...and actually all things involved....meaning, I have these conversations with people I work with and my boss and another co-worker in particular writes EVERYTHING off as just being in people's minds. That the mind is strong enough to create all of these things that are considered "paranormal". Like the idea that mediums exist, or ghosts, or the ability to experience the Afterlife or OOBE is all just the power of the mind to create these things as false reality...even if they do exist. So yes, the Afterlife might exist, but they believe that people claiming to go there or speak to people in the Afterlife is just the strength of the human ming and NOT REAL...which of course makes me unconfortable because I think that is a cop out.

But to play the role of the person who is seeking a higher definition of these things and their meanings, how can you counter an argument like that with FACTS or info that can't be written off as "fake" or "fantasy". I kind of had this talk briefly with Gordon and he enlightened me, but I wanted to get deeper in this and ask people's opinions here....how do you know that everything you do is not just "in your head"...and I will add more once I get some responses, if any....thanks.

-JG

Hi JG,

I also have tendencies towards skepticism.  But I have found quite a few examples of hard evidence supporting claims of an afterlife, NDEs, OBEs, etc.  This helps to overpower my skeptical mind that holds me back from having full belief in the supernatural.

One good example of such evidence is the case of Pam Reynolds.  She had an NDE during brain surgery in which her brain had been drained of blood and there was no electrical activity recorded in any part of her brain.  Unless she is lying, it seems to me her experience is pretty close to proof that human consciousness transcends the brain.  http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html

Another reason I believe in an afterlife is because of the resurrection of Jesus.  The Bible contains eyewitness testimony of various people who claimed to see Jesus after he died on the cross.  Many of these people died for their belief, so strongly did they believe Jesus really was still alive.  Also, the Shroud of Turin seems to provide scientific evidence that Jesus really did rise from the grave.  Scientists have not been able to explain this image of a man on an ancient cloth except by the hypothesis that it was the historical Jesus whose body dematerialized into light energy, imprinting the image on the burial cloth -- in other words, some form of resurrection or transition from physical matter into an astral body.  There is all kinds of hard scientific evidence linking the Shroud to Jesus.  The latest finding is that the carbon dating test that supposedly showed the Shroud to be medieval was bogus, because the sample of cloth taken was a medieval repair patch, not the original cloth.  This study has been reported in the news recently.  For more information on the Shroud of Turin, see the excellent website of Barrie Schwortz, a Jewish scientist who has examined the Shroud himself and believes it is really the cloth used to wrap the body of Jesus!  http://www.shroud.com

It is natural to have some skepticism, but the problem is when people refuse even to consider the evidence for phenomena that transcend our ordinary view of reality.  There is a lot of evidence out there, if we are willing to look for it and study it.

Freebird

Hi JG - I do clinical past life work with meditation and hypnosis, essentially a parallel to Bruce's work. In regression people often recall death by saying, "I've become everything", or "I'm like a drop of water in a bucket. I'm still the drop, but I' also the entire bucket."  One inference is that we simply are no longer restrained by the confines of a body. This is not abnormal, your influence carries your life forces into the world, so that your context is a mirror of your inner self. At death it seems that we become a holomorphism, distributed as one with all parts of the environment. Nothing actually changes except that your identity is no longer restrained within a shell, and everything continues that is not bound up in a local activity, nor self-contradictory. (These ideas work better and are more clear as math expressions showing conservation of nominal definitions in entropy state space.) The various "locations" in the spirit world are states intermediate between localized (earth-bound) and distributed (holomorphic) envisioned appropriately for those working there. This explains why the collective environment, like coffee pots, electrical wiring, creaking houses, magnetic fields on moving recording tapes etc, reflect influences of restless spirits - the spirits are, at least for the moment, influencing parts of the context over which their nature has been spread. You can try this out for yourself with Bruce's methods directly, or if you meditate, get a long resonating tube and focus your attention on its resonances for at least 30 minutes (to allow mental state change) with the ocean or outside air echoes in it, while sending a sense of love and oneness to loved ones in spirit. As you go into meditation and the mind empties of everything except love and oneness, you'll start to hear voices etc. It's a crutch, and imperfect, and it requires full focus. In the 1960's we found some OTC chemicals that enhanced the effect, but they open the door to psychic flies and other stuff, so I advise not.
- dave

How about indirect proof?  From high school science isn't there something about nothing just ceases to exist, just changes form; i.e. solid to liquid or gas.  How about the wierd, wonderful & hard to grasp world of quantum physics?  There is scientific proof  that stuff exists although we can't see or touch it directly.   How about that nothing else makes sense?  Scores of innocent people being wiped out by natural disasters, horrific accidents, serial killers, bad things happening to good people, etc. don't make sense unless the afterlife, karmic principles, etc. experienced by hordes of sincere people is true.  The alternative is to believe that all these things are random meaningless events.  Is it  scientific to believe  that life is a series of random meaningless events?