The Troubled Spirit

When you die, you know you’re dead because the brain keeps functioning, and you know what’s happening around you. A study suggests that a person’s consciousness keeps working after their heart stops beating and body movements fail. You are essentially ‘trapped’ inside a dead body with your brain still functioning, if only for a short time. More shockingly, some evidence suggests that doctors may even hear themselves being pronounced dead by the deceased. If the circumstances of death have been at all difficult or the person was emotionally disturbed in any way before they died – resentful, vengeful, guilty, lonely, or fearful, for instance – it is the intensity of those emotions and corresponding thoughts that will go with them, obscuring the potentially uplifting and reassuring aspects of the transition. “Buddhists and Hindus believe that the last thought at the moment of death determines the character of the next incarnation.” Contrary to our rather simplistic pictures of the after-death state derived from popular literature and superficial regression experiences, it is not true that there is an automatic “life review” after death when a Higher Self explains the “meaning” of that life and helps us correct our mistakes. This only occurs in peaceful deaths where the person is not mentally or emotionally obsessed with some unfinished issue.