There Is Life After Death. Tom Harpur

In the spring issue (1990) of the Oxford University magazine Oxford Today, Peter Snow reports that the Alister Hardy Centre has recorded thousands of mystical experiences by ordinary Britons as well. Visions, out-of-body “trips” and transcendental dreams have been coded for computerization by the centre. One staggering statistic emerges, he says: Nearly 40 percent of the British population will have a profound religious or spiritual experience at some time in their lives. “Clearly there is something in us struggling to get out,” Snow concludes.

      Colin Wilson cites similar results obtained by Dr. Karlis Osis of the New York Parapsychology Foundation. In 1960, Osis sent out ten thousand questionnaires to nurses asking about their patients’ deathbed visions, and found that in a large number of cases, at the moment of death, the dying believed they saw a dead relative. The same discovery was made, Wilson relates, when Sir William Barrett, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, was gathering materials for his own book, Death-bed Visions. For a modern and insightful look at how the dying often communicate their feelings, read Final Gifts, written by two hospice nurses, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley.

      Before reading further, I want to make one thing clear. Although I was raised in an intensely religious home and have not just studied but have experienced the spiritual dimension of reality all my life, I have never had what I would label a paranormal experience of any kind. One doesn’t go around looking for such experiences. They either happen or they don’t and, in my case, it seems they don’t. In other words, there is no hidden agenda here.

      At the same time, however, when I was a parish priest I’ve had first-hand encounters with some seemingly extraordinary phenomena. Several times when attending the deathbed of a parishioner, something was either said or observed to lead me to the conclusion that the dying person had had a vision or foretaste of a glory to come. One such incident stands out in my memory and illustrates what I mean.

      One day in June, many years ago, I was leaving the hospital closest to my church, St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines, in West Hill, Ontario, when a young couple stopped me in the entrance. They had spotted my Roman collar and, not knowing a minister themselves, suddenly asked me for help. They said the woman’s mother was in a coma suffering from a terminal illness. They asked me whether I would mind paying her a brief visit. We went up to a private room, one of those reserved for the dying, and I saw the patient, a woman in her mid-sixties, lying unconscious under an oxygen tent. I said a brief prayer at her bedside and, because I had learned that even when in a coma our sense of hearing can often still be operative, I read a brief passage to her from the New Testament. It is the one that speaks eloquently of the fact that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God, not even death itself. Then I put my hand through the opening of the tent and placed it on her forehead as I said a final blessing.

      Two days later, the daughter called me to say that, to their complete surprise, her mother had regained consciousness for a brief time the following day and had told her in great detail about my visit. “She said she heard the prayer and the reading and that suddenly her whole being had been flooded with an incredible sense of light,” the daughter said. “It seemed to envelop her and give her an assurance of wholeness and peace she had never known before. She had a kind of radiance about her face that was quite wonderful to see.” The dying woman relapsed into the coma shortly afterwards and died peacefully later that evening.

      Since I had been only too aware of my own limitations on that occasion—it had been a very hot day, I was tired and looking forward to getting home and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do for her at that point—I am certain that whatever happened had absolutely nothing to do with me. Yet I know that something strange and spiritually healing did occur.

      Because of my university background in the classics, particularly in ancient history, coupled with my training in journalism, I have always been reluctant to accept things on the basis of secondhand evidence. A couple of times over the past few years, most recently in June 2005, I decided to test the life-after-death-poll experiences with the readers of my syndicated Toronto Star column. In a brief footnote to the column, I said simply: “I am doing some research and would like to hear from you on the following: Do you believe in life beyond death? Have you ever experienced anything that amounts to solid evidence for this as far as you yourself are concerned? Please write briefly . . .”⁵ I was quite aware it was not a scientific poll. It wasn’t intended to be; there was little point in duplicating the many that had already been done by qualified researchers. What I wanted was a live sample, as it were, to get the flavour or feel of this phenomenon for myself.

      I received hundreds of letters in answer to my requests. While some were brief, most ran to several pages. They came from people of all ages, all walks of life and from various regions of the country. Roughly 3 percent of the respondents said they did not believe in a life after death. Typical of these was the man from a small Ontario town who concluded his articulate rebuttal with the words “What is after your life is what was before your life—nothing. Sorry, but at times the truth hurts.” Another skeptic wrote as follows: “I find it sad that so many people’s grip on their life is so precarious that rather than face the bleak truth of their mortality they will embrace any preposterous delusion promising them immortality.” To cover all his bases, though, he added, “In any case, from what I have read and heard of heaven I am sure I would find it incredibly boring and unpleasant existing under the critical eye of a humourless dictator whose compassion is all too capricious and fleeting.”

      For illumination on how paranormal experiences that are not properly understood can be a risk to one’s mental and emotional health, I refer the reader to Dr. Yvonne Kason’s book, A Farther Shore, mentioned in the bibliography. Dr. Kason discusses how millions of people today who have undergone religious experiences are greatly at risk of slipping into mental illnesses or of being misdiagnosed because psychiatrists and clergy tend to be the least skilled at helping people in spiritual crisis.

      The overwhelming majority, however, obviously wrote because they now feel positively about a future life. Several themes or characteristics stood out sharply as I read and reread what they had to say. Most of those who described one or more mystical experiences involving some form of “contact” with a deceased person said that this was the first time they had ever told anyone else about it. They expressed sincere relief not only at the opportunity to share this with somebody else, but also at learning that they were not going to be looked upon as eccentric or even deranged for talking about such intimate and unusual psychic happenings. I was also greatly impressed by the number of respondents who prefaced their story with the observation that they had not previously held strong convictions about an afterlife. In other words, it seems that it was an unusual experience that awakened belief in them, rather than the other way around. Greeley’s research has uncovered the same phenomenon. Closely related to this was the way in which the psychic event, in most instances, came unexpectedly as to place and time, as well as content. There were certain similarities, on the one hand, but there was a striking range of variables on the other. To tell the truth, I was surprised by the originality or creativity involved in whatever it is that is going on at such times. As you will see, people report a wide variety of visual and auditory experiences. At times, a fragrance is the vehicle; often electrical disturbances seem to occur with no explanation.

      One final word about the methodology. The content of the letters described several stages. The process was admittedly a subjective one. While nearly every letter was interesting, some were obviously more interesting than others. All I can say is that, using whatever critical powers I have, I gradually sifted them down to a final score or so. The overriding criterion was believability: Does this account have about it the ring of authenticity and of truth-telling? This is what Colin Wilson refers to as the “boggle threshold”—how far do we feel or intuit we can trust the person concerned? The credibility of any witness, whether in a court of law or elsewhere, has much to do with how sane and balanced they seem in other ways. None of this, of course, makes any prejudgment about the status of such reports as hard evidence of a life to come. More on that later.

      • M.B. is a widow whose husband died in 1984. They were “always very happy together” and his death has left a great void. She writes: “I have had the feeling many times that my husband was there in the room with me, but it is