{"id":2195,"date":"2011-07-03T20:36:31","date_gmt":"2011-07-04T01:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2195"},"modified":"2011-07-04T12:37:58","modified_gmt":"2011-07-04T17:37:58","slug":"the-zen-of-near-death-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2195","title":{"rendered":"The Zen of Near Death Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a \u201cdaisan\u201d talk with my sensei (Zen teacher) recently, we delved into the ever-popular subject of death. We had started the discussion with a koan about change, (Zuigan’s “Everlasting Principle”<\/a>) and then got around to fear and the anxiety caused by change. But ultimately, all the roads of change and fear lead to death. I don’t think that we resolved anything \u2013 Zen inherently resolves nothing \u2013 but at least we were both being honest. <\/p>\n

What do we humans fear so much about death? Well, for me, it’s the idea of no more consciousness. No more experiences. No more knowing myself and the world around me. During our little discussion, I told the sensei that I realize that during any night of normal sleep, we lose all of our consciousness for a period. No dreams, no sensations, no nothing. It’s about the same as being under anesthesia. So what is so terrible about that? Nothing \u2013 no fear, no anxiety, no suffering \u2013 no hell. That moment of \u201cblack sleep\u201d seems very natural (when you’re conscious, anyway). It isn’t a great tragedy. So why should a permanent state like that be seen as such a great tragedy?<\/p>\n

And yet, consciousness itself seems so different from the doings of the objective world, something entirely special, \u201csui generis\u201d, something that represents a gift from \u201csomewhere else\u201d. And that is where I ground whatever hope I would have for an after-life; the notion that consciousness is more than an emergent effect from certain highly concentrated and integrated data situations that occur in self-sustaining creatures having great capacities for environmental information input and analysis. The consciousness that we taste in our lives is, under this view, an off-shoot from a greater tree of meta-consciousness. And somehow the events of our own lives and our own local consciousness somehow accumulate in that meta-conscious realm, and will continue dynamically even after the earthly basis for consciousness as we know it goes the way of all earthly things. That would be my hope.<\/p>\n

But my thoughts about the \u201cdead mind\u201d of the night, and the occasional experience of general anesthesia, give me doubt about this theory \/ hope (wishful thinking, for sure). The stream of our conscious lives sometimes stops; the physical factors that support it end, temporarily anyway. And during this time, most of us (including myself) don’t claim to experience any sort of \u201chigher consciousness\u201d mediated beyond the boundaries of our known physical universe. During the night, or during a medical operation, we just disappear. (Yes, I know that some people do hear and remember things from their operations; but many do not). If there is some sort of trans-universal physicality that would mediate a \u201cmeta consciousness\u201d where life after death would occur, where arguably the experiences of our lives are already stored and building up, why don’t we remember experiencing it when we come back from our blackouts?<\/p>\n

The only out I could see from this dead-end to the hope for an after-life would be if somehow, the body’s processes that restore our conscious awareness after a nightly black-out or an operation somehow prevent the \u201cnext realm\u201d from breaking into our minds and neurons. And by the same coin, something about the process of dying tears down that separation, such that our consciousness does transition over to that other realm, like the fire from one candle lighting another just as the last trace of wax on the first candle melts away. <\/p>\n

At the moment, I have no good conjectures or theories whatsoever on why a dying body would remove an informational wall that a living body maintains against this \u201cultimate realm\u201d. But from a wild-ass guess perspective, might it have something to do with some sort of quantum-like weirdness involving super-positioned information states regarding this \u201clife information\u201d? I.e., could the integrated information of consciousness influence two places at once through wave coherence, as a quantum particle can; but only “de-cohere” and become manifest in one of these places? Would that allow the alternate state (“in heaven” or whatever) to manifest once the informational interference on this earthly end stops? Sigh, who knows . . . <\/p>\n

The only clue that we might have in this regard is something that I have assiduously avoided all my life; the topic of \u201cnear death experiences\u201d. If there was something tenable about NDE’s, if consciousness did continue when the thalamus-cortical loops could not sustain consciousness during a situation where a failure cascade in the system of the body (the \u201cnear death\u201d) would normally cause a permanent cessation of conscious informational looping, then maybe there is some hope that when the body dies, there is an \u201cother side\u201d to see you on. But I don’t want to invest all of my faith in an afterlife in NDE’s. They might be totally debunked at some point. A lot of scientists have a lot of reasonable-sounding explanations for the many reported NDE’s. <\/p>\n

And yet . . . for what it’s worth, the Wikipedia entry on NDE’s<\/a> doesn’t appear to totally rule out the idea that consciousness transcends known physical brain processes. I was rather surprised at the amount of attention and resources going into this topic. I guess that I’m not the only one feeling like my hope for an eternal tomorrow ride on whether there’s more to the NDE thing than delusions explainable from unusual (but not impossible) states of physical brain activity during physical trauma, or just people making things up to gain attention. A lot of scientists seem to believe the whole thing is hogwash, or explainable by known neurophysical processes. But nonetheless, there is an International Association for Near-death Studies and a Journal of Near Death Studies. Where there is a \u201cjournal\u201d, there is usually an open question involved. <\/p>\n

And then there is Dr. Sam Parnia<\/a>, a former skeptical researcher who now thinks there might be something novel happening at least in some instances (\u201cMIGHT\u201d being the key word here — i.e., worth further investigation). Other NDE researchers point out that many features of these experiences are not influenced by culture or age or religious views; there seem to be some universals involved in the reports given by those who \u201ccome back to testify\u201d. Unless NDE’s are entirely programmed in the genes, that would seem unusual from an organ (the brain) where environment and dynamical chaos and path-dependency are so prominent.<\/p>\n

But once again — who knows. As the song title by The Atlanta Rhythm Section goes, \u201cI’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight\u201d. I hope to drop off into that black region of no consciousness, with no bright lights at the end of a tunnel, no reunions with loved ones, no feelings of boundless love. And if I die before I wake \u2013 well, hey, I did the best I could. My sensei could ask for no more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During a \u201cdaisan\u201d talk with my sensei (Zen teacher) recently, we delved into the ever-popular subject of death. We had started the discussion with a koan about change, (Zuigan’s “Everlasting Principle”) and then got around to fear and the anxiety caused by change. But ultimately, all the roads of change and fear lead to death. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}