Each one of us must face his own death. Insofar as is known through our present-day science, no one of us is immortal. At least there is evidence from history that every human being can expect to die. Most of us would find it difficult to follow consciously don Juan’s advice to Carlos Castaneda: “Keep death at your left hand.”1 Rather, most of us generally attempt to avoid a realization that our own end must come, leaving such considerations for times when we are depressed.
How we face our death at the time that it has become imminent will depend upon our belief systems operating at that particular time. If we believe that death is the end of us as an individual—the total, utter and complete end—then we will face our death with a set of feelings and realizations different from any set we previously had.
Let us take a good look at death as “the end,” Death as God ruling our lives. According to this set of beliefs, we are born into the world as a result of the sexual activities of our parents; we live out our life span as a biological organism and eventually die—either through accident, disease, the operations of other people, or what we call old age.
Most persons in the United States have been exposed to a view of death taken from some organized religion—a view that, in summary, tells us that our body will die but our soul will go somewhere else for judgment, eventually to rejoin the body, which on the day of final judgment will rise again from the ground in which it is buried.
This particular belief system, even though it does not have as many adherents as it enjoyed in the last century, dominates those American industries that thrive on death. One is expected to buy or lease a plot of ground into which his body is to be placed at the end of his life. His survivors are expected to have that body embalmed and otherwise prepared by morticians to be as lifelike looking as possible for the wake. At the funeral, all one’s relatives and friends are supposed to gather to mourn his departure. Thus do the industries which market coffins, floral arrangements, cemetery plots, and so forth, thrive on the God as Death belief system (see The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford 2).
What the cause of one’s own death eventually will be is in all probability quite indeterminate. We are surrounded in modern civilization by almost countless potentially lethal devices and lethal situations, day in and day out. In California, for example, it is quite impossible to say when, and if, a very large earthquake may occur, wiping us out along with tens of thousands of other people. Anytime we drive a car at high speed on a freeway, we are placing ourself in jeopardy. In the ordinary home there are plenty of opportunities to be electrocuted, burned, suffocated, or poisoned. So, we do live with death at our left hand, even though we may ignore it.
Those who have been through a close brush with death followed by a long period of recovery in which they had a good hard look at the possibilities of dying, are in a better-than-average position to question their belief system regarding God as Death. One may suddenly be thrown into a coma for causes which he does not know, even though others, outside his body, can easily see what they are—an encephalitis virus which shoots up one’s temperature, a cerebral vascular accident, a bad fall with a blow to the head, a head-on automobile smashup, or leaking gas while one is asleep.
The point here is that the outside view of what happens to us under such grave circumstances is not at all like the inside view of what happens under these circumstances. I have collected many firsthand accounts of close brushes with death and have asked specifically about the inside experiences. I have had my own close scrapes with death and have recounted them in The Center of the Cyclone.3
To summarize all too briefly, most people experience a set of realities entirely different from the external realities during a period of traumatic unconsciousness. Of course we have been able to get accounts only from survivors, but in general the inside view is that there are realities in which one does not have a body, or the necessity for a body, but has his intelligence, memories, consciousness and emotions. In other words, he is a complete individual, extra-body, “sans body.”
This individual exists in realities in which there are other entities like the self. This reality in which he finds himself seems to be endless, eternal, and repeating. There are rumors that there is no death in these regions, that one goes on eternally and can do other things than inhabit a human vehicle. To the people with these sets of experiences, the human body is merely a temporary abode for something else which classically, in Christian theology, is called the “soul.” In The Center of the Cyclone I called it the “essence.” In Yoga terms it is the “atman,” and so forth. These kinds of experience are cross-cultural and have been recorded in various parts of the world and interpreted in various ways according to the belief systems then current.
In some instances the feeling is that one has left a temporary proprietorship by a human condition and returned to a much more generalized abstract condition in which he is of vast general purpose. The alternatives in this second state of existence are much greater than those that exist when one is in the human body. One’s access to knowledge is freer, unimpeded by human considerations. One somehow or other is more objective, more understanding, more loving than he is in the human body. One can also suffer more in this state if he has need to. He can go through heavens, he can go through hells, and he can go through a state of High Indifference (Merrell-Wolff).4 If he approaches this state centered within his own knowledge and belief systems, then he can move through the state and back out again much more intact than if he had had no preprogramming in regard to approaching this particular state. For those who have been in this state a sufficient period of time and have studied the results in sufficient depth, Death is not God, and one does not “die” in the usual sense. Death is an opening, a way out, a transcendence of the human condition. As I have often said, recounting my own experiences under a condition of abstraction, “I do not feel that in this state I am facing God; I feel more that I am facing people in His ‘outer office,’ that there are many steps between me and God still left to accomplish.” So the projection Death is equivalent to God is nonsense according to this belief system.
With experiences such as these one is hardly still in a position to buy a cemetery plot or a coffin—one can only, as it were, think of getting lost at sea, being totally destroyed in some catastrophe that leaves no body to worry about—or to opt for cremation. In reality of course, after such experiences, what happens to one’s body is totally unimportant and one tends to leave the problem to his relatives and friends, hoping they will not thus face a financial burden and that their own belief systems will enable them to carry on in spite of this “apparent death.”
When one tunes in on the high-energy communications networks in special states of consciousness, he is reassured by the then-existing fact that he is a node in such a network; that there is constant information being fed into him, being computed below his levels of awareness and transmitted to others. This is all done with extremely high energy, far above what one usually experiences while in ordinary states of consciousness in the body. One experiences streamings of energy from unknown sources; streamings of energy going toward unknown sinks. A few of the nearby “other nodes in the network” may be visible. In such states there is no body, there is only pure streaming energy, carrying information. In such a state one suddenly realizes that he is far more than he assumed he was when in the body, and yet he is also far less in terms of ego. In this state he is a “cosmic computer”—small size—connected into the rest of the cosmic computers and into a huge universal computer. During such experiences one feels the connections between all these computers as love, respect, awe, reverence, curiosity and interest. And yet there is a high degree of efficiency with which the traffic is handled in these information channels.
In such a state one realizes that he has existed for several millions of years, that again and again and again he has taken on some form in addition to this cosmic computer form—in short, that he has transmigrated again and again and again, not necessarily only as a human being. He realizes that there is a huge backlog of experience available to him if he could only tap into the storage mechanisms for these memories. At certain points it is as if the memories were not his own but were a central, universal store in which such information is carried through the centuries and the millennia.
After such experiences one can no longer feel that he ceases to be when his body dies. The “reality” of the end of the self is no longer. Somehow one is committed to a much broader view than the egoistic, solipsistic, body-centered belief system common in the human being.
Whether this is merely another set of beliefs which generate certain experiences when out of contact with the body, I don’t know. I have no secure way of separating traveling among one’s own simulations within one’s own programmatic spaces from a true set of experiences having to do with universal communication. For all I know, each one of us may end with the death of his brain. On the other hand, this belief is not as secure as it used to be; it has been disturbed by these experiences. My disbelief in my continuance beyond the death of my body has been weakened. For me the belief that we have by happenstance totally originated as biological organisms on this planet is no longer as strong as it used to be.
One could easily say that with knowing about the new belief systems of exploration and of finding the realities that lie adjacent to, superimposed upon, and inherent in the reality he is faced with every day, he could have more than one alternative. There is a saying in yachting that the skipper should never be caught with just one alternative. So, when one faces one’s death, one should have a number of alternative belief systems at his disposal. If there is only one system, and if that is that one ends with the death of his body, then he might well become rather desperate at the time of his death, although even then death can be faced and accepted with dignity, with love, and with compassion. As soon as death becomes something that one can grasp, can think about, explore, and deal with, rather than a wrathful and judgmental God to be faced at the end of one’s present physical being, then one can become much more optimistic about his sojourn on this planet.
REFERENCES
1. Castaneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan, Berkeley: University of California, 1968, and New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971.
2. Mitford, Jessica, The American Way of Death, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963.
3. Lilly, John C., The Center of the Cyclone, New York, Toronto, London: Bantam Books, 1972, 1973.
4. Merrell-Wolff, Franklin, Pathways Through to Space, New York: Julian Press, 1973, p. 115.