Hello Carlos,

Yes, my border collie has an intelligence that amazes me. She makes games she gets us to play and we don't figure out until later what the game was and that she manipulated us into playing it. Amazon parrots can have a vocabulary of up to 1,500 words, and one Amazon parrot was psychic--he knew what his owner was doing in other rooms of the house and what was going on in her dreams. I'm a certified feral colony manager, meaning I take care of feral or wild colonies of cats living in the area. I'd like to think all of my pets and all of the kitties I've come to know have independent consciousnesses and live forever. Let's hope that's true.

For my beliefs, I try to take a pretty disciplined stance. I just write what I am most confident in saying, although something else may be true and we may understand things better later.

As much as possible, I take a scientific view of evidence about the afterlife. I look to sources that are eye witnesses. I look for corroboration from as many sources as possible. I look for support from cognate disciplines. When something comes from a source that is an eye witness, such as someone living now in the afterlife, and that statement is corroborated by a number of such eye witnesses, and is supported in cognate disciplines, such as the study of consciousness, then I am more confident in it.

So I'm not saying that the writer you cite is "wrong." Gosh, I hope he's right! I'm just saying I have more confidence in what I can prove reasonably based on corroborated eye witness testimony and evidence. Without that, the schools of thought all stand at the same level of plausibility. The materialists who believe neither humans nor animals have consciousness independent of their neurons subscribe to a position equal in plausibility with a school of thought that believes people reincarnate repeatedly from lower animals to higher animals to humans to ascended masters to release from the cycle of reincarnation. They're just different schools of thought.

I know I love my border collie and all the animals I've ever cared for, and I know they'll come to greet me when I cross over. That's all that counts.

Love and peace, Craig