On the Questions of God and an Afterlife
[Okay, so I realize it has literally been a year since I last published something on this blog—a strange year indeed. So today, I give you an essay, intended to be part of a larger work on matters theological; but I don’t want to wait, so, here it is.]
“Do you know when the Mongols ruled China?”
“Well, perhaps we can ask them.”—Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
“Come on, Spock…You really have gone where no man’s gone before. Can’t you tell me what it felt like?”
“It would be impossible to discuss this subject without a common frame of reference.”…
[incredulously:] “You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?”
“Forgive me Doctor, I’m receiving a number of distress calls.”
“I don’t doubt it.”—Dr. Leonard McCoy & Spock, Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, discussing Spock’s recent return from death.
What, if anything, comes after we die? It is one of the most basic of our questions about life, and one that practically all religions seek to answer, one way or another. The fact that materialism gives the answer, “Nothing happens; nothing at all” is only more evidence that materialism is a religious position, after a fashion. However, if, as we have already argued, materialism is an insufficient view, we are within our rights to ask whether its answer to this question is likewise inadequate. So, again, we ask: is there something that comes after this life, and if so, what is it? And since many assume—or insist—that God is involved in such matters, some other questions become immediately relevant: Is there a God? And if so, what can we know of him?
To the simple questions of whether or not there is a God (or gods) or an afterlife, most religions have largely answered “yes” to both. To the more general question of what, specifically, happens when we die, they generally have given three types of answers: linear survival, cyclical reincarnation, and resurrection. In all three answers, it is assumed that there is something of the human person which survives death—in English we usually call it the “soul” or the “spirit”; where these answers differ is in what they believe happens to that something. In the first type of afterlife, the soul continues to exist after death, and goes on to whatever type of existence comes next, whether good, bad, or generally indifferent. This is the sort of afterlife generally reflected in the ancient literature of the Biblical and classical worlds: Homer, Virgil, and, for the most part, the Hebrew Bible. The second afterlife theory, as we may call it, believes that after death, the soul may return to this life, to be born again—perhaps as a human, perhaps as something else—and to again go through the cycle of birth, life, and death. This is the afterlife theory assumed by such major Eastern World Religions as Hinduism and Buddhism, although it is not limited to them. Indeed, along with linear survival, it is the other major answer man has generally given to the question: “What happens when we die?” (with the answer of materialism constituting a significant minority report, the consistent dissenting opinion of certain very deterministic thinkers among the ancients).
The third answer, found almost exclusively among those religions that trace themselves back to the Patriarch Abraham—specifically, Christianity, Islam, and at least some forms of Judaism—is that we experience a sort of linear continued spiritual existence after death, followed eventually by a resurrection, a return to our original physical forms, but “corrected and amended by the Author” (as the epitaph of Benjamin Franklin, printer, has it[1]) for an eternal life in something like a restored cosmos.
But in saying all this I am getting rather ahead of myself. My goal in this essay is to ask: can we answer these questions, at least partly, by an examination of some form of empirical evidence, and without relying upon the authority of any particular religious tradition? It may surprise you to learn that, today, in the twenty-first century, the answer is “yes.”
It’s quite simple, really, and it begins with the wisdom of Sinbad—the comedian, not the sailor. In one of his stand-up routines, Sinbad once gave the sage advice, “If you’ve never been skiing, tell people—just break down and tell people: ‘Look, I can’t ski at all; please help me.’”[2] The general principle involved here is: when wishing to prepare for an experience you have never had, ask the advice of those who have already had it. The two quotations which head this essay work together to capture this very idea. If we were to replace “when the Mongols ruled China” in the first with “what happens to people when they die,” we would have words expressing exactly the point I wish here to make: want to know what happens to people when they die? Perhaps we should ask them.
And why not? Since we all must eventually visit what Hamlet called “that undiscovered country, from whose borne no travel returns,” it behooves us to wonder, like Dr. McCoy in our second opening quote, what it is like, and to seek out those who—contrary to the Prince’s claim—have indeed returned from that otherwise undiscovered country of Death.
And today, those people are legion. While reports of people returning from death to life with memories of what lies beyond—even excluding strictly religious reports of resurrections and raisings of the dead—extend at least as far back as the fourth century BC, when Plato wrote perhaps the earliest Western record of what we today would call a near-death experience (NDE) in the tenth and final book of his Republic,[3] in recent decades, we have been inundated with such reports, thanks both to advances in medical science (which is often what make them possible) and our powers of communication and record keeping (which turn what would otherwise have been scattered personal experiences into analyzable, quantifiable, empirical data). In the last several years, extensive and rigorous study of these numerous reported experiences—a few of which have been revealed as spurious, but the majority of which have been found credible—has allowed researchers, mostly in the medical field, to reach some rather solid conclusions about death and what comes after.
First, let me be clear about what is involved here, for those who may be less than familiar with the relevant facts. It is now a relatively common thing for people who have been declared clinically dead—with no heartbeat and/or no brain activity—to be brought back from such a state, to return to a normal life; and often, such people report that during the period of time when they showed no signs of brain activity, they continued to have conscious experiences, experiences which often appear to include travel into—or at least to the brink of—what most people would plainly call “the afterlife.” Today, such experiences are generally referred to as “near-death experiences,” or NDEs (with the subject of such an experience called an “NDEr”), although a more accurate, if less musical, term might be “a temporary experience of death.” During an NDE, a person may experience any of several events. Often, these experiences include leaving their body in some sort of intangible form (an out-of-body experience, or OBE), seeing and hearing things happening in the room where their body is or in the general vicinity (in other areas of the hospital, for example, such as where their family is gathered); journeying into a sort of afterlife—sometimes positive, sometimes negative in form—where they may encounter other beings, human or otherwise, be greeted by family members who had died previously (including recently deceased family of whose death they were unaware), and/or experience a review of the life they have lived. One of the most common aspects of this experience is an encounter with what may be generally described as “a being of light” who plays a very important role in the experience. If the NDEr identifies this being, he is often identified as God, an angel, or perhaps Jesus.
It is not my purpose here to give great detail about these experiences, but rather to summarize the conclusions that researchers have reached from studying them. To do this, I shall draw upon the works and words of several researchers who have focused on the phenomenon of the near-death experience, seeking to cull from their writings a set of general conclusions concerning what we can know about the answers to the questions we have asked above.
First, despite what many would wish, we cannot dismiss these experiences as mere imaginings or hallucinations, for several reasons. These experiences cannot simply be the last flickering actions of the dying brain, because they do not merely occur while the brain is dying—they happen after the brain is dead. A completely inactive brain cannot give you hallucinations.[4] If NDEs were merely the result of the final firings of the dying brain, they would, one would think, be brief, transient, flashes of imagery and sensation. Instead, these experiences are generally rich and detailed. They tend to be described as more real and vivid than our normal waking, living world, rather than less, and they are often recalled with perfect clarity. Furthermore, it is fairly common for NDErs to demonstrate knowledge gained during their NDEs, such as the exact procedures used to resuscitate them, despite their complete lack of brain activity at the time. Some thinkers, such as William James, have speculated that the brain does not generate consciousness so much as act as a filter or reducing valve for our experience of consciousness. The intensity of NDEs tends to corroborate this idea, suggesting that at death, that filtering function is removed, or at least reduced.
The common elements reported in various NDEs could perhaps be explained as being the result of shared neurological processes—that is, they could, if there were any neurological activity involved in the first place—but they could also be explained simply as the experiencing of a common event—death—and a journey to a common destination—the afterlife. It is certain that the variations from person to person are not consistent with the experience’s being hallucinatory, since individuals often experience elements contrary to personal beliefs, knowledge, and expectations. For example, while some dismiss NDEs as merely a matter of religious people imagining what they expect to find in death, this is not what the data show. Instead, studies show “that religion is no more a factor in a person having an NDE than age or race.”[5] People do not report one thing when Hindu and another when Christian, a third thing when Jewish.[6] While their interpretations of what they experience may vary (the being of light, for example, is often called “God” or “Jesus,” but may be called simply “the light,” or even “a wizard”[7]), the actual experiences reported are generally quite similar and consistent.
Let me give a few examples of how people’s experiences in NDEs often differ from or exceed their beliefs, knowledge, and expectations. First, several NDErs, in meeting deceased family members during their experience, have encountered either family members of whose recent deaths they were unaware, or family members they never knew or knew of at all, but with whom they later show a seemingly recently acquired familiarity.[8] Even more fascinating to me are the many ways in which people report experiences contrary to their expectations or beliefs. For one thing, the being of light, often identified as God, is always referred to as “he,” even when he is reported as transcending gender, as in the NDE of “Diane,” who said of God “He contains both sides [male & female]…the strong and the gentle of both sides”[9] Another NDEr found that God did not fit her expectations on this point, since “I believed I saw God, not as a female as I thought, but as a man.”[10] Yet another woman was convinced she had seen Jesus in this role, despite her insistence that, as a Jew, she did not believe in Jesus Christ.[11]
More important than this, perhaps, is how often NDErs experience God as having a different character than they expect: infinitely loving, rather than judgmental; funny, rather than humorless; and generally, so transcendent of their expectations that they often insist that “God” is simply an inadequate word for what they experienced. Consider the following remarks from various NDErs (all quotes taken from Jeffrey Long’s book with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife):
—“‘God’ is just a small word compared with what I experienced.”[12]
—“[I]t seems to me that we are incorrect to name such Sacred Holiness, and power [as she encountered]. I can only say that I have witnessed the ultimate of all that is, was, and ever shall be, yet I can’t name that which can’t be described.”[13]
—“I became aware of a presence vast and unimaginable, everywhere and everything, the beginning and the end, and he was Love. I came to know that Love is a power to rival all powers—real and perceived—in the universe.”[14]
And finally:
—“All That Is [her term for the being she encountered] can be perceived simultaneously as a force and as a consciousness that exists within each individual consciousness and yet is separate from each consciousness or being. It might be called God, but the ideas of gods that we have are a pale and incomplete shadow of the All That Is that I perceived. We project an idea of a god or gods upon that infinite creative consciousness, which inevitably limits our understanding of the All That Is in ways that reflect the limited comprehension that we have of ourselves and the physical universe. // The word ‘God’ carries a lot of baggage, and our ideas of ‘God’ are currently deeply inadequate and inaccurate.”[15]
Writing in the later pages of his book, Jeffrey Long makes two very significant summary observations. First, “Hellish realms [such as those in the experiences just treated[16]] can be disconcerting to read about. The good news is that throughout this book, you can easily see that the evidence consistently points to a blissful heavenly realm and a God that loves us all profoundly and completely. That is, in my opinion, among the most significant and important messages in the study of NDEs.”[17] And yet, ironic though it may seem, “As we have already repeatedly seen, a common lesson from NDErs is that the earthly word God might not be the best term for what they encounter”[18]—like so many of our shopworn words, our traditional ideas about its meaning seem wholly inadequate when the reality itself is confronted.
One more note on the appearance of God in NDEs. As we have noted above, NDErs commonly encounter “a being of light” whom most but not all of them identify as “God.” In a study of 420 NDErs, it was found that, when they were asked whether they had received any information in their NDE as to whether or not God exists, only a minority of 167 (39.8%) answered “No.” The other 60.2% of them either answered “Yes” (191—45.5%), or were uncertain (a mere 62, or 14.8%). Even more significant than this is what Long and Perry say next: “Narrative responses revealed that essentially all NDErs who answered yes to this question stated that they encountered information or awareness that God or a supreme being does exist. Essentially none of the narrative responses to this question described awareness that God or a supreme being does not exist [emphasis added].”[19]
Hence, nearly half of the people considered in this study found in their near-death experiences evidence of the existence of God—with another nearly 15% being unsure—while none of them reported any evidence to the contrary. This is, to put it mildly, extraordinary (the very word Long and Perry use to describe these findings). As the authors note, this makes God more commonly reported in NDEs than such seemingly ubiquitous elements as a tunnel, a life review, or meeting deceased loved ones.[20] It also makes NDEs a very strong empirical argument for the reality of God. Or, as one NDEr quoted by Long and Perry put it quite simply, “I was speaking with God, so that is my proof that God exists.”[21]
Just so.
Furthermore, though they are more rare, there are the phenomena of shared death experiences (SDEs) and shared near-death experiences (would it be going too far to call them SNDEs?). In the first of these, a person dies, and at the moment of death, others nearby (such as family members waiting bedside) have an experience of witnessing from outside the sorts of things often reported in an NDE. For example, a man sits at his mother’s bedside. Suddenly, he sees a bright light and hears beautiful music. At the moment his mother dies, he sees her spirit leave her body, and watches as his mother’s life is briefly replayed before them; then he sees her depart down a tunnel towards a bright light. Either during this experience or after its end, he realizes that several of the other family members present saw and experienced the same thing he did.[22] The shared near-death experience is different. It happens when two people—most likely family—have NDEs at the same time and encounter each other in the afterlife. In another version, one person has an NDE, during which time a relative actually dies, and the NDEr encounters the spirit of the deceased as he or she passes on.[23]
From all this, researchers have drawn certain conclusions about what these experiences show. We begin with Long and Perry, who in their book God & the Afterlife observe, “Skeptics say that near-death experiences can’t tell us what happens to those who have permanently departed from this earth. But shared NDEs, while rare, might serve as evidence that what is observed in NDEs is the initial experience of those who have irreversibly died.”[24] Something similar could be said of the somewhat more common shared death experiences (SDEs). Furthermore, Melvin Morse, a very skeptical medical professional whose work with NDErs has nevertheless convinced him that we can learn some things from them about what comes after death, tells of a study he did in which he compared several children who had nearly died (and reported NDEs) with several other children who were seriously ill. He notes that despite having several specific elements in common with the NDErs, such as low blood-oxygen levels, sensory deprivation, psychological stress, and drugs, the seriously ill patients did not report any NDE-like experiences. From this he concluded that NDEs are not simply psychological experiences caused by any of these particular medical events. On the contrary, “This study indicated that the so-called near-death experience is indeed the dying experience.”[25] In another place, Morse summarizes the conclusions of researchers into near-death experiences by saying that “After rigorous and intense scientific scrutiny, it is now generally accepted that near-death experiences represent the only objective evidence of what it is like to die.”[26] Confessing his, shall we say, near-congenital condition of unbelief, he nevertheless acknowledges that the evidence for survival beyond death is strong: “Although I have an emotional bias against anything spiritual, intellectually I recognize that near-death research strongly supports the concept of some form of life after death and that certain aspects of human consciousness must be independent of brain function…it is now scientifically respectable to discuss the survival hypothesis [i.e. the hypothesis that our consciousness survives death].”[27]
Please allow me but two further direct quotations from the skeptical yet convinced Dr. Morse. Speaking of another doctor who has come to the conclusion of human survival based on the scientific evidence, he writes, “When asked about the human spirit by patients, [Dr. Sapathy] Silva tells them the simple scientific truth: there is a vital element in our anatomy that has the ability to see our body and the world around it while it is clinically dead. He points out that the physical body cannot see or feel this vital element, but it is there.”[28] Finally, in the Afterword to his book Parting Visions, he reports the following: “Physician Michael Schroter-Kunhardt … conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature [on death-related experiences] and concluded that ‘the paranormal capacities of the dying person suggest the existence of a time-and-space-transcending immortal soul.’”[29]
So, the evidence seems to point to the idea that we continue to have conscious experiences after death, and even enter into some sort of Afterlife (I could go into the details reported of this afterlife, but such would take us too far afield). It also seems to confirm the reality of someone who not only fits, but far transcends the idea of God held by most people in our secular age of theological ignorance—yet, the description of him given by NDErs is not inconsistent with what the major world religions, especially the monotheistic ones, actually say about God. Perhaps this is an instance in which we should allow the experience of the NDErs to inform the meaning we give to the word “God,” a word which seems to have lost for many all of the grand significance it once traditionally bore. Perhaps NDEs can help us to rehabilitate that word, which has become for many all too shopworn. In other words, if “God” is not the right word for the one whom so many encounter in their NDEs, perhaps it should be.
Let us now quickly summarize how the various NDErs we have quoted have described God, with a few descriptions from one final experiencer.
These NDErs Say That God is…
1. Sacred Holiness & Power
2. “the Ultimate of All that Is, Was, and Ever Shall Be”
3. Beyond Words
4. “Vast & Unimaginable”
5. Love
6. All That Is
7. A Force
8. Consciousness
9. Profoundly and Completely Loving of us all.
10. “the Mind or the ‘Order’ in all things”
11. All that is Beautiful
12. All that is Peaceful
13. All that is One
14. All that is Good
The last five of these come from “Amy,” another NDEr whose experience is reported by Long and Perry: “During my NDE, ‘God’ was the Mind or the ‘Order’ in all things…God was all that is beautiful and peaceful and One, and all that is good.”[30]
Summary
So, considering the evidence of shared death experiences (SDEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs, shared and otherwise), not to mention the more general category of death-related visions (DRVs),[31] there seems to be sufficient evidence to draw—as we have seen, many in the medical field have indeed drawn—several conclusions:
1. Human consciousness appears to survive physical death, and indeed to be experienced to a heightened degree after death (NDErs report much-improved hearing and vision—even the gaining of vision by those blind in life[32]—or even panoramic, 360-degree visual perception)
2. Death does appear to be followed by a future existence in what we may call, for lack of any better term, the Afterlife.
3. While many report a rather heavenly afterlife, there are reports of NDErs experiencing—at least initially—a more negative, one might say, hellish, existence. This is consistent with common intuitions that there are a plurality of possible afterlife destinations, and that our choices are not irrelevant thereto. As a example, one might consider the NDE of Howard Storm, whose experience was definitely of an infernal nature—until he who had never thought much of anyone but himself cried out to Jesus to save him—and that he did.[33]
4. There is a God who exceeds our ability to comprehend or categorize him.
5. This God is Love.
A (Not so) Brief Personal Conclusion
This all might seem like enough, and a good place to conclude, yet I cannot help wishing to say a few more words about…well, about certain words. For many people, it seems, the very word “God” is fraught with difficult, even uncomfortable associations. I dare say something similar happens with the traditional descriptions of God as “Father” or “King,” or even simply as a “He.” For many among us, such terms seem so undemocratic, so patriarchal. So many, it seems, have such negative impressions of kings, fathers, or even just of men in general. If the problem lies not there, it lies in the diminished connotations of “God” for so many, connotations of some great, grandfatherly bloke with a beard and a throne, who either pats us on the head and tells us to be good little boys and girls, or else thunders and rages like a petty King Lear, bitter over not receiving the adulation he thinks he deserves.
To be perfectly honest, these are attitudes with which I cannot sympathize. I have not always been the most saintly of men, it is true; but I have always been a follower of the Lord God of Israel. For me, the word “God” has never had imposed upon it from outside the negative connotations it has for some, but has drawn its meaning from within my experience of following this God and meditating upon the Church’s written record of his long walk with mankind, Israel especially. For me, true manliness and true kingship is something we could use a good deal more of—the sort of thing glimpsed, for example, in the death scene of Boromir in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. As Aragorn, son of Arathorn assures him that he has fought bravely to save the Hobbits, and has kept his honor, Boromir tells him, “I would have followed you. My captain. My king”—and the king assures him that he will not let the city of Gondor fall, “nor our people fail” (“Our people!” echoes the astonished Boromir).
Yes, for me, words like “his” and “Father” and “King” have never had negative connotations, but only ever the noblest associations. And precisely because the meaning for all these words has come from my own experience with God, I have never struggled with these faulty images which the fumblings of human thinking has imposed from outside. Oh, I have had my struggles, but they have been struggles within my relationship with God, not struggles with the idea of God. It is like the joke I once heard an old preacher tell: “My wife and I have been married for — years, and we have never considered divorce. Murder, yes—but never divorce.” Change his relationship with his wife to mine with God, and there you have it.[34]
Likewise, if someone had ever asked me, “Why do you believe in God?”, it would have been a bit like his asking “Why do you believe in your mother?” My answer for both is the same: “Because I know them.” I could give him rational reasons why he should believe in God, but I did not myself need such convincing. While an orphan might struggle to imagine what the word “mother” actually means, for a man fortunate enough to have a good mother “Mom” is a concrete personal reality, not an abstraction. So is it with me and the word “God.”
Yet, for this very reason, I can sympathize with those who say that “God” is a small word for what they experienced in death. Any person is far more in reality than their mere name, or any title they may bear or role they may play, might suggest. So much more is it so with he who is the source of all things. The first rule in thinking of God is that, as we have already used the word, he is always More. More than you can know; More than words can say; More than you can possibly imagine.[35] He can make himself known to us, but we cannot comprehend him; we cannot fathom him or count to him. “And that’s what’s driving you crazy…” I hear the voice of Will Riker say with a smile—for there is a certain type of scientific or philosophical mind which has trouble dealing with what it cannot comprehend, cannot pin down, label, and put into an equation. Yet, as we see from the testimony of those who have met him, such is God.
[1] It is a sign of how poorly educated many in the general populace have become on matters theological that Mr. Franklin’s epitaph has sometimes been cited as evidence he believed in reincarnation—rather than that very specific form of “return to the flesh” called “resurrection.”
[2] Sinbad, Son of a Preacher Man (1996).
[3] The story is that of the soldier Er, who revived after apparently having been slain in battle, and reported his experience of the afterlife.
[4] For an instance of this, read Dr. Eben Alexander’s book about his NDE, Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife. Dr. Alexander—himself a neurosurgeon, so he knows what is talking about—had an extensive adventure into another realm while his cerebral cortex was completely shut down by cerebral meningitis. The fact that the girl who guided him through this realm turned out to look just like a photo of the deceased biological sister he only learned about after his NDE is also not without its relevance.
[5] From Raymond Moody’s autobiography Paranormal, ch. 12, p. 128. He is summarizing what was found by Kenneth Ring in studying 102 separate experiencers of NDEs.
[6] Along the lines of Howard Wolowitz’s words: “Jews don’t have Hell. We have acid reflux.” (BBT 3.20, “The Spaghetti Catalyst”). He also claimed that “Jews don’t have Heaven” (BBT 5.21, “The Hawking Excitation”).
[7] On this last one: Melvin Morse reports interviewing “a young boy who nearly suffocated to death in a collapsed tunnel. He told me that he was fully conscious during the experience and that a wizard dressed in white appeared to him and told him to ‘struggle and I would live.’” (Parting Visions p. 166).
[8] An example of this is Eben Alexander’s previously noted encounter (cf. fn.3) with a young girl during his NDE. When he later learns of his previously unknown biological sister (Dr. Alexander being adopted) who died young, he recognizes her picture as a picture of the girl he had seen during his NDE.
[9] Reported in Jeffrey Long & Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife, p. 172.
[10] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 97.
[11] John Burke reports this in his book Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future that Awaits You (pp. 233-35), taking it from Nancy Evans Bush’s Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences.
[12] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 200.
[13] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 200.
[14] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 196.
[15] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 197-98.
[16] Earlier in the chapter, Long had touched on the phenomenon of Hellish NDEs, an aspect of our experience not to be ignored.
[17] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 194.
[18] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 197.
[19] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 42.
[20] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 42.
[21] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 49.
[22] The one book I know of dedicated to SDEs is Raymond Moody’s Glimpses of Eternity, from which the details given here are taken. My hypothetical example combines details from more than one SDE reported by Moody.
[23] For an example of a shared NDE, consider the story of “Karen” and the death of her grandmother as reported in Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, pp. 173-75.
[24] P. 176.
[25] From his book with Paul Perry, Parting Visions, p. 87.
[26] Morse, Foreword to The Eternal Journey: How Near-Death Experiences Illuminate Our Earthly Lives, by Craig R. Lundahl & Harold A. Widdison, p. xxiii.
[27] Morse & Perry, Parting Visions, p. 167.
[28] Morse & Perry, Parting Visions, p. 117.
[29] Morse & Perry, Parting Visions, p. 190.
[30] Long & Perry, God & the Afterlife, p. 202.
[31] This category, used by Morse, includes visions or dreams of deceased relatives experienced by those near death or in the process of dying, as well as dreams and visions of the recently departed experienced by their still-living relatives (often children or parents).
[32] For this, cf. Kenneth Ring’s Mindsight.
[33] Cf. Storm’s own book, My Descent into Death, as well as the report in John Burke, Imagine Heaven ch. 16, pp. 215ff.
[34] As to who might be killing whom in my scenario, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
[35] And yes, that echo of Obi-Wan’s last mortal words is deliberate.
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