LET’S TALK ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE – PART ONE
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE : YouTube Talk 2a © Nigel Peace, 2023
There is very good reason to believe that our consciousness does not depend on the physical body. This is no longer just a spiritual belief. There is now a great deal of evidence, from out-of-body events (OBE), near-death (NDE) and mystical experiences, and even from the rapidly developing discoveries of quantum physics, that consciousness – our essential self, perhaps – can live fully and independently.
The body is, if you like, a vehicle for this lifetime that enables the mind to express itself. And like all vehicles, wonderfully intricate as it is, it must eventually break down, releasing the self to enter a new world.
Despite the huge number of anecdotal accounts of spiritual mediums, who seem able to communicate with the departed and pass on messages, there are, sadly, very few descriptions of what this entrance, or ‘passing over’, actually feels like.
This is very important! Despite our death being certain, this lack of knowledge is why so many people fear the subject to the point of refusing even to think about, let alone discuss, it. Yet if we only knew that it is a safe and peaceful experience, leading to a new life, this would surely revolutionise for the better how we live on Earth.
In my talk about the process of dying, I gave an account based on a lucid dream in which my mother showed me what she had felt, a few days after passing. This is developed in my novel, The Unbroken, a love story and an adventure through other worlds.
However, I am definitely not alone! An extraordinarily similar account is offered by Frederic W H Myers through the automatic writings of Geraldine Cummins in her book, The Road To Immortality. Myers was an academic at Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. A highly intelligent and thoughtful, open-minded man, his apparent first-hand descriptions of dying and afterlife have been the foundation of belief for many spiritually-minded people.
He talks of death as “a mere episode… a pause on the long road and… a time of stillness, sinking gloriously into rest.” The soul then gradually becomes aware of its new, subtle or ‘etheric’ body; this has been attached to the physical by “many little threads”, he says, and “two silver cords” that break away as we move forward. The mind must now readjust to its new environment, a “place of Shadows” where fragments of our past life resurface from the deep subconscious. We watch this peacefully and with detachment before entering, “as the butterfly breaks through the chrysalis”, what Myers called “the world of illusion”.
There is no River Acheron and no need to pay Charon the ferryman!
So… what is this world like, this afterlife? There is a widespread belief in rolling hills, gently flowing rivers and verdant pastures populated by any number of animals and birds. Here, a lovely home has been prepared for us by our ancestors and there are cities of crystal buildings – libraries, colleges and galleries. It is a place of peace and love and learning. Even Myers describes “an absence of conflict and effort… the most desirable condition of being.”
This description has been repeated without question throughout the Mind, Body and Spirit community, by spiritual teachers and mediums alike. Why this has happened is, surely, Myers’ use of the word “desirable”. This is what we want to believe, much as in earthly life so many people yearn to relocate to the rolling Dorset meadows of England, the unspoilt White Mountains of New Hampshire or a quiet, ancient stone-built village in the Dordogne.
But is this a realistic image? No-one seems to question how, in a non-physical world, pastures grow without soil, rivers run without rain or why buildings should be crystalline.
We may not like to admit it, but the truth is that we generally see what we want or expect to see, and it may bear little resemblance to the facts. One graphic demonstration of this was the Double-Slit Experiment of 1927, in which electrons were fired at a plate with two slits towards a screen. (In later versions, a laser beam of photons was used.) If electrons are particles, one would anticipate two separate recordings on the screen. Instead, a wave-like pattern emerged as though the electrons were somehow passing through both slits at once. The same thing happened, intriguingly, even when the electrons were fired one at a time. But an even greater mystery arose when scientists set up devices to watch the electrons as they passed through the slits: now they behaved like individual particles. Human observation changed the behaviour of the electrons to what had been expected.
Consider, too, how human memory behaves. Psychologists have shown beyond doubt that our memories are fallible at best and unreliable at worst. This is because what gets encoded into our memory depends on how attentive we are, on other memories we’ve already stored and, especially, on our expectations at the time of an event. The information is then further degraded by our personal beliefs and prejudices. Worse still, memories are constantly revised whenever they are retrieved, they change according to whom we are telling them and why. Important details may be omitted or even invented.
The extreme case of False Memory Syndrome has led to many innocent people being accused of horrific crimes. The matter is so serious that in 2011 a British High Court judge established new legal guidance that witnesses’ testimony should be treated with the utmost caution.
We see and hear what we want or expect to see and hear. Angels in the clouds? A face in a candle flame or the Man in the Moon? Pareidolia is the tendency to think something we see is meaningful when in fact it’s just random. It’s actually not such a bad thing – human beings have become successful precisely because we search for meaning around us – unless we fail to use common sense.
Perhaps, then, the afterlife will at first satisfy our expectations. After all, the mind will be struggling for a while to make sense of what’s happening. Sadly, where does that leave the atheist or the converts of religions that teach very different scenarios, more Ethiopian Danakil Depression than French Dordogne?
The body is a vehicle for this lifetime that enables the mind to express itself. And like all vehicles, it will eventually break down, releasing our consciousness to live on in a new world.
Part One of this talk explores what kind of world we can expect…
It seems that Eva’s description of the experience, in my spiritual love story, The Unbroken, is not unique. It is backed up by no less a figure than F W H Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. He talked of death as “a mere episode… a pause on the long road and… a time of stillness…” Indeed, the afterlife that he goes on to describe has become the template for many spiritual people’s beliefs.
However, there are some very deep flaws in some of these. And it has been shown time and again, in science laboratories and courts of law, that people tend to see and believe just what they want to see and believe – which may not at all be the truth. So where does that leave Eva, who had no expectations of survival?
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE – PART TWO
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE : YouTube Talk 2b © Nigel Peace, 2023
In the first part of this talk, I suggested that most of our beliefs about the afterlife are based on what we want or expect to see. So we need some cool thinking and actual knowledge. We have extraordinary minds that can reach out far beyond the limitations of the physical world – consider telepathy, remote viewing and precognition. And it is our minds that will survive physical death and guide the soul in its new life. Are there any reasonable theories?
In my novel, The Unbroken, our heroine, Eva, had not been religious in earthly life so she had no fixed expectations. Nonetheless, the mind will always seek to settle on something familiar. She has experienced the “time of stillness, sinking gloriously into rest”, as Frederic Myers described it in the book The Road To Immortality, and watched the gossamer threads gradually detaching from her newly emerging body. She tells us,
‘Was I walking towards that light or was it coming forward to embrace me? It didn’t matter, I just wanted it. So I put one hesitant foot in front of the other…
‘Having walked ever more assuredly for timeless ages, sometimes stumbling over stones and hillocks, I suddenly found myself apparently on soft sand. It glistened, silvery, and yielded to my steps leaving traces of water in their prints. And not far away was the faint but unmistakable sound of gently lapping waves.’
She has reached a frontier. Well, there is no way back so it is not too surprising that a strange, silvery winged craft is waiting on the shore alongside a smiling, blonde pilot. And Eva is now too exhausted by the effort of becoming something new to worry about the woman’s gentle warning as she locks the seatbelt in place, “There’ll be a bit of turbulence.”
They fly across what may be a pale blue sea, although there seems to be no horizon between this and a sky, before arriving at a small island airport. Eva is taken to some kind of clinic where an unfriendly matron shows her to a room. She is not aware of any kind of treatment, yet is soon summarily discharged to find her own way onwards.
So far, these experiences mirror her lack of faith yet normal human expectations. But now her story diverges from common beliefs because not only does she appear to be entirely alone on this island, there is a persistent mist that prevents her from seeing anything clearly. The mist may actually be in her own eyes. However, she has not lost her natural courage and presses on, eventually finding a small wooden cabin in the forest waiting for her. And guess what, some of her clothes and books are there – even a pack of her favourite cigarettes!
Eva is creating her own new world. And in time the mist will clear. When she explores the island later, she finds no trace of the airport or the clinic. She does meet other beings – but only once she has gone looking for them – and eventually she discovers a way to leave the island for another, greater world.
How many worlds might there be?
Ancient Judaic texts describe seven celestial spheres that surround the Earth, inhabited by angelic beings of increasing rank and holiness. Sufi teachings also speak of a hierarchy of spiritual spheres that the soul must ascend. There is an obvious analogy here with Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos, where the seven known planets are fixed to crystalline spheres orbiting the Earth.
All such teachings have informed the beliefs of spiritually-minded people today. So it is not at all surprising that Frederic Myers also describes a succession of seven “planes”, each of which the soul must pass through on a journey of expanding consciousness before, he says, becoming “one with God.”
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? It’s what he had been taught. It’s what he expected. And for all the detail that he gives, this is delivered like a theoretical lecture that could just have easily been presented at the Society for Psychical Research. It is not a personal account.
Let’s think rationally about the structure of the spiritual universe. Is it reasonable that the ultimate creative force – we may as well call it God – would be content with a mere seven spheres? Why seven anyway? Why should any spiritual worlds, not having physical dimensions, be spherical? And if we have free will, why should we accept any of this?
Nuclear physicists are now embracing more and more extraordinary discoveries and theories. Not only do electrons change their behaviour when they’re measured, certain particles only exist at all while they’re being observed! Some suggest that there are no particles anyway but an infinite number of tiny, vibrating strings in a universe of ten, eleven or twenty-six dimensions. And let’s not even mention parallel universes, where an infinite number of versions of you and I exist simultaneously…
Let’s come back down to Earth, and what we’re likely to find when we leave it, our minds trying to make sense of where we are.
Eva has learned that she has a higher purpose and her new friends help her to escape the small island. She awakes to a new vision.
‘I was high up on a snowy mountainside overlooking an apparently infinite vista of expansive interconnected islands that swirled and flowed and danced in the soft light… Far away could be seen arched bridges linking one island to another, becoming ever lighter and lighter…
‘Down below, not far from my mountain, there were small movements of people or animals near the rivers that fed into calm seas… And the centrepiece of it all was a huge city of white, oddly-shaped buildings with angles and domes and towers, spread out beside wide boulevards and green spaces and full of movement, presumably of people.’
Ah, now this sounds almost familiar, doesn’t it, perhaps “the most desirable condition of being.” Eva is met by a long-lost friend from her earlier life.
‘Tomáš didn’t say much except that he was taking me to our home where I would meet the others and prepare the plan.
“We’re not going to the city, then?”
“Heavens, no. Awful place, soulless… full of people accepting what they have and doing what they’re told.”
“And you’re… we’re not like that?”
“Never. We’re what you might call… outliers. We do things our own way. And, okay, we do things we’re not supposed to.”’
She finds herself entirely alone on a misty island – there are no joyful waiting relatives, indeed no-one at all to tell her where she is or why or what to do. Yet she is alive and conscious, not to mention brave and resourceful, so now her mind begins to work overtime, formulating her own new world.
Each one of us will surely experience something like this, and everything will depend on what we expect to see and what we believe. Yet we can all be reassured that we will survive, our personality and character intact, and that there will be a purpose for us in our new life.
Well, our minds are powerful and Eva’s begins to create a world that makes some kind of sense. She crosses a border, finds herself in a clinic with some of her favourite things around her, and then…
…everything changes.