Life After Death

AS THEY WANDERED farther up the mountain, Savitri became more and more anxious, but Ramana paid no attention to her. He left the deer path, following a cut among some huge boulders, and was lost from sight. Scrambling after him, Savitri spied a stream, and beside it sat the monk. He pulled out his reed flute, which was tucked into his saffron robe, and began to play.

“My music doesn’t make you smile?” he asked, noticing the anxious look in Savitri’s eyes. All she could think about was the Lord of Death awaiting her at home.

“We have so little time,” she implored. “Teach me what you would teach.”

“Then you believe in rumors. What if I told you that you’ve never been happy? Would you believe me?”

“Of course not. I was happy this morning, before all this trouble began,” said Savitri.

Ramana nodded. “We all remember being happy, and no one can talk us out of that knowledge. So let me ask you another question. Can you remember not being alive?”

“Try harder. Cast your mind back to when you were very, very small. Try as hard as you can to remember not being alive. This is important, Savitri.”

“All right.” Savitri tried her best, but she had no memory of never being alive.

“Perhaps you can’t remember not being alive because you always have been,” said Ramana. He pointed to a locust clutching to a twig over her head. “If you see a locust emerging from the ground after seven years’ sleep, does that mean it was dead before that?”

“Yet the only reason you believe that you were born is that your parents saw you emerge from the womb. They thought they witnessed the moment when you began to exist, so they spread the rumor that you had been born.” Savitri was astonished at this line of reasoning.

Ramana became insistent. “Look at this stream. All you see is a short stretch of it, yet would you say you know where the stream begins or where it ends? Heed me, Savitri. You accept death because you accept birth. The two must go together. Forget these rumors that you were ever born. That is the only cure for dying.”

Ramana stood up and tucked his flute back in his robe; he was ready to walk on. “Do you believe me?”

“Then we will keep going.” Ramana began to walk away and Savitri followed, pondering what he had said. It seemed irrefutable that if she’d never been born, she could never die. Was it really true?

Ramana caught her thoughts. “We can’t base reality on what we don’t remember, only on what we do. Everyone remembers being; nobody remembers nonbeing.”

After a moment she gently touched his arm. “Play a little more for me, please. I wish to remember being happy.”

CROSSING OVER

Vedanta’s assertion that the soul is always near brings us face to face with the fascinating phenomenon of near-death experiences, which have become a fixed part of popular belief. (In a 1991 Gallup poll, 13 million Americans, roughly 5% of the population, reported that they had had such an experience.) Near-death is a momentary brush with another reality, or so it seems to those who report the experience. A person is lying in the emergency room or intensive care unit. His heart stops, and for all intents and purposes death ensues. Yet some of these patients, typically those who suffered cardiac arrest, can be resuscitated. When they are, nearly 20% report at least one of the familiar symptoms of NDE (as near-death experience is abbreviated in the medical literature)—leaving their bodies, looking down and seeing themselves on the operating table, watching medical procedures being performed as doctors tried to restart their hearts, finding themselves in a tunnel, going toward a bright light, feeling the presence of a higher power, hearing or seeing loved ones beckoning them on.

Dr. Pim van Lommel, the cardiologist who conducted a major Dutch study on this subject, was astonished by the finding that patients were having a full-blown NDE after their brains had ceased any activity—they were flatline until revived. Suddenly death becomes robed in the trappings of a miracle. How can a person experience any event after the brain’s clock has stopped? Other cultures, however, have ventured even further into the timeless, and they assure us that time may end, but consciousness continues.

A woman named Dawa Drolma sits quietly inside a black felt tent at the base of a Himalayan peak. This is her home, but there’s little privacy here as visitors stream in and out all day to ask questions and to get her blessing. Dawa Drolma has been famous throughout eastern Tibet ever since she came back from the dead. Her death occurred from a sudden illness when she was sixteen, and for five full days her corpse lay untouched by family or priests. After that time Dawa reentered her body with a full memory of what had happened in the Bardo, the subtle world of Tibetan Buddhist afterlife.

In those five days Dawa spent time in many heavens and hells. (These are Christian terms, but they correspond to places described in Buddhism where the righteous are rewarded and evildoers punished.) The goddess of wisdom took personal charge of showing Dawa each place, pointing out who was there and why. She felt the rapture of those souls who were prayed for by their still-living families. She heard the agonized screams and pleas for mercy of evildoers who had committed sins on earth. Dawa met the god of death, who gave her messages to impart to the living. He knew, and so did she, that Dawa would return to life. In fact, her dying wasn’t a chance event; she consciously undertook her journey, first considering all the risks and dangers. The local lamas warned her not to do it, but Dawa had a conviction that her life was going to be entirely about her death.

Year after year she repeated her story; it took a long time to convince people. Tibetan culture wasn’t prepared to give spiritual prominence to a woman, except under extraordinary conditions. But the direct knowledge Dawa brought back from the Bardo—and from the “Clear Light” that lies beyond—was unimpeachable. She showed people where to find buried gold. She knew secrets about their private lives and details about departed relatives that no one could possibly guess at. She debated learned lamas and equaled or outdid them in Buddhist theology.

Dawa Drolma isn’t unique in Tibet. People who come back to life are called delogs (or deloks), and one, the famed Lingza Chokyi, left a vivid account in the sixteenth century. “I was still in the room, but instead of being sick in bed I left my body and floated up to the ceiling. I saw my body like a dead pig dressed in my clothes. My children wept over me, and this caused me such intense pain. I tried to talk to my family, but no one could hear me. When they ate, I cried and got angry that they didn’t feed me. When they said prayers over me, I suddenly felt much better.”

Stages of Awakening

One amazing thing about delogs is their consistency; the experience of Dawa Drolma in the twentieth century mirrors that of Lingza Chokyi four hundred years previously. They see the same six levels of the Bardo, are guided by the White Tara, the goddess of wisdom, and receive messages to bring back to the living. These messages tend to center on being a good Tibetan Buddhist (just as apparitions of the Virgin Mary in every century tend to center on being a good practicing Catholic).

Experts in near-death experiences find much common ground between NDEs and delogs. They both describe leaving the physical body, looking down on themselves and the surroundings, being unable to talk to the people they see, and then traveling elsewhere using the power of thought. When delogs report that in the other world they had “a body from the golden age”—which is to say, young and perfect—we’re reminded that some NDEs remember that once they died they seemed to be back in the prime of physical life, somewhere in their twenties or early thirties. Deceased relatives appear on the other side, a region the Tibetans call “the Bardo of becoming.” When the newly dead person tries to join them, he is pushed back into the physical world with a sense that it isn’t the right time or that somehow a mistake has been made. In both cases there can be a profound sense of coming into contact with God or the supreme Light, after which the fear of death holds no more power.

There are significant parallels, then, between the experience of NDE and the delogs of Tibet. Since delogs provide more detailed and extended accounts, it seems fair to assume that an NDE is just the beginning of the awakening taking place that moves the dying person through all the stages needed for the soul to reveal itself. If we shed the specific geography of Christian heaven, the Buddhist Bardo, and the many Lokas, or divine realms, of Hinduism, the first stage of the afterlife emerges with certain consistent events.

“CROSSING OVER”

How the afterlife dawns

The physical body stops functioning. The dying person may not be aware of this but eventually knows that it has occurred.
The physical world vanishes. This can happen by degrees; there can be a sense of floating upward or of looking down on familiar places as they recede.
The dying person feels lighter, suddenly freed of limitation.
The mind and sometimes the senses continue to operate. Gradually, however, what is perceived becomes nonphysical.
A presence grows that is felt to be divine. This presence can be clothed in a light or in the body of angels or gods. It can communicate to the dying person.
Personality and memory begin to fade, but the sense of “I” remains.
This “I” has an overwhelming sense of moving on to another phase of existence.

This sevenfold awakening isn’t the same as going to heaven. Researchers often call this the “inter-life” phase, a transition between the mental state of being alive and the mental state of realizing that one has passed on. There are many specifics that change from person to person. Not all NDEs “go into the light.” Some patients report traveling to various planets in space or to other worlds according to their religious beliefs. Some experience a judgment scene that can be quite harsh, or even hellish; it can also be full of satisfaction, however.

The nature of the person plays a large part. A child can come back from heaven and report that it was full of baby animals at play, a cardiac patient can report sitting on God’s lap and being told by the Almighty that he must return to Earth, and a delog can see every detail of Tibetan theology. These images clearly depend on the culture they reflect. Huston Smith, an expert on world religions, declares, “Everything we experience in the Bardos is a reflection of our own mental machinations.” One can substitute “afterlife” for Bardos, since Christians see Christian images, not Buddhist ones, and Muslims see Islamic images.

Crossing over is only a transition, however. The full reality of the soul hasn’t yet revealed itself. For delogs, still ahead lies the experience of “the mind’s pure nature,” as Buddhists would call it. Delogs are quite clear that they haven’t actually gone anywhere, that every level of the journey exists in consciousness. What is actually real isn’t heaven and hell but the “Clear Light” that lies beyond them. Dawa visited that brilliant white light before descending back through the intermediate worlds in her return to physical existence.

As her son writes, “Despite the fact that the realms of cyclic existence are in the absolute sense empty in nature, mere projections of [the] mind’s delusions, on a relative level the suffering of beings trapped there is undeniable.” Westerners argue over whether the afterlife could be as real as the physical world; Easterners declare that both are mental projections. Westerners limit the human life cycle to a short span between birth and death; Easterners see an eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Thus there is huge room for variation even in the same journey: “As if in a dream or hallucination, beings float in and out of Dawa Drolma’s perception like flakes of snow. In one instant she encounters an acquaintance enduring the most hideous torments of hell; in the next she meets a virtuous person on the way to a pure realm. Occasionally, she sees entire processions of Bardo beings leaving for the pure realms shepherded by a great lama … who by the power of his or her altruistic aspirations, has come to save [them].”

A Wealth of Expectations

If different cultures see such different things after death, we must face the possibility that we create our own afterlife. Perhaps the vivid images that appear to dying people are projections, the soul’s way of helping us adjust to leaving behind the five senses. I accept that the afterlife is created in consciousness. But as a noted biologist told me with a sigh recently, “The minute you begin to use that word ‘consciousness,’ you are immediately shut out of science.” I can pick up a recent Time magazine to read the following from Professor Eric Cornell, a Nobel Prize winner in physics: “Science isn’t about knowing the mind of God; it’s about understanding nature and the reasons for things. The thrill is that our ignorance exceeds our knowledge.”

I’m sure that many people would agree, without realizing that “understanding nature” has limited value when you don’t understand human nature. Why are we leaving ourselves out of the experiment?

WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS ISN’T a viable possibility, explanations can only come from materialism. Drugs (for example, marijuana, hashish, LSD, ketamine, mescaline) can induce the brain to experience both a white light and a tunnel effect. So can putting someone in a centrifuge and spinning them at high enough rates to press blood out of the frontal lobes—astronauts and test pilots have such experiences when trained in centrifuges. Extreme stress can bring on hallucinations; patients hospitalized in intensive care during the aftermath of a heart attack are especially prone to them.

Is it possible that medicine has all the answers after all? Dr. van Lommel, who conducted the Dutch study of near-death experiences, doesn’t think so. He screened 344 patients whose heart had defibrillated (gone into chaotic twitching instead of a normal regular heartbeat) in the hospital. Talking to them within days of being revived, van Lommel discovered that anesthesia or medications didn’t affect their experience. What he marvels most at, however, are those reports of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Years afterward this paradox still fills him with awe: “At that moment these people are not only conscious; their consciousness is even more expansive than ever. They can think extremely clearly, have memories going back to their earliest childhood and experience an intense connection with everything and everyone around them. And yet the brain shows no activity at all!”

These observations undercut the dying-brain theory of materialism, since the brain has stopped functioning before the NDE begins, in that 4- to 10-minute limbo when resuscitation is possible without permanent brain damage. Van Lommel also points out that any physiological explanation, if true, should apply to everyone. He found that 82% of resuscitated patients couldn’t remember any near-death experience; why did their dying brains deprive them of one when the brains of 18% of patients had experiences?

Maybe consciousness isn’t in the brain. That’s a startling possibility but one consistent with the world’s most ancient spiritual traditions. What if an NDE is a step into the afterlife that is still governed by memories and expectations?

There is no doubt that heaven is the expectation of many people in Western society, and therefore we will have to examine its promises next, to consider if Paradise is the choice we really want to make.