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Don’t let these accounts of the near-death experience, which are so inspiring, lull you into believing that all you have to do in order to dwell in such states of peace and bliss is to die. It is not, and could not be, that simple.
— Sogyal Rinpoche
The Being of Light engulfed me, and as it did I began to experience my whole life, feeling and seeing everything that had happened to me.
— Dannion Brinkley, recounting his first near-Death experience Questioner: Is reincarnation real?
Ram Dass: To the extent that you are real, so is reincarnation.
In the last few decades, Death has begun to come out of the closet in the Western world.1 One of the primary catalysts for this was the pioneering work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with the terminally ill. Her landmark book, On Death And Dying, published in 1970, brought much-needed attention to the actual process of dying, restoring some dignity and authenticity to the whole process, in stark contrast to the professionally hushed euphemisms of the funeral industry. Also having a potent impact on Death awareness was Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, published in 1975, which described astonishing similarities in the near-Death experiences (NDEs) of very different people. Not surprisingly, so-called out-of-the-body experiences (OOBEs), which often form an integral part of NDEs, were also finding an increasingly interested audience beyond the marginal occult fascination with so-called astral travel, especially through the writing and work of Robert Monroe.2
Around the same time, in a study devoted to the actual experience of dying, psychiatrist Russell Noyes concluded that “life and death, rather than being dichotomous, are inseparably woven.”3 Noyes also later investigated the effects of having had a close encounter with Death, basing his study on 215 individuals who had had NDEs.4 Twenty-three percent reported a greater appreciation
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of life, and 25 percent reported a deeper awareness of Death, along with a new sense of Death’s closeness. Also, 41 percent claimed that their fear of Death was reduced as a result of their NDE. All in all, apparently a positive, life-affirming experience.
The NDE work of Moody, Noyes, and others, helpful as it was in bringing the topic of Death more into the foreground, had at least one major shortcoming: The NDE became glamorized. If having — or claiming to have had — an OOBE was on the curriculum for obtaining a psychic baccalaureate, having an NDE was one of the surest tickets to a higher degree.
“I died and came back” is a tough act to follow, especially given the tendency of NDE investigation to not sufficiently take into account the egoic appropriation — and resulting distortion — of transpersonal elements of the experience (discussed later).
In the late 1970s Kübler-Ross’s approach became more overtly metaphysical, giving the more conservatively inclined an excuse to discredit her work. I recall attending a five-day residential “Death and Dying” group led by her in 1981, at which she not only tirelessly and compassionately facilitated cathartic work (so as to help participants “complete unfinished business”), but also spoke at length about the “indisputable” reality of OOBEs and the remarkable metamorphosis afforded by Death. Her central simile was that of being liberated like a butterfly (leaving its cocoon) at Death, an image immensely appealing to many, but not so appealing to others. For example, existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom criticized such a notion of Death as being but “denial-based consolation,” saying that it demonstrated self-deception on Kübler-Ross’s part.5
Maybe, but Yalom’s apparently tougher, apparently more existential — or theoretically more unflinching — position regarding Death may itself constitute a denial of the possible transpersonal or transformational dimensions of Death. That the validation of such dimensions eludes current scientific methodology does not disprove their existence.6 After all, how valid is a search for validity that is conducted only through the parameters of the rational mind?
Kübler-Ross’s butterfly simile, which she used extensively to help explain Death to terminally ill children, originated from the time when as a young woman she went, shortly after World War II, into the Nazi death camps for children.
Scratched into the walls beside the children’s bunks were not only messages to
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parents and loved ones never again to be seen, but also many tracings of butterflies. Some, like Yalom, might view this as simply signalling a desire to escape, to somehow “fly away,” but Kübler-Ross eventually interpreted it as an actual intuiting of the nature of Death.
So do we have escape or transcendence here? I’d say both, and perhaps something else too — radical acceptance. When Death comes to children, they reportedly often display a wisdom far beyond their years, as if their evolution has been accelerated.7
In my group with Kübler-Ross, I found her convictions about Death and various related metaphysical concerns, to be marred by concretized literalism.
Most of the group appeared to uncritically absorb all her assertions. Such an unquestioning hearing also seems to be present in many considerations of NDE phenomena, as though what has been reported must be literally so.
Although I am not aligned with those who would explain away NDEs as mere neurological anomalies, I question those claims that glamorize NDEs , or that present those who have had such experiences as “survivors of Death.”
Survivors? After all, these are not the experiences of those who have died, but of those who have nearly died (varying according to their degree of approximation to actual biological death). Tibetan Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse says that the NDE “is a phenomenon that belongs to the natural bardo of this life,”8 rather than to the actual bardo of Death. (“Bardo” is Tibetan for “gap,” being an “interval of suspension”9 or a transitional reality in which the possibility of spiritual awakening is intensified.)
Adi Da further de-glamorizes the NDE, stating that NDE phenomena are
“typically valued merely as signs of personal, egoic survival.”10 This might be encapsulated as: “I had a NDE; therefore I am, and will continue to be.”
Fine, if “I” is truly transegoic, knowingly inseparable from Being, but not so fine if “I” is just egoity swathed in spirituality’s robes.
Adi Da goes on to say that NDE phenomena are simply “signs that something is falling away rather than continuing,” but that when people return to everyday consciousness, “they concretize the phenomena they encountered, [claiming]
that they are now more easeful because they survived death [my italics].”11 Of course, they did not really survive Death, except in the sense that all of us, while alive, are surviving Death.
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Furthermore, is not every experience, however superficial or ordinary, literally a near-Death experience? Can we ever conclusively say — or prove — that we are far from Death?
Whether “I” has ordinary or extraordinary experiences, it is still “I”. How comforting it can be to conceive of Death as a haven for “I” or as a benign gateway toward a better or more spiritual “I”! The story goes like this: We die, and we — if we have behaved properly — get resurrected, deposited, or reborn into a domain clearly preferable to our earthly home. Yet as naive as this may be, it contains, however distortedly, some sense of the timeless sublimity that we may sometimes intuit in moments of real openness; and that sublimity, suffused as it often is by a peace that surpasses understanding, sure can feel like Home. Perhaps our major difficulty here is that we want to be, and remain, in that “place” without doing the preparatory work that would enable us to do so.
Also, we’re likely to conceive of such a “place” in a dualistic context — as if it really is a somewhere for a somebody to go toward — forgetting that it is already the Ground of Nondual Being, to be recognized and embraced not by the
“me” of egoity (whatever its spiritual credentials), but rather by the “me” that is, and fully recognizes itself to be, none other than Nondual Being making an appearance as a somebody.
The “me” of egoity, necessary as it may be for conducting the business of everyday life, is inherently fearful, suffering not only from a case of mistaken identity, but also from existential separation anxiety (“Hell is other people,”
said Sartre). In the presence of such fear, it’s quite understandable that we would seek compensatory comforts, projecting ourselves into the future with enough conviction to create the illusion that we will persist, persist, and persist some more.
Given that Death spares no one, then Death anxiety ought to be right at the heart of psychopathology. The fact that it apparently isn’t is a testament to our capacity for distraction. We need to ask, and ask more than superficially: How much of what we are doing is actually motivated by our fear of Death? Or, from another angle, how much of what we are doing is motivated by our sense of presumed separateness? Lining our prison cell with spiritual books, making it more luxurious, or expanding it may ease us, but doing so does not free us, and in fact distracts us from recognizing and using the already-open
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cell door, the exit that becomes visible when Freedom becomes more important to us than security.
One of the most common ways to assuage Death anxiety — and the bulk of such anxiety may be unconscious — is to conceive of ourselves as somebody special, which leads to strategies like compulsive heroism, exaggerated individualism, let’s-get-ahead aggression, and narcissism. In such practices fester more than a few overblown, dysfunctional cries of “I matter!” (Ironically, we do matter, every last one of us, but not as agents of self-glorifying egoity and its supporting cast.)
The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helps immunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-now instability, and innate insubstantialness.
Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself — as in those programs that have (or advertise) as their central agenda the eradication of ego — it is still an
“I” who has now achieved the incomparable goal of self-transcendence!
“Look, Ma, no ego!” we announce as we unicycle past our rapt inner audience, too proud to notice our pride, forgetting that self-conceit persists well into advanced transpersonal stages of development.
In our craving to be somebody special — and don’t forget that we may find our specialness through being “nobody” — we bypass exploration of that very craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreams than to actually awakening from them.
And even when the dream is investigated, studied, analyzed, even integrated, what about the actual dreamer, the dream ego, the conceptual center of the dream? The investigation of that apparent self cannot be conducted by
“I,” but rather by that which relates not from “I” but to “I.” Such inquiry does not make the dreamer any more special than anything else in the dream, and in fact decentralizes and dethrones the dreamer to such an extent that a truer sense of identity than that of dream-state egoity or waking-state egoity emerges.12
Our ultimate identity, which is never other than always already exactly here, awaits our undivided attention. As we decentralize our headquarters, no longer insisting that Life must revolve around our separative self-sense, we enter that which we never really left but only dreamt we did.
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which basically is a series of instructions for making as liberating as possible use of the after-Death state, does not portray a rosy picture of what allegedly occurs after Death, although it does make abundantly clear that true liberation (or a full Awakening to our real nature) is possible at many points during the after-Death state. This, however, is impossible if we remain self-involved, self-possessed, and self-contracted, committing ourselves to acting as if we are a somebody who is busy having experiences.
In our presumed separateness, we may not only seek to fortify our “I”-ness, but may also seek union with what appeals to us. (There is, of course, a difference between seeking union and recognizing it, just as there is a difference between recognizing union and being it.)
But what about that which upsets or disgusts or frightens us? How eager are we to seek union with that? We may extol the virtues of “Oneness,” but just how inclusive is the circle through which we extend (or purport to extend) ourselves? Consider the following — describing the “wrathful deities”
apparently “met” in the after-Death state — from Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:13
The fifty-eight blazing, blood-drinking wrathful deities will appear, transformed from the previous peaceful deities. But now they are not like they were before; this is the bardo of the wrathful deities, so one is overpowered by intense fear and it becomes more difficult to recognize. The mind has no self-control and feels faint and dizzy, but if there is a little recognition liberation is easy, because with the arising of overwhelming fear the mind has no time to be distracted, and so it concentrates one-pointedly.
But is this really later? Is not Death here, now? So how do we respond to hellish conditions now? How do we react when we find ourselves in a nightmare, face to face with the 3-D, living-color projections of our worst fears? If we typically retreat or grab for the familiar, is it not likely that we would behave similarly in the after-Death state (assuming, of course, that it exists)?
When the “Ground Luminosity” (or natural radiance of primordial Being) of the bardo of dying and Death passes without being recognized by us as being none other than our intrinsic nature,14 then there supposedly occurs a kind of psychogravitational process (perhaps catalyzed by the very energy that “we” put into maintaining our sense of separateness) that generates color, then various shapings and visions.15 These visions all “ask” to be recognized as
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being just projections of our mind, non-separate from the very consciousness that is aware of them.
This is easier said than done, of course (an arguably parallel task being, during one’s sleep-dreams, to recognize everything therein as a dream, including the role one plays).
In order to properly perceive such visions, states Trungpa, “The perceiver of the visions cannot have fundamental, centralized ego.”16 That is, one cannot be only operating from an ego-governed position. A radically different
“position” is needed —namely, the perspective of Being (which, paradoxically, may be more individuated in its expression than its ego-governed counterpart).
A NDE may open one’s heart and transform one’s life for the better, but it generally does not radically decentralize egoity — at least for very long — and may in fact even strengthen it, in sometimes very subtle ways. The certainty that Death is not the end may do more to fuel “I’s” craving for immortality than to spur an actual exploration of the nature of “I.”
This has been unintentionally supported by the glowingly positive pictures conveyed by the majority of NDE reports. The relative rarity of negative NDE accounts — usually reported to be less than 10 percent17 — may reflect an actual scarcity of such experiences, but probably has more to do with an aversion to recollecting them, such as is often the case with traumatic events.
And negative NDEs may not be all that rare, according to some (like Maurice Rawlings, author of To Hell and Back).
Also, it may be that the majority of those having NDEs do not journey far or long enough “into” their near-Death reality to actually have to encounter the potentially terrifying visions or implications suggested in sources as diverse as The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bible’s Book of Revelation. That is, they may have been returned to conventional reality before their honeymoon with
“The Light” was over (the Wrathful Deities of Tibetan Buddhism apparently are not encountered until about a week after one’s death).
Extraordinary as the experiences of NDEs are, they may be no more than
“hallucinated phenomena that arise from the stimulation of the brain during the withdrawal of energy and attention from the body.”18 Whether such phenomena are heavenly or hellish is not as important as the actual lens through which they are viewed — and even created. That is, who, or what, is the experiencer,
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and who, or what, is aware of this supposed experiencer? We’ll revisit these and related questions later; for now, let’s close this chapter with a quote from Sogyal Rinpoche:
Wouldn’t it be tragic if this central message of the near-death experience — that life is inherently sacred and must be lived with sacred intensity and purpose — was obscured and lost in a facile romanticizing of death?19
NOTES
1. The HBO series “Six Feet Under” is a recent (and superbly presented) example of this.
2. Monroe, 1971.
3. Noyes, 1972, p. 183.
4. Noyes, 1980.
5. Yalom, 1980, p. 108.
6. Science need not — and should not — be discarded here. What is needed is a science conducted through intimacy with what is being studied. Trying to minimize researcher bias — as through a removed or sterilized “objectivity” — can itself be just another sort of bias, often leading to a distance from our subject, a distance that can easily obscure data obtainable only through intimacy with our subject.
7. Medical psychotherapist and grief expert Ellen Kalm describes (personal communication, 1997) a six year-old dying child once saying to her, “Just think of me as a book on loan from the library — it’s time for me to check back in.” Check out Melvin Morse’s books on NDEs in children.
8. Sogyal Rinpoche, 1992, p. 332.
9. Fremantle & Trungpa, 1975, p. 21.
10. Da Free John, 1983, p. 49.
11. Ibid., p. 50.
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12. Thomas Hora (cited in Bugental, 1976, p. 303) zeroes in on the consequences of letting “I” assume the driver’s seat: “The tragic element of the human condition is rooted in that cognitive deficiency which underlies the desire of man to confirm his self as reality.”
13. Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 134-135. According to Trungpa, the Wrathful Deities have as their main function the cutting of “the continuity of the self-preservation of the ego; that is their wrathful quality” (Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 66-67). It’s important to note that such wrath has nothing to do with even the subtlest ego-based ferocity; it is anger completely devoid of hatred. As such, it is a transegoic awakening force, inviting deep transformation. The fear (or shock) it inspires may be enormous, but such fear (or shock), in its very intensity, may be so immune to distraction that one’s mind is brought into a radically acute single-pointed focus, thereby permitting, at least in potential, a kind of insight and action not otherwise possible.
14. In speaking of NDEs, Stephen Levine asks (1997, p. 123): “How few returning were so well prepared, so familiar with their own great nature that they recognized
14. In speaking of NDEs, Stephen Levine asks (1997, p. 123): “How few returning were so well prepared, so familiar with their own great nature that they recognized