As I write this, my sister Jennell is in the last stages of her experience with glioblastoma brain cancer. Almost exactly a year ago, our father passed away, so recently two significant people with whom I grew up have left me. I came out to Oregon arriving in early June, so I’ve been here almost two months. It’s rough to lose your little sister to cancer, but the long, slow decline has given us lots of time to enjoy each other’s company. In June, conversations were still possible. In early July, interaction and a few words were possible. This last week, she has been barely responsive. As I write this, she may have hours, or possibly days, left in this mortal life.
I’ve been reflecting on my beliefs about what happens to us after we die. I can remember learning about my own mortality when I was three or four years old, back in 1971 or 1972. It was horrible. I cried a lot to think that I would someday die. This has given me pause when I consider my beliefs about life-after-death, because I can see that I have motivations to believe in life after death, and cognitive bias may be shaping my views. Most people are so eager to escape the fact of death that they will quickly latch on to beliefs about heaven or life-after-death, especially if their society offers this belief as normal.
There have been times in my life when I did not believe in life after death as most people do: with the survival of the soul. At those times, I considered that the positive qualities I liked about myself were qualities that many other people had as well. I didn’t like the idea that I would die because I had so much love for people, and that love should continue, but other people would feel love and act on love for generations to come, even without me, so that love that I admire would of course continue without me. I am intelligent and my intellect is always gaining knowledge and wisdom, and I didn’t want that to be lost either, but science and knowledge seem to be growing despite whatever contributions I made, so that's another case where I could take comfort in realizing that I was just a vessel for a specific manifestation of something larger, and that larger thing would continue. I found comfort in perceiving that all the things I liked about myself would continue on in their abstract or ideal natures that transcend specific manifestations and experiences of them. Some of my good character traits, such as my compassion, love of learning, my lack of jealousy, my inclination to forgive, and my passionate love, both erotic and platonic, seemed to me things that were lovely and should not be extinguished forever. But those things weren’t unique to me. Everyone has the capacity to manifest those qualities. The qualities themselves are transcendent. I suppose anywhere in the universe where Life evolves, creatures will emerge to demonstrate some sort of ethical and moral quality, and there will be love and affection, and there will be curiosity, and love of truth. The fact that convergent evolution that will make those qualities appear reflects a reality of this universe, that wherever social beings exist and form social groups, kindness, honesty, compassion, caring, and justice will probably emerge, because those qualities are inherently potential in this universe. Those things are not dependent on me, and I don’t “own” them. So, when I’m gone, those good qualities won’t die with me. They will be manifested in other beings for many generations, and in many other worlds all over the universe.
Also, when I have been a materialist, and believed (falsely, as I now know) that consciousness and personality emerge from the arrangement of matter and chemicals, I considered that my good qualities were inherently potential qualities of my universe, and if the universe is infinite, or expanding and contracting in infinite waves of big bangs and creations of new universes, eventually matter would again be arranged in a way similar to how it is now arranged in me, and other beings or persons would exhibit the qualities I liked about myself. So, again, the things I like about myself don’t necessarily “belong to me” as if only I can exhibit them. Many of my good qualities can be exhibited by anyone, and can be exhibited by animals, so those things go on, or will return in other lifetimes or other worlds and universes.
In recent years I have sometimes examined contemporary theory in anthropology and psychology, and it seems to me that many experts in those fields have adopted a theory of civilization that attributes much of what humans create in their cultures and civilizations to attempts to divert attention from the terror of their own mortality and death. I think there is some truth in this. People do not want to face their mortality, and they do not want to consider the frailty and brevity of life. So, we are highly engaged in activities and diversions that only make sense if we don’t think we’ll ever get old and die. I’m very influenced in my thinking by the work of the philologist and author J.R.R. Tolkien. In his epic stories, the human fear of death and the desire of humans to prolong their lives and escape their fate plays a large role in motivating the evil that occurs in the world.
Also, another source of evil in Tolkien’s sub-creation (in his fantasy world-building) is the tendency of those with power to try to use their power to organize the world in ways that conflict with the Divine Plan. That is, powerful figures rebel against the beautiful song of creation, and try to make a “better” (as it seems to them) world, and in the process, make the world hellish and corrupt. I sometimes feel this way about civilization, where human desires to conquer and dominate nature and other animals to feed the hunger for power and control over our lives leads us to excesses and ensnares us in futile pursuits of things that provide only brief and illusory comfort. People are willing to sacrifice their humanity and genuine relationships to engage in soul-crushing activities that help them get more stuff.
To some degree, I think modern society does this to us. Capitalism and technology provide us with ways to become insensitive to others, and to engage with our own striving toward impossible and absurd goals, distracting us from the real duties we have of creating a flourishing life and connecting in meaningful ways with other people. To some extent, the fear of death and aging and decline of our mortal bodies may be a motive for much of this. People would prefer to cope with their mortality with denial, escape, avoidance, and flight. It’s a comforting distraction to pursue wealth and other successes beyond the point we need to achieve basic security, but the comfort is shallow and may come at the cost of erosion of our ability to love, to care, to enjoy, and to appreciate the miraculous world around us.
I don’t actually accept the theory that terror about death motivates much of what we do as we build civilization and religion. I just think it offers an important perspective that we should consider, and keep in mind. But I’ll set it aside now, and move on.
The mainstream argument that we survive death comes from religions. The survival of death is a central belief in the Christian and Islamic faiths. The belief that the soul, or parts of the soul, or elements of soul, return to life through reincarnation is a common or central belief in Hinduism and Buddhism. In most religions there is an understanding that personhood and individuality and identity continue after death. This was also believed in early civilizations, in Sumer, Egypt, along the Yellow River in China, and in India. This was also a common belief in the civilizations of the Americas before European contact.
The central religious scriptures of these faiths don’t seem to me to offer much detail about what life after death is like. Much of the colorful detail is added through later texts. Popular beliefs and stories seem to infect the religions with some details that seem far-fetched to me. Those texts that made it into the Christian Bible in which Jesus promised eternal life seem to offer few explicit details about what “eternal life” would be like.
It’s not only the ancient religions that taught about life after death. Many of the more modern religions, and modern religious and spiritual leaders generally believe in some sort of survival after death. Continued spiritual existence after death is taught as a basic principle in the religion I profess (the Baha’i Faith), and my religion has texts revealed in the 19th century, so we can be relatively sure of what the Central Figures of our religion thought, at least at the broad and abstract level, about what happens to us after death. In addition, a wide variety of gurus, saints, holy people, and wise intellectuals have embraced belief in some sort of existence beyond death.
It is generally better to trust in empirical evidence, reason, and experimental results to find things we believe, but I think “revealed” truths from experts and the wisdom of persons with great insight can also offer valuable facets of truth, so I take religious teachings and the opinions of people who seem especially saintly or holy or wise as a valid source of information about the world, and from such sources, I see some very reasonable people who have been confident in life after death.
Then, there is reincarnation phenomena. Sometimes some people have had memories that seem to have belonged to other people. I think the phenomena is widespread and well-documented. It seems to me that sometimes the person who has memories that belong to another person (usually someone who lived before them and is no longer living) also feels that they have the same identity as the other person whose memories they can recall. However, my understanding is that this transfer of memories is spotty. People may have some vivid memories and detailed knowledge about some aspects of another person’s life, but seem to have no understanding of other significant aspects of that person’s life. They may remember two or three of the other person’s family members, but have no memory of others. This is one (of several) reasons I don't believe in the folk religious conception that we return again and again through cycles of birth and rebirth. If that was how things worked, shouldn't more of us have memories of our previous lives, and should those of us with such memories have more complete memories? I have no theory to explain reincarnation phenomena, but I do think the phenomena undermine belief that our consciousness (and memories) emerge from the brain, and support the idea that mind and memories exist independent of the physical brain, at least sometimes, for some people.
Reincarnation phenomena suggest to me that on occasion, some memories and some aspects of a person’s sense of identity can be transferred. I cannot conceive of a material way that the transfer of memories and identity could occur, so I take this as one of many indications that our world is essentially based upon a mental or consciousness foundation, and the material world we perceive with our senses and instruments is a sort of interface our minds create to understand the underlying mental objective reality. I don’t believe in standard reincarnation, but I cannot deny that sometimes phenomena suggestive of reincarnation have been observed. If memories and identity can be transferred across the barriers of death, time, and physical distance, that suggests to me that death is not the absolute end of a person, at least not initially, and not completely. Sometimes, some aspects of a person continue.
The experiences of persons near death are another indication to me that life may continue after death. I’m especially interested in cases of persons who have no heartbeat and no measurable brain activity for more than a few minutes, but then somehow are revived, and after revival report experiences that occurred while they were dead. The parsimonious explanation is that they did not have these experiences, but that upon their revival and the return of their brain function, their brain creates memories of the Near Death Experience. But, if someone can accurately report things going on around them at the time they were experiencing death, or if they have gained knowledge of events or things that they should not be able to know about in any other way, then their Near Death Experiences convince me that, at last for a short time, consciousness and awareness and identity can exist when the brain is not functioning. This again confirms my belief that consciousness creates the brain as a sensory indicator of mind, and that mind and consciousness is not an emergent property of the arrangement of matter. The Near Death Experience also suggests to me that death is not the end of existence.
A curious thing about near death experiences is that among those who are revived from a state of the brain no longer functioning while the heart was no longer pumping blood, most do not report the experiences. Also, each experience is different, although there are common themes. Also, not all the experiences are good. Some people have horrific and terrifying experiences. So, this suggests that the mind of the person dying has a role in shaping the experience during these short minutes or seconds of death, and culture and social expectations also shape the experience. This makes me hesitate more to say that Near Death Experiences tell us anything about the actual realities after death, but I think that Near Death Experiences to tell us that for some people, at least for a short time, life continues after clinical death.
There are also the cases of apparitions of the dead, or ghosts. These may be visions of persons who have died, or hallucinations of deceased persons or animals. Whether appearing in waking life or in dreams, the standard parsimonious answer is that people want to see someone or something that has died, and their minds create a hallucination to satisfy their desire. The other parsimonious explanation, put forth by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore (in Phantasms of the Living, 1886) is that some sort of telepathy reveals a truth (often the truth that someone has recently died) to the person who sees an apparition, and the apparition is a hallucination invented by the viewer to help them interpret the telepathic communication they have received. I, however, think that in some cases the minds of a deceased person or animal may be able to influence a viewer and give them the vision of an apparition. Especially interesting to me are cases where the apparition offers information or advice that seemingly could not have been known by the viewer, and when the apparition appears a significant time after death. Also, for me, when we accept telepathy, although that is something quite different from evidence for life-after-death, it does undermine the standard materialist model of reality, and it does conform to my suspicion that objective reality exists at a level of consciousness and mind (or, I might as well say soul and spirit, since I’m not sure what the distinction between mind and soul may be). I think that when we see deceased persons in hallucinations or dreams, these appearances may often be wish-fulfillment fantasies or daydreams brought into reality through hallucinations, but I suspect that sometimes there is actual communication from a deceased person, and that suggests to me that identity and interpersonal bonds survive death, at least for some time.
I have two personal examples here from my family history. First, my great-grandmother was having trouble running the restaurant she inherited when my great-grandfather died unexpectedly. She had a visionary dream in which my great-grandfather gave her advice and told her what to do. She followed his advice, and as it turned out, his advice was good, and she was able to achieve what she needed. The parsimonious response is that she had an unconscious hunch that she ought to take a course of action, and she herself generated the dream, and her mind invented a figure of her late husband to give her the advice that her unconscious knew, but was hidden from her conscious awareness. Another interpretation is that my deceased great-grandfather influenced my great-grandmother's mind and inspired her. I like to believe that persons who have died can inspire us, and I think that is a reasonable explanation. Another case involves my mother-in-law, who had a massive stroke, and was paralyzed in half of her body and generally unable to speak. She sometimes could say a few words, or respond to certain people with certain common phrases. I remember visiting her after the stroke and she called out my name, which seemed remarkable. About four months after her stroke, her second daughter passed away from cancer. After some days or weeks, the remaining children (at least those who were able to visit her) decided they would tell her. At the moment when these siblings came to see their mom, she looked at them and seemed to be gazing past them, and she called out to her deceased daughter, seemingly hallucinating her and then having a flash of recovery of her power of speech so that she could call out to her daughter. The parsimonious explanation is that despite the damage to her brain, she noticed that her second daughter was not visiting her, and that most of her children had come to see her without their sister, and she intuitively guessed that her missing daughter might have died, but then to avoid the grief that would come with that, she hallucinated that her daughter was there standing among her living children. The more interesting answer is that in her state of mind she was able to see the presence of a spiritual representation of her deceased daughter, or that her deceased daughter’s spirit chose this moment to appear to her mom, to comfort her. I myself have hallucinated a ghost. Our family cat had disappeared, and I suppose she had died. We had a replacement kitten. The small cat did not come to my bedroom or jump on my bed when I was sleeping, but this was a behavior or habit our old cat had regularly done before she had disappeared. One night I felt a cat jump on my bed, and the cat was large. It was as if our old cat had returned, but I had given up on our old cat ever appearing, and concluded that she was dead, so I assumed the cat I felt on my leg up on the bed with me was our new cat. So, I was very pleased, as this was the first time our new cat had done as our old cat used to do. This was at night, and my room was dark, and I was awakened from sleep at the moment the cat jumped on the bed with me. However, as the cat on my bed started to purr, just as our old cat had done, I heard outside my room the sound of a cat. That is, there was a cat outside my room, and there was a cat on my bed next to my feet. This was an uncanny situation, and I felt unnerved and somewhat horrified. But, as soon as my mood changed from happiness to fear and disquiet, the "cat" on my bed stood up, and jumped off the bed. This was a ghost phenomenon, and I assume it was one part of my mind conjuring a wish-fulfillment hallucination that my old cat was still alive and still cared about me, but some other part of my mind being frightened by the hallucination. Or, maybe some cats have ghosts.
I’m also interested in mediumistic communication with persons who have died. The evidence for this is less solid, and a problem is that many people can use tricks to convince other people that they are communicating with the dead. People are easily tricked, especially when they are so highly motivated to believe in life after death. Nevertheless, I think there have been cases or situations where people did seem to gain special knowledge through the agency of a deceased person communicating with them. This again suggests to me that identity, the power to communicate, and social bonds of love and caring do sometimes survive death, at least for a while, and that in some rare instances, the consciousnesses of those who have died can touch the consciousnesses of those who are living.
So, up to this point, I count five reasons I think some aspects of us survive death. I take the opinions of some very intelligent, or wise, or holy and saintly people who assure us that life after death is a fact as one point of evidence. Another is the fact that there is some reincarnation phenomena. The third reason is that some experiences of Near Death Experiences seem to indicate that some people survive death, at least for a while. A fourth reason is that ghost phenomena or “apparitions of deceased persons” in dreams or in hallucinations seen by multiple people indicates to me that in some cases some aspects of people seem to survive death. The fifth reason I believe is that it seems that sometimes people can act as mediums and receive communications from deceased persons.
In all five of these categories of reasons for my belief in life-after-death, I am aware that there is a lot of bad evidence. There are people lying, tricking, misleading, and offering false hope through deception. I’m aware of that, and I’m also aware that people can be gullible, and they want to believe. But I’ve looked into these various sorts of phenomena, and I’m convinced that some of these are true.
Finally, I have a personal reason for believing. In my case, when I was 13 years old, I had a mystical experience of transcendence. I saw for a few minutes a different reality in which everything was connected and all the created world was a sort of reflection of “love and light” or something like that. The experience was overwhelming, and physically similar to the experience of being thrust into cold water, or of being electrocuted (I’ve survived being struck by lightening), although the feeling was pleasant, and those two physical sensations I’m comparing it to are horrible. I’m just saying the feeling was intense, and far more wonderful and affirming than any orgasm or any other peak experience I’ve had, including the birth of my sons. In that experience, I felt that the insights I was having were more real that my real life. And, I felt something about how this mortal life was not all that we have. So, that experience is for me a special case of a feeling that I have seen with my own consciousness the fact of life continuing after death. But, my own experiences don’t really count as anything for anyone else. It's just a private and personal thing that happened to me that gives me another reason for believing in life after death.
Why do so many people want to convince non-believers in life after death? I think lots of people who tell us that “Jennell is going to a better place” are communicating what they hope is true. By testifying to their beliefs in a life after death, they are helping to affirm their beliefs, and offering comfort to themselves and what they hope will be comforting to us.
I do not know that belief in life after death is completely comforting. For one thing, I don’t know how long it lasts. Perhaps our existence continues after death for only a few hours, days, or weeks. Also, how much of us continues after death? I suspect that most of the things I don’t like about myself, and especially my pride, egoism, selfishness, narcissism, sloth, anger, and that sort of thing would fall away. And, although those are all faults, being a mortal human is a process of contending against our faults, and if our faults are effaced by death, we would be transformed, and not quite who we were while alive. For example, most of us love sex, and sex is considered a good part of married life in most cultures, but if we no longer exist manifested through physical bodies, I wonder what sort of sexual ecstasy will be enjoyed by us after death (orgasms are primarily mental, so perhaps we can have mental or spiritual sex in an after life, but I have no idea how that would work).
If we just die, and it’s all over, then we have the security of knowing with certainty what happens. If we continue existing, we are facing a situation of unknowns, and we lose control. I think the human desire to know with certainty, and to have control, compels many people toward atheism and a belief in materialism where death is the absolute end of a person.
I also doubt that the folk religion beliefs about heaven and hell are similar to whatever realities we experience after death. Perhaps our individuality merges with some greater consciousness or entity of which we become part of a composite. Perhaps life after death is more dreary and dreadful than we imagine. Perhaps the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup is correct and we are all alters of a single consciousness that has split up into sentient beings and plants and minerals and stars and the observable universe, but we go through something like integration and get merged back into the underlying unity consciousness after death. Perhaps we will feel intense regret, shame, and loss as we perceive how we have failed to live well when we were mortal beings manifesting in this world through bodies. I think that hoping for heaven and fearing hell is a level of spirituality appropriate for toddlers and small children, and I wish people would grow out of such spirituality levels.
I think we should live our lives as if there is no life after death. As far as I can tell, from the six sources of insight I’ve listed, I’m sure that something of us continues after death. I suspect that memories, identity, some of our noble and positive qualities, and our love for other persons probably continues, at least for some people. I don’t know if these all completely survive, or if merely fragments of us survive. I don’t know how long we continue with our individual identities, if we even persist as individuals after death. I really don’t know what happens after death, except that I’m pretty sure that for most of us, and perhaps all of us, we will continue in some form or another after death, at least for a time.
I like to believe that Jennell and I will continue to have a relationship after she is gone. I will continue to love her and to think of her, and I will recall her when I pray for her, or remember an experience with her, or look at photographs of her, or listen to recordings of her voice. But then, when I die, I will not be surprised if there is some sort of reunion, and the relationship can again become one with two-way communication. While I do not know with certainty that she will be “in a better place” after death, I trust what the leaders of my religion tell us, and they tell us that for many people, the life after this one is so wonderful and excellent, that we could hardly bear to continue living in this relatively drab and miserable reality if we really understood what comes next. I also trust the Baha’i scripture that promises us that “death is a messenger of joy”. The grief and loss for those of left behind is terrible, but the existences that follow in worlds beyond this one are opportunities for greater love and greater growth, and with that insight, if we really understand it, we should have joy at the thought of our mortality and the liberation of the person who has died. And so, for me, death is a time of profound mixed feelings. There is some joy, based on my religious beliefs, but there is grief, based on the grieving and loss and the diminishment of our lives whenever someone else has passed away.
In closing here is an excerpt from Meditation 17 by John Donne:
…The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
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