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Back Cover Text
Brain Activity Mapping or the BAM project as it was called was the biggest federal science initiative since World War II. BAM’s goal was to fully map the functioning of the human brain down to the lowest level of detail even mapping its most minute functions.
I joined BAM as one of the key software scientists on a personal secret mission to find out what happened to the human soul upon death. I knew the answer was to be found within the brain. The incentive to do this had come from a neurosurgeon in India who had as proof MRI scans of dying patients that showed a mysterious region of the brain light up with intense electrical activity at time of their deaths. At BAM I found that this area contained the Brain Code, a super secretive sophisticated code whose sole purpose was to transport the human soul to a secret destination upon death.
My goal was to find out what happened to us after we die? Where did the soul go? If I could answer that would I then not be able to answer where we all came from? Answers to questions that have haunted us humans since our origin, Answers that could prove religions and centuries old cultural beliefs right or wrong and lead to a fundamental change in the way we viewed life on earth. Answers that also had the potential to destabilize our society, disrupt law and order, and even topple governments. Irrespective of the outcome my scientific pursuit was for the truth. I cared not for the consequences.
Preface
This is a science fiction novel. Characters referred to in this novel do not exist in real life. Any similarities unless pointed out by me are purely coincidental. However, a lot of the material that I used to write this fiction came from real world experience. Ever since my Dad passed away I have had his spirit come visit me frequently in my dreams and I have used his accounts of spirit life in telling my story. The same is true of my Uncle who has visited me often and I have also used his accounts where helpful. As far as the Brain Code, the code that exists in the brain that sends the soul to its final destination upon death is based on scientific conjecture and not fiction.
As I have proposed in my book every intelligent device humans have built has within them what we engineers call as the “shutdown code.” That is, code that jumps to life saving a device’s memory and state when you power it off. If we put this common sense functionality in intelligent devices we created would you not think that whosoever created the magnificent human body would take care to put the same logic in there somewhere? Otherwise, what a waste our life is if all that means is after life we are dead like a spent battery cell! If you believe that there is a meaning to our lives then you must also believe that there is a mechanism that persists us after death. That part is our soul. Somewhere inside us is preprogrammed logic to extract our soul from our body and send it on its final mission after death. That logic is the Brain Code.
There is too much evidence that points to life after death. As I said before I used a lot of accounts conveyed to me by the spirits of my dad and uncle in writing this novel. When the spirits appeared in my dreams they were as colorful as their human counterparts were in life. For instance, my dad and uncle would show up often drinking Scotch whiskey and smoking exotic cigarettes and wearing clothes that they liked to wear and looking as they did to me when they were at the prime of their life. In my dreams the spirits did not talk to me in whispers or hushed tones. They were in my face, so as to speak, and were nothing short of the humans they were in real life. They met me at meeting places the same sort you and I would meet for lunch or a drink. Here are some such meeting places:
By the banks of a river
In a temple courtyard
At a bar
At a restaurant
At a nightclub!
As I had more and more of these dreams it became increasingly apparent to me that the spirits lived in a world much like ours except they had more powers than we did. This power that the spirits had in the after world were not of physical prowess but of mental and spiritual prowess. It appeared to me that this mental and spiritual prowess was something that you gained in the human life and took it to the spirit world. Sorry, all that body building and ripped abs does you little good but those long sessions of meditation and your efforts at fine-tuning you mind appeared to move with you to the spirit world. In many cases spirits could bend the laws of physics to their liking and in some cases they had to abide by them. As you read through this book you will see where they could bend the laws and where they had to obey the same laws we do.
One of the most interesting man-spirit interchange I had seen was when I was young. I had gone to visit an elder relative in a little village called Manjeshwar in Southern India situated along the coastline of Arabian Sea. He lived on a little house on top of a hill. The plot was several acres long and he had all kinds of fruit trees, including trees that produce many varieties of delicious mangos. Right across from his little house on the hill was an odd cemetery. I call it odd because there was only one grave in it. The grave was located right in the middle of the small cemetery. The cemetery belonged to someone who did not live in the nearby vicinity and my relative told me they meant to leave the plot undisturbed for centuries. Obviously, the grave was of someone very special. There was a name on the gravestone. The name was Christie J. Claire. As per the gravestone she had died at the young age of 18. Now this is India and to see a western name on a grave in a remote part of coastal southern India is very unusual. I was fascinated by this grave and go and look at the grave during my walks in the evening. I had seen my relative walking around the little cemetery at night. It made an eerie sight, especially on nights when there was brilliant moonlight and all the surroundings were illuminated as if in a ghastly light. It scared me to see this tall ruggedly thin man in his white shirt and dhoti (like a sarong worn sideways) moving around like a ghost in the cemetery.
One bright moonlit night I saw my relative speaking in a hushed tone to a woman that was tall, statuesque and dressed in white like an angel. They were speaking to each other in English. For those of you that know India you know that a majority of the population speaks English there. It is a legacy left behind by the British who ruled India for a long period as a colony and also the fact that India has too many different languages for everyone to learn to speak with one another and they generally choose English as the common language. I slowly made my way around the trees that blocked me from a full view of the grave and startled both my relative and the spirit. In one instant the lady in white was gone. I was a young boy at that time and my relative reprimanded me for sneaking around in the middle of the night. Next day I asked him about the lady in white and he looked at me as if I was an idiot and said, “That is what happens to kids that run around in the middle of the night. They become insane and start seeing things!”
All this would have been fine but for the fact that my relative’s main hobby was as a fortuneteller. He was very good at it. He made great income from it. He was a pharmacist for a medical shop by day and a fortuneteller on evenings and weekends. People from around his village came to see him and listen to his advice. He was known for his accuracy. I remember wondering if the lady spirit communicated helpful information to my relative that helped him very good in fortune telling.
Fast forward a few years and I had moved to Bangalore, India. At the time I was living there it wasn’t the high tech Mecca or the new Silicon Valley of India as it is being labeled now. It was a bustling town and there were quite a lot of spiritual gurus who lived in the town. Many of them were shenanigans; a few of them were genuine. One of them was a guru who could make things magically appear out of air. Whether it be holy ashes or a medallion or pills that cued a certain illness or an idol of your favorite Indian God – he could do it by simply waving his hands and at about any time. My dad was not only his devoted follower but also his chief banker. My dad at that time was one of the biggest bankers in the city and had secured the guru’s business for his bank. The guru really liked my dad and he often let us into his inner sanctum where he sat with us and talked about all things big and small.
I kept pressuring my dad to know how it was that the guru did those tricks. I had done an experiment that convinced me that it was not sleight of hand. In the experiment I followed the guru as he walked around his ashram giving audience to tens of thousands of devotees who had congregated there on a special Indian religious occasion. I wrote down in a notebook all that he gave away and it must have been at least 20 pounds worth of material or more. He handed out over 20 pounds of at least twenty different items manifesting them from the air. I looked at him from the side, from the behind; hiding behind a tree, but there was no sleight of hand. I assure you, if somehow the guru was hauling 20 pounds of material under his robe spread evenly all over I could have easily determined that he had lost some serious weight at the end of the session but such was not the case. I was convinced he was genuine.
My dad would not tell me the secret until a few months before he passed away. When he told me the secret it resonated with a few rumors I had heard in Bangalore. The guru acquired his powers by reaching out the spirit world. He was often seen in the local cemetery at night performing rituals well before he became a guru. My dad told me that the guru had secured the services of two spirits that were able to fetch whatever thing the guru wanted to manifest from the inner sanctums of his ashram where he had kept that stuff locked away. So the guru’s fetching of things from air was not the miracle he made it seem to be. However the fact that he was able to get it done by the spirit world did win many points because when is the last time you saw David Copperfield being able to do the same?
Let us look at the science and spiritualistic aspects of death. At some point in time your body ceases to function and you are declared dead. Fortunately we live in the modern world where there is little doubt that you are not dead when the doctors say you are dead. Such was not the case in the medieval world. Too many times you woke up in a casket buried six feet underneath and had to suffer an incredible and horrible death. But throughout the ages mankind has believed that physical death does not end a human and your soul progresses towards one of the two generally accepted conclusions. If you are a Christian, it is either heaven or hell. If you are Buddhist or a Hindu then your soul is about to be recycled into another life on Earth if your Karma register showed negative balance. Only when you reach balance on the scale of karma you are now released from having to come back to Earth.
Some of you have perhaps read Dr. Raymond Moody’s book about after death accounts of several people who undertook the journey towards what they often described as a bright white light but came short and were brought back into their bodies. They were nearly dead, dead enough for their souls to step out of their body and undertake a journey, but were pulled back into the body when they were brought back to life.
I am a software scientist. I pull the pieces of the puzzle together in the world of software. I make computers smart. A computer is much like a human brain, exceling it some areas, and falling severely short in other areas. You may find this hard to believe but a lot of what we are and how we function bears similarities to the machines we have invented. For instance the electric current that your brain uses to power the body and send millions of signals if not a mythical life force but ordinary current that we can produce through a battery cell. The way that your brain neurons connect and map out a memory is a variation of how modern computers process things. There is a lot of similarity between the brain and a computer. So is it conceivable to imagine that at the time of your death the brain is running a special code that it had perhaps held in reserve to send the soul out of your body safely and on its intended journey? I happen to believe that there indeed is such a secret set of code in the brain. As I recount in the first chapter I was supplied real evidence of such code by a close friend that was a neurosurgeon. He showed me a MRI scan where this code likely resided in the brain. “Some day” he said “I hope you will map this specific code so you can tell us all what happens after death”.
Surely if I can tell you what happens after death then I am in a position to tell you also where we came from?
Now you have the basis for my science fiction novel. I like what I write about science to be believable. Take for instance Michael Crichton and his novel Jurassic Park. I bought into his theory that if we find a well-preserved Dinosaur DNA you could conceivably bring to life dinosaurs. The rest of the novel was an exciting read because you kept wondering if what he recounted could very well be made possible by science. The basis for writing this book came true when rumors surfaced recently that the Obama administration is seriously contemplating an immense federal grant to a project to study the human brain and map its functions even down to the minutest detail. That project is called the BAM project or the Brain Activity Mapping project. This project is real and it will happen even if not federally funded. I have no doubt whatsoever that in the next 15-20 years the human brain will be completely mapped and all its mysteries explained by science.
So read on the science fiction novel I have carefully constructed with mostly what I believe to be facts and imaginative story telling and fiction where necessary. The science I describe to you in this book is real. The accounts of the spirit world were constructed by the accounts my dad and uncle gave me in my dreams. This novel describes what happens to your soul in the first twenty-four hours subsequent to death. I hope you will enjoy reading my novel.
THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER DEATH.
This is the account of the first 24 hours of the journey of the human soul upon death.
God Plays Dice 