Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife

humans had lost their exalted place in the Universe with the ideas of Copernicus, they had now also lost their place in time. But

There is no freedom, there is no true choice, not in the slightest. In this view, we ourselves are no more than wind-up dolls, automatons, executing thoughts and actions that we inherited from everything that came before us. Every choice we make is illusory from this perspective, because even the atoms and molecules in our brain are just following

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

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

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

Belief, as the sagacious Robert Anton Wilson once remarked, “is the death of intelligence”. Once we believe in something, we stop questioning that model of reality, and

“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’.”

The implications of a deterministic Universe for human beings were humbling, almost demeaning. Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch explains:

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.