For folks over 70: realities of our coming afterlife

 Two windows into what happens after ordinary mundane death:

(1) real ghost stories; but

(2) VERY important aspects we miss if we think that is our whole story

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1. GHOST STORIES

A retired top executive from the computer industry, who previously played a major role in the management of our local Quaker Meeting, recently called me by Zoom to talk about many subjects. He mentioned two things relevant to this topic:

(1) "I have been visited by a whole lot of ghosts, right here in my study. My wife says she cannot see them, but we all know I am still of clear mind. What do you think?"

(2) "That huge picture on the wall behind you, what is its story?"

Back at the time of William James, before the rise of  modern quantitative parapsychology (due to Rhine of Duke?), there were many very honest, intense and sincere groups working hard to understand PSI in a more scientific way than older traditions. I recommended my friend to read or learn about the classic book, Phantasms of the Living.

"First thing that you need to know is that what you see might be a projection from a LIVING person, not a ghost or spirit body or anything like that." Many traditions talk about "astral projection" rather than "astral travel."  What you see is NOT any kind of real body, but a projection of someone's mind. That someone might be alive or might be dead.

But yes, the story is tricky because so MANY older people suffer from Cognitive Decline, and the fraction who say they see ghosts increase at the same time. Science knows amazingly little about how elder cognitive decline actually works; when we age past 70, we are well advised to learn what science CAN tell us, limited as it is. Hameroff's conference in 2018 -- maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n941JWmT_xQ -- included a great session describing research trying to understand the links between cognitive decline and anesthesia; from that, I concluded we should avoid a need for anesthesia in any way we reasonably can. I HAVE seen people who showed cognitive decline after an operation which could have been avoided. One of my neighbors who experienced that learned that there are low level infections usually in hospitals  which few doctors know about which CAN be treated, but usually are not. And then Bredesen has great books on other aspects we should know about. On the positive side, I have seen reference to blueberry juice and mental stimulation in very serious technical literature, to stimulate production and use of new stem cells which can reverse the direction.

And so: GIVEN that "seeing ghosts" by older people can be explained away so easily, why should we believe such things?

First, it is NOT ONLY older people, but let me not elaborate. So MANY other people in our Quaker meeting have discussed such experiences, one of whom successfully created a new school and still teaches teachers skillfully in big Zoom classes!

Second... I told my friend: "I have seen the other side of this." 

Buried deep in http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm is the link:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html

where I mention my OWN experiments with "astral travel," mainly back in the 1970s,

echoed only in (veridical) dreams after that.

I certainly remember floating into rooms where one or even a few people, generally older, could actually see me. I communicated with them by smiles and other such body language, even as people around them seemed utterly puzzled or even disgusted. The people who could see seemed to have a kind of whitish glow about them, and yes, they saw enough of me that we COULD interact.

"What were you trying to tell them?" My friend asked. Nothing special. I do not even know what drew me to that particular place at that time... Or at other times, it would be just a side effect of my going somewhere else or answering a question on MY mind. 

That picture behind me was a huge picture of my father, Walter J. Werbos, who actually taught a course once (pro bono) at Wharton on marketing and public relations, and may be embarrassed now about one of his students who appropriated his way of signing the "J" with a great flourish. 

My father gave up Catholicism when he was young, probably due to abuses and distortions he ran across, or maybe due to lack of sheer justification in the DETAILS of what the church teaches now. Before 1967, when experience FORCED me to accept what I now call PSI (the other side of our minds and lives), I assumed he was probably a solid German technological atheist as I was. But later, when I confessed to him how my views had changed, he just smiled and said: "We wondered how long it would take for you to grow up." No, it wasn't just my half wild Irish Druid Catholic mother... it was the solid Germanic and industry side even more!!!

But my father was quite insistent he did NOT want a traditional Catholic funeral (as HIS mother had had), with a body and a viewing and all that. "When you die, you are gone. The body should be given to science. Don't waste money, and don't waste what's left."

When my brother and sister and I met at his house in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, when the time came to implement his wishes and discuss his estate, I insisted on sleeping in his bed that night. "WHAT?" they asked. A friend of my sister even offered for me to stay in her house, and I was actually VERY attracted to her at times, but most people would ask: "Aren't you afraid of seeing a ghost?" My reply: "If my father is ready to talk to me, I really would not wish to miss the hope of learning what he might tell me, of this life or beyond." (I have known many Asians who would fully appreciate this and have said much more to me.) 

Sadly, I did not see or hear from any ghost. But I DID have an "assumption dream," which is explained in that blog post above. (I hope I cited Eisenbud https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=mpsa.006.0065a ). Just as living people may "see a ghost", can a ghost see them? I first saw through my father's eyes at his Catholic memorial service (arranged by my family), where he was a little frustrated at seeing "through" the eyes of exactly that big picture which hangs behind me in my study now, which they used to represent him at the service. He did not ask or will or desire to be there, but the many people at the service looked at this picture and thought of him, and that "puled him in." (Did the ghost come to visit YOU, or did YOU call the ghost? PLEASE CONSIDER WHOM YOU CALL!!)

And then later, he travelled to the medical school place where they sent his body (prior to some kind of cremation later, though we never saw the ashes). And yes, THEY focused on the person they imagined they saw, and he had to put up with that for awhile. A short while, however, and ... 

2. NO WE DO NOT JUST GO TO HEAVEN OR HELL OR THE ASTRAL PLANE OR EVEN SHEER NOTHINGNESS

To us as normal humans, it seems easiest to imagine that nothing much really changes after mundane death, even if we end up in a strange place. "My self is permanent and unchanged." (MY self changes a lot even from early morning to late night after red wine, even now that I HAVE given up the Irish Cream.) 

But science, logic and first person experience ALL warn us  not to give way to that kind of human-centric bias in trying to understand a cosmos which is much, much bigger than us. It really is. Excess, undisciplined ego distortions are a huge problem for all levels of humanity. 

In the 1970's, I remember reading a brief, private piece by H. Spencer Lewis, which basically said:

"If you are trying to understand the soul and greater life, you should at a minimum study and understand two great books -- the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead." Tibet we visited and understood quite easily, but the Egyptian viewpoint seemed ever so strange to me until just a few years ago. "What are these ka and ma, TWO souls for each person?"

BUT: for now I must be brief. The links I gave now explain that our "souls" are all part of larger local soul/mind, our local noosphere, fully consistent with hard core Einsteinian realism. As PART of a larger system, we are like neurons in a brain. We are very diverse. The very life and future of our souls all depend on our CONNECTIONS (as is true for neurons in a brain). We all have varying MIXES of local and global connections. When folks like Gary Zukav 

sound like the Disney cartoon Coco --that IS PART of our fate and our potential and our true nature. But so too are

LONG DISTANCE and GLOBAL connections. Kill the long distance giant pyramid cells, and the brain itself will die. We need both, and harmony, and each of us... has multiple manifestations..