| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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The event of death is always astounding; our philosophy never reaches, never possesses it; we are always at the beginning of our catechism; always the definition yet to be made. What is death?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
What happens when we die? Does everything we are just stop? Is consciousness lost forever? Or does some vital spark inside us, a spirit or a soul, live on?
We find it almost impossible to think about not having a mind, of our awareness being snuffed out like a candle. Yet the stark fact is that within a century or so, everyone alive today – all six billion of us – will be dead. Nothing in life is more certain. Sooner or later, whatever we do, whatever we achieve, our physical remains will be rotting in the ground or have been burned to ashes. Or perhaps like Einstein's brain, blanched bits of us will be languishing in formaldehyde, pickled for prosperity and science.
We look around for comfort. But the message from the front line of brain research could hardly be more bleak. We should not build up any hope, it tells us, of being able to carry on after death. The brain too obviously plays a master role in making us what we are. When its workings are impaired, by drink, drugs, or disease, "we" alter too. And when the higher centers of the brain are completely put out of action, by a knock on the head or general anesthesia, our whole inner self seems temporarily to wink out. During life, our memories, personality, and awareness seem to depend crucially on the state of that bizarre, tofu-like mass between our ears. Why, then, should we kid ourselves? What is the point of holding out hope of being able to think and remain conscious when the brain is dead, if we can't even do it in the depths of sleep?
Humans are the only creatures on earth that know they are going to die. But that foreknowledge has come fairly recently and it flies in the face of four billion years of evolution. Those eons have genetically conditioned us to do all we can to preserve ourselves and our kin. The result is that we are caught in a dilemma. We are programmed to survive by our genes yet made painfully aware of our mortality by our forward-looking brain. If we admit that death is inevitable, then our will to survive may be fatally weakened. On the other hand, if we deny death, we have to turn a blind eye to a patent fact of the real world.
Only one avenue of escape is possible – belief in an afterlife. With this we can face the nightmare that death poses to the rational mind.
Cults to do with souls and immortality have cropped up everywhere in human time and space. As far back as Neolithic times and possibly earlier, men put faith in the survival of the spirit beyond death. Archeologists have found that early men buried food and weapons with their dead comrades to equip them for the life to come. In caves in Israel, Neanderthal remains up to 100,000 years old have been unearthed amid evidence of ritual burial. These include the skeleton of a 13-year-old boy found in a cavity cut into the rock at Qafzeh. The boy's body had been laid on its back with the skull resting on the grave's wall. His hands were facing upward. Across the hands and upper chest had been carefully placed the antler of a fallow deer. In the Shandir cave in the mountains of Iraq, a male skeleton was found lying on its side. Lining the grave were traces of ritually scattered flower petals.
From prehistory to the present day, we have countered the brevity of earthly life with the dream of eternity. Great systems of religion have sprung up to serve as focal points for our faith. But today, these traditional teachings and our cherished belief in an afterlife – what Sigmund Freud called the "oldest, strongest, and most insistent wish of mankind" – are under threat. Gods and souls seem out of place in the sterile, machinelike universe shown to us by science.
As the taproot belief in our spiritual nature withers, so we go to increasing lengths to deny or fictionalize death. Death has replaced sex as the big taboo. Even mentioning it is tantamount to bad taste, and when it strikes close to home we treat it as an outrage. The loved one was "struck down," we say, as if it were somehow unnatural to die. Freud pointed out that when a death occurs, "Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of death – accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event."
We distance ourselves from death by institutionalizing it. Whereas in earlier times most people spent their last days at home in the bosom of family and friends, today four-fifths of us are removed to hospitals or nursing homes. We are hidden from the gaze of the young and healthy and tended to by strangers. As the end approaches, we are discreetly moved to wards for the terminally ill and plugged into life-support machines. Technology takes over. And when we do eventually die, it is often the inadequacy of the equipment or the shortcomings of the treatment that are blamed.
Instead of accepting death as a natural and inevitable fact of life, we are in danger of convincing ourselves that, given further medical advances, we shall be able to stave it off for as long as we like. "Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their descendants," said Woody Allen. "I want to achieve it through not dying." Now, for the first time, science seems to be holding out the slender hope of cheating death. Already, some of our vital parts can be replaced with natural or synthetic substitutes. In time, it seems, the transplant surgeon will be able to do for a human being what any competent mechanic in a well-equipped garage can do for a car.
On a different front, the search is on for ways to slow or halt the steady degeneration of our bodies. Immortality without death beckons. Perhaps over the next century, we are told, genuine elixirs of life will be freely available in drugstores as vitamin pills are today. Then the old alchemists' dream will have come true and, along with our weekly groceries, we will bring home the means to slow or even reverse our aging processes.
Some of us may not live long enough to benefit from such advances. But no matter. For a price, we can arrange to have our still-fresh remains deeply frozen – our whole body, or merely our head (a "neuro"), stored like a pickle in liquid nitrogen – to await the glorious day when technology may be able to restore is to life. How desperate can we get? British biologists Peter and Jean Medawar echoed what must be the thoughts of most rationally minded folk: "In our opinion, money invested to preserve human life in the deep freeze is money wasted, the sums involved being large enough to fulfill a punitive function as a self-imposed fine for gullibility and vanity."
Danger signs are looming; we are becoming increasingly obsessed with clinging to life, avoiding death, at any cost. And not just our dignity is at stake. We have lost touch with the natural world and our spiritual roots. No longer is there a sense of participation in the living cycle, the renewing, regenerative sequence of life-to-death-to-life. Western man has wandered into a spiritual desert where traditions of intimacy with nature, the final rite of passage, and the belief in an eternal life have all but been forgotten
We fear death for many reasons. We fear the possibility of pain because we see it in the faces of others, the agony and angst of terminal cancer. We fear death's unpredictability, its awesome power to bring an instant end to everything we have lived and worked for. We fear the death of our loved ones – parents, spouses, and children. But above all we fear the loss of ourselves.
In the words of Sogyal Rinpoche, one of today's leading exponents of Tibetan Buddhism:
[O]ur instinctive desire is to live and to go on living, and death is a savage end to everything we hold familiar. We feel that when it comes we will be plunged into something quite unknown, or become someone totally different. We imagine we will find ourselves lost and bewildered, in surroundings that are terrifyingly unfamiliar. We imagine it will be like waking up alone, in a torment of anxiety, in a foreign country, with no knowledge of the land or language, no money, no contacts, no passport, no friends...As much as we believe anything, we believe that we have a unique, personal "self," an inner "I," that must be preserved at all cost. But if we dare to look deeply into this being, we find it is made up of no more than baggage picked up along life's way: a name tag, a character and biography shaped by our dealings with other people, memories of past events, possessions, family and friends, a hometown and everything else we have chanced across and claimed as "our own." These are the fragile props on which we depend and to which we desperately cling. Death is feared because it means a certain end to them all and, therefore, to the person we mistook them for. Sogyal Rinpoche points out: "We live under an assumed identity, in a neurotic fairy tale world with no more reality than the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. Hypnotized by the thrill of building, we have raised the houses of our lives on sand. This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place."
"You can't take it with you," the saying goes." No, but you can't take "you" with you, either. And that is the prime source of our death fear.
What, then, can we hope for after death? Nothing – absolutely nothing – if we believe what many scientists say. All life, they argue, can be understood in terms of chemical reactions. Every event, all the wonders of nature, can be explained by the accidental bumping and jiggling of particles. The brain is the mind. Why trouble to speculate further about an immaterial soul or afterlife?
We have come to respect the judgment of scientists on almost every issue because science works so well. It makes progress. It tells us in greater and greater detail how atoms behave or the universe has evolved. It gives us a privileged glimpse at the mathematical script that nature follows. And, most visible to the ordinary person, it leads to all kinds of technological marvels that have transformed our lives.
In effect, science has usurped religion and scientists have become our new high priests. The problem is that when science takes on spiritual or moral issues, it is an unmitigated disaster. To science, a human being is no more than a complicated machine. And how can a machine have a soul? The respected neurologist Richard Restak has even gone so far as to try to find evidence for the human soul by peering into brains with a PET scanner. Needless to say, he has come up empty handed.
As a society, we have made the mistake of thinking that because science can answer some questions very well, it might eventually be able to answer all questions. Scientists used to be quite modest in their claims. But recently, a number of them have been growing more ambitious, as if the illusory power we have handed them has affected their judgment. The result has been a number of grandiose claims that can be neither justified nor fulfilled. For example, Stephen Hawking ended his book A Brief History of Time with the statement that if his theory about the nature of the universe was upheld, it would help us "know the mind of God." Hawking may be a genius, but his opinions about God carry no more weight than those of his next-door neighbor. In a similar forthright style, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has said: "Science offers us an explanation of how complexity arose out of simplicity. The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything... We cannot prove there is no God, but we can safely conclude that He is very, very improbable indeed."
Dawkins may draw what conclusions he likes. But others may feel his aggressive intolerance of religion smacks of the very dogma he is so anxious to avoid. It is not hard to see why reductionism fails to find a God or a soul, or even a subjective aspect to human experience. All of these are left out of the reductionist's agenda from the very start.
In approaching issues such as death and the afterlife, an open mind and tolerance for all viewpoints are essential. We need to look through the eyes of the scientist and of the mystic and learn what we can from both. In doing this, we shall simply be following the lead of some of the world's truly great thinkers.
Men of the stature of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein were well aware of a link between their own work and long-held mystical traditions. Bohr, one of the most influential of all pioneers of quantum mechanics, once said:
For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory . . . [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.Likewise, the present Dalai Lama sees the possibility for much bridge-building between science and more intuitive forms of knowledge. He writes: "Death and Dying provide a meeting point between the Tibetan Buddhist and modern scientific traditions. I believe both have a great deal to contribute to each other on the level of understanding and of practical benefit."
Science would never make a good religion. By its very nature, it is chained to the material and the measurable. Far too much will always slip through its net. But because of what has recently been discovered about the world, scientists are at least being encouraged to think a little more holistically. For instance, there have been some momentous changes in the way science regards complicated systems. These are systems that, although made up of elements obeying fixed laws, are made up of so many elements that those laws are lost in a blizzard of complexity. Living organisms, it turns out, cannot even in principle be fully understood in terms of the separate particles of which the are composed. Even on a material level, we are more than just the sum of our microscopic parts.
Scientists have also had to revise drastically their view of man's relationship to the universe. From the physics of the subatomic world, quantum mechanics, we have learned that it may be meaningless to talk about the existence of particles outside our observations. It appears that by interrogating nature at the finest level we actually play a decisive part in bringing some aspects of reality into being.
Reductionism had effectively cut man off from the universe. It had become part of the scientific canon that the experiences of human beings were somehow of a lower order of reality than were events "outside." But now, quantum mechanics insists we can no longer hold with that duality. The fleeting particles that pop up in laboratory experiments owe their brief lives to the researchers who observe them. The particles are not always there, waiting to be noticed. They are provoked into existence from the shadowy quantum realm where nothing is solid or defined. The boundary between subject and object has become blurred.
On a cosmic scale, too, we have suddenly and unexpectedly found ourselves thrust into the limelight. It turns out that we live in a universe unreasonably well suited to the development of life. About 15 billion years ago, space, time, matter, and energy came into being in a titanic explosion known as the Big Bang. Our presence here today rests on that outburst having been precisely as violent as it was; even a slight tampering with the size of the bang would have caused the universe either to fly apart or fall back on itself before stars, planets, and life had a chance to form. Other uncanny coincidences have been found in the relative strengths of the four basic forces in nature and in the particular location of energy levels in key atoms such as carbon and oxygen. Wherever we look, whenever we look, we find that nature is strangely sympathetic to the evolution of life and intelligence.
These new perspectives of the world have not really brought a spiritual dimension to science. That would be claiming too much. But they have allowed the gap between the spiritual and the material close. We are beginning see ourselves written into the narrative of nature in a fundamental and mysterious way. Mind is not just something existing in a void playing with neutral items and trying to fit them into a vapid theory; rather it “belongs” in the universe. This new scientific picture, with its holistic overtones, sits better with intuitive ideas such as reverence for the soil, water, and air. It is more in keeping with a sense of the sacred, with the wordless feeling that we are an integral, inseparable part all exists.
Nature, we now appreciate, is an elegant unity whether we care to survey the macrocosm of the stars and galaxies or the microcosm of the atom. And we, it seems, may have a role – perhaps a very profound role – to play in this unfolding drama. The universe we find ourselves in is an evolving web of space-time that has spawned everything from particles to people, from quarks to consciousness.
Now the time has come to broaden our field of inquiry. In turning to face the deeper mysteries of life and death, we need to embrace not just what is outside us, but also what is within. As Tolstoy wrote: "The highest wisdom has but one science, the science of the whole, the science explaining the Creation and man's place in it."
We wonder what is the purpose of life and why we have to die. But science has shown us that life and death, in the broadest sense, are all around us. We exist today because, billions of years ago, giant stars "lived" and "died" in great explosions that threw out the fusion-made heavy elements of which our bodies are composed. Only by living and dying have plants and animals been able to evolve into such complex forms as ourselves. Only by living and dying do other life-forms continue to provide us with food and oxygen. And only by living and dying ourselves do we contribute in some small way to the process of universal recycling.
The simple truth is, there could not be a you, and there could not be a viable universe, without death – the death of stars and the death of succeeding generations of organic life. In the words of philosopher John Bowker:
If you ask, "Why is death happening to me (or to anyone)?" the answer is: because the universe is happening to you; you are an event of the universe; you are a child of the stars, as well as of your parents, and you could not be a child in any other way. Even while you live, and certainly when you die, the atoms and molecules which are at present locked into your shape and appearance are being unlocked and scattered into other shapes and forms of construction.We know that our bodies will eventually perish. We know that our brains will stop working. The great question remains whether consciousness is similarly doomed. Is there, as we so desperately want to believe, an afterlife waiting for us beyond the gates of death? The answer, I believe, is within our grasp.
As some scientists peer into the innermost recesses of the human brain, others continue to refine our knowledge of the near-death experience. Clues to the nature and future of consciousness are being supplied by fields as diverse as neurology, psychology, cosmology, and quantum physics. And added to all this is a growing sense that a merger between the highest teachings of science, religion, and mysticism is long overdue – a grand synthesis that will finally help us solve the greatest mystery of the universe.