Humanity spends so much time and effort on living, that they rarely think about their mortality, dying, death or an afterlife. Some do more than others, such as the religious; the terminally ill; the aged; or those with a morbid fascination for the subject. Yet it is highly incongruous that of the two most momentous moments in a person’s life, it is ones birth which is annually remembered on birthdays, while ones inexorable future day of death is thought of as little as possible.  

It is curious that people do not expend genuine effort in wanting to find out the answers to what happens at death and whether they will live again. Yet it is not surprising they don’t, for most people do not even question or if they do, do not seek the equally profound answers on who we are and why are we here. Even science seeks to answer what happens at death. Yet religion has surely failed in providing the truthful answer and Christianity for example, deceives believers with a false teaching about heaven and hell – refer articles: Heaven & Hell; and The Seven Churches – A Message for the Church of God in the Latter Days. 

Of all the pieces of information a human could know or understand, are there any more pressing or vital than what happens when we die? In a recent article on the top ten unexplained mysteries of all time as chosen by an online website, Clinical Death and Life after Death was unsurprisingly included – refer article: The Top Ten Unexplained Mysteries of all Time. 

Perhaps people are more curious about death than we realise. For example, in the heavy metal music scene a whole genre with numerous sub-genres, is devoted to death – called Death Metal. 

The process of dying is a tragic and unsettling experience for family and friends who witness the demise of a loved one. Death is the cessation of life, when the heart stops beating oxygen filled blood; the functions of the brain shut down; and respiration ceases. There are physical signs when a person is dying as well as after the moment of death. These symptoms are shared by those in latter stages of terminal illness, whatever condition they are suffering and can vary from hours to days in occurrence. 

Patients become drowsy due to having less energy and will spend more time sleeping. Appetite lessens, difficulty swallowing increases and ability to digest food diminishes. Breathing becomes irregular and can range from periods of shallow breathing to ones of deeper, rapid breaths. Breathing can become more noisy due to mucus build up, with a rattling sound when breathing – known as the death rattle. Changes in the chemical balance of the brain can cause hallucinations, confusion with restlessness as well as lashing out and shouting. Circulation changes can lead to cold hands or feet and the skin looking slightly blue. 

Very Well Health, Chris Raymond:

‘The moment of death is often thought of as the moment when the heartbeat and breathing stop. However, research is showing that death may not be that immediate. The brain is thought to keep “working” for 10 minutes or so after death, meaning that a person’s mind may have some kind of awareness of dying.’ 

The brain may emit brainwave activity from a few seconds to upwards of ten minutes, depending on the person after the body expires. This is an important point, which will be returned to later. Death is official when there is no pulse, no breathing, no reflexes and no pupillary constriction. After death occurs, a body begins to undergo changes as its temperature drops. Skin colour and texture look and feel different and the muscles relax, stiffen, and then relax again. 

What Happens One Hour After Death? 

‘At the moment of death, all of the muscles in the body relax (primary flaccidity). The eyelids lose their tension, the pupils dilate, the jaw may fall open, and the joints and limbs are flexible. With the loss of tension in the muscles, the skin will sag, which can cause prominent joints and bones in the body, such as the jaw or hips, to stick out.… As muscles relax, sphincters release and allow urine and feces to pass. Within minutes of the heart stopping, the body will get pale as the blood drains from the smaller veins in the skin (pallor mortis). The body starts to cool from its normal temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit until it reaches the air temperature around it. The “death chill” (algor mortis) is when the body temperature falls at a steady rate of 1.5 degrees F per hour. The expected decrease in body temperature during algor mortis can help forensic scientists get the approximate time of death, assuming the body has not completely cooled or been exposed to extreme environmental temperatures.’ 

What Happens 2 to 6 Hours After Death? 

‘Since the heart no longer pumps blood, gravity begins to pull it to the areas of the body closest to the ground (pooling), a process called liver mortis. If the body is not disturbed for several hours, the parts of the body that are nearest the ground can develop a reddish-purple discoloration that looks like a bruise. It’s caused by the accumulation of blood… chemical changes in the body’s cells cause all muscles to stiffen (rigor mortis). The first muscles affected are the eyelids, jaw, and neck. Over the next several hours, rigor mortis spreads to the face and down the chest, abdomen, arms, and legs until it finally reaches the fingers and toes. Interestingly, the old custom of placing coins on the eyelids of the deceased might have originated from the desire to keep the eyes shut, since rigor mortis affects them first. When infants and young children die, it is not unusual for their bodies to not display rigor mortis, possibly because of their smaller muscle mass.’ 

What Happens 7 to 12 Hours After Death? 

‘Maximum muscle stiffness from rigor mortis in the body occurs after about 12 hours. However, this timeline will be affected by a person’s age, physical condition, sex, air temperature, and other factors. At this point, the deceased’s limbs are hard to move. The knees and elbows will be slightly flexed, and the fingers and toes can look unusually crooked.’

What Happens 12 Hours After Death? 

‘After reaching a state of maximum rigor mortis, the muscles start to loosen because of the continued chemical changes in the cells and internal tissue decay. The process (secondary flaccidity) takes place over one to three days and is affected by external conditions such as temperature (for example, cold slows the process). During secondary flaccidity, the skin shrinks and creates the illusion that the deceased’s hair and nails are growing. Rigor mortis starts to disappear going in the opposite direction – from the fingers and toes to the face – over 48 hours. Once secondary flaccidity is done, the body’s muscles will relax again.’

A once vibrant human life tragically transforms as its dies and the physicality of that life as evidenced by the lifeless body remaining, only magnifies the shocking temporariness and fragility of human existence. Does it really end there? The precious life of an animated human being expiring like the application of a vehicle’s brakes causing a complete stop; whether gradually by illness and old age or abruptly from an accident or murder.

While the process of dying is relatively painless for many, Jeff Somers lists the worst ways to die in the article, The most painful ways to die, according to Science.

Drowning

‘… when… struggling in water, we… hyperventilate. This… leads to breathing in water, which causes a laryngospasm or vocal cord spasm… breathing in water can be very painful, and if you get water into your lungs the sensation is a searing pain that often lasts long after you’re out of the water… this process can be incredibly painful, especially when combined with the sheer panic most people experience while actively drowning. And… running out of air and being unable to breathe is “agony.” The only good news is that once… starved of oxygen long enough, you’ll pass out, and the rest of the drowning process will be… peaceful as a result.’

Lethal Injection

‘Lethal injection originally included three distinct components – a barbiturate and anesthetic to render the victim unconscious and numb their pain, a muscle relaxant that would paralyze them, and a drug to cause irreversible cardiac arrest. If everything goes perfectly, a lethal injection should render a condemned person dead in five minutes with a minimum of pain. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. After years of legal challenges, most states have abandoned the three-drug protocol in favor of using single drugs, most of which have never been studied or tested… even when lethal injection protocols are followed perfectly they can often result in “14 minutes of pain and horror” … it can sometimes be more like two hours, and… lethal injection causes agony and a sensation very similar to drowning, with all the panic and terror. Autopsies of executed prisoners have found their lungs filled with fluid and blood – an extreme pulmonary edema. The pain caused by this condition is described as “severe.” Worst of all, many of the drugs used in lethal injection are not anesthetics – they induce sleepiness, but don’t do anything to stop pain.’

Electrocution

‘… death by electrocution… [is] incredibly painful. The voltage coursing through the body often causes muscles to seize, which can result in broken bones and fractures. Tissues swell up painfully, and skin… often cracks open as the swelling gets worse. In addition, eyeballs can… [come] out of their sockets, and people often literally catch fire… many people who are electrocuted suffer cardiac injuries which result in severe chest pain.’

Sudden Decompression

‘… decompression sickness occurs because… low depths require divers to breathe compressed air that contains many more molecules of oxygen and nitrogen than on the surface. The extra oxygen gets used, but the extra nitrogen accumulates. If you rise to lower pressures too fast, the nitrogen expands and forms bubbles, which then cause agonizing pain, damage to tissues and muscles, and even death… commonly known as the bends… one survivor of the experience described how “each gulp of oxygen was torture”.’

Burning

‘… people who burn to death see their skin turn black and then split open to expose the tissue beneath to the flames. They may choke on smoke and soot, and their muscles seize up painfully. It’s often even painful to breathe because of the superheated air around them… the pain is most intense when the flames first burn the skin, and then subsides when the nerves have… been burned away. But then the flames spread to the next area of skin to begin the process over again.’

Radiation Sickness

‘Radiation is terrifying because it’s often deadly but invisible. You can be standing in a room absolutely smothered in deadly radiation and not know until your body starts to break down in agony… acute radiation syndrome (ARS) involving gamma radiation means high-energy photons penetrate your body and damage both tissue and genetic material. This can result in a cascade of health problems – bone marrow damage and resulting loss of immunity response, damage to the intestines leading to dehydration and infection, and finally the collapse of your circulatory system.’

Pancreatic Cancer

‘… pancreatic cancer is not just one of the deadliest cancers, it’s also often the most painful. This is because it aggressively invades or [pushes] up against the nerves near the pancreas. This leads to severe abdominal and back pain, and can lead to intestinal blockages that increase the suffering… pancreatic cancer is… very difficult to diagnose, and about 80% of tumors aren’t detected until the disease is advanced enough to start causing agonizing pain… pancreatic cancer can also cause soft-tissue pain (also called visceral pain… ). This is a deep-seated aching or cramping that can be difficult to pinpoint, especially because it can cause pain in a distant part of the body, known as referred pain.’

Heart Attack

‘While some heart attacks are relatively painless – and thus difficult for people to recognize – a heart attack can be an incredibly painful way to die. Worse, even the warning signs of a heart attack can be… painful to experience.’

Freezing

‘The popular conception of freezing to death tends to be a dark sort of peace – kind of like falling asleep. But… that drowsy sense of drifting away is the second stage of hypothermia that usually occurs right before losing consciousness… freezing to death is a process, starting with uncontrollable shivering as your body attempts to generate heat, then moving to muscle stiffness and disorientation as your heat-starved body begins to malfunction… when your core body temperature drops, your body will pull circulating blood from your extremities to keep your vital organs warmer, resulting in excruciating aching in your hands and feet. Frostbite can develop, inflicting… more suffering on your body as its initial stages are often accompanied by a burning sensation… though if it worsens, you’ll soon lose all feeling in the affected areas. After that… you’ll feel less and less pain as your body numbs and your brain starts to misfire, plunging you into a confusion that can lead to what scientists call paradoxic undressing, which… is when people suffering severe hypothermia actually take off their clothes. They also often attempt to burrow into the freezing ground while naked.’

Exposure to Chlorine Trifluoride

‘… ClF3 was isolated back in the 1930s when scientists were looking for something that was just as reactive as fluoride but easier to store. And ClF3… is… so reactive it will pretty much set anything it touches on fire… an instance when a metal cylinder of ClF3 broke open, spilling… onto a facility’s floor… “chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a three-foot hole in the gravel underneath… [filling] the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight.” The entire area had to be evacuated. It’s so dangerous the compound has been banned around the world for decades.’

Boomslang

‘… a boomslang is… a species of snake, a member of the Colubridae or rear-fanged snake family [found in Africa, particularly southern Africa]. It also sports one of the most fatal venoms a human can encounter… boomslang venom causes hemorrhages, and even a tiny amount of it can kill you… the venom causes your body to create a lot of tiny blood clots… resulting in both internal bleeding and bleeding from the orifices [as well as ‘urinating and vomiting blood’], along with severe fever, nausea, and uncontrollable shaking.’

Boomslang snake – a bright green coloured Boomslang dwells in trees.

Crucifixion – refer Appendix VIII: When the Creator came to dwell with His Creation.

Moheb Costandi describes the process of decomposition. As it is rather grim reading, only certain notable points have been included. For those readers wishing to read the whole article, it can be located at:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150508-what-happens-after-we-die

‘Far from being ‘dead’, a rotting corpse is teeming with life. A growing number of scientists view a rotting corpse as the cornerstone of a vast and complex ecosystem, which emerges soon after death and flourishes and evolves as decomposition proceeds. Decomposition begins several minutes after death with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down. This usually begins in the liver, which is rich in enzymes, and in the brain, which has high water content. Eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way. Damaged blood cells begin to spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins, discolouring the skin. 

During these early stages, the cadaveric ecosystem consists mostly of the bacteria that live in and on the living human body. Our bodies host huge numbers of bacteria; every one of the body’s surfaces and corners provides a habitat for a specialised microbial community. By far the largest of these communities resides in the gut, which is home to trillions of bacteria of hundreds or perhaps thousands of different species. 

The gut microbiome is one of the hottest research topics in biology; it’s been linked to roles in human health and a plethora of conditions and diseases, from autism and depression to irritable bowel syndrome and obesity. But we still know little about these microbial passengers while we are alive. We know even less about what happens to them when we die. 

Most internal organs are devoid of microbes when we are alive. Soon after death, however, the immune system stops working, leaving them to spread throughout the body freely. This usually begins in the gut, at the junction between the small and large intestines. 

Left unchecked, our gut bacteria begin to digest the intestines – and then the surrounding tissues – from the inside out, using the chemical cocktail that leaks out of damaged cells as a food source. Then they invade the capillaries of the digestive system and lymph nodes, spreading first to the liver and spleen, then into the heart and brain [and lastly, the reproductive organs].’

The article states that bacteria reaches the liver about 20 hours after death and that it takes them at least 58 hours to spread to all the other organs. After a person dies, their bacteria spreads through the body in a systematic manner and so the timing with which they infiltrate first one internal organ and then another may provide a new way of estimating the amount of time which has elapsed since a death. 

‘Once self-digestion is under way and bacteria have started to escape from the gastrointestinal tract, putrefaction begins. This is molecular death – the breakdown of soft tissues even further, into gases, liquids and salts. It is already under way at the earlier stages of decomposition but really gets going when anaerobic bacteria get in on the act. 

Putrefaction is associated with a marked shift from aerobic bacterial species, which require oxygen to grow, to anaerobic ones, which do not. These then feed on the body’s tissues, fermenting the sugars in them to produce gaseous by-products such as methane, hydrogen sulphide and ammonia, which accumulate within the body, inflating (or ‘bloating’) the abdomen and sometimes other body parts. This causes further discolouration of the body. As damaged blood cells continue to leak from disintegrating vessels, anaerobic bacteria convert haemoglobin molecules, which once carried oxygen around the body, into sulfhaemoglobin. The presence of this molecule in settled blood gives skin the marbled, greenish-black appearance characteristic of a body undergoing active decomposition. Cadavers give off a foul, sickly-sweet odour, made up of a complex cocktail of volatile compounds which changes as decomposition progresses. 

According to one estimate, an average human body consists of 50-75% water, and every kilogram of dry body mass eventually releases 32g of nitrogen, 10g of phosphorous, 4g of potassium and 1g of magnesium into the soil’ – Article: Wonder of Water. ‘Initially, it kills off some of the underlying and surrounding vegetation, possibly because of nitrogen toxicity… Ultimately, though, decomposition is beneficial for the surrounding ecosystem. Further research into how decomposing bodies alter the ecology of their surroundings may provide a new way of finding murder victims whose bodies have been buried in shallow graves. 

Grave soil analysis may also provide another possible way of estimating time of death. A 2008 study of the biochemical changes that take place in a cadaver decomposition island showed that the soil concentration of lipid-phosphorous leaking from a cadaver peaks at around 40 days after death, whereas those of nitrogen and extractable phosphorous peak at 72 and 100 days, respectively. With a more detailed understanding of these processes, analyses of grave soil biochemistry could one day help forensic researchers to estimate how long ago a body was placed in a hidden grave.’

This underlines the sheer physicalness of our home we call a body. Rather than owning them, we are more akin to tenants who rent or lease them. No sooner does one die and their body is quickly dismantled from within and without. Reduced down to its chemical components and returning to the soil from which it was ultimately derived. It again gives pause for thought. Is this really what an individual human life amounts to? Flesh and bone which disintegrates and then disappears back into the earth from whence it came? Is there more to our existence than accepting this as our only fate? 

The above is a vivid description of what happens to our body at death and during the hours and days which follow. But what about the metaphysical aspect of a person’s passing away? What many would call a person’s soul. Is there a way to document or measure a human soul? 

Dr Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Massachusetts decided to try and find out in 1907. His paper: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance, was published in American Medicine, where he claimed to have determined the weight for a human soul. Using six dying patients in nursing homes, MacDougall obtained just one set of satisfactory results; where accounting for the loss of bodily fluids attributed to evaporation of moisture from the skin and urine as well as feces, he discovered that one of the patients lost 21.3 grams in weight at the time of their death – approximately 3/4 of an ounce. 

MacDougall had already discounted air loss from the lungs, by lying on the scale himself and learning that breathing had no effect on weight. He then replicated the experiment with fifteen dying dogs, though measured no weight loss at the moment they expired. MacDougall’s conclusion was that dogs didn’t have souls. 

MacDougall’s findings have come under criticism and have not been deemed ‘scientific enough.’ With accusations such as using too small a sample size and a bed balanced on a scale as an inappropriate apparatus for measuring something like the soul. Donald Everhart comments: “MacDougall could have considered the additional epistemological weight [meaning: method, validity and scope between justified belief and opinion] that his study might have had if he found more than one case.” 

Critical to MacDougall’s findings and conclusions is the fact that no one has replicated his experiments to see if they hold up to scrutiny. ‘A hallmark process in the scientific method.’ Though to be fair, MacDougall did admit this, saying he was “aware that a large number of experiments would require to be made before the matter can be proved beyond any possibility of error.” Even so, he believed that he had enough evidence to publicise his hypothesis. Perhaps a glaring flaw in his argument, is MacDougall’s insistence in explaining the soul as a physical entity rather than a metaphysical one. 

Everhart postulates that it was French philosopher Auguste Comte, who indoctrinated the concept of positivism and ‘believed that all phenomena could be better explained through the physical sciences, rather than through metaphysical theology.’ Everhart says: “It would be quite the success for positivism if the soul, subject of millennia of theological argument, could be demonstrably studied using basic physical methods… Maybe that’s what MacDougall was after – an orderly, neat, scientific observation of the complex and ineffable.” 

Duncan MacDougall’s experiment is not proof of a soul, or that it was a soul leaving the physical body of his patient. If a soul exists, could it be subject to a quantitative measure anyway? Regardless, it does not negate that a person has a soul either, or that it leaves a person when their physical body dies. Can science answer the question about the existence of a human soul? Or does one need to turn to religion or esoteric writings to learn the answer? How about animals; do they have a soul? These are basic questions, yet deeply pertinent ones. 

There are cases of people who nearly die but don’t and in the process, experience an NDE or near death experience. One such person was fifty-five year old Kevin Hill. Tim Newcomb discusses his experience – emphasis mine: 

‘There was a peace about Kevin Hill as he watched himself die. And it’s a memory he now has after doctors resuscitated him and turned his death into a near-death experience (NDE). “I knew I was bleeding. I knew it was serious… The staff kept coming in and out to stop the bleeding. I knew I had died. I was separate from my body.” That’s how the memory ends, with the current reality of him being quite alive. “I just went to sleep, and I woke up alive and the bleeding had stopped… I knew it wasn’t my time to die.” Hill… from Derbyshire in England, has a disease that eats away at his skin. The calciphylaxis grew so intense that in 2022, he started bleeding and his heart stopped from the blood loss before doctors revived him. 

“I wasn’t looking down at my body,” Hill says about the event, “but I was separate from my body. It was like I was in the spirit realm. I was conscious of what was going on, but I had so much peace.” 

Researchers… believe NDEs most likely happen due to a change in blood flow to the brain during sudden life-threatening events, like a heart attack, blunt trauma, or even shock. As your brain starts losing blood and oxygen, the electrical activity within the brain begins to power down. “Like a town that loses power one neighborhood at a time, local regions of the brain go offline one after another.” 

During a NDE, your mind is left to keep working, but without its normal operational parameters. Whether simply an oxygen shortage, some sort of anesthesia, or a neurochemical response to trauma… the NDE leaves those who experience it with a real, sometimes detailed memory. “Everyone said I should be dead,” Hill says. Instead, it was a NDE.’

People have different near death experiences, where some individuals witness a tunnel of bright light and a welcoming figure at the other end; whether an angel or a dead family member, beckoning them to come forward. Not everyone has a positive experience. Newcomb records:  

‘In 2016, a Michigan-based priest named Gerald Johnson suffered a heart attack. He says he had a near-death experience (NDE) that sent him somewhere he never thought he’d visit: hell… [a] traumatic NDE – far from the kind of warm, bright-light epiphany you might expect to hear from someone who temporarily ventures into the great beyond. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy… I don’t care what he did to me. No one deserves that.” 

Johnson says that immediately after his heart attack in February 2016, his spirit left his physical body and went down to hell, entering through “the very center of the Earth.” Though he says “the things I saw there are indescribable,” he did his best. Johnson claims he saw a man walking on all fours like a dog and getting burned from head to toe: “His eyes were bulging and worse than that: He was wearing chains on his neck. He was like a hellhound. There was a demon holding the chains.” 

Johnson also heard music in hell, including Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” – traditionally upbeat tunes. Only this time, demons were singing the songs to “torture” people. Johnson says his hellacious NDE made him realize he needed to forgive people who had wronged him, instead of hoping for their punishment. Maybe Johnson’s story sounds far-fetched… But scientists say that while many of the most publicized NDEs have a positive spin, negative NDEs certainly occur, too. The experts just aren’t entirely sure how – or why.’

There are points in this narrative, which we will address as we progress. Including Johnson’s description of Hell and its location. While this terrifying mental journey and ordeal would have been real for poor Gerald Johnson, it was still only a terrible and vivid hallucination inspired and moulded by a collection of his own experiences, thoughts, beliefs and fears. It could also be argued that people who see a tunnel of light are merely hallucinating; though the fact that a considerable number of people with near death experiences all have this same dream or vision would question whether it is merely the mind playing a trick on them. 

More substantial data is obtained from those people who feel themselves leaving their body. This phenomena like Johnson who had the feeling or sensing that his spirit was somehow separating from his own body, or like Kevin Hill feeling as if he was in a different realm, is convincingly real. Numerous survivors of near death episodes, have recounted leaving their body and looking down on themselves lying in bed as they are being operated on or while they are terminally ill. These experiences reveal a bifurcation between the vessel or shell that is our physical body remaining behind at death and another component which is ethereal in nature, whether it be the soul or spirit, which does not remain. If so, what is it and where does it go? 

It is important to understand that the brain is a physical organ that dies and decomposes like the remainder of the body. Whereas the thinking and reasoning function of the brain, which we call the mind and its memories is different. Thus the human mind is associated with whatever is part of us that may work with the physical brain, but is not the same thing. We will investigate this mysterious phenomena in more detail; but first, what does the mind see when a person dies and what activity occurs in the brain at the time of death? 

Daisy Hernandez discusses the subject in an article for Popular Mechanics, What Do You See When You Die? Consciousness-Like Activity in Dying Brains Offers Some hints, 2023. Brain waves were captured in a dying 87 year old man while he was hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine as he passed away after a cardiac arrest. This patient was not the first to be recorded as previous patients who have been pulled off of life support have provided simplified EEG results from limited frontal cortex signals. 

Hernandez quotes Dr Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone. Parnia is widely respected in the field of resuscitation and a driving force in spreading the word about procedures which could help revive patients hours after cardiac arrest. Parnia states:

“For decades now, people have reported episodes of paradoxical lucidity and heightened consciousness in relation to death. This is intriguing as this seems to be occurring in brain areas that are shutting down in relation to death… Although, in the past, it had been assumed that these may simply be anecdotes, population surveys have indicated that this phenomenon occurs in around 10 percent of the population… [about 800 million people].” 

About nine hundred seconds of brain activity was captured, with the focus on analysing the first thirty seconds before and after the patient’s heart stopped beating. ‘Immediately following cardiac arrest… [there were] changes in the brain waves [involving]… higher-order cognitive functions, including information processing, concentrating, memory retrieval, conscious perception, and the different stages of dreaming, possibly indicating the brain was actively engaging in memory recall. Published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, February 2022. 

Parnia adds: “What is most intriguing is that this seems to be occurring when the brain is shutting down at the end of life. This study supports these descriptions and certainly raises the possibility that a marker of lucidity at the end of life may have been discovered.” 

‘In their paper, the team who worked with this patient theorized that because “cross-coupling” between the alpha and gamma waves indicates memory recall in healthy patients, this particular patient could have been experiencing a “recall of life,” or what is often referred to as someone’s life proverbially flashing before their very eyes. Alpha brain waves are produced when we’re alert, but calm, and help us with activities like learning and coordination. Gamma waves are the fastest brain waves, and are associated with high-level alertness, cognition, memory, and focus. 

A different study revealed a spike in gamma wave activity after death, located on a “hot zone” in the brain ‘connected to dreaming and altered states of consciousness between the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.’ Thus a dying brain can still be active and “covert consciousness” can let us see our lives literally flash before our eyes, as reported by survivors of near death experiences. 

‘According to Parnia, while the brain is in the process of shutting down and dying, “there is disinhibition of parts of the brain (i.e. emergence of functions) that are ordinarily depressed by our usual brain activity,” such as those we use to… [perform] our day-to-day tasks. Because of this, we’re granted access to what Parnia refers to as “aspects of reality at death that we would ordinarily not have access to,” including the depths of our consciousness.’ 

Parnia remains convinced that human consciousness can survive brain death; the point when there is zero blood or electrical activity in the brain. He thinks it is possible that memories of white lights and tunnels takes place immediately before or after brain death, or that it is some sort of a low level brain activity. Even so, Parnia stops short of actually endorsing any paranormal explanation. He suggests rather that we just don’t understand how consciousness works yet. 

The ability to learn more on this subject is currently stalled, for scientists would need to observe the neural activity of healthy subjects. Yet only ‘circumstances involving pathological conditions in acute care hospital settings’ are currently available. Broadening research for instance, to include EEG monitored ICU patients who survive cardiac arrest yet have experienced a spike in brain activity, is key to understanding more fully what we see when we die.

Several readers of the article left interesting comments and observations. 

1 As the soul leaves the body, could this be the uploading of memories and brain content? 

2 The numerous reports of enhanced lucidity and expanded consciousness reported consistently by persons surviving near death experiences are very reminiscent of the experiences elicited by psychedelic drugs… Certain neurons in the brain remain active for minutes to hours after clinical death. 

3 When we return to the sea of souls, we regain our omnipotence on the tunnel back to “Heaven”. Everyone we have ever known before and after are there as one but separate in consciousness. The weight of your life is the treasure you bring back to the sea of souls. Time isn’t linear there. 

4 When the body dies it is incapable of retaining the quantum field entanglement that ties the spirit to the body because entanglement requires electricity that an electrochemical neural system supplies. This is why your heart, stomach and I suspect other parts of your body contain brain cells. 

Remarkably, all four comments contain insightful elements of truth regarding death, dying and the afterlife; which hopefully will be clearer as we proceed. 

One scientist has controversially offered that death is an illusion generated by our consciousness. Ancient Code: ‘Wake Forest University School of Medicine scientist Robert Lanza… was a member of the team of scientists that cloned the world’s first early stage human embryos. 

In September of 2011, Lanza’s company received approval from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to start the first human embryonic stem cell trial in Europe. Dr. Lanza is the co-author of the book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. 

Ancient Code continue – emphasis mine: 

‘The professor took public notoriety after the publication of his book, which, based on notions of quantum physics, explains his particular hypothesis that holds that biology and life are the origin of reality and the Universe, not the other way around.

… the end of life would be only a notion instilled in our minds, since if there is neither time nor space, there can be no death. Lanza writes on his website how Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us… know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” According to new evidence, Einstein was right – death is an illusion. Furthermore, the researcher, author, and entrepreneur argues that immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time, but resides outside of time altogether. 

Essentially, the idea of dying is something we have always been taught to accept, but in reality, it exists only in our minds. Thus, if someone believes in death throughout their lives, they will create their reality based on this belief, and, on the contrary, if someone believes that he is made of immortal essence and that we are only in this life of passage, we will live in a way totally different than what we are used to, creating our reality based on that belief, otherwise totally incompatible with the previous one. 

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that observes it. The reality of time has been questioned by a strange alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as an idea in the mind, which in turn are neuroelectric events that occur strictly in the present moment.’

“Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?” – Tennessee Williams

Ancient Code: ‘Then death and the idea of immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries. Thus, it can be concluded that death cannot be a terminal or final event, as we usually consider it.’

Lanza and by extension Einstein are correct in that in timeless and spaceless dimensions beyond the three in the physical sphere we are able to perceive, death is not defined as we understand it. From a physical perspective, death is of dramatic finality, as we have read. Lanza says, “We believe in death because we’ve been taught we die. Also, of course, because we associate ourselves with our body and we know bodies die.” Lanza states: “Amazingly, if you add life and consciousness to the equation, you can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. For instance, it becomes clear why space and time – and even the properties of matter itself – depend on the observer. It also becomes clear why the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned for the existence of life.” 

This is a profound statement, as Lanza is saying the Universe is secondary to life and serves the living. In other words, life came first… prior to the physical Universe. This is the truth. Remember the words life and consciousness, as these concepts are significant regarding understanding the subject of what happens at death. The limitation of the physical senses and the impact they have on our comprehension of what is beyond the physical realm was aptly described by philosopher and critical thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“The influences of the senses, has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.” 

Lanza poses the following question, which we will seek to answer:

“Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’ – is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?”

The short answer is that it does, though Lanza is incorrect in part regarding energy. While it is self sustaining and does not end of itself; energy does have a source or beginning and conversely, we will learn that energy can be destroyed. 

Robert Lanza shares a vivid example: “This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine’s husband – Ed – started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.” In this summation, Lanza is strangely insightful. We will discover the paradox of being alive and dead is a truism. 

Science reservedly acknowledges there is something after death, though it is understandably loathe to admit a spiritual or supernatural solution. Aside from Duncan MacDougall searching for a soul, there have been a number of experiments conducted in seeking to affirm the existence of an afterlife, as there are also certain NDE anomalies which are difficult to ignore in giving credence to life after death. An article on Listverse in 2009, lists various experiments and phenomena. 

As they invariably involve contacting the dead, it is important to clarify that any voices, presences, apparitions or movement of objects are not departed loved ones but rather have a more sinister origin – refer articles: Nephilim & Elioud Giants I & II; Principalities & Potentates: What they want… Who they are; and The Top Ten Unexplained Mysteries of all Time.

Listverse – emphasis & bold mine:

‘EVP (electronic voice phenomena) is a mysterious event in which human-sounding voices from an unknown source are heard on recording tape, in radio station noise and other electronic media. Most often, EVPs have been captured on audiotape. The mysterious voices are not heard at the time of recording; it is only when the tape is played back that the voices are heard. Some skeptics say interpreting random sounds into voices in their own language would sound like random noise to a foreign speaker.

Interesting Fact: The 2005 film White Noise starring Michael Keaton focuses exclusively on the phenomenon of EVP as the main character attempts to contact his recently deceased wife. 

The God Helmet refers to a controversial experiment in neurotheology (study of correlations of neural phenomena) by Michael Persinger. When a modified snowmobile helmet is placed on the subjects head, magnetic fields start stimulating the brain. Persinger claims that near death experiences such as bright lights, the presence of God and seeing dead relatives… are reproduced. Richard Dawkins, who is known for his atheistic views and criticism of religion volunteered to test Persinger’s device. Afterward, he admitted on BBC that he was very disappointed that he did not experience communion with the universe or some other spiritual sensation. It should also be noted the helmet was also tested by a person that previously experienced a near death experience and the results failed to duplicate the same sensation.

Interesting Fact: Persinger claims that at least 80 per cent of his participants experience a presence beside them in the room, which they variously say feels like God or someone they knew who had died. 

The Phillip Experiment was conducted in the early 1970’s by The Toronto Society of Psychical Research. The purpose of the experiment was to see if a fictitious historical character could manifest itself through the group’s efforts of concentration. They named the ghost Phillip and gave the ghost a personality and a complete background, even drawing a portrait to make him seem more real. The 8 members in the group also memorized the fictional biography and studied the period in which Phillip was supposed to have lived. The séances proved nothing for many months until 1973 when Phillip began to communicate. He first came through as a solid rap on the table. In the months that followed, the group discovered that when they asked questions and using 1 knock as “yes” and 2 as “no”, they could actually have an intelligent conversation with their ghost.

Interesting Fact: The experiment came to a strange end when one member of the group broke ranks and stated aloud in a reply to Phillip that “we only made you up, you know.” All communications stopped. Once denied that Phillip was real, he ceased to exist. 

Ghost Hunters is a reality television series that debuted in 2004. A team of investigators travel to locations that are reported to be haunted. To locate ghosts the team has experimented with Geiger counters, EMF (electromagnetic field) scanners, infrared and night vision cameras, handheld digital video cameras, digital audio recorders, and laptop computers. The ghost hunters claim to have several good recordings of strange mists, odd lights, moving objects, and shadowy figures that manifest before the camera and disappear quickly.

Interesting Fact: Critics and skeptics of the program point to a lack of scientific methodology and critical examination in their investigations as well as questionable production aspects including editing.’ 

Harry Houdini’s Secret Code Experiment: ‘Houdini’s training in magic allowed him to expose many [but not all] mediums as frauds that had successfully fooled many scientists and academics. Fearing that spiritualists would exploit his legacy by pretending to contact him after his death, Houdini left his wife a secret code. Ten words were chosen at random from a letter written by Conan Doyle that he would use to contact her from the afterlife. After Houdini’s death on October 31, 1926 a friend of Doyle, Rev. Arthur Ford claimed to have contacted both Houdini and his deceased mother at a séance through his spirit guide. Ford stated that the message received was in the pre-arranged code worked out by Houdini and his wife before Houdini’s death. However most believe Ford conspired with Doyle and also talked Houdini’s wife (who was ill and self-medicating with alcohol) into conspiring to assist him in creating the impression he had contacted Houdini’s spirit.

Interesting Fact: Houdini’s wife Bess held yearly séances on Halloween for ten years after Houdini’s death, but Houdini never appeared.’

The damning piece of information in this account, is that Houdini’s spirit did not appear to his wife Bess for ten years even though she had the secret code. 

‘Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona wrote a book in 2002 called “The Afterlife Experiments”. In the experiments he used mediums and sitters (someone who had had very close relationships with people now dead) to investigate whether or not there is life after death. The mediums consistently came up with specific facts and names about the sitters departed friends and relatives that the skeptics have been unable to explain away as fraud, cold reading, or lucky guesses. For the first sitter the results showed that the mediums had ranged from being 77 percent to 95 percent accurate. The average hit rate was 83 percent. The hit rate for the second sitter was similar to that of the first sitter. To rule out lucky guesses he set up a control group of sixty-eight students from the University of Arizona. The hit rate of the control group was just 36 percent.

Interesting Fact: When the 83 percent hit rate of the mediums was compared with the 36 percent of the control group, Schwartz claims the statistical probability of the control group difference occurring by chance is one in ten million. 

Sir William Crookes was an English chemist and physicist and attended the Royal College of Chemistry in London. One of Crooks accomplishments was the “Crookes Tube” which would lead to the discovery of cathode rays, x-rays and the electron. Crookes had developed an interest in spiritualism possibly by the untimely death of his younger brother in 1867 at age 21. In 1870 Crookes decided that science had a duty to experiment with the phenomena associated with Spiritualism. The conditions he imposed on mediums were as follows: “It must be at my own house, and my own selection of friends and spectators, under my own conditions, and I may do whatever I like as regards apparatus”. Among the phenomena he said he witnessed were movement of bodies at a distance, changes in the weights of bodies, levitation, appearance of luminous objects, appearance of phantom figures and the appearance of writing without human circumstances which would point to the agency of an outside intelligence. His report on this research in 1874, concluded that these phenomena could not be explained and that further research would be useful.

Interesting Fact: Most scientists were convinced that Spiritualism was fraudulent, and Crookes’ final report so outraged the scientific establishment that there was talk of depriving him of his Fellowship of the Royal Society. 

Australian Psychologist Peter Ramster made a documentary in 1983 called “The Reincarnation Experiments”. During the experiments he found very convincing evidence of past lives. One of the individuals featured in the film remembered a life during the French Revolution. When under trance she spoke in French without any trace of an accent, understood and answered questions put to her in French and knew the names of streets which had changed and were only discoverable on old maps.

Interesting Fact: General George S. Patton was a staunch believer in reincarnation and often claimed to have seen vivid, lifelike visions of his ancestors and also believed he was a reincarnation of Carthaginian General Hannibal.’

The Scole Experiment: ‘In 1993 four psychic researchers and observers embarked on a series of experiments in the Norfolk village of Scole. For five years, more than 500 experiments were carried out. During some of the experiments objects materialized, lights danced, and solid beings appeared. Luminous spheres also flew around the room in apparently intelligent manner. Messages were also transmitted onto audio-tape. The experiments were repeated in the United States, Ireland and Spain. In the United States scientists from NASA, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the University of Stanford also took part.

Interesting Fact: James Webster, a professional magician with 40 years of experience investigating paranormal phenomena came to the following conclusion: “I was unable to discover any sign of fraud, and it seems to me that fraud couldn’t have been possible, both because of the type of phenomena observed and by the conditions in which they came about.”

All these experiments have validity, particularly the last three. What they show is that there is something or someone beyond ourselves. But what do they say about a person after they die? Very little. What is vital to appreciate is the fact that people are confused on two important key issues.

The first, is that while bonafide mediums do channel spirits; they are demons or dark angels and not, dead people. The second, is that people when they die do not live again in multiple lives as taught by reincarnation; yet incredibly, the teaching of a rapture or a resurrection – in that a person will live again – is true. 

Before we investigate these subjects further, curious life after death phenomena are listed by Listverse: 

Verified Out-Of-Body Experiences: ‘In 1991, singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds developed a deadly aneurysm. Faced with the choice of dangerous surgery or certain death, Reynolds opted for the risky procedure. Placed in an artificial coma, her body was then super-chilled to 15.5 degrees Celsius (60 F), while literally all the blood was drained from her brain. At the same time, her eyes were taped shut and her ears plugged with molded speakers that drowned all noise and allowed the monitoring of brain stem activity. She was, in the words of her neurosurgeon, Robert Spetzler, “as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive.” It was at this impossible point that Reynolds had her experience.

Suddenly floating above her body, she looked down to see 20 people at work. A woman by her left groin was saying “her arteries are too small.” A surgeon was holding a specialized brain saw behind her head. “Hotel California” by The Eagles was playing. She watched for a while then left for a tunnel of light, only returning to her body much later. Months after the operation, she told Spetzler about her experience – and was shocked to hear him verify every detail.’ While some do not believe her story and it is possible Reynolds somehow could hear conversations ‘… it would have been biologically impossible for her brain to form or retain memories at that time. Further, there’s the fact that she managed to perfectly describe a specialized piece of medical equipment she’d never seen before.

Meetings with the dead: ‘One of the classic components of a near-death experience is meeting dead relatives on the other side. If most of us were to give this much thought, we’d probably conclude that it was due to extremely vivid hallucinations. But Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia thinks there’s more to this than meets the eye. In a paper published in 2013, he noted that the number of patients who record meeting dead people far outweighs those who report meeting live people.

If these were random hallucinations, you’d expect as many people to be welcomed into the afterlife by, say, Barack Obama as their dead grandma. But even more interesting are the few verified cases where a subject has met a dead relative on the other side, despite having no way of knowing that this person had died. And that’s before we even get into the cases of people meeting their never-before-seen biological parents and later describing them accurately.’ 

Extreme Reality: ‘Dr. Steven Laureys is a man who absolutely does not believe in life after death. A director at the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research, he is firm that all NDEs can be explained away through physical phenomena. Nonetheless, his research into such experiences has thrown up some facts which are difficult to explain… Chief among these is the “hyper-reality” of NDEs. When Laureys and his team set out to study the memory of these events, they expected to find they worked in the same way as dreams or hallucinations: becoming more faded as time went by. Instead, they found the exact opposite. 

Rather than become dull with age, they found that the memory of an NDE stayed vibrant and fresh no matter how much time had passed – to the extent that it completely eclipsed the memory of real events. This isn’t supposed to happen. Generally, the only memories that are meant to stay vibrant are the big ones – like your wedding day or the birth of your kids or watching the Twin Towers come down. These patients were unanimously reporting that their NDE was more vivid than all of that combined, with the added bonus that it never faded. They retained perfect recall of that moment, convinced they’d experienced a fragment of heaven. Dr. Laureys doesn’t believe this is anything supernatural. However, he does believe all of us probably go through this when we die: an experience of “heaven” more intense than anything we’ve felt in all our waking lives.’ 

Laureys has inadvertently backed himself into a corner, like an amateur chess player. The doctor is convinced NDEs have a physical explanation, yet cannot account what the physical cause might be. If it is not supernatural or preternatural, both of which are ‘outside of nature’ and the ‘natural order’, then the answer must lay between the two as a paranormal occurrence which is defined as ‘without scientific explanation.’ 

Similarities: ‘One of the most peculiar aspects of NDEs is how similar they all are. If such visions can be accounted for by the random firing of brain cells, then surely they should all be wildly different. The trouble is, every NDE report is anecdotal. As such, there’s no telling whether NDEs are the same because that’s what happens when we die, or if they’re the same because people’s memories change and are influenced over time. At least that was the case until a team of Dutch researchers decided to find out for sure. In a study published in a highly respectable journal, The Lancet, the team looked at 344 patients who suffered cardiac arrest.

They then got them to talk about their experiences within one week of resuscitation. Of those questioned, 18 percent could remember at least bits of what happened and 8-12 percent recalled perfect examples of a classic NDE. That’s roughly between 28 and 41 unconnected people from 10 different hospitals recalling near-identical experiences over a comparatively short period of time. At the very least, this suggests that such memories aren’t false. While the team refrained from supernatural explanations, they did hypothesize it meant consciousness doesn’t arise from cell activity alone – potentially meaning our minds don’t always need a body to function.’

And there we have it… the amazing admission that the body and mind are separate entities, even though they work together when a person is alive. The human body and its brain are physical and each grows old and dies. The mind is not to be compared with the brain which will decompose and rot away. This aspect of the human mind is certainly considerably different in scope and not merely a physical function of the brain.

Personality Changes: ‘Remember how we said people who experienced NDEs usually retained perfect recall of the event? Turns out those memories have consequences – and they’re all positive. One of the doctors in [a] Dutch study… Pim van Lommel, began looking into the effect of such memories in 2001. He found that they caused a “permanent change” in the subject. People lost their fear of death, became happier, more positive, and more outgoing. 

Nearly all of them reported their NDE as a hugely positive thing that had even more impact on their lives as time passed. Interestingly, these changes weren’t just restricted to people who were predisposed to positivity or religious belief. No matter what their personality was before, those who’d experienced NDEs tended to share a very similar psychological profile afterwards. As Dr. Mario Beauregard noted in an article for Salon, “importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination.” According to Dr. Lommel, the most likely explanation is that the nature of consciousness means it can be experienced separately from the body, meaning NDEs are, in effect, real.’

If so, how and why is the human mind separate from the brain? We will hope to answer this conundrum. 

Firsthand Experience: ‘In 2008, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a form of meningitis that resulted in E. coli bacteria flooding his brain. He was quickly hospitalized and put in a coma for the best part of a week. Exactly what happened to him during the course of that week has become the subject of great debate. According to Dr. Eben himself, his brain essentially became a vegetable. His neocortex was offline and he was incapable of any higher thought or brain activity. He was basically due to die any second, at which point his “soul” went on a seven-day journey… What he claims to have seen sounds at times dangerously like nonsense, but less easily dismissible is his assertion that his brain was being monitored in minute detail every moment of that weird week. As far as he is concerned, it is a matter of verifiable fact that his brain was offline during his vision, to the point that it should have been incapable of producing even a dim and limited version of consciousness.’

Visions of the Blind: ‘Extraordinary claims rarely come more extraordinary than those of Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper in their book Mindsight. In brief, years of research have convinced the two professors that people who were born blind often regain their sight during an NDE. According to Salon, the pair interviewed 31 blind people for their study, all of whom claim to have had either an NDE or an OBE (out-of-body experience). Of them, 14 had been blind from birth. Yet they all reported a visual component to their experiences, whether in the form of a tunnel of light, seeing dead relatives, or even looking down on their own bodies from above. In other words, they appeared to prove the impossible… their subjects genuinely believed they’d had these impossible experiences – which raises the unsettling question of how someone blind from birth could be capable of describing anything visual.’ 

‘Doctor Ian Stevenson may have one of the strangest claims to fame: He’s possibly the first person in history to have provided proof of reincarnation. Over the course of four decades, Stevenson meticulously researched and documented cases of children apparently being able to recall their previous lives… he recorded over 3,000 cases of children under the age of 5 who had very specific knowledge of the lives, loves, and deaths of people they couldn’t possibly have known about. 

Stevenson documented children who had phobias linked to previous deaths, children with birth defects that mirrored their manner of dying, and even three children who flew into a screaming rage when they recognized their “murderers.” In nearly every case, he could link the child’s claims to an unconnected real person; and each time he investigated a case, he left behind research so thorough it would put most mainstream academics to shame… Stevenson’s work isn’t totally watertight… several of his studies may have been contaminated by using unreliable translators and his research as a whole relies on putting a whole lot of trust in a succession of random strangers. In other words, his work is probably thorough enough to convince the agnostic, yet nowhere near airtight enough to win over the skeptic.’

It is an inescapable conclusion that people are sharing similar NDEs, which are clearly not hallucinations and palpably occurring in a persons consciousness even after the ceasing of blood flow; the restriction of oxygen supply which has shut down the brain; and the body has clinically died. 

Returning to the matter of ghosts, communicating with the dead and reincarnation… as this writer has addressed this subject matter previously, we will aim to keep this survey brief. The true source for these three beliefs or practices are spirits themselves. In so doing, they have purposely made it confusing – John 8:44, I Corinthians 14:33. 

There are beings who as phantoms or ghosts, do not have corporal bodies. They are known by many names, though commonly as demons or unclean and lying spirits – 1 Kings 22:22. The Book of Enoch 15:1–12, explains that when the giants died in the antediluvian age, they lost their physical bodies to death; yet their spiritual component did not die and henceforth they were called evil spirits. 

These giants now demons, had been known as the Nephilim and as the offspring of angels and humans, were an abominable mix of spirit and flesh. While they were bigger, stronger, smarter and out lived mortal men, they still had a physical body. Their spirit was not the spirit of a man, but of their immortal fathers – Genesis 6:4, Job 32:8. Once their fleshly body died, their spirit lived on in an unnatural state. In this condition as a discorporate entity of energy, they often seek habitation in humans to quench their spiritual thirst – Luke 11:24-26. As they were born on the earth or in the physical realm, they are bound to the earth to torment humankind. 

It is these same spirits who often respond to ouija boards and who work with Mediums as familiars; impersonating souls who have died – 1 Samuel 28:7-15. Thus mediums are themselves deceived by the very spirits they channel – who claim to be dear, dead departed ones but who really are demonic entities – Articles: Nephilim & Elioud Giants I & II; and Principalities & Potentates: What they want… Who they are. Reincarnation is a deception of a similar nature, in that demonic spirits have lived past lives while inhabiting humans in different historical eras. The vivid and compelling memories children or adults have from a so called past life, are not truly theirs. 

Ironically, the conflicting state these spirits find themselves prompts important clues in understanding the plight humankind is ensnared in and which ultimately resolves the question surrounding what happens when we die – refer Chapter XXII Alpha & Omega. The 1990 film, Ghost a supernatural romance, perpetuates the timeless belief that people don’t really die when they, well… die. The major Christian denominations all participate in the error by teaching that when a person dies, their spirit continues on living, either going to heaven, hell or a halfway house called purgatory. None of which is in the Bible. 

The doctrine of Heaven and Hell is a fundamental tenet in Christianity. It provides great comfort to mourners that their beloved one has gone to a better place – to be with God in Heaven. Or have they, for all must admit to the thought that can insidiously enter into the mind… “what if they were not that good really and have actually gone to Hell”, to join someone else, not so pleasant. This prominent and powerful dogma was not taught by the Messiah and the apostles, for it is a false doctrine based on pagan, gnostic and demonic traditions – refer article: The Seven Churches – A Message for the Church of God in the Latter Days. 

There are three heavens described in the scriptures.

The first is Earth’s atmosphere: Genesis 7:11-12, Job 35:11, Jeremiah 16:4 – refer article: Climate Change & Global Warming – Looming Crisis or a New Equilibrium?

The second is outer space: Genesis 26:4, Deuteronomy 1:10, Psalm 8:3, Isaiah 13:10.

The third is God’s abode and where His throne is located; which is beyond the matter of the Universe. It is found in different dimensions outside of spacetime. What the Bible would call the spirit realm – Deuteronomy 26:15, 2 Corinthians 12:2, Revelation 4:1-2.

No human has ever gone to heaven – Acts 2:29, 34. John 3:13, ESV: “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Therefore, going up to a heaven when you die is a lie. When an animal dies, it is dead and gone forever. When a human dies, they are dead as in a long sleep – Romans 6:23. Their spirit, unlike an animal is retained by the Creator – Ecclesiastes 3:21. 

Ecclesiastes 9:5-6, ESV: “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun.” Similar to a CD (or cassette) player, which represents the body. Its function is to play the compact disc which has the required information on it. The Eternal keeps the CD, our spirit. It is at a later date when all are resurrected that the data on the CD (our spirit), will be reanimated in a new body – Job 14:14, 1 Corinthians 15:12-56. 

As there are three heavens, there are three hells described in the Bible.

The first is called Hades or Sheol, which refers to the earth beneath our feet and where one who has died is buried in the ground – Genesis 37:35, Job 14:13, Psalm 88:3, Matthew 11:23, Luke 10:15.

The second is Tartaroo: a specially created place designed to restrain specific angelic beings who rebelled out of time and their demonic offspring who should not have come into existence – Genesis 6:1-4, 1 Peter 3:19-20, 2 Peter 2:4-5, Jude 6.

The third is known as Gehenna: a consuming fire and where the false doctrine about hell originates – Malachi 4:1-3, John 15:6, 2 Peter 3:7-13, Revelation 19:20; 20:10-15; 21:8. 

When we die we do not go to heaven; nor do we go to hell either. But, there is a time in the future when all humankind will be given a choice and those who choose not to go with the one that leads to eternal life, will be consumed in a fireball of destruction on this planet – a literal hellfire.

There will be a new Earth designed to replace the passed away world, with the Eternal and his Son dwelling with the newly resurrected.

New Earth

But anyone not signing with the program, will be on the old one that will cease to exist with those unlucky enough to be on it – Matthew 13:49-50, Revelation 21:1–5; 22:1-5. 

The word rapture is not in the scriptures per se, though the concept certainly is – Matthew 24:40-41, 1 Thessalonians 4:17, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. A more accurate biblical name for the rapture is the first resurrection – John 11:25-26, 1 Corinthians 15:20, 1 Thessalonians 1:10; 4:16, James 1:18, Revelation 20:5. It applies to all true believers just prior to the Son of Man’s return at the beginning of the Great Tribulation and the time of Jacob’s trouble which precedes the Day of the Lord.

Later, there will be a second resurrection, where all who have lived and died yet not believed, will be given the opportunity to live again – Matthew 22:31-32, John 5:28-29, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, Revelation 20:11-15. Many who call themselves christian deny the hope of the resurrection (by believing in a heaven and hell) – 1 Corinthians 15:16-19. 

Humankind has an incredible potential set before them, should they choose its path. So while humans do die, death is simply a state of sleep, until the resurrection of the dead. As when one goes to sleep and wakes up a few hours later, so will the time between dying and being re-animated seem like just an instant, even if in reality millennia have passed by. 

In summary, death does mean dying, but it is not final. People will live again, just not immediately in a heaven or hell, but rather ultimately on a new Earth in the future. Therefore, anyone who sees a ghostly apparition or channels messages from the other side, is not speaking to a dead, human but a non-human, living entity. 

This brings us back to the composition of a human being as well as the question of a soul. The answer will forever be illusive to science, for they disregard what is beyond their senses and our three dimensions. The brain is an organ of the body like any other and is physical. The bridge between the brain and the mind is the nervous system and the mind itself is the manifestation of the God given spirit which animates all life – whether it is a star, a single cell organism or a plant. This connection between the mind and body is one of the top ten unexplained mysteries of all time. 

Man is more than just a body which acts as a vehicle for the soul, or the life that animates it. There is a spirit in man which the Creator has imparted to humanity. We read about the Holy Spirit which emanates from the Ancient of Days and is His divine essence and creative force – refer Chapter I Noah Antecessor Nulla; and article: Arius, Alexander & Athanasius. His spirit is the source of the spirit in man. As the soul is the life of a person; the spirit incorporates the personality and memories of an individual in their consciousness and mind.

The physical manifestation of the spirit which imparts life and acts as an ignition in keeping us all alive, is represented by the flow of electrical current though the circuitry of the body’s nervous system. It energises the brain’s capacity for controlling our metabolism; the lungs continuously breathing in oxygen; and our hearts perpetually pumping oxygenated blood through a network of arteries and veins. 

In 1 Thessalonians 5:23, English Standard Version we read: 

‘Now may… God… himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit [G4151 – pneuma: of the wind, breath, human spirit, ‘the vital principal by which the body is animated’ and ‘the power by which [a] human being feels, thinks, decides’] and soul  [G5590 – psuche: ‘the soul as an essence differs from the body’, a living being, that in which there is life] and body [G4983 – soma: a living body or dead corpse of a man or animal] be kept blameless…’

These are the three components of a human being and until science acknowledges this fundamental understanding regarding our composition and the laws governing our combined physical and spiritual attributes; their endeavours to fully understand the human mind will forever be limited. 

The above image while inaccurate from a strict sense, is still beneficial in delineating the important difference between a. the body (black outline and red); b. a soul – life force (blue); c. the spirit in man – consciousness (grey); and d. the Holy Spirit (grey/invisible).

‘But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand’ – Job 32:8, ESV. The spirit in man empowers the human mind beyond animal life; with the capacity to think, to reason, to plan, to question and to formulate answers. 

‘… and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it’ – Ecclesiastes 12:7, ESV. As the spirit in man is given by the Creator from conception, it returns to Him upon death – Psalm 146:4. The body decomposes and our soul which is empowered by spirit, physically dies – Genesis 3:19, Ezekiel 18:4, 20, Romans 6:23, Matthew 10:28. Our spirit – what makes us, us – is kept by the Creator in a state of sleep (or hibernation), until the appointed time.

While our soul is not immortal; our spirit is eternal. 

In Genesis 35:18 we read about Jacob’s second wife passing away during the birth of her second son Benjamin. Just as her life force or soul expired with her dying breath, Rachel was able to name the child, which Jacob later changed to Benjamin. 

EEB: ‘But Rachel was dying. With her last breath, she gave to her son the name Ben-Oni…’ 

Voice: ‘But as her life slipped away, just before she died, Rachel named her son Ben-oni…’ 

GNV: ‘Then as she was about to yield up the ghost (for she died) she called his name Ben-Oni…’

ESV: ‘And as her soul [H5315 – Nephesh: ‘Living being (with life in the blood)’] was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni…’

The Grim Reaper allegedly originates during the 1300s at the time of the Black Death epidemic throughout Europe and while the Angel of Death predates the reaper by a millennia or two, it is hard not to think of the two having a common inspiration. The Grim Reaper causes a victim’s death and collects their soul, or as psychopomp, merely severs the ties between the body and soul, guiding one to the ‘afterlife’ with no control over how the victim dies. 

The Grim Reaper

The Angel of Death in the scriptures is not named, though in Islam it is held to be an archangel called Azrael. The Angel of Death is linked to the mysterious Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament of which we have discussed previously. Numbers 22:31, ESV: ‘Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. And he bowed down and fell on his face.’ 

Job acknowledges that a man has a set number of days in Job 14:5 and in Psalm 103:20 we read that angels obey God’s instructions and do his bidding. This includes the passage from life to death – Luke 16:22. It also includes the extraordinary future instruction in Revelation 9:15, ESV: ‘So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind.’ 

Angel of Death

The Death Angel is most famously known for killing the firstborn of the Egyptians and their livestock in ancient Egypt prior to the Exodus (Hebrews 11:28) – Appendix VII: Moses, the Exodus & the Red Sea Crossing – Fabrication or Fact?

Exodus 12:22

English Standard Version

‘For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you.’

CJB: … Adonai will pass over the door and will not allow the Slaughterer to enter your houses and kill you.

The Voice: … He will pass over your houses and not allow His messenger of death to enter into your houses and strike you down.

CEV: … His angel that brings death will pass over and not kill your first-born sons.

Likewise, the same angel or perhaps a different messenger was used to spare the Kingdom of Judah from defeat to the Assyrian Empire in 2 Kings 19:35, ESV: ‘And that night the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.’ 

The Angel of Death was again instrumental in exacting the Eternal’s wrath in 2 Samuel 24:15-16, ESV: ‘So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning until the appointed time. And there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba 70,000 men. And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord relented from the calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, “It is enough; now stay your hand.” And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’ 

Angel of the Lord

These examples are of multiple slayings and death, yet there was an instance where an angel of the lord struck down one man and that was the evil King Herod who was instrumental in Christ’s death – Chapter XXIX Esau: The Thirteenth Tribe. Thus we learn that there is more than one angel of the lord. Acts 12:22-23, ESV: ‘And the people were shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.’ 

Nor does the Eternal always use righteous angels in taking human life. For the one who has power over death is Satan the Devil – the one whom Christ defeated – Matthew 4:1-11. Hebrews 2:14, ESV: ‘Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, [Christ] himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil…’

One of Satan’s chief archons is described in Revelation 9:11, ESV: ‘They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon [or destruction], and in Greek he is called Apollyon [or destroyer].’

In the future, one of Satan’s agents causes mass scale death, recorded in Revelation 6:8, ESV: ‘And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades [or the grave] followed him… given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with… pestilence…’

One of the three most righteous men to have lived pondered: ‘Will the dead live again? All my days are a struggle; I will wait until my change [relief] comes‘ – Job 14:14, NCV. 

Paul describes the transformation which Job faithfully believed awaited him, in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, ESV: 

‘But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars [or angels]; for star differs from star in glory. 

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural [physical] body [like an animal]; it is raised a spiritual [supernatural] body [like Christ]. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam [Christ] became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual.

The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image [likeness] of the man of heaven.’ 

Paul speaks in verses 38-39, of the difference between fish, birds, animals and humans. Each genetic make up for each kind is unique. One did not evolve from the other. Again, until scientists admit the existence of the dimensions comprising the spiritual realm and the source of the physical world, they will repeatedly fall short in comprehending the true nature of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our Earth and ourselves. Verse 41 is speaking of heavenly hosts and the stars are types of angels. The angels differ in their roles, responsibilities, gifts and abilities. Verse 44 highlights the change that Job was seeking. To be fully spirit and leave the physical behind – forever. 

‘I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.

Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?’ – Ecclesiastes 3:18-21, ESV. 

Humans are similar to animals, in that they are both physical flesh and die. The difference being – apart from being different kinds (or kingdoms) – is the fact that animals live once and the plan for them ends there. Their spirit returns to the Creator, though it is described as going down to the earth to show its end. The spirit in man goes upward, to reveal that people will one day live again. 

‘The natural person [or unbeliever] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly [foolish, simple] to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned – 1 Corinthians 2:14, ESV. 

There is an animal spirit, a spirit in man, an angelic spirit and the principal spirit these three have been born from, the Holy Spirit of the Creator. The Bible is clear that animal life possess a distinctive spirit of their own, while humanity has a unique spirit which sets it apart as more than just another animal and rather, made in the image of God – Genesis 1:26, Psalm 82:6, John 10:34. 

“You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.”

Wayne W Dyer (1989)

“Birth is not the beginning of life – only of an individual awareness. Change into another state is not death – only the ending of this awareness.”

Hermes Trismegistus

© Orion Gold 2023 – All rights reserved. Permission to copy, use or distribute, if acknowledgement of the original authorship is attributed to orion-gold.com