3

DEATH GRANTS THREE WISHES

AFTER TWO HOURS of walking through the woods, Savitri and Ramana came to a fork in the path.

“If we went that way we would arrive at Yama’s castle. Did you know that Death lives so close by?” he said.

Savitri shuddered. “I’m happy not to know.”

“Really?” Ramana seemed genuinely surprised. “I ran across the castle when I was out wandering one day. I was very curious to meet Death face to face.”

Savitri felt frightened simply to be reminded of something she so dreaded. Ramana reached out and took her hand. “Come, I can tell you about it as we walk.” He had a strong grip, and Savitri felt calmer, as if his strength was seeping into her.

“I immediately knew that I had stumbled on to Yama’s home,” Ramana continued, “because skulls were stuck on pikes surrounding the gate. So I sat down and waited for my host to appear. I waited all that day and the next. The next day Yama returned home. When he saw me he became distressed. ‘I’ve made you wait outside my gate for three whole days,’ he said. ‘Not even Death can break the sacred vow of hospitality. Therefore I grant you three wishes, one for each day.’

“‘That pleases me well,’ I replied, ‘for I have long wanted to gain knowledge of you, the wisest of all beings in creation.’ Yama bowed regally. ‘My first wish,’ I said, ‘is to know the way back home. I’m not a fool, and I have no desire to remain with you forever.’

“Yama smiled and pointed to the east. ‘You will find your way back to the living if you go that way, where the sun rises.’

“‘My second wish,’ I said, ‘is to know if you have ever felt love.’

“Yama didn’t look so pleased now, but reluctantly he answered. ‘The role of love is to create; my role is to destroy. Therefore, I have no need of love.’ Hearing that, I pitied Yama, but he glared proudly, scorning any attempt at compassion. He said, ‘Now be quick and name your third wish.’

“I said, ‘The great sages declare that the soul survives beyond death. Is this true?’ A black cloud came over Yama’s countenance. He sputtered with rage, but there was nothing for it but to answer me. ‘I will tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘There are two paths in life, the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. The path of wisdom is to pursue the Self. The path of ignorance is to pursue pleasure. Pleasure, being born of the senses, is temporary, and whatever is temporary falls under the sway of death. Thus the ignorant fall into my clutches. But the Self is the light of immortality. It shines forever. Few are wise enough to see this light, even though it is inside them and nowhere else. The Self is but the light of your soul. Now go. It will please Yama never to behold your face again.’ And off he stalked to nurse his rage.”

Savitri found this tale fascinating, but she was puzzled. “How can we miss finding the soul if its light shines inside us?”

Ramana stopped and looked around. He spied a rain puddle along the path and drew Savitri toward it. “Do you see the sun reflected in that puddle?”

Savitri nodded. “I do.”

“Then watch.”

Ramana stepped into the water, stirring up the mud and roiling the water’s smooth surface. “Can you still see the sun’s reflection?” Savitri admitted that she couldn’t. “This is why people cannot find the soul,” said Ramana. “It is muddied by the mind’s constant activity and confusion. When I destroyed the sun’s reflection I didn’t kill the sun. It is eternal, and nothing I do can extinguish it. Now you know the secret of the soul, which even Death cannot extinguish.”

Savitri grew grave and thoughtful. “This is something I want to believe.”

“You are still afraid,” Ramana said gently, “but learn this one thing: Do not trust reflections, not if you want to see reality.”

Savitri looked thoughtful as they continued to walk, her hand softly placed in the monk’s.

A QUESTION OF BELIEF

The worst afterlife I can imagine is hell.

The second worst may be heaven.

I scribbled these sentences on the page of a notebook in the summer of 2005. The words “heaven” and “hell” immediately strike a Christian note, but I was thinking generally. Heaven is where you go if you are good enough for God; hell is where you go if you aren’t. Aren’t they both synonyms for “the end”?

Vedanta holds that every afterlife is created to give us what we expect. If that’s true of heaven and hell, what kind of expectations do they stand for? Why should bad deeds doom you to a prison where your wrongdoing is punished without mercy or hope of reprieve? That’s an easy question compared to the opposite. Why should being good lead to a fantasy land above the clouds where virtue is rewarded with endless indolence, also without reprieve?

In the summer of 2005 these issues were close at hand for me. Death was something I had to think about constantly because my mother had lapsed into a coma. Hurry, an urgent voice said on the phone from India. I was on a jet immediately. From moment to moment it was uncertain whether I would reach her bedside in time to say good-bye.

It’s hard to imagine someone you love dying. My mother was nearly eighty and had been gradually fading for the past five years. Her body was a husk of what it had been even six months before. Everyone in the family agreed that it would be a blessing for her suffering to end.

I found myself thinking about just a single cell in my mother’s heart. As a doctor I could imagine that cell as clearly as if it were under a microscope. Any heart cell has exchanged all its atoms many times over during one lifetime. My mother’s weak heart, so full of a lifetime’s experience, was not a static object. It was a firestorm of change. Because every cell is like that, my mother has been passing in and out of life since the day she was born.

Old heart cells can’t go to heaven, yet they survive physical death in their own way. Your whole body does the same, putting itself into the grave and rising from the dead thousands of times a minute as old matter is exchanged for new.

Since molecules can always be replenished, only the death of knowledge matters. Knowledge is a cell’s essence, which no one will ever see or touch. When millions of oxygen atoms fly away on an exhaled breath, floating out into the world, what remains is far more important: how to build a cell, how a cell behaves, how it relates to other cells.

How can a string of simple molecules along a strand of DNA know all this? When we die we go in pursuit of the answer, because then we confront our essence behind the mask of matter. “Essence” means a distillation, boiling down something crude into something refined, extracting the pure from the impure. There’s no need to get tangled up in terminology here. Essence, soul, Atman, or holy spirit all suffice. After the initial stage of “crossing over,” the rest of the afterlife is beyond images; it concerns the soul.

My mother passed away, still in a coma, a few hours after I arrived at her bedside. It was a modern death, undramatic and swaddled in the caring cocoon of a hospice. The time to grieve had come, but knowing that Mother was now free to discover who she really was sustained me. Millions of people do not think in this way, relying on the time-honored idea of heaven, but that’s changing.

The erosion of traditional faith has not left Paradise untouched. After the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, in which the craft exploded in the atmosphere over central Texas and killed all seven people aboard, President Bush said he was sure that the dead astronauts “are now in heaven.” Yet in Tennessee, pollsters asked people if they agreed, and although 74% said they believed in the afterlife, only about half of them (37% of the total) thought the astronauts were in heaven, with another third saying they didn’t know.

One only has to look at a leading indicator like church attendance. While 44% of Americans say they attend church regularly, reliable statistics show that perhaps half that number is more realistic. Every major denomination is declining—as is also true in fifteen out of eighteen developed countries. (One exception is Christian fundamentalism, which claims growth in the United States and worldwide.)

To get some idea of where you fall in the spectrum of religious belief, ask some basic questions of yourself, as follows:

 

TO BELIEVE OR NOT?

Read the following statements and then rate each one:

A Agree—This is true to my beliefs.

D Disagree—This is opposed to my beliefs.

N No Opinion—I am uncertain, or don’t think about this.

A D N	I believe in God.
A D N	I think God is in heaven.
A D N	I expect to go to heaven when I die.
A D N	Going to heaven depends on being a good person.
A D N	Going to heaven means believing in what the Bible says (substitute Koran or other scriptures).
A D N	If you believe in God you have a better chance of going to heaven than if you don’t.
A D N	God is merciful, but he still created Hell.
A D N	Hell is for the punishment of sin.
A D N	Both heaven and hell are eternal.
A D N	Whether I am punished or achieve salvation, the outcome will be just.
A D N	It comforts me to think that I won’t disappear when I die.
A D N	Scientific proof of heaven will never come.
A D N	What happens after we die is known by faith.
A D N	Near-death experiences are real.
A D N	When people “go into the light” and then come back, this is a foretaste of the afterlife.
A D N	The near-death experiences I’ve read about increase my belief in heaven.
A D N	The loved ones I’ve lost will meet me in heaven.
A D N	I expect to join my mother and father after I die.
A D N	Communicating with the dead is real.
A D N	Reincarnation is real.

Total A ______

Total D ______

Total N ______

Compare the number of times you agreed, disagreed, or had no opinion and find one category that’s dominant.

High A (14–20 points) You are a believer. Believers fall into two categories, those who closely hold the tenets of an organized religion and those who pursue spirituality even though they have dropped out of church. As a believer you feel secure about the afterlife and take comfort from that certainty. You feel you have come to terms with fear of dying. Your God is benign—a higher being who will look after your soul when you die. What you know about near-death experiences totally confirms your belief.

High D (14–20 points) You are a skeptic. As a skeptic your approach to life is likely to be logical and materialistic. Although not necessarily a scientist, you trust the scientific model over models of faith, to the point that for you the two cannot coexist. You disbelieve in life after death and have made peace with that. You suspect that near-death experiences must be a strange kind of brain dysfunction. Your mind could be changed by more convincing evidence, but so far you’ve seen none; you suspect that every proof of the afterlife is either a fantasy or wish fulfillment. Since no one returns from the dead, you feel pretty certain we will never have reliable information about it.

High N (14–20 points) You are either agnostic or noncommittal. Despite the difference between these two groups, both agree that the afterlife may or may not exist. You may be someone who doesn’t think about dying, preferring to wait until there is no other choice but to face it. Or you may feel that the afterlife, like God, will never be explained. Accounts of near-death experiences mildly interest you.

If you don’t score 14 to 20 points in any category, consider yourself open-minded. Such people find credence in spiritual notions but also in materialistic or scientific ones. You are intrigued by near-death experiences but not totally convinced. You may experience a certain anxiety about having no fixed beliefs; you may consider yourself confused. Most likely you are comfortable with having no certainties because there is no certainty, in your opinion, to be had when it comes to the afterlife. (At the prospect of going to heaven, you sigh and think it would be nice. But you’re not counting on it.)

IT SHOULD COME as no surprise to discover that you are a believer, skeptic, or agnostic. Yet when you look at where other people fall, which could be very far outside your belief system, it may be disturbing to consider that you might all be right.

Believers may go to the heaven (or hell) that matches their religious background. In the afterlife they will meet their most cherished version of God—or gods. They will find themselves surrounded by angels or bodhisattvas. The emotional tone of that afterlife could be one of total bliss, if that is the tone they anticipate, or it could feel more ambiguous, even sad. Catholic theology allows for a weeping Jesus and his mother, Mary, sorrowing over the fate of sinners.

The experience could even feel like nothing. Skeptics may find that the afterlife is a blank, devoid of conscious sensation. For them, dying could lead to a long sleep without any perception of the self. The question is how long this state will last or what it might become.

For agnostics the afterlife is problematic. They may perceive that they remain themselves, occupying a kind of limbo where good and bad deeds form a hazy cloud that never resolves decisively. In this kind of afterlife the same worries and ambiguities that reside at the center of the agnostic worldview may persist. For Christians purgatory fits this description.

And the undecided or open-minded people? They may be in for the biggest surprise, because someone who is truly open-minded dies without any expectations. If your approach to life is to take it one day at a time, the very last day won’t be any different. In short, the ability of consciousness to shape our lives is the most permanent thing about us, the one aspect of the mind we can expect to continue.

Somewhere in the Gap

As long as the physical and the metaphysical remain confused, we are trapped in the gap between them. Since belief isn’t a given in our society, why should we all expect the same afterlife? Choice and conditioning must play a huge part in the outcome. Consider the following two people whose lives diverge in many ways:

Marion was born into a large Catholic family. She took Communion and was a believer until her mother died of ovarian cancer before she was forty. Watching her mother’s suffering killed something in Marion. She stopped believing in God’s mercy, although she hardly acknowledged this, even to herself. When she married a man who had long ago dropped his faith, she turned to career and family, and together they achieved success. Decades went by without any undue calamities. After her last child left home for college, Marion began to feel lonely, and within a few years she had vague, somewhat guilty impulses that made her reconsider joining the Church again. At fifty-two, she again feels the need for the faith she grew up in.

Aaron comes from a small family of nonpracticing Jews. As the only son his needs were nurtured as a child, perhaps to a fault, and when he developed a talent for mathematics, his father encouraged him to become an accountant (for the financial security). Aaron pursued the law instead, and by age thirty was established in a prominent Manhattan law firm. Since then he has never looked back. He married late to a woman who is also a lawyer, and together they own an apartment in the city and a summer cottage at the beach. They have no children, and when he found out that his wife was cheating on him, Aaron got over his shock rapidly. He arranged a divorce settlement that benefited him as much as possible. At fifty he hasn’t decided whether to remarry, and his career gives him little time to consider the prospects. So far as he is aware, he hasn’t had a spiritual thought in years.

It’s obvious that these two people have led very different lives. One is a placid follower, the other a fierce competitor. One put her energies into raising a family, the other into making a career. Key words for Marion include stability, intimacy, caring, togetherness, cooperation, listening, and patience. The key words for Aaron include independence, self-reliance, competition, power, ambition, and success. When two lives are different in so many core values, why should they anticipate the same afterlife?

Everyone’s basic choices, which have shaped their lives, begin at the level of consciousness. At this level choices aren’t simple. They depend on memory and conditioning, on culture and expectation. All these ingredients factor into what happens in the afterlife. Only some of the beliefs that make a difference center on religion. Looming much larger are the infinite other choices we make every day, for they create our personal reality.

What you choose today will ripple throughout a thousand tomorrows.