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Then, death, so call'd, is but old matter dress'd

In some new figure, and a vary'd vest:

Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies;

And here, and there the' unbody'd spirit flies.

— Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses

"What you have perishes; what you are survives beyond time and space." — Death Notice

"When the clock strikes me, the powers of being will prevail over the powers that be." — Saul Williams

"On__________Jonathan Zap won his long battle with corporeality by dying." (My future epitaph, in my official estate documents.)

The soul can survive the death of the body. I do not base this conclusion on faith or religious doctrine but on experience and evidence.

The intense fear of death as annihilation I had as a child vanished after a certain number of out-of-body experiences. The direct experience of awareness being outside my body, and incredibly enhanced by that separation, changed my perception of death from emergency to emergence. My fear of death as annihilation was replaced by a deep intuition of death as an orgasmic portal.

My personal experience shouldn't convince you, but a careful study of near-death experience findings should be enough to convince an open-minded skeptic that death is an event horizon, not a pit of oblivion. The position of neurological materialism, the belief that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or secondary effect of biochemical process in the brain, is resoundingly and definitively contradicted by NDE findings. Consciousness does not reside in the brain, and electrical activity in the brain is not a prerequisite for consciousness.* (see example of NDE evidence below)

There are also many well-documented cases of ADC (After Death Communication). I had my first evidential experience at two and a half years old, and there have been ongoing experiences since 2013. After his death, Dante's son received a communication from his father about where in the attic he could pull up floorboards and find an unpublished manuscript. A few anecdotes shouldn't convince you, but the overall weight of well-corroborated evidence should be more than sufficient.

*The following example of NDE evidence is far from the most impressive but is chosen because of the arch-conservatism of its source — National Geographic — an organization known to be unfriendly to paranormal claims. What follows are some transcribed excerpts from the National Geographic documentary: The Moment of Death Al Sullivan, a man who has survived a multiple bypass operation relates,

"In the operating room here comes Dr. Takata whom I had never laid eyes on before. He introduced himself, 'Hi Mr. Sullivan, good afternoon, I am Doctor Takata." and he told me what he was going to do: 'We are going to take veins from the legs and take arteries also from the chest wall and probably do four or five bypasses for you.' And I'm listening, listening, and all of a sudden I don't have to listen to him telling me I can see what he is doing, because I found I wasn't there to listen anymore. I just left my body and watched. I can see, but I'm up looking down at them. It used to be me, but it wasn't me because the real me is up here watching. That's when they started putting stuff over my eyes and all kinds of drapes and blankets all around me and I still, I could see Dr. Takata and his people, and this is another thing, I could see through the operating table and me and I could see what kind of boots he had on. At one point, he stepped back, the surgeon stepped back, and it looked like he was flapping his arms, and I thought: What in the world is he doing that for?" Al continues,

"He was orchestrating: Do this, do this, and do that, and it did seem very foreign to me what he was doing."

Al demonstrates Dr. Takata's strange movements, his hands to the sides of his chest, elbows bent, twisting around, and pointing with his elbows as he gives commands.

Dr. Anthony F. Lasala, MD, cardiologist at Hartford Hospital explains:

"Dr. Takata, when he's not operating, and trying not to contaminate his hands, will put his hands close to his chest and point with his elbow."

Dr. Lasala: "Al Sullivan would not know of this peculiar behavior of Dr. Takata. I did not tell him that."

Dr. Takata: " I cannot explain how he saw these things under the complete sleep of anesthesia."

Dr. Lasala: "Even if he was conscious, it would be impossible for Al to see Dr. Takata's stance or arm movement because Al was behind a drape that blocks the vision of the patient, and his eyes were taped shut."

Although any particular anecdote is unconvincing, I should explain the relevance of this photograph. A family I know in Boulder had an eighteen-year-old son named Bodhi. He had been trying to get hold of me to do an I Ching reading. We played phone tag for a couple of days, and then I heard from a mutual friend that Bohdi had lost control of a car on a high mountain road and died. A few days later, I was visiting with Bodhi's sister at the family home up in the mountains. She invited me to stay overnight and suggested I might want to sleep in Bodhi's room to feel more in touch with his departed spirit. Except for a futon we brought in, the room was completely bare, all of Bodhi's belongings having been removed. I sat on the futon and meditated on Bodhi, attempting to be open to his spirit. A few minutes into the meditation, I was startled to hear an object drop just behind my head. The room was completely bare — there was sitting against a wall, so it didn't seem possible for anything to fall just behind my head. I turned on the light to investigate. I discovered a single object left by Bodhi (and by whoever cleared out his stuff) in this bare room. It was a glow-in-the-dark star that he had attached to the ceiling. The star fell exactly behind my head and landed in the center of a purple cloud of melted candle wax.