Beliefs concerning the human being’s survival after physical death have persisted since before the dawn of time. All of the world’s major religions place a large amount of focus upon the subject, either in the stories of the central characters of each religion or in the description of the individual’s existence after death.
The rationalist in me is almost completely satisfied that this is nothing more than extended wish-fulfillment, built on fears of mortality and perverted grief. The ambiguity of existence after the organs of perception have ceased to function groundlessly serves to fan the flames of speculation.
However, I have no more reason to believe one account of the afterlife over another. Though I find it the most plausible possibility, I have no real reason for my relative certainty that the only thing after life is oblivion. Therefore, I must admit the possibility that there is something after this life…but what?
A popular belief is that a ghost is some sort of ‘lost soul’, possessed of a certain amount of awareness and continuity with the previously living self, existing near but not quite within our substantial world. A more scientific (but not necessarily more substantial) explanation regards ghosts as a ‘recording’ of particularly significant events or emotions, replayed by unknown means.
Mediums and spiritualists claim to be able to communicate to some extent with individuals who have died, in some cases producing information thought to be unavailable to the medium by any other means. Because of the revelatory and frequently personal, emotional effect such conversations can have (as well as numerous examples of trickery and even extortion), such ‘channeling’ remains one of the most hotly-criticized of all the paranormal fields.
Reincarnation is another popular supernatural topic, one that forms the basis for at least two of the world’s largest religions and a fair amount of ‘new age’ theory. The idea of some kind of spiritual continuity between two consecutive, unrelated human beings (or other types of beings) is a tempting one; “who were you in a past life?” can range from an idle party game to a deeply-held belief and a lifetime of personal exploration. As with mediums, some ‘past life’ narratives have included some very convincing details that resist easy dismissal — but, also like mediums, hoax and trickery is not uncommon, and even the wildest scientific theory cannot account for how reincarnation may be possible.
Chaudry Kilim has written extensively on metaphysical and technological subjects, and is also an advocate of using enterprise seo and social media to spread the word.