Life After Death: Human Experience and Quantum Evidence

 

        We’ve all lost loved ones to death and have felt the grief associated with the loss. Most religious people have faith that the deceased live on as spirits and, in fact, watch over them as guardian angels. I too believe this way but not because of religious teaching. I believe it because 1) there is actual evidence through innumerable reported near-death experiences and 2) because the science of consciousness dictates that it’s so.

The research into NDEs is skyrocketing through psychologists, neurologists, and theologians who study it with great intensity. The scientific community, though at first reluctant to give the topic much credence, has decided it can no longer ignore NDEs because of the sheer numbers of people who report having them. Incidences seem to occur with increasing frequency because of improved survival rates due to modern resuscitation techniques.

In the last 50 years or so, mostly since Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, in 1975, the topic and study of NDEs have exploded. As a psychologist and medical doctor, Moody spent 40 years of his life researching and writing about this intriguing phenomenon because of the large number of his own patients who reported them

        All the studies by researchers like Moody suggest that one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Humans are dual beings, i.e., they have a physical as well as a spiritual/conscious component to life. We are learning that while the physical body does seem to need the spirit self to survive in mortality, the spirit self appears able to exist independently of the body. Consciousness is not necessarily localized in the brain. Once we understand and accept this premise, we can begin to savor the reality of who we are and the boundlessness of what we can accomplish.

        This analogy may help: Consciousness is like a television signal in the airwaves. The signal is managed by a television set [the brain] to create pictures on the screen [brain chemistry] representing a television show [a near-death experience]. Based on this analogy, some in science, claim that the NDE [the television show] is manufactured by the television set. But this is clearly incorrect because it is the signal operating with the TV that generates the show, not the TV, itself. Death is the end of consciousness, according to science, just like hitting the off button on the TV set is the end of the signal out there in the airwaves. Again, this is not true. Shutting off the television set has nothing to do with the existence of television signals in the atmosphere; they still exist even if every television set in the world were shut off. Using this analogy, it seems clear that death is not the end of consciousness.

        What many consider to be the most profound aspect of NDEs is how dying people observe themselves from outside their bodies. They often report floating above their bodies while they watch people work to resuscitate them at the scene of an accident or in a hospital. They even find themselves in other locations away from their bodies observing activities that are later verified by people who were there. This exceptional event is called an out-of-body experience (OBE) or “veridical perception.” These accounts are about as close as we can get to scientific proof that consciousness survives bodily death.

        The second reason I believe in eternal consciousness can be summed up in the words of Teilhard de Chardin: “We are spiritual beings, having a human experience.” It helps to view consciousness, not as a byproduct of the brain that dies when the brain dies, but rather that a brain is a tool of consciousness that continues to be very much alive and working after the death of the body. Some believe that this consciousness even takes different forms as seen in documented cases of reincarnation. Many scientists now posit that there is a literal bonding between consciousness and the subatomic life that is quantum physics where both are needed for either to exist.

        A study by Nature concluded that the universe expands much like a giant brain and that universal laws govern the electrical brain signals as well as cosmic growth. Another study by Dr. Stuart Hameroff found that human consciousness is comprised of quantum (subatomic) information that is redistributed into the universe when we die. Such studies seem to indicate that those who die inhabit the same space-time as the living and that we will all someday return to a quantum state where mind and matter are inseparable. It also means that consciousness and the universe are the same things.

        It's amazing to me how much we lack in understanding the potential and power that is consciousness. By definition, it is a subtle energy field of infinite potentiality, an informational field producing our sense of self and a unified field of function that governs everything in the Universe. Subtle energy within atoms is why nuclear weapons are so powerful. Physicists have said there is enough energy below the subatomic level in the vacuum of space to create entire universes and consciousness is the power that directs it. People simply don’t understand the power that lies within them to transcend the challenges of life, to throw off the shackles of disease, and fill the world with more love.

        Is it any wonder that human consciousness, comprised of this kind of power that is literally part of a Universal Creator, can never die? Enfolded in this power are the answers to questions humankind has asked since we appeared on this Earth 1.6 million years ago.