Customer Reviews

Your Eternal Self

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The next time I encounter someone who is looking for assurance that physical death is not the end I will recommend this book. Having read literally hundreds of books offering evidence that consciousness survives physical death, I would have to rank this as number one from the standpoint of offering the reader the full gamut of phenomena supporting the survival hypothesis in clear and concise language.

This book deals with the most important question facing mankind - whether we are all marching toward extinction in a meaningless world or whether we are spiritual beings temporarily occupying physical bodies while participating in a divine plan. "Our culture has a desperate fear of death, as though death were somehow a bad thing - the end of existence," Dr. R. Craig Hogan, the author, advances, pointing out that much of the money spent in healthcare today is expended on the last two weeks of life, trying to keep the body alive just a few days longer. The problem, Hogan suggests, is that humankind matured intellectually over the past two millennia, but went spiritually backward. "The result is that over the two millennia since the Axial Age, humankind has been in a spiritual dark ages," he continues. "Religion punished anyone who spoke about spiritual things not sanctioned by the religion." Meanwhile, a "herd of stubborn skeptics" resisted from the other end out of pure elitist arrogance.

As Hogan points out, there is overwhelming evidence that we are eternal beings - evidence that if properly studied and discerned allows those accepting the afterlife on blind faith to move to true faith or conviction. At the same time, the skeptic with an open mind can move off his skepticism to belief.

"People today who are still not able to accept the abundant data that the afterlife is as real as this life have not read the evidence or participated in medium activities," Hogan explains. "They assume that the mind is confined to the brain, so evidence of the mind outside of the body couldn't be valid, and that justifies their not reading it. Because they haven't read the evidence, they assert that there is no evidence, and since they are not themselves aware of any evidence to the contrary, they are assured that the mind must be confined to the brain and that reinforces their belief that any evidence of the mind outside of the brain must be invalid. That circular reasoning leaves them in an ignorance of their own making."

Hogan begins by examining the most recent evidence which strongly suggests that the mind is much greater than and not confined to the physical brain. He first looks at remote viewing, mentioning some very impressive research in the area as well as his own interesting experience with this phenomenon. He then looks at out-of-body experiences, including near-death experiences, various forms of mediumship, including materializations and the direct-voice phenomenon, deathbed visions, apparitions, induced after-death communication, studies in ESP, what-have-you. He summarizes the findings of esteemed scientists and scholars both of yesteryear and today, often quoting them. He examines the arguments by the debunkers and then offers arguments debunking the debunkers.

After examining the evidence for survival, Hogan discusses some of the testimony from the spirit world concerning the conditions after death. "People do not lose their individuality in the afterlife and don't suddenly become omniscient or clairvoyant," he states. "They don't change. They also don't transform into being good or angelic. They carry their fears, conflicts, and problems into the afterlife." The environment one finds himself in depends on the person's state of being when he leaves the earth realm.

Hogan has taken the best evidence, distilled it, dissected it, and discerned it. The person with an open mind will find much food for thought in this book.

Dr. Hogan and I co-authored Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma. Since I am a psychologist, my primary focus has been helping people who suffer from grief and trauma. I have remained neutral regarding the issue of whether my patients' after death communications are real or not because it is important that my patients evaluate their experiences in any way that is comfortable for them.
That being said, I am well aware of the ongoing debate between afterlife believers and skeptics. It has seemed to me that most believers believe in everything, and that most skeptics believe in nothing. Both positions appear to be based more on simple beliefs than a critical analysis of the available evidence. The most remarkable aspect of Dr. Hogan's book is the mountain of scientific evidence he provides to support his hypothesis that the mind and the brain are two distinct entities. For skeptics to reasonably maintain their position, they will have to somehow respond to Dr. Hogan's very convincing and evidence based arguments. These kinds of arguments, I believe, is what the field of afterlife research needs.
On a more personal level, while I have believed for some time that the mind is more than the brain, Dr. Hogan's hypothesis is more radical than my own. To be honest, when I finished reading his book, I felt different. I felt like if he is right, the world is even more different than I had imagined. If you are like me, this book will challange your own personal paradigm or worldview, and make you think differently about who you are, and the world you live in.

R. Craig Hogan's book presents fascinating and compelling evidence that a non-physical reality truly exists. A truly open-minded reader will have a difficult time dismissing the evidence as inadequate or fatally flawed. Instead, the evidence is eye-opening and at times jaw-dropping. The concept that the mind is NOT located within the brain--and the reasons given for that amazing assertion--are more than worth the price of the book.

Evidence is presented by physicists, physicians, and other professionals from prestigious journals such as the Lancet. Data on numerous topics such as remote viewing, mediumship, and after-death communications are offered. The last part of the book ventures into practical concerns such as how to grow spiritually, and ponders questions such as "What are you to do with your eternal life?" and "What is the relationship of your eternal self to the physical realm?"

R. Craig Hogan is co-author of "Induced After-Death Communications" which reveals groundbreaking work on how EMDR--a well-established treatment for post-traumatic stress--can be used to trigger the subjective experience of having an after-death communication from a loved one.

In all, if you want to tantalize your mind (wherever it may be located) with fascinating evidence from reputable scientists that there is ample evidence of survival of consciousness after death and that we are really spiritual beings more than physical beings, you will enjoy this well-organized, thought provoking book.

How can it be possible that ideas come to people fully formed, seemingly out of the blue... out of thin air? Why do people consistently react to pictures physiologically BEFORE seeing the images? How do blind people see without use of their eyes? How have some people been able to speak and write in languages they did not previously know?

Dr. Craig Hogan takes us on an astonishing tour through these questions and much, much more in his extraordinary book, "Your Eternal Self." The shocking truth of the matter is that our minds are much more than our brains, and through our minds, we have access to and influence over physical things and people which are distant from us both space and time. Packed with excellent cutting-edge references to the most current scientific discoveries in the field of consciousness, "Your Eternal Self" gracefully opens a door to a completely new understanding of who and what we are.

I love the elegant simplicity of layout and organization of this book, as it so artfully guides us through a series of fascinating topics, experiments, questions, and ideas. When describing how we know what we know about the afterlife, "Your Eternal Self" explains that we are learning about the afterlife through: near death experiences, after death communication, induced after death communication, mental medium communication, and direct voice and physical medium communications.

I especially adore Chapter 10, "Recent Indications the Mind Forms the Brain," for its tour de force assessment of scientific research describing how the brain is reflecting what the mind has already seen. I give this book my highest recommendation, and hope that every serious seeker, researcher and student of consciousness reads it!

Speaking as someone with a scientific upbringing, and a willingness to be a believer about many things, I would not recommend this book - I got it for christmas after putting it on my Amazon wish list.

The approach of the book is bring up numerous stunning phenomena, with footnotes, and spend about a page on each one, ending with a sentance like "...so anyone can see the mind cannot be merely the brain".

The book frustrated me because it never deals with any one of the phenomena in enough detail to convince me that there isnt a good counter-explanation - In fact this was confirmed for me when I used his footnotes combined with google to realise that he only presented one side of some decidedly 2-sided situations - For example the classic "red shoe on the window ledge NDE" which seems extremely dodgy and anecdotal, and another "blind man who can navigate a room without bumping into things" which also has a fairly well understood neurological explanation (his eyes work, but the part of his bain which normally processes visual information on a conscious level does not work- yet some part of his lizard brain subconscious does process the visual information in a simple way and stops him walking into objects).

I had hoped that, given my "confirmation bias" towards being a believer, I would find the book really enjoyable - but it actually made me more doubtful about the existence of anything than I was before : I was left thinking "is this really the most compelling case that can be made for this stuff??"

The oldest confirmed age a human can live to is about 115 years. Is that it? A century and some change - pushing religion to the side, is that all for the human soul many celebrate so dearly? "Your Eternal Self" disagrees- and claims that this lifetime is only one stop in a eternal journey and that reality is far more than it seems - that your mind is not simply something that sulks around in your head and is something far greater. "Your Eternal Self" is an eye-opening look at the pseudo natural and everything related to the human mind - highly recommended for anyone into the science beyond the mundane world.

Craig Hogan's book "Your Eternal Self" is simply a masterpiece. It presents the scientific case of consciousness as an entity or phenomenon ontologically irreducible to the brain. To support his case, Hogan uses evidence from psychology, medicine, neuroscience, parapsychology, afterlife studies, etc. providing a cumulative (and solid) argument for his thesis.

Hogan's book will be a standard reference for the contemporary scientific evidence supporting afterlife and the mind-brain separation.

The book is rigorously referenced and documented; thus you will have extensive bibliography for an in-depth study of each topic discussed there.

The book is scholarly (making it an useful guide to scientists, philosophers and other scholars interested in consciousness, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology and scientific anomalies), but it's easy to read too, making it the best contemporary and up-to-date introduction for general readers interested in these important questions.

Our book discussion group is thoroughly enjoying this book! We are amazed how much scientific research has proven amazing theories about the mind & brain even going back as early as the 1800s!

The book is good but the shipper needs to ship it in a hard box. It was shipped in a padded envelope and when it arrived, the entire upper right corner of the book and all pages were folded down and permanently creased. If this were a gift I would have returned it.
This was not damaged in my mail box, as it fit fine.

This is a captivating book on the edge between nonfiction and metaphysics. R. Craig Hogan does a wonderful job addressing the life after death issue with
solid scientific evidence and from a more non-conventional perspective, involving remote viewing and after-death communication.
His data is backed-up by a myriad of scientists, medical doctors and physicists. It is provocative and a good read for those who are interested in life on the other side.