Like most people, I longed to be immortal, but was trained to believe that I was not. I could not be; I was a body, and that was that....
I saw too much of death and of the end of things when I was in medical school . . . working on a cadaver and subsequently in the hospitals watching the last breaths of life. I witnessed the last peaceful expirations of my own mother.
All of this seemed to me like the end of things. It was attended by fear, great fear. More than that, hopelessness, helplessness, despair as I attended those with chronic and incurable disease. Cancer wasted away the body, and there was nothing left toward the end. What could I do? Give false hope? Deny the oncoming death of the body? Give potions of morphine both physically and mentally? All of this was all that I could do.
I could pray, but I could not believe at that time that prayer meant anything, and whether there was such a thing as God who would intervene in the affairs of men. The body was the body and religion was religion and ne'er the two would meet. But --
Some twenty years ago I began to learn about Eastern psychologies, their beliefs in re-incarnation, the immortality of the soul who we are. It seemed strange to me. But there was a call to religion when I heard, "I am God and God is within me." "I am part of God." This seemed somehow to make sense; a molecule in the ocean. Which is the ocean and which the molecule? Each is total, and each is in the other. The one in the All and the All in the one. So it was taught, and so it seemed to be, and so it is that we are one, and we are eternal, and we are together and we are separate in our identities -- together.
How does all this play out in terms of life as we live it?
Clinical evidence seemed to weigh in upon me more and more to vivify and enlighten the teachings which had come. I saw and I learned and I remembered that the "I" is within me. That the "I" who I am today is not very different, if different at all, from the "I" who I was when I was four, when I was six, when I was eleven, when I was thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-five. Student, father, grandfather -- the "I," the eternal, remained the same. The "I" remains in a dream; the "I" remains in meditation; the "I" is out there hovering above me as I watch myself in self-seeking, self-searching, self-conscious contemplation. In meditation, prayer, the "I" is the Witness who watches as it is indeed a part of everything that exists now and forever. So the "I" is who I am even as the body changes.
And then I treated a triple amputee. He had been run over in his car by a train, and had survived. He was unhappy; he was handicapped; he was brave; he was trying; he was sad. But his inner self had not changed, neither in basic self-concept nor in his hopes for the future nor in the person he dreamed himself to be at night. And then I treated quadriplegics and paraplegics and those who had dwarfed in the body from old-age. Yet they remained, they remained, they remained as they were.
The poem, "Nurse Look At Me" [July 1996 issue] detailing the 90-year-old woman who was found dead on the floor of an Israeli nursing home, recounted who she was; not the doddering, slobbering old thing who existed just before she was found, but rather the young girl, the young adolescent, the young mother, a mother in full bloom, a grandmother and so on. Always the "I," much like the Witness, remaining, hovering over the scene, deep within the core, always eternal within the body.
And then there are so many discoveries of life after death. There are the life-after-death stories gathered by Raymond Moody, the stories of those who beckon in the other realm, the stories of those who have died indeed and been brought back by electro-shock applied to the heart, the stories of those in coma who nevertheless know everything that is going on. All of this bespeaks an eternal consciousness, hovering above, different from the body, even from the brain.
And then there are studies in reincarnation beginning with Professor Ian Stevenson who reported in exhaustive, even boring, detail the adventures of those who are reborn in India, recognizing places they were not to recognize, having lived there before. Stories about reincarnation which are influencing present life are coming more and more to the fore as our psychoanalytically trained, psychodynamically thinking clinicians find the effects of past lives as they influence our lives now. All of this is now being reported in the scientific tradition of Freud himself, bearing out the same witness to the importance of active, albeit unconscious memories as they are carried over from previous lives.
Putting all of this together, is there not a round gem of evidence, the many facets describing the jewel which say that we are indeed more than the body, different from the body, existent beyond the body when the body dies. These are the evidences: the eternal "I," the remainder of the "I" as the body has changed -- even withered or lost a part of itself, the near-death and after-death experiences of those who have come back, always telling the story the same; the scientific stories which are now being carried on to bear witness to those introspective, investigative knowledges brought to us by the Eastern sages of the past who have been studying the introspective realm for centuries, nay for millennia.
And is it not well for us to know that we are immortal? Is it not a promise and at the same time a moral obligation? If we can fool our contemporaries; if we can hide our sins and selfishnesses now, can we hide them from the eternal "I" who will come back to continue the journey onward, but at the cost of having to make up for the sins and harms committed in this lifetime? Are we not morally rewarded when we know that as we ascend the ladder of karma we will indeed be rewarded for our good deeds in growing ever closer to love, ever closer to our brethren and sisters, ever closer to God Himself, becoming a part of God. The molecule in the ocean, the molecule containing the God within the All. More than that, knowing the eternal powers of the "I" we also know the powers of the body: the mind, the "I," can repair the seemingly incurable. This I have learned, and this I have transmitted to my patients, and this has brought them hope and even cures of the incurable.
Love is all; Love is eternal. And so are we.
Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. is the co-author (with Patricia Joudry) of Twin Souls: A Guide to Finding Your True Spiritual Partner, published by Carol Southern Books, an imprint of Crown Publishers, New York.
Dr. Pressman is Emeritus Chairman of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University Health Sciences Center. He is Medical Director at the Center for Psychiatric Wellness, clinics that operate in Philadelphia and Haddonfield, N.J. These clinics bridge traditional and spiritual psychotherapy. Dr Pressman can be reached at 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106; telephone 215-922-0204.