Washington, American Psychological Association, Library of Congress Control No: 2023934129. 280 pp.

The author is a professor in the Department of Psychology at King’s University College at Western University, Canada, with subject specialisms relating to consciousness and altered states of consciousness. As he tells the story at the outset, he was concerned to write a textbook for a course he was teaching on death as an altered state of consciousness and this book was the result.

A key aspect of the author’s ambition is to show how the hypothesis that death is not the end of phenomenal consciousness is supported – indeed, demonstrated – by anomalistic evidence that materialists choose to ignore or reject outright. To this end, he ranges impressively far and wide in his presentation of that self-same evidence, considering claims arising from deathbed phenomena (including End-of-Life Experiences), after death communication, mediumship, instrumental transcommunication (evidence of the afterlife via electronic and other largely mechanical means), anomalous physical phenomena (pre-eminently those accompanying physical mediumship), Near-Death Experiences and past-life experiences. In the penultimate chapter he explores the possible nature of the afterlife and follows this with a brief summary.

The subtext throughout arises from the author’s oft-displayed conviction that the evidence as he has presented it really does provide substantial and cumulative grounds for belief in an afterlife. This subtext, presented with vigour, is that materialism cannot encompass or explain such evidence, which in turn challenges scientistic paradigms currently dominant within the academy. As an academic himself, this is clearly a key concern for Barušs. Scientism, he writes early on, is an ‘overbelief’ and in order to explain some or all of the evidence for the continuing persistence of consciousness in the absence of a functioning brain we need – or, at least, academics need – to overturn it in order to replace it with ‘a new story.’ This claim might well be seen to stereotype academia (and academics) somewhat unduly, but there is no doubting the conviction – frustration, even – with which it is expressed.

The book has several key strengths. I enjoyed the direct and sometimes spiky prose and the subject-matter ranges far and wide, ensuring that a beginner wanting to know something of the evidence for survival would do well to begin here. In fact, in the end I was left wondering if the author had tried to do too much. I take his point that ‘it is important to reflect what is actually in the literature rather than censor out the parts that we find unpalatable’ but came away wondering if a more selective, critical, engagement with key aspects of that literature might have done a better job of convincing materialist-academics rather than the ‘scattergun’ approach that he often seems to adopt. Indeed, in his eagerness to reflect the broad range of material included within his subject-matter he sometimes fails to deliver a more nuanced overview. The evidence for mediumship as it supports the survival hypothesis is presented at length, for example, but there is little or no consideration of the repeated – and often substantiated – claims of outright fraud that have dogged spiritualism’s history. Regarding the so-called Scole Experiments, he writes that he has ‘no reason to doubt the genuineness of the phenomena’ despite an earlier acknowledgement that investigators ‘were…frustrated that they were not allowed to videotape anything and…were not even allowed to use thermal imaging and infrared cameras in the dark.’ Hmm. Why not? I smell a rat, even if Barušs doesn’t. Similarly, he makes much of the veridicality and timing of Near-Death Experiencers’ (NDErs) observations whilst apparently out of their bodies during allegedly brain dead episodes, but makes little or nothing of observations made by some NDErs which later turn out to have been demonstrably wrong.

Overall, this work presents the fruits of an ambitious undertaking. The author’s conclusion from the evidence he presents – that ‘consciousness appears to continue in much the same way as it did during life’ – may not be shared by others, including academics and other materialists with a more sceptical bent, but the journey this book traces is a lively one and raises a considerable number of questions along the way.

This review first appeared in The Christian Parapsychologist, New Series Vol 3 No 2, Spring 2024, pp. 48 – 50.