Let's imagine, many decades from now, you are lying on your deathbed. You know that it cannot be far off now. What are you thinking? Are you reconciled to your biological life reaching its natural end and oblivion approaching, a final, ultimate switching off of your conscious experience? Or will you be secure in your belief that on dying, God will take you to His side, and your soul will continue to experience awareness for eternity, as an immaterial continuation of your conscious being - and there in Heaven, you will still be you?
Or something else - that your consciousness will slip free of one biological body and "slip inside this house as you pass by" (to quote the 13th Floor Elevators)?
Certainty is crucial at this juncture. One's final moments (may they be conscious!) are not a time for doubt. Existential anguish in face of death suggests you've left it too late (unless death comes too early - so powerfully portrayed by Zbigniew Cybulski at the end of Andrzej Wajda's film version of Ashes and Diamonds). The desire to hang onto your ego in face of death is universal, an unwillingness to let go - either to lose it into nothingness, or else to have it stripped from your consciousness so all that's left are occasional memories of subjective experiences - qualia - that will in future haunt another being. Neither are appealing to the mainstream Western mind.
Yet my lifelong experiences of incongruous memories of another place at a prior time to my own give me a certain confidence. A confidence that by seeking further, that by expanding my knowledge of the frontiers of science, neuroscience, particle physics, astrophysics and philosophy, that confidence will be deepened rather than weakened. My personal doubts - when faced with powerful arguments from reductionist-materialists - are weaker today than in years gone by. The reductionist-materialists' arguments are weakening as science learns ever more about that which it knows it doesn't know.
New ideas, new theories cast doubt on what was once scientific consensus, that there's nothing beyond matter, nothing above the laws of physics. These new ideas - such as science-based panpsychism or quantum-based consciousness theories - are to me Good News. They feel right to me. The click with my intuitive observations about qualia memories. My curiosity eggs me on.
We should all question orthodoxy - be it religious dogma or our outdated materialist cause-and-effect physics, rather than passively accepting either as a given. We should listen to the inner voice that seeks answers to our intuitive notions about purpose and reason for existing, for being aware, for our subjective experience.
I often think back to my father's final years; our walks on Sunday to the Polish chapel on Courtfield Gardens. He never talked about his faith; we'd walk to Mass talking about his observations - what he saw on the street, the changing seasons, his physical condition - and we'd walk home talking about the same. He guarded his beliefs well, to his death; in church, he'd take Holy Communion each week, and speak all the responses with the congregation, taking an active part in Mass - but his subjective experience of it remained his own.
Was he beset by doubts? I really don't know. Is he today with Jesus - or will a child one day be wondering why they are experiencing anomalous memories of the Warsaw Uprising and postwar London?
Am I beset by doubts? - Certainly less than I used to be. The notion that I'm deluding myself and creating a false narrative recedes as I learn to parse my metaphysical experiences with ever-increasing sincerity and accuracy. When the *PAFF* moments happen, I will continue to analyse them based on my ever-improving understanding of science and the philosophy of consciousness.
This time last year:
Body and soul
This time three years ago:
Religion and Happiness - a Lenten summary
This time four years ago:
Health and fitness in a Quarter of Abstinence
This time eight years ago:
Easter Sunday in the snow
Cycling to work - the new season begins
This time 11 years ago:
Five weeks into Lent
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