Conversations with a Soul (35 page)

Like all timeless myths, the saga of Gilgamesh offers us insight into issues that are as old as humankind itself, but then launches out to address questions of life and death by contrasting two very different options for dealing with death: the
past-future
and the
present.

This tension between living in the past-future and living in the present is something of a watershed in our conversation with death and the need to discover a relevant syntax, and it all starts with a particular experience of the present, the mystical experience of
transcendency.

However, before we explore the wonder of transcendency, we need to take a moment with its rival for our attention,
thinking
!

“Cogito ergo sum
,
”
I think therefore I am
.

Reaching far beyond prescribed reflection in ‘Philosophy 101’, Rene Descartes’ famous dictum has come to define
the
process
through which we put life together, or at least, that’s what we have been taught and generally that’s what we believe.

We are thinkers!

Even before we enter elementary school, the first formal rung on the ladder of learning how to reason, we are encouraged to think and praised when we do. Little wonder, then, that by the time we take our place in the adult world, thinking has become second nature to us. We have been taught to respect the process. We may not always reach the right conclusions but the practice cannot be faulted. It is deeply ingrained in all of us.

A lot of our thinking is initiated by questions, problems or strategies. Some of our thinking is born of fantasy and much of it simply goes nowhere. A good deal of our thinking is associated with remembering, and planning, but the planning is never completed and the task just goes on and on.

I don’t think I ever make a conscious decision to think, it just happens. It’s simply a part of life and I expect that everyone does the same without the need to advertise the fact. Without having to think about it children and adults have figured out that, throughout the day our minds don’t stop and we keep on thinking, even when we think about how to escape from thinking so that we might think!

Finally, we sometimes struggle to fall asleep because the thinking simply won’t stop and we’ve never discovered the off-switch. This is particularly tough if our thinking is tied into worrying for then our thinking extends an invitation to all the ogres that haunt our twilight realms. Even our leisure hours are committed to thinking as we puzzle over crosswords or Sudoku puzzles, or we try to figure out 'who-dun-it', or we wade through a book recommended by a friend who promised, 'It will
really
make you think'!

If thinking created a sound, then we would live out our days in incessant noise, sometimes falling to a muted whisper, sometimes rising to a terrifying crescendo, and in between an assault of mindless babble. Maybe that’s exactly what happens but having got used to the noise we don’t notice it.

Nevertheless, whatever else Descartes’ phrase may address; it has crowned
thought
as the most valuable characteristic attribute of human beings. Not just any old rambling head full of ideas, mind you, but a cognitive, rational, logical mind fed and nurtured by all the things we have learned and discovered about the world around us as well as the world within us.

Of course, as we have all experienced, sometimes our thinking leads us to conclusions that are anything but rational and logical. Fear, guilt, worry and a host of other factors can distort our judgments. Never the less, we are thinkers whether we consistently arrive at sane answers or not.

Clearly our ability to think is a magnificent gift and lies at the root of almost all human progress. Thought and its child, reason, are what sustain our civilization. This is the intellectual reservoir from which we, in the Western World, draw our understanding of reality.

And yet . . .

Paralleling our growth into the discipline of thinking there is another, probably even older passage of discovery – a journey into the world of
being
.

Long before young children are initiated into the exercise of thought, they already know how to embrace and be embraced by simply being:

From my study window I watched the solemn funeral procession, led by my five year old daughter, followed by her three and a half year old brother and several of their conscripted friends. In her hands she held a shoebox. Within the box, wrapped in tissue paper was a dead bird which they had found that morning. No one had thought to dig a hole, so the box was placed on the ground. She proceeded to inform the dead bird and God that she and her friends were sorry that the bird had died, and she trusted that Jesus would do the right thing and take care of the bird. Everyone then helped to scoop sand over the box and the funeral procession broke off for cookies and orange juice.

I reflected, not for the first or last time, that children have a remarkable ability to deal with death. Casual encounters with dead birds, insects and animals, all the way through to the death of a beloved pet and even that of a relative is integrated into 'the way things are.' Death, like life, happens all around us and is a part of the rough and tumble delivered to our door each day. Death is a reality. Being present to that reality is what is needed. Questioning and thinking simply get in the way.

Of course by the time we graduate from childhood and we learn to look at the world through adult eyes, everything has become a lot more complex and complicated; even though our ability to see,
really see
, has become severely constrained.

In inverse proportion to the commitment we make to thinking, our commitment to silence the mind and give ourselves to
being
is minimal – if at all.

The issue is not merely one of semantic differences but describes two radically different ways of accessing reality. While
thinking
enjoys undisputed authority in the West, and defines how we go about engaging the truth; in the East that authority is reserved for
being
.

While thinking marshals all our knowledge and relies on an orderly process of evaluating, arranging and accessing that knowledge, being exists on an entirely different plane and only becomes accessible to us
when we set thinking aside and we give ourselves to simply being; simply absorbing and being absorbed by the present moment which sometimes leads to a mystical experience, called transcendence!

People who practice meditation often speak about the way in which insights break through and warm the heart.

Both William James and Abraham Maslow's taught and wrote about a ‘peak experience’, calling it the
mystical experience. In
his 1901-1902 lectures at Edinburgh published as
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902). James noted that mystical experiences often produced physical sensations such as heat or ‘fire’ inside, and they were often accompanied by mental healing. …Maslow agreed with William James that ‘mystical experiences’ were often associated with religion. But to Maslow this was not a necessary part of their definition. Peak experiences could also occur in connection with ordinary life: They came from the great moments of love and sex, from the great esthetic moments (particularly of music), from the bursts of creativeness and the creative furor (the great inspiration), from great moments of insight and of discovery, from women giving natural birth to babies—or just from loving them, from moments of fusion with nature (in a forest, on a seashore, or on a mountains.), from certain athletic experiences, e.g. skin-diving, or from dancing.
⁹⁶

Not only psychologists but others who work in very practical realms, such as in architecture, have written about a mystical experience that is central to their work:

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
⁹⁷

There is a level of awareness or insight which breathes a vision into us from which we get our idea of
in
spiration. When we are inspired we become animated and see possibilities we never saw before. We cannot manufacture inspiration, it comes as a gift but we need to be open to receive the gift.

Most of us have had the experience of struggling with a problem which no amount of thinking managed to solve. Then, magically, when we stopped struggling and thinking and searching and we simply learned to be in the presence of our problem; when we dared to surrender our anxieties and acknowledged that we had no solution, suddenly we started to see possibilities we never saw before.

Despite Descartes’ dictum we can
be
without thinking!

We are more, much more than synaptic junctions and electrical impulses and brain waves. We are even more than the millions of cells that make up our bodies and enable us to live.

Let me illustrate this strange relationship.

It is an established fact that the millions of tiny cells that make up my body each have a limited life span. Every ten years, or so, every cell has died and been replaced by another. Therefore in one sense my body is no older than ten years, yet throughout the dying and changing of my physical reality, my core being, my deep inner self, all the personal realities that I summon when I use the personal pronoun, '
I'
remained constant.

That core being has its own history independent of my cells and genes. From that core I engaged the world: I loved and nurtured; I grieved and laughed, I knew satisfaction and despair; I learned and chose to change my outlook. Here resides the seat of my core values. People who claim to know me carry about an image of what I look like (the legacy of my gene pool) but in order to
really know me
, they need to move beyond my physical appearance and engage the inner person.

That inner person
was there when my parents celebrated my tenth birthday and
'I'
was there every year since.
'I'
am a lot older than my body.
'I'
was present for the past forty and fifty and sixty years while my body was engaged in dying every ten years.

One of the questions which my illustration begs is the question of whether the
'I'
can exist apart from my body. If my inner core being, has managed to survive cellular changes in my body, then my body and my inner self must exist on different planes.

Dr. Peter Fenwick, a prominent Neuropsychiatrist and Neurophysiologist, who for many years has collected and studied accounts of
Near Death Experiences
(in which a person is resuscitated after having died and returns to speak of their experience of death) as well as
End of Life Experiences
(in which a close friend or relative is visited by a dead or dying person) has written:

Over the last 50 years many experiments have been carried out which suggest that mind is not limited to the brain and that it is possible to demonstrate directly the effect of mind on other minds (telepathy) and of mind on matter (psychokinesis)
⁹⁸

Further evidence for the 'I' as part of my
being
, rather than a part of my
brain functions
, focuses on the 'visitors' who come to assist the dying, who, presumably come from beyond the grave in a manner we don’t understand.

Numerous accounts of persons dying who nevertheless journey, sometimes great distances, to inform their loved ones of their departure, again points to an existence of the 'I' which is independent of the body and is not limited by space or time.

C.G. Jung and Laurens van der Post, had shared many hours in rich conversation and exploration of the human heart. That relationship laid the foundation for the following experience: