always there is life: Near-Death Experiences and Other Evidence

This book is for my children and grandchildren. It begins with an autobiographical sketch and includes readings that have strongly influenced my thinking about the big questions of living and dying. Not all these readings are about near-death experiences (NDEs), but all should be read in the Light of NDEs. For although I have not had an NDE, the Light experienced by those who have (including my father) now illuminates my life as well as my thoughts. At 75, I now see my life as a wandering search for wholeness in the compelling worlds envisioned by secular scientists and spiritual teachers. The boy who excelled in science, and thought he would be a physicist, instead failed as a Christian preacher and became a critical teacher. Only now, at the end of my life, have I discovered what NDEs reveal about both science and spirituality. In these readings, physicians and other scientists consider how some survivors of cardiac arrest or accidents that have stopped the heart (and thus blood flow to the brain) nonetheless report vivid memories of Light and Love. This evidence falsifies the scientific assumption that consciousness is simply a product of brain activity, and verifies that the loss of ordinary consciousness at least for some enables an experience of transcending meaning. Cardiologist and NDE researcher Pim van Lommel reports that the "enhanced consciousness" during an NDE includes "nonlocal aspects of interconnectedness, such as memories from earliest childhood up until the crisis that caused the NDE and sometimes even visions of the future. It offers the chance of communication with the thoughts and feelings of people who were involved in past events or with the consciousness of deceased friends and relatives." To explain NDEs, van Lommel turns to quantum theory and endorses "the not yet commonly accepted interpretation that consciousness determines if and how we experience reality." In this view "consciousness is nonlocal and the origin or foundation of everything: all matter, or physical reality, is shaped by nonlocal consciousness." If this is the case, "Our endless consciousness predates our birth and our body, and will survive death independently of our body in a nonlocal space where time and distance play no role." Founders of quantum physics looked to the Eastern spiritual traditions, as psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell explains: "Eastern philosophies teach that we live in a sea of unified consciousness; that our personal consciousness exists both in and outside our bodies; and that our consciousness can travel away from the body during dreams, out-of-body experiences, and at death." Several of the scientists I quote in this book find in quantum theory a way of explaining how matter and mind unfold from a creative process that is the source of both. Social scientist Lawrence LeShan argues: "Field theory leads as inexorably to a concept of surviving biological death as classical physics does to a concept of total annihilation at bodily death. In the sense that all things that 'were, ' 'are, ' or 'will be' exist forever in the continuum, the individual continues to be." Psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker writes: "If the physical universe grows out of consciousness, there is no reason to think that a person's individual consciousness ends when the physical brain dies." Some NDE survivors report meeting Jesus on the Other Side, but most return to the visible world more spiritually awake than actively religious. For others, whose scientific vocation reinforced a secular view of reality, NDEs have given new meaning to "God." Spiritually transformed by his NDE, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander affirms: "God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal-and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link."

• | Author: Robert Traer
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Jun 18, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 314 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1986495507
• | ISBN-13: 9781986495509