A richer experience

By: Mukul Sharma

For non-believers, this life is all there is. There’s nothing before, after or any time else, and following death, it’s a return to nothingness. Some atheists offer themselves whimsical comfort by saying that before this slice of life happened, there was an infinite period when we didn’t exist and after we die, there’s going to be another infinity when we won’t either.
Nevertheless — since there’s no evidence to the contrary — we may find ourselves continuing in some kind of post-mortem existence, with no overtones of paradise, retribution or any kind of divine paraphernalia.

Of course, this is an area that only fringe researchers explore, yet even some prestigious scientists, notably the impeccably credentialed Ian Stevenson, who was director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, have endorsed it.

Among other things, he devoted the last 40 years of his life to the scientific documentation of past-life memories of children from all over the world.

In the end, he had over 3,000 cases on record in his files and many people, including sceptics and scholars, agree today that these offer the best evidence yet for life after death.

But here’s the twist: almost all non-spiritual atheists regard his work or the evidence he may have garnered over a lifetime as nonsense, while conveniently forgetting that Dr Stevenson was as much an atheist as any of them, if not more. It’s just that some people believe in a far richer nontheistic experience than one that has only an arid landscape on the horizon with little other than chance and nothingness calling the shots.