Evidence of an Afterlife, the Science of Near-Death Experiences

WHEN a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, the medical doctor experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

“Dr. Eben Alexander says he’s not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body,” notes Newsweek Magazine in a feature article.

“Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.”

“Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided,” Dr. Alexander wrote in the Newsweek October 15 2012 cover story.

“Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference,” he writes, “science tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe,” wrote David Bohm — legendary American quantum physicist known for his theory of an “Implicate Order,” a universe of undivided wholeness—”therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

“We are enfolded in the universe,” Bohm says. Theosophy agrees. “We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit,’ Blavatsky wrote:

“Matter is as eternal and indestructible as Spirit and one cannot be made cognizant to our senses without the other—even to our, the highest, spiritual sense.”

Theosophy also asserts what neurologists and physicists are now beginning to verify — that there is no special location of consciousness in the brain. Consciousness exists throughout the brain, and the body.

The mind actually lives independently with its own energetic matrix interpenetrating the physical body, using the brain, heart and other organs and cells as its toolkit on this plane.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

Death = Life

“Consciousness … has one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal,
ceaseless Motion, called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath’ — a Secret Doctrine fundamental (Vol. 1:2) —”which is the perpetual motion of the universe…there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.” Deepak Chopra agrees:

I AM

Mme. Blavatsky famously chose many notable scientists of her day to lend support to Theosophical teachings. Professor George T. Ladd, for example, confirmed many of the ancient occult teachings. Blavatsky cited Professor Ladd in her article Psychic and Noetic Action, quote: “The phenomena of human consciousness must be regarded

as activities of some other form of Real Being than the moving molecules of the brain.”

Physical brains are good to have, of course, especially since they are designed to be unique conductors of consciousness. Every cell and organ in the body has one. But there are unique spiritual brain centers too, most notably the pineal gland. (Read more: The Secret Doctrine 2:239)

Theosophy maintains this organ, with a small grain of sand at its center, was held sacred by the ancients among other centers, and is the mysterious focal point for manifesting higher states of consciousness such as intuition, and visions of the future. This turns the Cartesian dogma “I think therefore I am” on its head, replacing it with a phrase “I AM therefore I think.” This changes everything.

“When a neurosurgeon Dr. Alexander found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife,” the article continues.

“The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism,” Alexander writes, mimicking Blavatsky (Transactions): “The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

Human beings are indeed delicately balanced vehicles of consciousness and life force, Blavatsky notes in Elementals, declaring “the least deviation from harmony damages” it as an instrument.

Also reference  The Key to Theosophy, Section 10, “On the Nature of our Thinking Principle.”

Holistic Brain-Mind

Dr. Alexander’s Afterlife

“Dr. Eben Alexander says he’s not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.”

Falsifying Materialism

Following is a link to an important article – a review actually – of Thomas Nagel’s new book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980.

His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. Nagel is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind. “Many atheist philosophers are starting to doubt the Darwinian paradigm,” he writes.

This growing sentiment lends much overdue credence to H. P. Blavatsky’s persistent criticism of Neo-Darwinist dogmas repeated throughout her numerous writings, especially The Secret Doctrine.

Thomas Nagel

“Most reviews on Amazon are primarily a back and forth yadda yadda without any substantial content,” Nagel complains.  However an article (Published in the October 22, 2012 edition of The Nation) reviews Nagel’s book, “Mind and Cosmos” which challenges accepted scientific reductionist beliefs about mind.

The article is written by co-authors Michael Weisberg and Brian Leiter titled: “Do You Only Have a Brain? On Thomas Nagel.”

The authors are no lightweights. Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. Michael Weisberg is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.

Only a Brain?

“The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem,

threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.”

“Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either.

“An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel’s skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative.

“In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.

“In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.”

♥

The 19th century English poet, Francis Thompson, may have said it best:

All things by immortal power,
Near and Far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.