Scientists and psychologists have long been fascinated by the overlapping concepts of “brain,” “mind,” and “consciousness.” While the brain is a physical organ built like a computer with trillions of neurons glowing inside, the mind is considered an invisible entity that controls our emotions and thoughts. When it comes to consciousness, however, understanding becomes a little murky; particularly when it comes to the tricky question: does consciousness persist after death? In an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show podcast (@ShawnRyanShow) published on July 22, 2024, parapsychologist Edwin C. May ponders this question, considering concepts such as near-death experiences and ghosts.

May is an American physicist and parapsychologist known for leading the U.S. government-funded Star Gate remote viewing research program. According to War History Online, the Stargate Project was a multimillion-dollar program and secret U.S. military unit created by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the height of the Cold War to try to read the minds of Russian soldiers and defeat them. The Stargate Project involved telepathically reading other people’s minds and predicting the future through psychokinesis and extrasensory perception (ESP).

In this episode, May talked about topics such as psychokinesis, Stargate, Heaven’s Gate cult, near-death experiences, and consciousness. The main idea he conveyed in his talk is that he believes that “consciousness dies with the body” and that there is no afterlife. The video was viewed over 440,000 times in less than a month and received more than 2,000 comments.

About an hour and thirty-three minutes into the episode, host Shawn Ryan asked May, “What do you think happens when we die?” May simply replied, “Nothing.” Shawn asked if people just die and the lights go out, to which May replied, “I’ve read a lot and most neuroscientists believe that consciousness is an outgrowth of the brain, an emergent property of the brain, and if that’s true, consciousness cannot survive the burning of the brain in the crematorium after death.”

Shawn then asked him if he had ever studied near-death experiences. May replied that while he had not personally studied near-death experiences, he had certainly studied the research. He also gave the name of an organization that does such research. “There is an organization called the Templeton Foundation,” he said, adding, “They spend $5 million on research labs around the world that study near-death experiences. Templeton is known for this kind of spiritual stuff.”

He cited the example of a person named Joe who had three to four near-death experiences and who felt the rain running through his fingers and also saw the light. In a YouTube video, therapist Laci Green described that although no one really knows what happens when someone dies, many people seem to see the “white light” on their deathbed. May added that a near-death experience is real, just as people see lights on their deathbed, but it cannot yet be explained. “We may not be able to resolve these questions, like the meaning of life and serious questions like that,” he said in the video.

He reported that the Jews did not believe in life after death, but the Egyptians did. However, there is no solid evidence to support these ideas. One study has shown that consciousness arises from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers in brain neurons. And if that is so, that means that consciousness dies when the brain dies. However, if consciousness is a property of the mind, it may not die after death.

Unlike May, some experts believe that death is not the end of consciousness. Sam Parnia of New York University Langone Medical Center spoke to the New York Academy of Sciences and explained that it is possible that the brain does not give rise to the entity called “mind” or consciousness. It is entirely possible that there is another, yet undiscovered level of reality that essentially goes beyond what scientists currently know about the brain and that determines the reality of humans. Therefore, consciousness could still be present even after the person dies. But like death, consciousness is currently an unsolved mystery.