Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  The Phaedo moves through definitions, arguments and edifying talk on the nature of the philosophical life. At the end we shift into a mythic space where Socrates tells a tale of mystical geography. Like the more famous Allegory of the Cave in the Politeia, the story of the true earth is designed to make us conscious that our whole existence is skewed because of a fundamental cognitive deficit; we are trapped as it were in a state of mind whose effects on us are self-narrowing. The deficit lies in the ordinary way we perceive the world, the assumptions we take for granted, the emotional colouring we drape everything with. The story tries to help us see that the world we take for granted is a lie, a kind of bad dream we should wake up from, a distortion of things as they really are or might be. The use of analogy is supposed to help us imagine our alternate selves, and has a double function: to remind us that we are less than we think we are and more than we think we are.

  In the Allegory of the Cave, we mistake shadows for reality. In the Phaedo, we find ourselves fallen into a hollow of the earth, and instead of seeing shadows we see everything filtered through an obscuring medium of mist and fog that systematically distorts our vision; as in the cave, the world is arranged in such a way that we are unaware of the nature of the obscuring medium. That is, unless we learn how to observe ourselves and reflect on our observations. According to our working mind-brain theory, our inherently radiant and happy consciousness is filtered through the brain-mediated needs and attendant assumptions that drive us in the struggle for survival, physical and mental; this is our natural situation, cave-adapted and foggy-normal. However, if we could shift to a less survival-driven perspective, shake ourselves free, a different reality would be uncovered; in Plato’s story—a world experienced through the ‘aither’ of pure consciousness.

  ‘Now we do not perceive that we live in the hollows,’ says Socrates, ‘but think we live on the upper surface of the earth, just as if someone who lives in the depth of the ocean should think he lived on the surface of the sea, and, seeing the sun and the stars through the water, should think the sea was the sky … and should never have seen, by rising and lifting his head out of the sea into our upper world, and should never had heard from anyone who had seen how much purer and fairer it is than the world he lived in.’21 The shift from air to aither is a shift to a new and more profound state of consciousness. From underwater perception to open-air vision involves a drastic qualitative change towards clarity and unified perspective. One has to overcome an innate ‘sluggishness’ and ‘get wings and fly up’ into the aither; for most of us, such an experience of new consciousness is bound to cost a great deal of effort. There is also the possibility of sudden precipitation into the aither of pure consciousness via near-death.

  There is no compelling evidence that Plato was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, though the famous Seventh Letter and the Phaedrus show imagery drawn from the rites of Eleusis. If he did undergo the psychoactive ritual of Eleusis, Plato would have had an experience with transformative effects comparable to those of the NDE. He would have had it in mind when he wrote of the ‘true earth’ and the great escape from the ‘cave’. Through the aitheric medium of perception, everything would appear transformed: ‘And in this fair earth the things that grow, the trees and flowers and fruits, are analogously more beautiful; and so too the mountains and the stones and animals and plants.’ The common stones of the earth are seen as the rarest of gems and the whole of nature is perceived as beautiful and harmonious. A curtain has been lifted. ‘For there they are in plain sight.’ All the virtues, beauties, utilities are exposed, in the open and available to all, thanks to this platonically altered aitheric consciousness.

  Socrates goes on with his tale. ‘And they have sacred groves and temples of the gods, in which the gods really dwell, and they have intercourse with the gods by speech and prophecies and visions, and they see the sun and moon and stars as they really are, and in all other ways their blessedness is in accord with this.’22 The remarkable thing about Plato’s vision is that it’s not ‘otherworldly’; it is about this world, but this world as seen in a new and truer light, in a purified state of consciousness, a state not unlike the ones reported in NDEs, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic, erotic and other well-charted psychically expanded states. Plato describes a state of being in which the ‘true earth’ is revealed through a new aitheric consciousness, a state where the partition between human and divine—supraliminal and subliminal psyche—is removed along with all our ‘filtering’ devices. In this world, any honest man, as William Blake once said, would be a prophet.

  The ‘true earth’, according to Plato’s myth, is the very earth we inhabit; the difference is the quantum leap we take to a new form of consciousness. The ‘neo’ platonic model of ‘survival’ research is based on experimental tweaking of the ‘filter’ as we find it operating (at all levels of our existence) in our day-to-day, brain-mediated life. An array of interesting psychological phenomena may be understood as drastic reductions of self-filtering as they appear in the phenomena of shamanism, mysticism, the prophetic tradition, the world of magic, creative genius, mediumship, multiplex personality and so on. I would also emphasize as important the possibilities of experimentation that open up; the entire tenor of experiment changes; the point of attack is the deft one of how to push the veil aside, how to let what is already present, indeed what is already disposed to avail itself to us, to fully manifest and to penetrate the pores of our being. Everything about the way we are constituted seems to render this impossibly difficult.

  If the basic data of the NDE are as solid as they appear after thirty-five years of research, we may have a key for unlocking the door to the greatest adventure: exploring the outer limits of consciousness. The great discovery that has yet to penetrate the filter of the prevailing paradigm is that consciousness is able to persist without a functioning brain. The data seem to support the view claiming that consciousness is an original, primitive factor in nature, and therefore that brain-death does not automatically entail consciousness-death. This reverses the mainstream view that admits the puzzling quality of consciousness, but seems largely convinced that it must in the end turn out to be explained as an emergent property of the brain.

  The myth of the true earth provides a three-stage image of the evolving psyche. The first is an image of man immersed in the unreflective flow of existence, thoughtlessly identified with the body and the material world around him. Consciousness is happily (or miserably) absorbed in things, material objects, stuff; mind and brain jog along together without any problems, no mutual recriminations. They enjoying the Eden of their pre-critical spontaneity or caught up in existential ‘fear and sluggishness’.

  But the Phaedo myth takes us to the second stage and separates the psychic from the somatic realm of being; and the psyche asserts its autonomy and power over the somatic. This was perhaps one of the great intellectual discoveries of the Axial Age. It was taken by the Sankhya-yoga school, which also distinguishes purusha (soul or psyche) from prakriti (bodily nature).23 It is found in many schools of thought, and affirms the status of consciousness as distinct and not derived from brain. In most of the great salvation systems of the ancient world one finds a story in which some all-encompassing mental principle (abstractly referred to as ‘mind’ or ‘pure consciousness’) is treated as fundamental. Normally, however, we are entangled with our bodies and hypnotized by the imperatives of biological life, and our identity with ultimate reality is forgotten and concealed.

  Stage two of the story leads to the philosophical practice of detachment. As this is accomplished, consciousness engages the world with heightened openness and intensity. The second stage involves a transformation of perception, a rebirth of presence in this world; in short, not a contraction but a heightening, a fulfilling of consciousness, symbolized by the passage from aer to aither. Reductionists sometimes say that the afterlife is a cop-out, a kind of betrayal of earthly existence. But that isn’t Plato’s intent, according to whic
h, as we rightly practise this peculiar form of ‘death and dying’, we surrender to the ecstatic openness of being and experience a vision of the true earth. The true earth is transcendently concrete; it is hyper-physical; sensation and embodied life are enhanced, more fully realized than ever.

  In Plato’s vast cosmology of mind there is a region where those who have practised philosophy truly may completely depart from embodied existence, and we move towards the mystical third stage of Plato’s eschatological myth: ‘And of these, who have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether without bodies and pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough.’

  Entering the bodiless zones of supreme consciousness is difficult for most of us to imagine, or even perhaps to take seriously. Our whole sense of reality has been formed by experience as bodies in very local, confined environments. It’s bound to be hard for us to imagine the vast, alien forms of existence the most introvertive mystics claim to inhabit. Yet, that is exactly what a certain consensus of mystical experimentalists point to as not only possible but also the very peak of bliss and freedom. I am willing to entertain these speculations on superhuman forms of simultaneous, spaceless, time-stopped existence; I would suggest, however, that this introverted conception of mysticism should not be taken as exclusive; the writings of Paul Marshall describe the many-faceted world of ‘extrovertive’ mysticism, which balances the emphasis on ‘introvertive’, contentless mystical consciousness.24

  The message of the ‘true earth’ in the Phaedo comes to this: We think we live on the true earth when in fact our world is fallen into a mist-covered hollow that occludes the real thing, and we have in fact become accustomed to a rather dull, inferior mode of conscious being; beyond this hollow, or cave, it is possible to see and experience all things in light of the aither, the lucid mental atmosphere of the gods. If we practise philosophical death and dying, we may find ourselves able to clamber up out of the hollow into a world illuminated by a new and transformed mode of consciousness.

  Aldous Huxley, writing an account of his first mescaline experiment, refers to this passage from Plato’s myth, understanding the aitheric mode of perception as symbolic of a deeply altered state of consciousness.25 Ordinary stones look like rare gems on the true earth; this is certainly true—indeed would be commonplace—for individuals acquainted with the effects of certain psychoactive drugs. In my language, the ‘aitheric’ metaphor of Plato’s symbolizes a profound altered state, the most likely candidate in practice having been an LSD-induced trance at the Eleusinian mysteries.26

  Conclusion

  The Platonic model of the NDE I have proposed is a way of linking the ‘filter’ theory of the mind—brain problem to a range of phenomena, paranormal and mystical. The model at least allows phenomena that mainstream academics find difficult to assimilate to occur. It also opens veins of experimental inquiry, possibly (and hopefully) in a laboratory setting, but also in a more practical life setting, as indicated by Plato in the Phaedo. With NDEs increasingly well-documented, we can understand Plato’s paradoxical idea of philosophy as the practice of death and dying. The paradox is that this practice is really about the liberation of consciousness from its routine biological constraints and the hypothesized greater abundance of inner and outer life.

  The subtitle of this paper refers to survival research as a procedure with self-transformative uses. If there is any truth to the facts surrounding the theme of the NDE, it must surely have implications for human development, for the possibly fuller evolution of the human personality. In a book by Ernest Becker,27 it was argued that the denial of death contracts the human personality, and has profound effects on politics; the psychology of the death-deniers tends to create a civilization based on fear of death. It builds up an unconscious wall-like stance against death by creating the illusion of power through militarism, wealth and prestige. Becker offers a detailed analysis of how the denial and repression of death distorts the human being and poisons and robs her of the full capacity to live. Becker concludes that it is up to science to figure out a way of dealing with the denial of death and its impact on human existence. For Becker the psychological trauma was being forced to confront death as pure contingent finality—bereft of the consolations of traditional religion. Becker offers no suggestions as to how this need to integrate our view of life and death might be accomplished. Without blindly retreating to the arms of tradition, science might contribute something of use. It might be possible to cope with the trauma of reductive rationalism by focusing on evidence that removes the desperate need to deny death in the first place; I mean death understood as the nothingness that swallows up all meaning.

  Science (with the help of the NDE, for instance) could produce evidence that although death is contingent, it may not be final. Death may turn out to be a transformation and not, as mainstream wisdom would have it, mere annihilation. The NDE, and related phenomena, offer material for constructing a new image of death, a different story entirely, a story yet to be fully written. We are still caught up in the whirl of contingency; but at least we are en route, travellers towards an unknown destination.

  ‘Sorrow More Beautiful than Beauty’s Self’:

  John Keats and the Music of Mortality

  Ronald A. Sharp

  In 1981 the novelist E.L. Doctorow returned to Kenyon College—where I was teaching at the time—for a memorial celebration of his friend and classmate, the poet James Wright. As he affectionately recalled their student days together (which were long before I arrived at Kenyon), Doctorow told a wonderful story about himself and Wright, who both considered themselves serious writers as undergraduates. They were walking through the campus, approaching a group of students whom they regarded as ‘pseudopoets’, phoney pretenders to the literary who were really just sentimental half-wits. It was one of those spectacular Midwestern autumn days: the sun was shining in a clear blue sky and the ground was covered with richly coloured leaves. As the pseudopoets approached, Doctorow leaped dramatically into a pile of leaves, threw a handful up in the air and, as they began to fall around him, sang out in his best mock-poetic tone, ‘The leaves, the leaves are falling’—making fun of the kind of maudlin poetry that these phonies would typically write.

  Doctorow and Wright, who both went on to win Pulitzer Prizes, maintained their friendship long after college, and the retelling of this story became something of a ritual of their reunions. ‘Jim always wanted me to tell the story,’ Doctorow said. ‘I myself never considered it all that funny, but Jim loved it, and my dutiful retelling of it when we met provided some of the glue of our friendship.’ Thirty years after graduating from Kenyon, when Wright lay on his deathbed in a New York hospital, he had a visit from his old schoolmate. Wright, now in the last stages of cancer of the mouth, was unable to speak. After they embraced, Wright scrawled a few words on a piece of paper and handed it to Doctorow. It said: ‘The leaves are falling’. Wright died a few days later.

  I begin my teaching of Keats by telling the students this story, which in a different form Doctorow repeats in his book Lives of the Poets. How Wright takes those four simple English words—’the leaves are falling’—and transforms them from a witty example of ridiculous sentimentality to the simple profundity that most artists labour their whole careers to achieve has much to do with what I hope to demonstrate in this essay: that a sense of mortality deepens one’s apprehension and appreciation of beauty, and that this insight lies at the heart of Keats’s vision of death and dying.

  It is a vision of enormous philosophical reach and dazzling originality, but its roots spring directly out of Keats’s own painful experience. His father died when he was eight, and when he was fourteen, his mother died of tuberculosis. Keats literally nursed her as she died, just as he did his brother, Tom, a few years later, being the only family member left to care for him. Keats spent months at his brother’s bedside, until Tom died at the age of nineteen, immortalized in ‘Ode t
o a Nightingale’, where ‘youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ (26). It was not long until Keats himself came down with TB. A week after having his own first haemorrhage—a year before his death at the age of twenty-five—Keats wrote to his friend James Rice:

  How astonishingly (here I must premise that illness as far as I can judge in so short a time has relieved my Mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images and makes me perceive things in a truer light)—How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colours as are new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy … The simple flowers of our sp[r]ing are what I want to see again.

  (Letters 2: 260)

  Like many people facing death, Keats had a renewed sense of the wonder of the world—a feeling heightened by the prospect of an ending. We all know the familiar narratives of people in crisis who have come to a new appreciation of what matters to them—POWs who only want another chance to spend time with their children; accident victims who in a flash see that their materialistic lives have been empty; the father or neighbour or aunt who, in the midst of terminal illness, feels a love for family and friends that flows more fully than it ever did before. A similar perspective characterized Keats’s view of the world, most poignantly towards the end of his life but also in fact virtually from the beginning, long before he was actually dying. At the foundation of Keats’s work is the paradox that life accrues value precisely to the extent that one intensely experiences its fragility and transience. Or, as the 20th-century American poet Wallace Stevens put it in his most Keatsian poem: ‘Death is the mother of beauty’ (63, 88).