Church of the Churchless

The morality of recognizing "we are mortal"

It's late in the evening, and I don't have enough caffeine in my body to do writing-justice to the title of this post.

So consider this a blog down payment on addressing a question that I've been pondering more and more, as I get older and older. (Sixty-four is my chronological age; some days I feel twenty-four; others, 104.)

How much of morality, ethics, right/wrong judgments, and such are predicated on assumptions about what happens after we die? Meaning, would our choices about how to live a fulfilling life be markedly different if we believe in (1) life after death or (2) death after death?

I'm not sure. There's a lot to ponder in this pondering.

Intuitively, I feel that even people who aren't explicitly religious have a sense that the end of life isn't really The End. They often have a vague sense that consciousness continues after death in some form or another; that we get another chance at getting life right.

This attitude is much more obvious in true believers. Often on the nightly news I'll hear a parent of someone who died tragically say something like, "My daughter has gone to a better place."

Well, maybe, as I like to say. But probably not. 

Today a new longboard was delivered by UPS to feed my land padding addiction. Eyeing the suspiciously lengthy box, a giveaway to my wife's astute eyes, she asked me "How many longboards do you have now?"

The thought that instantly came to mind was, "One more than I had yesterday, but still not enough." However, knowing how my wife feels about the longboards occupying space in our cramped garage, I told her, "Four or five; can't remember exactly."

If I was fourteen rather than sixty-four I wouldn't feel the same pressure to experience the pleasures of longboarding by trying out so many different boards so rapidly. However, mortality is staring me in the face increasingly intently as friends and relatives die more frequently.

For many years I half-heartedly believed in reincarnation.

Either back on Earth in another bodily form, or as some ethereal soul-creature in another cosmic realm. I liked envisioning the prospect that whatever I couldn't experience in this life had a chance of being experienced in another one.

The grieving parent I saw on TV has a similar feeling, believing that his child is carrying on in heaven much as she did here. Even more happily, in fact, since Jesus and angels are looking after her.

What if, though, death truly is the end? Of life. Of existence. Of consciousness. Forever.

That "what if" encompasses a lot of moral consequences. Wouldn't a society put much more emphasis on enhancing both the quality and quantity of life of its citizens if every person believed that this is the one and only life each of us ever will experience?

It sure seems to me that preventing premature dying through better health care, not engaging in unnecessary wars, reducing gun violence, and such would be higher priorities if all of the members of a society viewed life as being almost infinitely precious -- because an infinity of non-life awaits after death.

To me, we'd make better moral decisions if we embraced our mortality more strongly. Religion arguably undermines present-day morality by assuming that whatever wasn't able to be experienced in this life, can be in the next one. 

Max Baucus, a Senator from Montana, announced today that he won't seek re-election in 2014. I often disagree with Baucas' political positions. But I like his reason for retiring.

Baucus, 71, has spent most of his adult life in Washington, having been elected to the House in 1974 and to the Senate in 1978. He explained his decision to retire in squarely personal terms, saying he had been wrestling with the idea since his mother died just over a year ago.

“It made me realize I’m not immortal. We’re all mortals,” Baucus said. “I don’t want to leave here when I’m 80 years old. There are things I want to do. . . . I want to see what life is like outside the United States Senate.” 

More reasons to doubt Eben Alexander's heaven and God claims

Eben Alexander's book, "Proof of Heaven," is a best-seller. But that doesn't prove that heaven and God are real. 

Alexander has done a great job of cashing in on his claim that while in a coma, he had a vision of heaven that supposedly must have resulted from his consciousness being completely separate from his physical brain. 

Only problem is, as I've blogged about before (see here, here, and here), there are excellent reasons to doubt Alexander.

Today I got an email from someone who had finished reading "Proof of Heaven." In response to one of my posts, he said:

Of course neither you nor I (nor Sam Harris, as he allows in his quoted comments) can prove that heaven is or is not real or that there is or is not a God. In that regard, it seems, the believer and non-believer are even-steven in the burden-of-proof department. (I agree with you, however, that Alexander certainly didn't "prove" his case.)

Hmmmm. I don't understand the rationale for considering believers in God and non-believers in God to be "even-steven" in the burden-of-proof department. This seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of how proof operates.

In everyday life, as in the scientific method, conclusions concerning whether something is true or false rest on a preponderance of evidence. Nothing is 100% certain (not even what I just said).

Yet almost always, there are good reasons to favor "true" or "false" in regard to something, rather than considering this is just a 50-50 coin toss.

Also, the burden of proof rests on the person claiming that X is true. Otherwise we'd be in a ridiculously impractical situation, having to consider claims that space aliens, Bigfoot, fairies, gnomes, angels, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other unproven entities are just as real as rocks, dogs, starfish, baseballs, and other stuff that can be demonstrably shown to exist.

So the question is: are there good explanations for what Alexander says he experienced, other than his claim that his consciousness became completely separated from his body, and he was able to be in the presence of God?

In the April issue of Scientific American Michael Shermer says yes in his Skeptic column, "Why a Near-Death Experience Isn't Proof of Heaven." After discussing several reasonable naturalistic explanations for Alexander's visions/hallucinations, Shermer says:

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. But what is more likely: That Alexander's NDE was a real trip to heaven and all these other hallucinations are the product of neural activity only? Or that all such experiences are mediated by the brain but seem real to each experiencer? To me, this evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven.

In an excerpt from a Larry King show, you can see Shermer explain why he doubts that Alexander's brain was completely inoperative. Alexander believes the mind can operate separately from the brain. Yet he has no proof of this. 

In this other excerpt from the show, Alexander says he is absolutely certain that God exists. Well, that's what I'd expect from someone who has written a book which claims that heaven and God exist. Sales aren't going to be as strong with a "maybe..." or "I believe so."

Alexander has faith that his supposedly supernatural experience was true, a vision of a non-material realm that is objectively real, not a subjective projection of his human brain.

Well, he joins countless others who have made similar claims. One of the first spiritual books I read was "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda. It's filled with tales that are even more miraculous than Alexander's.

And possibly more believable, since they supposedly occurred in a more awake-and-aware state of consciousness than a coma. So why not believe that the visions of "heaven" described by Yogananda are also real?

Along with the myriads of other supernatural visions contained in innumerable other religious, spiritual, and mystical writings. Once "believe whatever I say" is accepted on blind faith, we've entered a realm where reality becomes almost completely subjective.

Read the comments on Shermer's Skeptic column. Most are quite thoughtful and persuasive. For example:

When I read this article in the LA Times, I went a'Googling on NDEs, and found that they are common around the world, and.. the experience of each person is to see what they expect to be, in their culture. Christians see one, Hindus another, Muslims another. Mohammed says he visited the 7 levels of Paradise in his NDE. The vast variety of experiences really indicates they are physiological, and unique to the person, and not any indication of any paradise, or even a life after death. There would need to be an enormous number of Heavens to suit all the beliefs about the hereafter.

...Why do we consider personal individual experience to prove or disprove life after death? I have a schizophrenic daughter who constantly hears auditory hallucination. The voices that she hears are real to her. The conversations with those voices are real to her. They of course are not heard by anyone else. Therefore, how can someone’s near death experience proof or disprove the existence of life after death?

...I have a friend who has localized brain damage from a tumor. We were out in a boat one day with one other person, and my friend said that she was having a visual hallucination. I asked if she felt ok about it and she said yes, that it was very pleasant (fortunately all of hers are so far; she gets a bit of euphoria rather than fear). What are you seeing? I asked, and she said, I am floating above you (looking down on the boat). I thought this was interesting, in that many of the visions I've seen or heard reported in the press by people 'near death' are about floating up and looking down on the hospital room.

When you die, that's it: no heaven, hell, or rebirth

I love to get straight-talking churchless email. Here's a message that recently zoomed in from cyberspace. Thanks, Nancy, for letting me share it.

Hi Brian,

Came across your website "Church Of The Churchless" and I give it 2 thumbs up! Yes, religion is all man-made bullshit trying to give meaning and purpose to human existence.

I have delved into Hinduism and meditation and honestly, Hindus are way offtrack with such nonsense as reincarnation. No person comes back as another human to work out past karmas nor are they sent to planet earth to suffer in the next life. This I know from my own experience of searching for the atman or soul which is not present.

It's all freakin' fiction!

Hey, I recall a friend of mine, who practices the same yoga meditation technique, blurting out that he perceived only a thin layer of personality and no atman. He was a bit frantic and said if there's no atman than the whole concept of reincarnation is false.

Yep,I said, no atman, no reincarnation. 

Like the name of that soap opera, "You've got one life to live, baby, and that's that!" So, I guess this is what is termed enlightenment, when one sees the real nature of how things are.

Isn't it funny how people cannot accept the fact that when you die that's it, there is no heaven, hell, reincarnation or afterlife to go to.

The body just left to decay would serve a purpose as food for wild animals or vultures, the rest would eventually disintegrate over time. It always baffled me why so many people waste money on a corpse and pay outrageous fees for embalming, and burying a dead body.

The cheaper alternative is cremation, yet they try to sell you an elaborate, expensive urn when an empty coffee can will do just fine!

They can put me in a coffee can when the time comes! 

Kind Regards,
Nancy

Self/Soul is evolution's trick to make us think "I'm important!"

Why do humans feel that we have (or are) a Self/Soul that's distinct from the body/brain? Buddhism and neuroscience agree: there's no such thing, no self, no soul.

Yet it sure seems like there is. We look at the world with a consciousness that screams, "I'm floating above my mind and body! I'm in control of my physicality, not just material brain meat doing its thing."

A few weeks ago I blogged about Nicholas Humphrey's fascinating short book, "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness." The passages I shared in that post showed how Humphrey starts with a description of seeing a red screen and, in persuasive logical steps, ends up with the viewer's sense of self.

But it wasn't until I got to the end of the book that I learned about Humphrey's equally persuasive theory of why evolution has provided humans with a feeling of Me that other animals lack. At least to the same degree.

It's such an interesting theory, I'll quote Humphrey at length.

In the wider world, there are two sorts of "illusion" -- accidental and contrived. There are cases where we get things wrong as the result of bad luck, and cases where we are the victims of deliberate trickery. When, for example, we see a stick in water as being bent, or when we think we are moving as the train beside us pulls away, it is a matter of bad luck. We are applyihg rules of inference in situations where our information is inaccurate or incomplete. But no one is trying to delude us.

When, however, we see a stage magician bending a metal spoon without touching it, or when we feel the table at a spiritualist seance lifting off the ground, it is a matter of intentional trickery. We may, again, be applying rules of inference in situations where our information is inaccurate or incomplete. But this time there is an illusionist who wants us to get it wrong.

Now, with belief in mind-body duality, which kind of illusion is it? The general view among materialist philosophers has always been that it is an illusion of the first kind, an honest -- if regrettable -- error. But how about if it is actually an illusion of the second kind, a deliberate trick?

Could it be? Only of course if there were to be an active agency behind it, playing the role of the illusionist. But who or what could possibly be doing this? And what interest would they have in encouraging individual humans to believe in a non-physical soul?

The immediate, but unhelpful answer, might be that, since it is a case of self-delusion, the illusionist must lie within the subject's own brain. The more interesting answer might be that, insofar as the brain is desgined by genes, the illusionist is the subject's own genes. But in that case, the ultimate answer must surely be that the illusionist is Nature herself, working through natural selection. 

...Consciousness matters because it is its function to matter. It has been designed to create in human beings a Self whose life is worth pursuing. 

To start with, the Self is there for us, phenomenally thick and substantial. And being there is a huge advance on not being there. A temporally-thick Self is something to build a rich subjective life on. But for human beings it may very well go further. For we now have a Self that, however we come to it, seems to inhabit a different universe of spiritual being. And this is something else.

My suggestion is that in the course of human evolution, our ancestors who thought of their own consciousness as metaphysically remarkable -- existing outside normal space and time -- would have taken themselves still more seriously as Selves.

The more mysterious and unworldly the qualities of consciousness, the more seriously significant the Self. And the more significant the Self, the greater the boost to human self-confidence and self-importance -- and the greater the value that individuals place on their own and others' lives.

In which case it is easy to see how the very qualities of consciousness that seem to render it so mysterious and magical would have been the occasion for consciousness's becoming a runaway evolutionary success. In fact, those qualities would soon have been designed in. 

Wow.

I love this way of looking at self, soul, spirituality, religion, and belief in other-worldliness. So cool! It fits wonderfully with my now-churchless outlook on religiosity, which evolved from more than thirty-five years of immersion in mystical/spiritual teachings, mostly of an Eastern/Indian meditative variety.

Eventually it struck me that the people who were the biggest believers in realizing their true Self seemed to have the largest Ego. Which included me at one time. Our main goal and interest in life was ourselves. Meaning, we thought we had (or were) a Soul which didn't belong to this world, but to God. 

Humphrey's analysis seems right on: this sense of spiritual Self-dom is evolution's way of making humans feel, "I am so cool! So important! My life is the center of the cosmos, around which all else revolves!" In other words, the height of egocentricity, not selfless spirituality. 

What a great joke! Such a grand illusion!

Religious fundamentalists who believe so strongly in an immortal soul, and generally deny the fact of evolution, are drawn to this belief and that denial by... ha-ha, evolution.

Reality always get the last laugh, because it is real.

And not depressing, though I understand why religious believers feel that something important is being taken away from them when the Self/Soul is shown to be nature's trickery.

Here's part of a letter Humphrey wrote to someone dying who worried about his impending death and hoped he could escape his failing body. I like it.

Dear Joe,

You ask whether I think consciousness can survive the death of the brain. It's the most natural of all questions to ask. I think we human beings are made to ask it. I even think that in asking it we become better people. But my straight answer, as a scientist, is: not a chance. Consciousness is something we do with our brains.

This is both good and bad news. The bad news is obvious. The good news is that each moment of consciousness is, as you already know it is, amazingly precious. Albert Camus wrote," The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man."

But Camus' "absurd man" is both heroic and wise. He recognizes that when we cannot travel the wide sea of eternity, the more significant is the island that we stand on now. 

Brain damage can convince you of Christian bullshit

Recently someone emailed me about my "Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says" post. She wondered why I thought his heaven seemed so Christian. To her, Alexander's account of the afterlife sounded more Hindu.

Well, I'm no expert on Hinduism, but that assertion seems dubious to me. A quick check-in with the Great God Google taught me some things about Hindu notions of the afterlife.

A Wikipedia article on the subject emphasizes Hindu belief in karma and reincarnation. We keep coming back to life on Earth, not an eternal life in "heaven." Heaven and hell are temporary resting places where the soul/atman gets its temporary rewards or punishments for a life well or crappily lived.

Another web site noted the same concepts, focusing a bit more on how one gets out of the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. Liberation comes when the soul drop merges with the god ocean. But this actually is how the way things always are. Moksha or liberation is simply waking up from the dream of separateness.

With these ideas in mind, let's look at how Eben Alexander described his vision of "heaven" in the Newsweek cover story. Here's some pertinent quotes.
------------------------------------- 
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian...

I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Birds? Angels?

...I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang.

For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. ...Without using any words, she spoke to me. ... “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” “You have nothing to fear.” “There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself. “There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

...the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. 

One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church.

And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.
------------------------------------- 
So, yeah, I do indeed feel that Eben Alexander's vision of heaven is a heck of a lot closer to Christian notions of the afterlife than that of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, or other non-monotheistic religions.

He believes that God loves and accepts us unconditionally. That sure sounds like a personal creator God to me, not an impersonal Brahman, Buddha-nature, or Tao. God supposedly cherishes us deeply, forever. No mention of karma, rebirth, illusion of individuality, or any other "Eastern" concepts at odds with Christianity.

But regardless of how Christian'y Alexander's tale is, the Big Question is: should we believe it? Short answer: no. 

There are countless stories told by people about almost-dying-and-going-to-heaven. Now we have one more. Like I said in my initial post, I'm not aware of anybody who, say, was a Christian before their near-death experience of "heaven" and then recanted, becoming, say, a Buddhist. 

Virtually everybody (and maybe I can eliminate the "virtually") sees what they expect to see. Or at least what their brain has conditioned them to see. Neuroscience knows that expectations, framing, prior experiences, and such affect what a person experiences.

Awareness isn't like a shiny clear mirror that reflects only what is really there. Prior awarenesses lead the brain in previously trod directions. So a Christian believer has visions of a Christian heaven. No surprise there.

I've come across several additional thoughtful critiques of Alexander's fantastical tale of the afterlife. I only wish that Alexander himself had thought about alternative explanations of his vision rather than taking it to be a true view of what happens after death.

Oh, but then he wouldn't have been able to write a book that, almost certainly, will be a best-seller. And put up a snazzy web site marketing it.

Those who prefer to think for themselves, rather than accept illusions of heaven, are invited to read PZ Myer's hard-hitting "Newsweek panders to the deluded again."

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that line of crap before. “I’m a serious, hard-nosed scientist, I wouldn’t believe in that Christian stuff unless it was really true!” It’s a common trope. This guy was soaking in Christianity, wanted to believe in Christianity, and I don’t care if he was a Harvard neuroscientist, he was still vulnerable to self-delusion.

But here’s the real killer for me. People who go through these fantasies often tell of awe-inspiring insights that they receive and are quick to tell us how brilliant they were in Heaven. Alexander is no exception.

What were these concepts, you might wonder. He’s a neuroscientist; shouldn’t we expect some great “A-ha!” moments, some new powerful revelations about how the brain works that would revolutionize his field of study?

But of course not. He returns from his mind-expanding experience and does not sit down to write a revolutionary new paper on the science of the mind, but instead, as usual, writes a bunch of banal drivel about angels. This is the deep message that he shares with us that would have taken years to fully grasp, he claims.

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Here’s a deep message for you: brain damage can persuade you of the truth of some real bullshit.

l also enjoyed neuroscientist Colin Blakemore's "Is the afterlife full of fluffy clouds and angels?"

Dr Peter Fenwick, senior lecturer at King’s College, London, consultant at the Institute of Psychiatry, and president of the British branch of The International Association for Near Death Studies, acknowledges that there are deep problems in interpreting first-person memories of experiences that are supposed to have happened when the brain was out of action. Since the lucky survivor can only tell you about them after the event, how can we be sure that these things were perceived and felt at the time that their brains were messed up, rather than being invented afterwards?

The same problem applies to dreams, indeed to any memory. Memory is notoriously fallible, and is treacherously easily misled by expectation. The cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done brilliant experiments showing how the recall of real experiences can be transformed by what people think should have happened, and by what they are told might have happened.

In 150 years the science of perception has taught us that the way we appreciate the world around us is as much dependent on our expectations, our experiences, our inferences, as it is on the hard evidence of images on our retinas or vibrations in our ears. Remember the occasions when you have seen a face in the flickering flames of a fire, or been certain that you saw a person in the distance as you walked along at night – only to discover that the face in the fire disappears with the next burst of flame and the person in the dark is just a letterbox.

Is it not significant that the NDEs of Christians are full of Biblical metaphor? Either this confirms the correctness of their particular faith or it says that NDEs, like normal perception and memory, are redolent of culture, personal prejudice and past experience. Perhaps if Eben Alexander were a Muslim, there would have been the mythical 72 virgins on the butterfly wing, rather than the bucolic one. If he were a Buddhist he would be called a de-lok, a person who has seemingly died, but who travels into bardo – an afterlife state – guided by a Buddhist deity.

Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says

I'm impressed with myself. (And not for the first time, nor the last.)

Noted religious skeptic and neuroscientist Sam Harris has much the same reaction as I did, albeit more fully and cogently stated, to Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, when his cortex supposedly was "completely shut down," he had an experience of heaven that must have been separate from brain activity.

Hence, a soul travel of some sort to God's realm. Here's what I said about the guy's story three days ago, in response to a comment on this post.

Rain, I'm not much impressed with near death experiences, especially where the person having one experiences things that fit with their religious beliefs. Gosh, what a coincidence. Out of all the many religious beliefs existing among humans, it turns out that this Christian believer finds out that the one he accepts is true.

If he'd realized that Buddhism was correct, or Hinduism, rather than Christianity, I'd be more inclined to accept that his tale was something more than his own brain speaking to him. Note that he apparently came back with zero information about our physical reality that wasn't already known to him. Another sign that he didn't really have a genuine out of body experience.

He wants to claim that his brain was completely shut down, but how can he know this? CT scans don't show the functioning of the brain, to my understanding. And even fMRI scans aren't sophisticated enough to show what really is going on in every corner of the brain. The guy has gotten a book and publicity out of his experience. Good for him. That's how I feel about the Newsweek story.

Today, being a subscriber to Harris' email alerts, I learned about his own informed response to the Newsweek cover story. (I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek several months ago; this newest crap from the magazine makes me glad I did so.)

I encourage you to read Harris' "This Must Be Heaven." He's open-minded about what might lie beneath the mystery of consciousness, including the possibility that consciousness has a non-physical foundation. So am I.

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And Alexander doesn't offer up any.

This current tale of almost-dying and going to heaven really is no different from countless others. All it proves is that the brain is capable of conjuring up some marvelous fanatasies, something anybody who dreams or has imbibed a psychedelic has experienced.

It'd be nice if heaven was real.

But it's blasphemous, really, to assert that such-and-such is true about God when someone doesn't have any proof. If I were God -- and who can say that I'm not? -- I'd be pissed at people who spout off about my nature and realm when they don't know what they're talking about.

Below are some excerpts from Sam Harris' piece. He makes a lot of sense.

Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole.

According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. 

...Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.

Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case.

Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly.

Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?

...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.

...Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.

Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence

Last night I had another of my Holy shit! I'm going to die and not exist forever! moments. I wrote about these disturbing experiences six years ago in "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.

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.

This time it was a turtle's fault.

The 11 o'clock local news had a segment about a large sea turtle that washed ashore, looking decidedly dead. But it wasn't. If I recall correctly, a CT scan was used to look through the turtle's shell and figure out what was wrong with it.

Unbidden and uncontrollably, one of those Holy shit! realizations washed over me as the news team went on to another story.

I'm going to die eventually. Just like the turtle is. No more living. No more anything. This life is it. All there will ever be. No matter how much I love life, no matter how much I want to keep on living, death is going to throw me into non-existence. Forever. Me gone. All gone. For eternity.

Not exactly cheery bedtime thoughts. As I was brushing my teeth, the unfairness of it all seemed so obvious.

Here I am, alive. I'm a human being who can envision his own death. I enjoy life, but it's slipping away by the day, the hour, the minute, the second. I'm 63 fucking years old! My lifelong experiencing of one-thing-after-the-other is going to come to an abrupt halt with a final thing: the instant of my death. After that... nothing. Not even the awareness of nothing. 

After waking up this morning, I felt pretty much normal again. Aware of death, of course, yet immersed in the living of life. Thankfully. But the primal fear I'd experienced last night was still lingering closer to the surface of my consciousness than it usually is. 

Throughout the day I kept thinking...

About how religious people are able to easily envision an afterlife that isn't a viable post-death reassurance for me anymore. About how illogical my fear of non-existence is, since there's as little reason to worry about not existing as there is of falling into deep sleep: if I'm unconscious, there's no fear, no worry, no anything. 

It dawned on me that (1) not being afraid of dying because of a certainty about life after death has a lot in common with (2) being afraid of dying because of a certainty about non-existence after death. The commmonality is... certainty.

Of course, the odds are with (2), non-existence. Billions upon billions of humans have died with no sign of their continued existence. Evidence of life after death is extremely meager, almost, well, non-existent.

Still, anything is possible. Since no one knows what lies on the other side of death, there's room for uncertainty. (See my "Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death.")

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.

This morning I was drawn to read a few chapters in Pema Chodron's "The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times." Often I'm turned off by Zen books that are overly Buddhist'y, edging into dogmatic religiosity. But I liked what Chodon said about The In-Between State.

It takes some training to equate complete letting-go with comfort. But in fact "nothing to hold on to" is the root of happiness. There's a sense of freedom when we accept that we're not in control. Pointing ourselves toward what we would most like to avoid makes our barriers and shields permeable.

This may lead to a don't-know-what-to-do kind of feeling, a sense of being caught in-between. On the one hand, we're completely fed up with seeking comfort from what we can eat, drink, smoke, or couple with. We're also fed up with beliefs, ideas, and "isms" of all kinds. But on the other hand we wish it were true that outer comfort could bring lasting happiness.

...When we find ourselves in a place of discomfort and fear, when we're in a dispute, when the doctor says we need tests to see what's wrong, we'll find that we want to blame, to take sides, to stand our ground. We feel we must have some resolution. We want to hold our familiar view.

...That's why we're encouraged to spend our whole lives training with uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. To stay in the middle prepares us to meet the unknown without fear; it prepares us to face both our life and our death.

...We gradually discover that we are big enough to hold something that is neither lie nor truth, neither pure nor impure, neither bad nor good. But first we have to appreciate the richness of the groundless state and hang in there.

...Resting here completely -- steadfastly experiencing the clarity of the present moment -- is called enlightenment.

How to live happily until you die

Religious believers have dogmas that comfort when death stares them in the face. Resurrection of the body. Eternal survival of the soul.

Some secular "survivalists" hold onto equally unfounded hypotheses: that their body can be kept alive for a really long time through a health/medical breakthrough, or kept frozen and reanimated in some advanced technological future. 

(Uploading of one's brain contents to a back-up brain or computerized alternative is another dream of those who desire immortality outside of religion.)

In his "Immortality," a book I've blogged about recently here and here, Stephen Cave persuasively demolishes the efficacy of these three approaches to immortality -- Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul.

He also is skeptical, though not to the same degree, of the Legacy approach: continuing on through children, creative works, professional achievements, social/scientific accomplishments, positive memories in the minds of family and friends, etc. etc. 

Yes, we can sort of live on through the legacy we leave behind. But not really. We're dead and gone, so we don't know how our legacies are being treated. Cave asks the reader, do you even know the names of your great-grandparents, much less the details of their lives?

(My answer: no.)

So how do we deal with what Cave calls the Mortality Paradox, without fooling ourselves that we've cheated death via the unworkable approaches of Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy? The Mortality Paradox is simply stated:

Awareness of your mortality and an inability to conceive of ourselves as not existing.

ln a concluding chapter, Cave turns positive. Here, he says, is what can actually work to relieve our fear of death. 

First, "unending life would most likely be a terrible curse." He offers up good reasons for this statement, but it won't convince believers in an eternal, or timeless, heavenly realm where the soul or resurrected body never tires of divine delights.

The second step, then, is to accept "that the fear of actually being dead is nonsensical." Why? Because that fear is only present while we're alive. When we're dead, we're not conscious of anything, naturally including fear.

To talk of "being dead" is just a shorthand for saying they have ceased to exist. ..."Life has no end." That is, we can never be aware of it having an end -- we can never know anything but life.

This may seem obvious. However, now that I've finished Cave's book I realize that while my inescapable inability to know what it is like to be dead is just that, obvious, I hadn't fully embraced the meaning of this understanding.

Reading about Cave's third step, "to cultivate virtues that undermine those aspects of our nature that lead to both the will to persist forever and the corresponding existential angst," pointed me in a direction that fits with where my ever-increasing churchlessness has been leading me.

Here they are, The Three Virtues. I like them.

Naturally Cave says more about The Three Virtues than I've been able to share here. But this will give you a good idea of how secular wisdom concerning how to deal with death is akin to aspects of various spiritual "wisdom traditions," such as Buddhism and Taoism.

Identifying With Others.

Awareness of self might be important, but excessive concern with the self only exacerbates the fear of death, or loss of self, and leads some to a life of self-absorption. In order to combat this, we should cultivate selflessness, or identifying with others.

...This obsession with the self grew out of the doctrine of the immortal soul.

...We have seen that by taking the fear of death at face value, all four immortality narratives exacerbate the very attitudes that underpin that fear. By encouraging people to obsess about their own health, or the state of their own soul, or their particular legacy, they encourage the very self-centered, future-oriented and negative view that caused the fear in the first place.

...Bertrand Russell put it well: "The fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -- so at least it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."

Focus on the Present.

Similarly, picturing the future helps us to plan a successful life, but excessive concern with the future causes us to focus on the tribulations that lie ahead of us -- and we forget to live now. Therefore we should learn to live more in the present moment.

...When left to their own devices, our minds busy themselves with plans, plots, worries and idle speculation -- much of it about things that might go badly for us... By dwelling on all manner of possible threats, we bring death into life, only then to die without having truly lived.

...If you are happy now, then you are happy always, as there is only now. But equally, if you spend each moment worrying about your future happiness, then happiness will always elude you, and your life will be one of anxiety. And, as we have seen, worrying about death -- something we can never experience -- is the most foolish worry of all.

Gratitude.

Imagining all the things that could threaten our existence might help us to avoid them, but in excess it leads us only to worry about what we might lose rather than appreciate what we have. Therefore we should cultivate gratitude.

...That an unbroken chain of many millions of ancestors over billions of years all managed to do their bit to bring us into existence, that is our blessing. And it is an extraordinary one, involving more strokes of luck and cosmic coincidences than are possibly countable.

We can barely begin to measure the good fortune that led to the development first of life, then of animals, of mammals, of humans, of your family, and, finally, of you. Complex life -- and in particular the life of any individual -- is remarkable.

...And what these facts suggest is that before we rue our plight of a short life overshadowed by death, we should be grateful -- very, very grateful -- that we have a shot at life at all, and with a brain capable of appreciating and creating so much wonder.

...We have evolved to focus on what we stand to lose -- ultimately on the threat of death -- causing us to live in fear instead of reveling in the extraordinary good fortune of being.

...It is no coincidence that gratitude is one of the common themes throughout the world's wisdom literature and a powerful antidote to the fear of death. As the Greek Stoic Epicurus put it, "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has."

Cells, common ancestors, and Gaia -- suggestions of immortality

Like I said in my post "We can never be dead (but we're not immortal," in his book Stephen Cave does an excellent job of describing ways we humans attempt to achieve immortality -- then showing why they aren't up to the job.

Staying alive... we can try to make our years on Earth as many as possible, but it's obvious that everybody dies eventually.

Resurrection... Jesus supposedly did it, but there's no solid evidence of this, and no proof anyone else has pulled off the trick either.

Soul... nice idea, that a conscious non-physical aspect of us continues on after the body dies, but the getting-hit-on-the-head argument effectively demolishes the notion that consciousness isn't dependent on the brain.

Which leaves Legacy, the approach to immortality I've been reading about the past few days.

I've always been skeptical of relying on some legacy to make sure that I exist forever ever since I heard Woody Allen's apt "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."

Yeah, me too.

That's why I believed in soul, reincarnation, and such for over thirty years. I much preferred the idea of me living on as me, compared to me living on through blog posts, books, professional achievements, tree plantings, child/grandchild, memories in the heads of others, and so on.

In that last sentence I mixed together several sorts of Legacy, symbolic aspects like writings that came from my brain, and biological aspects that came, um, from lower down in my body.

Regarding the latter, my child and grandchild, Case talks about how we humans are related to other living things and arguably can't be considered as separate from the Life that permeates our planet.

In evolutionary terms, it is not long ago that all humans had a common ancestor -- a mere two hundred thousand years. A more positive ideology based on the biological Legacy Narrative would encompass the whole human race as our immortality vehicle. And indeed there are idealists, such as Einstein and Linus Pauling, who advocated just this.

But why stop at humans?

... A few simple creatures that started replicating a very long time ago have covered the earth with a tissue of life -- the biosphere -- all of which is profoundly interconnected. The question is, can any of these super-macro perspectives of nation, species, or biosphere provide a plausible immortality vehicle -- one that might even solve the problem of consciousness?

...The Gaia hypothesis is the claim that our entire planet is an integrated system that regulates itself in a way that is conductive to life.

...From this super-macro perspective, the human quest for personal immortality looks increasingly like a kind of mix-up. Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. To suggest one should live forever is like trying to preserve the shape of a particular dune in the shifting sands of a desert.

If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life.

[Lynn] Margulis thinks so: "Death is illusory in quite a real sense," she writes. "As sheer persistence of biochemistry, 'we' have never died during the passage of three thousand million years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted."

I like this way of looking upon life. My life isn't mine. Never was, isn't now, never will be. I'm an integral part of a much greater Life from which I bloomed, and which will live on long after I'm gone.

Cave says that the biological Legacy Narrative "dissolves you into a greater whole; it releases you from the struggle to become someone special, emphasizing instead the natural connectedness and continuity of being."

This strikes me as a naturalistic, non-mystical sort of enlightenment: an existential realization that nobody is an island, an isolated part that is born, lives, and dies alone, disconnected from all the life that has come before and will live on after.

It's a form of family consciousness described by Cave in an earlier section of his book. Except, the family with which we identify isn't just our recent human relatives, but the entire spectrum of life on Earth.

This is a worldview that would also be instantly recognizable to people from China, Japan, Korea, and many parts of Africa. ...It offers a strong sense of collective immortality, in which the particular person recognizes that he or she is a part of an ancient and continuing whole. For people in such societies the conclusion that we are a mere link in a chain of life would not have come as a surprise at all, but rather reflected a deep, lived reality.

Sure, this isn't the sort of immortality most people visualize when they imagine themselves living forever. But hey, likely it's the best we're going to be able to do if we've got a craving for eternal life. Or at least, super long life (life on Earth has been around for over four billion years).

We like to think of ourselves as a separate self. However, what if each of the cells that make up my body thought this way? Would that make any sense? Maybe just as much as me thinking that I'm an individual entity who is born, lives, and dies.

Stephen Cave writes:

It might seem obvious that a human is something over and above a lump of individual cells. But if this seems obvious when looking at a fully grown human being, it is much less obvious when looking at a newly conceived one.

The fact is, you were quite literally once a single cell: you started out as the fusion of an egg cell produced by your mother and a (much smaller) sperm cell from your father.

...As it grew, this clump of cells slowly acquired new abilities as a collective, over and above what an individual cell could do alone -- such as the capacities to do math and make music. This clump can also produce further cells -- eggs or sperm -- that are capable of fusing with another cell to produce a whole new clump carrying 50 percent of the first clump's genes.

...Therefore from the point of view of your genes, traveling the world in their little cells, the chain of life looks unbroken from generation to generation.

...From this perspective the history of life does not look like a series of discrete organisms that live and die but rather an unbroken chain of splitting and fusing cells, driven by busily replicating genes. 

...You live on in your children because you are not really the distinct individual that you think you are; you are just a widening of a chain of life that is billions of years old and has no end in sight. Talk of you as a particular person with a date of birth and one day a date of death is therefore just a convenient shorthand.

We can never be dead (but we're not immortal)

I've got some bad news and some good news for those who believe they have, or are, a soul. Bad news is, almost certainly the soul doesn't exist. 

The good news is, no matter. Because we can never be dead.

However, the good news doesn't mean we're immortal, which is the promise of soul. It just means, as Stephen Cave says in his fascinating book, "Immortality," that it is impossible for us humans to imagine our own nonexistence -- because whenever we try to do this, we're still alive.

That's what I learned from a quote in the leadoff reader review of Cave's book on Amazon, which made me buy it.

We do not linger like uninvited guests at our own funeral, nor are we plunged into the lonely void. We stop. The conscious experiences we have had are the totality of our lives; death, like birth, is just a term that defines the bounds of those experiences...The second step along the path of wisdom is therefore this realization that we can never be dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense. 

l'm enjoying "Immortality" a lot. It's going to be the book that I talk about next weekend at a meeting of a book discussion group, where the theme is History. That's because the subtitle of "Immortality"  is the quest to live forever and how it drives civilization.

Cave convincingly argues that the only four possible approaches to immortality, Staying Alive, Resurrection, Soul, and Legacy, are at the root of almost everything humans do. Or at least, the important stuff.

So far I've read the Staying Alive, Resurrection, and Soul sections. At the end of each, Cave discusses why this scheme for achieving immortality doesn't work. Because so many people believe in soul (I did, for over thirty years), I was particularly interested in the reasons he cites for why souls don't exist.

Here's some excerpts from "The Lost Soul" chapter. 

There is one big problem with the idea that your consciousness or "awareness" can in some form survive the death of your body. It is something with which we are all in fact very familiar, not least from countless Hollywood films: simply that if you get hit on the head with sufficient force, you will be knocked unconscious. Your awareness of the world ceases; your lights go out.

...Similarly, if you are injected with general anesthetic -- a syringe full of chemicals -- your awareness will be extinguished. For anyone who thinks consciousness can survive bodily death, this is an embarassment. 

The reason is this: the soul, which even in its pared-down form is supposed to maintain some minimum degree of consciousness, is supposed to be an entirely nonmaterial thing independent of the body -- only thus can it survive the body's death.

Now it is natural to suppose that a hard blow to the head would stop your body from working -- we might expect you to collapse to the ground and even to seem, from the outside, unconscious. But if consciousness were being maintained by an entirely nonmaterial thing, we would expect your consciousness to continue regardless. 

...The crux of the challenge is this: those who believe that the soul could preserve these abilities after the total destruction of the brain in death must explain why the soul cannot preserve these abilities when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed. 

Dying people talk about their family, not God

I liked this post, "My Faith: What people talk about before they die," even though it's on CNN's belief blog. It shows that what's important to people isn't dogma, but life as it's lived with loved ones.

We don't live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories.  We live our lives in our families:  the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends.

This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, this is where our purpose becomes clear.

Family is where we first experience love and where we first give it.  It's probably the first place we've been hurt by someone we love, and hopefully the place we learn that love can overcome even the most painful rejection.

This crucible of love is where we start to ask those big spiritual questions, and ultimately where they end.

Have a read.

Bad news: I'm going to die. Good news: I'll be nirvana!

Oh, the unfairness of it all. I really like being alive. Yet one day I'll be dead. Gone. Nonexistent. Forever unconscious. 

Damn it, damn it, damn it! Who the hell arranged the cosmos in this fucked-up fashion?! I want to live forever, or at least much longer than I'm going to, so where's the Complaint Department, Customer Service, Warranty Fulfillment? I need to talk to who's in charge, because this death deal is totally screwed-up.

That's basically how I think in my least harmonious, accepting, live-and-let-die moments. Which are quite frequent, because such thoughts enter my mind a lot.

I've learned, though, to not obsess over them as much as I used to. Yes, I still have a fear of non-existence. But it's not as strong as when I wrote "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." And I'm better able to recognize the ridiculousness in my petulant complaining about death bringing an end to my enjoyment of life.

Where did I get the idea that I'm entitled to anything else but one life here on Earth? What justifies my feeling that something is wrong with the fact that when I die, that's finis for me? 

Religions, mainly. Early on as a child I was told about salvation, life after death, heaven, hell, and such. Later, when I delved into Eastern religions, I learned about reincarnation, bardos, cosmic consciousness, higher realms of reality.

Those notions created the schism in my psyche between what is and what should be as regards death. Unlike an animal, such as our twelve year old family dog, I don't simply live every day as pleasantly as possible until one day I'm no longer alive. 

I, along with the vast majority of people on this planet, have been infected with the worst sort of deceptive advertising.

All those religions and supernatural belief systems have marketed after-life products which don't exist. Yet the sales job has been so successful, most of us are desperate to possess something we've never seen, have no proof of, and will never be able to tell if anyone else has.

Life after death.

In my saner moments, I tell myself, "Who promised you a rose garden? (without thorns)" Life is what it is. Death is all around us. It's impossible to ignore. Yes, I fear death. Yes, I"ve bought into promises of everlasting life and thereby raised my hopes beyond what is reasonable to hope for. But I can still focus on what is real for me here and now, not on illusory dreams of eternal immortality.

Us secular churchless irreligious non-believers enjoy a gift that the faithful lack: a vivid appreciation of how priceless every passing moment is. Heaven isn't a place we aspire to; for us it's the present moment, or it's nothing at all.

There's nothing more amazing, more awesome, more mysterious, I'd even say more divine, than realizing, really realizing with every fiber of one's being, that this present moment will never come again.

And more: that eventually there will be a moment which brings an end to all moments for me, you, everybody. The moment of death.

This morning, during one of my pre-meditation reading moments, I came across these passages in Owen Flanagan's "The Boddhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized." It made me look upon death in a somewhat different manner. Hey, I may be dead, but at least I'll be in nirvana.

Selfless persons are something we naturalists can believe in. Selfless persons whose consciousness continue after they die are not something we can believe in. The problem is that orthodox Buddhism is all about rebirth, sometimes gazillions of rebirths. One rebirth is too many for the naturalist and more is not merrier.

There is some consolation perhaps in the fact that virtually every description of nirvana, the ideal state achieved only by truly enlightened souls, Buddhas -- when they depart the earth -- makes it seem identical to what we would think of as the state of "just being dead," a state totally unaccompanied by the presence of any deity or communing with some heavenly host of (other) saved souls.

Personal consciousness ends, and one's body and spirit are taken to -- absorbed into -- Nature's bosom. gone altogether is me... the state in which you have achieved peace and tranquility because your consciousness is gone, your career as a person is over, and you are as dead as the proverbial doornail.

Karmic causality -- believable and unbelievable

Karma... a word that both is eminently scientific, and also annoyingly religious. I've spent a lot of time exploring both meanings of karma. 

Ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed learning about science. In my childhood room I set up a card table that fit oh-so-perfectly inside a corner of my closet. I'd sit down at the table, slide the closet door shut, turn on a light that I'd strung over the clothes rod, and spend many happy hours performing experiments with science kits.

Then, as now, the essence of science for me was cause and effect. Do this, and observe that. (See my "Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom" post.)

That's the believable side of karma: causes lead to effects which lead to more causes which lead... ad infinitum, back to the beginning of the universe. 

Karma, though, generally is viewed as having something particular to do with conscious beings. Usually billiard balls richocheting around a pool table aren't thought of as generating karma. But if a person risks her life to save a child about to step in front of a speeding truck, bystanders will say "that should get her some good karma."

Especially if they're Buddhist. 

Buddhism, like karma, comes in both scientific and religious guises. I'm enjoying Owen Flanagan's new book, "The Boddhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," which aims to sort out the unbelievable supernatural aspect of Buddhism from the believable natural aspect.

This includes karma. Flanagan likes how the current Dalai Lama supports scientific inquiry and findings of modern science, albeit with some caveats which allow supernaturalism to remain part of his Buddhist teachings.

Flanagan says one form of karmic causality discussed by the Dalai Lama is eminently reasonable and scientific.

The idea can be understood straightforwardly as follows: once sentient beings exist they think, feel, and act in ways that have effects. These effects are of two kinds: personal -- both intrapersonal (on the person herself) and interpersonal (on those with whom the person interacts) -- and environmental, affecting the natural and built worlds. To these one should add social, economic, and political effects.

Karmic causation as depicted in this way is natural. It is not due to theistic intervention at the beginning of the process, say, in creating a Big Bang with a plan, nor is there intentional (intelligent) design along the way other than the effects of the sentient beings (human and nonhuman) who eventually emerged and are creating karmic effects = effects via their actions.

However, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religious faiths which have karma as a central tenet don't only look upon karmic causality in this scientific fashion. If they did, karma would be an undeniable truth. Flanagan says that karmic causation then could just be called "sentient-being causation," a subtype of ordinary causation.

There's what he calls a less tame (meaning wilder, farther out, much more unbelievable) Buddhist interpretation of karma, though.

Karmic causation untame... names an ontologically unique kind of causation that accounts for how the psyches of future beings are determined by a set of causal processes that involve more than the environmental cum psycho-social-political-economic effects of previous occupants of the earth. 

What is meant by the idea of "the law of karma, by which an intentional act will reap certain fruits" [a Dalai Lama quote] is this: my consciousness does not die when my body does, it goes on and reaps in the next and possibly many (many) future lives what it sows in each antecedent life. 

The Dalai Lama, along with his Buddhist followers, admits there's no demonstrable scientific evidence of past lives. So the aforementioned caveat is brought in:

Science finds no evidence for rebirth, but it has not found its "nonexistence."

Well, science also hasn't found the nonexistence of the Tooth Fairy.

But once we get beyond a certain age, we realize that Mom and Dad are better explanations for why a quarter appears under our pillow after a tooth is put there than the Tooth Fairy. (Not sure what the going rate for a tooth is these days; back in olden times, when I was losing my teeth, I recall getting a quarter.)

So regular cause and effect, not involving karmic causality extending over past lives, now seems much more believable to me than Buddhism's karma untamed version. Religious believers, however, will keep on believing until the impetus for belief loses its energy. That's what happened to me, after I wrote a book which espoused the unbelievable aspect of karma.

Which is the essence of karma tame version. People do stuff; then they do different stuff, because causes keep happening, as do effects.

 

"How to Die in Oregon" made me less afraid of death

I'm going to die eventually. And I live in Oregon. So it figures that the award-winning 2011 documentary "How to Die in Oregon" would be of considerable interest to me. 

In 1997 Oregon became the first state to allow terminally-ill people to end their lives through self-administered lethal medications if a physician certified they had six months or less to live. It's officially called the Death With Dignity Act, but often is midleadingly referred to as physician-assisted suicide.

The movie shows that suicide isn't what terminally-ill people are doing when they choose to control the time and place of their death, rather than being subject to the vicissitudes of a painful, debilitating fatal disease.

They're doing just what the name of the Oregon Act says: dying with dignity. 

I recorded "How to Die In Oregon" months ago when it was first shown on HBO. Since, until a few days ago, it's sat on our DVR, passed over for other programs when we wanted to watch something -- mostly because of me.

My wife would say, "Why don't we watch How to Die in Oregon tonight?" I'd tell her, "Please, let's not. Too depressing." 

I was wrong. Very wrong.

I was deeply moved by the movie in some highly positive ways. If you're like me, scared to death of, well, death, you've got to find a way to see "How to Die in Oregon." (It'll probably be available on Netflix eventually.)

After the movie ended my wife said to me, "I'm surprised you liked it so much, given how you feel about dying." She probably was thinking of how, when we sat down with an attorney to discuss our wills/living trusts, I insisted that the attorney say "gerbils" instead of "dies" when she was referring to my eventual demise.

So rather than say "When Brian dies..." our attorney would say "When Brian gerbils..." This made the discussion easier for me to handle, though my alternative word demand must have confused any of her colleagues who overheard us talking.

The older I get (I'm 63 now), the easier it is for me to envision my death. Or rather, dying, because my bet is that after I die my consciousness will be as dead as my body, so I won't be aware that death has happened. 

"How to Die in Oregon" made me feel even better about dying.

From the opening scene to the final credits, I was mesmerized as I watched the movie, fascinated by how positive, upbeat, humorous, and courageous the people were who took advantage of Oregon's Death With Dignity law.

Even as they were drinking the liquid mixture of barbituates that would put them into a coma, and then cause them to die.

A review by Ebert at the Movies mentions how the first man shown looks into the camera and says, "Tell the next person this stuff tastes woody!" He's marvelously alert, aware, and blunt as he thanks the voters of Oregon for giving him this option to end his life on his own terms, not that of his disease.

(Watch the review to see some moving scenes from the movie; also, watch the trailer, where the above-mentioned man is shown at the beginning saying he knows what the medications will do: "It will kill me and make me happy.")

"How to Die in Oregon" shows how people act when they know this is the last day, hour, or minute they'll be alive. It's incredibly moving to share these moments. I'm grateful they and their families were so welcoming of the camera crew.

What a gift. The movie is transforming. At least, it was for me. I'll never look upon dying in the same way again. Or living.

Because the terminally ill people shown in "How to Die in Oregon" teach us how to make the most of our last moments. Which could come upon us at any moment, given that death usually can't be predicted.

There were a few allusions to an afterlife in the movie, but I can't recall any explicit displays of religiosity from those who chose the death with dignity option. Of course, most people who choose to die at a time and place of their own choosing likely aren't highly religious.

Mostly, the movie shows them living their last moments honestly, bravely, light-heartedly, warmly. They were supported by friends and family. They were sustained by nature (gardening, walks in a park). They trusted that when it was the right time to die, they'd know it.

I've struggled with a fear of death for much of my life. "How to Die in Oregon" taught me that there's a simple way to deal with that fear: don't be afraid. I realize those three words may not make much sense to someone who hasn't seen the movie.

If so, see it.

This film is like no other. It looks straight into the eyes of death, a subject that most of us dance around rather than embrace. (The Ebert video review says that at the Sundance Film Festival showing, the theatre was half empty; people wrongly thought the movie would be a downer.)

After watching the movie, my wife and I can't understand how anyone could argue that death with dignity shouldn't be an option for everybody. Every state in this country, and every country in the world, needs to pass similar laws.

When death is inevitable -- and even when it isn't -- people who aren't seriously depressed or mentally ill should be able to decide whether they want to keep on living. Why should anyone else be able to make that choice for someone? 

God almost certainly is an illusion. Death is real. The main objection to death with dignity is religious, which makes no sense. Illusions can't be allowed to overrule reality.

(Here's a good review of the movie.)

Looking into the void...and waking up

Recently I got an email from someone who resonated with my take on death, not-existing for eternity, and the virtually certain unfortunate/fortunate fact that when we die, we're gone forever (aside from the atoms that make up our time-limited assemblage into a living entity).

I asked the guy, Yeager St. John, if I could share his thoughts. "Sure," he emailed back. Here they are.

Hey Brian,

I came across your website, "Church of the Churchless" and must say, bravo. I have only read a few of your posts, but have enjoyed every bit. I came across your "death and the primal fear of non-existence" post and what you said really resonates with experiences I have had. I have never seen someone explain exactly how I felt.

It's not so much the act of dying as much as, "what about everything that was before and will come after," thoughts on eternity and infinity, where the universe is, what it all means, etc. I too have had the experience of looking back into the void, as if a curtain was pulled away suddenly. I feel like so many people have not realized this both unfortunate and fortunate truth about ourselves.

Instead so many people seem to concern themselves with material things in order to feel happy and deny the fundamental nature of their existence and being, using other things (monetary goals, religion, material things...) to distract themselves from their own existence and coming to terms with it.

Sometimes I think it is only the smarter people who ever have this epiphany of life, and that we are also the only ones who are able to deal with it and actually "wake up" to ourselves. Just like yourself, I do not seem to have "beat" the feeling of....I don't even know how to describe it. There are no words for the emptiness and fear that comes to you when you realize non-existence, as I'm sure you know.

But, I have found that being "woken up" to this fact of life and death has made me appreciate all that I have, which is to say, all that I have in the here and now. I have begun the process of living and being aware of the current moment and just doing what I can to be happy, which is mostly controlling my outlook on life, as that is the only thing I am completely in control of.

I don't let petty things bother me, because I've seen behind the curtain and don't fall for the social distractions. It's not to say that I live a perfect happy life and wake up every day happy, smiling, etc.

I still have off days, I still dislike certain things, I still get angry, sad, and a whole range of emotions. But I remember to ground myself. To remain in this moment, the only moment I have - and enjoy every bit of the eternal here and now. I take bigger risks, my levels of anxiety and fear in every-day life have reduced, and continue to do so, because I realize it's all a big game and really there is nothing to lose.

Listening to Alan Watts, Carl Sagan and other philosophers and mystics has really helped as well. It seems that we are all in this together, and even if we don't really understand, it's ok. Whatever this is will keep on going. I might not understand my purpose and existence, but like chaos theory proves, every little thing seems to matter and influence everything. 

I hope I've made myself somewhat clear, hahah. I tend to get jumbled when I think on this matter; my brain races and all the thoughts I have inside come gushing out. 

Either way, I just wanted to let you know there are are other deep thinkers out there, curious and aware about ourselves. Keep living and enjoying the here and now, and may your life be thick with experience.

Cheers,

Yeager
Yeager St. John

Since Yeager shared a link to his web site, I browsed around a bit. Checking out his videos, my eye was caught by the title "Dreams," and an image that said when did we forget our dreams? Great question.

For an answer, see below. I liked the video, in no small part because Fuck. That. Shit. is part of the answer.  

Dreams from Yeager St John on Vimeo.

Made in Adobe After Effects, the text is from an amazing comic - xkcd.com. The title of this particular comic is 'Dreams' and the number is 137 if you're up to read it, it's worth it.
 
"Does the routine destroy our creativity, or do we lose our creativity and fall into the routine?"

What's so great about ego loss?

Yesterday I got an email from someone who asked an excellent question. Why should he engage in ego-lessening practices?

Hello Mr. Hines.

I have practiced Zen for several years, but in the past year or two I have ‘fallen away’ from the practice. I find myself resonating with your concepts of ‘spiritual independence’ and ‘church of the churchless’.

I’m sending you this email because I thought you might have some insight on my question. Why do (why should?) I engage in ego-lessening practices?  I realize that the question comes from the ego.  It’s a sort of ‘what’s in it for me’ question.  But – what IS in it for me?  Why do it?

Any thoughts?

l wrote back, saying that I'd try to answer his question in tonight's blog post. Which puts me on the spot, because it's now tonight, and I'm starting to write a blog post. But I don't really know what I want to say, or what I'm going to say.

Yet this blog post is going to be written.

So who will do it? To be honest, I can't claim that it will be me. At least, not a capital "M" Me. At the moment it feels more like writing is happening, than that a well-defined entity inside my brain is pulling the writing strings.

Thus my first response is that ego-lessening isn't a practice, but the neuroscientific truth. Meaning, there isn't such a thing as an ego, self, soul, or other sort of homunculus (don't know if I'm using that term correctly, but I like the word) in charge of our inner and outer life.

From this perspective, trying to achieve ego-loss is like trying to make a ghost disappear. Since there's nothing there, what's there to do? (Well, read books like "The Ego Tunnel" and "I Am a Strange Loop." At the end of this post are other links to stuff I've written about the illusion of ego.)

However, while truth is enticing, it's eminently tradable for feeling good.

This is why religions hold so much appeal for so many people. Including me, for over thirty years. I loved the notion that the ultimate nature of little me (or rather, Big Me) was a soul-drop which would eventually merge in a spirit-ocean, assuring me (oops, Me) both eternal life and everlasting bliss.

Cool. Yet also, almost certainly, false.

Once I stopped believing in this fantasy, the death-denying magic didn't work anymore. No matter how I waved my wand in meditation, no longer could I bring myself to feel reassured that my final breath wasn't really "The End" but "To Be Continued."

Truth. Feeling good. Goddamn it, I want both! In my increasingly churchless psyche, I asked "Is there a way?" 

Well, ego loss seems to be the most likely path to the Land of Truth and Feeling Good. I like this way because it is appealingly short: no distance at all, because there is no place to go, nothing to do, and no one to become.

Still, I'm not there yet.

The thought of dying and not existing, forever, irks me greatly. In my true believing days I dealt with this bothersome prospect (more accurately, near certainty) by trying to expand myself into a soul-entity that couldn't be destroyed because it was cosmically great.

Now, I dream of not being anything or anyone, yet still being me. And here's what's marvelous about this: both modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom seem to agree that this is the way our human reality is.

I used to look upon these Rumi words in a more mystical fashion. They mean something different to me today.

Fear the existence in which you are now! 
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

Lastly, assuming there's a firstly somewhere in this blog post, I often think about a conversation I had in the kitchen of a woman who I'd just met at a party, and somehow got into one of those Meaning of Life conversations which, strangely, can come easily with a stranger.

A few years ago I wrote about what she told me on my other blog in a post about death and nearing sixty.  

Faced with the need to choose a category for this post, I ended up with "Humor." That's how I'd like to be able to look upon death: as a joke.

The Grim Reaper is too tenacious to be pushed away. But by laughing at the bastard at least I'd get some satisfaction from not taking the S.O.B. seriously.

Some years back an acquaintance told me a story about how her husband died. He had a brain tumor. OK, bad news.

But the good news – no, the great news – was that the tumor was in a part of the brain that controlled his understanding of death. So he was being killed by a disease that took away his ability to know he was dying.

Dear Tao, give me that brain tumor when it's my time to go.

The woman said they'd go to the doctor and he'd be told a dismal prognosis, that he didn't have much longer to live, and it wouldn't faze him a bit. They'd leave, walk down the sidewalk, and he'd say "Let's get an ice cream cone."

His health was good until it wasn't. Then, bingo, he was dead, not knowing he was dying.

Yes! Give me that! A double order, with a beer and fries! 

Death without knowing I was dying. Sounds good. No, sounds great.

I can't hope for a brain tumor that accomplishes that, but realizing there's no "I" to die -- same difference. And that, in almost a thousand (mostly unnecessary) words is my answer to the question, "What's so great about ego loss?"

Why we can't imagine the moment of our death

Thumbing through a recent issue of The New Yorker last night, I came across a thought-provoking paragraph about mortality in a personal history piece, "The Aquarium," by Aleksandar Hemon.

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that the mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

Humans are naturally optimistic. Which helps explain religion.

Most people's brains are hard-wired to generate an optimistic outlook on life. Evolution, it seems, has favored an ability to look into the future and see good things happening.

Such is the message of TIME magazine's cover story this week, "The Optimism Bias." It's a highly interesting article.

Tali Sharot, the author, says that "optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind."

This ability was naturally selected for in the course of Homo sapiens' evolution because it had so many survival advantages, such as planning ahead for a future reward. However, mental time travel comes with a big downside.

While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price — the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end.

The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future.

For atheists and agnostics, their focus is on a bright future in this life. But religious believers use their mental time traveling ability to envision a wonderfully pleasant life after death, otherwise known as heaven, paradise, god-realization, and such.

Optimism is great. Feeling that the future is beckoning us to good times fuels us with energy, enthusiasm, and the courage to overcome bumps along the Happiness Road.

We should understand, though, that our brains are doing what evolution has wrought when a sunny happy face beams down upon us as we contemplate the next unseen bends on our life's course. Optimism can blind our ability to discern reality as it is, rather than how we'd like it to be.

Most people believe in life after death. Religiosity is the default for humans, since it fosters an optimism that can mentally time travel on into eternity. "God is guiding my life here on Earth, and after I die He'll usher me into everlasting heavenly bliss!"

Well, almost certainly not. It can feel good to think that way, and there's nothng wrong with feeling good. We just should know what's going on in our brains when realism takes a back seat to optimism.

The TIME article ends with:

Why would our brains be wired in this way? It is tempting to speculate that optimism was selected by evolution precisely because, on balance, positive expectations enhance the odds of survival. Research findings that optimists live longer and are healthier, plus the fact that most humans display optimistic biases — and emerging data that optimism is linked to specific genes — all strongly support this hypothesis.

Yet optimism is also irrational and can lead to unwanted outcomes. The question then is, How can we remain hopeful — benefiting from the fruits of optimism — while at the same time guarding ourselves from its pitfalls?

I believe knowledge is key. We are not born with an innate understanding of our biases. The brain's illusions have to be identified by careful scientific observation and controlled experiments and then communicated to the rest of us. Once we are made aware of our optimistic illusions, we can act to protect ourselves.

The good news is that awareness rarely shatters the illusion. The glass remains half full. It is possible, then, to strike a balance, to believe we will stay healthy, but get medical insurance anyway; to be certain the sun will shine, but grab an umbrella on our way out — just in case.

Yes, certainly hell is dead. Along with heaven.

When the new issue of TIME magazine arrived a few days ago, my wife noted the cover story blurb -- "What if there's no Hell?" -- and said, I can't understand how anybody can believe in hell.

My reply to her: I can't understand how anybody can believe in Christianity, yet lots of people do.

Well, actually I do understand, because I've also believed weird spiritual stuff that now seems untrue to me. So I was speaking from my current churchless perspective.

For many years I entertained a belief that the only way back to God was to become a disciple of a "perfect living guru," so if hell is being separated from God, then I guess I was a believer in a sort of Christian'ish damnation: some are saved, and some aren't; if you haven't chosen to get on the Salvation Train, tough luck, because you're going to be left at the Bad Karma station.

Still, Christianity's hell is stranger than the maya of Eastern religions. Unquenchable fire. Torment. Damnation for eternity. That's truly hellish.

So I was pleased to read Jon Meacham's "Is Hell dead?" and learn that Rob Bell, an evangelical pastor, is urging Christians to adopt I don't know as a core tenet of their faith. Here's how the cover story starts out:

As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill's growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.

A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: "Reality check: He's in hell." Bell was struck.

Really? he recalls thinking.

Gandhi's in hell?

He is?

We have confirmation of this?

Somebody knows this?

Without a doubt?

And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?

So begins Bell's controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

And here's a few more excerpts:

Bell insists he is only raising the possibility that theological rigidity — and thus a faith of exclusion — is a dangerous thing. He believes in Jesus' atonement; he says he is just unclear on whether the redemption promised in Christian tradition is limited to those who meet the tests of the church. It is a case for living with mystery rather than demanding certitude.

...Belief in Jesus, he says, should lead human beings to work for the good of this world. What comes next has to wait. "When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage," says Bell. "So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are."

Fundamentalists are irked at Bell. For good reason: if the existence of hell is uncertain, then why isn't heaven also merely a speculation? (A 1997 TIME cover story addressed this very question.)

Going further, how about Jesus' resurrection? And his being the Son of God? Heck, why not question the very existence of God? Isn't God as mysterious, uncertain, and speculative as hell?

I say, absolutely.

If that sounds, well, absolutist, that's how I intended my "absolutely." Uncertainty when it comes to the nature of ultimate reality is the only thing we can be certain of.

So it's great that more Christians are joining the Uncertain Club. Welcome! Us members enjoy not knowing what happens after death. That keeps us focused on living life, now.

(If you're not certain that my uncertain view of certainty is correct, read my blog posts on this subject here, here, here, here, and here.)

Overcoming the fear of non-existence

So far I've written 1,228 posts for this blog. Like a proud parent, I'm tempted to say that I don't have a favorite, that I love all of my writings equally.

But that wouldn't be true. Some posts resonate with me more than others, because they spring from a deeper meaning-place.

Notably, "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." The day I wrote it, back in 2006, I didn't have much time for blogging. For me, that post was unusually short and to the point.

Which was how it had to be.

There isn't anything complex or subtle about the fear I described. It's scarier than death, because for most people dying isn't considered to be "The End," but the beginning of "Next Chapter."

Since, I've mused about the fear of non-existence here, here, and here (plus, I'm sure, elsewhere).

Today, Chris left a comment on the last-linked "here," saying:

Brian, five years on I wonder if you ever conquered your fear of non existence? Perhaps you found some particular words of wisdom of perhaps you have put it to the back of your mind?

A penny for your thoughts. Oh, and thanks for creating this site. It has been a useful outlet.

Excellent question. Yet a tough one for me to answer -- especially succinctly. But I'll do my best to respond in the same style I used in my original post on this subject: pithily and honestly.

-----------------------------

Chris, I'm still afraid of dying and never again existing in any conscious form.

A few weeks ago I had a dream, or barely conscious sleep state, where I remember waking up abruptly, scared shitless at the prospect (actually, almost 100% certainty) of this life being my one and only opportunity of existing.

Yet this fear isn't as strong as it was before. I'm thankful for that.

I don't know the reason.

My suspicion is that facing my fear of non-existence, of writing about it, of talking with other people about it, of reading about how other people deal with it -- all of this has resulted in some shifts within my psyche's unconscious, where the brain's real work takes place outside of our awareness.

So I don't worry much any more about trying to rationally come to grips with what it means to die, forever. Animals that we are, we humans naturally are afraid of death. If our ancestors hadn't fought for life, we wouldn't have come out winners in the Evolution Game.

However, I do believe that us Homo sapiens are capable of implanting some notions in our unconscious which can ameliorate instinctual fears. After being startled by a snake, I can tell myself "it isn't poisonous." And "it's good for our garden."

SImilarly, I do my best to think about non-existence in ways which are both truthful, so far as I can tell, and emotionally pleasing to me. I guess you could call these my philosophical comfort blanket -- what I cling to when the Dead and Gone Forever heebie-jeebies send a chill up my spine.

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."

Chris, if you haven't done this already, I encourage you to delve into what I look upon as "neuroscientific Buddhism." Or, "Buddhist neuroscience."

Namely, writers and researchers who are trying to make sense of the apparently solid fact that the self (or soul) doesn't exist as a separate, distinct, independent entity. Currently I'm reading, and enjoying, "Living as a River" -- a book I've blogged about recently.

I think the approach Bodhipaksa, the author, takes is right on for dealing with a fear of non-existence. HIs subtitle is fearlessness in the face of change. Well, what's a bigger change than death?

Fear, of anything, usually doesn't disappear suddenly.

The Six Element Practice described in "Living as a River" is traditional Buddhism, yet pleasingly updated with modern scientific insights and stripped of unnecessary religious dogma (such as rebirth).

Again, it seems to be that the best way to deal with a fear of not-existing is to undertand -- really understand, intutively, emotionally, in your gut -- that you have never existed as the self that is afraid of non-existence.

I used to enjoy Rumi a lot. I still do, but in a different way. I can read Rumi quotes about non-existence and view them in a much more scientific and less spiritual fashion now.

Here's my favorite Rumi passage. Understand these words, and a lot is understood.

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

Last thought before death -- what it says about us

A few nights ago, as I was going to sleep, an idea popped into my mind: "There'll be a moment when I have my last thought before I die. What would I want it to be?"

Intuitively, this struck me as an important question.

That last thought would be infinitely precious, in a way. It'd reflect what I considered to be most important to focus on an instant before earthly existence and I parted company.

(Note: I don't believe in an unearthly existence. And I realize that probably I won't know when my last thought is happening. But there's a good chance I'll realize that I'm at death's door, even if the exact moment I step through is a mystery.)

I ran through several options. None felt right.

I wanted my last thought to be meaningful, not "did I remember to turn the stove off?" I appreciate the final submission on this "last thoughts" discussion thread -- that final joint was awesome -- but I was looking for something with a bit more gravitas.

Before too long three words came to mind. I imagined saying them to myself. Then I envisioned saying them out loud to whoever was with me when I died. In either scenario, they worked for me.

"I love you."

Hope you're not disappointed. But, hey, this is my last thought, so I get to pick it, no matter how clichéd it might seem to anyone else.

Now, our 21st wedding anniversary was yesterday, so love has been on my mind. (Every year I'm grateful that my wife and I got married on St. Patrick's day, because this makes it almost impossible for me to forget our anniversary.)

When I wrote a message on a card for Laurel, which I left next to a bouquet of hand-picked flowers from our garden, I told her about my last thought. When I started writing (actually, printing, as my handwriting is so bad even my wife can't read it) about how I wanted "I love you" to be the final words in my dying brain, tears started flowing.

That told me I had picked a pretty damn right-on last thought.

Emotionally, saying "I love you" as death's darkness faded in seemed absolutely perfect. I've done a lot of good and bad, acted like a saint and a sinner, screwed up and made amends, been a jerk and a decent guy.

But in the end -- and there will be one, for sure -- all of that stuff seemed to fade into insignificance next to "I love you."

I was mainly thinking of my wife with that you. However, when I let my mind run free, images of so many other "you's" appear almost unbidden. They're all included in the final word of my last thought.

You too, you who are reading this blog post, whether or not you're a regular visitor to this here Church of the Churchless. I've gotten so much meaning, satisfaction, and happiness from writing my irreligious musings the past six-plus years, and from reading the comments of other people.

I guess I have an expansive view of love. I love the coffee I'm sipping right now at a downtown Salem coffee house. I love the lighted keys on my MacBook Pro. I love the cheese ravioli that I chowed down before starting to compose this post.

There's no limit to love.

Ultimately -- and why not go there in my last thought? -- I'm talking to the entire cosmos when I say "I love you." Meaning, I don't envision a personal Cosmic You who could hear those words.

No God. No divine consciousness. No savior of humanity. Still, I feel that telling everything in existence "I love you" is entirely appropriate, just as saying "Thank you" is.

But I'm me, nobody else. Everybody is going to have a different way of envisioning his or her last thought. So if you want to share what yours might be, comment away, recognizing that what actually passes through my or your mind at our last moment could be very different from what we expect.

(Shit! Truck! Fuck! I can't believe... are all distinct possibilities, along with countless others.)

If the universe is infinite, we're immortal (sort of)

Wow, I got some great news after reading only two chapters in physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." I'm immortal!

Only catch is, the "me" who exists forever isn't really the same me who is typing out these words. Though maybe it is.

Just depends on how I look upon myself: (1) as a being with a unique essence peculiar to myself (I don't mean a smell, but a non-physical identity), or (2) as a configuration of atoms which could be almost exactly duplicated in another corner of the cosmos.

I've read Greene's previous books, enjoying them, but finding them a bit overly technical. He's used a different style in "The Hidden Reality," jumping directly into the scientific good stuff without feeling like he needs to go over the basics of quantum theory, cosmology, and such.

So, bingo, by pages 4-5 Greene has introduced the mind-boggling premise of his book: reality could well be a hell of a lot bigger and stranger than it appears from our earthly vantage point.

A striking fact (it's in part what propelled me to write this book) is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics -- relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, unified physics, computational physics -- have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe.

Indeed, the chapters that follow trace a narrative through nine variations on the multiverse theme. Each envisions our universe as part of an unexpectedly larger whole, but the complexion of that whole and the nature of the member universes differ sharply among them.

In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they're hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes.

In some, the laws are the same as ours; in others, they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are of a form and structure unlike anything we've ever encountered. It's at once humbling and stirring to imagine just how expansive reality may be.

There's no better indication of how my current churchlessness differs from my prior true-believing self than what I read before my morning meditation (a habit for over forty years).

I still read some philosophy, usually of the Taoist/Buddhist mindfulness sort, but science books -- mostly neuroscience and physics -- are an equally common target for my yellow highlighter. Often I feel more inspired and energetic after learning a new scientific fact, than being exposed to some fresh philosophical wisdom.

Greene's discussion of infinity in his Endless Doppelgängers chapter had that sort of Wow! So cool! effect on me.

I had a sensation of being released from my usual preoccupation with myself and what is right around me -- which, of course, is a big reason why people are attracted to religions. Science, though, is even more effective at taking us out of ourselves, of putting our ego in its place, because it is real, while religiosity is fantasy.

Also, science is humble. Greene makes clear what modern science is confident about, and what is merely a hypothesis.

Our universe could be finite, like a spherical ball (except in this case, there is nothing the ball is resting in or on, so it is almost impossible to visualize the shape of the universe, as we have no familiarity with anything that isn't a separate "thing").

However, more likely the universe is infinite, for reasons I won't go into, but which have to do with the average amount of matter/energy in each cubic meter of the universe.

If this is true, infinity, not surprisingly, leads to some vastly interesting conclusions. One is that the big bang didn't result in the universe starting off in a teeny-tiny state, as I've visualized. Rather:

If space is truly infinite in size, then it always has been and always will be. When it shrinks, its contents are squeezed ever closer together, making the density of matter ever larger. But its overall extent remains infinite. After all, shrink an infinite tabletop by a factor of 2 and what do you get? Half of infinity, which is still infinite.

Religions speak of God as being infinitely this and that. Powerful. Knowing. Present. Loving. Yet there's no need to posit an other-worldly infinity; science finds evidence for infinity much closer to home. Right here, the universe where we live and breathe.

Which brings me to the most intriguing aha! in Greene's Endless Doppelgängers chapter. If the universe is infinite, then there are countless (maybe infinite) numbers of universes just like ours. Since that last sentence may sound weird, here's why a single universe could contain an infinite number of universes.

What we call the "universe" isn't all that there is.

Our knowledge of the universe is bounded by the speed of light, since information can't travel faster than this. Thus the maximum distance we can see is 41 billion light years -- more than the 13.7 billion year age of the universe, because space has been expanding since the big bang at faster than the speed of light. So distant galaxies are now much farther away than they were when light first left them.

Thus what we call the "universe" likely is just one patch of an infinite universe. Even though a patch with a radius of 41 billion light years is unimaginably huge, in an infinite universe there will be an infinite number of patches that size.

I won't go through all the arguments that Greene uses to reach his next conclusion. But trust me, they make good scientific sense. His most mind-boggling hypothesis is that in an infinite universe, each arrangement of particles in a particular "patch" of it will be repeated many times.

Since you and I are a particular arrangement of particles, this means that exact copies of us abound in other parts of the universe.

This means that if the universe is infinite in extent, you are not alone in whatever reaction you are now having to this view of reality. There are many perfect copies of you out there in the cosmos, feeling exactly the same way. And there's no way to say which is really you. All versions are physically and hence mentally identical.

Far out. In more ways than one. I'm blown away by this notion of countless me's existing elsewhere in the cosmos. And not just precise copies, but also variations on the Theme of Me.

Because not only will there be arrangements of particles that exactly mirror everything that's happened in my life, but there also will be universes where I did other things -- typed "stuff" rather than "things," for example. So it seems that in an infinite universe, everything that can happen, does happen.

Which can be interpreted to mean, "I'm immortal," since the arrangement of particles that I call "me" will be repeated countless times. However, note that Greene said "there's no way to say which is really you." Thus the whole idea of "me" as a unique individual falls away.

I find this possibility both disconcerting and appealing.

It's sort of like worrying that you've lost your car keys, then realizing that you don't have a car. Yes, it'd be nice to possess a car, but it's also pleasant to be relieved of the worries that come with having one.

Likewise, sometime I think that it'd be great if I had an immortal soul. However, if I had one, I'd worry about what was going to become of it after I die. No soul, no worries.

Brian Greene, sharp guy that he is, recognizes that his whole doppelgängers thing is founded on the assumption that we humans are arrangements of physical matter/energy, nothing more. If there is some unique something else (soul, spirit) that makes us who we are, then exact copies of you or me couldn't exist.

In interpreting the implications of this statement [that arrangements of particles in patches of the universe must be duplicated an infinite number of times], I should declare my bias. I believe that a physical system is completely determined by the arrangement of its particles.

Tell me how the particles making up the earth, the sun, the galaxy, and everything else are arranged, and you've fully articulated reality. This reductionist view is common among physicists, but there are certainly people who think otherwise.

Especially when it comes to life, some believe that an essential nonphysical aspect (spirit, soul, life force, chi, and so on) is required to animate the physical. Although I remain open to the possibility, I've never encountered any evidence to support it.

The position that makes the most sense to me is that one's physical and mental characteristics are nothing but a manifestation of how the particles in one's body are arranged. Specify the particle arrangement and you've specified everything.

Hard to disagree with. Bad news: we aren't special. Good news: we aren't special, so in an infinite universe the arrangement of particles I call "me' lives on... and on... and on.

 

Will Kurzweil's "singularity" let us become immortal?

Shit!

Along with a lot of other baby boomers, I bet, that was my instant reaction to the TIME magazine cover that shouted out "2045 The Year Man Becomes Immortal" at me when I opened the mailbox a few days ago.

Those of us who were born a few years after the end of World War II would be pushing 100 by the time immortality could be ours.

Even before I read the cover story, I figured that (1) almost certainly I'll be dead by 2045, and (2) even if I wasn't, living forever in a worn out body/brain wouldn't be very appealing.

But last night I read about futurist Raymond Kurzweil's prediction of the coming Singularity, and what he's forecasting is quite different from our usual conception of immortality. The story, by Lev Grossman, starts with a definition of "singularity."

The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

Well, that sounds interesting. I'd like to be around for it. And in a way, all of us already are -- the beginning stages at least.

Because Kurzweil is looking toward the day when computers develop artificial intelligences that dwarf ours, a trend that seems inevitable considering the rapidity of technological change.

Here's what the exponential curves told him. We successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity -- never say he's not conservative -- at 2045.

In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

Facebook. Twitter. Google. iPhones.

These and so much more are early signs of ever-more powerful artificial intelligences that at first will merely be an adjunct to our own, yet eventually could become conscious beings in their own right.

When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

This is what I found most interesting about the "singularity" story -- whether the super smart computers that are around the technological bend are going to become as human as we are, minus our bodies, of course.

The Big Question being: what makes us who we are?

Though difficult to imagine how this could happen given our current state of neuroscientific knowledge, Singularitarians (yes, that's a word, and yes, there are many of them) enjoy envisioning a future where the amazingly complex human brain has been mapped, neuron by neuron, connection by connection, into an artificial intelligence.

If each and every aspect of my brain were to be perfectly mirrored by a computer, what difference would there be between that machine "consciousness" and my own consciousness?

If the answer is none, then the quotation marks I put around the first "consciousness" wouldn't be needed, because the mental states of the machine and me would be identical.

Hence, I could achieve immortality by transplanting the contents of my psyche into a robot, computer, or other form of artificial intelligence. Which, seemingly, wouldn't appear to be any different from my current consciousness, leaving aside the not so minor detail of "me" existing within a mechanical, rather than biological, form.

Whether this sounds creepy or appealing to you probably reveals a lot about your philosophical and spiritual inclinations. Those who consider that people have a soul which constitutes their essence won't accept that a human could be transmuted into a machine.

The TIME story addresses such questions.

Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being... Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness -- a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socio-economics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient?

And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Singularitarians are confident that fairly soon these questions will be more than academic. However, my favorite godless science blogger, P.Z. Myers, is deeply skeptical that Kurzweil's vision of the future is going to become reality.

A few days ago Myers ridiculed the TIME story here. Last year he poked fun at the whole notion of the Singularity here, quoting John Pavlus, another skeptic.

How to make a Singularity
Step 1: “I wonder if brains are just like computers?”
Step 2: Add peta-thingies/giga-whatzits; say “Moore’s Law!” a lot at conferences
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: SINGULARITY!!!11!one

Since Myers is a biologist, I respect his view of how the human brain works, which isn't at all how a computer works.

He's [Kurzweil] guilty of a very weird form of reductionism that considers a human life can be reduced to patterns in a computer. I have no stock in spiritualism or dualism, but we are very much a product of our crude and messy biology — we perceive the world through imprecise chemical reactions, our brains send signals by shuffling ions in salt water, our attitudes and reactions are shaped by chemicals secreted by glands in our guts. Replicating the lightning while ignoring the clouds and rain and pressure changes will not give you a copy of the storm. It will give you something different, which would be interesting still, but it's not the same.

Well, time will tell. I just hope that if Kurzweil is correct, the Singularity happens sooner than expected, rather than later. Since I no longer believe that I have an immortal soul, I'll take immortality in any other fashion that presents itself.

Option 2: embrace bad spelling. I liked comment #12 on Myers' blog post.

I'm already immortal.
wait... that's a 't'?
Immoral, that's what I am.

Near-death experiences are physical, as is meditation

I've finished reading Kevin Nelson's intriguing book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." His focus is on near-death experiences. (I've previously blogged about the book here, here, and here.)

The bottom line is that Nelson cites lots of research, which he combines with his extensive knowledge of how the brain works, to come up with a compelling explanation for the seemingly spiritual nature of what often happens to people on the edge of death.

It's all physical. Natural. Brain-based. As is meditation. As is everything, so long as we are alive in a human body. Repeat: as is everything.

I realize that this stark statement will rub many people the wrong way, since it goes against the grain of the almost universal sensation (which appears early on in childhood, and continues into adult life) that our mental sense of "I" somehow is distinct from the material goings-on inside the brain.

Young children believe that when a mouse dies, it is still alive somewhere even though its body is dead. This shows that supernaturalism, the foundation of religiosity, basically is hard-wired into the human brain -- which goes a long way toward explaining why most people believe in God or some other immaterial ultimate reality.

Nelson's book helped me understand more clearly than before how our conscious awareness is just the tip of a neurological iceberg that we're clueless about.

Necessarily, because if our distant ancestors were privy to every complex detail of how their brains were processing the sight of a saber-toothed tiger stalking them, they wouldn't be able to act with sufficient speed and alacrity to escape the danger.

Neurological research now is able to reveal how hitherto mysterious brain processes are the likely cause of "spiritual" phenomena like out-of-body sensations and feelings of becoming one with the universe. Nelson says this recognition doesn't negate the meaning given to such experiences by those who have them.

But it brings spirituality down to earth, so to speak.

We have placed fragmented consciousness at the heart of many of our spiritual experiences and stripped away the illusion of the seamlessly integrated self. Odd as it may seem, we have shown that primal brainstem reactions seem to be at the root of experiences that we think of as spiritual and that make us most human. This concept of "knee-jerk spirituality" deals a strong blow to the idea that free will is necessary to connect with whatever we feel is sacred.

At the neurologist's command, a flicker of electrical current to the brain makes it seem that our consciousness has been lifted from our body and is floating freely in space. The brain pathways used during "natural" spiritual experiences are the same pathways used by spiritual drugs, indistinguishable from otherwise genuine religious conversions, transforming lives long after the drug is flushed clear from the body.

Clinical neurology tells us that these are the same pathways distorted by some diseases of the brain that produce disorders fitting criteria for religious experience. Are spontaneous and authentic spiritual experiences nothing more than "experiments of nature" telling us how the brain works?

We have strong indications that much of our spirituality arises from arousal, limbic, and reward systems that evolved long before structures made the brain capable of language and reasoning. Neurologically, mystical feelings may not be so much beyond language as before language.

Given that we share many of the structures and systems in our brains with other creatures, we may not be the only primate with spiritual feelings. Great apes mourned their dead, and evidence suggests that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife. In fact, I strongly suspect that mystical feelings could exist in many other mammals that are endowed with a limbic system that is very much like our own. And why can't dogs have out-of-body experiences?

No reason, so far as I can tell from watching our dog dream on her pad next to the television set, her paws scrabbling as if she's in hot pursuit of that squirrel which always manages to elude her.

I can easily picture her dreaming of leaving her canine form and soaring up to the tree branch where the squirrel chatters away at our Serena.

Who, you have to admit, looks divine. So, yes, I'm ready to accept that other mammals share our so-called "spiritual" experiences.

The self as illusion

For a long time I wanted to find my "true self." Then I got all enthused about calling off the search.

The Buddhist notion of neither-this-nor-that fascinates me. Something else. None of the above. Think outside the box. Even more, blow the fucking box to smithereens.

Searching. Finding. Real self. False self. God. Devil. Masters. Disciples. Wisdom. Ignorance. Good. Bad. Right. Wrong.

More and more, I have the sense that It is something else entirely. By “It” I mean the root, the core, the kernel, the center that we’re all spinning around and never finding.

Now, though, I'm beginning to suspect that there's no root, no core, no kernel, no center to me. I've never been able to locate one. And neuroscience has come to a pretty firm conclusion that such couldn't exist.

Here's what Kevin Nelson, M.D., has to say in his book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience."

Through localizing brain function, the behavioral neurologists had shown that who we think we are is a complicated and rather fragile synthetic process orchestrated by our brains. When something interferes with that process our reality and sense of self quickly and dramatically fragment.

While most of us view our "self" as concrete and coherent, akin to, say, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, to a neurologist the self is more like Picasso's cubist portrait of Dora Maar, his lover and muse: a fragmented amalgam of fractured planes.

Or, if you prefer Impressionism, our view of the self is a little like a water lily by Monet: at a glance it appears coherent, but up close you realize its harmonious appearance is an illusion, that the object you saw at a distance is actually a bundle of discrete and unconnected parts.

This conception of self is both disturbing and exhilarating.

I don't particularly like the idea that I don't exist -- at least, not in the way that I've become accustomed to thinking was true. Meaning, the entity that I feel myself to be, "Brian," isn't as distinctly solid and real as my sensing of myself from the inside of me.

But there's a positive side to being a shape-shifting, insubstantial, ever-changing conglomeration: like Janis Joplin sang, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. If self is an illusion, I've got no self that'll be lost when I die, or any reason to worry that my self might have an unpleasant afterlife if I don't embrace some form of religiosity now.

Thanks to a Twitter tweet by someone I follow, this morning I came across a Nour Foundation video of a panel discussion on "To Be or Not to Be: The Self as Illusion."

I watched the first 10:30, most of which featured Thomas Metzinger -- who wrote "The Ego Tunnel," a book I gave 5 stars to (that link contains pointers to five other posts I wrote about The Ego Tunnel).

Metzinger says that the brain/mind is not an entity, but a process.  He responds to the moderator's introductory comment about the self being an illusion in an interesting fashion. The big question, he says, is "who has all these states of consciousness?"

In other words (so far as I understand Metzinger), there is no one at home inside our heads to realize the self is an illusion.

At about the 8:30 mark, Metzinger speaks about our ancestors' primal urge that can be expressed as You Must Not Die! Of course, that powerful emotion would have been felt wordlessly by virtually all of the species which preceded the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Now, though, the cerebral cortex enables us to anticipate and articulate the prospect of our death even when we're not in mortal danger. This, says Metzinger, creates a chasm between we feel should not happen, our dying, and what we know will happen, our dying. We humans are the first animal to understand that we will die.

And thus springs one of the roots of religion. A tap root, in my opinion, because it supports and nourishes a central tenet of virtually every faith: continued existence of the self, or soul, in an afterlife.

This is a comforting belief.

However, comfort isn't a reliable guide to reality. Such is the quandary of the human condition -- when it is fitting to embrace what makes us feel good, even if it isn't true, and when truth should be faced head-on no matter the emotional consequences.

No evidence that near-death experiences are spiritual

Recently I was being my usual sceptical self in a coffeehouse conversation, saying "Everything we humans are aware of is processed by the physical brain, so nobody has ever had a purely spiritual experience."

My companion replied, "But what about near-death experiences? Sometimes people leave their bodies and view them from the outside."

Well, not really, according to a neurophysiologist, Kevin Nelson, who is a leading researcher on NDE's (near-death experiences). A recent issue of New Scientist has an interview with him -- attached as a continuation to this post -- where he states that NDE's are akin to lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreams are among the closest things we know of to an NDE. They are very similar. Brainwave measurements show that lucid dreaming is a conscious state between REM and waking. During REM consciousness, the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex is turned off. As that's the executive, rational part of the brain, this explains why dreams are so bizarre. But if the dorso-lateral cortex turns on inside a dream, you become aware that you are dreaming. It is like waking up in your dream. When the body is in crisis during an NDE and the brain is slipping from consciousness to unconsciousness, it can get momentarily stuck in a borderland between REM and waking, just like a lucid dream.

Near the end of the interview Nelson talks about the evidence, or rather lack thereof, that consciousness is separable from the physical brain.

You often hear people claim that these experiences happened during minutes when they were declared clinically dead. How could that be?

This is an incredible misconception that has arisen because people use the term "clinical death" when they really mean cardiac arrest. When your heart stops and you lose blood flow, you don't lose consciousness for another 10 seconds and brain damage doesn't occur until 30 minutes after blood flow is reduced by 90 per cent or more. So when experiencing an NDE, you are not dead.

People like to say that these experiences are proof that consciousness can exist outside the brain, like a soul that lives after death. I hope that is true, but it is a matter of faith; there is no evidence for that. People who claim otherwise are using false science to engender false hope and I think that is misleading and ultimately cruel.

Absolutely. And if it is misleading and cruel to use false science to engender false hope, doesn't this also apply to false spirituality, false religion, and false mysticism?

Like Nelson, I too hope that some part of us lives on after death. However, hope isn't reality; belief isn't truth. While I'm alive I'd rather live honestly, facing facts as we humans currently best understand them, instead of taking refuge in a fantasy realm.

I've ordered Nelson's book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." The way I see it, if there truly is a domain of consciousness beyond the material, it won't be found through means that are demonstrably physical.

So even if someone believes in an other-worldly spirit, soul, heaven, god, or whatever, they should pay attention to what science is learning about so-called "spiritual" experiences -- since if these are produced by the brain, as Nelson considers NDE's to be, they aren't what a seeker of spirit is looking for.

I came across another interview with Nelson that looks to be even more interesting, from a quick read-through of the first part of it. Early on he skillfully defends the following point of view against the interviewer's challenges.

Sure. I think near-death experiences are in the brain and I think that the only experience we can really know about comes from the brain and so I think that my emphasis as a neurologist, of course, is just that. It’s the brain.

Read on for the complete New Scientist interview.

Scientific quasi-remedies for a fear of death

I don't like the notion that I'll die one day.

More than the notion, it's the reality of death that produces a sense of unease which varies from mild mostly unconscious anxiety to a strong fearful awareness of impending non-existence.

So I wanted to provide a blog post addendum to my previous "This is it" ponderings. Not really a counterpoint; more like a therapeutic sidebar for those who, like me, enjoy life and don't relish the prospect of losing all trace of conscious existence for eternity.

There's good reason to argue that I can't help myself. No one can. Such is the position of Jesse Bering in his book, "The God Instinct." I just read a positive review in New Scientist which begins and ends with:

Thanks to evolution we naturally expect there to be a god -- or gods -- watching over us. Our brains interpret the world around us in ways that created God; the notion of the divine is "a scratch on our psychological lenses," says psychologist Jesse Bering.

...This fascinating book presents gentle, nuanced but convincing arguments for atheism. Bering knows he can't change the world, though. Thoroughly and permanently removing God from our heads "would require a neurosurgeon not a science teacher," he says.

Well, in my personal evolution I've reached a churchless state where an expectation that god is watching over me has shrunk to near-nothingness.

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.

(These approaches are interrelated, but I'll list them discretely.)

Panpsychism. This philosophy posits that "mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe."

Hmmmm.... sounds good. My personal mind doesn't even seem to inhabit the inside of my head all of the time, such as when I absent-mindedly lose a glove.

But given that the laws of nature are ubiquitous and seem to require some sort of awareness among particles of dumb matter/energy to work, panpsychism holds out the hope that whatever my conscious nature is, the universe shares it in some sense.

Against the backdrop of our immense scientific knowledge of the physical world, and the corresponding widespread desire to explain everything ultimately in physical terms, panpsychism has come to seem an implausible view. Nonetheless, the doctrine retains some attractive and interesting features. The recalcitrance of the mind, and especially consciousness, to fit smoothly into the scientific picture recommends our consideration of them.

Along this line, David Chalmers' philosophically sophisticated conception of naturalistic dualism holds that consciousness is an immaterial aspect of the universe which, however, requires physicality to manifest.

This leaves open the possibility that some form of unmanifested consciousness could pervade the cosmos. Not much to hang an awareness continues after death hat on, but it's a lot more likely than a God in heaven.

Consciousness is fundamental. Some aspects of the universe seemingly are irreducible. For example, space and time (or spacetime, as Einstein realized). Consciousness could be another. There's been increasing discussion of the possibility that it is a fundamental property of the universe.

Due to all these difficult problems in studying consciousness, more and more people in the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and physics began to realize that, just like time, space, mass, and energy, consciousness is a basic property of matter and it is an inseparable part of the universe. Recently, there have been serious discussions on this topic by researchers in mainstream research journals and research conferences. It is a developing trend in research.

Of course, it isn't comforting to me that space as a whole continues even though the space that my body currently takes up becomes available again, or that time as a whole carries on even though my time on Earth ends with my last breath.

The difference, though, is that I am conscious, while I can't say "I am space" or "I am time."

So there's a slight chance that a fundamental aspect of my consciousness still exists after I die, even if the individual aspect disappears when I do. This would be in the philosophical ballpark of Vedanta, which teaches that the personal self is an illusion while the universal Self is all-pervading.

(I haven't read "Implications of a Fundamental Consciousness," but it looks to be a serious discussion of this hypothesis. And here's a bunch of videos on this subject.)

Digital universe. Physicist John Wheeler is famous for his pithy it from bit hypothesis about the ultimate nature of reality. He wrote:

'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

This mild version of digital physics isn't as enticingly interesting as farther-out speculations. My favorite is that our universe, naturally including us, is a simulated reality.

Specifically, an alien's simulation.

I'm attracted to the idea that my typing I'm attracted to the idea is the result of an amazingly sophisticated (from our technologically crude 21st century earthly viewpoint) digital simulation being run by a highly advanced lifeform.

I almost added "in our universe," but if our universe is a digital simulation, the creator of it likely exists somewhere completely beyond our understanding.

In the October 2010 issue of Scientific American magazine, the article The (Elusive) Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow tells us that ”If aliens did enforce consistent laws, we would have no way to tell that another reality stood behind the simulated one”.

I guess the appeal of this notion is similar to that of a central Buddhist tenet: what we call "me" doesn't really exist.

In Buddhism believing in an independent self is considered to be a wrong view of reality. But if the entire universe has been fabricated by an alien civilization, then all of our understandings about ourselves and the cosmos are widely off the mark.

So if it happens that I don't really exist as the entity I consider myself to be, what am I losing when I die? Instead of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, it's bits of information to bits of information.

Though this notion may seem strange, it is being seriously considered by some very sharp people. Theoretical physicist John Barrow, for one:
Download Living in a Simulated Universe

It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another.

They would have computer power that differed from ours by a vast factor. Instead of merely simulating their weather or the formation of galaxies, like we do, they would be able to go further and watch the appearance of stars and planetary systems.

Then, having coupled the rules of biochemistry into their astronomical simulations they would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness (all speeded up to occur on whatever timescale was convenient for them).

Just as we watch the life cycles of fruit flies they would be able to follow the evolution of life, watch civilisations grow and communicate with each other, argue about whether there existed a Great Programmer in the Sky who created their Universe and who could intervene at will in defiance of the laws of Nature they habitually observed.

Well, if this is true, the bad news is that I've never actually lived. But the good news is that I'll never actually die -- given that I've never been truly alive.

Eternity is mine!

Here's a tale from the afterlives

I'm hugely enjoying David Eagleman's "Sum: forty tales from the afterlives." This is a marvelously creative and thought-provoking book, unlike anything I've ever read before.

Sum is a work of fiction (maybe). The back cover says:

With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

There's no way to explain the book. So I'll simply share one of the tales that I especially enjoyed. Read on.

Getting small: solution to all of my problems?

Last week I heard a Taoist scholar/practitioner say, "Feel small, and your problems will be small."

Makes sense. A similar intuition has been taking root in me since embracing the non-faith of churchlessness six or so years ago.

Most religions teach that bigger is better. We're supposed to expand our consciousness, rise up to heaven, grow in spiritual understanding, enlarge our connection with God.

I used to enjoy the feeling that my devotional practices enjoined by a religious organization -- meditation, volunteering, vegetarianism, tee-totaling, and such -- were helping me to become more.

More detached from this lower world of materiality. More attached to a godly power that was omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. More virtuous and ethical. More in touch with my soul, which would endure for eternity after my physical body/mind died.

Like virtually all religious believers, I was out to solve life's problems (including death) by becoming larger, stronger, and indestructible. Not in a material sense, of course. Spiritually.

Eventually I came to feel that this was a misguided way to go. There's no demonstrable evidence that any person ever has been able to overcome human limitations by becoming larger than life.

However, both logically and experientially I'm attracted to a less is more alternative.

Since we Homo sapiens are so puny, weak, and clueless in comparison to the vast, wild, mysterious cosmos, why not humbly acknowledge our littleness? And perhaps cultivate some shrinking to become even less than we already are.

This isn't any sort of original idea.

Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism/Vedanta, and other "eastern" faiths promote various varieties of no-self or ego-loss. So do the more mystical sides of the world's monotheistic religions.

Striving to become nothing seems contradictory to me, though. When I pull the plug on our bathtub drain, the water doesn't go through any effort to disappear. It just swirls away. Until...it's gone.

Similarly, I suspect that simply observing the nature of what we are -- basically, natural -- is all that needs to be done, or not done, to get one's psyche pleasantly small. (Again, not at all an original idea.)

Modern neuroscience doesn't find any enduring self or soul reflected in human consciousness.

I haven't found one either. It sure seems like there's no difference between me and the rest of the natural world, aside from the fact that, being a self-aware human, I can imagine/ manufacture/ produce/ create a seeming difference.

Isn't it true that what is bothersome are differences? Such as: The difference between what I want to have happen and what does happen. The difference between an enduring universe and a time-limited me. 

The smaller I feel, the less these differences matter to me. That may sound paradoxical, but it isn't.

If I consider that I can play golf fairly well, then comparing myself to Tiger Woods makes me feel lowly on the links. But if I see myself as utterly incompetent at playing the game, I've got no pride to defend, so the difference between me and a top pro isn't bothersome.

Here's a thought experiment that I enjoy playing around with:

What if I learned that, ala the Matrix, I wasn't the "me" that I've always considered myself to be, but a computer simulation? (Some scientists take seriously the notion that the universe is simulated reality.)

This knowledge wouldn't change how I experience life directly. But it sure would affect how I experience my experiencing of life.

How? I can't say, because I'm only imagining that I've learned I'm part of a computer simulation. But is this so different from the "real" thing? After all, how could I know for sure that the unveiling of the Matrix wasn't another aspect of an illusion?

As I said on this post recently, in the end imagination is what we're left with when we approach the limits of thing-ness (when we pass from considering discrete things to the seeming unity that things exist in, or as).

So I can imagine that once I've realized that I'm not really the separate "me" I thought I was, but rather part of a simulated whole that includes a representation of the self I seem to be, dying wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it does now.

My substantiality would have been recognized as a mirage. My simulated consciousness would have come to understand that it was a simulation, part and parcel of a wholeness that was out of my control and would continue (or not) with or without me.

Increasingly, it seems to me that what people call "enlightenment" is nothing more than what I've just described: recognizing that the separate enduring self each of us appears to be is just that, an appearance.

Which makes me feel really, really small. Yet also really, really relaxed. Like Janis Joplin said:

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Death is real. Religion shouldn't deny it.

My sister died yesterday. Unexpectedly. Shockingly. And really.

On my other blog I said what needed saying a few hours after I learned of Carol Ann's death. Now, I want to add on to how this experience has affected me.

Basically, it's made me more appreciative of genuineness. When my brother-in-law phoned with the news, he told it like it was: "Your sister is dead." I took it the same way.

Face to face with the truth, no turning away.

Deep into our conversation, Bob said that he knew Carol Ann wanted to be cremated. He wasn't sure, though, what to do with her ashes.

I told him, "I'm pretty sure that if she were alive, she'd say it doesn't matter to her. And I'm damn sure that now she's dead, it really doesn't matter to her, because almost certainly she doesn't exist any more, and if she does somehow, what happens to the remains of her body is immaterial to her."

Bob agreed. My sister and brother-in-law were/are as churchless as I am. Maybe more so. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Atoms to atoms. That's how they look upon death.

When someone you love dies, grief is inevitable. Natural. Genuine.

Not for an instant (well, maybe one, which passed quickly) did I think, "Carol Ann has passed on." On to what? She's dead. That's what I know. To assume anything else is to deny reality.

That seems disrespectful. To my honest grief. Also to my sister's dying.

I understand why people want to deny the reality of death when a loved one dies. It hurts to know that you won't ever see them again. Imagining that this is possible, and/or that they are in a "better place" is a common way of pushing away the pain.

Inauthentic. But common.

Recently the Oregon (as well as national) news was filled with updates on the fate of three climbers who attempted a wintry climb of Mt. Hood. One was found dead; the other two are missing.

Watching reports on local television when all hope for the climbers had been lost, I heard their relatives say what Christians so often do in situations like this. Lie.

Perhaps "lie" sounds harsh. But when I'd hear someone say, "We know that Katie is with God now," I'd yell at the TV screen, 'No you don't! You believe it!" Big difference.

For ten years my niece, Cathy Ferguson (my sister and brother-in-law's only child), refused to allow Carol Ann and Bob to see their two grandchildren. Or Cathy. This deeply hurt my sister and brother-in-law. Their house is in Walnut Creek, California, just a few miles from Concord, where Cathy and her family live.

As I said in a blog post about this craziness, religion played a big role in Cathy's obstinate and cruel refusal to reconcile with her mother -- who now is dead, and died without having seen her beloved grandchildren for a decade, ever since they were eight and ten.

Cathy and her husband were (and I assume, still are) fundamentalist Christians. They saw my sister as part of the "dark side." Meaning, everyone who doesn't accept Jesus as lord and savior.

This bullshit belief system supported them in a ten year crusade to keep their children from being exposed to the influence of godless grandparents. They professed other reasons too, of course, but this clearly was a major factor in their cruel and unusual grandparent abuse.

The reality of a fairly minor family disagreement became engulfed in an overlay of religious fantasy -- another example of how genuine human emotion ("I'm mad at my mother") can get turned into fake dogmatism ("She's an evil ungodly influence.")

Life is complicated. It's full of pain and suffering. Facing this reality head-on is the best way to deal with it.

Cry. Laugh. Then cry and laugh again. But for non-God's sake, let's make our crying and laughing genuine.

Have it flow naturally from the heart, unblocked by a rigid artificial religious belief system that stifles our authentic humanity.

I've got a death wish: not to die

Death isn't to die for. At least, that's how my churchless psyche looks at mortality. I like being alive. Being dead -- that has a disturbing ring of nothingness to it.

If it was up to me, I'd pass on the whole dying thing. And who wouldn't? Almost no one, aside from those who find life so painful, not existing seems preferable.

This is a big reason why religions, philosophies, and belief systems that promise continued life after death are so popular. The Bible says that Jesus removed the sting of death.

Hey, if there was convincing proof of this, I'd sign up for Christianity in a heartbeat. Or convert to any other faith that offered me eternal (or at least really lengthy) life.

A good life, of course. No hell. Or Fox News.

Dinesh D'Souza has written a book that purports to prove that the afterlife is real. "Life After Death: The Evidence" is an appealing title. Only problem is, D'Souza doesn't supply what he promises -- evidence.

I base this statement not on having read the book, but on some articles that summarize D'Souza's arguments. I read "Heaven Can Wait" in Newsweek, and "The Dead Are Dead" on the Pharyngula blog.

If I simply went by the Amazon product description, I'd probably have ordered a copy by now.

Unlike many books about the afterlife, Life after Death makes no appeal to religious faith, divine revelation, or sacred texts. Drawing on some of the most powerful theories and trends in physics, evolutionary biology, science, philosophy, and psychology, D Souza shows why the atheist critique of immortality is irrational and draws the striking conclusion that it is reasonable to believe in life after death.

That's false advertising. D'Souza is a fervent Christian. His web site says that he is a co-founder of the Y God Institute, "Fresh Arguments, Science, History and Reason to Support Christianity."

So he definitely does make an appeal to religious faith and sacred texts. In an interview, D'Souza makes the ridiculous claim that we should believe in the afterlife because Christian dogma says that Jesus was resurrected. Huh?

If the resurrection stands up to historical scrutiny, if it is an historical event by the standards of historical verification, then the Christian view of the afterlife rises above the pack. It is the one to take seriously.

Well, those are two big "if's."

If I had a hundred million dollars, I'd be sitting on the patio of my beachfront Maui mansion right now, enjoying the tropical warmth rather than a freaking cold day in Oregon.

If''s are easy to conjure up. I'm interested in afterlife evidence that has some substance to it.

The Newsweek piece reviews D'Souza's flimsy arguments (human goodness, quantum physics, multiverse notion in cosmology -- a bunch of if's) and ends with mention of what could be a genuinely solid reason to believe in the survival of consciousness after death.

The AWARE project, a scientifically rigorous study of near-death experiences in hospitals around the world. Some results are expected next year. (But believers in the afterlife are already offering up reasons why AWARE won't come up with evidence of non-bodily consciousness.)

Not surprisingly, it doesn't sound like D'Souza talks at all about the many anecdotal stories in Eastern faiths -- Buddhism, Hinduism, and such -- about mystic transport out of the body and into higher realms of reality.

I'm not saying that these are any more credible than the Christian tale of Jesus' resurrection. But they are a lot more recent, so have a higher potential of being verified in some fashion (or, not).

I've been there and done that -- embracing a belief in soul travel and survival of personal consciousness after death. I hope it's true. I also hope that the Maui mansion pops into my life. I've got lots of hopes.

Having practiced various meditation disciplines for about forty years, my current approach is this: do nothing and see what happens.

Meaning, make nothing my meditative mantra. And assume that nothing needs to be done to find out what happens after death. What will be, will be. And what won't, won't.

I'm open to other possibilities.

That's why I enjoy churchlessness, not embracing any particular faith. I'll roll in whatever direction the evidence (or lack thereof) for life after death takes me.

How to cheat death -- without religion

Religions offer up a damn good deal on death: have faith, do what you're told, and you won't die.

If this was really true, I'd sign up in a heartbeat, since then I wouldn't have to worry about what will happen after my last one. Which appears likely to be nothing... death being the absence of living.

But there are worse things than dying and not existing any more. I'd rank the possibilities in this order of preference:

(1) Die and live on pleasantly in another form ("heaven").
(2) Die and cease to exist.
(3) Die and live on horribly in another form ("hell").

Most of us have experienced pain, physical or psychological, that was so extreme, at some point we'd choose death over life if the suffering persisted. Knowing this, religions shrewdly use a good cop/bad cop strategy in marketing their belief wares to potential converts.

The joys of heaven await the faithful. The terrors of hell await the skeptics.

So it isn't surprising that most people in the world accept a promise of salvation from one religion or another. That's the easy way to go.

However, only if you don't think about the promise (better termed a scam) very deeply. Because obviously there's no way to know whether you've cheated death until after the game of life has stopped being played.

Thus no one --repeat, no one -- has ever confirmed for himself or herself a religion's claim that death is the gateway to more life. This claim has to be taken on faith: believe now and get the evidence later.

Well, to hell with that.

Driving around this afternoon, I heard part of an interview with Barbara Enrenreich, who has written a book decrying the relentless promotion of positive thinking in America.

She said that she's in favor of neither positive nor negative thinking, but rather realistic thinking. Excellent advice.

Religions want us to have warm and fuzzy notions of a fantasized afterlife (positive thinking), while fearing the hellish consequences if we don't have faith in the fantasy (negative thinking). 

There's another option: accepting that death is real, but not dwelling on death either positively or negatively.

In this way, death can be cheated honestly -- by not playing the heaven game, the hell game, or the "holy fuck I'm going to die and never exist again!" game. Don't play any game with death. Ignore it.

Easy to say, you may be thinking. But hard to do if you've got a life-threatening illness, or if a loved one has passed away.

Admitted. Sort of.

Yes, it may be hard to break a longstanding habit of pondering death either positively or negatively by envisioning what might happen after someone takes their last breath. However, it isn't difficult to focus on living while we're alive.

All we have to do is do it. Live. Here and now. Not there and then.

Some years back a woman told me a story about her husband's fatal brain cancer. She said that it attacked a part of his brain which controlled his fear of death. So he knew he was dying. And it didn't bother him a bit.

"Sounds like a great way to go," I told her.

Another great way to go is to live life fully, passionately, and whole-heartedly. Then, die. On-off. No mixing up of life and death. No premature dying by envisioning either a pleasant or unpleasant afterlife.

What happens after death (or doesn't happen) will happen. Or, not. 

We cheat death by walking away from the heaven/hell playing table. Eternal non-existence doesn't bother us either, because for now we exist -- thereby giving the finger to non-existence. 

If death has the last laugh, that's fine. We won't be around to be the butt of the joke.

Julian Barnes deals with death...irreligiously

The prospect (what a comforting word, so much better than "certainty") of dying can scare me to death.

So I just had to read Julian Barnes' book, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of." Because it's theme is death, and I want to believe that the title is true.

Barnes is a terrific writer. I don't want to summarize some favorite quotations from his book. I want to share them as wonderfully written.

So, here they are. Enjoy.

-----------------------------------------
Julian Barnes:

I don't believe in God, but I miss Him.

"What's all this about death, by the way?" she continued. I explained that I didn't like the idea of it.

Hadn't Camus said that the proper response to life's meaninglessness was to invent rules for the game, as we had done with football?

And here is the bet [Pascal's] made to sound almost not like a bet: "Go on, believe! It does no harm." ... But there are times, probably, when "it does no harm"-- except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm.

If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn't because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.

Adulthood brings approximation, fluidity, and doubt; and we keep the doubt at bay by retelling that familiar story, with pauses and periods of a calculated effect, pretending that the solidity of narrative is a proof of truth.

But Montaigne is a compendious writer, and if this argument fails to convince, he has many others. For instance: if you have lived well, used life to the full, then you will be happy to let it go; whereas if you have misused life and found it miserable, then you will not regret its passing. (A proposition which seems to me entirely reversible: those in the first category might want their happy lives to continue indefinitely, those in the second might hope for a change of luck.) Or: if you've truly lived for a single day, in the fullest sense, then you've seen everything. (No!) Well, then, if you've lived like that for a whole year, you've seen everything. (Still no.) Anyway, you should make room on earth for others, just as others have made room for you. (Yes, but I didn't ask them to.) And why complain of being taken, when all are taken? Think of how many others will die on the same day as you. (True, and some of them will be as pissed off as I am about it.) Further, and finally, what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I'll settle for a quarter.)

You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that's what matters. Whether He's an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It, or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn't matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant -- of which there seems startlingly little proof -- only that He exists.

What will it be like when Christianity joins the list of dead religions, and is taught in universities as part of the folklore syllabus; when blasphemy becomes not legal or illegal but simply impossible?

God is dead, and without Him human beings can at last get off their knees and assume their full height; and yet this height turns out to be quite dwarfish.

Perhaps the most important divide is less between the religious and the irreligious as between those who fear death and those who don't. We fall thereby into four categories, and it's clear which two regard themselves as superior: those who do not fear death because they have faith, and those who do not fear death despite having no faith. These groups take the moral high ground. In third place come those who, despite having faith, cannot rid themselves of the old, visceral, rational fear. And then, out of the medals, below the salt, up shit creek, come those of us who fear death and have no faith.

I would want my afterlife, if one's on offer, to be an improvement -- preferably a substantial one -- on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can't see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state?

My brother does not fear extinction. "I say that confidently, and not just because it would be irrational to have such a fear" (sorry -- interruption -- irrational? IRRATIONAL? It's the most rational thing in the world -- how can reason not reasonably detest and fear the end of reason?).

Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly.

I wonder if we can somehow farewell ourselves in advance. Can we lose, or at least thin, this resilient sense of specialness until there is less of it to disappear, less of it to miss?

People say of death, "There's nothing to be frightened of." They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. "There's NOTHING to be frightened of." Jules Renard: "The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word 'nothing.'"

As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse.

I think my sense of death -- which appears exaggerated to some of my friends -- is quite proportionate. For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.

Theorists of mind and matter may tell me that my death is, if not exactly an illusion at least the loss of something more inchoate and less personally marked than I pretend and desire it to be; but I doubt that this is how it will feel to me when the time comes.

I have always mistrusted the idea that old age brings serenity, suspecting that many of the old were just as emotionally tormented as the young, yet socially forbidden to acknowledge it.

Flaubert said: "Everything must be learnt, from talking to dying." But who can teach us to die? There are, by definition, no old pros around to talk -- or walk -- us through it.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending any more, in discarding artifice.

Be thankful you're not dead

It's Thanksgiving Day in the United States. In the rest of the world, I gather, it's a regular day.

The real point of Thanksgiving seems to be to overeat, spend time with family members, and rest up for shopping tomorrow (big sales start in a few hours).

My wife has made a couple of pumpkin pies. I've got a vegan Tofurky cooking in the oven. There's thankfulness pouring out of every pore of our daily newspapers and Internet news sites.

I'm not big on holidays. I don't like following a societal script. Be thankful on Thanksgiving. Be worshipful on Christmas. Be patriotic on the Fourth of July.

Well, maybe I don't feel like it.

Today, though, it happens that I was planning to write about a subject that can be easily fitted into the thankfulness theme. To me, it's the ultimate -- and foundational -- "thank you." Because without it no other appreciation can be offered.

Be thankful you're not dead. Or, put more positively, Be thankful you're alive.

Any other sort of thanks fades into insignificance compared to this. I've harped on this theme in other blog posts. I'll almost certainly do so again. The reason:

Many times a day now, not continuously but frequently, I'm struck by a sensation that isn't a feeling, or a thought, or a perception, or an understanding, or any other categorizable content of my consciousness.

Rather, it's more an overarching knowing about what awaits my consciousness. And everybody else's.

Death.

Which, given my churchlessness, is a word that carries with it a big fat series of question marks, extending into infinity.

??????????????????????????????????... No comforting assurance of continued aliveness anywhere along the line.

I used to shun this honest assessment of what likely awaits me after my last breath and heartbeat. Namely, nothing.

Instead, I clung onto conceptions that told me, "Reincarnation is real. Or you might hit the karmic jackpot and do some soul-soaring after death, rising to a higher sphere where peachy-keen life will be yours forever."

Well, that'd be cool. But I'm not counting on it. And it's not what my existential gut is telling me -- the "this is it, dude, all there is" intuitive knowing.

For which I'm grateful.

Because if there's life after death, I'll take it. Gladly (more accurately, ecstatically). However, there's no way to know this will happen. And believing that it will dilutes the probably one-and-only life that each of us is living now.

Religious believers frequently say that life is meaningless if there is no God. Bullshit.

Actually, life is much more meaningful with no God, no belief in life after death, no expectation that heaven and hell are anything other than what is here and now.

This is hard to put into words.

What I experience in those knowing moments is a sense of wonder, of awe, of unimaginably deep appreciation for being alive -- because I realize that there won't be any more living for me to do, ever, than this lifetime.

Sometimes this makes me feel a sense of urgency to get going on important, significant, legacy-like things before death comes and they can't be done. Usually, though, I simply feel thankful that I'm able to do whatever I'm doing at the moment.

I just took the Tofurky out of the oven. I forgetfully tried to lift the glass cover off of the casserole with my bare fingers. Ouch!

The pain, however, was part of life. Ever so much existentially better than not existing at all.

And now I'm about to eat what appears to be a delicious vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner (though I didn't read the fine print on the Tofurky box and defrosted the dumplings before boiling them, so add another adjective, "misshapen," to "delicious" and "vegetarian").

There's a lot to be thankful for, no matter our life situation. The heartiest thanks should go to Life itself, however.

No need to posit a giver of life, such as God. No need to assume a continuation of life, such as reincarnation or salvation. No need to know our condition before we were born or after we are dead.

Now. Life. Living. Gratitude. That's it.

And it's plenty. In fact, perfect.

Death can't be imagined

What do you think will happen to you after you die? If you're religious, many answers are possible. "I'll be in heaven." "My soul will exist without a body." "God and I will be a single consciousness."

But even if you're a non-believer, there's a good chance that you still harbor notions of your continued existence.

Seemingly it's super tough, if not impossible, for the human mind to conceive of nothingness. We're hard-wired to imagine that we'll always be something, rather than nothing.

This is the premise of a fascinating Scientific American article by Jesse Bering, "Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death." Read it. You'll gain a fresh perspective on belief in an afterlife.

Bering says that new research casts doubt on the common notion that fear of death is what drives religious conceptions of immortality.

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

He presents evidence to support this thesis, including the fact that the younger children are, the more difficulty they have imagining that someone who has died really is dead -- meaning that the deceased has no awareness of anything.

If religion was the primary cause of belief in an afterlife, then we'd expect to find that people with more exposure to religious dogma would be less inclined to say, "After death, there's nothing" (and really mean it).

However, the situation isn't that simple. Bering says that our innate psychological inability to imagine non-existence forms the floor upon which forms of religiosity are built:

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.

I've spent a lot of time pondering death. But there's one thing I can't conceive of: what's it like to be incapable of conceiving. Even the idea of "nothing" is much more of a something than nothingness actually is.

I liked this quote from philosopher Thomas W. Clark. I also found it deeply disturbing (guess I like to be disturbed).

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

There's a lot more to like in the article. It challenges some ideas I've accepted rather uncritically.

Like, that deep sleep gives us a foretaste of death. "Hey, I was asleep much of the night and wasn't aware of anything, so how bad could death be if it's just like a really long sleep?"

Some Eastern mystics liken enlightenment to the state of dreamless sleep. I've always wondered what's so great about not being conscious of an elevated consciousness. If I'm not aware of my expanded awareness, what's the point?

Bering points out that when you wake up and say to yourself, "I experienced dreamless deep sleep last night," you're not telling the truth.

For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”

Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”

So death is a mystery. We can't begin to imagine what not-existing would be like, because all we know is existence. Our imagination fills the can't begin to imagine void with beliefs about an afterlife.

Those ideas are comforting, and God knows, people need all the comfort they can get in a world that can be so harsh, painful, and cruel.

We just shouldn't fool ourselves: Nothing is the most likely non-something that we're going to be after death.

Since that is impossible to imagine, we should recognize our psychological blind spot for what it is -- and not mistake it for a grand spiritual vision.

My response to offer of eternal life

Sometimes the notion of dying scares me to death. Like I said in "Who has the best deal on death?" it isn't the dying that bothers me so much, it's the not existing. Forever.

A few days ago "Teacher" left a comment on that post, offering me a darn good deal. (I apologize for not replying sooner, Teacher; I've been busy dealing with some neighborhood land use issues.)

As I have taught others, it would not be impossible to teach You how you may transform yourself into a Neo Being with eternal life and preserved consciousness, as in "Brian will always be Brian".

Sounds great. But…

My first reaction was that I took up a similar offer in 1971, when I was initiated by an Indian guru, Charan Singh, into the Sant Mat / Radha Soami Satsang Beas system of meditation.

Supposedly the guru took up residence in his radiant form at my third eye, and was going to guide me through inner regions of consciousness until I realized my true nature as pure soul: undying, eternal, formless, pure vibrational energy.

Never happened.

Doesn't mean it won't (I still meditate every day, though not in the same fashion as before). However, the thirty-five years or so I spent pursuing eternal life in that fashion makes me wary of practices that sound similar.

Namely, learning how to transform one's consciousness under the direction of a teacher, or guru.

Now, it isn't learning from a teacher that concerns me. I learn Tai Chi from an instructor. I learn ballroom dance from an instructor. I've got no problem learning from someone who knows more about something than I do.

It's the nature of the relationship with a teacher that has to feel right. I jumped from traditional Shotokan karate to a more flexible mixed-arts style partly because I got tired of the "sensei is always right" attitude. I liked being able to ask questions, to talk back, to not have to follow rigid formalities.

So my response to Teacher is: sure, tell me what you've got. If you don't want to share it publicly, you can email me via the link at the top of the left sidebar.

Hopefully the practice can be communicated from a distance. I no longer travel for spiritual inspiration. And I don't believe in paying for it, so when Teacher asked what I had to offer, I thought "Not money, for sure."

I guess what I have to offer any teacher, such as my Tai Chi and dance instructors, is diligence. When I study something, I take it seriously. I pay attention in class; I jot down notes afterward; I practice (though my wife and I have been slacking off on dancing during the summer).

The way I see it, if a consciousness-changing practice truly is scientific, as Teacher describes the process of becoming a "Neo Being" to be, it should be able to be communicated without a lot of mystic mumbo-jumbo.

Or, if it truly flows from some divine source, one would think that it could be transmitted directly to someone – in a vision, dream, spark of inspiration, satori, whatever you want to call it.

Anyway, tell me more, Teacher, if you like. I'm always open to new ideas. I liked "The Matrix," so all the talk of Neo Being sounds pretty cool. What I have to offer is…interest.

Who has the best deal on death?

I'm not religious (obviously), but I still could sign up on the faith dotted line if I was assured of getting a good deal on death.

Which would be, basically: living forever. That's the worst part about death for me, not existing. I can handle the dying part. It's the likelihood of an eternal non-afterlife that sort of bugs me. (Actually, quite a bit more than "sort of.")

So I decided to read "How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife" to get a better idea of what sorts of salvation bargains are out there.

I've only read five chapters so far. Each is written by a expert in that religion, so it's nice to get the straight scoop from a true believer. The faiths I've learned about are: Assemblies of God, Baha'i, Baptist, Buddhism, and Unitarian Universalism.

As you can probably tell, the nineteen faith chapters are presented in alphabetical order in the book. I jumped ahead to Unitarian Universalism for a couple of reasons.

One, when I took the Belief O'Matic test a few days ago, I scored 100% on Unitarian Universalist – probably because I answered "don't know" to many of the questions. This bothered me a bit, because I used to be solidly Pagan, and that's a cooler-sounding faith.

Two, my wife's sister and her husband go to a Unitarian fellowship, and I like the sound of it. I could probably become a Unitarian if the group in our area didn't have such Christian overtones (every Unitarian group has its own style, I gather).

Unfortunately, I didn't find a whole lot reassuring about my death and afterlife in the Unitarian Universalist chapter, which, not surprisingly, is one of the shortest in the book.

Unitarian Universalists accept a scientific view of life and see life as lived in the here and now rather than in the hereafter. Whether or not Unitarian Universalists are agnostic about the existence of God, they tend to be agnostic about the existence of an afterlife…We simply admit that we do not know whether or not there is an afterlife.

Well, that's no fun. True, but not very helpful for my aspiration to eternal life at the right hand of Whoever or Whatever. So I went back to the beginning of the book. There I learned about two Christian faiths, Assemblies of God and Baptist.

It's easy to see why Christianity has taken off, believer-wise. Christians get a damn good deal on the afterlife, for not much cost. Basically you just have to believe in Jesus.

Assemblies of God: Death for us is simply transition into the presence of our Lord Jesus where we will share the joys of heaven…The believer who accepts and follows Christ is saved for eternity and retains his same personal identity…From the Bible we see also that we will recognize each other there [in heaven]. We shall know our friends and relatives. We shall enjoy fellowship with the saints of old time.

Baptist: Heaven and hell are conceived of as places where the redeemed and the damned either receive their rewards and undergo eternal felicity or are alienated from God. In one, there is the fellowship with God; in the other, the possibility of fellowship does not exist. The one is characterized by mansions, golden streets, home and reunion with loved ones; the other by outer darkness, fire, torment and isolation.

Hmmmm. Which to pick? Again, I can understand why so many people jump on the Christian train, since supposedly it's headed straight for the promised land – and it doesn't take along anyone but believers.

But, it's not for me.

So I moved on to the Baha'i faith. This felt quite familiar, as Baha'I is based on the teachings of a modern day incarnation of God, just as the Sant Mat faith that I followed for about thirty-five years is. In the 1800s Baha'u'llah revealed the way it is, death and afterlife wise.

There is, from a Baha'I view, but one physical experience for each soul – Baha'is do not believe in transmigration or reincarnation.

By becoming a Baha'I, one is not necessarily assured of salvation or of becoming more spiritual than someone who is not a Baha'i. But Baha'is believe that God has designated Baha'u'llah's teachings as the source of salvation of mankind for this dispensation, a period which shall endure for at least 1000 years. Therefore Bahai's also believe that the best means for the transformation and ascent of the human soul can presently be found in recognizing the station of Baha'u'llah and in following the guidance he has revealed.

Oh, great.

I spent more than three decades following the teachings of another messenger of God, and now I learn that I picked the wrong one. Plus, I'm never going to have another physical existence, so I'm screwed unless I get on board the Baha'I ship pronto.

Problem is, how do I know that Baha'u'llah is the real deal? He makes the same claims as Sant Mat does for their gurus, and also pretty much as Christianity does for its "guru," Jesus. How to choose?

Buddhism offers a pleasingly universal conception of the cosmos. But it sure requires a lot more brain cells to comprehend. Compare this excerpt from the "Buddhism" chapter with the pithy Jesus saves.

Selflessness, in both sutra and tantra, does not mean persons do not exist at all. "Self" here does not mean the "you" or "me" of ordinary language but refers to an overly concrete and otherwise misconstrued existential status. Nothing – neither persons, places, Buddhas, nor enlightenment itself – exists inherently. But they do exist. Only the inherently independent existence attributed to them does not.

Well, Buddhism, I want to exist as me! Otherwise, what's the point? (Guess if I understood that point, I'd be enlightened.)

So the search continues for a religion or faith that (1) makes sense to me, and (2) offers up a terrific deal on death. All offers considered.

I've got fourteen more chapters to read. Maybe Zoroastrianism…

Death is a marvelous backdrop for life

First, kudos to Edward for his comment on my "Finding Meaning in Meaninglessness" post. Like follow kudo'er Adam, I love the line, I have found that my life is none of my business. A comment excerpt:

There is no reason to be sure of anything. My certainty changes nothing of how I engage the world. Even being sure that I know nothing actually impedes my effective participation.

I have found that my life is none of my business. I get that there are (at least) two things going on: what I think is happening; and what is happening. These coincide most when I let the thinking happen, and give it the same valence as dreaming.

This makes a lot of sense to me, which probably shows that I don't understand it. Regardless, all I have to work with is what's at hand. Me.

Who would like to genuinely feel that life is none of my business, because that would mean that death isn't my business either. As it stands, I envision death often – not my favorite subject, especially when I'm being tested on it.

Which I'm not right now, or I wouldn't be sitting here typing on my laptop. But every indication, sadly, points to the fact that one day I'll be taking the final exam.

A Barna Group survey found that about 8 out of 10 Americans believe in an afterlife of some sort. One out of 10 believe that there is no form of life after one dies on earth. And one out of 10 (9%, actually) said life after death may exist, but they weren't certain.

Count me in the uncertain 9%. A percentage that really should be 100%, since neither the 81% of afterlife believers nor the 10% of afterlife deniers can be sure what's going to happen after they die.

The question for me is, what attitude toward death fosters the most living while I'm alive?

Often religious believers say that believing Jesus, Buddha, Allah, God, Krishna, Guru, or whoever will meet them after death gives them peace of mind, contentment, happiness. Well, I'm sure it does.

So does cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy (the drug), alcohol, marijuana, and other ways of coating one's consciousness with a layer of Ah, everything's all right.

Nothing wrong with this. Nothing at all. Echoing Marx, I just see religious belief as another feel-good "opium." And the problem with most addictive substances is their long-term side effects, not their immediate gift of Ah…

More and more often I've been going along through my day and getting hit with an intuitive out-of-nowhere smack on the psyche: "Life isn't going to last. This could be your one and only living, guy. Not only isn't this moment ever going to come again, after death no moment may ever come again."

Strangely (or not) that smack ends up feeling more like a caress. I'm grateful for it. It's a wake-up call. Brian, don't sleep walk through life like you so often do. Pay attention!

Life shows up most clearly against a well-defined backdrop. Death. Non-life.

So do white clouds coursing across clear blue sky. Out here in Oregon we get a lot of gray clouds hanging below gray overcast. Not nearly so attractive.

When people believe they'll enjoy an afterlife while they're in the midst of this life, the imagined "to come" blends with the actual "this is." Their attention is split between immediate and anticipated experience.

"Ooh, I'd like to do that. But God won't be happy with me when I get to the Pearly Gates, so I'd better not."

Uncertainty about what will happen after death provides a pleasing neutral backdrop to life. It's a lot easier to make out the details of a piece of art when it's been painted on a blank canvas, not one that's already been drawn on.

It's a matter of taste. Some people enjoy the baroque. Dogmas fastened upon theologies attached to beliefs suspended on anticipations.

I'm more into simplicity (though often you couldn't tell this by looking at the top of my desk). A few flowers in an unadorned vase on a mostly bare shelf.

A few minutes ago I was reading the weekly Sisters, Oregon newspaper and came across a realtor's ad. She said, in bold letters:

I like living here. I do it all the time.

Nicely said.

Some people, though, live here and there – earth and heaven, reality and fantasy – simultaneously. Not advisable, if you really want to enjoy the neighborhood.

Morality thrives without belief in immortality

Why would believing in life after death make us act more morally?

Religions argue that if people didn't anticipate some sort of afterlife – the nature of which depends on behavior in this life – there'd be little motivation to do the right thing here on Earth.

To my mind, there's an even better argument in the other direction: a belief in immortality creates an atmosphere where life as it is here and now is disrespected, disparaged, and downplayed.

That's immoral.

A plane crashes. There's a disaster in a coal mine. A stray bomb kills innocent children. Religious believers say to themselves, "The victims have gone to a better place. They're in the hands of God/Allah/Guru/whoever now."

But what if the dead are just that: dead. They had one chance to live a life. And now it's gone.

How precious does life now seem? Does earthly existence appear to be more or less of a treasure if it's viewed as just a way station on a much longer journey?

I say, less. So if you want to foster a culture of life, don't believe that it continues after death. Nurture life now. Protect life now. Embrace life now.

Consider stem cell research. Or providing condoms to prevent AIDS. Or global climate change. Or any of a host of other social issues where action isn't taken to alleviate a clear and present problem partly because religion preaches that the focus should be on an unseen heaven rather than evident reality.

Since most people believe in the survival of a soul, there's a pervasive, if largely unconscious, attitude that what doesn't get done in this life can be taken care of later on.

Whether it's called karma or God's will, the notion is that whatever apparent wrongs are committed on Earth will be made right in another lifetime or state of existence.

Maybe. But "maybe" is a shaky foundation for morality. It'd be a heck of a lot better if people did what needed to be done out of a clear-eyed compassionate recognition of how life could be made better right here, right now.

If this life is all there is, it's infinitely precious. Every life cut short because of inadequate health care is a freaking tragedy. So is every life lost from any other preventable cause: war, famine, violence, accidents.

Yeah, I'm hearing the song in my head. Maybe you are too. Let's sing it together. And imagine.

[Update: Here's another argument against religion-based morality. There I was a few days ago, waiting at a red light to turn left. Watching kids at both ends of the crosswalk, I didn't immediately notice the left turn arrow turn green.

A nano-second later the guy behind me in an big extended cab pickup, with a large dog hanging out the passenger side window, honks his horn at me in my humble Prius. Not just once, as a signal, but twice -- as a sign of irritation.

I turn left. A ways down the street he floors his truck and passes me on the right, on a two lane road, just to show me, I suppose, how he's still pissed that I held him up for a few seconds.

This sort of behavior is rare in Oregon. I've seen drivers wait through an entire green light behind a car that didn't notice the signal had changed. I've done it myself.

I think, "I don't want to disturb that person unnecessarily. They'll probably notice the light soon. It's no big deal for me to wait a while." I don't act the way I do because of some religious commandment. It just seems right.

But what if a supposedly holy book that lots of people believed in said, "Thou shalt honk when a driver fails to start off immediately when the light changes."

An intuitive sense of right and wrong, which in Oregon at least (don't know about New York City) generally manifests as patience, would be replaced with an artificial code of behavior that isn't as caring and compassionate.

The idea that people are selfish creatures whose negative tendencies are held in check only by religious authority isn't borne out by facts. Our social nature, honed by evolution, urges us toward cooperation and mutual back-scratching.

Religion says "Love your neighbor." But we already knew and felt that. Religion also says, "Do this because you're told to." Man-made commandments get mistaken for genuinely moral principles, leading to religiously inspired craziness.]

Proof of life after death? Not yet.

If truth can't be found on Google, it must not exist. That's my cyberspace-centric view of reality. So here's the result of my hour or so of Googling the question: is there persuasive scientific evidence of life after death?

Short answer: no. As some commenters (one of whom was me) on my "Life is a mystery. Afterlife, ditto" post observed, if such evidence existed, it'd be trumpeted to the heavens – plus the front pages.

Now, quite a few people believe that scientists and the media are censoring evidence of life after death. Such as this guy.

There are two expert opinions as to what so-called paranormal phenomena are, but in this "free" country the British people are only allowed access to the explanation that is politically correct, the first version that is listed below, because it is no danger to the powerful religious and scientific establishments.

Huh? It's difficult to believe that scientists, who are as egotistical and ambitious as everyone else, are willfully ignoring evidence for what would be the biggest discovery of all time – the survival of individual consciousness.

And I'm not sure why religious authorities would be opposed to this truth being revealed either, though I suppose the monotheistic religions could be threatened by someone (maybe everyone) surviving bodily death without the aid of Jesus, Allah, or God.

So if evidence for life after death was as strong as believers in the paranormal and psychic phenomena make it out to be, we'd know about it.

For sure, web sites like the Survival Research Institute of Canada would feature that evidence. Yet I read:

Today there is a growing body of evidence suggestive of life after death, including near-death experiences, death-bed visions, spontaneous apparitions, and spirit communication through mediums. While personal survival of death has yet to be scientifically proven, the potential implications of the evidence to date for philosophy, psychology, science and religion are enormous.

OK, granted. Enormous isn't a big enough word. But let's also pay attention to other words here: "growing," "suggestive," "has yet to be," "potential."

What would it take for this evidence to become strong enough to pass over into a validated scientific theory? Hard to say. To me, there's a difference between (1) life after death and (2) consciousness separate from a body.

Seemingly brain-dependent consciousness could be capable of perceiving events that aren't known to the bodily senses. I don't know how this would happen, obviously, but extrasensory perception doesn't seem to necessarily imply survival of consciousness after death.

Still, near-death experiences are deeply interesting to most people – since we're all going to die without the "near" one day. It makes sense that coming close to death, and returning to tell the tale, would offer insights into the real deal.

I found a Scientific Evidence for Survival web site that was nicely organized. I haven't checked out the 53 categories of evidence very closely, but appreciated that links to supporting information (which I'd bet isn't entirely scientific) were included.

Nonetheless, even this site says:

A scientifically controlled NDE that can be repeated which provides such evidence would be the scientific discovery of all time. However, science does not yet have the exact tools to accomplish this. But, science is coming very, very close. This kind of evidence and others provide very strong circumstantial evidence for the survival of consciousness.

"Circumstantial." Another sign that even those who believe in the survival of consciousness after death recognize this can't be proven to skeptics.

TIME magazine ran an article in 2007, "The Science of Near-Death Experiences." I was curious to see what conclusions a mainstream news organization, armed with fact checkers and hyperbole averse editors, would come to.

Clearly, NDE's are a mystery. Much more needs to be learned about them.

A flat electroencephalogram (EEG) recording doesn't suggest mere impairment. It points to the brain having shut down. Longtime NDE researcher Pim van Lommel, a retired Dutch cardiologist, has likened the brain in this state to a "computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn't hallucinate. It couldn't do anything at all."

Yet it's in this period, between switch-off and resuscitation, that many researchers believe NDEs occur. "Many near-death experiencers describe heightened perceptions and clear thought processes, and form memories, at a time when the brain is incapable of coordinated activity," says Greyson, director of the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies. "Our current neurophysiological models can explain NDEs only if one ignores much of the empirical data."

Yet materialistic explanations still are credible.

Science is trying to solidify the brain-based theory of NDEs, which goes something like this: Survival is our most powerful instinct. When the heart stops and oxygen is cut, the brain goes into all-out defense. Torrents of neurotransmitters are randomly generated, releasing countless fragmentary images and feelings from the memory-storing temporal lobes. Perhaps the life review is the brain frantically scanning its memory banks for a way out of this crisis. The images of a bright light and tunnel could be due to impairment at the rear and sides of the brain respectively, while the euphoria may be a neurochemical anti-panic mechanism triggered by extreme danger.

The article's final paragraph pointed in a certain direction, but reflected the uncertainty of life, death, and consciousness.

On balance, it's almost certain that NDEs happen in the theater of one's mind, and that in the absence of resuscitation, it's the brain's final sound and light show, followed by oblivion. Nonetheless, there's still no definitive explanation. There mightn't be a ghost in the machine. But it's a machine whose complexities remain well beyond our grasp.

We don't know what happens after death. That bit of knowledge is worth keeping in mind. So long as we have one.

Religions should offer a better deal on death

Yesterday I spent part of a nice afternoon musing about a not-so-nice subject, death. And here I am doing it again, on an even sunnier and warmer Oregon day.

As I said in "Baby boomers confront the big 'boom,' death," dying is an unwanted intrusion into the pleasant pursuit of existing.

Dying wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't a likely nasty side effect: non-existence. Forever.

That'd be a bummer, to put it mildly (only good side is, I won't be around to be bummed out). So humans have invented religions to reduce anxiety about the hereafter.

Which is more properly called the nothingafter, given the dearth of solid evidence that life continues after death.

However, thinking like Donald Rumsfeld – absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence – religions fill the void in our knowledge of what awaits our last breath with some supposedly reassuring notions about the afterlife.

Problem is, those notions don't come close to fulfilling my fantasy of what I want to have happen after I die.

If religions did a better job in this department, I'd be more likely to embrace some fantastical theology. After all, I'm not against feeling good. If a religion could make me look forward to death, rather than dreading it, hey, I might sign up.

I've read a lot of books about the world's religions, but not this one. It's on order, so when I read it, maybe I'll find a fantasy-fulfilling faith that fills the bill.

I doubt it, though, based on what I know now.

Christianity. Kind of vague. The whole deal about the dead being raised bodily at the Second Coming – creepy. I'm not big on sticking with my current body for eternity. Heaven sounds better, but the Bible is distressingly imprecise about the conditions there. I need more info. before I make a reservation.

Islam. The 70 virgins thing sounds fine. However, don't you have to die as a martyr to get them? I'm also worried about the patriarchal sexism of the Islamic paradise. Not much, to tell the truth, but I need to say that in case my wife ever reads this post.

Judaism. Once I sat next to a Jewish couple on a long flight to Hong Kong. I was enthused about learning how Judaism views death. I asked them what they think will happen after they die. I was told, "Jews don't think much about that; we're into celebrating the holidays." Scratch another religion.

Hinduism. Reincarnation is appealing, for obvious life-loving reasons. I'd prefer to know that Brian is still alive though, instead of starting over as a new person. Or as an animal, which would seem to be a demotion. Likely I'd be reborn as my dog's pet, she becoming a human, given how much she owes me for the pampering I give her.

Buddhism. It can't decide whether the Buddha taught that a soul exists. I'm not wild about my karmic tendencies being reborn, but not me. Alternatively, Nirvana (like the Hinduish merging with Brahman) is supposed to be akin to a drop merging with the ocean. What's wrong with a drop staying a drop?

Neoplatonism. In the course of writing a book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus, I learned that he said it'd be ridiculous for Socrates, say, to cease being Socrates just when he attained what he'd been searching for: the One (a.k.a. God). Cool. I could embrace Neoplatonism (but wouldn't have much company).

Taoism. It bothers me that there's so many stories about Taoists trying to become immortal. If returning to the Tao is so wonderful, why do they want to postpone it? Also, Taoists do a lot of joking about death. That's fine, but I'd find dying more humorous after I'm assured that I won't really be dead.

Sant Mat. This religion with roots in north India was my faith for a long time. It says that we can keep on going in astral and causal forms after death, which sounds excellent. But reincarnation also is a distinct possibility. And in the end, there's the drop merging with the ocean thing – sure sounds like extinction to me.

Oh, yes. Just remembered that, like Islam, Sant Mat literature also talks about how the disembodied soul can be tempted by visions of the most luscious women (or men, depending on your taste) who offer up all sorts of astral sensual delights.

That always sounded great to me. But then I'd read that the disciple is supposed to turn away from all that and keep to the company of the astral form of a bearded old man, the guru. Yeah, right. Give me a choice, and I'll see what I do.

Bottom line: no religion offers up a perfectly pleasing vision of how I want to spend my afterlife. Plotinus' Neoplatonism comes closest, since his description of the non-physical Platonic realm of forms basically is "everything we enjoy here on Earth, but without the bad stuff."

I have to admit, though, that I'm not really sure what my ideal eternal existence would be like, even if I could design one from scratch.

I mean, forever is a long time. Even timelessness, an alternative to eternity, could get boring.

Looks like I'll have to take my chances with whatever death serves up. Not that there's any alternative. But like I often say before I meditate in the morning:

If there's any being out there who can bestow a pleasant life after death, make me an offer. My anti-religious sentiment could be discarded super fast in the face of a really real reality.

Embracing a Stoic view of death

Like I said at the end of my previous post about dealing with death, there isn't much to add to the philosophic options given to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

After all, there are only so many different ways of looking at reality. The ancients ran though them all. Metaphysical. Natural. Atomistic. Holistic. Rational. Mystical.

So when I found myself leaning toward a "nature knows what it's doing" attitude toward death, it didn't take me long to realize that I was walking on well-trod Stoic ground.

I love Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Aurelius was a Roman emperor who penned philosophic observations while campaigning against his enemies.

He's helped me get through a bout in the dentist's chair and frustrations with Microsoft. Granted, those aren't quite as serious a problem as death, but Stoicism is well-suited to coping with just about anything.

Because one of its main tenets is to focus on the thing itself, not our reaction to it. It's amazing how problems fade away when we don't spread our own mental crap on top of what's really going on.

"His ship sank."
"What happened?"
"His ship sank."

"He was sent to prison." But if you add the proposition "a terrible thing happened to him," then that is coming from you.

These quotes are from Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who Marcus Aurelius much admired. They're in Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel, translated by Michael Chase.

The "citadel" being referred to is what's under our control: the judgments we make about what's happening. Ships may sink. Jail doors may close. Death may be at hand.

Those are facts. How we look upon them is something different. The Stoic ideal is to see things as they are, not as how our imagination considers them to be.

An objective or adequate representation is one which corresponds exactly to reality, which is to say that it engenders within us an inner discourse which is nothing other than the pure and simple description of an event, without the addition of any subjective value-judgment.

"He was sent to jail.
What happened? He was sent to jail. But 'He is unhappy' is added by oneself [i.e., subjectively]"

Thus both Marcus and Epictetus draw a clear distinction between "objective" inner discourse, which is merely a pure description of reality, and "subjective" inner discourse, which includes conventional or passionate considerations, which have nothing to do with reality.

As I wrote about in my previous post, I (obviously) was very much alive when I began to envision my death. Even more, there wasn't anything or anyone threatening me. Certainly not the full moon.

The thoughts of death that produced such a disquieting feeling in me came from…me.

To a Stoic, it's natural to be startled by things that go bump in the night. And that includes self-induced bumps, such as One day I'm not going to exist anymore!

However, what happens next often is unnatural. We start talking to ourselves. This subjective inner dialogue imagines all kinds of things.

"Somebody's broken into the house. They're coming to get me." "Death is going to cast me into eternal nothingness. I'll be non-existent for eternity."

Who says? How do you know? What in the here and now supports these notions of there and then?

Often, if not usually, zilch. Nada. Nothing.

My anxiety about nothingness is rooted in nothing. Crazy.

Yet this is a reflection of the normal state of human affairs. We're always making up stories in our heads. We project plot lines both forward into the future and backward into the past, even though we're not in control of the action, nor do we have a view of the entire stage.

When death comes, die. Until then, live – in reality, not fantasy.

If we want to become aware of our true selves, we must concentrate upon the present. As Marcus puts it, we must "circumscribe the present," and separate ourselves from that which no longer belongs to us: our past words and actions, and our future words and actions. Seneca has already expressed this idea:

"These two things must be cut away: fear of the future, and the memory of past sufferings. The latter no longer concern me, and the future does not concern me yet."

Death shines under a full moon

Walking the dog last night, I turned around when we got to the path that leads to Spring Lake. A full, or almost full, moon had risen above the tree tops.

Clear and cold. No sounds. Moonshine on the fir trees. Beautiful.

I spoke to whoever the heck it is I talk to on such occasions. "Thank you. For letting me be alive. To be aware of this moment, right here, right now."

But my gratitude had a flip side. And it made an appearance almost immediately.

Because I couldn't help going on to envision my death. No more dog walks. No more moon-jestic Oregon nights. No more anything.

Just nothing. Except there wouldn't even be "nothing," because consciousness is needed to be aware of nothing, and death will take away that.

It was a familiar feeling. Like standing on the edge of an abyss, teetering, knowing you're going to fall. Probably not now. But eventually. Guaranteed.

Dread mixed with the gratitude. Existential emptiness lay under the full moon.

In the next twenty minutes, as dog and man continued their walk around the lake and back through the forest, I ran through the basic philosophic and religious tricks that death-fearing people have used throughout history to keep the heebie-jeebies at bay.

Deny reality. I thought, "It'd be great if I kept on living after I died. That'd solve everything." Problem is, I'm no longer capable of believing in comforting beliefs like that. I know what I'm up to: seeking reassurance to life's biggest problem – not living – by denying it exists. Scratch that trick.

Embrace the angst. I shifted gears to facing the prospect of nothingness head on. I tried to talk myself into a positive answer to "How bad could not-existing be if I'm not around to know it?" Going to sleep is pleasant enough. Never waking up adds in a decided creepiness factor, though. Good try, but not good enough.

Lower expectations. "Okay," I told myself. "Look at it this way. You've been alive for 59 years. It could have been zero. Every year, every day, every hour, every second you're conscious is an inconceivably precious opportunity or gift. Appreciate it, you ingrate. Instead of feeling bad that you won't live forever, feel good that you've been alive at all."

That last inner dialogue had the most effect on me. It bounced me back to the present moment, to hearing my boots crunch on the gravel on top of the dam, the distant hooting of an owl.

Fear of death requires the thought of dying. If I'm only aware of being here and now, the prospect of not being there and then can't arise.

After I got home and fed the dog, who is an excellent example of living in the moment – food! good! yum! sleep! – I mulled over a more refined version of my philosophy of death.

I was struck by how religions almost invariably view death as a obstacle to be overcome. We need our souls to be saved, our bodies to be resurrected, our karmic bonds of birth and rebirth to be broken.

But this presumes there's a problem, that nature, God, Tao, whoever or whatever runs the cosmos, has seriously screwed things up.

And it takes a savior, a guru, a god-man, a revelation, a miracle, to get life and death back in order.

Funny. Nobody talks this way about other laws of nature. Gravity seems to work just fine. Ditto with electromagnetism.

Sure, some people fall off high places and go splat. Others get electrocuted. But we accept that the universe is set up, law-wise, just the way it should be. It's our job to adjust to the laws of nature, not for them to change to suit us.

With death though, it's the opposite. We want to cheat death, to block its game plan, to derail the Grim Reaper train that's transporting us hell-bent to god-knows-where.

In short, to get a very special favor: not die. (Along with an enjoyable afterlife, thank you very much.)

Well, as with almost every other philosophical notion, the ancient Greeks and Romans got there first. A fact I reminded myself of this morning when I browsed through some Marcus Aurelius.

(to be continued…I hope)

Near death experience revelation: “No B.S.”

Today I talked with an old friend. We'd only spoken once before since our college days, when we were initiated on the same day in 1971 into the Indian mystic-religious faith of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

We're both heretics now, a comfortable state for each of us. He'd been perusing some of my Church of the Churchless posts and felt like giving me another call.

I'm glad he did. I enjoy conversations that start out with a bang, in this case with "I died this year." Yeah, that grabbed my interest. He had me at "I died."

Which was true.

And disturbing, because he's a few years younger than me, and I don't like to hear about guys having heart attacks at 57, since I'm 59. Especially when they've been a vegetarian for as long as I have (thirty-seven years), had normal cholesterol, and no symptoms of heart disease.

Well, life happens. That was the main theme of our conversation. What is, is. Deal with it. There's always only one thing going on: what's going on.

Wishing, thinking, believing, hoping – nothing makes any difference, except the one thing that's actually happening. In this case, a heart attack.

He had just enough time to dial 911 before falling unconscious. In the ambulance his heart stopped. He was resuscitated (obviously). Not many people with this sort of coronary blockage survive. He did.

Naturally I wanted to know what he felt, aside from a lot of pain, after the heart attack hit. He'd once been a believer. Now he wasn't.

Did he get any inkling of what happens after death from coming so close to dying? Nope. He told me that he wasn't scared after he realized what was happening. He just knew that soon, real soon, he might stop existing. Forever.

Or, not. He might live on in some other non-bodily state. There wasn't any sense that one was more likely than the other. Just that either was a possibility, and either was all right.

What is, is. When you're dead, you're dead. When you're not dead, you're not dead. Pretty darn simple.

We agreed, happy heretics that we are, that having faith in life after death or salvation won't make any difference when the last breath or heartbeat comes. It isn't faith that is going to rule at that point, but reality.

Descriptions of near death experiences sometimes are exceedingly sickly religiously sweet. The person who has drifted to the Other Side and come back to tell his or her tale talks about being filled with light, the glorious presence of Jesus, or some other life-altering experience.

So it was refreshing to have my friend tell me that the big difference in him now is that he's utterly unwilling to put up with B.S. Bullshit, for those unfamiliar with American slang abbreviations.

That's understandable. If you've gotten that close to not existing for forever, which he thinks is the most likely destination after death, I can see why you wouldn't be interested in frittering your remaining life away on meaningless crap.

The question is, of course, why any of the rest of us would want to do that either. For me, that includes not putting up with religious crap – beliefs, concepts, imaginings, superstitions and such with no connection to here-and-now reality.

I enjoyed hearing about someone coming this close to dying, and remaining as confident that there's no life after death as he was before.

Not that I wouldn't like there to be life after death. Just as he would.

But we agreed that it's much better to live life fully, right here and right now at every moment, than to live partly here and now, and partly there and then – in an imaginary anticipation of what will happen in the next life, and what God or the guru requires of us so that we'll enjoy the afterlife.

Enjoyment is now. Life is now. Reality is now. Awareness is now. Experience is now. There and then will only be true when it comes into the here and now.

What is, is. Including B.S.

But we don't have to put up with it. Or have to nearly die in order to realize this.

Death no big deal to most over 50

I rarely pick up the AARP magazine, but a stint in my eye doctor's waiting room got me reading "Life After Death." The article describes the results of a poll that asked people over 50 questions about death, religion, heaven/hell, reincarnation and such.

Death scares me. Not as much now as it used to, but I've still got a primal fear of not-existing.

Looks like I don't have a whole lot of company, since only 20% agreed that "Thinking about my own death and what happens to me after I die scares me."

Interestingly, the somewhat religious were more afraid of death (25%) than the very religious (16%) or not at all religious (13%). Uncertainty breeds fear, it seems.

Given that 94% believe in God, it isn't surprising that 88% of those polled believe they'll be in heaven after they die. However, those responding said that just 64% of all people get to heaven.

Only 17% thought that people who don't believe in Jesus Christ go to hell, which is lower than I would have expected. In fact, just 29% said that believers in Jesus enter in to heaven. This points to less fundamentalism among American Christians than is generally believed to exist.

Another sign: 23% believed in reincarnation. The article quotes Jeffrey Burton Russell, a historian:

If you took this study 50 years ago, the belief in reincarnation would be down at about one percent. Generally, the traditionally clear Christian vision of Heaven has declined, while the vaguer visions of the continuation of life have taken its place.

Sounds like a good trend to me. I can understand why people seek reassurance from their religion that death won't be the final chapter in the story of their existence. The End isn't an appealing final plot twist.

But divisiveness and intolerance sprout when visions of an exclusive heaven dance through religious heads, the gates to paradise thought to be open only to a select few.

So it was nice to learn that just 40% believe heaven is "a place," while 47% say it is a state of being. I wonder, though, where you reside after death in your state of heavenly being. No place? Placelessness? Every place?

(Detailed poll results are in a PDF file here).

Salvation isn’t so serious to me anymore

Here's something curious (or, maybe not). Back in my fundamentalist days – yes, there's Eastern fundamentalism also – I was deeply concerned about my salvation.

I felt just like Woody Allen:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Yet now that I've evolved to a more open and non-dogmatic form of spirituality, I don't obsess nearly as much over whether I'll live on after I die. Or in what fashion my rebirth will occur, should that be in the cards for me.

So when I was nominally more religious, a true believer in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) branch of Sant Mat, I was seriously worried about what was going to happen to this ego-encapsulated being known as "Brian."

Yet isn't religiosity supposed to make you humble and egoless? I got to thinking about this after reading the July 2007 issue of the Western USA RSSB newsletter:

Sant Mat tells us…We have the opportunity to attain immortality…jivan mukhti, salvation before death.

Well, my first thought was "how can you be saved before you die?" I can see how you could believe you're saved from hellfire, rebirth, or whatever before your physical death.

However, until you actually die, that's just a hypothesis. Death is the ultimate spiritual experiment. It separates truth from falsehood cleanly, just like that!

My second thought was, "immortality sounds nice, but if it doesn't happen, that's OK too." As if I had a choice in the matter.

I was struck by how calmly I could accept precious little me being gone forever, imaginatively at least (hold a gun to my head and my reaction might be quite different).

Again, isn't this curious? Religious people fret over whether they're doing everything just right to ensure their personal salvation. This points to a Me-Me-Me mentality.

I know, because I once had it. And knew many others with the same "Thank god I'm saved, while others aren't" mentality.

That seems self-centered to me now. Plus, it doesn't show much faith in the goodness, justice, and harmony of the cosmos.

With my current Taoist sensibility, I'm pretty much content to accept that what will be, will be. I'm not looking for any special salvationary treatment.

On a Metolius river walk today, I came across a natural bridge that spanned the water.

Another stopped halfway. But the end of it displayed a burst of beauty.

I don't know which comes closest to being an analogy for what happens when we die. Do we fall into deep waters, never to rise again, or do we cross to another side?

Whichever, it seems to me that flowing along with whatever comes along is the best (and, really, only) course of action.

“Body Worlds 3” helps death lose some of its sting

Yesterday afternoon I spent two hours looking at dead bodies. Plastinated ones, so skillfully presented and preserved the smallest nerves and tendons could be seen.

I got tickets to Body Worlds 3 at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland because it was my wife's birthday. Laurel wanted to see the exhibition. I wasn't as wild about the idea, given that I've got this decided preference for existing rather than not-existing.

I've also been known to ask our estate planning attorney, "Instead of saying When Brian dies…, could you substitute When Brian gerbils…? We'll know what you mean, and I won't get so anxious."

Well, maybe I'm making some progress in accepting death. For I had no problem spending quite a bit of time with dead bodies that let it all hang out.

Also, upside down.

The main thing I learned from the exhibition was this: we're meat. Strip away our skin and humans look an awful lot like what you see in a butcher shop. Which shouldn't be surprising, because we're animals.

Animals, however, who can think about death and dying.

All sorts of people, young and old, toured Body Worlds 3 along with us. I was perusing a display about hip degeneration when I noticed an older woman with a cane looking at the bones with more interest than me. Understandably.

Another woman reclined in a motorized wheelchair, accompanied by a friend. Her body wasn't working so well either. Each of us is going to join that club one day, no matter how healthy we are at the moment. Death is an efficient equalizer.

As I walked from display to display, looking at dead bodies in astoundingly creative poses, moving along with other mortals, each of whom eventually was going to end up in the lifeless state we were so fascinated by, I felt a bond with my fellow OMSI-goers.

Now and then I'd interact with a person next to me, asking a question or making a comment. It was easier to reach out to a stranger than it would be, say, at an art exhibit. We all had a lot in common: being alive, after which we'll be dead.

The creator of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagen, wants this to be more than an anatomical learning experience. He says:

The human body is the last remaining nature in a man made environment. I hope for the exhibitions to be places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self recognition, and open to interpretation regardless of the background and philosophy of life of the viewer.

Scattered throughout the exhibit were quotations from great thinkers about death. I appreciated that, being a philosophical sort. I especially appreciated some quotes from Seneca and Epicurus.

Via a Google cache, I located the Body World Seneca passage.

Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering will not extend. It will return us to that condition of tranquility, which we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn. Death is neither good nor evil, for good or evil can only be something that actually exists. However, whatever is of itself nothing and which transforms everything else into nothing will not at all be able to put us at the mercy of Fate.

Makes sense. I don't fret over my state of nonexistence prior to my birth. Why, then, should I get hot and bothered over my not existing after I'm dead? I won't be around to be bothered then. As for now, I'm still alive.

This was pretty much the same argument in the Epicurus quote, which I wasn't able to locate verbatim online. Here's the chain of logic, though. (And here's a similar Epicurus sentiment).

(1) Death is annihilation.
(2) The living have not yet been annihilated (otherwise they wouldn't be alive).
(3) Death does not affect the living. (from 1 and 2)
(4) So, death is not bad for the living. (from 3)
(5) For something to be bad for somebody, that person has to exist, at least.
(6) The dead do not exist. (from 1)
(7) Therefore, death is not bad for the dead. (from 5 and 6)
(8) Therefore death is bad for neither the living nor the dead. (from 4 and 7)

OK. I'm convinced. But I'd still rather be alive than dead.

But wait. I am! Cool.

And Oregon State just won the College World Series. Again. It's a great time to be alive.

Of course, any time is.

Coping with death and the fear of non-existence

I got an email from someone who'd read my "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." She said:

I completely understand where you are coming from. I have been having the very similar thoughts more recently.

It completely numbs me up. I often need to choke/scream out aloud to bring myself back to sanity.

These days I sometimes fear the thought of having that feeling even.

I was wondering whether you have developed a coping mechanism? Or can share anything else with me about how it is/has been affecting you.

I am very much looking forward to your response. I haven't been able to completely relate to anyone else who is as overwhelmed as I am about these thoughts of non-existence.

Here's my open letter back to her:

-----------------------------------------

My friend in fearing non-existence, the first (and maybe most important) thing I want to say to you is bravo! Pat yourself on your trembling back. Embrace your shivering self.

Really. I'm not making light of the panic you've been feeling. I'm just suggesting that you deserve kudos for looking into the depths that most people shy away from.

I realize this isn't of your own doing, in a sense. I mean, the thoughts you've been having about dying and not existing, forever, spring from a source beyond your conscious self.

If you're like me, the thoughts about death that you're able to share with others arise from an unsharable experience. You're looking into a void of non-being that shakes you to the core. Nothingness can do that. It penetrates every defense.

As crazy as this may sound, from my perspective you're fortunate. So am I. We've had glimpses of an ultimate reality. Most people live their lives firmly within the bounds of the familiar. You've peered over the edge of everyday existence.

And what you saw scared you. Understandably.

But here's the thing: that experience is yours, just as my experience is mine. It is real, since it exists. Yet it isn't part of the fabric of objective reality in the way that the computer I'm typing these words with is. Using my mind, I can't make my computer disappear. However, fear is much more malleable.

Understanding that, I've been learning to cope with my own primal fear of non-existence. Well, "cope" sounds too negative. "Embrace" is more like it. I'm grateful for the soul-shuddering anticipation of death that I've had. It's given me the opportunity to live more vividly.

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.

I still sleepwalk through life more than I should. But feeling death's fingernails on my spine makes me more awake than I would be otherwise. For that, I'm grateful.

I spend some time every day meditating. Basically, I try to die. Not physically, mentally. I want to get as close as possible to what I fear the most: not existing as the person I am now. I've found that the terror of non-existence is strongest when I fear the fear.

When I say, "bring it on," whatever or whoever is responsible for the terror I've felt holds it back. Kind of strange. But not really. Like most fears, running away enlivens the threat. Staring it down makes it shrink away.

This doesn't have to be an aggressive posture. Sometimes I speak to non-existence in more of a "teach me" tone. Looking into the primal emptiness that each of us is familiar with, I sense that it's both highly repellent and highly attractive.

Religion, mysticism, and philosophy are worlds apart from the raw experience of what's been numbing you. And at times in my life, me. Words can't help us. I've been told by well-meaning friends, "Why be afraid of death when you won't be around after you die?"

I appreciate their intention to soothe. However, I've found that the light of reasonable words, no matter how bright, doesn't touch the darkness lying on the other side of my last breath. I'll enter it alone when I die, and I've got to deal with the anticipation of it in my own fashion while I'm alive.

You too. So all I'm doing here is sharing how I've been dealing with my fear of death. Your way might be very different from mine. Trust your heart. Don't hesitate to go where you're drawn, even if you're the only one on that path.

That said, I'll close by reiterating what has worked best for me: putting out a welcome mat for what I wish would never show up at my door.

Death comes for us all. I can either peek through the curtains of my life with fear and trembling or say to my eventual visitor, "Let's get acquainted as best we can now." For I'm pretty sure that if I could rehearse some mini-dying, the maxi-dying of my final performance will go more smoothly.

Sitting quietly in my meditation closet, I enjoy closing my eyes and simply saying to myself, "I am." Or, when the saying has run its course, even more simply experiencing non-verbally what those two words point to.

I try to leave aside all the descriptors that could be added to "I am… ." A man. An American. An agnostic. A husband. A father. A blogger. A Tai Chi student. A person who muses about death and the primal fear of non-existence.

Somehow, the less I feel myself to be, the more being I seem to feel. Whether this points to some sort of survival after death, I don't know. Naturally, I hope so.

Regardless, I know that "I am" for the moment. How many moments more, I don't know. That's not up to me. As a song I remember from the '50s said, "What will be, will be." Yes.

I'm grateful that I've been able to have the experience of being. Anything.

I could not have been at all. Which would have meant that I never would have had to worry about dying. But I'm happy to trade that worry for living my fifty-eight years.

Today I saw two Canadian geese land on the lake that I walk our dog around most afternoons. They flew low over our heads, honking. Fluttering down onto the water, they started in on what might have been some sort of goose mating dance.

Beats me. I'd never seen anything quite like it before. One goose would flap its way along the surface, honking like crazy. Then the other would catch up to it, echoing its cry. And so they went across the lake, water splashing, engaged in early spring goose living.

I felt a tear begin to form. A tear of gratitude. I too was alive. And able to be part of life.

For a moment, that was enough.

It may well be, for every moment that is enough.

[Next day update: In the course of completing a compilation of Church of the Churchless posts, I just came across "I'm alive. Wow!" It echoes what I was trying to say at the end here, perhaps more clearly.]

Keeping it real: facing death without God

You'd seen most of your family killed with machetes and guns.

You'd been taken away, marched to the edge of a pit with some other abductees, and left for dead after bullets missed you.

You'd spent hours trying to climb out of the pit, stumbling through blood and guts.

Somehow you survived. You made it from Rwanda to England. Now you want to tell your tale. You can't write in English very well. You need the help of a writer who works with refugees.

Last night I saw Sonja Linden's "I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda" performed by the Salem Repertory Theatre. It was, in a word, remarkable.

Our front row seats offered us an intimate view of Renee Noonan and Ted deChatelet, who played Juliette (the Rwandan) and Simon (the writer).

Linden's play is founded on the reality of an actual woman from Rwanda who saw her family murdered. She sought both healing and a testimonial act in writing about it.

The play is powerful.

Watching Noonan, a marvelous actress, become Juliette for ninety minutes, I was struck by how "acting" of this sort is a misnomer. Noonan's voice, expressions, and mannerisms exactly reflected what she was experiencing. The inside of Noonan/Juliette also was the outside—no evident difference.

By contrast, I'm frequently (if not usually) presenting a face to the world that differs from my subjectively experienced visage. If I'm angry, I try to hide it. If I'm happy, I try to tone down my exuberance. If I'm anxious, I try to appear calm.

With Juliette, what you saw was what she was. When she was sad, it showed. When she was joyful, it showed. Actress Noonan showed this audience member what it is like to not act as anything other than what you are.

Similarly, Juliette dealt with death as it was. There wasn't a single mention of God. Nor, to my recollection, any "why?"

God and why? are meaningless concepts when Hutu killers have been led to your Tutsi family door by a neighbor you considered a good friend, and the U.N. troops you hoped would be protectors ended up firing their guns only at dogs chewing on corpses.

Juliette looked death in the face. She didn't pretty it up, nor did she uglify it. In a moving scene, she lights a candle for each of the family members who were killed.

I liked how she talked about them as realistically as she faced death. They were human beings, not saints. She liked some things about her relatives; she didn't like other things.

Juliette never doubted her feelings. She spoke and lived from the heart, teaching her teacher, Simon, how to write more honestly, just as he was urging her to do the same (the first draft of her book was dry description; Simon drew out from her the perspective of the person behind the describing).

Death is scary. In Rwanda, for almost a million people it was brutal, nasty, painful. To be afraid of dying in that way (or indeed, any way) is normal. To be afraid of being afraid—that's an unnecessary complication.

Just as feeling bad about feeling bad is. Or doubting your doubt. Or being anxious about your anxiety. Reality is best lived simply, not complexly.

There weren't any answers in "I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda." Nor were there any questions. Death doesn't deal in Q and A's.

It is what it is: ugly and beautiful, bad and good, terrifying and delightful, an ending and a beginning. Juliette engaged with death in an authentically human fashion, head-on, with no turning away toward a mythical God or imaginary afterlife.

May we all be so bold. And so honest.

Living in the now

What if this is all that there is? This. Right here, right now. A succession of moments in the physical world. After we die: nothing. No more “this.”

As I so often repeat here at the Church of the Churchless, I don’t know. I sure hope there is life after death. As Woody Allen put it, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work I want to achieve it through not dying.”

But here’s another Woody Allen quote: “You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

Recently a friend, Randy, and I shared some thoughts via email about Eckhart Tolle and his “The Power of Now” philosophy. A while back I started to read the book but it didn’t grab me. With over 600 mostly positive Amazon reader reviews, obviously a lot of other people resonate with his message.

As they should. I fully agree with Tolle’s prescription for a happy, fulfilling, and enlightened life. It’s just the way he packaged his “be here now” advice that left me literarily listless.

I told Randy that the mystic spiritual path we both were initiated into many years ago has some failings. Like most other religions, it preaches withdrawal from this world in the hope of entry into a better one. I said:

Sant Mat seems to emphasize a "this world is shit, get out of it" mentality. That may be good advice, but the downside is that it encourages people who already are depressed, withdrawn, unsocial, etc. to embrace their dysfunction. I've come to think that it'd be a cruel joke if this world really is all that there is--no life after death--yet so many religious people end up trying to ignore it in the hope that heaven will be their reward for detachment.

It seems strange that God would choose to create our physical universe, and then desire above all that souls escape from it. In Islamic thought we are told, “God was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known.” Meaning, creation is the observable manifestation of hidden divinity.

So why not enjoy God’s gift? Fully. Enthusiastically. Passionately. Every day I sit for an hour or so in meditation with closed eyes and ears, trying to tune in to whatever may lie beyond the physical. But the rest of the time I seek to drink in the sights, sounds, and other perceptions of materiality.

Why ignore what is here now? This. If this is all that there is, then every earthly moment is infinitely precious, for there is no infinity to look forward to. Yet even if there will be life after our deaths, it still seems that each moment is to be richly savored, for it never will come again.

God may have other sorts of existences ready for us, but this present earthly one is the gift to be enjoyed now.

I don’t usually listen or agree with Dr. Laura. However, while station-surfing as I was driving around this afternoon I heard this radio psychotherapist advise a woman with a sexual problem: “You don’t want to die, looking back, at 102 and think of all the nights of passion you’ve missed.”

Today I spent a highly enjoyable hour watching belly dancers with evident joie de vivre and listening to Middle Eastern music at Salem’s World Beat Festival.

Yes, God certainly has given us lots of treasures. When you’re married, though, there’s a limit to what can be known about some of them.

[Tomorrow I'll probably post more belly dancing photos on my HinesSight weblog. Yesterday's post was about a less-joie de virvre'ly first day at the World Beat Festival.]