SEMINAR SERIES | Cartography of the Brain

18 July | 1 August | 15 August | 29 August | 12 September

We are delighted to have Dr David Lister return to give another seminar series at Swedenborg House following the success of his 2017 lecture series ‘Anatomy of Heaven’. More details will be forthcoming but put the dates in your diary as these seminars are not to be missed!

5. Near-Death Experiences | 12 September, 12-2pm

In this session, David Lister will discuss Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and the afterlife. Advances in medical resuscitation methods have resulted in many people returning to this life after experiencing what we call death. Some have written lengthy descriptions of these, e.g. Bettie Eadie in Embraced by the Light, Howard Storm in My Descent into Death and Clinically Dead by Ian McCormack. Swedenborg describes Polhem, his employer, watching his own funeral with Swedenborg. An interesting book Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr Brian Weiss describes the 84 deaths and reincarnation experiences—and their accompanying geographical location, or maps—of a woman he treated for phobias using hypnosis. In Arcana Coelestia vol. 3, Swedenborg says that ‘man is both internal and external. When separated from the internal man, the external man is the body and is therefore dead; for it is the internal man that is alive and that causes the external man to be so’. It is the internal man who is the basis of consciousness. Sir John Eccles, a 1963 Nobel Prize winner for Physiology and Medicine together with Andrew Huxley and Alan Hodgkin, experienced an ‘other-worldly’ state when he was about 18. In his book How the Self Controls Its Brain he explores the quantum mechanisms that Dr Lister thinks may underlie NDEs. Dr Lister will describe this work and suggest that Eccles’s theories explain aspects of the soul which have been discussed over the last 3000 years but with little idea as to what they were dealing with. It throws light on Swedenborg’s experiences of the geography of the next world.

This session concludes the series.

DAVID LISTER is the current chairman of the Swedenborg Society and a member for the past 19 years. David was a medical missionary in India and then a surgeon in Denmark, before returning to England to practice as a GP for the latter part of his career.

To book your place for these free seminars, just email avery@swedenborg.org.uk.