Exploring the Afterlife: Tao Lin’s NYC Lecture on Near-Death Experiences
What happens after you die?
It’s generally annoying when someone follows a question by saying that it is “in some sense, the only question.” But the question of what happens after death is, in some sense, the only question.
If death signifies for us the beginning of eternity, then what happens after death must be infinitely more relevant to the way we live our short, ~80-year lives in a universe that is at the very least billions of years old, and possibly much—even infinitely—older.
Though almost every culture and tradition has a concept of some sort of conscious existence after death, no one can agree about exactly the next life holds.1
We disagree endlessly about all manner of facts in life. Finding anything resembling universal truth often feels a fool’s errand.
Is death no different? Is there no evidence for even a single moment that transcends contention and controversy, maybe not in life but at the moment we cross over from this form of existence?
It was the possibility of this very sort of evidence that drove throngs of death-curious humans to congregate at new literary venue and prospective library “Earth,” in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 49 Orchard Street, on Saturday, June 1st, to hear the space’s first resident, novelist and thinker Tao Lin, speak in a talk entitled “DMT, Near-Death Experiences, and the Afterlife.”
Lin, renowned for his contributions to autobiographical fiction and alternative literature, branched out into non-fiction with his 2018 book Trip, which in large part detailed his psychedelic-impelled movement away from a nihilistically and hedonistically tinged existentialism, culminating in what could have easily been a life-ending addiction to amphetamines and benzos, influenced by the work and lectures of Terence McKenna, the premier psychedelic advocate of the 90s and a wide-ranging thinker in his own right.
Since then, and through his forays with psychedelic substances such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT), Lin’s sense of spirituality has deepened and intensified. Lin’s fans are generally able to trace the contours and bifurcations of aspects of his intellectual, spiritual, and wellness journey on Twitter, where he often shares ideas before they make it into his books.
Lin delivered his lecture extemporaneously, occasionally glancing down at his outline (since posted, along with video of the talk, online).
He started by walking the audience through his understanding of the modern world’s—and his own—relationship with materialism, the “idea that anything that exists is matter,”2 which necessarily3 precludes the existence of the soul and the afterlife, and by denoting the reasons he felt that the Big Bang—“the least plausible explanation (for) why this universe exists”—was false, and why modern physics was egregiously wrong, justifying itself and its suppositions through a series of ad hoc explanations.4
“In a materialist world, there's a lot less to think about and focus on and look forward to and find meaning out of,” said Lin, making reference to the ways that materialism had imposed itself in his life, including his parents’ own lack of identifiable spirituality.5 “If we can’t find an explanation for why the universe is here, it makes sense to just assume it came from somewhere else.”
That somewhere else, in his view, is “the spirit world.”
“Throughout my life, being a materialist, I'd always been searching for something deeper, something more magical,” Lin explained. “I would look into paranormal phenomena. But nothing was able to convince me that it was real until my 30s.”
It was then, in 2015, that Lin first smoked DMT, a powerful hallucinogenic dubbed “the spirit molecule” by Rick Strassman (the first researcher to successfully run clinical trials on DMT since the blanket criminalization of psychedelics in the late 1960s, and previous contributor to Countere). The experience was intense and compelling, but at the same time didn’t do much to move the needle of his spiritual views away from materialism. His fundamental view of reality remained unchanged when he was back on sober ground.
“I still didn’t know what a soul was,” he said. That remained unchanged until his psychedelic research led him to also research aborigines, whose animist worldview finally caused the writer to embrace a semblance of spirituality and an interest in the concept of the soul.
The next time Lin smoked DMT, in 2023, he “felt distinctly like he was hiding in this universe,” which felt “unreal and simple,” compared to the DMT realm. This had “strong reincarnation vibes,” Lin told the audience. “I just ended up feeling like my life here is just something brief and small compared to my old existence.”
A short while later, at the suggestion of a friend, Lin began to read seriously about Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). He pointed out that interest in NDEs tended to come in “waves,” with the most recent wave heralded by Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life after Life.6
Lin learned that “near-death experiences have happened throughout history and culture. And they’re common, even. They estimate that one in 20 people will have a near-death experience. And millions of people have had it. And they resemble each other… they also match accounts of the near-afterlife in Plato and the Bible and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and other accounts throughout history.”7
Lin then walked the crowd through common features of what occurs during a near-death experience: “People notice that they're looking at the dead body and they realize they're dead…and while outside their bodies, they have enhanced senses and cognition. They can see in every direction at once. It's like if we had eyes on every side of our heads. That's what people report being able to see when they're out of their body. And they talked about being able to think more the clearly than ever before. And they can hear better too, and they can know people's thoughts.”
It would seem, according to these anecdotes, that existing as an untethered soul is superior in every imaginable way to being a soul within a body. After this comes the life review—the oft-mentioned “life flashing before your eyes”—but with a lesser-known element in which one feels deeply the hurt of anyone you’ve ever caused pain, from their perspective. Next is an all-consuming white light, the presence of which inspires the near-death experiencer with a sense of unconditional love.
After describing the NDE phenomenon in full, Lin went on to suggest that it was this very experience in prehistoric times that inspired the development of the earliest belief systems we now call religion, citing that a number of indigenous groups reference NDEs for their beliefs about the afterlife.
Lin views the non-indigenous religions that have developed in the last 6000 years, since the advent of “dominator-culture,”8 as being limited and faulty in their beliefs, owing to the fact that they were developed at a time of social chaos and for purposes more in line with maintaining power and control over certain groups than in accurately representing the true nature of reality.
“It seems like the judgment or reward and punishment [aspect] of many religions, it could just be added on because of being in dominator-culture,” he said. “This is probably the main reason why I think near-death experiences are so good to talk about and to learn about…because it dissolves all this fear that after you die, you're going to be judged or punished.” Lin’s belief is that the life of this world, trapped in these limited and pain-susceptible bodies, is the absolute worst that things will be.
I am sympathetic to this view. This life has within it an abundance of tragedy, cruelty, and pain. Suffering is a key characteristic of the nature of this reality. Islamic Sufi conceptions also hold this current plane as the world of severity, contrasted with the spiritual world of mercy into which we will pass at the time of our death.
While I found Lin’s talk as percipient as ever and respect his analysis about modern religions’ susceptibility to corruption and inaccuracy, I find that he makes a a jump that I, and probably most religious believers of Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, etc) personally can’t make with him in full.9
By virtue of my religious understanding of the world, it’s deeply within me to believe we will all be judged, regardless of whether we believe in or however we wish to view Hell: as a made-up concept meant to inspire fear; as a physical, fiery reality; or as a metaphor for the consequences of unrighteous actions.10
The Final Judgement is an ever-present reality that informs every moment of my life. I consider it, like the DMT-space, to be “realer than real.” That isn’t to say I can define what it means to be judged, in a universe that seems by all rights determined. And from a God who I know to be “the most merciful, the entirely merciful.”11
Still, I think a lot of benefit can be derived, even among religious people, if the emphasis shifted away from punishment and instead towards consequences. And these consequences can, in the final analysis, be viewed as lessons.12
What we’ve been primarily concerned with here is near-death experiences, which we know about by virtue of anecdotes. Many people are now coming to the conclusion that the long-time dismissal of anecdotal evidence by empirical scientism is nonsensical and narrow-minded. Scientific data has value that can’t be garnered elsewhere, but the way that we as people primarily understand the world is through stories. And an anecdote is, of course, is a story.
Something I agree with Lin about unabashedly, as he has learned through his study of the stories of near-death experiencers, is that the reason that we are here is to “love and to learn.” What that means to each individual person is something we can perhaps endlessly discover throughout the course of our lives.
You’ve read some of Tao Lin’s thoughts, insights he gathered about near-death experiences, and some of my own regarding the subject of death and what comes after.
So now what is it that you think?
Tao Lin, when not adding to his list of things he doesn’t believe in that people aren’t ready to see, is currently working on his next book, tentatively titled Self Heal: How I Cured My Autism, Autoimmune Disorder, Eczema, Depression, and Other Health Problems.
Follow Mohammad Rafiq on Twitter.
Footnotes
1. For the Eastern, Dharmic traditions this continuation normally takes the form of reincarnation. In the West, generally speaking, we have the Final Judgement, then the sorting of souls into Heaven and Hell.
And there’s a whole lot of of in-between that basically serves to confuse the shit out of us: the Bardo of Tibetan Buddhism, the Purgatory of the Roman Catholics. There will be aerial tollhouses for some of the Orthodox, wherein wicked spirits will attempt to drag down to Earth the soul on its journey to God, and a perilous and arduous navigation to the next life for the Ancient Egyptians, who seem to have never heard the now-popular parlance “you can’t take it with you when you go.”
Maybe you pay the ferryman Charon to get across the river Styx if you died in Ancient Greece, or perhaps you sit forever in the stillness and darkness of Sheol if you passed on from this world as an ancient Israelite.
Don’t forget about the extra-Quranic tradition of the Punishment of the Grave developed in Islam, where the wicked will get a taste of their future punishment in the fire of Jahannam, tortured incessantly as they await judgement. The righteous, however, will gleefully await Paradise, in airy graves of peace and comfort.
The Buddhists, though, speak of many different hells, or Narakas, some hot, some cold. They are unpleasant, to say the least.
These are a fraction of the different afterlife traditions that human beings of varied cultures and climates have embraced in recorded history.
2. Materialism, Lin states, officially developed approximately 2500 years ago in Greece and India, before becoming so widely embraced by the majority of scientists 100 years ago that spiritual ontologies are almost reflexively “dismissed as superstitious and unscientific.”
3. In most models. Lin himself makes references in his Substack to old materialist paradigms from the 1800s, now widely discarded, that allowed for the soul through the use of infinitesimally small aether particles.
4. Lin focused on this take-down of modern cosmology in an essay for Document Journal. The three ad hoc arguments that he focused on in this lecture were dark matter, inflation theory, and dark energy. He also revises modern physics understanding of how old the universe is to at least a trillion years, citing the existence of structures such as the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall which would have taken many more billion years to form than we have available to us in the current paradigm of modern physics.
5. Lin’s dad was a physics professor.
6. One could also maybe argue that the most recent wave of public interest could be said to have begun with Lin’s posting about it online, which has coincided with the passing of Pluto into the sign of Aquarius. Pluto, the planet of sex, secrets, suspicion, obsession, trauma, transformation and—you guessed it—death, moved into Aquarius, the sign of the intellectual, the rebel, the alienated, the reformer, the one who questions and finds themself constantly in opposition to the presuppositions that society imposes and takes for granted.
7. They match accounts of the Hadith literature out of Islam as well: Umm Salama reported, “The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) came to Abu Salama (as he died). His eyes were fixedly open. He closed them, and then said: ‘When the soul is taken away the sight follows it.’”
8. An understanding of a dominator/partnership culture model, advanced by Riane Eisler in her 1987 book The Chalice and the Blade, and a societal degeneration from a partnership/egalitarian model that promoted peace to a male-dominated model that promoted war is central to understanding Lin’s worldview. We don’t have space to explore it more thoroughly here, but interested parties should check out this comprehensive essay Lin posted on his website.
The general notion of a spiritual/moral/physical decay of society and humans over long spans of time also roughly coordinates with the Hindu conception of a Yuga Cycle, gradually worsening cyclic ages. Most Yuga Cycle adherents would place us currently in the Kali Yuga, the worst, most sinful, and most degenerate of the four ages, where humans are said to be physically smaller in stature and live much shorter lives than in previous eras.
9. Lin said early in his lecture that the advent of Yahweh, an “angry, jealous God,” 3500 years ago represented a nadir of dominator culture. This understanding of Yahweh, though popularized in modern times and often cited for the anachronism and primitivity of Abrahamic faiths, may strike some who were raised in those faiths as somewhat incomplete.
It is true that there is a harshness to the Old Testament that is troubling to modern sensibilities. Yet by Lin’s own analysis it is accurate to say that we live in fallen times. The Hebrews who ascribed to the Old Testament lived in the desert, at a time when violence from neighboring peoples was the norm, and without the societal structures and technologies we have today that make easier the travails of subsisting within an environment that can be unforgiving and lethal.
It is true that Yahweh meted out harsh punishments for failures to hold to a strict moral code. But as a personification of the nature of reality, the conception of Yahweh is accurate to a world in which social, moral, and even ritual failures and mistakes could lead easily to severe consequences for the Israelites, possibly to the complete dissolution of them as a people.
The mercy of the God of the Ancient Israelites, though, can also often be understated, as Yahweh is described in Exodus 34:6-7 as “compassionate and gracious…slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.”
Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.
10. I would like also to touch more on the concept of Hell.
Has an understanding of Hell been a net negative for humanity? It certainly inspires fear. Fear, most can agree, should be avoided and minimized wherever possible, yet at the same time fear of consequences can be as powerful a motivator of doing good and avoiding evil as can hope for benefit.
How many individuals through the course of human history have been stopped from an evil they otherwise would have committed had they not feared the consequences of the hereafter?
The partnership societies preceding the descent into dominator chaos may have not had much use for Hell as a concept. But in Lin’s own analysis they were likely—as a virtue of their cooperative, pro-social values—better-behaved in general. In much the same way that one doesn’t need to construct prisons until people begin to commit crimes, one doesn’t need to speak of Hell until people begin to sin.
And Hell, while a consequence of bad behavior, need not be understood only in terms of punishment. The fires of Hell cause pain, as do all our struggles, yet fire also purifies. In this way Hell can be understood as a place of spiritual purification, and a person’s time incarnated in a Hell-like realm may prove a small period in the life of the soul and the lifespan of the universe.
11. God forgives all sins, and yet we are still judged. “One must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.” —Soren Kierkegaard
12. I would also cite Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of karma, that we can take to mean simply the notion that individuals’ actions and intent will influence their future.
These Dharmic traditions, in their holding fast to the concept of reincarnation, maintain that were an individual not to see the consequences of bad behavior in this life then they should surely see them in a life to come. How different is this understanding, practically speaking, from the understanding that humans will be judged for their deeds?
13. I will share an anecdote of my own. In 2021, I drank ayahuasca. I experienced a large number of things, some of which I can explain with words, some I can’t. But I seem to recall a clear moment where it became evident to me that I would certainly one day be judged, and the intensity, the utter seriousness of that realization was unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. It was clear to me that this coming judgement mattered more than anything else my life, that it was something that I needed to orient my life around. I knew that at the time of the judgement it would be clear that nothing was as important as my passing this judgment, that the consequences of not passing wholly untenable.
I understand why some readers might dismiss my experience here as a projection of my own deep-seated belief system. I was born a Muslim and after a brief stint of teenaged atheism returned to my faith, albeit with perennialist tendencies. Huge portions of the Quran are dedicated to reminding humankind of the reality of the coming of the Hour, the Day of Judgement. Next to the promotion of monotheism towards an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-merciful God, the coming of the Day of Judgement can be viewed as the central message of Islam.
So I wouldn’t blame anyone for not paying heed to my ayahuasca-vision. But I would like to draw attention to a 10-year-old interview with Graham Hancock on The Joe Rogan Experience. Through the course of the interview, Hancock detailed his addiction to cannabis, and spoke of an experience he had on ayahuasca that cured him of his life-disrupting dependence on the substance. Hancock mentions finding himself teleported to the judgement scene out of Ancient Egyptian mythology, which includes the weighing of one’s sinful heart against a feather.
“Everything you’ve done, every second, every minute of your life is completely transparent,” said Hancock. “Every thought, every action, everything you did from the moment you became conscious to the moment of your death is laid out in front of you and there’s no hiding from it. We’re great at creating illusions about our own behavior…all of that is stripped away.”
“I saw the way I was behaving…and I was shown that this had to stop, otherwise I was going to pay a huge price for it.”
I reference this simply because Hancock is himself a critic of the monotheistic faiths of Judaism Christianity and Islam, so has no religiously based impetus to defend a judgement-oriented view. Now what would have happened in this scenario had Hancock never familiarized himself with Ancient Egyptian mythology before imbibing “the vine of the souls?” Would he have had a similar realization and takeaway without the imagery and cultural associations? Would it have been less judgement-focused? I cannot say.