My standard disclaimer is always that I am a Pediatrician from Renton, Washington, and not a philosopher. It may turn out that we simply merge with some sort of universal consciousness or God.

When we think of an afterlife, we often think of a gasseous vapor leaving our body, with our same memories and personality. We hope that we, meaning our current self, will live forever. Nothing else in nature, however, seems to last without changing.

The gasseous vapor theory of the soul was a reaction to Newton's mechanical vision of life. By the 19th century, science felt that it could explain everything through specific universal laws. As one famous scientist told Napolean, "God? I have no need of that hypothesis".

It is clear that with the demise of the mechanical universe model, the dualistic philosophic of body as "machine" and soul as a "ghost" within it must also go.

Certainly I have seen nothing in near death reseach to support it.

But, I don't see that the only other alternative is a cruel joke by God, a blast of final spiritual fireworks, and then death. I will present evidence in the next 24 newsletters that the universe is quite dynamic and interactive, and that we might well persist after death, in one form or another. I would start thinking along the lines of "have you ever really been in your body", as opposed to "something must leave the body at death".

I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter. I do not have all or even most of the answers. I want the newsletter to be dynamic, a mutual striving to understand these new findings and grope our way towards new philosophies. That is why the newsletter will examine a huge range of topics, from the experiences of explorers in the Amazons as they meet primitive tribes, to UFO abductions, to modern brain science.

So, you have read me correctly! My thinking is filled with paradox and opposing viewpoints balanced in precarious harmony. Carl Sagan would be proud of me, as he said that the essence of science is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints at the same time.

Melvin Morse