Life After Death

LONG AGO, IN the dense forests that once encircled the holy city of Benares, there was ample work for woodcutters. One of these was the handsome Satyavan, who was all the more handsome because he had so much love for his wife, Savitri. Many mornings Satyavan found it hard to leave his hut to work in the woods.

One day Savitri lay dreamily in bed contemplating her happiness, which seemed complete. Suddenly she noticed a figure sitting cross-legged in the dusty clearing that served for a front yard. A wandering monk, she thought. She put rice and vegetables in a bowl and rushed out to offer them to the holy man, since hospitality was a sacred duty.

“I need no food,” the stranger said, pushing away the bowl that Savitri had placed on the shade-dappled ground. “I will wait here.”

Savitri drew back in horror, because suddenly she knew who her guest was. Not a wandering monk but Death himself, who is known in India as Lord Yama.

“For one named Satyavan.” The Lord of Death spoke politely. He was used to having absolute authority over mortals, and he approached them simply, with just a touch of imperiousness.

“Satyavan!” Savitri cried out. She could hardly keep from fainting when she heard her husband’s name. “But he’s strong and healthy, and we love each other dearly. Why should he die?”

“But if you care so little,” Savitri said, her wits coming back to her, “then why not take someone else? There are sick and wretched people begging for the release of death. Visit them and leave my house in peace.”

“I will wait here,” Yama repeated, unmoved by her plea and by the tears welling in Savitri’s eyes. In Yama’s face she saw a world where everything is nameless and without pity.

The young wife rushed back inside. She paced the floor, frantic in the knowledge that her husband would come home to meet his doom. Tigers feared the swing of brave Satyavan’s axe, but here was an enemy no blade could touch. Then Savitri had an idea born of desperation. Throwing a cloak around her shoulders, she ran out the back door into the woods.

Savitri had heard that there was a sacred place on the mountain, a space in the earth as large as a cave formed by the roots of a huge banyan tree. A reputed holy man lived there. Savitri would beg for his help. But she didn’t know her way and soon found herself following deer paths and washed-out gullies. Fear drove her as hard as breath and strength would allow, and so Savitri wandered, higher and higher, until she was totally exhausted. She collapsed on the ground and slept for a time; she couldn’t tell how long.

When a shaft of sunlight opened her eyes, Savitri found herself at the foot of a huge banyan tree. She spied the cavernous hole among the roots and peered into it anxiously. Before she could summon the courage to enter, a voice from inside said, “Go away!” It was so loud and sudden that she jumped.

“I can’t go away,” Savitri replied, her voice trembling. She explained her desperate plight, but the voice from the darkness said, “How are you different from everyone else? Death is two steps behind us, from cradle to grave.”

Tears welled up in Savitri’s eyes. “If you are wiser than ordinary people, you must have something more for me.”

The voice said, “You wish to bargain with Death? All who have tried that have failed.”

Savitri got to her feet with dignity. “Then let Yama take me in my husband’s place. What everyone says is true. Death is absolute. My only hope is that he will kill me and spare someone who doesn’t deserve to die.”

The voice was more gentle this time. “Be calm,” it said. “There is a way.” Savitri heard a stirring in the darkness, and then the holy man emerged from his cave. He was an ascetic, his thin body clad in a loincloth with a monk’s silk shawl thrown over his shoulders. He looked surprisingly young, however, and he told Savtiri that his name was Ramana.

The monk Ramana squinted in the sunlight, ignoring her for the moment. He had a gaze that she couldn’t read, then he stooped down to pick up a worn old reed flute lying on the ground.

“Come,” he said. “Perhaps you will be able to learn. I make no promises, but certainly you are desperate enough.”

As if forgetting her, Ramana began to play on his flute and wandered down a nearby deer path. Savitri stood for a moment, dismayed and confused, but as the notes of the flute faded into the forest, she had no choice but to run after them.

THE MIRACLE OF DEATH

Every life is framed by two mysteries. Only one of them, birth, is considered a miracle. If you are a religious person, birth brings a new soul into the world from its home with God. If you are not, the miracle is that a single fertilized cell in a mother’s womb can divide and subdivide again a mere fifty times to produce a complete new person. A blob of protein and water somehow knows how to shape itself into eyes, hands, skin, and a brain.

This nine-month transformation keeps accelerating, so that by the end a million new brain cells are appearing every minute. At the moment the newborn emerges, like a space shuttle undocking from the mother ship, every system that needs to function independently—heart, lungs, brain, and digestive tract—suddenly realizes that the moment is now and not a moment later. Organs detach from total dependence on the mother, and with astonishing precision they begin to act as if they had always been on their own. In a split second life chooses to live.

The other mystery that occurs, usually decades later, death, is very different. It brings to an end all the things birth struggled so hard to achieve. A thready heartbeat crosses an invisible line and becomes still. The bellows of the lungs, which have pumped some 700 million times, refuse to pump even once more. A hundred billion neurons cease to fire; a trillion billion cells throughout the body receive the news that their mission is over. Yet this abrupt finale is as much a mystery as birth, for at the moment life ends, 99% of our cells are typically still functional, and all 3 billion codons, the individual letters in the book of human DNA, remain intact.

Death comes without the miraculous coordination of birth. Some cells don’t even get the news for some time. If the dead person is revived within ten minutes or so, before the brain gets permanently damaged by hypoxia, the body’s machinery will go back to work as if nothing had happened. Indeed, death is such a blurry event that eyelids can continue to blink ten or twelve times after a head is severed from a body (a grisly fact discovered at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution).

Religion doesn’t consider death a miracle. In Christianity death is linked to sin and Satan—the Western equivalent of the Lord of Death. Death is the enemy, and God saves us from its clutches. But with God’s help dying is the doorway to a far more important event—the beginning of the afterlife. To the religious mind death brings the presence of God near, and witnesses throughout history have claimed to actually see the soul depart. (Not all of these witnesses are religious. I know of a prominent psychiatrist whose atheism was deeply shaken in medical school when he entered a cancer patient’s room at the exact moment of death and saw a ghostly, luminous form emerge from the body and disappear.) There is a persistent legend that 21 grams of mass disappear when we die, which must be the weight of the soul. In fact, no such change occurs.

Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don’t die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond. Mystics have long understood the joyousness of this moment. As the great Persian poet Rumi puts it, “Death is our wedding with eternity.” But not only mystics have seen through death’s illusion. The eminent twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.”

I believe that death accomplishes the following miraculous things:

It replaces time with timelessness.

It stretches the boundaries of space to infinity.

It reveals the source of life.

It brings a new way of knowing that lies beyond the reach of the five senses.

It reveals the underlying intelligence that organizes and sustains creation (for the moment we won’t use the word “God,” for in many cultures a single creator is not part of dying or the afterlife).

In other words, death is a fulfillment of our purpose here on earth. Every culture offers a deep faith that this is true, but ours demands a higher standard of proof. I think that proof exists, but it cannot be physical, since by definition death brings physical life to an end. To see this proof, we must expand the boundaries of consciousness so that we know ourselves better. If you know yourself as someone beyond time and space, your identity will have expanded to include death. The reason that human beings keep seeking fulfillment beyond the stars is that we sense that our own mystery lies there, not here in the realm of physical limitation.

Eternity Now

Being an invisible miracle, death is extremely elusive. But we get tantalizing clues that what lies on “the other side” is actually very close to us right now. People don’t comprehend how important this is in terms of the afterlife. The very word “after” implies that time hasn’t changed at the moment of death, that it still moves in a straight line, carrying a person from earthly time to heavenly time. This is wrong on two counts. First, eternity is not a function of time. In Christianity, sinners consigned eternally to hell wouldn’t be punished for a long time. They would be punished outside time. Good people who find salvation also live in that same region where clocks never tick. So our ordinary sense of time has no relevance to what comes “after.”

Secondly, our everyday sense of time is itself based on eternity. The universe exploded into existence 14 billion years ago, and started the cosmic clock going. Our bodies experience time because of atomic vibrations at the level of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, the building blocks of organic chemicals. We measure outside events using the inner clock of the brain, which is nothing but these organic chemicals. A snail’s brain clicks so slowly that it takes five seconds before one event passes and a new one appears. In that five seconds you could pick up a snail and move it ten feet, and to the snail it would appear that he had teleported through space. The human brain ticks fast enough that we can sense events lasting only a few thousandths of a second (the darting of a mosquito, the blur of hummingbird wings), but it is too slow to observe the flight of a bullet or the million neutrinos that pierce our bodies every minute.

Before the Big Bang time wasn’t ticking away; a second was equal to eternity. We surmise this because quantum physics has pierced the illusion of time, detaching from the atomic clock to go deeper into the fabric of Nature. At the deepest level vibrations cease. The universe flatlines like a dead brain. Yet the appearance of death is illusory, for the frontier where all activity ends marks the beginning of a new region, known as virtual reality, where matter and energy exist as pure potential. The basis for virtual reality is complex, but in simplest terms, a nonphysical region must exist to give birth to the physical universe. This region is a void, but it’s far from empty. Just as when you are dozing on the couch your mind is empty but can awaken instantly to an infinite choice of thoughts, so the virtual realm awakens to an infinite realm of new events. Creation leaps from the void to complete fullness, just as eternity leaps from timelessness into the fullness of time.

If eternity is with us now, underlying all physical existence, it must underlie you and me. The illusion of time tells us that you and I are shooting in a straight line from birth to death, when in fact we are inside a frothy bubble let loose by eternity.

Actually, the event of death has never been all that far away, and the fixed boundary between life and death isn’t impenetrable. A woman I know named May is a fifty-year-old divorcée from New Mexico. As a teenager she suffered the shock of having her adored older brother die suddenly in a car accident. “I was fifteen, he was nineteen, and he was the only person I’ve ever truly worshipped. When he died, poof, just like that, I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it,” May says. She was in a state of intense grief that dragged on for several years.

“I retreated completely. I stopped seeing anyone. I kept asking, Why? I want an answer. Tell me. Day after day no answer came.” May had given birth to a child, so she decided to return to society for her baby’s sake. “I knew it wasn’t good for him to grow up as a recluse, so I decided to start seeing a few people at a time.”

At the first social gathering she went to, May felt a sudden strange sensation. “I was talking to someone with a glass of wine in my hand when I realized that my feet had gone numb. The numbness quickly moved up both legs, and I had a flash. This is it. Immediately the room disappeared, and I was flying through space faster than I could imagine. It was like everything was incredibly compressed and expanded at the same time. I had no idea how long I was gone. The party was at a farm out in the country, so it took fifty minutes before the ambulance arrived. By then I had come to again; my friends told me they had felt a weak pulse the whole time. Nobody knew if I’d fainted or had a stroke.”

I asked her how she interpreted her experience. “It’s still here,” she said, holding her palm about a foot from her chest. “About that far.”

“What’s still here?” I asked.

“Eternity. I’m sure that’s what I experienced, and the feeling has never left me. It reassures me that I exist outside my body. In my thirties I had a tough time with breast cancer, but I wasn’t afraid of dying, not for a minute. How could I be? I’ve seen eternity.”

Vedanta—Answers from the Soul

I want to put a human face on immortality before we get to the science that supports it. Facts are useless if we can’t relate to them personally, and nothing is more personal than dying. In ancient India the idea that eternity could be experienced was widely accepted, so let’s venture there to see how that was possible. Thousands of years ago there were people who searched the depths of spirit for answers without offending God or trespassing on his domain. They were the rishis, or sages of Vedic India, who rose into prominence when Hinduism was in its earliest flowering, perhaps as far back as four thousand years ago or as recently as a thousand. The names by which the rishis are known, such as Vyassa, Brighu, and Vasistha, may or may not be historical, but the body of work they left behind numbers in the thousands of pages. Many writings lack a proven author, much like the Old Testament, but the teaching of the rishis, known as Vedanta, isn’t a religion.

The spiritual landscape of India was replete with gods and goddesses; there were innumerable Lokas, or nonphysical worlds. There were also hierarchies of angels and demons to rival anything in Dante. In the face of such bewildering diversity, the rishis didn’t offer one God. They offered one reality that encompassed every possible experience, both in this life and beyond. They posited that every level of existence was actually a state of awareness. Other worlds—all worlds, in fact—were formed in consciousness. Therefore, as creators of these worlds, we could experience them and influence them at will. That’s the essence of Vedanta. What the rishis were proposing was more than a philosophy; it was an invitation to participate in an endless experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to test the truth of reality by exploring it within yourself.

The invitation is still open. When you or I accept it, we are linked to the Vedic rishis by what Aldous Huxley called “the perennial philosophy,” which returns in every age to suit the demands of a new generation. It would be pointless to haul an ancient tradition into the present if it didn’t apply to us, but Vedanta does. For one thing, doubt has replaced dogma in many people’s lives. The present spiritual confusion may not be as exotic as the profusion of temples and gods in ancient India, but listen to the voices that circulate around us:

I was in the Alzheimer’s unit when my grandfather died. He was a totally different person by the end—out of his mind, doped up on morphine to the max. It was like watching a vegetable die. It was like nothing changed when his breathing stopped.

My ex-husband is such a bastard. I told him when he dies he’s got a ticket straight to hell. First class.

I’m a Buddhist. When I drop the body I will become pure consciousness.

I’m Hindu. I am pure consciousness already.

Who are they kidding? When you’re gone, you’re gone. Period.

That last voice is the voice of materialism, which regards death as final because it sees life only in the physical body. We may claim that denying the afterlife is scientific, but in fact it merely indicates a belief in materialism. The rishis believed that knowledge wasn’t external to the knower but woven inside consciousness. Thus they had no need for an external God to solve the riddle of life and death. The rishis had themselves instead, which is very fortunate, because so do we. Each person is conscious. Each person has a self. Each person is certain of existence, that is, of being alive. With these raw ingredients, Vedanta declares, anyone can come up with firsthand knowledge of anything, no matter how deep the mystery appears.

Then why haven’t we? Perhaps it’s because we don’t contact the deepest part of ourselves, which the rishis called Atman. The closest equivalent word in English is “soul.” Soul and Atman are a spark of the divine, the invisible component that brings God’s presence into flesh and blood. The biggest difference between them is that in Vedanta the soul isn’t separate from God. Unlike the Christian soul, Atman cannot come from God or return to him. There is unity between the human and the divine; awareness of this unity is the necessary step that makes reality dawn.

To say “I am God” comes naturally with Atman. It’s much less natural for us. Years ago I had a friend who was capable of intense spiritual experiences like leaving his body and seeing white light in his heart—or so he said. I told him that personally I didn’t have such experiences. “Neither do I,” he replied. “I have them impersonally.”

He gave me insight at that moment, because something eternal, boundless, and unchanging cannot be personal. Out of habit we say “my” soul, but that’s misleading. The soul doesn’t belong to me the way my house does, as a possession, or as my children do, as an extension of my flesh and blood. It doesn’t belong to me like my personality, or my memories, because senility and mental disorder can disable the brain and take away both.

Death isn’t about what I possess but about what I can become. Today I see myself as a child of time, but I may become a child of eternity. I see my place here on earth, but I may be on a journey to the universe. Human beings have a deep intuition that our destiny is infinite, but we fear death because it tests our wishes and dreams. We fear to be tested because if we turn out to be wrong, then all our aspirations feel empty. In my medical career I’ve seen how afraid people can be at the last. Dying isn’t more real than any other moment, but it is more definitive. No matter how rich and gifted you are, death is the great equalizer. (I remember when a renowned guru was giving a talk about how being absorbed into the light was the ultimate spiritual reward. The woman sitting next to me was fidgeting; she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Sounds a lot like death to me.”)

For the afterlife to have meaning, it has to be fully as satisfying as this life. Bringing money, power, sex, family, achievement, and physical pleasure to an end is not a trivial thing. Much that we love and depend on will be extinguished when this life comes to an end. And yet we can bring something to that moment. Many years ago when I was an inexperienced medical resident in Boston, an older couple was admitted to the hospital together. The husband was at the end of a long struggle with colon cancer. The wife, although she had a history of cardiac disease, was in much better shape. The two shared a room, and over the few days that I visited them, I could see how attached they were to each other.

The husband lingered for days, passing in and out of consciousness, in considerable pain. His wife sat beside him holding his hand, hour after hour. Then one morning I came in to find her bed empty—she had died suddenly of cardiac arrest during the night. The husband was having a lucid period, so I told him the news, reluctantly, since I was afraid of the shock it would give. But he seemed very calm.

“I think I’ll go now,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”

“For what?” I asked him.

“A gentleman always allows the lady to go first,” he said. He lapsed back into unconsciousness and passed away that afternoon.

He reminds me of what we can choose to bring to dying. Grace, calm, a patient acceptance of what’s to come: These are all qualities that can be cultivated, and when they are, death is a test we will not fail. Our fault is not that we fear death but that we don’t respect it as a miracle. The most profound subjects—love, truth, compassion, birth and death—are equal. They belong to our destiny but also to our present life. Ultimately the goal of this book is to bring death into the present and thereby make it equal to love.

To that end, I will continue the story of Savitri, a woman who sought to use love to outwit death, as an interlude in our discussion of the afterlife. In the fullness of love there is a secret that she learned and we must relearn. Tagore hints at it quite beautifully in the following poem.

WHAT WILL YOU GIVE?

What will you give

When death knocks at your door?

The fullness of my life—

The sweet wine of autumn days and summer nights,

My little hoard gleaned through the years,

And hours rich with living.

These will be my gift.

When death knocks at my door.