What happens after death? A Scientific Inquiry
Life’s greatest mystery is the pronged dilemma where do we come from? And what happens to us if anything, after death? From the earliest times, every religious and philosophical school and every human being with the modicum of curiosity has speculated on this simple conundrum. While there is a scarcity of hard evidence, the consensus of humanity both ancient and modern is strongly inclined towards the belief in immortality. There have always been atheists who enlisted that birth a purely biological phenomenon, and that consciousness lies within a person’s last breath. Such materialistic thinking, however, is in the minority, even in today’s mechanistic market and technological seduction. In 1982, a Gallup poll declared that 67% of Americans believe in life after death[1].
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But the question remains there, is there life after death? What is it really like? While most people acknowledge that consciousness survives that body, the nature of post-mortem activity has eluded the understanding and sometimes even the imagination. Rather than generating images of vitality, thoughts on immortality incline towards vagueness and abstraction.
The idea of life after death is indeed a completely empty one.
Noted H.H Price, former president of England’s society for physical research.
Unless we can form some rough conception of what the other side might be like ‘Mythology’. The world religions and spirituals have mad various claims about the next world. But only the last 30 years, with the emergence of extensive near-death stage, has a concordance of opinion been struck between modern medical evidence and the conjecture of the ancients.
Researchers investigating the experiences of people resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead have accumulated fascinating data. Their findings represent spontaneous sightings by ‘deathbed witness’ of another place of existence quite different from our own. The reports concur that, at the point of clinical death, consciousness separates from the body and is drawn through a tunnel into the light of indescribable brilliance and sensation of utmost joy and peace. Despite not wanting to return to earthly existence, their witnesses feel compelled to reunite their free-ranging disembodied selves with the narrow confines of their abandoned bodily vehicles. On reviving, they are quick to acknowledge their shelf transformations. They speak volubly and having lost their fear of death (Death, as described by them is like homecoming and like escape from prison) and are invariably frustrated at the insufficiency of the word to describe their blissful sojourn in this other form of consciousness.
Exciting and stimulating as their accounts most certainly one; the knowledge they convey is limited, just as a foreign correspondent’s communique would be unsatisfactory if he confined himself to reporting a nations activity from the border. Dr. Kenneth Ring, the author of ‘life at death’ voiced the incompleteness of near-death research when he wrote “What happens after the initial stages of Death remains an open question”
Based on the testimony of many part life therapists, such as Joel Whitton, Morris Netherton, Dr. Edith Fiore and Joe Keeton to name just four of more celebrated practitioners, subjects who is in hypnosis have travelled deep into death’s hinterland illumines a largely unknown area of human experience and these past life therapist have successfully treated many unhealed diseases. Though their processes are not purely scientific; not in line with modern technology-driven medicinal procedures but as John Langdon- Davis in his book "Man: The known and unknown" rightfully says that “Medicine had one great advantage over other branches of knowledge is ‘the only criterion of truth in medicine is it should work.
Past life therapist in order to discover the origin of the problem chooses to analyze a patient’s past life personality. In doing so, they imply standard psychiatric principles in re incarnational context. Since the development of psychoanalysis may historical figures have been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Sigmund Freud himself analyzed Moses and Leonardo-da Vinci, Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones analyzed hamlet, Carl Jung analyzed Picasso and even Adolf Hitler was analyzed in absentia by a group of psychoanalysts from united states. Having adopted basic Freudian principles, the past life therapists harbor is the great respected for the unconscious like. Like Freud, they do believe that nothing is accidental, that all thoughts and behaviors have antecedents causes but unlike Freud however, they believe these causes can reach back far behind birth to earlier incarnations and into the states in between life.
As recently as the last century, fluids from the liver and ball bladder and the position of the uterus were thought to be the causative agent of temperament. Early psychological researchers such as Jean-Marchand Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Freud lifted the study of mind from the abdominal cavity and blood vessels into the region of the subconscious. Repressed urges and the trials of psychosexual development were recognized to be the determinants of human goals, wishes, and fantasies.
Psychological research continued to make new discoveries. However, the contemporary psychology is limited by the premise that all adult neurotic behavior is motivated by childhood or adolescent experience. Carl Jung in his work memories, dreams, and reflections slight fully say that Rationalism and Doctrinism are the diseases of our time, they pretend to have all answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present view would have ruled out as impossible. Out concepts of space and time has approximate validity. I will end here with this great Carl Jung’s assertion and hope those new areas of psychological research would begin henceforth.