SPR GWEN TATE MEMORIAL LECTURE - Dr Paul Marshall - MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AND POSTMORTEM SURVIVAL

Certain experiences, including mediumistic contacts with the dead, crisis apparitions, and past-life memories, have been taken as evidence for life after death. Mystical experiences too can give the impression that death is not final, by bringing intuitions of immortality and other lives past and future. Furthermore, mystical experiences have claims to be ‘windows on reality’, and as such they can be used to inform understandings of the world that go beyond the pervasive physicalism of recent times, for which the disintegration of the brain at death must mean the extinction of mind and personality. Mystical experience points to alternative philosophies in which survival and other disputed phenomena, such as telepathy and psychokinesis, are possible and perhaps even probable.