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The pursuit of happiness

"Is this a mirage, a romantic's myth, a dreamer's dream? I am certain it it not. One night, many years ago, I went to a concert in Auckland with a friend. As we came out after one of the most magnificent performances of a classical symphony I have ever heard, my friend turned to me and said, 'Ah well, music is all very well but we have to get back to the real world'. It has taken me half a lifetime to realise what was wrong with that statement. It was the wrong way round. Music is the most powerful alchemy we know, the magic agent of transcendence that lifts consciousness into a more perfect state. When we lose ourselves in music we become more real. The return to everyday mode, to the sad, confused world of the ego-self, is a Fall, a reversion to unreality, an expulsion from some simalcrum of eternity, back into time.
The essence of the human quest is to break free of time, to reconnect to the eternal in all of us, in that space where the past and the future interleave, the reality laboratory of our own minds. We are all explorers; we are all time-travellers; we are all lost children seeking home. We have a dim memory of home; it is a place we have been before. In the remote future. / Page 257 / The last signpost on this journey is now in sight. It points to what is, to me, the strangest and most revelatory part of the quest. Of necessity, this part has to be incomplete for it can be 'known' only when we ourselves die.
In Chapter 6 I described the sequence of psychological states a dying person goes through, in the experience of Elisabeth Kuebler- Ross. However, I stop short of describing the actual moment of death itself. Let me now restate a point made in Chapter 6. Our attitude to and ignorance of death is shaped by the fact that we cannot comprehend death experientially; we cannot remember something we have not yet gone through. However this statement is, in a limited but important sense, not true. There exist in the community people who have died in the scientific definition of the term and as it were, returned to the living state by luck or medical management. These people can tell us what the death experience is like.
Near death experiences, or NDEs, have now been documented in many hundreds of cases. NDEs are defined by the cessation (at least to an outside observer) of some or all the normal physiological indicators of 'life': the heartbeat may stop, breathing may cease, and perhaps most importantly, the repetitive blips traced out on a video monitor by 'brainwaves' on the EEC may fade away, leaving a flat line on the screen (hence the term 'flat-liners'). This is not to say that every case of NDE occurs in a hospital; rather that, to qualify as a genuine NDE candidate, a person must have at the very least stopped breathing or lost any detectable pulse and that NDEs are most credible when the cessation of vital function is monitored by state-of-the-art technology. The period during which vital functions can no longer be measured can be as short as a few seconds or as long as two hours.
The remarkable thing about NDEs is that they show a consist-ency, a common 'core' of seemingly identical experience, irrespec-tive of gender, religion, background or race. This hints at the possibility that the brain experiences a more-or-less universal cog-nitive shift at the point of death. This is centrally important in the context of this book. The message of The Death of Forever is that ego ceases with physical death but that consciousness does not. NDEs may thus offer a window into that climactic moment my hypothesis predicts, when our human reality melts away like a shadow, when the fabricated skein of the time-trapped ego-self unravels, exposing the deep knowing of consciousness in its tempo-rally unfettered four-dimensional state. / Page258 / Before I analyse NOEs in the light of my conclusions in this book, I must address the alternative explanations for their occur-rence. Are NDEs hallucinations? Does the brain malfunction in a consistent way at death? Many experts think so. Some of the key elements of an NDE experience can be artificially induced by hallucinogenic drugs like ketamine (used in anasthesia) or 'angel dust'. This may be significant because, once the blood supply to the brain is diminished or cut off, the brain enters a period of anoxia or oxygen starvation. There is evidence that this oxygen starvation reproduces some of the effects of those hallucinogenic drugs that mimic the NDE.
Against this, an impartial observer must set the following facts. At precisely the time one might expect impaired brain function because of the stopping or winding-down of vital life support functions, NDEers report heightened cognition, a strong sense of a reality that is in a deep way more real than everyday awareness. Morever, at least one NDEer whom I have heard deliberately took a range of hallucinogenic drugs after his NDE specifically to compare their psychological effects with those of his NDE. His verdict was quite emphatic: whereas the drug-induced condition brought about sensory disorientation, the NDE was cogent, indelible and overwhelming; the effects of the drug-induced state faded quickly whereas the memory of his NDE remains with him to this day.
It is neither possible nor desirable, in a work like this, to give a balanced discussion of the various hypotheses advanced to 'explain' the NDE. Readers are referred to the detailed investigations of Margot Grey, Kenneth Ring and others, which attempt to analyse the phenomenon using accepted scientific methodology. The only point I would make concerns the 'criticism' that, with the virtue of hindsight, one can question whether a person who is later restored to full cognitive function can ever be said to have been 'dead' at all. I agree with this. In my view the significance of the NDE is that it gives us a fascinating window of insight into the actual experience of dying. It can say nothing about possible post-mortem existence except by inference and extension.
My attitude to NDEs has been significantly affected by a I programme I saw on ABC television. In this programme a group of
people who had experienced near death experiences were brought together with doctors and other experts. One aim of the programme seemed to be to try to see whether the NDE was a mental abberation / Page 259 / induced by the loss of vital function or whether it opened a door to a different dimension of being. The people who described their NDE made a big impact on me. It is one thing to read about NDEs in books, quite another to watch real people struggle to find words for something which seems to transcend language.
Consider the words of a scientist whom I will call John:

it's as if everything was there and everybody was there; the sense was of absolute total fulfillment. And yet there was no sense that I was there. That's the most extraordinary thing; John vanished at that moment.

That comment fascinates me: my hypothesis predicts that ego, the sense of self, evaporates at death but that consciousness remains. John in this instance used just the words I would expect of someone whose ego-self had dissolved but whose deep knowing, his real 'self, was unaffected. The 'I' flickers out of existence but integrated awareness, one in all and all in one, remains.
John expanded on this point in these words:

The sense was of immense depth... It's like having been to a space before everything was and then coming back and seeing all this from that space instead of seeing it, as I used to, from inside my head.

Other NDEers speak of retaining a sense of identity but only as a strand of the greater whole they now feel part of:

One of the feelings I remember most about them was the feeling of unity, of being totally a part of everything around me and about me. There was no separateness at all.

Different NDEers use different words and images to describe their experience but the one universal factor that almost everyone reports is a vision of light. Not just any light, light that goes beyond light. A radiance that is wordlessly ineffable:

I just found myself in this extremely bright light and felt absolute peace. I feel the light and the peace were one.
The light is brighter than anything you could possibly imagine.
There are no words to describe it.
A beautiful light- it's like being an ant inside a large diamond.

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Compare this with Whitman's words:

lighting the very light, beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.

Another universal element in the core experience is a sense of profound and transcendent love and oneness:
And the quite amazing thing is that I had an incredible sense of well-being - I just felt completely born aloft by goodwill and by love... just the most fantastic feeling of love and goodwill.

I felt exhilarated and felt I was one with everything.

And from another ABC programme on the same topic, this, to me, the most powerful description of all:

I came into the light and it hit me all over. I stood in the light... While I stood in the light, for that split second or a few minutes, whatever it was in time. I had this feeling of just total understanding. It was just being part of that universal spirit, part of what you can only describe as being all. Everything... and it was the most inspiring and, I guess, the greatest single experi- ence I've ever had in my life. It was just incredible.

This can be compared with Larry's description of his illumina-tion in the quote from The Razor's Edge given earlier. Although Larry is a fictional character, Somerset Maugham seems to have modelled his description of Larry's enlightenment on historical accounts of the moment of 'enlightenment' as documented for example by R. M. Bucke in his classic opus, Cosmic Consciousness. The point I want to emphasise is that Larry's description of his illumination could be fitted into a book on NDEs without changing a word.
To me one of the most intriguing aspects of the NDE is the feeling two people reported in which they state that their NDE was so real that the living seemed shallow by comparison:

As if it 's not the dying that's the problem but the living.

I felt as though I was awake for the first time in my life.
                     

Compare this again with Whitman's words:

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before or else I am awake for the first time and all before has been a mean sleep.

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In the context of this book, one has to note especially the odd  time-sense perception that often accompanies an NDE. As an
American NDEer reports of her 'life-review', the replay of one's life history that seems to be an integral part of an NDE:
I can't exactly describe it to you, but it was just all there. It was just there all at once. I mean, not one thing at a time, blinking off and on, but it was everything, everything at one time.
Compare this with Goethe's words 'one moment holds eternity'. Likewise, I am impressed by the strongly non-verbal nature of
the NDE experience. Not only do NDEers find that existing lan-guage is completely inadequate to describe what they went through, but communication with the 'light' (which seems to invite them to review their lives) takes place, wordlessly, in a kind of instant telepathy. As Patrick Gallagher, who had a nearly fatal car accident in 1976, reports:

I seemed to possess a knowledge as radiant, transfiguring and ideal as the luminous light...I knew that all one had to do was approach an interesting person and quite easily and almost immediately understand his essence. To do so completely re-quired only a brief glance... without any speech...the result was a consummate exchange of knowledge. Words cannot provide a hint of such a universal knowledge.
Confronting the deep similarities between NDEs and mystical experience ('cosmic consciousness') at least one commentator, Kenneth Ring, has drawn a striking conclusion:

What occurs during an NDE has nothing inherently to do with death or the transition into death...the NDE...should be re- garded as one of a family of related, mystical experiences that have always been with us, rather than the recent discovery of modern researchers who have come to investigate the phenom-enon of dying.

In this context it is interesting to note that the myth of the Fall, which I have used repeatedly throughout the course of this book, is not a specifically Christian phenomenon. Every human culture has its myth of a golden age, paradise, a time of innocence that man has 'lost' through some 'wrong-doing'. Anthropologist Richard Heinberg suggests that this golden age, this lost paradise, can be equated with  / 

PARADISE

PARADE EYES EYES PARADE

PARADE I EYES EYES I PARADE

PARADE I = 9 EYES = 9 9 = EYES 9 = I PARADE

Page 262 / the 'Dreaming' consciousness of 'primitive' cultures before the advent of symbolic written language:
perhaps our most useful new clue to this lost state of being is contained in the modern study of altered states of consciousness and in particular, the near-death experience. The essence of Paradise is...equivalent to what various traditions have termed, nirvana, ecstasy, union and cosmic consciousness. It is the condition of the absence of the separate human ego with all its defenses, aggressions and categories of judgement."

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

THE GARDEN OF NEED

"The concept that Eden really existed, as a paradisic state of mind, is appealing but it can lead too easily to the facile New Age belief that the purpose of life is to 'go home to Eden', to go back to the Golden Age, by returning to prehistory. This is woolly-minded romanticism. Evolution never runs back along its own tracks. As Ken Wilber stresses, the Edenic mentality felt itself to be 'one' with nature because it had not yet separated from nature; it was precon-scious (infantile) not superconscious (spiritual). So the 'goal' of personal growth and development is (in terms of the metaphor) not to go back to prehuman 'Eden' but forward to posthuman 'God', to integrate non-linear consciousness in its full depth with the self-consistent elegance of linear mathematical definition, perfecting both the intuitive holism of right-brain knowing and the mathemati-cal logic of left-brain science, uniting and thus completing both mind modalities, finally, in the one mutually supportive, comple-mentary, splendid synthesis.
This sense of return brings me to my final point. Carl Sagan has advanced an interesting explanation for the NDE. Noting the fre- quency with which NDEers report going through a 'tunnel' towards a source of radiant 'light', Sagan suggests that what NDEers are
doing is, in fact, reliving the birth process - running their lives back to their beginning. Elements of the 'core' NDE may be consistent with this suggestion -the 'life review' for example- but if Sagan is right, it is difficult to see why the sense of love and unity reported by NDEers is always linked to the light. One would suppose it would be more logically linked to the unitive darkness of the womb which the backward-running mind records as its first memory, prior to the traumatic separation of birth.
However, Sagan's thesis does dovetail with a motif of this book, that to know the end one must return to the beginning (see chapters / Page 263 / 5 and 7). The key cosmological conclusion of this book is that time is closed back upon itself to form a self-consistent loop. Thus end and beginning are, in a sense, 'linked events'. NDEs in this perspec-tive reunite the consciousness of life's 'end' with the consciousness of life's 'beginning' but moved up one or more octaves in the scale of creation because of the increase in knowing that comes from a life of searching. This is, I believe, how consciousness evolves. At our present stage of evolution we may be limited in what we can 'see', even after death. But the collapse of the linear time fallacy must bring us closer to the climactic mystery of completed consciousness, which in the mythology of our past cultures we have called 'God'.
Several times during the ABC programme I referred to earlier, the camera kept panning back to one man, in the front row. As others described their NDE, he obviously relived part of his. On his face was an arresting expression, a look hard to put into words; a look that, in less cynical times, might have been called 'holy'.
That look haunts me.
Finally, how does the message of this book help us live our lives? I believe that what is missing in our lives is a sense of the sacred. By this, I do not mean a return to religion in any formal sense. Religions like Christianity and Islam are, in my view, profaners of the sacred, denying in practice the very truths they profess in principle. The American historian, Lewis Mumford, summed up the failure of organised Christanity when he said:

Karl Marx once said of himself that he was not a Marxist; and of Jesus one may say without irreverence, that he was not a Christian. For little men, who guardedJesus' memory, took him, drained off the precious life blood of his spirit, mummified his body, and wrapped what was left in many foreign wrappings; over these remains they proceeded to errect a gigantic tomb. That tomb was the Christian Church.

To see how this came about, remember that the structure of our minds, with their emphasis on negative feedback, predisposes us to resist change. Organised religion, with its bureaucratic insistence on the 'right way' and 'eternal truths', denies change. Its very exclu- siveness shows how tightly its dogmas are identified with its own sense of collective ego. The eagerness it displays to win converts, to bring their otherness into its own self-image, betrays its deep-rooted / Page 264 / insecurity-that insecurity is the inevitable companion of ego. Christianity and Islam have been the chief examples of this unstable super ego and the consequences of their insistence that their way is the only way are only too evident, even today, on the streets of Belfast or Beirut.
The metaphor I have always used when I am confronted with the paradox of a thousand faiths, each claiming to have found 'the way', each claiming for themselves a monopoly on truth, an exclusive right to salvation, is the parable of the searchers on the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain they look up, dimly sensing the high place that the intuition of their prophets see as 'God'. Each searcher starts from the baseline of the mountain where, handicapped by ignorance and trapped by ego, he cannot see round the comer where his nearest fellow-traveller is. So, each searcher thinks, and be- lieves, that the path he has found, his way up, is the only way and that the vision he glimpses is a special privilege granted to him alone. As the searchers climb higher, i.e. evolve towards higher states of consciousness, their various paths start to converge and they see that round the edge of the hill are other roads, with other seekers. At the summit, the high place (pure consciousness), all paths unite. The sense of separateness that divided searcher from searcher and road from road is no more. They finally understand that all the seemingly different roads led to the same place in the end, the common meeting point that novelist Umberto Eco describes, where each can say:

I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself; and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else; and all differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where no one finds himself in his proper place. I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and there is no image.

When I began this book, I spoke of a 'gap at the centre' in Western civilisation due to the breakdown of the old faiths. The clear implication was that this gap needs to be filled. But with what? I repeat, I believe it can only be filled by a renewed sense of the sacred. By this, I do not mean a new set of beliefs, which will inevitably harden into dogma. I mean an experiential sense of trust and caring, / Page 265 / a renewed feeling for beauty in whatever form it may be found. To give this experiential message some 'shape' it will, I think, be necessary to develop a new story for our time, based on science. I say 'story' because science in its present form gives no human dimen-sion to the truths it creates and illuminates. We need a parable, not a textbook, a poem of reality so rich and beautiful that its meaning will transcend the words it uses.
An example may help. The timescale of evolution is framed in numbers so vast that they literally lie beyond comprehension. Who can really get a feel for a number like 10000 000 000 years ago? However, all of us can sense the meaning of deep time from a story I read when I was a boy, in Arthur Mee's Childrens' Encyclopedia:

Faraway, in the West of the world there is a mighty granite rock,
a mile high, a mile wide and a mile deep. Once every hundred
years a little bird comes to the rock and sharpens its beak on the
granite. And when the bird has worn the rock away, that will be
one day in eternity.

The restoration of this sense of the sacred is the most important task of this generation. People may say, 'No, it is more important to
develop strategies to combat the greenhouse effect (for example)' .
That is only superficially true. The greenhouse effect, a result of planetary pollution, is a direct consequence not so much of a rapacious commercial culture as of the attitudes and assumptions that make that culture possible. We see now whence those attitudes come. They are the direct consequences of the me-first competitive- ness of the ego-self. The only way, I repeat, the only way to reverse this planetary degradation is to break down the barriers that wall us off from each other and the world, to recognise that aphorisms like 'the brotherhood of man' are not romantic, pie-in-the-sky day- dreams but practical patents for survival.
To achieve this, I believe we need to reintroduce a cycle of rituals into life-not grandiose, self-important charades but participatory ceremonies that have their roots in human needs, rituals that give meaning to our lives, by connecting us to both the elemental simplicity we once were and to the sublime glory we shall be. When a group of people gather to share a meal, they could, for a minute, link hands. Small though this gesture is, it is rich in significance. We all need that human contact because we all need to belong to something bigger than ourselves: something that remembers our Page 266 / past and affirms our future. We should create new rites of passage to celebrate the phases of the human life cycle, rituals for birth, for the transit into adolescence, and above all, for dying.
Of these, the need for a ritual of dying is the most urgent. I know of no greater testament to the failure of our civilisation than the fact that so many people die alone, abandoned like discards on society's junk heap. Dying must again be united with a sense of the sacred, for it is here, if anywhere, that the psyche outgrows its human limitation. The most important message of this book is that consciousness cannot be extinguished by death, for consciousness transcends time. We should learn to approach death with gratitude, seeing it for what it is, the final elimination of ego, the end of the fallacies of time and self.
In the end it can all be said so simply.
Time and self are outgrown husks which consciousness will one day discard, just as a butterfly abandons its chrysalis to fly towards the sun."

TIBET:  A SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION

Page 10

"During the three centuries of Tibet's modern period, the national pri-ority was on monastic education, literary and philosophical creativity, the practice of meditation, the development of ritual and festival arts, and so forth. Spiritual adepts were accepted as the highest level of Ti-betan society, considered to have become perfected Buddhas through their practice of the Tantras (spiritual technologies) of Unexcelled Yoga (self-cultivation). They were inner-world adventurers of the highest dar-ing, the Tibetan equivalent of our astronauts-I think it is worth coin-ing the term "psychonaut" to describe them. They personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its transfor-mations in life and beyond death.
In Western culture, the last frontiers of our material conquest of the universe are in outer space. Our astronauts are our ultimate heroes and heroines. Tibetans, however, are more concerned about the spiritual conquest of the inner universe, whose frontiers are in the realms of death, the between, and contemplative ecstasies. So, the Tibetan lamas who can consciously pass through the dissolution process, whose minds can detach from the gross physical body and use a magic body to travel to other universes, these "psychonauts" are the Tibetans' ultimate he-roes and heroines. The Dalai Lamas and the several thousand "reincar-nate" Lamas (also called "Tulku," which means "Buddha Emanation") are these heroes and heroines. They are believed to have mastered the death, between, and rebirth processes, and to choose continuously, life after life, to return to Tibet out of compassion to lead the Tibetans in their spiritual national life and to benefit all sentient beings.
Thus the modern Tibetan civilization was unique on the planet. Only such a special civilization could have produced the arts and sci- ences of dying and death transmitted in this book. I describe the unique psychological character complex that corresponds to the modern Ti-betan society as "inner modernity." It should be understood to contrast with the modern Western psychological character complex, which can be described as "outer modernity." The Western character complex is usually contrasted with a premodern traditional" character. It is often / Page 11 / described as a complex of traits such as individualism, openness and flexibility of identity, restless reflectiveness, and adherence to rationality. This modern Western character complex is connected with a peculiar perception of all things-including psychic or mental things-as ulti-mately reducible to quantifiable material entities. This is what gives it its "outwardness." The modern Tibetan character complex shares the modern traits of individualism, openness and flexibility of identity, re-flectiveness, and rationality. But the Tibetan character is bound up with its peculiar perception, derived from Buddhist civilization, of all things as infused with spiritual value, as interconnected with mental states. In contrast to Western ideas, the Tibetan view is that the mental or spir-itual cannot always be reduced to material quanta and manipulated as such-the spiritual is itself an active energy in nature, subtle but more powerful than the material. The Tibetan view is that the "strong force" in nature is spiritual, not material. This is what gives the Tibetan char-acter its "inwardness." Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused outward on matter and the other in-ward on mind."

ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE TO DEDUCE

TIBET

THE IN BETWEEN

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

LIBERATION

THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IN THE BETWEEN

Translated by Robert Thurman 1994

Page 11
"Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused outward on matter and the other in-ward on mind."This difference of personality underlies the difference between the two civilizations. While the American national purpose is ever greater material productivity, the. Tibetan national purpose is ever greater spir-itual productivity. Spiritual productivity is measured by how deeply one's wisdom can be developed, how broadly one's compassion can exert itself. Tibetan Buddhists believe that outer reality is interconnected with inner mental development over a beginningless and endless series of lives, so they see no limit to how far the self and the environment can be transformed for the better. The self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all.
The ultimate example of the inwardly directed rationality of the modern Tibetan mind is precisely our present concern, the Tibetan exploration of death. The outwardly directed Western mind long ago dismissed the topic of death and future lives as archaic, of concern only to the superstitious traditional mind. Materialistic habits of thought reduce the mind to matter and eliminate the soul. Ruling out the pos-sibility of future lives, death is merely a physiological condition, equated with a "flatline" on an electroencephalograph. There is no interest at all in the states of the person or condition of the mind after death. Scientific investigation restricts itself to the material quanta perceivable by the physical senses, augmented by machinery, during this one bodily / Page 12 / life. At the same time, Westerners have set about exploring the outer world, the farthest continents, the macro realms of the outer galaxies, and the micro realms of the cell, the molecule, the atom, and the sub-atomic forces.
Tibetan inwardly directed reason put the material world second on its list of priorities. Its prime concern was the world of inner expe- rience, the waking, gross realm of causality, relativity, sensation, percept and concept, and the subtle realm of image, light, ecstasy, trance, dream, and finally, death and its beyond. The Tibetans considered the inner, subtlemost, experiential realm the important point at which to assert control of all subjective and objective cosmic events. And so they set about exploring this inner world, using analytic insight and contempla-tive concentration to extend their awareness into every crevice of ex- perience. They used the manipulation of dreams and inner visions to visit lucidly the territories of the unconscious. They used focused dis- identification with coarse subjectivity to gain access to the subtlest level of sentience. And they used an augmented sense of mindfulness and memory to gain access to past life experience, including the dreamlike experiences of the between states traversed from death to birth."

THE MUMMY

Ernest A. Wallis Budge 1893

Page 350

"The quality of the papyrus depended entirely upon the class of plant used in its manu-facture. The colour of the papyri that have come down to us varies greatly, from a rich brown to a whitish-grey; the texture of some is exceedingly coarse, and of others fine and silky. The width of papyri varies from six to seventeen inches, and the longest papyrus known (Harris, No. I, B.M. 9999) measures 135 feet in length. The finest hiero-glyphic papyri of the Book of the Dead are about fifteen inches in width, and when they contain a tolerably full number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet long

135 1+3+5 = 9

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