What lies beyond?

At a get together this weekend with friends, talk shifted towards ghost stories and life after death over some really scrumptious steaks. While everyone was putting their point of view forward and sharing their experiences, I for one shared my strong  belief in rebirth and the fact that the soul never dies. 

The conversation on these topics always tends to get stuck at a point where our scientific teaching comes in conflict with claims which are more of hearsay and do not have evidence to support them.

In my process of discovering more about life after death theories and authentic experiences shared by people about this, the book which really influenced me was that written by Dr Brian Weiss. 

Dr Brian Weiss

Dr Brian Weiss is a Psychiatrist practicing in USA and as a scientist he was only a believer of evidence based medicine till a point. His belief started to change when all the allopathic regimens written in text books failed to treat one of his patients who was suffering from depression and phobias. He decided to try an old technique of hypnosis on this patient as a last resort and was surprised to see that every time he tried hypnosis on the patient, she drifted back to a previous lifetime recounting experiences of that lifetime.

He was overwhelmed by what he experienced firsth and was compelled to write a book on the same which he titled, 'Many Masters Many Lives'.

The book strengthen my belief in 'life after death' and it helped that it was written by a doctor who was a man of science.

I have come across other evidences since then which support this claim out of which a study conducted by

Southampton University is another interesting piece of evidence.

 Scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines which is normally not possible for a man who is unconscious.

Another interesting report is that submitted by Dr. Ian Stevenson who also set up the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a research unit of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

He studied and  wrote about these 20 cases of rebirth. He set up a network of volunteers to find these spontaneous past life recall cases as soon as the children began to speak of them. He then would carefully question both the family of the living child and the family of the deceased to ensure that they had no contact and that no information would be passed between them. He would obtain detailed information about the deceased, including information not fully known to anyone involved such as details of the will, that he would use to verify that the child actually did know the information required.

He saw some parralles in  these cases and noted that the case usually starts when a small child of two to four years of age begins talking to his parents or siblings of a life he led in another time and place. The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of the life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.

To me the theory on life after death is the only theory which makes sense to this life on earth. The more I read about these interesting studies the more my belief in this theory is strengthened.