The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  This euphoria was evidently referred to by Sir William Osler as "kindly nature drawing a veil over our last minutes," but it hardly begins to tell us why one or two dying persons out of every thousand expresses a distinct spiritual revelation in the final stages of a lingering death. General George Gordon Meade, who defeated Lee at Gettysburg, for example, in a brief awakening out of his terminal coma, whispered, "I am about crossing a beautiful wide river, and the opposite shore is coming nearer and nearer." Thomas Edison, in similar circumstances, sighed,"It is very beautiful over there." And a cancer patient in England, whose hand was being tightly held by his doctor, murmured at the end, "Don't pull me back... It looks so wonderful further on!"

  One of the most unusual cases I have encountered involved a man whose heart had stopped for nearly ten minutes. By a heroic effort his doctor revived him briefly and, on asking him if he remembered anything that happened during the time he was "away," the man thought a long moment, then haltingly replied, "Yes, I remember. My pain was gone. I was free. I couldn't feel my body. I heard music - the most peaceful music." He paused, choked deep in his throat, then struggled on: "Peaceful music. God was there, and I was floating away. Music was all around me. I knew I was dead, but I wasn't afraid. Then the music stopped and you were leaning over me."

  Asked if he had ever before had a dream like that, the man made a supreme effort and said, with intense conviction, "It wasn't a dream." Then he closed his eyes for the last time, his breathing grew thick and, in a few minutes, he was dead.

  Still another case was that of a woman who was apparently dead for several minutes during an operation from which she later fully recovered. But the extraordinary thing is that, despite being under a general anesthetic, she acquired an uncannily vivid memory of having observed the operating room during those critical minutes from an indescribably spaceless position that somehow enabled her to see all four walls, ceiling and floor simultaneously, including her own lifeless body on the table as if from above or outside, and she could fully recall the tense conversation between the surgeons and nurses as they worked to get her heart beating again.

  What actually happens in the dying process is virtually impossible to assess because so much of it is intangible and, in most cases, beyond the present reach of science, which deals only with measurable phenomena. Experiments at the Bose Institute in Calcutta early this century indicated that a pea dies an extraordinarily violent death when cooked to 150°F., at which point it may discharge as much as a volt of electricity, a phenomenon attributable in some degree to all dying protoplasm and which some investigators thought might explain the oft-noted memory improvement in persons about to die. But the evidence seems not to have been substantiated nor widely accepted.

  The only researcher I know of who has claimed a quantitative clue as to the departure of the human "soul" was Dr. Duncan MacDougall, a physician on the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who in 1906 conducted a series of experiments by placing the beds of dying patients on special beam-type scales accurate to within one tenth of an ounce. A typical case he reported in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, for May 1907, said: "... subject was a man dying of tuberculosis... under observation for three hours and forty minutes before death ... He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour, due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and ... sweat.

  "I kept the beam end of the scales slightly above balance near the top limiting bar in order to make the test most decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly, coincident with death, the beam end dropped with an audible stroke, hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three fourths of an ounce." Dr. MacDougall, following in the footsteps of Anubis, weigher of souls in ancient Egypt, completed his experiments with six patients and "in every case found a distinct, sudden drop of weight" at death. But, to my knowledge, no one else has ever taken this evidence seriously enough to continue the experiments in order to confirm or disprove the findings.

  On the psychological side, however, there is the beginning of a consensus confirming that many a younger dying person typically goes through six stages in adapting to it. First, he refuses to believe he is dying. Second, when convinced, he protests, "Why me?" Third, he bargains: "I'll be good, dear God, if You'll only give me more time." Fourth, he is depressed, thinking, "It's all over. There's no hope. And who cares?" Fifth, he may break down into tears, ending with the feeling it was a relief to get it out of his system. And sixth, he finally accepts death: "I'm going to die, and that's beautiful because it is God's will and the way He made the world."

  With a little training in the subject, I think doctors, nurses and parents could make dying a lot easier, especially for younger people. There surely is little virtue in their continuing to be evasive, as most of them are now, seemingly influenced by the taboo. For everyone someday has to die. It is part of normal living and not only must be faced eventually, but it is something good for us to face whenever it appears. It also seems particularly important not to hide it from small children, who should be allowed to see people dying and to talk and even joke about it, when appropriate, and feel the depth and beauty of it as well they can. Someday I expect a course in dying will become a regular part of the school curriculum, for it is already among the most neglected as well as perhaps the most important of subjects.

  THE AFTERLIFE

  Whether or not death ever fully enters the realm of science on Earth, judgment of it seems remarkably stable - as, for example, that of Cicero who wrote two millenniums ago: "There is in the minds of men, I know not how, a certain presage of a future existence; and this takes deepest root in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls."

  Helen Keller "saw" death as illusory, and more clearly for being blind and deaf: "I know my friends not by their physical appearance but by their spirit. Consequently death does not separate me from my loved ones. At any moment I can bring them around me to cheer my loneliness. Therefore, to me, there is no such thing as death in the sense that life has ceased... The inner or 'mystic' sense, if you will, gives me vision of the unseen ... Here in the midst of everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven. Immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold when death sets me free."

  Even a man like Bertrand Russell, who did not believe in personal survival, strongly felt the abstract relation between an individual and his world, for he wrote that "an individual human existence should be like a river - small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls." But "gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."

  Perhaps one could go from there to realization that the "self" is illusory in nature, temporary from our present, limited viewpoint, a merely elementary, finite tool of learning. Alan Watts seems to have thought so when he wrote that "there is no separate 'you' to get something out of the universe," that "we do not come into the world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." He explained that "as the ocean 'waves' so the universe 'peoples' ... What we therefore see as 'death,' empty space or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endless waving ocean of life ... The corpse is like a footprint or echo - the dissolving trace of something you have ceased to do ... When the line between yourself and what happens to you is dissolved, you find yourself not in the world, but as the world ... There is a feeling of hills lifting you as you climb them, of air breathing yourself in and out of your lungs. All space becomes your mind..."

  The physical body, according to this view, may be a sort of gantry for the ship of soul, a matrix that gives form to spirit as language gives form to thought. Whenever, as the Bible pu
ts it, the Word is made flesh, consciousness may be quantized into mind seeds in association with developing organisms, each of which is largely controlled by genes, secretions and other stimuli. Then later, when individual thought forms and memory patterns are established, the gene structure and physical stimuli become less important, probably too restrictive, with the result that consciousness eventually breaks free of the body by means of the "hatching" process we know as death. It may even be that it is only through transcending the body that mature individual consciousness can become enabled to merge or synthesize with other consciousness or consciousnesses into some sort of greater organism for its continuing development.

  If doubt about personal immortality is one of an aging man's greatest burdens, at least the inevitability of dying can be said to be merciful. Just think what a scramble life would fall heir to if it were an accepted fact that each of us had a fifty-fifty chance of permanently avoiding death. Or even a one-in-a-billion chance. In a curious way also, when one thinks deeply about it, our doubt about immortality is far from an unmitigated liability. In fact there appears a spiritual bounty in this seemingly ultimate mystery, because having to face it for our few years on Earth effectively bestows upon us the privilege, if not quite the necessity, of exercising whatever faith in life we have. I refer to faith in contradistinction to certitude, for inevitably, if science had already solved the mystery with sufficient certitude, we would have been denied the very special exaltation of relying upon faith alone.

  Faith of course can be bolstered by religion and reason, since not only have all the great Prophets of God promised life beyond death, but reasonable philosophy also offers us a hearteningly positive answer to the classic query of "To be or not to be?" It is logical, you see, to conclude that there is nothing in nothingness or, which is the same thing, that not being cannot be. Doesn't the phrase say so itself rather plainly: it cannot be that something cannot be? Put another way, life is an inherently positive existence which has no such negative capacity as would be required if it were ever not to exist. Besides, the inscrutable wisdom of the universe, usually called God, has let us be. If nothingness were our divine destiny, how in heaven's name could we be here? How could we know of our own existence - or have an existence to know of? What meaning, what profit in a fleeing flash of positiveness if it is to be followed by an eternal negative? Obviously the answer is affirmative, we are meant "to be," and existence is our prime and positive destiny. We call ourselves "beings" because living is being and there is nothing without being.

  Or, looking at it through the eyes of a gambler, might I not say that the most skeptical speculator could consider eternal life a safe bet. For in fact eternal life is a bet one cannot lose. When you come right down to it, any outcome of the bet constitutes life and victory. If there were no life after death, that would be no outcome and there would be no one around to lose the bet. So all beings must be winners and the mere fact of being is the victory.

  To those who believe, as I do, that this is a positive world of unlimited potentiality and very probably infinite dimensions, it is natural and easy to accept life beyond death. The logic of it is that, in a world as potential as this - and I am thinking of the world in the broadest sense I know of, comprising the universe materially, mentally and spiritually - anything can happen if there is only sufficient room and patience or, in more fundamental terms, enough space and time. And if anything can happen, then it follows that everything must happen or must have happened somewhere in the infinities of space, time and other dimensions. The British novelist T. H. White went so far as to propose that "anything not forbidden is compulsory" on the unstated but implicit assumption that time goes on and on without limit. One could as easily say that "everything conceivable must eventually happen," for, if there are enough hours and millenniums and minds and dreams to conceive of something, there logically must be enough space and time for the same conception to be real in (reality being basically conception in definable form) - and, if everything conceivable happens, life after death (which is conceivable) must also happen sometime in some continuum or in some division or combination of consciousnesses.

  The concept of probability also, surprisingly enough, cannot help but be a factor in the equation of immortality. Physicists have discovered a number of elementary particles by looking for them on the premise that, if no good reason why one can't exist has been discovered, the probabilities favoring its existence must amount to enough to make that existence an ultimate certainty. If this line of logic seems shaky as ground for hoping that something real will pop up out of nowhere, let me say it works nonetheless with everything from quarks to quasars - and it gave physicists provable results in the subatomic neutrino in conformance with the elementary law of nature that categorically declares that all events (real or imaginary) have some degree of probability unless some principle (known or unknown) specifically prohibits their happening. In other words: anything that can happen does happen. And therefore, in the absence of any law forbidding consciousness after death, consciousness has a continuing measure of probability that, however small, adds and adds and adds ... ad infinitum.

  Perhaps now you will protest that an immortality compounded of eternal probabilities is cool comfort to the dying, that, if one has to wait a billion years for resurrection, one might as well forget it. But the billion years is of course relative and inherently illusory, for, without consciousness, the long sleep seems to its Rip Van Winkle to pass instantaneously and whether Rip "wakes up" in a minute or a billion years should make no difference to him - at least no conscious difference.

  Besides, what evidence is there that time in any way exists as a dimension beyond our present life? Not only did Einstein contend that neither time nor space is fundamental but many mystic sources corroborate him with suggestions that the most profound of influences are eternal and infinite - that is, outside of time-space as in Jesus' tense-twisted declaration that "Before Abraham was, I am."

  Passage from this finite world into an infinite world should be natural and painless, as Bertrand Russell suggests, perhaps taking on new perspectives, as in the analogy of the dying river boatman who, from his two-dimensional liver surface, which denied him a direct view of either his past around the bend behind him or his future around the bend before him, is suddenly wafted "upward" at death into the three-dimensional sky from which he views the river whole: taking in past, present and future simultaneously.

  If you can entertain this prognosis of immortality, it may be helpful to add that dying and passing beyond space-time is analogous to a character in a movie being transformed into a character in a book, because it amounts to switching from a medium of linear succession where birth, life and death follow each other chronologically like notes of a melody to a medium of integral simultaneity where birth, life and death are all displayed together like the notes of a musical chord.

  It is also analogous to evolving from the concrete particle milieu of the nineteenth century into the abstract field milieu of the twentieth, from finitude toward Infinitude. It is transcendental and so natural that many an astute philosopher has intuitively realized that, if one could understand the true reality of this world, there would remain virtually no difference between life and death. When Thales said as much in 600 B.C., one of his followers asked, "Why then are you not dead?" He replied, "Because it really makes no difference."

  If death is still unacceptable to you as a mere aspect of life, I might ask how, in the time before organic life evolved, one could have imagined life? And, if one could not, then how now death?

  Furthermore, if you don't agree that dying is living, pray tell me how it is that a watch serves (lives) only while it is running down? Why rivers flow? Why rain rains? Why fruit falls?

  I suppose one reason for the pervasive fear of death is that it implements our instinct for self-preservation, which has obvious survival value in evolution. But another reason must be that fear bolsters our sense of self that may be just what enabl
es us to keep soul in body long enough to get full benefit of this finite phase of transcendence.

  Did you ever try to imagine in full, vivid reality the world of your children and surviving friends after your death? It is hard, and takes an effort of imagination, although of course you can reason out the more predictable post-mortem events by logic. But, in fact, there is a strange inertia between you and that future world, an inertia that testifies to its illusory nature in relation to you if not to your whole present world. It is presumably the same barrier that separates your dead ancestors from your present life, and the relationship says something about the nature of this mortal world in general and your life in particular, about its soul essence being beyond space and time and self and, as I surmise, profoundly safe from the dangers and chances of earthly firiitude or personal mortality. To those in the larger world who are outside of time with no past or future, we here-now must be as if already "dead." We simply ARE.