Is there an afterlife?

[Biltong Bob]

I like the idea that my physical body will break down to become base elements, whether through cremation or burial or whatever (might end up at the bottom of the sea or something), and then those cells/molecules will be used/eaten by something else, and be metabolised into something else . Who knows? - maybe a sperm cell, maybe even the fastest sperm cell of one particular ejaculate and then become someone/thing else!

That's my idea of eternal life, and I'm happy with it

[FTP]

@@Stoned Whale that was pretty deep!

My philosophy is, we are energy and all energy is always transferred.

[Guest ANCB]

at the risk of exposing myself, but your dead, so who gives a fuck, and if the idea of floating around settles your mind regarding death then great i'm prolly just jealous you can compartmentalise it.

but i mean would you want more Tory bastards even after your ruddy dead?

[madgiz]

Food for thought..

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. Photo illustration by Newsweek; Source: Buena Vista Images-Getty Images

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Reliving History: The search for the meaning of the afterlife is as old as humanity itself. Over the years Newsweek has run numerous covers about religion, God, and that search. As Dr. Alexander says, it’s unlikely we’ll know the answer in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep asking.

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question.

Back where?

The universe as I experienced it in my coma is ... the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways. Ed Morris / Getty Images

A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.

Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.

What happened to me demands explanation.

Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.

Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

I don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.

I learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was down.

One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, M.D. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Copyright © 2012 by Eben Alexander III, M.D.

This new picture of reality will take a long time to put together. It won’t be finished in my time, or even, I suspect, my sons’ either. In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.

I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right.

http://www.newsweek.com/proof-heaven-doctors-experience-afterlife-65327

[Stoned Whale]

Thanks for that madgiz. Think I've read it before but interesting again none the less.

I'm sure I had read of a few other scientists who have had NDE have their entire world view turned upside down.

My first few experiences blew my mind and had me wide open to the afterlife. But I think it was DMT that left me back doubting my own experiences and interpretations.

DMT can take you to lands like the ones these people describe in NDEs. Admittedly a lot of the time it is a lot less profound place. And more novel. But none the less people have similar spirituality affirming experiences from simply ingesting DMT. Short acting, 15 minutes, but anyone that's "broke through" can tell you it can feel like days if not years you spend in these places.

I think after my first dmt trip I was awashed away with the idea of my consciousness being warped away to another dimension. With all these archetypal beings. Somewhere real, tangible in the physical sense.

But after that I couldn't help but think that all this really isn't that far fetched to think the human brain could create it all. We are pattern recognising machines. Personality archetypes people experience as beings on dmt could easily be created by the brain I think.

The article talks about her neocortex being shut down so sort of diminishes my ideas but I have very little neuro science knowledge. Maybe sciences ideas of consciousness are wrong. But I don't think that has to mean our brain can't create these "heaven" like experiences etc.

I've been through certainties either way. But open minded I am now atleast a little more.

E2a; Some of what I'm getting at would fit in well with the religion and placebo thread. Super interesting, yet personal topics.

Edited September 5, 2015 by Stoned Whale

[ratdog]

Sadly not imo, I think it`s a nice idea, but I also think perhaps it stops peeps delivering their true potential here and now if they think there`s another chance of some kind

[iBMe]

Massive DMT release just before death changes your perception of time so much that those last few moments seem like an eternity in a heaven or hell of your own creation.

Either that or the DMT opens the door for your consciousness to travel to the next place.

Pretty sure it involves DMT anyways

[Evelyn Pickaxe]

dmt

that is all

[Mephitis]

I'm on the fence as to what happens but one thing I do know for sure is that at the moment I'm in no hurry to find out for definite.

[wu-tang-sam]

@@wu-tang-sam

Any interest in sharing the experiences that have shaped your beliefs bud? Always interests me.

I find it difficult to re visit in my mind these days. Much more fragile mentally than I was back then. Plus it leaves the door open for all sorts of scoffing about mental illness and drug use.

But a few little things I'm ok to recall just quickly:

I've had two very close friends come to me in dreams on the night of their deaths (to put it bluntly ) . One who passed in an instant death bike accident, another in a police cell from a methadone and vodka cocktail. (should have been in hospital, but's that's another story).

Now this was before I'd heard of their passing. Hadn't seen either of them in weeks and wasn't in the habit of dreaming of my male friends with such intensity!

The dreams were like nothing I'd ever experienced before or since. Incredibly lucid, more like trippy visions in retrospect. They both had a common theme that I can only describe as "ascending". That sounds pretty cheesy, but that's the only word I can think of to describe them.

The first, we were on the balcony of my mate's first floor flat, the second in a tree, or some kind of platform in a tree. But in both instances, we were looking down and could see the whole world below us. Like a thousand cities viewed from miles above a flat earth. We were just hanging out and having a laugh, enjoying mundane chit chat. But like the best of times during those friendships.

Had very vivid recollections on waking on both occasions, which is something I never experience with my dreams.

I received the news of their deaths a day later once (through the local news), then a week after the second time.

I almost fainted on hearing these, not just with the shock of their sudden passing, but because I snapped right back to those dreams the instant I heard. Mainly because I just knew they'd dropped by to say "later" as they departed this world. Or so I believe.

I know statistically a significant amount of people will experience this phenomenon, that it can be written off with the law of probabilities. However, the nature of these dreams, just how they felt. I know there was more to them than coincidence.

Another episode, or series of them which I still can't fathom really, happened when the younger brother of a girl I was with died in another bike smash.

This stuff, (really quite freaky scary stuff at the time) occured in the few weeks following the night of the accicent. Another instant death here mercifully.

Without going into detailed description of every single event, and there was about a dozen, here's the gist.

We twice came downstairs to pictures tipped on the wall. I'm talking from completely straight, to a good 30 degrees off centre. I know they were straight, cos my ocd used to make me check them all the time. Straightened them up the first time, 4 or 5 days later, there they were again. (never happened before or after) Her very straight and sober mother also experienced this, as well as coming down to a pile of clothes tossed on the floor, that had been neatly folded the previous night. Happened to her twice. She started leaving those clothes folded, hoping it would happen again after the second time, but it never did.

I can see eyes rolling at this one , but our herb kept disappearing. 3 or 4 times as I recall. This had never really occured before or after that period. Her brother always hated her smoking herb btw.

On 2 of those occasions, the herb vanished from the draw we always kept it in. Only to emerge the day after in locations we'd never have left it. Atop a chest of draws in a room we hadn't entered in days, the middle of the bathroom floor.

Nothing very remarkable about that where tokers are concerned of course, but I swear we'd twice torn the place apart looking as it was our only herb at the time.

Another time it "materialised" on the living room floor, a few days after it had gone awol. This was a few hours after we'd hoovered top to bottom, checked the hoover and patted down every square inch of that carpet down.(being last bit of herb during a dryish spell) I very distinctly remember it.

Onto more unerving events.

We lived on an estate where you most definitely had to lock your doors after hours, lots of opportunists trying doors, like any estate I guess.

I was especially strict about double bolting that door every night, (partly down to my ocd), 10x checks before we went upstairs. Just no way I could possibly have gone up without multiple checks, impossible if you have ocd and it's one of your "things".

Anyway, twice over the following few weeks after her brother's death, we were awoken around 3am to the bloody thing banging in the wind. Not only unlocked, but opened. That door wasn't prone to opening when it was left unlocked btw.

Her cats used to use a small bedroom window to get in and out, that we left open 24/7, another thing her brother used to moan at us about all the time for security reasons

So these 2 times, woken up by the banging door, I rushed downstairs thinking someone's broken in, to be met with 2 distressed looking cats sitting on the kitchen floor. Everyone knows their cats right? and these 2 had the look of just having been rescued from outside on bonfire night.Very low to the floor, hair up on their backs. Seemed someone else had decided to let them in that night

The biggest wtf moment from that period came on the night following his funeral. My girlfriend had wanted to preserve some of the flowers from the wreaths, so we were advised to press them using blotting paper between some heavy yellow pages type books, then leave for at least a week.

This we did with the 7 or 8 she'd chosen to keep.1book on the bottom>paper and flowers,> then 3 on top as I recall. Left the books neatly stacked on the dining room table. I helped her do it, remember specifically as she was still physically shaky from the funeral and was getting too flustered to do it neatly herself.

We used to chill upstairs in the bedroom of an evening, and later that night she went down to grab some food or something. She wasn't even on the bottom step, when she said "why the fuck did you take them out? they're sposed to be in there for a week dumbass" or words to that effect.

I joined her downstairs, and I shit you not, those flowers were out of the blotting paper and books. Arranged neatly beside them on the table, in their semi pressed state. I checked the blotting paper, and you could clearly see the sap from the petals. The books were where they were, albeit not as tightly together as I'd left them 2 or 3 hours ago. I want to point out I was the last one to go upstairs during both the flower and the door episodes.

I'm 100% she didn't have a hand in it, wasn't playing some kind of sick joke on me. Neither of us were sleepwalkers.

She was/is (still see her very occassionally) a totally straight up person, doesn't have that kind of humour, responsible professional type, extremely down to earth. Plus the way she freaked and looked like a scared rabbit for days after each episode confirmed to me this stuff didn't happen by her hand. I mean she didn't find it comforting at the time, but months later did so, and always wished for something else to happen. Although it never did after those three weeks.

Oh, neither of us were on anything at the time of all this. Bit of slate and rocky, that was it. Odd drink here and there, but not even to drunk levels.

Also must say, for those who know a little of me, that all this happened before I'd developed a serious issue with alcohol and pills, and way before I had my brain injury, which triggered the worst of my mental health stuff. I was actually quite a high functioning person back then with an excellent memory .

Plus this doesn't account for her uber straight mum and dad experiencing very similar things during that time (in their seperate houses), or the 150 who heard the dozen or so car alarms going off in the crematorium car park on the day of his cremation. It was a perfectly still that afternoon, certainly not stormy or blowing a gale.

I noted that a few of those whose alarms had gone off during the service came up and apologised afterwards. "So sorry, that's never happened before with it" kind of thing. Her brother had been quite the little shit growing up apparently, with one of his favourite tricks being bouncing the neighbours cars until he set those alarms off, to the point the police were called once or twice.

That's just a few off the top of my head, without taking my mind where I don't want to with recollection right now

As I said, became a bit obsessed with it all for a period. I took to wandering into the back of our local spiritualist church, and going further afield to observe some of the more renowned mediums in the country. Some of it was very interesting, and to my mind on occassion, not something Derren Brown could have explained away quite so easily as with the 95% of the charlatens that occupy that field.

It was extremely unsettling when I wandered into a packed hall of a couple of hundred where a guy was doing mediumship. Completely on my own and anonymous in a town I wasn't known and stood quietly at the back. Only to be picked out by name, pointed at and told "he still doesn't like you smoking that waccy baccy btw Sam, anyway ****'s just saying hello mate, cos you didn't know each other that well did you". Then moving back to the messages of love for the grieving relatives that occupy a lot of these events.

Anyway, mediums are a whole other section of this discussion of course, not to stray too far from the thread title.

Phew, hadn't intended to write all that.

I realise it all makes me sound completely insane, and any half logical person could offer a million rational explanations to every last thing, from comfirmation bias to foul play to grief or drug induced psychosis.Thank goodness baz isn't around . But it's real enough for me, to qualify a belief I've always had for as long as I can remember

[indicatoker420]

I was going to mention dmt after reading the first post but someone's beat me to it, nice to see I'm not alone on that one then. Dmt really gets you thinking that there's more after death, well it does me anyway. I said this to my brother earlier too funny enough, now to come on here and see it already said by other members on the same day . I've woken from sleep and often felt like I felt soooooo peaceful and happy while asleep, a lot like the feeling you get during a dmt trip. They say dmt is released a bit during sleep, and much more upon near death, apparently.

[catfish]

an unanswerable question thats as old as man has been able to think .

im on the fence on this one

[catfish]

My afterlife will involve rotting away and maggots eating me.

Then il become npk and maybe some macro and micro.

so the life energy continues then

[indicatoker420]

Fight club film/book said that "You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else" and "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything". Not saying it's true obviously as nobody knows, but it's 2 of my favourite quotes.

[wu-tang-sam]

My little stories seem so blunt compared to the metaphysical and abstract turn this thread's taken, not to mention completely absurd to all the scientific minds here