Is there any evidence of life after death besides what written in the Vedic scriptures?

From Pritha Saha

For a more detailed answer to this question, you can hear this lecture: The Mystery of Reincarnation

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
Question by Pithan Saha. Is there any evidence of life after death besides what is written in the Vedic scriptures? Answer, yes. Science has come up with many phenomena which indicate the existence of life beyond death.
So, one of them is near-death experiences, whose scientific study was pioneered by Dr. Michael Sabone and subsequently by many other scientists, including Kenneth Ring, who especially pioneered the study of near-death experiences among the blind people. So, near-death experiences are experiences of people who were medically unconscious and sometimes clinically declared to be dead because even their heart was not functioning, their brain waves were flat, and still at that time, they were able to perceive themselves from outside the body and communicate. And later on, somehow they were miraculously revived, and when they came back, they gave objectively correct explanations of what was happening during the time of their outer body experience.
The most unambiguously documented case is of Pam Reynolds, who had aneurysm in her brain. Aneurysm means a swelling at the bottom of her brain, and because of that, she was given an artificial heart attack by which her third heart was stopped. All the blood from her body was taken out, and all the blood from her brain was drained out, so the brain was stopped.
Then her brain was lifted up, so that Dr. Spenzler, who did the surgery, could reach to the aneurysm, the tumor that was there, and then he took it out. So, during that period, there was no blood in her body, there was no heartbeat in her body, there was no brain waves in her brain. And yet, after she came back to life, she heard the talk between the brain surgeon and the cardiologist, she described the way her hair was arranged, she described the way her surgery was done, many significant, and Dr. Spenzler said that there is no way that she could have known all these things, every single parameter of life was absent at that time.
So, this is one evidence, period of experiences. Beyond that, there is, of course, past life memories. Dr. Ian Stevenson has pioneered this in a very major way, and subsequent to him, there are many other researchers, Dr. Antonia Mills, and Jim Tucker, and other researchers, especially based at the University of Virginia, Department of Personality Studies, who have documented more than 3,000 cases of children who remember their past lives.
And these children have been able to find out, or explain, give details of a distant personality, who lived several years before they were born, or at least some time before they were born, and with whom they had no contact, nor their families had their contact. And still they give detailed information about that person. And Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Tucker have looked at various normal explanations.
Could the children have known by normal means? Could the children have guessed this information? Could their parents have told this information to the children? Might the parents have made a whole fraud? And they have systematically refuted all these explanations and shown that there are a large number of cases where none of these explanations are satisfactory. So the past life memories indicate that this person not only continues to live after death, but that person goes on to the next body. And there, in that next body, continues existence.
So apart from this, there are also other evidences like possessions, apparitions, where people who are in a disembodied stage. So near-death experiences indicate that life can continue beyond death, in the sense that the body may be biologically or medically dead, but the person is still living and conscious. The past life memories indicate that the soul can go from this body to the next body.
And so existence continues not just beyond this body, but also it continues in a new body afterwards. So there is a book written by Dr. Joel Fisher called as Life Between Life. That means the soul has left this body and has not yet entered the next body.
So there are evidences of possessions, apparitions and communications. Possessions means this disembodied soul enters into the body of somebody else and starts speaking through him. You can hear the answer of the question on possessions to understand these three things clearly.
I won’t repeat them now. But there is a large body of evidence on this. And I am working on a book on this whole topic.
Hopefully within the next few months that book will be ready. And on this website itself, if you do a search for near-death experiences, you will get some articles also.