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It is one of the fundamental questions that everyone will ask themselves, but in an age of global pandemics, with the increasing challenge to once universal religious certainties and the growing partisan stranglehold on information, the question ‘what happens to the human personality after death?’ takes on renewed urgency to seek answers from every discipline of knowledge, from history to computer science. This volume aims to bring together the different strands of that wide inquiry with contributions from experts in their fields to provide a uniquely valuable reference book, reflecting the state-of-the-art of research. To this end, contributions are invited from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, parapsychologists, philosophers, physicists, medical researchers, computer scientists and others. This book project is being conducted under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research. Established in 1882, the SPR is the world’s oldest, largest and most reputable organisation for the scientific study of what we now call the ‘paranormal’. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to contribute to a project of fundamental importance and a unique chance to join the SPR’s long tradition of open-minded inquiry.
Frederic W.H. Myers’s book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was a hundred years old in 2003. While the purpose of the book was to argue for survival of bodily death, Myers also presented a unifying model of normal, abnormal, and parapsychological phenomena based on the workings of a subliminal or subconscious mind. Human Personality grew in the contexts of nineteenth-century Spiritualism, psychical research, and psychology and psychiatry. While Myers’s book presented creative ideas, its association with psychic phenomena and ideas of interaction with the spiritual world brought many criticisms. Nonetheless, the book has been very influential and its content is still relevant to present concerns of psi functioning and the subconscious mind. It is also argued that some modern parapsychological work is consistent with Myers’s ideas and that there are several lines of research that may be followed up to put Myers to the test.
A Natural Afterlife Discovered: The Newfound, Psychological Reality That Awaits Us at Death
A Natural Afterlife Discovered: The Newfound, Psychological Reality That Awaits Us at Death (Cover, Front Material, and Prologue)2022 •
This book reveals an amazingly long-overlooked psychological reality that dawned on the author when he woke up from a dream and thought: “Suppose I had never woken up? Though others would know, how would I ever know it was over?” Based on cognitive science research and analysis, the author found that consciousness is not extinguished with death but, from a dying person’s perspective, only imperceptibly “paused.” Given this, from your perspective, you’ll never lose your mind, self, and soul. And, given dreams and near-death experiences, you may experience a timeless natural—i.e., scientifically supported—afterlife, which can be a heaven of utmost happiness. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was an earth-shattering revelation about how life evolved. This book is about an equally earth-shattering scientific theory about how a human life ends, including its possible impact on society and on you. For more information on the book, including media posts and author interviews, visit bryonehlmann.com.
Journal of Scientific Exploration
Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness by Chris Carter2014 •
Science and the Afterlife Experience is the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with Parapsychology and the Skeptics (Carter 2007; reissued as Science and Psychic Phenomena, Carter 2012) and continued with Science and the Near-Death Experience (Carter 2010). These books provide handy introductions to parapsychology, psychical research, and allied concerns (such as the near-death experience) for a new generation of readers. They may best be described as quasi-scholarly, aimed primarily at a general (non-academic) audience, although they include notes, reference lists, and indexes. Carter, who holds an M.A. from the University of Oxford, England, identifies himself as a philosopher and here and there addresses philosophical concerns, such as the implications of "paranormal" phenomena for concepts of personal identity. One of the hallmarks of the series is the attention given to materialistic skeptical positions, extended in the volume under review to include super-ESP.
Death and Soul Consciousness recounts my growing interest in the spiritual perspectives of both East and West and how quantum cosmology appealed to me as a bridge between science and mysticism. I highlight the unitary nature of consciousness and associated research into presentiment, psychokinesis, remote viewing and in particular, the near-death experience. I set out my understanding of the soul journey, concluding with two past life regressions of my own, which suggest to me that learning from experience (often through adversity) is part of humankind’s continuing evolution of spiritual growth.
2003 Annual Conference Proceedings of the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research
From Spiritualism to Spirituality: The scientific quest to explain the psychical aspects of human nature2003 •
Over the last century and a half, the successes of science in explaining our normally sensed world have led to further attempts to expand science into the realm of the para normal and explain the para-normally sensed world of psychic phenomena. These attempts have helped to establish a greater and growing variety of psychical experiences as well as offer a real challenge to our traditional concepts of religious experience. Within this context, science first came into contact with the paranormal with modern spiritualism, then to parapsychology and finally to paraphysics and a new interest in consciousness and spirituality. At each stage of this evolutionary process, changes in the scientific attitude toward the paranormal coincide with changes in the evolution of attitudes in normal science as well as changes in religious attitude.
Presentation given at the inaugural workshop of the network “Religion and the Emotions”, funded by DFG (German Research Foundation), initiated and organized by Prof. Dr. Hartmut von Sass and Prof. Dr. Notker Slenczka, October 5–7, Theological Faculty of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
To make educated guesses about what happens to consciousness upon bodily death, one has to have some understanding of the relationship between body and consciousness during life. This relationship, of course, reflects an ontology. In this brief essay, the tenability of both the physicalist and dualist ontologies will be assessed in view of recent experimental results in physics. The alternative ontology of idealism will then be discussed, which not only can be reconciled with the available empirical evidence, but also overcomes the lack of parsimony and limited explanatory power of physicalism and dualism. Idealism elegantly explains the basic facts of reality, such as (a) the fact that brain activity correlates with experience, (b) the fact that we all seem to share the same world, and (c) the fact that we can't change the laws of nature at will. If idealism is correct, the implication is that, instead of disappearing, conscious inner life expands upon bodily death, a prediction that finds circumstantial but significant confirmation in reports of near-death experiences and psychedelic trances, both of which can be construed as glimpses into the early stages of the death process.
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