Robert Bigelow has built rockets, funded frontier science, and helped push some of the strangest questions into the public square. But in a recent conversation with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove on New Thinking Allowed, Bigelow makes it clear: the biggest “unknown” isn’t out there in space—it’s what happens when you die.
And he’s not interested in answering it with comforting slogans.
He wants evidence. Courtroom-grade evidence.
Because if consciousness survives death—even a little—everything changes.
Grief Is a Research Agenda
Bigelow doesn’t present this obsession as an eccentric hobby. He frames it as something life forced on him, repeatedly.
He describes losing close family members across decades—his father in a plane crash when Bigelow was 18, then a son, a grandson, and later his wife of 55 years. Anyone who’s been through loss knows the moment he’s pointing to: the moment grief stops being an emotion and becomes a question.
What’s next?
Most people pick an answer. A religion. A philosophy. A shrug.
Bigelow says he can live with faith. But he wants something else too:
Faith with proof.
Not because proof replaces faith—but because it deepens it.
And he claims he’s had personal experiences (and heard them from people around him) that made the “material-only” story feel insufficient—especially after his involvement with investigations around anomalous phenomena like Skinwalker Ranch.
If reality has layers, survival after death isn’t a sentimental wish. It’s a research problem.
The “God Force” and the Three Questions That Run the World
Bigelow sketches what he sees as the three questions behind everything humans argue about:
- Are we alone?
- What happens after death?
- Is there a supreme force?
He prefers “God force” to “God,” because the usual word feels too small—too human—for something omnipresent, omniscient, universally encompassing.
And then he drops a quiet reversal: he doesn’t buy the traditional “made in God’s image” idea. He leans toward the opposite.
We made God in our image.
But, he argues, that doesn’t mean there’s no higher reality. It means our metaphors are clumsy. Everything—living and nonliving—is still an expression of something bigger.
If you accept that possibility, the next question becomes unavoidable:
Do you continue when the body stops?
Why He Calls the Body a “Container”
Bigelow’s language is oddly strategic. He repeatedly avoids the word “body” and uses “container” instead.
Because containers are temporary by definition.
It’s a subtle rhetorical move, but it matters. “Body” can sound sacred. “Container” sounds… empirical. Like something a scientist might measure. Like something you might replace.
The real question isn’t whether the container breaks.
It’s whether anything remains when it does.
Putting Survival on Trial: The BICS Contest
Here’s the most interesting thing Bigelow did: he didn’t just fund research. He staged a challenge.
Through the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS), he created an essay contest focused on one foundational claim:
Does consciousness survive bodily death?
But he set the rules like a courtroom:
- Scripture doesn’t count.
- Assertions don’t count.
- You need substantive evidence.
- The standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” not absolute certainty.
That’s a huge shift in tone. It treats survival not as a belief, but as a claim that can be argued, supported, and weighed.
Bigelow says the contest produced a massive body of work—eventually published in a multi-volume set—and he seems genuinely proud of the seriousness it attracted.
In his mind, this is the “ground floor” of the whole mystery.
If survival is real, then the door opens to everything else: identity, memory, reincarnation, the nature of consciousness, even cosmology.
Consciousness in Three Layers
Bigelow offers a structure that sounds almost like a map:
- Incarnate consciousness — living beings.
- Discarnate consciousness — minds/entities no longer in bodies.
- Supreme consciousness — the God force.
Incarnate consciousness ranges from basic life (“it’s alive”) up through human self-awareness and altered states—dreams, meditation, out-of-body experiences.
And then he brings in what parapsychology has fought over for a century: psi phenomena, remote viewing, and mind-matter effects. He calls these “white crows”—rare examples that break the model and therefore get ignored.
Discarnate consciousness, he says, is the real leap: expanded perception, expanded agency, and (according to his reading of the literature and his own experiences) the ability to influence the physical world.
This is where he makes a claim that’s easy to dismiss—and hard to forget:
If there is an “other side,” it may be more powerful than our physics can currently explain.
The Central Currency: Love
Then the conversation takes a turn that’s almost annoyingly simple.
Across the survival literature, Bigelow insists, one theme repeats:
Love is the most valuable acquisition.
Not intelligence. Not status. Not achievement.
Love.
He describes an afterlife model where beings carry their baggage with them—good, bad, ugly—and evolve through choices. Growth isn’t automatic. It’s earned. Free will still exists.
Which makes the afterlife less like a reward system and more like… continuation. A school. A trajectory.
And the “grade,” so to speak, is love.
The Problem: Our Tech Is Vertical, Our Wisdom Is Flat
Bigelow’s biggest worry isn’t death.
It’s the mismatch between what we can do and who we are.
He sketches a simple graph:
- Human spirituality: slow, uneven, “bumping along.”
- Human technology: accelerating fast—going vertical, even “hypersonic.”
In other words: a not-very-mature species is gaining godlike tools.
That’s the recipe for disaster.
He suggests that based on multiple inputs and ongoing programs, he has a pessimistic view of humanity’s trajectory—and that the best we might do is prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually for turbulent outcomes.
It’s bleak. But he doesn’t deliver it like a doomsday preacher.
He sounds like a man reading weather patterns and saying: I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not betting on it.
Dark Matter, Dark Energy… and Consciousness?
Bigelow then swings for the cosmological fences.
Physics admits it understands only a small fraction of the universe. The rest is “dark matter” and “dark energy”—labels that basically mean: we see effects, we don’t know what it is.
Bigelow speculates that the “unknown 95%” could be connected to consciousness or to a supreme ordering intelligence—the kind of force that maintains coherence and structure at scale.
He rejects string theory as too manufactured to defend “in court.” He leans instead toward a more cyclical, infinite universe—one that “breathes” through expansion and contraction, consistent with some Eastern cosmologies.
Whether you buy it or not, his move is consistent:
If consciousness is fundamental, it might not be a weird accident inside skulls.
It might be woven into the architecture of reality.
AI: The Soul-Less Trap
And then—because it’s 2023/2026 and nobody gets out alive without talking about AI—Bigelow gives his most provocative argument.
AI is artificial intelligence. The keyword is artificial.
He grants the possibility of “artificial consciousness”—self-awareness, personality simulation, even convincing emotional display.
But he draws a hard line:
No soul. No spirit. No survival.
If you unplug it or destroy it, it ends. Full stop.
Mishlove softens the edge by adding uncertainty: maybe future systems could become complex enough to “host” something real.
Bigelow isn’t persuaded. His concern is practical:
What happens if we hand our infrastructure, governance, and survival systems to entities that don’t embody love, ethics, or spiritual continuity?
We may become captives of our own creations.
The Quiet Thesis Behind Everything
Bigelow’s argument isn’t “believe in the afterlife.”
It’s subtler—and more destabilizing:
If survival is true, it’s foundational.
Not a side topic. Not a comfort story.
Foundational like gravity.
If consciousness survives the container, then materialism is incomplete. Physics is missing something. Ethics matter differently. Love becomes a literal evolutionary technology. AI becomes a civilizational gamble. Cosmology becomes a spiritual science.
That’s why he staged a contest like a trial.
Because if the verdict comes back “yes,” the world doesn’t just get more mysterious.
It gets redefined.
Key Takeaways
- Bigelow wants afterlife research treated like a courtroom case: evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
- He calls the body a “container” to emphasize its temporary nature.
- He proposes three layers of consciousness: incarnate, discarnate, and supreme.
- He claims the survival literature converges on one core value: love as the main evolutionary gain.
- He worries humanity’s technology is outpacing spiritual maturity, raising existential risk.
- He speculates the “unknown” universe (dark matter/energy) may be tied to consciousness.
- He argues AI may simulate consciousness but lacks soul/spirit and therefore does not survive.
