EXCLUSIVEWhat REALLY happens when you die? Great minds from the arts, science and theology tackle humanity's eternal question - and their insights are chilling

• e-mail

It’s the question that has tormented the greatest human minds throughout history: What happens when we die?

Recently Chris Langan, a US horse rancher said to have the world’s highest IQ of 210, announced he had discovered the answer. Via his loftily titled Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, the 72-year-old claimed that when we die, we transition to a new ‘computational’ reality. In short, he claimed, death is merely the end of our relationship with the physical world – allowing us to enter a new dimension in ‘another kind of terminal body’. Whatever that means.

But what do you think? This Easter weekend, as Christians reflect on the death and resurrection of Christ, the Mail asked eight leading thinkers from science, the arts and theology for their views on this eternal conundrum.

Paulo Coelho

Brazilian author Paulo Coelho

The idea of death has been with me every day since 1986, when I walked the renowned Spanish pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago.

As I later wrote in my collection Like The Flowing River, until then, I had always been terrified at the thought that, one day, everything would end. But on one of the stages of that pilgrimage, I performed an exercise that consisted in experiencing what it felt like to be buried alive.

It involved lying down on the floor, crossing my arms over my chest in the posture of death and imagining all the details of my burial – as if I was being buried alive.

It was such an intense experience that I lost all fear, and afterwards saw death as my daily companion, always by my side.

Because of this, I never leave until tomorrow what I can do or experience today – and that includes joys, work obligations, saying I’m sorry if I feel I’ve offended someone, and contemplation of the present moment as if it were my last.

I can remember many occasions when I smelled the perfume of death: that far-off day in 1974, in Rio de Janeiro, when the taxi I was travelling in was blocked by another car, and a group of armed paramilitaries jumped out and put a hood over my head. Even though they assured me that nothing bad would happen to me, I was convinced that I was about to become another of the military regime’s ‘disappeared’.

Or when, in August 1989, I got lost on a climb in the Pyrenees. I looked around at the mountains bare of snow and vegetation, thought that I wouldn’t have the strength to get back, and concluded that my body would not be found until the following summer. Finally, after wandering around for many hours, I managed to find a track that led me to a remote village. I know death is not a topic anyone likes to think about, but I have a duty to my readers – to make them think about the important things in life.

And death is possibly the most important thing. We are all walking towards death, but we never know when death will touch us and it is our duty, therefore, to look around us, to be grateful for each minute.

• Paulo Coelho is the Brazilian author of 30 international bestsellers including The Alchemist 

Uri Geller

World-renowned mystifier Uri Geller

To my mind it is impossible to believe that life ends with death.

Look at it from a scientific point of view. In his famous equation, Einstein proved that matter can not be destroyed –

E = mc2 – but just changes form. Like matter, energy also cannot be destroyed. So, what happens to our soul, our spirit, our aura? These are the most powerful aspects of us – more important than our bodies - and I believe we continue to survive after death, just in some other way.

I believe that, at the point of death, we enter another dimension where we reunite with all those with whom we had emotional bonds in our lifetime – parents, grandparent, even our beloved pets. This life is just a corridor to the next, and what we do now determines what kind of afterlife we will be rewarded with.

What is amazing is that the idea of life after death is common to practically all religions. It’s hard to believe that billions of people –Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus etc – are all wrong. It is naive to think we are just molecules that are gone in the blink of an eye.

I believe there is a Creator - not a god with a beard who sits on a cloud, but an infinite being who lets us get on with life before calling us in when our time is up and transitions us to the next eternity.

Think of all the countless examples of near-death experiences people claim to have had. No matter what the religion, they are often similar – drawn towards a bright light with a feeling of total peace. This, surely, is a clue that life does not end with death.

• Uri Geller is a world-renowned mystifier who runs the Uri Geller Museum in Tel Aviv. His tarot card deck, Uri Geller: The Extraterrestrial Oracle, is on sale now.

Carlo Rovelli

Italian physicist and author Carlo Rovelli

I find it funny that somebody still believes there could be an ‘afterlife’. The only afterlife is in the memory of others, which in turn does not last long.

I think that we are scared by our end because of a silly mix-up: the instinctive fear of dangers we share with other mammals interferes with our species’ unique capacity to envision the far future.

Our life is so precious and wonderful precisely because it is finite. Some of those who believe in an afterlife are ready to kill others and waste their own lives by waging war on one another.

I find it wiser to live the beauty and the intensity of each moment we have. To strive to share this planet with mortals. To console each other for our sufferings here. To make life better for us and everyone else on Earth, not on mythical elsewheres.

• Carlo Rovelli is an Italian physicist and internationally acclaimed author whose books include The Order Of Time.

Elif Shafak

Turkish-British author Elif Shafak

My novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World tells the story of a sex worker in Istanbul called Leila and the lives of her dear friends. This book has an unusual structure because it begins with the demise of the main character, the literary heroine.

I did a lot of research before writing this story, and I was especially intrigued by recent scientific studies about the transition from life to death. An increasing number of studies show that the human brain can continue to function for a few minutes even after the heart has stopped pumping oxygenated blood and the lungs have ceased functioning. So the entire book takes place in that limited amount of time, merely a few minutes, right after Leila’s heart stops beating but while her brain is still ‘alive’, slowly shutting down, remembering moments from her past.

This is a fascinating subject that makes us realise that the passage from life to death is more complicated than we assume. Many doctors have observed lucid brain activity in patients who have passed away, sometimes as much as ten minutes after death.

This raises an intriguing dilemma: Does consciousness continue in some form, at least for a while, after death? I believe it does.

If the brain remains active after the death of the body, what exactly does the mind remember from the past – the good things or the bad? Does the mind travel back to childhood, almost like an unspooling of time?

I think these are all valid questions and they matter.

Whether there is a soul or not is an ongoing question, which we cannot answer with certainty. But clearly a human being cannot be reduced to a few organs and tissue. We are more than that.

Scientists, especially neuroscientists, are making remarkable contributions to our understanding of this universally important subject. But I believe we novelists can also offer a small contribution with our imagination, empathy and the fictional characters we create.

• Elif Shafak is the Turkish-British author of 21 novels translated into 57 languages.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake

Biologist and author Dr Rupert Sheldrake

My speculation is that we can go on dreaming after we die, but we can’t wake up because we no longer have a physical body to wake up in. We are ‘trapped’ in a dream world.

All of us dream, even if we forget most of them, and in our dreams we have another body – a dream body – in which we move around, talk to people, sometimes even fly.

Our dream body is obviously different from our normal physical body, which is lying asleep in bed.

After we die, we may live on in our dream body, even though our physical body is dead. The dreams we experience after death will depend on our memories, hopes, fears and relationships – and also on our religious faith.

If we believe that after death we will be helped by deceased family members, saints, angels and, for Christians, Jesus Christ, then this may well be what happens.

We may undergo continuing personal development in this after-death dreamworld.

We may ultimately pass beyond it into a state of union with ultimate reality, such as that encountered in mystical experiences while we are alive.

In this after-death journey, we may be helped by the prayers of those who are still alive.

I pray for family members and friends who have passed on, and I hope that when I die people will pray for me.

• Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a former fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, is a biologist and author.

Lord Sumption

Former Supreme Court judge and historian Lord Sumption

I am a Christian, but not an orthodox Christian. I don’t believe in an afterlife. What happens after death? Extinction. I am comfortable with that. In fact, I am rather relieved.

• Lord Sumption is a former Supreme Court judge and eminent historian.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain MBE

Writer, broadcaster and convener of the Rabbinic Court of Great Britain, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain

My faith, Judaism, is vague about the afterlife. It reckons the soul continues after the body dies but is happy to say we do not know exactly how.

Of course, people still want an image to hold on to, whether out of fear or curiosity. I try to help by suggesting that maybe it is like a drop of rain that comes down and hits a tree.

We are that drop of rain and can trace its individual life as it makes its way down the tree trunk. Eventually it reaches the end and falls into a puddle. It is still there but has lost its individuality – no longer recognisably you and me –and we return to the source from which we came.

But that’s just my guess and it is best not to rely on the unknown. Instead, it is important to make the best of this world, concentrate on the here and now, appreciate the people we care about, and be OK living with a question mark.

• Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain is a respected writer, broadcaster and convener of the Rabbinic Court of Great Britain.

Libby Purves OBE

Journalisr, presenter and author Libby Purves

Growing up, I was raised Catholic, so initially had childish images of Heaven and harps. When my irreligious dad died, my mum said she hoped there would be a quiet area of Paradise with chairs and newspapers and no winged nuisances singing hymns at him.

I loved the writer C.S. Lewis’s idea that what you come to after death depends on how you live; how clean and loving and humble your attitude. Since time becomes irrelevant when you’re dead, perhaps that is what religions have always meant. You find an eternity of joy or misery, depending on what you have made yourself into.

Read More

I was a typical teenager who lived online. Until I, like thousands my age, found the Church

But we don’t know. And, for that reason, I love the Christian burial service: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. It adds a ‘sure and certain hope’ of life to come but the main thing is a sane warning not to turn to superstition, spiritualism, zombie or ghost fantasies.

Meanwhile why not accept the mystery, the odd moments of half-belief?

Once, while tending a newborn baby in an old farmhouse, I heard an elderly man’s voice grunt in disgust: ‘Another one by Christmas, I suppose!’ But there was no elderly man. The room I was in was empty. Later I heard that a family who lived there many years earlier had a resignedly grumpy patriarch. It was probably my delusion, but I liked the idea of his aura hanging about, remembering the toughness of supporting 12 kids on the land.

At other times, after my own losses, there have been oddly consoling moments. A feather falling from the sky, a robin hopping towards me, a sunrise that felt like a message. Proves nothing – but, as the writer Milan Kundera wonderfully said, if we deny such poetic metaphors, we rob our lives of a dimension of beauty.

• Libby Purves is a veteran journalist, presenter and author.