One Hell of a Hangover

 

Buddhist Bardo

Friend Xerxes declares, without details, that he came to a “rational conclusion” long ago that there is no afterlife. 

Yet he then presents evidence from his own experience that there is an afterlife. He hears his late wife’s voice; he feels her move beside him in the bed.

He dismisses it only by denying Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, which is the foundation of all rational thought. He says there is no “either/or,” only “both/and.”

In other words, his belief that there is no afterlife is unmoveable by either reason or evidence. The phrase “long ago” here is telling: he, like many another, has his heart set on no life after death, and will not permit himself to think any more about it. It is a doctrine in literal denial of both reason and evidence. On what basis, then, does h hold it?

The New Atheists commonly claim that belief in an afterlife is wish fulfillment. “Pie in the sky when you die.” This is projection. Most people do not want there to be an afterlife. If there is no afterlife, we can do as we please here and now and get away with it.

The concept of an afterlife comes with the concept of cosmic justice, and always has, world-wide. We will one day stand naked before God, all our acts revealed. We must submit to a higher authority than ourselves. According to the Ojibwe, wild dogs will tear us apart for our sins. In Hindu or Buddhist terms, we must pay our karmic debt. Merely ceasing to exist, to break this cycle, is the ultimate Buddhist or Hindu hope: “nirvana” means non-being.

As with so many, Xerxes does not believe in an afterlife because he does not want there to be an afterlife. There is nothing to fear in simply going sleep and never waking up; there is nothing to fear in being blown out like a candle.

On the other hand, his love of his late wife is saying something different. Love speaks of the eternal. Or his wife is herself calling him, out of her love for him.

Wonderfulland

 

"ERECTED BY THE CITIZENS OF GANANOQUE
IN HONOURED MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE TOWN AND DISTRICT WHO FOUGHT AND FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918"

 Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare

Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep

In lax accompaniment through the air

Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep.

No sooner than they dump them on the floors

These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,

Feel great white wings go down like useless oars

And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!

How droll and ugly he who shone on high!

The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,

Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds

Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;

Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,

He cannot walk beneath the weight of wings.

―Baudelaire

When I was a child, my brother and I used to swap stories about “Wonderfulland,” a place where everything was wonderful. The fact that this was a fascinating topic for us reveals that we were only too aware that, counter to a common myth about childhood, the real word we experienced daily was not so wonderful.

I remember my father describing Belmont Park in Montreal as “the real Wonderfulland,” when he planned to take us there. But I knew in advance this could not be true, and the amusement park, although enjoyable, was nothing like it. Wonderfulland was not a place of thrill rides or cotton candy or custard cones.  It was a land of stories where imaginary things were real. One area, as I remember it, was the Old West, one was islands of the Caribbean, one had castles and forests, and so on.

The one detail I remember best is that part of it was Statueland―a garden full of statues. 

Why the statues? What did I know of statues? There was, as I recall, only one statue in the small town where I was growing up, of a World War I soldier, commemorating the war dead. It did leave a deep impression on me. We might have seen more statues on a trip to Ottawa; but if so, I cannot remember. 

Gananoque, my home town, was also famous for its pink granite. There was a stonemason’s yard on the main street with a display of tombstones. 

This, along with the war memorial, seems to me the most likely origin of statueland. It was the land of the dead. Perhaps this is why I have always felt a particular fondness for Remembrance Day.

I rather think that Wonderfulland emerged from our—perhaps only my—intimation that there was a heaven. This might have been instinctive, or rather instilled by God. Or it might have been the result of an early Catholic education.

I thought of Wonderfulland the other night while listening to Bruce Springsteen. I had not thought of it, I imagine, for years. Yet the thought came to my mind, out of nowhere, that this was someone who had visited Wonderfulland. There were hints of it in his music and his voice—not anything explicit, but a mood. It was a mood I knew well, I realized, from other art.

The mark of great art is that it has this sense of Wonderfulland about it. Michelangelo has it; it is all over the Sistine ceiling. Shakespeare often openly refers to it; it is his “green world.” Hans Christian Andersen knows it intimately, and his stories describe it in detail. It is where all fairy tales are set. Romanesque art is the art of Wonderfulland. Chagall paints it. Kurelek paints it. Sendak paints it. Blake paints it, and writes about it. Other writers who clearly know it well include Cervantes; Don Quixote is all about the difference between Wonderfulland and the imperfect diurnal world. Yeats, Stevenson, Coleridge, Hesse, Carroll, Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, all write about it. It is where the Krishna Gopala cycle takes place. Arthur Koestler chronicles it in non-fiction. 

It is perhaps most present in music. I hear it in Cohen, Dylan, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Diana Krall, Whitney Houston, Prince, Sinead O’Connor, Ian Tyson, Mark Knopfler, Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Buffy Sainte-Marie. It is everywhere in classical music. They say all art aspires to the condition of music; they speak of the music of the spheres, and of angels playing harps and blowing trumpets. Perhaps this is why: music among the arts is able most accurately to express the nature of heaven.

 “Realistic” art is an absurd and a philistine idea. The purpose of true art is not to show the world, not to “hold the mirror up to nature,” other than to shame it. It is to open a window to a vista of Wonderfulland.

Another insight: those who most experience Wonderfulland are inevitably going to be the most dissatisfied with life here below. The contrast is too intense. At the same time, God seems to give the clearest vision of Wonderfulland to those who are suffering, like Andersen’s Little Match Girl, in this life.

“Socrates: And now, I responded, consider this: If this person who had gotten out of the cave were to go back down again and sit in the same place as before, would he not find in that case, coming suddenly out of the sunlight, that his eyes were filled with darkness?"

Brains? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Brains!

It was Robert Kennedy's death, as I remember, that made me an atheist at age fourteen.

It was not the problem of evil—not “How could God allow this?” I understood the concept of free will well enough. It was a comment in some news story that, if Kennedy survived, at best, he would be “a vegetable,” given the serious damage to his brain.

This led me to the thought that the spirit or consciousness was too closely tied to the brain to allow for any life after death. Or for beings of pure spirit, like God.
By age eighteen, I had changed my mind completely. I had no choice—by then, I had had direct personal experience of God. But I’d also seen through what I thought by then was an obvious fallacy. So I was a bit surprised recently to hear one of the “new atheists”--I think it was Richard Dawkins--use the same argument: that people cannot think or even be without brains, and this proves that the soul cannot exist without the body.

The fallacy seems so simple, to me at least. The same observed phenomenon, of a “vegetative” state, could be equally accounted for by assuming the brain were the sine qua non of consciousness, or that it was only the conduit or bridge through which the soul was able to influence the body. Calling a lack of response “vegetative” merely illegitimately presupposes the former.

But it turns out I was not quite right. In fact, there seems to be legitimate empirical evidence emerging that the “conduit” or “bridge” hypothesis is the more probable one. For example, an article in yesterday's National Post cites a number of people who “woke up” hours after being declared brain dead, with the “loss of all brain function,” and in at least one case with no blood supply to the brain. This at least makes the link between brain and mind a bit more ambiguous: it seems to me that, even if the brain as an organ survived intact, if all activity ceased and then resumed, and the brain is the creator of consciousness, the consciousness that arose then should be a new one, with no memories and no continuing sense of self.

Otherwise, where did it go in the interim?

An accompanying article reports on a study (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMoa0905370)
bearing directly on the proverbial “vegetative” state. A British/Belgian team has discovered that, with sufficiently sensitive equipment for detecting brain wave activity, such “vegetables,” despite “devastating brain damage,” can actually answer questions about their past lives, correctly. In other words, they are not vegetables at all. They are perfectly conscious and apparently mentally intact. What is gone is the ability to communicate with their bodies and so with the outside world.

Only some patients have responded in this way. But, knowing that some people with severe brain damage are still conscious, it becomes entirely possible that all the rest are too—but either less able to communicate, or less able to detect our attempts at communication.

Occam’s razor now comes into play: we know that at least some “vegetables” are conscious and mentally intact. We do not know if any are not. The simplest, and therefore more probable, hypothesis is that they all are.

Had enough? For there are also scores of cases of people living normal lives, and scoring within the normal intelligence range—or even above it—with “no detectable brain.”

In other words, the onus seems clearly on those who would deny the possibility of a spirit or mind existing without a brain to demonstrate their case; even the purely empirical evidence, such as it is, seems to go against them.

Even if all this were not true, reducing thought and consciousness to a physical wad of soggy tissue or the electrical impulses coursing through it is a nonsensical concept in philosophical terms: as obvious an error as sitting down in a restaurant and eating the menu instead of ordering the meal, meanwhile looking out the window at the sky in hopes of seeing time flying by. While one may be related to the other in some mysterious way, they obviously exist and are on different planes.