| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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And what shall we know of this life on earth after death? The dissolution of our timebound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. Rather, does the little finger know itself a member of the hand.
– Carl G. Jung
We stand at the threshold of a new understanding. If we can readjust to the idea that consciousness exists only outside the mental world of the brain, then death no longer appears as the ultimate tragedy. It may still be an important event – the most important in our life. But it is not the end of everything. It is no great loss. Death, however poignant, is simply the removal of the "reducing valve" in our head. With the brain out of the way, the barrier between ourselves and the universe disappears.
Death is the breaking of a spell, the waking from a dream. In this alternative paradigm, consciousness is there all the time, all around us – in the trees, the earth, the sky, the emptiness of space. It is there waiting for us to rejoin it. Consciousness is like the world outside a bubble. From within the bubble all images seem broken and distorted. Only when the bubble breaks is the true appearance of things revealed. At death it is as if "we" move from one side of our senses to the other – from the highly filtered, highly processed world inside the brain to the true, unbounded universe, where subjective and objective coalesce. We step out of the dense fog of introverted human perception to the clear air of reality.
Those who have come close to death have, as it were, poked their noses into this greater world beyond human life. They have felt, briefly, incompletely, what it is like to be free of self and in contact with the absolute nature of things. No hallucination or fit of delirium could generate such an experience. Rather, it is ordinary life that, by comparison, begins to take on the air of unreality. NDEers need no convincing that there is life beyond human existence because, for a short while during this life, they have been part of it. They know the truth in a sense more intimate than anyone who has not yet been through the transformation – better than any materialist who insists on experimental proof or logic. We have to realize that there are some truths that transcend rationality, that lose their essence if we push too hard for explanations and discussion.
To understand our real nature and destiny we must bypass the analytical mind. Death achieves this in style by eliminating the brain altogether. But glimpses of the inner truth can come at any time if we are able to disconnect the mechanism of interpretation. Through meditation we can learn to put a temporary stop to analytical thought. This has been the approach used throughout the ages by mystics, who have strived to see through the illusion of the rational mind to the timeless ground of existence.
Mysticism is anathema to the hard-headed pragmatist. Those who practice Western religions may balk at it, equating it with all manner of pagan beliefs. But, in fact, mysticism has been the germ-seed of all religious faith, Oriental and Occidental. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have an inner mystical core. It is simply that in the East, mystical techniques are practiced more openly and have been systematically developed. Great bodies of knowledge, equivalent in authority to those of Western science, have grown up around traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Zen. Now, in the West, people are rediscovering these teachings and trying to fit them into a wider scheme that includes our own, more material views of the universe.
The single, simple aim of all mysticism is enlightenment, a state that goes entirely beyond rational thought to the bedrock of the universe. As Louis Armstrong once remarked about jazz, "Unless you know what it is, I ain't never going to be able to explain it to you." No explanation of mysticism, no exposition of its nature and goals can properly reach to its heart. Jung wrote: "The West frequently fails to fathom exactly the depths of the Oriental mind, for mysticism in its very nature defies the analysis of logic, and logic is the most characteristic feature of Western thought. The East is synthetic in its method of reasoning; it does not care so much for elaboration of particulars as for a comprehensive grasp of the whole, and this intuitively."
Through regular practice in meditation, the mystic seeks to break free of the chains that bind us to our selves, to dissolve the barrier separating the individual from the whole. This transcendent goal has been expressed again and again by great scientists, philosophers and religious leaders throughout the ages. The 13th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said: "The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge." The Chinese philosopher Sen T'sen explained: "When the Ten Thousand Things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been." And in the Mundaka Upanishad it is written: "As rivers flow into the sea and in so doing lose name and form, even so the wise man, freed from name and form, attains the Supreme being, the Self-luminous, the Infinite."
The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the 'I' who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process – the totality of being – that has no start or end.
The scientist within us may rail at this and demand, "How can there be any sort of life after death? How can consciousness exist without a brain?" But we can see now that these questions stem from a failure to grasp the true nature of consciousness and the brain. Better surely to ask, "How can there be consciousness with a brain?"
Still, the scientist within us may be unconvinced. "Take away the eyes and ears and other senses, take away all the nervous system, including the brain, and what are you left with by which to see and understand and experience the universe? Without these instruments, where is the means by which reality can know about itself?"
But, again, by framing the question in this way, we have fallen into the trap. We find it so hard to break out of our parochial, self-centered mode of thought. It is true that we cannot experience anything without the brain, because "we" are the brain's principal product. But it is true also that, while the brain lives, we cannot properly be conscious. Consciousness begins only when the brain and the self have died.
Think about the eye – that fabulous product of natural bioengineering. It takes in light rays and focuses them, forming an image on the retina. Then, via the optic nerve, it conveys the information in this image to the brain. But the eye does not add to what is already there – it takes away. The eye interferes with the light rays that fall into it. First it bends them from their original paths, then it destroys them completely by absorbing them. So the eye does not help us to become more conscious of the universe. Rather it denies any possibility of knowing what reality is like by altering and blocking at the source everything it comes into contact with. We cannot be conscious of anything that enters the eye because all such aspects of the universe are irrevocably changed or terminated in the process of "seeing." By the time we think we know about the things we are seeing, they no longer exist!
The same is true of our other senses. By hearing, we destroy any sound that reaches our ears. By touching a surface we alter unknowably the state of every atom or molecule that meets our skin. And even this description fails to do justice to the depth of our misunderstanding because "light rays," "sounds," "atoms," and "molecules" are pure artifacts of the categorizing mind. We haven’t the slightest idea as to the true nature of any of these things.
Once the brain goes to work, the possibilities for any significant level of consciousness are further removed. Signals related to aspects of the universe that no longer exist (because the senses have put an end to them) are filtered and processed and worked upon in all sorts of complicated ways until an internal picture emerges of what we take to be the outside world. Upon this picture is superimposed that greatest of all fabrications – our self. And so what we perceive in the end bears virtually no resemblance to the way reality is. We live in an artificial mental environment that has come about purely for the purposes of survival.
The brain is needed to produce consciousness, we assume. But the closer we look at this idea, the more fanciful it appears. Isn't "what it is like to be a light ray" so much more than "what it is to be the distorted memory of certain aspects of a light ray that no longer exists"? How do we suppose our brains even begin to grasp a few distant half-truths about the universe unless they are drawing upon a far greater knowledge and experience that already lies beyond our senses?
We cannot help but think of reality in pieces. Elephants, electrons, planets, people – "thing-ness" abounds in human space. And language can be used in no other way than to emphasize and reassert this illusion of the divided whole, even when it is being used to discuss mysticism.
Due to our false concept of reality we believe that we who perceive the world and the objects of our perception are completely distinct and separate. Yet the underlying nature of mind is neither the inner perceiving subject nor the external perceived objects. It is not even a combination of the two, for that is just covert dualism. In the course of separating ourselves from what we perceive, we fracture the essential unity of reality and project upon it our own mentally constructed images, just as a movie is projected upon a blank screen.
We see the world as being full of relatively stable objects, such as trees and rocks and ourselves. But in fact there is no stability anywhere, not even for a microsecond. Only our minds create that illusion. There are no trees, only a tree-air-earth-sun-cosmos process that never stands still. There are no people, only a people-air-food-cosmos process that is forever breathing, digesting and growing, breaking down, and healing itself. There are no objects or things at all, but just one great interconnected system that is the whole of reality. All the world is a living, dynamic movement, continuous change and impermanence its only genuine characteristics.
How ironic that the human brain, which we hold in such high esteem, should be the very reason "we" can never be conscious. What we take to be real is only a fantasy film playing inside our heads, with ourselves as the central character. For a while longer the film will run, before it ends and the hero vanishes. Inevitably this will happen, and so we look forward with dread to the moment when the brain must die.
And yet, our fear is misplaced. Death can be defeated. It can be overcome, here and now, if we confront what the end of human life means to each of us personally. In stark terms, we must gaze into the face of the corpse that exists inside us. And then we must go beyond the mask, looking inward ever more deeply, so that we become intimately acquainted with the impermanence of our self and the true nature of mind and reality.
"I'm growing old. I.m falling apart. And it's very interesting," wrote William Saroyan. All of "us" – our constructed selves, as well as our bodies – eventually fall apart. We cannot avoid it. The only question is whether we choose to begin that process of self-dissolution willingly today or wait for it to happen by default when we die. While we are alive, we have a choice – between the death (or diminution) of self, which implies the beginning of consciousness, or the continuation of self, which means prolonging the dream.
Even without any special effort on our part, moments arise when the self flickers from view. While absorbed in a piece of music, perhaps, or performing a compassionate act for another, we may temporarily forget our sense of self. For a while, a different vision appears of a wider world in which "we" are no longer there. "We" disappear, too, or merge with a greater whole, during the most intimate acts of communion – with another person; with the Earth, in seeing that everything we do affects the delicate balance of Gaia; and with the cosmos as a whole, in the deep knowing that we are all made of cooled stardust, which itself came from the raw stuff of genesis.
Such transcendent moments, however, are soon pushed aside as the rational mind reasserts itself. Then they are forgotten. To hold on to an appreciation of what death means, we need to become acquainted more often and more profoundly with the timeless, selfless mind inside us. We need to start letting go, loosening our grip on the material side of life.
This can seem frightening. Our tendency is to resist change, to fight against impermanence and insecurity. Keeping our job, protecting our house and family, jealously guarding everything we "own" – especially our selves – has become an obsession with us. How can we just let go, ease up and accept that change and dissolution are facts of life? Yet this is what we must do if we are to see through the illusions that surround us. Death will confront us with the one true reality in the end. But we have the opportunity to transform our vision of the world here and now.
All the world's religions lay great emphasis on selfless acts. "Love they neighbor as thyself" is as much a central theme of Western theologies as it is of Eastern. The common goal of all these great traditions is to limit selfishness and so prepare us for the ultimate dissolution of our timebound self at the point of death. It is no coincidence that behavior which people everywhere consider intrinsically good – generosity to our fellow humans, working for the benefit of others, valuing all forms of life – serves also to lessen our preoccupation with self and so encourage the realization that we are part of an undivided unity. Only when there is no self left is there no one who can die.
It may seem that our efforts to penetrate the mysteries surrounding life and death have taken us far from science and analytical thought. But that is inevitable, and we need not feel disturbed or guilty about it. Science alone cannot tell us what happens when we die because it is blind to too many fundamental aspects of reality. This is not a problem, providing that we realize that science is simply part of a much larger enterprise of truth seeking. Science's perennial weakness is to mistake the map for the territory.
Each of us has a fine line to tread if we are to avoid on the one hand becoming too enamored with reductionism and, on the other, falling into a counterculture of New Age irrationalism. No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers – not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed-up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature – knowing that these reflect the twin aspects of the universe – and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.
In a wider context, there is a need for those who profess science to be open-minded enough to admit theology and mysticism as allies in their search for a more comprehensive worldview. Similarly, those who seek truth inwardly should be prepared to recognize the value of a more rigorous, scientific approach. We need a whole-brain attitude, an end to centuries-old dualistic rivalry. As Alfred North Whitehead once remarked: "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster; it is an opportunity."
Related books by David Darling (click on a cover to begin reading):
