What is afterlife

Before talking of the afterlife I would have a short talk about the pastlife of our ancestors though there is no way of knowing whether they had an afterlife. ie life after death.

The present scientific consensus is “a single human evolution from Africa”, corroborated by a study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) combined with evidence of physical anatomy of archaic specimens (Allan Wilson, Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking 1980s). There is a vast amount of evidence. Some of you might have seen the BBC2 documentary – Prehistoric Autopsy by Prof Alice Roberts on Monday, Oct 22 2012.

Young and beautiful Dr Roberts is a physical anatomist-turned evolutionist. She set out on a journey back in time to create and “come face-to-face with some of our most ancient relatives, consulting an impressive array of international experts on what we now know about the lives and lifestyles of these distant cousins. First up is the most popular of long-extinct hominids, the Neanderthal - a species separate from us but with which we all share a small percentage of DNA because of interbreeding with ours human ancestors.

There was a “Multi regional hypothesis” of human origin, such as the Mungo Man (Australia 2002) and Peking man (China 1923-27). The hypothesis was later discarded due to lack of gene (mtDNA) flow (Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sfroza et el 1994).

According to the out-of-Africa theory, every body alive today in the world, including the Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, Kabuis, Mao-Marams - all the 36 tribes (so far counted) in Manipur, have descended from Africa.

As my research was only on the Meiteis I was writing about the Meiteis only. I could not have written about other tribes as I have not done research on them. Besides, some tribal communities in Manipur were included in the research of North East Indians by a few Indian and European geneticists. They concluded that Tibeto-Burman speaking tribes were immigrants from Tibet and Myanmar (Guha 1995, Grimes 1999, Sue et al 2000).

In all these researches the Meiteis were not included as they were not regarded as tribals but an ethnic minority community and that their language is not Tibeto-Burman. Not that it matters to anyone in Manipur, whether the Meiteis came direct from Africa or other tribal groups came from the Far East. The important thing is we are all here now together in Manipur and we should strive for a peaceful coexistence.

There are 7 billion people (Out of Africa) in the world today and they, according to many religious convictions, have to go somewhere in their afterlife ie life after death. Now what is afterlife?

Recently, Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon made a claim that there is an afterlife, in the Newsweek, titled Heaven is real, on Oct 15 2012.

Dr Alexander had bacterial meningitis and had been in coma for six days until his eyes popped open on the morning of the seventh day. While in a coma, he saw “a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones” and he travelled on “a butterfly wing with a young woman with high cheekbones [not his wife], deep-blue eyes and golden brown tresses, who told him he was loved, safe and could do no wrong”.

The doctor’s experience has convinced him that an afterlife existed. He wrote: “Although I consider myself a faithful Christian I was so more in name than in actual belief. As a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.”

It was his lavish scenic vision with a sexy blue-eyed blond guide that gave away his scientific explanation and he became targeted as a nut by many people who identified him with millions of people who had such fantasy dreams while tipping on LSD. They claimed the only difference is someone tipping on acid did not get publicity in a national magazine.

Nobody knows what afterlife is – a maddeningly vague existence after our exit from this world. Nobody has been dead for quite sometime and has come back to give a lecture of his experiences at Harvard or anywhere else.

Another Dr Peter Fenwick - a leading neuropsychiatrist, who is an authority on near-death experiences, has written a book called “The Art of Dying” (2008). According to him, the evidence he has collected suggests we are more than brain function, and that something – soul or spirit or consciousness – will continue in some form or another for a while at least, and death is not a lonely or a fearful journey, but an intensely hopeful one.

Dr Fenwick, though prone to exaggerated conclusions, described his discovery “that people have mental states which are present in the absence of brain function” and that there is “the potential for a continuation of life after death”. He talked about premonitions of the dying and a dying person reporting the vision of a dead relative or spouse coming to collect him/her as “guide”- which differ according to one’s culture.

Once there was a BBC documentary, interviewing a few people who had near-death experiences in the hospital, mostly British men. They described their experience of leaving their bodies and going through a tunnel until they met someone, dressed and looked like Jesus or Jesus himself saying to them - “Go back, your time has not come” and then becoming conscious. Among them was an Indian. He could see his relatives sad and weeping by his bed. He walked away and then through a well-lit tunnel he met a man dressed all in white, telling him to go back and that his time was not up.

My mother-in-law Mary Robson, who was a nurse, was dying after a severe post-operative haemorrhage in a hospital. She was 51. Her husband was sent for and she lay under a sheet. After a while a nurse saw her struggling under the sheet and she was semi-conscious. Later on, she narrated that she went through a black tunnel and saw a light at the end of the tunnel and she came out. She was struggling because she thought she was under a shroud. She lived till 91, alone, looking after herself, having survived her husband by 12 years.

There is another book “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death experiences” (2010) by Dr Jeffrey Long, an American radiation oncologist. Mary Jo Rapini, after collapsing from a burst brain aneurysm, was hanging in a murky limbo between life and death; she was drawn through a tunnel of bright light, met her maker, and was told she must return to the land of living.

Whether the existence of an afterlife is true or not, it is a belief-system in every religion including Paganism. In many religions there is a belief that the soul exists in another world and that one’s status in the afterlife is a reward or punishment for their conduct during life.

In the theist religions (belief in the existence of a God), generally people believe some sort of afterlife awaits them when they die. Members of the non-theistic religions (those who do not believe in the existence of a God) such as Buddhism, Jainism, Zen philosophy tend to believe in an afterlife, but without reference to a God.

The atheists and agnostics do not believe in an afterlife at all. They do not believe they walk as souls all over the places. The Sadducees – an ancient Jewish sect generally believed that there was a God but no afterlife.

There are various views of afterlife all over the world. Essentially, an individual after death lives on as the soul which carries with it a personal identity in contrast to the belief in eternal oblivion after death. In another popular view, the individual may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again, with no memory of what they have done in the previous birth.

My educated feeling is that an afterlife is an imaginative hypothesis formed by ancient religious people to have a lineage with God, before the advent of science.

Our brain is our mind. Until the brain is dead shown by an electroencephalogram (EEG) the brain is active despite no pulse, no heart-beat. The mind wanders. Most of the interviewees in the discussion were people whose heart suddenly stopped (cardiac arrest) - an electrical conduction fault of the heart. Such heart often reverts to normal spontaneously or with cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

When my eldest brother was dying with no pulse, very feeble heart beat and unconscious, I had to leave for London. With tears in my eyes I said (Tada I chatlage) goodbye to him. To my surprise, he answered back (phare phare) goodbye. He died two days after. It showed that his brain was working and it is anybody’s guess what sort of visions and thoughts he might have had for his near and dear ones.

Finally, whether one believes an afterlife exists or not, if it is a statement of belief, no burden of proof is required. But if one is going to argue the existence of an afterlife as a matter of truth, the burden of proof falls on him. At the moment there is no credible proof for an afterlife.

The writer is based in the UK
Email: imsingh@onetel.com
Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk
Corrigendum
Please refer to the article "How to bargain from a position of power" the year 1847 as appeared in para 13 should read as 1874.

11-Nov-2012 / 12:48 AM / Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh / 2 Comments