A Directory to the
Afterlife
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Before the mountains were
brought forth, well before Earth and World, man had already turned to
destruction and was called to return. For a thousand years in your
sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the
night. You carry them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the
morning they are like grass growing up.
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Psalm 90: 2-4
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to
Dawn
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
