Is There Life After Death?

By Liliana Falabella Martinez | Translation: Katia Moraes and Gisele Sweeney

Even knowing that death is a very natural thing, and it’s the only certainty we have about our life, it seems disconcerting to talk about it because we don’t like to remember we won’t be here forever. In our defiance to imagine life after death, the human mind imagined a wonderful garden, a purgatory full of punishments, an endless cycle of reincarnations, an enlightened and eternal existence, or created a vacuum leading to nowhere. In this article we want to provide the reader with more meaningful research facts, arguments and ideas about this subject without bringing religion to this equation.

In the middle of the 1700’s, Franz Anton Mesmer gave us a broader knowledge of the “animal” energy that exists in us. As the creator of the Mesmerism, he’s considered the father of the “animal” magnetism. His theories affirmed that there is an incalculable principle that acts upon the body. And that in every live organism there is a special force that circulates in a magnetic fluid animating the organic and inorganic world.

He believed that fluid could be transmitted to another body and that would invigorate the weakened bodies. He also believed that people with great vitality could transmit their energy to others if they knew how to re-direct that with their hands. In the 20th Century, the Kirlian photos illustrated Mesmer’s theories showing sicknesses in our “Ethereal Body,” or in our energetic body. The aura is a magnetic field that surrounds every material thing – animated beings or not. Today this energy is very well known and manipulated through Parapsychology and Alternative Medicine (Acupuncture, Reike, Chackras, and Feng Shui, among others.)

If we remember that energy is wrapped with a substance composed by 70% water, like the human being is, and that water is extremely influenced by thought (based on recent research published in the book “The Message from Water” by Masaru Emoto and that is also presented in the movie “What the Bleep do we Know?”), it is possible to suppose scientifically that this “energy” could manifest itself out of the body, so life can exist without the necessity of the body.

Thanks to the fantastic progress made in the medical procedures with their resuscitation techniques, more people are surviving cases of clinic death (characteristic of a heart attack.) The accounts made by people who had their journey to the “other side” interrupted, made them able to present a new idea of death and life. Instead of feeling anguish for being in the path to annihilation, now they talk about the complete certainty that they were only passing from a place of existence to another. I

n 1975, the psychiatrist Raymond Moody Jr. collected experiences of different people who had died for few moments and were brought to life. In the book they talk about what happen to them during those moments. The doctor advised them to tell their stories without making conclusions. The book “Life After Death” by Doctor Moody Jr., called a lot of attention from the average reader and doctors as well. The expression “Near-Death Experience” (NDE) was invented after its publication.

Near-Death Experience The similarity of the accounts of the Near-Death Experiences is impressive. Even tough the stories are different; the majority of them follow a basic script. This incidence defies any attempt to qualify these experiences as mere hallucinations. 1. The person feels out of their bodies and in that moment, all the discomfort, pain and affliction disappears. 2. They see a similar and subtle form of the body fluctuating a few meters from the ground. The individual conscience is still linked to this form and from above observes the body down below. 3. The conscience registers all the images ambient sounds. They can see and hear the sound of the machines and the effort of the medical group in trying to reanimate the body. 4. At some point, the conscience looses interest in this information and perceives the existence of a vortex or tunnel that attracts an irresistible force. Not all of them pass trough the tunnel. There are some that experience some kind of “Fluctuation” and ascend to space. Some get to see the planet Earth and some other planets. 5. The conscience penetrates the tunnel and moves at a stunning velocity. A difficult to qualify humming accompanies the motion. 6. The person critically recapitulates its life during the motion. The memories that surface wouldn’t be considered important if they were in an average state of consciousness. In this context tough, they are highly significant. The whole experience does not follow usual patterns of space and time. All their existence can be seen in few seconds. 7. At the end of the tunnel the consciousness perceives the light that can’t be compared to any material world phenomenon. This light transmits a sensation of peace, plenitude and happiness. The person wants to go into the light and leave the physical body. 8. A sudden specific memory interrupts the process. The person remembers loving people or some situation that needs solution. 9. Suddenly they feel a strong beat and the conscious-form goes back to the physical body. 10. The person suddenly gets inexplicably better.

In 1944, Carl Jung suffered a heart attack and had a Near-Death Experience. He saw himself outside of his own body and could see the Earth from space. “I felt very high in cosmic space. Very far, below me, was the round Earth bathed in a wonderful blue light.”

In another research, the doctor Melvin Morse also collected a succession of accounts of the same type that were published under “Closer to the Light – Learning from the Children.” The stories came from children that survived from accidents or from serious diseases. The caution away used by Doctor Morse and psychologists when interviewing the children, is apparent in the away the children narrated their stories.

Katie was found floating with her head facing down in the Christian Youth Association’s swimming pool. Nobody knows for how long she was unconscious or if she had beaten her head in the pool’s rim. Doctor Morse brought her to life even tough she had no pulses when he applied the arterial catheterization. Katie’s father suggested a round of prayers around her bed. Two nurses and a therapist stayed at her bed. Three days later the neurological tests showed a complete recover.

In front of her mother and brother, Katie identified the doctors and assistants who took care of her when she was still unconscious. She surprised everyone telling them about a beautiful young lady she “knew” was Elizabeth, and how they flew in the “tunnel.” They visited Katie’s house where she saw her brothers and her mother in the kitchen preparing lunch before they received the message of her accident. She described how they were dressed and the movements they did. Later, they all confirmed Katie’s version.

Vision when close to death

When someone in terminal phase starts to see people who were loved ones in this life and supposedly “come to pick them up”.

Appearance

A ghost is a spirit of a deceased person. History is full of cases of people who saw spirits or listened to voices from other world. A poltergeist (literally, noisy spirit) is a noisy ghost. Poltergeists make their presence noticed by noise. They are ghosts that like to disturb launching things in the air.

Experiences outside the Body

It is a psycho-physiological state in which the person has the sensation of loosing up and “float” as if they had abandoned their physical body. Your body can be seen from a certain distance. In some situations, they observe a kind of cord that extends from the material body to the “momentary one”. It is a subtle body, capable to hover over and go to other places. The experience outside the body can occur in the following situations: during natural sleep, general anesthesia, violent trauma capable to provoke a collapse, experience of almost death, torture, rape, very high fever, drug poisoning, drowning or in great crisis due to the lack of food.

Extra-Sensorial Perception

The parapsychologist and former president of the Brazilian Institute of Psycho biophysics, Hernani Andrade, affirmed that “the extra-sensorial perception” is a faculty of the spirit. It manifests itself especially when there is a displacement of the cupola; the spiritual body is moved away slightly from the physical body, still keeping a reasonable interaction between the two bodies. In this contingency there is a mixture of the two perceptions: sensorial and spiritual.

For example, in the case of the clairvoyance, the sensitive person “sees” what happens in the physical plan (ocular vision) and in the extra-physicist plan (spiritual vision) at the same time. It occurs, for example, when we are watching a window and its objects and we also can see the pedestrian and the vehicles on the street through the glass. So we see a mixture of images: the extra-sensorial parapsychologist of the objects inside the window and the ones on the street.

Materialization

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and complex phenomena of the human nature, the materialization occurs when a medium yields the ectoplasm, composed of its “energy fluid” so the entity can be materialized. The first descriptions of mediumship in China occurred 4 thousand years ago and mediums were called Wu.

The phenomena of spirit materialization were studied by scientists as: Nobel-Prize William Crookes and Charles Richet, Baron Von Schrenk Noitizing amongst others. The Nobel Prize, William Crookes, English physicist and chemist, born in London in 1832, discovered and studied the Thallium. He was the president of the Chemical Society of London and member of the Real Society Advisory team, known by various important researches on the physics and chemistry.

During three consecutive years the spirit Katie King revealed herself in sessions of materialization directed by Sir William Crookes and with the help of medium Florence Cook. It carried through various experiments and took various pictures of the entity Kate King that were able to verify the authenticity of phenomenon – including one where entity and medium appear together. Through his researches, Crookes could evidence that there are difference of weight, temperature and height between the spirit and the medium. In an interview published in the “The International Psychic Gazette”, in 1917, he stated: “There is no doubt that a connection was established between this world and another one”.

Reincarnation

When we remember Mozart executing a sonata at the piano when he was four years old and composing an opera when he was eight; Paganini and Teresa Milanollo, both children, play violin wonderfully; Liszt, Beethoven and Rubinstein were applauded when they were ten; Paschal, at twelve years old, discovered flat geometry; and Rembrandt, before knowing how to read, could drew as a great master. We ask: Would everything be just a coincidence, or these geniuses would have passed for other lives mastering their techniques?

The doctrine of the successive lives or reincarnation is also called Polygenesis, from two Greek words, Poly – as new, and genesis – birth. It was formulated since the beginning of the civilization in India. It is in the Vedas: “in the same way that we get rid of used clothes to acquire new ones, also the soul discards itself from an used body to redress itself of new ones.” Pythagoras was the first one to introduce in Greece the doctrine of the renaissance’s of the soul that he had known in his trips to Egypt and the Persia. Plato adopted the Patagonian idea of the Polygenesis: “it is certain that the living creatures come from the deceased ones; that the souls of deceased still revive.”

In our time, Carol Zaleski, theologian of Harvard, found similar statements among old people and he congregated them in his book “Otherworld Journeys”. He states that Greek, Roman, Egyptian and oriental had affirmed they had died and returned to life afterwards, and guarantee that after that experience they had no fear of death as before. According to him, still today this certainty survives in the Orient. The death would be a trip with the purpose of recovering the “true nature” of the traveler. The Professor Ian Stevenson, director of the department of psychology of the University of Charlottesville (Virginia) raised more than 1600 cases of regression of previous lives.

Many of these individuals bring birth marks in their bodies, where they had suffered wounds that supposedly would have come from their previous lives, since such wounds are compatible with the stories of their past lives. The Psychotherapist, Brian Weiss, that used the hypnosis to treat traumas generated in this life got surprised when one of his patients started to remember other incarnations and also started to bring information on his family, including on a son who was already deceased. Using the therapy of previous lives, he could cure the traumas of that patient and redirected his career to this new therapy.

None of the arguments above is enough proof of the survival post-death. Still, the set of the above phenomena constitutes a great testimonial in favor of this opinion. It is important to be open and keep yourself informed on the different existing possibilities. Like Shakespeare in “Hamelet” said: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy”. Eventually, some day all of us will contemplate this transit. But until then, why not to live more in harmony with the Laws of the Nature which we are part of, and thus we can also contribute positively doing the best we can today.