LET’S TALK ABOUT DYING
LET'S TALK ABOUT DYING – PART ONE
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: LET’S TALK ABOUT DYING : YouTube Talk 1a © Nigel Peace, 2023
Life is just wonderful, isn’t it? The Earth itself and all its creatures, including us, are complex and extraordinary, all relying on interdependent ecosystems. Dolphins depend on fish and crustaceans. Humans could not exist without bees. A single living body is a miracle of adaptation to its environment. As the trees absorb nitrogen and breathe out oxygen, so our lungs filter the air to provide that oxygen to our blood. The liver filters the blood in turn, detoxifies biochemicals and creates proteins, whilst many other organs play their essential roles.
All of this continues virtually unnoticed as we go about our lives, full of activity, effort and relationships. We know joy and sorrow, achievement and failure, glowing health and sickness. And whether we have spiritual beliefs or not, we are all trying to live the best earthly life we can.
Yet, for all this, life can be so fragile. For some, life is long and full of happy memories, while other lives are tragically cut short or lived in pain. Like the beautiful, paper-thin leaves of the poppy, life is here one day and gone the next. It was the Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae who aptly wrote,
‘In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row…
Short days ago we lived, felt dawn,
saw sunset glow,
loved and were loved,
and now we lie in Flanders fields…’
But… although we may not be aware of all the incredible lifeforms and internal organs that keep us alive, perhaps the greatest gift of all that we have is our consciousness. Throughout our bodies, the nervous system enables us not only to move and to sense our surroundings, but also to think and to dream. And we can be conscious of our thinking and of our dreams.
Medical science has proved that consciousness does not depend on the brain, whilst neuroscience suggests that we each have ‘a mental field existing in another dimension’. More simply, for example, it has been clearly demonstrated that consciousness separates from the physical body during out-of-body experiences (OBEs).
For all the beauty and wonder of physical life, whether long or brief, vibrant or painful, it must inevitably come to an end one day. Every tree, every butterfly, every human being will pass away. The miraculous vehicle of the body will break down, in one way or another. What then for our consciousness, our essential selves?
Throughout the millennia and across all civilisations, very many people have believed that we continue to live beyond physical death in some other world or dimension. Indeed, whilst acknowledging the sadness of loss, several cultures openly celebrate death as the passage of the soul to a better life. The ancient Egyptians had elaborate funerary practices including casting spells of blessing and burying foods and household goods in the grave. Egyptian beliefs in an afterlife spread throughout the ancient world.
The Mexican Dia de Los Muertos on 31st October is a festival of celebration when families welcome back the souls of their departed loved ones, believing that the veil between worlds disappears for this brief time. Clearly, this has echoes of our own Hallowe’en. In Madagascar, families come together at Famadihana to meet again those they have lost and to share memories and stories in their honour. The Balinese believe that the body is merely a temporary dwelling place for the soul. At Ngaben, there is no weeping or mourning but a day-long celebration of the soul’s ‘return to God’, involving music and sacred dance before the departed’s ashes are committed to the sea, returning them to nature.
Belief in an afterlife of some kind is extremely widespread and is, given what we now know about consciousness, not merely spiritual but also perfectly rational. Put simply, it seems extremely likely that the essential self – let’s call it the soul – does not die with the body.
So what does the experience of death feel like? And where does the soul then find itself? Given that this is one of the only two certainties of human life (the other being taxes!), surely these are questions that should interest every one of us. And if we knew the answers, not only would one of our greatest fears be removed – the reason so many people choose to ignore the subject – but the way we live our everyday lives would be utterly transformed. Knowing that the soul continues and carries all our experiences with us, would we not become more caring and thoughtful in how we live?
Of course, there are many who say that they already ‘know the truth’ of this. Often, however, theirs is belief rather than knowledge, and founded on religious or cultural teachings. Others claim that there is now real evidence, especially that of the now widely reported near-death experience (NDE).
These reports, often by patients who have survived cardiac arrest, usually start with an OBE accompanied by a deep sense of peace. A NDE can also occur during extreme trauma, or even in deep meditation. Then there will be a point of light, perhaps at the end of a tunnel along which one travels to a beautiful landscape where one meets deceased relatives or “light beings”. But then, inevitably, one becomes aware of a border that cannot be crossed because “it was not yet my time”, before the individual returns to normal consciousness.
At least, this is what many spiritual teachers would like us to believe. However, a close study of wide-ranging medical investigations reveals a rather different picture. The facts are that the tunnel of light is only reported by about one in six survivors and the beautiful landscape with waiting relatives by less than one in ten. Moreover, almost a quarter of survivors tell of having a frightening experience and many of these go on to suffer depression. Not what one would expect after visiting Heaven.
Quite apart from these anomalies, there are two major issues with the NDE phenomenon. The first is that surviving patients’ reports are heavily influenced by their previous cultural or religious beliefs. In other words, they more or less saw what they expected to see; there is no common, unified ground, which is what one might expect of a purely human experience.
The second issue, of course, is that all these people survived. They did not die. They did not actually visit the afterlife, so we are none the wiser. But don’t worry, there is good news to come!
Human life is extraordinary and beautiful. Our complex brains and intricate biochemical systems allow us to thrive on our wonderful Earth, having adventures, falling in love, doing valuable work…
Yet this life can also be so fragile. For many people, the body doesn’t always work so well. And all of us must face the fact that it will one day break down.
It would be good to be prepared, especially as there is so much evidence that our death is not to be feared. In Part One of this talk, I discuss the greatest gift of all that we have – our consciousness, the ability to be aware of our own thoughts.
Medical science has proved that consciousness does not depend on the brain, and it has been clearly demonstrated that consciousness can separate from the body, for example during out-of-body or near-death experiences. Our survival in a new world of the mind is no longer just a matter of belief.
On the other hand, there have been some extravagant claims about the experience of dying that just don’t make sense…
LET'S TALK ABOUT DYING – PART TWO
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: LET’S TALK ABOUT DYING : YouTube Talk 1b © Nigel Peace, 2023
In Part One of this talk, we established that our consciousness can certainly separate from the body and function perfectly well. But we were no closer to understanding what dying actually feels like.
The near-death experience seems to offer some hope, but the clue is in the name: these survivors didn’t actually die. What is actually happening here? One medical theory is that the psychoactive substance DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is released by the pineal gland, which is not brain tissue so it’s not affected by a loss of oxygen supply to the brain. This gland is close to the emotional, visual and auditory centres of the brain and DMT can yield psychoactive effects extremely similar to the NDE: bright lights and peaceful otherworldly feelings, or sometimes fear. It is also thought to influence our dreams, especially lucid ones, and NDE reports seem pretty similar to these.
The very good news, however, is that essential life in survivors of so-called clinical death has clearly not ceased. So these experiences are surely evidence that consciousness does not depend upon the brain. This supports the belief that we will survive physical death.
Where else can we look for knowledge about the dying experience? Well, there is a huge number of anecdotal accounts from spiritual mediums, who seem to be able to communicate with the departed and pass on often quite evidential ‘messages’. Almost none of these, though, describe what it was actually like to die: typically, all we get is along the lines of “I just went to sleep and woke up to find my family waiting for me.”
So here is an alternative account…
For all our differences and tribulations, I had a very close emotional and psychic connection with my mother. I knew through precognitive dreams when she was going to die, well before the first of her two strokes. So I was able to keep a vigil by her bedside, holding her hand and talking to her until the final breath. Three nights later, I was rewarded with a powerful, lucid dream in which not only did she appear, smiling and clearly very much alive, but she also showed me what her experience of dying felt like. And I also felt it, vividly and in detail, before (thankfully) waking up suddenly, alert and excited.
I have used and developed this experience in my novel, The Unbroken, a story of deep love and an adventure through mysterious worlds. Our heroine, Eva, has left the physical world and finds herself… well, let’s get her to tell us in these short extracts.
‘In the beginning, there was nothing. It is the strangest thing imaginable, being aware of nothing. There was no ground, no surrounding, neither ceiling nor sky. Nothing above, beside or below. Even I was not there… though I was aware of nothing, I was not. Can you conceive this? You may experience this yourself someday and, when you think about it, you may be afraid. But I can tell you that there will be no fear, nor pain, because you will… you will not be.
‘Yet I can say that it was… beautiful. Yes, nothing has real beauty.
‘Very, very gradually, I moved from nothing into something… As if I were gradually becoming accustomed to the place, a kind of outline of my body emerged… There were, too numerous to count, incredibly thin filaments like strands of a spider web streaming out from this body, sparkling in places along their length… I sensed them and I sensed surprise, especially as a few began to detach themselves and float away to be lost beyond me, dissipating. ‘Where have they gone?’ I felt myself asking, rather than the more obvious ‘What are they?’
‘And with that thought – probably my first thought in this new world – my surroundings were created as the darkness began to lift, like the vague shadows of trees and beasts in a valley below a mountain beyond which the morning sun has yet to rise. The silence, too, gave way to the soft murmurings of a gentle, cool breeze…
‘Whatever I was becoming began to move and so did the shadows around me. Some of them faded away whilst others floated towards me, even looming up before me like great beasts inspecting this interloper to their kingdom. Yes, a few of them even seemed to have intelligence of a kind… but there was no threat, no fear, and one by one they drifted away into the twilight apparently satisfied…
‘Far, far ahead, there must have been a light, and the mist was beginning to glow with the pure white of newly fallen snow. It was becoming more and more like the softest snow, gently moist and decidedly colder until it billowed into cumulus… I wanted that light, I had to reach it, but now I was exhausted by everything, by the nothing, by not being and becoming, by the effort of thought.
‘I gave up and simply allowed myself to fall into the cloud. Oh, that moment, if it was a moment, was beautful beyond description, like settling back into the softest imaginable mattress at the end of a hard day, and continuing to fall and to fall and to fall…’
We do not, then, wake up abruptly as though nothing has happened and find ourselves in a bright new world of verdant pastures and smiling relatives. There is a process, a gradual letting go of our past self during which the mind must readjust to new, non-physical surroundings. At first, there is nothing for it to relate to, even though the soul is aware and senses the beauty of that nothingness.
As thought begins to return, this new world becomes more visible. Yet the mind is still struggling and images from the depths of our subconscious, the Shadow, may appear. They are harmless.
And all the while there is an impulse, beyond our control, drawing us forward to the afterlife. Yes, there is a light because we have left behind the contrasts of the physical world. And we will reach for the light, falling gently and effortlessly into it.
Dying is nothing to be afraid of.
Unsurprisingly, there are very few trustworthy and reliable accounts of what it actually feels like to die. That’s why so many people choose to ignore the subject. Yes, it’s pretty daunting.
But what if there really were convincing evidence that it’s nothing to be afraid of?
In Part Two of this talk, I offer an entirely alternative account to those discussed earlier – one that was very personal and immediate for me. This is an essential theme of my spiritual novel, The Unbroken. So I let our heroine Eva describe her experience:
“In the beginning, there was nothing. It is the strangest thing imaginable, being aware of nothing… Even I was not there… I can tell you that there will be no fear, nor pain… Yet I can say that it was… beautiful. Very, very gradually, I moved from nothing into something…”
And her account is backed up by others, in my talk on Afterlife.