On Approaching Death

On Approaching Death

A letter to a relative

I must say that I disagree with your "atheism" regarding the afterlife. While I admit I'm a bit agnostic myself, I lean strongly towards the idea that something of the person survives death. Eliminating the trite argument that a negative can never be proved I think there is quite a bit of evidence for this. Which ever of the family goes first, I plan to meet up with them beyond the veil. So, you're not going to get away from being pestered by the rest of us by the easy out of dying.

I'm going to disregard the argument passed down verbally from first century cultists claiming that their leader came back from the other side. If (saint) Thomas who knew the principals first hand can demand to be shown, I figure I'm entitled to a little scepticism. Nonetheless, I think the preponderance of evidence is on the side of there being an afterlife.

I have three main points that incline me to this viewpoint. First is the simple recognition of the Law of Conservation of Everything. A recent Smithsonian magazine reported that biologists believe they will soon be able to use the DNA from stuffed specimens of the carrier pigeon to bring it back from extinction. I once had a great conversation with my graduate philosophy teacher where we pondered the idea that eventually science may progress to the point where we can resurrect the dead. Matter, energy, and most importantly, information can't be created or destroyed. Everything we can observe about the universe leads me to the conclusion that it's frugal.

Secondly, there is some really interesting research on the near death experience that indicates there's more to life than, well, life. There are several websites on NDE and the one I found recently that appears to attempt a very unbiased scientific approach is Horizon Research. They report a really interesting case recently where a woman with a tumor on the brain stem was refrigerated and "killed" so that she had no measurable signs of life - 100% flatline - which allowed surgeons to operate. The risky surgery was successful and she was revived whereupon she related details of the procedure she observed while dead that it's extremely unlikely she could have known or guessed at.

Lastly, I have had some rather unusual personal encounters with the afterlife. These are of the nature of past life memories. Take these with a grain of salt (I certainly do). I can't definitively say that they are actual "memories". I can only say that they have the same quality as consensus reality "memories". They "feel" the same.

In the first case I had woken from a sound and dreamless sleep concerned about what to do for the upcoming birthday of a good friend. With no money, I couldn't get her a present.For some reason I immediately started dictating a story for her as I "remembered" it (she was interested in all forms of psychic phenomena). What I remembered was the occurrence of two parallel past lives in 13th century Germany. In one I was a village herbalist. In another, I was a baron of the same area and officiate of the Roman church. Very briefly: the baron was desirous of the herbalist and when she spurned him he used his influence to have her burned at the stake. Later, the baron was riding a horse across a wooden bridge when the horse threw him, he hit the railing and broke his neck. The most interesting part of this vision/imagining/memory is that it didn't end there. I, as the baron, was ushered by a figure like Dante's Beatrice through a judgement kind of scenario where he was shown the herbalist burning in hell. Looking on the herbalist in the pit from the point of the baron, I became the herbalist suffering in the flames. This continued until I realized that I was there because I had denied the Christ under the baron's torture and thought myself worthy of this punishment. When I realized I wasn't, I was released from hell immediately and the peculiar vision/imagining/memory ended. I went on to give this strange tale to my friend as my birthday present.

In the second case, about twenty years ago a friend had taken a seminar on past life regression and (as I'm a good subject for hypnosis - learned self-hypnoses quite a while ago), we decided to experiment. I went into a self-induced trance and my friend used the techniques she had learned to guide me back through time. I was the wife of a Roman charioteer. In my friend's apartment I suddenly started coughing extremely violently and snapped out of the trance. In the trance I had been suddenly enveloped in a cloud of gas that was burning my lungs and I couldn't breathe. I had, of course, heard of Pompeii where the Vesuvius eruption had buried everyone in ash. That didn't fit the experience. I found later that at Herculaneum, a small seaport nearby, a burning cloud of gas had smothered people in a manner similar to my "past life" experience.

Finally, I am with Saint Whitehead who is attributed with saying the universe preserves value. I don't need to always be the same person I am now. I certainly wasn't in the past. What is important to "me" is that my values survive. If love, intelligence, the appreciation of beauty, harmony, music, if these things survive then surely the best parts of this personhood have survived.

So, though I reserve the right to change my mind, I'm convinced that something of us survives beyond death. I hope to see you there.

Not any time soon, though.