Nick Cook* writes in his 2021 essay entitled "What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?"
This, however, being the movies, there’s a catch. Carter is supposed to be dead – an angelic messenger sent to transport him to the ‘Other World’ at the moment he jumped had been unable to locate him in the thick English fog. Carter’s reprieve, though, is temporary – the matter of his survival, we are told, needs to be corrected. He is given three days to prepare his appeal to a heavenly court that will decide his fate: whether or not he can remain on Earth with June. The case against him is that the law of the universe is immutable – that to maintain its order, he has to die. In his defence, Carter maintains that the Other World’s clerical error has changed the rules of the game – he and June have fallen in love; his future, he says, now lies with her.
1 A Matter of Life and Death was released in the USA as Stairway to Heaven. It was directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starred David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter and Marius Goring.
Why choose this fictional story to open an essay on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death? The answer, as I hope will become clear, is manyfold. In the film, Carter’s friend and doctor, Frank Reeves, who has been helping to treat his increasingly debilitating visions as he approaches his heavenly trial, becomes his counsel in the Other World – this after Frank’s death in a motorbike accident on the night of the operation to stem bleeding from the lesions in Carter’s brain - lesions his surgeons believe to be killing him. Reeves, unlike the towering figures from history who are offered to Carter as his defence counsel – all of whom Carter rejects - is untrained in the ways of the courts. How, then, will Reeves defeat the infallible logic of the Other World’s petition, which is to see universal order restored?
In the pages to come, we will meet an extensive dramatis personae of witnesses and expert witnesses who will present proof beyond a reasonable doubt that our consciousness persists after bodily death. It is my intention for these witnesses to speak for themselves – and for the evidence to do likewise. If I have a role in the proceedings, it is to tap the spirit of Dr Reeves, because the question in the title – the question of our consciousness’s survival when we die - couldn’t be more timely.
Like Carter, we are, I will argue, approaching a moment of crisis - a fork in the evolutionary road. One direction leads toward a ‘transhumanist’ future, in which advances in computing, nanotech and medicine will permit the fulfilment of a materialist desire to extend our bodily survival to its absolute limit. In the other, lies what might be termed an ‘exoconscious2 future’ in which we learn to explore – and, ultimately, to unlock – capabilities within us increasingly ignored in the hallways of science since the 17th century - that speak to the potential of humans to be so much more than they – we - currently are. This latter journey is one that we can make only by travelling inward – a direction that is presently anathema to science. Yet, throughout this essay, the subjective experience will be called frequently to the witness stand as being not just relevant to the case for ‘survival’, but critical to it.
2 A term coined by Rebecca Hardcastle Wright, PhD, to denote the study of extraterrestrial dimensions of human consciousness.
I am a rationalist by nature – trained professionally in both the arts and the sciences. As a young journalist working for a trade publication3 that served a professional readership interested in technology and technology development, I was fortunate to have been mentored by other trade journalists who thought and analysed critically – there was no room in the business I had entered for sentiment or woolly-minded thinking: we were, I was told, all about the hard facts of science and engineering.
But there is one facet of journalism (of whatever stripe) that no mentor can ever teach: to pursue ‘the story’ you have to have curiosity. Everyone, to some degree, is curious, but in journalism, especially investigative journalism, you have to have good, liberal doses of it. I acquired mine, I am certain, from my father, an engineer and inventor. Long before I understood anything about the workings of the brain, my neural pathways were likely encoded by our discussions about the natural world and, as my father saw it, its inherent orderliness.
Which is why one particular story he used to tell troubled me – because it troubled him: the events he described surrounding the death of his mother, my grandmother, when my sister and I were very young.
My grandmother, Pamela, was an American who survived the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The only child of divorcees, she journeyed with her mother to England, where she eventually married my grandfather, an old school Englishman. My father and his brothers grew up in a large country house in the south-east of England, where my passionate, hot-blooded, highly literate, and curious grandmother, found herself encircled by the buttoned-down, stiff upper lip insouciance of the English class system. This was especially pronounced, post- World War 1, in the so-called Home Counties that surround London.
3 Jane’s Defence Weekly, for which I was Aerospace Editor from 1987 to 2005.
When she died, at the (even then) comparatively young age of 67 during what should have been a routine operation, my father spent the next several days in the family home with my grandfather, who had been especially affected by her sudden death.
To begin with, the signs of Pam’s presence were barely noticeable – during the small hours, clacks of a broom against pieces of furniture were audible in the attic above my father’s bedroom. Sweeping the attic was what she had done during persistent bouts of insomnia, but my father was able to put down what he thought he’d heard to grief and imagination. Lights turning off and on elicited a similar response. What neither he nor my grandfather could ignore, however, was the moment when, as they were discussing a part of her will whose interpretation they differed upon, a heavy lamp on the table beside them lifted six inches into the air and rocked from side-to- side, before settling back on to the table with a thump.
This being a household imbued with a requirement to display indifference to anything out of the ordinary, my father and grandfather looked at each other, but never said a word – indeed, they never spoke about it at all (although they did move on from the contentious clause of the will). But my father did speak to my sister, my brother and me about it – frequently – and we knew that he was not a man to make things up.
As an engineer, he wanted to know how energy had been transferred to that lamp apparently from nowhere. The bigger question – the matter of the energy’s connection to a surviving consciousness – was placed to one side. For me, too, the story remained little more than a tale to tell friends on dark nights, until, some years into my journalistic career, when I found myself researching material for what eventually turned into a book about anomalous science.
That experience was salutary – what I
saw as a trail of evidence, my colleagues saw as a fool’s errand. This exposed
me to a pleasure/pain principle that has permeated both, I am ashamed to say,
my former profession, and, to an equal, if not even greater extent, the
conservative hallways of science.
*Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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