Free Will After Life: A Study

Copyright © 2013 Jantine Brinkman.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-6829-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6831-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6830-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902306

Balboa Press rev. date: 2/11/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1

Chapter 1   Mainstream views on consciousness

Chapter 2   A dive into quantum consciousness

Chapter 3   Free will in Western and Eastern philosophy

Chapter 4   The self

Part 1

Chapter 5   Upon death

Chapter 6   The cross-over and beyond

Chapter 7   The life review and other afterlife activities

Chapter 8   Reincarnation and post-incarnation

Conclusion

References

INTRODUCTION

I am a mind-traveler and I love freedom. I started my voyages in my dreams; then I discovered guided meditations, created by various healers and psychologists. Since four years The Monroe Institute’s hemisync technology has facilitated my journeys, and occasionally so have shamanic drumming and relaxation techniques.

As I am also a medium, my journeys now and then consist of helping out souls who got stuck in their afterlife experience, by waking them up, sometimes almost literally from their self-created mental coffins, and showing them alternative paths and solutions. These journeys made it clear to me that freedom with regards to one’s afterlife destiny doesn’t follow automatically upon death. This worried me. As you can imagine, my freedom urges are not limited to earthly life. After death, I will want it as well.

In addition I am an academic. In the eighties of the last century I studied Scandinavian Languages and Literature after which I graduated in Swedish Literature in 1990. I love studying and scientific exploration, so even before I initiated my conscious mind-travels, from another angle of interest I had begun to read about the afterlife. After reading and analyzing many contemporary books on this theme, I felt I missed out on something essential to me. And then, finally, it hit me: I needed to add the freedom theme into my investigations, a theme that touches my heart and soul.

A dive into literature on freedom quickly led me to the notion of free will, which in its broadest definition includes the aspects of freedom of action and choice. Free will is considered by contemporary philosophers an important leitmotiv for the lives of many people in the modern 21st century Western world. I am clearly not alone in my urges. Of course, not all inhabitants of countries with a predominantly Western culture will recognize free will as one of the main features of their lives. Also, the inhabitants of countries with other types of culture, for example Eastern, African, Polynesian, may or may not recognize or value the concept, depending amongst others on their interests, priorities and on the amount of exposure to Western culture.

Free will after life is usually less of a field of interest for those Westerners that consider themselves atheist. Their belief does not include an afterlife.

People with religious beliefs often include an afterlife in their world view, more or less restricted to their particular faith. The portraits of the afterlife in religious literature usually contain a limited freedom of choice: one either goes to a type of heaven, purgatory or hell. God ultimately decides.

The philosophies of Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism also both include an afterlife, in which one’s destiny is ruled by one’s karma. However, actions can be taken during lifetime to influence the karma; humans have free will in these Indian philosophic traditions.

In the past century non-religious spirituality has received an increased attention in the Western world. This has been accompanied with the creation and rise of a variety of spiritual movements. The soul and spirit are basic features of their philosophies, inherited from Christianity, and so are reincarnation, the law of attraction and the karma-like view of ‘what you reap is what you sow’, all adopted from Buddhism and Hinduism. Also in these belief systems you will find quite some afterlife regulation, but most do view free will as a basic component of both life and afterlife. The fact that in the 21st century we embrace freedom in the West, motivated me to research the contemporary literature, produced in the past 30 years, on afterlife topics, free will and aspects of consciousness, and look for possibilities to enhance freedom of action and choice in the afterlife territories.

My intention is to provide those of you who consider these freedoms to be important both in and after life, with relevant information and, if available, with tools to notice and to enhance them after life.

This book is the outcome of a comprehensive literature study; it is not the result of an empirical scientific study. There is no definite scientific evidence available on the existence of any type of afterlife, or of consciousness, free will or freedom of choice in the afterlife. Near-death studies, however, are coming closer and closer to demonstrate the existence of consciousness outside the physical body, in a near-death state. Maybe at some point in the not too far future, there will be substantial, empirical and reproducible proof on the presence of consciousness on all levels of physical and nonphysical existence. In the meantime, to me as a medium and a frequent mind-traveler there is no doubt that such a consciousness exists.

THE BOOK CONSISTS OF TWO PARTS:

Part one is the theoretical framework. It contains information on consciousness, free will and the self. Without consciousness, free will is hard to contemplate or even imagine.

In chapter one you will read about the various views that exist on consciousness in mainstream thinking. This is followed by a chapter that captures the studies on this topic that are based on modern physics and philosophy, with a deep-dive into those that have created space for nonlocal consciousness. Chapter three presents the historical and contemporary views in western and eastern philosophy on free will. In chapter four the self is described.

In part two the results of the analysis of free will after life are provided, using the knowledge about consciousness, free will and self as provided in part one, as well as information from esoteric and Eastern literature. The results are presented in four chapters, each focusing on a particular afterlife phase: upon death, the initial steps after cross-over to non-physical realms, the life review and the activities afterwards, and the preparation for reincarnation and post-reincarnational existence. These phases, often mentioned in Western afterlife literature, are mainly used to structure the chapters; I do not view them as conclusive.

The book ends with my conclusion on free will after life.

I hope this book will provide you with new insights and new pathways, just like its creation process has done for me.

CHAPTER 1

MAINSTREAM VIEWS ON CONSCIOUSNESS

INTRO

I n this chapter I will provide you with information on definitions as well as on the various views on consciousness that exist in mainstream philosophy and science. Also I am including a short overview of the current issues in mainstream consciousness studies.

Mainstream, in its meaning of the current thought of the majority, in Western physics and philosophy is based on the assumptions of classical Newtonian physics. In the East it is based on various larger Chinese and Indian philosophical systems. The Western and Eastern mainstream lines of thought are opposites: separation rules the first, oneness the other.

I will concentrate on the Western views of consciousness, but also Eastern views will be touched upon. My aim is to first show you the classical way of thinking, in this chapter, and then move on to a modern, ‘avant-garde’, quantum way of thinking, explained in chapter two. This quantum way of thinking has several similarities with the Eastern way, and so have their views on consciousness.

THE NEWTONIAN WORLD

Now first a very short explanation of Newtonian physics, the foundation of the Western classical world view. This physics system, which originated in the 17th century, concerns itself with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces, such as gravity.

Newtonian physics state that both space and time are independent from anything external, and are therefore absolute. Space remains always similar and immovable. It is occupied by matter, in the form of solid objects, always larger than zero length, and therefore detectable by one’s senses, directly or via microscopes. These objects are considered to be impenetratable and permanent, obeying fixed cause-and-effect laws in a predictable manner.

The materialistic world view flowing from Newtonian physics was rather easy to foresee. It is a view in which matter comes first and only. Anything that cannot be perceived by the senses of sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell is considered questionable.

Material objects are seen as separated from each other, as well as humans and any other living organism as all of them consist of matter. All actions by living organisms are based on cause and effect, heavily determined by the circumstances these organisms live in. Although this view is still consciously or unconsciously present in people’s minds, it has lost its extreme deterministic qualities in the 20th and 21st century. However, the notion that only matter exists still prevails and continues to influence the Western world.

Classical physics states that there is a real world out there, acting independently of human consciousness, which, in this view, arises from real objects, such as neurons and molecules. It is seen as a byproduct of the material causes which produce the many physical effects observed. You will find the materialist view in many present day consciousness studies.

CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINITIONS AND TYPECASTING

In mainstream Western science and philosophy, many definitions and concepts exist on consciousness. The term refers to a variety of aspects of the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts (1). It has been defined as: subjectivity; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood; or the executive control system of the mind (2).

Despite the difficulty of definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives. (3)

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. (4)

The reason why it is difficult to define consciousness may be related to its subjectivity; it may simply mean different things to different people. This is one of the reasons that investigators use various models to describe the phenomenon. The model created by Ned Block is used widely in the