“When you’re dead, you’re dead.”---Marlene Dietrich
About 83% of Americans disagree with Marlene according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2021. When contemplating life after death, 75% of the population believes in Heaven but only 62% in Hell. Respondents who believe in neither were given the opportunity to describe their idea of what the afterlife might be like. Some said it would be a place where one’s spirit, consciousness and/or energy lives on after their physical body has passed away. Others expect to move into an alternate dimension. Many believe they will continue on in some other form. One optimist said “I like to imagine that living in the world we inhabit is like being in a cradle for the soul. We spend our lifetimes learning and growing and in the afterlife we retain all our memories and the lessons we’ve learned and that we continue to exist for a greater purpose that living prepares us for.” And no, that was not from a contestant in the Miss America Contest.
The most common view of Heaven is that it’s a place where everyone is free from suffering (73% of believers), where they will be reunited with deceased loved ones (65%), will have perfectly healthy bodies (60%) and can meet God (62%). Imagine that scenario. “Um…howdy, Mr. God, how’s it hangin’?”
The people who believe in Hell think “It’s a lot like Newark,” or Bike Week in Daytona. That you apply sun-screen lotion every morning and go to work in a desert smeltery. That you are tied to a chair and forced to sit in the first row of a Motorhead concert for two hours. Or that you are tranquilized and made to watch a football game between Georgia and FSU where all the Seminole players are kidnapped and replaced by a sorority all-star team.
Frankly, we here at The Flying Pie are a little cynical. Are we all just little toys made for the amusement of some bored creator? Are we like voodoo dolls our maker sticks pins in to watch us wiggle? Is it possible we’re all just part of an elongated Robert Crumb comic strip and nobody’s the wiser? Would that make R. Crumb God? Now that would be something to worry about.
After All
A man is hit by a bus in Roanoke, has a stroke at a Trump rally, is trampled by porcine revelers at the Flying Pig Parade. A feeling of disconnection comes over him, a sense of being outside himself. Perhaps he watches from above as doctors operate on his body, trying to save his life. Or maybe he suddenly discovers a tunnel, a guide, could be an old uncle or grandmother who shows him a world “more real” than the one he just came from. The man is awestruck, without words. Reluctantly, he slides away from this new world and back to the old, which is now disappointing and unsatisfactory. “I think I saw Heaven,” he marvels. “We think you got bopped on the head,” says the doctor.
There are books on the subject. Ninety Minutes In Heaven (2004) discusses a Christian pastor who ascended and met God after a car wreck; Heaven Is For Real (2010) is about a kid who sees heaven during surgery; Proof of Heaven (2012), was written by a Duke University-trained neurosurgeon who allegedly traveled to Heaven that year. All are best-sellers and there are plenty more. The author from Duke, Eben Alexander, told Newsweek that his experience convinced him that a soul (or consciousness) exists separate from or outside the mind and can travel to other dimensions on its own. “The world of consciousness beyond the body is the new frontier,” be believes, “not just of science but of humankind itself, and it is my profound hope that what happened to me will bring the world one step closer to accepting it.”
According to a Gallup poll, about 8 million Americans claim to have had a near death experience and regard the event as proof of an afterlife---a parallel, spiritual realm “more real than this one.” Raymond Moody, who wrote Life After Life in 1975 about such experiences, told CNN in 2013 that these stories transcend the particulars of religion. “I’ve gone to different continents and you can hear the same thing in China, India and Japan about meeting a being of complete love and compassion,” he said. Dissenters ask if you see something while you are stressed, unconscious or traumatized in some way, whether that circumstance delegitimizes the truth of your vision? Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University who has made his reputation studying brain scans of religious people who have ecstatic experiences as they meditate, believes the odd tunnels and lights often described can be easily explained. “As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first. That’s why you’d have a tunnel sensation. If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down.”
The rationalist author Sam Harris isn’t buying it either. Discussing Alexander’s argument, he states “No one’s cerebral cortex shuts down entirely during coma. Additionally, the doctor showed no understanding of the kinds of neurotransmitters that can be released by the brain during trauma, including one called DMT, which produces hallucinations. Let me suggest that Alexander sounds precisely like how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Fine, Sam, but how do you explain this one from respected psychiatrist Brian Weiss? “We had an elderly blind woman suffer a cardiac arrest during her stay at the hospital where I worked as chairman of the psychiatry department. She was unconscious as the resuscitation team tried to revive her. According to her later interview, she floated out of her body and stood near the window, watching the resuscitation. She observed without any pain whatsoever as they thumped on her chest and pumped air into her lungs. During the resuscitation, a pen fell out of her doctor’s pocket and rolled near the same window where her spirit was standing and watching. The doctor eventually walked over and put it back in his pocket, then rejoined the frantic attempt to save her. It was successful.
A few days later, she told her doctor that she had observed the resuscitation team at work during her cardiac arrest. ‘No,’ he soothingly reassured her, ‘you were probably hallucinating because of the anoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain). This can happen when the heart stops beating.’
‘But I saw your pen roll over to the window ,’ she replied, describing the implement and other details of the resuscitation. The doctor was shocked. His patient had not only been comatose during the session, she had been blind for many years.”
The argument rages on. An elite team of acidheads is being brought in to shed more light on the subject. Stay tuned.
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Then there are those troublesome ghosts. There are citizens who comment, “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I believe in ghosts.” Um…okay. But where are those ghosts hanging out? They’re dead, right?
Tu-po was the minister to Chinese Emperor Hsuan, who lived between 827 and 783 B.C. The two had a major argument and Hsuan had Tu-Po killed around 786 B.C. despite angry warnings that Tu-Po would come back and haunt him. His victim did more than that. Three years later, Hsuan was killed by an arrow fired by an apparition resembling Tu-Po in front of a large assembly of feudal lords, according to Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu. But who knows? Maybe Mo was just trying to beef up his book sales.
It’s almost a sure thing there are ghosts in the Tower of London, a hotspot for ghost sightings for centuries. The Queen’s House is the province of Arabella Stuart, cousin of King James I, who married against the king’s wishes and was promptly locked up in the Tower, where she is said to be still serving her time and not a bit happy about it. And then there seems to be the odd tale of a phantom bear in Martin Tower, where a guard who ran into the critter is said to have dropped dead from the shock. If true, his last words might well have been “Lions and tigers and bears…oh shit!” But who knows, maybe it was just some tainted Yorkshire Pudding.
In 1936, a photographer taking pictures of 300-year-old Raynham Hall in Norfolk, U.K. captured a famous image of an apparition floating down a stairway, one of the most convincing ghost photos ever taken. The manor, covering an area of some 7000 acres has a long history of being haunted and the BBC noted the ghost may well have been Lady Dorothy Townshend, wife of the second viscount of the estate. She died in 1726, supposedly of smallpox after having an affair which her husband discovered before her death. Scurrilous members of the notorious No Fun Gang have suggested the picture might be a double exposure, but we’re not buying it.
If there are no ghosts, how to explain Casper? Better yet, how do we explain the Ghost of Flight 401? The famed Eastern Airlines Lockheed Tristar, the first jumbo jet ever to crash, went down in the Florida Everglades in 1972, killing 101; 75 people survived. The crash occurred while the flight crew was preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light. The captain bumped the control yoke on the aircraft, causing it to turn off the autopilot and nobody noticed, allowing the plane to lose altitude and eventually crash.
During the following months and years, stories began circulating that employees of Eastern and numerous passengers were reporting sightings of dead crew members, particularly Captain Robert Loft and Second Officer Donald Repo, sitting aboard other L-1011s, in particular N318EA. The stories speculated that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged and refitted into other planes. The hauntings were said to be seen only on planes that used the spare parts. Loft and Repo were seen and discussed so often that Eastern’s management warned employees they could be dismissed for spreading ghost stories. Nonetheless, the airline supposedly removed all the salvaged parts from their fleet and the sightings stopped. John Fuller’s 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401 recounts surprisingly believable anecdotes of paranormal events aboard other Eastern aircraft and the belief that they were caused by salvaged equipment.
I’m B-a-a-a-ck!
“It’s deja vu all over again.---Yogi Berra
Almost everyone has had the experience---a sense of having already seen something you’re currently seeing or experiencing coupled with the knowledge you haven’t actually seen it. The common reaction is “I’ve been here before.” Bill Killeen felt it, himself, in Monument Valley, Utah and the Hoh Rain Forest in western Washington. Dubious observers call it the equivalent of a small brain glitch when two streams of thought collide. Believers in reincarnation equate those opinions with the phony “weather balloon” solutions the U.S. Air Force used to explain Unidentified Flying Objects. But could it be that many of us really have been here before?
Shanti Devi was born in Delhi, India in 1926. As a little girl in the 1930s, she began to claim to remember details of a past life. When she was four, she told her parents that her real home was in Mathura where her husband lived, about 145 km from her current home in Delhi. Discouraged in her beliefs by her parents, she ran away at age six, trying to reach Mathura. While in school in Delhi, Shanti Devi had been interviewed by her teacher/headmaster where she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, Kedar Nath. The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. Kedar Nath traveled to Delhi, pretending to be his own brother, but Shanti Devi recognized him immediately. She also knew details of Kedar Nath’s life with his wife.
The case was brought to the attention of Mahatma Gandhi, who set up a commission to investigate. The group traveled with Shanti Devi to Mathura, arriving on November 15, 1935. There she recognized several family members, including the grandfather of Lugdi Devi. She then discovered that Kedar Nath had neglected to keep a number of promises he made to Lugdi Devi on her deathbed and returned home to Delhi with her parents. The commission’s report published in 1936 concluded that Shanti Levi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi. Reincarnation 1, Doubters 0.
And here’s a surprise from PubMed: “Worldwide, children can be found who reported that they have memories of a previous life. More than 2,500 cases have been studied and their specifications have been published and preserved in the archives of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. Many of those children come from countries where the majority of the inhabitants believe in reincarnation, but others come from countries with different cultures and religions that reject it. In many cases, the revelations of the children have been verified and have corresponded to a particular individual, already dead. A good number of these children have marks and birth defects corresponding to wounds on the body of the previous personality. Many have behaviors related to their claims to their former life: phobias, philias, and attachments. Others seem to recognize people and places of their supposed previous life, and some of their assertions have been made under controlled conditions. The hypothesis of reincarnation is controversial. We can never say that it does not occur, or will obtain conclusive evidence that it happens. The cases that have been described so far, isolated or combined, do not provide irrefutable proof of reincarnation, but they supply evidence that suggest its reality.”
Of course there will always be doubters like Shane Richie, who once remarked, “I don’t believe in reincarnation now and I didn’t believe in it when I was a hamster.” Same here, Shane.
That’s all, folks. Or maybe not.
