Life After Death?

I’ve always been mildly interested in “near death” experiences. I approach them with my usual skepticism, but I’m not convinced they are easily dismissed as purely biological phenomena.

If, of course, you start with the assumption that there is nothing but biology – that there is no such thing as the spiritual and that all human experience is strictly limited to the human brain – then it would be hard to see these near-death experiences as anything but biology in action. If you’re open to the spiritual, you would have a different view.

As a newspaper reporter, I did at least one story on the subject, interviewing three Iowans who claim to have had a near-death experience. I found two of the three to be believable. I was unsure about the third – both about whether something extraordinary occurred and about whether he really believed it to have happened.

I also recently read the popular book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander. Couched in sometimes scientific language, and written from the view of a neurosurgeon who himself had a near-death experience during a critical illness, it describes his out-of-body “flight” and his perception of encountering a deceased family member.

God, the unknown

Previous to this experience, Alexander wrote, he was a “C & E’er,” one who went to church only at Christmas and Easter, mostly as a family obligation. During his years at Harvard and later during his medical training and practice, he had grave doubts about God. He finally wrote off the God question as “unknown.”

“Like an ocean wearing away a beach, over the years my scientific worldview gently but steadily undermined my ability to believe in something larger,” he wrote. His near-death experience changed that. Words can't adequately describe the experience, he writes, but he's adamant that it was real.

The “single most important” lesson from his experience?

“The (false) suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God,” he wrote. “(It) is the root of every form of anxiety in the universe, and the cure for it – which I received partially without the Gateway and completely within the Core – was the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God, ever.”

The “gateway” and “core” were phases of his journey during the experience.

The book is interesting and worth the read. He certainly has impressive credentials and the book is filled with footnotes, scholarly references and a whole appendix meant for medical colleagues. If and when you read the book, you can decide for yourself if his experience was "real."

When thinking about life after death, I’m sometimes near certain there is one, and at other times see it as wishful thinking. Left to oneself, a person is unlikely to have any useful insights into the subject.

All are alive?

Believers, however, often gain insight from the Bible and I recently had a couple of insights from listening to the gospel at Mass. It was the story of Jesus’ debate with the Saducees, a Jewish sect that believed neither in the resurrection of the body nor life after death (beliefs that evolved in ancient Judaism). I heard something in the gospel as if for the first time: After saying that God is “not God of the dead but of the living,” Jesus says, “for to him all are alive.”

Hmmm. So, if you see things as God sees them, nobody is “dead.” The estimated 107 billion people who have ever lived are still “alive” in some form. If you believe that Jesus is God, you can accept his authority on the subject.

As I was thinking about this, I considered all the elapsed time between the “deaths” of the first humans and the present. According to Christian theology, all of them would be “waiting” with us for the “end of time,” when Jesus will come again.

What a bummer, I thought, all that waiting. Makes waiting in the doctor’s office or for the traffic on the freeway a nanosecond. Then I recalled it is said that in the life of the spirit, there is no such thing as time, a situation I am incapable of imagining. And I realized that if there is an afterlife, it would be so different from our current experience that we wouldn’t have a clue about its nature. It would be like the other “dimension” in the old-time sci-fi TV show, the Twilight Zone.

We can’t imagine timelessness, the absence of space and place or what being a “spirit” is like. That’s why we keep coming back to heaven being “up there,” or why we can’t seem to move away from the stories about what happens with “St. Peter at the pearly gates.”

Is God giving some people who experience near-death experiences a taste of the afterlife so they can encourage the rest of us? Weirder things have happened.