Lent 2020 - Day 11
In his most famous soliloquy, To be or not to be, Shakespeare has his protagonist Hamlet ponder upon life and death:
"To die, to sleep,[I have long held that minds of humanity's greatest artists - from Shakespeare to Bowie - have entertained insights that speak of glimpses into past lives. They have been able to give voice to these insights thanks to the gift with which they were born, which they then developed, leaving their art to the Ages.]
Perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
Here, Shakespeare posits the notion of maintaining consciousness after death, likening the experience to dreaming. We all dream - it is a function of sleep. Despite all our advances in science, we still know very little about what goes on within the brain while we sleep, and how that squares with the subjective impressions we experience as we do so.
We all dream, yet how we dream differs from person to person. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. Researchers seeks correlations between dreaming and our knowledge of how the brain functions. Oneirology is different to dream interpretation - it's a quantitative study of the process of dreaming, rather than a search for what they 'mean'. Dreambooks that say, for example that dreaming of something foretells a death whilst dreaming of something else foretells money problems, are of no interest to oneirologists - nor to me.
Many people have no recollection of their dreams; other than being conscious of the fact that they dreamt of something as they slept, the content of those dreams is a jumble of everyday things, people and happenings. Most of my dreams are a confusion of elements - geographically set in a Polish England or in an English Poland; sometimes people from my past would pop by, the plot makes no sense. This is known as illusory dreaming. Every now and then I have a 'birth canal' dream of squeezing through a very tight passage (this one was a classic). There are also dreams of social awkwardness - such as being naked in public, or being lost, or being late. But these are quite common dreams, ones that need no metaphysical explanation. [Interestingly, in these dreams I am ageless, neither old nor young, I am experiencing the purest essence of 'me-ness'.]
But I have had, 20, 30 times, maybe in my life, dreams that are almost impossible to explain away in rational terms. Dreams that square in terms of the Unities of time, place and action. There's no weirdness; nothing's illogical or mixed up. This is known as authentic dreaming. Here's the interesting thing: a significant number of the ones I have had clearly do not come from my lifetime. Here's one and here's another. Both are literally amazing.
A dream I had as a teenager... the Pacific War, 1944 or '45. I am wading ashore from a ship, one of a long line of American soldiers, maybe sailors, headed towards an atoll. There's no shooting - the battle was over days ago; everyone's relaxed. We're carrying heavy wooden crates - ammunition? Spares? It's a warm day, very pleasant. The sky is clear; high up in the heavens, we can see fleets of silvery bombers heading north towards Japan. The scene is similar to this, but looking the other way, towards the beach, away from the ships anchored some way out. We are not wearing helmets, some men are stripped to the waist or in vests, no one is carrying weapons. Just crates. The sky in the zenith is a very deep blue; the sun glinting off the wings and fuselages of the bombers. I can still recall perfectly the way that dream felt to me then, so many years ago. [I write these words today sitting just a few feet from where I dreamt that dream!]
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| Scenes from my dreams |
What that means - are there parallel universes into which we glimpse? (the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics) - is out there to be discovered.
The science? We are at the cutting edge here. The 'hard problem of consciousness' is something that's bothered the philosophers for a while, but the science of how we slip in and out of consciousness and what happens as we sleep is moving ahead. I am particularly interested in the work of Stuart Hameroff, an American anaesthesiologist, who together with renowned British physicist Sir Roger Penrose has come up with a theory of consciousness that posits that it happens at the quantum-physics level within the neurons of the brain (rather than between the neurons) - within the microtubules inside the brain's neurons. As an anaesthesiologist, Prof Hameroff has seen people slipping in an out of consciousness all his working life; yet science is still not quite sure how this happens! The Penrose-Hameroff theory is called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (or Orch-OR for short). Orch-OR has been around for well over 20 years; it's been criticised by physicists, biologists and philosophers - but no one has yet come up with a better explanation of how consciousness functions. We shall see how the Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis stands up over the next few decades, whether it will be refined further or proved a dead-end for scientific enquiry.
There is a huge metaphysical mystery at work here. It's not, as some semi-informed rationalists would like to believe, a case of misfiring synapses. Prof Hameroff's work into what goes on within the tubules of the neuron when different anaesthetics are applied suggests that consciousness has that quantum aspect about it that by its very nature creates uncertainty.
Here's an anonymous comment I received on one of my posts from exactly ten years ago; it is spot-on: "Past, present and future co-occur and 'inform' one another. Information 'leaks' into this incarnation from other enacted lives. I am incarnate and disincarnate in different places along my meta-world line."
Brilliantly put. Another person who gets it!
This time two years ago:
Free Will and Quantum Mechanics
This time three years ago:
Good thinking captured - the importance of jotting it down
This time four years ago:
Spirit of place and our own spirituality
This time five years ago:
Poland's road death toll falls but remains too high
This time eight years ago:
My photos turned into beautiful watercolours
This time nine years ago:
Silver birches and blue skies
This time 11 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)
This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)
I think the concept of reincarnation, that we have successive iterations of ourselves, into perpetuity, smacks of a degree of narcissism.
ReplyDeleteWhy would I be SO important to this world, that I could never leave it? When I close my eyes for the last time, I will confidently be able
to say that I have given my best as a daughter, sister, mother, aunt, friend, colleague, neighbour. I’ve given this world more than I’ve
taken. That is ENOUGH for me. I shudder at the thought that I would come back on this mortal coil, to repeat another lifetime. Let someone who has new DNA, or a new constellation of atoms, or whatever you want to call it, take the place of mine.
@Anonymous:
ReplyDelete"Iterations of ourselves" - this is the crucial phrase. No, it is not an iteration of our self. It is but a ghost, a chimera, a slender thread of continuity, a sudden flashback - but into an entirely different set of DNA, an entirely different and unconnected biological entity born into entirely different circumstances. It was not myself, it will not be myself. A rising value of wisdom, one step further away from Zero, one closer to the Whole. The ego must be shed.
OK, then I struggle to understand how wisdom could be passed from one person’s DNA to another person’s DNA, who have lived at different times, under different circumstances. What would be the evolutionary push behind this transfer of knowledge? Perhaps, I am too narrow and practical in my thinking, not ethereal enough. ( Honestly, a little too woo woo for me!)
ReplyDeleteMy simplistic view: We are born, we live, we die - all within one singular body at one singular time. I have had no flashbacks, nor dreams, nor out-of-body experiences reminiscent of other lives, Mostly, I spend my time dealing with life’s complexities in the conscious here and now😊
The sacred and the profane are but an arthritic step apart. Big leaps are not a problem. Catholicism, for example, is not much bothered by or has much to fear from Pastafarians, the Jedi Knights, or atheists. Strike closer to heart though by questioning just one element of it, say, the confession, the virgin birth, etc., even if you were to accept everything else, and fire and brimstone will rain from the pulpits.
ReplyDeleteMaking your own religion? A quest for “the peace of mind” may be a false assumption (Nietzsche). If you start with that, you’ll end up with Christianity. Perhaps the alternative is to accept that everything changes, nothing endures in its essence, and nothing is perfectly satisfying?
Our lot is such that we cannot endure the awareness of our own mortality, so we quest. But could we endure the awareness of our immortality, were that ever made possible? I, for example, keenly await news of the first healing of an amputee by miracle (making the missing limb grow back). That’s where my quest will end.
For future reference, should conversation turn that way, it is useful to remember that the verb “to believe” has two meanings: to want something to be true (and pray) and to suspect something to be true (and experiment).
@Teresa:
ReplyDelete"What would be the evolutionary push behind this transfer of knowledge?"
Spiritual evolution - the desire of the universe for awareness and order - that's my gut feeling. I believe that there's so much that science has yet to grasp. Could consciousness be a property of matter, just as mass and energy are? The universe is unfolding, we are witnessing - willing - it to unfold. From Zero to One - there is a greater purpose. At least I feel it.
I agree, Jacek, that most of us have a tough time enduring the awareness of our own mortality. However, my parents, who both died old, were acutely aware of their mortality at the end of their lives and did not rail against it. They welcomed it. They were sick in body and frail in mind and willingly accepted that it was time to die. Neither, asked their children to apply extensive end-of-life measures to extend their lives. They died a peaceful, painless and dignified death, having made peace with their God. My parents’ final message to their children, which was a gift, was that although they were hugely important to us, their lives were but a small insignificant speck in time,
ReplyDeleteI would like to believe if I was given a terminal diagnosis tomorrow, I would not shake my fist at God, at the unfairness of my demise. I doubt that I would undergo, for example, a dubious and painful treatment, just to gain one more month of life, before I died.
We are a society that fears death. But death is a part of life. Nothing lasts forever. Old people die, babies are born. The cycle of life continues. Renewal is good - isn’t that a Lenten message?
@ Jacek Koba
ReplyDelete"accept that everything changes, nothing endures in its essence, and nothing is perfectly satisfying?"
Yes - everything changes. But why and how? Quantum physics is a rejection of Newtonian change = change as something that can be predicted in a set of equations and laws. Quantum change is unpredictable - when will that electron jump states? When will that isotope decay? Today, Mankind knows it knows less about the nature of the Universe than it did 95 years ago, when it was believed by theoretical physicists that we were six months to two years, and a handful of equations, away from knowing Everything.
I believe that there's far more mystery out there to be unravelled, that links our consciousness to a far wider purpose than just getting up in the morning and working for our daily bread. It's all ahead of us. One lifetime is not enough.
That's what bugs me about mortality - the end of Episode 2 of Series 3, but what about the rest of Series 3 and the next nine series? I demand to know!
Pray AND experiment!
@Michael
ReplyDeleteI look at it this way: the end of Episode 2, Series 3 may well be the end of me. And that’s OK! Let someone new and young be the star of the rest of Series 3 and the next nine series. Get a new cast of characters, a new plot line. The old characters and plot line was loosing its audience. Time to go.
@Teresa
ReplyDeleteWho said anything about 'star'? I'm curious as to how plot and characters will develop :-)
Dropping the ego is essential to acceptance of a hereafter...
I would strongly disagree with you that dropping the ego is essential to the acceptance of the hereafter. In fact, it is the presence of a strong ego that wants and demands life after death, so that the ego doesn’t disappear into nothingness. It wants to remain important and visible.
ReplyDelete@Teresa,
ReplyDeleteI think you have to have humility. It is not reliving life after life as 'you' - the thread is indeed slender. Personality does not accompany you, only the truest essence, the seeker after ever-greater awareness. And it's not there always; it resurfaces in ephemeral flashes, but ones that are familiar and bring joy - and when you have them all your life since childhood, you know there's something there,