It is very beautiful over there.
—Thomas Edison, on his
deathbed, describing a,
vision of the hereafter
“This is eternal bliss,” I thought. “This cannot be described; it is far too wonderful!”
—Carl Jung, describing a heart
attack that nearly killed him
Lately we’ve been hearing that it’s good to die. Testimony to this effect comes from the growing numbers of people who have “died” (which is to say that their heartbeat and breathing stopped) and then been revived. Survivors of these “near-death experiences,” or NDEs, typically say that they felt themselves rushing through dark space, saw their lives pass before their eyes, and then entered a realm of light where they encountered deceased relatives or friends. The prevailing emotion, they maintain, is ecstasy. A nationwide Gallup Poll conducted in 1982 found that fully a third of the eight million Americans who reported having a near-death experience “recall being in an ecstatic or visionary state.” Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut who interviewed one hundred two persons who nearly died, says NDEs evoke “a sense of the most profound peace and well-being that is possible to imagine.” Some find their flirtation with death so blissful that they get a bit grumpy about returning to life. “Why did you bring me back, Doctor?” one complained. “It was so beautiful!”
What we have, then, is a body of anecdotal evidence indicating that many who come close to death find the experience illuminating and ecstatic. NDE reports are rather consistent in this regard, though they come from individuals of many different ages, nationalities, and religious backgrounds. As one might expect, a few idiosyncracies emerge: A South Asian Hindu near-death pilgrim ventured to heaven on the back of a “bespangled cow,” while an American counterpart hailed a taxicab; and although modern NDE witnesses talk of being bathed in pure white light, a poor Essex farmer named Thurkill, who nearly died in the year 1206, was obliged to make his way through a more traditionally biblical landscape, where he encountered an icy salt lake, a scales where souls were weighed, a nest of piercing stakes and thorns, and a fiery corridor leading to hell. But one is impressed by the overall uniformity of the many NDE reports that describe a rush through darkness, then heavenly light everywhere, a review of one’s life, an encounter with the departed, and what Dr. Raymond A. Moody, whose books have drawn widespread public attention to the NDE phenomenon, calls “intense feelings of joy, love, and peace.”
What does it all mean? If NDEs provide a glimpse of life beyond death, then they present us with the prospect of a parallel universe, closer at hand than the stars in the sky. And if they tell us nothing about an afterlife, they still may constitute evidence of a harmony between mind and nature extending to the very horizons of mortal existence. In the zone near death falls the shadow of a great mystery. But has this mystery to do mainly with the mind, or with the universe?
The most obvious message of the NDE reports—that death is nontraumatic—is not news. Doctors have been saying as much for years, though few outside the medical community would listen. More than a century has passed since the Canadian physician Sir William Osier, in a study of some five hundred deaths, concluded that only eighteen percent of the dying suffered physical pain and only two percent felt any great anxiety: “We speak of death as the king of terrors and yet how rarely the act of dying appears to be painful,” Osier observed. More recently, the American physician Lewis Thomas noted that in all his years of practicing medicine he had witnessed but a single agonizing death, and that from rabies. Certainly a cause of death can be disagreeable—it is no fun to have lymphatic cancer, heart disease, or multiple sclerosis—but physicians who regularly tend to the dying agree that death itself is not all that unpleasant.
But what intrigues people about the NDE phenomenon is, of course, not just its emollients against the prospective pain of death, but the tantalizing possibility that near-death experiencers are bringing back glimpses from the great beyond—that, to put it bluntly, they have caught sight of heaven. Those who embrace this view stress that the NDE scenario accords with traditional conceptions of paradise as a luminous domain where we encounter the dearly departed. But however tempting it may be to believe in eternal life, and without pretending to render judgment on the validity of this ancient and widely held belief, it must be admitted that the near-death experience does not by any stretch of the imagination constitute proof that it is true.
The most telling objection to the notion that NDEs represent visions of an afterlife arises from the fact that they closely resemble reports, not of death, but of traumatic experiences that threaten death. A cogent study that bears on this point was conducted late in the nineteenth century by Albert Heim, a Zurich geology professor and alpinist who interviewed mountain climbers, masons, and roofers who had survived potentially fatal falls. Heim found that their accounts contained a number of common elements that turn out to be quite similar to modern reports of near-death experiences—a sense of euphoria and calm, a review of one’s past life, and a vision of intense light much like a glimpse of paradise. “There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain,” Heim noted, “but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety…. Reconcilement and redeeming peace were the last feelings with which they had taken leave of the world and they had, so to speak, fallen into Heaven.” Heim himself had fallen from an alpine glacier, while climbing at an altitude of 5,900 feet one day in 1871. “I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me,” he recalled. “I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain.”
Now, a climber falling from a cliff is not dead. He is not even ailing. He is fully fit, and is “near” death only in the sense that he has every reason to expect that he is about to die. If, as we have seen, the mental transfigurations he experiences while falling closely resemble modern near-death accounts, then the NDE phenomenon tells us about trauma, not death. And if it doesn’t tell us about death, it doesn’t tell us about life after death, either.
It appears likely, then, that the physiological basis of near-death experiences is stress. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the human nervous system responds to threatening situations by releasing a deluge of chemicals into the bloodstream. These chemicals include polypeptides that attach to endorphin receptors in the brain, the same receptors to which morphine and the other opiates bind themselves; when they are activated they result in reduced sensitivity to pain and a sense of euphoria.
Why do NDE accounts so closely resemble the traditional, Bible-tract image of heaven? Precisely because these are the visions produced by life-threatening stress. After all, people have been “dying” and coming back to life for thousands of years, albeit in fewer numbers than in today’s high-tech operating rooms. And since, as we have seen, their experiences show a remarkable uniformity, it is not surprising that their visions long ago came to be accepted as eyewitness accounts of heaven. If our conception of heaven as a blissful realm of radiant light was itself based on centuries of near-death testimonies, to claim today that heaven is real because our conception of it resembles the NDE reports is to reason in a circle. Therefore I agree with Dr. Moody when he writes that “we are no closer to answering the basic question of the afterlife now than we were thousands of years ago.”
But this is not to say that we have drained all mystery from the near-death experience. On the contrary, once we have dispelled the myth that NDEs shed light on the question of whether there is an afterlife, we are left with a greater riddle: Why is it that a human being’s encounter with death should most often be attended, not by grief and despair, but by a sense of illumination and ecstasy?
So far as we know, Darwinian evolution is the sole mechanism that determines the genetic endowment of human beings and other living organisms. Random genetic mutations create unique individuals within each species; natural selection sometimes favors the survival prospects of these atypical individuals; and those who survive long enough to reproduce may contribute their genes to future generations, who inherit the new characteristics that better fit them to their environment.
We can readily understand how Darwinian selection could have worked to produce the stress response: There is survival value in reacting to danger with a blast of adrenalin, which accelerates both mental and physical performance, and with natural painkillers, which by dulling pain enable the threatened individual to ignore his injuries and concentrate instead on taking actions that may save his life.* We are far more likely to be the descendants of young men and women who responded to attack with strength and clear-headed resolve than of those who succumbed to panic and were eaten. Similar benefits of the stress reaction may be identified in other life-threatening situations, from near-drowning to getting lost in the woods.
But what survival value can there be in believing, at a moment of intense stress, that we have entered into an ethereal realm of light, where we encounter the spirits of the dead and watch our lives pass in review before our eyes? These visions would seem, if anything, to distract our attention from the immediate task of surviving a brush with death. And to what extent can Darwinian selection serve to affect our experiences at the very extremity of stress, when the heart and lungs have stopped functioning and the odds of survival become vanishing small? If there is any point at which natural selection ought to have no further effect, certainly it is at the moment of death. Why, then, is there anything pleasant about dying?
Undeniably, we have a lot to learn about why we die in the first place. We’ve all heard about people who died once they have lost their reason to live. An old man from Ceylon told me that he used to resent the British civil servants who lived high on the hog in his native land, retiring while still young to sit on the verandas of their grand homes sipping gin-and-tonic, until he observed that most, having realized their fondest ambitions, were dead within a decade. Statistics support the notion that we may be able to exert an influence over the hour of our death: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, reported in 1990 that elderly Chinese-American women were less likely to die in the week preceding the Harvest Moon Festival than in the week after, when their death rate increased by a third; apparently they were in effect postponing their demise (from stroke, cancer, and heart disease in particular) until after the holidays. “These results are certainly consistent with the idea that there is such a thing as a will to live and that it makes a difference in how long you live,” said one of the researchers.
A clue to this mechanism may be found in evidence that near-death experiences tend to be cast in terms of each individual’s deepest concerns. Consider, for example, that while most NDErs say they communed with family members (presumably because family is important to most of us) for intellectuals the experience can be much more abstract. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer, who in life wrestled with the concepts of space and time, found himself doing much the same thing when his heart stopped for four long minutes during a bout of pneumonia. Ayer writes that he encountered what he called “the government of the universe.”
Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint. A further consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should. I felt that it was up to me to put things right…. It then occurred to me that whereas, until the present century, physicists accepted the Newtonian severance of space and time, it had become customary, since the vindication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, to treat space-time as a single whole. Accordingly, I thought that I could cure space by operating upon time.
Hobard Jarrett, a distinguished English professor with whom I used to teach at Brooklyn College, was once aboard an airliner that plunged thirty-four thousand feet before narrowly averting a crash; he tells me that as the plane dived toward the earth his mind was flooded with lines of Shakespeare’s poetry. Albert Heim while falling from the glacier worried that he would not be able to deliver a university lecture scheduled five days hence. (Though swathed in bandages, he gave the lecture on schedule.)
Many eerie stories suggest that some have foreseen their deaths. The physicist Heinz Pagels repeatedly dreamed that he would die in a fall. He wrote about this recurrent dream in the concluding paragraph of his book The Cosmic Code, published in 1982: “In cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me.” Six years later, on July 24, 1988, at the age of forty-nine, Heinz stepped on a loose rock and died in a fall, while descending from Pyramid Peak, Colorado.
I am not saying we can see into the future. (There is nothing supernatural, for instance, about a lifetime climber like Pagels anticipating that he might die during a climb.) I am suggesting, however, that it is possible to conceive of a suitable death for ourselves, in much the same way that we endeavor to fashion a suitable life. “As I choose the ship in which I will sail, and the house I will inhabit, so I will choose the death by which I leave life,” said Seneca the Stoic.
What are we to make of all this—of Heim the geologist believing, in what he thought were the final moments of his life, that he had “fallen into Heaven,” or Jarrett the English professor thinking of Shakespeare and John Donne as he plunged earthward in a crippled airliner, or the insouciance of the elderly Chuang Tzu, who when asked by his disciples what sort of arrangements would be appropriate for his funeral, replied, “My coffin will be Heaven and Earth; for the funeral ornaments of jade, there are the Sun and Moon; for my pearls and jewels, I shall have the Stars and Constellations; all things will be my mourners. Is not everything ready for my burial?” Or of Heinz Pagels, writing of his dream of death, “I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.” If there is, as Epicurus believed, “Nothing to fear from God; nothing to feel in death,” why not?
I once put this question to Lewis Thomas, who has proposed that the entire terrestrial biosphere resembles a single, unified organism akin to a living cell. “Perhaps the whole system selects for it,” he replied.
I don’t know how that would work, but if you were trying to develop a complicated system with a whole lot of different species, as many different kinds of creatures as exist on this planet, and have it work together on this planet as one system in a coherent way where everything depended on everything else, you would need some mechanism that made dying and death acceptable.
In his book The Medusa and the Snail Thomas wonders how it came to pass that death is usually painless. “Pain is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there’s time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick,” he writes. “If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.”
Perhaps we have underestimated the role of harmony in biological evolution. Popular accounts of Darwinism stress fierceness and competition, but for an organism to be “fit” means not so much that it dominates others, but that it is attuned to its environment. Harmony implies communication, and we are beginning to discover that nature is replete with communications channels of great variety and subtlety: Bees communicate by dancing, fire ants by emitting odors; and when a Douglas fir is infected by beetles it emits an allochemical that prompts neighboring firs to produce the insecticide-like substance they will need to ward off the same pests. Considering the enormous number of communications links ingrained in the vast tree of evolution, it may not be unreasonable to suppose that life on Earth resonates with internal and external harmonies as yet unnoticed by science. If so, for human beings to establish interstellar communications links would be less an innovation than a perfectly natural extension of a biological tradition.
It just may be that humans and other organisms are selected in part on what might be called aesthetic grounds, so that our ancestors tended to survive, not solely because they were good at hunting and gathering and agriculture and running away from trouble, but also because they felt that they belonged here—were able to enjoy life, to resonate with the world. Perhaps the bliss we experience when death approaches is a kind of major chord played on the nervous system by the plectrum of stress, a final note that bespeaks our resonance with the wider world, and the message of an easy death is that, in some uncomprehended way, we really do belong in the universe.
If so, death is a cosmological event. Stretching back through time are ties that bind us to all that there is—unbroken threads that tether our lives to all prior earthly life, link its chemistry to the ancient roilings of the molecular interstellar clouds, and implicate their atoms in collaborations of quanta set loose at the birth of the universe. When we inquire into the mysteries of the cosmos—of its birth and death, or our own—we set this old web humming. We have as yet heard but a fraction of its song. We listen for it in the waves on the shore, in the sound of the wind through the branches of the ancient forest, and with radio telescopes trained on the stars.
*Many victims of grizzly bear and shark attacks recall that instead of being preoccupied by pain, they experienced a detached state of mind that enabled them to assess their situation with some degree of objectivity. Presumably these changes in their mental state made them better able to deal with the attack and thus enhanced their chances for escape. The way to survive attack by a Great White Shark, for instance, is to relax and not struggle, so that the shark has an opportunity to feel your shape and determine that you are not one of the many fishes it finds tasty. This calls for considerable presence of mind, but divers and surfers who managed to go limp in the shark’s jaws have survived to tell the tale.