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Article/What the Bleep Do We Know About Life After
Death Conference |
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L. Yesse - October 2007 What was possibly most amazing about the What the Bleep Do We Know About Life After Death conference, held June 1st-4th 2007 on the campus of DeSales University in Center Valley PA, was that only about forty people attended. Millions of Americans---every one of which will experience death---and only forty interested enough in such a fundamental topic affecting every living thing? Where the bleep was CNN? Visitors to www.aaevp.com may recall this event mentioned last spring, though few other media outlets paid notice. Regrettable, as it was a most interesting conference, hosted by an organization called the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Inc. (ASPSI), and featuring speakers from a variety of academic and spiritual backgrounds. Luminaries such as Dr. Raymond Moody (author of Life After Life among other works) and P.M.H. Atwater (author of many books on near-death experiences and related topics) gave fascinating talks. One benefit of the limited attendance was the opportunity to talk with presenters one-on-one, and gain perspective on their personal journeys that had brought them to this conference and this particular path in life. So, what the bleep do we know about life after death? In some ways, as it turns out, not much more than many of our ancestors. Zoroastrianism was the first formalized faith to proffer the concept of an afterlife; since then, virtually all faiths have come to possess some model of afterlife existence. Dr. Moody described how the ancient Greeks utilized Oracles of the Dead to enable after-death communications (ADC), and how Plato in his Republic posed issues relating to the afterlife. Plato came up again in Charles Keyes' discussion of his Phaedo about Socrates' defense of his belief in the afterlife. In more recent times, Emanuel Swedenborg viewed the afterlife as knowable only by revelation from God in his work Heaven and Hell, as presented by Rev. Lawson Smith. Three Routes to Knowledge Dr. Moody remarked that there are three routes to knowledge: faith, reason, and experience. A few presenters at the conference spoke about their afterlife views from their personal experiences: Karin Nemri shared her near-death experience (NDE); Betsy Jo Miller offered ADC validation via channeled communications; P.M.H. Atwater described her own multiple NDEs; Rev. Daniel Kivel shared ADC visitations from his deceased son; and the AA-EVP's own Tom and Lisa Butler discussed the hard physical evidence offered from electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and instrumental transcommunication (ITC). While each speaker may have utilized these three routes in varying proportions, by conference's end it was clear that knowledge about life after death incorporates all three elements. It may be an exercise in futility to flatly declare exactly what life after death is like. A few of the presentations, however, offered compelling glimpses of what certain aspects of the afterlife may consist of, and how humankind might begin to comprehend it. Dr. Moody is currently tackling the comprehension task. He views the NDE as a "nonsensical" travel narrative, in that experiencers find themselves unable to express their experience through words alone. Thus his current research explores means of shifting thought processes by "breaking the rules" of rational thought, of creating a new form of logic that may provide NDE experiencers with tools to convey their "travels" in ways that non-NDErs can more readily understand. NDEs of Children Many of the most reliable NDE accounts can be said to come from the mouths of babes, that is, children under fifteen years of age. P.M.H. Atwater provided a number of interesting, even disturbing metrics about young NDE experiencers:  Ms.
Atwater has accumulated a vast array of data on childhood NDEs, and shared a few
of the individual stories that she encounters in her research. Some children report
"seeing" prayers during their NDEs, manifesting as brilliant white or multicolored
beams; a photograph was passed around that appeared to have captured this phenomena
coming from a church, with no apparent physical source for the colored streaks.
(See photo at right.)
We're Not in Kansas Anymore Perhaps not related directly to life after death, psychologist Dr. Steven Hoyer presented a nonetheless fascinating story suggesting that our lifetime(s) on this earth are anything but linear, sequential episodes. As described in his book Fireweaver: The Story of a Life, a Near-Death, and Beyond, Dr. Hoyer related how a Kansas woman was struck by lightning...though the strike was nonfatal and lasted only an instant in our normal timeframe, in her timeframe 600 years and an entire lifetime on another world had transpired! It may be easy for the layperson to dismiss such a report as fanciful nonsense, but Dr. Hoyer talked about the vast amount of detail and consistency the woman's story exhibited, over several years of interviewing. This was buttressed by a thorough assessment of her emotional state; she had been deeply grieving the recent loss of a close relative prior to the lightning strike. After this event, the impact of the loss had been long since forgotten in her now-distant past. If you think about it a moment, this really does raise some intriguing and compelling questions. What if our current model of time-linearity is actually an illusion? If time itself is an illusory artifact just of this physical world, perhaps even the concept of life "after" death needs reconsideration? And if that wasn't enough to warp one's mind, James Beichler's theories in his talk "The Scientific Bleep on the Afterlife" certainly was. A theoretical physicist, Dr. Beichler postulated a new unification-theory model that incorporates not only the quantum mechanics and general relativity known to physicists, but also mind and consciousness extending into higher dimensions. He noted that science and religion parted ways many centuries ago in order to survive and evolve, but are today beginning to merge back together, insofar as the supposed separateness of mind and matter can someday be resolved.  Commenting that vacuum, fields, and matter comprise the
current base components of science, Dr. Beichler maintains that physics is the logical
branch of science to tackle afterlife issues, in that we merely don't possess an
understanding of "paranormal" phenomena---yet. He feels that consciousness is some
kind of field or field effect; indeed, according to current quantum theory, material
reality doesn't exist until consciousness (i.e. an observer) causes wave packets
of energy to collapse into particles that are then perceived and measured. The famous
double-slit experiment affirms this particular quirk of our reality. After such
collapse, Newtonian physics then comes into play.
There's more. Dr. Beichler suggested that the evolutionary scale spans not just physical history, but dimensions. In his model, physical-world chemical reactions evolved and organized into what we recognize as Life in a 3-dimensional world. But Life itself also evolves and organizes, into what he labels Mind, which moves into a 4th dimension (how much would a thought weigh?). And in turn Mind evolves and organizes into Consciousness, calling for yet a 5th dimension, and defined as a magnetic pattern of stored memories in a 5D field. Whew. No matter how you approach it, using faith, reason, or experience, the topic of life after death seems to straddle that fine dividing line between what we can conceive of---heaven, reincarnation, leaving our physical bodies behind---and what's beyond our minds' grasp. We can study NDEs, OBEs (out-of-body experiences), ghosts and EVP till we're blue in the face, but until we actually experience a glimpse of what's beyond for ourselves, we can never truly know. We are blessed with researchers and explorers, like those at the What the Bleep conference, to lead the way in shedding light on what awaits each of us at the end of this earthly existence. All of us are in their debt, and those who came before them, as they endeavor to strip away the veil of mystery that lies at the borderline of life, and life after death. Ultimately, though, we must become our own explorers. We must embark on our own search for what the bleep we can discover about life after death. Perhaps that, in part, is what we were given this life to find out for ourselves. 
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