There is a Jehovah's Witness who comes to my door regularly, usually on Saturday morning when I am cooking a late brunch. His visits, unannounced, are an annoyance to me, but the conversations with him are usually filled with information. For instance, he and his son are big deer hunters, and one season he came to my door with a grave expression: the deer, he said, have unusually white coats, which meant a very big snow winter ahead. As it turned out, we had the most snow that year ever recorded since records had been kept in the state.
He also was a steel worker, and sometime in middle age fell from three stories up and broke his back. That was the end to his career and the beginning of his medical problems. For the last several years, he has been in several times for heart surgery, but his first time was the worst. He claims he went into a black pit of nothingness, even though he expected a light or some proof of a higher world. This turned him to the Witnesses, who proclaim a heaven on Earth to come rather than one in a celestial dimension. Exactly how his rational worked still puzzles me as to specifics, but the affects have changed his life. He did have a life-changing experience after all.
My mother is now in a later phase of senile dementia, perhaps due to Alzheimer's, although that cannot be ascertained with certainty without an autopsy. In any case, not only is she losing memory and gaining hallucinations that no one else sees, but certain aspects of her personality have undergone deep changes. What she thinks of herself now is not altogether clear, as her changes are often mercurial, but one thing is certain: she is not her old self. Brain damage due to the disease, or the ravages of old age, have been extensive, and with that, so have the changes been to her self and her entire reality system. Brain damage, or in the case of the steel worker, anesthesia, has real effects. Brains are important, not only to the functioning of the body but to the notion of self and the greater grasp of reality.
We often hear stories of the near-death experiencers, of how they meet relatives in a heavenly sphere, of how they experience light and a transcendental love, even as their brains are supposedly clinically "dead," that is, non-functioning. As our steel worker knows, this does not happen to everyone in dire conditions, but to enough to have caused a low-key national sensation. This is not new: from the earliest times of my own memory, people have talked of "life flashing before my eyes" when faced with imminent death. It is not a new fad, this belief in something beyond the brain, even if it does not refer to heaven. And yet, we know that when brains go wrong, bad things happen to memory, to thought, to the very nature of self. This is proof, it seems, that at the very least a greater part of our selves is locked in the brain, and that when the brain is damaged or dies, so does this part - or all - of ourselves.
Mystics see it differently. As Thomas Merton put it, no imagination, no image, nothing of this world suffices to define God, the hereafter, or any other notion we have put in our brains about Ultimate Reality. For them, the self is either an illusion - and that is just a word, which hedges in our thoughts - or an ephemeral floss. The world itself is seen through this floss, and although it is real, we cannot understand it as such. And so our image of ourselves, of our bodies, of our brains, is this partiality, this limited vision, itself. To dissect the brain for our true selves, then, is like scrutinizing a Bugs Bunny cartoon to determine the nature of rabbits. What we see as the brain is partial, unreal, a minor notion of what is the seat of the human being. It is, rather, the seat of the superficial self, just as the world we experience reveals only our own partial understanding, not he essence of the world itself. We build from illusion and in the end, only find a more refined illusion. Bugs Bunny will never, regardless of our industrious efforts, reveal the true rabbit.
It is my own sense that the mystics are right, buttressed as they are by scripture from many different religions, if properly understood. The enigmatic phrases of the great gurus, or Jesus or Lao Tsu become clearer when we understand our own partial realities. The strong are weak because they are most invested in our partial reality; the weak are strong because they are less so, and less committed to our group understanding. And at the bottom of it all is divine Love, which makes of our individual personalities only thin shells, only minor spices in the great cosmic stew.
What those who go to heaven and come back have really experienced I cannot say. Perhaps it is an expansion of vision that does not include the ALL, but somewhat more of it, as it is not limited to the laws of the natural world. I doubt that while there, those who do experience it are "themselves" as they understand it, but are changed. Most who have these experiences DO come back changed. As to what happens to the "self" of people who experience severe brain damage so that they can barely think or function,this I do not know. Are they held in limbo like the steel worker in his anesthetized state? In a book written by a hospice worker, she states that sometimes people in a coma will "come to" to say clear words of departure to those around them just before death. Where have they been all that time before? Where, for that matter, are we when in deep sleep, beyond even our dreams?
Yet we do not disappear there, just as I suspect we do not disappear in coma or in death. Rather, there, the brain and the systems of life as we understand them become irrelevant. It is not speculation - many throughout time have told us of the world of reality beyond our visions. But we cannot help but continue to look at the brain, or the heart as the Greeks had it, to see the human. It is all we think we know, and it is the reason why the path to Truth is so difficult. It, all we know, must be left behind to understand. In a way, the brain, our seat of knowledge, is the greatest obstacle of all. Perhaps as long as we are tethered to it, its very existence proclaims our limitations.
But we live on. The study of the brain will reveal some really interesting data, but it will not reveal ourselves. It might be that our true "brain" is the cosmic pulse of the universe itself, that the stars speak to us as they do because they are us, separate but together in a never-ending infinitude, dancing to the pulse that the wise say is joy, is love. But don't expect to find that on the dissecting table. FK
He also was a steel worker, and sometime in middle age fell from three stories up and broke his back. That was the end to his career and the beginning of his medical problems. For the last several years, he has been in several times for heart surgery, but his first time was the worst. He claims he went into a black pit of nothingness, even though he expected a light or some proof of a higher world. This turned him to the Witnesses, who proclaim a heaven on Earth to come rather than one in a celestial dimension. Exactly how his rational worked still puzzles me as to specifics, but the affects have changed his life. He did have a life-changing experience after all.
My mother is now in a later phase of senile dementia, perhaps due to Alzheimer's, although that cannot be ascertained with certainty without an autopsy. In any case, not only is she losing memory and gaining hallucinations that no one else sees, but certain aspects of her personality have undergone deep changes. What she thinks of herself now is not altogether clear, as her changes are often mercurial, but one thing is certain: she is not her old self. Brain damage due to the disease, or the ravages of old age, have been extensive, and with that, so have the changes been to her self and her entire reality system. Brain damage, or in the case of the steel worker, anesthesia, has real effects. Brains are important, not only to the functioning of the body but to the notion of self and the greater grasp of reality.
We often hear stories of the near-death experiencers, of how they meet relatives in a heavenly sphere, of how they experience light and a transcendental love, even as their brains are supposedly clinically "dead," that is, non-functioning. As our steel worker knows, this does not happen to everyone in dire conditions, but to enough to have caused a low-key national sensation. This is not new: from the earliest times of my own memory, people have talked of "life flashing before my eyes" when faced with imminent death. It is not a new fad, this belief in something beyond the brain, even if it does not refer to heaven. And yet, we know that when brains go wrong, bad things happen to memory, to thought, to the very nature of self. This is proof, it seems, that at the very least a greater part of our selves is locked in the brain, and that when the brain is damaged or dies, so does this part - or all - of ourselves.
Mystics see it differently. As Thomas Merton put it, no imagination, no image, nothing of this world suffices to define God, the hereafter, or any other notion we have put in our brains about Ultimate Reality. For them, the self is either an illusion - and that is just a word, which hedges in our thoughts - or an ephemeral floss. The world itself is seen through this floss, and although it is real, we cannot understand it as such. And so our image of ourselves, of our bodies, of our brains, is this partiality, this limited vision, itself. To dissect the brain for our true selves, then, is like scrutinizing a Bugs Bunny cartoon to determine the nature of rabbits. What we see as the brain is partial, unreal, a minor notion of what is the seat of the human being. It is, rather, the seat of the superficial self, just as the world we experience reveals only our own partial understanding, not he essence of the world itself. We build from illusion and in the end, only find a more refined illusion. Bugs Bunny will never, regardless of our industrious efforts, reveal the true rabbit.
It is my own sense that the mystics are right, buttressed as they are by scripture from many different religions, if properly understood. The enigmatic phrases of the great gurus, or Jesus or Lao Tsu become clearer when we understand our own partial realities. The strong are weak because they are most invested in our partial reality; the weak are strong because they are less so, and less committed to our group understanding. And at the bottom of it all is divine Love, which makes of our individual personalities only thin shells, only minor spices in the great cosmic stew.
What those who go to heaven and come back have really experienced I cannot say. Perhaps it is an expansion of vision that does not include the ALL, but somewhat more of it, as it is not limited to the laws of the natural world. I doubt that while there, those who do experience it are "themselves" as they understand it, but are changed. Most who have these experiences DO come back changed. As to what happens to the "self" of people who experience severe brain damage so that they can barely think or function,this I do not know. Are they held in limbo like the steel worker in his anesthetized state? In a book written by a hospice worker, she states that sometimes people in a coma will "come to" to say clear words of departure to those around them just before death. Where have they been all that time before? Where, for that matter, are we when in deep sleep, beyond even our dreams?
Yet we do not disappear there, just as I suspect we do not disappear in coma or in death. Rather, there, the brain and the systems of life as we understand them become irrelevant. It is not speculation - many throughout time have told us of the world of reality beyond our visions. But we cannot help but continue to look at the brain, or the heart as the Greeks had it, to see the human. It is all we think we know, and it is the reason why the path to Truth is so difficult. It, all we know, must be left behind to understand. In a way, the brain, our seat of knowledge, is the greatest obstacle of all. Perhaps as long as we are tethered to it, its very existence proclaims our limitations.
But we live on. The study of the brain will reveal some really interesting data, but it will not reveal ourselves. It might be that our true "brain" is the cosmic pulse of the universe itself, that the stars speak to us as they do because they are us, separate but together in a never-ending infinitude, dancing to the pulse that the wise say is joy, is love. But don't expect to find that on the dissecting table. FK
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