PSYCHOLOGY
‘Afterlife’- a Hoax or a Verity
Is death the ultimate cessation of our consciousness?
Is death the ultimate conclusion to our consciousness? Or there does persist a “you” beyond one's cessation. Well, don't we all like to know the answer to that? People have been indoctrinated to apprehend death as an endpoint to life throughout time and culture. But progression in resuscitation science, research, and futuristic medicine technology have challenged this taboo.
If there is one truth in the entire existence that you could indubitably rely on, that is death. “Death is Inevitable”. No animate being can skip that. Whether one is an agnostic, theist, religious, spiritual, catholic, satanist, ancient, you get the idea.
Defining death
Well, it is very arduous to define this indecipherable conundrum. Antecedently, a lack of pulse and breath was considered as the standard sign of death. but everything changed with progression in medical sciences in the late 1960s. Technology and machinery accrued the propensity to perform life-changing tasks like aerating lungs and pumping blood through a person’s arteries and veins. In 1968 Harvard Medical School recommended that brain death should be the standard definition for death. And it is the legal definition of death to date. According to NHS
Brain death (or brain stem death) is when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain functions. This means they will not regain consciousness or be able to breathe without support.
The Posthumous
The decomposition of the body commences just minutes after death. This process is termed as ‘autolysis’. Swiftly after the heart stops beating, enzymes from the body start to rupture cells, which secrets gasses along the way that causes the body to inflate like a balloon. Body temperature drops until it matches the temperature of the surrounding. As organs initiate decaying, blood vessels collapse, giving the skin a purple color tone. Bodily fluids eventually spill out from every cranny located in the body. Cells get deprived of their energy source and the protein filaments. This causes the muscles to become stiff and locks the joints.
Near-Death Experiences
Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are an unfathomable personal experience concomitant with death or impending death. They are triggered during peculiar life-threatening episodes when the body is contused by point-blank trauma, heart-attack, asphyxia, and so on. About one in 10 patients with cardiac arrest under infirmary life support experiences such an episode. Hundreds of survivors of these acutely distressing parlous circumstances tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and encountering a realm beyond the light, unconstrained by the boundaries of space and time.
Across time, in the scientific lingo neuroscience research suggests that NDEs are a result of physical changes in a traumatized brain. Some transcendental and religious dogmas about an afterlife include illustrations similar to NDEs. In specific religions, there are terms like “purgatory” and “limbo” that are mentioned to be the space where people who experience NDEs visit. The idea of purgatory is that after a person dies they need to be purged of their sins before they are accepted into heaven. Whereas Limbo is known to be the bridge between heaven and hell where those souls dwell who is not eligible to either one of them. Infants, who haven't committed any sin and neither have done any sanctified deed are believed to dwell on limbo after their cessation.
Consciousness
What is even consciousness? Well, there is one thing that I know for sure, and that is — “Consciousness is beyond our realm of comprehension”. We all know that it is a state of being aware or sense of our surroundings. This awareness is subjective and unique to us. Another thing we all are cognizant of is that our consciousness is the reflection of our brain. Our brain is remarkable and is an extremely complex organ in our body. We surely have studied brain activities; but the thing is that we have never had an explanation of how this results in emotions, feelings, and sentiments. How come the transmission of mere chemicals and electrical signals can engender emotion and feelings.
The notion of consciousness has vexed philosophers and scientists for ages. The principal reason for that is consciousness being imperceivable. No matter how advanced and futuristic tech do you possess, you would never be able to tell — what is going on a person's mind? This is probably why there doesn't exist a reliable elucidation of the connection between consciousness and brain activity.
The Garden & The Hellfire
Traditionally known as “heaven and hell” are the terms which are religiously believed to be the spaces where the human soul ventures after cessation. Heaven is said to be a religious and transcendent supernatural place where supreme beings such as gods and angels reside. Whereas Hell is a space in which evil souls are dumped to enforce eternal torture as a result of their deed done in their lifespan. Across cultures and religions, the notion of heaven and hell is divergent. They are also termed differently in different religions :
- Heaven in Christianity and Judaism, Mokshya in Hinduism, Nirvana in Buddhism, Paradise in Islam.
- Hell in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Hades in Greek, Samsara in Hinduism, The Bardo in Buddhism.
As I am Hindu, I think it is pretty mandatory for me to explain about Mokshya and Samsara. In Hindu mythology, it is stated that our bodies only die but our soul doesn't. After we are dead, our soul ventures into the unknown and incorporates a new body. As our consciousness is connected with our brain, the “you in us just disintegrates. So, this is how the “circle of life” is depicted in Bhagavad Gita — Holy Book of India. All of the beings just put on a new of body after the old body dies.
The Afterlife Experiment
Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona wrote a book in 2002 called “The Afterlife Experiments”. In the experiments, he used mediums and sitters (a person who had very near relationships with dead human beings ) to analyze whether or not the afterlife exists. The mediums persistently showed specific facts and names of the sitters’ departed family members and relatives that the skeptics were not able to give an explanation as fraud, cold reading, or lucky guesses. For the 1st sitter, the outcomes showed that the mediums had ranged from being 77% to 95% accurate. The average hit rate became 83%. The hit rate for the 2nd sitter came out to be just like that of the 1st sitter. To rule out lucky guesses he set up a group of sixty-eight college students from the University of Arizona. The hit charge of the control group became simply 36 percentage.
The Closure
Some people believe that death is not a full stop, but a comma in the story of life. We haven’t had the grasp of the mechanism of consciousness yet. Yes, I do believe that the entity we denote the mind or consciousness may not be produced by the brain. And there exists a possibility that maybe there’s another layer of reality that we haven’t unraveled in front of us yet which is fundamentally beyond what we know of the brain, and which ascertains our reality. Consciousness could be an unexplored scientific entity that may not necessarily be fabricated by the synaptic activity of the brain.
Life and death are laws of nature. Just the passage of time. Naturally, humans have lived to the maximum potential of 120 years. Everything that is animate has the tendency to die, either naturally through the failure of your limbs by the passage of time, or physically through the loss of blood such as getting murdered or drowning. Death is a phase of a changing universe.
P.S — Here is an article of Seventeen Case-Studies of the Near-Death Experienced persons.
