HOME
SUNDAY SCHEDULE
NEWSLETTER
CALENDAR
DIRECTIONS
LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMS
OUR BELIEFS
SERMONS
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
SOCIAL ACTION
ABOUT US
CONTACT US

When I think of the idea of the afterlife, I am reminded of a quote from Susan Ertz: Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

And on Sundays we consider lofty questions. Consider this one from philosopher Chuang Tzu: How do I know that adoring life is not a delusion? How do I know that we who despise death are not exiled children who don't know their way back?

Playwright Thornton Wilder puts it this way:

Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take them out and look at them very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth and it ain't even the stars.

Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for 5,000 years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.

Some people would call this “soul.” I think he’s on to something. There are a dozen definitions of “soul.” One is: the

spirit surviving death: in some systems of religious belief, the spiritual part of a human being that is believed to continue to exist after the body dies. The soul is sometimes regarded as subject to future reward and punishment, and sometimes as able to take a form that allows it to remain on or return to earth.

Are questions about the soul or afterlife idle curiosity? When tragedy strikes, when a loved one dies, we go through our stages, we find out who are friends are. We accept the helpful offers of food, errands, and hushed carefulness. Time stands still, or it drips slowly like a leaky faucet. We breathe in. We breathe out. We sit down. We stand up again.

We focus on what needs to be done right now. Things have a certain order to them. We find that we are helped along by a quiet crowd of kith and kin. No one argues. No one is noisy.

And then, we look up and notice the silence. The last car has left the parking lot, the sun has gone down, we are alone. It is near silent now, and we wonder whether or not to struggle with the aching weariness that sits on top of us.

Will the darkness swallow us up? Will we slide ourselves into oblivion? If we let ourselves really cry now, will we be able to stop?

But with the darkness can become a comforting presence. Being still, we may begin to feel the possibility of wholeness and peace.

Being still, we may let that sense of wholeness and peace wash over us. We may let it comfort us, and remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, something that we may not understand, but choose to accept and be a part of, and that something is Love

Science, in a corner of the room, nods quietly. But if religion claim humans have souls, science wants to measure those souls, since measuring is what Science does best. And if it can’t measure a soul, Science isn’t sure souls exist.

I remember my physicist father telling me that the universe was expanding at the speed of light since the big bang. I asked him what it was expanding into, and he said if physics can’t measure it, they’re not interested. Humph.

And yet, because everyone dies, people long to know what happens– if anything– to them after they die. They long to know what happens– if anything to their loved ones who have died before them.

If the soul exists after death, can we communicate with it? Can they communicate with us? What’s it like in the hereafter? Do souls get reincarnated? Do they want to communicate with the living?

While plenty of non-scientists over the years have investigated these questions, it turns out that plenty of scientists have too. This morning we’ll briefly investigate some side streets of the after life express: reincarnation, the weight of a soul, spiritualism, EVP, EMF and NDEs.

Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, traveled to India to meet a scientist, a Dr. Rawat, who investigates reincarnation claims– which are pretty common in India. The case she goes on turns out to be fairly typical.

The child, Aishwary, began talking about people from a previous existence when he was around three. 95% of the children in these cases began talking about a previous existence between the ages of 2 and 4 and start to forget about it all by age 5. Also typical is the sudden, violent death of the previous person.

“In some cases a poor villager has a child who claims to be the reincarnation of a richer villager in hopes of financial gain.

In another case a woman fell ill and claimed to have momentarily died, and then was revived with a different soul. Now that she had been reborn as someone new, she argued, she couldn't possibly be expected to live with her old husband (Divorce retains a weighty social stigma in India).

Dr. Rawat interviewed the doctor who examined her. It turns out he wasn't a doctor, but a bone-setter. And she wasn't dead. He said: ‘Well, her pulse was down.’” 28.

Some of the reincarnation testimony is ordinary. Other testimony is accurate with no explanation: "he had a wooden elephant, a toy of Lord Krishna, and a ball on an elastic string." 41. And this from a confident 3 year old?

Hindus tend to believe in reincarnation literally, not abstractly. According to Vedic scripture (The Ordinances of Manu)

Specific reincarnations depend on criminal actions: steal fire, become a heron; steal a house utensil, become a wasp. If you steal silk, linen, cotton, a cow, or molasses, one is reborn, respectively, as a partridge, a frog, a curlew, an iguana, or a vagguda bird.

But reincarnation in India isn’t such a stretch as it would be in America. After all, reincarnation of a sort is happening all over the place:

shoes are resoled, electric fans gutted and reworked. A boy pushes a filthy rusted bicycle, seat worn down to its metal skull, to the stall of a tire vendor, where rims hang like bangles on a rope between two trees... Exteriors are endlessly replaced, and the core carries on. 46.

What’s the official UU position on Reincarnation? Unitarian Universalists don’t make creedal those things known only through faith. At this point, reincarnation is something known only through faith.

Scientists over the last 100 years have been particularly interested in weighing a soul. After all, if you have one when you’re alive, and if it leaves you when you die, could there be measurable weight loss?

In their first good experiment, on April 10, 1901, three physicians watched a man die over 3 ½ hours. They wanted somebody who would die quietly and without much movement. They settled on a terminally ill (late stage tuberculosis) patient and put him and his bed on a giant scale. They wrote:

“Suddenly, coincident with death, the beam end [of the scale] dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remained there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be 3/4 of an ounce.”

That happens to be 21 grams, which is also the name of a Hollywood movie. How to explain the weight loss? Some said it was loss of bowels, others that it might be exhaled breath or perspiration or food digestion, but none of those work out.

As it happens, the scientific method in determining the 21 grams may have been questionable, and experiments with animals didn't show the weight loss, although maybe animals didn't have souls. There is also the issue of accuracy of the scales at the time.

Hmm. if the soul exists after death, can we communicate with it? This is the idea behind Spiritualism.

“Spiritualism, in a nutshell, is a religious movement devoted to communicating (via mediums) with those who have died and proving to others, via séances and other mediumistic demonstrations, that it is possible to do so.

Spiritualism was founded in 1848, by the elder sister of two bored pre-teens, Margaret and Kate Fox, who took to soliciting mysterious spirit "rappings" at their farmhouse in Hydesville, New York.

The noises stirred the imagination of local townsfolk and the entrepreneurial spirit of their [older] sister, who was soon inviting strangers to the house to observe the proceedings for a modest fee.

Within months the three sisters were on a nationwide tour, and Spiritualism was off and running. It spread steadily and traveled overseas, peaking in the aftermath of World War I, which left millions of American and European families grieving for lost sons and sadly vulnerable to the promise of contacting them in the afterlife.” 125.

On the other hand, some mediums have made uncanny predictions, have helped police solve crimes, and so forth. But it seems unlikely that we'll ever get "proof" in the empirical, scientific hypothesis sense, and that should be fine, I think.

So, we’ve covered reincarnation, the weight of a soul, and spiritualism. Sometimes people hear voices or see thing that make them think of ghosts– which would point to a soul.

There is EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomena, which has been around since the invention of the tape recorder. Here the idea is that the dead can communicate with us via radio or tape recorder, but again, there's not much in the way of proof. And there is odd stuff with radio waves. In fact whenever new technology comes about, some short time later someone claims to be communicating with the dead. I suppose email is next. 186.

It turns out, some haunted houses, are near EMFs. That stands for man-made electromagnetic fields. Exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels.

“Melatonin, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain – in particular, you're right temporal lobe – will be more prone to tiny epileptic micro-seizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.

Emotions of [mourning] produce stress hormones that may serve to raise the likelihood of these micro-seizures even further.”

Recent research indicates that you could indeed evoke that haunted feeling in a lab using EMFs:

“Of the approximately 1,000 people who have had signature electromagnetic bursts applied to the right temporal lobes, 80%, felt a presence.”

But wait, there’s more. There’s infrasound and the sightings of ghosts.

“Infrasound is the product of an inaudible, low frequency sound wave. [It can make objects move and shudder, even though we can't hear the sound] It has been reported to cause vision irregularities: sometimes blurring, sometimes a vibrating visual field.

“The eyeball, [you may be interested to know,] has a resonant frequency of 19 Hz. This means that in the presence of a standing 19 Hz Infrasound wave, your eye would start to vibrate along with the wave. The blurry gray ghost in the edge of [your] vision could have resulted from just such an infrasound.” 230.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t ghosts, it does mean that some of the phenomena of hearing and seeing ghosts can be reliably reproduced, and it may mean there is another explanation of a phenomena than a ghostly presence.

Which brings us to the study of Near Death Experiences, or NDEs. A lot of research has been done in this area. And drugs can simulate NDEs.

Here someone dies or comes close to death, gets resuscitated, and tells us something of what happened from their perspective: they see lights at the end of a tunnel, they rise above their bodies and watch the doctors working on their body.

There are some unusual cases. In 1991 a woman underwent brain surgery with her

“eyes taped shut, and molded, clicking inserts inside her ears. (Watching the brain stem's responses to clicks is a way of monitoring its function.)

“Despite this, despite the fact that her EEG was flat, meaning all brain activity had stopped (surgeons were repairing a massive aneurysm by draining the blood from her brain), she reported "seeing" the Midas Rex bone saw being used on her skull.

“She said it looked like an electric toothbrush and that its interchangeable attachments were kept in what looked like a socket wrench case.” 273.

And it was a very unusual looking saw in reality and she described it exactly.

Most NDEs describe something heavenly– lots of blue sky or farmland, rather than something hellish. Researchers think this is largely the attitude of the person involved:

"A bright light at the end of the tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying." 287.

On a Universalist note, the hellish or heavenly experience seems to have little to do with the character of the person involved. There is the story of

A mafia bagman who was shot in the chest and left to die. While lying there bleeding, he had "a beautiful experience, in which he felt the presence of God and unconditional love." One of the focuses of near death work has been the effects – often profoundly positive – that near-death experiences have on people's lives. The bagman, for example, quit the mafia and now counsels delinquent boys. 288.

There are things that we cannot explain with our current knowledge. Not everything will fit into the neatly measured boxes of science.

At the end of her quest for scientific proof of an afterlife, author Mary Roach asks:

“Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people will tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing.”

Is there an afterlife? Maybe you don't need proof, you just need an inclination.

We begin life and we end life in mystery. We are not always sure we are asking the right questions, but we keep trying. Here is a snippet Reverend Bonnie often includes in her memorial services, and it captures part of my own belief:

It is sometimes said that we are born
as strangers into the world,
and that we leave it when we die.

But in all probability we do not come into the world at all.
Rather, we come out of it, in the same way that a leaf
comes out of a tree
or a baby from its mother’s womb.

We emerge from deep within its range of possibilities,
and when we die, we do not so much stop living
as our living takes on a different form.

So a leaf does not fall out of the world
when it leaves the tree.
It has a different way and place to be within. Rev. Barbara Holleroth.