| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
– William James
Through out history, and in many different situations, people of all backgrounds and beliefs have enjoyed spontaneous mystical experiences. Suddenly the individual feels, beyond any shadow of doubt, that she is fundamentally one with the universe. Her sense of identity expands to embrace the cosmos as a whole.
Following the publication of an earlier book, Soul Search, I received many letters from individuals telling me of extraordinary and unprecedented experiences that had left them with a radically changed view of the world. One particularly fascinating account came from a young woman, Tina W., in Portsmouth, England. She wrote:
What happened could be explained as an hallucination or a dream, but in all my life I have never had an experience remotely like this one. Since it happened ... I have found it difficult to concentrate on anything else.The pivotal moment in Tina’s adventure was when “something clicked in my brain, because this was clearly the point of switchover from the normal dualistic mode of thinking to the selfless experience of transcendence. To a Zen practitioner it would be satori, the flash of lightning. A Muslim might have recognized it as “the Supreme Identity.” And there are other names: nirvana, Tao, enlightenment, zoning, bliss. So widespread is this fundamental mystical feeling that it has, along with the doctrines that purport to explain it, been called “The Perennial Philosophy.” For some, it comes only after years of asceticism, study, and devotion to some particular religious or meditation system. But for most ordinary folk, like Tina, it arrives out of the blue, unbidden and unsought. In fact, the very act of seeking may block or hinder the experience of enlightenment. As Tina mentions later in her letter, “I haven’t yet been able to get into that mode again.” The problem is that she is now trying to rekindle the feeling through an effort of intellect and of self-will, whereas the original experience arose spontaneously as a result of a freak series of events – a long period of relaxation, followed by complete exhaustion and, finally, an enigmatic biblical quotation (like a koan) – which caught her reasoning mind off guard.
It was around 10 P.M. in my bedroom in Portsmouth on my first day home after a long holiday. I had spent the previous month in the USA with my partner who lives there. I had the most wonderful, relaxing time living in a trailer in the countryside of West Virginia... Holiday over, I flew out of Washington, DC, on the evening of the 17th of September. The flight was awful. I didn’t sleep, and though I had flown several times before with no concerns at all, on this occasion my mortality came very clearly into focus. Anyway, we landed safely at 7 A.M. and I went straight to bed, where I stayed all day. At 9 P.M. I went to bed bed with a book – M. Scott Peck’s Further Along the Road Less Traveled. At this time, I had been awake for over thirty hours. About halfway through the book Mr. Peck relates an anecdote of a dinner companion asking him to explain his latest book in a sentence; he failed – but then went on to relate how Jesus encapsulated the Christian message: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy might and love thy neighbor as thyself.” Although these words were familiar, the depth of their meaning hit me then for the first time. It was as though something clicked in my brain ... I felt unbounded love for everyone and every living thing – just an immensity of love, so that it was almost unbearable – I totally abandoned myself to that feeling. What happened next is difficult to describe because words become inadequate... I felt overwhelmed by something, some pure clear clean cool essence ... pouring into me ... then somewhere around this point the experience occurred. All I can do is list impressions, thoughts, and feelings I was able to store. The real thing is way beyond description or even logical recall... Joy, ecstasy, love, I was immersed in it and saturated with it. Understanding of what was going on came intuitively ... we are all in but not aware of this dimension all the time. We are all one light but separate also. This doesn’t make sense in our regular consciousness but did in that state... I identified my boyfriend’s essence ... [and] remember thinking, “It doesn’t matter if I never see him again in the physical earthly sense because at this level we are always together. Material things and our desire for them seemed totally idiotic and unimportant... All the human defenses and facades we create to hide from each other are nonsense because we are all one. All the things we do to sustain our self-image are redundant here. Death is a release. Our body is anchoring us in space and time... Life as we know it is only the tiniest bit of what comes after...
I consciously decided to leave that mode (I thought I could get back again)... Afterwards, I cried a little, a combination of joy and shock, I think... It totally changed the way I feel about a lot of things – faith, death, life.
Tina comments that her experience was “way beyond description.” And this sums up the difficulty people have always faced in trying to convey to others this ultimate state of selfless being: by its nature it is ineffable. The whole point about transcendence is that it is the experience of reality, pure and simple, without any of the symbolic interpretation normally placed upon it by the rationalizing human mind. It is not something amenable to linguistic or logical analysis. This impossibility of putting the transcendent into language is why the different forms of religious instruction that have sprung up around the world vary so much. It is also why so much superfluous dogma has become attached to what is basically a very straightforward message: stop thinking and start experiencing.
All the most prominent sages throughout human history, including Buddha, Lao-tzu, Jesus, Muhammad, and Isaiah, apparently saw through the artificiality of the world of symbols to the true ground of existence. And subsequently, they each strove to put their experience and their method of achieving it into words that others might understand. The feeling of transcendent unity is the same for everyone when it happens, since there is only one reality. However, problems ensue in translating this feeling into words. Even greater difficulties arise when others, who have not had the experience themselves, try to convey secondhand or thirdhand what the fundamental teaching consisted of. And so, for instance, from the reasonably clear and simple message of Gautama Buddha, the vast and intricate system of religious philosophy that is Buddhism has sprung. Thousands of books and many millions of words have been set down on the subject, often in a style that only a lifetime devotee or learned academic could penetrate. But the irony is that language and symbolism are anathema to the basic message of Buddha, which is all about direct experience, unadulterated being. And the same is true of Christianity. The central teaching of Jesus – who, if he was any one man, was surely a flesh-and-blood human being like you and me – is to forget yourself and get in touch with the real world.
Every principal religion and moral code from around the world has this notion at its core: that we should aspire to be selfless. The admonition to “do as you would be done by” or “love thy neighbor as thy self” or “be as little children” is universal. To achieve the best, most natural, most worthwhile, state of existence we are urged to lose ourselves and merge with the whole. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckehart said:
As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things. Become pure till you neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things.Another great mystic put it this way:
Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.His name was Albert Einstein.
The true and sole aim of all deep religion and of all deep science is the same – to point past the personal, survival-oriented self to the boundless reality that has always been there. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Buddha said, “Look within, thou art the Buddha.” And what they meant was the same.
When the brain is relaxed enough to take time out from projecting the self, we become, in those brief mystical interludes, aware suddenly of a greater world stretching away on all sides beyond our small, personal, finite lives. The writer Aldous Huxley frequently expressed his view that the function of the human nervous system is to filter and limit the amount and intensity of the experience that our minds have to deal with. To him the brain was actually an impediment, a “reducing valve,” that restricted what we would otherwise be able to see. And in The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, he described his personal attempts to open up the reducing valve in his head using the hallucinogen mescaline.
Psychedelic drugs, most notably LSD, have been regarded by some as shortcuts to higher states of consciousness, as have the extreme states of exhaustion induced, for instance, by repetitive, anaerobic forms of dance. Nor is this a recent trend. Whether it be through eating magic mushrooms, licking the psychoactive secretions of certain types of toad, walking on red-hot coals, whirling like dervishes, or simply imbibing alcohol, people have been seeking artificially induced transcendent experiences for thousands of years. For others, music, poetry, prayer, quiet contemplation, or a walk in the woods or the hills can trigger the same effect. In a remarkable variety of ways, it seems that we all at times try to break free from our normal mode of self-centered awareness.
One of the most interestingly consistent times at which a very profound transcendent experience is reported to occur is when people come near to death. Studies and surveys reveal that the so-called near-death experience (NDE) is surprisingly common and, in its essential elements, is remarkably consistent. Many millions of individuals around the world claim to have had NDEs and, although interest in the phenomenon is greater today than it has ever been before, descriptions of such experiences are to be found in diverse records going back hundreds and even thousands of years.
Among the most common elements of NDEs are the sensation of leaving and floating away from the body, traveling down a tunnel toward an intensely bright light, an all-pervasive feeling of rapture and love, and seeing one’s life recapitulated in vivid detail. Most significantly, NDEers often relate having had a most extraordinary feeling of unity, an acute awareness of everything being there all at once, with a concomitant loss of self-boundaries. Subjects sometimes recall having felt as if they were really alive for the first time. And this, remember, during a period when, objectively, their bodies and brains were totally inert. Indeed, in some cases, profound transcendent experiences apparently took place after the person had been pronounced clinically dead.
It is possible to explain some aspects of the NDE, including the tunnel and the light, in terms of hallucinatory-type events taking placed in the distressed brain (though other explanations cannot yet be discounted). But conventional neurological wisdom is at a loss to account for the astonishing broadening and deepening of consciousness reported by people who have, albeit temporarily, crossed over the threshold from life into death. Some of these individuals went through all of the stages of dying up to and including cardiac arrest and the cessation of breathing for several minutes or more. They entered briefly into that uncharted region where all of us are destined eventually to go – but then, thanks in the main to modern resuscitation procedures, came back to tell their tale. Except that there should not have been any tale to tell. How can a brain in which virtually all neurological activity has ground to a halt be capable of giving rise to an awareness of unprecedented depth and acuity?
The most reasonable explanation is that the unity feeling which is the central mystery of the NDE is not a product of brain activity at all. It results instead from the removal of the brain’s restricting influence. For the first time in a person’s life, at the moment of death the selecting and limiting effect of the brain is eliminated, the psychological walls of the self are broken down, and the individual is set free to meld again with the whole unbroken field of reality.
If it were but one aspect of experience that pointed to a cosmic dimension of consciousness then we might easily choose to ignore it. But there is now compelling evidence from physics, psychology, Eastern philosophies, and numerous reported episodes of transcendental awareness in ordinary people for us to take this matter very seriously indeed. What is being suggested is not a new scientific paradigm, but a revolution in the metaphysical underpinnings of our worldview. The simple materialistic notion that consciousness can continue only as long as there is a brain to support it is becoming increasingly untenable. Quantum mechanics and our modern conception of space-time has made nonsense of the Newtonian mechanistic cosmos in which man was effectively divorced from the processes going on around him. We now know – and every experiment quantum physicists carry out further bolsters our knowledge – that we are deeply, intrinsically bound up with reality as a whole. Subject and object are one. The only reason we see it differently is that the self puts up artificial barriers, and creates the feeling of difference and distance between itself and the rest of the nature.
This same core truth was appreciated directly by those mystic-philosophers, principally in the East, who, through circumventing the self, saw directly the way things really are. And this same truth, it is clear, does not even require special training or effort for it to be grasped. At any moment, for one reason or another, a person can suddenly come into direct, unmediated contact with the cosmos – can, to all intents, become the cosmos.