So, Unveiled offered (in April) “Did Scientists Just Discover What Happens When We Die?” in a 9-minute video, based on a chronicle of an 87-year old man with epilepsy dying of a heart attack in Canada, and scientists recording his brain activity.
It’s not surprising, but scientists claim to have observed brain activity for about 15 minutes, including some time after heart stopped. They believe that the patient went into a “life review” and could revisit most of the important moments in his whole life.
During the review, time seems to slow down to the patient (just as it does in a dream) so as long as the lucid recollection lasts, life to the person still seems eternal, in a relativistic sense, even near the end. Likewise, going back to our earliest memories of childhood, life seemed to extend indefinitely back, even though it could not have happened (relatively speaking) until some time after conception and uterine attachment.
An implication of this observation would be, if death is violent (as in an explosion, or gunshot to the head) the opportunity for the life review is lost. So violent crime, or warfare (after conscription) can deny the person the opportunity even for this kind of “eternal life” at the end.
My own mother passed away peacefully after four days in a hospice at age 97 (in December 2010). Usually a medical death offers the opportunity for review.
So in a sense, death can be “honorable” or not, it seems to me. Imagine being a soldier sacrificed for the demands of his (authoritarian) leadership for more territory, making him nothing more than a pawn in a gambit. If that happened to me, I wouldn't want the 'honor' of a funeral. I would just be lost.
The idea that the brain is essential for human or animal consciousness to exist would contradict some ideas for afterlife, as usually offered in religious theology or even by end-of-life research by places like the Monroe Institute near Charlottesville, VA (review of their 2009 film "The Path-Afterlife").
Somehow the information from a person’s life would have to be captured, maybe on the surface of a micro blackhole, to be released as Hawking radiation when it evaporates, maybe inside a virus, even a spike protein. An infected person could transfer “identities” to others. But a particularly gifted person might have received information form others this way (from viruses). That person could be one of the 144,000 soul-houses who live to become angels. All of this sounds like sci-fi, and I had laid it out as a sci-fi novel called “Angel’s Brother” which is increasingly difficult to pull off as real world events since 2020 have gotten in the way. More about that in future posts.
Perhaps the micro black holes do go somewhere else (leveraging other dimensions in string theory), for use by 'soul families' as Monroe describes. But it is clear that any given time only a small percentage of past souls could really be 'reincarnates'. And it seems like new lives are more about compassion and sharing the goals of a 'group' or cohort, involving a lot of compassion, than about the self.
There is something going on with me right now. I'll keep the remarks high-level. But I need to be in control of my own 'agency' to be of use to others (especially to join in any kind of 'solidarity' for the political or social causes of others, especially publicly). This can put my 'soul' in a precarious position of the rest of the world really goes wrong. If the world becomes a zero-sum game (as because of climate change), sacrificial conflict will be inevitable. And so will indignation at the privileged. Here: 'What If Nothing Happens After Death?" Eternal oblivion?
(Posted: Friday, July 29, 2022 at 4 PM EDT)