My View of After Life
I’m not a church goer but I was brought up in the Christian religion and I consider myself to be a Christian. To me the strongest message of Christianity is that which is attributed to Christ Himself. “Love God and Love others as you Love yourself”. I have no belief in ‘devils’ or ‘demons’ or any such. They are just a device invented by the churches to keep the masses frightened and under the thumb. Same goes for spending an eternity in some place called ‘Hell’ just because of a finite number of interactions conducted over eighty years or so on Earth which is not even a drop in the cosmic bucket! However the idea of a person selling his soul has been around for a while and makes for some good fiction.
In fact I have no place for ‘beliefs’ of any kind. I cannot take the word of written material that has been around for thousands of years, whose authors are unknown and are dead by now and so cannot be cross examined. Also the material has been deliberately altered and vetted down through the ages for local political reasons and has been translated many times. In translations it is not uncommon for what were originally metaphors to become fact. In the Bible for example much hinges on the word ‘virgin’ which in our language means only one thing. In the original writing could the writer have merely wished to imply ‘young woman’, ‘unmarried woman’, ‘maiden’, ‘girl’ (or maybe the exact meaning was intended).
In life though we all ‘believe’ certain things for which we personally have no evidence but which we take for granted as ‘knowledge’. I for example have never been to Jerusalem nor have I ever met a person who has. Certainly much has been written about the place (and many others) but I have no personal contact with it. However I do not doubt for a second that such a place exists. That’s very much in the realm of ‘knowledge’ not just ‘belief’. So when does an overwhelming set of circumstantial and hearsay evidence translate over as ‘certain knowledge’?
Belief in God from the above religious perspective is very much a ‘belief system’ but then denying the existence of God is also a ‘belief system’ in that there is no evidence for such a belief. So what ‘evidence’ is there for anything?
Well now that’s a very good question. Let’s start with what is largely (due to modern medicine) a latter day phenomenon. Just go to Google and type in Near Death Experience or NDE. You will find HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of separate accounts from people of all walks of life, religions, no religion, ethnic, cultural, gender and age backgrounds who essentially tell the same story. They are in hospital and every measurable thing like heart rate and brain function is a flat-line! That means they are effectively dead. A third of all those who are resuscitated tell of a spiritual realm populated with departed loved ones and other beings including pets which is more real than ordinary life. These experiences are remembered in detail decades later and have life altering consequences for how the person views life. Compare this to a dream which we all do every night but which is almost completely forgotten the next day. The most convincing are the children under four years of age who are resuscitated because they have not yet experienced any cultural pollution. Some talk of meeting deceased relatives who they were not even aware had existed! There’s an amazing video interview with a blind woman who had been blind from birth. She says she has never experienced light and does not even see black; just nothing at all. She was in a bad car accident and found herself floating outside her body and suddenly she could SEE! She could see not only her immediate surrounds but the whole city sky scrape with all the tall buildings!
Now this leads to a more down to earth phenomenon or so it seems. I refer to CONSCIOUSNESS. Just exactly what is it? The biologists will swear up and down that the mind and the brain are the same thing. Every thought, every action, every image including emotions, love, hate etc are all happening due to electrical chemical firings of neurons in that tiny bit of folded grey matter that you keep between your ears! Well I’m sorry but I can’t swallow that and neither can a whole bunch of reputable mainstream scientists who are putting their careers on the line to undertake research into this area. Prof Dean Radin for example has done experiments where a group of volunteers focus their thoughts onto a machine designed to produce random numbers and the thoughts of those people have a measurable effect on the output of the machine. He has machines set up all over the world which produce random numbers continuously. Now whenever there is a key event where a good slice of humanity is focused on that event the machines go crazy producing great streams of order rather than randomness. This happened at September 11 for example and surprisingly the effect even starts BEFORE the planes hit the trade centre suggesting precognition on a combined scale of human consciousness. Other times included the verdict in the O J Simpson trial where a lot of people were focused on the outcome. Another event (not yet documented) would probably be the announcement of Michael Jackson’s death. Now consider, that on September 11 which was a normal busy day for air travel that the planes that hit the trade centre were HALF EMPTY! In other words some people at some gut level just were not happy about flying that day.
All this and much more points towards consciousness existing outside of the brain and body. The mind for example is not like a photo album. If I ask you to form an image of say a ‘pink elephant’ you can easily do so but if I now come along and cut up your brain I won’t find that image anywhere because it is not stored in any one place but rather it’s stored holistically.
Now let’s get to the important bit! In Quantum Physics there is an experiment called the ‘double slit’ experiment. This is where electrons (which sometimes behave as a wave pattern and sometimes behave as little particles) are fired ONE AT A TIME through a double slit barrier at a screen beyond. The pattern over time should be two parallel lines of hits as each electron goes through which ever slit it goes through randomly. It’s not though. It turns out to be a wave pattern indicating an interference pattern where the electrons are going through both slits SIMULTANEOUSLY and therefore interfering with each other as waves do. This is CRAZY but it gets better! The scientists figured out a way to put an observing device near the slits to observe exactly which slit the electrons were going through. NOW the pattern on the screen is just two parallel lines as would be expected. In other words the act of observing collapsed the probability function down to an actual single outcome!
There is great little illustration of this by Prof Fred Alan Wolfe which has to be seen to be believed.
This has huge implications in that it means that consciousness itself controls what happens in the universe at least at the quantum level. Without an observer there is no actual effect just an unlimited number of probabilities! It’s the old chestnut about ‘if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to witness it does it make any sound?’ Well I suspect that in this case it does because the woods are full of all kinds of creatures with consciousness not just human beings.
Now 13.7 billion years ago according to science’s best calculations we had an event (a singularity) which we have called ‘The Big Bang’. At that point and out of NOTHING AT ALL sprang all matter, energy, space and time which has been expanding (at a measurable rate) ever since. In the beginning this was very much a quantum event which was full of potential probabilities but which could not have particularized into the universe that we see today WITHOUT A CONSCIOUS OBSERVER!
Now to me this implies the existence of ‘a Creator’ or more simply ‘God’. Another factor which to me indicates ‘intelligent design’ or ‘God’ is the incredible order that we see in all things. Order is everywhere throughout the observable universe including even in the structure of our own bodies. Also scientists have discovered how finely balanced the parameters of our universe are. If things like the charge on an electron, the gravitational constant, the speed of light and many others varied by only a tiny fraction of what they are stars themselves wouldn’t form and we as human life forms would not exist. The counter argument to this is that there may be an infinity of universes each with their own set of parameters and so therefore the fact that we exist in a universe that exactly suits our needs should not surprise us as we could not exist anywhere else.
Does the whole thing come down to just random chance or is randomness just a tool of God ‘The Creator’? What about the double slit experiment before the observer was added? Wouldn’t God be a sufficient observer there to collapse the probability function without the need of a human observer? Does that mean that God is not Omni-present? Could it be that God only exists where life exists and that all life forms including us are tiny sparks of God?
It’s about time someone solved the question of ‘what is and where is consciousness’? Does it exist independently of the body and does it go on forever?
Home page.My View of the Afterlife. No doubt you are probably wondering ‘how did a nice scientific guy like me get involved with life after death?’ It is true that my professional qualifications are in science and mathematics and I spent my entire working life teaching and lecturing in these.
About fifteen years ago I started out on a very different journey and it is one that I never would have previously envisaged. I have NO religious convictions and while I was never a completely close minded person (as in people I know who say ‘even if you prove it to me and it is correct I still won’t believe it!) I was always very sceptical of anything that was not taught in my science/maths textbooks.
As things have turned out I am literally now blown away by an encyclopaedia of material which is as yet not considered mainstream science. With every passing day though more and more evidence mounts up. ‘Real’ scientists are performing ‘real’ experiments in ‘real’ laboratories with ‘real’ funding from governments and even organisations like the American CIA and they are getting ‘real’ repeatable results. There are TWENTY-TWO completely separate areas of study all of which on their own have produced evidence which proves the existence of life after death!
There is an old saying which is just so true. ‘A new idea is at first ridiculed as being impossible then it is violently opposed and finally it is accepted as being self evident!’
As an author this is the only topic that I have wanted to write about and I consider it to be the stand out topic of my life. I have written five novels and books 1 to 3 and 5 are directly concerned with comparing our material existence here on Earth with the afterlife realms. Book 4 deviates into time travel but still sticks to the main afterlife premise.
The books are all published under the heading ‘science fiction’ which they are but unfortunately when you label something like that only a subset of people show any interest. In the case of people who have read my books I have repeatedly had comments back like ‘I don’t usually like or read science fiction but these books are different.’ Certainly I meant for the books to have universal appeal particularly as the one certainty that everyone faces in life is death!