Afterlife: Fact or Fiction?

                            by Dr. Mark Pitstick

When I was nineteen-years-old, I worked part-time as a respiratory therapist.  On one of my first calls to the emergency room, we worked on a five-year-old boy who had been hit by a truck.  As we treated him, the story unfolded: he had been walking to his first day of kindergarten and was the only child of young parents.  Despite hours of resuscitative care, he died from multiple injuries.  In shock, I stumbled out into the hall just in time to see his parents’ faces contort in grief as a doctor told them the news.

I went outside, shook my fist at the sky, and cursed God.  How could an all loving, powerful, and knowing God allow a little boy to die so tragically?  What kind of world was this where innocent children suffer and die and people experience such losses?  Afterwards, I entered a period of agnosticism and experienced the emotional pain and confusion that accompany a bleak spiritual perspective. 

Over time, this and other difficult events in my life motivated me to search for answers to life’s existential questions such as: ‘Who am I?  Why am I here?  Is there a loving, just God?  Why is there so much suffering?  What happens after I die?’  You know the questions.  I began a quest to prove to myself whether or not God and the afterlife really exist. 

After thirty years of intense searching, I’ve assembled convincing proof that we each really are timeless spiritual beings who are here to learn, love, serve and enjoy.  There is a Divine Presence whose love and fairness know no bounds.  We suffer when we forget to view life from a spiritual perspective.  For example, that little boy’s “tragedy” compelled me to find sensible answers to life’s most difficult questions.  Since then, thousands of people have been helped by my outreaches and I’m just getting warmed up.  So was his death a tragedy or a victory?

The word ‘afterlife’ is really a misnomer; it’s all life.  Life is an unending adventure with periodic changes, like birth and death, that don’t end but merely alter the journey.  Many cultures celebrate the transition from formed to formless dimensions and rightly so.  Those who pass on have graduated from this physical experience.  Their souls evidently fulfilled required lessons and moved on to the next set of growth opportunities.  

There are many scientific, clinical, religious, and firsthand indications of afterlife for all.  I especially emphasize validation cases that have been confirmed and are difficult or impossible to explain otherwise.  Taken altogether, this evidence strongly points to the reality of our timeless soul natures. 

The nine categories of evidence include:

1.) after-death contact cases

2.) near-death and out-of-body experiences

3.) miraculous events and divine revelations

4.) scientific input 

5.) paranormal indications 

6.) religious and spirituality teachings

7.) peri-natal input

8.) reincarnation evidence

9.) firsthand experience and inner knowing

Keep in mind that only one event in one category need be true for the thesis of afterlife to be adequately proven.  As noted philosopher and physician William James said, “In order to disprove the law that all crows are black, it is enough to find one white crow.”  There is no reasonable explanation for all this evidence unless, in fact, consciousness indeed exists independent of the human experience. 

Discovering the ‘good news that sets us free’ has certainly made a huge difference in my life and it can in yours as well.