Is there any scientific proof for the existence of the soul?

Answer: Yes, there’s a lot. Let’s consider just one category of evidence offered by Near-Death Experiences (NDEs).

NDEs are experiences of extraordinary visions and perceptions during periods of unconsciousness among people who were medically dead or nearly dead due to various causes like accidents, diseases, surgeries or attempted suicides.

From the viewpoint of scientific testability, the most relevant among the NDEs are the autoscopic out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in which the patients report having seen their body from a perspective outside the body – generally from above the operating bed – and also give verifiable descriptions of, say, the surgical procedures adopted by the medical staff or of the events in their immediate vicinity or even beyond their vicinity.

Many such cases are documented by Dr Michael Sabom, an American cardiologist who has investigated NDEs for over three decades, in his book Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. Here’s one of the cases.

Sabom reports a case in which a patient recovering from sickness suffered an unexpected cardiac arrest. After he was revived, he reported that he had an OBE in which he had travelled down the hall and had seen his wife, eldest son and daughter arriving there, which was what had actually happened. This information is highly significant because (1) as he was soon to be discharged, he was not expecting his family members to visit (2) even if he had known that they would be visiting him, he couldn’t have known who would be visiting because he had six grown children, who took turns accompanying their mother when she came to see him (3) his family members were stopped in the hall that was ten doors away from the room where he was being worked on by the doctors and nurses (4) his face was turned away from them and (5) he was in the middle of being resuscitated from cardiac arrest.

Sabom’s pioneering work led to hundreds of scientists all over the globe taking up NDE research under serious global forums like The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) with peer-reviewed publications like The Journal of Near-Death Studies.

NDEs are fully explainable from the spiritual science paradigm that the soul is the source of consciousness. The soul has its own sense of vision and normally sees through the optical center of the brain, the optical nerve and the physical eye, but in unusual circumstances of bodily disruption as in NDEs, the soul comes out of the body and sees without any physical apparatus.

Therefore, NDEs offer a dramatic and authentic scientific demonstration that the soul does indeed exist and is the actual source of consciousness.