Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife

In her book The Near Death Experience: Mysticism or Madness, theologian Judith Cressy points out that a number of the biographies of celebrated mystics tell of an apparent dying, followed by a return to life with a visionary message to pass on.

It is in Book 10 of Plato’s classic, The Republic, that we find a remarkable narrative which suggests that the near-death experience has been with us throughout history. Here the

“When I first submitted an article to an International Palliative Care Journal some 15 years ago on death-bed visions, their reply was ‘this is not for us’ – code for ‘it’s too fringy’.”

It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.

Just as Davies, Dyson and Nagel have argued, a number of scientists now suggest, based on the theory of the quantum world, that consciousness may in fact be a fundamental property of the cosmos – far from the ‘accidental by-product’ of a biological brain.

appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature.9 [my emphasis]

The curious fact that human consciousness seems to be a way for the universe to observe itself ties in closely to developments in science over the past century, most notably in the field of quantum physics – the field of science concerned with phenomena at the microscopic scale (atoms and sub-atomic elements). The enigma that emerges at the quantum

To avoid having their brain annihilated, many people have unfortunately fled from a sense of proportion by rejecting science outright, retreating into fundamentalist religiosity, or at the very least enveloping themselves in a blissful (to them) shroud of ignorance.

“you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.