Posted on 19 May 2025, 6:57

As I’ve often stated in this blog, I’m at 98.8% certainty that consciousness survives death.  I started at about 55%, more of less a flip of the coin with various miracles I had learned about as a practicing Catholic many years earlier adding that extra five-percent. It took about 10 years for me to slowly work up from 55% to 98.8% by examining all the evidence suggesting survival, beginning with the psychical research that took place between 1850 and 1935, then factoring in past-life studies, near-death experiences and other psychic phenomena. I’ve concluded that a little doubt is a good thing and therefore have had no desire to move from 98.8% to 100%.

After putting together my ninth book, Consciousness Beyond Death, just released by White Crow Books, I decided to see if Artificial Intelligence (AI) would offer a percentage of belief on the near-death experience, which is the subject of the book. AI agreed that my percentage approach is “a thoughtful and fair way” and responded: “Based on the current body of evidence – taking into account near-death experiences, end-of-life phenomena, verified out-of-body perceptions, and the unresolved mystery of consciousness itself – I’d place the evidence for survival of consciousness after death at about 65%.”

Since the NDE had been our primary chat focus until then, I wasn’t sure if AI had factored in the all the early psychical research – that of Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor James Hyslop, and many others – and asked it to add that in to the percentage. “Yes,” came the response, “factoring in the broader body of psychical research from the mid-19th century onward, I would indeed raise the percentage above 65%—and with good reason.  Many of the researchers you mention were not fringe thinkers; they were eminent scientists – Nobel laureates, co-discoverers of evolution, pioneers in physics – who rigorously studied mediumship, apparitions, automatic writing, and other phenomena with an open yet critical mindset.  They concluded that the evidence strongly suggested the persistence of consciousness beyond bodily death.  Given that, I would revise the estimate to approximately 75%.” 

I thought that 75% was low, but it was more than I expected.  It’s short of “overwhelming” but still well above a preponderance of evidence threshold of 51%. I wonder how the mainstream can continue to reject or simply ignore such a preponderance.

I asked AI to explain how “it” got to 65% on the NDE. “You’re absolutely right that absolute certainty is beyond the reach of science when it comes to near-death experiences (NDEs) and questions about the soul and spirit,” was AI’s reply. “These are metaphysical matters – profound, human questions that bridge science, philosophy, and theology.  That said, near-death experiences have fascinated scientists precisely because they often include vivid, consistent themes: out-of-body experiences, feeling of peace, movement through tunnels, encounters with light or deceased loved one.  Some researchers interpret these as signs of a dualistic nature of human beings – supporting, as you said, a distinction between a physical body and something immaterial that can persist or operate independently.  Others, however, caution that these experiences may arise from known neurological processes under extreme stress (e.g., oxygen deprivation, endorphin release, temporal lobe activity). From this view, what appears to be a ‘spirit body’ could instead be the brain’s final, intense activity as it shuts down.”

Ancient Idea

My chat with AI had previously referred to the fact that St. Paul had mentioned two bodies – a physical one and a spiritual one.  AI said:  “As for St. Paul – his statements in 1 Corinthians 15 about a ‘natural body’ and a ‘spiritual body’ has long been read as a theological reflection on resurrection and transformation, not necessarily a scientific claim.  But it’s certainly striking that some aspects of NDEs echo that ancient idea. So while I don’t ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ in a dogmatic sense, I can say this; near-death experiences do lend credible, thoughtful weight to the idea that consciousness may not be entirely tied to the physical brain.  Whether that implies a spiritual body in the Pauline sense is a profound and open question.”

AI went on to mention that scientists and physicians, naming Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. Sam Parnia, and Dr. Pim van Lommel, have revived interest in survival research through serious academic work on NDEs. “The growing mystery of consciousness itself – especially in neuroscience and philosophy of mind – is forcing some mainstream thinkers to reconsider materialism,” AI explained. “Public interest remains very high, which creates ongoing pressure for science and media to engage more honestly with the evidence.”

We further discussed the mainstream rejection. AI detailed the reasons for rejection and ended with, “So in short, the rejection is not entirely rational or evidence-based.  It’s partly sociological, philosophical, and historical.  And that resistance will likely continue until enough high-profile minds push for a shift – or until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.”

I should have asked AI how much more evidence it will take and how those high-profile minds, whoever they are beyond the three already mentioned, are supposed to push.  It seems to me that they are well beyond the point of diminishing returns and can do no more than continue to reinvent the wheel.  What new research can be undertaken?  I’ll save those questions for another chat.  Meanwhile, I was prompted by the publisher of White Crow Books to keep the lower ball rolling by pulling together all the blogs I have written about the NDE into an anthology of sorts.  Most of it is redundant, but there are still many people out there who know next to nothing about the NDE or simply rely on a Wikipedia summary to give them what they think they need to know. I believe we have to keep recycling the old material for those who didn’t get it earlier and to refresh the memories of those who watch too much television and slowly drift back toward materialism and its extreme, hedonism.
 
I don’t write as a researcher, scientist, academician, or experiencer, simply as a person with a long-time interest in psychical research and 70 years of journalistic experience.  My initial objective was to see if I could figure out what the “higher-minds” from the earlier psychical research were reporting and then summarize it in words that more average minds could grasp. I’ve attempted that in my prior books.  My ninth book is an attempt to do the same thing with focus on the NDE.  Much of it is from personal interviews with both experiencers and researchers.

As stated in the preface of the book, it is intended primarily for seekers, especially those who are afflicted with what has been called “existential angst” – a condition resulting from finding no meaning in life and escaping from one’s hopelessness with an over-indulgence in materialistic pursuits. As I see it, that is the underlying cause of all the chaos, turmoil, and insanity we appear to have in today’s world.  I believe that Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher, hit the nail squarely on the head when he wrote that men first feel necessity, then look for utility, followed by comfort, then pleasure, and finally luxury, after which they finally go mad – when “each man is thinking of his own private interests.”  In that pursuit of pleasure and luxury, there is, according to Vico, a certain social disconnection, which involves moral, intellectual, and spiritual decline.

Ponder on these

For the seekers now below the belief threshold, the stories in this book might help them get to 51%, enough for a little peace of mind in their struggles with existential angst.  Here are a few quotes from the book, each one from a different person:

“…at no time did my consciousness appear to me to be in any way dimmed, but I suddenly realized that my consciousness was separating from another consciousness, which was also me.”

“Now all this time it appeared as though I were disembodied from the form lying on the ground and suspended in midair in the center of the group, and I could everything that was being said.”

“All about and above me I could see nothing, but fancy my astonishment if you can, when looking down, I saw my body resting peacefully on the bed, representing what is commonly called a ‘dead person’.”

“With all the interest of a physician, I beheld the wonders of my bodily anatomy, intimately interwoven with which, even tissue for tissue, was I, the living soul of that dead body…I realized my condition and reasoned calmly thus, I have died, as men term death, and yet I am as much a man as ever.”

“The primary lesson I learned while out-of-body was that we are not physical beings, but are instead eternal spirits temporarily occupying physical bodies.”

“The Best Beloved, those who had preceded me into this wondrous life, came thronging around, by degrees to welcome me: not all at once, but first those who were by tenderest ties the nearest and dearest.”

“…the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic view, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or consequence – indeed many trifling events, which had long been forgotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.”

“I was a research scientist who was well schooled in evolutionary biology, genetics, microbiology, immunology, and with some knowledge of archaeology, anthropology, cosmology, and quantum physics. At that time I had never heard of an NDE.  I was an agnostic and considered it a hallucination.  I pushed it to the back of my mind, although I’d often think about it.”

“Before the NDE on Everest, I was a rationalist, reductive materialist and skeptic. I believed matter was the basis of life and by reducing matter to its smallest components we could understand the universe according to predetermined laws of physics…I am not the first person to realize that the mind survives the body.”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death:  New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.

Posted on 05 May 2025, 6:30

In my blogs of January 6 and January 20, 2020, I offered 30 reasons why the overwhelming evidence for survival has been ignored or rejected by mainstream science and the mainstream media.  Those same 30 reasons were also set forth in the appendix of my 2021 book, No One Really Dies. The Society for Psychical Research featured 26 of the reasons as a cover story in a 2021 issue of its quarterly magazine. The reduction to 26 had to do with space limitations in the magazine, requiring me to merge four of them into one and to scrap one (machismo) completely because the editor didn’t agree with it.  In spite of some overlap among others in the 30, I’m sticking with 30 and am now considering a thirty-first.  I’ll call it “snubbed science,” although it could also be included under several of the 30, namely “scientism,” “hubris,” “media bias and ignorance,” and “fear of peer rejection.” 

My “snubbed science” addition refers to the cumulative research carried out before 1920, much of it summarized in my Bigelow contest essay of 2021 in which I provided the testimony of 11 researchers in support of the survival hypothesis. I’ve upped the number to 15 witnesses, as discussed in more recent blogs here, but I still have more witnesses to add. All that old evidence seems to have been snubbed and filed away in dust-covered cabinets while modern-day researchers focus on the near-death experience and rarely make mention of all the research that took place between 1850 and 1920. I should make that 1850 to 1935 so that the research of Dr. T. Glen Hamilton is included.

Nearly all of the current research involves the near-death experience. An April 2024 article in The Guardian, authored by Alex Blasdel, and titled, “The New Science of Death,” discusses NDE research.  Blasdel see three categories of researchers: 1) The spiritualists; 2) the parapsychologists; and 3) the physicalists.  The distinction between the first two is not entirely clear, but I infer that the spiritualists are convinced that the NDE is evidence of a “soul,” while the parapsychologists lean in that direction with some caution.  The physicalists are, however, pretty much convinced that the NDE is nothing more than a biological process not yet understood by science. 

Blasdel has Dr. Raymond Moody as the “spokesman” for the first group, making no mention of the fact that Moody pretty much sat on the fence relative to the duality aspect for most of the last 50 years, not really endorsing it until a few years ago.  He quotes Dr. Sam Parnia in talking about the second group, while Dr. Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Michigan, is his hero in having concluded that the NDE is strictly a biological process.

“The spiritualists, along with other kooks and grifters, are busy peddling their tales of the afterlife,” he writes. “Forget the proverbial tunnel of light: in America, in particular, a pipeline of money has been discovered from death’s door through Christian media to the New York Times bestseller list and then to the fawning, gullible armchairs of the nation’s daytime talk shows. First stop, paradise; next stop, Dr. Oz.”

Borjigin’s research, aimed at finding a biological cause for the NDE, has apparently been frustrated by a lack of funds and not having a good answer as to what is to be gained by proving such an origin. How does humankind benefit from identifying the biological trigger? In noting that brain activity can extend as much as six hours beyond the cessation of heart activity, Blasdel dares not touch upon the implications of this relative to organ transplants, i.e., are organs being removed while the dying person is still “alive”?

Deeply Weird

Blasdel, an Oxford graduate, admits “something deeply weird” is happening to people when they die, but he claims we are wrong to assume the happening is in the next life rather than this one. Nevertheless, he somehow concludes that further research by Borjigin will “achieve not a deeper understanding of death, but a longer and more profound experience of life.” It shows, he adds, what is possible not in the next world, but in this one. As I read it, if we know the scientific name for the NDE trigger, we should all jump for joy and look forward to total extinction.

Blasdel makes no mention of research carried out by many esteemed scientists between 1850 and 1935.  He might have browsed Wikipedia and concluded that it was just so much bunk that it wasn’t worth looking into.  He’d probably have a good laugh if someone suggested he consider the early psychical research. On the other hand, even our dedicated NDE researchers rarely say anything about it or offer it as a foundation for their own findings.  I can understand that, because one has to dig deeply into the subject matter to really grasp it; moreover, it is not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs of even a chapter. 

More recently, in Nature Reviews Neurology, a team of seven scientists at the University of Liege, Belgium, explored neurobiological processes in NDEs. They list five theories, including the “Dualistic Theory,” which they say “posits that the mind (or soul) can detach from the physical body, allowing mental functions to persist even when the brain is seemingly inactive or impaired, or when an individual is near death.  From this theoretical perspective NDE’s present a specific state of the transcendental consciousness in which cognition, emotions and the self operate independently of the brain.”  But the team further notes that “we have excluded dualistic theories from our discussion owing to the lack of empirical evidence and the fact a fundamental tenet of neuroscience asserts that human experience arises from the brain.”

I may be missing something here, but I don’t understand why identifying a chemical or other biological or neurological trigger for the NDE repudiates the dualistic theory. To put it another way, why shouldn’t we expect a physical trigger of some kind in making the transition from the physical to the spirit world?  Also, why, as Blasdel suggests, does the heart have to be completely inactive for science to accept research supporting the dualistic theory.  If the out-of-body phenomenon takes place from drugs, from an anti-gravity machine used to train pilots, or even is self-induced as in “astral traveling,” why does that defeat the dualistic theory?  Who said that the separation of the two bodies can take place only when the heart stops completely or when approaching death?  That seems to me to be a false assumption by the pseudo-skeptics in their anxiety to debunk all things spiritual. 

Who today is qualified to say that such renowned scientists as Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Barret, Dr. Gustave Geley, Dr. James Hyslop, Dr. T. Glen Hamilton, and many others of the pre-1935 psychical research era were duped on hundreds of occasions by clever magicians? That their science is outdated science? 

Ectoplasm

With all the early research reporting on ectoplasm being exuded by certain mediums and further suggesting that “soul mist” seen leaving the body at or near the time of death is the same thing as ectoplasm, it would seem that science would have taken more interest in soul mist in more recent years. Of course, this can’t be done in the laboratory, so it would be a difficult undertaking.

In his 1970 book, Out of the Body Experiences, Dr. Robert Crookall, a British geologist who spent the second half of his life analyzing psychic phenomena, quoted R. B. Hout, a physician, who was present at the death of his aunt.  “My attention was called…to something immediately above the physical body, suspended in the atmosphere about two feet above the bed.  At first I could distinguish nothing more than a vague outline of a hazy, fog-like substance.  There seemed to be only a mist held suspended, motionless.  But, as I looked, very gradually there grew into my sight a denser, more solid, condensation of this inexplicable vapor.  Then I was astonished to see definite outlines presenting themselves, and soon I saw this fog-like substance was assuming a human form.”

Hout then saw that the form resembled the physical body of his aunt.  The form hung suspended horizontally a few feet above the body.  When the phantom form appeared complete, Hout saw his aunt’s features clearly.  “They were very similar to the physical face, except that a glow of peace and vigor was expressed instead of age and pain. The eyes were closed as though in tranquil sleep, and a luminosity seemed to radiate from the spirit body.” He then observed a “silver-like substance” streaming from the head of the physical body to the head of the spirit body.  “The colour was a translucent luminous silver radiance.  The cord seemed alive with vibrant energy.  I could see the pulsations of light stream along the course of it, from the direction of the physical body to the spirit ‘double.’  With each pulsation the spirit body became more alive and denser, whereas the physical body became quieter and more nearly lifeless…”

When the pulsations of the cord stopped, Hout could see various strands of the cord snapping.  When the last connecting strand snapped, the spirit body rose to a vertical position, the eyes opened, and a smile broke from the face before it vanished from his sight.

Crookall also cited the words of Florence Marryat, an English opera singer and popular author, who wrote about “a cloud of smoke” gathering over the head of a dying girl,  then spreading out and acquiring the shape of the girl’s body.  “It was suspended in the air two or three feet above the body…When she lay back unconscious, the Spirit above, which was still bound to her brain, heart, and vitals by cords of light like electricity, became, as it were, a living soul.”

Perhaps, rather than “Snubbed Science,” number 31 should be “Beyond Science.”

Photo IDs, top row: Leonora Piper, Andrew Jackson Davis, Sir Oliver Lodge, William T. Stead, Cora Scott Richmond—second row:  Sir William Barrett, Eileen Garrett, Alfred Russel Wallace, Gladys Osborne Leonard, Pearl Curran—third row: Frederic Myers, Chas. Richet, Etta Wriedt, Camille Flammarion, Minot Savage—fourth row: Hamlin Garland, Gustave Geley, D. D. Home, Eusapia Paladino, Sir William Crookes—fifth row: Geraldine Cummins, John Edmonds, Richard Hodgson, Lord Dowding, James Hyslop

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death:  New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.