The afterlife

What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? As one ages, one of the interesting thoughts that occupy ones mind is what is there in the afterlife? Questions range from what happens to a person's essence after death to more mundane ones like “What will I do all day”? “Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?”

The notion that there is a life after this one on Earth is a widely held belief that predates recorded history. While cultures like that of the ancient Egyptians believed existence continued in "the Land of the Dead," the more modern Christian beliefs offer an afterlife in Heaven as a reward or in Hell as a punishment. Even more recent ideas suggest that life might continue in another dimension or plane of existence - perhaps even on another planet. Whatever the ideas, it's clear that humans want to believe - perhaps even need to believe in life after death.

Mary Roach, in her book “Spook”, examines an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die.

She starts her visit in the outskirts of Delhi chasing a claim of reincarnation by a five year old who could remember his past life in great details. What Mary did was to find the person who had recently died whose life mirrored the claims of the five year old. There were enough similarities to provoke research but not enough to provide proof.

In her search she then goes on to a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. She goes to the University of Arizona and meets with mediums currently working today; she tries her hand at telecommunication with the dead in the forests of California; and she even tries her hand at getting in touch with her own inner medium at a school in England. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.

Roach is dogged in her approach as she examines each phenomenon through the lens of scientific fact. In the end, however, she usually walks away skeptical.

A completely different approach is taken by David Eaglemen in his new book “Sum”. Since science could not prove the contours of the afterlife, whether it was the 72 virgins waiting in line or St Peter with a tablet as a gatekeeper, he felt free to imagine alternate afterlives that could be true.

In one afterlife, you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally structured her universe with a binary categorization of good and evil. But She soon realized that humans could be good in many ways and evil men may have a lot of good in them. How to categorize them? A computer program to weigh all in balance and give a verdict seemed so, well, automated. So She decided She would grant everyone a place in heaven and that everyone would be treated equally. So was born true equality. But the communists were baffled because they have achieved true equality but only with the help of a God they don’t believe in. The meritocrats are abashed because they are stuck for eternity in an incentive less system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage and the liberals have no downtrodden to promote. The only thing everyone is now agreed upon is that now they are all truly in Hell.

In the metamorphosis afterlife, you find that there are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. And all wait in the lobby until the third death. Some do not want to be remembered for the sins they committed in the past. But that is “the curse of the room, since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become what they want us to be.”

In Mirror afterlife, you find that you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you were at seeing yourself and so navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives helped you guide your life. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears and fingertips of others. But in this afterlife, all of the people with whom you have ever come into contact are gathered and all their mirrors are held up in front of you so that you can see yourself clearly for the first time.

In one afterlife, you relive all your experiences in carefully categorized groups: sleeping 30 years straight, sitting five months on the toilet, spending 200 days in the shower, and so forth. In another, you can be whatever you want, including a horse that forgets its original humanity. There are afterlives where you meet God, in one a God who endlessly reads Frankenstein, lamenting the tragic lot of creators; in another a God, female this time, in whose immense corpus earth is a mere cell. In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other peoples dreams. Or that afterlife contains only those people you remember or that the hereafter includes thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into all your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been. Perhaps we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers or we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together. There are a host of other possibilities…

What both these books offer is an interesting insight into one of the most perplexing conundrum of human life- what happens in the after life. But neither offers any scientific evidence to bolster their viewpoint. The journey however is a delight as both are delightful raconteurs.

A final thought from Mary Roach: “ We live life as though we'll always be around, as though there'll always be a tomorrow in which we can do the things we dream about and say the things we want to say to our loved ones. I would encourage people to get real about their limited time on earth. Let the specter of death inspire you to start doing the things that matter to you. Just, you know, on the off chance that there is no afterlife in which to do them.”