Billionaire Offers $1 Million for Proof of Afterlife
This past January, wealthy entrepreneur Robert Bigelow announced a contest: provide the best evidence of “[T]he survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death” for almost $1 million in prize money. Over 1,000 entrants entered the contest, seeking to prove life after physical death.
Dr. Jeffrey Long has studied near-death experience (NDE) for 20 years and was a runner-up in the contest. In his essay, Dr. Long broke down 12 lines of evidence for life after physical death common among near-death experiencers around the world. Of the three most important, the first is cardiac arrest and brain death.
“Immediately, when your heart stops beating, of course, blood instantly stops flowing to the brain,” Dr. Long said, “10-15 seconds after blood stops flowing to the brain, maybe up to 20 seconds, the electroencephalogram (EEG), which is a measure of brain electrical activity goes absolutely flat — there’s no measurable electrical activity going on in the brain — it should be, in those circumstances, impossible to have any kind of a lucid memory at that time. Yet, by the hundreds, we have people reporting NDEs exactly at that time, highly lucid and organized experiences consistent with NDEs occurring at all other times, and that should be medically, absolutely impossible.”
Next, comes the sensation of floating above the body.
“The initial event is what we call an out-of-body experience. Consciousness rises above the physical body and from that vantage point they can see ongoing earthly events, or hear them, and they are often visualizing people frantically trying to bring them back to life. What they see in that out-of-body experience is overwhelmingly accurate, down to the finest details. Even if their consciousness leaves the area of their body and goes someplace far from their physical body, far from any possible physical sensory awareness, what they can see and hear is almost invariably — and I’m talking about my study, I’m talking about 98 percent — accurate down to the finest details.”
His third line of evidence is NDEs in the blind.
“I’ve studied and interviewed an individual who was born totally blind. When she had her NDE it was stunningly visual. I have a series now of people who are severely visually impaired or legally blind, and in all of those cases in my series, their vision during an NDE is either normal or even supernormal awareness; dramatic, supernormal vision, supernormal sensory awareness that we see over and over again in NDEs that would be absolutely beyond what anybody could normally imagine. All lines of evidence and others that I have all converge on that conclusion that NDEs are, in a word, real.”
What can we learn from the phenomena of shared NDEs?
“We now have a series of about 16 NDEs where two or more people had a simultaneous life-threatening event — they had NDEs and remarkably they were aware of each other, during the time that their consciousness was apart from their bodies, able to communicate with each other typically and able to talk, aware that their physical bodies were down there. In general, in this series of shared NDEs, one person dies irreversibly, they’re not resuscitated, the other person comes back to life and is able to share a remarkable shared NDE. Now, that’s important because that’s some of the strongest evidence we have so far, from any source, that what’s described in an NDE may well be that initial step toward permanent irreversible death for all of us.”
The biggest unanswered question: why do some people have an out-of-body experience while others do not?
“There was a NDE that was like the Rosetta Stone of understanding why some do and don’t, but this very dramatic NDE was in an unearthly, heavenly realm, and they were communicating with what they very firmly believed to be God. They asked God directly — it was an overwhelmingly blissful, peaceful, loving experience, with emotions beyond anything they could have experienced beyond Earth, which is very common in NDEs — and because this was such a positive experience, she asked God directly ‘Why me? Why was I so special that this should happen to me?’ And God answered to her in the NDE ‘Love falls on everyone equally, this is what you needed to live your Earthly life,’ so that’s a possible reason why some have NDEs and some don’t.”
Dr. Long hopes the field of NDEs will move from reactive study to proactive study; being able to speak to people after being resuscitated about anything they may have seen or felt, while technically dead, as standard operating procedure. Perhaps then, humans can definitively prove there is an afterlife.
Contacting the Dead Through Psychomanteum Mirror Gazing
Is it possible to connect with loved ones after they’ve moved on from this lifetime? Many people have reported apparitions or felt the presence of an otherworldly spirit at some point in their lives, but those experiences are often spontaneous or fleeting.
While séances and psychic sessions claim to produce connections with the departed, there is another lesser-known method that dates back to ancient Greece: the psychomanteum experience. This modernized practice of mirror gazing has been developed by Dr. Raymond Moody, a man who has devoted his life to studying near-death experiences and, through this process, has had some profound results.
The Ancient Greek Psychomanteum: A Portal to the Dead
In ancient Greece, people would go to a Necromanteion, a ziggurat-like temple that was devoted to Hades, Persephone, and the dead, in order to contact the spirits of their departed relatives. The word Necromanteion translates to “oracle of the dead,” and it was believed that these locations served as gateways between the worlds of the living and the deceased. The most famous of these temples was the Necromanteion of Ephyra, where visitors attempted to communicate with spirits.
Rituals at the Greek Necromanteion
To prepare for these encounters, visitors underwent elaborate rituals that included:
- A ceremonial meal – consisting of barley bread, broad beans, pork, and oysters.
- A cleansing process – involving purification ceremonies
- Animal sacrifices – offered to the Gods of the Underworld
- A mirrored hallway – created by filling a bronze cauldron with water, which was polished frequently to ensure a highly reflective surface.
Under dim lighting, with flickering lamps casting eerie reflections, participants gazed into the water, awaiting visions of their deceased loved ones. Temple priests guided the ritual, chanting invocations to summon spirits. If contact was made, apparitions appeared in the water, whispers echoed through the chamber, or messages came through the priests. To close the ritual, a banishing ceremony ensured no spirits lingered, allowing the living to return unharmed.
Dr. Raymond Moody’s Mirror Gazing
Dr. Raymond Moody, a philosopher, psychiatrist, physician, and author of Life After Life (1975) and Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones (1993) is best known for coining the term near-death experience and for his research on consciousness and the afterlife. Inspired by theater of the mind techniques found in ancient texts, Moody revived the concept of the psychomanteum as a method for making contact with spirits. He has dedicated his life to exploring NDEs and contact with the spirit world.
Dr. Moody’s psychomanteum approach differs from the Greek tradition by eliminating animal sacrifice and ritual meals, instead focusing on a structured and meditative environment designed to induce an altered state of consciousness. This process mirrors traditional scrying, also known as catoptromancy, where individuals use reflective surfaces to receive visions.
