The after-death experience, also referred to as the near-death experience, occurs when a person is temporarily clinically dead. Some of those report flying, or otherwise moving, across a natural border of some kind towards a bright light and a few persons. One of these advises the sojourner to go back. Those who report an out-of- body experience of looking down at their own bodies have no out-of-Earth experiences to report.
Researcher Ian Wilson in his 1987 book ‘The After-Death Experience’ debunks “all varieties of claimed evidence for a life beyond the grave. He has checked out – and found wanting – the ‘past life’ memories produced by hypnotists … He has investigated mediums … He has inquired into the strange death-bed experiences reported … And he has exhaustively researched the stories of those whom, thanks to modern resuscitation methods, almost literally came back from the dead … “
“Yet, although Ian Wilson finds much that is both dubious and spurious … he presents compelling evidence that something of us might well survive physical death.” (From back cover of book)
Wilson also states (p.233) “But perhaps the real reason for the continued failure of all attempts so far to bring evidence for life after death within the confines of accepted science is something different … it may be that what truly constitutes ‘us’, a complex and evanescent set of memories and emotions, is simply not of an order to be isolated scientifically …”
The truth is that the scientific method requires repeatability of occurrences and observations. It is the most reliable method of researching the material realm, but not the immaterial, ephemeral, and insubstantial psychic phenomena of the ethereal realm.
This method is also restricted to processes of a mechanistic nature, notwithstanding the practice of some modern-day speculative scientific researchers offering hypotheses, as tentative explanations, which reportedly cannot be tested or mathematically reflected, even in the physical sciences. Where is the methodology for researching phenomena broadly categorised as psychic or paranormal?
Researchers whose religious beliefs deny the probability that each human has a soul; or whose path to knowledge is restricted to the methodology of science; or who rely on the visions of the dying; in order to explain away the real-life experiences (commonly one-off episodes) of some of those who were clinically dead temporarily, or who claim to recall some past-life events and relationships, may not be credible in some of their pronouncements.
Surely all clairvoyants and seers are not charlatans, or are easily misled. Surely academic researchers in parapsychology can be accepted as professionally competent, until proven otherwise.
The traditional boundary between the physical realm and what Ian Wilson refers to as “substance-less, space-and-time transcending something of us” may not be real. In a universe in which everything is somehow connected, the material realm may possibly be a ‘projection’ or emanation from the ephemeral realm; and that both realms are somehow intertwined.
In the latter circumstances, as in my own experience, reality will be physical, mental and spiritual simultaneously, and at all times; and remaining a mystery not yet penetrable.
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 