Religion

Vancouver winter brings on a near death experience  

And the author realizes all of life is but one big near death experience 

by Michael Nenonen  

You decide how much it's worth to you:

Once again, residents of the Lower Mainland are descending into rain and darkness. As the outer world disappears into watery shadow, we slow down and our attention turns inward. So it’s been with me at any rate. I’ve been reading less about politics and history lately, and spending more time looking into subjects with a rather idiosyncratic appeal. One subject in particular seems rather appropriate for this seasonal internalization of awareness. I’ve been reading about near-death experiences, or NDEs. The more I’ve read, the less I’m convinced there’s a fundamental difference between an NDE and our everyday experience.

By definition, during an NDE a person is closer to death than usual, but this is only a matter of infinitesimal degrees. Human life is inherently precarious. Innumerable sperm and ova perish for every successfully fertilized egg, and from the moment we’re conceived we exist on the cusp of destruction. Stillbirths are common throughout pregnancy, many children die in infancy, and of those who don’t, precious few will see their hundredth birthday.

NDEs are very brief, but so is human life, regardless of whether that life is measured in individual or species terms. The longest recorded human life was lived by Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. While 122 years may seem like a long time, it’s less than 3 percent of the lifespan of the world’s oldest known living organism, a 4,700 year-old bristlecone pine tree in the White Mountains of California. Modern Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years, which amounts to 0.2% of the 125 million years that placental mammals have walked the Earth. Mammals have existed for about 20% of the 600 million years of animal life, which itself counts for 13% of the 4.5 billion year history of life on this planet. If our species were to go extinct tomorrow, then within a few tens of thousands of years almost all trace of our civilization would vanish (assuming, of course, that we don’t cause an ecocidal catastrophe like a runaway greenhouse effect that puts our planet on the road to becoming another Venus). The biosphere would continue evolving without us for another 500 million years before the warming sun finally renders the Earth uninhabitable. Thus, if you live to be as long as Jeanne Calment, you’ll have witnessed a grand total of 0.0000024% of the biosphere’s evolution, while modern Homo sapiens have thus far witnessed 0.004%. From the biosphere’s perspective, our species is a firefly, and the longest human life is but a single beat of it wings.

But what of the experiential features of NDEs? NDEs are almost certainly generated by physiological and psychological processes in our brains, but, as The Matrix series so garishly pointed out, the same thing can be said of all of our experiences. We exist inside a bubble of neurologically-generated phantasms.

During NDEs people have only a minimal awareness of the world around them. But isn’t this always the case? The phenomenal world constructed by our neurological systems is at best barely a shadow of the world itself. Human eyes perceive a tiny fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. A dog’s auditory and olfactory acuity is much greater than ours. We can’t begin to imagine the kinds of sensory worlds inhabited by creatures who use echolocation or who can perceive electrical fields. Even if our technology could someday vastly broaden our sensory and intellectual capacity, there would still undoubtedly be countless features of the universe that couldn’t be perceived by any sense organ or comprehended by even the finest human mind.

There is one significant difference that distinguishes NDEs from daily experience: when undergoing an NDE, many people seem to acquire an existential clarity rarely felt in normal life. They know that they’re dying and they’re unafraid. Their memories are opened up, allowing them to review the minutia of their lives with unusual ease. They often feel profound wonder and love.

Afterwards, many survivors retain a vivid sense of their own mortality, coupled with a deep appreciation of the richness of their fleeting lives and a desire to remain faithful to their newfound potentials for compassion and joy. Such NDEs are like a moment of lucidity at the end of a troubling dream.

And this is where NDEs have a great deal to teach us. We typically go about our lives within an illusion of immortality. We try to ignore our impending deaths, and to live as though our lives and our world will go on indefinitely. We distract ourselves from the overwhelming evidence that we’re all just a few heartbeats away from annihilation, and that our world is as fragile as every other world that’s died before us. In 1491, the peoples of the Americas probably thought about their world’s future the same way we think of ours today. And in the hours before the asteroid struck, what cause would the dinosaurs have had, had they the means to think at all, to suppose that the tens of millions of years of their supremacy would so quickly end?

In Vancouver the illusion of immortality is particularly strong. In 1700 the Lower Mainland was hit by a magnitude 8.7-9.2 megathrust earthquake. These earthquakes occur in intervals of 300-900 years. Another may not happen before 2600. On the other hand, sometime within your lifetime the ground beneath your feet may start to seizure, inciting a disaster far greater than the one that ruined New Orleans in 2005. For all you know, it could begin before you’ve reached the end of this article. And yet, how many of us have taken a first aid course to prepare for this danger, or even put together an earthquake survival kit?

The price we pay for this illusion is the suppression of our sense of existential urgency. It persuades us that each moment is like every other in an endless series, that life is shallow and dreary, and that satisfaction, if it’s ever to be had, will only come when our bottomless desires are somehow fulfilled. By refusing to die, we become the living dead.

NDEs show us that there’s another way. The most enlightened expressions of the spiritual imagination encourage us to not only experience our lives as though we were having an NDE, but also to realize that in an ultimate sense we are having an NDE. In doing so, we relax our grip on our desires and our fears, we stop chasing after permanence and pride, our capacity for love is expanded, and we open ourselves to the glorious strangeness of our momentary being. As Leonard Cohen sings in Boogie Street: “So come, my friends, be not afraid. We are so lightly here. It’s not in love that we are made; in love we disappear.” Amen, Leonard.

You decide how much it's worth to you: