Tara’s Reviews > In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife > Status Update

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don’t need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder; just stand on the street corner and look around for a while.

Doctors came to seem like aloof priests who wielded fearsome power. Medical portals became thresholds to the great void. Do you wanna know if you’re going to live or die? Just log onto the hospital website and find out. Everything you ever wanted to know is waiting for you there. Waiting for us all.

Finding yourself alive after almost dying, is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

He didn’t believe in anything as simple minded as heaven or extravagant as reincarnation, but he also never looked up at the stars because he said he found the immensity overwhelming.
3/3

… like a wave on the ocean. Souls are made of something we don’t understand yet, he said in waves are just pulses of energy, moving through a medium. My father believed that when we die, our souls are subsumed back into the vast soulmatter of the universe like waves subsumed back into the sea.
2/x

The problem with rationality is that things keep happening that you can’t explain, and I was never able to explain the dreams I had about my father. But maybe I didn’t need to; maybe they’re just a the kind of coincidence that people love to find meaning in. My father was a devoted rationalist who nevertheless believed that humans have souls, and that each soul briefly exists as its own entity, and …
1/x

A worldwide belief in spirits could then develop that evolved a special caste of shamans, priests, and sorcerers who ferried messages back and forth between the tiny, beautiful world of the living and the vast tracts of the dead.
3/3

For hundreds of thousands of years, presumably, people have returned from the twilight world of hemorrhagic shock and low blood oxygen to report meeting the dead, hovering over their own bodies, and experiencing universal consciousness. Those experiences could be entirely the result of neurochemical changes in the dying brain but still mistaken for actual trips into the afterlife.
2/x

Some researchers point to similarities between so-called near-death experiences and religion as evidence of an afterlife, but it’s equally possible that religions have those traits precisely because that’s how people experience dying.
1/x