Our Declining Belief In Death

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain,” wrote Ben Franklin to his friend Jean-Baptiste LeRoy in 1789, “except death and taxes.” Had he written this today, however, it’s not at all certain that death would have made the cut.

Of course, no one knows for sure what happens when we die (well, no one who’s still with us), but there are quite a number of folks who feel they’ve perhaps gotten a glimpse, calling into question the very notion of death.

After falling into a weeklong coma, Eben Alexander, author of The New York Times bestselling book “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife,” found himself keenly aware of the fact that, as he puts it, he was loved, that he had nothing to fear and that he could do no wrong. This was pretty heady stuff, especially for someone who had always assumed that the brain – an organ that, in Alexander’s case, had completely shut down due to a rare infection – was the source of consciousness.

“[This] message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief,” he writes in an article published on The Daily Beast web site “It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.”

Going even further back – much further – the disciples of Jesus had their own glimpse of the so-called afterlife without having to go through anything approaching what Dr. Alexander did. Standing in the presence of their resurrected teacher, they were able to see firsthand that life really does go on, just as they’d been told.

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Eric Nelson writes each week on the link between consciousness and health from his perspective as a practitioner of Christian Science. He also serves as the media and legislative spokesperson for Christian Science in Northern California. Follow him on Twitter @norcalcs.