Life after Death
Humans are amphibians. Half spirit and half animal. As spirit they belong to the eternal world but as animals, they inhabit time.
- C.S Lewis
We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation. But as science probes deeper into these eccentricities, it is becoming clear that behaviours and attributes that seem frivolous at first glance often go to the heart of what it means to be human.
What happens to us after we die? Human beings have been asking that great, big matzo ball of an existential question since we stood upright and stopped dragging our knuckles in the primordial goo.
Do we fade into the nothingness of nonexistence? Do we re-awaken as crying, newly born infants (or animals) in a karmic cycle of reincarnation? Or maybe there's that white light that we hear so much about on Larry King and Oprah with its warm glow and the welcoming smiles of long-dead relatives. Perhaps we'll see St. Peter as a celestial maitre de checking to see if we've got our reservations for the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever one's individual beliefs are, it seems that human beings are positively obsessed with the question of what happens when the screen fades to black.
But why is this? Why does the question of what happens after we die, well, haunt us so much? In my new book How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save your Life, I discuss the notion that human beings are uniquely able to contemplate that question because we're the only species that can use our minds to travel through time and project into the future. And what do we find in said future? Our inevitable death. And that scares the hell out of us (or, some might argue, that scares the heaven and hell intous!)
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Becker had written in his seminal work The Denial of Death that, in essence, the sum of all human endeavor-our art, our architecture, our religions, our procreation-are all just desperate attempts to deny our own mortality and thus soothe our terror (what psychologists call thanatos anxiety) over the possibility that there's nothing more beyond the physical realm.
And the popular wisdom seems to be that we'll never really know what happens post-mortem because no one has ever come back to tell the tale.
This journey in which one faced one's own death and darkness-one's own shadow side-was part of a transformative and integrating "hero's journey", to use Joseph Campbell's language, in which one could, as Plato said, "die before dying". For the ancients, this was achieved by a rigorous mind/body contemplative philosophical lifestyle that culminated in a ritual known as an "incubation". During this transformative ritual, a person was suppsoed to lay totally still in a dark cave for hours, even days. Through this process, if a person had been properly trained and prepared, they could experience an amazing transformation wherein there was a sense of shedding the physical body as a snake sheds its skin.
This process of transfiguration was the human alchemy that Carl Jung wrote extensively about--and that the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians had discovered thousands of years earlier.
Perhaps the real key to the transformation-the magic, if you will-that seems to accompany actual near-death experiences lays with the dissolution of the self and the glimpse into the infinite. In a sense, death can be seen as a release or expansion of the individual egoic level of consciousness into the larger expanse. As the walls of the self are torn down, what's left? Nothing? Or is that nothing perhaps everything-the "allness" of Ultimate Reality?
So what does happen to a person after they die? Maybe a whole new awakening.
And, if you adhere to the teachings Plato and Pythagoras, you don't even have to physically die to experience that life-changing and reality-rocking awakening.
MysteryCase#3: UNSOLVED
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