| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and philosophical sides of our nature, time occupies a key position.
– Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
The naive Christian concept of heaven seems idyllic on the face of it. After death, your private soul with its self-identity intact is free to wander peacefully around beautiful gardens and leafy glades meeting happy, smiling people. No crime, no risk of accident, everything laid on. And just imagine what great characters of the past (and the future) you might run into – Einstein, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Bach – albeit that the vast majority of the heavenly host would be less auspicious folk like you and me. As George Bernard Shaw once remarked, “In heaven an angel is no one in particular.”
Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise – for a while. The problem is, it wouldn’t end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. Yet still you would be obliged to stay in this cozy, tranquil place populated by kindly souls like yourself. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting – the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: “Heaven for climate, hell for company.” The problem is – time; there’s just too much of it in eternity.
On earth, by comparison, time always seems to be in short supply. We ride atop the wave crest of now between the unreachable and knowable past and the reachable and unknowable future, prisoners of the present. But the present is always moving, carrying us helplessly forward to meet our destiny – and, ultimately, our death.
We live in a time-obsessed society. Get up, get dressed, wolf down breakfast, dash to work, do the job, try to beat the rush hour home, and finally collapse for an all-too-brief while before going to bed, ready to start the whole cycle again. For most of us, the day, the week, the year, our whole lives are mapped out for us by the need to stay in step with the rest of the world. The watch on our wrist, the clock on the wall, the bleeping alarm or pager warn us that the next appointment is already fast approaching. And all the while, the seconds of our life’s story tick remorselessly away. Two hundred and thirty-five million of them, or thereabouts, at birth, reducing by 86,400 with each day that passes. And, worryingly, time gathers pace, or appears to, the more our lives progress.
In childhood, a hot summer’s day can seem endless, whereas by middle age our birthdays race around again with alarming speed. We notice the same effect on a long vacation; the first few days seem unusually long, while later days fly by.
It may be, in part, that our brain derives its subjective measure of time by how often novel additions are made to its memory. When we are young and everything is new, the days seem stretched out because they are filled with so many new, “memorable” events. But as we grow older, routine sets in and the brain, with fewer fresh experiences to file away, compresses time and so speeds the apparent passage of our lives.
Then, too, there is evidence that the biological clock within each of us – the hormonal regulating mechanism responsible for circadian rhythms – slows down as we age. Less frequent “ticks” from our body’s metronome would create the illusion of time passing more quickly.
Other factors can affect the rate at which time seems to flow. LSD accelerates perceived time (as well as causing gross spatial distortions); tranquilizers retard it. Time seems to flow with peculiar variability in dreams and, similarly, under clinical hypnosis subjects can be influenced to perceive time as passing either more slowly or more quickly. During the commonly reported “life review” of near-death experiences, time can appear telescoped down to almost nothing, while other extreme temporal dislocations are associated with certain mental disorders and diseases of the brain.
Radical changes in the perception of time are often described by psychotic patients. Schizophrenics, for instance, may grossly underestimate their age or the period of their confinement. Effectively, they suffer a loss of time-consciousness.
Brain damage, inflicted by accident or disease, can have an equally devastating effect. Acute loss of short-term memory and other brain functions can totally sever an individual’s links to the past and the future. For them, it is as if time had ceased to flow.
All this suggests that, at the very least, there is a strong psychological component to our experience of moving through time. Our ability to make and access memories and so speculate about the future plays a crucial role in our perception of time flow. Once these links are broken, each moment appears in isolation, like a single frame from a world in which time as we know it no longer exists.
Time and mind, it seems, are inextricably linked. Could it be that, in the absence of all record-keeping, self-conscious observers such as ourselves, the universe would be completely timeless? In other words, is moving time a pure fabrication of our brain’s ability to make sense of disparate events or does it have a true and independent basis in reality?
Origins again. The evolution of human language and the development of our sense of self, we saw earlier, probably occurred hand in hand, the one feeding off the other. Language allowed man to internalize and rationalize the world in a remarkable new way – as a complex montage of discrete, labeled objects and events. But the flood of facts and discordant images that this fresh outlook on nature made available must surely have threatened the brain with overload and chaos. Some powerful organizing agency was needed to enable our ancestors to make sense of the piecemeal universe now gradually being revealed to them. And, in response, time may have entered human awareness.
Smoothly flowing, unidirectional time is the means by which man’s brain orders its memories. As language rose to preeminence, time became the sequencing device by which subjective, verbally encoded events and experiences could be sorted and stored coherently. Time gave us a map by which to find our way around in the confusion of reductionist space.
But, coincidentally, time emphasized the individual. It did this because consciousness of self depends upon having a clear sense of personal continuity through a succession of different states of awareness. Language and the subjective perception of flowing time and self-consciousness are mutually interdependent, so that inevitably they must have come about together.
Not all human cultures, however, have perceived time in quite the same way. The ebb and flow of tides, the recurrence of the seasons and the wheeling movements of sun, moon, and stars give the powerful impression that nature turns endlessly full circle. Because of this, early man and early civilizations almost certainly regarded time as being cyclical. We know that the Maya of Central America, for instance, believed that history would repeat itself every 260 years, the so-called lamat, a fact that the Spanish conquistadors were not slow to exploit in the timing of their invasion. In Hindu cosmology, the entire universe is thought to cycle between birth, death, and rebirth every 4,320,000,000 years, or one kalpa, an impressive enough time span even by contemporary astronomical standards (and close, incidentally, to the age of the earth).
Greek philosophers and cosmologists, too, embraced the notion of perpetual repetition. As Aristotle wrote in his great work Physics, “There is a circle in all things that have natural movement and coming into being and passing away... Even time is thought to be a circle.”
Jewish and Christian teachings, however, shattered the concept of this ancient cycle of time. The myth of the fall from Eden speaks of a unique, never-to-be-repeated beginning of time and history, the moment when man, having eaten of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, learns the bitter truth about his own mortality. Thus, wrapped in this parable for the masses is the chronicle of the passing from circular to linear time.
Christianity, with its emphasis on the birth and death of Christ and the crucifixion as once-only events, further underscored the notion of time as a straight path that stretched from the past to the future. So the mind of Western man became primed for the idea of progress and evolution – an idea that, paradoxically, led to the eventual schism between religion, with its timeless spiritual teachings, and science, with its progressive search for physical truth.
For the average person in the Middle Ages of Europe, progress of any sort must have been hard to discern. In the midst of such a firmly entrenched caste system, a static hierarchy from lowliest serf to monarch, the life of the peasant was unrelentingly the same, year in, year out. The psyche of the common man, tied as it was to the land and the seasonal rhythms, would still have retained much of the ancient feel for nature’s endless, organic cycles.
But all that was about to change. With the dawn of the Renaissance and the coming of the Age of Exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a great search began for new markets and raw materials. Shortly afterward, in mid-eighteenth-century England, the harnessing of steam empowered the Industrial Revolution, so that within little more than a generation the lives of countless ordinary folk in the developing West were altered beyond recognition. The focus of society shifted abruptly from agriculture to industry and commerce. The entrenched sense of repetition in time, based on the annual reappearance of plants, swiftly faded from mainstream awareness to be replaced by an insatiable desire for growth and change. Whereas agricultural institutions can afford to be static, those centered on commerce feed on growth as a means of generating new wealth. Capitalism had arrived and with it the yearning for material acquisition and progress. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the idea of change for one’s self and family came to be seen as natural and necessary. No longer, in this new, industrialized society, were there rigid barriers to the upwardly mobile.
Protestantism, too, was on the march, with its underlying ethos of hard work and self-improvement. So, borne along by a tidal wave of secular developments, Western religion became ever more strongly wedded to the notion of linear time. Just as Catholicism embraced fewer formal and repetitive rituals than did Judaism, so Protestantism abandoned many of the rigid, cyclical traditions prescribed by Rome.
By the nineteenth century, the idea in the West of temporal succession came to assume even greater importance in daily human life and thought. The fruits of the Industrial Revolution were now everywhere to be seen, while, on a different front, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection made linear time the backdrop for the development of life itself. It is no coincidence that the same era also saw the rapid evolution of the novel and the autobiography. Nor has the rush toward the future since slowed. Today, more than ever, we seem committed to a policy of accelerating material progress, change, and development, with scant regard for our spiritual growth.
We live our daily lives in a realm of causality, with a past and a future, governed by the clock. Here, in this ubiquitous device, is the very embodiment of linearity and sequence. Inside the clock, the to-and-fro rotation of a wheel or the vibrations of a crystal are translated into smooth movements of a pointer. The more constant the internal mechanism, the better, for one second must be defined as the equal of any other in true linear time. According to the clock, one event follows another in strict, unvarying sequence; four o’clock always follows three and precedes five. The consistent, one-moment-after-another sequence of clock time is so much a received part of normal awareness that we accept it as stemming directly from the way time “really is.”
Certainly, our perceived sense of linear, sequential time is successful in terms of getting things done in our kind of society. It lets us plan for the future and coordinate our individual and social lives. It is the basis for precise timing of events in any scientific enquiry.
But the gathering acceptance in the West of a linear basis for time has also had a profoundly negative effect. It has strengthened still further our sense of separation and of ego-consciousness. Consequently, death has become something to fear because it marks a unique, never-to-be-repeated occurrence – the potential extinction of our selves. No longer do we find solace in the notion of regeneration and rebirth, now that the wheel of time has been stilled. Our divorce from the cosmic cycles has resulted in a loss of our sense of communion with nature. And the effect of this has been devastating to our collective psyche.
At this stage in our history, to a greater extent than ever before, we construct sharp boundaries between our selves and the rest of the world. From an early age we are encouraged to see ourselves as different from other people, with our own unique personality and skills. The more we are treated as an individual, the more we become like one because our sense of self is based largely on how others relate and react to us. As children we are free, innocent of our limitations in time and space. A child lives each moment as if it were the only one. But as we grow older, our ego boundaries increasingly wall us in from our surroundings. Coincidentally, we become aware that every day is not the same, that death exists and that we are moving inexorably toward it.
We have reached, it seems, a crisis point in our cultural development. Our reasoning, forward-looking brain tells us that death is inevitable. Yet whereas in previous ages the individual saw herself as just another part of nature’s self-regenerative cycle, now we find ourselves with no such conceptual safety net. We have built up the importance of our selves, while at the same time we have become subjectively decoupled from the global cycles of life. We feel alone, in a vast, apparently uncaring universe, chained to egos that are terrified of dying. And worse, we have largely lost faith in the religions that once held out the promise of an afterlife. What is left? We can look to medical science for a way of extending life and postponing the fateful day. Or we can bury ourselves in the kind of pseudoscientific nonsense that nowadays is peddled as a substitute for true religion.
But always, at the back of our mind, is the certainty of death and the looming threat of personal dissolution. We know now, too, that this seemingly robust self inside our heads can be altered or chipped away or destroyed completely by physical changes to the brain. Our sense of self, modern neurology tells us, is an artifact of the human cortex – nothing more. The self is not the soul; there is no personal, immortal soul, the new high priests of science insist. Descartes and the other dualists and the Christian theologians were wrong all along. When the brain dies, the self dies. And when the self dies, so do we. “We must accept,” says Gerald Edelman, “that death means the irrevocable loss of an individual and that individual’s being.” Most contemporary neurologists would agree. In Daniel Dennett’s words: “Materialism of one sort or another is now a received opinion, approaching unanimity.”
Sadly, our response to this modern denial of the soul only makes matters worse. We bury the problem by staying busy, working harder, trying to acquire greater material wealth, “security,” and positions of power. We compete with our fellows from an early age for possessions and status. But in so doing we only strengthen and extend the boundaries of our ego-selves. What we own and even who we know become, in a sense, part of our selves. Losing someone or something dear to us is then a painful wrench, not so much because we are sorry for whoever is gone (though that may also be true), but because we ourselves have been diminished – a small part of us has died. Paradoxically, because of this, the more powerful and extensive our egos become, the more vulnerable and insecure we feel.
We are not alone among living things in having extended selves. The spider has its web, the snail its shell, and there are countless other animals and plants whose effective selves extend well beyond their physical bodies. In the case of a social insect such as an ant, we may even go so far as to treat an entire colony of creatures, which individually are incapable of survival, as a single superorganism – a sort of corporate self embracing perhaps millions of separate biological units.
But with modern man the scale of the “selfish” phenomenon has reached outrageous proportions. A rich individual may own a number of lavish homes, cars, and many other expensive pieces of property and have great monetary wealth, all of which becomes absorbed in the extended self and none of which is strictly necessary for survival. The rich, however, die on schedule with the poor.
Possessions have become another of our ploys for distancing or denying death. That is, by associating our vulnerable, biological self with more durable objects, we attempt to take the spotlight off the corruptible nature of the body. Unfortunately, the strategy backfires and the spotlight only shines ever more brightly on the frail purveyor of the illusion. The result is that we trap ourselves still further in the ego prison and, worse, in time, bequeath our material trappings to those we love most to perpetuate the folly. Sogyal Rinpoche explains this from a Buddhist perspective:
In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping to self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction... The fact that we need to grasp at all ... shows that in the depth of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear.Only a radical change in our outlook on life will cure these anxieties. We must start to see the world, and our relationship to it, in a very different way.
On a material level at least, physicists have been doing that for the best part of a century now. And to their surprise, they have had to come to terms with the fact that the basic physical components of nature – matter, energy, space, and time – are not really what they seem to be from our blinkered human perspective. Matter is mostly empty space. Energy and matter are freely interchangeable. And space and time, which we normally think of as being distinct, are in truth inseparable aspects of a single entity, spacetime. As Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s colleagues wrote: “The view of space and time which I wish to lay before you has sprung from the ground of experimental physics, and therein lies its strength. It is radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
Both the major cornerstones of contemporary physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, require that the three familiar dimensions of space be melded with a single dimension of time to form a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Bear in mind that this unification is not just a mathematical convenience or a piece of intellectual pie-in-the-sky. It is, our best physical theories tell us, a basic, underlying truth of the world in which we live.
From this 4-D perspective, a quite remarkable new view of reality emerges. If time is just another dimension similar to space, then the entire history of the universe from beginning to end is (and always has been) laid out along the time line. What we normally refer to as the “past” still exists, as does that part of the time line we call the “future.” Our human perception of an eternal present that seems to travel along in the future direction is an illusion, fashioned by our consciousness. As the mathematician Hermann Weyl put it, “The objective world simply is; it does not happen.”
It seems that our perception of time is out of step with reality. And yet, we should not be so surprised by that. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant first pointed out, we look out on the world with uniquely human senses and intellectual apparatus. Inevitably what we see is profoundly influenced by what we see with. And what we see with, in turn, has been conditioned and molded by biological necessity during the long course of life’s evolution. We have been genetically honed over billions of years to be effective survival and reproductive systems, and part of this development has involved becoming aware of just that thin slice of reality relevant to our species’ needs. In 1793 the poet William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But the problem is, such all-encompassing vision would have been ruinously distracting to a slow, underpowered hominid trying to eke out a living on the dry plains of Africa. We are stuck with our particular subjective outlook on the world because that, as it turned out, is what served us best in the struggle to stay alive.
Among our many adaptations is this peculiar ability of our minds to perceive time as something that flows, so that we feel ourselves to be voyaging along its course. We talk about all our experiences with reference to the present, the unique, timeless instant of “now,” and we observe things coming into being as they enter our present awareness. But the moment of “now” and the notion of “becoming” have no significance outside the realm of the ego-centered mind. The French physicist Louis de Broglie, who played an important part in establishing the foundations of quantum theory, summed up the paradox of time in this way: “In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given en bloc... Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exists prior to his knowledge of it.”
As an analogy, imagine you are sitting in a plane that is waiting to take off. The engines throttle up, the plane begins to move and you see the lights by the side of the runway flash past in sequence, just as you experience time one moment after another. After the plane is airborne, however, you can look down and see all the lights together – at the same time.” The impression that the lights were flowing past was an illusion created by your particular position in relation to the thing you were observing. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose has written:
Consciousness is ... the one phenomenon that we know according to which time needs to “flow” at all! The way in which time is treated in modern physics is not essentially different from the way in which space is treated ... the “time” of physical descriptions does not really “flow” at all... The temporal ordering that we “appear” to perceive is ... something that we impose upon our perceptions in order to make sense of them...We have a strong sense of being a self. And we have a powerful impression of this self moving through time. Yet both self and time, it seems, are chimeras of the brain. “We” are fictions trapped within a fiction of our own making. And we, who are but make-believe characters, wonder if there is a storybook heaven in which we can all live happily ever after.
We must surely try to break out of this dream – or nightmare. If only we can pause long enough from the daily task of building the walls of our ego-prison still higher, we may see a better course foreword. Albert Einstein, master architect of our new 4-D vision of the cosmos, pointed the way:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.