2024-08-13T23:36:56-06:00

I photographed this image the morning after my dad's funeral. To understand how it appeared and why it might be evidence of an after-death communication, see: Nathan Zap In Memorium

Card #697 – Survival of the Soul

Then, death, so call’d, is but old matter dress’d

In some new figure, and a vary’d vest:

Thus all things are but alter’d, nothing dies;

And here, and there the’ unbody’d spirit flies.

— Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses

“What you have perishes; what you are survives beyond time and space.” — Death Notice

“When the clock strikes me, the powers of being will prevail over the powers that be.” — Saul Williams

“On__________Jonathan Zap won his long battle with corporeality by dying.” (My future epitaph, in my official estate documents.)

The soul can survive the death of the body. I do not base this conclusion on faith or religious doctrine but on experience and evidence.

The intense fear of death as annihilation I had as a child vanished after a certain number of out-of-body experiences. The direct experience of awareness being outside my body, and incredibly enhanced by that separation, changed my perception of death from emergency to emergence. My fear of death as annihilation was replaced by a deep intuition of death as an orgasmic portal.

My personal experience shouldn’t convince you, but a careful study of near-death experience findings should be enough to convince an open-minded skeptic that death is an event horizon, not a pit of oblivion. The position of neurological materialism, the belief that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or secondary effect of biochemical process in the brain, is resoundingly and definitively contradicted by NDE findings. Consciousness does not reside in the brain, and electrical activity in the brain is not a prerequisite for consciousness.* (see example of NDE evidence below)

There are also many well-documented cases of ADC (After Death Communication). I had my first evidential experience at two and a half years old, and there have been ongoing experiences since 2013. After his death, Dante’s son received a communication from his father about where in the attic he could pull up floorboards and find an unpublished manuscript. A few anecdotes shouldn’t convince you, but the overall weight of well-corroborated evidence should be more than sufficient.

*The following example of NDE evidence is far from the most impressive but is chosen because of the arch-conservatism of its source — National Geographic — an organization known to be unfriendly to paranormal claims. What follows are some transcribed excerpts from the National Geographic documentary: The Moment of DeathWhat in the world is he doing that for?” Al continues,

“He was orchestrating: Do this, do this, and do that, and it did seem very foreign to me what he was doing.”

Al demonstrates Dr. Takata’s strange movements, his hands to the sides of his chest, elbows bent, twisting around, and pointing with his elbows as he gives commands.

Dr. Anthony F. Lasala, MD, cardiologist at Hartford Hospital explains:

“Dr. Takata, when he’s not operating, and trying not to contaminate his hands, will put his hands close to his chest and point with his elbow.”

Dr. Lasala: “Al Sullivan would not know of this peculiar behavior of Dr. Takata. I did not tell him that.”

Dr. Takata: ” I cannot explain how he saw these things under the complete sleep of anesthesia.”

Dr. Lasala: “Even if he was conscious, it would be impossible for Al to see Dr. Takata’s stance or arm movement because Al was behind a drape that blocks the vision of the patient, and his eyes were taped shut.”

Although any particular anecdote is unconvincing, I should explain the relevance of this photograph. A family I know in Boulder had an eighteen-year-old son named Bodhi. He had been trying to get hold of me to do an I Ching reading. We played phone tag for a couple of days, and then I heard from a mutual friend that Bohdi had lost control of a car on a high mountain road and died. A few days later, I was visiting with Bodhi’s sister at the family home up in the mountains. She invited me to stay overnight and suggested I might want to sleep in Bodhi’s room to feel more in touch with his departed spirit. Except for a futon we brought in, the room was completely bare, all of Bodhi’s belongings having been removed. I sat on the futon and meditated on Bodhi, attempting to be open to his spirit. A few minutes into the meditation, I was startled to hear an object drop just behind my head. The room was completely bare — there was sitting against a wall, so it didn’t seem possible for anything to fall just behind my head. I turned on the light to investigate. I discovered a single object left by Bodhi (and by whoever cleared out his stuff) in this bare room. It was a glow-in-the-dark star that he had attached to the ceiling. The star fell exactly behind my head and landed in the center of a purple cloud of melted candle wax.

My two major book-form works(both available free on this site) are directly related to afterdeath survival. My sci-fi epic on the singularity, Parallel Journeys , is my most vivid of evocation of survival.

Opening premise:

Does this reality feel fundamentally wrong to you? What if the truths of what lies hidden are exposed in the journal of a survivor of an extinction-level event in our near future? His journals have been sent back in time to warn us about the perilous edge between extinction and evolutionary metamorphosis on which the fate of our species trembles.

The survivor writing to us is an empathic 18-year-old named Tommy. He’s been sealed in a three-acre biosphere with just one other person, and the outside world has been radio-silent for the three years of their enclosure. Tommy is in telepathic contact with someone living during our time who may hold the key to an evolutionary metamorphosis. The journals, entitled Parallel Journeys, have been sent back in time to inspire you to create your own metamorphic butterfly effects to help our species avoid extinction and survive in a new form.