The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed I hedged my bets in my post, ‘It’s A Small World After All’, when I wrote that ‘after the ride stops you will in all probability cease to exist.’ Really the line should have read, ‘after the ride stops you will cease to exist,’ without ‘in all probability’. I’d like my existence (yours too) to continue beyond death. I don’t mean merely in my children and grandchildren’s memories, I mean in some real sense. Me, still existing somewhere. I’m not in any state of anxiety about this black hole of nothingness, because I know my continued existence is highly unlikely to happen. But still…

I wonder if any of you watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine back in the early 1990s. There was a character in it called Odo, played by the late René Auberjonois. Odo was a shape shifter whose day-to-day appearance mirrored that of the humanoids around him, but not quite. In one episode, Odo returned to his home planet where he assumed his true form of viscose fluid, and merged with a planet-wide pool of his own kind. In this state he became one with everyone else while maintaining, it was suggested, his own identity.

I liked this idea very much. It seemed to me that an after-life could be like this, one in which we merge back into the great consciousness without quite losing our own identity. It was a pleasant fantasy, one shared I suspect by whichever Star Trek writer envisaged Odo’s existence as being like this.

Recently I read Dan Brown’s latest, The Secret of Secrets (not his best) where, lo and behold, the same idea pops up again. Brown makes much of the idea that our sentience is drawn from a consciousness that exists separately from our physical bodies. According to this philosophy, after we die, the consciousness we have drawn down and made use of, continues as part of the greater consciousness ‘out there’, while retaining a sort of impression of us while we were alive. This sounded like so much Dan Brown hokum, even though he is at pains to stress that there is some research evidence for it. He’s right, there is, though it is problematic (as he acknowledges.)

Noetic science as it’s called proposes ‘non-local’ consciousness that some evidence suggests continues after our individual deaths. The problem is of course that much of this evidence is anecdotal and difficult, if not impossible, to replicate scientifically. What sort of rigorous experiment could be constructed to determine whether, when an individual dies, his or her consciousness continues? Hence the reliance on reports of near-death and out of body experiences and the significance of dreams and shared existential, spiritual states.

Still, it’s a nice idea and much more inviting than those after-life promises made by religions that are dependent on believing the right things, debasing ourselves in front of imagined deities and attaining a degree of righteousness in this life. How religions have tied up access to the after-life, if there is one, with all their ludicrous terms and conditions! Maybe it’s as simple as our consciousness continuing from wherever it is it actually exists. Or maybe not.