Making Peace With Death

A favorite reading this time of year for many Unitarian Universalists comes from religious educator Sophia Fahs, who wrote, “For so the children come, and so they have been coming. Always in the same way they come, born of the seed of man and woman. No angels herald their beginnings. No prophets predict their future courses. No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind. Yet each night a child is born is a holy night. Fathers and mothers—sitting beside their children’s cribs feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning. […] Each night a child is born is a holy night—a time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshipping.” This is what Sophia Fahs says, and in this way, she reminds us about our Unitarian Universalist First Principle: That all people have inherent worth and dignity. Birth—any birth—is a revealer of this mystery, and no angels are needed, no prophets, no stars. Our worth and dignity is INHERENT, and with every birth, the point is made again and again.

 

This morning, I would have us consider how this is also true about death. How it is a revealer of the mystery of inherent worth and dignity as much as birth. Death, like birth, is an integral part of what it means to be human, and it is from our simple humanity that our inherent worth and dignity flows. Not just from part of our humanity, but from all of it. The entire paradox of our being, which is a being-towards-death. “For everything there is a season, and time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die.” One time takes nine months and involves a lot of hard pushing coming into the world; and the other time involves its own kind of hard work, much pain and vulnerability in the leaving. Both times tell a story about the drama of life and its basic value, which nothing can take away.

 

All people have inherent worth and dignity. Affirming this fully requires us to make our peace with death, allowing us, in turn, to discover how it is that even this fearsome part of our existence can be a teacher, and lead us into dimensions of meaning that cannot be fathomed in any other time of life.

 

But first we have to make our peace with it. That has to come first.

 

And how do we do that, when death in our culture is taboo? Sociologist Goeffrey Gorer says that the subject of death has become as unmentionable today as sex was in Victorian times. “Death is the last and greatest taboo,” adds psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and this is evident above all in the clear discomfort people have when they find themselves in the presence of one who is terminally ill, or near death. Culture spends plenty of time telling us all about how to defy death, and presents multiple options for life extension. Culture whispers in our ear, “Age is a treatable condition,” and it agrees wholeheartedly with writer W. Somerset Maugham when he says, “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.” That’s our culture. It tells us all about how to handle ourselves during this occasion and that occasion; but as for the occasion of death, our culture is no help. Death is taboo. So we don’t know what to say. We don’t know what to do. The note to someone who is dying never gets written, the call never gets made, the visit is repeatedly put off. Or we do write the note, we do make the call, we do take the time to visit, but we end up isolating them even further, and intensifying their pain. They want to share their sadness, or their fear, but the anxiety is too much for us, and we shut them down, saying, “Oh, you’ll be fine. Don’t talk that way. Think positive. Try harder.” They want to know that they are still the person they always were to us—that in essentials, we still love them—but we may fidget in their presence, talk to others in the room like they are not there, stand or sit a little too far away. They want a taste of normalcy in the midst of all the craziness—talk about the weather, talk about politics, talk about neighborhood gossip—but we don’t follow their lead and decide instead to force a heavy existential conversation about life, the universe, and everything. They simply want to be seen in all their wholeness and fullness, but we act as if the only valid thing about them is their dying, we trap them with our concern, we oppress them with our compassion. We just don’t know our manners—because for our culture, the source of manners, death is taboo.

 

We just don’t know any better. Death has become for us, today, unknown territory. “Most of us,” says health journalist Virginia Morris, “reach our thirties and forties without ever having seen a death or helped someone through a terminal illness. We may not have even heard about anyone’s death in great detail—the gradual decline, the fear, the treatments, the pain, or the intimacy that can occur in the final stage of life.” That’s what she says, and it is no help whatsoever to see actors pretending to die on TV, or in the movies—whether perishing in some violent way, or dying yet still looking beautiful and in control. This is not real death. Death is messy. How do you make your peace with something you aren’t even directly familiar with? Death has disappeared, for the most part, into hospitals, nursing homes, and other similar institutions, in sharp contrast to only a short hundred years ago, when death usually happened at home, under the care of family, friends, neighbors, and often some spiritual guide, such as a minister or priest. People knew death back then, but now, not so much.  

 

All of this only intensifies our natural fear of death. Fear grows in darkness. Fear feeds on ignorance. It becomes seemingly impossible to talk about. But this is exactly what we need to do, and sooner rather than later. Says Virginia Morris, “Hanging on the edge of a precipice, engulfed by terror, is not the time or place to learn about emergency rock-climbing procedures; you have to learn them before you start the expedition. Likewise, we have to learn something about death now, while we are still healthy. […] No one said it would be easy. But by bringing death out into the open, by witnessing it, talking about it, learning about it, and trying in whatever way we can to accept it as an inevitable part of our lives, we can be better prepared, we can make better decisions when the time comes…” That’s what Virginia Morris says, and it is in connection with the issue of end-of-life decisions that the need to face our fears sooner rather than later is particularly crucial. During end-of-life care, doctors take their cues from their patients. If we have not worked through our fears, we will freeze up at the bedside of one we love; and while they might have asked that we spare them from any aggressive intervention procedures, when we are there at the bedside, full of our fears, overwhelmed by practical issues and considerations we had never once tried to think about before, we can find ourselves making decisions that will cause us regret later. In our pain we may hear ourselves saying to the doctor, “I don’t want to hear anything bad. I want you to fix her.” In our pain and confusion, for which we are so unprepared, we don’t know when enough is enough, we don’t know when to let go.

 

This is horrible. There has got to be a better way.

 

Which brings us to our reading from earlier, about the man voluntarily sitting down on his own grave. Doing this NOT with an attitude of morbidity but with one of honest affirmation, and as a result finding his life here and now deepened and enriched. It is a marvelous demonstration of living into our Unitarian Universalist First Principle, which, given everything I have said so far, is clearly a countercultural principle, calling us to reject culture’s taboo on death, calling us to go against the grain, calling us to refuse holding death at arm’s length, calling us to proactively prepare for the inevitable.  

 

It begins by turning on the light.  If fear grows in darkness, turn on the light. To this end, I highly recommend reading Virginia Morris’ book, entitled Talking About Death. It was inspired by her experience of her father’s death, just three months after giving birth to her own son. At one point she says, “When I was pregnant, I studied, practiced, and tried to imagine labor and delivery. I talked about it with friends, heard about their experiences, and got untold amounts of advice. But when my father had a life-threatening illness, I did nothing of the sort. I didn’t look things up or ask questions. My family didn’t even acknowledge—not in any meaningful way—that my father was going to die until he was almost gone.” This is what Virginia Morris says, and in great part, it’s the ironic contrast between her thorough preparation for her son’s birth and complete lack of preparation for her dad’s death that spurred her on to writing the book. When both rites of passage are equally momentous—both a part of what it means to be human—why should practicing for one be considered prudent while practicing for the other be shameful? Among other things, the book explores the up-close reality of dying, as well as suggestions for enabling a truly good death. It talks about how advance directives (as in a living will and a power of attorney for health care) are absolutely important but not sufficient in themselves to address all the complex and emotionally wrenching choices that arise when a life is in the balance. It even looks at the issue of manners I touched on earlier, how to be a truly comforting presence to one who is dying, as well as to his or her family. It’s about turning on the light. “The thought of death will always fill us with dread … but the fear is less paralyzing, less blinding, when we have knowledge…”

 

Turn on the light. Do this, and then next of all, talk. Talk about death with your loved ones. Talk about it when you are healthy, so that the subject won’t be so hard to broach when you are sick. Talk about it so as to clear away any vagueness and confusion about your end-of-life wishes, or the wishes of another. This is what Virginia Morris did with her mom, after her dad died. She says, “My mother always said that she wants to be ‘unplugged’ when she’s ‘at that point,’ and she has even said that she would like to be ‘done in’ if she is ever ‘like that.’ But the two of us never ventured much beyond these comments, and [I realized soon enough that I needed to clarify things.] So the two of us talked, and talked, and talked, and we discovered a number of things along the way. First of all, I realized that my mom, like many people, is not afraid of respirators and feeding tubes as much as she is afraid of being a burden. She does not want her children, or anyone else for that matter, to have to care for her. […] That was what she was thinking about when she said, ‘Do me in.’ [But] then I asked her about Dad’s death. Did she view that as a burden? Did she see his care as a drain? Would it have been easier if he had taken a vial of pills, which he had actually stored away for just such an occasion? No, she said, of course not. We talked about what caring for him had meant for us, what was hard about it and what was rewarding, and if there were any aspects of it we wished we hadn’t had to do, which there weren’t. We agreed that his care had not been a chore for us, but an honor and a privilege, a gift that has stayed with us.” That’s the conversation between Virginia Morris and her mom, and I have quoted it at length because it demonstrates how a willingness to talk and talk and talk can make all the difference. Without it, Virginia Morris would never have known that the real problem for her mom was not so much certain medical procedures as it was the fear of being a burden, and as for her mom: she might never have connected the dots in her mind, might never have realized that her children caring for her would be just as important for them as was caring for their dad. A gift. A time of giving and forgiving and letting go. We need these realizations as well, with the people we love. We need these kinds of conversations too.  

 

Turn on the light, talk it out, and then do this: open your heart to your own death. Invite the thought of death in. It will surely bring sadness. Absolutely. The thought of all the loss, the thought of leaving; how this will impact the people depending on us, how the party will go on without us. Inviting the thought of death will bring sadness, and it will also trigger fear: fear of losing control, fear of the unknown, the fear of the caterpillar who cannot possibly know ahead of time the great changes in store for him, and what comes next. Sadness, fear, depression—and yet, our will to live nevertheless remains. We foresee the end, and the end gives meaning to all that comes before. It is as philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” To the degree we allow ourselves to live with the thought of death, to sit on our very own grave and see ourselves from that perspective, our understanding and appreciation of what we have and of the life that is before us grows.

 

“I have done this many times now,” says Virginia Morris. “I imagine how I might respond if I were told that I had a terminal illness. I think about how I would react if I were caring for my husband, refusing further treatment for my mother, saying goodbye to a friend. I think how I might feel, whether I could act, and what I might regret. I walk through the process, and as I do, I sob pitifully into my pillow. Then I lie still, exhausted but not sleepy, staring out the skylight above my bed at the darkness beyond. I roll onto my side and see the bright red numbers on my clock. Then I creep quietly down the hallway, going first into one room and then another, so that I can gaze upon my sleeping children. I stroke their soft hair, listen to their gentle breathing, pull up the covers, kiss their cheeks, and draw in their sweet scents. Then I go back to bed, oddly fulfilled. Cold from the trek, I snuggle close to my husband, feel his warmth, love him enormously, and fall asleep.” That’s what she says. The end gives meaning to all that comes before. Meaning throughout the lifespan, from first to last. Even in the face of death, people’s worth and dignity remains, is inherent, IS.

 

Making peace with death. Turning on the light, talking things out, opening our hearts, and then this, finally: trust. Affirming our inherent worth and dignity by trusting the rhythm and flow of the life we are given, woven seamlessly into the larger life of the natural world. The natural world holding us in its embrace, and we love ourselves even as we love it. We see nature as a revelation of the sacred, and we see it in ourselves. “I am not ready to die,” says Unitarian Universalist poet May Sarton,

 

But I am learning to trust death

As I have trusted life.

I am moving

Toward a new freedom

Born of detachment,

And a sweeter grace—

Learning to let go.

 

I am not ready to die,

But as I approach sixty

I turn my face toward the sea.

I shall go where tides replace time,

Where my world will open up to a far horizon

Over the floating, never-still flux and change.

I shall go with the changes,

I shall look far out over golden grasses

And blue waters….

 

There are no farewells.

 

Praise God for His mercies,

For His austere demands,

For His light

And for His darkness.

 

 

The Possibility of Life After Death

In his essay entitled “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” This is what Emerson says, and he is talking about the place of each of us during our lives, between transitional times of birth and death. Stairs below us, stairs above. Extremes—but we do not know them; we do not know what they are like. Are they something? Or are they nothing?

 

Not that people throughout history have somehow fallen down on the job. “In the time of the Buddha,” says philosopher John Hick, “some two and a half thousand years ago, there was as great a multiplicity of rival views as today. Is the death of the body the extinction of the person? Or does a person survive as a continuing consciousness? Or as a resurrected person? With a spiritual body? In perpetuity or for a limited period?” And on and on. From time out of mind, people have been trying hard to find the answers, and none has proven itself to be THE answer. Why, then, take up the seemingly futile task of thinking about what happens when people die?  Why talk about it this morning, when for at least the past two and a half thousand years, or more, the reality of death has maintained an impenetrable ambiguity in the face of public investigation, and in some aspects it has invited belief in life after death while, in others, it has permitted the opposite conviction? Why? I like the answer John Hick gives. He says, “We shall not be able to refrain from speculating about death until we can refrain from speculating about life; for the one is inseparable from the other. … If we wish to think realistically about life we cannot avoid also thinking about death.” True words.

 

So here’s what I want to do this morning. Talk about my journey to a positive belief in the reality of life after death. My effort to peer into the stairs above me, to see what I can see. Perhaps my story will speak to yours.

 

My journey. No mystical experiences, I’m afraid. Primarily it has involved taking a close look at the reasons for and against life after death, as well as stepping back and becoming more aware of the different paradigms which powerfully influence how people imagine the relationship between mind and brain. 

 

Let’s start by considering the reasons for. Some of the ones I encountered in my journey were logical in character, meaning that they centered on the definitions of key ideas and the need to preserve their integrity. Others were theological in character, presupposing as true certain basic ideas given in a particular scripture or tradition, and the arguments go from there. The ones that really impressed me, however, were the empirical arguments—the ones grounded in concrete sensory experience.

 

We have already heard about one class of such experiences: the near-death experience. Another has to do with apparent cases of reincarnation memories. The gold standard for research on this is Ian Stevenson, M.D., a well-respected psychiatrist from the University of Virginia who was once described as “a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side.” Perfect for doing exhaustive, honest research. He and his collaborators gathered cases suggestive of reincarnation from all over the world—Africa, the United States, Canada, Burma, India, South America, Lebanon, and Turkey. Each case, he says, “usually starts when a small child of two to four years of age begins talking to his parents or siblings of a life he led in another time and place. The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of the life and he frequently [asks] his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.” That’s what Ian Stevenson says. Together with a network of volunteers, he would try to find these spontaneous past life recall cases as soon as possible. He’d carefully question both the family of the living child and the family of the deceased to ensure that they had no contact and that no information had or would be passed between them. He’d also obtain detailed information about the deceased, including information not fully known to anyone involved—such as details of the will—so as test the child’s knowledge. Over the years, Ian Stevenson accumulated 3000 such cases, and, having honestly considered alternative hypotheses—like fraud, information gained from others, extra-sensory perception, deception on the part of the parents, and even spirit possession—he argued that reincarnation stands as the best scientific hypothesis for explaining the cases. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation—that’s the place to begin exploring Stevenson’s research for yourself. Another good overview is a book by philosopher Robert Almeder: Death and Personal Survival: The Evidence for Life After Death.

 

We’re talking empirical evidence for life after death. The near-death experience, reincarnation memories, as well as cases of mediumship, apparitions, and out-of-body experiences. Viewed separately, we find in each class of evidence provocative cases which strongly suggest the possibility that something survives physical death. Viewed together, viewed collectively, a pattern arises that makes it hard NOT to believe.

 

But I will admit: we are talking about parapsychological stuff. Stuff which strikes many people as strange. Which naturally leads us to consider some objections to life after death. It certainly did for me, in my own journey, since parapsychological research has long proven to be a magnet for criticism, even enthusiastic contempt.  

 

Why is that? 

 

One reason, I think, is the National Enquirer effect. By that I mean a kind of guilt by association. Since they are controversial, and controversy attracts attention, accounts of near death experience, or reincarnation memories, or other parapsychological phenomena pop up now and again in National Enquirer-like sources, and we may think, Huh, parapsychology must lack credibility since the National Enquirer lacks credibility, is sheer sensationalism and entertainment and fluff. Nothing to it. However, to this I would say that it’s simply unfair to take the worst expression of something and treat it as if it were representative of the best. It’s unfair to read an article or see a special on TV that is so gullible and poorly thought out that you can drive a truck through it—and then think that you have, by this, successfully debunked all the quality research on the related phenomenon that’s out there—like Ian Stevenson’s research, or the Lancet NDE study from 2001. 

 

It’s unfair—but nevertheless, we can fall for it. We can succumb to the National Enquirer effect. And then there is this reason for objecting to parapsychological evidence for life after death: the shadow of fraud. It’s happened. During spiritualism’s heyday in the 19^th century, there was widespread fraud, especially as the movement was taken over by showmanship and riches were to be had. As for the 20^th century, there have been a few documented cases of evidence tampering in lab-based parapsychological experiments. Fraud has happened; and the shadow this throws can tend to spoil even evidence and experimental results that, in truth, are perfectly valid. To this, I would say four things: First, evidence tampering is something that researchers in all scientific fields have been tempted to do, or have done, for purposes of getting tenure, or preserving prestige, or other causes. It’s a problem every field deals with. Second point: some of the people who are most zealous about uncovering fraud are parapsychologists themselves. When they find it, they let everybody know. Transparency. They understand, more than anyone else, that the phenomena they study are extraordinary—and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence that, to be taken seriously, must be as immune as possible to the charge of fraud. This, in fact, leads to my third point: because of the intense scrutiny it has labored under in the 20^th century, parapsychological research has developed methodology and controls that are perhaps far better than you see in other branches of science. Given the level of criticism, parapsychology has had to run as tight a ship as possible, for it even to survive. Finally, there is this, my fourth point: whereas it is admittedly true that even the best cases for survival are not fraud-proof—since one can always conjure up ways in which the case might be tainted—still, there is the silent inexorable witness of evidence that continues to pop up in widely differing contexts, over time, examined by many different researchers. The silent inexorable witness that makes the probability of fraud remote, and in fact turns the suspicion back on the skeptic, and can lead one to wonder what it is that causes some skeptics to disbelieve no matter what; or to insist on standards of evidence, that, if adopted, would render any empirical science impossible; or simply to be more interested in ridiculing and name-calling than rational dialogue.

 

We’re talking about objections to the possibility of life after death. Besides the National Enquirer-effect and the shadow of fraud, there’s this: the idea that the origin of belief in life after death is wish fulfillment. People believing because it’s just something they want to believe in. “Such a theory,” says philosopher John Hick, “is attractive to an age schooled in the exposure of motives by modern psychology. But nevertheless [this theory is not in accord] with early man’s thoughts. For the most general primitive attitude to the dead of which we have evidence was not one of envy, but more of fear or pity. The dead were not usually thought of as having passed on to a higher and happier life but rather as having lapsed into an altogether less desirable state of mere half-existence. […] The early greek conception of the after-life, expressed in the Iliad and the Odyssey, centered upon the psyche or soul, which scholar Erwin Rohde described as ‘the body’s shadow image’ or ‘a feebler double of the man.’ At death this descends into erebus or hades where, while still recognizable and still bearing its earthly name, it persists as a depleted, joyless entity, a mere bloodless shadow of its former embodied self.” That’s what John Hick says, and he concludes: “Thus the ‘pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die’ view of the origin of humanity’s conviction of an after-life is not supported by the evidences of anthropology. On the contrary, ‘for the vast majority of mankind, the idea that the soul gains by passing out of this world is very rare indeed.’” The question for us thus becomes—how did belief in an afterlife take hold upon humanity, if not out of wish fulfillment? Perhaps for some of the positive reasons we’ve considered here today. Definitely, John Hick’s point prevents us from summarily dismissing the ancient conviction in life after death—psychologizing it away.

 

There’s lots of possible objections to consider, and reason requires that we take a fair look. Here and now, there is one more I want to consider—perhaps the objection that, above all, drives criticism and even contempt towards belief in life after death. It’s this: that life after death is simply impossible. So impossible that even to bring it up is to be ridiculous. Impossible in a way that some thought rocks falling to earth from the skies was impossible. “I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie,” said famous Unitarian Thomas Jefferson,” than stones would fall from heaven.” He was referring to what we now call … meteorites.

 

The key objection to life after death is that it is simply impossible. Why impossible? Because, after all, mind is dependent on the brain. How can you have thinking without a brain to support it? How to even imagine what that might be like? To even consider this—what’s the matter with you? 

 

This was the objection—there like the proverbial elephant in the middle of the living room—that I encountered pretty much everywhere in academia. There in the graduate school of philosophy I went to. There in the Unitarian Universalist seminary I went to. You just didn’t question the assumption. You just didn’t. 

 

Which is why I count one of the sweetest moments in my personal journey the time I discovered the work of William James, American philosopher of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In particular, his short work from 1898 entitled: Human Immortality. In his elegant prose he acknowledges that the “old notion of a life hereafter” has lost “its power to draw belief,” especially in “scientifically cultivated circles.” “One hears,” he says, “not only physiologists, but numbers of laymen who read the popular science books and magazines, saying all about us, How can we believe in life hereafter when Science has once for all attained to proving, beyond possibility of escape, that our inner life is a function of that famous material, the so-called ‘gray matter’ of our cerebral convolutions? How can the function possibly persist after its organ has undergone decay?”

 

But it is as a scientist that James asked me and asks all of us to take a closer look at the admittedly intimate relationship between mind and brain. Certainly one way of describing it is in term of “production,” as in the brain producing the mind as a tea kettle produces steam and an electric circuit produces light. Take away the tea kettle, and there’s no steam. Take away the electric circuit, and the light goes away. The brain dies, and there’s no more mind, nothing left. But—is this the only way to describe the relationship? William James says no. There is another way, of equal explanatory power: what he calls “transmission.” As in, the brain transmits a stream of consciousness, or a soul, or a spirit—whatever language you want to use—in the same way that a television set transmits ultra high frequency electromagnetic waves, transforms them into the programs we see and hear on our TV screens. Damage the TV, and the programs no longer come through all right. Turn the TV off, or unplug it, or smash it to smithereens, and nothing comes through at all. It looks exactly like death—but this does not mean that the ultra high frequency electromagnetic waves are gone too. They are just no longer capable of being received and translated. In some form and fashion, they are still there. Same goes for the mind, upon death of the body.

 

Now, William James proposed this alternate paradigm of mind-brain relations in 1898, so clearly his analogy in setting forth the transmission idea did not involve TV sets. He talked about sunlight shining through a glass prism, or air moving through organ pipes, as determined by organ keys. But my mind went immediately to the television set. It helped me to see instantly that the transmission paradigm of the mind-brain relationship made just as much sense as the production paradigm—that, in fact, what we have here are two radically different ways of understanding what it means to be human. Each one adequate to the facts. But one makes life after death impossible, while the other makes it … possible.

 

And here is where things stand. My personal journey to a reasoned belief in life after death. A careful consideration of the best evidence I can find. Taking a look at the objections and evaluating their persuasive force as fairly as possible. Stepping back and becoming aware of the different paradigms which make all the difference to how we envision the relationship between mind and brain. In the end, I freely admit that my belief, however reasoned I hope it to be, may not change anyone else’s mind. In fact I expect this, understanding the power of paradigms—how it can be so difficult to communicate across paradigms and hope to be understood. Yet this I know: that we do not have to think alike to love alike. It is why we are Unitarian Universalists, what it means to be Unitarian Universalists. And I know this too: that taking a reasoned position on something cannot possibly require anyone to have discovered an argument that demolishes all opposing views. Such a requirement is absurd. Not only is it egregiously false to the history of ideas, it’s also destructive to one’s own life. To hold off from believing something which is of vital significance to your heart and spirit until you have convinced everyone else is to make yourself a hostage to others, to paralyze your own growth. The exercise of reason is just not fundamentally about other people—your ability to convince other people. It’s about integrity, and self-respect. It’s about doing justice to the voice of reason and conscience within that honors doubt and won’t settle for unthinking faith. It’s about convincing yourself. Being able to give yourself to the belief without a sense of shame or dishonor. Reason, rightly used, prepares the way.

 

**

 

Reading before the sermon                                             

 

Our reading today is a reflection on the Near Death Experience, or NDE (for short). Because of modern advances in resuscitation technology, the past fifty or so years have seen an influx of accounts of remarkable experiences by some people who have been clinically dead and yet have been brought back. Their hearts had stopped beating; their lungs had stopped working; and thus, starved of blood and oxygen, their brains had shut down. One evidence of this is doctors shining a light into their pupils and nothing happening, no reflexive response to the light. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem, and that’s the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn’t work, it means that the brain itself has stopped working. 

 

Now, how we interpret NDEs depends on a prior belief regarding the nature of the relationship between the mind and the brain. Clearly, the state of our minds is closely related to our brains. But how, exactly, does the relationship work? 

 

One very common belief is that the brain produces the mind. There can be no minds without brains, and when the brain dies, the mind ceases to exist. Let’s call this the production theory of mind-brain relations. The brain produces the mind like an electrical generator produces electricity. Just as electricity ceases to exist when the generator breaks down or is turned off, so the mind fades away to nothingness when the brain dies.

 

If one believes this theory of mind-brain relations, then what neuroscientist Michael Persinger says about NDEs will ring true. He says that the best way to interpret NDEs is to see them as a “last gasp” of the brain’s functioning, triggered by a potent cocktail of drugs, a lack of oxygen, and perhaps even a fear of dying. The dying brain no longer perceives anything in the external world; all it is perceiving (for example: being outside of one’s body, the presence of dead loved ones, the tunnel, the bright light) are fantasies created in the mind and nothing more.

 

Yet does this hold up to the evidence?

 

A good place to start would be to explore the 13-year study of NDEs published in 2001 by the highly respected international medical journal, The Lancet. For now, I would simply have you consider the following report, which comes from Madelaine Lawrence, R.N., Ph. D., Director of Nursing Research at Hartford Hospital. She mentions the case of one patient who described floating up over her body and viewing the resuscitation effort being done on her. She then felt herself being pulled up through several floors of the hospital that seemed to dissolve as she moved through them until she found herself above the roof. There, she paused to enjoy the view of the night skyline of the city when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a red object. It was a shoe. She was struck by the oddness of this discovery, but only for a moment, as she felt herself “sucked up into a black hole” into the rest of her NDE. Afterwards, when she returned to her body, this patient told her experience to a nurse, who told the story to a medical resident, who laughed. However, the resident took his skepticism right upstairs to the janitor and convinced him to get a ladder. They checked the gutter on the roof, and the red shoe was there, just as the patient’s story had said it would be.

 

From Michael Sabom’s research we hear of other such cases, where NDE’ers came to know things in ways that are hard to explain. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, wondered about the degree to which exposure to TV medical shows influences the reports of NDE’rs. What they show on TV, he points out, is very different from what actually happens in a real ambulance or emergency room; so if the accounts that NDE’ers give of their resuscitation experiences resemble TV, then it’s likely that their experiences were nothing more than hallucinatory.

 

Here’s how Sabom conducted his research: He asked one group of people who almost died but who didn’t have an NDE to try to describe the resuscitation procedures. Then he asked a second group of people—this time, all NDE’rs–to describe the resuscitation procedures. The results? NDE’rs often contradicted TV procedures in accurately describing what doctors, nurses, and other medical staff actually do to resuscitate people. The reports from non-NDE’ers resembled TV.

 

These are just two of many cases in which NDE’rs come to possess information that can’t possibly be accounted for through the production theory of mind-brain relations. If the brain produces the mind like an electrical generator produces electricity, then the only ideas we can have in our minds about reality have to come through our physical senses in contact with the world around it, or their scientific extensions (as in telescopes and cyclotrons). Clearly, though, NDE’ers are coming to know things in ways that don’t involve their physical brains and sense organs.   

 

Perhaps we need a different theory of mind-brain relations, one which can more accurately account for the facts—all of them, even the strange ones that come to us from research into the NDE…..

 

Here ends our reading for today.