A Directory to the Afterlife

 

I was twelve when I encountered a young man in RAF uniform lying on the floor. His hands were wrapped in copper-wire from an extension cord; the other end of the cord was plugged in into 210 volts. Seconds later somebody entered the room before I had a chance to touch the corpse and hustled me away from the scene. There is an earlier memory still. My mother had taken me to the wake of a distant relative. He was lying in state in the room next door, but I didn’t get to see him. I must have been a handful and somebody told me to tone it down: “They still can hear us,” he said. 

The last section of the brain to die, apparently, is the one connected with hearing. Pronounced clinically dead, we still can hear. Whether other sections of the brain in this state are able to cogitate what we hear, is a different matter.

On a foggy autumn day I was waiting for my train at Waterloo Station, when I got into a conversation with an elderly lady. She was a crusty Yorkshire woman, a nurse from the Great War, who had seen people die because penicillin was not yet available. Her father had objected to her choice of vocation and after all those years she would still not forgive him for his criticism. We first spoke about the great pandemic of 1917. I don’t quite recall how the conversation moved on to Alzheimer and stroke victims, but she was adamant that from her medical experience, there was nothing imperishable in our mental makeup. “There is no such thing as an afterlife” she said. For her, “afterlife” was a prospect of prolonged decrepitude, like the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, and “why should anybody wanting this,” she said. Why indeed. But then came the surprise. She expressed a belief that people are reborn, “not necessarily here, but on a different planet perhaps. Think of Beethoven,” she said, “only four years old and already the boy couldn’t resist the piano. He brought the music with him.” She was about to say something else, but my train arrived and we parted; I’ve never seen her again.

Sometimes people claim to “remember” incidents from a previous life, usually the glamorous life of an important person. The occasional beggar is thrown in only when the expression on our faces makes them realize that they are laying it on a bit too thick. Then again, why should anybody want to remember the daily grind of a peasant?

When a Dalai Lama dies, something of his characteristics and personality is supposed to move on to a child born close to the hour of his death, and this something “remembers” the paraphernalia the deceased had been using. A tutor is appointed to the child, and after a long and intimate acquaintance, he believes to recognize the familiar characteristics everybody else in this community is still remembering of the predecessor. How under these circumstances leading suggestions can be avoided is beyond me. Then again, the Greek philosopher Plato considered all our acts of learning as actually remembering what we already know. Which begs the question what exactly this transitory “something” might be that carries the information from one individual to the next? There is no evidence for a “soul” in any form and shape; besides, Buddhists are not supposed to believe in “souls.” The Buddha went to extraordinary lengths to deny the existence of an immortal soul. Instead he explained the karma of rebirth based on a complicated nexus of moral choices affecting the material chain of cause and effect that leads to the assemblage of a new person. Only after reaching enlightenment this nexus can be brought to a standstill and we are released from the universal cycle of suffering. 

So, without a tangible medium, no tape-recording, no carrier pigeon, no radio beam, how can memories be recorded and travel through time and space, even to “a different planet?” Where should we look for Beethoven’s music, when Beethoven is not around?

Let’s not dwell here on “near-death-experiences,” which are what the label says on the tin: “near death,” a momentary flat-liner. Starving of oxygen, or in some cases under the influence of excessive arousal, the mind experiences a journey through a tunnel of bright light towards an often eagerly anticipated point of no return. Granny Nature’s kiddy-fiddler to sugar the inevitable, the sweet a dentist gives the kid for good behavior in the torture chair. This has some led to believe in a “spiritual” (or is it a spiritistic?) mind-merge with the Universe. I can’t say such ideas of a collective consciousness have any appeal to me: if in the process I lose my individuality, then I may just as well be dead for good. Either way I wouldn’t know the difference.

Physically, I think, there is no reason to be afraid of death: all that happens is that the shadows encroach from the edges and the lights go out. Our worry is about the pain and the anxiety before.

So, forget about exotic physics; forget about Meister Eckhard, John of the Cross-, or Madame Blavatsky. I mean, whom am I kidding, right? Yet there was this crashed airliner – a true story – of which parts had been cannibalized and used to maintain the other aircrafts of the airline. Apparently crews and passengers on these other airplanes, people completely oblivious to the presence of these spare parts, were beginning to be plagued by “sightings.” They believed to see crewmembers walk down the aisle, greeting them with a nod before mysteriously merging into the wall of the fuselage. The on-board crews recognized the faces of dead colleagues from the crashed aircraft. In public the airline reacted to these stories with eye-rolling denials, but at headquarters there was consternation. In the end all cannibalized parts were replaced and the sightings stopped. From which I can only conclude that even the manifestation of a ghost is in need of a material carrier.

In 1956 – where has the optimism of the 50s gone – Arthur C. Clarke published his novel The City and the Stars, where the people of Diaspar have the power of living multiple live-cycles, and at the end of each cycle – serious accidents apparently never happen – can consign an edited version of current experiences to the central memory bank. Birth and rebirth occur in vitro, the people are born without a mother; an appointed mentor is guiding the first steps into a life looking back on thousands of bygone existences, relationships and vocations. I must admit I am very intrigued.

© - 2/27/2009 - by michael sympson, 1,200 words, all rights reserved