Scientists Discover Life After Death

We assume we know about Life because we are all alive. But in fact, we know very little about the native qualities of this energy we can observe as distinctly separate from everything else in the physical world around us.

I say “native” qualities, because it appears possible that Life might continue on after the death of the body. We can’t see this energy, measure or detect it outside the body, so of course we jump to the obvious conclusion that it has no post mortem existence. Yet we do know that when Life is in our bodies we live and that in spite of our best attempts at a scientific understanding of this phenomenon, it appears and disappears with equal intrigue. Or does it?


Most doctors believe that when brain waves flat-line on equipment measuring EEG activity, the brain is dead and therefore assume the patient is dead. This follows from the premise that the brain is the source of consciousness. In fact clinical studies of near-death-experiences (NDE’s) suggest otherwise.

A long list of prominent researchers have produced a rich body of evidence that proposes brain death is not the end of consciousness, which further implies that body death may not be the end of Life. Interest in this new field of study was initially spurred in the late 1960’s by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose practice specialized in treating terminally ill patients.

In 1975 medical doctor and psychologist Raymond Moody wrote a seminal book entitled Life After Life, that caused much excitement and stimulated even more research into the area of Near-Death-Experience.

Later, renowned NDE authority Bruce Greyson, M.D. and Professor of Psychiatry launched the field of Near Death Studies by developing research tools that could produce defensible results in a clinical setting. He is quoted as reporting:

“A clear sensorium and complex conceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.”

Pim Van Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands conducted the first study of NDE’s in 344 cardiac arrest patients and published his results in The Lancet, the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journal in 2001. He reported approximately 18% experienced "classic" NDE's, which included out-of-body experiences (OBE’s).

The patients remembered details of their conditions during their cardiac arrest despite being clinically dead with flat-lined brain stem activity. Van Lommel concluded that his findings supported a theory that consciousness continued despite lack of neuronal activity in the brain

Science can clearly measure the effects of Life within a living organism. Although there is evidence that at the moment of death in humans, there is a sudden minute and inexplicable drop in body weight that produced the 21 gram theory, or otherwise known as “weight of the soul”. This was also referred to in Dan Brown’s recent book: The Lost Symbol, which has been prominently featured on the front page of The Institute of Noetic Sciences’ website.

Noesis has come to define the science of consciousness and The Institute of Noetic Sciences is an international research facility which has also verified much earlier weight of the soul experiments. Clearly something departs from our bodies at the moment of death. We can deduce that it is Life, or as some refer to it as the Soul which leaves when the body ceases to live. Apparently it has substance enough to have weight and that weight seems consistently to be roughly 21 grams.

But we can’t measure a unit of Life as itself outside the body - a bit odd don’t you think? And of course this is the fundamental problem science has always wrestled with in attempting to observe and define Life outside its organic container. It has simply never been done.

If you read scientific explanations for Life, you’ll notice they tend to stay closely on point with reference to biological Life, implying evolutionary biology and steer clear of any persuasion that Life can have an existence independent of organics. Can you blame them? After all, scientists measure things. From everything they can detect, there is no evidence of a thing we can point to as Life after death or any independent Life energy also referred to as Vitalism.

Perhaps we therefore also jump to an erroneous conclusion that, in humans for example, Life is only passed on by a mother’s living body initially as a zygote, which is technically two living cells: the male “seed” or sperm and the now fertilized egg, or ovum, from the female. This subsequently grows into an embryo, then a fetus and is finally born as a complete new living human baby. Analogously, like cavemen coming across fire from a lightning strike in the forest they were forced to carry a burning branch like an eternal torch – as their only known means to create fire was to transplant it.

What is it really that causes this material stuff of a human body, an animal, reptile, a plant, micro-organism (or even a virus though it is not technically classified as living) to become vitally animated – to live? Might it possibly be a special form of energy potential that doesn’t originate from the material of the body itself? Could it possibly continue to exist after an organism ceases to be a viable vessel to contain it any longer? Our failure to measure Life outside the body shouldn’t preclude the possibility, that we simply don’t have the means to measure that kind of energy.

There are other energies and forces science cannot isolate and are yet commonly known about and their effects on matter around us accepted as proof of their existence. The rather recent discovery of a mysterious Dark Energy (see Hubblesite.com video on dark energy for a fun visual explanation) and the more obvious force of Gravity are such examples. Gravity for instance, cannot be isolated or measured other than by it’s interaction with mass, e.g., when you drop an apple, it falls.

You’ll recall that Sir Isaac Newton significantly advanced our understanding of our physical world from that simple observation in his definition of the Laws of Motion. The force and therefore energy potentiality of gravity always exists, whether or not you choose to drop that apple. You cannot see gravity or measure it as an independent force either. Yet your body would just float into space if it were not always in effect around you.

It is at least possible that Life is another such independently unquantifiable energy or force. You can observe and measure the evidence of Life within organisms, but once it leaves them, like gravity without the apple, it may only appear to vanish. If this is true, then it would follow that Life might not need a body to exist, and in fact may have never needed physical organisms to exist at all.

Does gravity require the apple?

Want to read more on this fascinating subject of the mysteries of Life force energy and other normal activity unfortunately classified as paranormal?

For more information, read: A View Beyond the Stars at Amazon.com.