M.J. Rose

Overheard In New York:

[Bodies Exhibit, South St Seaport]

Woman in wheelchair: These models are fantastic!
Man pushing her: These aren’t models.
Woman in wheelchair: Oh, no!

I find the plastination of cadavers to be both educational and beautiful. What incredible detail and function we have in every single part of us …and the process lends itself to a good cause too – it’s not just for art or morbidity’s sake:

Donors Hope Plastinated Bodies Educate

By THOMAS PEIPERT (Source: Associated Press/AP Online)

DALLAS – Stace Owens has no intention of leaving this world when he dies. He plans to stick around for decades or longer, preserved in plastic and displayed in a museum or medical school…

Read the complete article here.

Back when I lived in Manhattan I felt a bit like a walking corpse thanks to long hours worked in publishing and a severe lack of home cooking, so I sometimes bowed out of the rigorous happy hour gatherings of the working stiffs in my circle to rest my bones and tune my brain at an NYU lecture. At one of these lectures I had the pleasure of listening to author Mary Roach speak about her new book – Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The subject was macabre and yet Roach somehow made it hilariously funny – an intelligent book about dead bodies, funny? This hooked me. I went out and read it, or rather, inhaled it. I kept my eye on Roach and very soon she granted her devotees another book, this time on the subject of life after death. In this book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Roach with her winking and skeptical eye, digs into the subject we here at the Reincarnationist can’t get enough of. I recommend you read Stiff first and then sink your teeth into Spook. You’ll have your fill of the mundane and mechanical tickings of bodily death, and will then be delighted to indulge in Roach’s scientific exploration of the inkling that all this roaming about in skin suits may be more than a purely biological experience…

“A sharp-eyed supernatural history.” –O: The Oprah Magazine, October 2005

Now, for some instant gratification, read this little treatise on death and all its workings…

Panpsychism

Is everything sentient?

Image source: hedweb