Church of the Churchless

An atheist had a near-death experience that challenged his spiritual skepticism

Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever. 

But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying. 

Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died."

That's a gift link from my digital subscription. Hopefully it will work for you. If not, this PDF file of the review is another way to read it.
Download Sebastian Junger’s ‘In My Time of Dying’ reviewed - The Washington Post

Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite for reading the entire review of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

The eventual diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery that had caused a massive abdominal hemorrhage, with enough blood loss to bring Junger perilously close to death. As surgeons worked to save him, Junger experienced the presence of his late father, who invited his son to join him. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to say. “Don’t fight it.”

Junger, a confirmed atheist and an adherent of the scientific method, had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing had left little room for a spiritual experience like this one, which turns out to be the central conundrum of this book and, I’d venture, his life. The meeting with his father was understandably unnerving. “He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.” But it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only visited him but opened the door to the idea that an afterlife might actually exist.

Really? Show me the proof. Oh, you can’t. Well, how can something be true if you can’t prove it? Ted Kaptchuk, a well-regarded Harvard physician, once told a New Yorker writer that he’d always “believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual and belief,” adding: “All ideas that make scientists scream.”

...Can we prove an afterlife exists? No. Might one exist? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. In any case, how lucky we are that Junger survived and that we’re able to join him on another mind-blowing adventure — this time to a place all of us will one day visit.

I have no doubt that Junger truly did have the experiences he describes that followed a harrowing medical emergency.

The big question, of course, is what to make of his visions. That's an unsettled question, though there's reason to believe that near-death experiences are a product of a brain on the edge of dying. Who knows for sure, though?

No one, including Sebastian Junger.

Belief in life after death precedes religious belief

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, so I know what I'm talking about, like to view tenets of religiosity as being a higher form of knowledge than ordinary knowledge of this world. 

But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural.

Here's a good example. Death. Not the cheeriest topic, but a important one, since death arrives for everybody.

The October 14, 2023 issue of New Scientist has an article called "The legacy paradox: Why do people spend time, effort and money to be remembered after death? And can we use this quirk for good, wonders Conor Feehly [the author]."

The article notes that if you believe in an afterlife, "a desire for a positive legacy makes some sense because, in a way, your soul will be around to see how your legacy unfolds." But what about people who don't believe in life after death, who can be termed extinctivists?

Maybe, Feehly writes, they cultivate their legacy to lessen their death anxiety by creating a sort of symbolic immortality through what they produce in the world that will live on after them. However, the article goes on to say:

But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator. 

Indeed, research by [Jesse] Bering and his colleagues suggests that belief in continued existence of the mind following death is a default state for all of us. 

In one study, for example, children watched a puppet show where an alligator ate an anthropomorphised mouse. Older children were unlikely to ascribe any psychological functions to the dead mouse.

However, the youngest children, who were 3 or 4 years old, took a different view. While they understood that the dead mouse no longer had biological needs, they stated that it still had emotions, contradicting the notion that afterlife belief is something we learn.

The findings, which have been replicated across both secular and religious schools, suggest that belief in the continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position, with religious belief systems taking advantage of this quirk in our thinking. "I think a lot of [legacy motivation] has to do with these cognitive [processes]," says Bering.

So instead of religious founders bringing back the good news that they've experienced the reality of life after death, there's good reason to believe the opposite: from a young age we humans intuitively view consciousness as surviving bodily death, then that view is used in religious teachings.

But this could be just one source of the widespread assumption among people that death isn't the end of our existence, but a transition to another form of life. Wishful thinking probably also plays a role in this.

The November 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has a story about deepfakes, videos, photos, or whatever that are skillfully manipulated to fool others into believing they are true. Here's excerpts from "Your lying eyes."

In the midst of writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle grew obsessed with photographs of two girls consorting with fairies. The fakes weren't sophisticated -- one of the girls had drawn the fairies, cut them out, an arranged them before the camera with hatpins.

But Conan Doyle, undeterred, leaped upon the express train to Neverland. He published a breathless book in 1922, titled "The Coming of the Fairies," and another edition, in 1928, that further pushed aside doubts.

...The most effective fakes have been the simplest. Vaccines cause autism, Obama isn't American, the election was stolen, climate change is a myth -- these fictions are almost entirely verbal. They're too large to rely on records, and they have proven nearly impervious to evidence.

When it comes to "deep stories," as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls them, facts are almost irrelevant. We accept them because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing evidence.

This is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for fairies. He'd long been interested in the supernatural, but the First World War -- during which his son and brother-in-law died -- pushed him over the edge. Unwilling to believe that the dead were truly gone, he decided that an invisible world existed; he then found counterevidence easy to bat away.

Were the fairies in the photograph not catching the light in a plausible way? That's because fairies are made of ectoplasm, he offered, which has a "faint luminosity of its own." But why didn't the shots of them dancing show any motion blur? Because fairies dance slowly, of course.

If Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales describe a detective who, from a few stray facts, sees through baffling mysteries, his "Coming of the Fairies" tells the story of a man who, with all the facts in the world, cannot see what is right in front of his face.

Imagining one's death is impossible, but a crucial part of living

Some things are impossible to imagine, because we have no experience of anything akin to that thing.

This is why, as I noted in a recent blog post, we can't imagine what the cosmos would be like without consciousness existing within it, because our attempt at imagining takes place within our consciousness. 

It's also why, no matter how hard I or anyone else may try, we can't imagine what things will be like after we're dead, because our attempt at imagining takes place while we're alive.

So our living consciousness is an inescapable barrier to knowing what, if anything, lies beyond conscious life.

Still, I believe that making an effort to imagine the imaginable can be beneficial, even if the attempt is doomed to failure.

Rather strangely, the older I get (I'm 74), the less concerned I am with pondering my eventual death -- which, as the saying goes, is as certain as taxes. Well, actually a lot more certain, since we can escape taxes but not death.

When I was younger, and a devotee of an Eastern/Indian spiritual teaching that taught either rebirth or union with God awaited us after death, I made the attorney who handled the wills for my wife and I say "When Brian gerbils..." instead of "When Brian dies..." Back then I had a strong fear of non-existence.

I have no idea why I picked the word gerbil for a death substitute.

Maybe it was because we used to have an annoying gerbil when my daughter was young, and I'd wish that it would die a peaceful gerbil death and leave us in peace.

Now, though, I don't think about death nearly as much, even though I've become an atheist. And when I do, the thought, or more accurately a feeling, usually comes over me unbidden. Meaning, spontaneously.

I've written about this now and then -- how I'll be raking leaves, or walking to my Tai Chi class, or doing something else routine, and suddenly I'll have a sudden realization that one day will be the last day I do that activity.

Or any activity. Because I'll be dead.

It's both a weird disturbing feeling and a normal pleasant feeling. Somehow my mind manages to combine both sensations in a single experience. 

I don't like the notion that eventually I'll die and be gone forever. As Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." I heartily agree, though sadly, I don't have any way to make that wanting a reality. Nor does anyone else.

What I do enjoy is how a visualization of death, as imperfect an imagining as this may be, leaves me with a deeper appreciation of life.

When that feeling of my eventual death comes over me, it makes my present-day living seem richer, more vibrant, more important. For at least a little while I vow to not sleepwalk through life, since each and every moment of this life is hugely significant compared to the nonexistence of death.

So there's a lot to like about death, as well as a lot to fear. If death were absent from life, seemingly the meaning we derive from our living would be much reduced, since we'd have plenty of time, eternity really, to do anything we wanted.

As it is, we don't know when we'll take our last breath. This lends every moment a certain poignancy. And it makes our problems seem less serious, given that most of us would rather be alive with problems, than dead with no problems. 

The exception being a life filled with so much pain and suffering, death appears preferable to life. Some people end up in such a state, and I find it difficult to deny them the right to end their life if that's what they want.

Cliché but true: death is what makes life precious

I'm no poet, but I admire poetry.

Some evidence is that after my wife got tired of watching Dickinson on Apple TV+, a streaming series about the poet Emily Dickinson, I continued on until I'd seen every episode of the first three seasons.

I loved how Dickinson looked at life in such a fresh and creative fashion, even taking into account how loosely the series probably adhered to the literal facts of Emily Dickinson. 

For example, she spent quite a bit of time in a carriage with Death, a cool Black guy who was overworked, particularly after the Civil War started. Did Dickinson fantasize those meetings? Was she mentally ill? 

Or was her fascination with Death a reflection of her poetic sensibilities? That rings most true to me. Reality is a slippery notion when it comes to poets and their poetry. 

Which really is no different than how slippery each of us becomes when we try to describe to someone else how we feel about something. There always is a gap between our intuitive experience and whatever means we use to convey that ineffable something to another person.

Poetry is one way of narrowing that gap. So is music, art, dance, tears, laughter, facial expressions, writing, hugs, plus so much more.

I'm toying with the idea of finding ways of writing blog posts for the Church of the Churchless that do a better job of capturing how I look upon various subjects. This wouldn't be poetry as such, but words with more of a poetic feeling tone.

Might as well start with death.

I'll be going about my day, doing routine stuff, when suddenly a message pops into my mind, surprising me.

"One day you won't be doing this. Or anything else. Because you'll be dead."

It's a message that rings true. No big surprise. It is true. 

We can make up stories about an afterlife. I've done that. Most people do. It's a foundation that religion rests on.

A very shaky foundation. Because no one knows if there is life after death. All we know is there is death after life. The proof is all around us. 

A million deaths in the United States from COVID-19. Deaths of friends, family, famous people, ordinary people, cats, dogs, cows, chickens, fish. 

Everything that lives, dies. But we humans, me certainly included for much of my life, we can visualize ourselves living on forever.

Kind of takes the sting out of death. Or so it seems. Because actually the stinger is still attached to the scorpion of death.

It has to be. Death is inevitable. 

And if we're honest, we say to ourselves, "I'm going to die, and I have no idea if there's any living after my death."

That honesty is what breaks through my ordinary mind from time to time. 

I'll be washing the dishes and suddenly realize, not for that much longer. Like I said, the realizing is a sudden burst of nothing else also for that much longer.

So it doesn't do me any good to vow that from this death-realizing moment onward I'll only do what is so deeply meaningful, in that way I will cheat death by living life so fully, I'll die satisfied. 

Fine. But I'll still die. Which will bring to an end satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and everything else.

There's a stark divide between existing and not-existing. We try to use our well-honed techniques for dealing with life's problems to handle our knowledge that death is the end of life.

But they don't work. They can't work. Something, anything, is utterly incapable of dealing with nothing.

I'm left, then, with a simple feeling of gratitude when I have one of my meetings with death. The encounter wakes me up. For a while it stops me from taking my life for granted. Also, my wife's life. Our dog's life. All lives.

No matter if I'm having a good day, a bad day, or a so-so day, I'm having a day. Yay! I'm alive. Who knows for how long. I sure don't. No one does. 

Whatever I do, at least I'm doing something. Which is a heck of a lot better than being nothing. If I could always realize this, I guess I'd be a Zen master. Or at least, a Zen student who does the dishes.

Death is the only victor in Russia's unjustified war against Ukraine

Apartment buildings can be rebuilt. So can hospitals, shopping centers, elder care homes, and all the other structures being destroyed by Russia's purposeful bombing of civilian areas, a clear war crime.

What can't be undone are the many thousands of deaths: soldiers on both sides, plus women, children, the elderly, and other Ukrainians unable to flee Putin's invasion.

That's heartbreaking. 

After Russia started this war, I've had this thought whenever I feel like my day isn't going well: I do have some problems, but I'm alive, and I don't have to worry about a missile demolishing my home.

There's a stark divide between life and death. Nothing else is so clear-cut.

Often I wish that my life was better in this way or that way. But when death comes to us, as it will for everyone, there's no better or worse for us after we take our last breath.

Because there's nothing at all. At least, that's the most likely outcome. If you believe in life after death, great. Whatever works for you. 

However, you must admit that this belief isn't proven reality. It's a hope, not a certainty, nor even a reasonable possibility. 

So when I hear reports of, say, 56 people being killed at an elder care home by a Russian tank, I'm saddened by lives needlessly cut short. (I wrote about this yesterday on one of my other blogs.)

Yes, I understand that many or most Ukrainians would rather die fighting against Russia than surrender  to Putin. Their courage is amazing. Along with most of the world, I admire Ukraine's determination to battle Russia's unprovoked invasion without any hint of surrender. 

It's the death of innocents that disturbs me the most, not the death of those who choose to take up arms against Russia.

Life is tremendously precious. Nobody knows this better than us atheists. We don't have a belief in life after death to assuage the pain of someone dying much too soon, or much too horribly. Yet it also is true that most religious believers lack a confidence that death is a beginning, not the end.

Russia has become more religious in the past few decades. But I'm confident that when the parents of the thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine so far learn the fate of their sons, they will be as grief-stricken as atheist parents would be.

Death is the great equalizer. Few people want to die. Almost everyone wants to live as long as possible, and as well as possible.

Thus if the Russian people really understood the horrors Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, almost certainly their approval of the war would be much less than it is now -- since Putin has squashed independent reporting on the war and has made it a crime to criticize the war, with a punishment of 15 years in prison.

I'd like it if the United States and our NATO allies would establish a peacekeeping force in Ukraine to minimize further civilian casualties. Probably this won't happen, but I can hope. Life and death shouldn't be left in the hands of politicians, especially tyrants like Vladimir Putin.

Moving essay about a neuroscientist preparing for death

Here's an essay from The Atlantic, "A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death." I'm a subscriber, so I don't know if non-subscribers can read this amazing essay. Click on the link and see if it works for you. If not, I've copied in what David J. Linden wrote below. He makes some cogent observations about why almost all religions believe in an afterlife.

A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death

About the author: David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart.

“Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.”

So I did. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did not contain the telltale signature of bursting bubbles in my stomach that would support a hernia diagnosis. A few weeks later, an MRI scan, which has much better resolution, revealed that the mass was actually contained within the pericardial sac and was quite large—about the volume of that soda can. Even with this large invader pressing on my heart, I had no symptoms and could exercise at full capacity. I felt great.

The doctors told me that the mass was most likely to be a teratoma, a clump of cells that is not typically malignant. Their outlook was sunny. Riffing on the musical South Pacific, my cardiologist said, “We’re gonna pop that orange right out of your chest and send you on your way.”

While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad—it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months.

I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe. Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues? I simply couldn’t accept it. I was so mad, I could barely see.

[And now comes the part where I’m weeping while I type.]

Five years ago, I met Dena and we fell for each other hard. This wasn’t mere “chemistry”; it was more akin to particle physics—a revelation of the subatomic properties of love. Dena has uplifted me with her pure and unconditional affection, her kindness, beauty, optimism, and keen intelligence. She is the best wife anyone could want, and she is way better than I deserve. Leaving her behind will be the very hardest part of this whole awful situation.

Until the moment of that diagnosis six months ago, I had been the luckiest man in town. My twins, Jacob and Natalie, have been nothing but a delight for 25 years. I’ve been fortunate to have a long career in academic science with the freedom to pursue my own ideas, which is a gift like no other. My good friends are a constant source of joy and amusement. By any reasonable measure, I’ve had a great life, full of love, creativity, and adventure.

I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd, and so I think about what preparing for death has taught me about the human mind. The first thing, which is obvious to most people but had to be brought home forcefully for me, is that it is possible, even easy, to occupy two seemingly contradictory mental states at the same time. I’m simultaneously furious at my terminal cancer and deeply grateful for all that life has given me. This runs counter to an old idea in neuroscience that we occupy one mental state at a time: We are either curious or fearful—we either “fight or flee” or “rest and digest” based on some overall modulation of the nervous system. But our human brains are more nuanced than that, and so we can easily inhabit multiple complex, even contradictory, cognitive and emotional states.

This leads me to a second insight: The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation. Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV. That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours. A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation.

If someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. Now the prospect of five more years strikes me as an impossible gift. With five more years, I could spend good times with all of my people, get some important work done, and still be able to travel and savor life’s sweetness. The point is that, in our minds, there is no such thing as objective value, even for something as fundamental as five years of life.

The final insight of my situation is more subtle, but it’s also the most important. Although I can prepare for death in all sorts of practical ways—getting my financial affairs in order, updating my will, writing reference letters to support the trainees in my lab after I’m gone—I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way. My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging. I don’t think this is a personal failing. Rather, it’s a simple result of having a human brain.

The field of neuroscience has changed significantly in the 43 years since I joined it. I was taught that the brain is essentially reactive: Stimuli impinge on the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, etc.), these signals are conveyed to the brain, a bit of computation happens, some neural decisions are made, and then impulses are sent along nerves to muscles, which contract or relax to produce behavior in the form of movement or speech. Now we know that rather than merely reacting to the external world, the brain spends much of its time and energy actively making predictions about the future—mostly the next few moments. Will that baseball flying through the air hit my head? Am I likely to become hungry soon? Is that approaching stranger a friend or a foe? These predictions are deeply rooted, automatic, and subconscious. They can’t be turned off through mere force of will.

And because our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future. In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.

If I am allowed to speculate—and I hold that a dying person should be given such dispensation—I would contend that this basic cognitive limitation is not reserved for those of us who are preparing for imminent death, but rather is a widespread glitch that has profound implications for the cross-cultural practice of religious thought. Nearly every religion has the concept of an afterlife (or its cognitive cousin, reincarnation). Why are afterlife/reincarnation stories found all over the world? For the same reason we can’t truly imagine our own deaths: because our brains are built on the faulty premise that there will always be that next moment to predict. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures.

While not every faith has explicit afterlife/reincarnation stories (Judaism is a notable exception), most of the world’s major religions do, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and arguably, even Buddhism. Indeed, much religious thought takes the form of a bargain: Follow these rules in life, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife or with a favorable form of reincarnation or by melding with the divine. What would the world’s religions be like if our brains were not organized to imagine that consciousness endures? And how would this have changed our human cultures, which have been so strongly molded by religions and the conflicts between them?

While I ponder these questions, I am also mulling my own situation. I am not a person of faith, but as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories and their ultimately neurobiological roots. I’m not sure whether, in the end, faith in afterlife/reincarnation stories is a feature or a bug of human cognition, but if it’s a bug, it’s one for which I have sympathy. After all, how wonderfully strange would it be to return as a manatee or a tapeworm? And what a special delight it would be to see Dena and my children again after I’m gone.

David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

Atheists more likely to believe in paranormal than religious people

Just in time for Halloween, a few days ago the New York Times had a story, "Many Americans Say They Believe in Ghosts. Do You?"

No, I don't. I also don't believe in God.

But lots of atheists do believe in paranormal phenomena, according to the story.

There are a number of different ways to quantify belief among Americans in so-called paranormal phenomena. One way is to ask a selection of people representative of the population if they believe in ghosts. In a 2019 IPSOS poll, 46 percent of respondents said they did.

Another is to ask what they fear. This year, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, about 9 percent of 1,035 adults surveyed said they feared ghosts, and the same amount said they feared zombies; many more people said they were afraid of government corruption, the coronavirus or widespread civil unrest.

The last time Gallup surveyed people about ghosts, in 2005, 32 percent of respondents said they believed in “ghosts or that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.” When Gallup asked the same question in 1990, the result was 25 percent.

Such beliefs have pervaded American culture and media for centuries. But some researchers are now studying whether their rise may be tied, in part, to the rise over the last few decades of Americans claiming no religious preference.

“People are looking to other things or nontraditional things to answer life’s big questions that don’t necessarily include religion,” said Thomas Mowen, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University.

For a continuing study on religion and paranormal belief, for example, Mr. Mowen said he is finding that “atheists tend to report higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk.”

So this shows that atheists are open to supernatural phenomena, even if God isn't part of them. Also, it shows that atheists can be as gullible as religious believers when it comes to accepting the existence of things that lack demonstrable evidence.

Last year, the share of Americans who belong to religious congregations fell below 50 percent for the first time in more than 80 years, according to a Gallup poll released in March. And the percent of people claiming no religion nearly tripled from 1978 to 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

Still, even as religious frameworks for thinking about the meaning of life and death have become less popular in the United States, the big existential questions inevitably remain.

The General Social Survey found that as religious affiliation declined over four decades, belief in the afterlife remained relatively steady: In 1978, about 70 percent of those surveyed believed in the afterlife, and about 74 percent reported the same in 2018.

As Joseph Baker, the co-author of the book “American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems,” put it: “People are outside of organized religions, but they still have this supernatural interest.”

I've got no problem with that. People should be free to pursue whatever interests they want, so long as they don't hurt others in the process. 

If believing in an afterlife makes someone feel better, great. Life can be tough. Whatever works for you, go for it -- again, if this doesn't harm anyone else. 

I'd much prefer to go on living after I die than to be dead and gone forever. Well, if the afterlife was pleasant, not hellish.

It's just really hard for me to believe in life after death in my current state of mind, though during my 35 years of religiosity I had no problem believing in both reincarnation and the preferable alternative of existing as a non-physical being in some higher realm of reality.

Yet I never believed in ghosts. I'm not sure why. After all, if I thought back then that it was possible for me to live on after my physical death, why couldn't others do the same as ghosts?

I guess one problem I had with ghosts is that they inhabit a difficult to believe in-between zone. Ghosts are physical enough to be visible to ordinary humans, yet supernatural enough to pass through walls and do other spooky stuff.

This could explain why more people believe in God than in ghosts. Of course, God also has a credibility gap. Somehow God is a supernatural being who also is able to produce physical effects in this world. But if God is omnipotent, that's no problem for God.

Ghosts, on the other hand, aren't viewed as omnipotent. (If any ghosts disagree, you can come visit on this Halloween night and set me straight.)

Thoughts on a good death

Over on my HinesSight blog, yesterday I wrote "My wife's sister died today. It was a good death." I'll copy it in here.

We're all going to die. That's 100% certain. Death follows life with a cosmic inevitability. The big question is: Will we die a good death?

This morning my wife, Laurel, learned that her older sister, Lynn, had died last night. Naturally there were tears. But not much sorrow. Because Lynn died a good death. 

In fact, a very good death. Exactly the way most of us would want to go, Laurel and I definitely included.

Lynn and her husband, Randy, had driven to Colorado from their home in Kentucky. Randy took her there as a romantic gesture. 

He had proposed to Lynn in Colorado. That's where they went on their honeymoon. 

Lynn had some health problems. However, she wasn't feeling bad on their Colorado trip. Last night she and Randy walked around the town where they were staying.

Sometime during the night Randy felt Lynn slumped against him in bed. He tried to wake her up. Then he realized she wasn't breathing. He called 911. Efforts to resuscitate her failed. 

Death sucks. Even when you're in your mid-70s, Lynn's age. Life is precious. Nobody wants to die so long as life seems worth living, 

Yet when death comes, most of us fear the suffering that often accompanies a person's last days more than dying itself. 

That's why Lynn had a good death. To die in your sleep while on a romantic getaway with your spouse -- that's a fine way to say goodbye to life.

No suffering. No lengthy period of physical decline. No beeping monitors in an ICU. Just going to sleep and not waking up.

Who knows? This could happen to any of us. Like, tonight. Or, tomorrow. Yesterday Lynn had no idea she was going to die. That's wonderful. 

To be alive one moment and dead the next, without a lengthy string of moments in-between marked by fear, anxiety, regret, or other negative emotions that afflict many dying people, that's a very good death.

Christof Koch presents a good analysis of near-death experiences

Are near-death experiences purely physical, or do they provide a glimpse into a mystical realm beyond ordinary awareness? 

The June 2020 issue of Scientific American has an article by Christof Koch that delves into this question. "Tales of the Dying Brain" is well worth a read regardless of how you look upon near-death experiences.

Koch makes clear his basic stance on this subject, one that I heartily agree with.

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences.

They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.

That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.

Koch then acknowledges the power a near-death experience can have for the person who comes close to dying.

The challenge, then, is to explain NDEs within a natural framework.

As a long-time student of the mind-body problem, I care about NDEs because they constitute a rare variety of human consciousness and because of the remarkable fact that an event lasting well under an hour in objective time leaves a permanent transformation in its wake, a Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus — no more fear of death, a detachment from material possessions and an orientation toward the greater good. Or, as in the case of Hemingway, an obsession with risk and death.

Psychedelic experiences bear a resemblance to NDEs.

Similar mystical experiences are commonly reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, DMT (aka the Spirit Molecule), and 5-MeO-DMT (aka the God Molecule), consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices.

There's still a lot to learn about near-death experiences. However, Koch makes a case for how they should be viewed.

Modern death requires irreversible loss of brain function. When the brain is starved of blood flow (ischemia) and oxygen (anoxia), the patient faints in a fraction of a minute and his or her electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes isoelectric — in other words, flat. This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down.

Like a town that loses power one neighborhood at a time, local regions of the brain go offline one after another. The mind, whose substrate is whichever neurons remain capable of generating electrical activity, does what it always does: it tells a story shaped by the person’s experience, memory and cultural expectations.

Given these power outages, this experience may produce the rather strange and idiosyncratic stories that make up the corpus of NDE reports. To the person undergoing it, an NDE is as real as anything the mind produces during normal waking. When the entire brain has shut down because of complete power loss, the mind is extinguished, along with consciousness. If and when oxygen and blood flow are restored, the brain boots up and the narrative flow of experience resumes.

This is how Koch concludes his piece.

More than 150 years later neurosurgeons are able to induce such ecstatic feelings by electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world.

Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns — whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode — and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.

Why the mind should experience the struggle to sustain its operations in the face of loss of blood flow and oxygen as positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains mysterious.

It is intriguing, though, that the outer limit of the spectrum of human experience encompasses other occasions in which reduced oxygen causes pleasurable feelings of jauntiness, light-headedness and heightened arousal — deep-water diving, high-altitude climbing, flying, the choking or fainting game, and sexual asphyxiation.

Perhaps such ecstatic experiences are common to many forms of death as long as the mind remains lucid and is not dulled by opiates or other drugs given to alleviate pain. The mind, chained to a dying body, visits its own private version of heaven or hell before entering Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

I never was, so I always will be

Profound? Obvious? Confusing? Meaningless? 

No matter what you might think of this blog post title, I reply: Yes, Yes, Yes, and...Yes.

In other words, I agree with you. I take this stance because I like the one-sentence statement that popped into my head a week or so ago, stimulated, I suspect, by the Buddhist books I've been re-reading lately.

So it doesn't really matter how anyone else looks upon I never was, so I always will be. Those words resonate with me, because they seem absolutely true.

Let's examine why I say this.

I never was points to the absence of an enduring, unchanging self or soul. This holds not just for me, but for everybody. So says Buddhism. So says neuroscience. 

Thus I, and you, and everyone else are an ever-changing process, not a standalone entity. We are part of life, of nature, of the world, of the universe. 

Certainly, we exist. Yet we don't exist in the sense most people see themselves -- as a being continuous with the baby that was given our name, and with all of the ages we experience until we die.

I never was that sort of being.

What I've been, and what I am today, is a swirling eddy in the stream of life that maintains a certain shifting shape, a certain fluid substance, but isn't in any sense a life form of which it can be said, "I am _____."

There's nothing to fill that blank. You, me, everybody, we are only an ephemeral collection of qualities produced by the seamlessly interconnected web of nature that not only surrounds us, but is us.

That's why I always will be. Because I never was.

If I'd been something that exists all on its own, my death would mark the end of that thing. (Again, there is no evidence of an enduring self or soul, so death is the last word of life's final chapter, not the beginning of a new plot line.)

However, since I never have been that sort of something, an island unto itself, I always will be. Not as me, of course, since the entity with my name attached to it is finite.

Rather, I always will be in the sense of what I already am, as we all are: nature, the natural world, reality. 

I realize that this won't seem to be good news to those who believe in a form of life after death where human consciousness persists much as it is now. But I don't see I never was, so I always will be as either good news or bad news. 

It simply is what appears to me to be the way things actually are, truth. 

The only reason someone would be dismayed at the thought of not continuing to live after their body takes its last breath is if they feel they are something that can't die. And that's a fantasy, not reality.

The beauty of Buddhism, and also of modern neuroscience, is how doing away with the illusion of self/soul eliminates the sense of unfairness, or wrongness, that we humans will die one day. 

If we never were the independently existing beings that we wrongly take ourselves to be, then death isn't the loss of anything that ever was. Since we always are changing, with no fixed center to our being, dying is the final change among countless other changes.

After that, our atoms are recycled into other entities. The world goes on. And so do we, in the only way that is possible -- as all that preceded our birth, and as all that follows our death.

Religion is anti-life when an afterlife is fantasized

I want to get some facts straight.

(1) Every living entity dies.
(2) This includes humans.
(3) So you, I, and everybody else will die.
(4) There is no solid evidence of life after death.
(5) Yet religions claim there's an afterlife.

It's difficult to see how anybody could disagree with 1-3 and 5. Plus, 4 is almost indisputable, since any evidence of life after death is extremely tenuous, unscientific, and open to dispute.

Given these facts, I can't understand why so many Americans look upon our current COVID-19 death count, of 266,000, Washington Post screenshot shown above, and shrug off the astounding number.

This shrugging is obvious by the actions of those who refuse to wear a mask even though this saves lives, and by politicians who refuse to promote public health measures needed to slow the spread of the pandemic.

The United States has 4% of the world's population and 19% of the COVID-19 deaths. Something is different in this country. Something is wrong with this country. 

One possibility is our individualism. Americans don't like to be told that they need to do something for the common good. Another possibility is that we have deeply polarized politics, with soon-to-be ex-president Trump a notorious liar about everything, including how to combat the coronavirus.

But there's something else to think about. The United States is one of the most religious wealthy countries. 

In fact, Americans pray more often, are more likely to attend weekly religious services and ascribe higher importance to faith in their lives than adults in other wealthy, Western democracies, such as Canada, Australia and most European states, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

For instance, more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%.) Actually, when it comes to their prayer habits, Americans are more like people in many poorer, developing nations – including South Africa (52%), Bangladesh (57%) and Bolivia (56%) – than people in richer countries.

I suspect that religiosity is a reason lots of Americans are so uncaring of 266,000 fellow citizens dying from COVID-19. A belief in an afterlife cheapens the value of this current life. 

Often religious believers say of someone who has died, "Now they're in a better place." Of course, they don't know that. They have no reason for saying that other than blind faith. Yet the fantasy of an afterlife is exceedingly common.

It's debatable, though, how many religious people truly believe they will live again after they die. If they genuinely felt death would leave them in a better place, why wouldn't religious believers kill themselves, along with their loved ones?

In a science fiction book I read a long time ago about a planet, Riverworld, one of the characters learned that after he was killed, he'd pop up again at a different place on the massive river that dominated the planet. So he sought death, since that was how he was going to be able to get closer to the headwaters of the river.

This fictional man had direct evidence of life after death. Religious believers don't, which explains why they're reluctant to die prematurely.

Yet because they want to believe in an afterlife, religious believers act in contradictory ways. They cling to their own life, yet often are uncaring when it comes to the death of others -- like the 266,000 who have died from COVID-19. 

They apparently consider that because eternity in heaven (or hell) is so, well, long, it hardly matters whether someone's life is cut short by a disease.

So millions of supposedly "pro-life" Americans refuse to wear a mask, physically distance, or give up a Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of people sitting around a table, potentially spreading the coronavirus at the same time they're saying "pass the mashed potatoes."

Meanwhile, scientifically-minded atheists like me are doing everything possible to keep ourselves safe, along with keeping other people safe by following public health orders.

Looks like atheism is pro-life, while religious belief is anti-life.

Near-death experiences are "real" only because people have them

A New York Times opinion piece makes an excellent point about near-death experiences that applies equally to all kinds of spiritual, mystical, and religious experiences.

There's plenty of evidence that people have these sorts of experiences. So that makes them real in a limited sense.

It's the same sort of reality that arises when someone goes to a country music concert and absolutely loves it. Their mind produces a feeling of subjective pleasure from being at the concert. 

However, this doesn't mean that the concert was objectively lovable. Someone who doesn't like country music could be sitting right next to the "loves it" person and have an experience of "hates it."

Likewise, John Fischer, the author of this opinion piece who has written several books about near-death experiences, says that while there's no doubt that people have them, there's no solid evidence that they prove the reality of life after death, heaven, and such.

Being similarly scientifically-minded, I keep this in mind whenever I hear about someone's claim that they've had some sort of supernatural experience. I'm perfectly wiling to accept that they believe they had a supernatural experience, while being deeply skeptical that the experience actually was of a supernatural reality.

Here's the opinion piece. I've boldfaced passages that refer to the "real" question.

Owen Gent

“Have you stood at the gates of doom? Or looked through the gates of death? Have you been to the edge of the universe?” In the Old Testament, The Voice from the Whirlwind poses these questions to Job.

The implied answer is no, for these seem to be divine prerogatives. For humans, heaven is a gated community, and we typically can’t even peer through. This is one reason (among many) near-death experiences inspire awe: They seem to give us a “God’s eye” view of what really lies beyond. They take us to the edge of the universe.

While it’s not exactly a scientific term, most of us have an agreed understanding of what “near-death experience” means. Obviously, an N.D.E. takes place in a “near-death context” — a situation in which one’s life is in jeopardy.

Most who have studied or discussed them agree that to count as an N.D.E., the experience must occur while the individual is not wakefully conscious and have a significant number of these aspects: an “out of body” experience in which one seems to be floating above one’s physical form and can see it and its surroundings; a life review; guidance by deceased loved ones or revered religious figures toward a “guarded” realm (a light in the darkness, a gated or fenced domain, the other side of a river).

Many people who have had an N.D.E. report being profoundly transformed — less anxious about death, more spiritual and more “prosocial” (including more concerned with morality).

These sorts of experiences have been reported throughout history and across cultures. Plato described one in “The Republic” — the Myth of Er. They are partly dependent upon the particulars of an individual’s life situation, religion and culture, but there are common elements as well.

For instance, the religious figures may be different — a Christian would see Christian figures, a Buddhist would see Buddhist figures, Hindu gods and goddesses would appear in a Hindu’s N.D.E., and so forth. Yet at a deeper level there is guidance by respected figures, a voyage led by trusted mentors from the known to the unknown. This time it is perhaps the most daunting journey, from life to death. Loving guidance on our last journey, or the last leg of our journey, is deeply resonant.

In popular literature, N.D.E.s are almost always interpreted “supernaturalistically.” They are interpreted as showing (or “proving”) that the mind is not the same as the brain and can continue after the brain stops functioning, and also that the mind has contact of some sort with a “heavenly” or nonphysical realm.

The titles of popular books about N.D.E.s proclaim that “heaven is for real” or that we have a “proof of heaven.” Medical doctors and neuroscientists writing about these issues claim that N.D.E.s offer “evidence for the afterlife” and “consciousness beyond life.” They think of them as round-trip tickets to the Good Place — the trip of an afterlifetime.

The proponents of a supernaturalistic interpretation of N.D.E.s insist that they are “real.” The neurosurgeon Eban Alexander’s “Proof of Heaven” even includes a chapter titled “The Ultra-Real.” I do not deny that people — many people — really have N.D.E.s, with their reported contents. They really have these experiences, just like people really dream.

So N.D.E.s are real in the sense of “authentic” — they really occur. No one should deny this; to do so is to disrespect a vast majority of those who sincerely report them.

There is, however, another sense of “real”: accurate. Are N.D.E.s, interpreted literally, accurate depictions of an external reality? This is an importantly different question. It is crucial not to slide from “real” in the first sense to “real” in the second, but this is precisely what many of the supernaturalists do. N.D.E.s really occur. But we cannot infer from this that they accurately depict guidance by deceased loved ones to a nonphysical realm.

The big question is: Do N.D.E.s provide a proof of heaven? Or hell? I don’t think so. None of the arguments is persuasive. There are clear, vivid dreams and hallucinations. There are deeply profound and transformative experiences caused by the ingestion of psychedelic substances. All of these experiences present their contents as “ultra-real.”

This is a known feature of any spiritual experience, and N.D.E.s are a kind of spiritual experience. People throughout the world have sincere and absolutely certain belief in their religions, but it does not follow from this sincerity and certainty that the religious beliefs are true, literally interpreted. How could they all be, given their radical differences? So too with N.D.E.s.

The arguments for supernaturalistic interpretations of N.D.E.s are glaringly problematic. Many of the most visible proponents of the idea that N.D.E.s prove the existence of an afterlife are doctors. They include Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon; the cardiologist Pim van Lommel; and the oncologist Jeffrey Long.

It is important to emphasize that their conclusions are not medical but philosophical. The ideas that the mind can separate from the body and have contact with a heavenly realm are clearly not medical conclusions, and physicians have no special authority here. After all, they are physicians, not metaphysicians.

I trust my physician to interpret my blood work, but not to let me know that my soul left my body when I was under general anesthesia. It is striking that some doctors employ such homeopathic doses of logic. They are trapped in a kind of tunnel vision.

It would be desirable to have a more plausible interpretation of N.D.E.s which they are real in both senses: They really occur and they are accurate. I propose that we interpret N.D.E.s as fundamentally and primarily about our journeys from life to death — dying.

Most N.D.E.s depict a journey toward an imagined guarded realm, but not a successful passage to it. Just as in the literature on living forever, such as the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” or myth of Tantalus or the quixotic search for the Fountain of Youth, we come ever so close, but in the end we don’t quite make it. In N.D.E.s we get right to the gates, but we don’t go through; we get right to the edge of the universe, but we stop there.

N.D.E.s show not that there is an afterlife, but that it is possible to die well, surrounded by loving companionship. We can die in sterile, cold hospitals — alone. (There are negative N.D.E.s.) Or we can die in a more humane setting, surrounded by loved ones. N.D.E.s are thus real in both senses: They really occur, and they accurately portray these possibilities.

They are important because they remind us of the possibility of dying well. We don’t have to accept either extreme: that N.D.E.s do not really occur or that they prove that heaven exists. They point us to something profound and beautiful about dying. They give us real hope, not false hope, in facing the next part of our journey, whatever that will bring.

John Martin Fischer is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife” and “Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life.”

Don't be 100% sure about anything, including God and life after death

In the course of looking through old blog posts yesterday to find those related to death, because I'm working on another book based on my writing on that subject, I came to a couple of posts that made me think, in my usual humble way, Dude, these are fantastic! They make so much sense, it's a freaking secular miracle!

So, behold...

Some ten years later, this is still my best guess about God. Also, about life after death, existence, and the nature of the self. Looks like I’ve reached a pretty stable stage of my atheism.

My best guess about God
May 3, 2010

Nobody knows what ultimate reality is, which religious believers call "God." All we have are guesses, some more defensible than others.

Here's mine — after some forty years of delving into mysticism, spirituality, religiosity, and philosophy. Subject to change, of course. If I've learned anything, it's that there's always more to learn. Or guess about.

I'll be as pithy as possible, a shift from my usual wordiness.

(1) God doesn't exist. Not in the sense of an all-knowing, all-powerful personal or individual consciousness. Or even a universal consciousness, though this is more likely than an anthropomorphic God.

(2) The cosmos is, always has been, always will be. In some form or another. Existence always has existed. If you want an eternal "God" to worship, there it is: existence.

(3) It may well be that our universe is just a very small part of the cosmos. But reality is thoroughly natural, not supernatural. Other universes, if they exist, are as natural as ours.

(4) We'll never understand the ultimate laws of nature. Or even know whether they exist. "Ultimate laws" probably is a human conception, not the way things really are.

(5) The biggest problem with being a member of Homo sapiens also is our biggest evolutionary advance: self-awareness. We are aware of being aware. Unlike other animals, we construct an ego, I-ness, by looping our awareness back onto ourselves.

(6) This creates a fear of death, because we know we're going to die. This creates a desire to exist forever, because we can ponder our non-existence.

(7) Thus springs up religion. Along with notions of God, soul, spirit, eternal life, heaven, and such. All are products of a self-created "self," which actually doesn't exist in the sense a stone, sunflower, star, or snake does. It is conceptual, not physical.

(8) Enlightenment — seeing reality as clearly as possible — is recognizing that ego, I-ness, selfhood, individuality, or whatever you want to call it doesn't exist.

(9) We're part of the cosmos. And the cosmos is part of us. We just happen to be beings who can conceptualize ourselves as separate from everything else, which we really aren’t.

(10) So when we die, we're dead, inasmuch as "I" consider myself to be a "Me." But the cosmos continues. And so will I. Just not as me. Whether this is a chilling or reassuring realization depends on how much "Me" is attached to my "I."

I’m confident that there’s no life after death. But not 100% confident. This is the way of science, and also of wise living. Never be absolutely sure about anything. Then you won’t fall prey to rigid dogmatism. And if a cherished belief turns out to be untrue, you’ll be more prepared for this.

Keep open a crack in your belief system
August 31, 2010

Ah, it feels so good to let in the light, to freshen the atmosphere, to relieve the pressure of a claustrophobic enclosure. Not anywhere outside — within our psyche.

All we need to do is keep open a crack in our meaning-of-life belief system, that conglomeration of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, knowings, and what-not which enable us to get out of bed in the morning, move through life with a sense of purpose, and offer us some answers to what's it all about?

Nothing is 100% certain. Including what I just said.

Hey, there might well be something that is 100% certain. So far, though, it isn't apparent. Even the most intensively validated theories of science, such as quantum theory, are considered by the scientific method to always be open to falsification.

So living in touch with reality requires that we remain open to the possibility that whatever we fervently believe to be true, isn't. Otherwise truth could smack us in the face and we'd pretend that we didn't feel a thing.

If you're absolutely sure that God exists, erase the absolutely in your mind. Ditto if you're absolutely sure that God doesn't exist. Double ditto for any other belief that you don't see yourself ever letting go of, or modifying.

Loosen your hold. Lighten your dogmatism. Lessen your certainty.

I'm not saying that we should uncritically embrace every alternative belief path that appears before us. The human mind generally moves along well-trod patterns for good reasons. Sticking with the tried and seemingly true allows us to learn from experience rather than having to figure out again today what was known yesterday.

However, whenever we find ourselves defending some position with unusually rigid zeal, that could be a sign that a retreat is in order. How far we move back from our personal 100% Certain Maginot Line is up to us.

I don't think it matters much how large the doubt gap is. Truth can slip through the eye of a psychological needle, or a wide open mental barn door.

What counts is that some crack exists in the otherwise solid structure of our belief system. This is where the benefits will come from that I mentioned above: lightness of being, freshness of attitude, relaxing of rigidity.

Recently I was lying in bed, about to fall into sleep, with thoughts of what one day will come, death, running through my mind. I mulled over one of my favorite frightening fascinating topics, non-existence.

I recalled how in a conversation with friends a few days ago, someone told a story about an atheist she knew who was in a hospice, close to dying. He kept asking staff and visitors, "What happens next? What happens next?"

Meaning, after death.

Now, since he was an atheist, one would expect that he already had an answer to his own question: nothing. When you're dead, you're dead. No more consciousness, no more existing.

But that prospect can be scary, especially if life feels like it's well worth living. If you're happy being alive, it's only natural to want to hold onto that good feeling for as long as possible.

That's why eternity is so appealing to religiously minded people. They don't believe they'll ever stop existing. To them death is just a transition to an even better life.

I could feel some familiar anxiety arising as I visualized my own non-existence (yes, I know that's impossible). I could tell that it was going to be difficult to fall asleep so long as I felt trapped within the bounds of a reality marked by an absolute finis at the moment of my last breath.

Then I thought, "That isn't absolutely certain. No one knows for sure what happens, or doesn't happen, after death. There's a slight possibility that my consciousness will continue to exist, just as I used to believe.”

Instantly I felt the mental pressure subside, like I'd opened a stress-release valve. I relaxed into a pleasant state of who knows? Sure, I still considered that the vastly most likely possibility is that death is The End.

But allowing even a small likelihood of To Be Continued into my mind changed everything. And the same would have been true if my certainty had been in life after death.

Cracks in belief systems are beneficial no matter what the content of our convictions are. It's never healthy to believe that you can't be wrong. That's egotistical, dogmatic, and, well, wrong.

In one of Huston Smith's books he talks of meeting a Zen practitioner who tells him, "I've got a new koan: I could be wrong.” Beautiful. Fully embrace that koan and it seems like enlightenment would be close at hand.

Psilocybin helps people die without fear or regret

I'm not a big fan of death.

Being alive strikes me as, well, a heck of a lot more appealing. More than infinitely so, in fact, since the difference between (1) being alive, and (2) dead and gone forever, is the same as the difference between something and nothing. 

How many zeros does it take to equal one? The answer is... not even an infinity, because no amount of nothing can equal even the smallest something.

But since death is inevitable, the next best thing is to not fear it. Or at least, not to fear it too much.

Which is why I've been enthralled by a 60 Minutes episode, Psilocybin Sessions: Psychedelics Could Help People with Addiction and Anxiety. Not just once, but twice, since it was repeated after its initial showing.

Click on that link and you can read a transcript of the episode. Here's some excerpts that include the part I found most interesting, since it dealt with a cancer patient's fear of dying.

For most of us, psychedelic drugs conjure up images of the 1960's. Hippies tripping out on LSD or magic mushrooms. But these powerful, mind-altering substances are now being studied seriously by scientists inside some of the country's foremost medical research centers. They're being used to treat depression, anxiety and addiction. 

The early results are impressive, as are the experiences of the studies' volunteers who go on a six-hour, sometimes terrifying, but often life-changing psychedelic journey deep into their own minds.

...We were told we couldn't record anyone participating in the study while they were on psilocybin because it might impact their experience, but we were shown how it begins – without the psilocybin. 

You lay on a couch, with a blindfold to shut out distractions and headphones playing a mix of choral and classical music – a psychedelic soundtrack with a trained guide, Mary Cosimano, watching over you.

Everything is done the same way it was for the LSD experiments scientists conducted in the 1950s and 60s. Some of the most dramatic results have been with terminal cancer patients struggling with anxiety and paralyzing depression. 

Kerry Pappas: I start seeing the colors and the geometric designs and it's like 'oh this is so cool, and how lovely' and, and then, boom. Visions began.

Kerry Pappas was diagnosed with stage III lung cancer in 2013. During her psilocybin session, she found herself trapped in a nightmare her mind created.

Kerry Pappas: An ancient, prehistoric, barren land. And there's these men with pickaxes, just slamming on the rocks. So… 

Anderson Cooper: And this felt absolutely real to you?

Kerry Pappas: Absolutely real. I was being shown the truth of reality. Life is meaningless, we have no purpose. And then I look and I'm still like a witness, a beautiful, shimmering, bright jewel. And then it was sound, and it was booming, booming, booming. Right here right now.

Anderson Cooper: That was being said?

Kerry Pappas: Yes. "You are alive. Right here right now,  because that's all you have." And that is my mantra to this day.

Kerry Pappas

Later in the segment, Michael Pollan, who took psilocybin in the course of writing his book, How to Change Your Mind, described why he thinks psilocybin has such a potent power to alter someone's perspective on reality. Then Pappas talks some more about how psilocybin has eliminated her fear of dying.

Michael Pollan: It seemed so implausible to me that a single experience caused by a molecule, right, ingested in your body could transform your outlook on something as profound as death. That's-- that's kind of amazing. 

...Michael Pollan: There is a reason [that love is on a Hallmark card]. And one of the things psychedelics do is they peel away all those essentially protective levels of irony and, and cynicism that we, that we acquire as we get older and you're back to those kind of "Oh, my God. I forgot all about love." (Laugh)

Pollan said he also experienced what the researchers describe as ego loss, or identity loss - the quieting of the constant voice we all have in our heads. 

Michael Pollan: I did have this experience of seeing my ego-- burst into-- a little cloud of Post-It notes. I know it sounds crazy.

Anderson Cooper: And what are you are without an ego?

Michael Pollan: You're, uh… (Laugh) You had to be there.

Researchers believe that sensation of identity loss occurs because psilocybin quiets these two areas of the brain that normally communicate with each other. They're part of a region called the default mode network and it's especially active when we're thinking about ourselves and our lives.

Michael Pollan: And it's where you connect what happens in your life to the story of who you are. 

Anderson Cooper: We all develop a story over time about what our past was like and who we are.  

Michael Pollan: Right. Yeah, what kind of person we are. How we react. And the fact is that interesting things happen when the self goes quiet in the brain, including this rewiring that happens.

...Michael Pollan: Maybe the ego is one character among many in your mind. And you don't necessarily have to listen to that voice that's chattering at you and criticizing you and telling you what to do. And that's very freeing.

It was certainly freeing for Kerry Pappas. Though her cancer has now spread to her brain, her crippling anxiety about death is gone.

Kerry Pappas: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I feel like death doesn't frighten me. Living doesn't frighten me. I don't frighten me. This frightens me.

Anderson Cooper: This interview frightens you, but death doesn't?

Kerry Pappas: No.

It turns out most of the 51 cancer patients in the Johns Hopkins study experienced "significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety" after trying psilocybin. Two-thirds of them rated their psilocybin sessions as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. For some, it was on par with the birth of their children.  

Kerry Pappas: To this day, it evolves in me.

Anderson Cooper: It's still alive in you--

Kerry Pappas: It's still absolutely alive in me.

Anderson Cooper: Does it make you happier?

Kerry Pappas: Yeah. And-- and I don't necessarily use the word happy. 

Kerry Pappas: Comfortable. Like, comfortable. I mean, I've suffered from anxiety my whole life. I'm comfortable. That, to me, okay. I can die. I'm comfortable. (LAUGH) I mean, it's huge. It's huge.

Sounds good to me. No, more than good. Great!

Which is why I'm hoping that the Oregon Psilocybin Society is successful in gathering enough signatures to put an initiative on the November 2020 ballot that would legalize the use of psilocybin in my state. And then, that voters approve the measure.

Measure 34 will legalize access to “psilocybin services” – also known as psilocybin assisted therapy – statewide.  Psilocybin, currently a Schedule 1 drug, would be administered in licensed therapeutic environments, supervised by trained facilitators. Rooted in research, the service model involves a sequence of sessions, including preparation, psilocybin administration, and integration afterwards. Each client will be screened for contraindications prior to scheduling a psilocybin session. Clients would not need a mental health diagnosis to qualify.

Love hurts. But the pain of love also is pleasure.

Last Tuesday our older dog, ZuZu, had to be put to sleep. Which is another way of saying, euthanized. Tearfully, I was able to write about her last days on my HinesSight blog in It was a good day for our dog to die.

Of course, it wasn't a good day. Not really. I wanted ZuZu to live much longer. What I meant was explained in the first part of the blog post.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't want our beloved older dog, ZuZu, to die. But she did last night, put out of her misery by a dose of morphine at Salem's emergency vet clinic.

What made it a good day -- and now the tears are coming, as I figured they would when I set out to compose this blog post -- was how ZuZu and I got to have a pleasant day together yesterday, since she went downhill really fast, as I'll describe later on.

Monday ZuZu and I had come back from central Oregon a day before my wife and other dog, Mooka. So on Tuesday I didn't want to leave her alone when I went to exercise at the River Road Courthouse athletic club.

In the morning we'd had our usual walk through our rural property, across a creek, and along a community trail here in Spring Lake Estates. ZuZu seemed pretty normal at that point.

She was walking a bit less energetically than usual, which likely was a sign of what was to come. But when she spotted a squirrel, the old ZuZu came to life. Zoom! She raced ahead and excitedly stared into the branches of a tree the squirrel had escaped to.

I'm so happy that ZuZu was able to chase a squirrel on her last day alive. It was one of her favorite things to do. We also ran into some neighbors walking their dogs, so she got to greet them a final time. Nice.

What I'm most glad about is deciding to take ZuZu to the Minto Brown Dog Park after exercising. It was starting to drizzle. I thought about going straight home. But I thought, "ZuZu enjoys the dog park. I've got time. Let's do it."

Yeah, it's a cliche. Live every day as if it were your last. And usually it isn't practical, since we need to plan for future days. 

However, it's also true that we never know. When we will die. When a loved one will die. When a pet will die. I had no idea when I drove the short distance from our athletic club to the dog park that ZuZu would be dead in less than eight hours.

It's been tough. Really tough. I miss ZuZu a lot. That's the price of love: pain, when a loved one departs, or suffers, or otherwise tears at our heart. But it's a price well worth paying.

The day after ZuZu died, I opened the rear hatch of my VW GTI. What I saw brought more tears to my eyes, along with a bit of an inner smile.

The dog park I'd taken ZuZu to on the afternoon of her last day alive has an unpaved parking lot. When I picked ZuZu up to put her in the back of the car, her paws were dusty. This was the last time she rode in my car, since she was taken to the emergency vet clinic that night in my wife's car.

My first thought was, "I never want to wash off the paw prints." Yes, I know that will be necessary. Eventually. For now, I enjoy looking at the paw prints, because they remind me of ZuZu and of the good times we shared.

This is the reason I took her dog bowl and put it on a shelf in my office, along with a photo of ZuZu with our older dog at the time, Serena. A vase that was on the shelf graces the inside of the dog bowl. I did this after realizing that I had a couple of choices about how to deal with ZuZu's death.

Try to forget about it, or embrace it -- feeling the pain of love as acutely as possible.

I decided to go the embrace route. The first few days after ZuZu died I could barely bring myself to look at the dog bowl and the photo. I wondered if maybe it would be better to do the forget thing. But I can't forget ZuZu. I don't want to forget ZuZu.

Yes, love hurts. But a life without love isn't worth living. The death of a loved one hurts tremendously. Yet I'm glad that it does. The pain of love is also its pleasure.

For my birthday, I've giving myself death

OK, readers of this blog post title should refrain from contacting a suicide prevention hotline.

The form of death I've decided to give myself for my 71st birthday is writing another book comprised mostly of what I've already composed for my Church of the Churchless blog on the subject of death.

After publishing a book, "Break Free of Dogma," that consists of 93 early churchless blog posts (2004-06) on various subjects, I decided to give a theme-based book a try.

Death seemed like a great subject. Not cheery, but inevitable. 

I have no problem admitting to a fear of death. I understand why many people, including my wife, Laurel, say they aren't afraid of death, but rather of suffering in the course of dying.

That makes sense, since I'm afraid of that also. But the idea of not-existing for eternity after I die strikes me as decidedly dreadful also, not that I, or any other living being, has a choice in the matter. So many of my Church of the Churchless posts deal with the fear of non-existence.

I devoted a couple of hours today to seeing how many blog posts I could find that dealt with death. From November 2004 to March 2007, I copied in over 10,000 words of death-related posts. 

So, yay, it looks like I should be able to cobble together an interesting book just from what I've already written about death. And I can always write more on some aspect of death that has escaped my attention previously.

If anyone who comes across this post has written about dealing with the fear of death from a non-religious perspective, I'd be interested in reading whatever you've put together. Again, non-religious. I realize that believing in life after death is how most people cope with their eventual demise, but as an atheist I reject that approach.

My email address is in the right sidebar. Or, click here. Here's a link to a recent post I wrote about death, "Recognizing the reality of death is key to living life."

Recognizing the reality of your death is key to living life

One of the best things about being human is also one of the worst things: understanding that your death is inevitable.

We have this capacity because of our evolved brain. Other animals, almost certainly, lack the ability to envision a far-off future that bears no resemblance to what's being experienced in the present. 

This enables us to construct civilizations that have transformed our planet. Cell phones, symphonies, electric cars, and so much else wouldn't exist without our ability to imagine possibilities that could exist, but don't at the moment.

But there's a dark side to what evolution has wrought. We members of Homo sapiens know that along with every other living thing, each of us will die one day. 

I call this dark because the fear of death isn't pleasant. Nor is dying itself, unless our suffering is so great, death is a longed-for release, not a dreaded tragedy. 

As I wrote about in Death and the primal fear of non-existence, I've had glimpses of the void that follows our last breath. It's more frightening than anything I've ever experienced, because nothingness is an absence, not a thing.

I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen.

But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the difference? I hope so. I don’t know if I can describe it any more clearly.

This experience has come to me about a dozen times. Mostly while I’m going to sleep. Occasionally in meditation. It isn’t something that I can bring about on my own. It isn’t a thought; it isn’t an emotion; it isn’t a perception. It’s as if a curtain covering non-existence opens for a moment, giving me a peek into a nothingness that is absolute.

Because I’m not there. I mean, I’m obviously there at the moment, looking into the depths of not-existing for eternity. Yet what I feel all the way down to the marrow of my being is what it means to live for a time and then to not live for all the rest of time.

Yesterday I had a milder version of what I tried to describe above. I was exercising at our athletic club, doing my usual thing in the room with weight-training machines, when a sudden realization hit my mind with the force of a heavy bar-bell striking a mat.

Eventually I'm going to die. That will be the end of exercising. Also, of life, of consciousness, of existing as anything else but insentient atoms.

I let that feeling wash over me for a few seconds. Then I moved to the next machine. Soon I felt "normal" again, though that word has ceased to carry a definite meaning for me. I really have no idea what is normal and what is abnormal when it comes to the deepest questions of life.

Is it normal to go through life without a stark realization of our inevitable upcoming death? When I was younger, I thought so, given that dying typically is far from the forefront of what youthful people are concerned about.

Now I'm 70. 

I've had friends and family members die. Many of them. When I get together with others my age or older, health problems often are a prime conversation topic. We don't talk a whole lot about death in a direct fashion, but the prospect of it lurks in the background.

This is good. In fact, I do my best to keep death in the foreground, since I find that life feels sweeter when I have the attitude of Not only will this moment never come again, there will come a time when no moment will ever come again.

Sure, I still get upset, frustrated, angry, worried, and all the other negative emotions that come with being human. But embracing the reality of my eventual death puts things in perspective. Compared to (1) being dead and not-existing at all, I find (2) dealing with life's problems as best I can a lot more appealing.

No matter how joyful I feel about doing something -- and sometimes the joy is minimal -- I'm grateful that the cosmos has conjured up my brain, body, and consciousness as existing for a certain amount of time on a planet circling one of the hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy that is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies in a universe some 14 billion years old.

That is so freaking far out, I don't even need to be high on (totally legal) homegrown Oregon marijuana to be blown away by the marvelousness of it all.

Would I prefer to not know that I'm going to die? Well, I have no choice about it, though I suppose there's a slim chance I'll develop some sort of condition that makes it impossible for me to envision my eventual demise.

Unfortunately, that condition likely would also make it impossible for me to do most of the things I enjoy doing: write, read, ponder, plan, look forward to the future, engage in citizen activism aimed at improving the world for future generations.

So I'm happy with being fearful about death.

That anxiety adds an extra "spiritual" dimension to my life, using that word in a decidedly non-supernatural sense. I'm pleased that I've given up the fantasy of life after death, since believing that this world is merely a stepping stone to some imagined eternal existence diminishes the priceless value of our one and only human existence.

Mary Oliver, the poet, put it beautifully. (Paraphrased in the image.)

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What sustains us is caring in time, not detachment in eternity

I was wrong.

In my blog post about a review of "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom," I said that because the book is over 400 pages, it would take me a while to write about it after I'd started reading "This Life" following my Amazon purchase. 

But here I am, writing about Martin Hägglund's book, because I'm loving it so much, I can't help but share my enthusiasm. For me, this truly is a life-changing book.

I'm understanding what life is all about in a clearer fashion. I'm acting differently toward the loved ones I'm in daily contact with, my wife and dog. I'm appreciating precious moments in my life with more passion, intensity, thankfulness. 

After reading the introduction and first chapter of "This Life," I'm resonating with Hägglund's central message. Expressed in my own words, it is that we all find meaning in the finitude of life, the uncertainty of life, the realization that what we love and value is precarious, so it needs our caring.

This is secular faith.

Hägglund says the following in his Introduction. I'm quoting him at length because this is a good overview of his viewpoint, which I heartily agree with -- and almost certainly will be writing more about.

Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future. Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life. As we will see, living on should not be conflated with eternity.

The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.

...To have secular faith is to acknowledge that the object of our faith is dependent on the practice of faith. I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity.

The object of secular faith -- e.g., the life we are trying to lead, the institutions we are trying to build, the community we are trying to achieve -- is inseparable from what we do and how we do it. Through the practice of secular faith, we bind ourselves to a normative ideal (a conception of who we ought to be as individuals and as a community).

The ideal itself, however, depends on how we keep faith with our commitment and remains open to being challenged, transformed, or overturned.

The object of religious faith, by contrast, is taken to be independent of the fidelity of finite beings. The object of religious faith --  whether God or any other form of infinite being -- is ultimately regarded as separable from the practice of faith, since it does not depend on any form of finite life.

The most fundamental example of finitude in our historical moment is the prospect that the Earth itself will be destroyed. If the Earth were destroyed, all life forms that matter to us would be extinguished. No one would live on and no aspect of our lives would be remembered.

Yet, from the standpoint of religious faith, such an end of life is only apparent. Even if all forms of living on are terminated, nothing essential is lost, since the essential is eternal rather than finite. 

...For the same reason, climate change and the possible destruction of the Earth cannot be seen as an existential threat from the standpoint of religious faith. To grasp the existential threat to yourself and to future generations, you have to believe not only that life is finite but also that everything valuable -- everything that matters -- depends on finite life.

This is exactly what religious faith denies. If you have religious faith, you believe that all finite life can be terminated and yet what is truly valuable will still remain.

Now, part of what makes Hägglund's book so intriguing and important is that his critique of religious faith doesn't rest on an assumption that eternity, and the supernatural realm where eternity resides, is fantasy. Sure, this is extremely likely. But Hägglund persuasively argues that eternity/infinity simply isn't desirable.

Hopefully a couple of concrete examples will make this clearer.

Living as I do in Oregon, where much of the state is still quite wild and dangerous, every winter the local evening news will feature a story of climbers on Mt. Hood who either are lost or in serious trouble. Bad weather often makes it impossible for search teams or a helicopter to locate the climbers.

Timberline Lodge, whose name reflects the fact that it is the highest substantial structure on Mt. Hood, is where relatives and friends of the climbers congregate. 

In all the many years I've watched coverage of searches for lost climbers, I've never heard a loved one say, "It really doesn't matter to me if he (or she) lives or dies. After all, life is eternal." This shows, as Hägglund points out in his book, that what almost everybody cares about the most is living on, not an abstract belief in eternity.

But if the search team finds that the climbers have died, usually a relative is heard saying, "I'm confident that he (or she) is in a better place now." Well, not really -- because if the relative had been truly confident that life is eternal, not finite, they wouldn't have been crying before, and praying that the search will result in the rescue of their loved one.

This shows that even religious people embrace secular faith in their everyday life. And that this secular faith is at odds with their religious faith.

Hägglund shares quotes from C.S. Lewis, a devout Christian, where Lewis bemoans the death of his wife, saying that he doesn't want her to live on in heaven, he wants her to be living on with him here on Earth, and it is unbearably sad that this is impossible. 

ZuZu and me

Recently I shared a post, "Our dog likely is dying, but we had a good time today." This day, Friday, was another good day.

My wife had to go to Portland to meet her sister from Kentucky, who is visiting some relatives in Oregon. So I had the sole care of our dog, ZuZu. Given her late stage liver disease and precarious health, I do my best to always take her with me in the car. I want to spend as much time as possible with ZuZu, since probably she doesn't have much time left to live.

Knowing that her days are numbered makes me more aware that everybody's days are numbered.

You, me, every person and every animal and every other living thing on Earth. We just do our best to shunt that fact to the back of our minds, since the prospect of death is painful, given that everybody we love (which includes ourselves) is going to die one day.

After going to the pharmacy, returning some shoes, and buying some socks, I took ZuZu to the Minto Brown Dog Park. She still has enough energy to be enthused about the sights and smells of other dogs, and the humans who pat her when she runs up to them.

It was one of those Oregon days when the sun comes out, then it sprinkles for a while, then the sun returns. During a sunny spell ZuZu would walk for a while, then roll over on her back and wiggle back and forth in the grass. It's one of her favorite things to do, which includes me kneeling beside her and scratching her stomach and under her chin while she lies in the grass.

I've got tears in my ears as I write this.

I love ZuZu so much. I don't want her to die. I want to scratch her tummy in warm grass for a lot longer than I'm going to be able to. I felt an unbearable sadness at the dog park, at the same time I was feeling ever-so-grateful for another good day with ZuZu.

Such is secular faith.

I want to do everything I can to make ZuZu's remaining life as pleasant as possible, as, of course, my wife does, and her vet does. We know that while death is certain at some point for all living beings, length of life and quality of life largely depends on our caring.

It's painful to love. It's painful to care. But I wouldn't trade that pain for eternity. It would take too many words for me to explain why, and this post is long enough. I'll let Hägglund have the last words.

I am asking us to let go of a way of thinking that leads to a dead end, to recognize that the peace of eternity only resides in the grave.

Rather than try to become invulnerable, we should learn to see that vulnerability is part of the good that we seek. Thereby we can learn to see that our finitude -- and the finitude of what we love -- is not in itself a restriction.

Our bonds to finite life are not only what constrain us but also what sustain us, opening us to the world and to others.

Our dog likely is dying, but we had a good time today

Life is difficult. Sometimes really difficult. Like when someone you love likely is going to die soon. Our dog, ZuZu, is in the late stage of chronic liver disease.

Her vet has told my wife and I that ZuZu probably has weeks or months left to live, not years.

So the WillaMutt Strut event ZuZu and I went to today was poignant for me. (It's put on every year by the Willamette Humane Society, where my wife is a volunteer dog walker.)

Here's photos of what likely was ZuZu's last time at the event. She enjoyed herself, as did I.

I'm grateful for every moment I can spend with ZuZu. I'm also grateful for the fact that while we humans can grasp the concept of impending death, dogs can't.

Maybe it isn't eternity we long for, but quality time in this life

Is eternity really so great? I've always thought so. Well, not really for "always," since that would be the same as eternity, and I'm definitely not eternal. 

Rather, I meant for as long as I've been pondering death and the likely end of this one-and-only life we're all enjoying. 

After reading a review by James Wood in The New Yorker of a book by Martin Hägglund, "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom," I ordered it from Amazon. 

Given that the book consists of 464 pages of quite intense philosophizing, I may not be writing blog posts about it for a while. So here's some excerpts from the provocative review. 

I've wondered about what kind of society would make the most sense in a world that had given up belief in an afterlife.

After all, if this life were considered the only life anyone would ever have, it sure seems like we humans would value the quality of this life considerably more highly than we do now.

Here's some glimpses of how Hägglund views this question. 

Once we seriously consider the consequences of life without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glick called "absence of change" would be not a rescue from anything  but an end of everything meaningful.

Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: "Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead."

...A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Haaglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund's central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn't know itself as such.

He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don't really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last "for a longer time." 

So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism.

He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being "present in the moment"; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.

...But if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. "The real measure of value," Hägglund says, "is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time), but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time)."

...And yet Hägglund's very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secularity seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge.

Hägglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by "irreligious criticism," a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism,  because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as Hägglund puts it, "our own lives -- our only lives -- are  taken away from us when our time is taken from us."

We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is "life-denying." Hägglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material.

Here's the problem with living: we're going to die

This isn't exactly breaking news, but I'll say it anyway. Each of us is going to die. 


Those seven words are undeniably scary. Life isn't always pleasant. Yet the gulf between having a difficult life and no life at all is more than immense. It's immeasurable. There's no way to compare being alive and being dead, or existence and non-existence.

The worst day anyone can have is on a different dimension than not existing at all.

Understand: I'm not saying that life is always worth living. Suicide and death with dignity testify to the fact that sometimes people prefer to check out of life early, rather than waiting for the involuntary eviction notice.

There are many reasons most people on Earth embrace some form of religiosity. However, a central reason has to be the reassurance almost every religion provides that when the last breath is taken, that doesn't mark the end of their life, but rather the beginning of a new form of existence.

I don't believe this is true.

There's no convincing evidence of life after death. Nor is there convincing evidence that human consciousness can exist without a functioning brain. Comas, anesthesia, being hit on the head with a baseball bat -- there's abundant evidence that consciousness is a product of the brain, though how this happens still isn't fully understood.

Still, each of has to come to grips with the reality of death whether we're an ardent atheist, committed religious believer, or somewhere in-between. 

Leaving aside the option of not thinking about death until it stares us in the face (which can be a good way to live, for those capable of doing this), it seems to me that there's two basic approaches to preparing for the inevitability of our eventual demise.

One is to try to expand our self. The other is to try to shrink our self. 

Almost all religions take the first approach: expanding the self. For example, some religions say that after death there is either bodily resurrection (Christianity) or reincarnation (Hinduism). Mystical aspects of religion proclaim that the soul can merge with God, taking on divine attributes. 

Aside from the fact that self-expansion, or consciousness-expansion, likely isn't possible in any sense that extends beyond the bounds of a single physical life, there's other reasons to shy away from this approach.

It encourages grandiosity.

I see this all the time in comments religious believers leave on my blog posts, notably those who are devotees of an Indian form of spirituality known as Sant Mat, or the Path of the Saints. They're fond of claiming that this is the highest form of religion, supposedly leading as it does to knowledge of an ultimate divine reality.

Of course, just about every religion makes this same claim.

Since there is no evidence of one religion being superior to another, almost certainly because they all are "fake news" (to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump), it seems ridiculous for a member of any faith to say that their way is the only way -- sort of like people arguing about which unicorn color is the most attractive, given that unicorns don't exist except in one's imagination.

So I prefer the other approach to dealing with life and our eventual death: shrinking the self. 

After all, us humans already are pretty damn insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Aside from having a lot of company here on Earth -- the human population is about 7.6 billion -- we are on a planet circling one of about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of at least 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

And we're very lucky to live 100 years, which is an infinitesimal blip in the 13.7 billion year old universe we inhabit. 

Thus it doesn't take much for us to shrink down to almost nothing, either figuratively or literally (the whole "ashes to ashes' thing). But our egos enjoy pretending that we're way more important than we really are, which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of religions.

God so loves us, he sent his only son to die for our sins. The soul is destined to return home to its heavenly father. Humans are the pinnacle of creation. 

The myths of religion are innumerable. I much prefer reality:

Each of us is nothing special. We're connected to all other living things through the secular "miracle" of evolution. We live for a while, then we die. Humility is not only a virtue, it's the way things are in a world that is much grander and longer-lived than us.

Of all the world's religions, in my opinion Buddhism and Taoism are the best at offering ways to help us shrink our sense of self. One reason is that neither posits an enduring Self, or Soul. Rather, they teach that life is ever-changing, as are we. Our existence is intimately connected with that of everything else on Earth. We're humble parts of the whole.

He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao, 
    "These are extra food and unnecessary luggage."
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.
    -- Tao Te Ching

As a concrete example of the difference between grandiose and humble approaches to spirituality, I spend exactly zero time and effort on religious web sites or blogs trying to push my atheist point of view. Sure, I enjoy sharing churchless/atheist ideas here on my own blog, but I don't go out of my way to convince others that they should adopt my perspective.

But ever since I started this blog in 2004, religious believers -- mostly of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas/Sant Mat variety -- have commented in droves on my blog posts. The way I see it, this shows that they're not very confident in their belief system, since when someone presents arguments against what they believe, they take this as a battle cry to fight against.

Thus I'm pleased to be a humble churchless blogger rather than a grandiose believer in religious dogma. It's much more relaxing that way, since my only commitment is to the truth as best I can understand it. Truth doesn't require any attempt to boost it up, since it stands tall on its own.

Regarding death, my bet is that what will happen to me is exactly the same thing that happens to every other person: we die and are gone forever. The way I see it, the more I can reduce my sense of ego and specialness, the easier it will be to let go when the moment of dying comes.

Until then, I'll enjoy life.

Sure, religious believers typically derive comfort from a fantasy that death won't be the end for them. But the price they pay for their belief strikes me as too high -- feeling like they are the special beloveds of God or some other higher power, which leads to a sense of separation from everybody else who won't enjoy such a marvelous afterlife.

I'd rather feel like I'm simply part of the dead-and-gone-forever crowd. If somehow I discover that I'm living on after I die, that'll be great news. I'm not counting on it, though.

Atheism has made me more comfortable with death

Often religious people wrongly consider that atheists are more afraid of dying than believers in God, which usually entails a belief in an afterlife.

That hasn't been the case with me. And it isn't the case with the many atheists I know.

In fact, I've found that actually the opposite has occurred. During the 35 years I was a devotee of an Eastern religion that taught the soul survives one's death, I was more afraid of dying than I am now. 

Here's an excerpt from a previous post, "We'll die the way we have lived." My wife and I prepared our wills many years ago, so my request to our attorney was during my true-believing phase. 

When my wife and I went to get our wills made, I asked the attorney to say "gerbiled" rather than "died" whenever she needed to refer to my death.

Yeah, it sounded sort of ridiculous when the attorney told us, "So upon Brian's gerbiling, his estate will pass to..." But I was fine with ridiculousness so long as I could lessen the probability that I'd have to seriously envision my, um, eventual gerbiling.

No, I can say it now: eventual death.

As noted in the post, likely growing older (something I've been unable to prevent, damn it) has something to do with becoming more comfortable with the inevitability of death. Observing changes in the body -- wrinkles, age/sun spots, assorted aches and pains -- clues us in to the fact that we're getting closer to the Big Change of death.

But I don't think this is the entire explanation for why I'm more comfortable with dying now that I've embraced atheism. The way it feels to me is that I've learned how to relax into reality. 

After all, atheism isn't a belief. It is an absence of belief -- of God, the supernatural, life after death, heaven, and such. Everything that religious people believe in requires a lot of effort to maintain. That's why there are holy books, preachers, sermons, worship, rituals, and so much else that supports religious belief.

By contrast, us atheists live much simpler lives based on some obvious facts about reality.

Obviously there is a physical world. 
Obviously everything that lives, dies.
Obviously human consciousness doesn't exist without a brain.

So atheism doesn't require any work, since all atheists need to do is observe reality as it is. Religious believers, though, have to exert considerable effort in attempts to convince themselves, and others, that there is a supernatural realm, there's life after death, and consciousness is separable from the body/brain.

I know this, because after 14 years of reading comments from religious people on this blog, I'm very familiar with the tortuous reasoning necessary to support beliefs such as the survival of something-or-other after a person dies.

I said something-or-other, because there's no evidence that anything non-material survives a person's death. And some religions, such as Christianity to my understanding, actually don't believe in a soul (Jesus' second coming is a physical event, when bodies come to life again, right?).

Thus it's been comforting for me to relax into a simple acceptance of what actually is, after those 35 years of attempting to convince myself that there was more to reality than the physical cosmos. 

Nobody, repeat nobody, knows if they will enjoy a life after death, because everybody who believes this is still alive. Even if someone has a supposed out-of- body experience, or visions of a heavenly realm, this is taking place while they have a functioning physical body and brain.

There is zero, repeat zero, demonstrable evidence of God, life after death, heaven, or consciousness without a brain. Anyone who believes in these things is forced to say stuff like, "But there's a possibility they exist!"

Well, sure.

There's also a possibility that nothing in the universe is truly real, because it could be a simulation of some advanced civilization that puts our computer games to shame. Just about anything we can imagine has some probability of actually existing, albeit extremely small.

Is it possible that death isn't the end, but the beginning of a new life? Yes. Is this at all likely? No. And that makes me feel good, because I find reality more comfortable than fantasy, even if I'd prefer that a fantasy be real. 

Zen's tiger and strawberry story is about dealing with death

The older I get -- I'm 69 -- the more I resonate with the Zen story of a man who had a bad day when he was chased by a tiger. Which turned into a much worse day when another tiger and a couple of mice showed up. 

A man was walking across a field when he saw a tiger. Fearing for his life, the man fled, but the tiger gave chase. The man reached the edge of a cliff, and just as he thought the tiger would get him, he spotted a vine growing over the edge of the cliff. Grabbing on to it, he swung himself over the edge to safety.

The tiger came to the edge and snarled at him from above. While precariously perched like this, the man saw another tiger growling at him from below. Trembling, he held on to the thin vine that was keeping him from being dinner for the tigers. What could be worse than this, he wondered.

Just then, two mice scampered out and began gnawing at the vine. As they chewed and the man pondered over his fate, he saw a juicy, red strawberry on a ledge next to him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. Ah, how sweet it tasted!

Now, some Googling revealed to me that there are different views of what this story is intended to teach us. Live in the moment is a common interpretation. A contrary perspective is don't be distracted by pleasure. 

I'm much more in favor of live in the moment than don't be distracted by pleasure.

Whoever thought the man paid undue attention to the strawberry obviously hasn't spent much time clinging to a vine that's being chewed by mice while tigers await above and below.

You might be thinking, who has experienced this? To which I reply to that thought: Everyone. Without exception. 

Because my view of what the story is all about is that the tigers represent the fear of death, and the mice represent death itself. After all, virtually everybody does their best to run from death when the specter of it appears before us. We cling to whatever life-giving alternative is available.

But in the end, the mice of human mortality are going to nibble through the vine of living, 100% guaranteed. The only question is how long it will take them.

The strawberry represents... a strawberry. (I have strawberries on my oatmeal almost every morning, and I live in Oregon, which has some of the best-tasting strawberries in the world.)

Not only a strawberry, of course. The strawberry is everything in existence.

Or at least, that portion of everything that we humans can be aware of. So long as death hasn't completely nibbled through the vine of our life, we should taste every bite of existence with gusto.

What gives the strawberry an extra dose of sweetness is precisely the fact that our ability to taste it is limited. Nobody lives forever. In fact, nobody even lives very long, by cosmic standards. The universe is about 14 billion years old. We're lucky if we can live to 80, and very lucky to live to 100.

This being a Church of the Churchless blog, I'm going to conclude my interpretation of this Zen story with some jabs at religion. 

There's zero demonstrable evidence, nada, zilch, that anyone has ever cheated death. Those damn mice can't be stopped. Death is an unavoidable eater of life. Death can be postponed, but only for a while.

Given the inevitability of death, and the near-certainty that when we die, we're dead forever (being scientifically-minded, I realize that nothing is 100% certain, including what I just said), it makes sense to get as much sweetness from life as possible while we're still able to cling to its vine.

So here's a Big Problem with religion: every major religion, and most minor ones, claim that another life awaits after we die. Meaning, no mice! Death is a fiction. Thus tigers are optional, since fear of death is justified only if death exists.

This makes strawberries, and the rest of life, less sweet. 

In fact, religions are notorious for urging people to shun many of life's pleasures, such as sex, alcohol, recreational drugs, sensual indulgences, partying-on. They claim -- again, with zero evidence -- that a gigantic heavenly strawberry awaits those who obey whatever restrictions a particular religion enjoins.

Thus the way I see it, the Zen story only has meaning for those who reject religiosity.  

Being religious won't save you from suicide

Just came across this piece by Jesse Bering in Skeptic, "No, Being Religious Will Not Save You From Suicide." Well worth reading. Makes some great points. Here's an excerpt.

Among the more obnoxious things I’ve read in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s death is that if only he had been a man of faith, he wouldn’t have taken his own life.

Consider the almost sneering commentary offered by Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in a syndicated piece written less than a day after the rogue chef’s body was found hanging by the belt of his bathrobe in a Strasbourg hotel room.

“If Anthony Bourdain had been a religious man, would he have killed himself? Probably not,” writes Donohue. “Bourdain was raised by his Catholic father and Jewish mother, though neither of them saw fit to raise him any religion … [Bourdain] said his views of religion were similar to those expressed by Christopher Hitchens, the British atheist. This is why the atheist organization, Freedom from Religion, was so proud of him.”

Not only is the tenor of Donohue’s sentiment completely tone-deaf and insensitive, his claim that Bourdain—or, for that matter, any other atheist suicide victim—could have been saved by religion is presumptuous and misleading.

In his unabashed efforts to show why Catholicism is superior to other religions (he touts his book The Catholic Advantage while writing about Bourdain’s suicide), Donohue points out that regular churchgoers are less likely to kill themselves. He’s right. But it turns out it’s a little more complicated than Donohue would have us believe.

The church buffering effect against suicide that he’s alluding to, in fact, has almost nothing to do with faith. Rather, the correlation comes from churchgoers being part of an active community, one with formal rituals encouraging social engagement and regulated moral support. It’s what’s known as the “network theory” of religion and suicide, first articulated by Émile Durkheim in the late 19th century.

In his famous treatise Suicide (1897), Durkheim reported that, despite their matched religiosity, Protestants were more likely to take their own lives than Catholics, a puzzling observation given that suicide is proscribed in both forms of Christianity. But Protestants are permitted free inquiry, have fewer formal rituals, and are characterized by more permeable groups.

This general trend—that it is church attendance, not simply religion, that protects people against suicide—has been found in study after study ever since. So, when Donohue writes that “those who are regular churchgoers have a much lower rate of suicide than atheists like Bourdain,” he’s conflating (and I suspect deliberately so) religious behavior and theism.

Death of 14-year-old boy shows appeal of religion

Death sucks. But death is inevitable. It happens to everybody. There's no exceptions.

Yet for senior citizens  like me -- I'm 69 -- we've had many years of living that make our eventual demise seem, if not appealing, at least part of the natural course of things.

A child's death, though... that's a whole different thing.

Today I read a story in our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, about the death of a 14-year-old boy from a rare form of bone cancer. 

It was heartbreaking. 

Jack Schumacher lived for baseball. He was good at math, loved LEGOs and loved his family.

A year ago, the Straub Middle School student was honing his pitching skills at Capitol City Sports, and looking forward to summer.

Then, a nagging pain began in his left hip. Within three months, there was a diagnosis: Osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Four months later, he learned there was no hope.

“What he was truly facing was his own mortality, knowing he was going to die,” said his mother, Tammi Huber.

There were tears, there was anger, there was questioning, Huber said. But by the time Jack died at 14, on May 18, he had come to terms with it.

That's inspiring, courageous, exemplary. The story explains one of the reasons Jack was able to face death with equanimity. Huber is Jack's mother.

Jack spent a lot of time talking about the afterlife, Huber said. And by the time he died, in her arms on May 18, he had made peace with it.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in an afterlife. But I can totally understand why a 14-year-old boy dying of bone cancer that has spread throughout his body would want to envision himself living on after he takes his last breath.

In fact, I can understand why anybody facing death would seek solace in what almost certainly is a fantasy, albeit a comforting one. 

Understand: I'm not saying that all atheists, or even most of them, experience death bed conversions. This simply isn't the case.

I'm simply pointing out the obvious: that a major appeal of religions is the reassurance they offer about death being not an end to existence, but the beginning of another form of life. 

This doesn't make an afterlife true. It just makes an afterlife a comforting belief.

And the question of why God allows children to die remains unanswered. This is part of the broader question of theodicy,  how a good God permits the manifestation of evil. 

Us atheists have an easy response. God doesn't exist, so there is no problem with bad things happening in the world. That's just the nature of reality. Pain, suffering, death, and other nasty stuff simply accompany living because this is how things are.

End of story. 

Lousy reasons to believe in an afterlife

A post on the Why Evolution is True site, "Dennis Prager explains why he believes in the afterlife," contains some really bad reasons for such a belief.

I'll copy in the post below for easier reading. Click on the link if you want to see the video in which Prager presents his reasons for believing.

Here’s a five-minute video by conservative Jewish “pundit” Dennis Prager; it’s part of his “Prager University” series of short videos, some of which are okay but most of which are dire. In this one, Prager himself explains why he believes in an afterlife.  The reasons boil down to these:

1. “If there’s a God, then there’s an afterlife. It’s that simple”.  Well, not to Jews, many of whom believe in the former but not the latter.
   
   
2. The injustice and suffering of this life demands that it be set right in the next life. This presumes that God wants to fix things, but it doesn’t explain why Prager’s “good and just God” would allow people to suffer in this life. Why would he let kids get leukemia or other people suffer, and not from the depredations of other humans? If God were both good and just, he wouldn’t let that shit happen. Prager never explains this “unjust suffering” coming from his loving God.
   
   
3. Since God isn’t physical, there must be parts of reality which are also “nonphysical”. To Prager, that means that therefore there is a nonphysical soul that survives the death of our body. This is a horrible piece of logic. Why couldn’t God be the only nonphysical thing in the cosmos?
   
   
4. We can’t become immortal through our deeds. After all, our good works disappear, and kids may die without producing any “works”. Further, Hitler’s bad deeds would make him “far more immortal” then any good human. Ergo, there must be ANOTHER way to live on: the divine afterlife. This is another ridiculous piece of logic.
   
   
5. If there’s no afterlife, none of us will ever again see the departed that we most love. Therefore, a good God wouldn’t do that, ergo an afterlife!
   
   
6. If there’s no afterlife, then this life, which is all we have, is a “meaningless crapshoot.” Prager can’t abide that, so there’s an afterlife.
   
   
7. The biggie: while Prager says he doesn’t have any idea of what happens in the afterlife, he does know that “my belief in the afterlife keeps me sane.” If there were no afterlife, bad people would get away with their misdeeds, and Prager wouldn’t see his loved ones again. As he says, “This would drive me mad.” Well, it doesn’t drive most of us atheists mad. We may not like it, but there’s a lot about reality that we don’t like. Reality doesn’t exist to make us feel good.

It all boils down to two things: Prager’s assumption of not only a God (for which there is no evidence), but a good God who, while allowing bad stuff to happen on earth, will make up for it in the afterlife. There’s no evidence for that, either, nor for an afterlife. The real message that Prager has is this: “I believe in God because it makes me feel good, and I’d go nuts otherwise.”

Well, there’s a lot of stuff that we could believe in that isn’t real but could make us feel good.  As an example, Sam Harris has used the delusion of an enormous diamond buried in his backyard. Prager uses the delusion of a God, which, though equally unevidenced, is socially acceptable because it’s common.

Truly, it baffles me that someone with a modicum of intelligence can produce a video purporting to give evidence for an afterlife when all he’s doing is pretending that what gives him comfort really exists. And most Americans are content to either live with such delusions or accept them in other people.

Death and non-existence is scary. Not facing reality, even scarier.

I'm afraid of death. This is natural. It is normal for a living being to try to cling to life and avoid death for as long as possible. 

But as I wrote about twelve years ago in "Death and the primal fear of nonexistence," I regularly get glimpses into what it means to not exist forever.

I don't mean a glimpse into the actuality of non-existence, because I won't be around to experience either that, or anything. What I feel is an existential terror that seems different to me from a fear of dying. It is the stark reality that one day I will cease to exist for eternity after my brief stint of living here on Earth.

My most recent Holy Shit! moment came while I was listening to a guided Daily Calm meditation on my iPhone's Calm app. I like Calm a lot. I just found this particular Daily Calm to be anything but calming. 

Here's the more positive image and quote that accompanied the guided meditation.

For sure, Mr. Pinker. You've got that right.

If, as is almost certainly true, each of us has only one life to live -- this one -- then there is indeed an incalcuable value to each and every moment. The sad thing is that most people either realize this too late, or never.

At least, this seems sad to me.  

It may well be that not being able to visualize our impending non-existence until our last breath is an even greater gift. Frequently I envy our dog for being able to simply live her life without worrying about death and her eventual non-existence.

But I'm a human and she's a canine.

Our self-awareness brings along with it the realization that Steven Pinker speaks of: that our capacity to be conscious of existence is exceedingly precious, since in the grand scheme of the cosmos, that consciousness is rare and brief.

I've written quite a bit about death and non-existence. Here's a good sampling of my posts, with an excerpt from each. 

Death and the primal fear of non-existence
I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen.

But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the difference? I hope so. I don’t know if I can describe it any more clearly.

Overcoming the fear of non-existence 
For me, the warmest, coziest, most reassuring thought-blankie is this: there's really no "me."

If I don't exist in the fashion that I have assumed to be true for most of my life, then not-existing after I die takes on a different meaning. This is hard to explain in words, because what I'm getting at is as much emotional as thoughtful.

It's sort of akin to worrying about losing a precious ring that you've always believed was a family heirloom, then having an older relative tell you, "It's not really worth much; we had it appraised a long time ago."

How I deal with the fear of death and non-existence
Thus whatever will happen to me, will happen to everybody. This realization takes away a feeling that I’m missing out on some special Salvation Treat others will enjoy. Knowing that billions of people have died before me, and billions will die after me, with the same thing happening to all of us after we take our last breath — that is comforting.  

Yet I readily admit: I’d like to live forever. Who wouldn’t? We just don’t always get what we want, though, as I recall the Rolling Stones saying in a song. In a way, we do though — since it seems that as people grow older, and their health gradually declines, death becomes, if not welcome, something not to be feared. In other words, nature seems to have a way of naturally reducing our youthful fear of death.

Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence
Believers in life after death don't know that for sure. Believers in non-existence after death don't know that for sure. Nobody knows! Nobody. Not with certainty. And therein lies a viable way of dealing with death: acknowledge that it's an unknown, and focus on the known. Living, here and now.

Coping with death and the fear of non-existence
It may well be that this life is all there is. After death, finis. The end. If that's the case, I want to make the most of the moments that I have left. By contrast, people who believe in eternal life, or a lengthy afterlife in some heavenly paradise, are partly here and partly there. 

Their imaginings of what awaits them beyond get mixed up with what is here, now. I don't want that to happen to me. So I try to use my glimpse of nothingness as motivation to embrace more fully the everything I'm currently aware of.

More thoughts about the fear of non-existence
For me, the beginning (and perhaps also the end) of genuine spirituality is confronting the fear of non-existence head on. I’m getting tired of being afraid. It seems that I’m approaching the point where I’m more afraid of being afraid than of the original fear itself.

Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death
However, as I just said, there's still a lingering sense (or wish) in me that something conscious and aware exists beyond our commonplace understanding of the physical. Since I now find it extremely difficult to accept that this is a supernatural divine being, I'm left with exploring the furthest reaches of scientific speculation.

Furthest reaches is a big subject. By nature, almost boundless.

So I'll simply throw out a few approaches for allaying a fear of absolute extinction at death that scientifically-minded folks like me can look into. If anyone has additional suggestions, feel free to share them in a comment. 

Watch this "Adam ruins death" video. Truthful, blunt, non-religious.

My wife and I are big fans of "Adam Ruins Everything." Here's how TruTV describes this entertaining and informative series.

In Adam Ruins Everything, host and investigative comedian Adam Conover embarks on a comically inventive yet unrelentingly serious quest to reveal the hidden truths behind everything you know and love. Tackling topics ranging from the workplace and voting to forensic science and security, he gives you not just fun facts to share with your friends, but information that will make you see the world in a whole new way. If knowledge is power, then Adam Conover will have you laughing all the way to the top.

Well, the Adam Ruins Death episode wasn't exactly hilarious, though it did have some funny moments. The part I liked the most was the opening few minutes where Adam looks directly into the camera and offers up some straight talk about death.

We're all going to die. There's no way to avoid it. When death happens to us, that's the end. Of everything for us. We won't even know that we're nothing, because a nothing can't know anything. Or be aware of anything. Our brain, our body, our faculties -- they're going to steadily deteriorate until death comes.

On the positive side... if we fully face the reality of death, life becomes more precious.

The only way to truly live is to realize the fantasy of eternal existence, heaven, and all the other trappings of religion designed to make people feel better about not existing after taking their final breath.

Here's a video of the opening. Enjoy. (As much as you can.) The truth about death may be uncomfortable, but it's hugely better to live honestly than to live a lie.

The astounding egotism of believing in an afterlife

Religious believers like to claim that they're more humble than us atheists. Their devotion to God supposedly is a reflection of a selflessness lacking in spiritual skeptics. 

Actually, the reverse is true.

It's taken me a while to realize this, in no small part because I brainwashed myself into believing otherwise during my 30+ years of religiosity. For a long time I was deeply proud of my humility. Now I understand how deluded I was. (See here and here.)

The most astounding display of religious egotism is belief in an afterlife. 

Think about it: it is obvious that all living beings are born, then die. Chickens, elephants, dogs, goldfish, spiders, pigeons -- they are all part of a natural cycle which begins with birth and ends with death. 

Atoms exist forever, so far as we know.

Everything in existence can be traced back to the big bang that marked the formation of our universe. This is a scientific truth: we are made of star stuff, since the heavier elements that comprise us were created by exploding stars billions of years ago.

But things composed of those atoms are subject to the laws of nature, such as entropy. Order inexorably turns into disorder, notably including our own bodies. We wear down. We fall apart. We die.

Every other life form on Earth accepts this, because they have no other option.

I have closely studied our dog for any sign that she is anxious about her eventual demise, or puts her canine brain cells to work pondering what will happen after she takes her last breath. But humans, as I blogged about recently, have evolved to possess a mental "strange loop" that allows us not only to be aware, but to be aware of our awareness.

(Some other animals appear to possess a form of self-awareness, yet not nearly to the degree that we Homo sapiens have.)

Understand: it is totally understandable that people want to cling to life. The members of every species do. If living and dying were viewed as equally desirable by a certain type of creature, almost certainly it wouldn't exist for very long. Thus we have a natural predilection to remain alive for as long as possible.

But the human capacity for abstraction has allowed us to come up with concepts that don't point to anything in the natural world. Like, "God," "soul," "heaven," and "afterlife." Probably our unique animal ability to foresee our own death is a major reason these religious concepts have taken root so solidly in almost every culture.

When the first humans were able to think, "One day I will be dead and gone forever," likely it didn't take long before this sort of reassuring thought followed: "Unless... God saves me." 

This also is totally understandable. It isn't true, though.

Modern science, including neuroscience, has progressed to the point that we can say with near certainty: (1) When the brain dies, we die, and (2) Further, whatever "we" are, it isn't anything separate and distinct from the workings of the brain.

Which was another point in my recent post, where I quoted Douglas Hofstadter:

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be.

Religious believers, though, reject this modern scientific understanding.

They cling to an archaic assumption that people have an eternal soul-consciousness which lives on after the physical body dies. This is as false as the long-discredited belief that the Sun revolves the Earth, yet is much more difficult to dislodge -- because it is so reassuring to creatures fearful of their impending death.

Belief in an ego, a "I-ness" separate and distinct from the atoms that comprise our brain, along with everything else in the universe, this is common to almost everybody.

However, religious believers supercharge this intuitive, yet mistaken, perception with the high octane fuel of holy books, dogmatism, prayer, rituals, and devotion to an imaginary God who will embrace their supernatural soul after death. 

I reject this extreme egotism, though I admit that sometimes it still seems tempting. Having once been addicted to religion, I'm akin to a recovering alcoholic who walks by a liquor store and still feels a desire to partake -- as in the good old drunken days. 

Except... I know now that those days when I was inebriated on religious superstitions weren't so good. The pleasant feelings were founded on lies. My sense of being a humble servant of the Lord flowed from extreme egotism. 

I'll end by quoting myself (yeah, I'm still egotistical, but at least now I admit it).

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

I also don't expect that there is any power guiding my life which isn't also directing the lives of every other entity on Earth. 

 

Great candidate for my last word: "Yes"

The older I get -- which, sadly, seems to be happening continuously -- the more I ponder the not-so-cheery question, "What should my last word be?"

Now, usually we hear talk of last words, not word. But since I'm such a wordy guy, in writing at least, I figure I should do something surprising and limit myself to a single Last Word.

(An aside: I enjoyed reading the "ironical sense of words said before a disaster" in the Wikipedia Last words article. These are so great, they almost -- but not quite -- made me want to do the last words thing.)

• "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!" General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House immediately before being killed by enemy fire.
• "Let all brave Prussians follow me!" Field Marshal Kurt Christoph Graf von Schwerin at the Battle of Prague, immediately before getting hit in the head by a cannonball.
• "Don't worry about it ... look, the clip is not even in it." Terry Kath of the band Chicago, just before putting a pistol to his temple and pulling the trigger.

I don't know whether my last word would be uttered aloud, so someone else could hear it, or silently inside my head, where it would be known only to me. 

Thus I want a word that does a damn fine job of (1) summing up my philosophy of life, so I remain true to myself in my last moment; (2) is positive, so anyone around me gets a feeling that my imminent death is going as well as possible; and (3) resonates pleasingly within my own fading psyche, so I end up on as high a note as possible in my swan song. 

I might change my mind, but currently the Last Word Winner is...

YES. 

Which conveys such extra multiple-word meanings as:

Yes, this is happening. I accept it. 
Yes, it is what it is. Dude.
Yes, thanks to the cosmos that made saying "yes" possible.
Yes, I accept the reality of all this, right here, right now.

This isn't the first time I've written about the appeal of YES. Well, more accurately Yes, Yes, Yes. 

In 2oo7, I wrote "Beyond religion's No to Yes, Yes, Yes."

One of my enduring memories of the marvelously '60's ish Oregon Country Fair outside of Eugene is a banner strung high between two trees that simply said, "Yes…Yes…Yes." (though the fair does have some dos and don'ts)

When I saw it, I thought…Yes.

There's so much in that one word. Everything, really. What more could we want if we have Yes? It's the negative side of life that is so disenchanting.

Nobody likes to be told "No!" Not children, not anybody. We're Yes seeking creatures who long for affirmation, positivity, acceptance.

And in 2014, I blogged, "'Yes, yes, yes' is an appealing philosophy of life" (based on a column I wrote for our town's alternative paper).

I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish, excessively optimistic. Life can suck. It can be painful, depressing, disappointing, tragic. 

But saying yes to all that is a lot better than denying it. Kudos to the folks in Salem who organized the Stories from the Dark Side series at the Grand Theatre (last Thursday, May and June). Great idea, inviting people to share tales from the darker side of themselves.

Recently I came across one of those wise Twitter epigrams that say so much in 140 characters or less: “Self hate lives in the gap of what you think you should be and what you actually are.”

Yes. This is what you are. This is what I am. Yet also more, because of Yes, and Yes, and Yes… without end.

So even if my last word turns out to be NO! -- there's a Yes behind that also. What is, is yes. Which doesn't leave anything out. 

Role of religion in Orlando gay nightclub shootings

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, I've talked about how tough it is to figure out how to stop more mass shootings in this gun-crazed natiom. 

The main problem is that the United States has both way more guns than any other industrialized country, and also way more gun deaths. While it's obvious that the two are connected -- more guns means more gun deaths -- it won't be possible to make those guns disappear. 

Religion seemingly also played a role in Omar Mateen's attack on a gay nightclub. He pledged allegiance to ISIS during a 911 phone call in the midst of the attack. ISIS is known for killing suspected homosexuals because of their twisted view of Islam. 

But if there is a clear link between the attack in Orlando and the Islamic State, it would be the most high-profile incident yet in the group's wider, relentless campaign against gays. Ever since the group came to prominence amid security vacuums in Iraq and Syria, it has set about persecuting religious minorities, women and others whose identity and lifestyle are anathema to its puritanical creed. In areas under the control of the Islamic State, its fighters have issued edicts against homosexual behavior and flashy hairstyles and promised death for anyone caught in the act of sodomy.

Christianity, though, also has played a big part in the persecution of the LBGTQ community. Christians haven't been throwing gays off of tall buildings (as ISIS has done), but many of them believe that homosexuality is against God's law.

Vox has an interesting recent piece, "LGBTQ religion activist: it's time to talk about America's faith-based homophobia problem."

As with every mass shooting before it, politicians are responding to Sunday morning’s massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando by extending their "thoughts and prayers" to the families of the 49 victims who lost their lives.

But what does it mean for politicians to offer their thoughts and prayers to a marginalized community they’ve prayed against?

"I find it so ironic when the same Christian leaders who put in the most footwork in oppressing us in this space try to use this tragedy as a talking point for their Islamophobia," Faith in America executive director Eliel Cruz told me in an interview Monday.

The Pulse shooting was a direct attack on Orlando’s LGBTQ community, which is consistently targeted by some politicians of faith who claim religious freedom when writing, lobbying for, and passing anti-LGBTQ laws.

The shooter, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, has been identified as an Islamist extremist. And while politicians may pair his homophobia with his religious beliefs as a Muslim, faith-based homophobia is an all-too-familiar American tradition.

Cruz’s nonprofit organization for LGBTQ people of faith and allies aims to counter religion-based bigotry head on. Cruz weighed in on why the shooting in Orlando serves as a sobering reminder that people choosing to use religion to oppress people, regardless of one’s particular faith practice, can lead to deadly consequences.

Here's another connection I see between religion and the reaction of Americans to mass shootings: many people believe that "thoughts and prayers" actually do something. 

I don't. (see here and here)

At least, those thoughts and prayers don't do anything for the victims of a mass shooting, nor do they do anything to help prevent another attack. However, thoughts and prayers can make people feel better, especially if they're part of a ritual or gathering of like-minded people.

Otherwise, they're useless.

There's no evidence that God exists, so a non-existent God isn't going to respond to prayers. There's also no evidence of life after death, so now non-existent people killed in a mass shooting aren't going to be aware of thoughts. (Nor would they be even while alive, unless the thoughts were communicated directly them in speech, writing, or whatever.)

I strongly suspect that given how religious most people in the United States are, this religiosity plays a role in our continued inability to do much to combat gun violence. Consciously or unconsciously, those who believe in God and an afterlife don't think that someone killed by a gun is dead and gone forever.

Rather, they're dead and gone somewhere else. Heaven is the most common hypothesis. Or rebirth here on Earth, if the religious believer accepts reincarnation. 

We hear this all the time from relatives of people who have died unexpectedly. "I miss her so much, but I know she's in a better place now." 

I can understand how comforting it is to feel that way.

But I'm convinced that this attitude plays a role in our reluctance to do something concrete and realistic to reduce the very high number of gun deaths in the United States. If someone believes, as I do, that this is our one and only life, then life becomes exceedingly precious. 

Cutting lives short, as happened in the deaths of the 49 people who were killed in the Orlando shootings, then can be seen as even more outrageous. There is no consolation in an afterlife, no hope of being reunited with a deceased loved one, no imagining that the soul of the departed is now in a "better place."

So religion plays a role in the persecution of members of the LGBTQ community, 49 of whom died in Orlando. It also arguably plays a role in our inability and unwillingness to tackle head-on the problem of mass shootings in this country -- because believing that a dead person is now in heaven diminishes the urgency of making this world as heavenly as possible.

Physicist Sean Carroll debunks unscientific religious myth-making

My wife is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, so we get the organization's excellent newsletter. On paper, even!

I just got around to reading the August 2015 issue. It had an excellent piece by physicist Sean Carroll -- the address he gave after winning FFRF's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award." 

You can read "Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible" on the FFRF web site. Or via this PDF file:
Download Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible - Freedom From Religion Foundation

Only the paper version had two interesting graphics. So I took photos of them to share here.

The first shows how the universe evolves from a state of simple order at the moment of the Big Bang to a state of complex disorder some 1 quadrillion years after the Big Bang (meaning, a really long time from now). That's the blue line.

The red line is emergent complexity in the universe. It shows how complexity -- life forms, star systems, etc. -- increases even as disorder/entropy also increases in the universe as a whole. But eventually emergent complexity declines to the simple order that marked the beginning of the universe.

Carroll has an easy-to-understand explanation of this in his acceptance address.

But complexity, the organization of the stuff that is going on, is a completely different thing from entropy. In the beginning, the universe was a very simple place, just hot and dense and smooth. And the end, a googol years from now, the universe will be a simple place once again. It will be empty space. It is between when the entropy is increasing from low to high that the universe became complex, forming planets and stars and galaxies and living organisms.

That behavior is not an accident. That is a universal way that complexity behaves. Entropy just goes up, but complexity first goes up and then fades away once you approach the final state, which we call thermal equilibrium. So the right answer to the creationists is that not only is it allowed by the second law of thermodynamics — that complex structures like living beings arose here on Earth — but the reason why is because of the second of thermodynamics. We are parasitic upon the increase of entropy of the universe.

We are little surfers riding a wave of entropy until we eventually scuttle up on shore, and it'll just be empty space forever. And again, the universe is not special, you can see this in a cup of coffee. You take a cup of coffee with the cream separate, that's low entropy. Highly organized but also very simple. If you mix them together, it is high entropy, everything mixed together but also very simple.

It's the "in between" when you see the tendrils of the cream reaching into the coffee and swirling in little complex patterns. That's when you get the complexity of the universe. These little swirls, these little ethereal bits of complexity that are caught between the simple beginning and the simple end. That's us. That's what we are, temporary eruptions of structure and organization as the universe goes from simplicity to simplicity.

So that explains how complex structure can (and indeed must) arise in a universe that has a simple beginning and simple end.

Carroll's other image is used to explain why life after death isn't possible. It's a nifty, though incomprehensible to most people, set of equations.

Here's what he says about the impossibility of life after death.

Why is that true? The argument is basically the following: The mind is the brain. That's what the mind is, there is nothing else other than the brain that is going on. And the brain is made of atoms. Here is the controversial part — even some of my friends get annoyed when I say this. But it's the truth so I will lay it on you.

We know how atoms work. They are not a mystery to us. And they work in such a way that when you die there is no way for the information that is "you" to persist after death. There is no way for that stuff, that knowledge, that set of beliefs and feelings that made up you, to leave your body. Because it is stuck there with the atoms that are decaying in your tomb or being cremated or whatever your favorite way to be after death is.

We don't know all of the laws of physics by any stretch of the imagination. But we know something about them, and we know enough to make a very powerful claim: there is no room for new laws of physics that would affect how the atoms in your brain actually work.

That's a very subtle statement. I think that Dan mentioned I have three hours to give this talk, so . . . I would get tired if that happened, but I would give the whole explanation for the laws of physics, how they came to be, why we are confident in them.

Instead I will just intimidate you into submission by showing you an equation. In this one equation are summarized all of the laws of physics necessary to understand the atoms in your brain at the energy mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives. We have quantum mechanics, we have spacetime, we have gravity, we have the other forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. We have matter, the electrons and the quarks you're made of, and we have of course the Higgs boson.

There are plenty of things physicists don't understand, but we know enough to say that if there are any other forces, particles, fields, phenomena, they can't affect the atoms in your brain. If there are new particles and fields that we haven't yet seen (which there probably are), either they're so weak or short-lived that they would not have any affect on what the atoms are doing, or we would have found them in experiments. Those are the only two options.

No one ever understands me when I say this, so I'm going to say the same thing over again. I'm not saying we understand all of physics. I'm not even saying we know how the fundamental laws come together to make complicated things like frogs and ecosystems and spiral galaxies. There are enormous amounts of work to be done in understanding how science works, including physics.

But we have a basic underlying framework, which we call quantum field theory. This framework is either true or false. All the evidence says that it's true, and if it's true then there is no room for new physics that can in any way affect what goes on in the atoms in your brain. We understand what they do. There is therefore no room for the information that you persist after you die.

Read Sean Carroll's entire piece to get the full impact of his message. You may not agree with him, but you'll take a fascinating ride through basic principles of modern science.

Death is scary. How we deal with the fear... often even scarier.

I've got no problem admitting that I'm afraid of dying.

I've grappled with a primal fear of nonexistence. I've asked our attorney, when drawing up our wills (or living trusts) to substitute the word "gerbils" for "dies" when speaking about me, as in When Brian gerbils, his possessions will go to... 

But my fear of death has moderated quite a bit as I've grown older. (I'm 67 now.) I'm still more than a little interested in the subject of death, though. So when I heard about a book called "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life," I couldn't resist asking Amazon to send me a copy.

After reading a few chapters, I wrote Afterlife myths enabled humans to cope with fear of death. Today I finished the whole book, having learned more about how we Homo sapiens handle death.

In short: as best we can, yet often not very well. 

Here's the basic problem, as described by the authors in their final chapter, "Living With Death."

From a biblical standpoint, the knowledge Adam and Eve gained by partaking of the apple made them mortal. From a scientific standpoint, the development of the human neocortex spawned symbolic thought, self-awareness, the capacity to reflect on the past and anticipate the future, and the knowledge of our mortality.

In this way, the "fall of man," the allegorical foundation of Western religion, converges with contemporary science: with increasing knowledge came the awareness of death -- and that changed everything.

The knowledge of death, rather than death per se, is the worm at the core of the biblical apple. It is that knowledge that made us human and initiated our unrelenting quest for immortality -- a quest that profoundly influenced the course of human history and persists to this day.

Now, this book is unique in that the authors are psychology professors who have conducted a lot of original research into attitudes toward death, and how reminders of death affect behavior.

So their conclusions are based on a lot more than philosophy (though philosophers such as Epicurus, they say, have echoed modern understandings of how humans deal with the fear of death). Here's how they speak in the final chapter about the work of a pioneer in this area, Ernest Becker, who wrote the classic The Denial of Death.

Once we formalized Becker's analysis of the human condition into terror management theory, we began fashioning experiments to test the many hypotheses that spilled readily out of the theory. 

Some thirty years and more than five hundred studies later, there is now overwhelming evidence confirming Becker's central claim that the awareness of death gives rise to potentially debilitating terror that humans manage by perceiving themselves to be significant contributors to an ongoing cultural drama.

We found, as Becker posited, that self-esteem buffers anxiety in general and anxiety about death in particular. We discovered that subtle, and even subliminal, reminders of death increase devotion to one's cultural scheme of things, support for charismatic leaders, and confidence in the existence of God and belief in the efficacy of prayer. 

They amplify our disdain toward people who do not share our beliefs even to the point of taking solace in their demise. They drive us to compulsively smoke, drink, eat, and shop. They make us uncomfortable with our bodies and our sexuality. They impel us to drive recklessly and fry ourselves in tanning booths to bolster our self-esteem. They magnify our phobias, obsessions, and social anxieties.

Regarding the last point, the idea is that instead of being afraid of one Big Unmanageable Thing -- death -- people are afraid of smaller things, as when someone who doesn't like public speaking says after a talk, "I felt like I was going to die on stage." 

Of course, the most direct way to deal with a fear of death is to convince yourself that you won't really die. This is why religious beliefs about the afterlife provide so much solace. Though almost certainly untrue, those myths prosper because they assuage peoples' anxiety about dying and being gone forever.

To someone with a religious mentality, physical death is real, but not the "gone forever" part. 

Since for a long time I believed in an Eastern/Indian view of immortality, my soul consciousness could merge with a universal cosmic consciousness, I understand the appeal of a belief system that views death as a crossing over into a form of life even better than what we enjoy now.

This fantasy would be fine, even if untrue, if it didn't typically come with serious side effects. As the quote above says, our fear of death leads us to cling to beliefs that keep this fear at a comfortable distance. 

It is rare to come across a religious or philosophical belief system which posits that everybody is equally likely to enjoy an eternally appealing afterlife. Usually there are conditions attached: one must have faith in such-and-such, or do this-and-that, in order to be saved from either existential obliteration or consignment to a nasty hell that is worse than death.

(Reincarnation arguably is an applies to all philosophy, but here too the teaching is that it is in our power to have a better or worse next-life depending on what we do in this one. So there still are winners and losers.)

There's no easy or clear answer to the problem of dealing with death in "The Worm at the Core." A concluding section says:

These modes of death transcendence are all grounded within a culturally constructed scheme of things, and some cultural worldviews guide us toward more constructive paths of transcendence than others. The question then becomes, as Ernest Becker put it, "What is life-enhancing illusion?"

It may sound harsh to call all forms of transcendence illusory. However, the authors did a good job of convincing me that they are. 

In this sense, bluntly put: The universe doesn't give a shit. It really doesn't. There's no objective meaning to life or death out there. The only meaning exists in here, in individual human minds. 

When we try to bolster our death-defying attempt at transcendence (biosocial, theological, creative, natural) -- which can be a secular sort, such as feeling that our actions in life have helped create a better world that will live on after us -- we're giving ourselves more credit than, most likely, we really deserve.

First, little of what we do during our life is going to make much of a long-term difference. Second, there's no guarantee that what we value so highly while alive will be a benefit to the world after we're dead. 

This is tough to admit.

I like to think that supporting progressive/liberal/environmental causes is a good thing. I can come up with persuasive reasons (to me, at least) why this is true. But who knows for sure? Maybe history will conclude that electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a terrible thing for the United States and the world. 

Yet here I am today, feeling that working for her election is a meaningful way to make the Earth a better place for future generations after I'm gone. 

It's helpful to distinguish, say the authors, between "rock" and "hard place" worldviews. As noted in these quotes, rock-type worldviews aren't as good for the Earth, though they're undeniably appealing to people who hold onto them. (I've added the boldface.)

The rock is a black-and-white scheme of things, with explicit prescriptions for attaining literal and symbolic immortality. Unfortunately, many people who subscribe to rock views fervently proclaim their beliefs to be absolute truth, and they insist that they can unambiguously differentiate between good and evil. 

"Isms" -- fundamentalism, fascism, communism, and some forms of free-market capitalism, are rock views. According to Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, the fundamental problem with all "isms" is confusing their way with The Way: "It makes its myths and doctrines, its rites and laws into ultimates and persecutes those who do not subject themselves to it."

Because rock worldviews provide clear and simple bases of meaning, self-worth, and immortality, they afford seductive psychological security for those who sustain faith in, and feel valued within, them.

...Such gritty acknowledgment of our mortal fate has its appeal, but serving the ashes of ancestors and the temples of one's deities has perhaps led to more atrocities and killing than all other human motives combined. Why? Because the rock-type worldview tends to foster an us vs. them tribal mentality that, as we have seen, breeds hatred and inflames intergroup conflicts.

The alternative to rock worldviews is the hard place: conceptions of life that accept ambiguity and acknowledge that all beliefs are held with some measure of uncertainty. Hard place worldviews are malleable. Although adherents of the hard place take their beliefs and values seriously, they are open to other ideas and refuse to claim sole ownership of the truth. 

They recognize that right and wrong, and good and evil, cannot always be disentangled. Consequently, they tend to be more tolerant of those who are different. 

The hard place means accepting that meaning and values are human creations. We each combine bits and pieces of our experiences with the ideas and "truths" that we encounter to construct the reality in which we live and to become the kind of people who can make the best of that world. 

Perhaps there is an ultimate meaning and truth out there, but we can never fully grasp it, because our awareness is constrained by the limits of our sense organs, our mental capacities, and our cultural blinders. This can be a disturbing realization, but it can be a liberating one as well. 

We do not have to accept the vision of reality that others have given us. Rather, we can strive to fashion meanings that maximize what we can get out of life and minimize the harm we do to others. 

...So we are caught. The rock provides psychological security but takes a terrible toll on those victimized by angry and self-righteous crusades to rid the world of evil. The hard place yields perhaps a more compassionate view of the world but is less effective at buffering death anxiety. 

Somehow we need to fashion worldviews that yield psychological security, like the rock, but also promote tolerance and acceptance of ambiguity, like the hard place.

"Soul" -- an appealing notion, but no agreement on what it is

For many years I believed that I had, or was, a soul. This idea was comforting, because the spiritual philosophy I followed taught that the essence of human beings was non-material, pure consciousness, and everlasting.

So when my body died, supposedly my soul would live on.

Worse case was, it, or I, would be reincarnated as another bodily life form. Best case was, my soul, or True Me, would leave matter and mind behind forever. In this case, soul-me would exist in a "heavenly" realm beyond time and space.

Now, it was always hard for me to imagine what such a soulful existence would be like. This was understandable in one sense, because all I knew was living in this physical realm.

However, descriptions of the Indian/Eastern version of the above-mentioned "heaven" were disturbingly vague -- which led increasingly skeptical moi to question whether the gurus who talked about this stuff had actually experienced a bodiless existence. 

The fact is, most religions believe in some sort of soul. But just because they all use this word (or a term in another language, such as atman), doesn't mean there is agreement about what "soul" means. 

Along that line, here's an interesting passage in a book I'm reading, "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life." It starts off a section called A Brief History of the Soul.

Common to virtually all conceptions of literal immortality is the idea of the soul. Otto Rank proposed that the soul is one of humankind's earliest and most clever inventions, enabling humans to dodge death by perceiving themselves as more than just physical beings.

As Rank's translators put it, "the soul was created in the big bang of an irresistible psychological force -- our will to live forever -- colliding with the immutable biological fact of death." Unencumbered by finite flesh, the soul's existence was not only conceivable, it was also certainly more welcome than the alternative prospect of total annihilation. 

Throughout history, humans everywhere have had souls, although the specific nature of them varies considerably across time and space.

For some, the soul is a physical entity with mass and volume, ranging from a full-sized shadow to a miniature replica of the body. For others, the soul is immaterial, but no less real. 

In some cultures, only humans have souls. In others, all living things have souls. In still others, all living things and minerals have souls. 

Some souls are completely independent of their body; they can come and go as they please, and they often appear in dreams and ritually enacted spiritual experiences. Others are connected to bodies to some degree. When bodies die, souls depart, either wholly or in part, depending on how the relationship between soul and body is construed by the culture.

Some have an autonomous ethereal existence of their own. Others join a general pool of ancestral "soul-stuff." Some souls are reincarnated into other life-forms. Others are reunited with their resurrected bodies. Regardless of the differences, all soul concepts render the prospect of immortality feasible because souls are detachable from their corporeal containers. 

Well, that's good news.

But if soul is real, seemingly there should be more agreement about what soul is like. So I'll be pleasantly surprised if my soul-consciousness continues after death.

I'm not going to bet my life on it, though.

Afterlife myths enabled early humans to cope with fear of death

Members of a wolf pack who are hunting prey with sharp horns don't stop and think, "Damn, if I keep chasing those animals, I could freaking die!" 

Early humans did. Because we have self-awareness, while animals, almost certainly, simply are aware. 

Meaning, a human can anticipate his or her death, even when the threat of that happening isn't imminent. Other animals also fear death, but only when their lives are immediately threatened.

This is a huge difference. An important difference. A difference that makes all the difference between us and other species.

It also is a central theme of a fascinating book I'm a few chapters into, "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life" by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszcyynski.

The authors are psychology professors who have engaged in a lot of research involving attitudes toward death and how people cope with knowledge of their own inevitable demise. This makes their book different from purely philosophical discussions of death.

They tie together psychological studies, anthropological findings, evolutionary theories, and other scientific/quasi-scientific information in a thoughtful, readable fashion.

I'm getting fresh insights into familiar ideas.

It seems obvious that myths about the afterlife are one way humans cope with the consequence of our unique ability to anticipate the future. This is a positive when alternative action scenarios are being pondered, but a drawback when a fear of death interferes with normal functioning.

Here's some passages from a chapter I read this morning, Homo Mortalis: From Primate to Human.

Symbolization, self-consciousness, and the capacity to contemplate the future were extremely helpful to our ancestors. But these highly adaptive cognitive abilities also gave rise to an ever-present potential for mortal terror. What happened when a life-form, crafted by billions of years of evolution to strive to survive at almost any cost, recognized that it was destined to lose that war?

...Our ancestors consequently used their imagination and ingenuity to stifle their existential dread. They were already employing their sophisticated intellectual abilities to ask and answer questions about how the world worked. But solving the practical problems of living was of little use or solace to them in the face of death.

...People terrified by the prospect of their own demise would be less likely to take risks in hunting to increase the odds of landing big game, to compete effectively for mates, or to provide good care for their offspring. So our ancestors made a supremely adaptive, ingenious, and imaginative leap: they created a supernatural world, one in which death was not inevitable or irrevocable. 

The groups of early humans who fabricated the most compelling tales could best manage mortal terror. As a result, they would have been the most capable of functioning effectively in their environment and thereby most likely to perpetuate their genes into future generations.

So afterlife myths sprang up. Along with rituals that acted out those myths.

Eventually full-blown religions came to be, sophisticated myths that reassure people afraid of dying and not existing... forever. Interestingly, the authors point out that embracing a supernatural unreality can be a good thing when it enables people to function better in natural reality.

Like ritual, art helped to make the incredible credible by offering concrete signs of a supernatural world. "Without art," mused George Bernard Shaw, "the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." Art depicting the supernatural, a feature of every known culture, is fundamental to constructing and maintaining supernatural death-transcending conceptions of reality.

...Ritual, art, myth, and religion thus play a much more significant role in human affairs than it is currently fashionable to acknowledge. Many evolutionary theorists view art and religion as superfluous by-products of other cognitive adaptations that have no adaptive significance or enduring value.

This view is simply wrong. These products of human ingenuity and imagination were essential for early humans to cope with a uniquely human problem: the awareness of death. The striving for immortality -- universal to all cultures -- forestalls terror and despair. 

Consequently, humans do not have agriculture, technology, and science despite ritual, art, myth, and religion; rather, humans developed agriculture, technology, and science because of them. 

Although "in their developed forms, phantasy-thinking and reality-thinking are distinct mental processes," wrote psychoanalyst Susan Issacs, "reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting... phantasies." We might not have calculus without grave goods, or dentistry without the tooth fairy.

Religious beliefs in an afterlife are false. But these illusions are useful. Or at least, they have been.

I'll be interested to see how, in later chapters, the authors look upon modern myths of eternal life, especially when these are tied to anti-scientific ideas about reality. I can understand how supernatural myths are a positive cultural force when they enable humans to better live their lives.

However, in this 21st century we're seeing the downside of religious myth-making.

Many people in this country, for example, refuse to believe in the reality of global warming because they feel that God is looking out for the Earth and wouldn't do anything to seriously screw the habitability of our planet.

So at this point in my reading of the book, I'm willing to accept the argument that afterlife myths were generally beneficial for early humans. I'm dubious, though, about the benefits religiosity is bringing to modern Homo sapiens. 

Sure, individuals feel better when they think they're going to live on after they die. But if this myth helps contribute to the demise of civilization as we know it, I don't see how this can be a good thing.

How I deal with the fear of death and non-existence

Recently I got two email messages from someone who said he shared my fear of death and non-existence.

The fearful feelings were bothering him. He felt like no one else understood what he was going through. He wondered if he was going crazy. He asked me how I dealt with this fear, and if I wanted to live forever.

Here's the reply I sent to him tonight.

Sorry for the delay in replying to you. Anyway… 

Yes, I would like to live forever. And yes, I do think like you. I’ve had the same feelings as you — the fears and thoughts about death. They just didn’t seem to last as long as yours, and maybe they weren’t as strong as yours.

 

No, you’re not mentally ill. You’re just a sensitive person who is in touch with feelings that most people aren’t. Most people either do their best to deny to themselves that they’ll ever die, or they believe in some sort of afterlife, usually in association with believing in some sort of God.

 

So I give you a lot of credit for facing head-on what most people try to avoid: dying and the fear of death. I realize how tough and disturbing this is for you. But honesty and truth are better than lying and falsehood. You’re being honest and truthful with yourself. 

 

Maybe it seems like you’re the only one you know who can’t cope with death. The way I see it though, is that you may be the only person who is honestly aware of what it means to die and possibly be gone forever. Congratulations to you for that.

 

Here’s a few ways that I deal with my own fear of dying. At the end of this message I’ll also share some blog post links on this subject. 

 

(1) I remind myself that I don’t really exist. At least, not in the way most people think they do, as a non-material self or soul that isn’t part of the physical world. Science and Buddhism both say that we humans don’t have a “self.” We aren’t something separate and distinct from the physical world. You and I are our brain/mind. When the brain/mind dies, so do we. This is true of everything living, everything that has a brain.

 

So since I’m not anything special, I can’t expect to be treated in a special way by the universe. Everything else that is alive dies. So will I. Of course, most alive things aren’t self-aware, so they don’t worry about this. I try to look at our dog and think, “She is smarter than I am in some ways.” Like, in the way she just lives each day as it comes, mostly happily, and doesn’t worry about dying one day.

 

(2) I also remind myself that nothing is certain. There is a chance that I will live after I die. I don’t think this is a big chance, but it is possible. I won’t know until I die. Until then, there is no way to know. No one does, because no one has ever actually and truly died, then come back to life. 

 

This gives me some relief from my fear of dying. I don’t have to believe in God, heaven, or an afterlife. I just need to recognize the truth: that life after death is possible; that we may have, or be, an immortal soul. There isn’t much evidence of this, but there is some evidence, some reasons for believing this. Again, this takes some of the intensity out of my fear of dying, sort of how I’d feel better as a passenger in a plane that is about to crash if the pilot said, “Things don’t look good, but there’s a chance we’re all going to make it.” 

 

So you might focus on the small chance that life after death exists, rather than the larger chance that it doesn’t. Hey, whatever works.

 

(3)  I don’t drink a lot of alcohol or use a lot of marijuana. But I use these substances regularly. They relax me. Marijuana particularly helps in lessening my sense of self, my ego. I feel like my problems, including the problem of dying, aren’t as large as they seem normally. Only you can decide whether alcohol or some other drug helps you more than it hurts. I just believe that a change of consciousness can help relax us, make us feel less tense and fearful, whether or not this change comes about “naturally” or some other way.

 

(4) I mediate every morning. As I blogged about recently, I’ve started listening to guided meditations on the Headspace web site. The first ten were free. Now I’ve paid $70 or so for a year’s worth of being able to listen to the guided meditations. I take my laptop to where I meditate, plug in some headphones, and spend 10 to 20 minutes being led through a relaxing set of instructions, including following the breath.

 

This seems to help me be more relaxed. About everything. Following the breath is an especially useful exercise for me, because the breath is connected with being alive. I used to worry a bit that my breathing might stop if I paid attention to it. Now I understand that breathing isn’t much under my control. I can’t stop it for very long. So I think following and paying attention to the breath, particularly in a guided meditation like the ones I’ve been listening to, indirectly helps with my fear of death.

 

(5) Periodically I try to cover my Cosmic Meaning? bases by praying in a decidedly non-religious way. Which goes something like this: “Whoever or whatever might be out there, aware of my consciousness though I am not aware of yours, it’d be great if you’d pay me a visit. Since I have no idea whether you exist, in what form you might exist, or how you might communicate with beings like me, I’m open to surprises. Give me some signs, outward, inward, or whatever, that you’re there; then hopefully you can educate me about what the cosmos is all about, including whether the consciousness of living entities like me survives bodily death.”

 

I feel like maybe the most likely outcome could be getting some communications from alien beings who are able to tap into the consciousness of humans. Sure, that seems impossible to us, but aliens could have capabilities much superior to ours. Or, if our reality actually is a computer simulation run by an advanced civilization, maybe whoever is in control of the simulation has it programmed to respond to certain entities who ask within the simulation, “What is this all about?” Who knows, I might get lucky. Of course, my asking is part of the game, as would be any response I get.

 

Knowing I was just part of a computer simulation seemingly would make my death easier to accept, as I’d feel like since I’ve never really existed as a “real” being, failing to exist in my flimsy state of existence wouldn’t be that big a deal.

 

(6)  I haven’t consciously thought that I’d do some dangerous stuff in order to deal with my fear of dying, but I think this helps me feel more comfortable with death. For me it’s sort of like looking closely at something scary until it doesn’t seem as terrifying. There’s also the sense of feeling so satisfied with an activity, I can think “If I died at this moment, it would be OK.” 

 

So I’ve enjoyed riding a big maxi-scooter (Burgman 650), practicing several forms of martial arts, taking up senior citizen longboarding/skateboarding, and some other risky activities. Motorcycle or scooter riding strikes me as especially beneficial in getting more comfortable with the prospect of dying, since you have to pay so much attention to all of the many risks on the road — cars, trucks, slippery pavement, deer in the road, etc. — at pretty much every moment. 

 

Somewhat along the same line, I think its healthy for people like you and me to admit both to ourselves and to others, “Yeah, I’m afraid of death and non-existence. But I’m damn well not going to let this fear stop me from doing whatever I want to do, even if it is risky. Someday you’re going to get me, Mr. Death. Until you do, I’m going to defy you by enjoying life as much as I can, for as long as I can, even if some form of that enjoyment kills me."

 

(7) Lastly, unless I think of more ways I deal with my fear of dying. I like to ponder a fact that seems likely to be true: whatever happens after death, everybody is in the same boat — even if it is a leaky, decrepit, sinking boat. Meaning, I very much doubt that Christians go one direction after death, while Hindus go another direction, and atheists still another direction

 

Thus whatever will happen to me, will happen to everybody. This realization takes away a feeling that I’m missing out on some special Salvation Treat others will enjoy. Knowing that billions of people have died before me, and billions will die after me, with the same thing happening to all of us after we take our last breath — that is comforting. 

 

Yet I readily admit: I’d like to live forever. Who wouldn’t? We just don’t always get what we want, though, as I recall the Rolling Stones saying in a song. In a way, we do though — since it seems that as people grow older, and their health gradually declines, death becomes, if not welcome, something not to be feared. In other words, nature seems to have a way of naturally reducing our youthful fear of death.

 

Here's some links to blog posts I've written about the fear of non-existence:

 

Death and the primal fear of non-existence
Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence
Overcoming the fear of non-existence
Benefits of realizing you're just a brain
Coping with death and the fear of non-existence
Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self
More thoughts about the fear of non-existence
Looking into the void... and waking up
Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death
Roger Ebert: "I do not fear death"
How to live happily until you die
Bad news: I'm going to die. Good news: I'll be nirvana!
"How to die in Oregon" made me less afraid of death
Keeping it real: facing death without God
Directionless, I feel like I've found my way

 

     — Brian

DMT, a natural psychedelic chemical, could produce "spiritual" experiences

Someone sent me an email with a link to an article whose title was so intriguing, I was eager to read the piece: "The psychedelic drug that could explain our belief in life after death."

DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful hallucinogenic drug around. The class A psychedelic is so potent that under the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances its manufacture is strictly for scientific research and medical use and any international trade is very closely monitored. But it also naturally occurs in the human body.

Now a Senior Psychologist at Greenwich University, Dr. David Luke, is trying to undercover a link between DMT and 'near death experiences' to explain elves, tunnels of light and centuries old folklore. On July 8th he’ll talk about his research at an event in conjunction with SciArt collaboration Art Necro at The Book Club in London.

I'd heard of DMT before, having quoted Sam Harris in a post about Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, supposedly with no brain activity, he experienced heaven. I called the post "Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says." Harris said:

...Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny.

...Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension.

Anyway, the article about research into DMT is well worth reading. Back in my college days I used LSD and mescaline. I had some profound experiences, but nothing like what DMT can produce.

A pioneering medical doctor in the 1990’s called Rick Strassman , started injecting people with DMT as part of a medical research project. About 50 to 60 participants were given high doses and they reported some extremely bizarre phenomena.

Approximately half of the participants on a high dose reported being in other worlds and encountering sentient entities, i.e. beings of an intelligent nature which appeared to be other than themselves. The experience was so powerful that participants were convinced of the reality of experience with these other beings.

...The beings themselves took on various forms. Sometimes they took on the form of little elves or imps or dwarves, sometimes they’re omniscient deities, other times they’re angelic beings. But they’re specifically not humans.

Well, the brain/mind works in mysterious ways.

No one knows why ingesting a chemical that the brain produces on its own causes people from different backgrounds and cultures to have similar experiences of sentient beings. But since this phenomenon has a physical cause, it's difficult to argue that DMT is a passport to a supernatural reality.

Idea of no-self doesn't translate into no-fear-of-death

Over on Slate there's an interesting piece by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols, "Buddhism and the Loss of Self." I've copied it in below for easy reading.

Surprisingly, research seems to show that Buddhists who don't believe they have (or are) a continuous self are more fearful of death than Hindus or adherents of the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam).

Buddhists also were less generous in a thought experiment about giving away a single dose of medicine that could extend either their own or someone else's life.

But I guess this really isn't so surprising. After all, our sense of self appears to persist even though we may think we've left it behind.

The way I think about this is, how would a supposedly "selfless" person feel if someone came up behind them on a dark sidewalk, put a gun to their head, and said I'm going to kill you.

I suspect they would react as anyone else would: with fear and trembling.

However, those who believe in an eternal soul will have the comfort of expecting that even if their body dies, their soulful conscious essence won't. So this could explain why Buddhists who embrace a doctrine of no-self are more afraid of death than Hindus, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Here's the essay:

Buddhism and the Loss of Self
by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols

Unlike Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism embraces the idea that there is no self, only a sequence of ever-changing and impermanent psychophysical processes. Just as one cannot step into the same river twice, there is no such thing as a continuous self, a single “me” that persists over time. Because there is no continuous self in life, there is no self to preserve in death.

The Buddhist no-self doctrine is sometimes said to alleviate a familiar source of suffering: fear of death. By focusing early and often on how the self is continually dying, many Buddhist scholars argue, one is able to make peace with death of the physical body. Buddhists also believe that embracing the no-self doctrine is central to the elimination of suffering: when one does away with the self, egocentricity and selfishness go with it.

Though the benefits of Buddhism have been oft-repeated, until recently there had been almost no empirical work on whether Buddhists actually are less selfish or less afraid of death. Our research team recently traveled to Nepal and India to examine the impact of these religious teachings on their adherents.

We measured responses from displaced Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus. We also surveyed Americans who were raised in Abrahamic religious traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Unlike Buddhism, Hinduism and Abrahamic religions characteristically subscribe to the belief that there is a self that persists over time (an ātman or soul), which survives the body in rebirth or the afterlife.

Our data show that Buddhists have internalized the no-self doctrine. While Americans and Indians indicate a high belief in the connectedness of the self and an essential core self that persists across the lifespan, Buddhists strongly disagree with these statements. This was true whether our test subjects were Buddhist monks and nuns or Buddhist laypeople. Buddhists also believe in greater impermanence of the world and everything in it.

We also asked these populations if they coped with death by embracing the no-self doctrine. While almost all Tibetans affirmed this coping strategy, virtually none of the Americans said they did. (Abrahamic religions rely on other means for coping with death, such as belief in an afterlife.) Indian Hindus were somewhere in between.

The no-self doctrine is deeply insinuated into the Tibetan Buddhists, but how do these beliefs affect anxiety about death and selfishness? We gave our subjects the fear of personal death scale to fill out, which contains a series of statements about different kinds of reasons one might be afraid of death, to which subjects rate their level of agreement. The scale allows us to measure both the overall fear of death and the reasons for this anxiety.

We were particularly interested in the items related to self-annihilation, which include, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the loss and destruction of the self,” and, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the destruction of personality.” When we asked prominent Tibetan scholars how a good Buddhist ought to respond to this scale, they said that one should have little to no fear of destruction of the self.

Nonetheless, Buddhist monks and nuns—those who were steeped in these religion doctrines day in and day out—exhibited significantly more fear of self-annihilation than Americans or Indians. Buddhist laypeople, who were less versed in the details of the doctrine of selflessness, also exhibited less fear than the monastics. If we consider only the other possible reasons to fear death, such as fear of the unknown, Buddhists were no less fearful than anyone else. In short, the no-self doctrine, rather than equipping the Tibetan lamas with serenity regarding end of life, seems to provoke a deep-rooted anxiety of self-annihilation, and does nothing to reduce overall fear of death.

In another survey, we gave participants a tradeoff task to measure generosity in end-of-life decisions. Imagine, we said, that you have a terminal disease that will kill you in six months unless you take a medication. There is only one dose of the medication available. If you take it, it will prolong your life by six months. If you don’t take the medication, it will go to someone else who has the same condition and, like you, will die in six months. If the medicine would prolong his life by twelve months instead of six, would you still take the medicine? What about two years? How much more life would the stranger have to receive before you would give up your medicine?

What we found surprised us. While Abrahamic and Hindu populations chose to give their medicine away when the stranger would live an additional couple of years, Buddhists were exceedingly reluctant to give their medicine away under any circumstances. If there is a ceiling on how much Buddhists value their lives over others, we never found it. Our scale only went up to “more than five years”—more than 70 percent of Buddhists selected this option.

Much of Buddhist philosophy and religious practice is aimed at cultivating selflessness, rechanneling concerns to the larger moral universe around us. But we did not find this effect in our studies. Ironically, it seems that these teachings, instead of mitigating fear of death and nurturing generosity, engender some of the behaviors and thought patterns they seek to destroy. These effects are especially strong among monastics who have the deepest understanding of these doctrines. They are the most fearful of self-annihilation, and the least generous with their lives.

This cross-cultural research highlights that religious teachings can have a deep and lasting impact on precisely the sort of moral and existential quandaries that religion is designed to help us navigate. However, these beliefs will not always have the impact on practitioners that we intend—and may in some cases even be counterproductive.

There are no believers in God at funerals

I really like Julian Baggini's retort to the oft-heard saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (Meaning, in desperate situations.)

Which, by the way, isn't true. I can also affirm that there are atheists/agnostics in dentist's chairs. 

Here's what Baggini said in his book, The Ego Trick.

But third, it seems that the charge can be turned around: there are no theists at funerals. Many people say that they believe that death is not the end, but the way people behave at graveyards and crematoria suggests that they don't really believe it.

You may cry and be upset at the prospect of a long separation from someone you love. But I don't think that's how death feels to most people. The parting feels absolute and final.

...Beliefs about what follow life can alter how we respond to death, but it seems that the vast majority of human beings at all times and all places react to the deaths of loved ones in ways which only make sense if at some level they really did think that was the end.

This is perhaps a rare heartening example of the inability of obvious falsehoods to really convince, even when most people officially believe them.

Great points.

The gap between what religious believers pretend to believe is true for them -- death is just a transition to heaven or some other "better place" -- and what they quite obviously actually believe -- death is the end of a person's existence -- is huge. 

On the local evening news I frequently hear Christians saying things like this about a loved one's death: "I know he is joyful with Jesus now," "She's looking down from heaven and is still with us," "The Lord took her for a special reason."

Yet scenes of the funeral show faces of sadness. Nobody is laughing, dancing, ecstatic about the death.

(I leave open the possibility that this might happen in some other cultures with a different attitude toward dying.)

So I think Baggini has pointed out how flimsy most religious faith is. If people truly believed that a better life in heaven awaits the faithful after they die, why don't they kill themselves? Or failing that, rejoice when death befalls a loved one who shared their faith?

The reason is that religious believers aren't sure there is a God, life after death, or heavenly realms. They just hope there is. But that hope is at odds with the facts:

No evidence of God, life after death, or heavenly realms.

Thus as Baggini said, "This is perhaps a rare heartening example of the inability of obvious falsehoods to really convince, even when most people officially believe them." 

Archbishop of Portland should butt out of a woman's assisted suicide

As a long-time lapsed Catholic (I flamed out after first communion, when I was about ten), it feels really good to tell an Archbishop to "butt out" in the title of this post.

Especially since what the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon is butting in about is a decision by Brittany Maynard, a woman with terminal brain cancer, to choose assisted suicide rather than a horrible lingering death.

And on Nov. 1, Maynard, who in April was given six months to live, intends to end her own life with medication prescribed to her by her doctor – and she wants to make it clear it is NOT suicide. 

"There is not a cell in my body that is suicidal or that wants to die," she tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. "I want to live. I wish there was a cure for my disease but there's not." 

Maynard has a stage 4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. 

"My glioblastoma is going to kill me, and that's out of my control," she says. "I've discussed with many experts how I would die from it, and it's a terrible, terrible way to die. Being able to choose to go with dignity is less terrifying." 

Oregon, the state where I live, passed this nation's first Death With Dignity act in 1994. My wife and I strongly support it. As, obviously, does Maynard, who moved to Oregon so she could take advantage of the law.

Recently on the Portland evening news I saw Archbishop Alexander Sample blathering on about how wrong it was that Maynard had chosen to end her life on her own terms. As noted above, she has tentatively chosen November 1 as her dying day, but says she might change her mind about the date depending on how she feels then.

There's a lot about religiosity that bothers me now that I've embraced churchlessness. Preachiness and pontificating about morality is especially irritating. 

Even more so when no one is being affected by a person's actions except the person herself. For example, though I'm in favor of abortion rights, I can resonate with some right-to-life arguments. After all, a potential human, a fetus, is involved with the decision whether to have an abortion.

(Some, of course, would do away with that word, "potential.")

But when it comes to ending one's own life, I firmly believe this should be the right of every individual. Yet only after careful consideration. Suicide, whether assisted or not, shouldn't be taken lightly. Life is precious, since, almost certainly, this is the only life each of us will ever have.

Archbishop Sample, though, has issued a statement that includes some bizarre bits of theological reasoning, in addition to being a totally unwarranted intrusion into Maynard's private life, and death. The statement can be read in its entirety here. I'll also include it as a continuation to this post. 

Here's some excerpts I found particularly weird.

Killing oneself eliminates the freedom enjoyed in earthly life. True autonomy and true freedom come only when we accept death as a force beyond our control. Our lives and our deaths belong in the hands of God who created and sustains us.

Huh? Freedom is being able to end your life when it becomes unlivable.

There isn't any enjoyment in having your brain and body destroyed by a stage 4 tumor. Believe me. My wife's sister died from stage 4 breast cancer. We know what she went through. We dearly wished she lived in Oregon, rather than in Indiana, and had a choice about how her life would end. 

Death is not a force beyond our control. That's an absurd thing to say.

Modern medicine argues against it. Wars argue against it. The death penalty argues against it. It's ridiculous to argue that God is in control of everything, but then accept all the ways human beings either prevent death from happening or cause it to happen.

Through the suffering, death and Resurrection of His Son, Jesus, we know that death is not the final word. Eternal life awaits all those who entrust themselves to God.

This is subjective opinion, not objective fact. Most people in the world don't believe those two sentences. The Archbishop needs to realize that the Catholic Church can't control how they think, nor should it try to.

Assisted suicide sows confusion about the purpose of life and death. It suggests that a life can lose its purpose and that death has no meaning. Cutting life short is not the answer to death.

Of course, life can lose its purpose.

When life becomes unbearable, there is no reason to keep on living. Meaning is not something outside of us (the subject of a recent post). Meaning isn't given to us by God or any other entity. Meaning is a dynamic relationship, an ever-changing flow between ourselves and the world.

Our final days help us to prepare for our eternal destiny.

So you believe, Archbishop Sample. Lots of other people disagree with you. So butt out of their end-of-life decisions.

The brain tricks us into believing something is real, when it is not

Ah, I love it when I see one of my thoughts reflected in someone else's brain. This helps me keep in mind that we humans are wonderfully alike, as well as wonderfully different.

I write a regular Strange Up Salem column in our town's alternative paper, Salem Weekly. (Feel free to give this effort to lift the blah-curse on my home town a Facebook like.)

With marijuana legalization on the ballot in Oregon, in the most recent issue my theme was "A Strange Reason to Legalize Marijuana." Here's how I started off the piece:

Here’s a news flash from the front page of modern neuroscience: “You don’t exist.” At least, not in the way most people believe they do.

We feel as if we look out upon the world as a detached ethereal consciousness floating behind our eyes, inside our head. We feel as if we’re a weightless self or soul inhabiting a body.

These feelings are wrong. The sense of self is an illusion. You, me, and everyone else are billions of neurons woven together via trillions of electrochemical connections.

Marvelously, the brain tells itself stories about how it is other than it is.

Then, not long after, I watched a new video by Andrea Diem-Lane and David Lane, "Near-Death Experiences: Neural Projections and Staying Alive." The first line of narration is...

The brain tricks us into believing something is real, when it is not, provided that such trickery gives it a survival advantage.

Absolutely! 

If I believe that I am a separate unique self, precious beyond compare, I'm going to fight harder to defend myself when attacked. Physically or psychologically, doesn't matter. Nobody messes with valuable Me.

Likewise, the short video convincingly argues that many (or most?) near-death experiences are the brain's way of telling itself, "Dude, life is really worth living. Fight to stay alive!"

The Lane's have a strong connection with India, so some of the examples are from that sub-continent. I liked how one woman devoted to her guru didn't see a vision of him when she nearly died, but rather was wowed by a Holy Chapati. 

It reminded her that she had cooking duties to attend to back on Earth.

Have a look.

 

I'll share my entire Strange Up Salem column as a continuation to this post.

We will die one day. Good or bad news?

Religions thrive because people are afraid of dying and not being alive anymore. If death didn't exist, I doubt religions would either. 

People can deal with other problems without religion. What gives life meaning? What is right and wrong? Is there an inherent purpose to the cosmos?

But death... that's a problem with no solution. Everybody dies. Everybody. No exceptions. 

So those who want to live on after their body dies have only one choice: fantasy, imagination, wishful thinking. Religions fulfil a desire for immortality which can't be met in any other way.

Well, it can't be met through religiosity either.

But just as people are easily lured to buy into other schemes that promise a lot more than they can deliver (lotteries, for example), religions easily attract converts through the wares they offer.

Notably, eternal life.

The big question, though, is whether trading reality for illusion is worth the reassurance religious dogma provides to true believers. 

Christianity, for example, likes to talk about the "good news" it brings. Basically, salvation. Death isn't the end! Jesus saves. God will be our best friend for eternity.

Sounds nice. But only if all this is true. If the good news is false news, then Christians are living a lie in what will be their one and only life. So are believers in every other religion.

August is blackberry time here in western Oregon. Luther Burbank, curse his non-existent soul, brought the Himalayan Blackberry to the northwest.

Now it is an invasive thorny plant-pest that grows everywhere. My wife and I labored for years to clear large patches of blackberries from our ten-acre property. We've succeeded so well, I have to pick and eat blackberries when I go for an evening dog walk around a nearby community lake.

Recently I was munching away on the tasty moist berries and suddenly realized, "One day there will be no more blackberry eating for me. In fact, no anything for me."

This wasn't as stark and startling a sensation as my fear of non-existence feeling. It was gentler, though no less intuitively truthful. 

I was grateful for it.

The berries I was eating began to taste even better. Life seemed more vivid, more precious, more worth living. Walking home, I thought about what life would be without death. Could we even call it life, in the sense of how we look upon living now?

Seemingly it would be more akin to "existing," a word which connotes something other than the energetic, flowing, ever-changing, unpredictable nature of "living."

Not that I have a choice, but I prefer living over existing. This is the downside of religiosity: it injects a big dose of fantastical eternal existence into the reality of ephemeral life. Thus it dilutes actual living with the promise of eternal life.

"Sure, those blackberries taste good now. But just wait until you taste heavenly fruit! No comparison."

Well, of course not.

It is impossible to compare something real with something imaginary. The car in my driveway can't begin to compare with my fantasy car. However, I can drive and enjoy the car I actually have, which makes it incomparably superior to my fantasy.

Several days ago a rare summer thunderstorm journeyed up the Willamette Valley. Before the storm hit, hints of its arrival were in the sunset. Sitting on our deck, I had to grab my iPhone with an unbidden thought of "heavenly."

Not in the sense of supernatural, of course. Nature was producing the divine light show without any help from God. It was a special moment. But then, all moments are when we realize there will come an end to our experiencing of them.

This is the grace, so to speak, of not being a religious believer. We trade an abstract conceptual fantasy of eternal life for a more vibrant direct experience of living here and now. I'm happy that I've made that trade.

I'll end with a few quotes from John Gray's "The Silence of Animals."

Simenon's tales carry no moral lesson. But if there is an idea at work in them, it is that the impressions through which we pass are more real than the selves we think are authors of our lives.

...The world in which you live from day to day is made from habit and memory. The perilous zones are the times when the self, also made from habit and memory, gives way. Then, if only for a moment, you may become something other than you have been.

...He breaks out from the prison of his ordinary self not into a great oneness but into an outward world he had not seen before.

...The willful opening of the mind to the senses is a prelude to events that cannot be made to happen. Like that of religious mystics, contemplation of this kind involves nullifying the self. But not with the aim of entering any higher self -- a figment left behind by an animal mind.

God-seeking mystics want this figment to guide them to a new way of living. They are right in thinking that a life made up only of action is the pursuit of phantoms; but so is life passed on a fictive frontier between two worlds. 

The needy animal that invented the other world does not go away, and the result of trying to leave the creature behind is to live instead with its ghost.

Godless contemplation is a more radical and transient condition: a temporary respite from the all-too-human world, with nothing particular in mind.

...Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption from being human.

But no redemption is needed.

Inference to the best explanation. Fancy words, simple way of living.

Idly glancing at a bookshelf in our house a few days ago, I noticed a book that I bought back in 2010, Paul Thagard's "The Brain and The Meaning of Life." Since, I've been re-reading some of it each morning.

Great book, with some great ideas. I blogged about these before in "Reality is real, but brains construct knowledge" and "Divinity isn't necessary to make life meaningful."

Here's an excerpt from the first post.

When we go on our evening walk, my dog has a very different experience of reality than I do, given her vastly superior sense of smell. As I stand holding the leash, waiting for her to finish a comprehensive sniffing of a clump of grass that looks to me just like all the other clumps along the road, she is engaged in tasting an odor feast that's beyond my comprehension.

So we Homo sapiens do indeed construct our knowledge of reality through the only means available to us: the human brain. Thagard reviews some hypotheses about how we do this, and arrives at a favored theory: inference to the best explanation.

Don't be thrown off by this fancy phrase.

It's what we all do every day of our lives. Recently my wife excitedly told me that I had to come and see what was being done to a cherished twenty year old vine maple tree that is a centerpiece of our landscaping.

Bark was being chewed off. Not just a little. A lot. Some large branches were almost girdled, which could kill them. We talked about what animal could be the culprit. Deer? Raccoons? Ground squirrels?

We immediately suspected the latter, as they've been causing us other problems.

Some Googling revealed that they do indeed like to eat bark, something we hadn't noticed before. So ground squirrels became our inference to the best explanation and we've been acting accordingly to deal with the little furry irritants.

Re-reading Thagard's book reminded me how often he mentions "inference to the best explanation." This strikes me as simple common sense, but the concept has some pretty sophisticated philosophizing behind it. 

I could understand the first part of the Wikipedia article on abductive reasoning, a.k.a. inference to the best explanation. The rest of it looked way too complex for me to attempt to fathom. Especially on a pleasant early summer Saturday. 

This part I grasped, though.

For example, the lawn is wet. But if it rained last night, then it would be unsurprising that the lawn is wet. Therefore, by abductive reasoning, the possibility that it rained last night is reasonable (but note that Peirce did not remain convinced that a single logical form covers all abduction). 

Moreover, abducing rain last night from the observation of the wet lawn can lead to a false conclusion. In this example, dew, lawn sprinklers, or some other process may have resulted in the wet lawn, even in the absence of rain.

Peirce argues that good abductive reasoning from P to Q involves not simply a determination that, e.g., Q is sufficient for P, but also that Q is among the most economical explanations for P. Simplification and economy both call for that "leap" of abduction.

It seems to me that, again, this is an example of common sense being dressed up in fancy philosophical language. As in my ground squirrel example, isn't this what everybody does when faced with a problem that needs figuring out?

Look at evidence. Consider alternative hypotheses that could explain the evidence. Pick the best one. Thagard puts it this way:

Inference to the best explanation in science has the same basic structure as does reasoning in law, medicine, and everyday life. 

In all these domains, you should collect as much relevant evidence as you can, consider higher-level hypotheses and alternative ones, and accept the ones that provide the best overall explanation of the evidence.

For example, Thagard argues persuasively, and I agree with him, that "minds are brains" is a better explanation than "consciousness is supernatural."

There is lots of evidence that supports the first hypothesis, ranging from a baseball bat to the head to sophisticated MRI machines. Evidence of the supernatural nature of consciousness is so few and far between, it might as well be considered zero.

Best explanation, of course, isn't the same as desired explanation.

This is where honest respect for factual evidence is important. Thagard explains how motivated reasoning skews good explanations of facts. When we want something to be true, we ignore evidence at odds with that desire.

Sure, it'd be nice to live forever, to continue to exist after death in a non-bodily form. This is why religions are so popular: they promise something that people desperately want, just as a con man does.

However, even religious true believers should admit that when it comes to demonstrable evidence, the inference to the best explanation leads to the conclusion that minds are brains. When the brain dies, so do we.

It'd be nice if reality were otherwise. But reality is real. It isn't nice.

We'll die the way we have lived

I don't like to think about death. Especially my own. When my wife and I went to get our wills made, I asked the attorney to say "gerbiled" rather "died" whenever she needed to refer to my death.

Yeah, it sounded sort of ridiculous when the attorney told us, "So upon Brian's gerbiling, his estate will pass to..." But I was fine with ridiculousness so long as I could lessen the probability that I'd have to seriously envision my, um, eventual gerbiling.

No, I can say it now: eventual death.

I still don't enjoy pondering my demise. However, for some reason or other (passing age 60 and getting closer to the grim reaper?) I'm able to more closely embrace the notion of death and dying than when I was younger.

This allowed me to enjoy a TEDx talk by Keith Seckel filmed at last year's event here in Salem, Oregon: "Life and Death Matters." He's a good speaker with a wise message.

Those who die a good death are who they've always wanted to be.
Choose to live life fully.
We'll die the way we have lived.
Every moment counts.
Who do you want to be?
What will you choose today, in order to become that person just a little bit more than you were this morning?

"Meaning of life" is only meaningful some of the time

Every other day, usually, I write a post for this blog. it takes me about an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less. 

That's just about the only time when I really ponder The Meaning of It All. If even then, since I might be writing about a churchless subject that doesn't rise to that level of profundity. 

So very little of my daily life has anything to do with matters of philosophy, religion, mysticism, spirituality, or such. Mostly I'm doing everyday nitty-gritty stuff. 

For example, this morning I dealt with a turn of events in my campaign to save three large street trees in downtown Salem from being cut down for no good reason.

Last night it looked like the battle was lost (ignore the "update"). Today, things took a turn for the better. Such was the centerpiece of my psyche for much of the day.

My mind is focused on many other things during my typical waking moments, of course. But very little of my attention is on matters of cosmic significance. Does God exist? What will happen when I die? Where did the universe come from? 

Yet fairly often people will leave comments on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, you are obsessed with bashing religion. You need to get a life!" 

My usual response is something like, "News flash: I do have a life. A happy, fulfilling life. Very little of my life has anything to do with bashing religion. Most of the time I don't think about religion, or the lack thereof, at all."

David and Andrea-Diem Lane talk about this sort of thing in their essay, "Consciousness Interruptus: The Temporal Context and the Self-Referential Trap."

Don't be scared away by the title; the piece is fairly easy to read and understand. Here's some excerpts: 

A dog doesn't appear to meditate on how distant stars will die and transform into black holes, or how universes may appear and disappear over eons of time. Yet, as humans with enlarged brains we evolved to ponder all sorts of imponderables, and thus our Darwinian gift is also at times our Darwinian curse.

...The seemingly most important questions we tend to ask (Is there a God? Do I have a soul? Is there life after death? Etc.) only arise at certain moments in our awareness and completely subside at other moments. Indeed, within any normal 24 hour cycle, the issues we think that are so vital and so urgent only last for a set duration only to disappear when deep sleep overwhelms us and all such questions are forgotten until we awake again.

...Thus, I have long noticed that whenever we are happy—very happy—at a particular juncture in life we may also feel a certain anxiety, a certain fear that it may end. Yet, if we are deeply depressed or extremely ill, we don't worry as much (if at all) about death or non-existence.

Therefore our questions and worries are a priori predicated upon our wavering moods. Instead of getting trapped with our self-referential feedback loops, pondering conundrums that may never be resolved, it might be wise to introspect on why certain questions only emerge at certain times and not at others.

In other words, instead of a continual stream of unanswered queries, we focus on why we are asking why in the first place, such as why I fear death only when I am relatively happy but never when I am severely sick with stomach flu.

The questions we ask have less to do with some ultimate truth but more to do with our own neurological phases.

Makes sense. I never have been seriously ill. But I've had some nasty persistent colds. Bed-ridden, feverish, coughing, blowing my nose, the meaning of life doesn't matter to me at all. I just want to feel healthy again! 

Sometimes I wonder why the frail elderly don't seem to fear death as much as vigorous younger people do. As the Lane's say in their essay, likely this is partly because we naturally begin to let go of our attachment to life when living becomes more painful and difficult.

This does imply that the Big Questions of Life only demand answers in certain psychological circumstances.

When I'm out and about on my current exercise obsession, an outdoor elliptical bike called the StreetStrider, I'm in a consciousness zone where nothing matters except where I am and what I''m doing in that moment. I don't worry about being content because I am content.

Give the Lane essay a read. There's more to it than what I excerpted -- including mentions of how deep sleep is considered by some to be a desirable state of consciousness. 

I've never understood this.

To me, deep sleep is lack of consciousness. Yes, I've read Ramana (quoted in the essay). But deep dreamless sleep is one of the psychological states of beings with brains who are alive. I like to go to sleep because so far I've always woken up in the morning.

Deep sleep gives me the rest I need to be awake and aware the next day. Otherwise, deep sleep is just a death of sorts, in the same way anesthesia is a death of sorts. No consciousness, no awareness of being alive.

Which I'm pretty sure is what death minus the "of sorts" is.

No consciousness. No awareness of being alive. I don't get how this is a desirable state of consciousness, unless life is so unworth-living, not being alive seems preferable.

Matthew McConaughey thanks God for his Oscar (sad, but true)

I felt betrayed when Matthew McConaughey launched into a praise God! acceptance speech after he won the Oscar for Best Actor last night. 

Guess I mistook his excellent acting on HBO's True Detective, where he plays an appealingly cynical existential atheist, with how McConaughey actually feels about religion. Which is, in his words:

"First off I want to thank God, because that's who I look up to. He's graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human hand," the 44-year-old Texas native said. "He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late (British actor) Charlie Laughton, who said, 'When you got God you got a friend and that friend is you.'"

McConaughey then went on to show his appreciation for his wife, children, mother and late father.

"To my father, I know he's up there right now with a big pot of gumbo, he's got a lemon meringue pie, he's probably up there in his underwear, he's got a cold can of Miller lite and he's dancing right now," he continued.

Hmmmm. There are two references to know in McConaughey's quoted remarks.

Supposedly he knows that the opportunites in his life are the result of God's grace. And he knows that his deceased father is in heaven with a pot of gumbo and a lemon meringue pie. Plus, his dead father is drinking beer and dancing (in celebration of his son's Oscar, I assume).

Of course McConaughey actually doesn't know either of these things. He believes they are true; he wishes them to be true; he hopes they are true. But he doesn't know they are true.

I would have responded more favorably to his acceptance speech if he'd been heavier on the honesty and lighter on the dogmatism.

There would have been nothing wrong with saying, "It makes me feel good to imagine that my father is in heaven right now, celebrating with a beer and some gumbo." After all, this is the truth. McConaughey, like other religious people, enjoys believing that death isn't the end of his connection with deceased relatives.

They're still alive on another plane of existence. One day they will be reunited with the living through God's love and grace.

It's a nice story. I completely understand why Christians like McConaughey embrace it. I just wish that atheism was as socially acceptable in the United States as religious belief. (Among the Hollywood Oscar audience, it probably is, but not many places elsewhere.)

Here's my view of a refreshingly honest acceptance speech:

I want to thank my father for everything he did for me. I still love my dad, even though he is dead and gone. Since he no longer exists, my father can't hear these words. I wish he could, but my father taught me the difference between fiction and fact. So when I point my finger to the sky and say, "thank you, dad," I'm pointing to my memory of a man who helped me face reality as it is, not as how I'd like it to be. Because of him, I'm a better actor, and a better person. Godless, and better for it. 

Beautiful thoughts: why teacher David Menasche isn't afraid to die

Wow. What a moving story. David Menasche's "Why I'm not afraid of dying."

When I saw the title mentioned in a tweet, I will confess that my first thought was, "Oh, please, don't let the reason be I know that God loves me and I'll be going to heaven.

Thankfully, it wasn't.

Menasche is a teacher with apparently incurable brain cancer. Here's some of what he says in his piece.

The cancer had finally succeeded in taking me out of the classroom, but I wasn't ready to let it take me out of the game. I wasn't afraid to die. I was afraid of living without a purpose.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, a person who has a why to live can always find a how. My "why" had always been my students. I just needed to find a new "how." Since I no longer had a classroom for them to come to me, I decided that I would go to them.

...What I learned from my travels was that my students had grown up to be kind and caring people.

People who picked me up when I fell over curbs, read to me from books I could no longer see, and cut my food when I could not grasp a knife. They shared with me their deepest secrets, introduced me to their families and friends, sang to me my favorite songs and recited my favorite poetry.

...And it was through them I realized that those very human moments, when we connected on a deep and personal level, were what made my life feel so rich, then and now. My students had taught me the greatest lesson of all. They taught me that what matters is not so much about what we learn in class, but what we feel in our hearts.

I am a pragmatic man. I know there is no reason I should still be alive. The cancer never lets me forget that it and not I will ultimately win this battle of wills. I know the disease will have its way with me, and sooner, rather than later.

My limbs are withering and my memory is fading. Yet as my world dims from the tumor growing in my head, I see ever more clearly the gifts the promise of an early death has brought.

I've ordered Menasche's book, to be released tomorrow.

Partly because "The Priority List: A Teacher's Final Quest to Discover Life's Greatest Lessons" looks to be an inspiring read. And in part because I wanted my Amazon order to be an (inadequate) reaching-out and thank-you to a courageous guy who has a lot to teach us all.

Brains are us: a fresh thought for a New Year

OK, this isn't exactly a New Year's resolution blog post. But I don't believe in resolutions. Those of the spiritual variety, at least. I've expressed my disbelief here, here, and here.

A fresh thought, though... I'm up with that. 

I enjoyed this letter in the yearend issue of New Scientist magazine.

From Iain Petrie
Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland argues that it can be difficult to accept that "you're just your brain" (30 November, p. 30). So it would seem. 

When she says, "I've made my peace with my brain," it rather suggests that she regards herself as an entity distinct from her brain.

Even saying "my brain has made peace with itself" would imply, through the use of the possessive determiner "my," that there is not a one-to-one identiy relation between self and brain.

Perhaps the best phrase would have been "this brain is at peace with itself."
Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK

Not a new idea, that brains are us. Just one that is both almost certainly true and exceedingly difficult to internalize, make real, live as if it were true. 

For me, it's the key to living a relaxed life that is free of excessive existential Woody Allen'ish anxiety: Oh, no! I'm going to die! I want to live forever! What shall I do?!

Well, the answer to the last question is easy. Nothing. There's nothing you can do. You are your brain; your brain is you. In fact, there is no brain and you. Just brain/you.

"You" (and "I") are higher level abstractions conjured up by neuronal goings-on in the brain. No brain, no you. So death is nothing to worry about.

There never was a distinct "you" that could die. Just a brain that, like all living things, dies. Maybe this doesn't sound like a cheery New Year's greeting, but I find it uplifting.

Happy New Year!

(I wrote about Churchland's New Scientist interview in "Benefits of realizing you're just a brain.")

Three ways of dealing with anxiety about death

Nicholas Humphrey's "Soul Dust" is one of those books that I both want to never end, and am eager to come to the end of. Like I said in a previous post, I'm loving the book. 

So I want to keep enjoying the chapter or so that I read each morning. However, I also am curious to learn how Humphrey ends his book (last chapter comes up tomorrow).

Thus reading this book is somewhat akin to dealing with the knowledge that each of us will die one day. We don't like the idea of living coming to an end, while having an understandable curiosity about what that end will be like.

Here's how Humphrey neatly encapsulates the ways people use to deal with the peculiarly human knowledge of life's finitude (other animals apparently don't anticipate their eventual demise).

I will review -- or at any rate visit -- three strategies of restoring meaning to life that are widely on display as human responses to anxiety about death.

Discount the future -- and live for the present.
Disindividuate -- and identify yourself with cultural entities that will survive you. 
Deny the finality of bodily death -- and believe the individual self to be immortal. 

None of these strategies works perfectly.

Each has its place in the anxiety-reducing armamentarium. I've used all three, and continue to do so, albeit in a much different fashion from what I did before in my religious true-believing days. (In another post I'll explain how I can both accept and deny the finality of bodily death.)

Humphrey discusses each.

Living for the present is great. However, it is the extremely rare person (proably nonexistent) who can always be in the now without thinking of then. Like, the moment of one's death. So anxiety lingers about that immutable future event.

Becoming less of a discrete individual is fine. This is the basic notion of Buddhism: tone down your individualism, and you won't mind no longer existing as an individual so much. Creating legacies (children, art, work, social action, etc.) that live on after you are in the same vein. But symbolic survival isn't the same as actual survival.

As Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

The last approach, believing in an immortal soul/self, is how most people in the world deal with anxiety about death most effectively. Virtually every religion posits survival of the individual into some sort of afterlife.

Even Buddhism, though its "theology" of rebirth is rather confusing.

Believing, though, isn't the same as knowing. I can know that I am experiencing the present moment, and I can know that I am creating some sort of effect that will most likely live on after me (again, children and resulting grandchildren are a good example). 

Continued existence of my immortal soul, however, is a huge leap of faith. Humphrey does offer up persuasive reasons why people make this leap, including the fact of dreaming and deep sleep -- which show that we can consciously exist when the body is "dead," and wake up again after failing to be aware.

But this doesn't in any way prove the existence of a soul that survives actual bodily death. No matter, for the vast majority of humans. They find comfort and meaning in believing that when they die, they will continue to live in an immaterial form.

Humphrey is dubious that this belief will become extinct anytime soon. Yet...

Given all this, and how much the spiritual health of future generations of our species could depend on it, you may wonder, as I do: is people's belief in the afterlife secure? I suggested above that the one thing that might potentially undermine the belief would be modern science.

...the day may come -- even come soon -- when science will have revealed the illusion of consciousness for what it is, and any rational person will have no choice but to accept the game is up.

Our physical self dies; our symbolic self believes it won't

When I'm in a complaining mood, I like to curse the cosmos for crap that particularly annoys me. Who asked for this stuff? We'd be better off without it. 

For example...

Fourteen billion or so years after the big bang, life on Earth has evolved to the point that we humans can envisage the possibility of our self existing forever, even though it is obvious that every single Homo sapiens who has ever lived, has died.

This is totally fucked up. Whoever is in charge of the cosmos, and it seems pretty damn clear that nobody is, there's obviously hugely better ways of arranging human consciousness. Here's two.

(1) Make it so we always die and are gone forever, and we can't envision any alternative to this inescapable reality.

(2) Make it so we never die and live forever, and we can't envision any alternative to this inescapable reality.

Either way would leave us satisfied with what actually is. Either death and eternal non-existence, or life and eternal existence.

However, what has transpired is a splitting of our awareness. We are conscious of both our concrete physical self, and also of our abstract symbolic self.

In his book, "The Antidote," that I've blogged about recently, Oliver Burkeman describes this viewpoint, first expressed by Ernest Becker in his classic The Denial of Death.

Indeed, an enormous proportion of all human activity, in Becker's view, is 'designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.'

We are able to sustain this denial, he explains, because we possess both a physical self and a symbolic one. And while it is inevitable that the physical self will perish, the symbolic self -- the one that exists in our minds -- is quite capable of convincing itself that it is immortal.

...If Becker is right, the 'wondrous' fact that we behave as if we're immortal isn't so wondrous after all. You don't fail to think about your mortality. Rather, your life is one relentless attempt to avoid doing so -- a struggle so elemental that, unlike in the case of the 'white bear challenge', for much of the time you succeed.

Don't think of a white bear for the next two minutes. This almost-impossible feat ("Mustn't think of a white bear... damn, I just did!"'; "Am I not thinking of a white bear?... damn, now I am!") somehow is made semi-possible when white bear is replaced by death.

But that's only because we put so much effort into distracting ourselves from the reality of death.

Which is why I say it would be much better if we could just accept what freaking is, rather than feeling compelled to conjure up a possible future where our symbolic self lives on after our physical self dies.

Keeping that symbolic self tidily in order, psychologically well-fed, protected from messy realizations like Woody Allen's below (from his 1975 movie Love and Death), this is a wearying job.

BORIS: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness.
SONIA: What did you say?
BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future. 

I look at our dogs and envy them. They seem to enjoy their lives. Every day. Eat, go for a walk, sleep, play, get patted, sleep, eat... start over. One of our dogs likely only has a year or two to live. But she doesn't know that. She is happy being alive now; doesn't worry about being dead later.

In a different way, I envy people who are sure they will live forever, albeit in a different bodily or non-bodily form. I used to be one of those people. It was comforting to believe that my symbolic self was more lasting and real than my physical self, despite any convincing evidence that this was so.

Being stuck with the knowledge that (1) I will die, and (2) I won't live after I die -- that sucks. Not that I have any alternative. For me now, trying to forget about (1) and (2) is like trying to forget about a white bear. 

When I try to do it, I fail. The only approach that makes sense to me is to enthusiastically embrace those two almost certainly true facts. Such is the approach that Burkeman advocates in his book, a subject for another post.