Life After Death

I read that Robert Bigelow the billionaire entrepreneur was so convinced that his dead wife Diane was 'still around' i.e. had survived as a personality after her death, that he founded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies after her death.

We All Imagine DEATH In Our Own Way

The Institute organised an essay competition called 'The Contest' for writers, philosophers or scientists to give a proof that would stand a legal court test (i.e. beyond reasonable doubt), that life continued after death.

Now Mr Bigelow is perhaps as well known outside the aerospace industry, for the financial support he has given for investigations of UFOs and Para-psychological topics, including the continuation of consciousness after death. 

In January 2021, he put up an award of prizes totalling US $1 million in The Contest, for anyone who could demonstrate the existence of a life after death .... in the form of the 3 best essays proving that life continued in another form, with rewards of $500,000, $350,000 and $150,000 for the best three submitted. Many of these 1,300 essays submitted, used the same incidents as 'proofs', but apparently Mr Bigelow was satisfied that the proof was there, 'beyond reasonable doubt' as his website proclaimed ..... and he ended up publishing the top 29 in 5 special books (and on-line).

BICS Satisfied Consciousness Survives Death

Some of you may also be familiar with his 1996 purchase of Skinwalker Ranch, a 512-acre cattle ranch located in Utah, that is the site of purported paranormal phenomena (its not known what he investigated or found on the property) .... a ranch that also featured on a TV series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch after he sold the property in 2016.

Now when I was reading about this consciousness after death competition, my mind was immediately cast back to an interview I had read somewhere, with the actor, singer, and the worlds oldest spaceman William Shatner, who was in his 90's during the interview.

Captain Kirk

I had saved some of it in a text file at the time, as a possible blog subject, but I had then forgotten it, and so I can't attribute it's source (but it may have been Yahoo). Anyway he had been asked about life and death:

Q: "When you pass on, do you think that you'll see him and the other people you've lost again?"

A: 'It's such a ridiculous notion, and it has no logic in it. I'm an old man somehow. I don't feel like an old man, but I'm an old man! I don't want to go to heaven as 91. I want to be 32 or 27! 18 was a great year for me! I don't mind trying this all over again.'

'But there's no logic in the idea that you're going see your parents [when you die]. That means they're old, and they don't want to be old! They want to be lovers before you were conceived. So that whole thing doesn't make any sense.'

'What does make sense is the renewal and the evolution of the connection between us and the universe. The story as we know it is that our bodies return to the stars, but what happens to this beautiful thing inside us?'

'I had this great horse. He got lame in all four feet — he was an old horse. I led him down to the place where we had dug his grave. I was with him, and he was feeling [my presence] even though his legs were sore. Then the vet came and gave him an injection, and within a count of one, the horse fell over and went in the hole that we had dug.'

'And I thought, "Where did this incredible life force that was this stallion go? It's gone? What do you mean gone? Where did it go?" How do you eliminate some loved one's soul, for want of a better word. It's an entity. We think that it's in our heads, but maybe it's in our gut or a combination of both.'

'But where does that thing, that energy, that life force go when you die? That's a mystery.'

He was also asked about his thoughts on life and decisions he had made:

'I'm morally against regret. If you are faced with a branching road, it's either left or right. Say you choose right, and you fall through the sky and as you're falling you think, "I should have turned left!" But you didn't know that you should have turned left when you turned right.'

'Once you've made a decision, you're a different person. You can't regret it. We were just talking about failure, and it's the same thing. You didn't know you were going to fail, you have to try again.'

'It's another split in the road that will take you to a different place.'

Mr Bigelow might have saved himself some money, had he taken Mr Shatner's views on both subjects in to his philosophy .... death and its outcome is a mystery, and we should not regret that fact.