Is there life after life? I am quite sure there is. I have thought about this issue for many years now. This is not the first time accounts of experiences of people who died clinically, but not biologically, and have floated out from their bodies to see doctors and paramedics trying hard to resuscitate them. They experienced a very deep sense of peace, absolutely no pain, and could describe later how the people around his body frantically trying to resuscitate him. They then left the scene and pass through a tunnel at the other end they saw a beam of light. They then emerged out of the tunnel into a place so beautiful they have never seen before.
The first account of people who died or came to near death, and came back to describe their experience with death and extreme euphoria after death was described in a book written by Dr Raymond Moody who is a psychiatrist who wrote in his book “Life after Life” published in 1975.
In their account with death complied in his book, he found people went through this tunnel very swiftly where they were given fleeting glances of their lives since they were born till they died. It was like a scene in a movie showing all the things they did when they were alive.
At the end of a tunnel they saw a very, very beautiful field with beautiful music playing. So exhilarating was the place they went that they have never experienced it before. They described the beautiful scenes and a sense of complete calm, ultimate joy and total peace within them that they never wish to return to this world anymore…yet they were asked to return. They also saw all their dead relatives in this world of complete ecstasy.
Those who died have one thing in common. Their experience was the same. Yet, they were all from different races with different cultures, various beliefs, different religions, and were of different ages, although most of them were westerners.
They also described after they floated out of their bodies what they actually saw places where it would have been impossible to know, such as at the scene of the accident where they died, the people who were trying to resuscitate them, what they did trying frantically to revive them.
They could also describe which hospital they were brought to, the objects they saw at the hospital, above the hospital on the roof tops as they floated up above the building. They also described in great detail the various hospital rooms they easily without effort passed through the concrete walls separating the rooms, and what they saw in these rooms.
All these descriptions of the scenes, the people, and the objects around the vicinity of the place they died were not possible even for anyone working, or living in that area as some of these places are either restricted areas, or cannot be seen from the ground.
Of course neuroscientists tried to explain all that by giving all sorts of theories about changes in the brain chemistry at the point of oxygen deprivation. I am aware of these different explanations which to me are very unsatisfactory.
For example, how could a person who has just died inside an operating theatre (OT) described exactly who were there inside the OT, what they did to him or what they said or do? Neither was it possible to describe the next room adjourning the OT?
Yet, they gave an accurate account of the doctors, nurses, their dresses and colours, and the positions they were in, the shapes of the objects around the place, and where they were placed, and even several locked rooms away.
They described the people in the corridors and elsewhere, and what was above the rooms, outside the buildings, the roof tops of the hospitals and adjourning buildings. How can changes in neurochemistry of the brain explain all these unless they have actually seen them before, and they were merely recalling these images during changes in the brain chemistry?
For a very long time already I have a very strong conviction within me that there is something very mysterious about a force that swells in all of us. Others just call it ‘life’.
Personally, I have a very strong conviction that life, just like matter and energy to Science, cannot be destroyed. There is some kind of a ‘life force’ that resides within the empty physical shell of the body that drives our body chemistries. That, I believe is that force that keeps all living things alive.
Once death intercedes, this ‘vital forces’ that controls all body chemistries simply leaves the body, the bones, muscles, organs, nerves, and systems. It just leaves. It does not control the body anymore. The entire body then breaks down (decomposes) leaving only an empty shell (skeleton) where this life force once lived.
The analogy is exactly like a house where there are living people staying. We see lights, movements, normal activities of people staying there such as people cleaning the house daily. Once the occupants (life) leave, the house is left empty like an empty shell. There is no more sign of life or activity in the house anymore. There is no more light, no more water, no more movement, no more washing and cleaning, no more sound, no more voices, or laughter, and no more people walking in and out of the house. It is like an empty shell where no one stays.
The house becomes empty of life. It becomes neglected and after some years it decays with the walls, beams, and roofs crumbling down, and weeds, creepers and grass invading inside the house just like remains of a grave left unattended in a graveyard.
There is absolutely no reason why the chemistry of a body cannot continue to proceed even after death if scientists think that a living body is nothing but just a machine that processes body chemicals which they like to call it biochemistry? If that is the case, then why do the chemicals in a dead body start breaking down almost immediately after death starting with rigor mortis. Why doesn’t chemistry continue as usual as if the body was alive? Isn’t that just chemistry scientists have been talking about, and shouldn’t these body chemicals continue to react to obey the laws of chemistry? Why do they stop then? Is there another higher force controlling them?
There is no reason for this if life is just made up of organic chemicals, and if life is just chemical reactions of organic molecules in a living body as we scientists, physiologists, doctors and biochemists know?
After all, immediately after life force leaves the body, all the necessary chemicals of life, namely water, biological fluids, salts and electrolytes, vitamins, DNA, sugars, amino-acids, oxygen, carbon dioxide, iron, minerals, etc, etc are still there - all intact. They have not suddenly disappeared.
Why then did they no longer want to continue to react and to proceed chemically as usual? Why don’t they want to obey chemical laws just like non-living chemical reactants would react inside a test-tube? It makes no sense to me as a research medical scientist trying to answer them from the point of science.
Why must all the chemicals in the body immediately stop, and start to reverse and decompose?
To me, obviously there is no longer this mysterious ‘life force’ living there to control their chemical reactions. It has already left the body to allow the body to return to dust of the soil from where it came. They can no longer proceed without a master control. They all just break down back eventually into dust even if the body is cremated, ashes as dust. Astronomers tell us we are made from star dusts from a supernova explosion.
This is exactly likened to occupants moving out from a house where they once lived. The house suddenly became an empty shell with no more activity within. It is as simple as this.
Life forces (life) can never be destroyed like matter and energy. It is just part of the cosmic fabric of this universe. In short, nothing in this universe can be destroyed, albeit they might be interchangeable like matter and energy.
So perhaps life may be interchangeable on death to another form just like food when eaten gives life to another life. A life has to be sacrificed at death in order to give life to another life. We cannot eat cement and bricks or soil which has no life in them. We can only keep alive with food which once had life in them till we destroy it and infuse it into our living body. It is as simple as that.
Life is just interchangeable in the food chain of carbon cycle. Others may like to call it ‘reincarnation’ in a cycle, but I am unsure about this?
But scientists know the existence of matter and energy because they can be measured. But with ‘life forces’ (vital force), they can never be measured just like health that can never be measured in absolute units.
But life is real. It exists, else I can never type this letter, and you can never read it if you and I have no life. ‘Life forces’ inside all living things is real, very, very real indeed. We can also feel it even though we cannot measure it like blood glucose, cholesterol and all the other tens of hundreds of enzymes in the body. We know their existence from all the living things around us that creep, crawl, walk, feed, reproduce, respire, and respond to stimulus.
Both life and health are there residing inside every living body although none can be measured as some kind of a physical or non-physical entity.
I have much more to pen my thoughts on this. This has troubled me for many years already. I just cannot agree with my scientific and medical counterparts that we are just biochemical machines producing bio-chemicals that can be measured like liver and cardiac enzymes.
I have much, much more to pen my thoughts, but this is just a précis of my answer to your question.
There has never been this 4th dimension in thinking from the biological scientists so far – at least to my living senses.
Comments by:
Dr lim ju boo
BSc (Medical Physiology & Chemistry), PG Dip Nutrition,
MSc, MD, PhD (Med), FRSPH, FRSM