Sans Segarra: 600 million views and his 'supraconsciousness' theory

Sans Segarra: 600 million views talking about death

An 83-year-old retired surgeon, former head of General and Digestive Surgery at Bellvitge hospital, a specialist in oncological surgery and one of the pioneers of laparoscopy in Spain, fills theatres to talk about what happens after death. Manuel Sans Segarra (Barcelona, 1943) has racked up six hundred million views on videos, sells out every venue he appears at and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of "La supraconciencia existe" (Supraconsciousness Exists, 2024), translated into Russian and Chinese. His publisher, Planeta, is not quite sure which shelf to put him on: his first book was filed under Science and Medicine; the new one, "La humanidad en crisis" (Humanity in Crisis), is being released simultaneously under Current Affairs, Self-Help and Esotericism.

The paradox is the business. A man in a grey suit from thirty years ago, with no jokes and quotes from philosophy, science and religion in his talks, has become a mass phenomenon that fits no influencer playbook. He says Pope Francis summoned him after reading his book and asked him why he fills theatres while churches empty out. The Dalai Lama also received him and told him to carry on. His answer to the pontiff, according to his own account: the Church is based on dogma, while people today demand scientific evidence.

What supraconsciousness is and why it divides opinion

The thesis is easy to state and hard to swallow: there is an inner energy, a supraconsciousness, that survives the body. Sans Segarra presents it as a door of hope; much of the scientific community dismisses it as quantum mysticism, an improper borrowing from the vocabulary of physics. An Argentine physicist with his own channel publicly reproached him for his inaccuracies when discussing quantum phenomena, according to those who trinc the story. The doctor's defence: everything is energy, a thought registers on an electroencephalogram, and there are subtle energies we cannot see.

The ground he treads is not virgin territory. Before him came Raymond Moody, the psychiatrist who pioneered near-death experiences; George Ritchie, the doctor who suffered clinical death in 1943 as an army recruit; and more recently Pim van Lommel and Eben Alexander. The most frequent criticism is not that the phenomenon does not exist, but how Sans Segarra explains it: observing accounts from the dying proves nothing about what lies on the other side. In his book, according to those who have read it, he cites only two of his own patients; the rest is second-hand material.

The surgeon who kept quiet for years

He himself admits the cost. While running a two-hundred-bed department, questioning the foundations of the scientific method earned him private warnings: "Careful, you're going to damage your career." He kept quiet for years, he says, because his team was paying the price. Now he argues he can no longer harm anyone and that the rejection has softened: he was admitted to the Real Academia Europea de Doctores (European Academy of Doctors) with a speech on supraconsciousness, and his own hospital asked him to deliver the closing lecture. He is fighting for near-death experiences to become an elective subject in medical schools.

Meanwhile, the business works. The lectures are not free and the books sell. Some see a preacher's racket built on the gullible and desperate; others pay up and leave comforted. Death is taboo, and taboo sells. Sans Segarra himself frames it with a chilling statistic: in Catalonia, among 15 to 35-year-olds, the leading cause of death is suicide. He has operated on young people who drank bleach. "What kind of society have we built?" he asks. It is the only moment when his story needs no metaphysics.

The audience that buys the book and the one that ridicules it

Reception splits into two camps that are hard to reconcile. On one side, readers who find the audiobook "interesting" and value the cases of patients who supposedly described what was happening during their surgery. On the other, those who call it an embarrassment and point out that a publisher of Planeta's standing is releasing material that fails the minimum standards of written quality. Between the two extremes, a sceptical majority who would neither buy his book nor pay for a ticket, but concede his message may do some people good. Responsible consumption, in the most literal sense: everyone decides what they spend on.

The detail that grates most with the experts is not the thesis but the vocabulary. When someone with no physics training starts invoking the quantum, anyone with three basic notions bristles. It is the same as when an eighty-year-old father talks about computers and everything is "the megabytes". The word quantum works today as a magic seal of approval, and that disarms anyone who has read half a textbook.

Why a man who tells no jokes fills theatres

The most cynical explanation is the simplest: there is demand. A generation that abandoned the catechism still needs a story about death, and prefers to hear it from a surgeon in a white coat than a preacher in a pulpit. The 83 years, the grey suit, the stern expression and the accent do the rest. Medical authority is the best possible marketing for selling the unprovable, and he knows it: "I, humbly, open a door of hope for them."

The uncomfortable question remains. If supraconsciousness exists and survives the body, why has no one come back with a verifiable message? The dead we knew simply left, without communicating, and their memory lasts as long as those who remember them. Perhaps Sans Segarra's success says nothing about death and much about the living: about what we are willing to pay to avoid thinking about it.