How Did We Get Here?

This essay emerges from a thread of inquiry I’ve been following for some months now. It began with reflections on Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Secret of Secrets, which, despite its fictional cloak, engages intriguingly with ideas about consciousness beyond the body. That curiosity nudged me back to our previous series of conversations exploring near-death experiences, morality, and the moral frameworks embedded in religious narratives.

Alongside fiction, I’ve been reading John Hagan’s The Science of NDE, which offers a sober, scientific lens on phenomena often relegated to mysticism: the continuity of consciousness, the life review, and encounters with forces both benign and challenging. The interplay between Hagan’s research, Brown’s narrative imagination, and my own reflective explorations has led me here – to a meditation on consciousness, morality, and what life might truly mean when viewed through the prism of lived experience, near-death accounts, and cross-cultural insights.

The Inquiry

Life has a peculiar tension: we live, we err, we fear death – and yet, for reasons I cannot fully name, my “spirit radar” has been nudging me toward questions of consciousness and the afterlife. Are we more than the sum of our neurons? Does the self detach, continue, or vanish at death?

Near-death experiences (NDEs) offer tantalising glimpses. Researchers like Pim van Lommel document survivors who report consciousness beyond the body, encounters with radiant presences, and profound life reviews. These reports consistently shift priorities: fear diminishes, empathy grows, and values recalibrate.

Detached or Lost?

The idea of consciousness detaching at death – yet remaining judged, measured, and surveilled – strikes me as absurd. It mirrors the Abrahamic paradigm I grew up knowing: a “magnifying glass God” scrutinising every misstep, ready to declare, “I told you so.” A lost consciousness, in contrast, is simpler and, strangely, more forgiving: experience ends, and the existential ledger closes.

Benign and Malignant Forces

NDE accounts hint at dualities: benevolent presences that guide and reassure, and threatening forces that confront unresolved guilt or fear. These forces are less cosmic dictators than mirrors of our consciousness – internalised moral and relational truths projected outward in moments of extreme clarity.

A Personal Interlude: Through the Tunnel

My reflections on NDEs are not entirely detached from personal experience. Over a decade ago, I underwent a past life regression session – partly out of curiosity, partly out of a romantic hope of discovering who I might have been before this life.

The session surprised me. I had always thought hypnosis would render me limp, vacant, and out of control. Instead, I found myself vividly responsive, answering promptly, narrating scenes as they appeared without hesitation.

First came a tunnel – dark, but not frightening. Its walls were made of smoke, black and grey, like an ethereal passage. At the end was light. I stepped into it and found myself walking on clouds. Around me rose pillars of light shaped like people at a gathering, acknowledging me as if I belonged among them. A deep happiness overtook me, so intense that tears rolled down my cheeks in the physical world.

My therapist interpreted this as a rare glimpse of Heaven – not the anthropomorphic meeting hall of ancestors but a place of energies and auras, formless yet perceivable. At that moment, I was told I had touched the realm of a “senior soul.” Whether true or symbolic, I cannot deny the weight of that experience.

Later in the session, I saw an escalator and, without thinking, named the number glowing on its dial: “333.” My therapist gasped – a sacred number, she explained, in the Indian cosmic order. It was a moment of strange authority, as if a cipher had been handed to me without premeditation.

What to make of all this? Perhaps nothing more than my subconscious weaving symbols into story. Yet, like many who have brushed against NDEs, I carried away not proof, but a shift – a lingering sense that consciousness is more expansive than I had imagined.

Gods, Devils, and Human Fallibility

Comparing Abrahamic God(s) to ancient pantheons illuminates something striking. The Olympians, Hindu devas, and Egyptian gods were fallible, capricious, deeply human. By contrast, the linear, judgmental God of the Abrahamic tradition demands obedience under absolute moral scrutiny – a setup where humans are almost inevitably destined to fail. No wonder the “magnifying glass” metaphor resonates so strongly.

Life as Cycle vs Line

If life is a straight line, finite and final, mistakes feel terminal, and death is the ultimate arbiter. But if life is cyclical, consciousness can learn, adapt, and return – much like resitting a failed exam. NDEs, dreams, and mystical experiences all point to continuity, relational learning, and the possibility of hope beyond immediate failure.

The Soul of the Matter

From NDEs, consciousness studies, my PLR experience, and cross-cultural reflection, a pattern emerges: life is less about proving ourselves under divine surveillance and more about awakening, integrating, and connecting. The moral universe may be relational rather than punitive, experiential rather than codified, cyclical rather than linear. In this frame, love, empathy, awareness, and growth are the real currencies of meaning.

Sobering Thoughts

Yet even the most hopeful frameworks cannot fully erase the weight of mortality. Consciousness, however continuous or cyclical it may be, is still tethered to life as we know it – to bodies that fail, loves that fade, and moments that pass irretrievably. The hope, the lessons, the light glimpsed in NDEs, and the possibility of cycles beyond our grasp – all remind us of a sobering truth: the journey of consciousness is fragile, provisional, and often incompletely understood.

Perhaps the real call is to inhabit each moment fully, to learn ethically and relationally, and to confront existence with eyes open – neither clinging to fear nor presuming omniscient certainty. The universe may not need to be linear, just honest; not punitive, just instructive; not final, just inviting – a classroom in which consciousness itself can awaken, if we are attentive enough to the lesson.

P.S.:

This essay is part of an ongoing series where I explore consciousness, morality, and the meaning of life through the lenses of literature, science, and lived experience. From Dan Brown’s narrative provocations to John Hagan’s clinical studies and my own past life regression, I’ve been circling the question of what lies beyond – and what it means for how we live now.

I welcome your reflections, resonances, and challenges. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or reach out to me directly. After all, consciousness may be the most personal of experiences, but it is also the one thing we all hold in common.