| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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Lonely? Why had he thought that... For that was the one thing they could never be again. Only individuals can be lonely – only human beings. When the barriers were down at last, loneliness would vanish as personality faded. The countless raindrops would have merged into the ocean.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Death awaits us, but no longer with the threat of extinction. Death may mean the end of body and brain and self. But, precisely because of that, it marks the beginning of our intimate reunion with nature – our return to a wider, timeless consciousness. In the light of this knowledge all fear dissolves. Since self is an illusion, its loss amounts to nothing. Only those aspects of us that are selfless – qualities we might put under the unifying heading of "love" – will endure.
Nor need we be anxious about facing death alone. Loneliness exists only while we are under the enchantment of self, while we remain caged in our skulls, cut off from other minds, solitary prisoners of our inner, private worlds. Death is to be welcomed, when in due course it draws near, for with it we shall be freed from our terrible isolation. It is the one event that draws us all together again, back into the single true mind of the universe. Death is not a failure or a finality, but a triumph and the start of an experience we can hardly begin to imagine in our present form.
As soon as death's true nature is widely recognized in our culture we shall be able to change our attitude toward the process of dying in others. As Elisabeth Kübler Ross has written: "We shouldn't nail the dying to the threshold between two states of consciousness. We shouldn't prolong their lives with medication, injections and life-support machines. We should let them go. They're not going into nothingness. They're entering another state of being. We must let our dead go into that world."
Once the fear of death has been removed by the knowledge that consciousness continues on the other side, our whole outlook on caring for the dying will be permanently transformed. We will not wish to resort to the paraphernalia of needless and often painful life-prolongation, to commit so many people to spending their last days joined by tubes and wires to a mass of heartless technology. The dying will be allowed to slip away quietly, peacefully, joyfully. And we can wish them well on the voyage ahead, knowing that the only true part of them that has ever existed will live on, as it lives on inside each of us today.
But we can go on to do more than just change our attitude toward death in others. We can, and should, begin preparations for our own death today. That does not mean rushing out to make wills, reserving burial plots, or selecting favorite funeral hymns – though in fact any of these material preparations could be used as a launch-pad to thinking deeply about what our own death implies. Proper, spiritual preparation for death involves a dedicated search for the true nature of reality. And that, in turn, calls for a lifelong voyage of discovery into consciousness without self.
How to reach this self-less inner state? How to experience, as self melts away, the transcendent consciousness that belongs not to "us" or "now" but to everything through space and time?
All of us, at some peak moments in our lives, have reached briefly through to the infinite – running, spinning free through the wind as a child, sitting alone on a high mountain, or in a thousand other situations that simply happen. Materialism and the drudge of the workaday world can kill the memory of such experiences and make us cynical of the pure wonder of timeless, self-less feelings. Yet they are there for anyone to enjoy at any moment if we can only remember just how to let go.
Each to his or her own. There are many ways to break through the illusionary world of the rational mind. Prayer, charity, music, poetry – a million different roads.
One approach that might be mentioned, not because it is necessarily "better" than any other, but because it so extraordinarily well mapped and detailed, is the preparatory method for death and dying prescribed by Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is, in effect, a manual that tells how we can consciously die.
That may seem like an extraordinary claim – that as a person goes through the various stages of death he can remain alert, keenly aware of what is happening to him. We might even be inclined to pour scorn on it. But considering the depth of our own ignorance about what happens as the brain dies, criticizing other worldviews might be a hasty move. We have much to learn about death – and why not start with the wisdom that has been built up meticulously over many centuries by people who have devoted their lives to a deep study of the nature of mind and reality?
Every branch of learning, from physics to philately, has its own peculiar terminology. In Buddhism, life and death are considered to be changes in what is called the Clear Light. Birth is when the Clear Light peaks, death when it declines. As we go through the process of death, our minds shift from a gross to a subtle level. This is similar to falling into a deep sleep in which there is no awareness of hearing, seeing, smelling and so on. After a while in sleep the mind becomes slightly less subtle and we begin to have dreams. This activity of mind becomes grosser and grosser until we wake up and our gross sense consciousness begins to function. In the same way, the mind at death becomes increasingly subtle and all gross sensations and memories dissolve.
What happens next may seem fantastic. According to Buddhist belief, after a while in a kind of limbo state (known as the Bardo), a person's mind becomes associated with a union of cells in a mother's womb. As the fetus develops, the mind becomes increasingly gross as it associates more closely with the bodily senses. In other words, there is reincarnation.
How do we respond to that claim? With cries of "unscientific," "un-Christian," "unprovable"? Perhaps. But we have already discussed situations in which something barely distinguishable from reincarnation could conceivably come about by technical means. What would happen if, in the future, a person who was identical to you in every way were brought to life? Would that mean that you had, in some sense, been reincarnated? Alternatively, could you be reincarnated by having your memories and thought processes downloaded into a sophisticated computer?
We don't even have to resort to such far-fetched scenarios. The fact is, there would be very little difference between the effect of Buddhist-style reincarnation and the emergence, after your death, of someone whose inner experience of self was very similar to your own. We could even define your reincarnated self to be the baby born shortly after your death whose developing self-consciousness went on to most closely resemble your own. Inevitably, there would be such a person (even if we couldn't say who it was), and he would be the one human being in the world who, as it were, took over the baton from you.
Even in the Buddhist tradition, reincarnation is not to be seen as a direct continuation of a particular person or soul. In other words, it is not really you that comes back but a "different you." As the present Dalai Lama has explained: "The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like the pearls in a pearl necklace, held together by a string, the 'soul,' which passes through all the pearls; rather they are like dice, one piled on top of the other. Each die is separate, but it supports the one above it, with which it is functionally connected. Between the dice there is no identity, but conditionality."
Stories are frequently told of people who claim to be able to remember incidents from past lives. Some of these involve children who, upon visiting certain places for the first time, recall obscure facts about the people who once lived there, which it is said, are subsequently verified. Other evidence comes from adults who supposedly regress to earlier incarnations during deep hypnosis.
As with NDE's, it is difficult, without researching each case exhaustively and personally, to draw any firm conclusions. Similarly, there is no way of knowing if the infants who are "found" to be reincarnations of past Buddhist masters (including the Dalai Lama himself) have any real link with people who are now dead. How could we ever confirm such claims? Nor do we know if there is any mechanism by which fragments or traces of memories can be passed on from other lifetimes. These are problems – important problems – that await a more metaphysically inquisitive science.
Finally, we return to the claim that it is possible to remain aware as the body, the senses and the self dissolve during death. In Tibetan Buddhism this is said to be paramount if the dying person is to avoid another reincarnation or, at least, coming back in some undesirable and possibly nonhuman form. The process of dissolution can be practiced in everyday life, through meditation, so that the various stages of dying can be recognized and dealt with as they occur.
Remarkably, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is intended to be read aloud to a person for up to seven weeks after Western medicine would have pronounced him dead. The teachings of the book are believed to help guide the person through each step of his or her dissolution and the final transformation of his or her consciousness.
It has often been reported that the corpses of Tibetan Buddhist masters remain fresh and curiously healthy-looking for days or even weeks after breathing has stopped. The shading of life into death seems capable of being drawn out to an extraordinary degree, with the greatest exponents of the art of dying apparently able to exert incredible control over what is happening to them.
Sogyal Rinpoche recalls an astonishing incident following the apparent death of Lama Tseten, an old Buddhist teacher, in 1959. Barely had Tseten stopped breathing when Jamyang Khyentse, Sogyal Rinpoche's own spiritual master, entered the tent where Tseten lay, as if he had sensed what had happened. According to Rinpoche, Jamyang Khyentse looked into the old man's calm face and chuckled.
"La Gen [old Lama]," said Jamyang Khyentse, "don't stay in that state!"We can make of this what we will. Whether we choose to look more deeply into what Buddhist traditions have to offer or whether we opt for a different mystical or religious or scientific path is entirely up to us. There are no best guides, no single right way – only a common goal.
He could see, I now understand, that Lama Tseten was doing one particular practice of meditation in which the practitioner merges the nature of his mind with the space of truth.
"You know, La Gen, when you do this practice, sometimes subtle obstacles can arise. Come on. I'll guide you!"
Transfixed, I watched what happened next, and if I hadn't seen it myself I would never have believed it. Lama Tseten came back to life. Then my master sat by his side and took him through ... the practice for guiding the consciousness at the moment of death.
In our lives we go through many rites of passage: birth, first day of school, first sexual encounter, marriage, birth of offspring, retirement, death. Each is a trial, a teetering moment of crisis, a leap from one state of being to another. But of them all, death is toweringly the most important.
With death comes a certain end to body and brain. With death, everything we took ourselves for is abruptly stripped away leaving ... what? Nothing, except that which really mattered all along. Death rips through the membrane that separates "us" from the whole, undifferentiated universe.
The truth we must come to terms with, sooner or later, willingly or not, is that we do not survive beyond the grave. But, then, who did we think "we" were during life? We do not survive unchanged even from one moment to the next. The person who woke up this morning is not the same who is reading these words now. And, more to the point, the person you are now is no more than a crafty sleight of your survival-oriented mind.
For as long as we lay emphasis on the importance of self and seek to shore up our ego awareness, death will continue to terrify us with its threat of dissolution. In every sense it is selfish to be afraid to die. Only by pursuing a life course that diminishes our obsession with self, with material and emotional "me-ness," can we gain the deeper insights needed to face death with equanimity. A wonderful future lies ahead of us, following the trial of death, but not as individuals. In store is nothing less than a grand reunion with reality, an expansion of consciousness that can only occasionally be glimpsed through the dim portals of our senses and brain.
Many questions remain. But this much is already clear: death is not the end or a mindless void. It is not a doorway leading to oblivion. It is a beginning. After death we shall all be together at last – except that, in another sense, "we" will be the only ones who are not there. What was us will have merged again with the unbroken ocean of consciousness. We shall have returned to the place from which we came. We shall be home again – and free.
There is my truth; now tell me yours.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
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