Life after death

Belmont Club (long since moved to PJMedia) is one of my favorite blog destinations and I was rewarded a week ago with this post about a near-death experience of Eben Alexander, a Virginia neurosurgeon. Which led me to read his 2012 book about it and consider his unequivocal assertion that there is life after death.

I have always tended to believe the latest thing I read, which isn’t very smart, I suppose, but in this case I was predisposed to the subject, being a believer, if not entirely convinced about it. After reading the book, I am more so, despite one critic’s cutting remark that the good brain surgeon’s assertions should carry no more weight than if he was a plumber.

That seems unnecessarily harsh, as well as inaccurate, and since it came from one of his former employers it suggests some bad blood between them. But it could be only a sarcastic example of medical science’s absolute insistence that our consciousness arises from our brains (although they admit they don’t know how it does that) and that any experience, hallucinatory or real, has to originate there.

So when our brain dies, we’re dead, and that’s all she wrote. But it’s not even close to what Alexander wrote. He concluded from the medical evidence that his brain was essentially dead during his six-day coma and ongoing visit to “heaven.” Which led him to borrow an old idea that the brain is a mere filter for an independent consciousness or soul located in the beyond, possibly involving the seventy percent of the universe composed of mysterious dark matter and dark energy. Or as Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club puts it, him being a software guy: a non-local, distributed system.

“His model of consciousness essentially requires the existence of non-local components. You are probably using such a system already. In your smartphone, tablet or Chromebook, some of the data lives on the device itself. But probably not much. Most of the data will live on a web drive, or in an email server, or on the cloud. It will be elsewhere. Where exactly it physically resides, you might not even know….

“The question Dr. Alexander was posing, though he didn’t cast it in my terms (he being a neurosurgeon and not a developer) was whether human beings were part of a distributed system, which we call for convenience ‘God’. We would still have an identity, an IP if you will, but we would also have connectivity….”

The god Alexander experienced, which he chose, rather tritely, to call Om, was not specific to any earthly religion. So Alexander, something of a reluctant atheist before his afterlife journey, is now taking mucho flak not only from atheists and his professional colleagues as could be expected but from some religious fundamentalists as well.

So why didn’t he keep it all to himself, you might well ask. Is he in it for the bucks (his book is a bestseller) or is he sincere in wishing to spread the good news that death is not the end? He did keep it to himself for almost six years before “disgracing” the cover of Newsweek, as one critic had it. (For that, however, Alexander would have to get in line.) And he’s already discovering to his chagrin that the publishing game is manipulative (Simon & Schuster chose the title of his book, “Proof of Heaven” which he doesn’t like it and which drew a lot of the criticism) and the news media is already proving that it will draw and quarter him if he trusts them too much.

Fernandez concludes: “I closed Dr. Alexander’s book with the realization that all he was really asking for was for the reader to keep an open mind on the subject of what life was: to consider the possibility that our lives are not as limited as we suppose. He knew the answer for himself, as a result of his experiences. However, each of us was likely to have to come to his own conclusion.”

Indeed. So if this subject interests you even half as much as it does me, follow the links above and finally try this one for a new educational and research outfit Dr. A. has formed to further spread the word, and then decide for yourself.

I know what I think. It’s good to believe, even by a hair, that your deceased parents are doing more than moldering in their graves. Although Dr. A.’s rendition of the heavenly choir does seem a trifling boring. I did like the angels and the butterflies, though. But you’ll have to excuse me.

My guardian angel wants a chat about my latest egoistical foul-up. Unconditional love and compassion are supposed to rule my day and my persistence in considering some of my fellow earthly travelers to be assholes and idiots is just not part of the divine plan. Nor good for the future incarnation of my eternal soul. Sigh.