Sermon by John Pawelek
What I am about to present is part evidence, part fantasy. It is a bit like theater in that you need to suspend disbelief.
Surely the vast majority of us are not fans of the fact that we are going to die. By and large, the world’s major religions all espouse a belief in an afterlife. Unitarian Universalists don’t have such a provision, but rather leave it up to the individual. Whatever you may think, several lines of evidence from surveys of thousands of people who have had near-death experiences indicate that the answer is surprisingly yes, it seems likely there is an afterlife.
Three years ago I would have never thought of discussing such a topic, but that was when I was walking around Barnes and Noble and happened to come upon Dr. Eban Alexander’s “Proof of Heaven”, #1 on the NYT bestseller list. I was totally absorbed and have been reading about the topic ever since.
Alexander tells of his near-death experience when he fell into a coma due to a severe E. coli infection in his brain. The bacteria were resistant to four different antibiotics, a common problem in hospitals. His EEG showed a flat-lined brain. “The house-keeping parts functioned during the coma. But when it came to the neocortex, the part of my brain that is responsible for emotions, thoughts–that was destroyed by the infection. I could see it on the scans. There is no medical precedent in which a brain under attack by such a severe bacterial infection has ever recovered anything like it’s full capabilities.
Yet Alexander had a vivid memory of a journey to another world. He saw “a being of light, a circular entity that gave off beautiful heavenly music while throwing off filaments of living silver and golden light”; a “staggeringly beautiful valley full of lush and fertile greenery with waterfalls flowing into crystal pools. He was sitting on a butterfly’s wing among pulsing swarms of millions of other butterflies.” He heard “choirs producing music unlike anything he had heard before.” He was filled with a sense of “overflowing, indescribable, unconditional, divine love”. A message that kept coming through to him was “There is nothing you can do that’s wrong.” Think about that.
When he awoke from the coma 7 days later a very odd thing had happened, the infection was gone, and his neocortex was fully functional.
Interestingly, the neocortex is thought to control consciousness and one implication of Alexander’s NDE and that of many others is that consciousness is not part of the brain or any other part of the body. It is something else— mysteriously outside the body. In fact, no one knows what consciousness is.
However, Alexander’s experience was from only one person. The book by Jeffrey Long, MD “Evidence of the Afterlife—The Science of Near-Death Experiences” documents near-death experiences from nearly 1500 respondents. He established a website with some 100 questions for people who had had NDE’s for a variety of reasons: cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage, violence, accidents and so forth. They divided the answers into several catagories:
- “Lucid Death”
For example,
-One individual had a brain hemorrhage and was flat-lined in a coma for 3 days. Yet he insisted that he could see and hear what people were saying. A friend had brought a lavender candle to his room and placed it in a drawer next to his bed. When he awoke the first thing he did was reach into the drawer and pull out the candle.
-Patients were asked “Did your vision differ in any way from your normal, everyday vision, including field of vision, colors, brightness, depth-perception?” the vast majority of respondents answered yes.
Most convincing: Some of the people in the survey were born blind or had acquired blindness later in life. Nonetheless, after recovering from the NDE were able to describe visually what they had seen around them.
- Out of Body
Many who were near death, with no brain activity, no pulse, reported rising above their bodies, watching medical personnel below, and even moving to other rooms.
- Impossibly Conscious
Anesthesiologists preparing people for surgery go through intensive efforts to make certain that loss of consciousness and a state of amnesia are maintained throughout. Some of these people go through NDE’s on the operating table, for example with cardiac arrest. Yet upon recovery are able to describe the events that had occurred around them. They were conscious and remembered what they saw even though it seemed impossible.
- Family Reunion
Many near-death experiencers describe dramatic and joyous reunions with family members and other people they knew who had died before the NDE occurred. Some described meeting relatives who had died before they were born, in some cases confirmed by photographs.
- From the Mouths of Babes
There has been considerable discussion in the media about NDE’s, for example, Oprah has had programs devoted to the subject, and there are many books and movies, for example: “Flatliners” where a group of medical students induce near death experiences in each other. This raises the possibility that adults with NDE’s have been influenced by this and tend to say what they think they should say. As a “control” Long asked similar questions of young children, 4-5 year old’s who had had NDE’s and their responses were the same. In fact the responses were the same in all age groups and cultures studied throughout the world.
- Changed lives
Those who have undergone NDE’s are frequently reported by friends and families to be different people after recovery– happier, more loving, peaceful.
Long concludes that while he started as a skeptic and tried to approach the project objectively, “After considering the strength of the evidence, I am convinced there is an Afterlife.”
Conclusion
I, like most of you I presume, remain skeptical. I think Long would have been better served if he had said there is a reasonable possibility rather than convinced. It is really hard in science to establish absolutes and particularly in this case. I do think it was a great idea for Long to establish a website with the questionnaire. But the evidence is circumstantial. As far as we know there is no one who has actually died who has come back to tell about it. I mean dead dead, not an NDE. Which brings us back to where we started with the story of Jesus. “On the third day he rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven from which he returned to spread the good news about what he had seen.” Let’s assume that the story is true. Most Biblical scholars agree that there was a historical Jesus. Is it possible that what happened to Jesus was in fact a near-death experience? Was he was left for dead but actually only in a coma. His body was washed and he was put into a cave sealed by boulders. A few days later the boulders were removed and the body was gone. Then he appeared to two of his disciples “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have (Luke 24:39). Maybe what actually happened was that he was never dead. And when he came around he wanted to tell people what had happened. Wouldn’t you?
So there you have it. Here’s what I think. We know very little. We came out of the Big-Bang from nothing and are literally made of star-dust. Throughout human history people have said “what you see is what you get”, only to be disproven later. We live in at least 10 spatial dimensions. We know of 4, length, width, height, and time, and we don’t know what time is. This is the take home message: if there really are afterlives, they would need to have somewhere to go and it would seem that the extra dimensions would be the key. Could one or more of these dimensions contain afterlives, or maybe an infinite continuum of afterlives? Are we in an Afterlife now? Of course it makes no sense but I look on it as a great adventure.