Is There An Afterlife?

And what would it do to us if the answer was yes?

The idea that life may continue after death, in one form or another, is something that most moderns who take pride in their intellect tend to dismiss as childish, irrational superstition. And yet, it seems that lately, more people start questioning this entrenched position—such as none other than John Cleese of Monty Python fame.

Yes, the creator of one of the most brilliant parodies of authoritarian religion ever made believes in an afterlife.

So—is there something to it? And what effects might such beliefs have on us?

The Materialist Position

Most “enlightened” people tend to believe that any notion of an afterlife (except in the sense that people will remember you after you are gone) is nonsense.

However, they have to wrestle with the pesky fact that for time immemorial, almost all people and peoples did believe in some form of life after death.

The materialist explanation for this usually goes something like: well, these people just didn’t know better, and they found comfort in the belief that life doesn’t end when we die. Modern science, however, has made it clear that an afterlife is impossible.

The problem with that stance is that science has not shown any such thing. What happened was that, in the wake of modern science, and especially in the late 19th century, people have adopted the philosophical position of materialism, also known as physicalism: the idea that all there is in the universe can be described by and reduced to physics, where physics is understood as something fixed and timeless that blindly orders everything there is: dead matter. But this idea doesn’t follow from any experiment, any empirical observation, or any math. It is a philosophical position, an assumption, from which an abstract model had been constructed which was then declared to be the totality of reality.

This philosophical position excludes the existence of an afterlife a priori. The materialist doesn’t deny it based on evidence, but reasons backwards from his a priori assumption: everything can be reduced to physics more or less as we know it, in a machine-like material cosmos that is all there is, and therefore an afterlife cannot exist. And if it cannot exist, then everything hinting at its existence should be explainable from within the abstract model: in materialist terms.

Now, I’m not saying that this picture is entirely wrong. But it is just one standpoint, one perspective, one lens through which to look at the world. There is no reason to assume that it is the only lens, or the only truthful one.

We always need to be aware of what kind of lens we are using when looking at the world. Being able to switch those lenses, instead of reflexively reverting to one single one, is a sure sign of intellectual maturity.

Here’s what happens when we look at the idea of an afterlife through the materialist lens: people in the past believed in an afterlife because circumstances were harsh, and the belief helped them cope with reality. Add to that the convenience for the leaders of any given society to promise their underlings heavenly rewards for their obedience, and you get a powerful societal pressure, powerful “memes” that have entrenched themselves in the psyche over millennia. Going back even further, one might assume that such a belief might have increased reproductive fitness in the Darwinian struggle. OK, you might object that believing in an afterlife might actually reduce fear of death, and therefore should have been weeded out by the ruthless forces of natural selection. But you need to think bigger: the benefit for group cohesion might have been greater than the downside for the individual, so at the end of the day, the afterlife meme won out.

Now, from the non-materialist perspective, things look very different.

The Non-Materialist Perspective

If you give up the materialist lens for a moment (that is, the modernist package of materialism, Darwinism, machine analogy of life and the cosmos, etc.), the literal existence of an afterlife cannot be ruled out a priori. Suddenly, from that perspective, the best explanation for why so many people in the past deeply believed in an afterlife is simply that there is such a thing.

It is a bit like looking at the historical record and realizing that no steam engines have ever been mentioned as being widely used until the 19th century, and then saying that well, let’s start with the hypothesis that steam engines simply had not been around before that. Sure, it could be otherwise: perhaps the records are lost, or there is some cover-up going on, who knows. But let’s start with the most obvious hypothesis first.

We modern people have some difficulties with an argument like that, because nothing in our worldview, in our presuppositions, excludes the idea that steam engines haven’t been around until the 19th century—whereas they do rule out an afterlife. But the analogy still holds.

Leaving the materialist/modernist camp, therefore, if even just as an exercise in “switching lenses,” immediately leads to the hypothesis that there is such a thing as an afterlife.

And it opens up the possibility to take people’s thoughts about it in the past, as well as the way we still talk about it, seriously. The need to explain all that away as “memes” or survival mechanisms rooted in the Darwinian (or social) jungle suddenly disappears. (Or rather, if we accept evolution, it becomes a matter of bringing both ideas together instead of trying to use one to exclude the other.)

It seems to me that when we talk about people “passing,” about “aunt Mary smiling from above,” about her “hopefully having a good time up there,” and so on, something very deeply resonates in many of us. Even if we might intellectually reject such ideas, and even if we might say them in a humorous tone, our eyes are shining when we say them, our soul brightens up, and we feel this subtle yet real connection, this joy, this profound knowledge of something beyond the visible, buried as it is under a pile of assumptions and studied reflexes that make us reject the very thought.

In line with that sentiment, besides the cross-cultural, cross-epoch agreement about an afterlife until very recently, there are other pesky facts that the materialist needs to explain.

Among them is the mountain of research into psi phenomena, part of which may at least lend the idea of an afterlife some credibility.¹ A good example are Near-Death-Experiences, or NDEs.

Carl Jung reports one such case that apparently made a big impression on him:² one of his patients, a young woman, almost died after a forceps delivery, and fell into a coma. During that time, as Jung explains, “… she was looking down from a point in the ceiling and could see everything going on in the room below her: she saw herself lying in the bed, deadly pale, with closed eyes.” She saw the nurse and doctor beside her, the doctor agitated. After being unconscious for 30 minutes, she “came back,” and to the doctor’s (and Carl Jung’s) amazement, she could tell in detail what happened during her absence—as if she really did watch the whole thing from above. And this despite, as Jung put it, that she “was in a coma and ought to have had a complete psychic black-out and had been altogether incapable of clear observation and sound judgement.”

The woman also described to Jung how, during her NDE, she was aware of “a glorious, park-like landscape shining in the brightest colors and, in particular, an emerald green meadow with short grass which sloped gently upwards beyond a wrought-iron gate leading into the park.” Apparently, she told Jung that she was convinced that this was the world she would enter at death.

There have been thousands of cases of that type recorded since then, arguably because NDEs have become more common due to modern medicine’s ability to suspend patients between life and death and often pull them back. While Carl Jung’s case might be explained away as just a hallucination followed by a lucky guess, there are plenty of cases that are even more puzzling: people who were blind from birth who experience an NDE and reported what they saw around them, which matched with reality. People who, during that experience, went somewhere else entirely and described what they saw—which then was verified by third witnesses. People who were hooked up to an EEG during their experience, the EEG showing a flat line—no brain activity, and yet experiences that are consistently described as completely real, deep, and transformative. And so on.³

Common features of Near Death Experiences—regardless of religious beliefs and culture—include meeting dead relatives, seeing a tunnel of light, experiencing a life review, and a mystical experience of meeting a light being. In many cases, once “back,” people drastically change their outlook on life and undergo a deep character transformation.

You can look at this from a materialist perspective, I suppose, and write NDEs off as mere hallucinations. Same goes for terminal lucidity, deathbed visions, apparitions after a loved one dies without prior knowledge of such, etc. I would say though that the fact that few materialists actually try to explain in detail how such things might be possible under their presuppositions, and indeed few care to look at such cases at all, indicates that materialist explanations are anything but straight-forward.

Now, having said all that, I wouldn’t necessarily infer that everybody goes straight to some kind of paradise-like afterlife once the lights are switched off; nor do I necessarily think that there might not be quite a few different angles from which to look at the issue, some more “materialist” than others.

To raise a few important questions: does everybody go to an afterlife, or is it just some people? And among those, is it a fundamental difference in their soul make-up that determines it? Maybe we have to actually make an effort in this life to grow something permanent to gain some form of eternal life? Some mystics, and perhaps even St. Paul, hinted at such a scenario.⁴ And will there be a harsh judgement by God, or rather sudden insights and revelations about ourselves that make us self-judge? Can evil exist in the afterlife and if so, does it have power there? Maybe we should look at it in terms of non-linear time, i.e. that the afterlife represents a distant state of evolution of consciousness, which projects itself back in time so to help us—and thus itself—reach that state? Are there different paths, different futures possible: so that for some people, the world will cease, while others are on the path towards evolution?

Perhaps it is even possible to cultivate both the materialist perspective and the spiritual, afterlife-affirming perspective simultaneously, because in some sense, they are both true? Is there a more secular way of making sense of all that?⁵

I can’t answer all those questions. My point is simply that we should always be mindful of our assumption, of our hidden presuppositions, especially when we think and talk about something like the afterlife.

Let’s also not forget that a truthful perspective should be fruitful as well (at least to my mind). So let us now turn toward the question of what a belief in the afterlife might do to us.

Belief in the Afterlife and Us

Perhaps the most common perspective about the effects of a belief in the afterlife is the Marxian opioid for the masses take: if we believe in an afterlife, so the argument goes, this makes us more obedient to authorities who are out to exploit us. Instead of toppling them, we are kept in check by the belief that all might be better after death if only we obey the priests and kings.

I think there is at least some merit to this. But as all things in life, it depends on the person who believes such things and their spiritual make-up.

For example, the exact opposite effect can happen as well, especially in our modern post-religious world: the authorities often use fearmongering to render us obedient, fear of death in particular. If I believe in an afterlife, and see death as just the closing of a chapter in my spiritual development, then avoidance of death ceases to be my main driving force; I would rather accept certain risks if they mean I don’t sin against my soul. Political fearmongering becomes less effective if we believe that higher values are where it’s at, a belief that is greatly reinforced by accepting an afterlife.

And this is true also for the twin authoritarian strategy of dangling carrots in front of our heads: it becomes harder to corrupt people into doing the authorities’ bidding by doling out money, favors, welfare, nice jobs, etc. when people prioritize their values over material gain in the belief that once this is all over, their holding true to the sacred and holy counts more than their peace of mind and riches.

Besides, we modern people with our egalitarian leanings find it utterly inconceivable that there might actually be some truth to the idea that maybe, just maybe, we should accept our station in life, knowing that our spiritual welfare might be more important than our earthly status. Accepting the hand we’re dealt with and striving towards making the best of it instead of desperately trying to change that hand, potentially making things much worse? What a concept!

Another objection to the fruitfulness of a belief in the afterlife concerns the supposed judgement that awaits us: if we just behave well because we fear God’s judgement on the other side, how much is our good behavior worth, really? I think this criticism has much merit. Indeed, merely obeying an authority out of fear when deep down we don’t want to, or question the rules, hardly seems very spiritually advanced.

But such fear of God’s judgement is a very low form of spirituality, and it is certainly not the only way to look at it. Granted, I still think that this sort of faith can be useful and hold society together—keep it from degenerating into the worst kind of barbarism and hell on earth. And it is this kind of faith that the materialists might be able to explain with their evolutionary arguments. Fear of God’s judgement certainly can make groups strong and effective, while keeping the most unhealthy impulses by those with little intrinsic motivation for goodness in check. In their language, a belief in the afterlife might make a positive evolutionary equilibrium possible.

However, instead of judgement, a better way of looking at it might be that if we accept an afterlife, this means that we cannot escape life. Seen in a more mature light, it’s not so much that fear of God’s judgement will keep us in check, but that we realize that a continuation of life after death leads to the insight that we actually want to find that coherence in us, that deep well of values and love, that which makes life worth living, that which holds together our scattered and fragmented being and gives us purpose and meaning. After all, if we have the choice between just continuing forever as we are, sinking ever more deeply into despair and nihilism until our soul freezes over, suspended and motionless in the twilight zone between night and the first ray of light, and saying to ourselves: enough! I will finally exit this endless night and move towards that distant first ray of light—what do we choose?

And it is here that we may be able to reconcile the afterlife with a more materialist perspective, because the same line of thought applies if we assume life simply ends with death: enough already. Let’s move towards the light, for what else is there to do?

However, I would argue that a mature relationship with the afterlife greatly reinforces this choice for the light, because, again, an afterlife means that we can’t escape life. If life just ends, on the other hand, we might just as well forfeit a path of effort and spiritual struggle, and wait out the night to sink into total blackness. Which, in my experience, is how many people these days choose—and, sadly, not without sadness.

1. For a good primer on the topic, the long history of research, and the results, see Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, HarperOne, 2009

2. Recounted/quoted in Stafford Betty, When did you ever become less by dying? Afterlife: The Evidence, White Crow Books, 2016

3. See ibid. for more examples as well as references to the literature.

4. G.I. Gurdjieff thought that we need to grow something like an astral body, and it is this astral body alone that might survive death. Paul talked about the kingdom of God that we may enter after our spiritual transformation, i.e. learning to “walk according to the spirit.”

5. I guess a very strict physicalist perspective utterly rules out any form of afterlife; but there are other approaches: for example, A.N. Whitehead and Iain McGilchrist could be understood as allowing for an afterlife that is more like a projection of the collective consciousness that transcends our usual understanding of scientific time, as opposed to some “other realm.” Such a concept, it seems to me, wouldn’t make the afterlife any less real than the more picturesque conceptions that many religions and spiritual traditions offer.