Sam Parnia’s book, Lucid Dying (Hachette 2024), was released yesterday, with brisk sales of the Kindle version.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s 2019 interview with Parnia at Closer to Truth: “The evidence so far suggests that the entity we call the human mind… does not become annihilated after a person has died.” A partial transcript follows:

We have to remember that death is a process. Just because a person has died — they’ve been given a time of death, and essentially called a corpse — the cells inside the persons body have not died. Have not become so damaged that we can’t bring them back.

As science has progressed, we are now able to manipulate those processes for hours after death and bring back a whole person and study their consciousness during that time — which was impossible until very recently, right?

And so the incredible discovery through this (2:21) is that we can bring back people and send them home. We can really have the miracle of science. We can take someone who is dead and make them alive again, which is amazing.

But the other amazing part of this, which is why I am so fascinated by this, is that we can study what people experience when they are dead. The evidence so far suggests that the entity we call the human mind (2:45), consciousness, what the Greeks called the psyche, that was later translated into “soul” — the me, Sam — does not become annihilated after a person has died and we … certify them as being dead.

That entity continues. And it continues even when the brain does not seem to be functioning. Which raises the question that consciousness may be a separate entity from the brain. It’s not magical. It’s just not discovered yet. But it doesn’t die. (3:12)

Now, I can’t tell you what happens, three hours, four hours, ten hours after the person has died. I can’t tell you whether the consciousness gradually fades away, disappears into thin air as some people might believe, or does it continue for ever longer periods of time… .“

SAM PARNIA, “IS LIFE AFTER DEATH POSSIBLE?” (SEPTEMBER 25, 2019, 6:27 MIN, 1:46 – 3:30 MIN) FROM INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN AT CLOSER TO TRUTH

Like psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, the author of After (MacMillan 2021), Parnia says he is not religious. Rather, his views are the outcome of clinical experience in a field where doctors have literally never gone before.

We Live in Curious Times

Fields of science that were supposed to prove the inevitable correctness of materialism, naturalism, physicalism, eliminationism, etc., are just not doing their job the way they were supposed to. Maybe the more spiritually oriented founders of science disciplines were right — that never was science’s job and never should have been.

Parnia’s question of whether the soul continues to survive after the body is long gone is an important one. In our forthcoming book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Defense of the Existence of the Soul (Hachette Worthy, June 3, 2025), Michael Egnor and I will argue that the immortality of the soul can be successfully defended on philosophical grounds. Near-death experiences point in that direction for sure but, as Parnia notes, they do not by themselves establish it.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.