ABSTRACT
Up to this point, the focus has been on those films which address the non-empirical question of what happens beyond the point of actual physical death. As we have seen, both theologically and cinematically, all manner of speculations have been rife concerning the nature of the ‘body’ that we may expect to inhabit in a post-mortem environment, and as to whether such representations accord with teachings that can be adduced from scriptural, creedal, doctrinal and other religious texts and formulations. What Dreams May Come (Vincent Ward, 1998) is a case in point. This is because the film’s delineation of heaven as an inherently subjective environment where each soul creates his or her own paradise can only stand or fall on assumptions about the nature and form of the afterlife that have been arrived at from philosophical and theological musings which, no matter how erudite or intellectually satisfying, correspond to the very objection that Immanuel Kant espoused in the eighteenth century concerning whether we can ever attain knowledge of the ultimate realm. For Kant, it is impossible for humans to know about the world as it is in itself (the noumenal world); we can only speak of the world as it appears to us through the senses (the phenomenal world), inasmuch as the only possible ground for knowledge is that of our sense-experience (see Kant 2007: 258-62). The focus in this chapter will be on those attempts that have been made, particularly within the last century or so, to buck this epistemological trend, by interrogating through the latest scientific advances whether we can glean anything about the next world, if there is one, from the findings of so-called out-of-body and near-death experiences. This will be followed by a discussion of the no less fraught and contested, particularly in academic (including theological) circles, testimony pertaining to séances, mediumship and telepathic communication and what they may have to say about the veracity of so-called ‘mind-dependent worlds’ along the lines of that proposed in the 1950s by the philosopher and parapsychologist Henry H. Price.
