Imagine that there was one experience that was guaranteed to permanently wake people up, or at least that had a good chance of doing so. Imagine that, after this experience, people would have a permanent sense of wonder and appreciation, a sense of the harmony and meaning of the universe, and a strong sense of connection to it.
Believe it or not, this experience already exists, although only a small number of people have been privileged to have it so far: a journey to the moon, or into space. A large proportion of the 24 American astronauts who travelled to the moon in the late 1960s and early ’ 70s had powerful spiritual experiences during their trip and were permanently transformed as a result. A term has even been invented for the phenomenon: ‘lunar consciousness’.
Jim Irvin was a member of the first extended scientific expedition to the moon in August 1971. When he returned to Earth after his two weeks in space he found that he could appreciate everything – all the mundane and ordinary activities of life he had completely taken for granted before. He found that just to sit in a chair or to eat food in the normal way was a source of joy. He felt that he had found the perfect cure for anybody who was prone to depression and boredom: just shut them in a box and deprive them of all ordinary experience for two weeks then let them out again.
But that wasn’t the most the most important part of his experience. Before his trip, Irvin had been a conventional church-going Christian. He’d thought of God as a personal being who existed apart from the world and controlled it from somewhere else in the universe. But while he was on the moon he felt that God was there with him. He experienced God as a living presence which pervaded the whole of the universe and everything in it. The experience affected him so profoundly that just a few months after his return to Earth, he left NASA and spent the rest of his life as a evangelist.
Charlie Duke, a member of the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972, had a similar experience. While looking out from the hatch of the spaceship onto the lunar landscape, he had a mystical vision of the presence of the divine. As he describes it, ‘I was overwhelmed by the certainty that what I was witnessing was part of the universality of God.’ While walking on the moon and looking down at his fresh footprints in the lunar dust, he ‘just choked up. Tears came. It was the most deeply moving experience of my life.’ 1 He’d never been particularly interested in religion or spirituality before, but shortly after his return to Earth he also became a born again Christian. As he puts it, his three days’ walk on the moon led to a walk with Jesus for eternity.
Edgar Mitchell also had a mystical experience, but didn’t interpret it in conventional religious terms. He was a member of the third successful mission to the moon in January 1971 and holds the joint record for the longest moonwalk (9 hours and 17 minutes). While looking out at the Earth from his spaceship, he felt an overpowering sense of euphoria and tranquillity and shifted into a different state of consciousness in which he perceived the meaning of the universe. There was nothing accidental; the universe was filled with order and harmony. And there was no separateness. All planets and stars and all human beings were a part of the same whole, part of a spiritual force which pervaded the whole universe. He was a part of this unity too. He wasn’t a detached observer looking at it from the outside, he was inside it; in fact he was it.
This feeling returned to Mitchell several times during the journey home, in fact every time he looked at the Earth. He felt that he’d become enlightened in some way, although he didn’t fully understand what had happened. He described it later as ‘the overview effect’ and summarized the experience as ‘interconnected euphoria’ and ‘instant global consciousness’. 2
The experience changed the course of Mitchell’s life. He turned his attention from outer to inner space. He began to read books on spirituality and consciousness and to do research on altered states of consciousness and psychic phenomena. Within two years of his trip to the moon, he had left NASA and set up his own research institute, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is still flourishing today.
Gene Cerman, who took part in two lunar missions – Apollo 10 and 16 – had a similar vision of meaning and purpose. As he describes it in the film In the Shadow of the Moon :
I was standing on a plateau somewhere out there in space that science and technology had allowed me to get to. But now what I was seeing, and even more importantly what I was feeling at that moment in time, science and technology had no answers for… Because there I was and there you are, the Earth – dynamic, overwhelming – and I felt the world was just … there was too much purpose, too much logic. It wastoo beautiful to happen by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you, and bigger than me, and I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense. There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create to go on in our lives. 3
Another astronaut who experienced personal transformation was Al Worden, a member of Apollo 15 in July 1971. He had always thought of himself as a fairly normal man, rational and extraverted. He’d never been particularly sensitive or emotional, and had certainly never written – or even read – any poetry. But as he was orbiting the moon, something shifted inside him. On his return to Earth he started to write soul-searching poetry to express his feelings about the miracle of his journey into space. Reflecting on his journey to the moon, he wrote,
In love with myself and with my work
Unheeding the many dangers that lurk
In outer space or here on earth
I accept all as due my birth.
4
Rusty Schweikhart didn’t actually travel to the moon – he was a member of the Apollo 9 mission, in March 1969, which carried out tests to prepare for the moon landings later that year. But his vision of the Earth from space also transformed him.
One of the tests was a spacewalk around his lunar module, where he floated 160 miles above the Earth and just a few miles above the moon. As he gazed below, he felt as though he had lost his identity as an American astronaut and was ‘part of everyone and everything sweeping past me below’. And he felt a profound attachment to and appreciation for the planet Earth:
You realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white planet, is everything that means anything to you – all of the history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joys, games, all of it on that little spot out there… This tiny beautiful Earth – the planet that keeps us alive, that gives us everything we have, the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the beauty of nature. And everything is so perfectly balanced and organized so that we can live. This beautiful tiny planet spinning through space. 5
This heightened state of awareness stayed with Rusty after his return to Earth and his life changed as a result. Whereas before he’d given little thought to anything beyond his career as an astronaut, his new sense of connection filled him with the need to help others. He started to do voluntary work at a clinic for drug addicts and as a telephone counsellor for troubled teenagers, and also to practise transcendental meditation.
Many astronauts felt this profound gratitude for the Earth and later became involved in environmental causes as a result. Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, has found that his appreciation of the wonder of life on Earth has never faded in 40 years:
Since that time I have not complained about the weather a single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic – I’m glad there are people around. …When I got back home, I [would go] down to shopping centres and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream or something, and just watch the people go by and think, ‘Boy, we’re lucky to be here.’ Why do people complain about the Earth? We are living in the garden of Eden! 6
With the possible exception of Ed Mitchell, none of these astronauts had any interest in unusual states of consciousness beforehand. They were hard-headed scientists who even had a reputation for being emotionless automatons. It wasn’t as though they went looking for these experiences either – every minute of their time in space was meticulously planned out, filled with tests and tasks, so they had little opportunity to relax and contemplate their situation. Nevertheless, space travel gave them what millions of monks and seekers have been searching for since time immemorial: a taste of enlightenment and a shift to a new state of being.
It’s perhaps a shame, then, that space travel isn’t yet available to members of the public. Seeing our planet from space would have a similar awakening and life-changing effect on all of us. Gazing at the oasis of the Earth with the whole universe still and silent around us, we’d be likely to see Brahman pervading the whole universe and experience our oneness with it.
This would be impossible, of course, but in a sense it’s also unnecessary, because there is one experience we all have which can be, if approached in the right way, the equivalent of travelling to the moon: facing our own death.
It’s sometimes said that human beings are the only animals who are aware of their own death, but is this really true? Many of us live our life almost as if there’s no such thing as death, putting things off and never taking any chances or feeling any urgency, as if we have an infinite amount of time on our hands. We damage and pollute our bodies as if we’re indestructible and take life itself for granted just as we largely take our health, freedom and the people in our life for granted.
Part of the reason for this is that many of us don’t want to think about death. We live in a death-denying culture; if sex was the great taboo of the twentieth century, then death is the great taboo of the late twentieth and early twenty-first. At earlier times, people made a conscious effort to remind themselves of their own mortality, through memento mori (literally, ‘remember you must die’). In the sixteenth century, scholars used to keep skulls on their desks to remind them that they were always close to death, while in the Victorian era people wore lockets containing the hair of their deceased loved ones, and mourning veils. But, perhaps because of our materialistic, youth-worshipping culture, and because many of us don’t believe in an afterlife, we try to repress our awareness of death.
But this is a great shame, because if confronted directly, becoming aware of our own mortality can be a liberating and awakening experience. We’ve already seen – for example with Glyn and Stephanie – that the death of people close to us can trigger transformational experiences (or SITEs, as I’ll refer to them from now on, standing for ‘suffering-induced transformational experiences’.) And when we face death personally , the effect is even more powerful.
Of course, some of the experiences we’ve looked at so far have featured personal encounters with death: for example, Cheryl, Carrie and Iris had to face the possibility that they were going to die of cancer, while Gill Hicks and Michael Hutchison both had near-death experiences. However, in this section of the book we’re going to look at experiences where encountering death was the main factor, or even the only one. In this chapter, we’re going to look at the cases of people who experienced awakening as they went through the process of dying. Then in the following two chapters, we’re going to look at people who returned from both longterm and sudden encounters with death.
How do you think you’d feel if you had a fatal disease and only had a certain amount of time to live? You’d probably expect to be devastated and depressed, thinking about all the friends and relatives you were leaving behind, and all the things you planned to do with the rest of your life but wouldn’t be able to do now. You might think about the things in your life that you’d worked so hard to build up but were now going to be taken away from you. It might seem monstrously unfair, having to die while everyone else was living on.
However, there’s a chance that you might react in a much more positive way. There’s even a chance that the process of dying would be a serene and even blissful experience.
The English playwright Dennis Potter, famous for television plays like The Singing Detective , was, by all accounts, not a particularly likeable person throughout most of his life. He was a short-tempered and bitter man who had at least as many enemies as friends. But during the final months of his life, after he’d learned that he was dying of prostate cancer, his character changed. He became serene and compassionate, and admitted that his coldness and aggression had really only been a mask he’d used to hide his natural timidity. During a TV interview he gave shortly before his death, he remarked that he didn’t feel sad or sorry for himself, only for the close friends and family who were going to be losing somebody they loved. He said that he was, in fact, happier and more at peace with the world than he’d ever been before. The knowledge that he was going to die soon generated a state of inner well-being, together with a heightened awareness of his surroundings, an intense awareness of the ‘nowness’ of his experience and the beautiful ‘is-ness’ of the world. As he said during the interview:
We forget that life can only be defined in the present tense. It is, is, is. And it is now only…
That nowness becomes so vivid to me that in a perverse sort of way I’m serene. I can celebrate life… The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful… The fact is that if you see, in the present tense – boy, can you see it; boy, can you celebrate it. 7
Things he’d seen millions of times before now seemed amazingly beautiful and full of significance, as if it was the first time he’d really seen them. Looking through the window at apple blossom in his garden, it seemed to him ‘the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be’. 8
In other words, Dennis Potter’s imminent death brought about a psychological transformation, a shift to a higher state of consciousness. And this wasn’t just a temporary experience, but a stable, continuous state which apparently lasted for weeks until his death.
In his recent book Pilgrims , a hospice nurse called Paul McDermott describes his relationship with a lady named Val, who was dying of cancer. When he first met her, she was 74 years old and had been given a month to live. She was an ordinary working-class woman who had barely had an education and hardly ever read books. She had spent most of her working life in a post office and been married to an army engineer, who had died four years before.
The charity Paul worked for offered support for people who wanted to die in their own homes and he drove out to see Val two or three times a week. At first, he found her difficult and hostile. Although she had agreed to the support, she seemed reluctant to cooperate, or even be civil to him. She seemed to enjoy embarrassing him, trying to make him feel uncomfortable by asking, ‘So, do you think I’m dying?’ Knowing that he’d come to the UK from New Zealand a few years earlier, she would complain about ‘foreigners flooding into Britain’.
Paul began to realize that this wasn’t just him, though – Val seemed to be difficult with everyone. She had fallen out with all her family, including her only child, and didn’t seem able to keep any friends.
However, as Paul gained her trust, and as she began to accept her imminent death, her personality changed, like Dennis Potter’s. She began to read poetry – a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, a present from her husband years before – and together, Paul and Val started to explore how she felt about dying. They discussed philosophical questions such as whether there was life after death and whether God existed. Then, one day while cooking, Val had a sudden mystical experience:
I was making a little roast: some potatoes and beans and a nice bit of chicken. And then suddenly I just stopped. The kitchen knife was in my hand in mid-air … and I just stopped. I didn’t move for I don’t know how long. It might have been a minute, it might have been an hour, I don’t know, but I knew time didn’t matter… While I was standing there I realized something, something I hadn’t realized before. I said to myself, ‘I’m not Val.’ It was wonderful. So peaceful. I said, ‘I’m not Val. I’m not an old woman. I’m not this and I’m not that. I’m just me. I’m me! And I love it!’ And I haven’t felt the same since. 9
Val’s experience here is similar to Byron Katie’s in the last chapter – a moment of complete clarity and realization, a sudden dis-identifcation with the person she had been before (‘Val’) and a rebirth as a new person. She had made contact with her true self – what the Indian Upanishads call the Atman , the pure spiritual self beneath the superficial identity of the ego.
After this, Val was reconciled to death. She lived nine months longer than expected and spent her final months feeling more whole than ever before: ‘I know that I’m dying, piece by piece. There’s no denying that. But what’s very odd is that I don’t feel any less. It’s almost like I feel I’m more than I was before.’ 10
She had another powerful experience before she died, a vision she interpreted as showing that there was life after death. She saw herself riding a beautiful white horse, and she kept riding until they reached the edge of a precipice:
I went to another level of consciousness… I knew it wasn’t a dream, because all the time I knew I was there, and not here, if you see what I mean… There, way, way down [over the precipice], and stretching as far as I could see in all directions, was a city of light. Everything there was made of light. Everything! And I just stood there and stared at it… It was so beautiful. I’d never thought I would see anything like that. 11
His relationship with Val had an awakening effect on Paul too. It made him re-evaluate his life. He stopped watching TV and his marriage broke up because he didn’t feel able to compromise his true self any more. He developed a new spiritual awareness, an ability to sense the connectedness of everything. He now sees death not as a tragic and catastrophic ending, but as ‘an opportunity, a fulfilment of all that has gone before’. 12
In his work as a counsellor at a hospital for cancer patients, Kevin Hinchcliffe, whose own transformational experience we looked at in Chapter 5 , has witnessed transformations similar to those of Dennis Potter and Val:
With a lot of the people I work with at the hospital, when they are faced with their own mortality, there is a big shift. All the things that they value, such as their house, their car and their holidays, disappear. They realize that these things have no value whatsoever and start talking about their friends, their loved ones, the sunshine and nature. A lot of people fight against the idea of death right till the end, but others become quite serene. Once they know that they’re not going to recover, they accept it and you can see a light in their eyes. You can feel the acceptance and tranquillity all around them, as a kind of aura. Then the difficulty isn’t so much comforting the patients themselves, but their relatives. They’re the ones who are really suffering.
This is similar to what happened to Deborah Hutton, an English health journalist. In November 2004, she found that she had an aggressive form of lung cancer which had already spread from her lungs to her bones and lymph nodes. It seemed incredibly unfair, since she’d given up smoking 23 years before and had always made a big effort to keep fit and eat healthy food. As she wrote, she was ‘never ill, never down, a runner of half-marathons, and yoga freak and nutrition nut to boot’. 13 But over the following weeks she found a new kind of serenity. Just two weeks before she died in July 2005, she told an interviewer, ‘I feel that each moment is exquisitely precious. I love the rain. I love the clouds, I love the sun. Each day feels like a gift, and of course it is.’ 14
Treya Killam Wilber, wife of the American philosopher Ken, also became intensely aware of the awakening power of death as she was dying of breast cancer. Treya was already a spiritually developed person, having studied Eastern spiritual traditions and practised meditation most of her adult life. But as her cancer reached its terminal stages, her spirituality deepened and intensified. In her journals – quoted in Ken’s moving account of their relationship and her death, Grace and Grit – she describes her closeness to death as generating a ‘deliciously keen knife-edge of awareness … this satisfyingly one-pointed focus’. 15 She compared it to ‘carrying a meditation master around with me at all times’ who could at any moment ‘unexpectedly give me a sound whack!’ 16
Treya tried various courses of treatment, some of which seemed to offer hope. However, once she accepted that she was going to die, she developed a new serenity and sense of connection:
The growing acceptance of life as it is, with all the sorrow, the pain, the suffering, and the tragedy, has brought me a kind of peace. I find that I feel ever more connected with all beings who suffer, in a really genuine way. I feel a more open sense of compassion… Because I can no longer ignore death, I pay more attention to life. 17
Similarly, at the age of 33 the English writer Winifred Holtby was told that she had cancer and probably only had two years left to live. She felt devastated and depressed. Although still young, she had led an incredibly active life and was full of ideals and ambitions for the future. She had been a political activist, fighting for women’s rights and supporting the British Labour Party. After a six-month trip to South Africa in 1926, she had fought to bring attention to the oppression of the black population there. She had published 11 books in her short life, as well as writing articles for more than 20 different magazines and newspapers. The news of her cancer seemed incredibly cruel, since she had only recently begun to achieve the success she had sought as an author.
She remained bitter and depressed until a sudden mystical experience reconciled her to her death. One day she was out walking near a farmhouse when she saw some lambs gathered around a frozen water trough. She broke the ice for them and then, as her friend Vera Brittain writes:
[She] heard a voice within her saying, ‘Having nothing, yet possessing all things.’ It was so distinct that she looked round, startled, but she was alone with the lambs on the top of the hill. Suddenly, in a flash, the grief, the bitterness, the sense of frustration disappeared; all desire to possess power and glory for herself vanished away and never came back… The moment of ‘conversion’ on the hill of Monks Risborough, she said, with tears in her eyes, was the supreme spiritual experience of her life. 18
As a result of this experience, Holtby became aware that ‘There is nothing anywhere in the world or without that can make us afraid.’ 19
All of the stories we’re heard so far in this book are paradoxical in that they all show that pain and suffering can lead to intense joy and liberation. But these stories of the liberating and awakening effect of death are the most paradoxical of all. Death is the thing we fear most. We associate it with misery, decay and bitterness – the end of all our ambitions, of all the success, status or wealth we’ve built up, of all the things we enjoy doing, parting from the people we love… But these stories make it clear that it is possible to die happily – joyfully, even. Death isn’t always an untimely and painful interruption of life – as Paul McDermott points out, it can be a serene and fitting end to our journey. After battling through our life, struggling against stress, worry and disappointment, in the weeks or months before our death we may find peace and fulfilment. The process of dying may bring the contentment that has eluded us all our life. In Leaves of Grass , Walt Whitman wrote, ‘Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die.’ 20 This may not be the case for most people – but for some, it certainly is.