Do we really die?

Robert Anderson PhD

4 February 1942 - 5 December 2008 

Of all the intellectual quests that have occupied man for millennia, surely that of death has been the most intriguing.  The greatest question affecting each and every human being is the question of death and dying.  

Do we simply cease to exist or do we pass quite naturally into some other world? 

New scientific evidence based around quantum physics - the study of the invisible part of our universe – now points strongly to the position that we all survive death. 

A group of British scientists, including two astrophysicists, a thermodynamics specialist, and other professional researchers, are conducting experiments and solving complex equations that they believe furnish conclusive and irrefutable proof of human survival of bodily death. The group has come to regard that continuation as the functioning of a natural, universal law, the study of which is strictly a branch of physics, and mathematics, rather than an article of religious faith. The researchers’ premise is that certain recent mathematical discoveries, combined with results of in-depth exploration of physics and quantum mechanics, now furnish verification for many previous well-documented scientific experiments dealing with what has been previously known as “psychic phenomena”.

As a physicist I have always been intrigued by the work carried out by such world-renowned scientists as Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge and many others who worked on the problem of survival evidence. 

Unfortunately, the establishment have done all that they can to hide this work from public view.  This is particularly so in the case of the Church who one would think would welcome such research.  For example, the lecture given in 1933 by Sir Oliver Lodge FRS, The Mode of Future Existence.  Because this great scientist wrote articles and published books along these lines, he was vilified by those who had taken control of scientific and religious teaching throughout the world.  Much the same treatment was meted out to Sir William Crookes who actually proved by repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions that the subject of survival after death is a branch of physics.  As we are only too aware today, censorship and character assassination are the only weapons that those with a great deal to lose from the truth have in their armoury.

Hiding the Truth

Without doubt, one of the most significant offences against survival research can be placed at the feet of the Anglican Church in Britain.  In 1937, a committee was appointed to fully investigate survival and mediumship by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury.  At that time, this was the Right Reverend Cosmo Lang.  The committee consisted of an august body of investigators:  Dr Francis Underhill, Bishop of Bath and Wells; Dr W R Matthews, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral; Canon Harold Anson, Master of the Temple; Canon L W Grensted, Nolloth Professor of the Christian Religion at Oxford University; Dr William Brown, Celebrated Harley Street Psychologist; Mr P E Sandlands QC, Barrister-at-Law; and Lady Gwendolen Stephenson. 

The study took two years to complete and the final report concluded that:  “Certain experiences with mediums make a strong prima facie case for survival and for the possibility of spirit-communications.”  It went on to say that:  “It is our opinion that representatives of the Church should keep in touch with groups of intelligent persons who believe in spiritualism.” 

The report was duly stamped Private and Confidential and locked away in Lambeth Palace in London.  There it stayed until 1979 when the Church’s 40-year embargo expired.  But the story has an ironic ending.  Cosmo Lang, who died in 1945, remorseful for withholding the report, came back in 1959 through British direct voice medium, Leslie Flint, to apologise for doing so. 

There is a very good reason why Christian priests dislike mediums so much.  Whenever we speak to people in the “next world” through mediums, the message is always the same, it never varies.  It makes the priests redundant.  There is no place just reserved for Christians, we all survive the death of our physical bodies whether Buddhist, Jew or Muslim or of another religious persuasion.

The churches have not been the only ones keen on hiding this truth.  The media are also culpable.  Until recently, it was against the Broadcasting Act to discuss survival after death in a serious scientific manner on air in Great Britain.  In 1994, following many complaints, the Chairman of the Radio Authority, Lord Chalfont, and his committee removed these restrictions.  The scientific case for survival after death is now being presented on radio stations throughout the country.  Unlike New Zealand, this does not apply to television programmes in the UK.  Following their phenomenal success of the Living TV channel, featuring mediums giving hope and comfort to bereaved people, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) strengthened its guidelines regarding what information the public are allowed to receive.  A scientific discussion of survival was allowed on radio, but not television.  This kind of censorship is becoming increasingly common and insidious.

Another example of the fear about the facts of survival leaking out was the interference by the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.  She overruled the Church of England’s first choice for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr John Habgood.  A brilliant scholar, holding a first class honours in physics from Cambridge University, and one of many prelates reading survival after death as a consequence of his physics, Habgood knew it is a scientific fact that there are people living in the invisible part of our universe.  This was a major reason for Mrs Thatcher rejecting him in 1990 in favour of Canon George Carey.

It makes one shiver at the thought that similar intolerance and prejudice in past centuries led to much worse events.  The passage in the King James Bible of 1611 – “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” Exodus 22;18 - cost the lives of countless thousands of women who were tortured and burnt at the stake as witches.  This came from a church that felt itself too important, self-righteous and/or afraid to investigate the truth of ‘witches’ practices that included mediumship.  

There continued to be occasional prosecutions under the Witchcraft Act even in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The most well known is that of the medium, Helen Duncan, in 1944.  Duncan was the last person to be imprisoned under the Act and her case is particularly interesting as it involves deception by the Admiralty.  During a sitting in Portsmouth on 19 January 1944, Mrs Duncan fell foul of the security services when a sailor from HMS Barham materialised and greeted his surprised mother sitting in the audience.  His death had been kept a secret by the Admiralty, which had been trying to conceal news of the ship’s sinking three months earlier.  The authorities supposedly feared that by her alleged clairvoyant powers she could betray details of the D-Day preparations.  The accusations in court centred round defrauding the public; the Admiralty not being able to admit that her clairvoyance was real.  Although completely innocent, Helen spent nine months in prison.  The Act was only repealed in 1951.  Much of the evidence provided by certain mediums today has been subjected to close, even hostile scientific scrutiny, and found to be true and verifiable.

The New Physics

While these great scientists made huge inroads into convincing many of the truth of survival, they lacked the one indispensable ingredient – the mathematics.  As Professor Richard Feynman said, "If your theories and mathematics do not match the experiment, then they are wrong.” 

Mind no longer appears as mere brain function.  Mind, it seems, has the potential of being immortal.  Contrary to the paradigms of established physics, the soul (for want of a better word) really does exist.  To arrive at this conclusion as a spin-off from a successful attempt to solve other problems (which are still bedevilling physicists and cosmologists) seems to add more credibility than direct attempts to prove survival.  We now have the mathematics together with a great deal more evidential material.  We can now “look” into the brain and watch thoughts being formed.  We have Positron Emission Tomography or PET, we have Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (NMR), and many other highly sophisticated instruments to aid us.  All of these tools are now available to examine the mind and brain that it uses to express itself.

And what do we find?  

We discover that the mind uses the brain but is not generated by it. 

How do we know this?

Some of the material researchers, such as Professor Peter Fenwick, are making discoveries about the Near Death Experience (NDE) that are nothing short of amazing.  With improvements in our ability to resuscitate patients that have died, we are finding more and more examples of the NDE. The subject has gained such importance that symposia and conferences are now being held on a regular basis worldwide. 

The effect of a NDE is invariably life-changing.  The reports are almost always consistent.  The reasoning of the sceptics, that it is a function of “oxygen starvation to the brain” is far too simplistic.  We are in a position now to know when the brain and the functions of other organs have died completely away.

Is Mediumship Real?

Those who have watched the TV1 series “Sensing Murder” with an open mind cannot fail to be impressed with the accuracy obtained by the three mediums they employ.  Names, dates, places and much more are given; information later verified from police files. 

The CIA and the KGB knew that it is a scientific fact that mediums are nature’s links with people in the invisible part of the universe.  They did not waste time trying to prove it, they simply put them to use.  They used mediums to spy on each other during the Cold War.  I recommend reading Psi Research Behind The Iron Curtain to anyone wanting to know more about this. 

Mediumship is the one facet of human psychology most open to fraud. Good mediumship is a very rare commodity.  Even so there is no point in having counterfeit money if real money does not exist.  Much of the evidence provided by certain mediums has been subjected to close, even hostile, scientific scrutiny, and found to be true and valid.

Discarnate entities sometimes appear through materialization mediums - those specially endowed individuals who are able to furnish a psychic link between the two planes.  At other times, usually when influenced by extremely strong emotions on either, or both, the etheric or physical level, materializations occur spontaneously.  Other mediums, while not always able to effect materializations, are still able to relay communications between the two levels of existence.

Extensive research into electronic communication with after-world beings is also being conducted now using the electronics.  Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP as it is known is now a well-established research topic.  The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena and the Continuing Life Research organizations are in the forefront of these investigations.  Marconi, the inventor of radio, was at the time of his death experimenting to contact the dead using his equipment.  Even Thomas Edison experimented with devices for spirit communication. 

Many researchers using instrumental transcommunication (ITC) say they have received messages from “the other side” through tape recorders, televisions, computers and even telephones.  Electronic Voice Phenomena has been reported for well over 30 years.  Sceptics claim that there is nothing to EVP, that the “voices” are a hoax, just random noise interpreted as voices, real voices already on the tape, or voices picked up from radio, cell phones and other sources.  Is this likely?  When we examine the volume of evidence, over years of EVP research, their reasoning is obviously wrong.  Let us start from the beginning.

Two pioneers of EVP were Konstantin Raudive, a Swedish psychology professor, and Fredrich Juergenson, a Swedish filmmaker.  In the late 1950s, Raudive began to hear words recorded on blank audiotape and eventually put together over 100,000 recordings.  Juergenson first captured his unexplained voices while taping bird songs and continued his research on EVP for over 25 years.  These were not cranks but pragmatic scientists who came to the incredible conclusion that, yes, the dead can communicate by radio.  So much so, that there was even a radio program illustrating the fact.    

In 1983, Radio Luxembourg conducted the first-ever, live-on-air broadcast of EVP.  Scientist, Hans Otto König, had designed equipment reaching into the 30,000 Hz range, far beyond the range of the human ear.  Most tape recorders do not go beyond 15,000 or 20,000 Hz.  On air, the EVP discarnate voices came through as clearly as the voices of the live questioners.  Presenter, Rainer Holbe, was audibly overwhelmed and said:  “I tell you, my dear listeners of Radio Luxembourg, and I swear by the life of my children, that nothing has been manipulated.  There are no tricks.  It is a voice, and we do not know from where it comes.”  The station also issued an official statement afterwards backing the authenticity.

A final example may suffice.  In 1952, two Italian Catholic priests were trying to record a Gregorian chant, but a wire in their equipment kept breaking.  In desperation, one of the priests asked his dead father for help.  To his amazement, his father’s voice was heard on the tape saying, “Of course, I shall help you.  I’m always with you.”  The matter was later brought to the attention of Pope Pius XII, who apparently accepted the genuineness of the phenomenon. 

So what can we infer from all this? 

We can deduce that we have an ever-mounting accumulation of sound scientific research that verifies that some part of our being survives bodily death, not only survives death, but returns into the flesh to avail itself of the lessons of life.  Arthur Schopenhauer described the current situation in the study of quantum physics as it relates to ongoing life now and survival in the following way:

"Any unexplained phenomenon passes through three stages before the reality of it is accepted.  During the first stage it is considered laughable.  During the second stage, it is adamantly opposed.  Finally, during the third stage, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

 

Sadly, Bob died in December 2008.  He was a Quaker and lived by the tenets of the Quaker Testimonies:  Peace, Equality, Simplicity and Integrity.  He opposed violence between people and nations, and to other species and our planet.  He believed that true peace can not be dictated; it can only be built on equality, social justice, respect, and co-operation between all peoples.  He was passionate about the welfare of all beings, regardless of race or religion, with a special caring for women and children, and about the welfare of the world his generation would leave behind.  Bob’s beliefs were reflected in the love he gave his family, friends and everyone he met.  He worked tirelessly towards a better world.

Bob was a frequent lecturer at Theosophical Society Centres and elsewhere around New Zealand.  Teaching was his passion and his profession.  He held a combined honours degree in Physics and Chemistry, and a PhD in Science Education.  He wrote for periodicals and authored 11 books. 

 

 

Enquiries about books written by Robert Anderson should be addressed to naturesstar@xtra.co.nz

 

Other lectures given by Bob are available on this site.