Afterlife

Excerpt from my new book, available now

Hi People,

My new book, Afterlife: Is There Consciousness After Death?, is now available as an EPUB here, and also on Amazon for Kindle here. There will be a paperback version available on Amazon in a few days. The EPUB version is free for paid subscribers.

I hope you will pick it up and I am sure you will enjoy it!

Excerpt from the book:

The modern world still operates according to mythological principles. We are just unaware of this. Harpur calls history, “that mythological variant we have chosen to take literally.”

Mythological thought endlessly reiterates, repeats, and spirals around certain motifs, themes, and archetypes. “Myths do not, so to speak, get us anywhere,” Harpur writes. “While there are myths about progress, myths do not themselves progress.” He reviews the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ work on mythologies, described as systems which ‘will never consist in anything other than proceeding towards re-groupings, in the midst of a totality that is closed and complementary with itself.’ Like Harpur, Levi-Strauss saw “literal scientific progress” as another mythological variant. Levi-Strauss noted cryptically, “mythological thought is not prescientific; it should be seen rather as an anticipation of the future state of science.”

The movement from Medieval to postmodern society is not, for Harpur, a triumph of reason over superstition. The worldview of postmodern society — which includes Darwinian evolution, the Big Bang, the myth of progress, and so on — is equally mythological. What people now believe to be true is a “symmetrical inversion” of the older myths.

“We tell ourselves that modern Western culture developed historically out of the Middle Ages via the Renaissance; but this whole movement might be read less as a development than a symmetrical inversion of the old world — a movement `from God to man, from dependence to independence, from otherworldliness to this world, from the transcendent to the empirical, from myth and belief to reason and fact ... from a supernaturally static cosmos to a naturally determined evolving cosmos, and from a fallen humanity to an advancing one’”, he writes in The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. “It is likely, therefore, that our culture will, in turn, not so much `advance' as symmetrically invert once again, returning to the old outlook but in another guise.”

Perhaps we can do better than Harpur thinks. Perhaps we can achieve a return that is also an advance. Applying the tools of science to ancient mysteries, we can spiral up to a new level of understanding. The evidence amassed over the last centuries indicates that reincarnation is a legitimate aspect of our world, that consciousness can exist outside of the body, that we can access information from a nonlocal source, that we can, at times, communicate with the spirits of the dead. nn-DMT seems to reveal adjacent dimensions inhabited by many forms of consciousness — by an ecology of souls.

It seems highly likely that consciousness continues after bodily death, in some form. The amount of awareness a person is able to maintain after physical dissolution may depend on the work they do — the level of esoteric development they attain — during their lifetime. This is what Indo-Tibetan Buddhists believe: Monks at a high level of realization are capable of what seem to be supernatural manifestations after death. Their body may shrink, as if they are withdrawing it from the physical world, or the corpse may not decay for weeks. According to Tibetans, they accomplish this by maintaining themselves in a state of subtle consciousness.

Having lost touch with any idea of the sacred or of realms beyond physical death, humanity is quickly depleting the physical resources of the planet. In our quest for meaningless material and economic progress, we are dissatisfied, insatiable. When we supersede reductive materialism, we will shift our focus as a species toward the hidden dimensions of reality that can be investigated by a science within consciousness. Consciousness constructs the persistent illusion of this universe, precisely tuned to allow for the emergence of biological beings such as ourselves, who can study its workings and participate in its creation. We are That, consciousness, in individuated form. We don’t know its limits — or if it has limits.

When we realize consciousness as fundamental, the investigation of the continuity of life beyond death, as well as a wide variety of psychic and supernatural phenomena, will no longer be marginalized or seen as a threat to the social order or a violation of reason. In fact, such inquiries will be prioritized as essential, just as they were for ancient civilizations. Quantum physics tells us that conscious participants are active agents, transforming what they investigate. We are discovering that our language, logic, and conceptions about reality influence, affect, what we experience as reality. This nuanced understanding will have to be integrated into future modes of inquiry. As McKenna quipped, the alienation of modern civilization will end when we become the alien.

As one world ends, a new world opens.