I've been keenly intrigued by the phenomenon of death, (in a very subjective sense), since at least the summer before my senior year in high school. I had gone to Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado, with a number of friends to see a half dozen rock bands in concert, including Lynerd Skynerd touring on their Street Survivors album, which contained the monster hit single "That Smell," with it's prescient refrain "the smell of death's around you," (a few members of the band and crew were killed in a plane crash just a couple months later). On the way home from the show early the next morning, I was sleeping with my girlfriend in the camper shell in the back of a pickup truck when the driver fell asleep at the wheel and rolled the truck on the highway, (we lived about thirty miles north of Denver). Nobody was killed, but I suffered a brain stem contusion and was unconscious for about forty hours following the accident. I experienced retrospective amnesia and temporary but lingering partial paralysis of the right side of my body, but the psychological and behavioral ramifications were longer lasting and more profound. This incident has affected the way I live and view death and made clear the fragility of life.
I don't know that I ever could have been declared dead by any medical criteria, though I'm sure the initial trauma would have come close, and I have very little memory of the first few days in ICU or even of the concert itself, so I can't say that I've ever really experienced the psychic phenomena associated with NDEs. However, my behavior for many years exhibited the classic symptoms of the psychological unease and confusion generated by the near death experience, manifested subjectively by a will to live every moment to the hilt as if it were my last, and only in recent years have these symptoms dissipated. This follows two more close brushes with death, much broader and more objective study of the phenomenon, and, significantly, a cessation of alcoholic consumption. Since resuming my formal education ten years after graduating high school, much of my extracurricular study has focused on the areas of death and dying, from a neuropsychological perspective to the historical, sociological, and mythological realms. I began with the classics, Kubler-Ross's (1969) On Death and Dying and Moody's (1975) Life After Life, moving on to more esoteric and eclectic readings in a myriad of disciplines, from anthropology to philosophy. My interest is driven not only by my personal experiences, including a fascination with motorcycles and five years riding Harley-Davidsons, (until my last one was totaled in an accident in 1990 from which I emerged virtually unscathed), but even more so by my academic specialization in matters of religion.
Whereas the agricultural revolution some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago was the precipitating factor in the rise of organized and sedentary civilization, such organization would not have been possible without the social cohesion of shared religious beliefs, and questions of death and afterlife are at the very heart of most religious belief systems. Even as a child, raised a Christian in a devout Lutheran home, my formative influences were the issues of faith and the resurrection of Jesus. Thus, my core interests and the matters of importance that propel and direct the fecundity of my febrile quest for knowledge, from the rise of australopithecine scavengers on the African savannas through the development of Neolithic farming communities to the historical succession of monument building civilizations all revolve about the central fact that humans die, then we try to explain this and memorialize it and speculate about what becomes of the individual consciousness and animating spirit afterwards. What is life and what is death? What is spirit and what is soul? Is there any difference? The existential philosophers, especially Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and the mystics, Buddhist, Sufic, Cabalistic, and Christian, from Eckhart to Teilhard de Chardin, have informed my ideas on this topic, so I am no novice in this regard.
Therefore, being quite non-traditional in most senses of the word, I chose not to interview one of my contemporaries, who by and large have not contemplated this subject as deeply nor explored it as broadly as myself. Rather, I decided that the one person who could challenge and stimulate my imagination, as he has done so often in the past, was my former history professor at the community college where I earned my associate degree, and incidentally where I have been working on my counseling practicum this semester. So it was no problem to arrange a meeting with him one evening at his office where he was doing some grading while waiting for his wife, a psychology professor, to finish her class. I had already explained to him the nature and purpose of my request for an interview, and had composed over a dozen specific questions beforehand in order to expedite the process, though normally I'm fairly loose and spontaneous about such things. I was already familiar with his sentiments and had a pretty general idea of his philosophy, so I did not anticipate any bombshells. I did hope to cut to the quick of his open-minded speculative ratiocinations and discover the core truth of his beliefs, perhaps even arriving at a manageable summary of his philosophy. (Sometimes during his lectures I was not quite sure how much of what he said was bedrock personal belief and how much was merely heuristic devices and didactic parameters of discussion and suggestion---the truth was as I had suspected, for the most part, though he is certainly not absolutist or judgmental, as I already knew.) I cannot be certain that I have comprehensively and parsimoniously encapsulated his views in this essay, but following is a fair and faithful representation of his responses to my queries, along with a bit of interpretation in places on my part, and I will be tendering him a copy of this as well. After all, the phrasing of the question bears as much weight as the answer itself, just as the form of the question determines the nature of the reply.
So the first question I had thought of was where I began, putting the query to him bluntly regarding something about his beliefs that I had never been quite certain of, namely "do you believe in the resurrection of the dead?" I had purposely couched this in the phraseology of the Apostolic Creed in order to gauge his response to the loaded connotations of this question. He avoided these overtly religious overtones by rephrasing and clarifying the question and asking me "do you mean an afterlife? Yes." He went on to expound on his reasoning and his subjective justifications for this position, explaining his understanding of the nature of this concept. Biological, corporeal life is just a dress rehearsal for the real thing, the true ceremony. Life is a preliminary heat, a warm up for the big race. It is like a preparatory course, a developmental class in thinking and feeling before the credit course that really counts.
This is the impression I had gathered from his lectures, and yet was almost surprised that this was his basic belief. Frankly, I must admit that I felt a slight sense of disappointment because I had hoped for a little more, something a bit more profound or unconventional. Not that his reasoning or arguments were unconvincing or standard, run-of-the-mill religious platitudes. Far from it. This man is anything but standard and run-of-the-mill, and I was certainly able to perceive the possibilities inherent in his words. This sounded like much the same philosophy implicitly underlying Moody's (1975) work with reported NDEs, and explicit in Weiss (1988) and Cerminara (1985) in their studies of past life hypnotic regression and reincarnation, respectively, and somewhat reminiscent of the pronouncements of the renowned "Sleeping Prophet," psychic Edgar Cayce. However, I attempted to be objective and very conscientiously took care not to read my own thoughts, biases, and understandings into his ruminations on the subject of an afterlife, though obviously I can only understand another's words based on my own subjective experience. I attempted to clarify his responses where I felt this was necessary, though I was not as reflective as a counselor would be with a client, and tried to carefully balance my need for understanding with his time constraints in order to complete the interview with some semblance of finality and comprehensiveness. Thus I was able to ascertain explicitly that his comprehension of afterlife did not entail "reincarnation," though his explanation almost seemed to shade into variations of this concept. He did not mention "heaven" or any sort of paradise, although this seemed almost implicit in his description, but he rather envisioned the possibility of a sort of purgatory, a staging area or period of indeterminate length and location, although I did not fully understand the distinction of how this quasi-existence differed from corporeal life.
He rejected the notion of a punitive type of hell or underworld, being unable to reconcile this with the concept of a loving God. In response to my question regarding the existence of a "grand architect of the universe" he responded in the affirmative that there is a plan, but not a Calvinistic preordination or a Deistic type of model. I cannot assume that his is the traditional conception of an omniscient, omnipresent Biblical creator God, though we did not attempt to discuss the nature of this divinity. The nature of divinity itself is the crux of the matter regarding the existence of "God," since a god must first be defined to be communicated, and various opposing conceptions of God can exist simultaneously in the minds of their believers. It all depends on what a given society considers holy and how this sacred essence is symbolized, embodied or envisioned. "Gods" have existed in practically every culture since the dawn of society, from the nameless god of the Hebrews through the rain god of the Mesoamericans, Tlaloc, to the crocodile god of the Australian aboriginals. But to understand "God" one must define and delineate the nature of the term to even approach a comprehension of the force or entity thus represented. I did not even attempt to broach this process of definition because, though it is integral to religion and a sharing of such beliefs, it is yet peripheral to the objective of this essay and the purpose of the interview upon which it is based.
Next I had to ask him about the meaning of life, since much of his discourse thus far far reflected upon this topic, so I slipped in the question just to get everything above board. Much of his explanation in the previous answers incorporated his views as to the meaning of life. I asked the question apologetically for its ambiguity and limitless nature, but it was on my list and he took it in the spirit in which I meant it, as a way to consolidate or round out his philosophy. He believes life is a phase of existence, incorporating his metaphors of the race and the game and the prep course, being a sort of generational series of energy levels. His words brought to my mind a vision of electron shells and energy absorption and emitted photons, but I don't know whether this atomic allegory is truly descriptive of his own vision. To synthesize his ideas I would say that he believes life is a time to learn to love, and I really couldn't agree with him more. And of course it should be recalled that his classes and lectures have had a formative effect on my own philosophy, at times inspiring profound insights and mystical leaps of imagination on my part, so it is not surprising that I would be so amenable to some of his ideas.
I also floated an idea before him regarding my own ideas about the relationship between the genesis of civilization, religion, and the theology of death, namely whether the phenomenon of death might be at the root of all organized religion. This is a component of my own philosophy which has only recently begun to coalesce into a coherent body of thought, an idea which even Max Weber (1963) seemed to refer to only vaguely and incidentally, (at least in my incomplete reading of his work on this subject), and my interviewee seemed mildly intrigued perhaps, though non-committal. This was just sort of a trial baloon, so I didn't really expect much. He communicated his own understanding that life seems kind of purposeless if there is nothing after death for us, if "this" is all there is, and he noted Nietzsche's observation that if God didn't exist then man would have invented him, (or her, or it---he believes the form of God is rather dependent on the observer as to its shape and gender or lack thereof; another tenet I agree with readily, based on the lines of Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle of energy).
He mentioned his skepticism of the Adam and Eve theory of descent from a single pair of ancestors, to which I responded by mentioning the as-yet inconclusive studies of mitochondrial DNA. This "mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis lends credence to the African genesis theory of homo sapien sapiens by genetically tracing widely varied populations of modern humans matrilinealy to an idealized single ancestor, though there is controversy in the anthropological community and grounds for criticism regarding this idea. This is entirely tangential to the topic under discussion here, but my interviewee evinced his willingness to reconsider his beliefs based on scientific evidence, a refreshingly open-minded approach to this field of ultimate questions and superstitiously held beliefs. He is very opposed to dogmatic and unexamined beliefs, as shown by his eclectic system of faith. He was raised Presbyterian but has attended any number of denominational churches and otherwise, (and synagogues and mosques, I might presume), though he attends none religiously (a pun) or regularly. His lifestyle is one of an energetic quest for knowledge and synthesis, and his teaching style is calculated to breach and dissolve the barriers of preconceived notions, attempting through iconoclasm to instill his thirst for truth in others.
I directed the discussion after this in a more objective direction by asking about funerals and death rituals, knowing from experience that this man seemed to attend what I might consider an inordinate number of funerals. He does this not from a sense of morbidity or mere responsibility to the deceased or their family, although elements of each may factor into his decision to attend such a ceremony. (He does believe that the deceased knows who comes to their funeral, as well as their motivations for doing so, since the dead are already beyond time and space and limits of individuality in that higher plane or state of existence.) It is only the luck of the draw, so to speak, the interplay of random chance and synchronicity, that has caused so many of his friends, family, colleagues and associates to die and provide these opurtunities for him. I already knew that his father passed away earlier this year after a lingering illness, (and being cared for in my interviewee's home, though I think he died in the hospital), and then just the weekend before this interview they had gone to Kansas to bury his wife's father.
I asked him whether he felt Western civilization dealt constructively with the disposal of the dead, and whether Christian funerals were satisfactory. He was rather ambivalent about their effectiveness, saying he would prefer to do away with long drawn-out ceremonies and contrived pompous eulogies, restricting such speeches to heart-felt comments by family and friends who were intimately close to the deceased. He prefers timely disposal of the corpse; he cremated his father with little ceremony aside from a small wake the night of the death, though his father-in-law had a large open casket ceremony with a procession and the whole nine yards. But he has been to the funerals of some very famous people as well, like Winston Churchill, and seemed to agree that a national or social leader lying in state can serve a therapeutic function for the populace. When queried as to his ideal funerary ritual he cited a preference for a closed casket and a short, intimate ceremony, saying he felt it was better to remember the deceased as when they were unsullied, vital and alive, rather than deteriorated on the death bed or dressed up in some serene but stiff death pose. I asked his opinion of other cultures' death rites and whether there were any which he felt might deal more effectively with personal and communal grief, but this question went essentially unanswered.
I inquired about his opinion of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his feelings toward such issues as assisted suicide and euthanasia, which elicited responses very indicative of his core philosophy. He is a true believer in the sanctity of life, and is therefore opposed to any form of killing, (though he does eat, of course, and I don't believe he is a vegetarian). He does not hunt, but does approve of sport fishing on a catch and release basis. He does not agree with the prolongation of life by mechanical means in cases where the patient is incapable of improvement, although this stipulation rested in a very delicate balance between passive euthanasia and the removal of intravenous glucose nourishment. He gave me an anecdote about a man he knew who was in a coma for 17 years, and then regained consciousness, in order to illustrate the danger of hasty decisions in this regard.
He is opposed to capital punishment, as am I, and believes that perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity such as Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Timothy McVeigh (if he is proven guilty of the Oklahoma City anfo-bombing) should be isolated, locked away, and studied for whatever sociopathic insights they might yield, not murdered in some socially-sanctioned perverted ritual of retribution. He is opposed to war, (I myself protested the farce in the Persian Gulf), and rejects even the notion of justified war; though here again we are faced with those paradoxical gray areas which confound every discussion of ethics and morality. Based on the evidence I've seen and the investigative intimations I've heard, I believe the Persian Gulf crisis was engineered at the highest levels of international statecraft and global finance and was fought over black gold, not some humanitarian myth of stopping a demagogic tyrant, (who was armed with subsidized American loans and restricted technology, and who nonetheless murdered hundred of thousands of Kurds and marsh Arabs following the cease fire). But I am also opposed to and sickened by the policy of appeasement being prosecuted by NATO and UNPROFOR in the Balkan peninsula, and I believe that the historic ethnic and political hatreds and territorial ambitions being pursued by the Serbian president Milosovic and Dr. Karadzic in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Krajina region of Croatia must be countered with overwhelming force, just as Hitler's megalomaniacal madness was quelched. In recent years I've tended to think of myself as a pacifist, and I still have some ambivalence toward the just war theory as proposed originally by Augustine, but I feel there are a few principles worth fighting (and dying) for, among which is freedom from totalitarianism, and another of which is that liberty must be tempered with justice.
My own philosophy might well be termed "spiritual humanism," in a deeply transpersonal sense. I reject most traditional concepts of a creator God, aside from the dreaming god of Hindu mythology who dreams a dreamer dreaming in a dream. (I've studied dreams a bit, tending toward a Jungian orientation of cognition informed by a Hobsonian view of neuropsychology, flavored with LaBergian lucidity and intrigued with the spice of Carlos Castaneda's anthropological "fiction," but best sythesized in the root metaphor concept by Kelly Bulkeley (1994). I don't believe in any omniscient Being, though I'm certainly open to the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligences so far advanced beyond our own human cognitions that such entities would seem to be "gods," and indeed the mythological systems of numerous cultures world-wide (including the Judeo-Christian tradition) seem to hint at such possibilities. I am skeptical of the idea that our known universe might have a conscious design, although the superstrings of supergalactic clusters might be just as sentient in their relationships as elementary particles composing an atom of seratonin in the human brain might be. In fact I do believe that the nature of God consists of and in pure energy, which is indeed omnipresent and ubiquitous throughout our world, from the weak nuclear force binding the atomic nucleus to the infinitely less powerful force of gravity which locks the known universe in a magnificently chaotic and complex waltz of quantum give and take. I know that time and space are relative to the observer's point of view, and this is the key to understanding my own paradigm---the balance between object and subject, figure and field.
Death is a gateway, the ultimate door of perception, the release from subjectivity and the end of objectivity as well. I remain agnostic about the question of an afterlife and the existence of an individual, personal soul capable of coherent existence as a self when decoupled from the sensorial and cognitive functions of the human organism; but I am quite intrigued by the similarities between reported NDEs and the intricate series of stages of passage from this life as described in the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Oriental concepts of the wheel of life and karma are somewhat gestaltic in my preconsciousness, and perhaps play a larger role in my philosophical outlook than I realize, especially when coupled subconsciously with soteriological ideas like sin and grace and redemption. However, I look askance at most Biblical exegesis as commonly espoused by our secular capitalist Occidental culture, because I've read the Bible, (all 66 books in the canon, and some of the Apocrypha and some of the Gnostic gospels as well). I've studied the social and political history of how it was compiled, and the manners and climates and systems within which the Church has developed into the oft-corrupted social institution we know today, and I've compared the Christian Bible qualitatively to other holy scriptures and other ancient literature, and I see it for what it is, without the magical aura of suggestion and superstition of the "Holy Word" blinding me to its properties and true nature. Therefore I reject the conservative ideology and the philosophical underpinnings of the evangelical and fundamentalist movements, both of which I am still intimately familiar with, being employed as an operations technician by a right-wing Christian satellite radio news network and also operating the sound board for the early service at a Lutheran church where both my parents and the network news director are members. I see death as the end of corporeal life, and don't conceive of an afterlife incorporating sensation and linear logic, as would be required to be conscious of heaven or hell.
I experienced a classic episode of mystical enlightenment long before I entered college, and since then have studied this phenomenon back through history and across cultures. I comprehend the Hindu-Buddhist concept of maya, that all phenomenological experience is illusory and ephemeral, similar to Hobson's theory that dreaming consists in our psychic self attempting to make sense of the random firing of neurons during REM sleep. I understand that the mystical experience is a neuropsychological phenomenon as well, present in the concerted integration of intense electro-chemical cortical activity stimulated by "enlightenment [which] occurs when introspection succeeds in breaking through the level of language," (Ferris, 1992, 96). And as a mystic I see through the inner eye of love that we are all the same in essence, from the stars in the sky to the living rock of our mother planet earth, from my white calico cat to the CEO in his glass tower, from the neo-facist strategists for our partisan policymakers to the innocent farmers being massacred in east-central Africa. I believe with my history professor that life and death are the same, in a way, unified and interconnected and integral components of a cosmic whole.
I asked him what lessons he thought we could learn from death, and I think the essence of his answer can be summed up in two words: love life. Life and death are paradoxical, opposite and identical. There are no absolutes, only shades of gray and degrees of definition. As he said, "I can't imagine this world without me," and yet he does, and knows they would haul all the books and papers and clutter out of his office within days, and some other instructor would move in. He said he can't imagine living with the knowledge of impending death, as in a terminal diagnosis of illness, and he has the utmost admiration and respect for those who do, (yet I'm sure he knows that he would be a pillar of dignity and courage and a shining example of strength and faith if he were in that position). He nodded to me for my own bout with colon cancer, yet the prognosis was not terminal and I never even knew of the tumor until my bowel perforated and I became deathly ill. I'd felt an intermittent bellyache for a week, and only when the pain became excruciating and overwhelmed me did I undergo an emergency colostomy (and appendectomy, since that was where we thought the problem might be before the surgery, so they took it out too), and only hours later with morphine in my veins did the surgeon inform me of the cancer. I suffered a second operation to reverse the colostomy and a year of mild chemotherapy, but I never doubted that I would survive.
I do not fear death, even knowing that I live with a terminal condition called life. I try to make the best of it with a smile on my face, because it's more fun that way than scowling. Happiness is merely a state of mind, and since I don't worry about the petty little cares of this world (much), it's easy for me to say that if I'm alive today then it must be a great day, and I'm feeling wonderful. After all, we only see what we want to see anyway, and I'd much rather see positive and cheerful illusions than negative ones. You can only do as you will, and if you believe something is so, then it will be, and you can only be here, now. I believe there is an aspect of divinity within every human being and every other form of life, and the art is in balancing the love of the particular with the love of the whole, so my worship is living love and loving life. I try to leave my legacy smiling in the memories of all those whom I can touch in some way, and my desire is to enrich the lives of the living who are left behind (or at least to do no harm) when I exit stage left to confront my next wild wonderful adventure, beyond that glowing horizon.