Life After Death

There will never be a definitive book on the afterlife, which I think is good, because no single book will ever convince skeptics or console everyone who has wondered what happens after death. What might change society’s fear and doubt is a rising tide of evidence. Below I have listed every book and Web site that helped me write this book. They constitute a mountain of evidence that life continues after death; more important, each one is a symptom of rising consciousness. Too long has death been a mysterious subject. The best I can hope for is to shed a little light into that darkness, but I couldn’t have done it without the countless other people trying to shed the same light.

We have entered a new era in research where the Internet has become as valuable as standard book references. Besides Googling any general topic (e.g., ghosts, near-death experiences, heaven) at www.google.com, one can turn to the ever-expanding online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.com. The only flaw with Web references is that they tend to be overwhelming in number but sometimes shallow in coverage. The great virtue of online referencing is that the reader can go deeper than the author on any particular topic with the push of a button.

I touched only briefly on the physical changes caused by death. Sherwin B. Nuland won a National Book Award on the subject with How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (Knopf, 1994). Nuland, a senior Yale physician, goes into clinical detail about the biology of the dying process, covering heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS, among other topics, in his exploration of how every person’s death is as unique as his life.

Spiritual experiences also cause physical changes, making them just as real, if you are a materialist, as the changes caused by death. An early popular book on the subject is Nona Coxhead, Mindpower (Penguin, 1976), which emphasizes research into ESP and other areas of parapsychology. For a contemporary study of how current breakthroughs in brain science are changing our view of consciousness, I turned to Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint for the Human Spirit (Park Street Press, 2002), which is refreshingly humane and far-ranging. Pearce writes for the general reader and intersperses neurology with intriguing anecdotes.

I have tried to be as nontechnical as possible when discussing the vast philosophical system known as Vedanta. Readers who want to go back to the source should begin with The Concise Yoga Vasistha (State University of New York Press, 1984), in a clear and readable translation by Swami Venkatesananda. This great work describes the education of Lord Rama, an incarnation of God in human form, at the feet of an immortal rishi, Vasistha, who tells his young pupil all the Vedantic knowledge about death, reincarnation, and the projection of all worlds from the Self. I’ve kept this book at my side for many years.

The story of the Tibetan delog Dawa Drolma is recounted by her son Chagdud Tulku in his introduction to her book, Delog: Journey into Realms Beyond Death (Padma Publishing, 1995). This is the best entry into personal experiences of the Bardo that I’ve found. The classic work on death and dying in the Tibetan tradition is the now-famous Tibetan Book of the Dead. It may strike many Westerners as too exotic and detailed in its Buddhist ritualism, which is the product of many centuries of religious practice. More accessible is Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), which covers the same ground.

Near-death experiences were introduced to the public in the 1970s through several bestsellers, one of them being the immensely popular Life After Life by Raymond Moody (Mockingbird Books, 1975), a quick read that still retains the excitement of a physician who has just discovered a remarkable phenomenon. Since then the literature on NDEs has grown enormously. A great deal of it is summarized and updated on a Web site, www.near-death.com. This site gives details of some of the most prominent and widely publicized experiences, but it branches much further into almost every aspect of death and the afterlife.

The near-death experiences of children are particularly fascinating because they are considered to be innocent, unbiased witnesses. Of the several books on the subject, I turned to another physician’s book, Melvin Morse, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (Ivy Books, 1990). Dr. Morse has several other titles in the near-death field. Another notable writer is P. M. H. Atwater; the book of hers I read was Beyond the Light: The Mysteries and Revelations of Near-Death Experiences (Avon Books, 1994). The mainstay of such books, of which there are dozens, are real-life stories told firsthand by those who have come back from clinically dying.

The best clinical study on NDEs was conducted in Holland by Dr. Pim van Lommel. It is well described in Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (W. W. Norton, 2005), a book told from the perspective of a bemused journalist. An even more detailed account, told without the bemusement, can be found online at www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4207&l=en.

p. 37 The percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they’ve had a near-death experience is cited in the online article “Religious Interpretations of Near-Death Experiences” by David San Filippo: http://www.lutz-sanfilippo.com/library/counseling/lsfnde.html. The doctoral essay contains many other academic references to the NDE phenomenon as well.

p. 38 The story of the historical delog Lingza Chokyi is told at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/info-theory/course.html.

p. 42 “Science isn’t about knowing the mind of God …” is quoted from “What Was God Thinking? Science Can’t Tell” by Eric Cornell (Time, Nov. 14, 2005, p. 100).

p. 43 “At that moment these people are not only conscious …” is quoted from an online interview with van Lommel at http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4207&l=en.

Religious belief is a vast topic, but for a thumbnail sketch of where religion is headed in modern America, I consulted a leading poll, The Next American Spirituality: Finding God in the Twenty-First Century, by George Gallup Jr. (Cook Communications, 2000). The Gallup organization is dedicated to documenting the actual beliefs of every faith around the globe, which is especially needed in the Islamic world, where reliable data has been scarce, even in recent years. You can do your own browsing of opinions across the board on Google, entering topic phrases like “church attendance” or “believe they will go to heaven.”

I didn’t rely on any specific book for the Christian conception of heaven, but for official theological answers I consulted The Catholic Encyclopedia, which “proposes to give its readers full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine.” The home page for the encyclopedia is http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/. I did not explore the thicket of contrasting beliefs stemming from Protestant theology, although as always there were many helpful articles at Wikipedia.

For anyone who wants to browse the religious landscape, the easiest way to begin is to take a question like “Where is heaven?” or “What is heaven like?” and enter it at Google—innumerable results crop up. One can browse the beliefs of various denominations online at http://www.religioustolerance.org/heav_hel.htm.

The vagaries of the Old Testament God, with his many faces and changes of mood, are thoroughly covered in Jack Miles, God: A Biography (Vintage, 1996). The book is nonreligious, treating the Old Testament as source material in the life of a fascinating, captious, mercurial person who happens to be God.

When I contend that Jesus often sounds like a Vedic rishi, I have in mind the Book of Thomas and other Gnostic gospels. The fascinating history of how these seminal Christian writings came to be unearthed accidentally by a wandering Egyptian shepherd in 1945, and their subsequent suppression by the Church, is told best by Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, 1989). Hers is one of those exceptional books on religion that hugely influence public opinion; it came as a revelation that the Christian tradition had an early, authentic mystical tradition that allowed women full status and told an alternate Christ story that doesn’t end with suffering and dying on the cross.

For anyone who wishes to read every single word attributed to Christ in any gospel, official or unofficial, an invaluable source is Ricky Alan Mayotte, The Complete Jesus (Steerforth Press, 1997). It is usefully arranged by topics, such as Commandments, Parables, Jesus Speaking About Himself, etc.

One of the major points I emphasize throughout this book is that the afterlife is still evolving, as it must since life as a whole is always evolving. This is true of hell, too, as described in Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell (Harvest, 1995), a readable survey compiled by a freelance journalist. Similar surveys on both heaven and hell have appeared regularly, but a more in-depth reference is Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Vintage, 1996). Her approach is to trace Satan, not as a real personage but as a concept whose basis can be found in anthropology, psychology, and literary analysis. Such a humane approach appeals to me because it shows so clearly and in detail how the devil can be considered our own creation.

A similar approach can be taken to Christ, who is boldly explained in mythic terms by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians (Harmony Books, 2001), which puts Jesus in the context of the ancient world and its belief in the Goddess. Here the attempt is to fill in how early Christians used Jesus for the archetypal purpose of fulfilling the myth of God-as-man that exists in every ancient culture.

Akasha is the subtlest of the five Mahabhutas, the five elements from which creation is constructed (the others being earth, air, fire, and water). Readers who want to study the system of Mahabhutas might begin online at http://ignca.nic.in/ps_04012.htm. For traditional Indian beliefs in Akasha and how they affected Western spirituality, see the online discussion at http://www.saragrahi.org/.

There are, of course, many popular books on ghosts and communicating with the dead. Mary Roach’s Spook gives a readable survey of these topics, told from a skeptical and amused point of view that will either immediately appeal or irritate. Popular books by psychics that have reached millions of readers include James Van Praagh, Talking to Heaven: A Medium’s Message of Life After Death (Signet, 1999) and Allison DuBois, Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye (Fireside, 2005).

The phenomenon of psychic communication has been researched at the university level by psychiatrist Gary Schwartz, whose experiments have engaged me personally. The same research brought Allison DuBois to light and resulted in a television series on NBC, as recounted in Gary E. Schwartz and William L. Simon, The Truth About Medium (Hampton Roads Publishing, 2005). Schwartz gives a thorough account of his academic research, the leading findings in the field, in The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death (Atria, 2003), for which I wrote the introduction.

Readers who are interested in the historical perspective of the afterlife may want a survey like Harold Coward, editor, Life After Death in World Religions (Orbis, 1997), which collects essays on each faith by various experts. I came up with my own synthesis, relying heavily on a classic work, Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), which is still a model of fairness and ecumenical tolerance, not to mention graceful writing and valuable insights. If there is one book that every person interested in religion should begin with, this is it.

The subject of spiritual materialism is incredibly important because so many people, especially in the West, are driven by ego needs even when it comes to spirituality. We turn spiritual to gain things from the world that we otherwise couldn’t through work and struggle, and thus we transform work and struggle into spiritual processes. The book that started me thinking along these lines was Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala, 2002), which is told from a Buddhist perspective but with a Western audience in mind.

It goes without saying that eternity is indescribable, but the Vedic rishis were comfortable living in unbounded awareness. Therefore their descriptions are the most reliable that we possess in the world’s wisdom traditions. It helps to have someone who continues to have similar experiences. I would point to Nisargadatta Maharaj, a humble Indian farmer who became a renowned guru in Bombay after enlightenment. His book, I Am That (Acorn Press, 1990), is one of the purest spiritual testimonies we have in modern times. Not only is it completely unspoiled by any trace of the guru game, which has been played in India for centuries, but Sri Nisargadatta seems to be witness to a very expanded state of awareness, fully comparable to the ancient rishis. This is another of the few books I’ve kept by my side for years.

pp. 122–26 My account of Mellen-Thomas Benedict’s journey into the afterlife comes from online: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/reincarnation04.html.

pp. 135–36 The story of Dawn J., the woman who healed with miraculous oil, is told in Cheri Lomonte, The Healing Touch of Mary (Divine Impressions, 2005), which contains dozens of similar firsthand accounts.

Readers who are interested in theories of consciousness face a bewildering number of choices, and in the context of science almost all those choices are materialistic. That is, they assume that mind arises from matter. Since I disagree with the assumption, I am halfhearted about recommending even a good survey like Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004), which does a thorough job covering the many philosophical questions raised by current theories. The most praised authors in the field seem to be skeptics who believe that mind is actually an illusion created by neural activity and outmoded thinking about the brain. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books, 1992), which argues aggressively for the proposition that consciousness is a materialistic phenomenon and nothing more. Therefore, human consciousness could (and one day will) be duplicated by a computer.

For a more pluralistic, open-minded discussion, see Susan Blackmore, editor, Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human (Oxford University Press, 2006), in which twenty-one thinkers talk in conversational interviews about the whole problem of relating mind and brain. Finally, for a perspective that is more neurological, I read the fascinating speculations of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Shambhala, 1998), which attempts an all-inclusive theory that follows the evolution of mind from a basis in organic chemicals. It is up to each reader to decide if Vedanta, whose own all-inclusive theory begins with consciousness instead of chemicals, stands up to modern skepticism as I have claimed.

The discussion of the five Koshas is my own synthesis of traditional Vedic ideas. Those ideas are easy to explore online at Web sites such as http://swamij.com/koshas.htm.

The literature on angels is vast, but I found that what I wanted to say did not involve the many historical surveys describing how angels appear in various world religions. However, there are many fascinating accounts from people who have learned to cooperate with the devas, creative agents that are the Indian parallel of angels. These are all New Age books that center on Findhorn, a famous Scottish community that claimed to use devas to grow crops on barren soil, among other remarkable things. See Dorothy MacLean, To Hear the Angels Sing: An Odyssey of Co-Creation with the Devic Kingdom (Lindisfarne Books, 1994) and Machaelle Small Wright, Behaving As if the God in All Life Mattered (Perelandra, 1997) for two sympathetic stories of women who suddenly found that they could talk to devas and use them to manifest desires. Both are at polar opposites to skepticism and materialism.

The literature on reincarnation is quite unwieldy since it spans every religion and spiritual movement. The main source of popular belief in reincarnation is probably Theosophy, a movement that grew out of nineteenth-century spiritualism but also incorporated a broad range of ideas from India. See James S. Perkins, Experiencing Reincarnation (Theosophical Publishing House, 1977), for a readable introduction. For me personally, it was fascinating to discover how many spiritual notions I absorbed as a child at home have been adopted by the Theosophists, and the New Age in general.

For the scientific proof of reincarnation, I am indebted to an excellent survey article, “Death, Rebirth, and Everything in Between: A Scientific and Philosophical Exploration,” by Carter Phipps, in the journal What Is Enlightenment? (Issue 32, March-May 2006, pp. 60–90). The Web address is http://www.wie.org/, where subscribers can read the entire article.

This led me to the important research by the University of Virginia psychiatrist Ian Stevenson on children who claim to remember past lives. His Web site is http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/. On the same topic an invaluable book is Carol Bowman, Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child (Bantam, 1998), in which a mother finds that her children’s irrational fears of loud noises and house fires is cured by past-life regression, leading her to explore the field in depth. A Web site devoted to regressing children to their past lives is http://www.childpastlives.org/.

pp. 173–74 I first became aware of the boy who remembered dying in a World War II air battle from an ABC News report: http://www.reversespins.com/proofofreincarnation.html.

pp. 174–76 et passim The anecdotes of children who remember their past lives, mostly derived from Ian Stevenson’s database, are recounted in Phipps, pp. 63–70 (see above).

p. 175 The quotes from children reported by their parents is from Ian Stevenson’s Web site, http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/.

p. 176 The source of out-of-body research at the Monroe Institute can be browsed at http://www.monroeinstitute.org/. Another good article, linking out-of-body experiences and NDEs, can be found online at http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/sci-docs/ctt97-ssooo.html.

I had already started writing about Akasha before discovering Ervin Laszlo’s Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Inner Traditions, 2004), the most wide-ranging argument for incorporating consciousness and science. Since my topic was the afterlife, I wasn’t able to include the dozen or more mysteries, ranging from advanced quantum theory, cosmology, biology, and neuroscience, that according to Laszlo will never be solved until consciousness is taken into account. Readers who want to investigate these prevailing enigmas should start here.

Laszlo discusses the Zero Point Field, but there is a complete and very readable book devoted to it—see Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe (Harper Perennial, 2002), which describes many experiments and gives detailed anecdotes of various discoveries, in contrast to Laszlo’s method, which is to outline and survey prevailing theories with a minimum of narrative.

pp. 202–204 Helmut Schmidt’s experiments, followed by the Jahn team at Princeton, are recounted in McTaggart, The Field, pp.101–16.

p. 204 “On the most profound level …” quoted from McTaggart, The Field, p. 122.

p. 209 An easily accessible presentation of the paradox known as Schrödinger’s cat can be found online—see http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci341236,00.html

Current speculations about “extended mind”—the possibility of intelligence outside the brain—cover a wide range of science. A good overview is provided in Part 2 of McTaggart’s The Field, pp. 99–179, told largely from the perspective of field theory in physics. For firsthand research and in-depth thinking, the best source is Rupert Sheldrake, who made a first impression with his impressive book on evolution, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press, 1995), in which he brilliantly speculates on how life could have evolved, and continues to evolve, through its own self-interacting intelligence.

Undaunted by the outrage his nonmaterialistic theory causes among Darwinians, Sheldrake has challenged them to replicate his own experiments. His research into the telepathic parrot and other psychic pets is contained in The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind (Three Rivers Press, 2004) and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (Park Street Press, 2002). His entire output has been immensely influential on me, and I cannot imagine an open-minded person who would not be deeply intrigued.

I have only sketched in the burgeoning field of information theory, which is fascinating but not yet expanded to cover a topic as specific as the afterlife. My introduction to the subject came from Hans Christian von Baeyer, Information: The New Language of Science (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), which is readable and free of higher mathematics.

Savant syndrome has become a widely publicized phenomenon. My first acquaintance with it came from Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (Touchstone, 1998), which gives a neurologist’s firsthand account of meeting autistic children with extraordinary abilities. Sacks’s interest in “other brained” people ventures into no spiritual speculations. Joseph Chilton Pearce does, in Evolution’s End: Claiming the Full Potential of Our Intelligence (HarperCollins, 1992). His lengthy first chapter on savant syndrome links it to a nonmaterial field of intelligence that we all tap into. A nice online article on savant syndrome and its link to genius, “The Key to Genius,” can be found at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/genius_pr.html.

I became intrigued by memes from online reading. The Internet is rife with discussions of these “mental genes.” For the definition of memes, see http://www.intelegen.com/meme/meme.htm. For examples of memes, see http://memetics.chielens.net/examples.html. The evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who invented the term, discusses it in The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1990). My fascination with memetic theory falls short of agreeing with it, however.

pp. 216–18 A full account of N’kisi, the telepathic parrot, is in Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At, pp. 24–27; the statistical analysis of the research results is on pp. 300–305.

p. 220 Amit Goswami’s statement “The universe is always putting new wine into old bottles …” is quoted from a personal conversation.

pp. 225–26 The remarkable story of a musical savant named Rex can be found online at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/20/60minutes/main957718.shtml. p. 226 The story of the “automobile savant” is told in Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence, p. 82 (see above).

p. 226 The story of the child prodigy who is enrolled at Juilliard was told on CBS News and can be found online at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/60minutes/main657713.shtml.

The topic of emergence—the appearance of a new phenomenon in Nature—is discussed lucidly for the general reader online at Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). I have also benefited enormously from the physicist Amit Goswami, who has written extensively on creative leaps made in nature—see The Self-Aware Universe (Tarcher, 1995). One of the boldest attempts to combine the physical and spirituality can be found in Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Inner Traditions, 2006). Both authors are scientists who refuse to accept the schism between the scientific and spiritual views of the world.

Remote viewing, the preferred term now for what used to be lumped under the rubric of clairvoyance, is emerging from the fringes. Readers can browse a dedicated Web site, http://www.farsight.org/ that contains copious information on the subject. There is also a recent, extensively researched book, Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception (Farsight Press, 2005). A veteran of the military’s secret remote viewing program, Project Stargate, has written about his experiences and outlines how anyone can learn the skill with enough self-discipline and dedication—see Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (Hampton Roads, 2000).

pp. 242–43 The story of the psychic who could see inside the SQUID comes from McTaggart, The Field, pp. 142–46.

p. 243 The experiment in remote viewing that I participated in was run by Marilyn Schlitz, director of research for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. See their home page at http://www.noetic.org/. This site leads to a wealth of material on every aspect of science, spirituality, and the paranormal. To my knowledge, this is the most extensive and wide-ranging institute of its kind, and I have been inspired by their work for twenty years.

p. 244 “Then at thirteen minutes …” quoted from an online interview with Cleve Backster in which he also discusses his astonishing research on telepathy in plants—http://www.derrickjensen.org/backster.html.

p. 248 All the Tagore poems are from Deepak Chopra, On the Shores of Eternity: Poems from Tagore on Immortality and Beyond (Harmony, 1999).