Proof of life after death…? It’s all a matter of faith — or lack of it, experts say. But is that really true? An unanswered question… answered.
Reporting by David Stone
Assorted Ideas, Large & Small
Proof of Life After Death: Upfront
Today, countless people accept scientific, rational proof of life after death. They’ve seen enough, but conservatives push back. As they always do. Let’s take a look.
- Near-death experiences — NDEs — a longstanding cultural phenomenon around the world, first explored in depth by Dr. Raymond Moody, opened a door for future researchers.
- Dr. Michael Newton tripped over a universe of life suspended between lives, using regression therapy. Since, thousands of documented histories, recorded by licensed practitioners, have been compiled.
- Dr. Jeffrey Long collected stories about NDEs, subjecting them to rigorous statistical analysis. Verified, his discoveries are bullet proof.
Put them all together, and you get an answer. It’s simple and, also, perplexing.
Life After Death: Setting High Standards for Proof
It’s one of our great mysteries. Proof of life after death demands solid evidence, lots of it.
Now, from these three doctors and their collaborators — anecdotal, scientific and statistical — we have that.
After the Big Question, Smaller Ones
There’s no longer any “What if?” But a lot of open doors await explorers eager to find out what’s in the next room.
We may discover clues about where we came from, why and what meaning we bring to the world, if any.
Curiosity got me searching, decades ago.
The Chase for Proof with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
A friend, an intensive care nurse, struggles with patients in their final hours day after day. She encouraged me to read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s groundbreaking, On Death and Dying.
I did, and it shook loose some unexamined cultural certainties.
But it forced questions too.
If there’s life after death, where and what is it? What does it tell us about life in the world we know? Do we finally have answers we can trust?
Take the many personal stories. Some are on bestseller lists. Put them together with published reports from scientists, Raymond Moody, Michael Newton and Jeffrey Long. You get fascinating results that are also convincing.
All three doctors risked professional scorn just for doing the research. They also risked it for making what they learned public, heaven forbid (excuse the pun).
What we understand should be reassuring to science, although it isn’t, and troubling for established religions.
At our cores — the part of us we think of intimately as “me” — we’re spiritual and everlasting. It’s something we know.
It’s not so much about proving life after death. It’s about recognizing that life is eternal. Life after death is just a different place to be as a consistent presence. It might not be the personality and body we know.
The next smart step is to learn some details while we stop wasting time knocking down irresistible reality.
Life After Death, In Death, Between Lives…
Are we talking about proof here?
There’s another universe — or universes — to explore. The once radical term “near death experience” is only 30 or so years old. We’ve only begun discovery.
Discoveries so far can confuse, but a fascinating picture emerges from the newest evidence.
Dr. Raymond Moody wrote about NDEs in Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon–Survival of Bodily Death. All he really said was that many people experience more than a simple disappearance into nothingness. This occurs in the proximity of physical death.
And not just that, something transcendent happens.
His interviewees described nothing clearer than a transition space. It was occupied while their bodies were clinically dead. During this time, they can’t think, feel, remember or see. This was far from proof of life after death.
Dr. Michael Newton’s Giant Step
Dr. Michael Newton changed the conversation. This happened accidentally. He stumbled into what he wrote about in Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives.
It was like Columbus smacking into the Americas.
Newton looked for something. He found a universe of otherness. It is a place where we all have roots, no matter what’s happening or isn’t happening on the ground.
A detailed library of recorded regressions into this space was gathered by Newton and his colleagues. It leaves little doubt about the idea. but, it raises many questions about the details.
Statistics and Proof of Life After Death
Then, Dr. Jeffrey Long, in a rigorous statistical study, (Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences), settled it. This is true, at least as far as NDEs go. He establishes beyond a reasonable doubt. There is an area that many, if not all, of us enter when our bodies fail.
Nothing here verifies religious convictions nor does anything discourage them. All that’s proven is, no matter what becomes of your body, an essential part of you goes on. It almost certainly has many times before.
Long’s information comes from stories volunteered by the few who come back, the minuscule percentage of people who report NDEs. The similarities prove a commonality of experience beyond chance and an unlikelihood of traditional explanation.
He rebuts skeptics with thoughtful, factual analysis.
Jeffrey Long’s latest video…
Books written by Eben Alexander (Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife), Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing) and others corroborate through personal experience what we’ve learned.
We have another life, whether after, before, between or in parallel. Something’s there, greater than the three-dimensions rigged to time with which we’re daily engaged.
Full Interview with Dr. Michael Newton
More than twenty years ago, Michael Newton, PhD, was a practicing psychologist using hypnotherapy with his patients.
He sometimes used past life regressions as a tool when he had the subject under hypnosis. A conventional therapist and atheist, he didn’t go there because any kind of belief system.
A successful past life regression does not prove a subject has past lives. But they discover what they believe are earlier incarnations while under hypnosis.
Professional practitioners may agree on the possibility past lives without agreeing on what they are or what they mean.
The big thing Newton discovered, though, was something he never imagined. Then, he regressed a patient plagued by profound loneliness and isolation.
When loneliness spurred the hunt…
Many longtime friends had died, but her loneliness went beyond the usual pain of loss.
After Newton regressed her through several past lives without locating a root cause, a solution suddenly presented itself.
“They’re here,” the woman declared, still under hypnosis.
She was with her friends and family, embraced by their love, she said.
When Newton asked her to identify which prior incarnation she was in, the woman’s answer was shocking.
She wasn’t in any of them.
She was with her friends in a universe between lives.
The experience inspired twenty years of intensive research and the recording of thousands of Life Between Lives sessions. An institute was founded to support and collect the research.
Summarizing what’s been learned from Life Between Lives research, Newton and colleagues have documented people’s revelations of the interstices. They say they exist between incarnations. They exist without physical bodies.
These are spaces occupied by them not just before and after incarnations, but also during them. He discovered that our “lives between lives” are our constant lives. They are spent in a place where we’re permanently rooted.
The full complexity and depth of these experiences is beyond our grasp. Mountains of documentation tell us that we’re privileged to become human. We do so as a learning and experiencing initiative. This comes from an essential place from which we extend ourselves. It is also a place to which we always return.
Dr. Jeffrey Long Finds Statistical Proof
Evidence For An Afterlife
Although Dr. Long’s mission started only with an interest in collecting objective evidence of near death experiences. This evidence can be explored statistically with scientific rigor. What he’s found extends beyond that.
NDEs, it seems, can’t exist outside the context of life after death.
Readers should feel free to take in the information on the website Dr. Long built for this purpose as well as his book Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences. His evidence and analysis is compelling.
Long sets out nine criteria to be considered in verifying that near death experiences are universal and consistent. He explores them with exhaustive rigor. He also takes the trouble to debunk the debunkers, taking on skeptics with detailed analysis of their published opinions.
More Skilled Analysis Than Faith
Some of the content in the NDEs is exciting. However, Long’s book is more an explanation of the science. It discusses how the science yields truth. His NDE subjects are not different from Moody’s or Newton’s. Their reports are more meticulously picked apart. They still point to the same conclusions.
Only reflex skeptics can deny the reality and context of near death experiences. Those who will not accept the science, no matter how conclusive, also deny it. We’re lucky so many people have had the courage to face ridicule to talk about theirs.
But then, there’s the other thing.
A near death experience depends on an afterlife for context.
Acquaintances, friends and family routinely meet the subject at death’s door. Sometimes, these are individuals the dying person never met in real life. Some are people he or she didn’t know were dead.
If not from an afterlife, where do they come from?
Taken in context with Michael Newton’s life between lives, the answer is an inescapable revelation. It reveals the fuller story of who we are.
Raymond Moody’s NDEs
NDE’s Are Individual, But Similar
A pioneer who coined the term “near death experience,” Dr. Moody watched it grow into universal recognition.
Thanks to popularizers, especially Oprah Winfrey, most people now understand what is meant by “NDE.”
As a young doctor — Moody is both a medical doctor and forensic psychiatrist — he was intrigued by similar types of experiences critically ill patients confided in him.
Outstanding features were bizarre revelations about being in a sort of nowhere land that was neither living nor dead.
He began collecting and collating details of the stories that his subjects experienced as real. In the days before he coined the term, the similarities of their near death experiences were startling, contrary to much of what we believe about reality.
Initially, Moody stuck by his conviction that the NDE stories proved only that many critically ill patients who survived remembered having them.
He did not believe they were proof of life after death and resented religious fundamentalists who used his research to make their case. He also thought the New Age movement overstated the results of his research as spiritual proofs.
But over time, his opinion changed.
In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, he said about his NDE research, “It has given me great confidence that there is a life after death.”
Conclusion
The question of life after death has existed for millennia, and unfortunately, there is no conclusive proof in either direction. It remains a topic of philosophical and religious debate, with various perspectives and interpretations across different cultures and belief systems.
Science’s limitations:
- Current scientific methods rely on studying the physical world and observable phenomena. Life after death, by definition, transcends the physical realm, making it outside the scope of current scientific capabilities.
- Studies of near-death experiences (NDEs) have provided intriguing anecdotal evidence, but these experiences can be subjective and vary greatly, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about an afterlife.
Religious and philosophical perspectives:
- Many religions offer faith-based beliefs in an afterlife, often involving concepts like heaven, hell, reincarnation, or spiritual realms. These beliefs provide comfort and meaning to many, but lack concrete evidence.
- Philosophical arguments for and against life after death exist, based on logic, reason, and thought experiments. However, these arguments often reach inconclusive or contradictory positions.
Ultimately, the question of life after death remains a personal one:
- Whether you believe in it or not is a matter of individual faith, philosophy, and life experience.
- Some find comfort in believing in an afterlife, while others focus on making the most of their present life.
It’s important to respect different perspectives on this issue and appreciate its complexity. While conclusive proof might remain elusive for now, the question itself can encourage meaningful reflection on life, death, and the human condition.
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