The following is
Essay #3, The Great Debate, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
Of course, when
you're in that in-between zone -- what the
Tibetans call a "bardo" -- after your life
is over but before you've died, you have
plenty of time to think -- to ruminate and
to wonder what will happen to you when you
finally cross that threshold and enter the
house of death.
Oh, perhaps
before I follow that train of thought, I
guess I should clarify what I meant when I
wrote that line about my life being over.
Obviously, either I'm still here or a ghost
is writing this. What I meant was that the
really active part of my life has finished
-- no more love affairs, exciting
adventures, extensive travels, doing
research, writing books, and so forth -- all
the activities that I enjoyed so much during
my life until recent years. Yes, I still
have my quieter pleasures, as I have
written, but mostly I am just waiting --
waiting to die. And can't help speculating
what will happen once I do.
Lately, I have
been reading a little philosophy, not about
life and death matters, but in doing so, it
has occurred to me that so many of the
world's great thinkers are professed
atheists and are convinced that when we die,
that's it. Poof! Death brings annihilation
to our individual personalities and to all
consciousness. We enter into a sleep from
which we never awaken.
Let's consider
this roster of the world's greatest minds
who hold this view. There's
Friedrich
Nietzsche, of course, who became the most
influential philosopher of the 19th century,
albeit only after he had gone mad in 1889
while embracing a horse that was being
beaten on the streets of Turin. And then
there was
Heidegger, commonly regarded as
the greatest philosopher of the 20th century
despite his unapologetic embrace of and
involvement with Nazism. But let's not get
distracted.
Another
unabashed atheist who immediately comes to
mind (at least mine) of whom you have
doubtless heard is a fellow named
Sigmund
Freud, unquestionably one of the most
influential thinkers of the 20th century.
And then I immediately think of the
psychoanalytically-inclined anthropologist,
Ernest Becker, whose Pulitzer prize-winning
book,
The Denial of Death, I used to assign
in one of my classes. Becker, incidentally,
died before reaching the age of 50 and
prepared for death by reading
Chekhov, which
I used to read to my mother before she died,
but never mind. I seem to be digressing
again, which may be my own way of denying
death. Finally, we shouldn't overlook one of
the most widely quoted philosophers of our
own time,
Woody Allen, who can be seen
toting around Becker's book in his glorious
smash hit,
Annie Hall. And in another one of
his top-rated films,
Hannah and Her Sisters,
his mordant character makes us laugh by
reminding us that the universe is totally
meaningless, which, leads him to consider
becoming a
Hare Krishna. Whatever works.
But let's
continue our list of the world's most
influential avowed atheists. No such list
would be complete without mentioning the
most revered and beloved scientist of our
own time, the recently deceased
Stephen
Hawking whose incontestable genius was often
compared to
Einstein's. And how about
another intellectual luminary,
Steven
Weinberg, one of the leading theoretical
physicists of the present day and a Nobel
Laureate to boot?
And then these
days there are any number of literary
heavyweights who find themselves in the
atheists' camp. Just to take two whose books
I have recently read, there's
Phillip Roth
whose almost vicious attacks on religion are
well known as is his disdain for anyone who
believes in the poppycock of an afterlife.
And then just last night, I came across this
passage from the English writer,
Julian
Barnes, when reading his almost unbearably
affecting memoir concerning the death of his
wife:
"When we killed -- or exiled -- God,
we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that
sufficiently at the time? No God, no
afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him,
of course, this long-standing imaginary
friend of ours, And we weren't going to get
an afterlife anyway." |
To conclude our
roster of prominent religious debunkers, of
course we can't overlook that contemporary
clutch of infamous atheists --
a quartet
that includes
Richard Dawkins,
Daniel
Dennett,
Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris
-- no intellectual slouches, these guys.
Well, when you
consider the collective brain power and
enormous influence of these men -- and of
course they are all men (make of that what
you will), the idea that death is not a dead
end seems patently ludicrous -- a childish
fantasy for people who can't deal with the
obvious fact that death brings only
extinction. We like to imagine what most
religions teach -- that we will continue to
exist even after death, but in light of all
reason, this is pure balderdash.
Still, as we
know, most people don't believe this is
balderdash. Surveys consistently show that
the vast majority of people, certainly in
the United States, believe in some form of
life after death. Also arrayed against the
view of the intellectual giants I've
mentioned is the testimony of literally
thousands of near-death experiencers who
have at least entered into the first stages
of death, which so far as I know, none of
the formidable thinkers cited above ever did
before their deaths; that is, none of them
is known to have had an NDE. I can only
wonder if they had, whether they would have
remained so sure of their position. In my
research on NDEs, I can say that I have
encountered more than a few former atheists
who changed their mind after having had an
NDE.
However that may
be, almost all near-death experiencers
become undeniably convinced that some form
of postmortem existence awaits us all. Let
me take just a few moments to offer some
illustrative examples from those persons who
have come the closest to crossing the bourne
from which Shakespeare taught -- wrongly, as it
turns out -- no traveler returns.
I was standing
in a mist and I knew immediately that I had
died. And I was so happy that I had died but
I was still alive. And I can't tell you how
I felt. It was, "Oh, God, I'm dead, but I'm
here. I'm me. And I started pouring out
these enormous feelings of gratitude because
I still existed and yet I knew perfectly
well that I had died.
I know there is
life after death. Nobody can shake my
belief. I have no doubt -- it's peaceful and
nothing to be feared. I don't know what's
beyond what I experienced, but it's plenty
for me. I only know that death is not to be
feared, only dying.
Upon entering
that Light... the atmosphere, the energy, it's
total pure energy, it's total knowledge,
it's total love -- everything about it is
definitely the afterlife if you will… As a
result of that [experience] I have little
apprehension about dying my natural
death…because if death is anything like what
I experienced, it's gotta be the most
wonderful thing to look forward to,
absolutely the most wonderful thing.
It gave me an
answer to what I think everyone must wonder
about at one time or another in this life.
Yes, there is an afterlife! More beautiful
than anything you can begin to imagine. Once
you know it, there is nothing that can equal
it. You just know!
What is striking
about these quotes -- and the literature on
NDEs is replete with them -- is not merely
their unanimity of opinion, but the tone of
absolute certitude that pervades them. Those
who have left their bodies behind, even for
a moment, know without a scintilla of doubt
that they will continue to exist, as
themselves, in another world of
indescribable radiant beauty.
So where does
that leave us? We have two diametrically
opposed points of view to consider -- that
of the renowned and world famous
intellectual atheists I've cited and that of
the thousands of unknown ordinary persons
who have had NDEs. Take yer choice.
For atheists,
however, the road stops here, and there is
nothing further to add. But the testimony of
NDEs tells us that there is something more
that awaits us after death, even if they
can't tell us what. The question is, is
there a way to know, and, secondly, does it
make sense to try to conceive of it while we
are, like me, waiting to die?
The
distinguished psychiatrist
Carl Jung, who
himself had a
profound NDE when he was
nearly seventy years old, was an ardent
proponent of precisely this kind of
imaginative exercise. In his captivating
memoir,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
written toward the end of his life, he
exhorts his readers as follows:
"A man
should be able to say he has done his best
to form a conception of life after death, or
to create some image of it -- even if he
must confess his failure. Not to have done
so is a vital loss." |
At the risk of
disagreeing with the great man, I demur. In
fact, I think it is a friggin' waste of
time. I give several reasons for taking this
position in my book,
Lessons from the Light,
but the one I would emphasize here is
two-fold. First, of all, it is impossible to
know what, if anything, is going to happen
to us, and second, near-death experiencers
themselves tend to shy away from these
speculations, often implying that the world
beyond death completely defies
representation in ordinary language. After
all, if such a task could daunt even a
sublime poet like
Dante, what could we
expect from mere mortals when they try to
describe their encounter with the ineffable?
But there is a
third reason as well. Thinking about the
afterlife, assuming it exists, which honesty
compels us to admit we can't know for
certain in any case, keeps us from paying
attention to our lives here, which is the
only thing we can be certain of. Didn't
Ram
Dass remind us, in the title of his seminal
book of wisdom,
Be Here Now?
When the time
comes for us to die, either we'll find out
or we won't. Why waste time thinking about
it now? I'm with
Omar Khayyam on this one.
The hell with it. I'm going to the movies
with my girlfriend. Afterward, we'll have
our bread, cheese and wine, though probably
in our case we'll substitute some chocolate
confection for the wine. I'm alive now and,
while I'm waiting to die, by jingo, I'm
going to enjoy myself as long as I can.
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
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