DEATH: LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

Many things inform what we hold to be true in our lives. For example, sensory empiricism is the method of understanding objective reality that grounds modern science. From this perspective, what is true is what we can experience and measure with our five senses. From this lens of perception, we are able to define reality based on its physical nature; we are real in terms of our own embodiment. But other dimensions can be seen as unreal by or are excluded within the scientific worldview. Traditional science and medicine typically treat mystical states and contemplative or intuitive knowing as the result of delusion or pathology. Yet insights and experiences that transcend easy physical explanations play a powerful role in how people understand death and what may lie beyond. Such ineffable insights can catalyze shifts in our perceptions of reality. It is also possible that such experiences can remain unexplored or ignored, depending on a person’s life circumstances, awareness, or cognitive defense mechanisms. Bringing intention and awareness to our worldview around death can turn a painful experience into a gift. It may lead to alterations in our goals, values, and priorities… How we respond to direct encounters with death and existence beyond the physical is very personal. The people profiled in this book offer different ways of knowing and different ways of identifying what is true for each of us. Developing the capacity for equanimity in the face of difficult or out-of-the-ordinary encounters can lead to feelings of connectedness and balance. Questions of life beyond death can be met with curiosity and inquisitiveness, and our questioning may occur within or outside of spiritual practices. Having an experience with death can have profound transformative potential, regardless of our spiritual or religious orientation. Perhaps the great work of the twenty-first century is to develop our capacities to hold multiple ways of knowing and appreciate the diversity of perspectives that make up the whole of our shared human experience. Each of us holds a piece of the puzzle. There is no one experience, no one ontology, that trumps all the others. This pluralistic view may invite each of us to bring a sense of humility, compassion, appreciation, gratefulness, and interconnectedness to our relationship with death and what may lie beyond the physical. It is this range of perspectives that are explored in this book. Death truly can make life possible. At the time I met him, Gilbert Walking Bull was an elder of his Lakota tribe. He saw himself as a bridge-maker between worlds. He grew up in a small village on the Pine Ridge Reservation, at the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota. Raised by traditional holy people, he was chosen by the spirits to serve Tunkasila, or the Great Spirit. Walking Bull was trained by his grandfather, who also worked in the spirit world (wanaoi, in the Lakota language). His grandfather, like Walking Bull, “was color blind; he healed all people, and people respected him.” It took courage for Walking Bull to share his worldview with those outside his tribe. Many of his people would not have wanted him to communicate his cultural knowledge to the non-Indian world. Yet he felt that the Great Spirit guided him to impart the healing power of his tradition “so it can help others down the line.” … Walking Bull described his unique childhood and being raised on the reservation. It is where all the holy men lived at one time. They worked together. They didn’t want to lose our Lakota culture and religion, so they found kids that they kept out of the reservation schools, and they raised them in the traditional Lakota ways. I happened to be one of them. I never went to school, but I have been in ceremonies and guided by my grandfathers… In order to understand these things, you must study to become familiar with and reach the unseen world. To reach the unseen world, you must come from your faith and belief within—not from a book. But to learn from people who have a strong religious or spiritual path to teach and guide you how to concentrate, pray, sacrifice, then you will feel the Great Spirit’s energy and power… The lens of diverse spiritual traditions provide us with resources for transforming the fear of death. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and advocate for a new, more spiritually evolved science. He shared with me his own views on death: I think contemplating dying is essential to how we live. If you’re afraid of death or you’re in denial of death, then your life has to be a kind of evasion of death, or keeping yourself so busy you can’t think about it. I think one of the great advantages of most traditional religions is that they make people less afraid of death. Death is scary, especially if it is painful. But they make people less afraid of death because there’s a feeling that death is a transition. If you believe that death is the end and the mind just goes blank, you may be scared of that or scared of growing old. So anything that makes people less afraid of dying is probably a great help in the way that people live their lives. In truth, it is hard to find anyone who is exactly from one tradition. Cultures blend. They inform one another. Each of the wisdom holders that I spoke with is influenced by his or her own and others traditions and customs. They are bridge people who walk between worldviews, tending their own while holding a sense of curiosity and appreciation for alternative perspectives.