I have entitled this final section ‘personal conclusions’ since, because of the nature of the subject of survival and the evidence supporting it, people are likely to come to any one of a range of different conclusions depending on their backgrounds. Every individual approaching the subject of survival comes to it with their own preconceived ideas about life and death and, as I have suggested above, these tend to influence how they interpret the evidence. What follows are my own personal conclusions derived from the evidence outlined in this bibliography and based on my background as a scientist and as someone who has been deeply interested and involved in spiritual matters for almost all my life. I have tried to be objective in my assessment, as far as that is humanly possible bearing in mind that both spiritual wisdom and quantum physics suggest that all things are interconnected and thus real objectivity is not attainable.

I am led to the conclusion that the weight of evidence in favour of the spiritual hypothesis in general and of the survival of death in particular (the two being inextricably linked) is so great that it is only by ignoring - or denigrating - large parts of this material that the concept of survival can be rejected. History shows that humanity is essentially a ‘spiritually-oriented’ species; we have almost always understood that there is some greater reality than just ourselves and the material world, and have constantly sought after this reality in however illogical a manner. The following quotation seems to me to sum up the human situation:

"We are not human beings following a spiritual path but spiritual beings following a human path."¹⁸

The recent, western belief that there is nothing other than the material world seems to me to be a minority, and relatively transient, view taking into account the whole of human experience in the past, present and, from the way things appear to be developing, seemingly into the future also.

The mass of evidence supporting survival is composed of accounts of many different events and investigations. Taken separately almost all of these can be individually criticised by the sceptically-minded in one or more of a number of ways with the intention of showing that there are flaws in the observation or interpretation of the event, so that any conclusion supporting survival or other paranormal explanation must be ruled out. However when taken together as a whole, for me the evidence forms an integrated, coherent and very considerable foundation underpinning the concept of survival and provides a justification for the belief in survival which the great majority of humanity has held for millennia. Nevertheless, however strong the evidence for survival appears to be, it must be accepted that there is, as yet, no absolute, incontrovertible evidence which provides an overwhelming case in its favour. As I have stated above, whether we favour either the spiritual or the materialist hypothesis, for most of us both must remain essentially belief systems until incontestable evidence becomes available which - for the individual - converts one or other of these hypotheses into reality. Human experience suggests that awareness of this reality is only generated by rare events such as mystical experience or NDEs; or - in the case of rare individuals like Swedenborg, Blake and Steiner - it is inborn.

Thus given the choice between the outwardly bleak, meaningless and mechanistic outlook of the materialist/humanist interpretation of life - with, for me, its lack of any clear justification for this outlook - and the positive, meaningful and life-affirming philosophy of the spiritual hypothesis, I find myself very much supporting the latter, particularly as it is reinforced by such a large body of direct and frequently explicit evidence. At least it gives me a spiritual philosophy to live by which provides a meaning to life and an explanation for and understanding of many of the events in life which otherwise may seem pointless and incomprehensible. The information which has come from the research into survival provides humanity with the means and the justification to plot a more constructive and positive way ahead than the blind and destructive path that we have been following for the past two or three hundred years.

Notes