An education which leaves untouched the entire region of transcendental thought is an education which has nothing important to say about the meaning of human life.
Geiger, The Long Way Home, p. 3, 1963.
Many people fear death. Why? Is it due to our lack of understanding of its purpose in our lives, of its inevitability? Or is it because we think when we die, we cease to exist and simply can’t abide the thought? And is this, I wonder, where our fascination and curiosity about ghosts, stories of hauntings and things that go bump in the night might come from? Is there a homing beacon within us drawing us to such accounts, not just because ghost stories reflect cultural and social norms and values, but because something deep within us intrinsically knows our existence continues beyond physical death, and that somehow, we seek validation through such accounts?
The question is, are human beings more than their body?
I believe the phenomena of after-death contact suggests they are. Is there another reality beyond what is known and experienced through the physical senses? I believe after-death contact suggests there is. Does existence continue in this reality, albeit in different form? I believe after-death contact suggests it does. And are those from this reality able to positively influence the lives of the living? I believe after-death contact suggests they can. Is physical death the passageway through which human beings pass to reach “the other side”? I believe after-death contact suggests it is. Is death merely a biomedical phenomenon for the individual, or, because it is a passageway to another existence, something more meaningful? I believe after-death contact suggests it is.
After-death contact, like other other-worldly phenomena, is difficult to explain. Acknowledging and accepting its existence is one matter, but truly understanding the conditions which bring about its occurrence is another. And while biographical self-accounts not only challenge and invite us to consider notions of our own mortality, the afterlife and our ongoing existence after death, it is my hope that people will draw their own conclusions and come to their own decisions.
After-death contact isn’t just “other-worldly phenomena” however. It is unique because it brings hope. I like to see this as the hope that despite the pain and suffering we experience in life when someone we love, or who is close to us dies, that something fundamentally good is at work in people’s lives of an uplifting nature. And though stories of such encounters between the living and the dead can be challenging, the lived experience of such events educate us with the realisation that we don’t “die” when we die.
And because after-death contact, as an idea, extends an invitation to consider life from an alternate transpersonal or spiritual perspective, it brings with it the hope that human beings can grow beyond what they think they are at a given moment in time. Remember too, when after-death contact occurs it is the deceased who are reaching out to the living, not the other way around. Importantly, what is also suggested by these encounters is that death is not an impermeable barrier between the living and the dead.
The appearance and reappearance of the dead in our lives, of our loved ones, evidences the fact that the deceased can exist in two worlds simultaneously, their world and ours. Even if their appearance in our world is only brief, it is enough because it’s ramifications are so powerful.
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