Hi Moment,
I'm sorry to hear about your mom's illness, and I hope that she'll get better and live a long and happy live with you. I have an idea of what you're going through, and my heart goes out to you.
No one knows what--if anything--happens after death. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer suggested that the approximate answer is: whatever happens before conception. That's about the best answer that anyone has been able to give.
I've spent over a decade studying this question from many different angles. I've made countless journeys through the forest of thought and emotion, I've always gotten lost, and I've always eventually returned to my starting point--the question--without knowing anything more than I did when I started, except that the question is a lot more complicated than it seems.
Imagine that I told you, "Don't worry. I had a near-death experience. I was out of my body. I read signs and heard conversations from a city 50 miles away from where my body was during cardiac arrest that were later proven true. Death is an illusion. I swear to you that we survive, and that we'll all be reunited after bodily death." If I told you a story such as that (which I invented just now), it would probably give you some comfort if it had actually happend to me, and I sincerely related my interpretation of it to you. It would be an anecdote. No one could prove or disprove it, but it could well allay your anxiety temporarily.
When we're confronted with a life-and-death question--Do we survive death?--we have a major obstacle: We desperately want the answer to be *yes*. That biases our thinking. Just last night, I was looking at some academic journal articles about near-death experiences. It's an empirical fact that the most eminent scientists that we have are, in the vast majority, atheists who believe that there's nothing after death and that we are our bodies, period. But then, we have anecdotes from individuals who have had near-death experiences and swear up and down that we survive death. Can we learn anything from them? Are they hallucinations, or are they glimpses of an afterlife?
No one knows, and there's no way to tell. We can't get outside of ourselves--out of the human condition--and somehow objectively determine The Truth. We're confronted with ambiguity, which forces us to draw our own conclusions, which will differ from others' conclusions based on both one's genetic makeup and developmental history. Generally, we tend to believe what we're taught to believe in early childhood, we fall away from strong faith until growing middle aged, and then (as empirical studies show) religiosity skyrocks. This isn't surprising, because it's at that point that most people keenly realize that they may not have that much more time left.
But religiosity is a red herring. It's irrelevant to the philosophical question, Do we survive death? So is the existence of a god, or many gods. The important question is survival. It's the decisive question that's like an unstoppable acid that cuts through every other question or problem.
A doctor who spent many years researching NDE's was asked what conclusion he drew from them, and he replied that he wouldn't be surprised if we survived death, nor would he be surprised if death meant oblivion. There are impressive aspects to the NDE, but there are problems, too. When you take everything together, there's no way to draw a reasonable conclusion. Despite what people dogmatically assert--either that we survive or that survival is impossible--no one really knows. We can't prove either case.
Let's say that we could, and did, prove that we survived death. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be the end of it. Let's say that we survived death, and were reunited with our relatives and pets in a blissful afterlife without any form of suffering, and with overflowing joy. Who is to say that 5,000 "years" later, we wouldn't die, and that would be the end of us? In other words, we don't really only want to survive death. We want an assurance of personal *immortality*, and the immortality of those we love. (I suspect that we're rather less concerned about people such as Stalin and Hitler, or would wish for their annihilation.)
Let's further say that we somehow proved that we were personally immortal. All of us. What would our existence be like? We'd presumably still be ourselves: we'd have our same memories--good and bad, happy and painful. We'd have our talents and limitations. Or would we be radically different? If all of our problems and limitations were somehow extirpated from us, then what? We'd be so radically different that it might not even make sense to call us the same person--if "person" is even the right word to use.
Put very roughly, we don't know if we're humans seeking something "spiritual," or "spirits" who have incarnated to have a human experience. From the human perspective--our perspective--though, there are lots of problems with the idea of survival. For example, we know from studying patients who have had their corpus callosum severed due to epilepsy, that the right and left hemispheres of the brain have a mind of their own. There have been cases reported where one man's right hand tried to hit his wife, while his left hand tried to stop his right hand. Contrary to how we seem to experience consciousness, empirical research suggests that consciousness isn't unified, but a set of different processes that are usually integrated together, giving the illusion of continuity.
Do you remember the Terri Schiavo case? (If not, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case.) At what point did Terri die? Did she die when she slipped into a persistent vegetative state? Did she die when her heart stopped beating and there was no brain activity? (Even then, some cells could continue to function for minutes or even hours, and certainly the bacteria that line our guts were digesting the surrounding tissue.) Dying is a process, more so than an event. I mention Terri to ask a question: If some people don't "survive" life, how likely is it that they'll survive death?
Another example is Ronald Reagan. Let's say that he survived death. Who would he be, then? A teenaged boy? A young actor? A father? The governor of California? The former President of the United States? The Alzheimer's victim? We assume, in the case of survival, that an individual would be reconsituted to their best possible state, but what basis do we have for making such an assumption apart from hope, fueled by fear of annihilation at death?
There has been some research done that suggests that alleles (different forms) of the DRD4 gene predispose people to believe or not believe in supernatural phenomena. I'd like to quote at length from pp. 77-8 of Lee M. Silver's book, _Challenging Nature_:
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In comparing the personality traits of "normal" people with different forms of the DRD4 gene, David Comings, a medical geneticist at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, made a remarkable discovery. Those individuals who inherited the most active forms of DRD4 were more likely to believe in miracles, the "inability of science to explain many things," and the idea that "one's life is directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being." In contrast, the least active forms of DRD4 predisposed people toward "rational materialism" and away from "spiritual acceptance." Dr. Comings, for one, was not surprised. He told me that he himself was clearly predisposed toward rationalism; by the age of 10, he had concluded that 'man made God rather than the other way around."
Results obtained in a number of different experimental and observational areas support and extend the significance of Comings's finding. In one experiment, the Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger fed the drug L-dopa--which increases dopamine levels in the brain--to people who were "skeptics" with regard to paranormal phenomena. With an externally induced dopamine "high," natural skeptics showed a newfound tendency to accept mystical explanations for unexplained phenomena. But the best-documented connections between dopamine, DRD4, and delusional or mystical experiences come from two types of observations made on schzophrenic patients. First, the amount of DRD4 in the brain of diagnosed schizophrenics is 500 percent higher than normal. Second, drugs like clozapine that block DRD4 and reduce the dopamine signal provide the most effective means of eliminating or reducing the hallucinogenic symptoms experienced by many of these patients."
One final point about DRD4 deserves mention. In 2002, the geneticist Robert Moyzis and his colleagues discovered that the most highly active form of this gene first appeared as a mutation in human populations between 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, and then spread rapidly through populations in Europe, Africa, and the Amercas. Without a doubt, this new mutation provided a specific advantage. The dopamine system has many functions, and we cannot know for sure, today, what the advantage might have been. But it is certainly intriguing that the appearance of the DRD4 mutation coincides with the earliest archeological evidence for a belief in the afterlife--accoutrements buried along with cadavers.
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As depressing as that may seem, please keep in mind that this is coming from a scientist who is speculating about a scientific, evolutionary matter, and trying to relate it to religiosity. Even if his speculations are entirely correct, strictly speaking, just because a particular gene spread throughout the human population leading to greater or lesser levels of susceptibility to spiritual beliefs, doesn't mean that there *isn't* some type of spiritual reality--specifically, an afterlife.
From the human standpoint, we have to accept the findings of science. Whether or not there's "more" is a mystery. It's just as big of a mystery as what happened "before" the Big Bang. The Big Bang ushered in the fabric of space-time, so even the words that we use become metaphorical in trying to describe such a situation. Or, if you consider quantum mechanics--a topic about which I understand exactly nothing--I do know that there are multiple possible interpretations, and physicists argue over them. One thing that they don't argue about is results. Quantum mechanics makes predictions with devastating, jaw-dropping accuracy.
Moment, all of us (I shouldn't generalize; that would make me guilty of dichotomous--black and white--thinking; reality is messy and full of color, so to speak, including radiation invisible to the human eye) want the answer to the question that you wonder about. It tears you apart. It tears me apart. Others are able to put it out of their minds for a long time, so long as they're healthy. Inevitably, though, we will all die, and assuming that we still have minds that can think (i.e. are free of dementia and other neurological deficits), we're going to use them to ask the big questions of philosophy. Science gives us good answers in the empirical realm, the realm in which we, as humans--material "objects"--exist. Its aim is to describe, predict, and control physical phenomena, and its discoveries have extended and improved the quality of human life throughout the world.
But who is to say that there aren't other realms beyond that which science operates in? It seems arrogant to me for our puny minds to suggest that what we see is all that there is. Sure, there's "dark matter" and lots of physical theories that none of us will understand, and that scientists would say have nothing to do with the question of surviving death anyway. But if they accept that there are things that they don't understand, why not accept the possibility that there may be an afterlife?
The reason that they're reluctant to do so--or at least one of them--seems to me to be that they have no way of falsifying it. They have no way of testing it, and so it fits outside the realm in which science operates.
Double blind prayer experiments have failed to show that prayer has any efficacy. Generally, science has tended to kill off spiritual belief in the same way that antibiotics kill bacteria. As science advances, it seems that religion retreats. We don't burn "witches" at the stake anymore. We don't treat epileptics foaming at the mouth during a grand mal seizure as if they were possessed by "demons."
However, speaking as a philosopher, it's not logically impossible that there could be an afterlife. Even Richard Dawkins calls himself an agnostic, strictly speaking. To call himself an atheist would put the burden of proof on him to prove that there is no "God." He knows that he can't do that. But we, who want there to be an afterlife, should be equally humble in acknowledging that we can't prove that there is an afterlife. We can hope. We can investigate. We can take heart in the stories told on www.near-death.com and www.nderf.org, or the stories told by near-death experiencers on YouTube. Will those pursuade you?
From personal experience, my belief in the possibility of an afterlife waxes and wanes with my emotional state. If I'm happy, I tend to be more optimistic. If I'm miserable and suffering, I tend to think that this life is all that there is--the ultimate tragedy. I tell you as sincerely as I can: I simply don't know what the answer to the greatest question is, and I don't believe that there's any way *to* know.
To a large degree, we're forced to grapple with this demon on our own. There are a lot of bitter people who have realized that a religion, such as Mormonism, is false, and proceed to decide that there is neither a god nor an afterlife. They're angry. They've been lied to, and many of them have lived their entire lives within a lie, donating decades to a false church. Their anger is understandable. But maybe they're throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I wish that I could give you an answer that would comfort you. I wish that I had such an answer for myself. People who have full-blown, "transcendent" NDE's, are *convinced* that we survive death, but there are very few of them, and obviously, we're not among them. Even if their interpretation is wrong, and we're annihilated at death, wouldn't it be great to live the rest of one's life feeling certain that we survive and not plagued by existential anxiety? For most of us, that's not an option.
We're forced to decide for ourselves, and what we believe will tend to fluctuate. It's true that many people go happily along with their lives and take comfort in the tenets of their religions, largely unconcerned with the question, but for those of us without the road map of a religion--a human invention--to fall back on, we have to create our own map as best we can, and that's not easy. It summons our deepest resources. It feels us feeling alienated from our friends and neighbors, as if we knew a secret--a fearsome secret--that they didn't know, one that we dare not share with them for fear of being ostracized.
There's one more thought that I'd like to share with you, Moment, but it's too complicated to try to articulate here. Go to
http://library.nu. Create an account for yourself. Then, do a search on the book "Rephrasing Heidegger." Download and extract it. (If you need help, feel free to e-mail me.) Read the first chapter. Learn a little about phenomenology. The very structure of our brains (at least, normal, well-functioning ones) seems to impose a type of road map on the world, like a stamp imprinted on soft wax. We use this structure to make sense of the world.
It's not impossible that William James was right: that our brains are "reducing valves" for consciousness, that consciousness exists apart from the brain, but is filtered by it. While human (I'm speaking either metaphorically or literally, but I have no idea of knowing which is the case), everything that science tells us is valid. But freed from the physical body, perhaps we'll learn that we are far greater, "spiritual" beings than we ever imagined, and that this brief existence that is human life is just one bump along an immortal existence and--best of all--that things will get better, and better, and better.
Maybe the real message of the NDE is both a spiritually hopeful *and* a practical one: Life courageously, and die courageously. All the rest will take care of itself, whatever the answer to the greatest question is.
Let me add one more thing. I experienced the death of a close, gay, ex-Mormon friend due to suicide. He had everything going for him: he was a writer who would make Camus envious. He had a brilliant mind, and at various times was in law school or an MBA program. He was a brilliant cellist, too. And wouldn't you know it? He was knockout handsome. But none of it helped him in the end, Moment. All he ever wanted was to find the love of his life and live happily ever after. He poured his entire personality into reaching that goal, and failed--again and again--until he gave up, and killed himself.
When I found out, my first reaction was one of disbelief, then shock, then guilt ("Could I have done something? If only I'd known, I'd have dropped everything and..."), then a sense of profound loss, then recollections about him and how much he meant to me... I loved him so very much, but he's gone, and I, too, wonder, if I'll ever see that great being again. It hurts. Time doesn't heal. It just makes us forget. It encysts. There really is no right or wrong way to go through the grieving process. The closer that the person is to us, the more a loss drains our world of meaning (a sense of joy and purpose). It turns our world upside down. And no matter what we do, we know that we can't bring that person that we loved so much back.
Nearly all of us are terrified of death. We react to that terror in different ways. Some of us deny it. Others are paralyzed by it. Others make up stories about an afterlife (without realizing that that's what they're doing) to coddle themselves or, more often, they read New Age books such as those of Brian Weiss about ascended masters and incarnating to learn lessons and reincarnation and so on, and find comfort in them.
Don't worry about religions and what they have to say about an afterlife. The fact that they say different things demonstrates that their accounts are logically contradictory, which leaves us doubting them, with good reason. Instead, maybe one good way to deal with the fear of death (as oblivion) is to make certain that you tell your mother how much you love her, and show it. Don't forget to love yourself, too. And your friends. And your hobbies. And music. And the fact that you're 17 and have a lifetime ahead. Make it a great life, Moment, so that as Nikos Kazantsakis wrote, when it's over, regardless of what--if anything--happens after death, you'll leave death with nothing but a "burned out castle."
I have another suggestion that may help, and this will sound very strange coming from a philosopher. Instead of focusing on your thoughts, focus on *action* in the real world. Go and do things that you love. Move your muscles. Volunteer. Help people. But only do those things if you enjoy them. Love yourself, first and foremost, and don't sacrifice your own happiness for anyone else.
If things get bad, seek out the help of a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. Read. Educate yourself. Think for yourself. None of this is easy, but if you can do these things consistently, over time, the chances are high that you're going to become resilient, self-determining, and, with the smallest bit of luck, successful and happy. Happiness has its ups and downs, but it's the journey and goal that matter, not necessarily reaching it.
This life is often a bumpy ride. Please remember one final thing, and remember it well: we are *all* in this together. We were all born. We will all die. All of us are at different points along that journey, some closer to the unknown horizon than others. We don't know what that horizon holds: eternal oblivion, or a portal into a heavely existence in the next step of eternal progression (which I don't mean in any way to associate with the Mormon idea). We are all in this ship--the Titanic--together. We know that it will founder. Even if we get on a life raft, we know that we'll eventually die. No one is spared. The next time that you go to a crowded bookstore or mall, look around at all of the people, and tell yourself that in one century, probably not a single person that you can see will still be alive, including you. That may be good or bad. We don't know.
And this is just the barest overview about your question. Again, the question is far more nuanced and complicated than we can even imagine. One crucial decision that you're going to need to make at some point is this: What's more important to me--comfort or truth, especially if the truth winds up not being comforting? The tricky part to the question is that with the question of life after death, we don't seem to have any way of knowing either way, and so we live with anxiety--some more so than others, depending on our genes and developmental history, as well as support structure and culture.
I wish that I could give you more than this--that I could give you a certain foundation for survival on which you could rest all your hopes securely, but I'm only human, just like you and everyone else here. No one knows the answer, and be suspicious of anyone who claims to. I want there to be more, and I hope that there is, but in the end, I confess that I don't know.
I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that this message has helped you in any way, but I'd really like to know what your reaction is to it.
I wish you peace of mind, strength, courage, nurturing relationships, the health of you and your mother, a long, happy, fun, and rewarding life, love, knowledge, and success. In your case there's every reason to feel confident that the best lies ahead of you. Embrace life and love your fate, as Nietzsche would say--or better yet, as I would put it: *create* it!
Steve