Is Pope Francis Really Dead? Is Anyone?

 

It seems to me there is no valid distinction between mindand soul. These are both terms for the perceiving consciousness plus the will.People tend to use “soul” if they are arguing that the mind is immortal.

I hold to this, firstly, by Occam’s Razor: there is no reasonto multiply entities. Secondly, if the soul is not the perceiving consciousness,the “I,” it does not matter whether it is immortal. And if it is to be judgedbased on our acts of will, as all major religions affirm, it must include thewill.

Now, does the perceiving consciousness survive the death ofthe body? Is it dependent on the physical brain?

Friend Xerxes write, “no one has ever come back from theother side to tell us what goes on there.”

This is not obviously true. As Xerxes himself notes, peoplehave indeed revived after being declared dead; and they have reported experiencesof the hereafter.

Granted, we call them “near-death experiences” rather than “after-lifeexperiences.”

But there is a tautology here: “brain death” is actuallydefined as an “irreversible” loss of brain function. In other words, if anyonecomes back from death, they were by definition not dead.

Are their experiences legitimate evidence for an afterlife?

Xerxes laments, “there is no way of testing the validity oftheir memories.”

But there is. Those returning to life have reported hearing andseeing things during the period when they were supposedly dead; and their accountsare confirmed by others present. So the consciousness survives the absence ofall activity in the brain, at a minimum. And the claims of out of bodyexperiences have also been confirmed: they were able to accurately reportthings they could not have seen from their body. So the consciousness is nottied to the body.

We cannot similarly independently confirm their reports of aworld apart from the physical world, to which they journey. But we can confirmit by the fact that those experiences tend broadly to tally among differentreports. As Xerxes notes: “Often they report seeing bright lights, moving downsome kind of tunnel, being welcomed into a new world of peace and calm.”

It is on the same basis that most of us confirmed theexistence and nature of Timbuctu, in the days before Google maps. The fact thatthose who had not actually been there cannot verify reports is immaterial.

Then there is the witness of Jesus. Xerxes laments that,having been resurrected, he said “not one word about the far side of death.”

He actually said a lot. This was all that “kingdom of heaven”stuff. He said after death would come a judgment, and that the good and justwould enter paradise, while the evil and iniquitous would enter eternal flames.And that there was no passage between the two. More detail is given, albeit notby Jesus in the flesh, in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible.

I imagine Xerxes means Jesus did not say any of this this afterthe resurrection. But, having already said it, what would have been the reasonto repeat it now, or for the gospels to record it? Only if, based on his morerecent experiences in the underworld, harrowing hell, his understanding hadsomehow changed. Presupposing, as well, that he was not omniscient, was not God,so that he could have misunderstood previously.

And then, as Xerxes reports from his own experience, thereis the evidence of “ghosts.” People actually seem able to communicate with us, everynow and then, after physical death. While I have not personally had such unambiguousexperiences, many others have, including Xerxes, who has distinctly heard hisdeceased wife speak to him in the night, or felt her presence as she rose fromthe bed to use the facilities. Such stories are common.

There are other sources of evidence. While anything physicalis transitory, appears and disappears, anything mental or spiritual isimmortal, endures. The cat runs into the bushes and disappears. Yet the memoryof the cat running into the bushes remains in my mind’s eye indefinitely; if itfades, it can be reinvoked. The mental cat is immortal.

You will say memories fade. But they do not die. We may havegreater or lesser difficulty summoning them to consciousness, as time wears on,but they are there forever somewhere, and can resurface. A certain smell, acertain song, the taste of a madeleine…

Try that with the actual cat Sniffles you had as a child.

So it is of the essential nature of the mind to be immortal.

This is not yet to get into the medical reports of thosewith virtually no physical brain sometimes nevertheless demonstrating normalintelligence. This is not to get into the reported miracles of the saints orIndian yogis, like levitation, bilocation, praeternatural knowledge, and soforth; which broadly suggest mind can exist and act without dependence on thephysical body. Given, of course, that such reports can be false.

The rational conclusion, therefore, based on the evidence,is that the mind or soul is immortal; that there is life beyond the life in thebody. It is merely a materialistic prejudice to balk at the idea.

William Blake, or Bishop Berkeley, or Plato, would argue thatthe body and the physical world are the epiphenomenon. Only the mind is real. Blakewrote “the body is that portion of the soul visible to the five senses.”

Berkeley has never been disproven on this. People just don’twant to hear it.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.