Is There Life After Death?

Death is generally a taboo topic, but the attitude towards it differs from one culture to another.

While in countries like Mexico, death is easily discussed and is even celebrated on a national fest holiday, called the Day of the Dead (DeSpelder & Strickland, 1983), in modern western societies, people try to push the knowledge of their life coming to an end at some point, to the most remote corner of their brain and do whatever they can to avoid thinking about it.  They prefer to live in denial since they can’t come to terms with it. Though death anxiety is reduced for devotees of religion and people with a personal philosophy about death.

Personally, I have always been wondering about death as early as I can remember. As a child, the idea of disappearing and never coming back again, was simply terrifying. As an adult all I could argue with myself was : If consciousness doesn’t survive physical death, what was the point of evolving into consciousness?

And then I would think, death is another one of those big mysteries (like how did everything start) human mind cannot grasp completely the big question: Is there life after death? And if yes, what is it like?

The most interesting information I ran into, apart from the amazing accounts on near death experiences and recalling of past lives, was that on Frederic Myers, a professor of classics at Cambridge university, in England.

The following paragraphs are excerpts of the book “You cannot die: The Incredible Findings by Ian Currie.

“Myers had a  passionate curiosity about the meaning of human life. He devoted most of his adult years to trying to satisfy this curiosity, but he did it in a rather unusual way. He did not pore over theological writings and philosophical speculation. He felt that if human life did have a purpose, then it could be discovered in only one way: through the study of human experiences. This conviction led him, in 1882, to found the first Society for Psychical Research with some of his Cambridge colleagues.

Myers was a man of enormous energy and great intellectual ability. After twenty years of intensive investigation, he concluded that he had answered this question. He wrote a book about what he had learned that became a classic – probably the most important work ever written in this strange field – called “Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death”.