|
|
CONSCIOUS LIVING AND DYING
Recent personal experience has revealed how collective beliefs affect emotions and behaviors at the crucial stages of death and transition. As intelligent beings we have paid insufficient attention to the confusing impact of mixed messages in popular religious and scientific dogma. This leads to unresolved and unnecessary fears that pervade every aspect of the process. American society expends a great deal of energy and resources to psychologically deny the reality of death. We treat it as unnatural, something that is not honestly talked about with the young in families and schools. We pay theological and medical professionals to handle it. When we do talk about it we cloak it in an aura of either a mystical "going home" or a "clinical cessation of biological life." It is neither of those. For most of us it involves messy biological functions and exceedingly complex emotions, ideas and communications. We apply no preventative thinking to the topic, even though early life-style choices, to a very large extent, determine when and how each individual faces death. When it rears its head, we hope to fence it off, treat it in a technical or clinical fashion and get it over with as quickly as possible. We too easily believe the myths of Supernaturalism or Modernity: When I get ill, modern medicine will keep me well until death becomes inevitable and then I will go peacefully. God will take care of me and keep me from suffering. The difficult stories happen to someone else. Somehow, I'll manage to escape. My extended family has been engaged recently with the certainty of dying as an inevitable aspect of living. Until faced with the imminent prospect of such a profound transition, we easily maintained facile beliefs about reality. But my half-brother Earl's two-year struggle with cancer has pulled his wife and children, our mother and sisters, and all of our familial attachments into a vortex of ambiguity that only an unnatural approach to death can bring. We can no longer blithely ignore deep questions that ultimately require attention. "How does it feel to die? Does its form have meaning for me? Can I postpone it? What actually happens to us? Is physical death a transition to something else?" Finally facing these questions forces us to come to grips with doubts or internal contradictions in our core beliefs. For months, the members of my brother's church assured him and themselves of the power of their God to heal him. They proclaimed their faith that he would rise and walk again. Because he had believed all the sermons for several years, he fervently sought healing prayers. While this temporarily boosted his spirits, it unintentionally built up expectations that crumbled into despair. When the condition of his body reached the point where he began to believe he would not survive, the psychological crutch easily constructed by those standing around his bed could not console him. His religious conditioning had made it impossible for him to accept his death as a natural consequence of life. At this stage, church members had to change the message. Unable to state why he should be taken at a relatively young age, they urged him to accept that it must be his God's will. This led to questions. "Why me?" "What have I done?" "Do I have no choice in the matter?" They now told him that their God 's purpose was unknowable, and had to be taken on faith. Faced with the possibility of divine judgment, Earl panicked. Of course they assured him that in his case, his judgment would be favorable, because he had accepted the creed of their church. Earl was very confused. First, he thought professing belief would heal him, and had difficulty understanding why it had not done so. Then he thought, "Perhaps I have been too bad a sinner." (He had been a faithful husband and a supportive father. His few youthful escapades would not have made the headlines of the local paper had they been known.) In periods of fragmented consciousness, he emotionally searched for clues of why God had sentenced him to death. Crying that his earlier professions of faith, accepted and reinforced by his church members, had not worked, he could no longer find peace in words of ritual prayer. Bewildered, he questioned why a God who could heal him would refuse to do so. In phrases disjointed by cancer among his synapses, he confessed, to anyone who would listen, every little negative event in his life he could recall. When out-of-body experiences and a life review started in his altered states, he was quite frightened. Both his church and materialist friends thought he was simply delusional due to the cancer eating his brain. Dismissing them as accidental dreams, they had no inkling of the subconscious work being done. He had never been told the meaning of his subtle-energy, noumenal forms. While he laughed with us at joyful memories, he wept at the negative ones. Afraid they added charcoal to the fires of his punishment; he could not see their value as lessons in the journey of a personal consciousness. In ultimate irony, a religion created to control behavior through fear of an imagined God could not assuage Earl's fear of meeting that same God. When he hopefully requested singing of the song "Just As I Am," the church group substituted "Sinner, Come Home." Instead of supporting a nonjudgmental transition, they denied to the end that a natural death follows a natural life. What if we could naturally deal with these issues long before our time for transition actually approaches? Would it change the way we live our lives? Would it make a difference when the moment arrives? I believe it would be invaluable to incorporate from the beginning of life an awareness of its physical ending. As we have re-learned the benefits of conscious, natural birthing (with the minimum of artificial intervention), it is time to re-assess the value of conscious, natural dying. The latter merits our explicit celebration as much as the former. We have sufficient evidence to start reinforcing children's knowing that they could have lived before and will likely incarnate again. Many techniques exist to help us maintain use of the inner senses while we develop the physical, rational side of ourselves. Developing the multidimensional awareness possessed by each conscious being would make it possible for us to deliberately communicate with each other at the time of transition (as in The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Being keenly aware that the way we live determines the way we die would affect the way we treat our bodies and what we put into them. Recognition of the effects of environmental (physical and emotional) pollutants on the quality of dying as well as living would change personal habits and institutional policies. Awareness of a consciousness that transcends this physical incarnation would make us open to enjoying the depth of our inner senses throughout our lives. Practice with multidimensionality at the peak of life would lessen the fear of experiencing it as death approaches.
|
Homepage