Happenings Newsletter

freelance correspondent in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and an Op-Ed contributor to The Asian Wall Street Journal.  Schmicker turned his investigative attention to the paranormal and unexplainable-- topics that included ghosts, spirits, and reincarnation—after working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, where the people he met had no problem accepting the reality of the spirit world and had experienced such phenomena, themselves. It was when he returned to the U.S. that Schmicker discovered that one of his relatives, a Catholic priest, had a daily diary filled with many personal ESP experiences.

Up until that time, Schmicker had accepted Newtonian physics and materialist science’s message that there was no evidence supporting the reality of occurrences like ESP, telepathy, spiritual interactions or even an afterlife and heaven. Without evidence, there was no basis for belief in the possibility or reality of these events happening or being anything other than chance or folktales.

Thus began Schmicker’s quest to find “the best scientific evidence for other so-called ‘paranormal’ phenomena reported by humans for centures….”  His first book on this subject, Best Evidence, published in 2000, detailed his findings. The book offered experiences, vison and reports of several phenomena being studied by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Arizona and the University of Virginia School of Medicine.  Yet skeptics refused to look at the evidence based on the argument that “these phenomena can’t exist: therefore, they don’t.”

The premise of this book, What Comes Next?, is this:  Newtonian materialist science says that the only acceptable evidence can be physical evidence. Since an afterlife would not be a physical place or experience, there could be no evidence studied or used to conclude that an afterlife, heaven, or even a divine presence exists.

Enter Quantum physics, which suggested, according to multiple Nobel Prize-winning scientists working in that field, that our consciousness survives death.  Schmicker explains that “Quantum Physics is currently science’s most precise, powerful, proven theory of reality.”

For that reason, the book lays out two parts:

Part I – the personal story of Schmicker’s investigation, and
Part II – the hard scientific evidence supporting the afterlife argument this book makes, aimed at skeptics in search of evidence.  

Thus, the premise of the book is that “Near-Death Experience research says our consciousness survives death. Quantum physics explains why this is scientifically possible and logical.”

Schmicker describes the publications and experts he focused on in accumulating the evidence, stressing that he leans toward Nobel Prize winners whose opinions reflect innovation, deep knowledge and experience, rigor, and an almost universal respect of their peers. For NDEs, Schmicker relied on medical researchers rather than anecdotal reports.

Consciousness—which includes experiences ranging from “vivid color sensations…the faintest background aromas…thoughts on the tip of the tongue…musical experience…existential angst…the taste of peppermint to the…experience of selfhood,” all of which have a “distinct experienced quality”—was defined by Newtonian physicists to be merely a product of the brain. Yet critics of this consciousness-from-matter point of view, including Australian philosopher David Chalmers, called this “the hard problem” facing Materialist neuroscientists—that “consciousness emerging from matter is not something one would logically predict from Newtonian physics. Chalmers points out that some scientists insist that it is merely an illusion.

Schmicker reports that non-Newtonian-focused scientists and neurologists determined that the higher mental functions “such as consciousness, reasoning, imagination and will—are not produced by the brain” because the mind is non-physical.” They suggest that, based on near-death experience research, the mind acts like a radio transmitter and the brain is like a radio receiver.  If you turn off the receiver (the brain) it does not stop the transmitter (the mind) from continuing to transmit, in the same way that turning off or destroying a radio does not stop the music that can be played on the radio.  The radio is not creating the music, it is just facilitating the transmission of it.

The book also touches on Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick’s explanation that the brain filters consciousness, but only allows us to perceive a small part of what exists in the same way that we know about x-rays, infrared radiation and microwaves because we have instruments that can detect them.  Ironically, then, since consciousness exists apart from the brain and continues to exist even after the brain has died, it is only in death that we can become fully conscious.

Humans have been reporting near-death experiences for more than 2000 years, and when surgeons and physicians began reporting the near-death stories of their patients—children and people blind from birth among them—scientists could no longer dismiss the reports and statistics, as well as the fact that survivors worldwide were reporting having the same experiences. But it was not until 2001 that a Dutch Cardiologist, Pim Van Lommel, published a 20-year systematic study in a controlled environment involving near-death experiences of hospital patients who survived a cardiac arrest. “Their experiences are identical, irrespective of whether they believe that death is the end of everything or whether they believe in life after death," Van Lommel wrote.

As an additional part of his findings, Schmicker writes about more than just NDEs and out-of-body experiences and their connection to Quantum Physics’ discoveries. The book also includes a discussion of how our conscious awareness is the basis of physical reality before death, findings that are even more complex than the principles of physics outlined above. It is worth the read, as it piggybacks on Lynn McTaggart’s The Field, Fred Allen Wolf’s Taking the Quantum Leap, and David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics.