A Modest Christmas Gift

New Reflections on the Afterlife

I’ve been taking some time to review the winning essays in the Bigelow Institute’s contest, seeking evidence for the afterlife. According to the website, “The winners were chosen based on the power of the arguments presented and on how persuasively the essays made the case for survival of human consciousness beyond a reasonable doubt.” I wrote an essay for the competition that, for whatever reasons, didn’t make the final cut. My essay is available (free for everyone until Monday, and always free for paid subscribers) here.

I was honestly hoping to find a breakthrough in this compilation. Instead, I feel mildly disappointed. Even so, there is much to be gained from skimming through these works for anyone with an interest in the topic.

I am always astonished that most people seem to lack intellectual curiosity about the possible continuity of individual self-identity or consciousness after death. I find this topic riveting — it was one of the reasons I embarked on my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002). In the Introduction, I wrote:

The self-enclosed logic of secular materialism denies any independent existence to the soul, attributing all facets of the human personality to the synaptical wiring of the brain. Psychedelics indicate that this is not the whole story—especially the lightning strike of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a chemical produced by our own bodies and by many plants. Smoking DMT is like being shot from a cannon into another dimension and returning to this world in less than ten minutes. The DMT revelation strongly suggests that the psyche cannot be reduced to a manifestation of our physical hardware.

(It doesn’t seem that any of the winning essays explore psychedelic experience as central to their hypothesis.)

As I have noted repeatedly, our accepted metaphysical paradigm has profound, if invisible, impacts on every facet of our society. Materialism remains the ruling ideology today. Materialism is, I believe, ultimately a nihilistic belief system that no longer matches the scientific evidence. As a reigning system, materialism induces the economic determinism — what Rene Guenon called “the reign of quantity” — which underlies our current global race toward ecological self-termination. Without a change in our metaphysics, we will not be able to alter our course.

A few of the winner essayists make this connection, including the cardiologist and Near Death Experience (NDE) researcher Pim Lommel, who writes:

We should realize that when people still believe that death is the end of everything we are, including our consciousness, they will give their energy only towards the temporary and material aspects of their life. Their lives will be just about competition and about making more money. In their short-sightedness they will forget how we are interconnected with each other and with nature. They will forget to reflect on the future of our planet, where our children and our grandchildren will have to live and survive. To quote Dag Hammerskjöld (1905-1961): ’Our ideas about death define how we live our life.’

In that sense, I believe that substantiating the “Survivalist Hypothesis,” as it is called, is mission critical for humanity’s physical survival also. I tend to think that materialism is kind of a virus of modernization, caused by the hypertrophied development of left-brain, rational thought. Western industrial society unfortunately transmitted this virus, via Marxism, to Russia and, in particular, China, which remains officially atheist. The dominance of myopic rationalism leads inexorably to a technocratic system of global control and the technological Singularity, which threatens a final rupture in our relationship to the organic biosphere.

As I note in my essay, “Many different kinds of evidence strongly indicate the continuity of some form of consciousness and individual identity beyond physical death. These include startling examples of mediumship, evidence from NDEs, out-of-body experience, hypnotic past life regression, telephone calls received from the dead via the bizarre phenomenon of Instrumental Trans-Communication (ITC), apparitions of the deceased, as well as spontaneous past-life recall in early childhood, which has been carefully studied. Much of this research is quite familiar and well-known to those in the field.”

Jeffrey Mishlove, who won first prize in the competition, provides this diagram which show the various branches of survivalist research:

I think the Bigelow Institute made a mistake in how they framed the essay question, assuming their goal was to advance the cutting edge of investigation in this field. They asked contestants to “summarize the best evidence available for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.” But repeatedly summarizing the evidence (as many of the essays proceed to do) will not influence or change the beliefs of skeptics and materialists, who still hold the dominant position in the scientific and media establishments. What matters is not just a preponderance of evidence, but the mechanism or organizing hypothesis under which that evidence becomes first sensible and finally more persuasive than the materialist paradigm.

Perhaps it would have been more effective to present to the essayists the body of agreed-upon evidence in the various categories and ask the investigators to propose scientific models which can be explored and eventually field-tested, accommodating the entirety of the evidence? Unsurprisingly, given the subject, many of the authors simply provided a condensed version of material already presented in their published books.

I wrote my essay for the competition before I read Bernardo Kastrup, who makes the most philosophically thorough argument for idealism (the thesis that consciousness is the fundamental reality) I have found. In my essay, I was already arguing for idealism, based on the works of Amit Goswami and Rudolf Steiner, among other thinkers. According to Goswami, a physicist who wrote a manual on quantum mechanics: “The consciousness of the subject in a subject-object experience is the same consciousness that is the ground of all being. Therefore, consciousness is unitive. There is only one subject-consciousness, and we are that consciousness.”

Kastrup wrote an essay for the competition which theorizes that consciousness exists after death only in a kind of abstract or generic sense, as a dissolution of the individuality into the greater whole:

While a single drop of dye is clearly discernible when trapped in a dropper, it isn’t so in the ocean, even though the entire substance of the drop is still there and nothing has disappeared. Similarly, the mental processes that constitute the inner life of a person, when circumscribed by a dissociative boundary, are clearly discernible on the dashboard of perception. But upon the end of dissociation, when the dissociative boundary unravels, they become dispersed in the broader cognitive space of transpersonal associations that constitutes the world-in-itself. Everything about the dead is still in the world, this world, but no longer discernible as a discrete entity, just as a drop of dye is not discernible in the ocean. This is analogous to what in quantum physics is called ‘decoherence.’

Kastrup’s conclusion of decoherence and dissolution doesn’t seem very different from the materialist perspective, which posits permanent annihilation of individual identity after death. As I explore in my essay (and many of the winning essays, including Chris Carter’s, also explore), a great deal of evidence suggests this is not the whole story. Quantum mechanics, via Action at a Distance and nonlocality, also offers a basis for conceiving how a “quantum self” or “quantum monad” might maintain coherence after physical death, and seek to continue patterns of development via rebirth or reincarnation.

In his essay, Mishlove reviews the cross-cultural evidence around reincarnation. Researchers such as James Matlock and Ian Stevenson found that the median period before reincarnation in Western cases is 35 years, where for other cultures, particularly Asian cultures, it is 16 - 18 months. Mishlove proposes that this cultural difference indicates “the interpenetration of the living world with that of the deceased,” proposing:

If the afterlife operated independently, according to its own laws and principles, one would expect the intermission length reported by children with past-life memories — to be unaffected by cultural expectations. … Such findings show us we the living can influence the afterlife. People who enter the afterlife will see what they need to see or what they’re prepared or conditioned to see. They are still encountering something very real on the other side. To the degree that these stories enter our culture, we are setting ourselves up to have different afterlife experiences.

I find it worth reflecting on this in conjunction with the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake proposes there are no fixed laws in nature, only patterns that become more coherent with repetition, forming “morphogenetic fields” via “morphic resonance.” If consciousness is the underlying ground or “ontological primitive,” then our structures of knowledge and belief may fundamentally influence the expression of what we experience as the deep substrata of reality, not only in this world but in other dimensions we may encounter after death.

I foresee, eventually, a figure-ground reversal in our society. What has been denigrated, considered ridiculous to even discuss — the survival of consciousness after death, any possibility of an afterlife, a soul or spirit — will become crucial to the evolving stem of humanity. What is currently the focus of our society — material accumulation, technical progress — will be deemed of lesser interest, seen as lacking intrinsic merit. By recognizing the importance of the topic, the Bigelow essays make a small but significant step forward in this ongoing, inevitable shift in cultural priorities.

If you want to dive deeper into this extraordinary topic, you can purchase my recent 4-part seminar here. It includes 12 hours of lectures and class discussion, plus a syllabus of research in the field. Half priced for paid subscribers.