WHAT SURVIVES DEATH?

The paranormal is full of supposed phenomena relating to an afterlife. From ghosts, to possessions, to reincarnation, to mediumship the idea is prevalent that there is life after death, and it interacts with those who are alive.
Sometimes, I seem skeptical about such claims. Rather, psychology can answer it, with phenomena such as cryptomnesia, multiple personality, hallucination, split-brain and hysteria all playing their part.

I remain convinced that these DO play a part.

But this does not imply that the mystery is explained fully with such phenomena. For I am also convinced that there is much more to it.
For instance, what do we KNOW survives death? Quite a lot, actually. Death causes decay which is the seed of new life. If you had offspring, your DNA survives. But also remembrance of you survives in the minds of others.

This can form a cultural link.

For instance, if the person was a writer, his words continue to exist. Stories about a person can go on to enter culture. This was even an early religious form in ancestor worship, and myths seem to suggest remembrance of past feats.
This all suggests that the dead can continue to have a cultural influence upon our thought processes. And in an important sense, this is a form of life after death, including interaction with the living.

Moving away from culture, what else is there?

Well, the more I study the mind, the more convinced I become that it is not yours. Rather, we have become too infatuated with the idea of the ‘individual’ as a separate entity.
Carl Jung identified specific ‘archetypes’ within the mind. These seem to be expressions of human character traits. If this is correct, then the various ‘character’ elements we can have are actually shared throughout the species.

Emotions seem to follow a similar idea.

Whilst our emotional expression can be specific to the person, the actual emotions themselves seem to be ‘shared’. Emotions seem, again, to be more species traits than personal.
Bearing this in mind, we can have a new model of individuality. Rather than being ‘separate’ to the species, it seems to be that what we class as the ‘individual’ is a specific pattern – an amalgam – of various species traits. We are more of the species than the person.

This has a bearing on life after death.

We see death in terms of the individual. When a person dies, we seem to think what he was dies with him. Of course, religionists have known this to be wrong. Rather, his ‘spirit’ survives.
Are we now in a position to define what ‘spirit’ is? If all the elements that made up your mind are of the species, then when you die, those traits remain within the species. ‘You’ may not be as dead as you think.
Earlier, I noted how the person leaves elements of himself in ‘culture’. Now, could it be that, after a person’s death, this cultural input could somehow merge with the species traits, thus producing a form of afterlife of the person?
Such a view is highly speculative, and in order to be experienced, the known phenomena I spoke of earlier would have to be invoked. But it is, perhaps, wrong to say that a rational theory cannot be made of a real interactive survival of death.

© Anthony North, May 2008