-Andrew Atkin
Religion--and spirituality--should be about opening minds, not closing them.
The terror of death:
There's an interesting man, Dr Michael Newton, who did hypnotic regressions on hundreds of people. He [supposedly] regressed people back to their life between incarnated lives. Anyway, one thing that he said that was of interest to me, was that Atheist-materialists repress their fear of death.
That they repress their fear is believable to me, not just because absolute death is unpalatable, but because of the way materialists seem to act. I've seen two kinds of "repression" from this camp...
People either become aggressive in response to the conversation on spiritualism (and death) and reject having to even talk about it--operating a "just don't go there" defense--or, they relate to it in an emotionally knocked-out way, where they become psychologically split from the meaning of what they believe. That 'split' type will listen to someone talk about spiritualism and death, but only with a kind of vague indifference.
The split type is the most defended, I believe. They're a lost cause to try and convert from their position, because they're unreachable (psychologically). The ones who can potentially reconsider are the more aggressive ones, who typically just say "don't go there!". Those guys can still, potentially, think about this stuff with sincere engagement - they just need to first take a deep breath.
And then there are the [apparently] religious people, namely the Western Christians. I believe these people are more afraid of death than they appear. In the Western world, religion is not what it used to be. There are few true believers. Why?
We've broken down religion by contradicting it with a simplistic representation of science. Religion in the West has become more of a soft tradition than a social-psychological foundation with teeth. Crudely, Christianity has gone from Jesus Christ to Santa Claus. It's not serious anymore.
Because of this, I think there's little true confidence in life after death in the modern Christian world. So the Christians are afraid too. The whole Western world is afraid.
Ok. So what's the effect of all this? It's a good question to ask because [real] religion is powerful stuff - and it's gone. I can only speak from my observation, but I will. I think our abandonment of religiosity has made the West weak - vulnerable to depression and fear.
People feel an ultimate meaninglessness behind everything. What does anything really matter if you're eternally dead after a few short decades? Nothing really. It's all just a lukewarm disco party at the end of the day, right?
So, our existential grief sucks the spark out of life, as that morbid cloud of doom is always there in the subconscious.
At worst, this 'existential crisis' can make us self-centered and ethically corrupt. You know...live for yourself, for today, because you have no tomorrow. And as the atheistic mind might assume, higher idealism for the brotherhood of man is just a trick of the mind - an emotional disturbance born from evolutionary pressure, that survival once decided to be useful.
Body and Soul:
Okay. Before you take the gun out of the draw, I have some good news. The consciousness (meaning, spirit) is not created by the brain. It can't be, has been [logically] shown not to be able to, and there's empirical evidence from multiple areas showing it almost certainly does not. Biological death is not conscious death. Biology is not the material of the mind...
-This needs much further explanation, but I will say the following for sake of imprinting a basic picture:
The atomic world (meaning material world, as we experience it) is effectively an avatar structure born out of the field (aether) of which gives birth to the material (vibratory) world. Consciousness is much more likely based within the field directly, than matter itself - that's what everything points to.
When your computer dies you don't die with it. Same for the brain - which is just a computer, of course.
From my observation, scientists who claim otherwise typically have no idea about the evidence supporting the non-materialist case. Or more typically, they refuse to give the evidence the time of day as they see the supposition as inherently implausible. They would've never really tested their assumptions, and I notice they have a picture in their minds of what 'material' even is that's literally 100 years out of date. This, I think, is the essence of why they believe life after death is inherently implausible.
Religious rebirth:
Anyway, there's hope for a new kind of authentic religion (if you can call it that) in the West. But it won't be Christianity, Islam, or Jehovah's Witness, etc. Those old ideas are past their use-by date, and they're so full of corruptions, I believe, that they should be held at a cautious arms length in any circumstance (see here).
Victorian science has given the fundamentalist faiths a lethal kick to the gonads. In turn, I don't believe there's any coming back to Christianity (and other) in the way it was in the past. But we do need a religious rebirth of sorts, or at least a major overhaul in the way we relate to our old dogmas.
The 'overhaul' must honour the scientific standard and be consistent with what we know to be fact. From there, we can likely get the West out of its spiritual morbidity, and into a faith that the modern mind can respect. Not a faith based on grand stretches and wild speculation, but a faith that can be believed-in with confidence.
What should that faith be? Well, it's already evolving in a way via research, insight and philosophy. There are a lot great conversations going on - but that goes beyond what I want to write here. (Explore the links below the page, if you will).
But one thing I would like to say, is that a modern 'great' religion, if it ever comes to be, would surely not be dictatorial or cultish. Its leaders, if any, would be more akin to ethical philosophers than authoritative priests who are above debate. And it would be a faith of inspiration - not intimidation (I hope).
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Note: On the Near Death Experiencers:
The curious thing about people who've had an NDE, is that they have the same confidence in life after death that you and I have in the night turning to day. And their anticipation for their post-biological future is overwhelmingly positive.
As research on NDE people has made clear, the broad effect from their experience is that they become more spiritual yet less religious (in the institutional meaning of the word) and less materialistic. Money and position is generally only a means to an end, for them. They're less miserable and suicidal, yet also less risk-averse because they feel they can't ultimately lose. Death is seen not as a fearful end, but a natural transition.
With an intellectual update and 'faith' renaissance, people in general can come closer to the outlook enjoyed by those who've gone through an NDE. That is, they can come away from their spiritual blues. This belongs to all of us - if we can get past our fears and take the time to look and consider.
Note: The strength of the evidence:
Dr Jeffery Mishlove, a life long NDE (and other) researcher, made an important point on evidence in his recent talk.
He said that any isolated case on the NDE and Past lives recall, etc, can be rightly nit-picked and broken down with possible 'other' explanations, making the evidence from a singular case inconclusive...
That's true. It's hard to prove reincarnation and NDE cases, etc, to the point where the validity of a given case is conclusively undeniable. Creating laboratory-type conditions where there can be zero potential for contamination is virtually impossible, in practical terms. And that's what you may need for an inarguable proof that could satisfy the strictest of sceptics.
But what Mishlove also said, that was very true, was that the gravity behind the evidence is not the isolated cases as such, but the fact that we have so many robust cases....
Documented cases of children who remember past lives, for example, runs into the thousands. NDE cases run into the millions. There are also countless cases of out-of-body experiences (usually accompanying NDE's) where people in hospitals are reported to have explicitly seen and heard things that should have been absolutely impossible from their geographical position and debilitated state of mind.
It's the shear volume of cases, demonstrating consistency in the structure of the experiences, with validations, that gives the greatest weight to the evidence - moving in the direction of being able to declare 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the consciousness is not derivative of brain activity. There is a domain of what we can call 'spirit' outside what is immediately observable, in simplistic material terms.
To be clear: When a single patient tells a doctor, word for word, what they said about them in another faraway room while they were totally unconscious, then that is freaky. When it happens thousands of times over, with all different people, and is formally documented then it's more than freaky. It demands serious attention. This is where we are.
So, this is what people should appreciate if they are to look into this work. Look broadly, don't just nit-pick isolated cases. Develop perspective on the body of evidence.
Related links - my personal content:
My personal "religious" philosophy (video).
Example (one of many) of how a brain cannot generate a consciousness (video).
The mechanical argument for life after death.
The spiritual revolution we need.
Outside links of interest:
Leading researcher on NDE's (video)
Mark Gober "the end of upside down thinking" (video).
