who was waving his rifle dramatically. I can’t expunge the image of the emaciated face, the child’s beautiful, terrorized eyes. To be trashed and cheated of your life before you have begun to live it—an iconic crime against humanity. I’m consoled by the research that points to the reality of an afterlife. I can think about the murdered children in new ways. The ineffable brutality of their fate is not the last word. We can think about justice and humanity becoming the winner in the long run. I can paint the faces in my mind of children laved in a new world of love. Research of the soul explorers has opened our imaginations to a higher sphere of human experience. We’re also living at a time when there seem no limits to how low humankind can descend. Nevertheless, I believe that we humans possess the power to break free and ascend to the height we need to come together.
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