Towards scientific validation of an afterlife

‘If consciousness is like a limitless ocean, a soul might be likened to a surfer’s wave, albeit one that endures over time.’ Daniel Drasin

With more than thirty years of research into the afterlife and paranormal phenomena, Daniel Drasin surveys the evidence for human consciousness continuing after death and insists on the legitimacy of scientific inquiry into a ‘Greater Reality’.

His book, A New Science of the Afterlife: Space, time and the Consciousness Code (Park Street Press, June 2023), is an easy and commonsensical read of only 110 pages — I read it avidly in a single evening — and valuable for its accessible and concise assessment of the latest science in the field, as well as its itemising of resources and recommending reading.

Drasin asks the reader to prepare for ‘a deep dive into one of today’s most compelling and far-reaching frontiers of scientific exploration’ and discusses fifteen propitious lines of post-materialist investigation being carried out today. Yet he says modestly that his book is only a small contribution to the ‘emerging flood of science-based afterlife-related literature’.

His work represents an inspiring consciousness-based post-materialist worldview in a society dominated by materialism which is (only) an assumption about reality, although one which has diverted us from achieving a deeper and transformative understanding of consciousness, space and time, life and death. This when, surely, the fundamental task of humans is to learn aboutthe true nature of reality.

Social pressures and militant scepticism tend to inhibit post-materialist thinking and research, Drasin agrees, but, optimistically, he believes a paradigm shift is under way, and that the continuity of consciousness beyond the physical body can be demonstrated objectively. Of course, such a shift, I feel, would necessarily involve a discarding of an outdated idea of the nature of science.

Drasin is an award-winning documentary film-maker and, since the early 1990s, as featured in his documentary Calling Earth, he has been actively investigating the field of…