Dying

It’s amazing to me that so few people think deeply of Death. Has no one else around ever watched a loved one pass on? Doesn’t anyone wonder where they went, what they are feeling now, what the experience was like for them? Doesn’t everyone lie awake for hours at night wondering if the next heartbeat will be the last? Don’t you wonder what comes next? Death is not the most popular dinner table conversation topic--are we all so afraid of it that we cannot even talk about it openly? As soon as you bring up the subject you get half the group running for cover and the other half retreating to religion. I have an old friend who has worked for many years with hospice care and has assisted with many deaths. She is the only one I know who can talk extendedly and openly about the subject, yet she also needs to use a certain professional detachment much of the time—the subject is just too awesome and belief-shaking and close to the heart.

For many, I suppose, the stories they learned in Sunday school will carry them through; they may have their beliefs tested, but not shaken. It is much simpler to believe in the souls who have passed just going to a nice new place and walking around in robes and sandals playing a harp. It is hard to avoid constructing your explanation of the universe in terms of places and dimensions. For me too, Sunday school lessons anestheticized the inborn fear of death for a large portion of my life, but they started breaking down when I started really thinking. I also always laughed at the silliness of those 19th century séances one reads about. I wondered how anyone could be so gullible as to allow themselves to be fooled by fake voices and knocks under the table. But the desire, the need, to communicate with those loved ones who have gone is indeed very powerful. It would make many people do almost anything if there could be a shred of belief. The person who was there talking to you one day has entered a new place and why can’t you talk any more? It is all very strange and our well-rehearsed interpretations of reality break down in the face of it. Talk to almost anyone who has been in the presence of one who is passing on and you will hear many strange stories—strange in that they are outside our accepted everyday experience, outside the simple explanations that our rationality gives us, unrelatable to the stories we have learned to use to give substance to the world. You will hear of visions, animals appearing at doors, voices, lights, dreams, sudden feelings. Many things surround the passing of a human soul, few of them susceptible to scientific explanation.

At the present time they are building CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. It will be the largest particle accelerator ever imagined, 17 miles in diameter. There have been fears among the less scientific of us that when switched on it will create a miniature black hole that will swallow the Earth. When asked about this by a journalist, the physicist who is in charge of the project dropped his pen on the table and said, “This pen should fall right through the table—the distance separating its atoms is so vast, why don’t the atoms of the pen just slide past the atoms of the table? Theoretically they could, if they were lined up just right, but they don’t. The chances of a black hole forming are about the same.” We depend a great deal on our senses to create a model of the universe that we use as our working hypothesis of how things “are”. It is of course just one possible explanation out of an infinitude of explanations. This Newtonian sort of world view works well to interpret the trajectory of a basketball, pound nails, to take you to the grocery store, to live your Earthbound life. But it doesn’t do well to explain where your loved friend or mother “goes” after her voice stops and her eyes go away.

Science is not the enemy in this story. There are clues that leak even into the supposed rationality of modern science that give away the game—for example, try to grasp an everyday rational understanding of quantum mechanics or try to contemplate the Big Bang (all matter existed in one unidimensional point? Whoof!) Or study the human mind-body relationship--everything psychologists learn about human (and animal) perception leads to the conclusion that there are many Truths, that all perceptions are subjective, that the only certain thing is that everything must be doubted. To the Buddhists and those in the Yogic tradition, the world of perception is a fantasy, a veil of imagery that must be let down to see the real Truth which is that there is none. To gain release from the fantasy, the dream-we-take-to-be-the-world, (which is often a bad dream full of pain), one must learn to dissolve like salt in the ocean of all possible truths, to ignore the 6 senses, the 12-fold causal chain, to let one’s atoms fall through the table. One “must”—but of course all such words and concepts are part of the illusion, so . . . ?

gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate bodhi svaha