Is there a Life after Death?

A car hits you and you die…What next?

Do heaven and hell really exist? If so, what is it like there?

Numerous questions like this crowd our minds. Finding a definite answer to these questions as we’ve never been able to interview a dead person. However, religious texts speak extensively of afterlife and some people claim to have been to the other side and returned to life. Based on their descriptions, we can put together a rough sketch of how things after death might look like.

Someone gets hit hard on the head, suffers a stroke or sustains considerable injury in a crash. He feels like he’s disconnected from the world and passes through a gate or tunnel. He is guided through realms and comes across things more ‘real’ than this reality. These realms are both familiar and strange, possessing a music that’s not quite music and a light brighter than any other light. There are different descriptions of the afterlife in which people come across their close ones, historical characters and in some cases even Jesus himself. The tourist is left speechless and reluctantly returns to reoccupy his body on this earth. This experience changes him completely and makes him calmer and determined to preach heaven’s truth. The Book of Enoch, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, tells a version of this story and so does the Book of Revelation, Christianity’s most foundational description of the sights and sounds of heaven.

Anthropologists have found nothing of the kind in the burial ritual of the Homo sapiens that might classify them as religious. However, it is known that they buried their dead with great care and consideration and included food, weapons and various personal belongings with the body. Even the Neanderthal men buried stone implements, decorative shells and bones in the deceased in the graves. In absence of written scriptures, it is safe to assume that these prehistoric people believed that death was not the end and they required nourishment for some kind of existence after death.

The part of human being that survives after death is known in most religions as the soul which must answer for all its earthly deeds, good and bad. Hinduism perceives that after death, the soul unites with the Universal Soul or Brahman. Buddhism teaches that an individual is but a transient combination of the five aggregates (skandhas)—matter, sensation, perception, predisposition, and consciousness—and has no permanent soul.

With the growth of rational thinking, the idea of afterlife has gained more importance. The neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, said in Newsweek in 2012 that his experience convinced him that his consciousness (the soul, or the self) exists somehow separate from or outside the mind and can travel to other dimensions on its own. “This world of consciousness beyond the body,” he wrote, “is the true new frontier, not just of science but of humankind itself, and it is my profound hope that what happened to me will bring the world one step closer to accepting it.”

It is believed that only people have near-death experiences (NDEs) have seen the realm beyond this world. Unfortunately, people on the brink of dying often do and even if they don’t, their visions can’t be compared as they have approached the other realm in different ways: some had an accident, some a stroke while some had a heart attack. Over the years, science has put forward many theories as to connect these visions of heaven and the chemical and physical processes that occur at death.

Andrew Newberg, a professor and neuroscientist of Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital, has said that the “tunnel” and “light” that the NDE-ers frequently describe can be easily explained. As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first, he points out. “That’s why you’d have a tunnel sensation.” If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down last. Newberg puts forward the following scenario, which he emphasizes is guesswork: When people die, two parts of the brain that usually work in opposition to each other act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous system—a web of nerves and neurons that run through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the body—is responsible for arousal or excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic system, with which the sympathetic system is entwined, calms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system promotes the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you’re falling asleep. But in the brains of people having mystical experiences, and perhaps in death, both systems are fully “on,” giving a person a sensation both of slowing down, being “out of body,” and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. It is possible, Newberg asserts—though not at all certain—that visions of heaven are merely chemical and neurological events that occur during death.

In any case, what happens after death is still a mystery. A fair warning to you all:

DO NOT TRY TO GET INTO AN NDE TO KNOW WHAT THE OTHER SIDE LOOKS LIKE!

Picture credits to respective owners.